"Ayy-"
"Zoo-"
"Zoooo-"
"Called-"
"Kall-"
"No: call-dah-"
"Kall-durgh-"
"Good-I live in a zoo called-Haiti."
"-Ayiti?"
"What? Yeah, yeah-high tits-whatever the fuck you sambos call this fuck hole." Buzz-cut laughed and his crew harmonized-except for the dissenters, one of whom had caught Max's eye and looked at him in helpless apology, as if to say, it's them not me.
Max didn't give a fuck about him and his educated guilt. It was the Haitian he felt for. It was pitiful to watch and it made Max mad. He was reminded of Sammy Davis Jr.'s Uncle Tom routine in those Rat Pack Vegas shows he had on videotape. Frank and Dean would be humiliating him onstage, calling him every polite racist epithet in front of the audience, who'd be whooping and laughing, while Sammy would slap his thigh and clap his hands and open his mouth wide, looking like he thought it was all just a good joke, but his eyes would be cold and detached, his soul someplace else entirely, and that open mouth would suddenly seem to be howling in pain and-mostly-anger, drowned out by a drumroll and cymbals, and more audience guffawing. The Haitian was like Sammy had been, only he wasn't having it so hard because he, at least, didn't understand what Buzz-cut was saying and doing to him.
Right then, for the first time in his life, Max felt very briefly ashamed to be an American.
He turned back to the bar and shook his glass at the barman for a refill. The barman poured him his fourth Barbancourt and asked him how he was liking it. Max told him it was just great.
A man walked up to the bar and ordered a drink, speaking in Kreyol. He talked a little with the barman and made him laugh.
He turned to Max, smiled politely, and nodded to him.
Max nodded back.
"Did you just get here?" the man asked.
Max didn't know if he meant the bar or the country. The rum was starting to kick in hard. He was looking over the edge of sobriety, contemplating the plunge.
"Max Mingus, right?" the man asked.
Max stared at him too long to feign mistaken identity. He said nothing and waited for the man's next move.
"Shawn Huxley." The man smiled, holding out his hand. Max didn't take it. "Relax-I'm a journalist."
Ingratiating tone, ingratiating smile, ingratiating body language: all the mannered sincerity of a snake posing as a used-car salesman.
"Look, I get a list of daily arrivals from my man at the airport-Mingus, Max, AA147. It's not a common name."
French-American accent. Not Haitian, not Cajun. Canadian?
Good-looking guy, close to pretty: smooth caramel skin, Oriental eyes, a thin mustache crowning his upper lip, and his hair cut in a fade, carefully shaped around the forehead and temples. He wore khakis, a short-sleeved white shirt, and sturdy black shoes. He was Max's height and a third of his build.
"Not me," Max grunted.
"Come on-it's no big thing. I'll buy you a drink and tell you about myself."
"No," Max said, turning away and facing the bar.
"I can imagine how you feel about the press, Max. What with those guys in the Herald digging all that stuff up about you before your trial-and all the trouble they gave your wife-"
Max glared at Huxley. He didn't like journalists, never had, not even when they'd technically been friends, on the same side. When his trial had gone nationwide, the press had dug up every single piece of dirt they could find on him, enough to bury him twenty times over. It played so well-one of the most decorated and respected detectives in Florida, a hero cop, had really built his glittering career on brutalizing suspects into confessions and allegedly planting evidence. They'd camped outside his house, dozens of them. They couldn't get enough of the fact that he was in an interracial marriage. White journalists had asked Sandra if she was his cleaning lady; black journalists had called her a sellout, an Aunt Jemima, and condemned him for having a plantation mentality.
"Listen, I wasn't bothering you, but you are bothering me," Max barked, loud enough to make people leave their conversations and look over. "And you mention my wife again and I will tear your head off and shit in the stump. You got that?"
Huxley nodded, looking petrified. Right then Max could have played with Huxley's fear, toyed with it, stirred it into terror and offloaded a few grudges that way, but he let it go. The guy-and all those media guys-had just been doing their jobs and chasing promotions, same as everyone born with ambition and enough ruthlessness to trample over people to get there. If he'd been an upright cop, never cut any corners, done absolutely everything by the book, the press would have been on his side, championing his cause-and he still would have done prison time for manslaughter. Either way he'd have lost.
Max needed a piss. He hadn't had one since he'd been driven to the Carvers'. The tension of the evening had distracted him from his expanding bladder. He looked around the bar, but there didn't seem to be any obvious doorway people disappeared through, let alone anything marked out. He asked the barman, who tilted his head right to a spot behind where the prostitutes were standing.
Max walked over. The girls perked up and smoothed and straightened their dresses with lightning downstrokes and turned on their open, inviting stares. Their looks reminded him of Huxley's look-instant, one-spoon-and-stir friendship, trust, and discretion, all available for the asking, as long as you paid the price-a salesman shedding his soul piece by piece with every successful deal. Journalists and whores slept in the same bed. Mind you, he thought, how much different was he? Working for the people he had worked for? Looking the other way as he cleaned up their messes? We all did things we didn't want to do, for money. It was the way of the world-sooner or later, everything and everyone was for sale.
There were two bathrooms, male and female gender symbols sloppily painted in bright blue and pink on doors fitted at ankle height above the sloping, dusty floor. In between them was a room behind a wooden-bead curtain. There was an open camp bed with a bare pillow on it and an overturned box of Bud with an oil lamp on it. Max guessed it was where the barman or caretaker slept.
Inside the cubicle, a polished black cistern was fitted low, level with Max's face. The toilet didn't have a seat and there was no water in the bowl, just a black hole. He pissed a long stream and heard it gurgle where it hit something soft and wet and hollow a few feet under. It smelled faintly of ammonia and rotten flowers-the scent of the industrial-strength lime and disinfectant they were throwing down after the day's sewage.
Max heard someone walk past the cubicle, light a cigarette, and inhale deeply. He stepped out and saw Shawn Huxley in the corridor, close by, back to the wall, one foot up against it.
"Was that interesting? Listening to me piss? Did you get it on tape?" Max sneered. He was drunk, not badly, but enough to recalibrate his center of balance.
"The Carver boy," Huxley said. "That's why you're here, right?"
"What if I am?" Max replied, getting up in Huxley's face, unintentionally spraying him with spit. Huxley blinked but didn't wipe it off. Max focused on a small pearly drop hanging off the edge of the journalist's mustache, close to his lip. He'd catch it if he stuck his tongue out.
Max was drunker than he thought. He'd mistaken the point of stopping and turning back for the point of no return. It had been a very long while. When he spit in people's faces he'd already lost control.
"I can help you out," said Huxley, dragging on his cigarette.
"Don't need you," Max replied, looking Huxley over. The journalist was even slighter in bright light, as if he lived on a diet of celery, cigarettes, and water.
"I've been here close to three years. Arrived a few months before the invasion. I know my way around. I know the people-how to work their combinations, make them open up."
"I've got one better." Max smiled, thinking of Chantale.
"That could be the case, but I think I'm onto something that could be tied in with the kidnapping."
"Yeah? What's that? And how come you haven't followed it through, all the way to the reward money?" Max asked.
"It's not something you can do alone," Huxley said, dropping the cigarette he'd smoked to the filter on the floor and grinding it out under his heel.
Max couldn't be sure Huxley was for real. That was the trouble with journalists. You couldn't trust them, not ever. Most of them were born backstabbers with more faces than diamonds.
What's more, why was Huxley offering to help him? Journalists never helped anyone but themselves. What was Huxley's angle? Probably financial, Max guessed. The Charlie Carver case wasn't exactly going to make the front pages in North America.
Max decided to go along with Huxley-albeit guardedly. He was in a foreign country that seemed to be losing its grip on the twentieth century and falling backwards through time. Huxley could be useful to him.
"You meet any of my predecessors?" Max asked.
"The short guy-sleazy-looking dude."
"Clyde Beeson?"
"That's him. I saw him around my hotel a lot-"
"Hotel?"
"The Hotel Olffson-where I'm staying."
"What was he doing there?"
"Hanging around the journalists, picking up scraps."
"Sounds about right," Max muttered. "So how did you know where he was headed?"
"I heard him asking someone at the bar for directions to the waterfalls one night."
"Waterfalls?" Max stopped him, remembering where Medd had gone. "The voodoo place?"
"Yeah. Said he was following up a lead. Last time I ever saw him," Huxley said. "Did you know him?"
"Florida PI, what do you expect?" Max replied.
Beeson went to the waterfalls too. What kind of lead were they chasing?
"Were you friends?" Huxley asked.
"No, the opposite," Max said. "I went to see him before I came out here. He was pretty fucked up, to say the least."
"What happened to him?"
"Don't ask."
Huxley looked Max right in the eye and pulled an ambiguous smile-part knowing, part amused-the sort that people used when they wanted you to think they knew more than they did. Max wasn't going to fall for that shit. He'd used it himself.
"Did Beeson mention Vincent Paul to you?"
"Yeah he did," Max said.
"Vincent Paul, Le Roi de Citй Soleil. That's what they call him, the scared rich folk-after Louis XIV, the glamorous French king. It's meant as an insult."
"How so?"
"Vincent lives in or around Citй Soleil-Shit City, as I call it. It's this gigantic slum outside of Port-au-Prince, by the coast. Makes your 'hoods back home look like Park Avenue. In fact, there's nothing like Citй Soleil anywhere in the world. I've been to slums in Bombay, Rio, Mexico City-paradise in comparison. Here you're talking close to half a million people-that's near ten percent of the population-living on six square miles of shit and disease. Literally. Place even has its own canal. 'The Boston Canal,' they call it. It's filled with old oil from the power plant."
Max had taken everything in. Concentrating on the inflowing information had sobered him, helped clear his mind.
"And you say that's where I can find Vincent Paul?"
"Yeah. They say he who runs Citй Soleil runs Haiti. The people there are so poor, if you promise them food, clean water, and clothes they'll throw bricks at whoever you point to. Some say Paul's paid by the CIA. Whenever they want a president ousted they get him to stir up Citй Soleil."
"Do you think that's true?"
"The only way to find out would be to ask the man himself, and you don't do that. He talks to you, not the other way around."
"Has he talked to you?"
"Had an appointment a while back, but he changed his mind."
"Why?"
"Didn't say," Huxley chuckled.
"Do you know anything about this town he's meant to have built?" Max asked.
"Only that no one knows where it is. No one's ever been there."
"Do you think it exists?"
"Maybe, maybe not. You never can tell very much about anything in Haiti. This country runs on myths, rumors, hearsay, gossip. The truth has a way of getting lost and disbelieved."
"Do you think Vincent Paul's got anything to do with Charlie Carver's disappearance?" Max asked.
"Why don't we meet up tomorrow or the day after and have a long talk, see what we can see, maybe work out a way of helping each other," Huxley said, smiling. He crushed his new cigarette out.
Max realized Huxley had been leading up to this moment, feeding him bigger and bigger scraps of information, getting him hungrier and hungrier before closing the kitchen and rewriting the rules his way. He'd been played.
"What's in it for you?" Max asked.
"My Pulitzer." Huxley smiled. "I'm writing a book about the invasion and its aftermath-you know, the bullshit you'll never read about in the papers. You wouldn't believe what's been going on here, what people have been getting away with."
"Like what?"
Just then, Buzz-cut walked in. He looked over at Max and Huxley and smiled snidely, showing wolfish canine teeth.
"Hello ladies," he sneered.
He tossed Max a disgusted look. His gray-green eyes might have been attractive had they not been so small and cold, icy-bright pinpricks in a face that breathed meanness.
He walked into the room between the cubicles. They heard him draining his bladder all over the bed and the box and the floor. They looked at each other. Max saw contempt in Huxley's eyes-but it ran deep, all through him, from the very bottom of his heart.
The soldier finished and came out of the room, zipping himself up. He shot them another look and belched long and loud in their direction.
Max looked at him, gave him the right amount of attention, but was careful not to lock eyes with him. Most people you could stare down if you let them think you had nothing to lose; others you had to let stare you down, no matter how much you knew you could fuck them up. It was all about choosing your moment and reading your people. And this was all wrong.
Buzz-cut walked out of the corridor and back to the bar.
Huxley took out another cigarette. He tried to light it but his hands were shaking worse than a detoxing wino's. Max took the lighter from him and worked the flame.
"It's shit like that-shit like him-I'm writing about," Huxley spat through his first cloud of smoke, his voice quivering with anger. "Fucking Americans should be ashamed of themselves having a scumbag like that fighting in their name."
Max agreed with him but didn't say so.
"So you are Haitian, Shawn?"
Huxley was taken aback.
"You see a lot, don't you, Max?"
"Only what's there," Max said, but he'd only just guessed.
"You're right: I was born here. I was adopted by a Canadian couple when I was four, after my parents died. They told me about my heritage a few years back, before I went to college," Huxley explained.
"So this is like a Roots-type thing for you?"
"More a fruit-from-the-tree-type thing. I know where I came from," said Huxley. "Call this-what I'm doing-giving a little something back."
Max warmed to him. It wasn't just the rum or their shared loathing of Buzz-cut. There was a sincerity about Huxley you didn't find in the media: maybe he was new to the game and still had most of his cherry or maybe he hadn't wised up that it was a game at all, thought he was on a mission, chasing "the truth." Max had had ideals once, when he'd started out as a cop, young enough to believe in bullshit like people's inherent good and that things could improve and change for the better; he'd fancied himself some kind of superhero. It had taken him less than a week on the streets to turn into an extreme cynic.
"Where can I reach you?" Max asked.
"I'm at the Hotel Olffson. Most famous hotel in Haiti."
"Is that saying anything?"
"Graham Greene stayed there."
"Who?"
"Mick Jagger too. In fact I'm in the same room he stayed in when he wrote 'Emotional Rescue.' You don't look too impressed, Max. Not a Stones fan?"
"Anyone important been a guest of the place?" Max smirked.
"None you'd know." Huxley laughed and handed him his business card. It gave his name and profession, and the hotel's address and phone number.
Max palmed the card and slipped it in his jacket pocket, next to the signed Sinatra CD Carver had given him.
"I'll be in touch as soon as I've found my bearings," Max promised.
"Please do that," Huxley said.