THE MEN FROM the airport picked Max up for dinner. They drove out of the estate, down the street, and then took a left at the end and headed up the steep road that would take them up into the mountains. They passed a bar, its name framed in a proscenium of brightly colored bulbs: LA COUPOLE. Six or seven white men, beer bottles in hand, were hanging around outside, talking to some local women in tight short skirts and dresses. Max recognized his countrymen straightaway from their matching clothes—khakis, like his, and the same cut of shirt and T-shirt he’d packed for the trip. GIs on leave, the conquering army, getting wasted on U.S. taxpayers’ dollars. He made a mental note to stop by the bar when he was done meeting his clients. The search for Charlie Carver would start tonight.
The Carver estate doubled as a banana plantation, one of the highest-yielding in Haiti. According to a footnote in the CIA report, the family plowed the profit it made from the annual harvest into its philanthropic projects, notably Noah’s Ark, a school for the island’s poorest children.
The Carvers’ home was a striking four-story white-and-pastel-blue plantation house with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up to the brightly lit main entrance. In front of the house was a well-tended lawn with a bubbling fountain and a fish-filled saltwater pool in the middle and park benches set around its edges. The area was floodlit like a football stadium, from manned high towers set in the surrounding trees.
A security guard armed with an Uzi, and a Doberman on a button-release leash met them as they drove around the lawn to the staircase. Max hated dogs, always had, ever since he was chased by one as a child. The dumb ones tended to pick up on this and they’d growl and bark and bare their teeth at him. The trained ones bided their time and waited for the signal. This one reminded him of a police attack dog, standing obediently by its master’s side, lining up homicidal thoughts, trained to go for the balls and throat—in that order.
A maid showed Max into the living room, where three of the Carvers sat waiting for him: Allain, an old man Max guessed was Gustav, and a blonde he supposed was Charlie’s mother and Allain’s wife.
Allain got up and walked over to Max, his leather heels clicking across the polished black-and-white tiled floor, hand already extended. He was flashing the same professional smile, but otherwise appeared markedly different from the cool creature Max had met in New York. He’d washed the pomade out of his hair, and with it had gone a good five years off his age and most of his gravitas.
“Welcome, Max,” he said. They pumped hands. “Good trip?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Is your house OK?”
“It’s great, thanks.”
Carver sounded like a preppy hotel manager, in his brown brogues, khakis, and short-sleeved light-blue Oxford shirt that complemented his passionless eyes. He had thin, freckled arms.
“Come on over,” Carver said and led Max across the room.
The Carvers were sitting around a long, solid-glass coffee table with five neat cubes of magazines on the bottom shelf and a vase stuffed with yellow, pink, and orange lilies on top. Gustav was sitting on a gold-trimmed black-leather armchair, the woman on a matching chair.
The place smelled of furniture polish, window cleaner, floor wax, and the same disinfectant they used in hospital corridors. Max also picked up a faint stench of stale cigarettes.
He wore a beige linen suit he’d bought off the rack at Saks Fifth Avenue in Dadeland Mall, an open-necked white shirt, black leather shoes, and his Beretta, clipped to the left side of his waist. They hadn’t frisked him before he’d gone in. He made a note to tell the Carvers this, if he finished the job with any affection for them.
“Francesca, my wife,” Allain said.
Francesca Carver smiled limply, as if offstage arms were desperately winding up her smile at great strain. She took Max’s extended hand in a cold, clammy clasp, which briefly reminded him of his and Joe’s patrol-car days, when they’d “shit-sifted”—hand-searched for drugs hidden at the bottom of backed-up toilets. Most of the time they’d had to use their bare hands, because they hadn’t brought gloves to the bust. He remembered how month-old sewage had the same texture as cold, raw hamburger—the same feeling he was getting from Mrs. Carver’s hand.
Their eyes met and locked. Her irises were a light, washed-out shade of blue that registered faintly against the whites, like the ghost of a long-forgotten ink drop on laundered fabric. Her look was pure beat cop—wary, probing, doubtful, edgy.
Francesca was beautiful, but in a way that had never done it for him—a distinguished, distant beauty that spoke status, not sexiness. Delicate, porcelain-pale skin; perfectly balanced features, with nothing bigger or smaller than it should be, everything symmetrical and in exactly the right place; high, sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a slightly upturned nose that was the perfect platform for a disdainful or withering look. Manhattan WASP, Florida belle, Palm Springs princess, Bel Air blue blood—Francesca Carver possessed the sort of face that launched a dozen country clubs and required annual membership or good connections to get close to. Her life, he imagined, was four-hour lunches, crash diets, monthly colonic irrigations, manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, liposuction, twice-weekly trips to the hairdresser, a nanny, a personal trainer, a daily/weekly/monthly allowance, limitless reserves of small talk. She was Allain Carver’s perfect foil.
But all was not completely right about her. A few things let her down and fractured the facade. She was drinking what must have been four straight shots of neat vodka out of a large tumbler; her dark-blond hair was packed into a tight, severe bun that exposed her face and drew attention to its thinness and pallor, to the shadows under her eyes and the vein in her left temple, thumping away under her skin, her pulse accelerated, tense.
She said nothing and their exchange remained wordless. Max could tell she didn’t approve of him, which was odd, because parents who called him in to look for their missing children usually regarded him as though he was the next best thing to a superhero.
“And my father, Gustav Carver.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Gustav said to Max. His voice was gravelly and expansive, a smoking shouter’s voice.
They shook hands. The elder Carver displayed a lot of strength for someone his age, who’d also suffered a stroke. His handshake, applied with minimum effort, was a bonecrusher. He had a forbidding set of paws, the size of catcher’s mitts.
He took the heavy black-and-silver-topped cane he’d rested across the arms of his chair and rapped on the couch to his left, close to him.
“Sit with me, Mr. Mingus,” he growled.
Max sat down close enough to the old man to smell mild menthol coming off him. Father looked nothing like son. Gustav Carver resembled a gargoyle, at rest between demonic eruptions. He had a huge head with a swept-back, brilliantined mane of thick silver. His nose was a broad beak, his mouth thick-lipped and bill-shaped, and his small, dark brown eyes, peering under the drapes of sagging eyelids, glistened like two freshly roasted coffee beans.
“Would you care for a drink?” Gustav said, more order than invitation.
“Yes, please,” Max said and was about to ask for water, but Gustav interrupted him.
“You should try our rum. It’s the best in the world. I’d join you, but I’ve had mutinies in the pumphouse.” He patted his chest, chuckling. “I’ll drink it through you.”
“Barbancourt rum?” Max asked. “We get that in Miami.”
“Not the deluxe variety,” Gustav snapped. “It’s not for foreigners. It never leaves the island.” His accent was closer to English than his son’s.
“I don’t feel like alcohol right now, Mr. Carver,” Max said.
“So what can I offer you?”
“Water, please.”
“That’s another deluxe drink here,” Carver said.
Max laughed.
Gustav barked at a male servant who came quickly over from near the doorway, where Max hadn’t noticed him standing when he’d walked in. Carver ordered Max’s water in words that left his mouth like a blast from a starting pistol.
Looking at the servant practically fleeing the room, Max caught sight of Allain, sitting at the other end of the couch, staring blankly into space, playing with his fingers. Max realized he hadn’t been conscious of Allain’s presence in the room after he’d been introduced to Gustav. He stole a look at Francesca, on the opposite chair, and saw her sitting in the same way—back upright, hands folded on her lap—staring in the same way at a different nothing.
The dynamics of the family fell into place. Gustav Carver ruled the roost absolutely, without question or opposition. It was his show and everyone around him was an extra, a hired hand, even his family.
The old man sucked all the energy and personality out of the room and assimilated it into his. It was why Allain appeared so changed from when Max had last seen him, demoted from the regal to the regular; and it was why Francesca was reduced to a silent bit of arm candy. Gustav must have been a terrifying father to grow up under, thought Max, the sort who disowned what he couldn’t break and bend.
The living room was vast. Three of the walls were lined with antique books—hundreds of them; collection after gold-embossed collection—their spines forming tasteful blocks of color—maroons, greens, royal blues, chocolate browns—against which furniture was offset to highlight its subtleties. He wondered how many of their books the Carvers had actually read.
It took a certain type of person to lose themselves in a book. Max wasn’t one of them. He preferred physical activity to sitting down, and he’d outgrown made-up stories as a kid. Until he’d gone to prison, Max had only read the papers and anything related to a case he was working on.
Sandra had been the reader in the household—and a voracious one, too.
The light in the room—coming from spotlights in the ceiling, and tall lamps placed in all four corners—was a warm, comforting, intimate golden-ochre, the glow of fireplaces, candles, and oil lamps. Max could make out two armor breastplates and peaked helmets, mounted on pedestals, standing at either end of the bookcases to the right of the room. On the wall opposite him, between two arched windows, was a large portrait of a woman, while below it ran a long mantelpiece massed with framed photographs of various shapes and sizes.
“Your name? Mingus? It’s black American, no?” Gustav said.
“My dad was from New Orleans. A failed jazz musician. He changed his name before he met my mom.”
“After Charles Mingus?”
“Yeah.”
“One of his pieces is called—”
“‘Haitian Fight Song,’ I know,” Max interrupted.
“It’s about la gague—our cockfights,” Gustav informed him.
“We’ve got those in Miami too—”
“They’re rougher here—primal.” Gustav smiled broadly at him. The old man’s teeth were sandy-colored and black at the roots.
Max’s eyes fell on the lilies in the vase. There was something wrong with them, something that jarred with the room’s nobility.
“Do you like jazz?” Gustav asked him.
“Yes. You?”
“Some. We saw Mingus give a concert here once, in Port-au-Prince, at the Hotel Olffson. Long time ago.”
Gustav fell quiet and stared over at the portrait on the wall.
“Come,” he said, pushing himself up out of his chair with his cane. Max stood up to help him, but Gustav shooed him away. He was about Max’s height, although slightly stooped and a lot narrower about the shoulders and neck.
Gustav took Max over to the mantelpiece.
“Our Hall of Fame—or in-fame-ey, depending on your politics,” Carver announced with a guffaw, spanning the breadth of the mantelpiece with a sweep of the arm.
The mantelpiece was made of granite, with a thin band of intertwined laurel leaves painted around the middle in gold. It was a lot wider than he had expected, more ledge than mantelpiece. Max looked across at all the photographs. There were well over a hundred there, five rows deep, each one turned at a different angle so that its core figures were visible.
The photographs were in black frames, with the same gold-leaf pattern running around the inside of their borders. At first glance, Max saw only unfamiliar faces staring back at him, in black-and-white, sepia, and color—Carver’s forebears: men old and older, women mostly young, everyone Caucasian—and then, flitting in between the aristocratic profiles and posed box-camera shots of yesteryear, were shots of the younger Gustav—fishing, playing croquet in plus fours, with his wife on their wedding day, and, most of all, shaking hands with celebrities and icons. Among those Max recognized were JFK, Fidel Castro (those two photographs placed side-by-side), John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer, William Holden, Ann-Margret, Clark Gable, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Truman Capote, John Gielgud, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor. Carver never seemed dwarfed or rendered irrelevant in the stars’ auras; on the contrary, Max thought his seemed the more commanding presence, as if he were really posing in their snapshots.
There were two photographs of Sinatra—one of the Chairman meeting Carver, the other of him kissing an awestruck Mrs. Carver on the cheek.
“How did you find him? Sinatra?” Max asked.
“A tadpole who thought he was a shark—and a complete vulgarian too. No class,” Carver said. “My wife adored him, though, so I forgave him virtually everything. He still writes to me. Or his secretary does. He sent me his last compact disc.”
“L.A. Is My Lady?”
“No. Duets.”
“A new album?” Max said, too excitedly for his liking. He hadn’t thought to check any record stores before he’d left. Before he’d gone to prison, he’d habitually shopped for new music on Tuesdays and Fridays.
“You can have it if you want,” Carver said, with a smile. “I haven’t even opened it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You can,” Carver said, patting him affectionately on the shoulder and then looking up at the portrait.
Max studied it and recognized an older version of Judith Carver from the mantelpiece photographs. From her near lipless face, he could see she was the mother of Allain Carver. She was seated, legs crossed, hands folded one over the other and placed on her knee. In the background, on a stand behind her, were the same vase and lilies found on the coffee table. It was then that Max realized what had been bothering him about the flowers—they were fake.
“My wife, Judith,” Carver said, nodding up at the portrait.
“When did you lose her?”
“Five years ago. Car accident. On her way back from the beach. Our driver was run off the road,” he said, and then he turned to Max. “Husbands shouldn’t bury their wives.”
Max nodded. From the side, he saw Gustav’s eyes welling up, his bottom lip trembling until he bit it still. Max wanted to do or say something comforting or distracting, but words failed him and he didn’t trust his own motives.
He noticed for the first time that he and the old man were dressed the same: Gustav was wearing a beige linen suit, white shirt, and well-polished black leather shoes.
“Excusez-moi, Monsieur Gustav?” the servant said behind them. He’d brought Max’s water—a tall glass with ice and a slice of lemon, sitting alone in the middle of a wide, round silver tray.
Max took the glass and thanked its bearer with a nod and a smile.
Carver had picked out a family photograph from the pile. Max could see it had been taken in the living room. Carver was seated in an armchair, cradling a baby in his arms, beaming. Max vaguely recognized the baby’s face as Charlie’s.
“This was after the little man’s baptism,” Carver said. “He farted all through the ceremony.”
Carver laughed to himself. Max saw he loved his grandson. He saw it in the way he held the boy in the photograph, and in the way he looked back at the two of them together.
He handed Max the photograph and walked along the mantelpiece, stopping almost at the very end and retrieving a smaller picture from a back row. He stood where he was and studied it.
Max looked at the photograph—the Carver family gathered around the patriarch and his grandson. There were four daughters—three took after their mother and were beauties based on the same template as Francesca’s, while the last one was short and fat and looked like a younger version of her father in drag. Francesca stood next to her, and Allain ended the row on the right. Another man was in the picture—about Allain’s age but much taller and with short, dark hair. Max guessed he was an in-law.
Carver came back to where he’d been standing. Max noticed he walked with a slight limp on his left side.
He took the baptism photo back and leaned in close to Max.
“I’m very glad you’re working on this,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I’m honored to have a man like you here. A man who understands values and principles.”
“As I told your son, this may not have a happy ending,” Max said, also whispering. He usually kept his feelings in check with clients, but he had to admit he liked the old man, despite everything he’d read about him.
“Mr. Mingus—”
“Call me Max, Mr. Carver.”
“Max, then—I’m old. I’ve had a stroke. I don’t have much time left. A year, maybe a little more, but not much. I want our boy back. He’s my only grandson. I want to see him again.”
Gustav’s eyes were watering again.
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Carver,” Max said and he meant it, even though he was almost a hundred percent sure Charlie Carver was dead, and was already dreading having to tell the old man.
“I believe you will,” Carver said, looking at Max admiringly.
Max felt ten feet tall, ready to get to work. He’d find Charlie Carver—if not his body, then his ghost and the place he haunted. He’d find out what happened to him and who was responsible. Then he’d find out why. But he’d stop there. He wouldn’t dispense justice. The Carvers would want that satisfaction for themselves.
His eyes fell on something he hadn’t seen until then, something not immediately apparent unless the viewer was up close—words, stamped into the mantelpiece pillars and filled in with gold paint. They were from Psalm 23, the best-known one, which starts, “The Lord is my shepherd…”—only these quoted the fifth verse:
“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.”
A maid walked up to them.
“Le dîner est servi,” she said.
“Merci, Mathilde,” Carver said. “Dinner. I hope you’ve come with an empty stomach.”
As Max and Carver began to walk toward the door, Allain and Francesca rose from their seats and followed them. For a while, Max had completely forgotten they were all in the same room.