Chapter 18



THEY DROVE TO the Boulevard des Veuves, where Charlie had been kidnapped.



They parked the car and got out. The heat fell over Max in a fine net of molten lava, baking his skin, boiling him inside. He broke out into an immediate rush of sweat, which flooded down his back and seeped through his shirt. Outside the bank the heat had been tempered by the breeze blowing straight off the sea, but here the air was flat, airless, and bone-dry, and the heat was so intense he could see it rippling in front of him in solid currents, blurring his view.



The sidewalks were raised high above the ground, their hazardous surfaces worn ice-smooth and mirror-bright by billions of footsteps and decades of neglect. They moved very slowly down the street that was jammed with people—some selling, some bartering, some buying, many hanging around and talking. Max heard his rubber soles squelching as he walked across the baked concrete. Everyone was looking at them, following them—especially Max, who sensed mass bemusement and incredulity coming at him, instead of the suspicion and hostility he'd been used to when going through the ghettos at home. Bearing in mind what had happened to him a few hours before, he avoided making eye contact. They stepped off the sidewalk and down into the road that was only slightly less congested.



If the whole city wasn't already dragging itself around on what was left of its last legs, Max would have said that they were in a bad neighborhood. The Boulevard des Veuves had once been paved with small hexagonal stones. All but the ones still hugging the edges of the sidewalk were gone, ripped out, sometimes professionally, in geometric strips, or haphazardly, in clumps of one or two dozen. Every two yards there were drains—gaping square holes cut out of the curbs—and every four or five meters, parts of the road had collapsed and left huge, stinking, fly-infested black craters, which doubled as rubbish dumps and public toilets where men, women, and children would piss and shit in full view of everyone, not remotely disturbed by the passing traffic. The place stank of shit, rank water, putrefying fruit, vegetables, and carcasses.



There was dust everywhere, on and in everything, blowing down from the mountains that ringed the capital. The mountains had once been heavily forested, but successive generations had cut down all the trees for homes, carts, and firewood. The sun had dried up the once rich and fertile soil now left bare and exposed, and the wind had blown it back into Haitians' faces. He tasted it on his tongue, and he knew if he closed his eyes just once and tried to plug into the place, he'd know exactly what it would be like to get buried alive in this godforsaken, fucked-over country.



Charlie's face was plastered all over the street, the stark black-and-white posters offering a cash reward for information about his kidnapping, competing with larger, colorful ones advertising concerts by Haitian singers in Miami, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and New York.



He pulled down one of Charlie's posters to start showing around. He noticed a small, hand-drawn symbol in black in the left-hand margin—a cross, slightly curved in the middle, with a round head, a split base, and two-thirds of its right beam missing. He looked at the other posters and saw that they were all scored with the same mark.



He pointed the mark out to Chantale.



"Tonton Clarinette," she said. "That's his sign. Means he took Charlie."



They started canvassing the street for witnesses to Charlie's kidnapping. First they went to the shops—small food stores with no air-conditioning and threadbare shelves; stores selling pots and pans and wooden spoons and ladles, hooch shacks, a bakery, a butcher's with one dead, half-skinned chicken hanging up, a used auto parts place, another place selling only bright white chicken eggs—all producing a variant on the same answer: Mpas weh en rien—I saw nothing.



Then they quizzed people on the street. Both times Chantale showed them the poster and did the talking.



Nobody knew anything. They shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, replying in one or two phrases or long throaty outbursts. Max stood and watched, filtering the people they approached through interrogator's eyes as they answered, looking out for the telltale signs of lying and concealing, but all he saw were exhausted, half-asleep men and women of indeterminable ages, confused by the attention they were getting from the white man and the light-skinned lady.



After more than an hour of this, Max thought of seeking out the shoemaker store Francesca had mentioned. He'd been looking out for it the whole while they'd been on the street, but he hadn't seen anything even close. Maybe they'd passed it, or the store had closed down. At least half of the people he saw were barefoot, with feet so thick and deformed, so built up with waxy keratin about the sole and heel, he doubted they'd ever worn shoes.



They headed back to the car. An old man selling snow cones out of a wooden cart equipped with a cooler and bottles of brightly colored syrup was standing nearby, shoveling ice into a paper cup.



Max could tell he'd been waiting for them. He'd spotted the man out of the corner of his eye while searching the crowd, always on the periphery wherever they moved, pushing his cart, shaving the ice block in his box, watching them.



He started talking to Max as he approached. Thinking he was trying to sell them some of his polluted refreshments, Max waved him off.



"You want to listen to this, Max," Chantale said. "He's talking about the kidnapping."



The man said he'd seen it happen, close to where they were parked, but on the opposite side of the road. His version of events followed Francesca's very closely. Faustin had parked the car in the road and waited a long time. The snow-cone seller said he heard Faustin yelling at both women.



By then a crowd had gathered around the car. Faustin lowered the window and told them to mind their own business and get out of the way. When they didn't move, he pulled out a gun and fired a couple of shots in the air. As Faustin was firing, Rose grabbed at his face from behind and tried to tear his eyes out. That was when he shot her.



Many in the crowd had by then recognized Faustin and they stormed the car, armed with machetes, knives, bats, metal pikes, and rocks. They smashed the windows, turned the car over twice, jumped on the roof, and began hacking into it. The man said close to three hundred people swarmed all over the vehicle.



The crowd dragged Faustin out through the roof. Although covered in blood, he was still alive, screaming for his life. They threw him into the mob. The man said they must have hacked the bodyguard into mincemeat, because all that was left of his body when the crowd moved on was a big puddle of blood and guts, with some cracked-off pieces of bone and bloody scraps of his clothes. He remembered, laughing, how they'd cut off his head, stuck it on a broomstick, and run off down toward La Saline with it. Faustin, he said, had an abnormally big tongue—easily as big as a cow's or a donkey's. They tried to pull it out of his head, as they'd done his eyes, but it was stuck so fast they left it dangling down his mouth to his chin, where it bounced and flopped around in the air as the crowd ran toward the slums with their trophy, singing and dancing all the way.



The snow-cone seller wasn't too clear about what happened next. The people who'd stayed behind started stripping the car for parts. Then Vincent Paul and his men arrived in three jeeps and people scattered. Paul started shouting, running up and down the road, asking where the boy and the woman were. Someone pointed to where the mob had gone with Faustin's head. They put Rose's body in the back of the jeep and took off after the crowd at high speed.



The man said he never found out what happened next. The incident had taken place a few days before the American troops invaded the island, he said, when the Haitian army and militia were going around, randomly spraying poor neighborhoods with bullets and setting others on fire. So many wires had gotten crossed and much had been forgotten or ignored in that climate of dread and fear.



Max thanked him and gave him five hundred gourdes. The snow-cone seller looked at the money and pumped Max's hand, promising to sacrifice a little something in his honor the next time he went to a temple.



Chapter 19



THE OLD WOMAN was as Francesca had described her, wearing a faded pink dress and sitting outside on the porch of a shoemaker's shop at the far end of the Boulevard des Veuves. The shop was in a house whose front was covered in a mural depicting a black man in dungarees and rolled-up white sleeves, hammering the soles of a boot while a shoeless child looked on and an angel watched above them both, in the middle. It was the only indication of the shop's trade. The doorway, although open, revealed only a deep, impenetrable darkness impervious to sunlight. Someone had put up a poster of Charlie on the wall directly opposite.



Chantale introduced them and told her what their business was. The woman told Chantale to stand closer and talk into her ear. Max didn't blame her. He could barely hear her himself above the street din of people shouting over the traffic growling and beeping its way through the clogged road.



The woman listened and spoke loudly, the way the hard-of-hearing do, her voice still managing to sound muffled and trapped in her cheeks.



"She says she saw what happened. She was right here," Chantale said.



"What did she see?" Max asked, and Chantale translated almost as soon as the words left the woman's mouth.



"She says she's heard you're paying people for their memories."



The woman smiled and showed Max all that was left of her teeth—two curved brown-stained canines that looked like they belonged in the jaws of a vicious dog. She glanced over her shoulder into the open doorway behind her for a moment, nodded, and then, looking from Max to Chantale, addressed her interpreter in a lower voice. Chantale screwed her face up into a wry smirk and shook her head before relaying back to Max what she'd just been told.



"She wants more than you paid the last guy."



"Only if what she says is true and any good."



The woman laughed. She pointed a finger, crooked and spindly like a twig, at the opposite side of the road.



"That's where he was," she said.



"Who?" Max asked.



"Big man…" she said, "the biggest man."



Vincent Paul?



"Have you seen him before?"



"No."



"Have you seen him since?"



"No."



"Do you know Vincent Paul?"



"No."



"What's that you people call him?" Max said.



"Le Roi Soleil?" Chantale asked her and got a bewildered stare back. The woman didn't know what Chantale was talking about.



"OK. The man? What was he doing?"



"Running," was the reply, then, nodding to the poster on the opposite wall, "Running with that boy."



"That boy?" Max said, pointing to the image of Charlie's face. "You sure?"



"Yes," she said. "The man was carrying him over his shoulder, like an empty sack of coal. The boy was kicking and waving his arms."



"What happened next?"



The woman showed Max her stained fangs again. Max reached into his pocket and showed her his roll of greasy gourdes. She held her hand out to him and beckoned with her fingers: pay me.



Max shook his head with a smile. He pointed to her and made a gabbing motion with his fingers: you talk.



The woman smiled at him again and then she laughed and made a remark about him to Chantale, which Chantale left untranslated, although it made her smirk.



The woman was well within her last quarter-century. Her hair, what little he saw of it escaping from under the green scarf she'd tied around it, was pure white, matching her eyebrows. Her nose was boxer-flat and the eyes were a shade darker than her skin, their whites beige.



"A car came out of the Cité Soleil road," the woman told Chantale, pointing it out to them both. "The big man got in the car with the boy and they left."



"Did you see the driver?"



"No. It had black windows."



"What kind of car was it?"



"A nice car—a rich person's car."



"Can she be more specific? Was it a big car? What color was it?"



"A dark car with dark windows," Chantale said. The woman carried on speaking. "She says she'd seen it around here—a few times before the incident—always turning up that road."



"Has she seen it since?"



Chantale asked her. The woman said no she hadn't and then said she was tired, that remembering things too far back made her sleepy.



Max paid out eight hundred gourdes. The woman quickly counted the money and gave Max a sly, conspiratorial wink, as if they shared a deeply personal secret. Then, stealing another glance over her shoulder, she divided the money up into each hand, dropping the five-hundred-gourde note down her dress and deftly slipping the balance in her shoe, her motions fast, her hands and fingers phantoms barely glimpsed. Max looked at the front of the woman's dress—faded and threadbare, patched and stitched up—and then down at her feet. She wore unmatched shoes, of different sizes and colors: one black, scuffing to gray and held together by fraying twine, the other originally a reddish brown with a busted clasp and bent buckle. They were so small they might have fitted a child. He didn't see how she could have stashed money in either shoe.



Max looked over into the shop doorway, to see what it was she'd been checking on. It was too dark to see inside and there was no sound coming from within, although he sensed someone was in there, watching them.



"The shop is closed," the old woman said, as if reading Max's mind. "Everything closes in time."



Chapter 20



"SO WHAT DO you think? Did Vincent Paul kidnap Charlie?"



"I don't know," Max said. "No proof either way."



They were sitting in the car, parked on the Rue du Dr. Aubry, sharing one of the bottles of water Max had packed in a portable cooler for the trip.



Chantale took a sip of the water. She was chewing a cinnamon Chiclet. A UN jeep went by, trailing a tap-tap.



"They blame Vincent Paul for everything here—everything bad that happens," Chantale said. "All the crime. A bank gets robbed?—it's Vincent Paul. A car gets jacked?—it's Vincent Paul. A gas station gets held up?—it's Vincent Paul. A house gets broken into?—it's Vincent Paul. Bullshit is what it is. It isn't him. But people here, they're so dumb, so apathetic, so scared, so—so damn backward—they believe what they want to believe, no matter how stupid and nonsensical. And these aren't the illiterate masses who are saying this, but educated people who should know better—the same people who run our businesses, the same people who are running the country."



"Well, judging by the state of this place, that's no surprise." Max chuckled. "What do you think about him, Vincent Paul?"



"I believe he's mixed up in something very big, something very heavy."



"Drugs?"



"What else?" she said. "You know about the criminals Clinton's sending back to us? Well, Vincent Paul always sends someone over to the airport to pick up whoever's coming home."



"Where do they go?"



"Cité Soleil—you know, the slum I told you about yesterday."



"He who runs Sitay So-lay runs the country. Ain't that the way it goes?" Max said, remembering what Huxley had told him.



"Impressive." Chantale smiled as she passed him the water. "But what do you know about the place?"



"Some." Max nodded and repeated much of what Huxley had told him.



"Don't ever go in there without a guide—and an oxygen mask. You go there on your own and get lost? If the people don't kill you the air will."



"Will you take me?"



"No way! I don't know the place and I don't want to know it," she responded almost angrily.



"That's too bad because I wanna go there tomorrow. Check it out," Max said.



"You won't find anything—not just by looking. You need to know where you're going."



"Ain't that the truth." Max laughed. "OK. I'll go there on my own. Just tell me how to get there. I'll be all right." Chantale looked at him, worried. "Don't worry, I won't tell your boss."



She smiled. He took a pull on the water and tasted her cinnamon on the spout where her lips had been.



"What else can you tell me about Vincent Paul? What is it with him and the Carvers?" Max asked.



"Gustav bankrupted his father. Perry Paul was a big wholesaler. He had a lot of exclusive deals going with the Venezuelans and the Cubans, and he was selling things very cheaply. Gustav used his influence in the government to put him out of business. Perry lost everything and shot himself. Vincent was in England when it happened. He was quite young, but hatred's a genetic thing here. Whole families will hate each other forever because of their great-grandparents' falling-out."



"That's fucked up."



"That's Haiti."



"What was he doin' in England?"



"Getting an education—school, college."



Max remembered the man's English accent the previous night.



"Have you ever met him?" Max asked.



"No." She laughed. "What I'm telling you's what I've been told, what I've heard. Not hard fact."



He scribbled a few notes.



"Where to, detective?"



"The Roo doo Chumps da Mars."



"Rue du Champs de Mars. What's there?"



"Felius Doofoor."



Chantale said nothing. When he looked up at her, he saw she'd gone pale and looked scared.



"What's the matter?"



"Filius Dufour? Le grand voyant?"



"What was that last thing in English?"



"Out here it isn't the politicians or the Carvers who have the real power, it isn't even your president. It's people like the man you're going to meet. Filius Dufour was Papa Doc's personal fortune-teller. Duvalier never did anything important without consulting him first," Chantale lowered her voice as if she didn't really want to be heard. "You know Papa Doc died at least two months before it was announced to the public. He was so scared of his enemies discovering his body and trapping his spirit that he ordered that they bury his body in a secret location. To this day no one knows where it is—except for Filius Dufour. He was said to have conducted the burial ceremony. Just like he was said to have married Baby Doc to his mother on the day of Papa Doc's death out by the sacred waterfalls—some sort of rare voodoo ritual that very few people in the world know how to perform; it ensures the smooth transfer of power from father to son. After the Duvaliers fell from power, everyone who was associated with them either went into exile or went to jail or got killed—everyone except Filius Dufour. Nothing happened to him. Everyone was too scared of him, what he could do."



"I thought he was just a voodoo priest."



"A houngan? Him? No. A voyant is like a fortune-teller, but they go much deeper than that. For example, if you really want a woman you can't have—say she's happily married or not interested in you—you can go to your houngan, who'll try and fix it for you."



"How?"



"Spells, prayers, chants, offerings. It's very personal and informal and it depends on the houngan. A lot of it involves some really disgusting things, like boiling the woman's used tampons and drinking the water."



"Does it work?"



"I've never known anyone who tried it." Chantale laughed. "But I've seen plenty of ugly men walking around here with beautiful women, so draw your own conclusions."



"What would the voyeur—?"



"Voyant. Now they're very different. Absolutely nothing to do with voodoo—but go telling that to a non-Haitian and they won't believe you." Chantale scrutinized Max as she spoke to see if he was taking her seriously. She was pleased to see he had the notebook open and was scribbling furiously.



"All over the world you've got fortune-tellers—tarot-card readers, palm readers, gypsies, psychics, mediums. Voyants are like that, but they go a lot further. They don't use any gimmicks. They don't need them. You go to them with a specific question in mind—say, you're getting married in a month and you're having doubts. The voyant looks at you and tells you, in broad strokes, what will happen. Just like you're having a conversation. He or she can't ever tell you what to do, merely show you what the future has in store and let you make your mind up."



"So far so Psychic Hotline," Max said.



"Sure, but the grands voyants—and there are maybe two in the whole of Haiti—and Filius Dufour is as powerful as any man can be—they can change your future. If you don't like what they tell you, the grands voyants can talk directly to spirits. To get back to the woman you can't have—imagine you've got spirits watching over you."



"Like guardian angels?"



"Yeah. The grands voyants can talk directly to these spirits and cut deals with them."



"Deals?"



"If the woman's been letting them down, not following her destiny, being cruel to people around her, then they will agree to let the voyant in to push her toward the man."



"Is that right?" Max said. "And of course, the success of all this depends on believing what you've just told me?"



"It works on nonbelievers too. It's worse for them because they don't know what's hit them—the run of bad luck they're suddenly getting, their wife of fifteen years leaving them for their sworn enemy, their teenage daughter getting pregnant—that kind of thing."



"How come you know so much about all this?"



"My mother is a mambo—a priestess. Filius Dufour initiated her when she was thirteen. He initiated me too."



"How?"



"At a ceremony."



Max looked at her but he couldn't read her face.



"What did he do?"



"My mother gave me a potion to drink. It made me leave my body, see everything from above. Not very high up, more like a couple of feet. Do you know what your skin looks like when you step out of it?"



Max shook his head no—not even when he was stoned on the best Colombian or Jamaican grass.



"Like grapes going off—all wrinkled and hollow and sagging, even when you're as young as I was."



"What did he do?" Max asked again.



"Not what you think," she replied, reading his mind through his tone. "Ours may be a primitive religion, but it's not a savage one."



Max nodded.



"When did you last see Dufour?"



"Not since that day. What do you want with him?"



"Part of the investigation."



"And…?"



"Client confidentiality," Max said sharply.



"I see," Chantale snapped. "I've just told you something very personal, something I don't exactly spread around, but you won't tell me—"



"You volunteered that information," Max said and immediately wanted to take it back. It was an asshole thing to say.



"I didn't volunteer anything," Chantale sneered and then softened. "I felt like telling you."



"Why?"



"I just did. You've got that confessional quality about you. The kind that listens without judging."



"Probably cop conditioning," Max said. She was wrong about him: he always judged. But she was flirting with him—nothing overt, everything tentative and ambiguous, nothing she couldn't deny and dismiss as wishful thinking on his part. Sandra had started out the same way, fed him enough to suspect she was interested in him, but kept him guessing until she was sure of him. He wondered what she would have made of Chantale, if they would have gotten along. He wondered if she would have approved of Chantale as a successor. Then he dismissed the thoughts.



"OK, Chantale. I'll tell you this much. Charlie Carver was visiting Filius Dufour every week for six months before he vanished. He was due there the day he was snatched."



"Well let's go talk to him," Chantale said, starting up the engine.



Chapter 21



THE RUE BOYER had once been a gated community of exclusive gingerbread houses set behind coconut palms and hibiscus plants. Papa Doc had moved his cronies there during his reign, while Baby Doc had converted two of the houses into exclusive brothels he'd filled with $500-an-hour blond hookers from L.A. to entertain the Colombian cartel heads who were in and out of the country to oversee their drug distribution and wash the profits in the national banks. The cronies and whores had fled with the Doc regime and the masses had claimed the road as theirs, first looting the houses down to the floorboards, then squatting in the shells, where they remained to this day.



Max couldn't understand why Dufour had chosen to stay behind. The street was a dump, as bad as he'd seen in any ghetto or bottom-of-the-ladder trailer park.



They drove through the remains of the gate—an iron frame, tilting back away from the road, one corner bent all the way down, pointing at the ground, ruptured hinges bent and twisted into the shape of malign butterflies, needles for antennae and razors for wings. The road was the usual obstacle course of potholes, craters, bumps, and gulleys, while the houses—once glorious and elegant three-story structures—hung back from view, dark and shadowy symmetrical blurs, stripped of all features, corroded by their sudden influx of poverty, fit only for the wrecking ball. They were now home to small villages of people—old and very young, dressed almost identically in rags that barely preserved their dignity and sometimes differentiated their gender. They all followed the passing car as one, a flock of blank and hollowed stares clustering around the windows.



Dufour lived in the very last house on the road that turned out to be a cul-de-sac. His house was completely different from the rest. It was a dull pink, with a blue frill running along the tops and bottoms of its balconies, and the shutters—all closed—were a bright white. Green grass covered the front yard, and a rock-and-plant-lined path led up to the porch steps.



A group of maybe a dozen children were playing in the road. They all stopped what they were doing, and watched Max and Chantale get out of the car.



Max heard a whistle behind him. He saw a young boy sprint across the grass and disappear around the side of the house.



As they started walking toward the path, the children in the road came together in a tight group and barred their way. They all had rocks in their hands.



Unlike all the other kids he'd seen in the streets, these were dressed in proper clothes and shoes, and they looked healthy and clean. They couldn't have been more than eight, but their faces were hard with experience and wisdom beyond their years. Max tried to smile disarmingly at a girl with bows in her hair, but she gave him a ferocious stare.



Chantale tried talking to them, but no one answered or moved. Grips tightened on the rocks and young bodies tensed and shook with aggression. Max looked at the ground and saw they had plenty of ammunition if they needed it. The road was a quarry.



He took Chantale's arm and moved her back a few steps.



Suddenly they heard a whistle from the house. The boy ran back shouting. Chantale let out a sigh of relief. The children dropped the rocks and went back to their game.



Chapter 22



A TEENAGE GIRL with a warm smile and braces on her teeth opened the door and let them in. She motioned for them to wait in the yellow-and-green-tiled foyer while she ran up an imposing flight of wide, carpeted stairs that led to the first-floor landing.



The house was initially pleasantly cool after the baking heat of the outdoors, but once they were acclimated, the cool turned out to have a chilly edge. Chantale rubbed her arms to warm herself up.



Although there was a skylight that illuminated the foyer, Max noticed an absence of any lights—electrical or otherwise—and there were no switches of any kind on the walls. He could barely make out anything farther than five feet in front of him. The darkness teemed all about them, almost solid, practically alive, waiting at the edges of the light, ready to pounce on their spot as soon as they left it.



Max noticed a large oil painting on the wall—two Hispanic-looking men with thin, near-ossified faces stood behind a pretty, dark-skinned woman. They were all dressed in Civil War–era clothes, the men resembling Mississippi gamblers in their black frock coats and gray pinstriped trousers, the woman in an orange dress with a white, ruffled collar and a parasol in her hand.



"Are any of those guys Doofoor?" Max asked Chantale, who was studying the portrait quite intently.



"Both," she whispered.



"Has he got a twin brother?"



"Not that I've heard."



The girl reappeared at the top of the stairs and beckoned them up.



As they climbed the stairs, Max noticed that the walls were hung with framed photographs, some black-and-white, some dated, some sepia-toned, all of them hard to properly discern in the light that seemed to get dimmer the farther away they got from the floor, despite their relative nearness to the skylight. One photograph in particular caught Max's eye—a bespectacled black man in a white coat talking to a group of children sitting outdoors.



"Papa Doc—when he was good," Chantale said when she noticed what Max was looking at.



The girl led them to a room whose door was wide open. Inside, it was pitch-black. Still smiling, she took Chantale's hand and told her to take Max's. They shuffled in, seeing absolutely nothing.



They were taken to a couch. They sat down. The girl struck a match and briefly lit up the room. Max caught a short glimpse of Dufour sitting right in front of them in an armchair, a blanket over his legs, looking right at him, smiling; and then it went dark as the match subsided to a small flame which was transferred to the wick of an oil lamp. He couldn't see Dufour anymore, which wasn't a bad thing, because the little he'd seen of him hadn't been pleasant. The man reminded him of a monstrous turkey, with a long and sharp nose that seemed to start from right in between his eyes, and a loose and floppy pouch of flesh dangling under his lower jaw. If he wasn't a hundred years old, he couldn't have been far off.



The lamp gave off a feeble, bronze glow. Max could see Chantale, the mahogany table in front of them, and the silver tray bearing a pitcher full of chilled lemonade and two glasses with blue patterns around the middle. They couldn't see Dufour or anything else of the room.



Dufour spoke first, in French, not Kreyol. He explained, in a voice so soft it was barely audible, that he knew only three words of English—"hello," "thank you," and "good-bye." Chantale translated this to Max and asked Dufour if he objected to her being there as an interpreter. He said he didn't and addressed her as "mademoiselle." For an instant, Max got a glimpse back into another era, when men touched their hats, stood up, pulled out chairs, and opened doors for women, but the vision was quickly overtaken by present concerns.



"I'm sorry for the darkness but my eyes no longer see like they did. Too much light gives me terrible headaches," Dufour said in French, and Chantale translated. "Welcome to my house, Mr. Mingus."



"We'll try not to take up too much of your time," Max said as he set his tape recorder and notebook and pen down on the table.



Dufour joked that the older he got the smaller things became, remembering an era when tape recorders were cumbersome reel-to-reel players. He told them to try the lemonade, that he'd had it made for them.



Chantale poured them each a glass. Max was amused to see that the designs on the glasses were oriental ones, showing men and women in various sexual positions, some commonplace, some exotic, and a few requiring the suppleness of professional contortionists to pull off. He wondered how long it had been since Dufour had had any sex.



They made small talk as they sipped their drinks. The lemonade was bittersweet but very refreshing. Max tasted both lemon and lime juice mixed together with water and sugar. Dufour asked Max how long he'd been in the country and what he thought of it. Max said he hadn't been in Haiti long enough to form an opinion. Dufour laughed loudly at this but didn't define his laughter with a quip or a retort.



"Bien, bien," Dufour said. "Let's begin."



Chapter 23



MAX OPENED HIS notebook and pressed RECORD.



"When did you first meet Charlie Carver?"



"His mother brought him to me a few months before his disappearance. I don't remember the exact date," Dufour said.



"How did you meet her?"



"She found me. She was very troubled."



"How so?"



"If she hasn't told you, neither can I."



His response to the latter had been polite but firm. There wasn't much life left in Dufour but Max could detect an iron will propping up his crumbling body. Max was playing the interview like a conversation, keeping his tone neutral and his body language relaxed and friendly—no arms on the table, no leaning forward, sitting back in the couch: tell me everything, send it my way.



Chantale was the opposite, virtually coming off her seat, as she strained to hear the old man, because the little that remained of his voice faded in and out, rising, when it did, to no louder than the hoarse hiss of hot grit hitting a snowbound road.



"What did you make of Charlie?"



"A very clever and happy boy."



"How often did you see him?"



"Once a week."



"The same day and time every week?"



"No, they changed from week to week."



"Every week?"



"Every week."



The sound of a lid being unscrewed came from Dufour's direction, then a smell of kerosene and rotting vegetables overtook and flattened the pleasant scent of fresh lime that had been the room's only perfume. Chantale screwed up her face and moved her head out of the way of the worst of the stench. Max paused the tape recorder.



Dufour said nothing by way of explanation. He rubbed his palms, then his wrists and forearms, and then he did his fingers one by one, popping their respective knuckles when he was finished. The smell went from bad to nasty to nearly unbearable, forming an acrid rubbery taste in the back of Max's throat.



He looked away from the old man's direction and glanced around the room. His eyes had acclimated to the quarter-light and he could see more now. All about him surfaces gave off the tiniest reflections of lamplight, reminding Max of photographs of crowds holding their lighters aloft during rock concerts, a butane Milky Way. To his left, were the shuttered windows, the fierce sun penetrating through the smallest fissures in the wood, beaming in from the outside in phosphorescent dots and dashes, a blinding Morse code.



Dufour closed the container and said something to Chantale.



"He says he's ready to continue," she said to Max.



"OK." Max switched the recorder back on and stared straight ahead of him, where he could vaguely make out his host's head and a pallid blur where his face was. "Who made the appointments? You or Mrs. Carver?"



"Me."



"How did you notify them?"



"By telephone. Eliane—my maid—she called Rose, Charlie's nanny."



"How much notice did you give them?"



"Four, five hours."



Max scribbled this down in his notebook.



"Was there anyone else with you at the time?"



"Only Eliane."



"No one came to the house while you were with him? No visits?"



"No."



"Did you tell anyone Charlie was coming to see you?"



"No."



"Did anyone see Charlie coming here?"



"Everyone in the street."



Dufour laughed as soon as Chantale had finished translating, to confirm that he was joking.



"Did you notice anyone suspicious watching your house? Anyone you hadn't seen before?"



"No."



"No one hanging around?"



"I would have seen."



"I thought you didn't like daylight?"



"There is more than one way to see," Chantale translated.



Fasten your seatbelts, hold on tight—mystic mumbo-jumbo Disneyland here we come, Max felt like saying, but didn't. He'd been here before, in a similar situation, talking to a voodoo priest who was rumored to have supernatural powers. That was back when he was looking for Boukman. The most powerful thing about that guy had been his smell—bathtubs of rum and months of skipped showers. He'd humored the priest, cut him slack, and come away from their encounter with a working understanding of Haiti's national religion. Sometimes—though not often—it paid to tolerate and indulge.



"You're not asking me the right questions," Dufour said through Chantale.



"Yeah? What should I be asking?"



"I'm not the detective."



"Do you know who kidnapped Charlie?"



"No."



"I thought you could see into the future?"



"Not everything."



How convenient. I guess that's what you tell people when their relatives suddenly die.



"For example," Dufour continued, "I can't tell people when their loved ones are going to die."



Max's heart skipped a beat. He swallowed dry.



Coincidence: no such thing as mind reading.



Something—or someone—stirred behind him. He heard a floor-board subtly creak, as though it was being stepped on firmly but slowly. He glanced over his shoulder but couldn't see anything. He looked at Chantale. It seemed she hadn't heard anything.



Max turned back to Dufour.



"Tell me about Charlie. About when he came to see you? What did you do when he came?"



"We talked."



"You talked?"



"Yes. We talked without speaking."



"I see," Max said. "So you—what? Used telepathy—ESP, ET—what?"



"Our spirits talked."



"Your spirits talked?" he asked, as neutrally as possible. He desperately wanted to laugh.



They had officially entered the realm of bullshit, where everything happened and the far-fetched was never far enough. He'd play along, he told himself, until the rules got too fucked-up and the situation threatened to change owners. Then he'd weigh in and turn the tables.



"Our spirits. Who we are inside. You have one too. Don't confuse your body with your soul. Your body is simply the house you live in while you're here on earth."



And don't confuse me with a dickhead.



"So, how did you do that—talk to his spirit?"



"It's what I do, although…it's not something I've ever done with a living person before. Charlie was unique."



"What did you talk about?"



"Him."



"What did he tell you?"



"You were told why he came to see me?"



"Because he wasn't talking, yeah—and?"



"He told me the reason why that was."



Max saw something cross his peripheral vision to his right and quickly turned to catch it, but there was nothing to see.



"So, let me get this right—Charlie told you—or his 'spirit' told you—what was wrong with him? Why he wasn't talking?"



"Yes."



"And…?"



"And what?"



"What was wrong with him?"



"I told his mother. As she hasn't told you, neither will I."



"It could help my investigation," Max said.



"It won't."



"I'll be the judge of that."



"It won't," Dufour repeated firmly.



"And his mother took your word for it? Whatever it was you claim Charlie told you?"



"No, like you she was skeptical. Actually she didn't believe me," Chantale said hesitantly now, her tone questioning and confused. What she was hearing made no sense to her.



"What changed her mind?"



"If she wants to tell you, she will. I'm saying nothing."



And Max knew he'd get nothing out of him, not this way. Whatever it was, Francesca or Allain Carver would have to tell him. He moved on.



"You said your 'spirits talked'? Yours and Charlie's? Do you still talk? Are you in touch with Charlie now?"



Chantale translated. Dufour didn't answer.



Max realized that he hadn't seen the maid leave the room. Was she in there with them? He searched the area in the direction of the door, but the surrounding darkness was too finite, too determined to yield no more than it had to.



"Oui," Dufour said finally, shifting in his seat.



"Yes? Have you talked recently?"



"Yes."



"When?"



"This morning."



"Is he alive?"



"Yes."



Max's mouth went dry. His excitement briefly dispelled all his doubts and disbelief.



"Where is he?"



"He doesn't know."



"Can he describe anything to you?"



"No—only that a man and a woman are caring for him. They're like his parents."



Max scribbled this down, even though he was recording their exchange.



"Does he say anything about where he's at?"



"No."



"Is he hurt?"



"He says he is being well looked after."



"Has he told you who took him?"



"You have to find out yourself. That's why you're here. That is your purpose," Dufour said, raising his voice, a hint of anger there.



"My purpose?" Max put down his notebook. He didn't like what he'd just heard, the arrogance of it, the presumption.



"Everyone is put on earth for a purpose, Max. Every life has a reason," Dufour continued calmly.



"And…so?"



"This—here and now—is your purpose. How things take their course is up to you, not me."



"Are you saying I was born to find Charlie?"



"I never said you were going to find him. That hasn't been decided yet."



"Oh? And who decides that?"



"We don't yet know why you're here."



"Who's 'we'?"



"We don't know what's keeping you here. With the others it was easy to see. They were here for the money. Mercenaries. Not right. But that's not what brought you here."



"Well, I ain't here for the climate," Max quipped, and then almost immediately remembered the dream he'd had in his hotel room in New York, where Sandra had told him to take the case because he had "no choice." He remembered how he'd weighed up what remained of his options, how he'd glimpsed his future, how bleak it had all seemed. The old man was right—he was here to rescue his life as well as Charlie's.



How much had Dufour already known about him? Before he could ask him, the old man started talking.



"God gives us free will and insight. To a few He gives a lot of both, to many He gives more of one than the other, and to most He limits what He gives. Those with both are aware of where their futures lie. Politicians see themselves as presidents, employees as managers, soldiers as generals, actors as superstars, and so forth. You can usually tell these people at the starting gate. They know what they want to do with their lives before they turn twenty. Now, how and when we fulfill our purpose—our 'destiny'—is a lot up to us and also a little out of our hands. If God has a higher purpose in mind for us and sees us wasting time with a lowly one, He will intervene and set us back on the right path. Sometimes it's a painful intervention, sometimes a seemingly 'accidental' or 'coincidental' one. The more insightful recognize His hand shaping their lives and follow the path they were meant to. Max, you were meant to come here."



Max breathed in deeply. The stench had gone and the sweet tang of lime was back. He didn't know what to think.



Stick to what you know, not what you'd like to know. You're investigating a missing person, a young boy. That's all that matters—what you're going after. As Eldon Burns used to say: Do what you do and fuck the rest.



Max took Charlie's poster out of his pocket and unfolded it on the table. He pointed out the cross scored in the poster's margins.



"Can you see this?" he asked Dufour, pointing to the marks.



"Yes. Tonton Clarinette. That's his mark," Dufour replied.



"I thought Ton Ton Clarinet was a myth."



"In Haiti all facts are based on myths."



"So you're saying that he's for real?"



"It is all for you to discover." Dufour smiled. "Go to the source of the myth. Find out how it started and why, and who started it."



Max thought of Beeson and Medd and where Huxley had told him they'd gone: the waterfalls. He made a note to talk to Huxley again.



"Back to Charlie," Max said. "Did he see Ton Ton Clarinet?"



"Yes."



Max glanced at Chantale. She caught his stare. Max saw fear in her eyes.



"When?"



"The last time he came here, he told me he'd seen Tonton Clarinette."



"Where?" Max leaned in closer.



"He didn't say. He just told me he'd seen him."



Max scribbled "interview Carver servants" in his notebook.



"People steal children here, don't they?" Max asked.



"It happens a lot, yes."



"Why do they steal them?"



"Why do they steal them in your country?"



"Sex—mostly. Ninety-nine percent of the time. Then it's for money, or it's childless couples who want to cut out adoption agencies, lonely women with a mothering fetish, that kind of thing."



"Here we have other uses for children."



Max thought back for a second and quickly got to Boukman.



"Voodoo?"



Dufour chuckled mockingly.



"No, not vodou. Vodou is not evil. It's like Hinduism, with different gods for different things, and one great big God for all things. No children are ever sacrificed in vodou. Try again."



"Devil worship? Black magic?"



"Black magic. Correct."



"Why do they sacrifice children in black magic?"



"Various reasons, most of them insane. Most black magic is the preserve of deluded idiots, people who think if they do something shocking enough the devil will ride out of hell to shake their hands and grant them three wishes. But here it's different. Here people know exactly what they're doing. You see, you, me—all of us—we are all watched over, guarded by spirits—"



"Guardian angels?"



"Yes—whatever you want to call it. Now, almost the strongest protection anyone can have is a child's protection. Children are innocent. Pure. Very little lasting harm comes to you when one is watching over you—and that which does is the sort of harm you learn and grow from."



Max thought things through for a moment. This was the Boukman case all over. Boukman had sacrificed children to feed some demon he'd supposedly conjured up.



"You say children make the most powerful guardian angels because they're innocent and pure?" Max asked. "What about Charlie? What would they want with him—apart from his being a child?"



"Charlie is very special," Dufour said. "The protection he offers is greater, because he is among the purer spirits—those sometimes known as the Perpetually Pure, those who will never know evil. Other spirits trust them. They can open many doors. Not many people have them as guardians. Those who do are usually people like me, those who can see beyond the present."



"So is it possible to…'steal a spirit'?"



"Yes, of course. But it's not a simple procedure and not everyone can do it. It's very specialized."



"Can you do it?"



"Yes."



"Have you done it?"



"To do good you have to know bad—you, Max, more than most, know what I mean. There is a bad side to what I do—a reversal of my process, a sort of black magic, which involves enslaving souls, forcing them to become the protectors of evil. Children are a major element of that. They're a premium here in Haiti, a currency."



Just as Chantale finished translating, the maid came into the room and walked over to them.



"It's time," Dufour said.



They said their good-byes. The maid took Chantale's hand and Chantale took Max's and they filed out of the room. In the doorway, Max looked back at where they'd been sitting. He thought he saw a faint outline of not one but two people standing where Dufour had been. He couldn't be sure.



Chapter 24



THEY HEADED BACK to the bank, Max at the wheel now, getting used to Port-au-Prince's ruined streets. Once he'd dropped Chantale off, he'd return to the house. His head was heavy, pounding. He was done for the day. He couldn't think clearly. He hadn't had time to release the information he'd been steadily accumulating throughout the day, and his brain was fit to burst. He needed to process all the information, break it down into useful and useless, chuck out the trash and keep the good stuff, then work it, break it down, look for common threads and connections, promising leads, things that didn't quite seem to fit.



Chantale had barely said a word since they'd left Dufour's house.



"Thanks for your help today, Chantale," Max said and looked over at her. She was pale. Her face shone with a dull dew of perspiration, which pooled and crested into small droplets on her upper lip. Her neck and jaw muscles were tensed.



"Are you OK?"



"No," she croaked. "Stop the car."



Max pulled over on a bustling road. Chantale got out, took a few steps, and threw up in the gutter, prompting an exclamation of shocked disgust from a man who was pissing up against a nearby wall.



Max steadied her as she heaved a second time.



When she'd finished, he stood her up against the car and made her take deep breaths. He got the water bottle out, poured some onto his handkerchief, and wiped her face, wafting the notebook to cool her off.



"That's better," she said after she'd recovered and the color had returned to her face.



"Was that too much for you? Back there?"



"I was real nervous."



"Didn't show."



"Trust me, I was."



"You did great," Max said. "So much so I'll give you tomorrow off."



"You're going to Cité Soleil, right?"



"You got me!"



They got back in the car and she drew him a map. She told him to get some surgical masks and gloves—which he'd find in one of the two main supermarkets—and to be prepared to throw his shoes away if he planned on leaving his car and walking around. The ground was quite literally made of shit—animal and, most of it, human. Everything that breathed in the slum had a textbook's worth of diseases on it and in it and all around it.



"Be real careful out there. Take your gun. Don't stop your car unless it's absolutely necessary."



"Sounds like what they used to tell folk about Liberty City."



"Cité Soleil is no joke, Max. It's a bad bad place."



He drove her to the Banque Populaire and watched her and her ass until she'd gone through the entrance. She didn't turn around. Max wasn't sure if that still meant something now.



Chapter 25



HE CALLED ALLAIN Carver from the house and gave him a rundown of what he'd done, whom he'd talked to, and what he was planning to do next. He could tell from the way Carver listened—grunting affirmatively to let Max know he was still on the line, but asking no questions—that Chantale had briefed him thoroughly.



Next, he called Francesca. No answer.



* * *



Sitting out on the porch, notebook in hand, he played his interview tapes.



The questions came to him.



First up: Why had Charlie been kidnapped?



Money?



Absence of a ransom demand ruled that out as a motive.



Revenge?



A strong possibility. Rich people always had their fair share of mortal enemies. It came with the territory. The Carvers, with their history, must have had a phone book's worth.



What was wrong with Charlie?



He hadn't started talking yet. Some people start slow. Shit happens.



What about that thing with his hair?



He was a little kid. One of the few things Max remembered his dad telling him was how, when he was a baby, he used to cry every time someone laughed. Shit happens, then you grow up.



Sure, but Dufour had found something.



Did the kidnappers know what it was?



Maybe. In which case, the motive became blackmail. The Carvers hadn't mentioned anything about that, but that didn't necessarily mean it wasn't going on. If there was something really wrong with the kid, Allain and Francesca were probably keeping it from Gustav because of his fragile health.



Why hadn't Francesca told him about Charlie's condition herself?



Too painful? Or she didn't think it was relevant?



Had the kid been kidnapped for black-magic purposes?



Possibly.



He'd have to start checking up on the Carvers' enemies and then cross-reference them against involvement in black magic. But how was he going to do that? The country was upside down, running on a faint pulse. There was no police force to speak of, and he doubted there were any criminal records or files he could go through.



He'd be doing it the hard way, looking under every rock, chasing every shadow.



What about Eddie Faustin?



Eddie Faustin had been involved. He was a major player. He'd known who was behind the kidnapping. Find out who he knew.



Who was the big guy the shoemaker woman had seen?



Faustin? He was supposed to have been killed and beheaded near the car, so it may not have been him. But if he shared the same genes as his mother and brother, he wasn't a big man. Both Faustins were medium build, soft going on flab.



Of course, Vincent Paul had been on the scene.



Was Charlie alive?



He only had Dufour's word on that, and, unless Dufour was the kidnapper or was holding him captive, he dismissed the claim and continued to presume him dead.



Did Dufour know who'd kidnapped Charlie?



As before.



How serious was his hold on Francesca?



She was rich and vulnerable, ripe for exploitation. It happened all the time, phony psychics and mystics taking advantage of the lonely, the bereaved, the chronically self-obsessed, the naďve, the plain fucking dumb—all promised a glorious future for just $99.99 plus tax.



What if Dufour was the real deal?



Stick to what you know.



Was Dufour a suspect?



Still unresolved. Yes and no. A man that close to Papa and Baby Doc must have had the juice to pull off a simple kidnapping. He was bound to know a few unemployed Tonton Macoutes, starving for cash and pining for their glory days, who would have done it at the drop of a hat. They used to abduct people all the time. But what would be his motive? At his age, with very few more years of life left? Had Gustav Carver fucked him or his family over in the past? He doubted it. Gustav would not have messed with one of Papa Doc's favorites. Still, for now, he couldn't rule anything out.



* * *



Later he tried to sleep but couldn't. He went to the kitchen and found an unopened bottle of Barbancourt rum in one of the cupboards. As he took it out, he spotted something tucked away in the corner. It was a four-inch-tall wire figurine of a man in a straw hat, standing with his legs apart and his arms behind his back.



Max stood it up on the table and inspected it as he drank. The figure's head was painted black, its clothes—shirt and trousers—dark blue. It wore a red handkerchief and carried a small bag, like a school satchel, slung across its shoulder. The pose was militaristic and the look that of a color-coordinated scarecrow.



The rum went down well, filling his belly with a soothing warmth that soon seeped into the rest of him and translated into a pleasant feeling of utterly groundless hope. He could see himself getting used to the stuff.



Chapter 26



NO MATTER WHAT Huxley and Chantale had told him about Cité Soleil, nothing could have prepared him for the horrors that paraded past his windshield as he waded into the slum. A small part of him, once hard and rigid in its ways, broke off and drifted toward the place where he hid away his compassion.



At first, as he was going in, driving down the narrow, soot-covered track that served as a main thoroughfare, he saw a shantytown maze, thousands of densely packed one-room shacks stretching out as far as the eye could see, east and west, horizon to horizon, no clear way in or out, just trial, error, and lucky guesses. The more he saw of the shacks and the closer he looked at them, the more he realized that there was a sort of pecking order in the slum, a class system for lowlifes. About a quarter of the homes were adobe huts with corrugated-iron roofs. They looked fairly sturdy and usable. Next down were huts that had thin planks of wood for walls and light-blue plastic sheeting for roofs. A medium wind would probably carry them and their inhabitants out to sea, but at least they were better off than the bottom layer of the slum's housing pyramid—homes made out of patched together cardboard, a few of which collapsed as soon as Max looked at them. He supposed the adobe huts belonged to veteran slum dwellers, those who'd survived and crawled to the top of this shit heap. The cardboard shacks belonged to the new arrivals and the weak, the vulnerable, and the almost dead, while the wooden ones were for those in-between gutters.



Thick plumes of black charcoal smoke came out of crude holes in the middle of the roofs and dispersed into the sky, forming a zeppelin-shaped pall of gray smog, which hung over the area, churning but not breaking up in the breeze. As Max passed, he felt the stares coming his way from the huts, hundreds and hundreds of pairs of eyes falling on the car, cutting through the windshield, peeling him down to his basic core—friend or foe, rich or poor. He saw people—thin, wasted, bone shrink-wrapped in skin, clinging to the edges of extinction—leaning against their hovels.



Randomly spaced between blocks of shacks were areas that hadn't yet been claimed and built on, where the ground was a cross between a mammoth garbage dump and a snapshot of World War I killing fields, postconflict—broken, muddy, blasted to fuck, strewn with death and despair. In some areas the muck was piled into imposing great mounds where children with insect-thin legs, distended bellies, and heads too big for their necks played and scavenged.



He passed two horses, hooves buried in muck, barely moving, so emaciated he could clearly see their rib cages and count the bones.



There were open sewers everywhere, gutted cars and buses and trucks serving as homes. All the windows in his car were shut and the air-conditioning was on, but the sharp stench of the outside still crept in—every bad, evil smell mixed into one and multiplied by two: month-old dead bodies, fermenting trash, human shit, animal shit, stagnant water, stale oil, stale smoke, crushed humanity. Max started to feel sick. He pulled on one of the masks he'd bought in the supermarket before he'd set out that morning.



He crossed over the "Boston Canal" on a makeshift bridge made of lashed-together metal girders. The thick sludge river of used oil split Cité Soleil down the middle, a permanent wound on the slum's poisoned soul, bleeding its black venom into the sea. It was simply the worst place he'd ever seen—a circle of hell served up to earth as a warning. He couldn't believe that the UN and U.S. had occupied the country for two whole years and done nothing about Cité Soleil.



He was looking for signs of Vincent Paul—cars, jeeps, things that worked, things that didn't belong here. All he could see was misery living in misery, sickness sucking on sickness, people trailing their shadows.



He reached an elevated stretch of ground and got out of the car to look around. Mindful of what Chantale had told him about walking in the slum, Max had bought some throwaway footwear—a pair of scuffed army boots with ground-down heels—from a woman selling a basket of the things on the sidewalk near the Impasse Carver. He was glad he had, because with every step he took, his feet were sucked a little into the ground, which, in spite of the raw, blistering sunlight, was soft and gooey instead of baked rock-solid.



He looked over the chaotic mess all around him, at the multitude of hovels erupting from the ground like metallic pustules, giving the landscape the texture of a battered and corroded cheese-grater. The place was home to over half a million people, yet it was eerily quiet, with barely a noise heard above the sound of the sea, a quarter of a mile away. It was the same cowed stillness he recognized from the worst parts of Liberty City, where death struck by the hour. Here, he supposed, it came by the second.



Could Vincent Paul really have a base here? Could he live in a place so defiled?



His feet suddenly plunged deep into the ground with a thick, slurping sound and he was instantly up to his ankles in muck, feeling it pulling at his soles. He yanked his feet out and got back on solid ground. The deep footprints he'd left where he'd gone down immediately began to disintegrate as the ground corrected the break in its smooth, sticky surface, and oozed thick, poisonous treacle over the blemish.



Max heard the sound of approaching cars.



In the distance, off to his left, he saw a small convoy of military vehicles—three army trucks topped and tailed by jeeps—heading off toward the sea.



He ran back to the Land Cruiser and started the engine.



Chapter 27



HE FOLLOWED THE convoy to a clearing near the sea, where a semicircle of large, olive-green tents had been erected. Two of them flew Red Cross flags.



Hundreds of Cité Soleil inhabitants were queuing for food that soldiers were dishing out to them from behind long foldaway tables. The people took their paper plates and ate where they stood, many walking to the back of the line to eat and go back for more.



Elsewhere, others waited their turn in front of a water truck, empty buckets, cans, and gallon containers in their hands. Farther on, there were three more trails of people, ready to receive rations of rice, cornmeal, or coal. The queues were surprisingly orderly and quiet. There was no pushing or shoving, no fighting or panic. Everyone would receive what they were waiting for, as in communion.



Max started thinking he'd been wrong, that the UN was actually doing something to relieve the suffering of these desperate people it had freed in the name of democracy, but when he looked a little more closely at the vehicles, he noticed they were all unmarked. None of the soldiers were wearing the sky-blue headgear of the occupying forces, and neither were any of them carrying matching ordnance. Instead they had a miscellany of gangbanger hardware—Uzis, pumps, and AKs.



Max realized he was looking at Vincent Paul's band of brothers moments before he got his first clear view of the man himself, emerging from a medical tent. Like his men, he didn't wear a mask, surgical gloves, or temporary shoes. He was dressed top-to-toe in black—T-shirt, combat trousers, and paratrooper boots. He was towering, hulking, dark and bald.



The big man moved to one of the food tables and helped out, serving people, talking to them and laughing with them. It was the laughter—deep, booming rolls of joviality, the sound of a formation of incoming jets heard from afar—that confirmed Vincent Paul's identity. Max recognized the voice from two nights before, when he'd been saved from the street robbers.



After he'd dished out a few platefuls to the food queue, Paul went among the people. He talked to children, squatting down so he could be at eye level with them, he talked to men and women, stooping down to listen to them. He shook hands and accepted hugs and kisses. When an old woman kissed his hand, he kissed hers right back and made her laugh. People stopped moving forward in their lines and stood where they were to watch him. Some started to leave their places and walk toward him.



And then Max heard it—a hissing murmur at first, the scraps of a song—"ssssan-sssan / ssssan-ssssan / ssssan-ssssan," and then it grew louder as more people picked it up and gave the chant body and definition—"Vinnn-ssssan / Vinnn-ssssan / Vinnn-ssssan." He had become the focus of all attention, the place all eyes had turned to. The inhabitants of Cité Soleil had forgotten all about their hunger and misery and were crowding around Vincent Paul, surrounding him completely, yet leaving a broad, respectful halo of space around him so he could move with ease, shake hands, and accept embraces. Max noticed two striking women in military fatigues flanking him, watching the crowd, hands close to the pistols at their hips.



Paul raised his hands and the crowd fell quiet. He stood a good few inches above the tallest person there, so most had a good view of his huge, domelike head. He addressed them in a deep baritone that reached Max, although he couldn't understand a word Paul was saying. The crowd lapped it up, breaking out into cheers, applause, whistles, foot-stamping, and hollering. Even Paul's own men, who must have heard it all a million times over, were clapping with unforced enthusiasm.



Max had seen this kind of shit before, on the streets of Miami. Every few years, the biggest homegrown dealers—the ones who'd managed to stay alive and out of jail through luck, ruthlessness, money, and good connections—would decide to "give something back" to the community they'd helped decimate with their drugs and turf wars. They and their crews would roll into the 'hoods on Christmas Day and hand out roast turkeys, presents, and even money. It was what happened toward the end of their street-lifespans, the last grand gesture before they got taken down by rivals or cops. They'd got everything their limited minds had ever dreamed of—wealth, pussy, petty power, fear, cars, and clothes. Now they wanted love and respect too.



Here Max admired Paul's philanthropy, irrespective of his long-term ulterior motives. He'd begun to understand that this was a part of the world where everything he knew and took for granted had either long broken down or never existed. The only way people could help themselves was by leaving the country altogether, like thousands did every year when they took to the seas and risked their lives heading for Florida. Those who remained were doomed to a life lived on their knees, slaves to the kindness and mercy of strangers. Someone had to help them—and as it looked for sure that that someone wasn't going to be the U.S. and the UN, why not the man people claimed to be the biggest drug lord in the Caribbean?



Watching Paul lapping up the adulation, pressing more flesh, Max was sure he was looking at Charlie Carver's kidnapper. He could quite easily have snatched the kid and hidden him in Cité Soleil. He had the power to pull it off and get away with it. He had the power to do almost anything he wanted.



Chapter 28



IN THE LATE afternoon, Vincent Paul got into a jeep and left the slum. A truck and two more vehicles followed him out.



Max tailed them out of town, through dusty, arid flatlands and clumps of buildings that were either half-built or half-ruined. Then, as night fell, they headed up into the mountains, clinging to a steep, meager crust of dirt road, which was all that separated them from hundreds of feet of thin air.



The last stretch of the journey took them across a plateau. They made for a small bonfire, near where the convoy came to a halt. The vehicles then positioned themselves so that they were facing each other, and their headlights intersected and lit up a square of rough, rocky earth.



Max killed his lights, rolled a little closer to the place where they'd stopped, and got out of the car. He established his bearings so he could find his way back, then he approached the convoy.



The back of the truck was opened. There was fierce shouting both inside and out, and then a man was thrown out. He hit the ground with a thud, a scream, and the thick jingle of chains. One of Vincent's men picked him up and slammed him up against the truck.



Then more men were pushed out of the truck, all landing on top of one another. Max counted eight of them. They were marched into the lit-up space between the vehicles.



Max got a little closer. A group of a dozen or more civilians were watching what was happening.



Max walked off to the left, staying in the darkness. He had a clear view of the captives, who were lined up in a row. They were dressed in UN military uniforms and looked Indian.



Arms behind his back, Paul inspected them, glaring down at each and every one of them as he passed. He resembled a father angry with his unruly brood; the men, compared to him, were small and snappable.



"Do you any of you speak and understand English?" Paul asked.



"Yes," they answered as one.



"Who's the commanding officer here?"



A man stepped forward and stood at attention. He tried to meet Paul's eyes but his head traveled so far back he seemed to be staring up at the sky, seeking out some distant star.



"And you are?"



"Captain Ramesh Saggar."



"Are these your men?"



"Yes."



"Do you know why you've been brought here?"



"No. Who are you?" the captain asked in a heavy accent.



Paul glanced briefly over at the civilians, then back at the captain.



"Do you know why you're in this country?"



"I'm sorry?"



"What is the purpose of your presence here, in Haiti? What are you doing here? You, your men, the Bangladeshi division of the United Nations army?"



"I-I-I don't understand."



"You don't understand what? The question? Or what you're doing here?"



"Vye are you asking me dis?"



"Because I'm the one asking the questions and you're the one answering them. They're simple questions, captain. I'm not exactly asking you to divulge military secrets."



Paul was all business, his tone pointed but even, without emotion. If he was following the sort of interrogation procedure Max thought he was, his calm, no-nonsense manner was the prelude to an explosion. Joe had been brilliant at that—used his bulk to intimidate and terrify the suspect, and then confused them by coming over all reasonable and quiet and to the point—"Look, just tell me what I want to know and I'll see what kind of deal I can cut you with the DA"—and then, if it wasn't working or the scumbag was a particularly sick fuck, or Joe was just having a bad day—KA-FUCKING-BOOM!—he'd backhand them to the floor.



"Answer my question. Please."



"Ve are here to keep de peace."



Max heard the first tremor in the captain's voice.



"To 'keep the peace'?" Paul repeated. "Are you doing that?"



"Vat is dis about?"



"Answer my question. Are you doing your job? Are you keeping the peace?"



"Yes, I—I dink so."



"Why?"



"Dere is no civil var here. De people are not fighting."



"True. For now," Paul looked at the other seven soldiers, all standing at ease. "Would you say your job—this 'keeping the peace' you think you're doing so well—would you say an aspect of it would involve protecting the Haitian people?"



"Pro-protecting?"



"Yes, protecting. You know, preventing harm from coming to them. Do you understand?"



Now there was a hint of venom in Paul's voice.



"Yes."



"Well, then? Are you doing your job here?"



"I-I-I dink so."



"You think so? You think so?"



The captain nodded. Paul glared at him. The captain averted his eyes. His composure was cracking.



"So then, tell me, captain. Do you think 'protecting the Haitian people' does or does not include raping women—actually, no—let me be more specific. Do you think, Captain Saggar, that 'protecting the Haitian people' involves raping and beating up teenage girls?"



Saggar said nothing. His lips were trembling, his whole face quaking.



"Well?" Paul asked, leaning in close.



No reply.



"ANSWER MY DAMN QUESTION!" Paul roared and everyone, including Paul's own troops, jumped. Max felt the voice in his gut, like deep speaker bass.



"I-I-I—"



"Aie-Aie-Aie," Paul mimicked in a faggot voice. "Are your feet on fire, captain? No? Well, answer me."



"N-n-n-no it does not, but—but—but—"



Paul held his hand up for silence and Saggar flinched.



"Now you know what this is about—"



"Sorry!" the captain blurted.



"What?"



"Ve said ve vere sorry. Ve wrote letter."



"What—this?" Paul took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and read it out loud. "Dear Mr. Le Fen—that's that man over there by the jeep, red shirt, that's him—I am writing to apologize on behalf of both my men and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force for the regrettable incident involving your daughter and some men under my command. We will endeavor to make sure this kind of incident is not repeated. Yours sincerely, Captain Ramesh Saggar."



Paul slowly folded the letter and slipped it back into his pocket.



"Do you know that ninety percent of the Haitian population is illiterate? Did you know that, captain?"



"N-n-no."



"No? Do you also know that English isn't the first language here?"



"Yes."



"It's actually the third language, if you like. But ninety-nine percent of the people don't speak English. And Mr. Le Fen is one of the majority. So what good's a LETTER WRITTEN IN ENGLISH going to do?—HEH? More to the point—what good's a LOUSY LETTER going to do to Verité Le Fen? Do you know who that is, captain?"



Saggar didn't answer.



Paul called to the group and held his arm out. A girl came over, limping badly. She faced Saggar. They were the same height, although the girl was in an unnatural slouch. Max couldn't see her face, but judging from the captain's expression, she must have been in real bad shape.



Max looked over to the soldiers. One—a skinny bald man with a thick mustache—was shaking.



"Do you recognize her, captain?"



"I'm velly sorry," Saggar said to her. "Vat ve did to you vas bad."



"As I explained, captain, she can't understand you."



"P-p-please translate."



Paul told the girl. She whispered into Paul's ear. Paul looked at Saggar.



"Vat did she say?"



"'Languette maman ou'—literally, your mother's clit. Figuratively, 'Fuck you.'"



"Vat—vat are you going to do to us?"



Paul reached into his breast pocket again. He pulled out something small, and handed it to Saggar, who looked at it, his expression stunned, then disbelieving, then confused. It was a photograph.



"Vere—vere did you get this?"



"In your office."



"But—but—"



"Nice-looking girls. What are their names?"



Saggar looked at the picture and started to sob.



"Their names, captain?"



"If—if you—if you hurt any of uz dere vill be velly much trouble for you."



Paul beckoned the last man on the row to come over. He positioned him opposite Saggar, took a few steps back, drew his pistol, and shot the man through the temple. The soldier's body crumpled into a heap on the ground, blood geysering out of the hole in his head. Saggar cried out.



Paul holstered his pistol, walked over, and kicked the body to one side.



"What are your daughters' names, captain?"



"M-m-m-meena and Ssss-su-su-sunita."



"Meena?" Paul pointing to the picture. "The eldest? The one with the hairband?"



Saggar nodded.



"How old is she?"



"Th-thir-thirteen."



"Do you love her?"



"Yes."



"What would you do to me if I raped her?"



Saggar said nothing. He looked down at the ground.



"Don't look at your feet, captain—look at your daughter. Good. Now, imagine I raped your daughter. Can you?" Paul looked at the officer. "Picture the scene: me and my buddies are driving down the street one day. There are eight of us. We see Meena, walking, on her own. We stop and talk to her. We ask her to come for a ride with us. She refuses, but we take her anyway. Right there, in broad daylight, plenty of witnesses to identify us, but no one to stop us because we're in military uniform and we have guns.



"Oh, I forgot to mention this minor point—in our spare time we're UN peacekeeping troops. We're here to protect you. Only the people we're protecting are actually terrified of us. You know why? Because we're always snatching young girls like Meena off the street."



Saggar was looking back at the ground, head hung, shoulders slumped, stance crumbling: fear and guilt, but not yet resignation to his fate. He couldn't believe Paul was going to kill him and his men. That hadn't registered. Max knew he was. He'd given the leader of the gang that had kidnapped Manuela a similar speech. He'd used the guy's kid sister as an example, trying to throw the crime back in his face, personalize it, make him feel it, the damage, the pain. It hadn't gone to plan. The gang leader told Max he'd got so wasted on crack and PCP one time he'd fucked his kid sister in the ass. Five months later he'd started pimping her out to the local pedophile. Max had blown the motherfucker's brains out without regret or remorse.



"We drive your daughter to an isolated place. She's a brave girl—a gutsy girl—your daughter—Meena. She's a fighter. She bites one of my buddies, almost takes his finger off. So he caves her teeth in with his rifle butt. And then he grabs her by her ears and forces his cock down her throat while another of my guys holds his gun to her head. Everyone has their turn. Everyone except me and the driver. I'm above all that. You know, if I want pussy I put on two condoms and go to one of those Dominican whores near my barracks. As for the driver? He refuses to join in.



"When my guys are done in her mouth, they rape little Meena. Twice. Each. We take her virginity—we really rip the little bitch open, tear her apart inside. Literally. She's hemorrhaging. We notice—obviously. So what do we do? Stop and take her to a doctor? No. We turn her over and fuck her in the ass. Twice. Each. Then, you know what we do? We piss on her and drive off, looking for the next girl.



"Meena's found two days later. Nearly dead. Do you know how many stitches it takes, just to sew up her vagina? One hundred and eighty-three! And she's thirteen years old."



Saggar started crying.



"I-I-I…I didn't do anything," he whimpered.



"You stood by and let it happen. They're your men, under your command. One word from you and they would've stopped. You have to accept full responsibility."



"Look—report me to my superior. I sign confession. They vill—"



"—'Discipline you in accordance with UN military regulations'? ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY!" Paul shouted. "The Le Fen family went to your superiors before they came to me. Did you know that? And what did your superiors do? They made you send a written apology to the family. So what'll they do this time? Sentence you to washing my car?"



"Please," Saggar said, falling to his knees. "Please don't kill me."



"If that had been your daughter you'd want to kill me, wouldn't you?"



"Please," he blubbered.



"Answer my question."



"I vood turn you over to justice," Saggar bawled.



"Do you know we have no laws here in Haiti? No laws for absolutely anything? Bill Clinton's torn up our Constitution so he can pay his Arkansas lawyer clique to write us a new one? So, while we're waiting for Bill to play Moses, why don't we give you some Bangladeshi justice? Tell me, captain. What is the penalty for rape in your country?"



Saggar didn't reply.



"Come on. You know."



Saggar sobbed but didn't answer.



"You know I know. I looked it up," Paul said. "I just want to hear you say it."



"D-d-d-death."



"Sorry?"



"Death penalty."



"So rape is judged so extreme a crime in your country it's punishable by death, but you think it's OK here? Is that it?"



"You said dere is no justice here."



"Only among Haitians. You see, this is our country. Not yours. You can't come over here and treat us like this. Not without consequences. And I am those consequences."



"My men just vanted to have zome fun. Dey not mean to hurt de girl."



"Try explaining that to her, will you? Do you know you bastards didn't just ruin her face forever, you ruptured her spine, so she'll never be able to walk properly again? She won't be able to carry anything on her back. Women carry everything in this country. So she's as good as dead when she grows up. You ruined her life. You might as well have killed her," Paul said.



Saggar's face was shiny with tears.



Paul pointed to the right. "Go and stand over there." Saggar stumbled forward. "Stop. Stay." One of Paul's men trained a rifle on the captain's head.



Paul went up to the Bangladeshis and grabbed one of them by the arm. He inspected his hand and then jerked him out of the line. The soldier didn't have time to move his feet. His legs went limp and Paul dragged him along the ground by his shirtfront and stood him up where Saggar had been.



"What's your name?"



"Sanjay Veja!" the soldier shouted. He was the only bald and clean-shaven man in the group.



"She bit your finger so you broke her face with your rifle. You were the first one in. The one who hurt her the most. Do you have anything to say to that?"



"No," Veja said.



"Take off your trousers."



"V-vat?"



"Your trousers," Paul pointed and repeated slowly, "Take—them—off."



Veja looked at his fellow soldiers. None of them looked back at him. He complied. Paul stepped away from him and began rummaging on the ground, picking up, weighing, and rejecting rocks until he found what he wanted—two large, flat, smooth ones that he just about got his huge hands around.



"And your underwear. That too," Paul said, without turning around.



After another look back at his comrades in arms, Veja timidly stepped out of his white boxers.



Paul went up to him, arms behind his back.



"Hold up your dick." Paul looked to make sure he'd complied. "Now stand at ease."



Max watched Paul lower himself into a tensed-up catcher's crouch, eye-to-eye with the soldier. He took a deep breath through his nose, and then, at the speed of a blink, he whipped his rock-holding hands around from behind his back and slammed them together on Veja's dangling scrotum. Max heard two sounds—the loud crack of the rocks impacting and, right behind it, a strained, wet pop.



The soldier's mouth dropped wide-open, as if all his jaw muscles had dissolved. His eyes pushed up out to the rims of his sockets, and every vein and artery in his skull bulged up in a network of thick, gorged knots.



Veja first screamed in an unnaturally low register. Then, as the realization of what had happened to him caught up with the pain, the scream cracked into a rush of terrible, terrifying howls, delivered in searing bursts from the pit of his soul. Max felt Veja's cries all the way down deep inside of him and wanted to puke. Some of the soldier's comrades did just that, while two fainted and the rest—including Captain Saggar—wept, whimpered, and pissed themselves.



Paul wasn't finished. He jerked his arms sharply to the left, until his elbow was in line with his neck and his whole body shook with the strain and effort. Max saw the soldier's naked right leg lifted up off the ground, his foot shaking. Paul repeated the whole motion with his right side, before bringing his arms back down and then twisting them rapidly back and forth, as if he was wringing out wet clothes.



He stopped. He gulped down air, filling and clearing his airways with great big breaths before he uttered a heavy, exhausted grunt and tore Veja's mangled scrotum from his body with a massive backward lurch. The sound of it going reminded Max of stitches popping and tight fistfuls of feathers being simultaneously ripped out of chickens.



Veja staggered backwards, two steps, three, one, mouth working soundlessly, throat spasming up and down, all screamed out, unable to expel any more of his immense pain. He lurched forward and then went back again.



Max saw the bloody gash in the middle of his legs, the crimson rivulets pouring down his thighs.



Veja reached for his violated crotch and touched the mush below his dick.



Paul tossed the blood-soaked rocks and flesh away.



Veja brought his bloody fingers up to his eyes, studied them closely, and then, just as his face began to crumple into tears, he keeled back and slammed into the ground, cracking his skull.



He was dead.



Paul took out his gun and put a round in Veja's head. Then he dragged another soldier, screaming and pleading and crying, out of the shattered group. Paul slapped the man's face with a huge, bloody paw.



"You stay here and watch your friends. Just like you did when they raped the girl," he said and turned him around to face his comrades. He then shouted at the two guards who were watching Saggar. They shoved him over to his men.



"You are animal—monster!" Saggar yelled out at Paul. "You vill be punished for this."



Paul stepped away and whistled. The rocks began to fly.



The first volley came from the girl's family, who'd moved into position, opposite the rapists. They threw large rocks at them, over-and underarm, and fired smaller ones by catapult. All found their targets—heads were opened, brows were split, eyes were put out.



The rapists tried to run backwards but they met an immediate hail of rocks flying out of the darkness, hurled and shot at them by unseen hands. One soldier was knocked out, another dropped to the floor and pulled his legs up in fetal position.



The rocks flew into heads and faces and knees and chests. Max saw a man killed when one catapulted rock struck his cheek and spun him right into the path of another, high-velocity stone that caved his temple in and rammed skull bone into his brain.



Saggar was on all fours, scrambling around, feeling his way along the ground, blood covering his face from a gash in his forehead, one eye buried under a mound of swollen skin.



None of the rapists were left standing when the Le Fen family moved in, sticks and machetes in hand, Verité leading the way, helped along by her father. The other rock-throwers came out of the darkness and together they formed a circle around the fallen men.



Moments later, the sounds of beating and pounding and stabbing and slashing came from the circle. Max heard a few cries of pain, but it all seemed minor after Veja's screams that were still clearly echoing around his head.



The crowd worked on the bodies, letting out their hatred, sucking up as much raw vengeance as they could before their muscles gave out and tiredness got the better of them.



When they staggered away, they left behind a pulped vermilion mass, a gleaming, viscous lake of retribution.



A guard went around and put nominal bullets in the skulls that were still intact.



Paul looked at the driver.



"Now—you—I want you to go back to your barracks in Port-au-Prince and tell everyone what happened. Start with your friends and colleagues, then tell your commanding officer. Tell them I was responsible. Vincent Paul. You understand?"



The man nodded, his teeth chattering.



"And when you tell them what happened, tell them this from me—if any of you ever rape or harm any of our women and children in any way, we will kill you—like that," he said, pointing at the tangle of body parts. "And if any of you come looking for revenge, rounding up our people, we will all rise up and massacre each and every one of you. And that isn't a threat, it's a promise. Now go."



The driver started walking away, very slowly, head down, slouching, steps uncertain, as though they were the first he'd taken in a long while and half-expected his legs to give way. He put a good few meters between himself and the scene, and then he broke into a run and disappeared into the night like a man on fire who's spotted water.



Paul went to be with the family.



Max couldn't move. He was numb with shock and disgust, his mind paralyzed by conflict. He hated all rapists and, in theory, up to the moment it had happened, he had agreed with Paul's actions.



True, what the soldiers had done was evil, and their official "punishment" had been a joke, an insult to the victim, but justice hadn't been served by Paul's act. The girl hadn't got her life and innocence back, just the satisfaction of knowing that the rapists had been punished, that they'd suffered before dying. But what good would that do her next year, and the year after? What good was it doing her now?



Sure, the punishment Paul had meted out would be a deterrent—in Haiti—but once the UN troops moved on they'd do it somewhere else, in another land they'd been dispatched to "to keep the peace" in.



A better, more responsible way, would have been for Paul to have talked to the press, stirred up a major stink about the rape, and forced the UN to prosecute its troops and make it plain that such conduct was unacceptable.



But then Max thought of Sandra and asked himself what would he have done in Paul's place. Taken them in and waited a year for some judge to maybe sentence them to fifteen to life if the evidence stood up? No, of course not. He would have castrated the motherfuckers with his bare hands too.



What was he thinking, exactly? Paul was right. What did Paul give a fuck what the UN did elsewhere? This was his homeland and these were his people. That's as far as he saw.



Fair play. Fuck 'em.



Max sneaked away back to his car and drove off.



Chapter 29



WHAT PASSED FOR nightlife in Pétionville was in full swing when he drove down the main road leading to the market square. A few bars and restaurants had opened their doors wide out onto the sidewalk and lit up their painted signs to show they were ready for business. There was barely anyone there.



Max needed a drink and a little company around him to redress the balance, a little brightness and banality to chase away the shadowy aftershocks he was feeling in his gut and running up and down his veins. It had been years since he'd seen someone die, not since he'd shot those kids. They'd deserved it too, but that didn't make it any easier to absorb and move on from. A little dying always stayed with you. He was glad it wasn't as hard to deal with now as it was then, when he'd had more to live and care for. He'd watched cops gun down criminals and criminals murder cops. And then there were all those people he'd killed himself—in the line of duty, and a step or two over it. He didn't know how many—he couldn't bring himself to count—but he remembered all their faces, their expressions, those who'd begged for their lives, those who'd told him to go fuck himself, those who prayed, the one who'd forgiven him, the one who'd wanted his hand held, the one who'd blown his last breath in his face and the way it had smelled of fried gunpowder and bubblegum. His boss, Eldon Burns, had kept a tally of all the people he'd taken down, but then he was morbid that way, and he liked numbers. He kept his old Smith & Wesson .38 Special service revolver as a paperweight on his desk. There was a notch on the butt for every kill. Max had counted sixteen.



He passed La Coupole and spotted Huxley standing in the doorway talking to three streetkids. He parked the car and went over to the bar.



"Good to see you again, Max," Huxley said warmly as they pumped hands. The boys he'd been talking to shied away a little, the smaller hiding behind the taller of the trio.



Huxley said something to them. The taller boy babbled something back, talking fast and excitedly, a hoarse catch in his throat, making the sound of a flock of singing sparrows hitting a tin roof. He pointed to Max with his fingers and eyes, stabbing in his direction with both.



"What's he saying?" Max asked, guessing the boy'd been among his prospective attackers.



"He says to tell you he's sorry for the other night," Huxley said, frowning with incomprehension. Max looked at the kid. He had a small head where very little hair grew, and tiny eyes that shone like onyx buttons. The child seemed more fearful than apologetic. "He says he didn't know who you were."



"Who does he think I am?"



Huxley asked him. Max heard Vincent Paul's name in the ensuing babble.



"He says you're Paul's friend."



"His friend? I ain't—"



The boy interrupted him with another rush of words.



"He says Paul warned them to look out for you around here," Huxley translated, looking impressed. "You meet him?"



Max didn't answer.



"Ask the boy when he last saw him?"



"Yesterday," Huxley said. "Wanna grab a drink and fill me in?"



* * *



Huxley laughed when Max told him about what had happened after they'd last met.



"All you had to do was treat the kid with a little respect, just said no, firmly. He would've left you alone. They don't persist," Huxley explained. "Being rude to someone who's born with nothing to lose isn't wise—and being rude to them in their own country, on their own streets, is pretty fuckin' stupid, Max. You're lucky Vincent Paul came along when he did."



The bar was nearly empty and no music was playing. In the courtyard outside, however, was a large group of Americans. They sounded like Midwesterners, straw-sucking cowpokes out on the weekend. He heard the rifles being dry-fired and magazines being slapped into place.



Max was on his third straight Barbancourt. The measures were more than generous. The booze was starting to work its charms again, loosen him up.



"So, how was Shitty City? You went there today, right?" Huxley asked, lighting a cigarette. Max shot him a suspicious look.



"C'mon, Max. You smell like a skunk hit you." Huxley laughed. "You know how everyone here can tell a riot's coming? 'Cause the air smells like you—the smell of the Shitty City. When all the people come out of Cité Soleil and head for Port-au-Prince to bring down the government, the clouds turn their noses up, the wind blows in the opposite direction, and birds fall out of the sky. I know that smell. You can't fool me, Mingus. I'm Haitian."



Max realized he was still wearing his throwaway boots, caked to the toecaps in Cité Soleil muck.



"Sorry 'bout that."



"Don't worry. You find anything out there?" Huxley asked.



"Not much," Max said. He wasn't going to tell him what he'd witnessed. "Just some kind of relief operation—Vincent Paul's charity work."



"The green tents? Yeah, he's famous for that. That's why they love him in the slums. He looks after them. All free, paid for out of the proceeds of his drug trade. Guy's like a cocaine Castro."



Max laughed.



"Know where this place is?"



"No. It's like El Dorado. Nobody knows where it is or how to get there, but everyone swears it exists. You know how things go around here," Huxley said. "How's the investigation?"



"Early days," Max replied, sinking his drink.



The Americans came in. Marines, about thirty of them, walking heavily through the bar and out into the street, all armed, blacked up, and dressed head-to-toe for combat.



"What's goin' on? A raid?" Max asked quietly.



"No." Huxley smiled and shook his head as he watched the troops filing out. "You know how this whole 'invasion' went down? Not a single shot fired? No opposition. Well, a lot of the soldiers are pissed they didn't see any combat, so every couple of weeks they go downtown and play war games with the UN troops. The UN guys defend this old barracks in the Carrefour district of Port-au-Prince. The marines have got to go and try and take it."



"Sounds like fun," Max said sarcastically.



"There's a catch."



"Yeah?"



"They use live rounds."



"Bullshit!"



"No word of a lie."



"No!"



"On my mother."



"She alive?"



"Sure." Huxley laughed.



"What about casualties?"



"Not as high as you'd expect. There've been a couple of fatalities on both sides, but high command have covered it up—said it was an enemy attack or a blue-on-blue."



"I still don't believe you." Max chortled.



"Same as me till I saw it for myself," Huxley said, standing up.



"Where you goin'?"



"I've got a video camera in the car. I'm just waiting for one of the guys to take a direct hit so I can sell the tape to CNN."



"I thought you were here for a noble cause?" Max laughed.



"I am. But a man's gotta eat." Huxley laughed too. "Feel like coming?"



"Not tonight. I've had a full day. Maybe some other time. Don't get shot."



"You too. Take care."



They shook hands. Huxley took off after the troops. Max ordered another drink and stared at the still-smoldering cigarette butt the journalist had left behind, following the smoke up to the ceiling. He didn't care if what he'd just heard wasn't true. It was a good story and it was making him laugh. Right now that was all that mattered.



Chapter 30



MAX CALLED ALLAIN Carver the next morning and told him he wanted to interview all the servants who'd been working for them at the time of Charlie's kidnapping.



Allain said he'd fix it up for the following day.



* * *



Max interviewed fifteen servants in a small room on the first floor of the main house, overlooking the lawn and the thick perimeter of trees surrounding it. Other than a table and the chairs he and Chantale sat in, there was no furniture in the room. It quickly dawned on Max that the setup was a deliberate way of reinforcing the household's social code—servants always stood when spoken to. Max made a point of offering his seat to everyone he talked to. He was politely turned down and thanked for his kindness at every occasion by both the very old and the very young, all of them casting a quick, fearful look up at the only painting in the room—a large oil canvas of the present-day Gustav, dressed in his beige suit and black tie, glowering down on them above their interrogators. At his side, on a thick leather leash, sat a bulldog the same color as Gustav's suit, its head and expression bearing more than a passing resemblance to its master's gargoylic mien.



The Carver domestic staff were broadly divided into culinary, cleaning, mechanical, gardening, and security. Most of them worked directly for Gustav. Allain and Francesca employed their own retinue.



The interviews followed the same pattern. Max started with the old man's staff. He asked them their names, what they did, whom they worked with, how long they'd been there, where they were on the day of the kidnapping, and if they'd seen or heard anything suspicious in the weeks leading up to it. Other than their names, responsibilities, and length of service, their answers were very similar. On September 4, 1994, they'd been working in or around the house either with or in plain sight of several other people.



When he asked them about Eddie Faustin, he found that the bodyguard had seemingly passed through their lives like a perfect stranger. They all remembered him well enough but none had much else to say about him. They'd only known him by sight. Gustav Carver forbade the household staff from having any personal contact with his security, and vice versa. Even if they'd wanted to get acquainted with Faustin, it would have been next to impossible because he'd spent all day out of the house. They didn't see him when he finished his shifts either, because he didn't live in the servants' quarters with the rest of them, but in the main house, in one of the basement rooms reserved for key personnel.



The servants themselves were so alike in their smiling, benign deference, Max had a lot of trouble remembering any of them after one'd left the room and the next one came in.



They took a break for lunch, which was brought up to them—grilled fish so fresh they could still taste the sea in the meat, and a salad of tomatoes, kidney beans, and red and green peppers.



When they'd finished, Chantale rang the bell that had come with their food. The servants came into the room and cleared the plates.



"I meant to ask you about Noah's Ark?" Max said to Chantale, spotting the words as he rifled through his notebook for a clean page.



"Ask the next person who walks in," she said curtly. "They'll know more about it than me. They all come from there."



He did just that. The next interviews were with Allain and Francesca's retinue. Noah's Ark, he learned, was an orphanage school in Port-au-Prince, owned and run by the Carvers. The family recruited not just their domestic staff from there but virtually everyone who worked for them.



The new interviewees were different from Gustav's servants: they had clearly discernible personalities.



They opened up about Faustin. They described how they used to see him going through Francesca's rubbish, stealing things from the bins and taking them back to his room. When they'd cleaned out his room after his disappearance, they'd found a voodoo doll he'd made out of her hair, fingernail clippings, tissues, old lipstick tubes, and tampons. Some told Max they'd heard rumors that the bodyguard picked up light-skinned Dominican whores in Pétionville and paid them extra to wear long, blond wigs while he fucked them. Many said they'd often seen Faustin entering or leaving a bar called Nwoi et Rouge, run by his ex-Macoute friends. One or two muttered that they'd seen him taking Charlie's soiled nappies out of the rubbish, while the last person they interviewed claimed he'd overheard Faustin talking about a house he owned in Port-au-Prince.



* * *



They finished the interviews in the late afternoon. As they drove down the mountain toward Pétionville, Max opened the windows and let the air in. Chantale looked exhausted.



"Thanks for your help—again," he said, and then added, awkwardly, "I don't know what I'd do without you."



"Feel like getting a drink?" she offered, with a hint of a smile.



"Sure. Where do you suggest?"



"I'm sure you've got just the place in mind." She smiled.



"How about Eddie Faustin's old hangout?"



"You take me to the classiest joints," she said and laughed her lusty laugh.



Chapter 31



NWOI ET ROUGE was named after the colors of the Haitian flag under the Duvaliers. Black and red. Papa Doc had changed the flag's original blue to black to cement the country's complete break with its colonial past, to better reflect the country's largest ethnic majority, and to underline his beliefs in noirisme—black supremacy; beliefs that didn't extend to the woman he married—Simone, a light-skinned mulattresse. For many people, the revised flag's colors came to symbolize the darkest, bloodiest period in the country's already turbulent and violent history.



To Max, the flag recalled that of the Nazis, whose colors it shared. The coat of arms—cannons, muskets, and flagpoles dominated by a palm tree crowned with a ski hat—could have been the work of a stoned surfer with a yen for eighteenth-century military history. Who the fuck would ever take a place like that seriously?



The flag was proudly displayed behind the bar, between framed photographs of Papa and Baby Doc. Papa was dark and white-haired, his thick, black-rimmed glasses slightly humanizing a pinched face whose features suggested a limitless capacity for cruelty. His son, Jean-Claude, was a doughy lump with soft, Arabic features, bronze skin, and dopey eyes.



The bar was in a stand-alone one-room house on a stretch of road between the end of the mountain and the start of Pétionville. It was easy to miss, yet easy to find if you were looking for it.



When Max had stepped in with Chantale, the first thing he'd noticed hadn't been the flag or the portraits, but the heavyset old man sweeping the floor around a wide pool of light cast by a single lightbulb, burning so brightly at the end of its flex, it seemed almost liquid, a drop of molten steel gathering volume before dropping to the ground and burning a hole all the way through the cement floor.



"Bond-joor." Max nodded.



"Bon-soie," the man corrected him. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, loose, faded blue jeans held up by red suspenders, and a pair of worn open-toe sandals. He'd swept the dirt into a small, brownish pile to his left.



There was a watercooler behind the bar, a long row of clear bottles lined up next to it, and, at the very end, right before a tall fan, Max read the word TAFFIA, written in crude block capitals on a blackboard. Below were two equations:



ТЕЛЕГРАМ

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Книжный Вестник
БИБЛИОТЕКИ

Библиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории

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