THE NEXT DAY he got a call from Allain, who wanted to see him that afternoon.
Allain was pale-waxy-looking, with a slight bluey tinge to his ghostly skin. A rash of stubble had advanced across the lower half of his face, and there were deep shadows under his eyes, spreading to the start of his cheeks. Max could tell he'd slept in his clothes. He was wearing his jacket to conceal a badly crumpled shirt, whose collar was crushed and whose cuffs he hadn't bothered to roll down. His tie was on crookedly, his top button undone. He'd combed his hair back but was running low on brilliantine; clumps of hair were already starting to pull away from the main, leaning off to the side and pointing in different directions. It was as if someone had taken the old Allain, the first one Max had met, and gone over him with a wire scrubber: he was still recognizably all there, but much of the gloss had come off.
They were in a meeting room on the top floor, sitting on opposite sides of a round table. They had a great view of the sea through the smoky-gray glass. Max thought there was water in the carafe in front of them, but when he poured himself a glass, alcohol fumes wafted out. Max tasted it. Neat vodka. Allain was almost through the glass he'd poured himself. It was three in the afternoon.
"Sorry," Allain said sheepishly. "I forgot."
He wasn't drunk.
Allain had Max's plane ticket waiting for him on the table. He'd be leaving on the eleven-thirty flight back to Miami the following day.
"Chantale'll take you," Allain said.
"Where is she?"
"Her mother died on Tuesday. She took her ashes back to her hometown."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Max said. "Does she know what happened?"
"Yes. Some," Allain said. "I haven't told her the full details. I'd appreciate it if you kept those to yourself."
"Sure."
Max turned the subject to the raid in La Gonвve. Allain told Max what they'd found, looking absolutely horrified as he reeled off the details. When he'd said as much as he could, he broke down and wept.
After he'd recovered, Max resumed his questioning. Had his father never mentioned La Gonвve to him? No, never. Had his father ever played him the clarinet? No, but Allain knew he played. His father was also a fairly gifted trumpeter. Had he ever been suspicious of why his father had such a vast array of business contacts? No. Why should he? The Carvers were important people in Haiti. He remembered meeting Jimmy Carter before he'd run for president. In Haiti? No, Georgia. His father had done a deal to import Carter's peanuts after the Haitian crop had failed. Carter had even come by to say hello when he was in the country negotiating for the junta's peaceful surrender.
Max went back and forth like this, and the more he asked and the more Allain answered, looking Max in the eye with sad, bloodshot eyes, vision slowly steaming up with alcohol and heartbreak, the more he convinced Max that he really didn't have a clue about what had been going on around him.
"He hated me, you know," Allain blurted out. "He hated me for what I was and he hated me for what I wasn't."
He ran his hands back over his hair to smooth it down. He wasn't wearing his watch. Max noticed a thick, pink scar over his left wrist.
"What about you, Allain? Did you hate him?"
"No," Allain replied tearfully. "I would have forgiven him if he'd asked me."
"Even now? With all you know?"
"He's my father," Allain replied. "It doesn't excuse what he's done. That still stands. But he's my father all the same. All we have here is ourselves and our families."
"Did he ever use any of those psychological techniques on you?"
"What? Hypnosis? No. He wanted to get a shrink to straighten me out, but Mother wouldn't let him. She always stuck up for me." Allain looked at his blurred reflection on the table. He finished his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Then he suddenly clicked his fingers and patted at his jacket.
"This is for you." He pulled out a crumpled but sealed envelope, which he held out to Max between his fingers.
Max opened it. Inside was a receipt for a money transfer into his account in Miami: $5,000,000.
Five million dollars.
Max was speechless.
A big pile of money on a plate.
Tomorrow he was going back to Miami. He had his life to restart. The money in his hand would be a great big help, maybe all the help he'd ever need.
Then a shadow stole up and chilled the vision.
"But…" Max started, looking up from the zeros.
He remembered Claudette Thodore, sold for the money that went into the Carver empire, an empire made out of the flesh of children. Some of that money was in his hands, and that money was his future.
"Isn't it enough?" Allain looked suddenly frightened. "I'll gladly pay you more. Name it."
Max shook his head.
"I've never been paid for a job I didn't finish," he said finally. "I can't even tell you for sure what happened to Charlie."
"Vincent's back on the case again," Allain said. "He liked you, you know, my father. He said you were an honorable man."
"Yeah? Well, I don't like him," Max answered. "And I can't accept this money."
He put the receipt on the table.
"But it's in your account. It's yours." Allain shrugged. "Besides, the money doesn't know where it's come from."
"But I do. And that's a big problem," Max said. "I'll wire it back to you as soon as I get the chance. So long, Allain."
They shook hands, then Max walked out of the boardroom and headed for the elevator.
He parked his car near the pastel pink Roman Catholic cathedral and walked off into downtown Port-au-Prince.
Close to the Iron Market, he stopped by a building that claimed it was a church, despite looking like a warehouse from the outside.
He pushed the door open and went into what was, quite simply, the most extraordinary, beautiful chapel he'd ever seen.
At the end of the aisle, behind the altar, covering the entire wall from the ground up to three shuttered windows under the vault, was a mural, some twenty-one feet tall. He walked down between the plain-looking wooden pews and took a seat in the second row from the front. A dozen or more people-mostly women-were sitting or kneeling in various places.
The Virgin Mary, in a yellow dress and blue cape, dominated the Nativity panel. She came toward the viewer with her hands clasped over her heart, two angels behind her, holding up the ends of her cape. Beyond was an open, thatched structure, like a hut with a roof but no walls, very similar to ones he remembered seeing from his car window on rides in and out of Pйtionville.
The mural panels were capped and linked by angels, playing music or bringing down garlands to the scenes below, suggesting that Jesus's life, from beginning to rebirth, was one act.
He'd sometimes cracked cases after a solo brainstorm in a church; an hour or so sitting contemplating eyeless icons and stained-glass windows, breathing in stale candle fumes and feeling the weight of all that humbled silence around him. That had helped him get his head straight and his thoughts in line.
What now? Where was he going after this?
In the immediate future, there were the same old problems he was facing before he went away: he'd have to go back to the house and face all its happy memories massed behind the door, ready to engulf him the minute he walked in, a welcoming party of ghosts. He thought of Sandra again and sorrow mounted up in hot, damp pressure behind his eyes and his nose.
When he got back to Miami, his career as a private detective would be over; the end of everything he knew how to do and still, somehow, wanted to do-despite the things he'd seen, all the danger he'd been in; despite fearing that he wasn't that good anymore, that there were things here he might have missed.
What was he going to take away from Haiti? What was he going to gain? Not money, not the satisfaction of a job well done because-and for the very first time in his career-he hadn't solved the case. He was leaving unfinished business behind. The little boy's face would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was still really none the wiser about what had happened to him. It was all speculation, conjecture, rumor. Poor kid. A double innocent.
He'd helped bring down an international pedophile ring-or at least started the process of its collapse. He'd saved the lives of countless children and spared their parents a taste of death in life, of having to carry on with a loved one gone. But what of the children they'd find and free? Could they be healed? Could the process be reversed, could they put back what had been taken away? He'd have to wait and see.
Wait and see: that was the best and worst he could expect from his life now. The thought spooked and then depressed him.
He left the church an hour later, stopping a woman coming through the front door to ask her the name of the place.
"La Cathйdrale Sainte-Trinitй," came the reply.
Outside, the sun dazzled him and the heat and noise disoriented him for a while, as he walked through the streets, farther and farther from the cool, quiet, innate somberness of the church.
He got his bearings again and walked back to where he'd parked the car. It was gone. Shards of broken glass on the sidewalk told him what had happened.
He didn't mind. In fact, he really didn't care.
He retraced his steps and found the Iron Market. Opposite was a long row of parked tap-taps waiting for custom-1960s hearses, coupes, and sedans, and the voodoo-psychedelia of their painted exteriors. He asked the driver at the head of the queue if he was going to Pйtionville. The driver nodded and told him to get in.
They waited for a full forty minutes for the car to fill up with people coming in off the streets with baskets of vegetables, rice, and beans, live chickens, and dead wet fish. Max found himself wedged tightly in the corner, almost buried beneath the half a dozen bodies crammed in the back, a large woman sitting on his lap.
When the driver was good and ready, they left. He took the back streets out of the capital, where the only competing traffic were people and livestock. Inside the car it was lively, everyone seeming to know everyone else, everyone talking to one another-everyone, that is, except Max, who couldn't understand a damn word.
He packed his case and had dinner at a restaurant near La Coupole.
He ate rice, fish, and fried plantain, and left a good tip before walking out of the door with a wave and a smile to the pretty young girl who'd served him.
As he walked back home, he watched the children-bedraggled, skinny, bloated bellies, filthy, dressed in rags, many in tight packs, scavenging through rubbish heaps, some playing games, some hanging around on street corners, a few stumbling barefoot behind their parents. He wondered what he'd saved them from.