HONESTY AND STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS weren’t always the best options, but Max chose them over bullshit as often as he could. It helped him sleep at night.
“I can’t,” he told Carver.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I won’t because I can’t. I can’t do it. You’re asking me to look for a kid who went missing two years ago, in a country that went back to the Stone Age about the same time.”
Carver managed a smile so faint it barely registered on his lips yet let Max know he was being considered unsophisticated. It also told Max what kind of rich he was dealing with. Not rich, riche—old money, the worst; connections plugged in at every socket, all the lights on, everybody home—multistory bank vaults, fuck-off stockholdings, high-interest offshore accounts; first-name terms with everybody who’s anybody in every walk of life, power to crush you to oblivion. These were people you never said no to, people you never failed.
“You’ve succeeded at far tougher assignments. You’ve performed—miracles,” Carver said.
“I never raised the dead, Mr. Carver. I only dug ’em up.”
“I’m ready for the worst.”
“Not if you’re talking to me,” Max said. He regretted his bluntness. Prison had reformed his erstwhile tact and replaced it with coarseness. “In a way you’re right. I’ve looked for ghosts in hellholes in my time, but they were American hellholes and there was always a bus out. I don’t know your country. I’ve never been there and—no disrespect meant—I’ve never wanted to go there. Hell, they don’t even speak English.”
Then Carver told him about the money.
Max hadn’t made a fortune as a private detective, but he’d done OK—enough to get by and have a little extra to play with. His wife, who was a qualified accountant, had managed the business side of things. She’d put a fair bit of rainy-day money away in their three savings accounts, and they had points in The L Bar, a successful yuppie joint in downtown Miami, run by Frank Nunez, a retired cop friend of Max’s. They’d owned their house and two cars outright, taken three vacations every year, and eaten at fancy restaurants once a month.
He’d had few personal expenses. His clothes—suits for work and special occasions, khakis and T-shirts at all other times—were always well cut but rarely expensive. He’d learned his lesson after his second case, when he’d got arterial spray on his five-hundred-dollar suit and had to surrender it to forensics, who later handed it to the DA, who recycled it in court as Exhibit D. He sent his wife flowers every week, bought her lavish presents on her birthday and at Christmas and on their anniversary; he was also generous to his closest friends. He had no addictions. He’d quit cigarettes and reefer when he’d left the force; booze had taken a little longer but that had gone out of his life too. Music was his only real indulgence—jazz, swing, doo-wop, rock ’n’ roll, soul, funk, and disco; he had five thousand CDs, vinyl albums, and singles he knew every note and lyric to. The most he’d ever spent was when he’d dropped four hundred bucks at an auction on an autographed original double ten-inch vinyl copy of Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” He’d framed it and hung it in his study, opposite his desk. When his wife asked, he lied and told her he’d picked it up cheap at a house-repo sale in Orlando.
All in all, it had been a comfortable life, the sort that made you happy and fat and gradually more and more conservative.
And then he’d gone and killed three people in the Bronx, and the wheels had come off and everything had skidded to a loud, ungainly stop.
Postprison, Max still had the house and his car in Miami, plus $9,000 in a savings account. He could live on that for another four or five months tops, then he’d have to sell the house and find a job. That would be hard. Who would employ him? Ex-cop, ex-PI, ex-con—three crosses, no ticks. He was forty-six: too old to learn anything new and too young to give in. What the fuck would he do? Bar work? Kitchen work? Pack shopping bags? Construction? Mall security?
True, he had some friends and people who owed him, but he’d never called in a favor in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now that he was on his knees. It would be tantamount to begging, and that went up against his every rule. He’d helped people out because he could at the time, not for what they could do for him later, not for points in the karma bank. His wife had called him naïve, marshmallow-soft under the concrete-and-razor-wire carapace he showed the world. Maybe she’d been right. Maybe he should have put self-interest before others. Would his life have been any different now? Probably, yes.
He saw his future, clearly, a year or two from now. He’d be living in one of those one-room apartments with stained wallpaper, tribes of warring roaches, and a set of dos and don’ts on the door, handwritten in semiliterate Spanish. He’d hear his neighbors arguing, fucking, talking, fighting; upstairs, downstairs, left and right. His life would be one chipped plate, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. He’d play the lotto and watch the results go against him on a portable TV with a shaky picture. Slow death, gradual extinction, one cell at a time.
Take Carver’s job or take his chances in the postcon world. He had no other choice.
Max had first spoken to Allain Carver over the phone in prison. They didn’t get off to a good start. Max had told him to fuck off as soon as he’d introduced himself.
Carver had been pestering him pretty much every day of the last eight months of his sentence.
First came a letter from Miami:
“Dear Mr. Mingus, my name is Allain Carver. I greatly admire you and everything you stand for. Having followed your case closely…”
Max stopped reading there. He gave the letter to Velasquez, his cellmate, who used it to make a joint. Velasquez had smoked all of Max’s letters, except for the personal ones. Max nicknamed him “The Incinerator.”
Max was a celebrity prisoner. His case had been on TV and in all of the papers. At one point, almost half the country had had a strong opinion about him and what he’d done, a sixty-forty split, for and against.
During his first six months behind bars he’d had fan mail by the sackful. He’d never replied to any of it. Even the sincerest well-wishers left him cold. He’d always despised strangers who corresponded with convicted criminals they’d seen on TV, or read about in the papers, or met through those fucked-up prisoner pen-pal clubs. They were the first to demand the death penalty when the boot was on the other foot and that foot had stomped one of their loved ones to death. Max had been a cop for eleven years. There was a lot of it left over in him. Many of his closest friends were still on the force, keeping these very same people safe from the animals they wrote to.
When Carver’s first letter arrived, Max’s mail was down to letters from his wife, in-laws, and friends. His fan base had moved on to more appreciative types, like O. J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
Carver met Max’s silence over his first letter with a follow-up two weeks later. When that, too, elicited no response, Max received another Carver letter the next week, then two more the week after that, and, seven days later, two more again. Velasquez was pretty happy. He liked Carver’s letters, because the paper—thick, water-marked cream stationery with Carver’s name, address, and contact numbers embossed in the right-hand corner in emerald-foil letters—had something in it that reacted fantastically with his weed and got him more stoned than usual.
Carver tried different tactics to get Max’s attention—he changed paper, wrote longhand, and got other people to write in—but no matter what he tried, everything went by way of The Incinerator.
So, the letters stopped and the phone calls started. Max guessed that Carver had bribed someone high up, because only inmates with serious juice or imminent retrials were allowed to take incoming calls. A guard brought him from the kitchens and took him to one of the conference cells, where a phone had been plugged in, just for him. He spoke to Carver long enough to hear his name, think he was English from his accent, and tell him what was what and never to call him again.
But Carver didn’t give up. Max would be interrupted at work, in the exercise yard, at meals, in the shower, during lockdowns, after lights-out. He dealt with Carver as he always did: “Hello,” hear Carver’s voice, hang up.
Max eventually complained to the warden, who thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Most inmates griped about hassles on the inside. He told Max not to be such a pussy and threatened to put a phone in his cell if he bothered him again with this bullshit.
Max told Dave Torres, his lawyer, about Carver’s calls. Torres put a stop to them. He also offered to dig up some information about Carver, but Max passed. In the free world, he would have been curious as hell; but in prison, curiosity was something you gave up with your court clothes and your wristwatch.
The day before his release, Max had a visit from Carver. Max refused to see him, so Carver left him his final letter, back on the original stationery.
Max gave it to Velasquez as a going-away present.
After he got out of jail, Max was all set to go to London, England.
The round-the-world tour had been his wife’s idea, something she’d always wanted to do. She’d long been fascinated by other countries and their cultures, their histories and monuments, their people. She was always going off to museums, lining up to get into the latest exhibitions, attending lectures and seminars, and always reading—magazines, newspaper articles, and book after book after book. She tried her best to sweep Max along with her enthusiasms, but he wasn’t remotely interested. She showed him pictures of South American Indians wearing pizza plates in their bottom lips, African women with giraffe-like necks fitted with industrial springs, and he really couldn’t begin to see the attraction. He’d been to Mexico, the Bahamas, Hawaii, and Canada, but his world was really just the USA, and that was a world big enough for him. At home, they had deserts and arctic wastes and pretty much everything in between. Why go abroad for the same shit only older?
His wife’s name was Sandra. He’d met her when he was still a cop. She was half Cuban, half African-American. She was beautiful, clever, tough, and funny. He never called her Sandy.
She’d planned for them to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary in style, traveling the globe, seeing most of the things she’d only read about. If things had been different, Max would probably have talked her into going to the Keys for a week, with the promise of a modest foreign trip (to Europe or Australia) later in the year, but because he was in prison when she told him her plans, he wasn’t in a position to refuse. Besides, from where he was, getting as far away from America as possible seemed like a good idea. That year out would give him time to think about the rest of his life and what best to do with it.
It took Sandra four months to organize and book the tour. She arranged the itinerary so they’d arrive back home in Miami exactly a year to the day they’d left, on their next wedding anniversary. In between they would see all of Europe, starting with England, and then they’d move on to Russia and China, followed by Japan and the Far East, before flying on to Australia, New Zealand, and then on to Africa and the Middle East, before closing out in Turkey.
The more she told Max about the trip during her weekly visits, the more he started looking forward to it. He took to reading in the prison library about some of the places they’d be visiting. In the beginning, it was a way of getting him out of one day and into the next, but the more he began to delve into the stuff of his wife’s dreams, the closer he got to her, perhaps closer than he’d ever been.
She finished paying for the trip the day she died in a car crash on U.S. 1, which she appeared to have caused by inexplicably and quite suddenly switching lanes straight into the path of an oncoming truck. When they performed the autopsy, they found the brain aneurysm that had killed her at the wheel.
The warden broke the news to him. Max was too stunned to react. He nodded, said nothing else, left the warden’s office, and went about the rest of his day pretty much as normal, cleaning the kitchen surfaces, serving at the counter, feeding the trays through the dishwasher, mopping the floors. He didn’t say anything to Velasquez. You didn’t do that. Showing grief or sadness or any emotion unrelated to anger was a sign of weakness. You kept those things well hidden, bottled up, out of sight and sense.
Sandra’s death didn’t sink in until the next day, Thursday. Thursday was her visiting day. She’d never missed one. She’d fly in the night before, stay with an aunt who lived in Queens, and then, the next day, she’d drive up to see him. At around two p.m., when he’d usually be finishing off in the kitchen or bullshitting with Henry, the cook, he’d be called out to the visiting room over the PA system. Sandra would be waiting for him on the other side of the booth, behind the glass partition and the wall between them. She’d always be immaculately dressed, a fresh layer of lipstick on her mouth, big smile on her face, eyes lighting up, just like she was on a first date. They’d talk about this and that, how he was feeling, how he was looking, then she’d give him back-home news, tell him about herself, tell him about the house, talk about her job.
Henry and Max had an arrangement. Henry would work around Max on Thursdays, giving him things he could finish up quickly so he could get out as soon as his name was called. Max always helped Henry out in the same way on Sundays, when Henry’s family—his wife and four kids—came to see him. They got on well enough for Max to ignore that Henry was doing fifteen to life for an armed robbery that had left a pregnant woman dead, and that he ran with the Aryan Brotherhood.
On the outside, it was business as usual that Thursday. Only, Max had woken up with a heavy, aching feeling in his chest and a sense of emptiness that opened up into a numb void as the morning went on. He kept on hearing a peculiar rush of air in his ears, as though he was stuck in a wind tunnel, and the vein in his forehead began to wriggle and twitch under his skin. He wanted to tell Henry his wife wasn’t coming that week and then let him know why the following week, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything, because he knew the minute he did he’d lose control of his words and most likely crack up.
He didn’t have enough to do in the kitchen to keep his mind busy. He had the almost-spotless stove to wipe down. The stove had a clock set in the middle of its controls. He tried to stop himself, but he kept on staring at the clock, watching the black hands move in clicks, stepping up to 2:00.
He replayed the previous week’s visit in his mind, every single second of the last time they were together. He recalled every word she’d said to him—about the surprise discount she’d managed to get from one airline, the free nights at a luxury hotel she’d won in a contest, how impressed she was with his knowledge of Australian history. Had she ever said anything about migraines, or headaches, or dizzy spells, blackouts, nosebleeds? He saw her face again through the bulletproof-glass partition they met through; the glass was smeared with the ghostly fingerprints and lipmarks where a million convicts had touched and kissed their loved ones by proxy. They’d never done that. They agreed it was pointless and desperate. It wasn’t as if they’d never get to do the real thing again, was it? He wished they had now. It would have been better than the absolute nothing he was left with.
“Max,” Henry called over from the sink. “Time to play husband.”
It was a few clicks away from 2:00. Max started taking off his apron, right on cue, then stopped.
“She’s not coming today,” he said, letting the straps of the apron fall to his side. He felt a hot surge of tears geyser up to his eyes and mass around the edges.
“Why not?”
Max didn’t answer. Henry came over to him, wiping his hands on a dishcloth. He saw Max’s face, about to crack wide open and spill. He looked surprised. He even backed off a step. Like almost everyone else in the joint, he thought Max was a tough motherfucker—an ex-cop in General Population, who’d held his head up and hadn’t once flinched from meeting violence with violence on at least five occasions that he knew of.
Henry smiled.
He could have smiled out of mockery, or the sadistic delight in the misfortune of others that passes for happiness in prison, or plain simple confusion. Tough guys didn’t cry—unless they were pussies all along, or worse, in mid-meltdown.
Max, buried fifty feet deep in grief, read mockery in Henry’s face.
The roaring in his ears fell still.
He punched Henry in the throat, a straight, short jab powered in with his full weight, which went straight to the windpipe. Henry’s mouth dropped open. He gasped out for air. Max smashed a right hook into his jaw and busted the bone in two. Henry was a big, tall guy, a daily free-weight freak, who could press three-fifty clean without breaking a sweat. He went down with a huge thud.
Max fled the kitchen.
It was a bad move, the worst. Henry was high up in the Brotherhood, and their main source of income. They dealt the best drugs in Attica. Henry’s kids smuggled them in for him in the cracks of their asses. The Brotherhood would want blood, a face-saving kill.
Henry was in the infirmary for three days. Max ran the kitchen in his absence, all the while waiting for payback. The Brotherhood weren’t random killers. They liked to come in packs of four or five. The guards would know about it in advance. Tipped-off and paid-off, they’d look the other way, as would everyone in the vicinity. Inside, where he hurt most, he prayed they’d stick him clean, straight through a vital organ. He didn’t want to wind up a free man in a wheelchair.
But nothing happened.
Henry claimed he’d slipped on some stray grease on the kitchen floor. He was back running the kitchen by Sunday, his jaw tightly wired. He’d heard about Max’s loss, and the first thing he did when he saw him again was shake his hand and pat him on the shoulder. This made Max feel worse about hitting him.
Sandra’s funeral was held in Miami, a week after her death. Max was allowed to attend.
She was laid out in an open casket. The undertaker had dressed her in a black wig that didn’t suit her. Her real hair had never been that straight or that black; she’d had a russet tinge to it in places, brown in others. The makeup was all wrong too. She’d never needed much when she was alive. He kissed her cold, rigid lips and slipped his fingers between her folded hands. He stood there staring down at her forever, feeling her a million miles away. Dead bodies were nothing new to him, but it was very different when it had belonged to the most important person in his life.
He kissed her again. He desperately wanted to flick her eyes open and see them one last time. Besides, she’d never closed her eyes when they kissed, ever. He reached out and then noticed that the overhanging white lilies from the massed display had shed their pollen onto the collar of the dark blue pinstriped business suit she’d been dressed in. He wiped it clean.
At the service, her youngest brother, Calvin, sang “Let’s Stay Together,” her favorite song. The last time he’d sung it was at their wedding. Calvin had an incredible voice, mournful and piercing like Roy Orbison’s. It busted Max up. He cried his fucking heart out. He hadn’t cried since he’d been a kid. He cried so much his shirt collar got wet and his eyes swelled up.
On the way back to Attica, Max decided he’d take the trip Sandra had spent the final part of her life organizing. It was partly to honor her wishes, partly to see all the things she never would, partly to live her dream, and mostly because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.
His lawyer, Dave Torres, picked him up outside the prison gates and drove him to the Avalon Rex, a small hotel in Brooklyn, a few blocks away from Prospect Park. The room was functional—bed, desk, chair, closet, bedside table, lamp, clock radio, and phone—and there was a communal bathroom and trough-like sink on the top floor. He was booked in for two days and nights, after which he was taking a plane to England from JFK. Torres handed him his tickets, passport, $3,000 in cash, and two credit cards. Max thanked Torres for everything and they shook hands and said good-bye.
First thing Max did was open his door, step out of his room, walk back inside, and close it behind him. He liked it so much he did it again and again half a dozen times until he’d taken the shine off the novelty of being able to come and go as he pleased. Next thing he did was take off his clothes and check himself out in the wardrobe mirror.
Max hadn’t seen himself naked in a mirror since he’d last been a free man. Seven years on, he looked good from the neck down, dressed in just his two tattoos. Big shoulders and bulging biceps, chunky forearms, a short, wide neck, a six-pack, thick thighs; put him in trunks and body oil and he could have won a Mr. Penitentiary award. There was an art to working out in prison. It wasn’t about vanity and fitness; it was about survival. It was wise to be big—if you cast an impressive shadow, people thought twice about fucking with you, and usually kept out of your way—but you didn’t want to get too big, in case you stood out and became a target for young first-timers out to get a rep; there was nothing more ridiculous-looking than a cellblock hulk dying from a toothbrush shiv rammed in his jugular. Max was very fit before he’d gone into prison. He’d been a three-time Golden Gloves middleweight boxing champion in his teens, and he’d stayed in shape running, swimming, and sparring at a local boxing gym near Coral Gables. Exercise wasn’t a quantum leap to him; he had the built-in discipline that comes from learning to swallow a punch whole. He’d been allowed half an hour in Attica. He’d hit the weights six days a week, upper body one day, legs the next. He’d done three thousand push-ups and crunches in his cell, every morning, five hundred at a time.
Although still attractive in the blunt and brutal sort of way that deceptively appealed to women with a taste for rough men and kamikaze relationships, his face wasn’t too handsome. His skin was tight, but it was wrinkled and waxy pale, almost ghostly from the lack of sunlight. The needlepoint scars around his lips had faded. There was a new meanness in his blue eyes and a sour downturn to the ends of his mouth, which he recognized from his mother who, like he, had been left alone at the onset of her autumnal years. And as had happened to her at the same age, his hair had gone completely gray. He hadn’t noticed the transition from the dark brown he’d been on the day of his incarceration, because he’d stayed bald in the joint, to appear more forbidding. He’d let his hair grow out in the last few weeks leading up to his release—a mistake he intended to rectify before he left town.
The next morning he went out. He needed to buy a warm winter coat and jacket, and a hat, too, if he was going to lose his old-man’s hair. It was a bright, freezing-cold day. The air burned his lungs. The street was swarming with people. Suddenly he was lost and didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going. He’d walked slap-bang into the middle of rush hour, everybody on their way to earn money and take shit with a thank-you and a smile, and build up a backlog of grudges and resentments in the process. He should’ve known better and prepared himself for it, but he felt as if he’d been beamed in from another planet against his will. A seven-year stretch of time slipped its leash and rushed at him, jaws wide open, belly empty. Everything had changed—clothes, hairstyles, walks, faces, brands, prices, languages—too much to take in and absorb and break down and analyze and compare. Too much too soon after prison, where everything stayed the same and you were on at least face terms with everyone you saw. Now he was straight in at the deep end. He could float but he’d forgotten the strokes. He plodded along, keeping two steps behind the people in front of him and two steps in front of those behind, chain-gang style. Maybe no matter how free we think we are, we’re all prisoners in our own way, he thought. Or maybe he just needed time to wake up and get with the program.
He slipped out of the crowd and snuck into a small café. It was packed with people getting a caffeine fix before hitting their offices. He ordered an espresso. It came in a cardboard cup with a holder and a warning printed on the side that the drink was VERY HOT. When he tasted it, it was lukewarm.
What was he doing in New York? It wasn’t even his town. What was he doing even thinking of traveling the world when he hadn’t been home, got his bearings, and readjusted himself to freedom?
Sandra wouldn’t have wanted him to do this. She would have said it was pointless, running away when he’d have to come back eventually. True. What was he scared of? Her not being there? She was gone. He’d just have to get over—and move on the best he could.
Fuck it. He’d go back to Miami on the first plane out.
In his hotel room, Max called up the airlines. All flights booked solid for the next two and a half days. He got a seat for the Friday afternoon.
Even though he didn’t have a clue what he’d do when he got to Miami, he felt better now that he was heading somewhere familiar.
He thought about taking a shower and getting something to eat, and maybe that haircut if he could find a place.
The phone rang.
“Mr. Mingus?”
“Yes?”
“Allain Carver.”
Max didn’t say anything. How had he found him here?
Dave Torres. He was the only one who knew where Max was. How long had he been working for Carver? Probably since Max had asked him to stop the calls he was getting in prison. Instead of going to the authorities, Torres had gone to the man himself. Double-dealing scumbag never missed an opportunity to make a buck.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
“What’s this about?” Max said.
“I have a job you might be interested in.”
Max agreed to meet him the next day. His curiosity was back.
Carver gave him an address in Manhattan.
“Mr. Mingus? I’m Allain Carver.”
First impression: imperious prick.
Carver had stood up from behind an armchair when Max had walked into the club. Instead of coming over, he’d taken a few steps forward to identify himself and then stood where he was, arms behind his back, in the style of royalty meeting an ambassador from a former colonial state, now hopelessly impoverished and in dire need of a handout.
Tall and slender, dressed in a well-tailored navy blue wool suit, light blue shirt, and matching silk tie, Carver might have strolled in off a 1920s-set musical where he’d been cast as an extra in a Wall Street scene. His short, blond hair was slicked back from his forehead and parted down the middle. He had a strong jaw, long, pointed face, and tanned skin.
They shook hands. Firm handshake, soft, smooth skin unperturbed by manual labor.
Carver motioned him to a black-leather-and-mahogany tub chair set in front of a round table. He waited until Max had sat down before he took his place opposite him. The chair was high-backed and finished some two feet above his head. He couldn’t see to his left or right without leaning all the way forward and craning his neck out. It was like being in his own booth, intimate and secretive.
Behind him was a bar that stretched the width of the room. Every conceivable spirit seemed to be lined up there—green, blue, yellow, pink, white, brown, clear, and translucent bottles glinting as gaily as plastic-bead curtains in a well-heeled brothel.
“What would you like to drink?”
“Coffee, please. Cream, no sugar.”
Carver looked over to the far end of the room and raised his hand. A waitress approached. She was fashion-model thin, with high cheekbones, pouting lips, and a catwalk strut. All the staff Max had seen so far looked like models: both the barmen had that slowburn, stubbled seducer look advertisers used to sell white shirts and cologne, while he could have seen the receptionist in a clothes-store catalogue, and in another life, the security guy monitoring the CCTV screen in a side office might have been the Diet Coke break guy on the construction site.
Max had almost missed the club. It was in an anonymous five-story townhouse in a cul-de-sac off Park Row, so anonymous that he’d walked past it twice before he’d noticed the number 34 stamped faintly into the wall near the door. The club was three flights up in a mirrored elevator with polished brass handles running around the middle and reflections accordioning to infinity. When the doors opened and he’d stepped out, Max thought he’d arrived in the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.
The interior was vast and very quiet, like a library or a mausoleum. All over the thickly carpeted floor, black tub chairs sprouted like burned-out oak stumps in a desecrated forest. They were arranged so you only saw their backs and not the people in them. He’d thought they were alone until he saw clouds of cigar smoke escaping from behind one of the chairs, and when he looked around more closely, he saw a man’s foot in a beige slip-on beyond another. A single framed painting adorned the wall nearest to them. It was of a young boy playing a flute. He was dressed in a ragged, Civil War–era military uniform a good ten years too big for him.
“Are you a member here?” Max asked, to break the ice.
“We own it. This and several similar establishments around the world,” Carver replied.
“So you’re in the club business?”
“Not particularly,” Carver answered with an amused look on his face. “My father, Gustav, set these up in the late fifties to cater for his best business clients. This was the first. We have others in London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlin—and elsewhere. They’re a perk. When individuals or their companies do over a certain amount of net dollar business with us they’re offered free lifelong membership. We encourage them to sponsor their friends and colleagues, who of course pay. We have a lot of members, turn a good profit.”
“So you can’t just fill out a form?”
“No,” Carver chuckled.
“Keep the peasants out, huh?”
“It’s just the way we do business,” Carver said dryly. “It works.”
There were traces of East Coast WASP wrinkling Carver’s otherwise crisp English accent, an unnatural reining in of some vowels and an overexaggeration of others. English school, Ivy League diploma?
Carver resembled a matinee idol manqué, looks fading agreeably. Max placed him as his own age, maybe a year or two younger; balanced diet–healthy. There were lines on his neck and crow’s-feet etched at the ends of his small, sharp blue eyes. With his golden skin he could have passed for white South American—Argentinean or Brazilian—bloodlines going all the way back to Germany. Untouchably handsome but for his mouth. That let him down. It resembled a long razor cut where the blood had just started to bubble but not yet run over.
The coffee came in a white porcelain pot. Max poured himself a cup and added a measure of cream from a small jug. The coffee was rich and strong, and the cream didn’t leave a greasy slick on the surface; it was connoisseur stuff, the kind you bought by the bean and ground yourself, not the average brews you picked up in the supermarket.
“I heard about your wife,” Carver said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” Max countered curtly. He let the subject die in the air, then got down to business. “You said you had a job you wanted me to look at?”
Carver told him about Charlie. Max heard the basics and flat-out said no. Carver mentioned the money and Max quieted down, more out of shock than greed. In fact, greed didn’t even enter into it. While Carver was talking numbers, he handed Max a manila envelope. Inside were two glossy black-and-white photographs, a headshot, and a full-length bodyshot—of a little girl.
“I thought you said your son was missing, Mr. Carver?” Max said, holding up the picture.
“Charlie had a thing about his hair. We nicknamed him Samson because he wouldn’t let anyone go near it. He was born—somewhat unusually—with a full head of the stuff. Whenever anyone tried to sneak up on him with a pair of scissors he screeched—this deafening howl. Quite terrifying. So we left it alone. I’m sure he’ll outgrow the phobia eventually,” Carver said.
“Or not,” Max said bluntly, deliberately.
Max thought he saw Carver’s face change for an instant, as a shadow of humanity stole away a fragment of his all-business composure. It wasn’t enough to make him warm up to his potential client, but it was a start.
Max studied the headshot. Charlie didn’t look anything like his father. His eyes and hair were very dark and he had a large mouth with full lips. He wasn’t smiling. He looked pissed off, a great man interrupted in the middle of his work. It was a very adult look. His stare was intense and stark. Max could feel it prodding at his face, humming on the paper, nagging at him.
The second photograph showed Charlie standing in front of some bougainvillea bushes with almost the same expression on his face. His hair was long all right, bow-tied into two drooping bunches that poured over his shoulders. He was wearing a floral-patterned dress, with frills on the sleeves, hem, and collar.
It made Max sick.
“It’s none of my business and I ain’t no psychologist, but that’s a sure-as-shit way to fuck a kid’s head up, Carver,” Max said, hostility upfront.
“It was my wife’s idea.”
“You don’t seem the henpecked kind.”
Carver laughed briefly, sounding like he was clearing his throat.
“People are very backward in Haiti. Even the most sophisticated, well-educated sorts believe in all kinds of rubbish—superstitions—”
“Voodoo?”
“We call it vodou. Haitians are ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent vodouiste, Mr. Mingus. There’s nothing sinister about it—no more than, say, worshipping a half-naked man nailed to a cross, drinking his blood and eating his flesh.”
He studied Max’s face for a reaction. Max stared right back at him, impassive. Carver could have worshipped supermarket carts, for all he cared. One person’s God was another person’s idea of a good joke, as far as he was concerned.
He looked back at the photograph of Charlie in his dress. You poor kid, he thought.
“We’ve looked everywhere for him,” Carver said. “We ran a campaign in early 1995—newspaper and TV ads, billboards with his picture on them, radio spots—everything. We offered a substantial reward for information, or, better still, for Charlie himself. It had predictable consequences. Every lowlife suddenly came out from under a rock and claimed they knew where ‘she’ was. Some even claimed they’d kidnapped ‘her’ and made ransom demands, but it was all—the sums they wanted were trivial, way too small. Obviously, I knew they were lying. These peasants in Haiti can’t see past the ends of their noses. And their noses are very flat.”
“Did you follow up on all the leads?”
“Only the sensible ones.”
“First mistake right there. Check everything out. Chase every lead.”
“Your predecessors said that.”
Bait and hook, Max thought. Don’t go there. You’ll get drawn into a pissing contest. Still, he was curious. How many people had already worked on the case? Why had they failed? And how many were out there now?
He played indifferent.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Right now we’re just having a conversation,” Max said. Carver was stung, brought down to a level he usually didn’t frequent. He must have been surrounded by the sort of people who laughed at all his jokes. That was the thing about the very rich, the rich born and bred: they swam in their own seas and didn’t breathe the same air as everybody else; they lived parallel, insulated lives, immune to the struggles and failures that shaped character. Had Carver ever been forced to wait until next month’s paycheck for a new pair of shoes? Been turned down by a woman? Had property repossessors knocking on his door? Hardly.
Carver told him about the danger, brought up the predecessors again, hinted that bad things had happened to them. Max still didn’t rise to it. He’d gone into the meeting a third of the way determined not to take the job. Now he was almost at the halfway mark.
Carver clocked his indifference and switched his talk to Charlie—when he’d taken his first steps, how he had an ear for music—and then he went into a bit more detail about Haiti.
Max listened, feigning interest with a fixed look, but behind it he was going away, back into himself, delving, working out if he could still cut it.
He came up strangely empty, unresolved. The case had two obvious angles—financial motive or some possible voodoo bullshit. No ransom, so that left the latter, which he knew a bit more about than he’d let on to Carver. Or maybe Carver knew about him and Solomon Boukman. In fact, he was certain Carver did know about that. Of course he did. How couldn’t he, if he had Torres on his payroll? What else did Carver know about him? How far back had he gone? Did he have something stored up, ready to spring on him?
Bad start, if he wanted to take it farther. He didn’t trust his future client.
Max ended their meeting telling Carver he’d think about it. Carver gave him his card and twenty-four hours to make up his mind.
He took a cab back to his hotel, Charlie Carver’s photographs in his lap.
He thought about ten million dollars and what he could do. He’d sell the house and buy a modest apartment somewhere quiet and residential, possibly in Kendall. Or maybe he’d move out to the Keys. Or maybe he’d leave Florida altogether.
Then he thought about going to Haiti. Would he have taken the case in his pre-con prime? Yes, certainly. The challenge alone would have appealed to him. No forensics to fall back on and cut corners with, just pure problem-solving, brain work, his wits pitted against another’s. But he’d mothballed his talents when he’d gone to prison, and they’d quietly wasted away with inattention, same as any muscle. A case like Charlie Carver’s would be up the hill backwards, the whole way.
Back in his room, he propped the two photos up on his desk and stared at them.
He didn’t have any children. He’d never cared for kids all that much. They tried his patience and fried his nerves. Nothing would piss him off more than being stuck in a room with a crying baby its parents couldn’t or wouldn’t shut up. And yet, ironically, many of his private cases had involved finding missing children, some mere toddlers. He had a hundred-percent success rate. Alive or dead, he always brought them home. He wanted to do the same for Charlie. He was worried that he couldn’t, that he’d fail him. Those eyes, sparkling with precocious rage, were finding him again, all the way across the room. It was stupid but he felt they were calling out to him, imploring him to come to his rescue.
Magic eyes.
Max went out and tried to find a quiet bar where he could have a drink and think things through, but everywhere he passed was full of people, most of them a generation younger than he, most of them happy and loud. Bill Clinton had been reelected president. Celebrations everywhere. Not his scene. He decided to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels at a liquor store instead.
While he was looking for a store, he bumped into a guy in a white puffy jacket and ski hat pulled down almost to his eyes. Max apologized. Something fell out of the man’s jacket and landed at his feet. A clear plastic Ziploc bag with five fat joints rolled tampon-style. Max picked it up and turned to give it to the man, but he was gone.
He slipped the joints into his coat pocket and carried on walking until he found a liquor store. They were out of Jack. They had other whiskeys, but nothing came close to a hit of Jack.
Of course, there was always the reefer.
He bought a cheap plastic lighter.
Back in the day, Max Mingus and his partner Joe Liston had liked nothing better than to unwind with a little reefer they got off a snitch dealer called Five Fingers. Five’d feed them certified busts and throw in a few free ounces of Caribbean Queen—a very potent strain of Jamaican grass he used himself.
It was the best shit Max had ever had, way better than the year-old garbage he’d just smoked.
An hour later, he sat on his bed, staring intently at the wall, vaguely aware of the lurchy feeling in his stomach.
He lay back and closed his eyes.
He thought of Miami.
Home sweet home.
He lived near Hobie Beach, on Key Biscayne, off the Rickenbacker Causeway. On a good evening, he and Sandra used to sit out on the porch and watch downtown Miami in all its hypnotic, neon-lit splendor, the smell of Biscayne Bay wafting in on the cool breeze, fish and boat oil mixed in. No matter how many times they took in the view, it was always different. Manhattan had nothing on his hometown on a good day. They liked to talk about the future then, right then when life was good and promised to get better. To Sandra, the future meant starting a family.
Max should have told her about the vasectomy he’d had a few months before they’d met, but he’d never had the—yeah, he’d never had the balls.
How could he bring children into the world after seeing what was left of the ones he found in his line of work, the ones he had to pick up and reassemble piece by piece? He couldn’t. He’d never let his kids out of his sight. He’d lock them up and throw away the key. He’d stop them going to school and playing outside and visiting friends, in case they got snatched. He’d run background checks on all his relatives and in-laws in case they were hiding pedo convictions. What kind of life would that be—for them, for his wife, for him? None at all. Best to forget having a family, best to forget continuing the cycle, best to shut it down completely.
1981: that had been a bad time for him, a shit era. 1981: the year of Solomon Boukman, a gang leader from Little Haiti. 1981: the year of the King of Swords.
Sandra would have understood, if he’d been honest with her from the start, but when they’d first started dating he was still in his confirmed-bachelor mode, lying to every woman he met, pretending he was a long-term prospect, telling them whatever they wanted to hear so he could fuck them and run. He’d had plenty of opportunities to come clean with her before they got married, but he thought he’d lose her. She came from a big family and loved children.
Now he regretted not reversing the vasectomy when he’d had the chance. He’d thought about it a year into his marriage, when being with Sandra had started changing him for the better and, with it, little by little, changing his attitudes toward starting a family. It would have meant everything to him to still have something of her left behind, even a trace he could love and cherish as he had loved and cherished her.
He thought about their house again.
They had a large kitchen with a counter in the middle. He used to sit there at night, trying to get his head around a case that was keeping him awake. Sometimes Sandra would join him.
He saw her again now, dressed in a T-shirt and slippers, hair pillow-frazzled, a glass of water in one hand, Charlie’s headshot in another.
“I think you should take this case, Max,” she said, looking across at him, her eyes all puffed up with broken sleep.
“Why?” he heard himself ask.
“Because you got no choice, baby,” she said. “It’s that or you know what.”
He woke up with a start, fully dressed on the bed, staring at the blank ceiling, his mouth dry and tasting of rotted beef.
The room stank of stale reefer, taking him right back to his cell after Velasquez had taken a nightcap hit before saying his prayers in Latin.
Max stood up and staggered over to the desk, twenty jackhammers busting out of his cranium. He was still mildly stoned. He opened the window and the freezing-cold air tore into the room. He took a few deep breaths. The fog in his head retreated.
He decided to take a shower and change his clothes.
“Mr. Carver? It’s Max Mingus.”
It was nine a.m. He’d gone to a diner and eaten a big breakfast—four-egg omelet, four pieces of toast, orange juice, and two pots of coffee. He’d thought things through one more time, the pros and cons, the risk factor, the money. Then he’d found a phone booth.
Carver sounded slightly out of breath when he answered, as if he was cooling down from a morning run.
“I’ll find your son,” Max said.
“That’s great news!” Carver almost shouted.
“I’ll need the terms and conditions in writing.”
“Of course,” Carver said. “Come by the club in two hours. I’ll have a contract ready.”
“OK.”
“When will you be able to start?”
“Assuming I can get a flight, I’ll be in Haiti on Tuesday.”