* * *



Max got his passport stamped red and moved into the arrivals section, which he found was in the same cavernous room as departures, customs, ticket collection and purchasing, car rentals, tourist information, the entrance, and the exit. The place was heaving with people—old and young, male and female—toing and froing, pushing and shoving, all shouting at the tops of their voices. He saw a chicken darting through the crowd, slaloming past legs, clucking maniacally, flapping its wings, and shitting on the floor. A man chased after it, bent over, arms outstretched, knocking down anyone who didn't move out of his way.



Max had called Carver before he'd boarded. He'd told him the flight number and its time of arrival. Carver said someone would be waiting for him at the airport. Max looked around in vain for a stranger holding up a sign with his name.



Then he heard a commotion coming from his left. A large crowd, four or five bodies deep, was gathered at the end of the arrivals area, everyone jostling and pushing their way forward, everyone shouting, everyone volatile. Max spotted their focus of attention—the luggage carousel.



He had to pick up his suitcase.



He made his way over to the rabble, trying to gingerly sidestep people at first but, when he found he wasn't getting any closer to the carousel, he did as the Haitians did and prodded, pushed, elbowed, and shoulder-bashed his way through the crowd, stopping only once so as not to step on the chicken and its owner.



He got to the front of the crowd and moved down until he had a clear view of the carousel. It wasn't working, and looked like it hadn't in years. Its chrome sides were held together by rivets, many burst or half-bursting, leaving sharp, ragged corners twisting outwards prohibitively. The conveyor belt, once black rubber, was mostly worn down to the steel plates, bar odd areas where scraps of its original rubber coating stubbornly clung to it, like fossilized chewing gum. The plates themselves had long warped out of any clear geometric shape.



The carousel was the highlight of an area with high, grubby-white walls, a dark marble floor, and wide, rickety-looking fans that barely stirred the air or relieved the accumulated heat, as much as they threatened to come crashing down and decapitate the people below.



When Max looked closer, he realized that the conveyor belt was in fact moving and luggage was coming around, although its progress was so intensely slow, the cases were appearing at a surreptitious creep, inch by inch, a moment at a time.



There were a lot more people standing around the carousel than had been on his flight. The majority of them had come to steal the luggage. Max quickly began to sort the legitimate passengers out from the thieves. The thieves snatched at each and every case that came within reach. The real owners would then try to grab or wrestle their property back. The thieves would put up a struggle for a while, then give up and push their way back to the carousel to try their luck with more luggage. It was a free-for-all. There was no airport security around.



Max decided he wasn't going to start off his stay in Haiti by punching someone out—no matter how justified his actions. He pushed his way through the crowd until he was as close as possible to where the cases emerged.



His black Samsonite came out after an eternity. He got his hands on it and crudely pushed his way through the throng.



Once out and away from the mass, Max noticed the chicken again. Its master had fastened a noose-shaped lead around its neck and was tugging the bird away toward the exit.



"Mr. Mingus?" a woman asked behind him.



Max turned around. He noticed her mouth first—wide, plump lips, white teeth.



"I'm Chantale Duplaix. Mr. Carver sent me to collect you," she said, holding out her hand.



"Hello, I'm Max," he said, shaking her hand, which was small and delicate-looking, but her skin was hard and rough and she packed a tight grip.



Chantale was very beautiful and Max couldn't help smiling. Light brown skin with a few freckles about her nose and cheeks, large honey-brown eyes, and straight, shoulder-length black hair. She was slightly shorter than he, in her heels. She wore a dark blue, knee-length skirt and a loose short-sleeved blouse, with the top button undone over a thin gold chain. She looked to be in her midtwenties.



"Sorry about the trouble you had with your bag. We were going to come help you, but you did OK," she said.



"Don't you people have security here?" Max said.



"We did. But you people took our guns away," she said, her eyes darkening, voice toughening. Max could imagine her losing her temper and flattening all before her.



"Your army disarmed us," Chantale explained. "What they failed to realize is that the only authority Haitians respect is an armed authority."



Max didn't know what to say. He didn't know enough about the political situation to counter and comment, but he knew vast proportions of the outside world hated America for meddling in other countries. He knew then how hard the job ahead would be, if Chantale was meant to be on his side.



"But never mind about that," Chantale said, flashing him a bright-white smile. There was, he noticed, a small, oval beauty mark to the right of her mouth, right on the demarcation line between her face and her bottom lip. "Welcome to Haiti."



Max bowed his head, hoping the gesture didn't come over as sarcastic. He promoted Chantale to late-twenties. There was maturity and self-control in her, a certain smooth diplomacy that only comes from experience.



She led him through customs—two tables where everyone was being made to open their bags for inspection. All along there had been two tall men standing in the background, watching. Mustaches, sunglasses, and distinct gun-bulges on their sides, under their overhanging shirts. They followed Max.



Chantale smiled at the customs officials, who smiled back and waved her through, stares following her until she was out of range. Max couldn't help himself. He checked her out from behind. He saw what they did and let out a silent whistle. Broad shoulders, straight back, elegant neck. Slender ankles, very athletic curves to her calves: she looked after herself—running, no doubt, and working out with weights. Her ass was perfect—high, pert, round, and firm.



They walked out of the airport and crossed the road to where two navy blue Toyota Land Cruisers were parked one behind the other. Chantale got into the first car and opened the trunk for Max to put his bags in. The men got into the car behind.



Max sat in the front seat next to her. She turned on the air-conditioning. He broke out into a heavy sweat as his body fought to acclimatize after the heat of the airport.



He looked at the airport entrance through his window and saw the con he'd been on the plane with, standing near the entrance, rubbing his wrists and taking in his surroundings, looking left and right. The man looked lost and vulnerable, sorely missing his cell, the safety of familiarity. A woman sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a pair of battered, ruptured sneakers was talking to him. He shrugged his shoulders and held up his empty palms in a sign of helplessness. There was worry in his face, a dawning fear. If only the punks and the hardmen could see him now, cornered by the free world, life calling his bluff. Max entertained the notion of playing good Samaritan and giving the con a lift into town, but he let it slide. Wrong association. He'd been to prison but he didn't consider himself a criminal.



Chantale seemed to read his mind.



"He'll get picked up," she said. "They'll send a car for him, like we did for you."



"Who's 'they'?"



"Depends which bit of porch talk you eavesdrop. Some people say there's an expat criminal collective operating here, like a union. Whenever someone comes in from a U.S. prison, they get picked up and assimilated into the gang. Other people say there's no such thing, that it's all really Vincent Paul."



"Vincent Paul?"



"Le Roi de Cité Soleil—the King of Cité Soleil. Cité Soleil is the biggest slum in the country. It's next to Port-au-Prince. They say he who rules Cité Soleil rules Haiti. All the changes of government have started there—including the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier."



"Was Paul behind that?"



"People say all sorts of things. They talk a lot here. Sometimes it's all they do. Talking's like a national pastime, what with the economy being the way it is. No jobs. Not enough to do. More time than purpose. You'll notice," Chantale said, shaking her head.



"How do I get to meet Vincent Paul?"



"He'll come to you if it gets to that," Chantale said.



"Do you think it will?" Max asked, thinking of Beeson. Had Chantale collected Beeson from the airport? Did she know what had happened to him?



"Who's to say? Maybe he's behind it, maybe he isn't. He isn't the only person who hates the Carver family. They have a lot of enemies."



"Do you hate them?"



"No," Chantale said, laughing and locking eyes with Max. She had beautiful, doelike eyes and a telling laugh—loud, raucous, vulgar, smoky, knowing, and irresistibly filthy; the laugh of someone who got drunk, stoned, and fucked complete strangers.



They drove off.



Chapter 8



THE ROAD AWAY from the airport was long, dusty, and milky gray. Cracks, fissures, gaps, gouges, and splits shattered the road surface into a crude latticework that frequently converged into random potholes and craters of differing sizes and depths. It was a miracle the road hadn't long ago fallen apart and regressed to dirt track.



Chantale drove deftly, swerving around or away from the biggest holes in the road and slowing down when she had to roll over the smaller ones. All of the cars in front of them, and on the opposite side of the road, were moving the same way, some negotiating the road like classic drunk drivers, steering more dramatically than others.



"First time in Haiti?" she asked.



"Yeah. I hope it's not all like the airport."



"It's worse," she said, and laughed. "But we get by."



There were, seemingly, only two types of car in Haiti: luxury and fucked-up. Max saw Benzes, Bimas, Lexes, and plenty of jeeps. He saw a stretch limo. He saw a Bentley followed by a Rolls-Royce. Yet for every one of these there were dozens of rusted-out, smoke-belching sand trucks, their holds full of people—so full, some were hanging off the sides, others clinging to the roof. Then there were the old station-wagons brightly painted all over with slogans and pictures of saints or field workers. These were taxi cabs, Chantale told him, called tap-taps. They too were filled with people and loaded on top with their belongings—crammed baskets, cardboard boxes, and cloth-wrapped bundles. To Max, it looked like everyone was fleeing the scene of a natural disaster.



"You'll be in one of the Carver houses in Pétionville. It's a suburb half an hour out of Port-au-Prince. The capital's too dangerous right now," she said. "The house has a maid called Rubie. She's very nice. She'll cook for you, wash your clothes. You'll never see her—unless you spend all day indoors. There's a phone, TV, and a shower. All the essentials."



"Thanks," Max said. "Is this what you do for the Carvers?"



"Chauffeur?" she said with a smirk. "No. This is a one-off. I'm on Allain's team. He offered me the rest of the day off if I picked you up."



The road bisected an endless dry plain, a dustbowl peppered with thinning, yellowy grass. Scenery flew by. He noted the dark mountains to the left and the way the clouds hung so low, so close to the ground they seemed to have broken their moorings and drifted loose from the sky, threatening to land. There were occasional lollipop speed signs—black on white: 60, 70, 80, 90—but no one was paying much attention to them, let alone staying to a particular side of the road, unless something bigger was coming the other way. Chantale kept to an even seventy.



Painted billboards, thirty feet high and sixty feet wide, stood on the roadside, advertising local and international brands. In between were smaller, narrower billboards for local banks, radio stations, and competing lottery syndicates. Once in a while, Charlie Carver's face appeared, those intense, haunted features blown up and planted high in black and white, eyes still staring straight into you. REWARD` was painted in tall red letters above the image; $1,000,000 below it. To the left, in black, was a telephone number.



"How long has that been up?" Max asked after they'd passed the first one.



"For the last two years," Chantale said. "They change them every month because they fade."



"I take it there've been a lot of calls."



"There used to be, but it's died down a lot since people worked out they don't get paid for making stuff up."



"What was Charlie like?"



"I only met him once, at the Carver house, before the invasion. He was a baby."



"I guess Mr. Carver keeps his private and professional life separate."



"That's impossible in Haiti. But he does his best," Chantale replied, meeting his eyes. He picked up a hint of sourness in her tone. She had a French-American accent, a grudging collision, with the former tipping over the latter: born and raised on the island, educated somewhere in the States or Canada. Definitely late twenties, enough to have lost one voice and found another.



She was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her wide mouth and taste those plump, slightly parted lips. He looked out of the window before he stared too hard or gave anything away.



There were a few people about, men in ragged shirts and trousers and straw hats, shepherding small flocks of pathetically thin, dirty, brown goats, others pulling donkeys saddled with overflowing straw baskets, or men and women, in pairs or on their own, carrying jerricans filled with water on their shoulders, or balancing huge baskets on their heads. They all moved very slowly, at the same lazy, listing gait. Farther on, they came to their first village—a cluster of one-room square shacks painted orange or yellow or green, all with corrugated iron roofs. Women sitting at the roadside in front of tables, selling melting brown candy. Naked children played nearby. A man tended to a pot cooking on a fire, billowing plumes of white smoke. Stray dogs nosing at the ground. All of this roasting under intense, bright sunlight.



Chantale flicked on the radio. Max was expecting more "Haďti, Ma Chérie" but instead heard the familiar bish-bosh-bullshit machine beat of every rap record ever made. A remake of "Ain't Nobody," a song Sandra had loved, ruined by a rapper who sounded like half the inmates in Attica.



"Do you like music?" Chantale asked him.



"I like music," Max replied, looking at her. She was pumping her head to the beat.



"Like what? Bruce Springsteen?" she said, nodding at his tattoo.



Max didn't know what to say. The truth would take too long and open up too many ways into him.



"I got that done when I didn't know better," he said. "I like quiet stuff now. Old-man stuff. Old Blue Eyes."



"Sinatra? That is old," she said, glancing across at him, her eyes taking in his face and chest. He caught her eyes straying down his shirt. It had been so long since he'd flirted. He'd known how to play situations like this in the past. He'd known what he wanted then. He wasn't so sure now.



"The most popular music here is called kompas. Compact. It's like one really long song that can go on for half an hour or more, but it's really lots of short songs put together. Different tempos," Chantale said, eyes fixed on the road.



"Like a medley?"



"That's it, a medley—but not quite. You'd have to hear it to understand. The most popular local singer is Sweet Micky."



"Sweet Micky? Sounds like a clown."



"Michel Martelly. He's like a mixture of Bob Marley and gangsta rap."



"Interesting, but I don't know him."



"He plays Miami a lot. You're from Miami, right?"



"And other places," Max said, checking her face to see how much she knew about him. She didn't react.



"And then there's The Fugees. You've heard of them, right?"



"No," Max said. "Do they play kompas?"



She burst out laughing—that laugh again.



Her dirty bellow echoed around his brain. He imagined himself fucking her. He couldn't help it. Eight years and nothing but his hand for relief.



Now he had a problem—a hard-on. He stole a quick glance at his crotch. It was a major one—a rock-solid sundial he felt poking right past the fly of his shorts and pushing against his trousers, setting up a tepee over his groin.



"So…tell me about The Fugitives?" he said, almost gasping.



"Fugees," she corrected with a giggle, and then she told him: two guys and a girl, the singer. The guys were Haitian-Americans and the girl was African-American. They played hip-hop soul, and their latest album, The Score, had sold millions worldwide. They'd had big hits with "Ready or Not," "Fu-Gee-La," and "Killing Me Softly."



"The Roberta Flack song?" Max said.



"The same one."



"With rapping over it?"



"No—Lauryn sings it straight, Wyclef says, 'One time…one time' all the way through—but it's set to that hip-hop beat."



"Sounds terrible."



"It works, trust me," she said defensively and a little patronizingly, as if Max wouldn't get it anyway. "Lauryn can really sing. I'll try and find it on here. They're live on the radio."



She turned the radio dial and flipped through stations playing snatches of funk, reggae, calypso, Billboard Top 40, Kreyol language, hip-hop, but she couldn't find The Fugees.



As she leaned back, Max stole a glance at her chest. His eyes passed through the gaps between the buttons of her blouse: white push-up bra with lace-trimmed cups, small, teak-colored breasts puffing over the edges. He noticed the traces of a smile in the corners of her lips. She knew he was looking her over and liking what he saw.



"So what about you?" Max asked. "Tell me about yourself. Where did you study?"



"I majored in economics at Miami University. Graduated in 1990. I worked for Citibank for a few years."



"How long have you been back?"



"Three years. My mom got sick."



"Otherwise you would've stayed in the U.S.?"



"Yeah. I had a life there," she said, a hint of regret waving behind her professional smile.



"So what do you do for Allain Carver?"



"Personal assistant stuff mostly. They're thinking of getting me into marketing because they want to launch a credit card, but that's on hold until the economy picks up. The U.S. is supposed to be coming up with this aid package, but we haven't seen dollar one yet. Don't suppose we ever will."



"You don't like us much, do you?"



"I don't know what you people think you're doing here, but it isn't making things any better."



"Nothing like getting off to a positive start," Max said and looked out of his window.



* * *



Twenty minutes later, they came to their first town, a dusty pit of peeling, battered buildings and roads even more damaged than the ones they'd come down.



The Land Cruiser slowed as it turned into the main street, which was choked with people; the dirt-poor, wearing international-charity clothes that slipped off their waists and shoulders, walking on shoeless feet calloused and deformed into human deep-sea-diver boots, all moving at a plod dictated more by habit than urgency or purpose. They looked like a defeated army, a conquered people, broken in two, shuffling off into a nonfuture. This was Haiti, barely a footprint out of slavery. Many were pushing crude carts cobbled together from planks, corrugated iron, and old tires stuffed with sand, while others carried big woven reed baskets and old suitcases on their heads and shoulders. Animals mingled freely among the people, at one with them, their equals: black pigs, sunstroked dogs, donkeys, skinny goats, cows with protruding ribs, chickens. Max had only seen this sort of poverty on TV, usually in news clips about a famine-hit African country or a South American slum. He'd seen misery in America, but it was nothing like this.



It killed his hard-on.



"This is Pétionville," Chantale said. "Home sweet home for as long as you're here."



They drove up a steep hill, took a left, and rolled slowly along a heavily potholed side road flanked by tall, whitewashed houses. Two palm trees stood at the end of the road, where it curved off and led back down into the middle of the suburb. In between the trees was the entrance to a drive. IMPASSE CARVER was painted on either trunk in black lettering.



Chantale turned into the drive, which was dark because it was lined on both sides with more palm trees, sprouting in front of high walls, whose leaves intertwined under the sky and filtered the light through in a murky, aqueous green haze occasionally broken up by sharp bolts of bright sunlight. The ground was perfectly smooth and even, a relief after the ruptured streets they'd driven down.



Max's house was at the far end of the drive. The gate was open and Chantale turned into a concrete courtyard overhung with more palm trees. He saw the house in the background, a single-story orange building with a sharply sloping corrugated iron roof, built three to four feet off the ground, with half a dozen wide stone steps leading onto a porch. Bougainvillea and oleander bushes grew close to the walls.



Chantale parked the car. The bodyguards rolled into the courtyard moments later.



"The Carvers have invited you to dinner tonight. You'll be picked up around eight," she said.



"Will you be there?"



"No, I won't," she said. "Come. Let me show you around the house."



She showed him around as an estate agent would a first-time buyer, telling him more than was strictly necessary and enthusing about fittings and appliances. It was a small house—two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The place was spotless, the tiled floors polished and shiny, a smell of soap and mint hanging in the air.



When she was done, she told him to take a walk around the gardens out back and took her leave of him with a handshake and a smile, both still thoroughly professional, although he thought he detected a degree or two of warmth in there too. Or was he misreading signs? Or was it wishful thinking, the fantasies of a widower who hasn't had sex in seven years, getting turned on by a beautiful woman's touch, no matter how slight?



Chapter 9



NIGHT FELL QUICKLY in Haiti. One minute it was late afternoon, still broad daylight, then a second later it went dark, as quick as though someone flipped a switch.



Max had been inspecting the grounds behind the house. There was a Japanese-style rock garden, immaculately presented and tended to, with paving stones leading across green-marble gravestone chips to a square granite slab set with a large, round, white metal-mesh table and six matching chairs. The chair seats were slightly dusty, as was the top of the table, which had flecks of red candle wax in the center. He imagined a couple might have sat there at night, sipping cocktails by candlelight and maybe holding hands and savoring the moment. He'd thought of Sandra, who'd liked doing things like that. Savoring the moment, cherishing it, holding his hand like she was holding on to time itself and pausing its hand midturn, claiming the moment as hers. He remembered their first anniversary, eating barbecued fish in the house they'd rented in the Keys. They'd watched sunsets and sunrises every day and danced on the beach to the sound of the waves. He wondered what she'd make of Haiti so far. It was one place she'd never mentioned.



The garden was bordered with young palm trees, maybe two or three years old at the most, still thin and breakable, only just finding their girth. A row of mango, orange, and lime trees marked the end of the grounds. Between these ran a high fence capped with coils of razor wire. The fence was electric; it hummed constantly, like the dying vibrations of a struck tuning fork. It had been disguised from both inside and out by deep green ivy. He walked to the far end of the fence until he reached a twenty-foot white wall, also capped with razor wire. The ground in front of the wall was strewn with broken glass, half buried in sand. He found a gap in the fake fence foliage and peered through. The house backed onto a ravine that ran the length of the estate. His half was marked out and separated by a retentive wall. The opposite end was a high ridge of dark earth. Tall trees grew out of the ground, but they were all bent precariously over the ravine, tilted at painful acute angles, half their roots sprung from the soil and grasping at thin air, as if they'd been uprooted by an avalanche that had frozen in midcascade. A slick of stagnant, oily black water filled the bottom of the ravine. In front of him was a Texaco petrol station and a kind of diner.



He heard noises from the street. Every town had its particular traffic timpani. In New York, it was car horns and sirens, gridlocks and emergencies. In Miami, it was the smoother sound of moving traffic, breaks and skids, backfiring motorbikes and belching lowriders. In Pétionville, the cars rattled as though they were dragging busted fenders along their broken-up roads, and the horns sounded like out-of-tune alto-saxophones.



He was standing there staring at the outside world when night had fallen and caught him by surprise.



* * *



He was grateful when he couldn't see anything anymore. The air around him was chiming with crickets and cicadas, the inky darkness punctuated by fireflies, tiny lime-green flares burning for a meager second before disappearing forever.



The skies were clear and he could see thousands of stars splashed out above him, closer than he'd ever seen them in America, a glittering white spray that looked almost within reach.



He headed back up to the house. As he did, a whole new sound made him stop in his tracks. It was a faint, faraway sound. He listened. He waded past the insects and the traffic and the sounds of breadline, shantytown humanity hunkering down for another night in the shit-shack motel.



He found it. He turned a little to the right. There it was, coming from someplace above the town. A single drumbeat, repeated every ten or twelve seconds—domm…domm…domm…domm.



It was a bass drum, its sound carrying through the raucous chaos of the night, insistent and strong, like a giant's heartbeat.



Max felt the sound pass into his body, the rhythm of the lonesome drum seeping into his chest and then flowing into his heart, the two beats briefly becoming one.



Chapter 10



THE MEN FROM the airport picked Max up for dinner. They drove out of the estate, down the street, and then took a left at the end and headed up the steep road that would take them up into the mountains. They passed a bar, its name framed in a proscenium of brightly colored bulbs: LA COUPOLE. Six or seven white men, beer bottles in hand, were hanging around outside, talking to some local women in tight short skirts and dresses. Max recognized his countrymen straightaway from their matching clothes—khakis, like his, and the same cut of shirt and T-shirt he'd packed for the trip. GIs on leave, the conquering army, getting wasted on U.S. taxpayers' dollars. He made a mental note to stop by the bar when he was done meeting his clients. The search for Charlie Carver would start tonight.



* * *



The Carver estate doubled as a banana plantation, one of the highest-yielding in Haiti. According to a footnote in the CIA report, the family plowed the profit it made from the annual harvest into its philanthropic projects, notably Noah's Ark, a school for the island's poorest children.



The Carvers' home was a striking four-story white-and-pastel-blue plantation house with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up to the brightly lit main entrance. In front of the house was a well-tended lawn with a bubbling fountain and a fish-filled saltwater pool in the middle and park benches set around its edges. The area was floodlit like a football stadium, from manned high towers set in the surrounding trees.



A security guard armed with an Uzi, and a Doberman on a button-release leash met them as they drove around the lawn to the staircase. Max hated dogs, always had, ever since he was chased by one as a child. The dumb ones tended to pick up on this and they'd growl and bark and bare their teeth at him. The trained ones bided their time and waited for the signal. This one reminded him of a police attack dog, standing obediently by its master's side, lining up homicidal thoughts, trained to go for the balls and throat—in that order.



* * *



A maid showed Max into the living room, where three of the Carvers sat waiting for him: Allain, an old man Max guessed was Gustav, and a blonde he supposed was Charlie's mother and Allain's wife.



Allain got up and walked over to Max, his leather heels clicking across the polished black-and-white tiled floor, hand already extended. He was flashing the same professional smile, but otherwise appeared markedly different from the cool creature Max had met in New York. He'd washed the pomade out of his hair, and with it had gone a good five years off his age and most of his gravitas.



"Welcome, Max," he said. They pumped hands. "Good trip?"



"Yeah, thanks."



"Is your house OK?"



"It's great, thanks."



Carver sounded like a preppy hotel manager, in his brown brogues, khakis, and short-sleeved light-blue Oxford shirt that complemented his passionless eyes. He had thin, freckled arms.



"Come on over," Carver said and led Max across the room.



The Carvers were sitting around a long, solid-glass coffee table with five neat cubes of magazines on the bottom shelf and a vase stuffed with yellow, pink, and orange lilies on top. Gustav was sitting on a gold-trimmed black-leather armchair, the woman on a matching chair.



The place smelled of furniture polish, window cleaner, floor wax, and the same disinfectant they used in hospital corridors. Max also picked up a faint stench of stale cigarettes.



He wore a beige linen suit he'd bought off the rack at Saks Fifth Avenue in Dadeland Mall, an open-necked white shirt, black leather shoes, and his Beretta, clipped to the left side of his waist. They hadn't frisked him before he'd gone in. He made a note to tell the Carvers this, if he finished the job with any affection for them.



"Francesca, my wife," Allain said.



Francesca Carver smiled limply, as if offstage arms were desperately winding up her smile at great strain. She took Max's extended hand in a cold, clammy clasp, which briefly reminded him of his and Joe's patrol-car days, when they'd "shit-sifted"—hand-searched for drugs hidden at the bottom of backed-up toilets. Most of the time they'd had to use their bare hands, because they hadn't brought gloves to the bust. He remembered how month-old sewage had the same texture as cold, raw hamburger—the same feeling he was getting from Mrs. Carver's hand.



Their eyes met and locked. Her irises were a light, washed-out shade of blue that registered faintly against the whites, like the ghost of a long-forgotten ink drop on laundered fabric. Her look was pure beat cop—wary, probing, doubtful, edgy.



Francesca was beautiful, but in a way that had never done it for him—a distinguished, distant beauty that spoke status, not sexiness. Delicate, porcelain-pale skin; perfectly balanced features, with nothing bigger or smaller than it should be, everything symmetrical and in exactly the right place; high, sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a slightly upturned nose that was the perfect platform for a disdainful or withering look. Manhattan WASP, Florida belle, Palm Springs princess, Bel Air blue blood—Francesca Carver possessed the sort of face that launched a dozen country clubs and required annual membership or good connections to get close to. Her life, he imagined, was four-hour lunches, crash diets, monthly colonic irrigations, manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, liposuction, twice-weekly trips to the hairdresser, a nanny, a personal trainer, a daily/weekly/monthly allowance, limitless reserves of small talk. She was Allain Carver's perfect foil.



But all was not completely right about her. A few things let her down and fractured the facade. She was drinking what must have been four straight shots of neat vodka out of a large tumbler; her dark-blond hair was packed into a tight, severe bun that exposed her face and drew attention to its thinness and pallor, to the shadows under her eyes and the vein in her left temple, thumping away under her skin, her pulse accelerated, tense.



She said nothing and their exchange remained wordless. Max could tell she didn't approve of him, which was odd, because parents who called him in to look for their missing children usually regarded him as though he was the next best thing to a superhero.



"And my father, Gustav Carver."



"Pleased to meet you," Gustav said to Max. His voice was gravelly and expansive, a smoking shouter's voice.



They shook hands. The elder Carver displayed a lot of strength for someone his age, who'd also suffered a stroke. His handshake, applied with minimum effort, was a bonecrusher. He had a forbidding set of paws, the size of catcher's mitts.



He took the heavy black-and-silver-topped cane he'd rested across the arms of his chair and rapped on the couch to his left, close to him.



"Sit with me, Mr. Mingus," he growled.



Max sat down close enough to the old man to smell mild menthol coming off him. Father looked nothing like son. Gustav Carver resembled a gargoyle, at rest between demonic eruptions. He had a huge head with a swept-back, brilliantined mane of thick silver. His nose was a broad beak, his mouth thick-lipped and bill-shaped, and his small, dark brown eyes, peering under the drapes of sagging eyelids, glistened like two freshly roasted coffee beans.



"Would you care for a drink?" Gustav said, more order than invitation.



"Yes, please," Max said and was about to ask for water, but Gustav interrupted him.



"You should try our rum. It's the best in the world. I'd join you, but I've had mutinies in the pumphouse." He patted his chest, chuckling. "I'll drink it through you."



"Barbancourt rum?" Max asked. "We get that in Miami."



"Not the deluxe variety," Gustav snapped. "It's not for foreigners. It never leaves the island." His accent was closer to English than his son's.



"I don't feel like alcohol right now, Mr. Carver," Max said.



"So what can I offer you?"



"Water, please."



"That's another deluxe drink here," Carver said.



Max laughed.



Gustav barked at a male servant who came quickly over from near the doorway, where Max hadn't noticed him standing when he'd walked in. Carver ordered Max's water in words that left his mouth like a blast from a starting pistol.



Looking at the servant practically fleeing the room, Max caught sight of Allain, sitting at the other end of the couch, staring blankly into space, playing with his fingers. Max realized he hadn't been conscious of Allain's presence in the room after he'd been introduced to Gustav. He stole a look at Francesca, on the opposite chair, and saw her sitting in the same way—back upright, hands folded on her lap—staring in the same way at a different nothing.



The dynamics of the family fell into place. Gustav Carver ruled the roost absolutely, without question or opposition. It was his show and everyone around him was an extra, a hired hand, even his family.



The old man sucked all the energy and personality out of the room and assimilated it into his. It was why Allain appeared so changed from when Max had last seen him, demoted from the regal to the regular; and it was why Francesca was reduced to a silent bit of arm candy. Gustav must have been a terrifying father to grow up under, thought Max, the sort who disowned what he couldn't break and bend.



The living room was vast. Three of the walls were lined with antique books—hundreds of them; collection after gold-embossed collection—their spines forming tasteful blocks of color—maroons, greens, royal blues, chocolate browns—against which furniture was offset to highlight its subtleties. He wondered how many of their books the Carvers had actually read.



It took a certain type of person to lose themselves in a book. Max wasn't one of them. He preferred physical activity to sitting down, and he'd outgrown made-up stories as a kid. Until he'd gone to prison, Max had only read the papers and anything related to a case he was working on.



Sandra had been the reader in the household—and a voracious one, too.



The light in the room—coming from spotlights in the ceiling, and tall lamps placed in all four corners—was a warm, comforting, intimate golden-ochre, the glow of fireplaces, candles, and oil lamps. Max could make out two armor breastplates and peaked helmets, mounted on pedestals, standing at either end of the bookcases to the right of the room. On the wall opposite him, between two arched windows, was a large portrait of a woman, while below it ran a long mantelpiece massed with framed photographs of various shapes and sizes.



"Your name? Mingus? It's black American, no?" Gustav said.



"My dad was from New Orleans. A failed jazz musician. He changed his name before he met my mom."



"After Charles Mingus?"



"Yeah."



"One of his pieces is called—"



"'Haitian Fight Song,' I know," Max interrupted.



"It's about la gague—our cockfights," Gustav informed him.



"We've got those in Miami too—"



"They're rougher here—primal." Gustav smiled broadly at him. The old man's teeth were sandy-colored and black at the roots.



Max's eyes fell on the lilies in the vase. There was something wrong with them, something that jarred with the room's nobility.



"Do you like jazz?" Gustav asked him.



"Yes. You?"



"Some. We saw Mingus give a concert here once, in Port-au-Prince, at the Hotel Olffson. Long time ago."



Gustav fell quiet and stared over at the portrait on the wall.



"Come," he said, pushing himself up out of his chair with his cane. Max stood up to help him, but Gustav shooed him away. He was about Max's height, although slightly stooped and a lot narrower about the shoulders and neck.



Gustav took Max over to the mantelpiece.



"Our Hall of Fame—or in-fame-ey, depending on your politics," Carver announced with a guffaw, spanning the breadth of the mantelpiece with a sweep of the arm.



The mantelpiece was made of granite, with a thin band of intertwined laurel leaves painted around the middle in gold. It was a lot wider than he had expected, more ledge than mantelpiece. Max looked across at all the photographs. There were well over a hundred there, five rows deep, each one turned at a different angle so that its core figures were visible.



The photographs were in black frames, with the same gold-leaf pattern running around the inside of their borders. At first glance, Max saw only unfamiliar faces staring back at him, in black-and-white, sepia, and color—Carver's forebears: men old and older, women mostly young, everyone Caucasian—and then, flitting in between the aristocratic profiles and posed box-camera shots of yesteryear, were shots of the younger Gustav—fishing, playing croquet in plus fours, with his wife on their wedding day, and, most of all, shaking hands with celebrities and icons. Among those Max recognized were JFK, Fidel Castro (those two photographs placed side-by-side), John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, William Holden, Ann-Margret, Clark Gable, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Truman Capote, John Gielgud, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor. Carver never seemed dwarfed or rendered irrelevant in the stars' auras; on the contrary, Max thought his seemed the more commanding presence, as if he were really posing in their snapshots.



There were two photographs of Sinatra—one of the Chairman meeting Carver, the other of him kissing an awestruck Mrs. Carver on the cheek.



"How did you find him? Sinatra?" Max asked.



"A tadpole who thought he was a shark—and a complete vulgarian too. No class," Carver said. "My wife adored him, though, so I forgave him virtually everything. He still writes to me. Or his secretary does. He sent me his last compact disc."



"L.A. Is My Lady?"



"No. Duets."



"A new album?" Max said, too excitedly for his liking. He hadn't thought to check any record stores before he'd left. Before he'd gone to prison, he'd habitually shopped for new music on Tuesdays and Fridays.



"You can have it if you want," Carver said, with a smile. "I haven't even opened it."



"I couldn't."



"You can," Carver said, patting him affectionately on the shoulder and then looking up at the portrait.



Max studied it and recognized an older version of Judith Carver from the mantelpiece photographs. From her near lipless face, he could see she was the mother of Allain Carver. She was seated, legs crossed, hands folded one over the other and placed on her knee. In the background, on a stand behind her, were the same vase and lilies found on the coffee table. It was then that Max realized what had been bothering him about the flowers—they were fake.



"My wife, Judith," Carver said, nodding up at the portrait.



"When did you lose her?"



"Five years ago. Car accident. On her way back from the beach. Our driver was run off the road," he said, and then he turned to Max. "Husbands shouldn't bury their wives."



Max nodded. From the side, he saw Gustav's eyes welling up, his bottom lip trembling until he bit it still. Max wanted to do or say something comforting or distracting, but words failed him and he didn't trust his own motives.



He noticed for the first time that he and the old man were dressed the same: Gustav was wearing a beige linen suit, white shirt, and well-polished black leather shoes.



"Excusez-moi, Monsieur Gustav?" the servant said behind them. He'd brought Max's water—a tall glass with ice and a slice of lemon, sitting alone in the middle of a wide, round silver tray.



Max took the glass and thanked its bearer with a nod and a smile.



Carver had picked out a family photograph from the pile. Max could see it had been taken in the living room. Carver was seated in an armchair, cradling a baby in his arms, beaming. Max vaguely recognized the baby's face as Charlie's.



"This was after the little man's baptism," Carver said. "He farted all through the ceremony."



Carver laughed to himself. Max saw he loved his grandson. He saw it in the way he held the boy in the photograph, and in the way he looked back at the two of them together.



He handed Max the photograph and walked along the mantelpiece, stopping almost at the very end and retrieving a smaller picture from a back row. He stood where he was and studied it.



Max looked at the photograph—the Carver family gathered around the patriarch and his grandson. There were four daughters—three took after their mother and were beauties based on the same template as Francesca's, while the last one was short and fat and looked like a younger version of her father in drag. Francesca stood next to her, and Allain ended the row on the right. Another man was in the picture—about Allain's age but much taller and with short, dark hair. Max guessed he was an in-law.



Carver came back to where he'd been standing. Max noticed he walked with a slight limp on his left side.



He took the baptism photo back and leaned in close to Max.



"I'm very glad you're working on this," he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. "I'm honored to have a man like you here. A man who understands values and principles."



"As I told your son, this may not have a happy ending," Max said, also whispering. He usually kept his feelings in check with clients, but he had to admit he liked the old man, despite everything he'd read about him.



"Mr. Mingus—"



"Call me Max, Mr. Carver."



"Max, then—I'm old. I've had a stroke. I don't have much time left. A year, maybe a little more, but not much. I want our boy back. He's my only grandson. I want to see him again."



Gustav's eyes were watering again.



"I'll do my best, Mr. Carver," Max said and he meant it, even though he was almost a hundred percent sure Charlie Carver was dead, and was already dreading having to tell the old man.



"I believe you will," Carver said, looking at Max admiringly.



Max felt ten feet tall, ready to get to work. He'd find Charlie Carver—if not his body, then his ghost and the place he haunted. He'd find out what happened to him and who was responsible. Then he'd find out why. But he'd stop there. He wouldn't dispense justice. The Carvers would want that satisfaction for themselves.



His eyes fell on something he hadn't seen until then, something not immediately apparent unless the viewer was up close—words, stamped into the mantelpiece pillars and filled in with gold paint. They were from Psalm 23, the best-known one, which starts, "The Lord is my shepherd…"—only these quoted the fifth verse:



"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over."



A maid walked up to them.



"Le dîner est servi," she said.



"Merci, Mathilde," Carver said. "Dinner. I hope you've come with an empty stomach."



As Max and Carver began to walk toward the door, Allain and Francesca rose from their seats and followed them. For a while, Max had completely forgotten they were all in the same room.



Chapter 11



DINNER WAS SERVED by two maids in black uniforms with white aprons. They were silent and unobtrusive, serving the first course—two slices of prosciutto, with chilled cantaloupe, honeydew, galia, and watermelon—with the minimum of fuss, their presence a brief shadow at the shoulder.



The dining room, black-and-white-tiled, like the living room, was brightly lit by two huge chandeliers and dominated by the banquet table that could sit twenty-four. Judith's portrait hung on the left-hand wall, her face and torso looming over the end of the table, her essence filling the place she had no doubt occupied in body. The table was decorated with three vases of artificial lilies. Max and the Carvers sat close together at the opposite end. Gustav was at the head, Francesca faced Allain, and Max was placed next to her.



Max looked down at his place setting. He'd landed in alien territory. He didn't stand much on ceremony and etiquette. Other than the restaurants he'd taken his wife and girlfriends to, the only formal dinners he'd attended were cop banquets, and those had been like frat parties, disintegrating into roll fights and rude food-sculpture contests.



Cutting his ham, Max looked at the Carvers. They were still on the melon. They ate in silence, not looking at each other. The percussive tap of metal on porcelain was the only sound filling the cavernous dining room. Gustav kept his eyes fixed on his food. Max noted the way the fork trembled in his fingers as he brought it up to his mouth. Allain stabbed at his food, as though trying and failing to crush a zigzagging ant with the point of a pencil. He brought pieces of fruit up to his lipless mouth and snatched them in, like a lizard swallowing a fly. Francesca held her cutlery like knitting needles, dissecting her fruit into small morsels she then dabbed into her mouth without really opening it. Max saw how thin and pale and veinless her arms were. He noticed she was trembling, too, a nervous tremor, worries rattling inside of her. He glanced back at Allain and then again at her. No chemistry. Nothing left. Separate rooms? Miserable couple. Did they still argue or was it all silence? It was more than just the kid. These were two people staying together like bugs on sap. Max was sure Carver had someone on the side. He looked after himself, kept up his appearance, cut a dash. Francesca had given up. Poor woman.



"How long've you been in Haiti, Mrs. Carver?" Max asked, his voice filling the room. Father and son looked his way, then Francesca's.



"Too long," she said quickly, just above a whisper, as if implying that Max shouldn't be talking to her. She didn't turn her head to look at him, merely glanced his way out of the corner of her eye.



Max swallowed the ham with a loud, hard gulp. It hurt his throat going down. There was another slice to go but he didn't touch it.



"So, tell me, Max—what was prison like?" Gustav barked across the table.



"Father!" Allain gasped at the old man's brusqueness and indiscretion.



"I don't mind talking about it," Max said to Allain. He'd been expecting the old man to ask him about his past.



"I shouldn't have taken the Garcia case," he started. "It was too close, too personal. My wife and I knew the family. They were friends. Her friends first, then mine. We babysat their daughter, Manuela, sometimes."



He saw her again, now, in front of him. Four years old, her grownup features budding, crooked nose, brown eyes, curly brown hair, impudent smile, always talking, a little Inca. She'd loved Sandra, called her "Auntie." Sometimes she'd want to come and spend the night with Sandra even when her parents were with her.



"Richard and Luisa had everything most people wish for. They were millionaires. They'd been trying for a baby for years. There'd always been complications. Luisa had had three miscarriages and the doctors told her she couldn't get pregnant again—so, when Manuela came along they thought it was a miracle. They loved that little girl."



Manuela hadn't liked Max much, but she'd inherited her father's smooth, diplomatic skills and, even at that age, she'd understood the importance of not offending people unless you were sure you could get away with it. She'd been polite to Max and called him "Uncle Max" to his face, but when she thought he couldn't hear she referred to him as "Max" or "he." It had always made him smile, hearing the future adult in the child.



"They contacted me as soon as they got the ransom demand. I told them to go to the cops, but they said the kidnappers had warned them not to or the girl would die. Usual TV-movie shit," Max said, talking to the room. "Never trust a kidnapper, least of all one who tells you not to go to the cops. You'll find they don't know what they're doing, and nine times out of ten the victim gets hurt. I told Richard all this, but he still wanted to play it by their rules.



"He asked me to be the bag man. I was to drop the ransom off and wait for the kidnappers to call and tell me where to find Manuela. I delivered the money near a pay phone in Orlando. Some guy on a motorbike picked it up. He didn't see me. I was hiding across the street. I got his registration, make of the bike, his basic physical description.



"The call never came. I ran the bike details by a cop friend of mine on the job. It belonged to one of Richard's employees. I got the information I needed out of him and turned him over to the cops.



"He told me Manuela was being held at a house in Orlando. I went there and she was gone," Max said. He saw Francesca Carver twisting her napkin tight under the table, loosening it and then twisting it again with a hard wrench of her hands.



"The ransom guy had given me the names of his accomplices. Three of them, still teenagers. Seventeen. Two boys, a girl. Black. All three had records. The girl was a runaway, turned hooker. One of the boys was the ringleader's cousin."



The maids came in and cleared away the plates and refilled the glasses with water and juice. Allain and Gustav were giving him their full, undivided attention. He felt them hanging on his every word. Francesca wasn't looking at him. The vein in her temple was throbbing again.



"There was a manhunt, first state, then national, the FBI got involved. They spent six months looking for Manuela and the kidnappers and they found nothing. I was out looking for her too. Richard offered me a million dollars. But I did it for free."



Max remembered his search all too clearly, mile after black-and-white mile of endless highway and freeway, hours and days of nothing but road, sitting in rented cars, all of them with different defects—no air-conditioning, no heating, no left indicator, slow gear change, no radio, radio too loud, fast-food fumes of previous occupants; the motel rooms, the TVs, the plane rides; the tiredness, the legal speed pills washed down with pots of coffee, the calls home, the calls to the Garcia family; despair growing ever longer in him like an afternoon-to-early-evening shadow. He was feeling it all over again, distanced, diluted in time, but its trace still potent enough.



"I've seen some pretty fucking horrible things in my time. I've seen people do things to each other you couldn't imagine. But all that time it was kind of OK. It was part of my job. It came with the territory. It was something I could leave behind at the end of every shift, wash off and dive back into a few hours later.



"But when it's personal it hits you bad. Those few hours' downtime—that space between doing your job and not doing your job—that disappears. You're not a professional anymore. You're right there with the next of kin—the moms and dads, the husbands and wives, the boyfriends and girlfriends, the roommates, the pets—catching some of all those tears.



"Do you know they train you as part of the detective's course, in the art of breaking bad news? They train you in professional sympathy. Some out-of-work Hollywood acting coach trained me. I was top of my class. I oozed professional sympathy at the drop of a hat. I tried to ooze some of that sympathy on myself. Didn't work.



"I found Manuela Garcia almost a year after her kidnapping. In New York. She'd been dead six or seven months. They'd done things to her. Ugly things," Max said. He stopped himself in time from giving the details.



The maids brought in the main course. All Haitian food: grillot—cubed pork fried in garlic, pepper, and chili, and served with a lemon dressing; slivers of plantain, fried golden brown; a choice of either cornmeal and thick kidney-bean sauce, or riz dion-dion—rice with local mushrooms. There was also a tomato salad.



Max couldn't be sure if the Carvers ever really ate native, or if the food hadn't been specially prepared for him, as an induction. They weren't putting much of it on their plates. He had the rice, plantain, grillot, and a hefty dollop of tomato, which he dumped into his dinner plate, ignoring the salad side-plate. He noticed his gaffe when Francesca put a few sliced tomatoes into the salad plate and a single grillot on her main plate. He didn't let it bother him.



Allain Carver had the same as him. Francesca cut her pork cube into tiny fragments that she fanned out in her plate and looked at intently, as if divining her fortune.



They ate in silence for a few minutes. Max tried to take his time over it, but he was hungry and the food was delicious, the best he'd eaten in over eight years.



His plate was almost empty by the time conversation resumed.



"So what happened next, Max?" Gustav asked.



"Well," Max began, taking a long drink of water. "You know there's a whole shrink industry devoted to looking into the sort of mind that'll think up the most repulsive torture it can inflict on another human being and then see it through? These are the same fancy mouthpieces defense attorneys wheel out in court to explain that some sick fuck ended up the way they did because they were abused as children, because their parents were fuckups themselves. I don't buy that shit. Never have. I believe most of us know right and wrong, and if you go through wrong as a child you look for right as an adult. But for most Americans, therapy is like confession and shrinks are the priests. Instead of saying their Hail Marys they blame their parents."



Gustav Carver laughed and clapped his hands. Allain smiled tightly. Francesca had gone back to strangling her napkin.



"I knew those kids would get off. There's no death penalty in New York. They'd play the mental illness card and they'd win. Two of them were crack addicts, so that's diminished responsibility right there. They'd put most of the blame on the ringleader, the oldest one, the one who'd organized it—Richard's employee. In between, Manuela would be forgotten about and the trial would be more about the kids. The media would get hold of it and make it into this big indictment of African-American youth. They'd get fifteen to twenty. They'd get raped in prison, sure. The men would get AIDS. Maybe. But for all their wasted, rotted lives, Manuela's would go unlived.



"I found the girl first. It wasn't hard. She was out turning tricks for rock. She took me to the other two. They were holed up in Harlem. They thought I was a cop. They confessed everything, down to the last shitty detail. I heard them out, made absolutely sure it was them…And then I shot 'em."



"Just like that?" asked Allain, looking horrified.



"Just like that," Max said.



He'd never told anybody this much about the Garcia case, and yet it had felt right. He wasn't after absolution or even understanding or empathy. He'd just wanted to free himself of the truth.



Gustav was beaming at him. There was a twinkle in his eye, as if he'd been both moved and invigorated by the story.



"So, you pleaded guilty to manslaughter, yet you committed premeditated cold-blooded murder? You received a very light sentence. The same system you criticized looked after you," Gustav said.



"I had a good lawyer—" Max said, "—and a great shrink."



Gustav laughed.



Allain laughed too.



"Bra-voh!" Gustav barked joyfully, his approval echoing around the room, coming back in sets of two and three, giving Max a small yet highly appreciative spectral audience.



Allain stood up and joined in.



Max was part amused, part embarrassed, part wishing himself away. The two Carvers were no better than the redneck vigilante freaks who'd written to him in jail. He wished now he could have taken it all back, fed them the same line of crap he'd fed the cops and his lawyer, about self-defense with intent.



Francesca broke up the fun.



"I knew it," she said venomously, eyes turned to slits, rounding on Max. "This isn't about Charlie at all. It's about them."



"Francesca, you know that's not true," Allain said patronizingly, as if he were scolding a child for telling a blatant lie. He gave her a cutting, get-back-in-line look that made her lower her head.



"Francesca's understandably upset," Allain explained to Max, leaning over to him, cutting her off.



"Upset! I'm not upset! I'm beyond upset!" Francesca screeched. Her face was crimson, her blue eyes bulged, more washed-out-looking than ever. The pulsing vein in her temple had turned purple, forming a bruise-colored whorl. Like her husband, she had an English accent, only hers was the real deal, no East Coast edges or lopsided-sounding vowels.



"You know why you're here, don't you?" she said to Max. "They didn't bring you here to find Charlie. They think he's dead. They have all along. They brought you in to find the kidnappers—to find whoever it is who dared go up against the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-owning Carver clan! That story you just told confirms it all. You're no 'private detective.' You're nothing more than a glorified hit man."



Max looked at her, feeling chastised and embarrassed. This wasn't what he'd expected.



In some ways, she was right. He had a short fuse. He acted on his impulses. His temper got the better of him, and yes, it had sometimes clouded his judgment. But that was then, when he still cared, before he'd fallen foul of his own system.



"Francesca, please," Allain said, appealing to her now.



"God damn you, Allain!" she yelled, throwing down her napkin and standing up with such force her chair flew back and fell over. "I thought you promised to find Charlie."



"We're trying," Allain said, pleading.



"With him?" Francesca said, pointing at Max.



"Francesca, please sit down," Allain said.



"Damn you, Allain—and damn you too, Gustav!—damn you and your damn family!"



She shot Max a tearful, hate-soaked look. The veins in the corners of her eyes pushed up against her skin like early-morning worms. Her lips were trembling with rage and fear. Her anger made her look younger, less damaged and vulnerable.



She turned and ran out of the room. Max noticed she was barefoot and had a small tattoo over her left ankle.



Silence followed the explosion, a big pall of nothing that settled over the scene. It was so complete, so still in the room that Max could hear the Doberman's paws scrabbling on the gravel path outside, the crickets chirping in the night.



Allain looked humiliated. He was blushing. His father sat back in his chair, watching his son's discomfort with an amused expression playing on his thick lips.



"I'm sorry about my wife," Allain said to Max. "She's taken this whole business very hard. We all have, obviously, but she's—it's hit her particularly hard."



"I understand," Max said.



And he did. There were two kinds of victim-parent: those who expected the worst and those who lived in hope. The former didn't crack; they lived through their loss, grew thicker skins, became mistrustful and intolerant. The latter never recovered. They broke up and they broke down. They lost everything they'd ever loved and lived for. They died young—cancers, addictions, intoxications. Max could tell casualties from survivors the moment he met them, on the threshold of their greatest grief, not yet stepped over. He'd never been wrong, until now. He'd thought the Carvers would be OK, that they'd pull through. Francesca's outburst had changed his mind.



He put another grillot in his mouth.



"She was with Charlie in the car when he was kidnapped," Allain said.



"Tell me what happened," Max said.



"It was just before the Americans invaded. Francesca took Charlie in to Port-au-Prince to see the dentist. On their way there the car was surrounded by a hostile mob. They smashed the car up and took Charlie."



"What happened to her?"



"She was knocked out. She came to in the middle of the road."



"Didn't you have security?" Max asked.



"Yes, the chauffeur."



"Just him?"



"He was very good."



"What happened to him?"



"He was killed," Allain said.



"Tell me," Max said to Allain. "Was your wife on TV here a lot? Or in the papers?"



"No—maybe just once, at a function for the U.S. ambassador a few years ago. Why?"



"What about your son? Was he in the press?"



"Never. What are you getting at, Max?"



"Your driver."



"What about him?"



"What was his name, anyway?" Max asked.



"Eddie. Eddie Faustin," Allain answered.



Faustin? Max's heart skipped a beat. Was this Faustin any relation to Salazar Faustin of The SNBC? He didn't want to start down that path just yet.



"Could he have planned Charlie's kidnapping?"



"Eddie Faustin didn't have the brains to tie his laces, let alone plan a kidnapping," Gustav said. "But he was a good man. Very very very loyal. He'd break his back for you and wouldn't even ask you for an aspirin to take away the pain. He took a bullet for me once, you know? Didn't complain. He was back at work a week later. He and his brother used to be Macoutes—you know, the militia? Not a lot of people liked them—because of things they did under the Duvaliers—but everyone feared them."



Yes: same guys. Max remembered. Salazar was ex–Haitian secret police. They'd trained him in viciousness. Those stories he'd told them in interrogation—initiation ceremonies where they'd had to fight pit bulls and beat people to death with their bare hands. Same people. One big happy family. Keep it to yourself.



"Maybe people were out to get him," Max said.



"We thought of that, but they could have come for him anytime. Everyone knew he worked for us. Everyone knows where to find us," Allain said.



"Including the kidnappers, right? Are you sure he couldn't have been behind it—or maybe involved?" Max said to Gustav.



"No, Eddie wasn't involved and I'd stake my life on it," the old man said. "No matter how clear-cut it appears."



Max trusted Gustav's judgment—to a point. There were many ingredients to a kidnapping—the safe house, the abduction planning, victim stakeout, abduction, getaway. You needed a calm, calculating, orderly, fairly rational brain to put them all together and make them work. You needed to be ruthless and cold-blooded, too. Gustav Carver wouldn't have had someone that intelligent so close to him. Most bodyguards were dumb lunks with great reflexes and nine lives. And Eddie Faustin must have been every bit as dumb as his former boss said, to have carried on working after taking a bullet.



If Eddie was involved in the kidnapping, he had been manipulated into it. The mob was possibly a distraction, deliberately organized to kill Eddie and get him out of the way, while the kidnappers quietly made off with the kid. Were they part of the mob, or did they drive up and take the kid?



Wait a minute—



"Where was Eddie's body in relation to Mrs. Carver?"



"There was no body," Allain said.



"No body?"



"Just a pool of blood near the car. We think it's his."



"All blood looks the same. It could've been anyone's," Max said.



"True."



"For now I'll treat Eddie as a missing person too," Max said. "What about witnesses? Your wife?"



"She only remembers up to the mob attacking the car."



"So if Eddie's alive, then he'd know who took Charlie."



"That's a big 'if,'" Gustav interrupted. "Eddie's dead. The mob killed him, I'm sure."



Maybe, thought Max, but maybes didn't solve cases.



"What was Eddie's brother called?"



"Salazar," said Allain, glancing over at his father.



"The same one you arrested," said Gustav, as if on cue.



"You're very well informed," Max said. "I guess you also know they all got deported back here?"



"Yes," said Gustav. "Does that bother you?"



"Only if they see me first," Max said.



There was a moment's silence. Gustav smiled at Max.



"You'll have a guide," Allain said. "Someone to show you around and act as your interpreter. In fact, you've met her. Chantale."



"Chantale?" Max said.



"She's going to be your assistant."



Gustav guffawed and winked at Max.



"I see," Max said. "She doesn't look like the sort who has a ghetto passkey."



"She knows her way around," Allain said.



"That she does!" Gustav laughed.



Max wondered which of the two she'd fucked. He guessed Allain, because Allain was blushing to the roots of his hair. Max felt stupidly jealous. Carver's money and status was an aphrodisiac. Max tried to picture Chantale and Allain together and couldn't. Something didn't fit. He chased her from his mind, told himself to focus, to think of her as a colleague—a partner, a life-support unit, same as when he was a cop. That was always a passion-killer.



He ate another grillot but the meat had gone cold and rock-hard. He was still hungry. He ate some tomatoes.



"My son hasn't had a lot of luck with assistants," Gustav said.



"Father!" Allain started.



"I think you should tell Max what he's up against, don't you? It's only fair to him, isn't it?" Gustav said.



"I met Clyde Beeson, if that's what you mean," Max said.



"I was thinking more about the unfortunate Mr. Medd," Gustav said.



Allain looked uncomfortable. He eyed his father angrily.



"When did he come into the picture?" Max asked.



"January, this year," Allain said. "Darwen Medd. Ex–Special Forces. He'd tracked drug cartel members in South America. He didn't get very far before he—"



Allain trailed off and looked away from Max.



"Medd disappeared without a trace," Gustav said. "The day before he vanished he told us he was going to Saut d'Eau—it's like a voodoo version of Lourdes—a waterfall you go to purify yourself in. Charlie had apparently been sighted there."



"And you never heard from him again?"



Allain nodded.



"Do you know who gave him the information?"



"No."



"Did you follow it up—the waterfall lead?"



"Yes. A false one."



"Did you pay Medd a lot of money upfront?"



"Less than you."



"And you checked the airport—?"



"—and the ports, and the border—no sign of him."



Max didn't say anything. There were more than just official exits out of any country and Haiti was no different. The boat people who washed up on the Florida coastline every day were proof of that. And then Medd could quite easily have slipped into the Dominican Republic over the border.



But—assuming he was still alive—if he had left the country, why had he wanted to get out so quickly, without telling Carver?



"You're not telling him everything, Allain," Gustav growled at his son.



"Father, I don't think that's relevant," Allain said, avoiding looking at either of them.



"Oh, but it is," Gustav said. "You see, Max, Medd and Beeson had a predecessor—"



"Father—this is not important," Allain said, all bared teeth and fierce eyes and clenched fists.



"Emmanuel Michelange," Gustav said, raising his voice to a boom.



"Did he disappear too?" Max asked Allain, trying to draw him away from his father's orbit, hoping to divert another family explosion before it happened.



But the question caught Allain off-guard, and panic crept into his eyes.



Gustav stirred. He was going to speak, but Max quickly signaled for quiet with his index finger to his lip.



Allain didn't notice. He'd turned pale. His eyes were fixed but unfocused, his mind gone from the present, digging back through time. He didn't get too far before he drew up a bad memory. Sweat had pooled in the lines on his forehead.



"No, just—only Medd disappeared," Allain said, his voice fluttering. "Manno—Emmanuel—was found in Port-au-Prince."



"Dead?" Max said.



Allain replied, but the effort was so slight the word got caught in his throat.



"Was he split in two?" Max offered.



Allain lowered his head and held it up between his thumb and forefinger.



"What happened, Mr. Carver?" Max said, firmly but staying on the right side of empathy.



Allain shook his head sadly.



"Mr. Carver, please," Max said in the same tone, only leaning over to create a sense of intimacy. "I know this is hard for you, but I've really got to know what happened."



Allain was silent.



Max heard something dragging across the floor near Gustav's seat.



"TELL HIM!" Gustav erupted from the end of the table.



Max and Allain looked up in time to see the old man standing up in his place and bringing his cane down through the air.



There was a huge crash as the cane met the table and place setting. Glass and crockery smashed and flew across the room in shards and splinters.



Gustav stood over the table, angry, tottering, and malevolent, his presence filling up the room like toxic gas.



"Do as I say and tell him," Gustav said slowly and loudly, raising his cane and pointing it at Allain. Max saw squashed kidney beans and grains of rice stuck to the edges of the stick.



"No!" Allain shouted back at him, pushing himself out of his seat by the points of his fists, glaring at his father, rage hammering at the insides of his face. Max got ready to jump between them if the younger man attacked the older.



Gustav looked back at him, defiantly, an unflustered smirk cresting his jowls. "Emmanuel Michelange," Gustav said, wiping his cane clean on the tablecloth and resting it by his chair, "was the one and only local we enlisted—" He growled the world out like it was a hair-ball he was hawking up. "I was against using the natives—dumb and lazy is what they are—but junior here insisted. So we gave it a try. He was next to useless. Lasted two weeks. They found him in his jeep in Port-au-Prince. They'd taken the wheels and engine out—and much more. Emmanuel was sitting there, in the driving seat. His penis and testicles had been cut clean off—actually, not clean off—they'd used scissors."



Max felt fear bundle up in his stomach and trickle toward his balls.



Gustav was staring at Allain the whole time he was talking. Allain was staring back at him, fists still clenched, but Max could tell he wasn't going to use them. His father had known it all along.



"Michelange was asphyxiated on his own genitalia," Gustav said. "His penis was blocking his throat. And each testicle was lodged in either cheek like so—"



Gustav demonstrated by putting his index fingers in his mouth and pushing out his cheeks. He looked grotesque but hilarious. Then he stuck his tongue out at his son and wiggled it from side to side. Now his resemblance to a gargoyle was uncanny.



"That's something Chantale won't have to worry about, I suppose," Max said.



Gustav roared with laughter and slapped the table.



"AT LAST!" he bellowed. "SOMEONE WITH OOOMPH!"



"You bastard!" Allain shouted. Max thought it was at him, but the son was still looking at his father. He stormed out of the room.



A ghastly stillness descended on the big room again, a vacuum within a vacuum. Max looked down at his unfinished food and wished himself away.



Gustav sat down and called to the maids. They came in and cleaned up around him; then they cleared away the plates.



On her way back from the kitchen, one of the maids brought Gustav the silver cigarette box, lighter, and an ashtray from the living room. He spoke to her again, mumbling, so she had to bend over to hear him. The old man cupped her shoulder as he spoke to her.



The maid left the room and Carver took an unfiltered cigarette from the box and lit up.



"I used to smoke forty a day before my first stroke," Gustav said. "Now I'm down to just the one—keeps the memory alive. You?"



"I quit."



Gustav smiled.



Some people are born smokers. Carver was one of them. He loved his habit. He inhaled the cigarette smoke and held it in his lungs, getting the most out of each puff before slowly exhaling.



"Sorry you had to witness that earlier. All families argue. It's rough but healthy. Do you have any family, Mr. Mingus?"



"No. My mother's dead. I don't know where my dad is. Probably dead too now. I guess I got cousins and nephews and stuff, but I don't know them."



"What about your late wife's family? Are you in touch with them?"



"On and off," Max said.



Gustav nodded.



"Allain got upset about Emmanuel because they were childhood friends. I put Emmanuel through school, college. His mother was Allain's nanny. He loved her more than he loved his own mother," Carver said. "In Haiti we have a servant culture. We call them restavec. It's Kreyol for 'stay with,' derived from the French rester—to stay—and avec—with. You see, we don't pay our servants here. They live with us, 'stay with' us. We clothe them, feed them, give them decent accommodation. And in return they cook, clean, do things around the house and garden. It's feudal, I know." Carver smiled and showed his caramel-colored teeth. "But look at this country. Ninety-eight percent of the population are still rubbing two sticks to light a fire. Have I offended you?"



"No," Max said. "Prison was kind of like that. Bitch culture. You'd see people getting bought and sold for a pack of smokes. A cassette player'd buy you a blow job for life."



Gustav chuckled.



"It's not as barbaric here. It's a way of life. Servitude is in the Haitian gene. No point in trying to reform nature," Carver said. "I treat my people as well as possible. They all have bank accounts. I put all their children through school. Many have gone on to be modest middle-class achievers—in America, of course."



"What about Emmanuel?"



"He was very bright, but he had a weakness for women. Stopped him concentrating."



"His mother must have been proud."



"She would have been. She died when he was fifteen."



"That's way too bad," Max said.



Gustav stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. The maid returned. She brought something over to Max and put it on the table in front of him. Frank Sinatra's Duets CD, personally autographed to Gustav in blue ink.



"Thank you very much," Max said.



"I hope you enjoy it," Carver said. "There should be a CD player in your house."



They looked at each other across the table. Despite witnessing the old man's undeniable cruelty, Max liked him. He couldn't help himself. There was a fundamental honesty to him that let you know where you stood.



"I'd offer you coffee but I feel like turning in," Carver said.



"That's OK," Max said. "Just one more thing: What can you tell me about Vincent Paul?"



"I could talk about him all night—although most of it wouldn't interest you," Carver said. "But I'll tell you this one thing: I think he's behind Charlie's kidnapping. He's not only someone I think could have organized it, but the only one who would."



"Why's that?"



"He hates me. Many do here," Carver grinned.



"Has he been questioned?"



"This isn't America," Carver guffawed. "Besides, who'd dare go talk to him? The mere mention of that ape's name makes brave men shit their panties."



"But, Mr. Carver," Max said. "Surely you—a man in your position—you could've paid people to…"



"To what, Max? Kill him? Arrest him? On what 'charge'—to put it in your terms?—suspicion of kidnapping my grandson? Doesn't hold water.



"Believe me, I looked at every way to bring Paul in—'for questioning,' as you say. Can't be done. Vincent Paul's too big a deal here, too powerful. Take him down for no reason and you've got a civil war on your hands. But, with proof, I can move on him. So get it for me. And bring back the boy. Please. I implore you."



Chapter 12



BACK IN THE car, heading down the mountain to Pétionville, Max heaved a big sigh of relief. He was glad to be out of that house. He hoped he never had to have dinner with the Carvers again.



He hadn't realized how much the pressure of the evening had gotten to him. His shirt was sweat-stuck to the lining of his jacket and he was picking up the beginnings of a stress headache behind his eyes. He needed to walk, unwind, be alone, breathe free air, think, put things together.



He got the men to drop him off at the bar he'd spotted on their way out. They weren't happy about it, told him "it not safe," and insisted that they had orders to drive him all the way home. Max thought of showing them his gun to reassure them but he told them everything would be OK, that he wasn't far from his house.



They drove away without so much as a wave. Max watched their taillights disappear in the night faster than pennies down a well. He glanced down the road to get his bearings.



At the very bottom was the middle of Pétionville—the roundabout and marketplace—lit up in bright orange neon and totally deserted. In between was near-complete darkness, broken, here and there, by stray bare bulbs over doorways and in windows, small fires on the roadside, and random headlights. Max knew he had to turn down a side street, walk to the end of it, find the Impasse Carver, and follow it home. He now realized he should have let the men drive him back: not only would it be a bitch finding the gate to his compound in the dark, but, more immediately, he didn't know which street led to home. He could see there were at least four to choose from.



He'd have to walk down the hill and try each of the streets until he came to the right one. He remembered being in simple, stupid situations like this when he was younger, always drunk and stoned when he hadn't scored. He'd always made it home. Safe and sound. He'd be OK.



But first he needed a drink. Just one—maybe a shot of that six-star deluxe Barbancourt old man Carver had offered him earlier. That would see him home, help him along his way, isolate him from the fear that was starting to whisper in his mind. He was seeing Clyde Beeson in his diaper again and asking himself what had happened to Darwen Medd. He was imagining Emmanuel Michelange with his dick scissored off and stuffed down his throat and wondering if he'd been alive when they'd done that to him. And he was thinking about Boukman, sitting there, somewhere on the street, maybe by one of those small fires, watching him, waiting.



From the outside, La Coupole was a small, bright-blue house with a rusted corrugated-iron roof whose eaves were hung with a string of flickering multicolored bulbs, similar to the ones surrounding the sign—two wooden planks with the bar name painted in white in a crude, jumbled script: part block, part cursive, part straight, part bent. Small spotlights were trained on the walls and highlighted the chips and cracks in the concrete. The windows were boarded up. Someone had spray-painted LA COUPOLE WELCOME U.S. in black on one of the boards, and painted a list of drinks and prices on the other—Bud, Jack, and Coke were on sale; nothing else.



Music was thudding from within, but it wasn't loud enough for him to make out more than the bass. It was the only noise in the street, although plenty of people—all of them locals—were hanging around outside the bar, talking.



A bald teenager in a grubby white suit with no shirt and shoes was sitting on an old motorbike. The seat was sprouting springs and foam from its four corners. The kid was surrounded by a semicircle of little boys, also bald, all of them looking up at him with awe and respect. The picture belonged in a church or a modern-art museum—Jesus cast as a Haitian slum kid dressed in a soiled John Travolta disco suit.



Max walked inside. The light was dim and rust-tinted, but he could make everything out. It was a lot bigger than he'd expected. He could see where they'd knocked down the back of the original house and built an extension because they either couldn't afford or hadn't bothered to paint the walls a uniform color. A third of the interior was the same blue as the exterior, while the rest was rough, unadorned, unsanded gray brickwork. The floor was plain cement.



Wooden tables and chairs stood around the edges of the room and clustered up in the corners. No two tables and chairs were matched. Some were tall and round, others squat and square, one was made up of four banged-together school desks, another was once part of a larger table that had been sawn in half and modified, while there was one table with brass-or copper-capped corners that looked suspiciously like an antique.



There were plenty of people inside, most of them white males. All off-duty American and—he supposed—UN troops. Max could spot his countrymen. Twice as big as their multinational counterparts; one part exercise, one part overeating, one part genes—hefty arms, broad shoulders, small heads, and no necks; just like him. Most of the few female soldiers who were around were put together the same way. They were all talking among themselves, telling stories and jokes, laughing, drinking only Bud or Coke out of bottles. They gave Max a blatant once-over when he passed them by. He stood out in his suit and shiny black shoes, overdressed in a room of jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers.



He made his way to the bar. There were no stools, only standing and leaning room. There was exactly one bottle on display behind the counter—standard Barbancourt rum, unopened, yellow-paper cap seal still intact. The beer and Cokes were being served out of a cooler.



Max surprised the barman by asking for rum. The barman got the bottle down, opened it, and poured out slightly more than a double measure in a clear plastic beaker. He was going to dump a handful of ice into it but Max shook his head no. He paid in dollars. Two bucks. No change.



The music was coming from the courtyard to the left, through a doorway with no door. An amused-looking Haitian DJ was manning a CD player behind a table, pumping some God-awful HiNRG with an androgynous singer rhyming "love" with "dove" in a German accent, while in front of him a few dozen off-duty peacekeepers were dancing like epileptics having fits on an ice rink.



Max felt eyes on him. He turned his head and followed the feeling back to a dark corner near the bar. Two Haitian women were smiling at him, catching his eye, beckoning him. Prostitutes. They had the same look the world over. He felt a tug in his groin, a pull on his balls. Black women and brown women were his favorites, the ones he always gravitated to, the ones who made him stop and do a double take.



One of the whores started coming over to him, walking awkwardly in a too-tight black dress and tall silver heels. He realized he'd been staring at them without seeing them, all the while playing host to his memories and fantasies. They'd sensed his need in an instant, smelled the curdled lust on him. Max stared the woman in the eye and stopped her in her tracks, her smile giving way to a worried look. He shook his head and looked away, back at the DJ and his dancers.



He sipped his drink. The rum was surprisingly good: sweet and mellow on his tongue, easy on his throat. Instead of the bare-knuckle hook to the gut he was expecting, it gave him a cozy, comforting feeling. The embrace was warm and familiar.



You never really got over an addiction. You could stay clean for the rest of your life, but it was always there, the impulse to start again, shadowing you, walking parallel, ready to catch you if you slipped. It was best to quit a habit when the high was still greater than the low and the pleasure outweighed the pain. That way you kept good memories and had no regrets, like people you meet and leave behind on vacation.



Max hadn't been an alcoholic, but he'd been getting there. He'd had a drink at the end of every shift, no matter when they'd finished up. As early at seven or eight in the morning, he and Joe would find the first open bar and sit with people knocking one back on their way to work, and others getting ready to find breakfast after an all-night binge. It was always only the one drink in the mornings—a shot of Irish whiskey, neat, no rocks.



He'd drunk a lot when he'd gone out, but never so much that he'd lost control. It had helped him forget he was a cop and lose the telltale aura of battered rectitude and all-seeing otherness cops have about them. It had eased him through difficult social situations. It had gone well with meals and lonely nights. And it had helped him get laid. A lot.



Max had never taken his pleasures by halves. He'd smoked a pack of red Marlboros a day, more when he was drinking and even more when he was on the verge of cracking a case. He'd smoked plenty of reefer with Joe, too—good Jamaican shit that never failed to put him in a good place. Joe had stopped when he'd read that smoking too much weed made a man psychotic and gave him tits. Max dismissed it as a scare story dreamed up by the FBI's PR department, and carried on regardless.



Sandra had helped him quit it all—booze, weed, cigarettes, and his job.



Then she'd said yes to marriage.



The night before his wedding he'd deliberately slipped off the wagon. He'd bought a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Marlboros. He'd been free of both for a year, but he wanted to say good-bye to his old ways in style, just the three of them—cigarettes, booze, solitude—together one last time.



He'd driven out to Ocean Drive, sat by the sea, and got reacquainted. The cigarette had tasted horrible, the booze had scalded his throat, and he felt like a freak looking for trouble out there on his own in the sand, with the cruisers, petty criminals, beach bums, and dumb-ass tourists looking to get mugged. He'd doused his cigarette in the bottle, screwed it shut, lobbed it out into the sea, and walked away, feeling more stupid than satisfied.



Now the bottle had washed back.



No one was smoking in the bar. Max finished his glass and ordered another.



The drink was loosening him up, helping him to relax and think.



The Carvers: Gustav was scary, but remarkable. Max admired him. The old man ran the show, despite his illness. They'd have to pry the strings from his cold dead hand.



Allain was probably a nicer guy. He'd had other ideas about their business, a more inclusive way of running things. Though he was crushed at home, he wasn't lacking in courage.



There wasn't a lot of love between father and son—maybe none whatsoever—but there was respect—at least from Allain's side—and there was Charlie. Charlie Carver was holding the family together, uniting them.



And the same went for Francesca Carver. She hated him but he saw where she was coming from and he empathized with her, even pitied her. She wanted out of her marriage and out of the Carvers and out of Haiti, but she wasn't leaving without her boy—either literally or figuratively; not until she'd found out what had happened to him, not until she'd got closure.



The Carvers were dysfunctional but they weren't the worst family he'd ever met. They were standing together in adversity, supporting each other in their own way.



In all likelihood, Charlie had been stolen to get back at the old man rather than the son. Gustav was likely to have a long list of enemies. If they were rich, they'd have enough money and clout to delegate a kidnapping to hired hands that wouldn't know whom they were working for.



Or did they? Three private investigators had come and gone—one was dead, one was missing, presumed dead, one was gruesomely fucked up. All three must have come real close to finding the kid—or led someone to believe they were.



He downed his third rum. People were staying well out of his way. A couple of Americans were talking to the prostitutes. They were all on first-name terms but they'd never done any business. The girls looked disinterested. The soldiers probably didn't want to get AIDS, and there wasn't a condom thick enough to dispel the myth that the disease had started in Haiti.



A Haitian man was clinging to the fringes of a small group of Americans, listening intently to their conversation, hanging on to every word, parroting the ones he understood. If someone said "fuck" or "shit" or dropped a brand or celebrity name, the Haitian would echo it, slapping his thigh and laughing at an obscenity, or nodding his head and saying "Yes man!" or "That's right yo!" in his impression of an American accent, which sounded like Chinese yodeling. Once in a while the group would look at the guy and laugh, some indulgently, some mockingly. A few would stay quiet; they'd taken a profound dislike to their hanger-on. Max could see it in their faces, the way they stood, the smallness of their eyes when they tried not to look at him, the way they winced when they heard him imitating them. They'd probably wanted nothing more than a quiet night out.



The Haitian was wearing a baseball cap backwards, a baggy T-shirt with the Stars and Stripes on the front and back, loose jeans, and Nike sneakers. A real fan of his conquerors.



Then Max saw what was really happening.



The Haitian was actually talking to someone Max hadn't seen, standing in the middle of the group, hidden from view by his comrades. Max only noticed him when one of them went to the bar for more drinks.



He was a buzz-cut blond with a tiny nose and a thick mustache. He was having fun with the Haitian, pretending to teach the guy English when all he was really doing was making him demean himself.



Max listened in.



"Repeat after me: 'I,'" Buzz-cut said, hands moving like an orchestra conductor's.



"Aye—"



"Live—"



"Leave—"



"In—"



"Eeen—"



"A—"



"Ayy—"



"Zoo—"



"Zoooo—"



"Called—"



"Kall—"



"No: call-dah—"



"Kall—durgh—"



"Good—I live in a zoo called—Haiti."



"—Ayiti?"



"What? Yeah, yeah—high tits—whatever the fuck you sambos call this fuck hole." Buzz-cut laughed and his crew harmonized—except for the dissenters, one of whom had caught Max's eye and looked at him in helpless apology, as if to say, it's them not me.



Max didn't give a fuck about him and his educated guilt. It was the Haitian he felt for. It was pitiful to watch and it made Max mad. He was reminded of Sammy Davis Jr.'s Uncle Tom routine in those Rat Pack Vegas shows he had on videotape. Frank and Dean would be humiliating him onstage, calling him every polite racist epithet in front of the audience, who'd be whooping and laughing, while Sammy would slap his thigh and clap his hands and open his mouth wide, looking like he thought it was all just a good joke, but his eyes would be cold and detached, his soul someplace else entirely, and that open mouth would suddenly seem to be howling in pain and—mostly—anger, drowned out by a drumroll and cymbals, and more audience guffawing. The Haitian was like Sammy had been, only he wasn't having it so hard because he, at least, didn't understand what Buzz-cut was saying and doing to him.



Right then, for the first time in his life, Max felt very briefly ashamed to be an American.



He turned back to the bar and shook his glass at the barman for a refill. The barman poured him his fourth Barbancourt and asked him how he was liking it. Max told him it was just great.



A man walked up to the bar and ordered a drink, speaking in Kreyol. He talked a little with the barman and made him laugh.



He turned to Max, smiled politely, and nodded to him.



Max nodded back.



"Did you just get here?" the man asked.



Max didn't know if he meant the bar or the country. The rum was starting to kick in hard. He was looking over the edge of sobriety, contemplating the plunge.



"Max Mingus, right?" the man asked.



Max stared at him too long to feign mistaken identity. He said nothing and waited for the man's next move.



"Shawn Huxley." The man smiled, holding out his hand. Max didn't take it. "Relax—I'm a journalist."



Ingratiating tone, ingratiating smile, ingratiating body language: all the mannered sincerity of a snake posing as a used-car salesman.



"Look, I get a list of daily arrivals from my man at the airport—Mingus, Max, AA147. It's not a common name."



French-American accent. Not Haitian, not Cajun. Canadian?



Good-looking guy, close to pretty: smooth caramel skin, Oriental eyes, a thin mustache crowning his upper lip, and his hair cut in a fade, carefully shaped around the forehead and temples. He wore khakis, a short-sleeved white shirt, and sturdy black shoes. He was Max's height and a third of his build.



"Not me," Max grunted.



"Come on—it's no big thing. I'll buy you a drink and tell you about myself."



"No," Max said, turning away and facing the bar.



"I can imagine how you feel about the press, Max. What with those guys in the Herald digging all that stuff up about you before your trial—and all the trouble they gave your wife—"



Max glared at Huxley. He didn't like journalists, never had, not even when they'd technically been friends, on the same side. When his trial had gone nationwide, the press had dug up every single piece of dirt they could find on him, enough to bury him twenty times over. It played so well—one of the most decorated and respected detectives in Florida, a hero cop, had really built his glittering career on brutalizing suspects into confessions and allegedly planting evidence. They'd camped outside his house, dozens of them. They couldn't get enough of the fact that he was in an interracial marriage. White journalists had asked Sandra if she was his cleaning lady; black journalists had called her a sellout, an Aunt Jemima, and condemned him for having a plantation mentality.



"Listen, I wasn't bothering you, but you are bothering me," Max barked, loud enough to make people leave their conversations and look over. "And you mention my wife again and I will tear your head off and shit in the stump. You got that?"



Huxley nodded, looking petrified. Right then Max could have played with Huxley's fear, toyed with it, stirred it into terror and offloaded a few grudges that way, but he let it go. The guy—and all those media guys—had just been doing their jobs and chasing promotions, same as everyone born with ambition and enough ruthlessness to trample over people to get there. If he'd been an upright cop, never cut any corners, done absolutely everything by the book, the press would have been on his side, championing his cause—and he still would have done prison time for manslaughter. Either way he'd have lost.



Max needed a piss. He hadn't had one since he'd been driven to the Carvers'. The tension of the evening had distracted him from his expanding bladder. He looked around the bar, but there didn't seem to be any obvious doorway people disappeared through, let alone anything marked out. He asked the barman, who tilted his head right to a spot behind where the prostitutes were standing.



Max walked over. The girls perked up and smoothed and straightened their dresses with lightning downstrokes and turned on their open, inviting stares. Their looks reminded him of Huxley's look—instant, one-spoon-and-stir friendship, trust, and discretion, all available for the asking, as long as you paid the price—a salesman shedding his soul piece by piece with every successful deal. Journalists and whores slept in the same bed. Mind you, he thought, how much different was he? Working for the people he had worked for? Looking the other way as he cleaned up their messes? We all did things we didn't want to do, for money. It was the way of the world—sooner or later, everything and everyone was for sale.



There were two bathrooms, male and female gender symbols sloppily painted in bright blue and pink on doors fitted at ankle height above the sloping, dusty floor. In between them was a room behind a wooden-bead curtain. There was an open camp bed with a bare pillow on it and an overturned box of Bud with an oil lamp on it. Max guessed it was where the barman or caretaker slept.



Inside the cubicle, a polished black cistern was fitted low, level with Max's face. The toilet didn't have a seat and there was no water in the bowl, just a black hole. He pissed a long stream and heard it gurgle where it hit something soft and wet and hollow a few feet under. It smelled faintly of ammonia and rotten flowers—the scent of the industrial-strength lime and disinfectant they were throwing down after the day's sewage.



Max heard someone walk past the cubicle, light a cigarette, and inhale deeply. He stepped out and saw Shawn Huxley in the corridor, close by, back to the wall, one foot up against it.



"Was that interesting? Listening to me piss? Did you get it on tape?" Max sneered. He was drunk, not badly, but enough to recalibrate his center of balance.



"The Carver boy," Huxley said. "That's why you're here, right?"



"What if I am?" Max replied, getting up in Huxley's face, unintentionally spraying him with spit. Huxley blinked but didn't wipe it off. Max focused on a small pearly drop hanging off the edge of the journalist's mustache, close to his lip. He'd catch it if he stuck his tongue out.



Max was drunker than he thought. He'd mistaken the point of stopping and turning back for the point of no return. It had been a very long while. When he spit in people's faces he'd already lost control.



"I can help you out," said Huxley, dragging on his cigarette.



"Don't need you," Max replied, looking Huxley over. The journalist was even slighter in bright light, as if he lived on a diet of celery, cigarettes, and water.



"I've been here close to three years. Arrived a few months before the invasion. I know my way around. I know the people—how to work their combinations, make them open up."



"I've got one better." Max smiled, thinking of Chantale.



"That could be the case, but I think I'm onto something that could be tied in with the kidnapping."



"Yeah? What's that? And how come you haven't followed it through, all the way to the reward money?" Max asked.



"It's not something you can do alone," Huxley said, dropping the cigarette he'd smoked to the filter on the floor and grinding it out under his heel.



Max couldn't be sure Huxley was for real. That was the trouble with journalists. You couldn't trust them, not ever. Most of them were born backstabbers with more faces than diamonds.



What's more, why was Huxley offering to help him? Journalists never helped anyone but themselves. What was Huxley's angle? Probably financial, Max guessed. The Charlie Carver case wasn't exactly going to make the front pages in North America.



Max decided to go along with Huxley—albeit guardedly. He was in a foreign country that seemed to be losing its grip on the twentieth century and falling backwards through time. Huxley could be useful to him.



"You meet any of my predecessors?" Max asked.



"The short guy—sleazy-looking dude."



"Clyde Beeson?"



"That's him. I saw him around my hotel a lot—"



"Hotel?"



"The Hotel Olffson—where I'm staying."



"What was he doing there?"



"Hanging around the journalists, picking up scraps."



"Sounds about right," Max muttered. "So how did you know where he was headed?"



"I heard him asking someone at the bar for directions to the waterfalls one night."



"Waterfalls?" Max stopped him, remembering where Medd had gone. "The voodoo place?"



"Yeah. Said he was following up a lead. Last time I ever saw him," Huxley said. "Did you know him?"



"Florida PI, what do you expect?" Max replied.



Beeson went to the waterfalls too. What kind of lead were they chasing?



"Were you friends?" Huxley asked.



"No, the opposite," Max said. "I went to see him before I came out here. He was pretty fucked up, to say the least."



"What happened to him?"



"Don't ask."



Huxley looked Max right in the eye and pulled an ambiguous smile—part knowing, part amused—the sort that people used when they wanted you to think they knew more than they did. Max wasn't going to fall for that shit. He'd used it himself.



"Did Beeson mention Vincent Paul to you?"



"Yeah he did," Max said.



"Vincent Paul, Le Roi de Cité Soleil. That's what they call him, the scared rich folk—after Louis XIV, the glamorous French king. It's meant as an insult."



"How so?"



"Vincent lives in or around Cité Soleil—Shit City, as I call it. It's this gigantic slum outside of Port-au-Prince, by the coast. Makes your 'hoods back home look like Park Avenue. In fact, there's nothing like Cité Soleil anywhere in the world. I've been to slums in Bombay, Rio, Mexico City—paradise in comparison. Here you're talking close to half a million people—that's near ten percent of the population—living on six square miles of shit and disease. Literally. Place even has its own canal. 'The Boston Canal,' they call it. It's filled with old oil from the power plant."



Max had taken everything in. Concentrating on the inflowing information had sobered him, helped clear his mind.



"And you say that's where I can find Vincent Paul?"



"Yeah. They say he who runs Cité Soleil runs Haiti. The people there are so poor, if you promise them food, clean water, and clothes they'll throw bricks at whoever you point to. Some say Paul's paid by the CIA. Whenever they want a president ousted they get him to stir up Cité Soleil."



"Do you think that's true?"



"The only way to find out would be to ask the man himself, and you don't do that. He talks to you, not the other way around."



"Has he talked to you?"



"Had an appointment a while back, but he changed his mind."



"Why?"



"Didn't say," Huxley chuckled.



"Do you know anything about this town he's meant to have built?" Max asked.



"Only that no one knows where it is. No one's ever been there."



"Do you think it exists?"



"Maybe, maybe not. You never can tell very much about anything in Haiti. This country runs on myths, rumors, hearsay, gossip. The truth has a way of getting lost and disbelieved."



"Do you think Vincent Paul's got anything to do with Charlie Carver's disappearance?" Max asked.



"Why don't we meet up tomorrow or the day after and have a long talk, see what we can see, maybe work out a way of helping each other," Huxley said, smiling. He crushed his new cigarette out.



Max realized Huxley had been leading up to this moment, feeding him bigger and bigger scraps of information, getting him hungrier and hungrier before closing the kitchen and rewriting the rules his way. He'd been played.



"What's in it for you?" Max asked.



"My Pulitzer." Huxley smiled. "I'm writing a book about the invasion and its aftermath—you know, the bullshit you'll never read about in the papers. You wouldn't believe what's been going on here, what people have been getting away with."



"Like what?"



Just then, Buzz-cut walked in. He looked over at Max and Huxley and smiled snidely, showing wolfish canine teeth.



"Hello ladies," he sneered.



He tossed Max a disgusted look. His gray-green eyes might have been attractive had they not been so small and cold, icy-bright pinpricks in a face that breathed meanness.



He walked into the room between the cubicles. They heard him draining his bladder all over the bed and the box and the floor. They looked at each other. Max saw contempt in Huxley's eyes—but it ran deep, all through him, from the very bottom of his heart.



The soldier finished and came out of the room, zipping himself up. He shot them another look and belched long and loud in their direction.



Max looked at him, gave him the right amount of attention, but was careful not to lock eyes with him. Most people you could stare down if you let them think you had nothing to lose; others you had to let stare you down, no matter how much you knew you could fuck them up. It was all about choosing your moment and reading your people. And this was all wrong.



Buzz-cut walked out of the corridor and back to the bar.



Huxley took out another cigarette. He tried to light it but his hands were shaking worse than a detoxing wino's. Max took the lighter from him and worked the flame.



"It's shit like that—shit like him—I'm writing about," Huxley spat through his first cloud of smoke, his voice quivering with anger. "Fucking Americans should be ashamed of themselves having a scumbag like that fighting in their name."



Max agreed with him but didn't say so.



"So you are Haitian, Shawn?"



Huxley was taken aback.



"You see a lot, don't you, Max?"



"Only what's there," Max said, but he'd only just guessed.



"You're right: I was born here. I was adopted by a Canadian couple when I was four, after my parents died. They told me about my heritage a few years back, before I went to college," Huxley explained.



"So this is like a Roots-type thing for you?"



"More a fruit-from-the-tree-type thing. I know where I came from," said Huxley. "Call this—what I'm doing—giving a little something back."



Max warmed to him. It wasn't just the rum or their shared loathing of Buzz-cut. There was a sincerity about Huxley you didn't find in the media: maybe he was new to the game and still had most of his cherry or maybe he hadn't wised up that it was a game at all, thought he was on a mission, chasing "the truth." Max had had ideals once, when he'd started out as a cop, young enough to believe in bullshit like people's inherent good and that things could improve and change for the better; he'd fancied himself some kind of superhero. It had taken him less than a week on the streets to turn into an extreme cynic.



"Where can I reach you?" Max asked.



"I'm at the Hotel Olffson. Most famous hotel in Haiti."



"Is that saying anything?"



"Graham Greene stayed there."



"Who?"



"Mick Jagger too. In fact I'm in the same room he stayed in when he wrote 'Emotional Rescue.' You don't look too impressed, Max. Not a Stones fan?"



"Anyone important been a guest of the place?" Max smirked.



"None you'd know." Huxley laughed and handed him his business card. It gave his name and profession, and the hotel's address and phone number.



Max palmed the card and slipped it in his jacket pocket, next to the signed Sinatra CD Carver had given him.



"I'll be in touch as soon as I've found my bearings," Max promised.



"Please do that," Huxley said.



Chapter 13



MAX LEFT LA COUPOLE at around two a.m. The Barbancourt rum was making his head reel, but not in an unpleasant way. Booze had always promised to take him up someplace good only to fuck with his controls and leave him stranded midway, tasting the inevitable crash. This was a different kind of drunk, closer to an opiate float. He had a smile on his face and that good feeling in his heart that everything would be all right and the world wasn't such a bad place really. The booze was that good.



Dark telegraph poles leaned out of the concrete, tilting slightly forward, toward Pétionville's brightly lit center. The wires were slung so low and loose Max could have touched them if he'd wanted to. He was walking in the street, barely feeling his footsteps, bracing his body against the downward pull of gravity, which threatened to send him sprawling flat on his face. Behind him, people were coming out of the bar, spilling conversation and laughter, which faded to murmurs and splutters in the deep silence that confronted them. Some Americans tested the rigidity of the stillness with a one-off scream or shout or a bark or a meow, but the quietness sucked the noise into more silence.



Max didn't know exactly which street he had to turn down. He couldn't remember how many he'd passed on his way up before he'd noticed the bar. He was close to the center of town, but not that close, somewhere in the middle. He passed one road, looked down it but it wasn't the right one. There was a supermarket on the left and a graffitied wall to the right. Maybe the next road. Or the next. Or the one before. He'd meant to ask Huxley for directions, in between one of the four or five other drinks they'd had together. He'd forgotten. Then he'd stopped caring sometime after he'd lost count of the drinks he'd had. The Barbancourt had told him he'd find his way home no problem. He carried on walking.



His shoes were starting to pinch the sides of his feet and scrape off the flesh on his heels. He hated them, those nice, new, shiny, leather slip-ons he'd bought at Saks Fifth Avenue at Dadeland Mall. He should have broken them in before he'd put them on. He didn't like the clack-clack the heels were making in the road. He sounded like a young horse in its first shoes.



And then there were the drums—not any closer than when he'd first heard them, but clearer, the sound raining down from the mountains like rusty cutlery; a full battery of snares, tom-toms, bass drums, and cymbals. The rhythms had a jagged edge. They'd gone straight for the drunk part of his brain, the part he'd hit when he'd fallen off the wagon, the part that would hurt like a motherfucker in the morning.



Someone tugged at his left sleeve.



"Blan, blan."



It was a child's voice, hoarse, almost broken, a boy's.



Max looked from side to side and saw no one. He turned around and looked back up the road. He saw the bar's lights and people in the distance, but nothing else.



"Blan, blan."



Behind him, the other way, downhill. Max turned around, slowly.



His brain was on the graveyard shift, everything taking its time to fall into place, adjust, calculate. His vision had dancing ripples before it, as if he were at the bottom of a deep lake, watching pebbles falling through the surface.



He barely made the boy out in the darkness, just a hint of silhouette against the orange neon.



"Yes?" Max said.



"Ban moins dollah!" the boy shouted.



"What?"



"Kob, ban moins ti kob!"



"Are you—hurt?" Max inquired, stumbling in and then out of cop mode.



The boy came right up to him. He had his hands out.



"Dollah! Ban moins dollaaarrrggh!" he screamed.



Max blocked his ears. The little fucker could scream.



"Dollah?" Money. He wanted money.



"No dinero," Max said, putting his hands up and showing the boy his empty palms. "No money."



"Ban moins dollah donc," the boy whined, breathing hotly all over Max's still-open palms.



"No dollar. No peso, no red fucking cent," Max said and carried on walking down.



The boy followed him from behind. Max stepped a little faster. The boy stayed on his heels, calling after him, louder.



"Blan! Blan!"



Max didn't turn around. He heard the sound of the child's feet scuttling after him, soft footfalls underscoring his cracking heels. The boy wasn't wearing any shoes.



He walked faster. The child stayed right on his tail.



He passed a road he thought looked familiar, and stopped abruptly. The boy thudded against the back of his legs and pushed him. Max bounced two steps down, losing his balance and his bearings. He took a couple of wild, desperate steps to steady himself but put his foot through a sudden empty space where there should have been road. His leg went down, down, down. And then his foot splashed into a puddle. By then he'd already tilted too far over. He fell straight down, landing hard on his front, bumping and grazing his chin. He heard something scrape away down the road.



He lay still for a few seconds and assessed the damage. His legs were OK. No real pain. His torso and chin didn't hurt much. He was conscious of something nasty, the notion of pain, waving at him behind opaque glass, but it was a crooked shadow in a still-beautiful, silky mist. In the days before general anesthetic, they must have given future amputees Barbancourt communion.



The boy cackled over his head.



"Blan sa sou! Blan sa sou!"



Max didn't know what the fuck he meant. He got up, pulled his leg out of the crater, and turned around, uphill, pissed off as hell, his chest now stinging with pain. The rum's spell was broken and all the nightmares had come rushing back. Half his trouser leg was soaked in a cocktail of piss, dead oil, and matured sewage.



"Fuck off!" he shouted.



But he couldn't see the boy. The boy was gone. In his place, in front of Max, stood about a dozen street urchins, all no taller than ten-year-olds. He picked out the edges of their heads and their teeth, those who had them or were baring them, and the whites of their eyes. He could smell them—stale woodsmoke, boiled vegetables, earth, moonshine, sweat, decay. He could feel them peering at him through the darkness.



There were no lights on this stretch of road, no inbound or outbound cars. The bar lights were now pinpoints in the distance. How far down had he come? He stared quickly to the street on his left. Two rows of boys were standing across it, blocking his way. He wasn't even sure it was the street he wanted. He had to retrace his steps, maybe go back to the bar, start again. Ask for directions this time.



He started forward but stopped. He'd lost his shoe in the crater. He looked down at the road, but he couldn't find the hole he'd gone down. He touched the ground with the ball of his foot but felt solid asphalt.



The drumming had suddenly stopped, as if the players had seen what was happening and come over to look. Max felt like he'd gone deaf.



He took off his other shoe, slipped it in his jacket pocket, and started to walk up the hill. He stopped again. There were more kids than he thought. They were stretched out all the way across the road. He was standing right in front of them, close enough to inhale nothing but their gutter-fresh stench. He was going to say something but he heard small whisperings behind him, words evaporating in the air like raindrops on a hot tin roof.



When he turned around, there was another cordon of boys, roping off the way down. He noticed shapes now moving up from Pétionville town center. More children, heading his way. They were carrying things—sticks, it seemed, big sticks, clubs.



They were coming for him. They were coming to kill him.



He heard a rock fall off a pile to his left and roll down into the street. The whispering around him increased to tones of rebuke, all coming now from the same direction. He followed the sound and traced it to the doorway of an empty building. He looked closer, pushed into the darkness for the lightest tones, and he saw that they were passing out rocks, to each other down the line. Half of them already had one in their hands, held down by their sides. When everyone was armed, he supposed, they'd rain them down on him. Then the others would beat the life out of him with their clubs.



His mouth went dry. He didn't know what to do. He couldn't think. He couldn't sober up.



The rum came rushing back to him. His body suddenly felt good, his throbbing chin dulled, his head was light again. He was brave and invincible.



It didn't seem so bad. He'd been through worse than this. He could push his way through. Why not give it a try? What the hell?



He took a couple of steps back and squared his shoulders for the bulldozer run. He could hear them behind him. He didn't look. Could they see what he was doing? Probably. These kids lived in the dark. Had they second-guessed him?



When he charged, he'd knock three or four of them down. They'd pelt him with rocks, but if he kept his head covered and ran like a motherfucker, he'd escape the worst of the barrage.



Uphill, drunk, not so young anymore. Where was he going?



They'd chase him and he wouldn't know where to turn. He'd worry about that later.



And how many were there?



A hundred. Easily. He was dead.



The rum rush deserted him. Optimism split on him too.



The drum started again—just the one, the same deep slow beat he'd heard in the courtyard earlier in the evening. This time it sounded like bombs dropping on a distant town or a battering ram striking a city's gates. The beat didn't go into his heart but right behind his ears, every note a grenade exploding in his skull, sending shock waves down his spine, making him wince and shudder.



Think again, he told himself. One more try. If that fails, run.



"You want money?" he pleaded, despite himself. No response. The rocks were passed on in silence, the kill hands filling up, the circle almost closed. It seemed hopeless.



Then he remembered his gun. He was armed, full-clip.



Suddenly a motorbike roared into life at the top of the hill, the engine shocking the night like a chain saw in a chapel. It was the kid in the white suit.



He came down the hill, the bike slowing to a growl and then a purr as it came up to the circle around Max.



The kid put his bike down and came over to Max.



"Sa wap feh lŕ, blan?" he spoke in a deep, ragged voice that belonged to someone five times his age.



"I don't understand," Max slurred. "You speak English?"



"Inglishhh?"



"Yeah, English. You speak?"



The kid stood his ground and looked at him.



Max heard it before he saw it, something slicing through the air, something heavy, aimed right at his head. He ducked and the kid in the suit swung into space.



Max dug a furious left-right combination into the kid's ribs and solar plexus. The kid gasped and cried out as he folded over like paper, sticking his chin straight out for a right hook, which Max slammed home and sent him sprawling to the floor.



Max grabbed the kid in a choke hold, pulled out his Beretta, and jammed the barrel through his mouth.



"Back the fuck up or he dies!" he yelled, looking all around him. The kid was flailing at him with his hands, kicking at the ground, trying to tip Max over. Max stamped on one of the kid's hands with his bare heel. He heard bones give and a strangled cry boil in the middle of the kid's throat.



No one moved.



What now?



He couldn't exactly drag the kid around with him as he looked for his way home, checking every street until he found it. No way. Maybe he could use him as a shield, push him as far away from the crowd as possible, then cut him loose and go on his way.



No way would they let him.



He could try and shoot his way out.



But no, he wouldn't use it. Not on fucking children.



He'd fire in the air and run as they hit the deck or scattered or panicked.



"Put your gun away!"



Max jumped.



The booming voice had come from above, in the black sky, behind him, downhill. Still keeping his hold on the kid, Max shuffled around toward Pétionville. The view ahead was completely blocked by the man's body, which Max couldn't see but sensed, massive and heavy, the thunder in dark, roiling clouds.



"I won't ask you again," the man insisted.



Max took his gun out of the kid's mouth and slipped it back in his holster.



"Now let him go."



"He tried to fuckin' kill me!" Max yelled.



"Let him GO!" the man boomed, making some children jump and drop their rocks.



Max freed his assailant.



The man barked something in Kreyol and blinding-white overhead lights came on. Max looked away, hand up against the glare. He saw the kid on the ground, blood all down the front of his suit.



Suddenly Max could see every millimeter of the immediate street. The children were standing around him three rows deep. They were all skinny, dressed in filthy rags, many only in shorts, turned away from the light, hands shielding their eyes from the glare.



The same voice barked in Kreyol again.



The kids all dropped their rocks in a collective crash. The rocks rolled down the road, some thudding into Max's bare feet.



Max squinted into the lights. The voice was coming from above the row of floodlights.



The voice boomed again and the children scampered, a stampede of tiny, mostly bare feet ripping down the road, puttering away as fast as they could. Max saw them running through Pétionville's square, over a hundred of them. They would have torn him to pieces.



He heard the sound of a big engine turning over and saw twin sets of exhaust fumes rising up behind the lights, in the shape of upended pine trees. It looked like a military jeep. He hadn't even heard it coming.



The man's accent was straight-up English—not a hint of French or American in it.



Max felt the man looking down on him, at least a good extra foot taller. And he felt his presence—powerful, magnetic, and crushing—enough to fill a palace.



He came closer to Max.



Max looked but couldn't see his face.



The man reached down and grabbed the kid by the middle of his jacket and plucked him clean off the ground, as though picking up something he'd dropped and come back for. Max only saw his bare forearm—thickly veined and heavily muscled, bigger than one of Joe's biceps—and his fist—blunt and heavy and crude as a sledgehammer head. Max swore the man had six fingers. He'd counted five knuckles not four when he'd seen the hand bunch up the boy's suit jacket into a handle.



The man was a giant.



The overhead lights went out and the main ones flicked on, dazzling Max all over again. The engine kicked into action.



Max's vision regrouped in time to see the jeep reversing quickly down the hill. It reached the roundabout, turned left, and headed off down the road. Max tried to see the people inside but he couldn't make anyone out. From where he stood, it looked empty, driven by spirits.



Chapter 14



WHEN THEY WERE gone, he stumbled around the now-empty streets, looking for the elusive road home. The drunkenness came and went in waves, dumb dizziness tripping over moments of lucidity.



Eventually, by a process of elimination, which involved retracing his steps to the bar and then going down each of the four right-hand turn-offs between the bar and the center of town, he found the Impasse Carver.



It was the road he'd been closest to when he was surrounded by the kids.



* * *



Back at the house, Max went to his room, took out his wallet, unclipped his holster and gun, and dropped them on the bed. He peeled off his suit, turned beige to brown, sweat-soaked all the way through to his back and underarms and butt. It was ruined. The trousers stank. The left leg was black and stiff and sticky up to the knee.



It was hot and humid inside. He turned on the fan to stir up the dead air and blow up some cool breeze. His hands were shaking, currents of fear and rage passing back and forth through his veins and arteries, making his heart pound fast, pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream. He was thinking back to those kids. Part of him wanted to go back outside and kick their raggedy, Live Aid–handout asses to voodoo heaven. Another part of him wanted out of this godforsaken country on the next boat-people armada. And yet another part of him was curled up and made small and hiding its humbled head in shame.



He remembered Huxley's card and the Sinatra CD in his pocket. The card was still there but the CD was gone. He realized that it had been knocked out of his pocket when he'd fallen down the crater. He bundled the suit up and tossed it into a corner of the room. He undid his shirt and wiped himself down, then he took off his underwear, balled them all together, and walked to the bathroom, where he tossed them into the laundry basket before getting into the shower.



He turned on the water, and a freezing-cold white streak tore out of the showerhead and blasted his skin. He gasped in shock and went to turn down the jet, but he sensed all the pent-up rage and fear and frustration churning inside him, unspent and untapped, the kind of thing that would bug him every time he stepped out of the house if he didn't release it, vent it. He turned the faucet up full, making the pipes shake and rattle and threaten to pop the brackets that held them against the wall. He let the icy water bash and pound into his flesh until it started to hurt. He held on to the pain as he focused on the humiliation he'd just had to crawl his way out of.



He'd been shamed, shamed by a bunch of little kids. They'd have killed him if it hadn't been for that guy in the jeep. What could you do when it was kids who were threatening to take your life? If you killed them, you burned in hell. If you didn't, they burned you.



No solution, no release. His anger crawled away until it found a hole big enough to hide in and wait for the poor unsuspecting bastard who provoked it.



He dried off and went back to his room. He was too damn hopped up to sleep. He wanted more rum. He knew he shouldn't, that it was the wrong way to drink, that if he did he'd be taking familiar steps back to alcoholism, but right now, at this moment, he didn't give a good fuck about any of that.



He changed into khakis and a white T-shirt and padded to the kitchen.



He opened the door and switched on the light.



Francesca Carver sat at the table.



"The fuck are you doing here?" Max snapped, taking a step back in shock.



"I've come to talk to you."



"How did you get in?"



"We own this house, remember?" she answered with haughty impatience.



"What do you want to talk about?"



"It's about Charlie—things you need to know before you go any further."



* * *



Max went off and got his notebook and tape recorder, while Francesca sat at the table, drinking a glass of bottled water she'd found in the fridge and smoking a French Gitanes cigarette that came in a fancy-looking blue-and-white pack. They stank like hell but they suited her—the sort of thick, all-white cigarettes classic-movie heroines from the forties and fifties were always puffing on at the end of holders.



Max guessed he hadn't smelled her cigarettes when he'd walked into the house because the stench coming off him had been far worse.



"Before I start, you've got to promise me one thing," she said, when Max returned.



"That depends," Max said. She looked very different, much prettier, more relaxed, less ravaged. She'd changed into a pale blue blouse, long denim skirt, and sneakers. She wore her hair down and a little makeup, much of it concentrated around her eyes.



"You can't repeat any of this to Gustav."



"Why not?"



"Because it'd break his heart if he knew—and with his heart already hanging by a thread. Can you promise me this?"



Bullshit, Max thought. She had no love for Gustav Carver. Besides, what kind of fool did she take him for, packaging it all in soft, plaintive tones, reaching for his nearest, fattest heartstring? She must have been to acting school, to do that with her voice, change pitch, wrap each word in a tear before uttering it.



"What's the real reason?" Max asked, looking her straight in the eyes, finding the pupils, holding them.



She didn't flinch. Her eyes met his and held them back. Her stare was cold and hard and remorseless; it said: seen the very worst, seen it all, seen too much of it, still standing—fuck you.



"If Gustav knew what I'm about to tell you, he'd be absolutely livid."



"You mean Charlie's not his grandson?"



"No!—and how dare you!" she snapped. She looked disgusted. Her face flushed light purple, stare-stabbing him. She took a short drag on her cigarette and dumped it in a cup half-filled with water she'd taken to using as an ashtray. The butt hissed as it went out.



"Sorry." Max smiled at her. "Just checking."



She'd walked right into it. Good—a weakness. He didn't know if he'd hit a raw nerve buried under a truth or upset an applecart of prudishness. He was stabbing in the dark, testing the depth of her sincerity. So far, she was holding up.



"Tell me what you want to tell me, Mrs. Carver."



"I want your word."



"Are you sure?" Max asked.



"You haven't much else to offer me, have you?"



He laughed. Stuck-up bitch. She wanted his word? Sure, why not? What was the big deal? He could always break it. It wouldn't be the first time. Words, promises, handshakes, and vows meant nothing to him outside friendship.



"I give you my word, Mrs. Carver," Max said, sounding sincere and reflecting it in the steady eyes he fixed on Francesca. She appraised him and seemed satisfied.



The cassette recorder was on and picking up everything she was saying.



"You were on the right track, back there in the house, about Eddie Faustin," she began. "He was involved in the kidnapping. He was the inside man."



"You came here to tell me that?"



"I wanted to speak to you freely. I couldn't talk to you in front of Gustav. He won't hear a bad word about Faustin. The man took a bullet for him and that makes him a saint in Gustav's book," Francesca said, pulling hard on her cigarette. "He's so stubborn. No matter what I told him happened during the kidnapping, he just dismissed it completely—said I couldn't possibly remember anything because I'd been knocked out. And even afterwards, when we went through Faustin's quarters and found what he had in there—"



She broke off and held her forehead in her fingertips, rubbing circles around her skin. It looked more dramatic than therapeutic.



"What did you find?"



"Faustin used to live in the old stables, behind the main plantation house. They were converted into small apartments for the family's most trusted restavecs. After the kidnapping his apartment was emptied and they found a doll—a voodoo doll—in a box under his bed. The doll was of me."



"Did he hate you?"



"No. This was a love—or lust—charm. It was made with my real hair, and the wax was embedded with my fingernail and toenail clippings. He'd collected them, or paid one of the maids to collect them."



"Did you ever suspect he was doing that?"



"Not at all. Faustin was a trusted employee. Always polite, very professional."



"You didn't feel that he had any desires for you—ever catch him looking at you—er—inappropriately?"



"No. Servants know their place here."



"Sure they do, Mrs. Carver. That's why Faustin helped kidnap your son," Max slipped in sarcastically.



Francesca flushed angrily.



Max didn't want to piss her off too much, in case she clammed up. He moved it along:



"What happened on the day of the kidnapping?"



She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another almost immediately.



"It was on the morning of Charlie's third birthday. You could see the American warships that were bringing the invading troops, right there on the horizon, opposite Port-au-Prince harbor. Everyone was saying the Americans were going to bomb the National Palace. There was rioting and looting going on in Port-au-Prince. People would leave their homes in the mountains and walk down to the city with carts and wheelbarrows to carry the stuff they were looting from shops and houses in the capital. It was anarchy.



"You'd know how bad it was by smelling the air. If you picked up the smell of burning rubber, it meant looting and rioting was going on. Protesters closed off roads with barricades of burning tires. Sometimes you could look out and see these two or three columns of thick black smoke stretching all the way from Port-au-Prince up to the sky. That would mean it was really bad.



"And it was really bad when we drove into town in the bulletproof SUV that morning. Rose was sitting in the front with Eddie Faustin. I was sitting in the back with Charlie. He was happy. He let me play with his hair. I was running it in and out of my fingers. We were going to the Rue du Champs de Mars, not too far from the National Palace.



"It was very very dangerous in town that day. Constant gunfire. I lost count of the bodies we passed in the streets. Faustin said we needed to stop somewhere secluded and wait for the shooting to stop, so we parked in the Boulevard des Veuves. It's usually packed, but that day it was deserted. I knew something was very wrong with Faustin. He was sweating a lot and he'd been looking at me in the rearview mirror the whole drive down.



"All our cars are meant to have loaded guns under the seats. I checked under mine. Nothing. Faustin saw me looking and when I caught his eye again he smiled as if to say 'They're not there, are they?' He'd locked the doors. I tried not to show how scared I was getting.



"The gunfire died down. Rose asked Faustin why we weren't moving. Faustin told her to mind her own business—really rudely. I shouted at him to watch his mouth. He told me to shut up. That's when I knew something was really really wrong. I got hysterical. I screamed at him to let us out of the car. He didn't reply. Then some kids turned up outside. Just street kids. They saw our car and came over. They looked inside. One of them said Faustin's name and started shouting and pointing at us.



"More people started coming over—adults now, with machetes and clubs and tires and cans of gasoline. They were chanting 'Faustin-assassin, Faustin-assassin' over and over. Faustin used to be a feared Tonton Macoute. He'd made a lot of enemies, a lot of people wanted him dead.



"The crowd massed up around the car. Someone threw a rock at the back window. It bounced off without damaging the car, but it was some kind of signal because they stormed us. Faustin drove out of there, but he didn't get far because people had put up a barricade at the end of the road. He started reversing but the mob had caught up with us. We were trapped."



Francesca stopped there and took a deep breath. She'd turned pale, her stare cowering.



"Take your time," Max said.



"People came out from behind the barricades and rushed the car," she continued. "Pretty soon it was surrounded. People were chanting 'Faustin-assassin' and then they were hitting the car with clubs and rocks, kicking it and rocking it. They smashed the windows. And then they started stabbing at the corners of the roof with something. Faustin got a machine gun out from under his seat. Rose was screaming. So was I, I suppose. Charlie was calm through it all, just looking out at everything like it was so much scenery. The last thing I remember is running my hand through his hair, hugging him, telling him everything would be OK. After that…The next thing I remember was coming to in the road.



"I was lying in the same street, but hundreds of yards away from the car. I don't know how I got that far. There was this old woman in a pink dress, sitting on the other side of the road, in front of a shoemaker's, looking straight at me."



"What did you do next?"



"I went back to the car. It was overturned. The street was empty. There was blood everywhere."



"How badly were you hurt?"



"Just concussed. A few bruises, a couple of cuts. Rose was dead. Faustin was gone. And so was my little boy," she said, lowering her head.



She started crying. Silent, rolling tears first, then sniffles, and finally the deluge.



Max paused the tape and went to the bathroom and fetched some toilet tissue. He gave it to her and sat and watched as she cried herself dry. He held her and it helped her get through the worst. He didn't mind her so much now, and he was sure she wouldn't mind him much now either. She had no choice.



"Let me fix us some coffee," Francesca offered, standing up.



He sat back and watched as she took a steel percolator and a round metal tin from one of the row of glass-fronted cupboards running along the wall over the sink. The kitchen was painted a glossy cream-yellow, easy to wipe clean.



Francesca added bottled water and coffee to the pot and put it on the stove. She went to another cupboard and pulled down two cups and saucers. She wiped the insides of the cups with a dishcloth she found on top of the fridge. She seemed to be enjoying herself, as a tiny smile made its way to her lips and lit up parts of her eyes while she busied herself. Max supposed she missed a life without servants.



He looked at his watch. It was now four-fifteen. It was still dark outside but he could hear the first birds of morning chirruping in the garden, competing with the insects. Chantale was due at the house at eight. Too late to go bed. He'd have to skip sleep.



The coffee brewed with a low whistle. Francesca decanted it into a thermos pot and brought it over to the table with the cups, saucers, spoons, a jug of cream, and a bowl of sugar all on a tray. Max tasted the coffee. It was the same stuff he'd had at Carver's club. Probably the family's homegrown brand.



They sat in near silence. Max complimented her on the coffee. She smoked first one then another cigarette.



"Mrs. Carver—?"



"Why don't you call me Francesca?"



"Francesca—what were you and your son doing going to Port-au-Prince that day?"



Max lifted the pause button on his tape recorder.



"We had an appointment."



"Who with?"



"A man called Filius Dufour. Well, no ordinary man, a houngan—a voodoo priest."



"You were taking Charlie to see a voodoo priest on his birthday?" Max said, sounding more surprised than he actually was. The local religion was well entrenched in the Carver household. He remembered how defensive of it Allain had been.



"I'd been taking him to see Filius once a week every week for six months."



"Why?"



"Filius was helping us—Charlie and me."



"How?"



"How long have you got?"



"As long as you need," Max said.



Francesca checked Max's watch. Max inspected the amount of tape in his machine. It was a two-hour cassette, almost through on the first side. He fast-forwarded it and turned it over. He hit RECORD as soon as she started speaking.



"Charlie was born in Miami on September 4, 1991. One of the nurses screamed when she saw his face. It looked like he'd been born with a pitch-black caul, but it was only his hair. He was born with it all, you see. It sometimes happens.



"We came back to Haiti three weeks later. The country was then run by Aristide—a kind of mob rule masquerading as a government. A lot of people were leaving. Not just the boat people, but the rich, all the business brains. Gustav insisted on staying put, even though Aristide had twice singled us out in public speeches as white people who'd 'stolen' everything from the poor black Haitians. Gustav knew Aristide was going to get overthrown. He was friendly with some of the military and he was just as friendly with some of Aristide's key people."



"He gets around," Max said.



"Gustav subscribes to the 'Keep your friends close, your enemies closer' maxim," Francesca said and then met his eyes and held them for a moment. Max sensed her probing him.



"Aristide was overthrown on September 30," she continued. "Gustav threw a party that night. Aristide was meant to have been assassinated, but there was a change of plan. It was a happy party, nonetheless.



"Charlie was christened a month later. I knew something wasn't right with him from the very beginning. When I was a teenager I babysat my nephews and niece when they were babies and they were very different from Charlie. They were responsive. They recognized me. Charlie wasn't like that. He never looked at me directly. He never seemed particularly interested. He never reached out to me; he never smiled. Nothing. And—here's the odd thing—he didn't cry."



"Not at all?"



"Not ever. He made sounds—baby sounds—but I never heard him cry. Babies cry all the time. They cry if they wet themselves or poo themselves. They cry when they're hungry. They cry when they want your attention. Not Charlie. He was very very quiet. Sometimes it was like he wasn't there.



"We had a doctor checking up on him every week or so. I mentioned it to him, the boy's silence. He joked and told me to make the most of it, that it wouldn't last.



"But, of course, it did. Allain told me not to worry, that Gustav himself didn't start talking before he was almost four."



Francesca stopped and lit another cigarette. Max was getting used to the smell.



"Actually, I say Charlie wasn't responsive, but he always smiled at Gustav. And I heard him laugh too whenever the old man pulled faces at him or tickled him. They had a real bond. Gustav was really really proud of Charlie. He always made time for him. Took him with him to the bank a few times. Sat with him at night, fed him, changed him. It was very touching, seeing them together. I'd never seen Gustav happier. He isn't too good with his other grandchildren. Not as attentive. Charlie's his only grandson. I think he wants to die safe in the knowledge that the family name will be preserved, live on. He's old-fashioned, but this whole country isn't much more advanced than him."



Max poured himself another cup of coffee. The first had chased the tiredness out of his bones and out from behind his eyes.



"So, this—Charlie's condition—was playing on your mind when you went to see the voodoo priest? It wasn't about you at all, was it? It was about your son. You thought something was wrong with him, so you took him to the priest for an opinion?"



"Yes and no. It's not quite like that. Charlie had a thing about his hair…"



"I saw the picture," Max said shortly. "Him in that dress."



"He wouldn't let anybody cut it…"



"So your husband explained," Max said disgustedly.



"We really had no choice. People were making Charlie's life a misery."



"Was this before or after you put him in a dress?" Max said sarcastically.



"That was for his own good," Francesca insisted testily. "You know that Charlie screamed anytime someone went near him with a pair of scissors?"



"Yes, Allain told me."



"Did he tell you how he screamed? It wasn't a baby's scream, or even a little boy's scream. It was pure pain—this blood-curdling, earsplitting screech. Imagine a cave of screeching bats. People said they could hear it two miles away."



Max paused the tape. Francesca had upset herself with the recollection. She was biting her lip and trying hard not to cry. He wanted to hold her and let her loose the grief on his shoulder, but it didn't feel appropriate. He was interviewing her, gathering evidence, not acting as her counselor or confessor.



"Explain the dress," he said after she'd blinked away the tears. He already knew the answer but was easing her back into the Q & A.



"Charlie's hair was never cut. It got unwieldy. We tied it in bunches and bows, and finally we braided it. It was easier to put him in a dress and present him to the outside world as a girl than to explain why his hair was that way. It worked, you know. He wore a dress the whole time," Francesca said.



"How did you find out about the voodoo priest?"



"One day, out of the blue, Rose brought me a handwritten message from him. It mentioned things about me and Charlie that no one—and I mean no one—could have known."



"Care to elaborate?"



"No," she said bluntly. "But if you're as good as Allain says you are, you'll surely find out."



Max continued with his questions.



"How did Rose know the priest?"



"Her mother, Eliane, works for him."



"I see," Max said, already lining up potential suspects. "Could Rose have known about these 'things' you won't tell me about?"



"No."



"Not even in a place as small as this?"



"No."



"OK. So you and Charlie went along to see the priest? What happened there?"



"He talked to me, and then he talked to Charlie, separately, in private."



"How old was Charlie then, two?"



"Two and a half."



"Had he started talking by then?"



"No. Not a word."



"Then how did they communicate?"



"I don't know because I wasn't there, but whatever it was, it worked, because Charlie changed toward me. He opened up. He looked at me. He even started smiling—and he had such a lovely smile, the sort that really made your day when you saw it."



Francesca's voice had gone down to a whisper, all her words dwarfed by a mounting grief.



She blew her nose loudly, honking like a seal, and then she lit another cigarette, the last one she had. She crushed the packet in her fist.



"How often did you and Charlie see the priest?"



"Once a week."



"Same day and time?"



"No, it always varied. Rose would tell me when."



"I'll have to see this guy."



Francesca took a folded piece of paper out of her breast pocket and slid it across to him.



"Filius's address and directions. He's expecting you at around two this afternoon."



"He's expecting me?"



"He saw you coming. He told me two months ago."



"What do you mean he 'saw me coming' two months ago? I didn't know I was coming two months ago."



"He sees things."



"Like a fortune-teller?"



"Something like that, but what he does isn't the same."



"How come you acted that way at dinner?"



"I didn't realize it was you."



"So you've talked to Doofoor since?"



"Yes."



"Which is why you came down here?"



She nodded.



"He must have some hold on you."



"It's not like that."



"Did you tell my predecessors any of this?"



"No. I only told them about the kidnapping."



"Why?"



"Emmanuel was a nice guy, but he was indiscreet, a gossip. I hated Clyde Beeson and I didn't care too much for Medd either. They were only here for the money."



"It's what they do for a living, Mrs. Carver," Max said. "Same as anybody else doing a job. Could be in an office, could be pumping gas, could be a cop, could be a fireman—most people do what they do for money. Those that don't are either lucky or stupid."



"Then you must be stupid, Max." She smiled, looking him straight in the eye. "Because you're not lucky."



* * *



She had little else to tell him after that.



Max walked her to the gate. She shook his hand and apologized for her outburst at dinner. She begged him to find Charlie. He said he'd do his best and watched her head up the path at the end of which, she'd told him, a car was waiting for her.



Dawn had broken and a grayish blue light hung about the courtyard and garden, which was noisy with birds no doubt breakfasting on sluggish insects. Beyond him, the street was starting to come alive.



As he went back to the house, he heard a car start up in the driveway. A door opened and closed and the car drove away.



Chapter 15



MAX WASHED HIS face and shaved and made more coffee.



He sat out on the porch with his cup. The sun rose and in seconds his surroundings were flooded in brightness, as if a searchlight beam had been pointed down on the country.



He sipped his coffee. He wasn't tired anymore, not even hungover.



Max checked his watch. Six-thirty a.m. Same time in Miami. Joe would be up, setting the breakfast table for his wife and kids.



Max went to the bedroom and called Joe's home number. The phone was an old, rotary model.



"Joe? It's Max."



"Hey wasshappenin' man?!!? I was jus' thinkin' about you."



"That ole-time voodoo's starting to work," Max said, thinking of Charlie's priest.



Joe laughed.



"You in the kitchen, Big Man?"



"No, my home office. Soundproof. That way my wife says she don't have to listen to Bruce. She hates him as much as you do."



"Amen to that," said Max. "Listen, I need some information on someone. Is that going to be a problem?"



"Nope. I can do it right here, right now. Got the database right in front of me."



"How so?" asked Max, incredulous.



"Whole thing's online now," Joe said. "I do my brain work at home these days. The workplace is just for keepin' tabs on the little juniors, hobnobbin' with the brass and gettin' away from the family every now and again. Things've moved on a lot since you went away Max. Technology's like rust—never sleeps, always movin' forward, slowly takin' over what we're too lazy to do…. Anyway, this search you want done could take time, dependin' on how many eyes are on the system right now."



"I've got time if you have, Joe. You may need to cross-reference with the Interpol database."



"Shoot."



"First name Vincent, last name Paul. Both spelled the way they sound."



"He Haitian?"



"Yes."



Max heard Joe's fingers typing in the information, music in the background, turned low. Bruce Springsteen's voice over spare acoustic guitar. He wondered if Gustav's Sinatra CD was still in the street.



"Max? Nada on the nationwide database, but there's a Vincent Paul on Interpol. Low priority. Listed as an MP—missing person. Brits want him. Scotland Yard."



Joe tapped some more.



"Picture here too. Mean-looking bastard—like Isaac Hayes on a really bad day. Big motherfucker too. They've got his height down here as six-nine and change. Probably straight seven in shoes. Go-liath baby! There's a lot of cross-referencing I've got to do here…. There's a known associate come up. No ID yet. Machine's slow…. Listen, this could take another hour, and I've got to see to the kids. I'll put this thing on auto-search-and-select. The minute I got it I'll call you. What's your number?"



Max gave it to him.



"But I'd better call you, Joe. I don't know when I'll be back here."



"OK."



"If I need it, can you run some forensics tests?"



"Depends what it is you're looking for."



"DNA, blood-typing, fingerprint cross-referencing?"



"That's OK. Small stuff. Just don't be sending no whole body over—or a chicken."



"I'll try not to." Max laughed.



"How's it goin' out there?" Joe asked.



"Early days," Max said.



"If you walk away now the only thing you lose is money. Remember that, brother," Joe said.



Max had forgotten how well Joe knew him. Joe had heard the doubt in his voice. Max thought of telling him about the kids outside La Coupole, but he thought it best not to mention it, let it go, sink through his memories. If he kept it uppermost in his mind, it would cloud his vision, mess with his perceptions. Keep the channel clear.



"I'll remember that, Joe, don't worry."



Max heard the music—Bruce flailing away on acoustic guitar, piping notes through a harmonica like Bob Dylan on steroids. He guessed Joe was at his happiest now, at moments like these, listening to his music, right in the bosom of his beloved family. Joe would always have someone around who cared about him and would care for him. Max wanted to stay there a little longer, listening to Joe's life, listening to the sounds of warmth and tenderness, his home, its parts as fragile as a newborn baby's.




Part 3




Chapter 16



"MAX, YOU STINK," Chantale told him and laughed her dirty laugh.



She was right. Although he'd showered and brushed his teeth, the scent of a night of neat booze was a hard one to shake off in a hot climate. The rum he'd been drinking fairly steadily up until a few hours ago was evaporating through his pores and reeking up the inside of the Land Cruiser, sweet and stale and acrid, candy boiling in vinegar.



"Sorry," he said and looked through the window at the landscape passing them by in a brown, yellow, and sometimes green blur as they headed down the winding road to Port-au-Prince.



"No offense meant." She smiled.



"None taken. I like people who speak their minds. It usually means they mean what they say—saves trying to figure them out."



Chantale smelled great—a fresh, sharp yet delicate citrus fragrance hummed about her and insulated her from his odor. She was dressed for the day, in a short-sleeved turquoise blouse, faded blue jeans, and desert boots. Her hair was scraped back in a short ponytail. Sunglasses, a pen, and a small notebook poked out of her blouse pocket. She hadn't just come to drive around. She'd come to work with him, whether he liked it or not.



She'd arrived at the house at seven-thirty, rolling into the courtyard in a dusty Honda Civic whose windscreen looked like it hadn't been cleaned in a year. Max was eating the breakfast Rubie, the maid, had cooked for him. He'd wanted eggs over easy, sunny side down, but when he'd tried explaining it to her, she must have misinterpreted his hybrid of slowed-down English, sound effects, and sign language, because he'd ended up with an omelet served up on cassava tortillas. Still, it was delicious and filling. He'd washed it down with extra-strong black coffee and a tall glass of a juice she'd called chadec—grapefruit without the tartness.



"Heavy night?" Chantale asked.



"You could say that."



"You go to La Coupole?"



"How would you know?"



"Plenty of bars round your way."



"Have you been there?"



"No," she laughed. "They'd mistake me for a hooker."



"I don't know about that," Max said. "You're way too classy."



There: he'd made his first move on her—no deep breath, no summoning dormant strength, no scrabbling around for the right words; he'd just opened his mouth and exactly the right thing had come out, smooth and simple; the sort of ambiguous compliment that didn't stray beyond platonic flattery. He'd slotted straight back into velvet predator mode like he'd never given it up. Things went either way from here—either she'd pick up on his words and bat them back to him with a spin of her own, or she'd let him know no way was it going any further.



Chantale gripped the wheel a little too tight with both hands and looked straight ahead.



"I don't think your countrymen know the difference out here," she said bitterly.



She wasn't going for it. It wasn't a direct rebuff, but she wasn't yielding. Max heard a corrosive anger in her words, the sort of defense mechanism you build after a heartbreak. Maybe she'd recognized his play because she'd fallen for it before—and been burned.



"He must've hurt you pretty bad, Chantale," Max said.



"He did," she replied curtly, speaking to the windscreen, cutting off the conversation's circulation by turning on the radio and turning it up loud.



They took a sharp left turn around the side of the mountain they were driving down and as they cleared it, Max saw Port-au-Prince spread out before him, a few miles below, spilling out from the coastline like a splurge of dried vomit waiting for the sea to wash it away.



* * *



There was a heavy U.S. military presence in central Port-au-Prince, a cordon of humvees, machine gun–mounted jeeps, and footsoldiers in body armor massed opposite and all around the National Palace, where the current president—Aristide's successor and close associate, a former baker and rumored alcoholic called Préval—lived and ran his country as far as his puppet strings would stretch.



According to Huxley, who'd filled Max in, the current Haitian constitution forbade a president from serving consecutive terms, but did allow him or her to serve alternate ones. Préval was considered by many to be little more than Aristide's gofer, keeping the seat warm and ready for his master's inevitable return. Democracy was still a fluid thing.



"Damn Americans!" Chantale said as they passed a jeep full of marines. "No offense."



"None taken. Don't you agree with what's happening?"



"I did at first, until I realized invading this place was nothing but a preelection publicity stunt on Clinton's part. He'd messed up in Somalia, the U.S. was humiliated, his credibility hurt. What do you do? Pick on a near-defenseless black country and invade it in the name of 'democracy' and 'freedom,'" Chantale said bitterly, and then she laughed. "You know how they sent Jimmy Carter in to negotiate peace with the junta, after they'd refused to stand down?"



"Yeah, I saw that…." Max said. In prison, he thought. "Mr. Human Rights himself. I hated that asshole. He ruined Miami."



"The Mariel boatlift?"



"Yeah. It used to be an OK place, full of retired Jewish folk and right-wing Cubans plotting to kill Castro. It was real quiet, real conservative, low crime, peaceful. Then Castro sent his criminals and psychos over in the boats, mixed in with all the decent, law-abiding refugees who just wanted to start a new life, and thanks to El Jimbo we were fucked without a guidebook. It was hell bein' a cop back then, let me tell ya. We didn't know what hit us. One minute Miami's a nice place to bring up your kids, the next it's Murder Capital, USA."



"Guess you voted for Reagan?"



"Every single Miami cop did in 1980. Those that didn't were sick or weren't registered." Max smiled.



"I used to be a Democrat. I voted for Clinton in '92, Dukakis before. Never again," Chantale said. "Did you hear what happened in the so-called peace talks between Carter and General Cedras—the head of the junta?"



"No. Tell me."



"Carter came over, TV cameras rolling. He meets with General Cedras and his wife. And it's Mrs. Cedras who does the negotiating. She gets Carter to agree to pay each member of the junta ten million dollars, guarantee them safe passage out of the country and immunity from prosecution. Done deal.



"Then she wants the U.S. to protect their houses. And she negotiates with Carter for the U.S. government to rent out their houses to embassy staff. Done deal. And finally—and this is where it almost fell apart—Mrs. Cedras wanted her black leather sofa freighted out to Venezuela, where they were all moving to. Carter said no deal. Why? Because Carter wasn't authorized to pay for a moving company. Everything else was fine, but not that.



"They argued and bickered and it went back and forth. Finally, when it looked like it was going to be a deal breaker, Carter called Clinton and got him out of bed to explain the situation. Clinton was pissed off. He really chewed Carter out, screamed at him so loudly people said they could hear what he was saying in the other room. Anyway, Clinton OK'ed it and the sofa went into exile with the junta."



Max burst out laughing.



"Bullshit!"



"True rumor," Chantale said.



They laughed.



The Presidential Palace itself was a gleaming, expansive, two-storied, brilliant white edifice. It soaked up and part-reflected the sunlight so that it appeared luminous when viewed against its dark backdrop of surrounding mountains. The red-and-blue Haitian flag hung from a mast above the main entrance.



They drove around a pedestal mounted with a statue of General Henri Christophe, one of Haiti's first leaders, on his horse, facing the palace and the U.S. troops. Groups of young Haitian men sat or stood around the bottom of the pedestal, clothes fluttering off skinny limbs, eyeing their occupiers, watching the traffic, or staring vacantly into space.



The rest of the city, what he saw of it, was a dump—a rancid, rusted, busted-up, busted out ruin of a place. Port-au-Prince wasn't just in bad shape, it was in no shape at all. Reeling, tilting, tottering on the verge of collapse, virtually everything about the place needed a million-dollar face-lift or, better still, a complete demolition-and-rebuilding job. A row of gingerbread houses—doors long gone, shutters hanging off hinges—in what must once have been a wealthy part of town, stood filthy and derelict, squatted in by God knew how many people, some of whom Max saw hanging off the balconies.



There were no traffic lights anywhere. Max had seen exactly one set since they'd left Pétionville, and those weren't working. The streets, like almost every street he'd seen in Haiti, were cracked and potholed. The cars that rolled down them were belching, farting, patched-together, wrecking-yard salvage, bursting with people. A few colorfully painted tap-taps went by, hooting, overloaded with people and their possessions, bundled up in sheets and clothes and heaped on the roof, along with as many passengers as could fit on. And then there were the occasional luxury cars, tens of thousands of dollars of imported high-maintenance automobile daintily threading their way across the wrecked roads with their sudden craters and bumpy surfaces.



The city made Max sad in a way he'd been before. Through the detritus, the near rubble, Max saw a few proud and fine grand old buildings that must have looked glorious in their prime and would have been impressive again if restored. Yet he couldn't see this ever happening. If capital cities are meant to be shopwindows for the rest of the country, then Port-au-Prince was a car showroom that had been looted and set on fire and left to burn, nearly unnoticed, until rain had finally come and doused the flames.



"I remember when the pope came here," Chantale said, turning down the radio. "It was in 1983, a year before I went to the States. Jean-Claude Duvalier—Baby Doc—was still in power. Well, it was really his wife, Michele. She was running the country by then.



"She cleaned the streets up, all the ones you see here. They were full of beggars and merchants who sold their stuff off big wooden tables. She made them pack up and move elsewhere, where the pope couldn't see. There were handicapped people here too—physical and mental—they used to camp out here and beg at the roadside. She got rid of them too. The streets were resurfaced and whitewashed. A few hours before the pope drove down in his motorcade, Michele had the road hosed down with Chanel perfume. I was standing right there when it happened. The smell was so strong it gave me a headache and stayed in my clothes for months and months, no matter how many times my mother washed them. I've had a Chanel allergy ever since. If someone's wearing it I get headaches."



"What did they do with the handicapped people?"



"Same thing that happened to them in the midseventies, when they decided to make the country more attractive to tourists. They rounded them all up—the sick, the lame, the needy—and they shipped them off to La Gonâve. It's a small island off the coast."



"I see," Max said, patting himself down for a notebook. He couldn't find one. "What happened to them? Are they still there?"



"I don't know. Some of them I suppose stayed on. These were dirt-poor people living as close to the ground as rats. No one cared about them," Chantale replied as Max picked up the small army knapsack lying at his feet, where he'd put his camera and tape recorder. He'd packed a pen but no paper.



Chantale opened her breast pocket and handed him her small notebook.



"Never forget the fundamentals." She laughed.



Max scribbled down the details.



"Have you heard of Ton Ton Clarinet?"



"You say 'tonton,' Max, not 'tonnn-tonnn.' You sound like you're imitating an elephant walking." She laughed again. "Tonton Clarinette's an urban legend, a spook story parents tell their kids: be good or Tonton Clarinette will come for you. He's like the Pied Piper, hypnotizing children with his music and stealing them away forever."



"Do they say Tonton Clarinet took Charlie?"



"Yes, of course. When we were putting up the posters the street people would come up and say: 'You'll never find that child—Tonton Clarinette's got him—just like he's been taking our children.'"



Max nodded as he thought of Claudine Thodore.



"See that over there?" Chantale said, pointing to a shabby-looking street of stunted buildings with fading signs painted on their roofs and walls. People were jumping out of a dump truck that had just parked itself in the middle of the road. "That was once the red-light district. Lots of gay bars and brothels and clubs. Really wild carefree place. Every night was party night here. People may not have had much but they knew how to have fun. Now you can't even drive through here at night, unless you're in a military vehicle."



"What happened to the bars?"



"Jean-Claude closed them all down when AIDS hit in 1983. Most of the rich American gays who used to come here for dirty weekends stayed away because your media said Haiti was the birthplace of the disease. Jean-Claude rounded up all the gays too."



"Did he send them to La Gonâve?"



"No. No one knows what happened to them."



"In other words they were killed?"



"Probably. No one's sure. No one followed it up—not publicly anyway. Didn't want to start any whispering. Homosexuality's a big no-no here. They call gays massissi and lesbians madivine in Kreyol. There's a saying now: 'There are no gays in Haiti: they're all married with children.' It's a secret society," Chantale said. "But Jean-Claude was known to be bisexual for a time. I think it was all the coke he was doing, and the fact that he'd screwed every woman he wanted in Haiti. He was supposed to have had this high-society boyfriend, René Sylvestre. Big fat guy, drove around in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce and wore dresses."



"Sounds like Liberace."



"They called him 'Le Mighty Real'—after that gay disco singer."



"As in 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real'?"



"You know it?"



"Sure do. I have the twelve-inch in my attic."



"You?!!?" Chantale laughed.



"Yeah."



"For real?"



"Yeah. What's the big deal? I'm the original Tony Manero. 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real'—that's my song!"



"I can't see it." She laughed her laugh again.



"Look a little closer," Max said.



"We'll see."



Chapter 17



THEY DROVE DOWN Boulevard Harry Truman, a wide, palm tree–lined, and surprisingly smooth stretch of road that ran alongside the coast. To the left, Max could see a tanker and a warship on the horizon, while ahead of him, some distance away, he could make out the port, with its rusted and half-sunk ships clogging up the waters. A procession of blue-helmeted UN troops passed them by, heading along on the other side of the road.



The Banque Populaire d'Haďti, the Carver family's business nucleus, was an imposing, cream-colored cube that might have been better suited for a library or a courthouse. It vaguely reminded Max of pictures he'd seen of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.



The bank was set back from the road, built on top of a gentle slope, and surrounded by an expanse of lush green grass. A sandstone wall ran around the building, topped with bright pink and white flowers half-hiding stiletto spikes and razor wire. A high metal gate stood between the bank and the street. Two armed guards sat on either side of it. One of them spoke into a radio when Chantale drew up, and the gate opened back from the inside.



"This is the special entrance," Chantale said as they drove in and started up a short path that split the surrounding grass into two squares. "Only the family, certain staff, and special customers are allowed to use it."



"Which are you?" Max asked, noticing a silver Mercedes SUV with tinted windows following them in.



They followed the path around to a half-empty parking lot. A steady stream of people were entering and exiting the bank through a revolving door.



As they got out, Max saw the Merc parked a few spaces behind them. Max glanced over, long enough to take in the scene and break it down, but not long enough for someone to notice him staring. Four men got out—heavy Hispanic types. They walked around to the open hatch.



Max had seen all he needed to. He knew what would come next, even before they overtook him and Chantale on the way to the bank, run-walking two very heavy suitcases apiece toward the entrance.



"Special customers?" Max asked.



"Money doesn't know where it came from. And neither do my employers," she said without a hint of embarrassment or surprise or worry, like she'd had to deal with this sort of remark before—or been trained to deal with it.



Max said nothing. He expected plenty of drug money had gone through the Banque Populaire. Since the early eighties, at least ten to fifteen percent of the world's cocaine was being distributed via Haiti and most of the major players in the South American cartels had built up strong links with the country, many using it as a place to lie low for a year or two. He was sure the Carvers never actively solicited drug business—Gustav was way too shrewd an operator for that—but they didn't refuse the custom when it came knocking, either.



Max had wanted to start his investigation at the bank, on the Carvers' home turf. It was the way he'd always worked, from the client outwards: the more he knew about the people who were paying him, the more he knew how their enemies thought; he saw what they hated and coveted and wanted to take away and destroy. He'd first establish motive, then he'd throw a net around the likely suspects and haul it in. He'd eliminate them one by one until he found the culprit.



They followed the case-carriers through the doors. The inside was predictably magnificent, a cross between an aircraft hangar and a corporate mausoleum where dead CEOs might be laid to rest under brass plaques embedded in the ground for future generations to ignore and tread on. The frescoed ceiling was almost a hundred feet high, suspended by huge, dark granite Delphic pillars. The fresco depicted a light blue sky with fluffy clouds, and God's hands opening up and showering down all of the world's major paper currencies, from dollars to rubles to francs to yen to pounds to pesetas. The Haitian gourde was conspicuous by its absence.



The counters were at the far end of the bank. There were at least thirty of them, separated into numbered cubicles, built of granite and bulletproof glass. Max noticed how well dressed all the customers were, as if they'd all made a special trip to the clothes store and hairdresser before they came to do their business. He guessed that having a bank account in Haiti gave you a certain social status, made you part of an exclusive circle, and the whole ritual of withdrawing and investing money was the social equivalent of taking communion and giving to the collection on a Sunday.



The men with the cases were ushered through a door to the right of the counters. Two security guards stood by the door, pump-action shotguns draped casually across their arms.



The center of the highly polished dark granite floor was inlaid with the national flag, which took up half the total space. Max walked around it, studying it: two horizontal bands, dark blue on top of red, with a crest depicting a palm tree flanked by cannons, flagpoles, and bayonet-fitted muskets. A blue-and-red cap dressed the top of the tree, while L'UNION FAIT LA FORCE was written on a scroll at the bottom.



"It used to look a lot better, when it was the Duvalier flag, black and red instead of blue. It meant business. The flag was changed back to its original colors ten years ago, so the floor had to be redone too," Chantale said as she watched Max walking around it, taking in its detail. "It's a very French flag. The colors—the blue and the red—were basically the French tricolor with the white symbolizing the white man torn out. The slogan and the weapons all symbolize the country's struggle for freedom through unity and violent revolution."



"A warrior nation," Max said.



"Once," Chantale replied sourly. "We don't fight anymore. We just roll over and take it."



"Max!" Allain Carver called out as he crossed the floor toward them. A few heads—all female well-to-doers lining up for service—turned and stayed turned, eyes focused on him as he crossed the floor briskly, heels clicking, hands extended a little in front of him, as if anticipating a catch.



They shook hands.



"Welcome!" Carver said. Warmish smile, suit crisp and well-fitting, hair plastered back; he was in control once more, lord and master.



Max looked around the bank again, wondering how much of it had been built from drug money.



"I'd love to give you a guided tour," Carver apologized, "but I'm going to be tied up with customers all day. Our head of security—Mr. Codada—will show you around."



He took them back the way he'd come, ushering them through a guarded door and into a cool and long, blue-carpeted corridor that ended, some way down, at an elevator.



They stopped outside the only office in the corridor. Carver rapped twice on the door before opening it brusquely, as if hoping to catch the inhabitant off-guard, in the middle of something embarrassing or forbidden.



Mr. Codada was on the phone, one foot on his desk, laughing loudly and making the tassels on his patent-leather loafers rattle in time with his outbursts of mirth. He looked over his shoulder at the three of them, waved vaguely, and carried on his conversation without changing his posture.



The office was spacious, with one wall dominated by a framed painting of a modern white building overlooking a waterfall, and another traditional painting—also framed—of a street party outside a church. His desk was bare, apart from the telephone, a blotter, and some small, black, wooden figurines.



Codada said, "A bientôt ma chérie," blew a couple of kisses into the receiver, and hung up. He spun his chair around to face his new guests.



Without moving from his spot near the door, Carver talked to him brusquely in Kreyol, motioning to Max with his head as he spoke his name. Codada nodded without saying a word, his face a mixture of professional seriousness and leftover jollity. Max understood the dynamic right away. Codada was Gustav's man and didn't take Allain at all seriously.



Next, Carver addressed Chantale, far more gently, smiling, before turning on the surface charm a little more as he took his leave of Max.



"Enjoy your tour," he said. "We'll talk later."



Maurice Codada stood up and walked around his desk.



Codada air-kissed Chantale on both cheeks and pumped her arms warmly. She introduced him to Max.



"Bienvenu ŕ la Banque Populaire d'Haďti, Monsieur Mainguss," Codada gushed, bowing his head and showing Max an odd-looking freckled, pink, bald spot on his crown, before taking Max's hands and also shaking them vigorously. Although he was a slender little man, shorter and narrower than Max, his grip was strong. Chantale explained that she would have to translate, as Codada didn't speak English.



Codada took them back outside to the main entrance and immediately started showing them around the bank, running a rapid-fire commentary in Kreyol, which seemed to rattle out of his mouth like telex script, as he walked them across the floor.



Chantale packaged up his verbal geysers into one-liners: "The pillars come from Italy"—"The floors too"—"The Haitian flag"—"The counters come from Italy"—"The staff do not, ha, ha, ha."



Codada moved about the line of customers, shaking hands, slapping shoulders, air-kissing the ladies, working the crowd with the gusto of a politician campaigning for office. He even picked up a baby and kissed it.



Codada resembled a lion made up as a circus clown—a cartoon character looking for a comic strip. He had a flat, broad nose, round ginger afro, and redhead's naturally pale complexion pocked with a heavy spray of freckles. His lips were red—the lower one rimmed purple—and permanently moist from where he darted the pink tip of his tongue all around them like a praying mantis chasing and missing a fleet-footed bug. His stare was hooded, roasted-coffee-bean irises peering out from under eyelids crisscrossed with a spaghetti junction of fine veins and arteries.



Max thought Codada lacked virtually every personality trait needed for working in security. People who worked those jobs were introverted, secretive, and above all discreet; they said little, saw everything, thought and moved quick. Codada was the opposite. He liked people or liked their attention. Security personnel blended into the crowd but thought everyone in it a potential threat. Even his clothes were wrong—white duck pants, a navy blue blazer, and a maroon-and-white cravat. Security staff favored dull tones or uniforms, while Codada could have passed himself off as a maître d' on some gay cruise liner.



They took a mirrored elevator up to the next floor, the business division. Codada stood to the left of the door so he could get the full three-dimensional view of Chantale his position allowed. Max had thought he was gay, but Codada spent all of the few seconds the ride lasted tracing the outline of Chantale's bust with his gaze, slurping up the detail. Just before they reached the floor, he must have felt the intensity of Max's stare, because he looked straight at him, then flicked the briefest look at Chantale's bosom, and then went back to Max and nodded to him very slightly, letting him know they'd broached common ground. Chantale didn't seem to notice.



The business division was tile-carpeted, air-conditioned, and reeked faintly of plasticine. The corridors were lined with framed black-and-white, dated photographs of all the major constructions and projects the bank had financed, from a church to a supermarket. Codada led them past various offices, where three or four smartly dressed men and women sat behind desks furnished with computers and phones, but none of them were actually doing anything. In fact, nothing seemed to be happening on the entire floor. Many of the computer screens were blank, no phones were ringing, and some people weren't even bothering to disguise their inactivity. They were sitting on desks and gossiping, reading papers, or talking. Max looked at Chantale for an explanation but she offered none. Codada's tones cut straight through the silence. Many looked up and followed the guided tour, some laughing out loud at some of the things he said, but whatever it was was either lost in translation or left out altogether.



Max was beginning to understand Gustav's mentality, his attitude toward people. There was something to hate about it, but then again there was much more to admire.



It was slightly livelier on the next floor—mortgages and personal loans. The setup of the area was the same, but Max heard a few telephones ringing and saw that some computers were on and being worked at. Codada explained through Chantale that Haitians tended to build their homes from scratch rather than buy them from previous owners, so they often needed assistance to buy the land, hire an architect and a construction crew.



The Carvers had their offices on the upper floor. Codada used the elevator's walls to straighten himself up and pat down his hair. Chantale caught Max's eye and smiled at him with a what-a-jerk-this-guy-is look. Max patted down his bald head.



The elevator doors opened onto a reception area manned by a woman sitting behind a tall mahogany desk, and a waiting area of low black-leather couches, a coffee table, and a water cooler. Two Uzitoting security guards in bulletproof vests hovered about at opposite ends of the area. Codada led them out of the elevator to a set of heavy double doors on the left. He typed in an access code on a keypad in the frame. A camera eyed them from the right. The doors opened onto a corridor that led to another set of double doors at the end.



They walked down to Gustav Carver's office. Codada spoke their names through an intercom and they were buzzed in.



Gustav's secretary, an imposing Creole woman in her late forties, greeted Codada with next to no warmth and almost as much in the way of a greeting.



Codada introduced Max to her but not the other way around, so Max never caught her name. She didn't have it on her desk either. She shook Max's hand with a curt nod.



Codada asked her something and she said "Non." He thanked her and led Max and Chantale out of the office and back down the corridor.



"He asked if we could see Gustav Carver's offices, but Jeanne said no," Chantale whispered.



"What about Allain?"



"He's VP. His office is on the first floor. We passed it."



Codada took them back downstairs to the ground floor. Max handed him two hundred bucks to change for him into Haitian currency. Codada glided off toward the tills, glad-handing and air-kissing a few more customers on his way there.



He came back a few fast minutes later, holding a small brown brick's worth of gourdes between his thumb and index finger. The currency had been so hopelessly devalued by the invasion and Haiti's parlous economic state that a dollar was worth anything between fifty and a hundred gourdes, depending on which bank you went to. The Banque Populaire had the most generous exchange rate in Haiti.



Max took the pile of money from Codada and flicked through it. The notes were damp and greasy and—despite their blue, green, purple, and red colors—all were varying shades of gray-brown. The smaller the denomination, the smallest being five gourdes, the more obscured the value and design by dirt and grime, while the notes of the highest denomination, five hundred gourdes, were only mildly smudged, the bills' details completely discernible. The money reeked strongly of unwashed feet.



Codada walked them through the revolving doors and they said their good-byes. As they were speaking, the men with the cases—now empty—came out through the doors. Codada broke off his farewell to greet them, embracing one of the men warmly.



Max and Chantale walked back to the car.



"So what do you think?" Chantale asked.



"Gustav's a generous man," Max said.



"How so?"



"He's keeping a lot of people on the payroll with nothing to do," he said. He wanted to throw Codada into the mix too, but he didn't. It was never good to judge based on appearances and instinct alone, even if they'd yet to let him down.



"Gustav understands the Haitian mentality: do something for someone today and you've got a friend for life," Chantale said.



"I guess that cuts both ways."



"Yes it does. We go an extra mile to help a friend and an extra twenty to bury a foe."



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