Mr. Clarinet
A Novel
Nick Stone
For Hyacinth and Seb
And in loving memory of Philomčne Paul (Fofo), Ben Cawdry, Adrian "Skip" Skipsey, and my grandmother
Mary Stone
Yo byen konté, Yo mal kalkilé.
(Haitian saying)
Contents
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
TEN MILLION DOLLARS if he performed a miracle and brought
Part 1
Chapter 1
HONESTY AND STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS weren't always the best options, but Max
Chapter 2
BACK IN MIAMI, Max took a cab from the airport
Chapter 3
MAX HAD KNOWN Joe for twenty-five years. They'd started out
Chapter 4
AT THE HOTEL, Max took a shower and tried to
Chapter 5
CLYDE BEESON HAD fallen far. Life hadn't just kicked him
Chapter 6
MAX DROVE BACK to Miami and headed for Little Haiti.
Part 2
Chapter 7
THE FLIGHT OUT to Haiti was held up for an
Chapter 8
THE ROAD AWAY from the airport was long, dusty, and
Chapter 9
NIGHT FELL QUICKLY in Haiti. One minute it was late
Chapter 10
THE MEN FROM the airport picked Max up for dinner.
Chapter 11
DINNER WAS SERVED by two maids in black uniforms with
Chapter 12
BACK IN THE car, heading down the mountain to Pétionville,
Chapter 13
MAX LEFT LA COUPOLE at around two a.m. The Barbancourt
Chapter 14
WHEN THEY WERE gone, he stumbled around the now-empty streets,
Chapter 15
MAX WASHED HIS face and shaved and made more coffee.
Part 3
Chapter 16
"MAX, YOU STINK," Chantale told him and laughed her dirty
Chapter 17
THEY DROVE DOWN Boulevard Harry Truman, a wide, palm treelined,
Chapter 18
THEY DROVE TO the Boulevard des Veuves, where Charlie had
Chapter 19
THE OLD WOMAN was as Francesca had described her, wearing
Chapter 20
"SO WHAT DO you think? Did Vincent Paul kidnap Charlie?"
Chapter 21
THE RUE BOYER had once been a gated community of
Chapter 22
A TEENAGE GIRL with a warm smile and braces on
Chapter 23
MAX OPENED HIS notebook and pressed RECORD.
Chapter 24
THEY HEADED BACK to the bank, Max at the wheel
Chapter 25
HE CALLED ALLAIN Carver from the house and gave him
Chapter 26
NO MATTER WHAT Huxley and Chantale had told him about
Chapter 27
HE FOLLOWED THE convoy to a clearing near the sea,
Chapter 28
IN THE LATE afternoon, Vincent Paul got into a jeep
Chapter 29
WHAT PASSED FOR nightlife in Pétionville was in full swing
Chapter 30
MAX CALLED ALLAIN Carver the next morning and told him
Chapter 31
NWOI ET ROUGE was named after the colors of the
Chapter 32
CHANTALE DROVE MAX to a café where she ordered a
Chapter 33
"IT'S NOT THAT we don't care. We doonly we
Chapter 34
THEY LEFT FOR Saut d'Eau at four a.m. the following
Chapter 35
TO MOST HAITIANS, Saut d'Eau is a place where the
Chapter 36
CLARINETTE WAS A village on its way to becoming a
Chapter 37
THE LEBALLECS LIVED half an hour away from the cemetery,
Chapter 38
WHEN THEY RETURNED to Clarinette, they asked anyone who looked
Chapter 39
IT WAS STILL dark when he got back, but the
Chapter 40
BEFORE SHE'D DISAPPEARED in November 1994, Claudette Thodore had lived
Chapter 41
"DO YOU STILL think Vincent Paul took Charlie?" Chantale asked
Chapter 42
MAX WAITED UNTIL nightfall; then he went around to the
Chapter 43
MAX CONSIDERED TELLING Allain about the tape, but he held
Part 4
Chapter 44
"HOW ARE YOU feeling?" Vincent Paul asked Max, after he'd
Chapter 45
"THE WOMAN YOU know as Francesca Carver was once called
Chapter 46
MAX WAS BLINDFOLDED and put in the back of an
Chapter 47
THERE WERE FIVE telephone messages waiting for himJoe, Allain,
Chapter 48
THE FOLLOWING EVENING Max watched Eloise being picked up outside
Chapter 49
MAX WAS COLLECTED by Paul's men shortly after three a.m.
Chapter 50
"CAN WE GET you anything Mister Co-da-da? Water? Coffee? Something
Chapter 51
ELOISE SHOT MAX a furtive look when he walked into
Chapter 52
"MAURICE FIRST MET Monsieur CarverGustavin the 1940s. He
Chapter 53
MAX PACED AROUND in the street outside the house, his
Chapter 54
THE NEXT MORNING Max woke up with the phone ringing
Chapter 55
GUSTAV CARVER SMILED warmly when he saw Max walk into
Chapter 56
ON HIS WAY back, Max stopped off at La Coupole,
Chapter 57
THE NEXT DAY he got a call from Allain, who
Chapter 58
"I'M SORRY ABOUT your mother, Chantale," Max said as they
Part 5
Chapter 59
BACK IN MIAMI, back at the Kendall Radisson Hotel. They
Chapter 60
DECEMBER 21: JOE called him just after eight a.m., to
Chapter 61
"VINCENT? IT'S MAX Mingus." The line wasn't good, a lot
Part 6
Chapter 62
CHANTALE HAD JUST finished loading two cases into the back
Chapter 63
CARVER'S BEACH HOUSE overlooked a tiny scrap of paradisea
Chapter 64
THE GIRLS CAME in first. Kreyol, laughter.
Chapter 65
HUXLEY DROVE. MAX sat next to him with the gun
Chapter 66
"MY SISTER PATRICEI used to call her 'Treese.' She
Chapter 67
CARL AND ERTHA were waiting for them by the door.
Chapter 68
EARLY THE NEXT morning, Vincent Paul, Francesca, and Charlie came
EPILOGUE
TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS in $100 bills.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PROLOGUE
New York City, November 6, 1996
TEN MILLION DOLLARS if he performed a miracle and brought the boy back alive, five million dollars if he came back with just the body and another five million if he dragged the killers in with ittheir dead-or-alive status was immaterial, as long as they had the kid's blood on their hands.
Those were the terms and, if he chose to accept them, that was the deal.
* * *
Max Mingus was an ex-cop turned private investigator. Missing persons were his specialty, finding them his talent. Most people said he was the best in the businessor at least they had until April 17, 1989, the day he'd started a seven-year sentence in Attica for manslaughter and had his license permanently revoked.
The client's name was Allain Carver. His son's name was Charlie. Charlie was missing, presumed kidnapped.
Optimistically, with things going according to plan and ending happily for all concerned, Max was looking at riding off into the sunset a millionaire ten to fifteen times over. There were a lot of things he wouldn't have to worry about again, and he'd been doing a lot of worrying lately, nothing but worrying.
So far, so good, but now for the rest:
The case was based in Haiti.
"Haytee?" Max said as if he'd heard wrong.
"Yes," Carver replied.
Shit.
He knew this about Haiti: voodoo, AIDS, Papa Doc, Baby Doc, boat people, and, recently, an American military invasion called Operation Restore Democracy he'd seen on TV.
He knewor had knownquite a few Haitians, expats he'd had regular dealings with back when he'd been a cop and worked a case in Little Haiti, Miami. They hadn't had a decent thing to say about their homeland, "bad place" being the most common and kindest.
Nevertheless, he had fond memories of most of the Haitians he'd met. In fact, he'd admired them. They were honest, honorable, hardworking people who'd found themselves in the most unenviable place in Americabottom of the food chain, south of the poverty line, a lot of ground to make up.
That went for most of the Haitians he'd met. When it came to people, there were always plenty of exceptions to every generalization, and he'd come face-to-face with those. They hadn't left him with bad memories so much as the kind of wounds that never really healed, that opened up at the slightest nudge or touch.
The whole thing was already sounding like a bad idea. He'd just come out of one tough spot. Why go to another?
Money. That was why.
* * *
Charlie had disappeared on September 4, 1994, his third birthday. Nothing had been heard or seen of him since. There had been no ransom demands and there were no witnesses. The Carver family had had to call off its search for the boy after two weeks, because the U.S. Army had invaded the country and put it on lockdown, imposing curfews and travel restrictions on the whole population. The search hadn't resumed until late October, by which time the trail, already cold, had frozen over.
"There's one other thing," Carver said when he'd finished talking. "If you take the job, it's going to be dangerous . Make that very dangerous."
"How so?" Max asked.
"Your predecessors, they Things didn't turn out too right for them."
"They're dead?"
There was a pause. Carver's face turned grim and his skin lost a little of its color.
"No not dead," he said finally. "Worse. Much worse."
Part 1
Chapter 1
HONESTY AND STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS weren't always the best options, but Max chose them over bullshit as often as he could. It helped him sleep at night.
"I can't," he told Carver.
"Can't or won't?"
"I won't because I can't. I can't do it. You're asking me to look for a kid who went missing two years ago, in a country that went back to the Stone Age about the same time."
Carver managed a smile so faint it barely registered on his lips yet let Max know he was being considered unsophisticated. It also told Max what kind of rich he was dealing with. Not rich, richeold money, the worst; connections plugged in at every socket, all the lights on, everybody homemultistory bank vaults, fuck-off stockholdings, high-interest offshore accounts; first-name terms with everybody who's anybody in every walk of life, power to crush you to oblivion. These were people you never said no to, people you never failed.
"You've succeeded at far tougher assignments. You've performedmiracles," Carver said.
"I never raised the dead, Mr. Carver. I only dug 'em up."
"I'm ready for the worst."
"Not if you're talking to me," Max said. He regretted his bluntness. Prison had reformed his erstwhile tact and replaced it with coarseness. "In a way you're right. I've looked for ghosts in hellholes in my time, but they were American hellholes and there was always a bus out. I don't know your country. I've never been there andno disrespect meantI've never wanted to go there. Hell, they don't even speak English."
Then Carver told him about the money.
* * *
Max hadn't made a fortune as a private detective, but he'd done OKenough to get by and have a little extra to play with. His wife, who was a qualified accountant, had managed the business side of things. She'd put a fair bit of rainy-day money away in their three savings accounts, and they had points in The L Bar, a successful yuppie joint in downtown Miami, run by Frank Nunez, a retired cop friend of Max's. They'd owned their house and two cars outright, taken three vacations every year, and eaten at fancy restaurants once a month.
He'd had few personal expenses. His clothessuits for work and special occasions, khakis and T-shirts at all other timeswere always well cut but rarely expensive. He'd learned his lesson after his second case, when he'd got arterial spray on his five-hundred-dollar suit and had to surrender it to forensics, who later handed it to the DA, who recycled it in court as Exhibit D. He sent his wife flowers every week, bought her lavish presents on her birthday and at Christmas and on their anniversary; he was also generous to his closest friends. He had no addictions. He'd quit cigarettes and reefer when he'd left the force; booze had taken a little longer but that had gone out of his life too. Music was his only real indulgencejazz, swing, doo-wop, rock 'n' roll, soul, funk, and disco; he had five thousand CDs, vinyl albums, and singles he knew every note and lyric to. The most he'd ever spent was when he'd dropped four hundred bucks at an auction on an autographed original double ten-inch vinyl copy of Frank Sinatra's "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning." He'd framed it and hung it in his study, opposite his desk. When his wife asked, he lied and told her he'd picked it up cheap at a house-repo sale in Orlando.
All in all, it had been a comfortable life, the sort that made you happy and fat and gradually more and more conservative.
And then he'd gone and killed three people in the Bronx, and the wheels had come off and everything had skidded to a loud, ungainly stop.
Postprison, Max still had the house and his car in Miami, plus $9,000 in a savings account. He could live on that for another four or five months tops, then he'd have to sell the house and find a job. That would be hard. Who would employ him? Ex-cop, ex-PI, ex-conthree crosses, no ticks. He was forty-six: too old to learn anything new and too young to give in. What the fuck would he do? Bar work? Kitchen work? Pack shopping bags? Construction? Mall security?
True, he had some friends and people who owed him, but he'd never called in a favor in his life, and he wasn't about to start now that he was on his knees. It would be tantamount to begging, and that went up against his every rule. He'd helped people out because he could at the time, not for what they could do for him later, not for points in the karma bank. His wife had called him naďve, marshmallow-soft under the concrete-and-razor-wire carapace he showed the world. Maybe she'd been right. Maybe he should have put self-interest before others. Would his life have been any different now? Probably, yes.
He saw his future, clearly, a year or two from now. He'd be living in one of those one-room apartments with stained wallpaper, tribes of warring roaches, and a set of dos and don'ts on the door, handwritten in semiliterate Spanish. He'd hear his neighbors arguing, fucking, talking, fighting; upstairs, downstairs, left and right. His life would be one chipped plate, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. He'd play the lotto and watch the results go against him on a portable TV with a shaky picture. Slow death, gradual extinction, one cell at a time.
Take Carver's job or take his chances in the postcon world. He had no other choice.
* * *
Max had first spoken to Allain Carver over the phone in prison. They didn't get off to a good start. Max had told him to fuck off as soon as he'd introduced himself.
Carver had been pestering him pretty much every day of the last eight months of his sentence.
First came a letter from Miami:
"Dear Mr. Mingus, my name is Allain Carver. I greatly admire you and everything you stand for. Having followed your case closely "
Max stopped reading there. He gave the letter to Velasquez, his cellmate, who used it to make a joint. Velasquez had smoked all of Max's letters, except for the personal ones. Max nicknamed him "The Incinerator."
Max was a celebrity prisoner. His case had been on TV and in all of the papers. At one point, almost half the country had had a strong opinion about him and what he'd done, a sixty-forty split, for and against.
During his first six months behind bars he'd had fan mail by the sackful. He'd never replied to any of it. Even the sincerest well-wishers left him cold. He'd always despised strangers who corresponded with convicted criminals they'd seen on TV, or read about in the papers, or met through those fucked-up prisoner pen-pal clubs. They were the first to demand the death penalty when the boot was on the other foot and that foot had stomped one of their loved ones to death. Max had been a cop for eleven years. There was a lot of it left over in him. Many of his closest friends were still on the force, keeping these very same people safe from the animals they wrote to.
When Carver's first letter arrived, Max's mail was down to letters from his wife, in-laws, and friends. His fan base had moved on to more appreciative types, like O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
Carver met Max's silence over his first letter with a follow-up two weeks later. When that, too, elicited no response, Max received another Carver letter the next week, then two more the week after that, and, seven days later, two more again. Velasquez was pretty happy. He liked Carver's letters, because the paperthick, water-marked cream stationery with Carver's name, address, and contact numbers embossed in the right-hand corner in emerald-foil lettershad something in it that reacted fantastically with his weed and got him more stoned than usual.
Carver tried different tactics to get Max's attentionhe changed paper, wrote longhand, and got other people to write inbut no matter what he tried, everything went by way of The Incinerator.
So, the letters stopped and the phone calls started. Max guessed that Carver had bribed someone high up, because only inmates with serious juice or imminent retrials were allowed to take incoming calls. A guard brought him from the kitchens and took him to one of the conference cells, where a phone had been plugged in, just for him. He spoke to Carver long enough to hear his name, think he was English from his accent, and tell him what was what and never to call him again.
But Carver didn't give up. Max would be interrupted at work, in the exercise yard, at meals, in the shower, during lockdowns, after lights-out. He dealt with Carver as he always did: "Hello," hear Carver's voice, hang up.
Max eventually complained to the warden, who thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. Most inmates griped about hassles on the inside. He told Max not to be such a pussy and threatened to put a phone in his cell if he bothered him again with this bullshit.
Max told Dave Torres, his lawyer, about Carver's calls. Torres put a stop to them. He also offered to dig up some information about Carver, but Max passed. In the free world, he would have been curious as hell; but in prison, curiosity was something you gave up with your court clothes and your wristwatch.
The day before his release, Max had a visit from Carver. Max refused to see him, so Carver left him his final letter, back on the original stationery.
Max gave it to Velasquez as a going-away present.
* * *
After he got out of jail, Max was all set to go to London, England.
* * *
The round-the-world tour had been his wife's idea, something she'd always wanted to do. She'd long been fascinated by other countries and their cultures, their histories and monuments, their people. She was always going off to museums, lining up to get into the latest exhibitions, attending lectures and seminars, and always readingmagazines, newspaper articles, and book after book after book. She tried her best to sweep Max along with her enthusiasms, but he wasn't remotely interested. She showed him pictures of South American Indians wearing pizza plates in their bottom lips, African women with giraffe-like necks fitted with industrial springs, and he really couldn't begin to see the attraction. He'd been to Mexico, the Bahamas, Hawaii, and Canada, but his world was really just the USA, and that was a world big enough for him. At home, they had deserts and arctic wastes and pretty much everything in between. Why go abroad for the same shit only older?
His wife's name was Sandra. He'd met her when he was still a cop. She was half Cuban, half African-American. She was beautiful, clever, tough, and funny. He never called her Sandy.
She'd planned for them to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary in style, traveling the globe, seeing most of the things she'd only read about. If things had been different, Max would probably have talked her into going to the Keys for a week, with the promise of a modest foreign trip (to Europe or Australia) later in the year, but because he was in prison when she told him her plans, he wasn't in a position to refuse. Besides, from where he was, getting as far away from America as possible seemed like a good idea. That year out would give him time to think about the rest of his life and what best to do with it.
It took Sandra four months to organize and book the tour. She arranged the itinerary so they'd arrive back home in Miami exactly a year to the day they'd left, on their next wedding anniversary. In between they would see all of Europe, starting with England, and then they'd move on to Russia and China, followed by Japan and the Far East, before flying on to Australia, New Zealand, and then on to Africa and the Middle East, before closing out in Turkey.
The more she told Max about the trip during her weekly visits, the more he started looking forward to it. He took to reading in the prison library about some of the places they'd be visiting. In the beginning, it was a way of getting him out of one day and into the next, but the more he began to delve into the stuff of his wife's dreams, the closer he got to her, perhaps closer than he'd ever been.
She finished paying for the trip the day she died in a car crash on U.S. 1, which she appeared to have caused by inexplicably and quite suddenly switching lanes straight into the path of an oncoming truck. When they performed the autopsy, they found the brain aneurysm that had killed her at the wheel.
The warden broke the news to him. Max was too stunned to react. He nodded, said nothing else, left the warden's office, and went about the rest of his day pretty much as normal, cleaning the kitchen surfaces, serving at the counter, feeding the trays through the dishwasher, mopping the floors. He didn't say anything to Velasquez. You didn't do that. Showing grief or sadness or any emotion unrelated to anger was a sign of weakness. You kept those things well hidden, bottled up, out of sight and sense.
Sandra's death didn't sink in until the next day, Thursday. Thursday was her visiting day. She'd never missed one. She'd fly in the night before, stay with an aunt who lived in Queens, and then, the next day, she'd drive up to see him. At around two p.m., when he'd usually be finishing off in the kitchen or bullshitting with Henry, the cook, he'd be called out to the visiting room over the PA system. Sandra would be waiting for him on the other side of the booth, behind the glass partition and the wall between them. She'd always be immaculately dressed, a fresh layer of lipstick on her mouth, big smile on her face, eyes lighting up, just like she was on a first date. They'd talk about this and that, how he was feeling, how he was looking, then she'd give him back-home news, tell him about herself, tell him about the house, talk about her job.
Henry and Max had an arrangement. Henry would work around Max on Thursdays, giving him things he could finish up quickly so he could get out as soon as his name was called. Max always helped Henry out in the same way on Sundays, when Henry's familyhis wife and four kidscame to see him. They got on well enough for Max to ignore that Henry was doing fifteen to life for an armed robbery that had left a pregnant woman dead, and that he ran with the Aryan Brotherhood.
On the outside, it was business as usual that Thursday. Only, Max had woken up with a heavy, aching feeling in his chest and a sense of emptiness that opened up into a numb void as the morning went on. He kept on hearing a peculiar rush of air in his ears, as though he was stuck in a wind tunnel, and the vein in his forehead began to wriggle and twitch under his skin. He wanted to tell Henry his wife wasn't coming that week and then let him know why the following week, but he couldn't bring himself to say anything, because he knew the minute he did he'd lose control of his words and most likely crack up.
He didn't have enough to do in the kitchen to keep his mind busy. He had the almost-spotless stove to wipe down. The stove had a clock set in the middle of its controls. He tried to stop himself, but he kept on staring at the clock, watching the black hands move in clicks, stepping up to 2:00.
He replayed the previous week's visit in his mind, every single second of the last time they were together. He recalled every word she'd said to himabout the surprise discount she'd managed to get from one airline, the free nights at a luxury hotel she'd won in a contest, how impressed she was with his knowledge of Australian history. Had she ever said anything about migraines, or headaches, or dizzy spells, blackouts, nosebleeds? He saw her face again through the bulletproof-glass partition they met through; the glass was smeared with the ghostly fingerprints and lipmarks where a million convicts had touched and kissed their loved ones by proxy. They'd never done that. They agreed it was pointless and desperate. It wasn't as if they'd never get to do the real thing again, was it? He wished they had now. It would have been better than the absolute nothing he was left with.
"Max," Henry called over from the sink. "Time to play husband."
It was a few clicks away from 2:00. Max started taking off his apron, right on cue, then stopped.
"She's not coming today," he said, letting the straps of the apron fall to his side. He felt a hot surge of tears geyser up to his eyes and mass around the edges.
"Why not?"
Max didn't answer. Henry came over to him, wiping his hands on a dishcloth. He saw Max's face, about to crack wide open and spill. He looked surprised. He even backed off a step. Like almost everyone else in the joint, he thought Max was a tough motherfuckeran ex-cop in General Population, who'd held his head up and hadn't once flinched from meeting violence with violence on at least five occasions that he knew of.
Henry smiled.
He could have smiled out of mockery, or the sadistic delight in the misfortune of others that passes for happiness in prison, or plain simple confusion. Tough guys didn't cryunless they were pussies all along, or worse, in mid-meltdown.
Max, buried fifty feet deep in grief, read mockery in Henry's face.
The roaring in his ears fell still.
He punched Henry in the throat, a straight, short jab powered in with his full weight, which went straight to the windpipe. Henry's mouth dropped open. He gasped out for air. Max smashed a right hook into his jaw and busted the bone in two. Henry was a big, tall guy, a daily free-weight freak, who could press three-fifty clean without breaking a sweat. He went down with a huge thud.
Max fled the kitchen.
It was a bad move, the worst. Henry was high up in the Brotherhood, and their main source of income. They dealt the best drugs in Attica. Henry's kids smuggled them in for him in the cracks of their asses. The Brotherhood would want blood, a face-saving kill.
Henry was in the infirmary for three days. Max ran the kitchen in his absence, all the while waiting for payback. The Brotherhood weren't random killers. They liked to come in packs of four or five. The guards would know about it in advance. Tipped-off and paid-off, they'd look the other way, as would everyone in the vicinity. Inside, where he hurt most, he prayed they'd stick him clean, straight through a vital organ. He didn't want to wind up a free man in a wheelchair.
But nothing happened.
Henry claimed he'd slipped on some stray grease on the kitchen floor. He was back running the kitchen by Sunday, his jaw tightly wired. He'd heard about Max's loss, and the first thing he did when he saw him again was shake his hand and pat him on the shoulder. This made Max feel worse about hitting him.
Sandra's funeral was held in Miami, a week after her death. Max was allowed to attend.
She was laid out in an open casket. The undertaker had dressed her in a black wig that didn't suit her. Her real hair had never been that straight or that black; she'd had a russet tinge to it in places, brown in others. The makeup was all wrong too. She'd never needed much when she was alive. He kissed her cold, rigid lips and slipped his fingers between her folded hands. He stood there staring down at her forever, feeling her a million miles away. Dead bodies were nothing new to him, but it was very different when it had belonged to the most important person in his life.
He kissed her again. He desperately wanted to flick her eyes open and see them one last time. Besides, she'd never closed her eyes when they kissed, ever. He reached out and then noticed that the overhanging white lilies from the massed display had shed their pollen onto the collar of the dark blue pinstriped business suit she'd been dressed in. He wiped it clean.
At the service, her youngest brother, Calvin, sang "Let's Stay Together," her favorite song. The last time he'd sung it was at their wedding. Calvin had an incredible voice, mournful and piercing like Roy Orbison's. It busted Max up. He cried his fucking heart out. He hadn't cried since he'd been a kid. He cried so much his shirt collar got wet and his eyes swelled up.
On the way back to Attica, Max decided he'd take the trip Sandra had spent the final part of her life organizing. It was partly to honor her wishes, partly to see all the things she never would, partly to live her dream, and mostly because he didn't know what else to do with himself.
* * *
His lawyer, Dave Torres, picked him up outside the prison gates and drove him to the Avalon Rex, a small hotel in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from Prospect Park. The room was functionalbed, desk, chair, closet, bedside table, lamp, clock radio, and phoneand there was a communal bathroom and trough-like sink on the top floor. He was booked in for two days and nights, after which he was taking a plane to England from JFK. Torres handed him his tickets, passport, $3,000 in cash, and two credit cards. Max thanked Torres for everything and they shook hands and said good-bye.
First thing Max did was open his door, step out of his room, walk back inside, and close it behind him. He liked it so much he did it again and again half a dozen times until he'd taken the shine off the novelty of being able to come and go as he pleased. Next thing he did was take off his clothes and check himself out in the wardrobe mirror.
Max hadn't seen himself naked in a mirror since he'd last been a free man. Seven years on, he looked good from the neck down, dressed in just his two tattoos. Big shoulders and bulging biceps, chunky forearms, a short, wide neck, a six-pack, thick thighs; put him in trunks and body oil and he could have won a Mr. Penitentiary award. There was an art to working out in prison. It wasn't about vanity and fitness; it was about survival. It was wise to be bigif you cast an impressive shadow, people thought twice about fucking with you, and usually kept out of your waybut you didn't want to get too big, in case you stood out and became a target for young first-timers out to get a rep; there was nothing more ridiculous-looking than a cellblock hulk dying from a toothbrush shiv rammed in his jugular. Max was very fit before he'd gone into prison. He'd been a three-time Golden Gloves middleweight boxing champion in his teens, and he'd stayed in shape running, swimming, and sparring at a local boxing gym near Coral Gables. Exercise wasn't a quantum leap to him; he had the built-in discipline that comes from learning to swallow a punch whole. He'd been allowed half an hour in Attica. He'd hit the weights six days a week, upper body one day, legs the next. He'd done three thousand push-ups and crunches in his cell, every morning, five hundred at a time.
Although still attractive in the blunt and brutal sort of way that deceptively appealed to women with a taste for rough men and kamikaze relationships, his face wasn't too handsome. His skin was tight, but it was wrinkled and waxy pale, almost ghostly from the lack of sunlight. The needlepoint scars around his lips had faded. There was a new meanness in his blue eyes and a sour downturn to the ends of his mouth, which he recognized from his mother who, like he, had been left alone at the onset of her autumnal years. And as had happened to her at the same age, his hair had gone completely gray. He hadn't noticed the transition from the dark brown he'd been on the day of his incarceration, because he'd stayed bald in the joint, to appear more forbidding. He'd let his hair grow out in the last few weeks leading up to his releasea mistake he intended to rectify before he left town.
* * *
The next morning he went out. He needed to buy a warm winter coat and jacket, and a hat, too, if he was going to lose his old-man's hair. It was a bright, freezing-cold day. The air burned his lungs. The street was swarming with people. Suddenly he was lost and didn't know what he was doing or where he was going. He'd walked slap-bang into the middle of rush hour, everybody on their way to earn money and take shit with a thank-you and a smile, and build up a backlog of grudges and resentments in the process. He should've known better and prepared himself for it, but he felt as if he'd been beamed in from another planet against his will. A seven-year stretch of time slipped its leash and rushed at him, jaws wide open, belly empty. Everything had changedclothes, hairstyles, walks, faces, brands, prices, languagestoo much to take in and absorb and break down and analyze and compare. Too much too soon after prison, where everything stayed the same and you were on at least face terms with everyone you saw. Now he was straight in at the deep end. He could float but he'd forgotten the strokes. He plodded along, keeping two steps behind the people in front of him and two steps in front of those behind, chain-gang style. Maybe no matter how free we think we are, we're all prisoners in our own way, he thought. Or maybe he just needed time to wake up and get with the program.
He slipped out of the crowd and snuck into a small café. It was packed with people getting a caffeine fix before hitting their offices. He ordered an espresso. It came in a cardboard cup with a holder and a warning printed on the side that the drink was VERY HOT. When he tasted it, it was lukewarm.
What was he doing in New York? It wasn't even his town. What was he doing even thinking of traveling the world when he hadn't been home, got his bearings, and readjusted himself to freedom?
Sandra wouldn't have wanted him to do this. She would have said it was pointless, running away when he'd have to come back eventually. True. What was he scared of? Her not being there? She was gone. He'd just have to get overand move on the best he could.
Fuck it. He'd go back to Miami on the first plane out.
* * *
In his hotel room, Max called up the airlines. All flights booked solid for the next two and a half days. He got a seat for the Friday afternoon.
Even though he didn't have a clue what he'd do when he got to Miami, he felt better now that he was heading somewhere familiar.
He thought about taking a shower and getting something to eat, and maybe that haircut if he could find a place.
The phone rang.
"Mr. Mingus?"
"Yes?"
"Allain Carver."
Max didn't say anything. How had he found him here?
Dave Torres. He was the only one who knew where Max was. How long had he been working for Carver? Probably since Max had asked him to stop the calls he was getting in prison. Instead of going to the authorities, Torres had gone to the man himself. Double-dealing scumbag never missed an opportunity to make a buck.
"Hello? Are you still there?"
"What's this about?" Max said.
"I have a job you might be interested in."
Max agreed to meet him the next day. His curiosity was back.
Carver gave him an address in Manhattan.
* * *
"Mr. Mingus? I'm Allain Carver."
First impression: imperious prick.
Carver had stood up from behind an armchair when Max had walked into the club. Instead of coming over, he'd taken a few steps forward to identify himself and then stood where he was, arms behind his back, in the style of royalty meeting an ambassador from a former colonial state, now hopelessly impoverished and in dire need of a handout.
Tall and slender, dressed in a well-tailored navy blue wool suit, light blue shirt, and matching silk tie, Carver might have strolled in off a 1920s-set musical where he'd been cast as an extra in a Wall Street scene. His short, blond hair was slicked back from his forehead and parted down the middle. He had a strong jaw, long, pointed face, and tanned skin.
They shook hands. Firm handshake, soft, smooth skin unperturbed by manual labor.
Carver motioned him to a black-leather-and-mahogany tub chair set in front of a round table. He waited until Max had sat down before he took his place opposite him. The chair was high-backed and finished some two feet above his head. He couldn't see to his left or right without leaning all the way forward and craning his neck out. It was like being in his own booth, intimate and secretive.
Behind him was a bar that stretched the width of the room. Every conceivable spirit seemed to be lined up theregreen, blue, yellow, pink, white, brown, clear, and translucent bottles glinting as gaily as plastic-bead curtains in a well-heeled brothel.
"What would you like to drink?"
"Coffee, please. Cream, no sugar."
Carver looked over to the far end of the room and raised his hand. A waitress approached. She was fashion-model thin, with high cheekbones, pouting lips, and a catwalk strut. All the staff Max had seen so far looked like models: both the barmen had that slowburn, stubbled seducer look advertisers used to sell white shirts and cologne, while he could have seen the receptionist in a clothes-store catalogue, and in another life, the security guy monitoring the CCTV screen in a side office might have been the Diet Coke break guy on the construction site.
Max had almost missed the club. It was in an anonymous five-story townhouse in a cul-de-sac off Park Row, so anonymous that he'd walked past it twice before he'd noticed the number 34 stamped faintly into the wall near the door. The club was three flights up in a mirrored elevator with polished brass handles running around the middle and reflections accordioning to infinity. When the doors opened and he'd stepped out, Max thought he'd arrived in the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.
The interior was vast and very quiet, like a library or a mausoleum. All over the thickly carpeted floor, black tub chairs sprouted like burned-out oak stumps in a desecrated forest. They were arranged so you only saw their backs and not the people in them. He'd thought they were alone until he saw clouds of cigar smoke escaping from behind one of the chairs, and when he looked around more closely, he saw a man's foot in a beige slip-on beyond another. A single framed painting adorned the wall nearest to them. It was of a young boy playing a flute. He was dressed in a ragged, Civil Warera military uniform a good ten years too big for him.
"Are you a member here?" Max asked, to break the ice.
"We own it. This and several similar establishments around the world," Carver replied.
"So you're in the club business?"
"Not particularly," Carver answered with an amused look on his face. "My father, Gustav, set these up in the late fifties to cater for his best business clients. This was the first. We have others in London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlinand elsewhere. They're a perk. When individuals or their companies do over a certain amount of net dollar business with us they're offered free lifelong membership. We encourage them to sponsor their friends and colleagues, who of course pay. We have a lot of members, turn a good profit."
"So you can't just fill out a form?"
"No," Carver chuckled.
"Keep the peasants out, huh?"
"It's just the way we do business," Carver said dryly. "It works."
There were traces of East Coast WASP wrinkling Carver's otherwise crisp English accent, an unnatural reining in of some vowels and an overexaggeration of others. English school, Ivy League diploma?
Carver resembled a matinee idol manqué, looks fading agreeably. Max placed him as his own age, maybe a year or two younger; balanced diethealthy. There were lines on his neck and crow's-feet etched at the ends of his small, sharp blue eyes. With his golden skin he could have passed for white South AmericanArgentinean or Brazilianbloodlines going all the way back to Germany. Untouchably handsome but for his mouth. That let him down. It resembled a long razor cut where the blood had just started to bubble but not yet run over.
The coffee came in a white porcelain pot. Max poured himself a cup and added a measure of cream from a small jug. The coffee was rich and strong, and the cream didn't leave a greasy slick on the surface; it was connoisseur stuff, the kind you bought by the bean and ground yourself, not the average brews you picked up in the supermarket.
"I heard about your wife," Carver said. "I'm sorry."
"Me too," Max countered curtly. He let the subject die in the air, then got down to business. "You said you had a job you wanted me to look at?"
Carver told him about Charlie. Max heard the basics and flat-out said no. Carver mentioned the money and Max quieted down, more out of shock than greed. In fact, greed didn't even enter into it. While Carver was talking numbers, he handed Max a manila envelope. Inside were two glossy black-and-white photographs, a headshot, and a full-length bodyshotof a little girl.
"I thought you said your son was missing, Mr. Carver?" Max said, holding up the picture.
"Charlie had a thing about his hair. We nicknamed him Samson because he wouldn't let anyone go near it. He was bornsomewhat unusuallywith a full head of the stuff. Whenever anyone tried to sneak up on him with a pair of scissors he screechedthis deafening howl. Quite terrifying. So we left it alone. I'm sure he'll outgrow the phobia eventually," Carver said.
"Or not," Max said bluntly, deliberately.
Max thought he saw Carver's face change for an instant, as a shadow of humanity stole away a fragment of his all-business composure. It wasn't enough to make him warm up to his potential client, but it was a start.
Max studied the headshot. Charlie didn't look anything like his father. His eyes and hair were very dark and he had a large mouth with full lips. He wasn't smiling. He looked pissed off, a great man interrupted in the middle of his work. It was a very adult look. His stare was intense and stark. Max could feel it prodding at his face, humming on the paper, nagging at him.
The second photograph showed Charlie standing in front of some bougainvillea bushes with almost the same expression on his face. His hair was long all right, bow-tied into two drooping bunches that poured over his shoulders. He was wearing a floral-patterned dress, with frills on the sleeves, hem, and collar.
It made Max sick.
"It's none of my business and I ain't no psychologist, but that's a sure-as-shit way to fuck a kid's head up, Carver," Max said, hostility upfront.
"It was my wife's idea."
"You don't seem the henpecked kind."
Carver laughed briefly, sounding like he was clearing his throat.
"People are very backward in Haiti. Even the most sophisticated, well-educated sorts believe in all kinds of rubbishsuperstitions"
"Voodoo?"
"We call it vodou. Haitians are ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent vodouiste, Mr. Mingus. There's nothing sinister about itno more than, say, worshipping a half-naked man nailed to a cross, drinking his blood and eating his flesh."
He studied Max's face for a reaction. Max stared right back at him, impassive. Carver could have worshipped supermarket carts, for all he cared. One person's God was another person's idea of a good joke, as far as he was concerned.
He looked back at the photograph of Charlie in his dress. You poor kid, he thought.
"We've looked everywhere for him," Carver said. "We ran a campaign in early 1995newspaper and TV ads, billboards with his picture on them, radio spotseverything. We offered a substantial reward for information, or, better still, for Charlie himself. It had predictable consequences. Every lowlife suddenly came out from under a rock and claimed they knew where 'she' was. Some even claimed they'd kidnapped 'her' and made ransom demands, but it was allthe sums they wanted were trivial, way too small. Obviously, I knew they were lying. These peasants in Haiti can't see past the ends of their noses. And their noses are very flat."
"Did you follow up on all the leads?"
"Only the sensible ones."
"First mistake right there. Check everything out. Chase every lead."
"Your predecessors said that."
Bait and hook, Max thought. Don't go there. You'll get drawn into a pissing contest. Still, he was curious. How many people had already worked on the case? Why had they failed? And how many were out there now?
He played indifferent.
"Don't get ahead of yourself. Right now we're just having a conversation," Max said. Carver was stung, brought down to a level he usually didn't frequent. He must have been surrounded by the sort of people who laughed at all his jokes. That was the thing about the very rich, the rich born and bred: they swam in their own seas and didn't breathe the same air as everybody else; they lived parallel, insulated lives, immune to the struggles and failures that shaped character. Had Carver ever been forced to wait until next month's paycheck for a new pair of shoes? Been turned down by a woman? Had property repossessors knocking on his door? Hardly.
Carver told him about the danger, brought up the predecessors again, hinted that bad things had happened to them. Max still didn't rise to it. He'd gone into the meeting a third of the way determined not to take the job. Now he was almost at the halfway mark.
Carver clocked his indifference and switched his talk to Charliewhen he'd taken his first steps, how he had an ear for musicand then he went into a bit more detail about Haiti.
Max listened, feigning interest with a fixed look, but behind it he was going away, back into himself, delving, working out if he could still cut it.
He came up strangely empty, unresolved. The case had two obvious anglesfinancial motive or some possible voodoo bullshit. No ransom, so that left the latter, which he knew a bit more about than he'd let on to Carver. Or maybe Carver knew about him and Solomon Boukman. In fact, he was certain Carver did know about that. Of course he did. How couldn't he, if he had Torres on his payroll? What else did Carver know about him? How far back had he gone? Did he have something stored up, ready to spring on him?
Bad start, if he wanted to take it farther. He didn't trust his future client.
* * *
Max ended their meeting telling Carver he'd think about it. Carver gave him his card and twenty-four hours to make up his mind.
* * *
He took a cab back to his hotel, Charlie Carver's photographs in his lap.
He thought about ten million dollars and what he could do. He'd sell the house and buy a modest apartment somewhere quiet and residential, possibly in Kendall. Or maybe he'd move out to the Keys. Or maybe he'd leave Florida altogether.
Then he thought about going to Haiti. Would he have taken the case in his pre-con prime? Yes, certainly. The challenge alone would have appealed to him. No forensics to fall back on and cut corners with, just pure problem-solving, brain work, his wits pitted against another's. But he'd mothballed his talents when he'd gone to prison, and they'd quietly wasted away with inattention, same as any muscle. A case like Charlie Carver's would be up the hill backwards, the whole way.
* * *
Back in his room, he propped the two photos up on his desk and stared at them.
He didn't have any children. He'd never cared for kids all that much. They tried his patience and fried his nerves. Nothing would piss him off more than being stuck in a room with a crying baby its parents couldn't or wouldn't shut up. And yet, ironically, many of his private cases had involved finding missing children, some mere toddlers. He had a hundred-percent success rate. Alive or dead, he always brought them home. He wanted to do the same for Charlie. He was worried that he couldn't, that he'd fail him. Those eyes, sparkling with precocious rage, were finding him again, all the way across the room. It was stupid but he felt they were calling out to him, imploring him to come to his rescue.
Magic eyes.
* * *
Max went out and tried to find a quiet bar where he could have a drink and think things through, but everywhere he passed was full of people, most of them a generation younger than he, most of them happy and loud. Bill Clinton had been reelected president. Celebrations everywhere. Not his scene. He decided to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels at a liquor store instead.
While he was looking for a store, he bumped into a guy in a white puffy jacket and ski hat pulled down almost to his eyes. Max apologized. Something fell out of the man's jacket and landed at his feet. A clear plastic Ziploc bag with five fat joints rolled tampon-style. Max picked it up and turned to give it to the man, but he was gone.
He slipped the joints into his coat pocket and carried on walking until he found a liquor store. They were out of Jack. They had other whiskeys, but nothing came close to a hit of Jack.
Of course, there was always the reefer.
He bought a cheap plastic lighter.
* * *
Back in the day, Max Mingus and his partner Joe Liston had liked nothing better than to unwind with a little reefer they got off a snitch dealer called Five Fingers. Five'd feed them certified busts and throw in a few free ounces of Caribbean Queena very potent strain of Jamaican grass he used himself.
It was the best shit Max had ever had, way better than the year-old garbage he'd just smoked.
* * *
An hour later, he sat on his bed, staring intently at the wall, vaguely aware of the lurchy feeling in his stomach.
He lay back and closed his eyes.
He thought of Miami.
Home sweet home.
He lived near Hobie Beach, on Key Biscayne, off the Rickenbacker Causeway. On a good evening, he and Sandra used to sit out on the porch and watch downtown Miami in all its hypnotic, neon-lit splendor, the smell of Biscayne Bay wafting in on the cool breeze, fish and boat oil mixed in. No matter how many times they took in the view, it was always different. Manhattan had nothing on his hometown on a good day. They liked to talk about the future then, right then when life was good and promised to get better. To Sandra, the future meant starting a family.
Max should have told her about the vasectomy he'd had a few months before they'd met, but he'd never had theyeah, he'd never had the balls.
How could he bring children into the world after seeing what was left of the ones he found in his line of work, the ones he had to pick up and reassemble piece by piece? He couldn't. He'd never let his kids out of his sight. He'd lock them up and throw away the key. He'd stop them going to school and playing outside and visiting friends, in case they got snatched. He'd run background checks on all his relatives and in-laws in case they were hiding pedo convictions. What kind of life would that befor them, for his wife, for him? None at all. Best to forget having a family, best to forget continuing the cycle, best to shut it down completely.
1981: that had been a bad time for him, a shit era. 1981: the year of Solomon Boukman, a gang leader from Little Haiti. 1981: the year of the King of Swords.
* * *
Sandra would have understood, if he'd been honest with her from the start, but when they'd first started dating he was still in his confirmed-bachelor mode, lying to every woman he met, pretending he was a long-term prospect, telling them whatever they wanted to hear so he could fuck them and run. He'd had plenty of opportunities to come clean with her before they got married, but he thought he'd lose her. She came from a big family and loved children.
Now he regretted not reversing the vasectomy when he'd had the chance. He'd thought about it a year into his marriage, when being with Sandra had started changing him for the better and, with it, little by little, changing his attitudes toward starting a family. It would have meant everything to him to still have something of her left behind, even a trace he could love and cherish as he had loved and cherished her.
He thought about their house again.
They had a large kitchen with a counter in the middle. He used to sit there at night, trying to get his head around a case that was keeping him awake. Sometimes Sandra would join him.
He saw her again now, dressed in a T-shirt and slippers, hair pillow-frazzled, a glass of water in one hand, Charlie's headshot in another.
"I think you should take this case, Max," she said, looking across at him, her eyes all puffed up with broken sleep.
"Why?" he heard himself ask.
"Because you got no choice, baby," she said. "It's that or you know what."
He woke up with a start, fully dressed on the bed, staring at the blank ceiling, his mouth dry and tasting of rotted beef.
The room stank of stale reefer, taking him right back to his cell after Velasquez had taken a nightcap hit before saying his prayers in Latin.
Max stood up and staggered over to the desk, twenty jackhammers busting out of his cranium. He was still mildly stoned. He opened the window and the freezing-cold air tore into the room. He took a few deep breaths. The fog in his head retreated.
He decided to take a shower and change his clothes.
* * *
"Mr. Carver? It's Max Mingus."
It was nine a.m. He'd gone to a diner and eaten a big breakfastfour-egg omelet, four pieces of toast, orange juice, and two pots of coffee. He'd thought things through one more time, the pros and cons, the risk factor, the money. Then he'd found a phone booth.
Carver sounded slightly out of breath when he answered, as if he was cooling down from a morning run.
"I'll find your son," Max said.
"That's great news!" Carver almost shouted.
"I'll need the terms and conditions in writing."
"Of course," Carver said. "Come by the club in two hours. I'll have a contract ready."
"OK."
"When will you be able to start?"
"Assuming I can get a flight, I'll be in Haiti on Tuesday."
Chapter 2
BACK IN MIAMI, Max took a cab from the airport to his house. He asked the driver to take the longer way around, down Le Jeune Road, so he could check out Little Havana and Coral Gables to get a feel for how far his hometown had come in seven years, check the pulse beating between the poles, from barrio to billionaires' row.
Max's father-in-law had been looking after the house. He'd picked up the bills. Max owed him $3,000, but that wasn't a problem, because Carver had given him a $25,000 cash advance in New York when he'd signed the contract. He'd played dumb and brought Dave Torres with him to read through it and witness it. It had been funny watching Torres and Carver pretend they'd never met. Lawyers are great actors, second only in talent to their guilty clients.
Max stared out of the passenger window but not much was getting through. Miami: Seven Years Later was passing him by in a glistening blur of cars, more cars, palm trees, and blue sky. It had been raining when the plane touched down, one of those almighty Sunshine State soakings where the raindrops hit the ground so hard they bounce. The downpour had stopped a few minutes before he'd walked out of the airport. He couldn't focus on the outside when there was so much going on within. He was thinking about returning to his old home. He hoped his in-laws hadn't decided to spring a surprise welcome-back party on him. They were good-hearted, always well-intentioned people, and it was just the sort of good-hearted, well-intentioned shit they'd pull.
They'd passed Little Havana and Coral Gables and he hadn't even noticed. Now they were on Vizcaya's main highway and heading for the Rickenbacker Causeway.
Sandra had always met him at the airport when he'd been away on a case, or out of town to meet a potential client. She'd ask him how it had gone, although she could always tell, she said, by looking at him. They'd walk out of the Arrivals section and she'd leave him waiting outside the terminal while she went and got the car. If things had gone well, he'd do the driving. On the way home, he'd tell her what had happened and what he'd done to make it so. By the time they'd reached the front door, he'd have talked the case dry and the subject would be closed, never to be mentioned again. Sometimes he'd come out into Arrivals beaming, triumphant, vindicated, having flown out someplace on a wild hunch that had turned up one of those golden leads that bring a case to a swift and happy conclusion. Those occasions were few and far between, but they were always Occasions. They'd go out dancing, or to dinner, or down The L Bar if there were other people to thank. But two times out of three Sandra did the driving, because she'd have read failure in Max's body language, resigned despair in his face. She'd make light small talk while he sat and brooded in silence, staring out at the sky through the windscreen. She'd sprinkle domestic trivialities in his thought stream, stuff about mended curtains and cleaned carpets and new household appliances, stuff to let him know that their life went on despite the deaths he'd uncovered and had to report back to a hoping-against-hope spouse or relative or friend.
She'd always been there, waiting at the barrier, the face for him.
He'd looked for her, of course, when he'd come through Arrivals. He'd looked for her in the faces of women who might have been waiting for men, but none of them looked as she always had.
He couldn't go back to the house. Not now. He wasn't ready for that museum of happy memories.
"Driver? Keep driving, don't take the turn," Max said as he heard the indicator lights go on.
"Where we goin'?"
"The Radisson Hotel, North Kendall Drive."
* * *
"Hey Max Mingus! Wassappenin' wit'chu?" Joe Liston's voice boomed down the phone when Max called him from his hotel room.
"Good to hear your voice, Joe. How you been?"
"Good, Max, good. You home now?"
"No. I'm staying at the Radisson in Kendall for a few days."
"What's wrong wit' your house, man?"
"Sandra's cousins are there," Max lied. "I thought I'd give them the run of the place a while longer."
"Yeah?" Joe said, chuckling. "They got ID?"
"ID?"
"You're a big fuckin' hero 'round here, Mingus, don't you go spoilin' it," Joe said, losing the chuckle. "Ain't no one at your house, man. I've been sendin' a patrol car up and down your street on the hour every hour since Sandra passed."
Max should have known better. He felt embarrassed.
"I ain't gonna be thinkin' more or less of you 'cause you're hurtin'. I will think less of you if you start playin' me for some fool that just got off the bus from Retard City, Ohio," Joe said, admonishing him as he probably did his children, cutting the reproach with a guilt-inducer.
Max didn't say anything. Neither did Joe. Max heard the sounds of office life going on through the receiverconversations, phones ringing, doors opening and closing, pagers. Joe was probably used to his children apologizing about now, and then crying. Joe would pick them up and squeeze them and tell them it was OK, but not to do it again. Then he'd give them a kiss on the forehead and put them down.
"I'm sorry, Joe," Max said. "It's been hard."
"No es nada, mi amigo," Joe said, after a deliberate pause meant to make Max think he was evaluating his sincerity.
"But it's gonna stay hard for you as long as you keep runnin' away. You got to go to the mountain otherwise that sucker's gonna go for you," Joe said. Probably what he told his kids when they complained about their homework being difficult.
"I know," Max said. "I'm working on it right now. In fact, that's one of the reasons I was calling. I need a couple of favors. Records, old files, anything you've got on an Allain Carver. He's Haitian and"
"I know him," Joe said. "Missin' son, right?"
"Yeah."
"Came in here a while back and filed a report."
"I thought the kid went missing in Haiti?"
"Someone reported they'd seen him here in Hialeah."
"And?"
"That someone was some crazy old lady claimed she had visions."
"Did you check it out?"
Joe laughedbig and hearty laughter, but dry and cynical tooclassic cop's laugh, the way you got after more than two decades on the job.
"Max? We started doin' that we'd be lookin' for little green men in North Miami Beach. That ole lady's from Little Haiti. That kid's face is everyplacestuck on everythin'walls, doors, storesI bet it's in the water they drink, toohis face and the fiddy-thousand-dollar reward for information."
Max thought about Carver's initial campaign in Haiti. The Miami version had probably yielded the same results.
"You got an address for the woman?"
"You takin' the case, right?" Joe said. He sounded worried.
"Yeah."
"Main reason Carver came to see me was he wanted to get in touch wit'chu. I hear you played hard to get? What changed your mind?"
"I need the money."
Joe didn't say anything. Max heard him scribbling something down.
"You'll need a piece," Joe said.
"That was the second favor."
Max was banned from owning a gun for life. He'd expected Joe to refuse.
"And the first?"
"I'll need a copy of everything you've got on the Carver kid, plus his family."
He heard more scribbling.
"No problem," Joe said. "How about we meet at The L tonight, say 'round eight?"
"On a Friday? How about someplace quiet?"
"The L's got this new lounge bar? Away from the main one? It's so quiet you can hear a flea fart."
"OK." Max laughed.
"It'll be good to see you again, Max. Real good," Joe said.
"You too, Big Man," Max said.
Joe was going to say something and then stopped. Then he tried again and stopped again. Max could hear it in the slight sucking noises he was making as his mouth opened and he took in the right amount of air to launch the words massed at the back of his throat.
They still had it, their old telepathy.
Joe was worried about something.
"What's bugging you, Joe?"
"You sure you wanna go to Haiti?" Joe asked. "'Cause it ain't too late to back out."
"Where's this coming from, Joe?"
"It ain't gonna be too safe for you out there."
"I know about the country's situation."
"It ain't that," Joe said slowly. "It's Boukman."
"Boukman? Solomon Boukman?"
"Uh-huh."
"What about him?"
"He got out," Joe said, his voice dropping close to a mumble.
"What?!!? He was on death row!" Max shouted, standing up as his voice rose. His reaction surprised him: seven years in prison and he'd mostly kept his emotions in check, his expressions to a bare minimum. You couldn't afford to let people see what got you up or down in jail, because they'd use it against you. He was already adjusting to the free world, finding his left-behind self again.
"The government gave him a free pass home," Joe explained. "They're deportin' the Haitian criminals instead of keepin' 'em locked up. Happenin' all overstate and fed."
"WHAT?!!?"
"This ain't official. It's one of those under-the-radar things you never find out about. And even if it did come out, who'd give a shit? Us? We'd say good riddance. The Haitians? Who they gonna complain to? Us? We're already rulin' their country."
"Do they know what he did?" Max said.
"That ain't the point, as far as they see it. Why waste taxpayers' money keepin' him in prison when you can send him back home?"
"But he's free."
"Yeah, but that's the Haitians' problem now. And now it's yours tooyou meet him out there."
Max sat himself back down.
"When did this happen, Joe? When did he get out?"
"March. This year."
"Mother-fucker!"
"There's more to tell" Joe started and then he broke off to talk to someone. He put the receiver down on his desk. Max heard the conversation get louder. He couldn't make out exactly what was being said, but someone had fucked up. Dialogue turned to monologue, Joe's voice crushing everything in its path. Joe grabbed the phone. "MAX?!!? I'LL SEE YOU TONIGHT! WE'LL TALK SOME MORE THEN!" he roared and slammed the phone down.
Max laughed, imagining the poor subordinate getting the trade end of one of Joe's tirades. He had a way of using every inch of his towering frame to win an argument, leaning his face right over yours and looking down into your eyes like you were a piece of dog shit he'd stepped in on his way to church. And then he'd start talking.
He suddenly stopped laughing when he remembered the first child-sacrifice victim, the way the body had looked on the morgue slab.
Solomon Boukman: child killer. Free.
Solomon Boukman: mass murderer. Free.
Solomon Boukman: cop killer. Free.
Solomon Boukman: gang leader, drug baron, pimp, money-launderer, kidnapper, rapist. Free.
Solomon Boukman: his last case as a cop, his last collar, the one that almost killed him.
Solomon's words to him in court: "You give me reason to live," stage-whispered with a smile that chilled Max to the core. Those words had made the whole thing between them very personal.
Max's words back: "Adíos, motherfucker." How wrong he'd been.
Boukman had headed up a gang called The SNBCshort for Saturday Night Barons Club, adapted from Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death. Its members swore their leader had supernatural powers, that he could read minds and predict the future, that he could be in two places at once, materializing in rooms just like they did on Star Trek. They said he got his powers through some demon he worshipped, some méchant loa. Max and Joe had caught him and shut down the gang.
Max was shaking with anger, fists balled up, heat rising up in his face, the vein in his forehead twitching and wriggling like a worm in a frying pan. Solomon Boukman was someone Max had taken great pride in catchingand great joy in working over with his fists and a sap before he'd booked him.
Now Boukman was free. He'd beaten the system. And he'd beaten Max and pissed in his face. It was too muchtoo much to have to come back to.
Chapter 3
MAX HAD KNOWN Joe for twenty-five years. They'd started out as partners in Patrol and moved on up through the ranks together.
The pair were known as "Born to Run" within the Miami PD. Their boss, Eldon Burns, coined the nickname because he said the way the two of them stood together reminded him of the cover of Bruce Springsteen's eponymous album, where the pale, scrawny singer is propped up against Clarence Clemons, his gargantuan, pimp-hatted sax player. It wasn't a bad comparison. Joe dwarfed everyone. Built like a linebacker who'd swallowed the team, he was six foot five in his socks and had to duck to get through most doors.
Joe dug the nickname. He loved Bruce Springsteen. He had all his albums and singles, and hundreds of hours of live shows on cassettes. It was virtually all he seemed to listen to. Whenever Springsteen toured, Joe would have front-row seats for all the Florida concerts. Max dreaded having to share a car with his partner after he'd seen his hero in the flesh, because Joe would describe the experience in excruciatingly precise detail, song by song, grunt by grunt. Springsteen's shows averaged three hours. Joe's reports would go on for six. Max couldn't stand Springsteen, didn't know what all the fuss was about. To his ears, the "Boss" 's voice was stuck somewhere between throat-clearing and throat cancerand the perfect soundtrack for white guys who drove station wagons in motorcycle jackets. He'd once asked Joe what the attraction was. "It's like everything that moves one person and leaves another standing still: you either get it or you don't. Ain't just about the music and the voice with Bruce. It's about a whole lotta other things. You get me?" Max hadn't, but he'd left it at that. Bad taste never hurt anybody.
That said, he had no problem with their nickname. It meant they were being noticed. After they'd both made detective, Max had the album image and title tattooed on his inner right forearm. A year before he'd had a traditional cop tattooa shield bearing a skull and crossed six-guns, surrounded by the legend DEATH IS CERTAINLIFE IS NOTinked into his left arm.
* * *
The L was named after the shape of its building, although you'd have to see it from above to know. Detective Frank Nunez had first spotted it from a police helicopter while giving chase to a vanload of bank robbers across downtown Miami. He got some of his friends to come in with him in return for points, including Max and Sandra, who put in $20,000. Until they had to sell their share to help pay Max's legal bills, the bar had made them double their investment every year. It was a big hit with the downtown business-and-banking crowd, who packed it Monday through Saturday.
From the front, The L resembled a fairly typical bar, with its wide, black-shuttered windows and flashing beer signs spelled out in bright neon squeezed-toothpaste lettering. There were two entrances. The right took you straight to the bar, a big, high-ceilinged space with varnished wooden floors and a maritime theme in the ship's wheels, anchors, and shark harpoons mounted on the walls. The left entrance led up a long flight of stairs to the L Lounge. The lounge was screened off from the bar by a tinted wall-window that allowed its patrons to see the goings-on down below unobserved. It was ideal for first dates and clandestine office affairs, because it was sectioned off into intimate booths, each softly lit with red and gold Chinese-style lanterns. The lounge had its own bar and served some of the best cocktails in Miami.
When Max walked in, he saw Joe sitting on the outside of a middle booth, close to the window. He was in a blue suit and tie. Max felt underdressed in his loose sweatshirt, khakis, and running shoes.
"Lieutenant Liston?" Max said as he drew up to his friend.
Joe smiled broadly, a capsized quarter-moon of teeth that glowed across the bottom of his dark face. He got up. Max had forgotten quite how immense he was. He'd put on a few pounds around the waist and his face was a little rounder, but he still looked like every suspect's interrogation-room nightmare.
Joe gave Max a big hug. Despite his prison workouts, Max's shoulders didn't make either side of Joe's chest. Joe patted Max's arms and stood back a couple of steps to look him over.
"See they fed you," he said.
"I worked the kitchen."
"Not the barbershop?" Joe said, patting Max's bald head.
They sat down. Joe took up most of his side of the booth. A ring-binder file was on the table. A waiter came over. Joe ordered a Diet Coke and a shot of bourbon. Max asked for a fat Coke.
"You dry?" Joe asked.
"Dry-ving. You?"
"Slowed drinkin' down so much I might as well have quit. Middle age is beatin' my ass. Can't shake a hangover like back in the day."
"You feel better for it?"
"Nope."
Joe's face hadn't aged muchnot in the lounge light at any ratebut his hairline had been beaten back from his forehead and he wore his hair lower than before, which led Max to suspect he was thinning in the middle.
There were a few couples in the lounge, all still in their office suits. Anonymous piano Muzak tinkled from corner speakers, the tune so indecipherable they might as well have been playing the sound of a horse pissing on wind chimes.
"How's Lena?" Max asked.
"She's good, man. Sends her love," Joe said. He reached into his suit jacket, pulled out some photographs, and handed them to Max. "Mug shots. See if you recognize anyone you know."
Max looked through the pictures. The first was a family shot with Lena in the middle. Lena was tiny, next to Joe almost fetal. Joe had met her at his local Baptist church. He hadn't been particularly religious, but church was a better and cheaper alternative to trawling bars and clubs or dating fellow cops; he'd called it "the best singles spot outside of heaven."
Lena had never liked Max. He didn't blame her. The first time they'd met, he'd had blood on his collar from where a suspect had bitten his earlobe. She'd thought it was lipstick, and from then on, she'd always looked at him like he'd done something wrong; relations, like their conversations, had stayed the polite side of functional. Things hadn't improved between them after he'd left the force, either. His marrying Sandra had appalled her. Even God didn't cross the color line in her world.
The last time Max had seen Joe he'd had three children, all boysJethro, the eldest, then Dwayne and Dean, one year apartbut there were two baby girls on Lena's lap.
"Yeah, that's Ashley on the left and on the right is Bryony," Joe said proudly.
"Twins?"
"Double trouble. Stereo."
"How old?"
"Three. We wasn't plannin' on havin' no more kids. They just happened."
"They say the unplanned ones are the most loved."
"'They' say a lot of things, most of 'em bullshit. I love all my babies equally."
They were cute-looking kids, took after their mother, same eyes.
"Sandra never told me," Max said.
"You two's had more pressin' bidnis to talk over, I'm sure," Joe said.
The waiter brought the Cokes and bourbon. Joe took the shot glass, quickly checked around, and tipped the drink on the floor.
"For Sandra," he said.
Pour out a little liquor for the dead, spirit for spirit. Joe did that every time someone close to him died. Right then solemnity threatened to invade their space, get the better of the moment. Max didn't need it. They had things to talk over.
"Sandra didn't drink," Max said.
Joe looked at him, read the traces of humor left over on his lips, and burst out laughing. He had a big laugh, a rolling rumble of joy that filled the room and made everyone look their way.
Max stared at the photograph of his godson. Jethro was holding a basketball up on splayed fingertips. The boy was twelve but already tall and broad enough to pass for sixteen.
"Takes after his daddy," Max said.
"Jet loves his ball."
"Could be a future there."
"Could be, but best let the future be the future. Besides, I want him to do well in school. Kid's got a good head on him."
"You don't want him to follow in your footsteps?"
"Like I said, the kid's got a good head on him."
They clinked glasses.
Max handed him back the photographs and looked over at the main bar. It was packed. Brickell Avenue bankers, businessmen, white-collar workers with loosened ties, handbags on the floor, jackets draped carelessly over the backs of their chairs, hems trailing on the ground. He homed in on two executive types in similar light gray suits, both clutching Bud bottles and talking to a couple of women. They'd just met, exchanged first names, established common ground, and now they were searching for the next conversation lead-in. He could tell all that from the tensed-up body languagestiff-backed, alert, ready to run off after the next best thing. Both men were interested in the same girlnavy blue business suit, blond highlights. Her friend knew this and was already looking around the bar. Back in his bachelor days, Max had specialized in going for the ugly friend, reasoning that the better-looking one would be expecting attention and would play hard to get and leave him holding his dick and a big tab at the end of the night. The woman who wasn't expecting to get hit on would be more likely to give it up. It had worked nine times out of ten, sometimes with the unexpected bonus of the good-looking one making a play for him. He hadn't liked most of the women he'd dated. They were challenges, notches, things to be possessed. His attitudes had changed completely when he'd met Sandra, but now that she was gone all those old thoughts were coming back to him like the ghost of an amputated limb, sending him feelings out of nowhere.
He hadn't had sex in seven years. He hadn't thought about it since the funeral. He hadn't even jerked off. His libido had shut down out of respect.
He'd been faithful to Sandra, a one-woman man. He didn't really want anyone else, anyone new, not now. He couldn't even imagine what it would be like again, going through all that bullshit conversation, pretending to be a sensitive guy when the only reason you'd gone up to her was to see if you could fool her into a fuck. He was looking at the whole scene below him with the pioneer's distaste for the follower.
Joe pushed the file over to him.
"Dug up a little on the Carvers of Haiti," Joe said. "Mostly back story, nothing current. The video's got a load of news footage about the Haitian invasion. Allain Carver's in there somewhere."
"Thanks, Joe," Max said, taking the files and putting them down on the seat beside him. "Anything on them here?"
"No criminal records, but Gustav Carver, the dad? He's got a mansion in Coral Gables. Got B&E'd six years back."
"What they take?"
"Nothing. Someone broke in one night, took one of their fine-china dinner plates, shit on it, put it on the dining-room table and left without a trace."
"What about the security cameras?"
"Nada. I don't think the case got followed through. Report is only two pageslooks more like a complaint than a crime. Probably some pissed off ex-servant."
Max laughed. He'd heard of far stranger crimes, but the thought of Allain Carver finding that on the table when he came down to breakfast was funny. He started to smile, but then he thought of Boukman and his expression wilted.
"So, you wanna tell me what happened with Solomon Boukman? When I went to New York he was sitting on death row, one last appeal away from the needle."
"We ain't in Texas," said Joe. "Things take time in Florida. Even time takes time here. A lawyer can take up to two years to put in an appeal. That stays in the system for another two years. Then you got yet another two years before you get in front of the judge. Add all that up and it's 1995. They turned down Boukman's last appeal, like I knew they would, only"
"But they fuckin' set him free, Joe!" Max said, raising his voice to a near shout.
"Do you know how much a one-way ticket to Haiti costs?" Joe said. "A hundred bucks, give or takeplus tax. Do you know how much it costs the state to keep a man on death row? Hellforget that. Do you know how much it costs the state to execute a man? Thousands. See the logic?"
"The victims' families 'see the logic'?" Max said bitterly.
Joe didn't say anything. Max could tell he was angry about it too, but there was something else eating away at him.
"You wanna tell me the rest, Joe."
"They cleaned out Boukman's cell the day he left. Found this," Joe said, handing Max a sheet of school exercise-book paper sealed in an evidence bag.
Boukman had cut out a newspaper picture of Max at his trial and stuck it in the middle of the paper. Underneath it, in pencil, in that strange, childlike writing of hiscapitals, all letters bereft of curves, strokes linked by dots and drawn so straight he appeared to have used a rulerhe'd written: YOU GIVE ME REASON TO LIVE. Below that, he'd drawn a small outline of Haiti.
"Fuck's he mean by that?" Joe asked.
"He said that to me at his trial, when I was givin' evidence," Max said and left it at that. He wasn't going to spring the truth on Joe. Not now. Not ever, if he could help it.
He'd come face-to-face with Boukman twice, before his arrest. He'd never been so terrified of another human being in all his life.
"I don't know about you, but there was somethin' really scary about Boukman," Joe said. "D'you remember when we busted in therethat zombie-palace place?"
"He's just a man, Joe. A sick, twisted man, but a man all the same. Flesh and blood like us."
"He didn't so much as groan when you laid into him."
"So? Did he fly off on a broomstick?"
"I don't care how much Carver's payin' you, man. I don't think you should go. Give it a pass," Joe said.
"If I see Boukman in Haiti, I'll tell him you say hello. And then I'll kill him," Max said.
"You can't afford to take this shit lightly," Joe said, angry.
"I'm not."
"I got your piece," Joe lowered his voice and leaned over. "New Beretta, two hundred shells. Hollow point and regular. Gimme your flight details. It'll be waitin' for you in Departures. Pick it up before you get on the plane. One thing: don't bring it back. It stays in Haiti."
"You could get into serious shit for thisarming a convicted felon," Max joked, hiking up the sleeves of his sweatshirt to just below his elbows.
"I don't know no felons, but I do know good men who take wrong turns." Joe smiled. They clicked glasses.
"Thanks man. Thanks for everything you did for me when I was away. I owe you."
"You don't owe me shit. You're a cop. We look after our own. You know how it is and always will be."
Depending on what they'd done to get there (most rapes and all kiddie-sex crimes were out, but everything else was tolerated, cops who went to jail were protected by the system. There was an unofficial national network, in which one state police department looked out for a felon from another state police department, knowing that the favor would be returned in spades sometime down the line. Con-cops would sometimes be kept in a maximum-security prison for a week or two and then quietly transferred out to a minimum-security white-collar jail. That was what happened to those who'd killed suspects, or got caught taking backhanders or stealing dope and selling it back on the street. If they couldn't swing a transfer, a fallen cop would be segregated, kept in solitary, have his meals brought to him by the guards, and allowed to shower and exercise alone. If solitary was all booked up, as it frequently was, the cops would be put in General Population, but with two guards watching their backs at all times. If a con did make a move on a jailbird cop, he'd get thrown in the hole long enough for the guards to put the word out that he was a snitch, and let out just in time to get shanked. Although Max was arrested in New York, Joe had had no trouble making sure his friend got five-star security treatment at Attica.
"Before you leave you should go see Clyde Beeson," Joe said.
"Beeson?" Max said. Out of all the Florida PIs, Clyde Beeson had been his major competition. Max had always despised him, ever since the Boukman case.
"Carver employed him before you. Didn't work out too good, way I heard it."
"What happened?"
"Best you hear it from him."
"He won't talk to me."
"He will if you tell him you're going to Haiti."
"I'll see him if I got the time."
"Make time," Joe said.
It was close to midnight and the bar crowd below was peaking. They were drunker, looser, their walks to and from the bathroom unsteady, their voices raised to shouting pitch above the din of the music threading through a hundred different conversations. He could hear the muffled din through the glass.
Max checked on how the executives were doing with the women. He saw the blonde and one of the men at a table near the back. Their jackets were off. The man had rolled up his sleeves and taken off his tie. The woman had on a sleeveless black halterneck. From her well-toned and proportioned arms, Max saw she worked out regularly. The man was making his move now, leaning closer to her across the table, touching her hand. He was making her laugh too. It probably wasn't even that funny, but she was interested in him. Her friend was gone, so was the man's competitionprobably separately; losers rarely left together.
Max and Joe talked some more: who'd retired, who'd died (threecancer, bullets, drunk and drowned), who was married, divorced, what the job was like now, how things had changed postRodney King. They laughed, bitched, reminisced. Joe told him about the fifteen Bruce Springsteen concerts he'd seen while Max had been away. Mercifully, he kept the details to a minimum. They drank more Diet Cokes, scoped out the lounge couples, talked about getting older. It was good, it was warm, time passed quickly, and Max forgot about Boukman for the whole while.
By two o'clock, the bar had emptied of all but a few drinkers. The couple Max had been watching had left.
Joe and Max made their way out.
It was cool and slightly breezy on the street. Max took in a deep breath of Miami airsea, mixed with swamp and mild traffic fumes.
"How does it feel? Bein' out?" Joe asked.
"Like learning to walk and finding out you can still run," Max said. "Tell me something? How come you never came to see me?"
"Did you expect me to?"
"No."
"Seein' you in there would've messed with my moral compass. Cops don't go to jail," Joe said. "Besides, I felt kinda responsible. Not teachin' you some restraint back in the day, when I could've."
"You can't teach a man his nature, Joe."
"I hear that. But you can teach him sense from none-sense. And some of that shit you pulled back then, man? That was some senseless none-sense."
Those parental tones again. Max was close to fifty, two-thirds of his life as good as gone. He didn't need a lecture from Joe, who was only three years older than he but had always acted like it was ten more. Anyway, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. What had happened had happened. There was no undoing any of it. Besides, Joe was no saint. When they'd been partners, there had been as many brutality complaints against him as there were against Max. No one had given a flying fuck or done anything. Miami had been a war zone. The city had needed to meet violence with violence.
"We cool, Joe?"
"All-ways." They hugged.
"See you when I get back."
"In one piece, manthe only way I wanna see ya."
"You will. Give my love to the kids."
"Take care, brother," Joe said.
They went their separate ways.
Opening the door of his rented Honda, Max realized that Joe had called him "brother" for the first time ever in all of the twenty-five years he'd known him. They might have been best friends, but Joe was a segregationist when it came to his terms of endearment.
That's when Max guessed things were going to be bad in Haiti.
Chapter 4
AT THE HOTEL, Max took a shower and tried to catch some sleep, but it wouldn't come.
He kept on thinking about Boukman walking free while he was in prison, Boukman laughing in his face, Boukman slicing up more kids. He didn't know what pissed him off more. He should have killed him when he had the chance.
He got up, turned on the light, and grabbed Joe's file on the Carvers. He started reading and didn't stop until he'd finished it.
* * *
Nobody seemed particularly sure where the Carvers came from, nor when they first appeared in Haiti. One rumor stated that the family were descendants of Polish soldiers who deserted Napoleon's army en masse to fight alongside Toussaint L'Ouverture's insurgents in the 1790s. Others linked the family to a Scottish clan called the MacGarvers, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived on the island, where they owned and ran corn and sugar-cane plantations.
What is known is that by 1934, Fraser Carver, Allain's grandfather, had become a multimillionairenot only the richest man in Haiti but one of the wealthiest men in the Caribbean. He'd made his fortune by flooding the island with cheap essential foodsrice, beans, milk (powdered and evaporated), cornmeal, cooking oilbought for him at a huge discount by the American military and shipped into the country for free. This very quickly drove many traders out of business and eventually gave Carver the monopoly on virtually every imported foodstuff sold in the country. He opened the country's second national bankthe Banque Populaire d'Haďti in the late 1930s.
Fraser Carver died in 1947, leaving his business empire to Allain's father, Gustav. Gustav's twin, Clifford, turned up dead in a ravine in 1959. Although the official cause was given as a car accident, no vehicle, wrecked or otherwise, was found near the body, whose every bone appeared to have been broken at least once. The CIA report quoted an unnamed witness who saw members of the militiathe FSN or Tonton Macoutes, as they were more commonly knowngrab Clifford off a residential street and bundle him into a car. The report concluded that Gustav Carver had had his brother killed with help from his friend and close associate, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the country's president.
Gustav Carver had first met François Duvalier in Michigan in 1943. Duvalier was one of twenty Haitian doctors sent to the city's university to train in public-health medicine. Carver was in town on business. They were introduced by a mutual friend, after Duvalier, who knew of the family by reputation and legend, insisted on meeting Gustav. Carver later told a friend about this meeting and said he was convinced that Duvalier was bound for greatness, a future president of Haiti.
By then three quarters of the country's population were plagued by yaws, a highly contagious and crippling tropical disease, which ate away at limbs, noses, and lips. Its victims were invariably the shoeless poor, as the disease entered their bodies through their bare feet in the form of a spirochete.
Duvalier was sent to the most infected area of Haiti, the Rural Clinic of Gressier, fifteen miles southwest of Port-au-Prince. He quickly ran out of the penicillin he needed to cure the sick and sent for more supplies from the capital, only to be told that their stock was almost depleted and that he would have to wait another week for supplies to come in from the United States. He sent a message to Gustav Carver for help. Carver immediately dispatched ten truckloads of penicillin, as well as beds and tents.
Duvalier cured the entire region of yaws and his reputation spread among the poor, who hobbled great distances on crumbling legs, to be cured. They nicknamed him "Papa Doc." Thus "Papa Doc" became a popular hero, a savior of the poor.
Gustav Carver funded Duvalier's 1957 presidential election campaign, and supplied some of the muscle to bully voters who couldn't be bribed into supporting the good doctor. Duvalier eventually won by a landslide. Carver was rewarded with more monopolies, this time in the country's lucrative coffee and cocoa businesses.
Haiti entered another dark age when Papa Doc declared himself "president for life" and went on to become the most feared and reviled tyrant in the country's history. Both the army and the Tonton Macoutes killed, tortured, and raped thousands of Haitianseither on the orders of the government or, more often than not, for personal reasons, usually to steal a plot of land or take over a business.
Gustav Carver continued to build his vast fortune, thanks to his coziness with Duvalier. The latter not only rewarded him with more monopoliesincluding sugar cane and cementbut also had accounts in Carver's Banque Populaire d'Haďti, where he regularly deposited the millions of dollars in U.S. aid he received every three months, then siphoned most of it to Swiss bank accounts.
Papa Doc died on April 21, 1971. Jean-Claude took his father's place as "president for life" at the age of nineteen. Although nominally in power, Baby Doc had absolutely no interest in running Haiti and left it all to his mother, and later his wife, Michele, whose wedding to Baby Doc made the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records as the third most expensive ever; while in the same year, an IMF report rated Haiti the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
* * *
Miami dawn. Max finished reading and stepped out onto the balcony. Like the best businesspeople, the Carvers were ruthless opportunists. And like the best businesspeople, they'd have a phone book's worth of enemies.
The feeble sunlight had yet to fade out most of the stars, and the breeze still had the chill of night about it, but he was sure it was going to be a nice day. Every day out of prison was a nice day.
Chapter 5
CLYDE BEESON HAD fallen far. Life hadn't just kicked him in the teeth; it had plugged the gaps with papier-mâché. He couldn't even afford a house. He lived in a trailer park in Opa-Locka.
Opa-Locka was a shithole, one of Dade County's most derelict areas, a small gray wart on Miami's toned, bronzed, depilated, hedonistic ass. It was a nice day, with clear, light blue skies and unbroken sunlight drenching the landscape, which made the area, with its neglected and crumbling Moorish-inspired architecture, seem all the more desolate.
Max had got the address from the receptionist who manned the lobby of Beeson's heyday homea luxury apartment complex in Coconut Grove, overlooking Bayside Park with its joggers, yachting clubs, and postcard-perfect views of Florida sunsets. The receptionist thought Max was a debt collector. He told Max to break the puta's both legs.
Depending on their dwellers and location, some trailer parks make a good go at suburban drag, masking their identities behind white picket fences, rose bushes, clean, close-cropped front lawns, and letterboxes that aren't filled with dog shit. They even go as far as calling themselves cute, homely things like Lincoln Cottages, Washington Bungalows, Roosevelt Huts. Most trailer parks don't go that far. They don't bother. They hold up their hands, admit what they are, and pick their spot out in the scrapheap to the left of destitution.
Beeson's neighborhood looked like it had been hit by bombs dropped through the eye of a passing hurricane. There was wreckagestoves, TVs, gutted cars, fridgesand garbage strewn everywhere, so much that it had been incorporated into the landscape; some enterprising soul had built some of the waste into tidy mounds and then planted these with arrow-shaped wooden signs painted with the house numbers in large, seminumerate digits. The trailers were in such bad shape on the outside that Max mistook them for torched and abandoned wrecks, until he glimpsed the shadows of lives through the windows. There were no working cars in sight. No dogs, no kids. The people who lived here were off the radar and staying therewelfare dropouts, junkies, petty criminals, terminal no-hopers, born losers.
Beeson's trailer was a battered and flaking off-white oblong with two shuttered windows set either side of a sturdy-looking brown door with three locks on it: top, middle, and bottom. The trailer was mounted on red brick blocks, permanently going nowhere. Max drove right up to it and parked his car.
He knocked on the door and stepped back so he could be seen from the window. He heard deep barks, the scratching of claws behind the door, and then a thud, followed by another thud. Beeson had himself a pit bull. The shutters blinked behind the left window, then spread a little wider.
"Mingus?!!? Max Mingus?" Beeson shouted from inside.
"Yeah, that's right. Open up, I need to talk."
"Who sent you?"
"No one."
"If you're lookin' for a job, the toilet here needs emptyin'," Beeson chuckled.
"Sure, after we talk," Max said. Wiseass motherfucker hadn't lost his ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. Still spoke in that same voice, part growl, part squeak, caught between pitches, like he was losing his voice or waiting on his other ball to drop.
The shutter lifted and Max got a glimpse of Beeson's faceround, pudgy, blood-drained palestaring left and right of where he was standing, checking the background.
A few moments later, he heard the sound of maybe half a dozen chains being taken off hooks behind the door, followed by a tattoo of dead bolts thunking back and all three Yale locks springing open. The inside of the door must have looked like a bondage corset.
Beeson stood in a sliver of cracked-open doorway, squinting into the light. He'd left a thick chain on the door, level with his neck. At his feet, the dog stuck his snout out into the open and barked and slobbered at Max.
"Waddayawant, Mingus?" Beeson said.
"Talk about Charlie Carver," Max replied.
He could tell from the way Beeson was standing, half-forward, half-back, that he had a gun in one hand and the dog's leash in the other.
"The Carvers send you?"
"Not to you, no. But I'm looking into the case now."
"You goin' to Haiti?"
"Yeah."
Beeson pushed the door closed, undid the chain, and pulled it back open. He motioned to Max to come in with a tilt of the head.
It was dark inside, even darker after the bright day, and this made the stench all the more overpowering. A huge, acrid blast of baked filth rushed up and smacked Max in the face and forced its way down his nostrils. He staggered back a couple of steps, his stomach contracting, a hint of a heave brushing the edge of his throat. He clamped a handkerchief over his nose and breathed through his mouth, but he tasted the evil smell on his tongue.
There were flies everywhere, buzzing past his ears, bumping into his face and hands, some settling and sampling him before he shrugged them away. He heard Beeson drag the pit bull away into a corner and strap it to something.
"Better watch that car you came in," Beeson said. "Li'l fuckers here will strip the paint off a pencil it stays out there too long."
He opened the left blinds and stood away squinting. In a loud, whizzing drone, the flies in the room all darted for the bright white light that split the darkness.
Max had forgotten quite how short Beeson washe barely scraped five feetand how disproportionately large his spoon-shaped head was.
Unlike many a Dade County PI, Beeson had never been a cop. He'd started his working life as a fixer for the Florida Democratic Party, gathering dirt on rivals and allies alike and molding it into political currency.
He'd quit politics for private investigations after Jimmy Carter's nomination in 1976. He was reputed to have made millions out of ruining livesmarriages, political careers, businessesbringing down everything he snooped around in. He'd worn, driven, eaten, fucked, and lived in the fruits of his success. Max remembered the sight of him when he was king of the hill: designer suits, gleaming patent-leather tasseled loafers, shirts so white they virtually glowed, storm clouds of cologne, manicured hands, and a thick pinkie ring. Unfortunately, given his gnomic stature, pomp-and-prime-era Beeson hadn't cut quite the dash he assumed a few thousand dollars worth of tailoring would give him; instead of looking like some Florida hotshot, he'd always reminded Max of an overeager kid on his way to First Communion in Sunday clothes his mom had picked out for him.
Now here he was, wearing a grubby tank top under an open cheap, black beach shirt with orange and green palm trees splashed over it.
Max was shocked at the sight of him.
It wasn't the shirt or the tank top
It was the diaper.
Clyde Beeson was wearing a diapera thick, grayish-brown toweling diaper held together at the waist by large, blue-tipped baby safety pins.
What the fuck had happened to him?
Max looked around the trailer. It seemed empty. Between him and Beeson was a linoleum-covered floor, an olive-green leather armchair with the stuffing popping out near the armrests, and an upturned packing crate he used as a table. The floor was filthy, covered in an oily-looking black grime, its original yellow color apparent through the pit bull's claw gouges and paw-print streaks. There was dog shit everywhere: fresh, dried, and semidried.
How had Beeson let himself go like this?
Max saw cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, from the floor to the ceiling, covering the windows to his right. Many of the boxes were damp and sagging in the middle, their contents about to spill out.
The light coming through the blinds sliced through air that was hung heavy with layered cigarette smoke and dotted with bluebottle flies hurtling past them and smacking into the exposed window, thinking it was the great outdoors. Even the flies wanted out of this pathetic cesspit.
The dog growled in Max's direction from a murky corner where the darkness had retreated and bunched up on itself. He could just about make out its eyes, glinting, watching.
He guessed the kitchen behind him was stacked with filthy dishes and rotting food, and he hated to think of what lay in Beeson's bedroom and bathroom.
It was roasting hot. Max was already covered in a thickening film of sweat.
"Come on in, Mingus," Beeson beckoned over with his gun-holding hand. He had a long-barreled .44 Magnum with solid steel cast, the kind of six-shooter Clint Eastwood used in Dirty Harryno doubt a major influence on its buyer. The gun was almost as long as the arm that held it.
Beeson noticed that Max hadn't moved. He was staying put, with his handkerchief clamped over his nose and a disgusted stare in his eyes.
"Suit yourself." He shrugged and smiled. He looked at Max through sticky, toadlike brown eyes propped up on puffy cushions of grayish flesh. He couldn't have been sleeping much.
"Who are you hiding from?" Max asked.
"Just hiding," he replied. "So Allain Carver has got you looking for his kid?"
Max nodded. He wanted to take the handkerchief away, but the stench in the room was so thick he could feel particles settling on his skin in a fine dust.
"What d'you tell 'im?"
"I told him the kid was probably dead."
"I never knew how you ever made a buck in this town wearin' an attitude like that," Beeson said.
"Honesty pays."
Beeson laughed at that. He must have been smoking three or more packs a day, because his mirth triggered a loud, raucous chugging cough that tore chunks out of his chest. He hawked a tongue-load of phlegm up onto the floor and rubbed it into the filth with his foot. Max wondered if there was tumor blood mixed in with the spit.
"I ain't doin' your spadework, Mingusif that's what you come for'less you pay me," Beeson said.
"Some things haven't changed."
"Force-a habit. Money ain't no use to me now anyways."
Max couldn't stand it any longer. He stepped back to the door and threw it open. Light and fresh air stormed the trailer. Max stood there for a second, breathing in deep, cleansing breaths.
The pit bull was barking, yanking at the chain and the thing that held it, probably desperate to flee the cesspool it had been living in.
Max walked back to Beeson, sidestepping a slalom path of dog turds leading into the kitchen. He'd narrowly missed standing in a tepee of turds that looked too deliberately arranged to be natural. Beeson hadn't moved. He didn't seem to mind that the door was open.
The flies were all fleeing past Max, tearing through the air to freedom.
"How d'you end up like this?" Max said. He'd never believed in fate or karma or that Godif there was onereally got involved in individual cases. Things happened for no particular reason, they just happenedand rarely to the right people. You had dreams, ambitions, goals. You worked for them. Sometimes you succeeded, most times you failed. That had been Max's take on life. No more complicated than that. But standing there, looking at Beeson, gave him pause, made him question his beliefs. If this wasn't what divine retribution looked like, then there was no such thing.
"What? You feel sorry for me?" Beeson asked.
"No," Max said.
Beeson smirked. He studied Max, running his eyes up and down him.
"OKwhat the fuck? I'll tell ya," Beeson said, moving away from the window, sitting down in his armchair with the gun rested across his lap. He took a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. "I went out to Haiti September last year. I was there three months.
"See? I knew the case was a no-er from the moment Carver told me the specifics. No ransom, no witnesses, nothing seen, nothing heard. But what the fuck? I tripled my fee, seeing as Haiti ain't exactly the Bahamas. He said fine, no problem. Plus he mentioned the same dead-or-alive bonus thing he probably told you."
"How much did he say?"
"A cool mil if I dug up the body. A cool five if I found the kid alive. That what he's promised you?"
Max nodded.
"Now, I know this guy's a businessman and you don't get to the kind of money tree the Carvers live in by spending it on hope. I told myself the kid is as dead as Niggerown cop chalk, and the dad just wants to bury the body or burn it or whatever shit they do to the dead out there. I figured it'd be an easy mil, plus I'd have myself a little vacation. Two weeks' work max."
Beeson smoked his cigarette to the brand name, then lit another off the end. He dropped the butt on the floor and ground it out with his bare heel without showing any sign of pain. Max guessed he was on some serious dope, hardcore painkillers that put the body on ice but kept the brain in a candlelit bubble bath.
All the while he was talking, Beeson hadn't stopped staring Max dead in the eye.
"Didn't work out that way. First three weeks I was out there, showin' the kid's picture around, I keep hearin' the same nameVincent Paul. I find out he runs the biggest slum in the country. And because of that people are sayin' he's the real power in the land. He's meant to have built this whole modern town no one's ever been to or knows where it is. They say he's got people working there naked in his drug factories. He's got 'em wearin' Bill and Hillary Clinton masks. Like a fuck-you to us. Forget Aristide or whatever monkey puppet Clinton is putting in there. This guy Paul? He's a major-league gangster. Makes all these nigger gangbangers we got out here look like Bugs Bunny. Plus he hates the Carvers. Never found out why."
"So you guessed he snatched the kid?"
"Yeah, clear as day. He's got motive and muscle."
"Did you talk to him?"
"I tried, but you don't talk to Vincent Paul. Hetalkstoyou." Beeson said the last slowly.
"And did he?"
Beeson didn't reply. His eyes shifted downward, and then his head followed. He fell silent. Max stared at the front of his scalp, bare but for a few strands of long, reddish-brown hair. The rest was massed up behind in a rusty halo, like half an Elizabethan collar. He stayed like that for a long minute, not making a sound. Max was about to say something, when he raised his head slowly. Before, his eyes had been defiant pinpricks, daring in his squalor. Now the look was gone and his eyes had widened, the sacks below them deflated. Max saw fear creeping into them.
Beeson glanced out of the window and dragged on his Pall Mall until he started coughing and spluttering again. He let the fit pass.
He moved himself up to the edge of the chair and leaned forward.
"I never thought I was getting close to nothing, but maybe I was, or maybe someone thought I was. Anyway, one day I'm sleeping in my hotel. The next day I'm wakin' up in some strange room with these yellow walls, no idea how I got there. I'm tied to this bed, naked, facedown. These people come in. Someone gives me a shot in the ass andkapow!I'm gone. Out like a light."
"Did you see these people?"
"No."
"What happened next?"
"I woke up again. Obviously. I thought I was dreamin'. 'Cause I'm on a plane. American Airlines, midair. I'm flying back to Miami. No one looks at me like there's anything strange. I asked this stewardess how long I'd been there and she told me an hour. I asked the person behind me if they'd seen me get on, and they say no, I was lying there asleep when they got on."
"You don't remember getting on the plane? Going to the airport? Nothing?"
"Nada. I went through Miami airport. I picked up my bag. Everything was there. It's only when I'm on my way out that I notice Christmas decorations. I grabbed a paper and saw it was December 14! That freaked the shit outta me! That's two fuckin' months I can't account for!two whole fuckin' months, Mingus!"
"Did you call Carver?"
"I woulda done, except " Beeson took a deep breath. He touched his chest. "I had this pain here. Like a tearing, a hot tearing. So I went to the airport bathroom and opened my shirt. This is what I found."
Beeson stood up, slipped off his shirt, and lifted up his grimy tank top. His torso was matted with thick, curly, dark brown hair that spread out in a vague butterfly shape, starting below his shoulders and finishing at his navel. But there was a place where the hair parted and didn't growa long, half-inch-thick pink scar than ran from the edge of his neck, down the middle of his chest, passed between his lungs, and rode over his round stomach before ending at his guts.
Max got the chills, a sinking feeling in his stomach, as if the ground had opened up right there in that fucked-up trailer and he was falling into an endless abyss.
Of course, it wasn't Boukman's handiwork, but it all looked so familiar, so like those poor children's bodies.
"They did this to me," he said, as Max looked on, horrified. "The mother-fuckers."
He dropped his tank top and fell back on the chair. Then he buried his head in his hands and started crying, his fat body shaking like Jell-O. Max reached into his pockets for his handkerchief but he didn't want Beeson getting his pestilential hands on it.
Max hated seeing men cry. He never knew what to say or do. Comforting them as he might a woman seemed to violate their masculinity. He stood there, feeling awkward and idiotic, letting Beeson weep himself out, hoping he'd finish up quick because there was a lot he needed to know.
Beeson's sobbing gradually broke up into diminishing puddles and sniffs and snorts. He scraped the tears off his face with his hands and wiped the damp off on the hairy back of his head.
"I checked myself straight into a hospital," he continued, once he'd gained control of his voice. "There was nothing missing, but" he pointed two fingers down at the diaper "I noticed after I ate my first meal. Went straight through. Them Haitians fucked up my sewage works full-time. No one could fix 'em here. I can't hold nothin' in too long. Permanent dysentery."
Max felt a twinge of pity. Beeson reminded him of those cellblock bitches he'd seen in the exercise yard, waddling around in diapers because their sphincter muscles had been permanently loosened by multiple gang-rapes.
"You think it was this Vincent Paul who did it?"
"I know it was him. To warn me off."
Max shook his head.
"That's a hell of a lotta trouble to go through just to warn someone off. What they did to you takes time. Besides, I know you, Beeson. You scare easy. If they'd burst into your room and stuck a gun down your throat you would have been outta there like a fart on a match."
"You say the sweetest things," Beeson said, sparking up another cigarette.
"What were you close to?"
"Whaddayamean?"
"Had you turned up something on the kid? A lead? A suspect?"
"Nothin'."
"Are you sure?" Max asked, searching Beeson's eyes for signs of lying.
"Nothin', I'm tellin' ya."
Max didn't believe him, but Beeson wouldn't give it up.
"So why d'you think they fucked with me like this? Send a message to Carver?"
"Could be. I'll need to know more," Max said. "So what happened afterwards? With you?"
"I fell apart. Up here," he said matter-of-factly, tapping the side of his head. "I had this collapse, this breakdown. I couldn't work no more. I quit. Gave it up. I owed clients for jobs I didn't finish. I had to pay 'em all back, so I don't have that much left, but what the fuck? At least I'm still alive."
Max nodded. He knew all about the place Beeson was in now. Going to Haiti was pretty much the only thing that was stopping him from finding his own shit-covered trailer to live in.
"Don't go to Haiti, Mingus. There is some bad shit out there in that place," Beeson said, his voice a steady, even whine of cold wind passing by a warm house, whistling through the cracks, trying to get in.
"Even if I didn't want to, I haven't got much choice," Max said. He took a last look around the trailer. "You know, Clyde, I never liked you. I still don't. You were a two-bit shamus, a greedy, double-dealing traitor scumbag with a morals bypass. But you know what? Even you don't deserve this."
"Take it you don't wanna stay for dinner?" Beeson said.
Max turned and made for the door. Beeson picked up his Magnum and stood up. He padded over to Max, squishing a fresh turd on his way.
Outside the trailer, Max stood in the clean air and sunlight, breathing deeply through his nose. He hoped the stench hadn't stuck to his clothes and hair.
"Hey! Mingus!" Beeson shouted from the door.
Max turned around.
"They fuck you in jail?"
"What?"
"Was you some nigger's bitch? Some nigger call you 'Mary'? You get some o' that ole jailhouse lurve from the booty bandits, Mingus?"
"No."
"Then what the fuck special happened to you, make you come over all sympathetic? Old-school Max Mingus woulda said I got what I deserved, woulda kicked me in the teeth and wiped his foot on my face."
"Take care of yourself, Clyde," Max said. "No one else will."
Then he got in his car and drove away, feeling numb.
Chapter 6
MAX DROVE BACK to Miami and headed for Little Haiti.
When he was a kid in the 1960s, he'd had a girlfriend called Justine who lived in the area. It was called Lemon City back then, and was mostly white, middle-class, and great for shopping. His mother would often go there for Christmas and birthday presents.
By the time Max had become a cop a decade later, all but the poorest whites had moved out, the shops had closed or relocated, and the once-prosperous neighborhood had gone to seed. First the Cuban refugees had moved in, and then the more prosperous African-Americans from Liberty City had bought up the cheap houses. The Haitians started arriving in significant numbers in the 1970s, refugees from Baby Doc's increasingly murderous regime.
There was a lot of tension between African-Americans and Haitians, often spilling into bloodshedmost of it the latter'suntil the newly arrived immigrants began to organize themselves into gangs and look out for one another. The most notorious of these was The SNBC, aka The Saturday Night Barons Club, led by Solomon Boukman.
Max had last come to the neighborhood when he was investigating Boukman and his gang in 1981. He'd driven through street after trash-choked street, past boarded-up stores and derelict or tumble-down houses, without seeing a soul. Then there'd been the riot he and Joe got caught up in.
Fifteen years later, Max was expecting more of the same, only worse than before, but when he got onto Northeast 54th Street, he thought he'd come to the wrong place. The area was clean and full of people walking streets lined with shops painted in bright, vivid pinks, blues, oranges, yellows, and greens. There were small restaurants, bars, outdoor cafés, and stores selling everything from clothes and food to wood sculptures, books, music, and paintings.
Max parked, got out of his car, and started walking. He was the only white face on the block but he had none of the anticipatory edge he would have had in a black ghetto.
It was late afternoon and the sun had started to set, giving the sky its first tinge of purple. Max walked down to a place his mother and father had taken him to in his teens, a furniture store on 60th Street they'd bought their kitchen table from. The store was long gone, but in its place stood the imposing Caribbean Marketplace, built as an exact replica of the old Iron Market in Port-au-Prince.
He went inside and walked past small stalls selling more food, CDs, and clothes, as well as Catholic ornaments. Everyone spoke Kreyol, the Haitian dialect composed of part-French and partWest African tribal tongues. The speech patterns sounded confrontational, as if its two composite parts were on the verge of full-scale argument with each other. Kreyol wasn't spoken; it was half-shouted, the pitch edgy and intense, everyone sounding like they were getting the last word in before the fists started flying. Yet when Max checked the speakers' body language, he realized they were probably doing nothing more threatening than gossiping or bartering.
Max walked out of the marketplace and crossed the road to the Church of Notre Dame d'Haďti and the neighboring Pierre Toussaint Haitian Catholic Center. The center was closed, so he went into the church. He might not have had much time for any notion of God in his life, but he loved churches. He always ended up going into them whenever he needed to think. They were the quietest, emptiest places he knew. It was a habit he'd picked up as a beat cop. He'd cracked many a case sitting in a pew with just the sound of his thoughts and a notebook for company. Churches had helped him focus. He'd never told anyone about thisincluding his wifein case they'd thought he was a secret Jesus freak with a messianic-identity complex, or in case they turned out to be Jesus freaks themselves.
The church was empty, save for an old woman sitting in the middle pew, reading aloud from a Kreyol prayerbook. She heard Max walk in and turned to look at him without breaking off from her recital.
Max took in the wall of stained-glass windows and the mural depicting the journey of Haitians from their homeland to South Florida, watched over from the skies by the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. The air reeked of stale incense and cold candles and of the scented pink and white lilies pouring out of vases mounted on metal stands either side of the altar.
The woman, still reading aloud, never left Max with her gun-barrel black eyes. He could feel her stare like one can feel a security camera following one around a bank vault. He looked her oversmall, frail, white-haired, with liver spots sprinkled on a sagging, deeply lined face. He tried the smile he used on potentially hostile strangersbroad, well-meaning, open, all lips and cheeksbut it fell flat on her. He retreated slowly down the aisle, feeling for the first time awkward and unwelcome. Time to go.
As he was leaving, he glanced over at a bookcase in the corner near the door. There were Kreyol, French, and English Bibles, as well as a variety of books about the saints.
Next to the bookcase was a large cork notice board, which took up most of the remaining wall. The board was covered with small pictures of Haitian children. On the bottom of each photograph was a yellow sticker bearing the child's name, age, and a date. The children were all colors, aged between three and eight, boys and girls, many in school uniforms. Charlie Carver's image caught the corner of his eye. A smaller print of the picture he had was tucked away in a right-hand corner, a face among dozens, easily lost. Max read the small print: Charles Paul Carver, 3 ans, 9/1994. It was the month and year he'd disappeared. He inspected the dates on the other photographs. They went back no further than 1990.
"Are you the police?" a man's voice asked behind him, French-American accent, black intonation.
Max turned and saw a priest standing in front of him, his hands behind his back. He was slightly taller than Max, but slender and narrow about the shoulders. He wore round silver wire-rimmed glasses whose lenses reflected the light and hid his eyes. Salt-and-pepper hair, salt-and-pepper goatee. Late forties, early fifties.
"No, I'm a private investigator," Max said. He never lied in church.
"Another bounty hunter," the priest snorted.
"Is it that obvious?"
"I'm getting used to your type."
"That many?"
"One or two, maybe more, I forget. You all pass through here on your way to Haiti. You and the journalists."
"You've got to start someplace," Max said. He could feel the priest's stare probing beyond his eyelids. The priest smelled faintly of sweat and an old-fashioned soap, like Camay. "These other children?"
"Les enfants perdus," the priest said. "The lost children."
"Kidnapped too?"
"Those are the ones we know of. There are many many more. Most Haitians can't afford cameras."
"How long's this been happening?"
"Children have always gone missing in Haiti. I started putting photographs on the board very soon after I started working here, in 1990. In our other religion a child's soul is highly sought after. It can open many doors."
"So you think it's a voodoo thing?"
"Who knows?"
There was a sadness in the priest's voice, a weariness that suggested he'd gone through every possibility a million times over and come back empty.
Then Max realized that this was personal for the priest. He looked back at the board, and searched through the photographs that hung off it like scales, hoping to find a striking family resemblance so he could broach the subject. He found nothing so he went for it anyway.
"Which one of these is yours?"
The priest was initially shocked, but then he smiled broadly.
"You're a very perceptive man. God must have chosen you."
"I played the right hunch, Father," Max said.
The priest stepped forward up to the board and pointed at a photograph of a girl right next to Charlie's.
"My niece, Claudine," the priest said. "I confess I put her there so some of the rich boy's aura would rub off."
Max took Claudine's picture down. Claudine Thodore, 5 ans, 10/1994.
"Went missing a month later. Thodore? Is that your last name?"
"Yes. I'm Alexandre Thodore. Claudine is my brother Caspar's daughter," the priest said. "I'll give you his address and number. He lives in Port-au-Prince."
The priest took a small notebook out of his pocket and scribbled his brother's details on a piece of paper, which he tore out and handed to Max.
"Did your brother tell you what happened?"
"One day he was with his daughter, the next day he was looking for her."
"I'll do my best to find her."
"I don't doubt that," the priest said. "By the way, the kids in Haiti? They have a nickname for the bogeyman who's stealing the children, Tonton Clarinette. Mr. Clarinet."
"Clarinet? Like the instrument? Why?"
"It's how he lures the children away."
"Like the Pied Piper?"
"Tonton Clarinette is said to work for Baron Samedithe vodou god of death," Father Thodore said. "He steals children's souls to entertain the dead with. Some say his appearance is part man, part bird. Others say he is a bird with one eye. And only children can see him. That's because he was a child himself, when he died.
"The myth goes that he was originally a French boy soldier, a mascotvery common in those days. He was in one of the regiments sent to rule Haiti, back in the eighteenth century. He entertained the troops by playing his clarinet for them. The slaves working in the fields used to hear his playing and it made them angry because they associated the sound and the music the boy made with captivity and oppression.
"When the slaves rose up, they overpowered the boy's regiment and took a lot of prisoners. They made the boy play his wretched instrument while they slaughtered his comrades one by one. Then they buried him alive, still playing his clarinet," Thodore spoke gravely. It might have been folklore, but he was taking it very seriously. "He's a relatively new spirit, not one I grew up fearing. I first heard people talking about him twenty or so years ago. They say he leaves his mark where he's been."
"What kind of mark?"
"I haven't seen one, but it's supposed to look like a cross, with two legs and half a beam."
"You said children have 'always' gone missing in Haiti? You got any idea how many that is a year?"
"It's impossible to say." Thodore opened his palms to indicate hopelessness. "Things there are not like here. There's nowhere and no one to report the missing to. And there is no way of knowing who these children are or were, because the poor don't have birth or death certificatesthat is only for the rich. Almost all of the children who go missing are poor. When they disappear it's as if they never existed. But nowwith the Carver boythis is different. This is a rich society child. Suddenly now everyone is paying attention. It's like here, in Miami. If a black child goes missing, who cares? Maybe one or two local policemen go looking. But if it's a little white child, you call the National Guard."
"With all due respect, Father, that last part, that's not quite true, no matter how it sometimes appears," Max said, keeping his tone level. "And it was never that way with me, when I was a cop here. Never."
The priest looked at him hard for a moment. He himself had cop's eyes, the ones that can tell sincerity from bullshit at a thousand paces. He offered Max his hand. They shook firmly. Then Father Thodore blessed him and wished him well.
"Bring her back," he whispered to Max.
Part 2
Chapter 7
THE FLIGHT OUT to Haiti was held up for an hour while it waited on a homeward-bound con and his two armed guards.
Inside it was packed to near capacity. Haitiansmostly menheading home with bags of food, soap, and clothes, and boxes and boxes of cheap electrical goodsTVs, radios, video recorders, fans, microwaves, computers, boom boxes, which they'd half-or quarter-jammed into the overhead luggage compartments.
The stewardesses weren't complaining. They appeared to be used to it. They picked their way past the brand-name obstacles with straight-backed poise and stuck-on professional smiles, always managing to squeeze through without creasing their bearing, no matter how tight the space.
Max could tell the visiting expats apart from the natives. The former were tricked out in standard ghetto garbgold chains, earrings, and bracelets; more on their backs and feet than they had in the bankwhile the latter were dressed conservativelycheap but smart slacks and short-sleeved shirts for the men, midweek church dresses for the women.
The atmosphere was lively, seemingly unaffected by the delay. The conversations rolled out loud and clear, Kreyol's dueling rhythms bouncing back and forth off each other and from all corners of the plane. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The voicesdeep and gutturalcollectively drowned out the in-cabin preflight Muzak and all three pilot announcements.
"Most of those people live in houses with no electricity," said the woman sitting next to Max, in the window seat. "They're buying those things as ornaments, status symbolslike we'd buy a sculpture or a painting."
She told him her name was Wendy Abbott. She had lived in Haiti for the past thirty-five years with her husband, Paul. They ran an elementary school in the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince. It catered to both the rich and the poor. They always made a profit, because very few of the poor believed in education, let alone knew what it was for. Many of their pupils either went on to the Union School, where they were taught the American curriculum, or to the more expensive and prestigious Lycée Français, which prepared them for the French baccalauréat.
Max introduced himself and left it at his name.
The con came on board, led in by his two escorts in a loud clunk-chink clunk-chink of thick chains. Max read him: heavy-duty denim pants, no belt, loose white T-shirt, blue-and-white headscarf, no gold, no icelow-ranking gangbanger, probably caught selling rocks or coming back from his first kill, reeking of chronic and gun smoke. Strictly small-time, hadn't even left the second rung of the ghetto ladder. He was still in his prison clothes, because he'd outgrown his court ones working out in the yard. He puffed his chest out and kept his cellblock face on, but Max could see his eyes running to panic once he'd taken in the crowd on the plane and absorbed his first big whiff of freedom without parole. He'd probably expected to die in prison.
"I wonder if he knows what an insult he is to his heritage?returning to Haiti as his forefathers arrivedin chains," Wendy said, looking at the con.
"I shouldn't think he gives a shit, ma'am," Max replied.
Up until then the con had kept his gaze locked in some vague middle distance, not focusing on anyone or anything in particular, but he must have felt Max and Wendy's stare, because he looked their way. Wendy dropped her gaze almost as soon as she made eye contact with the prisoner, but Max went eyeball-to-eyeball with him. The con recognized his own kind, smiled very faintly, and nodded to Max. Max acknowledged the greeting with an involuntary nod of his own.
None of that would have happened in prison, a black con bonding with a white oneunless he was buying or selling something, most usually dope or sex. Once you were locked up, you stuck to your own kind and didn't mix and mingle. It was like that and no other way. The tribes were always at war. Whites were the first to get gang-raped, punked-out, and shanked by blacks and Latinos, who saw them as symbols of the judicial system that was stacked against them from the day they were born. If you were smart, you unlearned any liberal views you had and got in touch with your prejudice as soon as the cell door slammed behind you. That prejudicethe hatred and fearkept you alert and alive.
The guards sat the con down and took their places either side of him.
The plane left Miami International ten minutes later.
* * *
Shaped like a lobster's pincer with most of the top claw chewed off, from the air Haiti looked completely out of place after the dense, luscious green of Cuba and all the other smaller islands they'd flown over. Arid and acidic, the country's rust-on-rust-colored landscape seemed utterly bereft of grass and foliage. When the plane circled over the edges of the bordering Dominican Republic, you could clearly see where the two nations dividedthe land split as definitely as on any map: a bone-dry wasteland with an abundant oasis next door.
* * *
Max hadn't slept much the night before. He'd been in Joe's office, first photocopying the old files on Solomon Boukman and The SNBC, then looking up the former gang members on the database.
Although he'd founded The SNBC, Boukman was a delegator. He had had twelve deputies, all fiercely loyal to him and every bit as ruthless and cold-blooded. Of these, six were now deadtwo executed by the State of Florida, one executed by the State of Texas, two shot and killed by police, one murdered in prisonone was serving twenty-five to life in maximum security, and the remaining four had been deported to Haiti between March 1995 and May 1996.
Rudy Crčvecoeur, Jean Desgrottes, Salazar Faustin, and Don Moďse had been the most fearsome of Boukman's subordinates. They were the enforcers, the ones who watched over the gang, made sure no one was stealing or snitching or shooting off their mouths where they shouldn't. Moďse, Crčvecoeur, and Desgrottes had also been directly responsible for kidnapping the children Boukman sacrificed in his ritual ceremonies.
Salazar Faustin was in charge of The SNBC's Florida drug operation. He was a former Tonton Macouteone of Duvalier's private militiawho had used his connections in Haiti to set up a highly efficient cocaine-smuggling network in Miami. The drugs were bought direct from the Bolivian manufacturers and then flown into Haiti on two-seater passenger planes, which landed on a secret airstrip in the north of the country. The pilot was changed and the plane was refueled and flown on to Miami. U.S. customs didn't bother to check the plane, because they thought it was only coming from Haiti, a non-drug-growing zone. Once in Miami, the cocaine was taken to the Sunset Marquee, a cheap hotel in South Beach, which Faustin owned and ran with his mother, Marie-Félize. In the basement, the cocaine was cut with glucose and distributed to The SNBC's street dealers, who sold it all over Florida.
Both Salazar and Marie-Félize Faustin received life sentences for drug trafficking. They were deported on the same dayAugust 8, 1995tearfully reuniting at the airport.
* * *
They landed at two-forty-five in the afternoon. Airport staff in navy-blue overalls wheeled a white ladder up to the plane doors. They'd have to walk across the tarmac to the airport building, an unimposing and untidy rectangular structure with cracked and flaking whitewashed walls, a flight tower sticking out of it to the right, three empty flagpoles in the middle, and WELCOME TO PORT-AU-PRINCE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT painted across the bottom front, above the entrances, in crude, black block capitals.
The pilot asked the passengers to wait for the prisoner to leave the plane first.
The door opened. The guards, both now wearing sunglasses, stood up with the con and led him out of the aircraft.
* * *
When Max stepped off the plane, he was surprised by the heat that smothered him in a dense, airless blanket. Not even the slight breeze that was blowing could dislodge or loosen it. The hottest days in Florida seemed cool in comparison.
He followed Wendy down the steps, heavy carryall in hand, breathing in air that seemed like steam, popping sweat through every pore.
Walking side by side, they followed the passengers as they made their way to the terminal. Wendy noticed the red flush in Max's face and the damp film across his brow.
"You're lucky you didn't come in the summer," she said. "That's like going to hell in a fur coat."
There were dozens of troops around the runway areaU.S. Marines in short-sleeves, loading up trucks with crates and boxes, relaxed and unhurried, taking their time. The island was theirs for as long as they wanted it.
Ahead of them, Max could see the marshals handing the con over to three shotgun-toting Haitians in civilian clothes. One of the marshals was crouched down, unlocking the shackles around the prisoner's ankles. From where he was standing, it could have passed for something quite considerate, perhaps the marshal tying his charge's shoelaces before handing him over.
Once the chains and cuffs were off, the marshals boarded a waiting U.S. military jeep and were driven off toward the plane. The three Haitians, meanwhile, talked to the con, who was massaging his wrists and then his ankles. When he was finished, they walked him off to a side door at the farthest end of the terminal.
Music came from the terminal. A five-piece band was performing near the entrance, playing a midtempo Kreyol song. Max didn't understand any of the words but he picked up on a sadness at the heart of what might otherwise have passed him by as a sweet, inconsequential tune.
They were old musicians, thin and stooped men in identical Miami dime-store beach shirts with palm-trees-in-the-sunset motifs; a bongo player, a bass guitarist, a keyboard player, a lead guitarist, and a singer, all plugged into a stack of amps set against the terminal wall. Max saw how some people were swaying in time as they walked, and he heard others in front of him and behind him, singing along.
"It's called 'Haďti, Ma Chérie.' It's an exile's lament," Wendy explained, as they passed by the band and were at the entrance, which was split into two doorwaysHaitian citizens and non-Haitians.
"This is where we part, Max," Wendy said. "I've got dual nationality. Saves on long lines and paperwork."
They shook hands.
"Ohwatch out for the luggage carousel," she said, as she got into line at passport control. "It's the same one they've had ever since 1965."
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