THE ROAD AWAY from the airport was long, dusty, and milky gray. Cracks, fissures, gaps, gouges, and splits shattered the road surface into a crude latticework that frequently converged into random potholes and craters of differing sizes and depths. It was a miracle the road hadn't long ago fallen apart and regressed to dirt track.
Chantale drove deftly, swerving around or away from the biggest holes in the road and slowing down when she had to roll over the smaller ones. All of the cars in front of them, and on the opposite side of the road, were moving the same way, some negotiating the road like classic drunk drivers, steering more dramatically than others.
"First time in Haiti?" she asked.
"Yeah. I hope it's not all like the airport."
"It's worse," she said, and laughed. "But we get by."
There were, seemingly, only two types of car in Haiti: luxury and fucked-up. Max saw Benzes, Bimas, Lexes, and plenty of jeeps. He saw a stretch limo. He saw a Bentley followed by a Rolls-Royce. Yet for every one of these there were dozens of rusted-out, smoke-belching sand trucks, their holds full of people-so full, some were hanging off the sides, others clinging to the roof. Then there were the old station-wagons brightly painted all over with slogans and pictures of saints or field workers. These were taxi cabs, Chantale told him, called tap-taps. They too were filled with people and loaded on top with their belongings-crammed baskets, cardboard boxes, and cloth-wrapped bundles. To Max, it looked like everyone was fleeing the scene of a natural disaster.
"You'll be in one of the Carver houses in Pйtionville. It's a suburb half an hour out of Port-au-Prince. The capital's too dangerous right now," she said. "The house has a maid called Rubie. She's very nice. She'll cook for you, wash your clothes. You'll never see her-unless you spend all day indoors. There's a phone, TV, and a shower. All the essentials."
"Thanks," Max said. "Is this what you do for the Carvers?"
"Chauffeur?" she said with a smirk. "No. This is a one-off. I'm on Allain's team. He offered me the rest of the day off if I picked you up."
The road bisected an endless dry plain, a dustbowl peppered with thinning, yellowy grass. Scenery flew by. He noted the dark mountains to the left and the way the clouds hung so low, so close to the ground they seemed to have broken their moorings and drifted loose from the sky, threatening to land. There were occasional lollipop speed signs-black on white: 60, 70, 80, 90-but no one was paying much attention to them, let alone staying to a particular side of the road, unless something bigger was coming the other way. Chantale kept to an even seventy.
Painted billboards, thirty feet high and sixty feet wide, stood on the roadside, advertising local and international brands. In between were smaller, narrower billboards for local banks, radio stations, and competing lottery syndicates. Once in a while, Charlie Carver's face appeared, those intense, haunted features blown up and planted high in black and white, eyes still staring straight into you. REWARD` was painted in tall red letters above the image; $1,000,000 below it. To the left, in black, was a telephone number.
"How long has that been up?" Max asked after they'd passed the first one.
"For the last two years," Chantale said. "They change them every month because they fade."
"I take it there've been a lot of calls."
"There used to be, but it's died down a lot since people worked out they don't get paid for making stuff up."
"What was Charlie like?"
"I only met him once, at the Carver house, before the invasion. He was a baby."
"I guess Mr. Carver keeps his private and professional life separate."
"That's impossible in Haiti. But he does his best," Chantale replied, meeting his eyes. He picked up a hint of sourness in her tone. She had a French-American accent, a grudging collision, with the former tipping over the latter: born and raised on the island, educated somewhere in the States or Canada. Definitely late twenties, enough to have lost one voice and found another.
She was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her wide mouth and taste those plump, slightly parted lips. He looked out of the window before he stared too hard or gave anything away.
There were a few people about, men in ragged shirts and trousers and straw hats, shepherding small flocks of pathetically thin, dirty, brown goats, others pulling donkeys saddled with overflowing straw baskets, or men and women, in pairs or on their own, carrying jerricans filled with water on their shoulders, or balancing huge baskets on their heads. They all moved very slowly, at the same lazy, listing gait. Farther on, they came to their first village-a cluster of one-room square shacks painted orange or yellow or green, all with corrugated iron roofs. Women sitting at the roadside in front of tables, selling melting brown candy. Naked children played nearby. A man tended to a pot cooking on a fire, billowing plumes of white smoke. Stray dogs nosing at the ground. All of this roasting under intense, bright sunlight.
Chantale flicked on the radio. Max was expecting more "Haпti, Ma Chйrie" but instead heard the familiar bish-bosh-bullshit machine beat of every rap record ever made. A remake of "Ain't Nobody," a song Sandra had loved, ruined by a rapper who sounded like half the inmates in Attica.
"Do you like music?" Chantale asked him.
"I like music," Max replied, looking at her. She was pumping her head to the beat.
"Like what? Bruce Springsteen?" she said, nodding at his tattoo.
Max didn't know what to say. The truth would take too long and open up too many ways into him.
"I got that done when I didn't know better," he said. "I like quiet stuff now. Old-man stuff. Old Blue Eyes."
"Sinatra? That is old," she said, glancing across at him, her eyes taking in his face and chest. He caught her eyes straying down his shirt. It had been so long since he'd flirted. He'd known how to play situations like this in the past. He'd known what he wanted then. He wasn't so sure now.
"The most popular music here is called kompas. Compact. It's like one really long song that can go on for half an hour or more, but it's really lots of short songs put together. Different tempos," Chantale said, eyes fixed on the road.
"Like a medley?"
"That's it, a medley-but not quite. You'd have to hear it to understand. The most popular local singer is Sweet Micky."
"Sweet Micky? Sounds like a clown."
"Michel Martelly. He's like a mixture of Bob Marley and gangsta rap."
"Interesting, but I don't know him."
"He plays Miami a lot. You're from Miami, right?"
"And other places," Max said, checking her face to see how much she knew about him. She didn't react.
"And then there's The Fugees. You've heard of them, right?"
"No," Max said. "Do they play kompas?"
She burst out laughing-that laugh again.
Her dirty bellow echoed around his brain. He imagined himself fucking her. He couldn't help it. Eight years and nothing but his hand for relief.
Now he had a problem-a hard-on. He stole a quick glance at his crotch. It was a major one-a rock-solid sundial he felt poking right past the fly of his shorts and pushing against his trousers, setting up a tepee over his groin.
"So…tell me about The Fugitives?" he said, almost gasping.
"Fugees," she corrected with a giggle, and then she told him: two guys and a girl, the singer. The guys were Haitian-Americans and the girl was African-American. They played hip-hop soul, and their latest album, The Score, had sold millions worldwide. They'd had big hits with "Ready or Not," "Fu-Gee-La," and "Killing Me Softly."
"The Roberta Flack song?" Max said.
"The same one."
"With rapping over it?"
"No-Lauryn sings it straight, Wyclef says, 'One time…one time' all the way through-but it's set to that hip-hop beat."
"Sounds terrible."
"It works, trust me," she said defensively and a little patronizingly, as if Max wouldn't get it anyway. "Lauryn can really sing. I'll try and find it on here. They're live on the radio."
She turned the radio dial and flipped through stations playing snatches of funk, reggae, calypso, Billboard Top 40, Kreyol language, hip-hop, but she couldn't find The Fugees.
As she leaned back, Max stole a glance at her chest. His eyes passed through the gaps between the buttons of her blouse: white push-up bra with lace-trimmed cups, small, teak-colored breasts puffing over the edges. He noticed the traces of a smile in the corners of her lips. She knew he was looking her over and liking what he saw.
"So what about you?" Max asked. "Tell me about yourself. Where did you study?"
"I majored in economics at Miami University. Graduated in 1990. I worked for Citibank for a few years."
"How long have you been back?"
"Three years. My mom got sick."
"Otherwise you would've stayed in the U.S.?"
"Yeah. I had a life there," she said, a hint of regret waving behind her professional smile.
"So what do you do for Allain Carver?"
"Personal assistant stuff mostly. They're thinking of getting me into marketing because they want to launch a credit card, but that's on hold until the economy picks up. The U.S. is supposed to be coming up with this aid package, but we haven't seen dollar one yet. Don't suppose we ever will."
"You don't like us much, do you?"
"I don't know what you people think you're doing here, but it isn't making things any better."
"Nothing like getting off to a positive start," Max said and looked out of his window.
Twenty minutes later, they came to their first town, a dusty pit of peeling, battered buildings and roads even more damaged than the ones they'd come down.
The Land Cruiser slowed as it turned into the main street, which was choked with people; the dirt-poor, wearing international-charity clothes that slipped off their waists and shoulders, walking on shoeless feet calloused and deformed into human deep-sea-diver boots, all moving at a plod dictated more by habit than urgency or purpose. They looked like a defeated army, a conquered people, broken in two, shuffling off into a nonfuture. This was Haiti, barely a footprint out of slavery. Many were pushing crude carts cobbled together from planks, corrugated iron, and old tires stuffed with sand, while others carried big woven reed baskets and old suitcases on their heads and shoulders. Animals mingled freely among the people, at one with them, their equals: black pigs, sunstroked dogs, donkeys, skinny goats, cows with protruding ribs, chickens. Max had only seen this sort of poverty on TV, usually in news clips about a famine-hit African country or a South American slum. He'd seen misery in America, but it was nothing like this.
It killed his hard-on.
"This is Pйtionville," Chantale said. "Home sweet home for as long as you're here."
They drove up a steep hill, took a left, and rolled slowly along a heavily potholed side road flanked by tall, whitewashed houses. Two palm trees stood at the end of the road, where it curved off and led back down into the middle of the suburb. In between the trees was the entrance to a drive. IMPASSE CARVER was painted on either trunk in black lettering.
Chantale turned into the drive, which was dark because it was lined on both sides with more palm trees, sprouting in front of high walls, whose leaves intertwined under the sky and filtered the light through in a murky, aqueous green haze occasionally broken up by sharp bolts of bright sunlight. The ground was perfectly smooth and even, a relief after the ruptured streets they'd driven down.
Max's house was at the far end of the drive. The gate was open and Chantale turned into a concrete courtyard overhung with more palm trees. He saw the house in the background, a single-story orange building with a sharply sloping corrugated iron roof, built three to four feet off the ground, with half a dozen wide stone steps leading onto a porch. Bougainvillea and oleander bushes grew close to the walls.
Chantale parked the car. The bodyguards rolled into the courtyard moments later.
"The Carvers have invited you to dinner tonight. You'll be picked up around eight," she said.
"Will you be there?"
"No, I won't," she said. "Come. Let me show you around the house."
She showed him around as an estate agent would a first-time buyer, telling him more than was strictly necessary and enthusing about fittings and appliances. It was a small house-two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The place was spotless, the tiled floors polished and shiny, a smell of soap and mint hanging in the air.
When she was done, she told him to take a walk around the gardens out back and took her leave of him with a handshake and a smile, both still thoroughly professional, although he thought he detected a degree or two of warmth in there too. Or was he misreading signs? Or was it wishful thinking, the fantasies of a widower who hasn't had sex in seven years, getting turned on by a beautiful woman's touch, no matter how slight?