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 Pйtionville 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 gвchette-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 Citй 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 Citй 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."