Max searched the bar for seats and saw none at all. There were small towers of crates stacked against the walls. He guessed the patrons arranged those as stools and tables. This was drinking at its most rudimentary, frontier-style.



The man looked at Chantale and started talking to her, his voice making the sounds of a train going off the rails and rolling down a long, steep hill, dumping its cargo of logs with every turn and bounce and crash. Max heard the name "Carver" crop up twice in the spill.



"He says if you're looking for the Carver boy too, you're wasting your time with him," Chantale translated. "He'll tell you what he told the others."



"What's that?" Max asked the man, trying to meet his eye but failing to, because the way he stood under the bulb drowned them in shadows. The man replied, laughed, and waved.



"He hasn't got him. Good-bye."



"Very funny," Max said. His head was beginning to sweat. He felt the sweat sprouting all over his scalp, neighboring droplets fusing, seeking out others, finding them, fusing, building up, getting set to run. The bar stank of stale smoke, sweat, and, above all, of ether.



"Why did they think you had the boy?" Max asked.



"Because of my great friend, Eddie Faustin," the man answered and pointed off to his right.



Max went over to where the lightbulb's reflection marked out a single photograph in a frame. He recognized Faustin straightaway—he'd inherited the family resemblance to a furious donkey: big head, bulbous nose, protruding chin, eyes, and ears, and a genetically transferred scowl with flared nostrils and fully exposed upper teeth. Faustin wasn't a big guy. His body was slight, too small for his head. Max was surprised he'd survived the bullet he'd taken for Carver.



In the picture, he was standing between two people—his brother, Salazar, and the barman, who had a revolver in his hand and one booted foot parked on a dead body. Jagged exclamation-marks of blood splashed the ground near the corpse's head and back. The hands and feet had been tied. The trio were smiling proudly for the camera.



"Those were good times," the barman said.



Max turned and saw him smirking through a few crooked teeth with plenty of empty space in between them.



"Who took the picture?"



"I can't remember," the barman replied, leering at Chantale as she translated, the space around his eyes twitching as his head moved gently up and down her curves, his grip fastening on his broomstick.



Just then, there was a quiet fff-fut, as something struck the lightbulb and fell to the ground with a faint trail of smoke. It was a moth, wings instantly burned useless by the bulb. It lay on its back for a moment, struggling furiously in the air before it ceased all motion.



The man chuckled and swept the moth into the pile he was building. When Max looked at it, he saw it was made up of nothing but dead moths. The broom was crude and homemade—a long stick with a bunch of dried reeds wrapped around the end for a brush.



"What's your name?"



"Bedouin," the man said, straightening up a little.



"Bedouin…Désyr?" Chantale asked, her tone dropping to a hush.



"Oui. Le męme."



"Dieu…" Chantale whispered, stepping back.



"What is it?" Max asked her, moving in.



"I'll tell you later," she said. "When we're out of here."



Another moth self-destructed on the bulb. It fell on Max's head, bounced off, and landed burning and kicking on his shoulder. He flicked it off. Désyr tutted and said something under his breath as he walked over with his broom and swiped the dead insect deftly across the floor into the pile as though it were a puck.



"Taffia?" he said to Max, making a drinking motion with his hand.



Max nodded and followed Désyr to the bar. Désyr got a paper cup from under the counter and held it under the water cooler. The liquid came out, releasing an air bubble inside the plastic bottle and a sharp, chemical smell that was similar to gasoline.



Désyr handed the paper cup to Max. Max took it. The fumes stung his eyes.



"People drink this?" he asked Chantale.



Désyr chuckled.



"Yeah. They also clean and run their engines on it when they can't get gas. Runs almost as well. It's a hundred-and-eighty-proof rum. Be very careful with that. It can make you go blind," Chantale replied.



Max took a very small sip of taffia. It was so strong it was tasteless and burned his tongue all the way down to his throat.



"Jesus!" Max said, wanting to spit it out.



Désyr laughed and motioned to Max to throw it down his throat in one go. Max sensed that this might win him a little credibility with the bar owner, and he might tell him something more about Faustin and the kidnapping. There was only about a finger of booze in the cup.



He took a deep breath and tossed back the taffia. It hit the ends of his mouth like a firebomb and proceeded to burn its trail all the way down into his stomach.



The alcohol rush was almost instantaneous—the equivalent of five double bourbons on an empty stomach smashing into him all at once, filling his head with a dizzy euphoria. His vision blurred and swayed as his eyes tried to regain focus. Tears ran down his face and blood rushed to his head. His temples pounded. His nose dripped. The hit was like coke and amyl nitrate and smelling salts all rolled into one. Only he didn't feel remotely good. He gripped the bar but his palms were sweaty and his hands slid back. He felt a turbulence in his stomach. He breathed deep, smelling nothing but the taffia. What the fuck was he thinking drinking that shit?



"Bravo blan!" Désyr shouted and clapped his hands in front of him.



"Are you OK, Max?" Chantale said in his ear as she placed a steadying hand against his back.



"Fuck's it look like?" he heard himself think but not speak. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly, then another, and another after that. The air coming out of his mouth was hot. He repeated his breathing, keeping his eyes locked on Désyr, who was watching him with high amusement, no doubt waiting for him to keel over.



The nausea passed, as did the spinning in his head.



"I'm OK," he said to Chantale. "Thanks."



Désyr shook another cup at him. Max waved his hand no. Désyr laughed and spilled more capsized-train talk Chantale's way.



"He says you're not only the only white man who's ever drunk taffia without passing out—very few Haitians have ever managed it."



"That's great," Max said. "Tell him I'll buy him a drink."



"Thank you," Chantale said, after she'd asked Désyr. "But he doesn't touch the stuff."



Max and Désyr both laughed at once.



"Eddie Faustin drank here, didn't he?"



"Oui. Bien sűr," Désyr said, taking a bottle of Barbancourt from under the counter and pouring some out into a paper cup. "Before he died he drank more than usual."



"Did he say why?"



"He was coming to the end of his future and this made him nervous."



"He knew he was gonna die?"



"No. Not at all. He told me his houngan had predicted things for him—good things, women things," Désyr said, leering at Chantale and sipping his rum. He took a tobacco pouch out of his trouser pocket and rolled himself a cigarette. "He was in love with the blond Carver woman. I told him it was madness, impossible—him and her?" He struck a match on the countertop and lit it. "That's when he went to Leballec."



"This his hoone-gun?"



"He only deals in black magic," Chantale explained. "They say you go to him if you're ready to sell your soul. He doesn't accept cash like the other black magicians do—he takes…I don't know. Nobody knows for sure, except those who've gone to him."



"Did Faustin tell you what happened when he went to see Le—the hoone-gun?" Max asked Désyr.



"No. But he changed. Before he used to talk and laugh about old times. He used to play dominoes and cards with us, but not after he'd been to see Leballec. He'd stand where you are now and just drink. Sometimes he'd drink a whole bottle."



"Of that shit?"



"Yes. But it didn't affect him."



Max started to think that maybe the houngan had asked Faustin to kidnap Charlie.



"Did he ever talk to you about the boy? Charlie?"



"Yes." Désyr laughed. "He said the boy hated him. He said the boy could read his mind. He said he couldn't wait to get rid of him."



"He said that?"



"Yes. But he didn't steal the boy."



"Who did?"



"Nobody took him. The boy's dead."



"How do you know?"



"I've heard that he was killed by the people who attacked the car. They trampled him to death."



"No one found the body."



"Cela se mange," Désyr said and extinguished his cigarette by pinching the burning tip.



"What did he just say, Chantale?"



"He said…"



"Le peuple avait faim. Tout le monde avait faim. Quand on a faim on oublie nos obligations."



"He said…" Chantale began. "He said they ate him."



"Bull-shit!"



"That's what he said."



The taffia had filled Max's stomach and chest with a strong heat. He could hear the low murmur of digestive gases as they worked their way up his gut.



"This Le—"



"—Ballec," Chantale finished.



"This Le-Ballack? Where does he live? Where can I find him?"



"Far from here."



"Where?"



Another train accident, this one prolonged, because Chantale kept on either interrupting him or asking more questions. Max listened out for familiar words. Désyr said "oh" a few times, Chantale said something like "zur." Then he heard something he recognized.



"Clarinette."



"What did he say about clarinet?" Max interrupted them.



"He says you'll find Leballec in Saut d'Eau."



"The voodoo waterfalls?" Max asked. Where Beeson and Medd both went before they disappeared. "What about the clarinet?"



"It's a town—a small town—closest to the waterfall. It's called Clarinette. It's where Leballec lives. Faustin used to go there to see him."



"Have you heard of this place, Chantale?"



"Not of the town, but that doesn't mean anything. Someone sets up a home on a piece of land here, gives it a name, it becomes a village."



Max looked at Désyr.



"You told the others about this place, didn't you? The other blanks who came here?"



Désyr shook his head.



"Non monsieur." Then he chuckled. "I couldn't. They failed the taffia test."



"They pass out?"



"No. They refused to drink my drink. So I told them nothing."



"So, how come they went to So—to the waterfalls?"



"I don't know. I didn't tell them. Maybe somebody else did. I wasn't Eddie's only friend. Were they looking for Leballec?"



"I don't know."



"Then maybe they went there for another reason."



"Maybe," Max said.



Another moth flew into the bulb and dropped to the floor. Very soon after, Max heard another go the same way, and then, almost simultaneously, two moths smacked into the light and made it shudder and shake.



Désyr clapped a friendly paw on his shoulder.



"I like you, blanc, so I'll tell you this: if you go to Saut d'Eau, make sure you leave before midnight passes. White magic—good magic—honest magic is done before midnight," he said, addressing Chantale directly. "Black magic is done after midnight. Don't forget it."



"Why are you helping me?" Max asked.



"Why not?" Désyr laughed.



Chapter 32



CHANTALE DROVE MAX to a café where she ordered a pot of strong coffee and a bottle of water. Over the next hour, he got himself sobered up and cleared the taffia from his head.



"You always so reckless? It could have been battery acid for all you knew."



"I'm the try-most-things-once kinda guy," Max said. "Anyway, why would he have wanted to poison me?"



"Bedouin Désyr? I wouldn't put anything past him. They used to call him 'Bisou-Bisou.' It literally means 'Bedouin Le Baiseur.' Bedouin The Stud. Only it wasn't meant the way you'd think. Back when he was a Macoute, Bedouin Désyr was a serial rapist. His thing was raping wives in front of their husbands, mothers in front of their children, daughters in front of their fathers—the age didn't matter."



"How come he's still alive? And out in the open like that?"



"Myths are stronger than death, Max. A lot of people are still terrified of the Macoutes," Chantale explained. "Very few of them were ever brought to trial for all the things they did. Even then they went to prison for a week and got let out. Some got killed by the mobs. But most of them just disappeared, went to another part of the country, went abroad, went to the Dominican Republic. The cleverer ones joined the army or hooked up with Aristide."



"Aristide?" Max said. "I thought he was supposed to be against all that."



It was now nighttime. They were the only ones in the café. The overhead fan was on and the radio was playing compas, loud enough to distract from the sounds spilling in from the street outside and the creaking blades beating at the dead hot air inside. Right in between the music and the sidewalk hubbub, Max heard the familiar exploratory rhythms of the drums starting up in the mountains.



"That's how he started out," Chantale said. "I believed in him. A lot of people did. Not just the poor."



"Don't tell me." Max smiled. "Us evil racist white Americans decided we didn't want another Commie on our doorstep—especially not a black one—so we had him overthrown."



"Not quite," Chantale retorted. "Aristide turned into Papa Doc quicker than it took Papa Doc to turn into Papa Doc. He started sending the mobs around to beat up or kill his opponents. When the papal nuncio criticized what was going on, he had him beaten up and stripped naked in the street. That's when people decided enough was enough, and the army took over—with the blessing of President Bush and the CIA."



"So what's Aristide doing back here?"



"Bill Clinton had a reelection this year. In 1993, barely a year into his first term, he'd messed up big time in Somalia. His approval ratings took a dive. America suddenly looked weak, vulnerable. He had to do something to get his credibility back. Restoring a president deposed by a coup seemed like a good idea. America as champions of democracy—even if it was Aristide—the third Duvalier in waiting," Chantale explained. "They've got him on a leash now, so he'll have to behave himself until Clinton's gone. Then who knows? Hopefully I'll be far away from here," she said, looking out on the street where a UN car had stopped and the driver was handing out cartons of cigarettes to someone on the street.



"Where are you planning on going?"



"Back to America, I suppose. Maybe I'll move to L.A. Nothing left for me in Florida," Chantale said. "What about you? What'll you do when you've finished here?"



"I don't have the faintest idea." Max laughed.



"Thought of moving on yourself?"



"What? Like to L.A.?" Max looked at her and met her eyes. She looked down. "L.A. ain't my scene, Chantale."



"I thought you said you were the try-most-things-once kind."



"I know L.A." He laughed again. "Did a few cases out there. Hated it every time. Too sprawled out, disconnected. Worked twice as fast so I could get out fast. Movies, résumés, head shots, tit jobs, and bullshit. Everyone tryin' to crawl through the same hole. Lots of people gettin' left out. Victims and broken dreams. I've got that kind of shit at home—only there I actually feel sorry for some of them. Their hard-luck stories change a bit every time. In L.A. they're all reading off the same page. You're better off staying here if you're gonna move there."



"I'm not staying here a second longer than I have to." She shook her head.



"That bad?"



"No, but not much better." She sighed. "I had happy memories of growing up here, but when I came back whatever I'd known was all gone. I guess I had a happy childhood. Made coming back here as an adult that much harder, disappointing."



A couple walked in and greeted the waiter with a handshake. First-to third-episode daters, Max decided, still checking each other out, circling, everything formal and polite, timing the move. They were in their late twenties, well dressed. The guy ironed his jeans and the woman had just bought hers or only wore them on special occasions. They both sported polo shirts, hers turquoise, his bottle-green. The waiter showed them to a corner seat. Chantale watched them with a wistful smile.



"Tell me about Faustin's hoon-gan."



"Leballec?" she said, lowering her voice. "First up, he's not a houngan. Houngans are good. Leballec is a bokor—a black magician. He's supposed to be as powerful as Dufour, but a hundred times worse.



"You know, in life, certain things aren't meant to happen to you. Say you're in love with someone who just doesn't want to know, or you really want a job you can't have—disappointments, things that don't go your way. Most people shrug their shoulders and move on to the next thing. Here people go to their houngan or their mambo. They look into the future and see whether or not the person's desires are going to be fulfilled for them. If they're not, the houngan or mambo might try to fix it—as long as it's not going to alter the direction of the person's life. But a lot of things you want but can't have are just not meant to be."



"So they go to Le Balack?"



"His kind, yes. They call them 'Les Ombres de Dieu.' God's shadows. Those who walk behind God, in the dark, where He doesn't look. They give you what you're not supposed to have," Chantale whispered, looking fearful.



"How?"



"Remember what Dufour told you about black magic? How they use children to fool your guardian angels?"



"Le Balack kills kids?"



"I don't want to say," Chantale said, sitting back. "No one knows for sure what they do. That's between the people he's working for and him. But it's guaranteed to be extreme."



"What kind of people would go to him? Generally?"



"People who've lost all hope. Desperate people. People at death's door."



"That's everybody sometime," Max said.



"Faustin went."



"To make Francesca Carver fall in love with him—or whatever. Maybe that's why he stole Charlie," Max said, thinking things through. "Dufour said Charlie was very special. Le Balack thought so too."



"Maybe," Chantale said. "Maybe not. Maybe Charlie was payment."



"Payment?"



"Les Ombres never ask you for money. They ask you to do something for them in return."



"Like a kidnapping?"



"Or a murder."



"What happens if the spell doesn't work?"



"They don't ask you to do anything for them upfront, not until you've got what you want. Then you start paying. That's how it starts."



"What?"



"Well, whatever you cast out you get back three times over. Good and bad," Chantale said. "It's how things maintain their balance. No bad deed goes unpunished. In the early eighties, before AIDS hit the headlines, Jean-Claude Duvalier had a mistress and a mister. He was bisexual. The mistress was called Véronique, the boyfriend was called Robert. Véronique got jealous of Robert, who was getting more attention from Jean-Claude. She was scared of losing favor and scared of getting dumped for a man. So she went to Leballec. I don't know what she asked for but Robert died quite unexpectedly in the middle of Port-au-Prince. Like that—" she snapped her fingers "—at the wheel. When they opened him up they found water in his lungs, like he'd drowned."



"Couldn't someone have drowned him and dumped him in the car?"



"Lots of people saw him driving the car. He even stopped to buy cigarettes a few minutes before he died," said Chantale. "Word got back to Jean-Claude that Véronique had been seen at Saut d'Eau with Leballec. He knew what that meant. He was terrified of Leballec. Even Papa Doc was said to be scared of him. He cut Véronique off. A month later they found her, her mother, and two of her brothers drowned in the family swimming pool."



"Any idea what this Le Balack looks like?" Max asked. He'd recovered from the taffia, although he felt tired.



"No. No one I know's ever seen him. When are we going to look for him?"



"How about tomorrow?"



"How about the day after? It's a long trip over bad road. We'll have to leave here early—three or four in the morning," she said, looking at her watch. "You can get some rest, sleep off the taffia, go at it fresh."



She was talking sense. He'd need a clear head if he was going to the place where one of his predecessors had disappeared and the other had returned from with his torso opened up from neck to navel.



Chapter 33



"IT'S NOT THAT we don't care. We do—only we appear not to. And appearance is everything," Allain Carver said with a grin. He'd woken Max up three hours earlier with a phone call telling him to meet up at Noah's Ark.



Max was badly hungover, feeling much worse than he had the night before, with a sack of greasy cannonballs for a stomach and a headache that felt like someone was using his skull for a mixing bowl. He couldn't understand it. He was pretty much OK when he'd got out of bed, but the sickness and the pain had kicked in the minute he'd finished his first cup of coffee. He'd taken four extra-strength migraine pills, but they hadn't done a thing.



Noah's Ark was situated on a sideroad off the Boulevard Harry Truman. Carver led Max and Chantale through a small wrought-iron bar gate and up a white footpath bordered with dark-blue bricks. They crossed a lush lawn, part-shaded by leaning coconut palms and dotted with sprinklers whose mist made miniature rainbows above the ground. To the right was a small playground with swings, seesaws, a slide, and a climbing frame.



The path ended at the steps of an impressive two-story house with bright, whitewashed walls and a navy-blue tiled roof. The window frames and the front door were also navy blue. The institution's emblem—a dark blue boat with a house in the middle of it instead of a sail—appeared as a relief on the wall above the door.



Once inside, they came face-to-face with a mural of a white man in a safari suit. He held two seminaked Haitian children—a boy and a girl, dressed in rags—by the hand. He was leading them away from a dark village whose inhabitants were all either dead or hideously deformed. The man was looking straight at the viewer, his jaw set in grim determination, his face assuming a heroic cast. The sky behind them was stormy with blades of lightning splitting the horizon and spears of rain attacking the diseased township. The man and his charges were dry and bathed in the golden hue of a rising sun.



"That's my father," Allain said.



When Max looked a little harder, he indeed recognized Gustav in his younger days, albeit in a very flattering light, making him look a lot more like his son than his true self.



As he led them down a corridor into the heart of the institution, Carver explained that Gustav had played a big part in helping his friend François Duvalier cure the population of yaws—a highly contagious tropical disease that, untreated, caused its victims to be covered in painful, runny sores before losing their noses, lips, and eventually limbs, which withered up into the color and shape of unattended cigarette ash before dropping off. He'd bought all the medicines and supplies from America and helped them reach Duvalier. On a visit to the village depicted in the mural, Gustav had come across two orphans, a boy and a girl. He decided to rescue them and look after them. This later led to the establishment of a Carver-funded orphanage school.



The corridor they walked down was lined with annual school photographs going back to 1962. Farther on, there were wide corkboards covered with children's drawings, grouped into age ranges starting at four and ending at twelve. There were so few sketches in the teenage category that they had all been grouped on the board they didn't even half fill, and even those had been done by only two people, both exceptionally gifted.



Carver went on to explain that Noah's Ark cared for children from birth through their teens or college graduation. They were fed, clothed, housed, and educated according to either the French or American curriculum. French was the primary language in Noah's Ark, but pupils who showed an aptitude for English—as many unsurprisingly did, with the prevalence of American television and music in their lives—were steered toward the American system. French classes were taught downstairs, English upstairs. Once they had finished their formal education, those who wanted to were sent to college, fully funded by the Carvers.



There were classrooms on either side of the corridor. Max looked through the windows in the doors and saw small, even-numbered groups of pupils, boys and girls, all dressed in smart uniforms of blue skirts or shorts and white blouses or shirts. They were all immaculately turned out and paid complete attention to their teachers, even in the back rows. Max couldn't imagine any classroom in America being so orderly, so disciplined, and so interested in their lessons.



"So what's the catch?" Max asked as they headed to the next floor.



"Catch?"



"The Carvers are businessmen. You don't give money away. What do you get out of it? It can't be publicity because you're too rich to care what people think about you."



"Simple," Carver said with a smile. "They finish their studies, they come and work for us."



"All of them?"



"Yes, we have many businesses—worldwide, not just here. They can work in the U.S., the U.K., France, Japan, Germany."



"What if they get a better offer elsewhere?"



"Ah—there's what you'd call a 'catch.'" Carver laughed. "From the age of sixteen all pupils at Noah's Ark sign a contract, stating that upon completion of their studies, they will either work for us until they have repaid our investment in them—"



"Investment?" Max said. "Since when's charity been about investing?"



"Did I ever say this was a charity?" Carver said.



Max heard English being spoken in a mixture of American and Franco-Haitian accents as they toured the next floor, looking into the classrooms, seeing the same model pupils.



"It usually takes a period of six to seven years to repay our investment—more for girls, eight or nine years," Carver said. "Of course they can simply repay us the full amount in one go and they're free."



"But that doesn't ever happen because where are they gonna get that kind of cash from?" Max said, anger in his tone and eyes. "I mean, it's not like they're like you, Mr. Carver? Born breathing in silver and gold."



"I can't help being born rich any more than they can help being born into poverty, Max," Carver replied, his thin lips smiling uneasily. "I understand your misgivings, but they're perfectly happy with the arrangement. We have a ninety-five percent retention rate. Take—for example—the person teaching here." He pointed to a petite, light-skinned woman in a roomy olive-green dress that seemed to have been designed with a monk in mind, so close was it to a habit. "Eloise Krolak. One of ours. She's the headmistress here."



"Krolak? Is that Polish?" Max asked, studying the headmistress a little closer. Her hair, pulled back in a severe bun, was black save a halo of gray at the roots. She had a small, protruding mouth and a slight overbite. When she spoke, she resembled a rodent gnawing at a piece of soft food.



"We originally found Eloise outside the town of Jérémie. A lot of the people are very light-skinned. Many have blue eyes like Eloise. They descend directly from a garrison of Polish soldiers who deserted Napoleon's army to fight for Toussaint L'Ouverture. Once they'd helped overthrow the French, Toussaint gave the soldiers Jérémie as a reward. They intermarried and produced some quite beautiful people."



With exceptions, Max thought, looking at the headmistress.



They moved on to the next floor. Carver showed them the mess hall and the staff areas—a common room and a variety of offices.



"Where do the kids sleep?" Max asked.



"In Pétionville. They're driven in every morning and taken home at the end of the day," Carver said. "This is the junior house. Up until twelve. There's another Noah's Ark on the next road."



"You only told me about the successful ones, right? The smart ones?" Max said.



"I don't follow."



"Your servants came from here too, right?"



"We can't all be high flyers, Max. Airspace is limited. Some of us have to walk."



"So, how do you separate them? High and low? Do the low walkers show an aptitude for shining shoes?" Max said, trying and failing to keep the indignation out of his voice. Here was a people whose ancestors had gone to war to free themselves from slavery, and here were the Carvers as good as putting them right back where they'd started.



"You're not from here so you don't understand, Max," Allain replied, an impatient edge to his voice. "We make a commitment to each and every one of these kids here for life. We look after them. We find something for them to do—something that suits them, something that earns them money, something that gives them dignity. The jobs we provide allow them to build or buy a house and some clothes, allows them to eat and have a better standard of living than ninety percent of the poor bastards you see in the streets. And if we could help all of them, believe me we would. But we're not that rich.



"You're judging us—this place—what we're doing—by your American standards—this empty rhetoric of yours—liberty, human rights, democracy. They're just empty words to you people. You talk of these things, yet blacks in your country only got the same rights as you less than forty years ago," Carver said, lowering his voice but driving his point home with well-aimed fury. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the sweat that had accumulated on his upper lip.



There were things Max could have said right then in defense of his homeland, about how America at least offered people a choice, about how anyone with enough will, determination, discipline, and drive could make a success of themselves there, and how it was still the land of opportunity. But he didn't go there. This wasn't the time and place for a debate.



"Ever make a mistake?" Max asked instead. "Have an Einstein cleaning your toilet all his life?"



"No. Never," Carver replied defiantly. "Anybody can be an idiot but not everybody can be intelligent."



"I see," Max said.



"You don't approve, do you? You don't think it's fair?"



"As you said, Mr. Carver. This ain't my country. I'm just a dumb-ass American with a head full of rhetoric and no right to talk about right and wrong," Max replied sarcastically.



"The average life expectancy here is around forty-eight. That means you're middle-aged at twenty-four." Carver's tone got back on an even keel. "People who work for us, who go through our system, they live beyond that. They get old. They see their children grow up. Just like people are meant to.



"We are saving lives and we are giving lives. You might not understand but the whole of Europe used to run that way before the French Revolution. The rich looked after the poor.



"Do you know that when they see us coming, people abandon their children so we might pick them up and give them a better life? It happens all the time. What you see here may look bad from a distance, Max, but close up it's really quite the opposite."



Chapter 34



THEY LEFT FOR Saut d'Eau at four a.m. the following day, Chantale at the wheel. The waterfalls were only forty miles north of Port-au-Prince, but thirty of those constituted the worst roads in Haiti. When the weather was good, a round trip by car took an average of ten hours; when it was bad, it took a day and a half.



Chantale had brought a small hamper of food for the trip. Although there were plenty of places to stop off along the way, and the waterfalls had a little tourist town nearby called Ville Bonheur, you could never be sure what you were eating. Household pets and pests alike were often passed off as pork, chicken, and beef.



"Why are you going to Saut d'Eau—exactly?" Chantale asked.



"First up: I want to talk to this Le Balek guy. Faustin knew who kidnapped Charlie. He might've shared the information, or left a clue with him. Plus Clarinet was the last place my predecessors went to before they disappeared. I want to find out why, what it was they saw or heard. They must've been on to something."



"Don't you think whoever's behind this would've taken care of any loose bits of evidence by now?"



"Yeah." Max nodded. "But you never know. Maybe they overlooked something. There's always that chance."



"Slim," Chantale said.



"Way it always is. You always hope your perp's dumber and sloppier than you are. Sometimes you get lucky." Max chuckled.



"You didn't mention Filius Dufour."



"What, that go-to-the-source-of-the-myth crap? Last thing I'm gonna do is act on a fortune-teller's advice. I deal in fact, not fantasy. You know an investigation's running on fumes when you bring the occult in as a partner," Max said.



"I don't think you believe that," Chantale said.



"If he cared about the kid and really knew anything he'd have said."



"Maybe he wasn't allowed to say anything."



"Oh? Who by? The ghosts he talks to—or whatever the fuck he does. Come on, Chantale! The guy knows as much as me—nothing, nada, bupkis."



For the first hour, they drove in complete darkness, leaving Pétionville and crossing a billboard–and telegraph–pole studded plain on their way to the mountains. The ride was surprisingly smooth until they took a long hairpin bend around the first hills, and the terrain turned first to gravel and then to rubble. Chantale killed the speed and turned on the radio. American Forces Radio was playing "I Wish I" by R. Kelly. Chantale quickly changed the dial and got the Wu Tang Clan rapping "America"; then she turned to another station and got Haitian talk radio, the next was broadcasting a church service, the ones after that were from the Dominican Republic and blasted out a mixture of salsa, talk, a sports match—probably soccer, judging from the pace—and another church service—all in Spanish. It made Max smile, because it reminded him of Miami radio—only far less corporate and slick than they would ever have allowed back home.



Chantale dug a cassette tape out of her bag and pushed it into the player. She pressed PLAY.



"Sweet Micky," she explained.



It was a recording of a concert. Sweet Micky had a voice like sandpaper cleaning a cheese grater, his singing was a repertoire of shouts, barks, screams, laughter, and—for the higher notes—the whining yelps of fighting cats; the music behind him was madcap funk, played at a frenetic pace that didn't let up. It was like nothing Max had ever heard before. Chantale was getting into the song, dancing with her whole body, tapping her hands on the wheel and her feet on the pedals, moving her head, torso, and hips. She whispered the chorus—"Tirez sur la gâchette—baff!—baff!—baff!"—making her hand into a gun shape and stabbing at the air, smiling away to herself, her eyes alive with joy and aggression, as she dipped below the surface and connected with the song's furious groove.



"I guess that wasn't 'Imagine all the people, livin' life in peace'?" Max said when the song finished and she ejected the tape.



"No," she said. "It's about the raras. It's a kind of traveling dance people do at carnival time—moving through the streets, village to village. It lasts for days. Pretty wild too. Plenty of orgies and murders."



"Sounds fun," Max quipped.



"You might see it."



"When is it?"



"Before Easter."



"Not if I can help it." Max laughed.



"Are you going to stay here until you find Charlie?"



"I hope it doesn't take me that long, but yeah, I'll be here until the job's done."



By the green and red lights of the dashboard, Max saw her smile.



"What'll you do if the trail runs cold?" she asked.



"It ain't exactly hot now. We're checking out rumors, myths, hearsay. Nothin' solid."



"What about when those run out? What then?"



"We'll see."



"What if he's dead?"



"He probably is, if I gotta level with you. We're just gonna have to find the body and the person or persons who took his life—and why. Motive's always important," Max said.



"You're not the kind that gives up, are you?"



"I don't believe in unfinished business."



"Did you get that from childhood?" she asked, looking across at him.



"Yeah, I guess. Not from my parents. I didn't know my dad. He took off when I was six and never came back. Closest I had to a dad was this guy called Eldon Burns. He was a cop who ran this boxing gym in Liberty City. Trained local kids. I went there aged twelve. He taught me to fight—and much more. I learned some of my life's lessons in the ring. Eldon had these rules taped to the changing-room walls, so's you wouldn't miss 'em. One of 'em was 'Always finish what you start.' If it's a race and you're comin' in last, don't pussy out and walk the rest of the way—run to the finish line anyway. If it's a fight and you're gettin' beat—don't say 'no mas' and quit on your stool, fight to the last bell." Max smiled at the memory. "'Go out standing,' he'd say, 'and one day you will be out-standing.' It's a good rule."



"Was he why you became a cop?"



"Yeah," Max said. "He was my boss back in them days too."



"Are you still in touch?"



"Not directly," Max said. He and Eldon had fallen out before he'd gone to prison and they hadn't spoken in over eight years. Eldon had come through for him at his trial and he'd been there at Sandra's funeral, but he'd done both out of duty, to square favors. They were quits now.



Chantale sensed Max's ambivalence and turned the radio back on, rolling the dial until she came to some unobtrusive piano picking out the notes of "I Wanna Be Around."



The sun was starting to rise and the mountains were appearing ahead of them, peaks silhouetted black against a sky painted shades of black, indigo, and mauve by the dawn.



"What about you?" Max asked. "How's your mother?"



"Dying," she said. "Slowly. Sometimes painfully. She's saying she'll be glad when it's over."



"What's your dad doin'?"



"Never knew him," Chantale said. "My mother got pregnant during a ceremony. She was possessed by a spirit at the time, so was my father. It's called 'chevalier.' It means 'knight' in French, or 'ridden by the gods' in our language."



"So you're a god's child?" Max quipped.



"Aren't we all, Max?" she countered with a smile.



"That ever happen to you—Chevrolet?"



"Chevalier not Chevrolet," she corrected him with mock indignation. "And no. It hasn't. I haven't been to a ceremony since I was a teenager."



"There's always time," Max said.



She turned and gave him a look he felt in his crotch—bedroom eyes coupled with a searching gaze. He couldn't stop his eyes from slipping down to her mouth and the small, dark brown mole under her bottom lip. It wasn't perfectly oval, more like a comma that had been knocked on its back. Not for the first time he wondered what she was like in bed and guessed she was spectacular.



* * *



It was now light. The road they were taking was a dirt track cut into a dry, barren plain of white rocks, boulders, and—once in a while—the carcasses of dead animals, picked clean and bleached pale. There were no trees or bushes in sight, only cacti. It reminded him of postcards he'd received from friends who'd taken a trip to the great southwestern states.



They drove up into the mountains. They were nothing like the ones he had back home. He'd been to the Rockies and the Appalachians, but these were completely different. They were brown, barren mounds of dead earth, being slowly but systematically eroded by every breath of wind, every drop of rain. It was hard to imagine that the whole island had once been rainforest; that this environmental catastrophe of a place had had life, that it had been the commercial cornerstone of a foreign empire. He tried to imagine what the people who lived in the mountains would look like, and he came up with an Ethiopian famine victim.



But he was wrong.



They might have been every bit as poor, but the country people lived somewhat better than the miserable souls in town. The children, although thin, didn't have the bloated bodies and starved, haunted looks of their Port-au-Prince counterparts. The villages they passed weren't anything like the desperate hovels of Cité Soleil. They were collections of small huts with thatched roofs and thick walls painted in bright colors—reds, greens, blues, yellows, and whites. Even the animals looked better off: the pigs less like goats, the goats less like dogs, the dogs less like foxes, the chickens less like anorexic pigeons.



The road got bad and they slowed to a crawl. They had to drive around potholes five feet deep, drive in and out of craters, creep around hairpin bends in case someone was coming their way. They saw no cars at all, but there were a few wrecks, stripped right down to pencil outlines. He wondered what had become of the drivers.



Despite the air-conditioning keeping the car cool, Max could feel the heat outside, pouring down out of the light blue, cloudless sky.



"Allain didn't tell you everything about Noah's Ark," Chantale said. "Not surprisingly—given your attitude."



"You think I was out of line, sayin' what I did?"



"You were both right," she answered. "Yeah, it's wrong, but look at this place. More people than crops."



"What didn't he tell me?"



"Background stuff, about the contracts. All the time those children are growing up, they're constantly reminded where they came from and who it was who took them away from that. They're taken to Cité Soleil, to Carrefour, to other nasty places. They get to see people dying of starvation and disease—not to teach them charity or compassion, but to teach them gratitude and respect, to teach them that the Carvers are their saviors, that they owe their lives to the family."



"So they're brainwashed?"



"No, not really. They're educated, taught the Carver creed along with their verbs and their multiplication tables," Chantale said. "Anyway, they're basically convinced that the minute they leave the Ark they'll end up in the slums with poor folk."



"So, when they turn seventeen or eighteen and the contracts come out they happily sign their lives away?" Max concluded. "So they trade Noah's Ark for the Carver empire?"



"That's right."



"How come they hired you?"



"Allain likes to hire outsiders," she said. "Apart from his servants."



"But this contract—it's not enforceable if you go overseas, right? Say you're studyin' in America and decide you wanna go work for JP Morgan instead of Gustav Carver, they can't stop you."



"No, they can't, but they do," she said, lowering her voice, as if someone were listening.



"How?"



"They have contacts everywhere. They're very rich, powerful people. People with influence. Try and break a deal and they break you."



"Have you known it to happen?"



"It's not something they exactly brag about or anybody finds out about, but I'm sure it's happened," Chantale said.



"What happens to the kids who don't conform? The problem kids? The ones who rebel in the back row of class?"



"Again it's not something they openly talk about, but Allain told me the kids who don't get with the program are taken back to where they were found."



"Oh that's real civilized," Max said bitterly.



"That's life. Life isn't easy anywhere, but here it's worse. It's hell. It's not like those kids don't know how lucky they are."



"You need to change jobs. You sound like your boss."



"Fuck you," she said under her breath. She turned the radio on and turned up the volume.



Max thought for a while about what he'd heard, then he switched off the radio.



"Thanks," he said to her.



"What for?"



"Opening up a whole new dimension to this investigation: Noah's Ark."



"You're thinking the person who kidnapped Charlie might have been expelled from there?"



"Or had his or her future destroyed by the Carvers, yeah. A life for a life. Third oldest motive in the book."



Chapter 35



TO MOST HAITIANS, Saut d'Eau is a place where the waters have miraculous healing properties. The story goes that on July 16, 1884, the Virgin Mary appeared before a woman who was standing in the stream, washing her clothes. The vision then transmogrified into a white dove that flew off into the waterfall, forever imbuing the cascade with the powers of the Holy Spirit. Since then Saut d'Eau has attracted thousands of visitors every year, pilgrims who came to stand under the blessed waters and pray out loud for cures to illnesses, relief from debts, good crops, a new car, and quick solutions to U.S. visa problems. The anniversary of the Virgin's appearance is also celebrated with a famous festival around the waterfall, which lasts all day and all night.



When he first set eyes on the place, Max almost fell for the legend himself. The last thing he expected to find after hours of driving through the arid wilderness was a small piece of tropical paradise, but that was exactly what it was—a proverbial oasis, a mirage made real, or a sanctuary—a reminder of the way the island had once been, and all it had lost.



To reach the waterfall, Max and Chantale had to walk along the banks of a wide stream that cut through a forest of densely packed trees, overflowing foliage, thick, dangling vines, and riots of sweet-scented, brightly colored flowers. They weren't alone. As they'd drawn closer to their destination, more and more people had joined them on the road—most on foot, but some riding donkeys and tired-looking horses—all of them pilgrims heading for a cure. Once they'd reached the stream, they'd waded into the water and walked solemnly and humbly toward the hundred-foot-tall cascade. Despite the great roar of the crashing torrent up ahead, there was a deep quiet within the forest, as if the essence of silence itself was locked into the soil and the bountiful vegetation. The people seemed to sense this, because none of them spoke, nor made much noise in the water.



Max saw that some of the trees along the way were studded with candles and covered with photographs of people, Christian saints, cars, houses, postcards—most of them of Miami and New York—as well as pictures cut or torn out of magazines and newspapers. These trees, with their enormous thick trunks and thin, spindly branches, some heavy with cucumber-shaped fruit, Chantale explained, were called mapou in Haiti. They were sacred in voodoo, trees whose roots were said to be a conduit for the loas—the gods—from this world into the next, and whose presence was meant to signify the nearness of flowing water. The tree was inextricably linked to Haiti's history: the slave rebellion that brought Haiti independence was rumored to have started under a mapou tree in the town of Gonaives, when a stolen white child was sacrificed to the devil in exchange for his help in defeating the French armies. Haitian independence was declared under the very same tree in 1804.



When they reached the waterfalls, they stopped at the bank, near a mapou. Max put down the hamper he'd been carrying. Chantale opened it and took out a small drawstring bag of purple velvet. She removed four metal candleholders, which she stuck into the tree in four equidistant points, like those of the compass. Moving counterclockwise, she spiked four candles into the holders—one white, one gray, one red, and one lavender. Then she took a picture out of her wallet, kissed it with her eyes closed, and tacked it in the middle of the candle arrangement. She sprinkled water on her hands from a small, clear, glass bottle, and then rubbed what smelled like sandalwood lotion into her hands and arms. Whispering quietly, she lit each candle with a match and then, tilting her head back, she looked up into the sky and stretched out her arms, palms up.



Max moved a little away, out of her immediate range, to give her some privacy. He looked at the waterfall. Off to the left there was a break in the trees, where the sun streamed through and made a gigantic rainbow in the mist rolling off the torrent. People were standing on the rocks directly under the falls, water pounding on their bodies. Others stood apart, off to the sides, where the cascade was not as forceful. They chanted and held their hands up to the sky, in much the same way Chantale was doing; some shook instruments like maracas, others clapped their hands and danced. They were all naked. Once they got close to the rocks near the falls, they shed their clothes in the stream and let them float off with the current. In the stream itself, the pilgrims stood waist-deep, washing themselves with herbs and bars of yellow soap they bought from boys selling baskets of the things on the banks. Max noticed several of them were in trances, standing stock-still in crucifixion poses; others were possessed, bodies shaking, heads snapping back and forth, eyes wide and rolling, tongues darting in and out of perpetually moving mouths.



Chantale walked over to him and rested her hand on his shoulder.



"That was for my mother," she explained. "It's a thing we do for the sick."



"How come they get rid of their clothes?" Max asked, nodding at the worshippers.



"It's part of the ritual. First they shed the burden of their past bad luck—symbolized by the clothes—then they wash themselves clean in the waterfall. Like a kind of baptism. Only they're making a great sacrifice getting rid of their clothes, because all of these people you see here have very little."



Chantale started walking down the bank toward the water, an empty bottle in her hand.



"You going in?" Max asked incredulously.



"Aren't you?" she replied, smiling, her eyes full of suggestion.



Max was tempted as hell, but he held back.



"Maybe next time," he said.



She bought a bar of soap and a handful of leaves from the boys with the baskets and then she waded in and began to cross the stream toward the dark rocks and the brilliant white deluge pummeling them.



Before she reached the falls, she took off her shirt and dropped it in the water. She soaped her face and her bare torso and then pulled herself up on the rocks. She stripped down to a black thong and tossed away her jeans after her shoes.



Max couldn't take his eyes off her. She looked completely different from the way he'd imagined her without her clothes on. He'd assumed she'd have a typical white-collar body, going to pieces with inattention and a sedentary life, no time or energy to look after herself; hips running away at the sides, ass and thighs mottled with cellulite, middle going soft. But Chantale had a firm, athletic build. Her legs were long and strong, her shoulders and arms toned, her breasts small and firm: a sprinter's body. Maybe she'd run track in college. She looked like she still worked out.



She saw him looking at her and she smiled and waved. He waved back, automatically, inanely, suddenly back down to earth, embarrassed that she'd caught him looking at her.



Chantale stepped back and forced herself into the middle of the torrent, right under the innermost edge of the rainbow, where the water fell hardest and heaviest. Max lost sight of her completely, confusing her again and again with a variety of other bathers and their shadows, outlines blurred or invented by mist and motion. At times there seemed to be many people there with her, cleansing themselves, and then, suddenly, the waterfalls would appear completely empty, as if the pilgrims had been dissolved like so much dirt and washed into the stream with the banks of discarded clothes.



As he was looking for Chantale, he felt his attention being pulled away from his search and off to his left, where he sensed someone observing him. He wasn't being watched out of curiosity or wonder, the way some of the people on their way to the stream had looked at him; he was being assessed and evaluated by a trained eye. He knew the feeling, because he'd been taught to recognize it as a cop. Most criminals were paranoid as hell and had a naturally heightened sense of suspicion, same as the blind with their better-developed senses of smell and sound. They'd know if they were being watched; they'd actually feel the person's presence, dogging their every breath, tracking their every thought. This was why cops were taught the "Sun Rule of Observation": never look directly at a target but focus on the space five degrees to its left or right, keeping the main attraction well within sight.



The person who was watching him hadn't learned this. He also hadn't learned the other important rule—always stay out of sight; if you're going to see, don't be seen.



He was standing on the rocks, away from the crashing water, part obscured in the mist; a tall, thin man in ragged blue trousers and a long-sleeved Rolling Stones T-shirt that was torn and frayed around the hem. He was looking right at Max without a trace of an expression on the little that could be seen of his face under the thick mop of shoulder-length dreadlocks hanging from his scalp like the legs of a dead mutant tarantula.



Chantale reappeared on the rocks, shaking the loose water out of her ears and slicking her hair back with her fingers. She stepped down into the stream and started walking back toward Max.



At the same time, Dreadlocks stepped into the water and also began to head his way. There was something in his hands, something he didn't want to get wet, because he was holding it high up above the stream. The worshippers who weren't in some other mental space got out of his way, exchanging worried looks, some hurrying for the bank. A possessed woman made a wild grab at what he was holding. He smashed his elbow into her face, sending her flying back into the water. The spirits fled her body as she splashed back to land, blood running down her face.



As Dreadlocks drew closer, Max motioned to Chantale to go back to the rocks. He was near the bank now. Max thought of pulling his gun on him and getting him to stop, but if the guy was a nutcase that wouldn't do anything. Some people just wanted you to shoot them because they didn't have the guts to put themselves out of their misery.



Dreadlocks slowed down and stopped right opposite Max, up to his ankles in water. He held out what he had in his hands—a battered, rusted tin box with some of its original design—a large, blue rose—clinging to it.



Max was about to walk toward him when a large rock flew out and hit Dreadlocks on the side of the head.



"Iwa! Iwa!"



Children's frightened yells, right behind Max.



Suddenly Dreadlocks was hit from all sides by a crossfire of rocks and large stones, thrown with surprising accuracy, all striking some part of his body.



Max ducked and moved back up the bank, where the stone throwers were gathered—a small group of children, the eldest being maybe twelve.



"Iwa! Iwa!"



This emboldened the worshippers who, up until that moment, had stood stock-still, watching. They began to pelt Dreadlocks with stones, but they didn't have the children's accuracy and their shots went wide, hitting the frozen human crosses and sending them toppling into the water, or striking the possessed and either completely exorcising them or driving them into even more demonic spasms.



Then Dreadlocks's hands took a direct hit. He dropped the box, which fell into the stream, disappeared below the surface, and then bobbed back up a few feet away.



Dreadlocks went after it, running as fast as he could, pushing through the water, pursued by volleys of stones and a few of the bolder pilgrims who, thinking he was fleeing them, made after him with sticks, but were in no hurry to catch up with him.



Dreadlocks vanished down the stream.



When it was clear he wasn't coming back, natural order returned to Saut d'Eau. The spirits repossessed the bodies they'd abandoned, worshippers returned to the stream water to soap themselves and climbed up the rocks to the falls, and the children on the bank resumed tending to their baskets.



Chantale came back. Max handed her a towel and a new set of clothes from the hamper.



"What's 'e-wah' mean?" Max asked as he watched her dry her hair.



"Iwa? Means devil's helper. People who work with bokors," she said. "Although I don't think that guy was one. He's probably just a local freak. Plenty of them around. Especially here. They come here normal, they get possessed, they never leave."



"What did he want with me?"



"Maybe he thought you were a loa—a god," she said, pulling on a sports bra.



"That would make a change," Max laughed, but as he replayed the incident he didn't find it so easy to dismiss. He was sure Dreadlocks had known either who he was or what he was doing there, whom he was looking for. It was in the way he'd first stared at him, deliberately, making sure he got his attention. Only then had he made his move. And what was in the box?



Chapter 36



CLARINETTE WAS A village on its way to becoming a small town. The bulk of it was situated on top of a hill overlooking the waterfalls, but the slopes of those hills were littered with a tumble of one-room houses, huts, and clapboard shacks so randomly ordered that, from a distance, they made Max think of a forgotten cargo of cardboard boxes spilled out of a long-gone truck.



People stopped to stare at them as they got out of the car. The adults scoped them out from head to toe, checked out the Land Cruiser, and went on about their business as though they'd seen it all before but were still interested in the upgrades. The children all ran away. They were especially scared of Max. Some went and got their parents, to point him out to them, others went and got their friends, who all came in cowering three-foot gangs and then ran off screaming as soon as he looked at them. Max wondered if their fear of him was only due to their never having seen his kind before, or if suspicion of the white man was something that had been passed down in the genes, mixed into the DNA.



Clarinette's tallest building was its imposing church—a mustard-yellow ring of reinforced concrete, topped with a thatched roof and a plain black cross. Four times the size of the next-biggest structure—a blue bungalow—it dwarfed the other amateurishly constructed clay and tin hovels clumped untidily around it. Max guessed from the way the church was positioned, right in the center of the village, that it had been built first, and then the community had evolved around it. The church didn't look much more than fifty years old.



The top of the cross scraped the clouds that hung incredibly low here, sealing the village in an impenetrable veneer of dusk, which the sun, although at its fullest, couldn't overcome. The gradual erosion of the nearby mountain ranges had brought the sky that little bit closer to the touch.



There was a freshness to the air, healthy nuances of oranges and wild herbs undercutting the smells of woodfires and cooking. In the background, over the hubbub of people going about their business, was the constant sound of the waterfall a few miles below, its great roar rendered as a persistent gurgle, water running down a drain.



They walked through the village, talking to people along the way. No one knew anything about Charlie, Beeson, Medd, Faustin, or Leballec. They weren't lying, as far as Max could see. Questions about Tonton Clarinette produced only laughter. Max wondered if Beeson and Medd had really come here, if Désyr hadn't deliberately misled them.



As they got closer to the church, they heard drumbeats coming from inside. Max sensed the rhythms going straight into his wrists, midtempo bass notes catching in his bones and creeping into his veins, getting in sync with his pulse beats before they eked down into his hands and fingers and moved up and down them, making him clench and unfurl his fists as though he had pins and needles.



The door to the church was padlocked. There was a notice board fixed to the wall, with a prominent picture of the Virgin Mary on it. Chantale read it and smiled.



"This place isn't what you think it is. It isn't a church, Max," she said. "It's a hounfor—a voodoo temple. And that isn't the Virgin Mary, it's Erzilie Freda, our goddess of love—our Aphrodite, one of the most exalted goddesses."



"Looks like the Virgin Mary to me," Max said.



"It's camouflage. Back when Haiti was a French slave colony, the masters tried to control the slaves by eradicating the voodoo religion they'd brought over from Africa and converting them to Catholicism. The slaves knew there was no point in resisting the masters, who were heavily armed, so they apparently went along with the conversions—only they were very cunning. They adopted the Catholic saints as their own gods. They went to church just as they were supposed to, but instead of worshipping the icons of Rome, they worshipped them as their own loas. St. Peter became Papa Legba, loa of the lost, St. Patrick was prayed to as Damballah, the snake loa, St. James became Ogu Ferraille, the loa of war."



"Smart people," Max said.



"That's how we got free." Chantale smiled. She looked back at the notice board for a moment and then returned to Max. "There's a ceremony today at six. Can we stay for it? I want to make an offering for my mother."



"Sure," Max nodded. He didn't mind, even if it meant making the trip back to Pétionville in pitch darkness. He wanted to see the ceremony, just to satisfy his curiosity. At least he'd come away with something from this place.



They left the main village and walked east where two mapou trees grew, Max marveling at how tranquil and quiet the countryside was after the capital.



They came to a low, long, sandstone wall that had been abandoned before completion. The structure's south-facing end, had it been finished, would have given people on its upper floors a clear and spectacular view of the waterfalls a mile down.



"Who'd want to build here? It's out in the middle of nowhere," said Chantale.



"Maybe that was the whole point."



"It's too big for a house," Chantale said, following the wall with her eyes all the way back toward the mountains behind the village.



Both mapou trees were adorned with burned-out candle stubs, ribbons, locks of hair, pictures, and small scraps of paper with handwriting on them. A little farther on, a shallow stream trickled quietly down to the chasm of Saut d'Eau. It would have been an idyllic scene were it not for the two rottweilers playing right in the middle of the water.



Their owner, a short, thickset man in jeans and a crisp white shirt, was standing on the other side of the stream, watching both his dogs and Max and Chantale, seemingly at the same time. He was holding a Mossberg pump shotgun in his left hand.



"Bonjour," he called out. "American?"



"That's right," Max said.



"You with the military?" the man asked, a hint of New Jersey in his accent.



"No," Max replied.



"You visit the falls?" the man asked, walking along his side of the bank so he could face them. The dogs followed him up.



"Yeah we did."



"You like 'em?"



"Sure," Max said.



"Got nuttin' on Niagara?"



"I don't know," Max said. "Never been."



"There's some flat stones up ahead'll get you over this side without you needing to step in the water." The man pointed to some vague spot in the water. "That is, if you're meaning to come this way?"



"What's over there?" Max asked, not moving from under the shade of the trees.



"Just the French cemetery."



"Why 'French'?"



"Where the bodies of French soldiers are buried. Napoleon's men. See all this land? Used to be a tobacco plantation. There was a small garrison stationed back where the town is. One night the slaves rose up and took control of the garrison. They brought the soldiers here, right where you stand, between those two mapoux.



"One by one they made 'em kneel down on a vévé dedicated to Baron Samedi—that's the god of death and graveyards—and they slit their throats," the man said, drawing his finger across his throat and clucking his tongue as he completed the motion. "They drained their blood and made it into a potion, which they all drank. Then they put on the soldiers' uniforms, painted their faces and hands white—so's they'd fool anyone watching them from a distance—and they went on the rampage, killin', rapin', and torturin' every white man, woman, and child they found. Not one of them got so much as a scratch on him. When they was done and free, they all come back here and settled down."



Max looked at the trees and the ground where he stood, as if something about them could betray their history; then, finding nothing remarkable there, he and Chantale followed the bank until they found the raised stepping stones that led across the stream.



The man and his dogs came to meet them. Max put him at about his age, midforties, maybe a few years older. He had a dark moon face and small, sparkling eyes that were full of mirth, as if he'd just regained his composure after hearing the funniest joke ever told. His forehead was heavily lined and there were deep brackets around his ears, light furrows continuing the ends of his mouth, and a spray of silver stubble around his jaw. He looked strong and healthy, with thick arms and a barrel chest. He could have been a professional body-builder in his youth, and, Max imagined, he still worked out now, pumping serious iron a few times a week to keep his flame alive and the flab at bay. They'd never met before but Max already knew him—his posture, his build, and his stare gave him away: ex-con.



Max held out his hand and introduced himself and Chantale.



"The name's Philippe," the man said and laughed, flashing the best set of teeth Max had seen on a local. His voice was hoarse, not through shouting or any infection, Max reckoned, but through lack of use, no one to talk to, or not much worth saying to the ones he was with. "Come!" he said enthusiastically. "Let's go see the cemetery."



* * *



They crossed a field and another stream until they came to a wild orange grove whose powerful, heady smell had left its trace around the village. Philippe navigated his way through the trees, sidestepping piles of sweetly rotting fruit, naturally grouped into loose shapes, part-square, part-circle, where they'd dropped off the branches and bounced and rolled to a stop. The oranges were the biggest Max had ever seen, the same size as grapefruit or small honeydew melons, their skin thick and dull with a slight blush creeping out from the stem. Their insides, where they'd burst, were flecked with red. The orchard was buzzing with flies, all feasting on the abundance of putrefying sugar.



The cemetery was some way in, a large rectangle of tall, thick grass and headstones—ostentatious and modest, straight and crooked, enclosed by a waist-high metal-bar fence and entered through one of four gates at the side.



The soldiers were all buried side by side, sixty bodies in five rows of twelve, their resting places marked out by big, gray rocks of roughly the same size with smoothed-down surfaces and the surnames chiseled in deep, crude capitals.



"I didn't tell you everythin'," Philippe said, as he led them past the makeshift tombstones. "The slaves didn't just drink their blood and steal their uniforms, they took their names too. See?" he pointed out a rock with the name VALENTIN gouged into it. "Ask around town and every name you hear'll come right back to this place."



"Wasn't that a contradiction in terms?" Max asked. "If they wanted to be truly free, what would they want with the slave masters' names?"



"Contradiction?" Philippe smiled. "It was all about eradication."



"So why leave this behind? Why bury the bodies?" Max asked.



"Haitians are big on respect for the dead. Even white dead. Didn't want to get haunted by no French-speakin' ghosts." He smiled and looked at Max. On the walk over, Max had undone the trigger guard on his holster.



"Somethin' went wrong somewhere, though," Philippe said as he led them to a wide clearing that separated the soldiers' graves from the other tombstones in the cemetery. A single rock stood in the middle, marking out a plot of dry, bare, reddish-brown earth where no grass grew. No name was carved into it.



"Napoleon's army had a lot of boys in it—some as young as eight, orphans who got conscripted. The garrison here was real young. The commanding officer was twenty," Philippe said, looking down at the grave. "That there is where they buried the garrison's mascot—don't know how old he was, but he wasn't more'n a boy. Don't know his name neither. He used to play the clarinet to the slaves working these fields. They took care of him last.



"They made him play his clarinet while they strung his buddies up by the legs and opened their throats into a bucket. They didn't do that to him. They put him in a box and buried him alive right here." Philippe touched the ground with his foot. "They say they heard him playin' his clarinet long after they'd put the last fistful of dirt down over his head. Went on for days, this thin music of death. Some people say when there's a strong wind blowin' through here, they hear the sound of the clarinet mixed in with the stench of these oranges here no one wants 'cause they feed off the dead."



"What went wrong with the spell?" Max asked.



"If you believe in that kind of stuff, Baron Samedi turns up to claim the bodies the slaves have offered him and he finds the kid still alive. He adopts him as a sidekick, puts him in charge of his children's division."



"So he becomes the children's god of death?"



"Yeah—only he isn't a god as such, 'cause no one worships him like they do the Baron. He's more a bogeyman. And he don't wait for the kids to die neither. He just takes 'em alive."



Max remembered what Dufour had told him about going to the source of the Mr. Clarinet myth to find out what had happened to Charlie. He was here, at the source, where the myth had sprung. So, where was the answer?



"How do you know all this? About the soldiers and stuff?"



"I grew up with our history. My mother told me when I was a kid. Her mother before that, and so forth, all the way back. Word of mouth keeps things alive better than books. Paper burns," he replied. "Fact, unless my radar's all wrong, my mother's the one you come here looking for, right?"



"Your mother?" Max stopped, confused. "What's your last name?"



"Leballec," Philippe smiled.



"Why didn't you say so sooner?"



"You didn't ask." Philippe chuckled. "You come 'bout the boy, right? Charlie Carver? Same as them other white guys did."



Just then, Max heard heavy footfalls and twigs snapping in the orchard right behind him. He turned around and saw three large oranges rolling across the ground toward the fence.



"So your mother's the—?"



"—bokor, yeah, that's right. Bet you wasn't 'spectin' that, right? Woman be up in here, runnin' shit? Women do everythin' in this country 'cept run the damn place. They did, Haiti wouldn't be on the train to Shitsville like it is now." Philippe nodded.



"Where is she?" Max asked.



"A short way away." Philippe nodded his head eastwards and started walking; then he stopped and turned around and looked Max right in the eye. "When you get out?"



"When did you?" Max asked back. He could always tell an ex-con from the tension in their neck and shoulders, the way their bodies were in a permanent state of alert, ready to fend off an attack. Philippe had it in spades, and so did Max.



"Two years back." Philippe grinned.



"They deport you?"



"Sure did. Only way I was ever gettin' out this side of a body bag. I was one of the first they sent over, the guinea pig."



"You ever meet someone called Vincent Paul?"



"Nope."



"Know who he is?"



"Yup. Sure do."



Philippe motioned with his thumb for them to get going, took a few steps forward, then stopped again.



"'Case you wonderin' what it was I did—it was a murder," he said. "Pre-meditated. Got into some shit with a guy. Escalated into a no-way-out situation. One day I just rolled up to him and blew him away. Only part I regret's gettin' caught. You?"



"Same ballpark," Max said.



Chapter 37



THE LEBALLECS LIVED half an hour away from the cemetery, at the end of a dirt road that crossed another field and was broken up by a stream, before leading down a sharp slope to a grassy plain overlooking the waterfalls. They hadn't had to look far for the building material: their home was a sturdy one-floor rectangle whose walls were made of the same sandstone as the abandoned building shell near Clarinette.



Philippe made them wait outside with the dogs while he went to talk to his mother.



Max heard the hum of a generator coming from behind the house.



A dark shape appeared at the bottom of the window nearest the front door, hovered in the glass for a moment, and then vanished.



A while later, the door opened and Philippe beckoned them in. The dogs stayed put.



Indoors it was cool and dark. The air smelled pleasantly sweet, like a well-stocked candy shop, with hints of chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon, aniseed, mint, and orange, all threading in and out of range, never quite settling into a definite fragrance.



Philippe showed them into a room where his mother sat waiting at a long table draped in black silk cloth, trimmed with purple, gold, and silver thread. She was in a wheelchair.



The room was windowless but brightly lit by thick, purple candles positioned in tight rhomboid formations on the floor, or placed in multiple brass candelabras, stood on objects of varying height and length, themselves also shrouded in black cloth. The candles on the ground were three-quarter crosses, the heads substituted by the flame.



The room should have been boiling hot, but the temperature was the bearable side of chilly, thanks to the air-conditioning running on full power and an overhead fan they could hear clicking and grinding above them. The artificial breeze caused the flames to undulate gently on their wicks, making the walls appear to be turning slowly around them, like a great, shapeless beast stalking its prey and biding its time, waiting for its moment, savoring the dread.



Philippe did the introductions. His voice was tender and his body language respectful when he addressed his mother, telling Max she was someone he loved and feared in equal measure.



"Max Mingus, may I introduce you to Madame Mercedes Leballec," he said and stepped off to one side.



"Bond-joor," Max said, automatically and unconsciously bowing his head. There was an innate authority about her, a power that thrived on the humility and intimidation of others.



"Mr. Mingus. Welcome to my house," she spoke in French-accented English, slowly and graciously, enunciating each word in a smooth voice that came across as studied and mannered, one she specially laid on for strangers.



Max placed her in her late sixties or early seventies. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue denim dress with pale wooden buttons down the front. She was completely bald, her cranium so smooth and shiny it seemed as if she'd never had hair. Her forehead was high and steep, while her facial features were cramped close together, squashed down, smaller and less defined than they should have been. Her eyes were so minute Max could barely find their whites, their movements those of shadows behind spyholes. She had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows, but wore an abstract version of the latter in the shape of two bold, arcing, black strokes beginning at the edges of her temples and tapering down to points that almost met in the gap between her forehead and the start of her flat, funnel-shaped nose. Her mouth was small and made a fishlike pout; she had a firm jaw and a chin so deeply clefted it resembled a hoof. She made Max think of an eccentric and slightly scary reclusive old movie queen, postchemotherapy. He shot a quick, comparative look at Philippe, now slouching on a stool behind her, his hands on his lap. He couldn't see one iota of a resemblance.



She bade them to be seated with a regal sweep of her hand.



"You're looking for the boy? Charlie?" she spoke as soon as they'd taken their places.



"That's right," Max replied. "Do you have him?"



"No," Mercedes answered emphatically.



"But you know Eddie Faustin?"



"Knew. Eddie is dead."



"How d'you know he's dead? They never recovered his body."



"Eddie is dead," she repeated, wheeling her chair up closer to the table.



Max noticed the big stainless-steel whistle she was wearing on a string around her neck. He wondered whom it was for—the dogs, Philippe, or both.



"Eddie ever tell you who he was working for—or with?"



"We wouldn't be sitting here right now if he had."



"Why's that?" Max asked.



"Because I'd be rich and you wouldn't be here."



Something behind her left shoulder caught Max's eye. It was a life-size brass sculpture of a pair of praying hands, standing upright in the middle of a draped table. The table was flanked by two long candles on Delphic column–styled sticks. A chalice and an empty, clear, glass bottle were placed either side of the hands. A dog skull, a dagger, a pair of dice, a metallic sacred heart, and a rag doll were arranged behind them in a semicircle. But the display's focal point was the objects he noticed last of all, placed directly below the hands on a brass dish that might have been a communion-wafer plate: a pair of porcelain eyes, the size of ping-pong balls, with bright blue irises staring right into his.



It was an altar used in black-magic ceremonies. He remembered finding a lot of them in Miami back in the early eighties, when the Cuban crime wave hit and broke all over the city; bad guys prayed to bad spirits for protection before they went off and did bad things. Most cops had loudly dismissed the altars as superstitious bullshit, but deep down they'd been more than a little creeped out by them. It was something they didn't understand, an influence they couldn't curtail.



"So, Eddie said nothing at all about the people he was working for?" Max continued.



"No."



"Not one single detail? Didn't he even tell you if he was working for a man or a woman? If they were black or white? Foreign?"



"Nothing."



"Didn't you ask?"



"No."



"Why not?"



"I wasn't interested," she answered in a flat, matter-of-fact way.



"But you knew what was going down?" Max leaned a little over the table, just like he used to do when he was shaking down a stubborn witness in the interrogation room. "You knew he was gonna kidnap that kid."



"It was none of my business," she replied very calmly, completely unruffled.



"But surely you thought it was wrong, what he was doing?" Max insisted.



"I'm no one's judge," she answered.



"OK," Max nodded and sat back. He glanced across at Chantale, who was following the proceedings intently, and then at Philippe, who was yawning.



He looked back at the altar, connected with the staring eyeballs, and then took in the background. The wall behind Mercedes was painted turquoise. A headless wooden cross hung in the middle of it diagonally, its beam bristling with long nails, crudely hammered, some bent, most sticking out at crooked angles. The cross looked like it was meant to be falling from heaven.



"How long had you known Eddie?"



"I helped him get his job with the Carver family," Mercedes answered, smiling slightly as she saw Max looking at the things behind her.



"How did you help him?"



"It's what I do."



"And what is that?"



"You know," she said and her mouth stretched into a smile that showed a row of tiny teeth.



"Black magic?" Max asked.



"Call it what you will," she said with a dismissive wave.



"What did you do for him?"



"Mr. Carver had a choice between Eddie and three others. Eddie brought me something from each of his competitors—something they'd touched or worn—and I went to work."



"Then what?"



"Good fortune is not forever. It has to be repaid—with interest," Mercedes pushed her chair back a little.



"They say Eddie died bad. Is that how he paid?"



"Eddie owed a lot."



"Want to tell me about it?" Max prompted.



"He came to me with all his problems after he got the job with Carver. I helped him out."



"What kind of problems?"



"The usual—women, enemies."



"Who were his enemies?"



"Eddie was a Macoute. Almost everyone he'd ever beaten and robbed wanted him dead. And then there were families of people he'd killed, women he'd raped, they were out to get him too. It's what happens when you lose power."



"What did you get out of him in return?"



"You wouldn't understand—and it's also none of your business," she said firmly and waited to see Max's reaction.



"OK," Max said. "Tell me about Eddie and Francesca Carver."



"Some things in life you just can't ever have. I tried to warn him against pursuing that madness. I didn't see a good end for it. Eddie wouldn't listen. He had to have her, the same way he'd had to have everything else in his life. He thought he was in love with her."



"Wasn't he?" Max asked.



"Not Eddie." She chuckled. "He knew nothing about that. He'd raped all the women he hadn't paid for."



"And you worked for him?"



"And you haven't worked for bad people?" She laughed deeply, in the middle of her throat, without opening her mouth. "We're not that different, we're both for hire."



As far as Max could tell, she had nothing to hide, but she was keeping things from him just the same; he sensed it, some vital piece of information slipping through the cracks of everything she was saying.



"How did you try and bring Eddie and Mrs. Carver together?"



"What didn't I try? I tried everything I knew. Nothing worked."



"Had that ever happened to you before?"



"No."



"Did you tell Eddie?"



"No."



"Why not?"



"He wasn't paying me to fail," she said.



"So you lied to him?"



"No. I tried something else—a rare ceremony, something that's only done in desperation. Very risky."



"What was it?"



"I can't tell you," she said. "And I won't tell you."



"Why not?"



"I'm not allowed to discuss it."



She looked a little afraid. Max didn't push her.



"Did this thing work?"



"Yes, at first."



"How?"



"Eddie told me he had a chance to take off with the Carver woman."



"'Take off'? Like elope?"



"Yes."



"Was he more specific?"



"No."



"And you didn't ask because it didn't interest you?" Max said.



She nodded.



"So how did it go wrong?"



"Eddie's dead. It can't go more wrong than that."



"Who told you he was dead?"



"He did," Mercedes said.



"Who? Eddie?"



"Yes," she answered.



"How'd he do that?"



She pulled herself back closer to the table.



"Do you really want to know?"



Close up, she smelled of menthol cigarettes.



"Yes," Max said. "I do."



"Are you of a nervous disposition?"



"No."



"Very well," Mercedes rolled her chair back and talked to Philippe quietly in Kreyol.



"Could you two get up and step away from the table so's we can set up," said Philippe, getting up from his stool and pointing vaguely to his right.



Max and Chantale went and stood close to the door. The wall space was entirely taken up by wooden display shelves, screwed to the wall, starting close to the ceiling and ending just above the floor. There were twenty individual compartments, each displaying a thick, cylindrical, glass jar filled with clear, yellowy liquid, which held its contents in perfect suspension. Max scanned them randomly, noting a huge egg, a black mamba, a small human foot, a bat, a human heart, a fat toad, a chicken's claw, a gold brooch, a lizard, a man's hand



"What are these for?" Max whispered to Chantale.



"Spells. Good and bad. My mother's got a few of these. The egg can be used to make a woman fertile or barren," she said, then pointed to the foot, which Max noticed was professionally amputated above the ankle. "The foot can be used to cure broken bones or to cripple someone." Then she directed Max's attention to the hand, shriveled and grayish-green in color. "That's a married man's hand. See the wedding ring?" He saw the faded gold band hanging loose at the bottom of the second-from-last finger. "It can either make or break up a marriage. Everything you see here has two possible uses. It all depends on who's asking and who's casting. The good spells are done before midnight, the bad after. But I don't think a lot of good gets done around here."



"How did they get these?" Max asked.



"They bought them."



"Where from?"



"Everything's for sale here, Max," she said.



He looked back at what the Leballecs were doing.



Philippe had removed the cloth from where they'd been sitting, revealing the varnished wooden table it had been covering. There were markings of various sizes on the surface, indentations painted black. First and most prominent, set in two arches in the middle, facing Mercedes, were the letters of the alphabet: capitals running A to M, and then N to Z. Below, in a straight line ran numbers one to ten. In either upper corner were the words OUI and NON, and on the opposite side was carved the word AUREVOIR.



"Is that what I think it is?" Max asked Philippe.



"It ain't Monopoly."



"You're kidding me, right?"



"You said you wanted to know." Philippe smiled. "This is knowledge. You two wanna come over here."



Max hesitated. What if this was bullshit?



So what if it was, he told himself—bullshit only hurts the believer.



"I thought you charged for this kind of thing?" Max said, not moving.



"So you're going to do it?" Mercedes asked.



"Yeah."



"Good," Mercedes smiled. "Then consider it a gift from me to you. You're much more of a man than your predecessors—Mr. Beeson and Mr. Medd."



"You met 'em?"



"Beeson was very rude and arrogant. He called me a 'hocus-pocus bitch' and walked out as soon as he saw what we were doing. Medd was more polite. He thanked me for my time before he left."



"They never came back?"



"No."



Meaning they didn't believe in this shit either, thought Max. Which either made him more open-minded or a born-again fool.



"Shall we begin now, Max?"



The table was a huge Ouija board. A notebook, a pencil, and a solid, clear-glass, oval pointer were placed at Mercedes's side.



They were about to have a séance.



* * *



They sat around the table, Max in front of Mercedes, Chantale opposite Philippe, heads bowed, holding hands in a circle, as though they were saying grace. Everyone apart from Max had their eyes closed. He wasn't going to take it seriously. He didn't believe in it.



"Eddie? Eddie Faustin? Ou lŕ?" Mercedes called out loudly, filling the room with her voice.



If she was faking, Max thought, she was putting her heart and soul into it. Her face, under the strain of concentration, was even more bizarre than it had been when relaxed. She'd screwed it up so much that her features disappeared almost entirely in whorls and bunches of pinched-together, scrunched-up flesh. She was squeezing Chantale and Philippe's hands so hard her fists were shaking with the effort. They were both wincing in pain.



The room had gone a shade darker. Max thought he saw something move by the shelves and looked over. The exhibits seemed a fraction brighter and alive, vivid and empty like lit-up clothes-store mannequins on an empty, dark street. He swore he could detect movement in some of them—a pulse beat in the hand, the toes moving at the end of the foot, the snake darting out its tongue, cracks forming in the eggshell. Yet when he focused on them individually, they were utterly lifeless.



Philippe and Chantale tightened their respective grips on Max's hand, their lips moving soundlessly.



The atmosphere in the room had changed. He did not feel oppressed in there, despite all the black-magic paraphernalia, the knowledge that his predecessors had passed through here on their way to mutilation and, quite possibly, death. But now he felt a tightness creeping into his chest and back, a feeling of someone heavy standing on it.



When he first heard the sound, he didn't register it as anything special. He mistook it for the fan.



When he heard it again it was closer and louder, coming from right under his nose: a single light tap, followed by the sound of something small scraping over a smooth surface, a sound not unlike that of a zipper being done up, top to bottom, low notes ending on high.



He looked down at the board. Things had changed. The pointer had moved—or been moved—from Mercedes's side up to the letters. It was indicating the letter "E."



Chantale and Philippe let go of his hands.



"Qui lŕ?" asked Mercedes.



He saw the pointer turn, independently, to point at "D."



Max wanted to ask Mercedes how she was doing it, but his mouth was too dry and his balls ice.



Chantale's face was impassive.



Mercedes had written the first two letters down.



The pointer turned to the right and moved across the board slightly to stop at "I," its motions jerky yet steady, as if really guided by an unseen hand. It looked impressive—even if it was fake, which he kept telling himself it was, so he wouldn't freak out.



He thought of looking under the table to see if there was a machine underneath, controlling the spook show, but he wanted to see where it was all going.



Both Mercedes's hands were on the table.



The pointer moved back to "E" and stayed put. It looked like a big, congealed teardrop.



"He's here," Mercedes said. "Ask what you want to know."



"What?"



"Ask—him—your—question," Mercedes said slowly.



Max felt suddenly stupid, like he was being taken in and massively conned, all the while being loudly laughed at by an invisible audience.



"All right," he said, deciding to play along for the time being. "Who kidnapped Charlie?"



The pointer didn't move.



They waited.



"Ask him again."



"Sure he understands English?" Max quipped.



Mercedes gave him an angry look.



Max was about to say something about the batteries dying when the pointer jerked into motion and zipped around the two arches of letters, stopping there just long enough for Mercedes to write down what they were before moving on to the next.



When the pointer stopped moving, she held up her pad: H-O-U-N-F-O-R.



"It means temple," she said.



"As in voodoo temple?" Max asked.



"That's right."



"Which one? Where? Here?"



Mercedes asked but the pointer didn't move.



And it never moved again for them. They repeated the ceremony. Max even tried to empty his mind of all doubting thoughts and cynicism and pretend he really believed in what they were doing, but even so, the pointer didn't budge.



"Eddie has left," Mercedes concluded, when she'd tried for the final time. "He usually says good-bye. Something must have scared him. Maybe you did, Mr. Mingus."



* * *



"Was that for real?" Max asked Chantale as they walked back toward the orange grove.



"Did you see any trickery?" Chantale said.



"No, but that doesn't mean it wasn't going on," Max said.



"You need to believe in the impossible once in a while," Chantale retorted.



"I do," Max grunted. "I'm here aren't I?"



He was sure there was a perfectly rational, humdrum explanation for everything they'd witnessed at the Leballec house. Accepting what he'd just seen at face value was just too much of a mind-fuck.



Max believed in life and death. He didn't believe life crossed over into death, although he did believe that some people could be dead inside and appear to be living on the outside. Most lifers and long-timers he'd seen in prison were like that. He was pretty much that way too, a corpse wrapped in living tissue, fooling everyone but himself.



Chapter 38



WHEN THEY RETURNED to Clarinette, they asked anyone who looked old enough to remember, or give them a sensible answer, who had been in charge of the construction site they'd crossed over on their way to the stream.



The replies were the same from person to person:



"Monsieur Paul," they all said. "Good man. Very generous. Built us our town and hounfor."



Not Vincent Paul, Chantale explained, but his late father, Perry.



How long ago had they been working there?



No one was quite sure. They didn't measure time in terms of years, but in what they'd once been able to do—how much they could carry, how fast they could run, how long they could fuck and dance and drink. Some said fifty years when they didn't look much past forty, others said twenty years, a few claimed they'd been working on the building a hundred years ago. None of them had known what they were building. They'd followed orders.



Chantale estimated it would have been between the midsixties and the early seventies, before the Pauls had gone bankrupt.



What was Monsieur Paul like?



"He was a good man. Generous and kind. He built us houses and a hounfor. He brought us food and medicine."



Like father, like son, Max thought.



Did any children go missing during that time?



"Yes. Two: the children of mad Merveille Gaspésie. The brother and sister both disappeared the same day," they said, shaking their heads.



Then they all told the same story: the Gaspésie children used to play near the building works. They were youngsters, about seven and eight years old. One day they both vanished. People searched high and low, but they were never found. Some said they'd fallen into the waterfalls, others that they'd met Tonton Clarinette out by the graveyard.



Then one day—quite recently—their mother, Merveille, by now an old woman—went to all her friends' houses, telling them her son had returned, and that they should all come and see him. She got together a large group of people and brought them back to her house, but when they arrived, there was no one there. She insisted the boy had returned, that he was well dressed and very rich. She showed them the thick roll of money he'd given her, all crisp, new bills. When she asked him what had happened, where he'd disappeared to, he said a man with a deformed face had taken him and his sister away.



The people didn't really believe her, but they went along with her, because she was suddenly the richest woman in town. Privately, they said she was mad.



Merveille waited for her boy to return. He never did. She waited and waited and wouldn't leave her house in case he turned up. She called his name out over and over again: "Boris."



In the end, she went crazy. She started hallucinating and turned violent whenever people tried to help her. She had no other family and lost all her friends.



And then one day all the noises in her house stopped. When a group of people finally plucked up the courage to enter the house, she was gone and she hadn't been seen since. No one knew what had happened to her. It was a mystery.



* * *



"So what do you think, detective?" Chantale asked, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin.



"About the missing kids? Maybe they were abducted, and maybe that woman's son did come back—how else would she have gotten all that money?" Max said. "But you know, this whole story could just be another myth."



They were in the car, eating the lunch Chantale had made—pork loin, avocado, and gherkin sandwiches on thickly sliced homemade bread, potato and red pepper salad, bananas and Prestige beer. The radio was on low, an American station playing AOR power anthems back-to-back—the Eagles, Boston, Blue Oyster Cult, Reo Speedwagon. Max flipped the dial to Haitian babble and left it there.



It was late afternoon. The light was starting to fade and the clouds were thickening above them, slowly sealing off the sky from view.



"What about Vincent Paul?"



"He's still my main suspect. He's the only constant, the one who keeps popping up everywhere. Perhaps he kidnapped Charlie to get back at the Carvers for an actual or perceived hurt to his family. Of course, I've got absolutely no proof of this." Max finished off his beer. "I need to talk to Paul, but I've got a better chance having a one-to-one with Bill Clinton. Besides, I'm assuming Beeson, Medd, and that Emmanuel Michaelangel guy tried to do exactly the same thing, which could be why they ended up the way they did."



"What if it's not him?" Chantale said. "What if it's someone you don't know about yet?"



"I'll have to wait and see. That's what most detective work comes down to, you know, waiting and watching."



Chantale laughed out loud and shook her head with a weary sigh.



"You really remind me of my ex-husband, Max. This is the kind of thing he used to say when he knew he was getting nowhere on something. He was a cop. Still is. Miami PD, in fact."



"Yeah? What's his name?" Max was surprised but almost immediately realized he shouldn't have been. The voodoo aside, she was a straight arrow, conservative, a safe pair of hands—exactly the kind of woman most cops married.



"Ray Hernandez."



"Don't think I know him."



"You don't. He was still in uniform when you quit," she said. "He knew all about you. Followed your trial every day. Used to make me tape the news when he was out on duty, case he missed something."



"So you knew who I was? Why didn't you say anything?"



"What was the point? Anyway, I thought you'd guess Allain had told me the basics about you."



"You got that right," Max said.



"Ray despised you. Said you were a thug with a badge. You, Joe Liston, Eldon Burns, the whole MTF division. He hated the lot of you, hated the way you brought down the good name of the police."



"What did he do, your Raymond? What division?"



"When he made plainclothes? First Vice, then Narcotics. He wanted Homicide but to get it he had to play ball with the kind of people who held you in high esteem."



"That's the way of the world. It's all about politics, mutual dependencies, credit in the favors bank," Max said. "You don't get to where you want to be without breaking hearts and stepping on people." He could imagine what type of guy her husband was—the kind of self-righteous, ambitious prick who'd end up working in Internal Affairs, because they promoted faster and rewarded backstabbing and betrayal. "How come you and him broke up?"



"He was cheating on me."



"What an asshole!" Max laughed and she joined him.



"That he was. Were you faithful to your wife?"



"Yeah," Max nodded.



"I can imagine."



"Oh yeah?"



"You're about as brokenhearted as I've seen anyone be," she said.



"That obvious?" Max replied.



"Yes it is, Max," she said, looking him right in the eye. "You didn't come here to find Charlie. You didn't even come here for the money. That's what other people do. You came here to get away from your ghosts and all that guilt and regret you've been carrying around with you ever since your Sandra died."



Max looked away from her and said nothing. He had no comeback for that, no ready denial. Her words had bitten into him and they'd bitten deep.



Outside, the doors of the temple had been opened and people were starting to make their way into it, casually drifting in, as if compelled by curiosity and a need for a fresh experience.



The drums had started up too, a slow beat that Max felt passing into his ankles, reverberating in the bone, filling his feet with the urge to move, to dance, to walk, to run.



* * *



Inside, the temple was far larger than he'd anticipated—big enough to accommodate two separate ceremonies, their hundred or more participants and observers, and, seated on four-tiered benches almost covering the entire circumference of the wall, an orchestra of drummers.



From the sight of them, he was expecting to hear pure chaos—the rhythms of downtown Port-au-Prince transcribed in tribal beats. Their instruments were all homemade—crudely fashioned hollow wood or modified oil drum, stretched animal hide fixed with nails, tacks, string, and rubber bands—but he recognized suggestions of tom-toms, snares, bongos, bass, and kettledrums there. The musicians were randomly placed—wherever there was room—and there was no one conducting or directing or shouting out cues; they watched the proceedings, listened in, and played along with their hands, keeping to the same beat, steady as a metronome, and making a sound no louder or quieter than distant thunder.



Max sensed this was just the prelude.



It was steam-room hot, thanks to the many bodies, the lack of ventilation, and the burning torches shedding amber light from their brackets on the wall. The air was so still and thick it was virtually painted on. Clouds of incense were wafting up toward the roof and then coming back down as light smog.



When Max breathed in deep to get more oxygen into his blood, he experienced a heady, near-narcotic rush, both sedative and amphetamine, a cool, soothing sensation in his back followed by a rush of blood to his eyes and a quickening of the heartbeat. He picked up a cocktail of natural smells—camphor, rosemary, lavender, gardenias, mint, cinnamon, fresh sweat, and old blood.



In the middle of the temple, people were dancing and chanting around a thick, twisted column of black rock, sculpted in the shape of an enormous mapou trunk, rising up from the ground and passing through a large, round hole in the roof, where it was topped by the cross they'd seen from the street. As with the real tree, there were dozens of lit candles stuck to the sculpture. Worshippers were walking around it, sticking their pictures, scraps of paper, ribbons, and candles on the rock, and then stepping into the mobile encirclement of bodies, falling into step, joining in the dance of swaying hips and nodding heads, adding their voices to the chants. Max tried to pick out what they were saying, find part of a word or phrase he could hold on to, but there was nothing discernible coming out of those mouths, only deep notes, held, extended, played with, and transformed.



The floor was bare earth, trampled flat by motion and baked hard by the heat. There were three large vévés, drawn in maize, two of snakes—one with its body wrapped around a pole and its tongue pointing out toward the temple entrance, the other swallowing its tail—and, in between them, a horizontal coffin, split into four sections, each containing a crucifix and an eye, both drawn in sand.



"Loa Guede," Chantale said over the drums and the chanting, pointing to the vévé of the coffin. "God of death."



"I thought that was the good Baron," Max said.



"He's god of the dead," she said, meeting his eyes, almost leering at him. She was a little giddy, unsteady, like she was on her third drink of the night and starting to feel the booze kicking away her restraints. "You know what goes with death, Max? Sex."



"He the god of that too?"



"Oh yeah." She smiled and laughed her lusty laugh. "There's going to be a banda."



"A what?"



She didn't answer. She didn't explain. She'd started to dance, shimmying from the calves up, her body undulating in smooth, slow waves, feet to head, head back to legs. He felt the drums in his thighs and hips now, inspiring him to dance with her.



Chantale took his hand and they started moving toward the mapou sculpture. He was dancing, despite himself, imitating those before him, the drums helping his legs and feet keep time, practically transforming him into a natural.



He sensed someone watching them but it was too dark and there were too many people looking their way to pick out the individual.



To the far right of the column, Max saw a group of people standing around a pond of bubbling gray water. Two half-naked boys were standing in it waist-deep, beckoning to the bystanders, some of whom were tossing coins into the pool. Then a woman in a light blue robe walked in. The boys grabbed her by the arms and plunged her under the water, holding her down hard, like they were trying to drown her, then letting go and staggering back out. The woman slowly reemerged, naked now except for her underwear and the thick, gray muck she was completely caked in. She got back onto solid ground, took a few steps forward, and then threw herself on the earth, writhing on her front and back, slapping the ground hard with her open hands, then throwing dirt all over her body and stuffing it into her mouth. Then she ran at the crowd of people gathered watching the worshippers dancing around the column, grabbed one of them—a man—by his shirt and spat a jet of purple fluid at his face. The man staggered backwards, crying, furiously rubbing at his face and eyes. The woman took hold of his wrist, pulled him over to the pond, and pushed him in. The two boys dunked him and kept him under until he'd stopped thrashing around. When they let go, the man slowly rose from the water. He too was the color of ash and milk—and stark naked. He crouched down on the ground and watched the dancers.



Chantale stepped up to the sculpture and stuck to it a picture of a woman sitting up in a bed. Then she lit a candle and fixed it to a groove in the rock. She mumbled a few words in Kreyol and then began to chant as those around her were doing. They joined in the circle of people moving around them.



The drums beat a little faster, the bass dominated, vibrating in Max's thighs.



They danced. Max followed Chantale and all the others, shuffling, dipping his hips from side to side, touching the ground with his left hand, then his right, bringing them both together and separating them, as if miming an explosion. He could barely feel himself doing it. The stuff they were burning in the air had first loosened him up and now he was beginning to feel himself being separated from his body, his being floating around his cage of bone and sinew. His brain had powered down to all but its basic functions. His senses had been wrapped in cotton wool, stuffed in a tube, and dumped in a deep, warm river, where they were floating slowly away from him, getting beyond reach. He was watching them go and he didn't care. This was bliss.



He heard the drums picking up the beat, he moved his feet a little faster. He heard himself joining in with the chanting, somehow finding a common note and sending it out from the bottom of his stomach. He wasn't a singer. He'd never sung in church when he was a kid. Too embarrassed. First, he'd sounded like a girl, then his balls dropped and he sounded like he was belching. His dad had tried to teach him music, just the two of them at the upright piano one night, when he was five. No use. His dad had told him he was tone-deaf. Not anymore he wasn't, not in here.



His eyes fell on Chantale. She looked so beautiful, so sexy.



They were moving faster now. Worshippers were starting to fall away from the circle. Women were standing quaking, eyes rolling, tongues out, foaming at the mouth, in the full grip of spiritual possession. Meanwhile, the muck-caked born-agains were running out of the pond, spitting purple jets at people in the crowd watching the dancers, and dragging them off to the gray waters.



Max felt simply wonderful now. He was smiling and heard laughter in his head, coming from deep within.



He was facing Chantale now, the two of them standing on their own, away from the circle. He was feeling the drum beats in his crotch. Chantale was looking right at him, grabbing and squeezing her breasts, gyrating and thrusting her crotch in and out. She pressed herself up against him and rubbed her hand all over the front of his trousers. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the pleasure of her touch fill him completely.



But when he opened them, she was gone.



In her place, he saw a man coming toward him. He was naked, his skin covered in dry, gray mud, cracked and flaking, the whites of his eyes turned brake-light red. He was sucking his cheeks rapidly in and out, purple juice dribbling out of gaps in his lips.



Max suddenly came to his senses, feeling like he'd been slapped out of a deep sleep.



Groggy and swaying on his legs, he tried to look for Chantale while keeping his eyes on the man. All around him the scene was beginning to change and change fast. He saw gray-caked men grabbing women from out of the dancing circle and throwing them to the ground, ripping their clothes off, raping them. The women weren't putting up any resistance. Most seemed to be welcoming the assaults.



The drumming was now fast and loud, an arrhythmic attack, devoid of form and order, coming from everywhere, the noise falling on the middle of the temple like a hail of bullets and flaming arrows. The drums were now serrated wheels tearing into Max's head.



He pressed his hands over his ears to kill the sound. Just then, the mud man ran at him and spat a stream of purple fluid straight at his face. Max ducked in time, missing most of the projectile, but he still caught a few stray drops on his knuckles. They burned like lava.



The mud man grabbed hold of his arm and tried to pull him forward. Max bent back and snapped three of the fingers gripping him and then he kicked the mud man hard in the chest. The mud man flew back, smashed on the ground, and slid a little way until he came to a stop. But he was up on his feet almost instantly, charging at Max again, red eyes ablaze with insane rage.



Max threw a combination of jabs and hooks at his assailant's head, stopping his run and forcing him back. Then he hit him with two huge, fast uppercuts that connected in the same spot—right under the mud man's chin—one after the other, a split second apart, lifting him off the ground and scrambling his senses. The guy was as good as done. Instead of landing more punches to his head, Max simply pushed him over, letting him fall, knocked-out cold.



He looked for Chantale. She wasn't by the column. She wasn't by the pond. He headed toward the crowd. They'd linked arms and weren't letting him through.



Max backed off. The drums were killing his head, a million pummeling jackhammers running relay around his brain.



He turned around and went back toward the sculpture. She couldn't be far. All around him, men and women were down on the ground, naked, fucking, multiple positions. The air reeked of sex and sweat.



He headed for the pond.



Then he saw Chantale standing near the water. A mud man had ripped off her shirt and was tearing off her bra. She was offering no resistance, watching the man's titanic struggle with her underwear with a glazed look and a dumb, detached smile.



Max sprinted over and pushed the mud man headfirst into the pond.



He grabbed Chantale's hand, but she pulled out of his grasp, slapped his face, and started ranting at him in Kreyol. He stood there, at a loss. Then she gripped his head and crushed her lips against his, snaking her tongue into his mouth, running it up and down his tongue, licking it, tasting it. And then she grabbed his crotch, drew him toward her, and started dry-humping him.



The pain left Max's skull and the drum migrated back to his loins. He felt himself slipping again, surrendering, wanting nothing more than to fuck Chantale in the dirt.



He was watching her pulling down her jeans when a mud man smashed into him. They went down together, Max taking the brunt of the fall and their combined weight on his shoulder. The mud man tried to punch him, but it was a wild, bullshit strike and he missed completely. Max kneed him hard in the solar plexus, so hard he caught the blast of stinking air the blow forced out of the mud man full in the face.



The mud man withered away, puking bile on the ground. Max took hold of his neck and what he could hold of his skinny buttock, picked him up like light luggage, and tossed him toward the pool.



Chantale was still where he'd left her, only with another man—normal, but naked and glinting with sweat—standing in front of her, jerking off, getting himself hard, ready to rush her.



Max snatched Chantale by the arm and fast-walked her away, heading for the exit. At first, she snarled and kicked and tried to get away, but then, as they got closer to the crowd and farther from the ceremony, she stopped fighting, grew limp and then heavy, her legs dragging. Max asked her if she was OK. She didn't reply. She tried to look at him through rolling eyes.



He hoisted her over his shoulder. He pulled out his gun and thumbed off the safety. The crowd didn't budge.



Then, right in front of him, stood Dreadlocks. People were moving out of his way, opening up space.



Max didn't slow down.



Dreadlocks came out of the crowd and headed toward them, carrying his blue-rose box before him in his hands.



Max raised his gun and sighted Dreadlocks's head.



"Stop!"



Dreadlocks didn't pay any heed. He pushed the box into Max's chest and rushed past him. Max took the box in his free hand.



He glanced back.



Dreadlocks was gone, but five mud men were running toward them, brandishing machetes and knives.



With Chantale on his back, Max pushed, nudged, kicked, and stamped the rest of his way out of the temple.



* * *



Chantale slept most of the way back, dressed in Max's shirt, her snores accurate facsimiles of busy-barnyard noises.



He drove with the window cranked open and the radio playing an all-night Haitian talk show. He couldn't understand a word they were saying, but it was better than the wall-to-wall Bon Jovi all the other stations were blasting.



After five hours, he was back on the airport road, heading up to Pétionville. Chantale woke up and stared at Max as though she'd expected to find herself in bed at home.



"What happened?" she asked.



"What's the last thing you remember?" Max switched off the radio.



"We were dancing in the temple—together."



"Nothing after?"



Chantale thought about it for a while but drew a blank. Max told her what she'd missed, starting backwards with the box, editing out what had gone on between them, but sparing no detail in describing how he'd saved her from a potential rapist.



"I was never going to get raped, Max," she said angrily. "It was a banda, a ritual orgy. People get possessed and they fuck each other's brains out. No one knows what they're doing."



"Looked like rape to me—voodoo date rape, conscious or unconscious, whatever you wanna call it. The guy was tearin' your clothes off," Max said.



"People do that when they're having consensual sex, Max. It's called passion."



"Yeah? Well, I don't know how you can just go fuck a stranger like that. He could've had AIDS. Jesus!"



"You mean you've never fucked strangers before, Max?"



"What? Yeah, but that isn't the same thing."



"Why? You meet a woman—where? In a bar, a nightclub? Music's loud, you're both loaded. You go someplace, you fuck, and in the morning you leave and never see each other again. Same thing—only with us, it has more meaning."



"Right," Max sneered sarcastically. "We decadent, soulless Americans just go around having empty one-night stands, but over here when you do it in a voodoo temple it's a religious experience. You know what I think, Chantale? I think it's a crock of shit. Fucking's fucking. Rape is rape. And that guy was gonna rape you. End of story. No way would you've made it with some guy covered in mud, if you'd been in your right mind."



"How would you know?" Chantale snorted.



Max didn't respond. He gripped the wheel tight and gritted his teeth, wishing for a good long while that he'd left the ungrateful bitch to get gang-raped in the dirt.



He'd intended to let her stay at the house, but he drove fast through Pétionville and took the road down to the capital. At night, every big American city was lit up like a mini-galaxy. Port-au-Prince had a few grudging scraps of light floating in the black, like stray white butterflies caught in an oil slick, otherwise nothing. He'd never known a place so dark.



Chapter 39



IT WAS STILL dark when he got back, but the insects had gone to ground and the birds had started singing in the courtyard. Daylight was on its way.



There was a message on the answering machine from Joe. It was too early to call him back.



* * *



Inside the box Dreadlocks had given him, Max found a croc-hide billfold containing numerous cards—ATM, AmEx, VISA, MasterCard, library, blood donor, Gold's Gym. They all belonged to Darwen Medd.



Max also found half a dozen black-on-white business cards held together by a paper clip. If he was still alive, Medd worked out of Tallahassee, where he specialized in missing persons and corporate affairs. The latter was probably a recent diversification, something he was gradually setting himself up in so that he'd still be working when he got too old and too slow to look for runaways and abductees. Working in the business sector was safer and paid a lot better. You sat at a desk and followed paper trails by phone, fax, and computer. The only fieldwork involved was meeting your client for lunch, dinner, or drinks. If you were good, you never stopped working. Some companies kept you on a retainer. The better you were the more you were retained. It was a nice life. Boring as hell, but something Max had once been planning to move into himself.



There was no money in the wallet but, tucked in a corner of the change pocket, he found a single folded piece of paper.



It was a page torn from a Haitian phone book dated 1990. Letters I–F, one section circled in blue ballpoint: all the Faustins in Port-au-Prince—thirteen of them.



Medd had been on the same track.



Who was Dreadlocks? Why did he give Max the box?



Was he Medd? No. Dreadlocks was a black man. He was crazy, and quite possibly mute. He hadn't made a sound near the falls, nor in the temple.



Perhaps Dreadlocks had seen Medd at the waterfalls when he'd visited Mercedes Leballec. Maybe Medd had befriended him. Or maybe he'd just found Medd's body and taken his wallet. Or maybe he'd just found the wallet. He'd sealed it in a box and given it to the first white man he saw at Saut d'Eau.



It occurred to Max that the best way of finding out was to go back to Saut d'Eau and ask him, but he wasn't going to go back there again, not if he could help it.



* * *



At six-thirty he called Joe. His friend answered on the second ring. Joe was in the kitchen with the TV news on low. Max could hear his two girls in the background.



They talked and joked, Joe doing most of it. He had a three-dimensional life. Max only had what he was looking for.



"That guy you asked me to check out—Vincent Paul?"



"Yeah?"



"You know, I told you the Brit police wanted to question him."



"Yeah?"



"It was in connection with a missing-persons case."



Max's grip tightened on the receiver.



"Who?"



"A woman," Joe explained. "Back in the early seventies, Vincent Paul was a student at Cambridge University in England. He was datin' this local girl called—" Max heard him thumbing through a notebook. "Josephine…Josephine Latimer. The girl was an artist. She also liked to drink. A lot. One night she ran over this kid in her car and drove off. A witness made the car and her license plate. She gets arrested and stuck in prison until the bail hearin'.



"Now, her parents are big shots in this small town. Everyone knows who they are, so their daughter bein' involved in a hit-and-run is big local news. The police want to make an example of her, show the people that everyone is equal before the law. They delay the bail hearin' for two weeks. The girl stays in jail and gets beaten up and raped. When she gets out she's a mess, tries to kill herself.



"The trial happens a year later. Nineteen-seventy-three. She's found guilty of manslaughter. She's due to be sentenced in two days. They're sayin' five years jail time minimum. She knows she can't do no time. She knows she isn't gonna make it in there.



"The day she's due in court she disappears. There's this manhunt—local at first, then it goes nationwide. Her boyfriend—Vincent—he's gone too. Now Vincent is this giant—six-eight, six-nine—so he's not exactly gonna be difficult to spot, knowwhumsayin'?—but, somehow, it takes a whole two months after her disappearance before someone comes forward and says they saw them on a boat goin' to the…the—the Hook of Holland."



"So that time on the boat? Was that the last sighting?" asked Max.



"Yeah. Him and his girl. She's still wanted in England for manslaughter and skippin' the country. But this is all kinda low priority now. Bonnie and Clyde they ain't."



"Not over there, maybe."



"You see this Vincent Paul in Haiti?"



"Yeah."



"You talk to him?"



"Not yet—you don't talk to him, he talks to you," Max quipped.



"What? Like God in the burnin' bush?"



"Somethin' like that." Max laughed.



"What about the woman? Josephine? You see her?"



"Not that I know of. What she look like?"



"I ain't got a picture for her. But you see this Vincent Paul you ask him where she's at or where she went to."



"I'll do that, if I get a chance."



"You know the Brits sent two police officers out to Haiti to look for 'em. Scotland Yard guys."



"Don't tell me—they found nothin'?" Max said.



"Exactly. You think Vincent or his family might've paid 'em off?"



"Maybe, but his family went bankrupt when he was in England. Besides, from what I know so far, payin' people off isn't Vincent Paul's style. He'd sooner kill 'em."



They both laughed.



"You know a cop called Ray Hernandez—one of yours?" Max asked.



"Yeah, sure, I know him." Joe lowered his voice so his kids wouldn't hear. "If it's the same guy, we call him Ray Headuphisassez."



"Sounds right."



"How you know him?"



"His name came up in the joint," Max lied.



"Used to be a narc," Joe murmured. "Was bangin' his partner's wife. Then he found out his partner was dirty so he snitched him out to IA. They rewarded him with a desk and made him lieutenant. He's a full-on asshole. Time I met him he talked to me like I was a piece of ess-aitch-eye-tut, knowhumsayin'? Thing I didn't get 'bout him? His wife was a hottie. Man must be blind and dumb to cheat on that."



Max guessed Joe's wife wasn't within earshot. He'd never known a woman so jealous. If she caught Joe so much as looking at a woman on a billboard she'd throw a fit.



"I need you to do a couple of other things for me, Joe, please."



"Name it."



"I need you to look up the following people, see what you can get: first up—Darwen Medd. He's a PI out of Tallahassee."



"No problem, but no guarantees on when neither," Joe said. "Say, Max?"



"Yeah?"



"Know what I'm hearin'?"



"What?"



"The sound of you enjoyin' yo'self."



"I wouldn't quite put it that way, Joe."



"I don't mean 'enjoyin' yourself like you gettin' off—enjoyin' yo'self, but you enjoyin' the idea of maybe nailin' these sonsobitches. There's this spring in your voice. The old Mingus, no-bullshit steel."



"You think so?"



"I know so. I know you, Mingus. You're back, Max."



"If you say so, Joe." Max chuckled. He didn't feel back at all. He didn't want to be anywhere near this.



* * *



Afterwards he went to bed and fell asleep as the sun started streaming through his window.



He dreamed he was back in the voodoo temple, caked in gray mud, fucking Chantale on the ground with the drums going crazy. Joe, Allain, Velasquez, and Eldon were dancing all around them. Then he saw Charlie sitting on Dufour's lap, staring at him. They were by the pond. He couldn't see Dufour's face, only his seated silhouette. He tried to stand but Chantale was holding him down, her arms and legs wrapped around him tight. He finally managed to get up and began walking toward Charlie, but he and Dufour were gone. In their place were the three kids he'd killed. They all had his gun in their hands. They aimed and fired at him. He went down. He was still alive, looking up at the cross through the hole in the roof. Sandra came and stood over him, smiling. She was holding a little girl by the hand. The girl was pretty but looked immensely sad. Max recognized Claudette Thodore—the missing niece of the priest from Little Haiti—and remembered that he'd forgotten to visit her parents.



He told the girl he'd go see them first thing in the morning, before he went looking for Faustin's house.



Sandra bent down to kiss him.



He reached up to touch her face and woke up with his hand in the air, fingers caressing nothing.



It was night again. He checked the clock. Seven p.m. He'd slept for a full twelve hours. His mouth was dry, his throat tight, the sides of his eyes wet. He guessed he'd cried in his sleep. Outside the crickets were chirruping and the mountain drums were telegraphing their beats straight to his stomach, dancing with his hunger, telling him he should eat.



Chapter 40



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