DINNER WAS SERVED by two maids in black uniforms with white aprons. They were silent and unobtrusive, serving the first course—two slices of prosciutto, with chilled cantaloupe, honeydew, galia, and watermelon—with the minimum of fuss, their presence a brief shadow at the shoulder.
The dining room, black-and-white-tiled, like the living room, was brightly lit by two huge chandeliers and dominated by the banquet table that could sit twenty-four. Judith’s portrait hung on the left-hand wall, her face and torso looming over the end of the table, her essence filling the place she had no doubt occupied in body. The table was decorated with three vases of artificial lilies. Max and the Carvers sat close together at the opposite end. Gustav was at the head, Francesca faced Allain, and Max was placed next to her.
Max looked down at his place setting. He’d landed in alien territory. He didn’t stand much on ceremony and etiquette. Other than the restaurants he’d taken his wife and girlfriends to, the only formal dinners he’d attended were cop banquets, and those had been like frat parties, disintegrating into roll fights and rude food-sculpture contests.
Cutting his ham, Max looked at the Carvers. They were still on the melon. They ate in silence, not looking at each other. The percussive tap of metal on porcelain was the only sound filling the cavernous dining room. Gustav kept his eyes fixed on his food. Max noted the way the fork trembled in his fingers as he brought it up to his mouth. Allain stabbed at his food, as though trying and failing to crush a zigzagging ant with the point of a pencil. He brought pieces of fruit up to his lipless mouth and snatched them in, like a lizard swallowing a fly. Francesca held her cutlery like knitting needles, dissecting her fruit into small morsels she then dabbed into her mouth without really opening it. Max saw how thin and pale and veinless her arms were. He noticed she was trembling, too, a nervous tremor, worries rattling inside of her. He glanced back at Allain and then again at her. No chemistry. Nothing left. Separate rooms? Miserable couple. Did they still argue or was it all silence? It was more than just the kid. These were two people staying together like bugs on sap. Max was sure Carver had someone on the side. He looked after himself, kept up his appearance, cut a dash. Francesca had given up. Poor woman.
“How long’ve you been in Haiti, Mrs. Carver?” Max asked, his voice filling the room. Father and son looked his way, then Francesca’s.
“Too long,” she said quickly, just above a whisper, as if implying that Max shouldn’t be talking to her. She didn’t turn her head to look at him, merely glanced his way out of the corner of her eye.
Max swallowed the ham with a loud, hard gulp. It hurt his throat going down. There was another slice to go but he didn’t touch it.
“So, tell me, Max—what was prison like?” Gustav barked across the table.
“Father!” Allain gasped at the old man’s brusqueness and indiscretion.
“I don’t mind talking about it,” Max said to Allain. He’d been expecting the old man to ask him about his past.
“I shouldn’t have taken the Garcia case,” he started. “It was too close, too personal. My wife and I knew the family. They were friends. Her friends first, then mine. We babysat their daughter, Manuela, sometimes.”
He saw her again, now, in front of him. Four years old, her grownup features budding, crooked nose, brown eyes, curly brown hair, impudent smile, always talking, a little Inca. She’d loved Sandra, called her “Auntie.” Sometimes she’d want to come and spend the night with Sandra even when her parents were with her.
“Richard and Luisa had everything most people wish for. They were millionaires. They’d been trying for a baby for years. There’d always been complications. Luisa had had three miscarriages and the doctors told her she couldn’t get pregnant again—so, when Manuela came along they thought it was a miracle. They loved that little girl.”
Manuela hadn’t liked Max much, but she’d inherited her father’s smooth, diplomatic skills and, even at that age, she’d understood the importance of not offending people unless you were sure you could get away with it. She’d been polite to Max and called him “Uncle Max” to his face, but when she thought he couldn’t hear she referred to him as “Max” or “he.” It had always made him smile, hearing the future adult in the child.
“They contacted me as soon as they got the ransom demand. I told them to go to the cops, but they said the kidnappers had warned them not to or the girl would die. Usual TV-movie shit,” Max said, talking to the room. “Never trust a kidnapper, least of all one who tells you not to go to the cops. You’ll find they don’t know what they’re doing, and nine times out of ten the victim gets hurt. I told Richard all this, but he still wanted to play it by their rules.
“He asked me to be the bag man. I was to drop the ransom off and wait for the kidnappers to call and tell me where to find Manuela. I delivered the money near a pay phone in Orlando. Some guy on a motorbike picked it up. He didn’t see me. I was hiding across the street. I got his registration, make of the bike, his basic physical description.
“The call never came. I ran the bike details by a cop friend of mine on the job. It belonged to one of Richard’s employees. I got the information I needed out of him and turned him over to the cops.
“He told me Manuela was being held at a house in Orlando. I went there and she was gone,” Max said. He saw Francesca Carver twisting her napkin tight under the table, loosening it and then twisting it again with a hard wrench of her hands.
“The ransom guy had given me the names of his accomplices. Three of them, still teenagers. Seventeen. Two boys, a girl. Black. All three had records. The girl was a runaway, turned hooker. One of the boys was the ringleader’s cousin.”
The maids came in and cleared away the plates and refilled the glasses with water and juice. Allain and Gustav were giving him their full, undivided attention. He felt them hanging on his every word. Francesca wasn’t looking at him. The vein in her temple was throbbing again.
“There was a manhunt, first state, then national, the FBI got involved. They spent six months looking for Manuela and the kidnappers and they found nothing. I was out looking for her too. Richard offered me a million dollars. But I did it for free.”
Max remembered his search all too clearly, mile after black-and-white mile of endless highway and freeway, hours and days of nothing but road, sitting in rented cars, all of them with different defects—no air-conditioning, no heating, no left indicator, slow gear change, no radio, radio too loud, fast-food fumes of previous occupants; the motel rooms, the TVs, the plane rides; the tiredness, the legal speed pills washed down with pots of coffee, the calls home, the calls to the Garcia family; despair growing ever longer in him like an afternoon-to-early-evening shadow. He was feeling it all over again, distanced, diluted in time, but its trace still potent enough.
“I’ve seen some pretty fucking horrible things in my time. I’ve seen people do things to each other you couldn’t imagine. But all that time it was kind of OK. It was part of my job. It came with the territory. It was something I could leave behind at the end of every shift, wash off and dive back into a few hours later.
“But when it’s personal it hits you bad. Those few hours’ downtime—that space between doing your job and not doing your job—that disappears. You’re not a professional anymore. You’re right there with the next of kin—the moms and dads, the husbands and wives, the boyfriends and girlfriends, the roommates, the pets—catching some of all those tears.
“Do you know they train you as part of the detective’s course, in the art of breaking bad news? They train you in professional sympathy. Some out-of-work Hollywood acting coach trained me. I was top of my class. I oozed professional sympathy at the drop of a hat. I tried to ooze some of that sympathy on myself. Didn’t work.
“I found Manuela Garcia almost a year after her kidnapping. In New York. She’d been dead six or seven months. They’d done things to her. Ugly things,” Max said. He stopped himself in time from giving the details.
The maids brought in the main course. All Haitian food: grillot—cubed pork fried in garlic, pepper, and chili, and served with a lemon dressing; slivers of plantain, fried golden brown; a choice of either cornmeal and thick kidney-bean sauce, or riz dion-dion—rice with local mushrooms. There was also a tomato salad.
Max couldn’t be sure if the Carvers ever really ate native, or if the food hadn’t been specially prepared for him, as an induction. They weren’t putting much of it on their plates. He had the rice, plantain, grillot, and a hefty dollop of tomato, which he dumped into his dinner plate, ignoring the salad side-plate. He noticed his gaffe when Francesca put a few sliced tomatoes into the salad plate and a single grillot on her main plate. He didn’t let it bother him.
Allain Carver had the same as him. Francesca cut her pork cube into tiny fragments that she fanned out in her plate and looked at intently, as if divining her fortune.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Max tried to take his time over it, but he was hungry and the food was delicious, the best he’d eaten in over eight years.
His plate was almost empty by the time conversation resumed.
“So what happened next, Max?” Gustav asked.
“Well,” Max began, taking a long drink of water. “You know there’s a whole shrink industry devoted to looking into the sort of mind that’ll think up the most repulsive torture it can inflict on another human being and then see it through? These are the same fancy mouthpieces defense attorneys wheel out in court to explain that some sick fuck ended up the way they did because they were abused as children, because their parents were fuckups themselves. I don’t buy that shit. Never have. I believe most of us know right and wrong, and if you go through wrong as a child you look for right as an adult. But for most Americans, therapy is like confession and shrinks are the priests. Instead of saying their Hail Marys they blame their parents.”
Gustav Carver laughed and clapped his hands. Allain smiled tightly. Francesca had gone back to strangling her napkin.
“I knew those kids would get off. There’s no death penalty in New York. They’d play the mental illness card and they’d win. Two of them were crack addicts, so that’s diminished responsibility right there. They’d put most of the blame on the ringleader, the oldest one, the one who’d organized it—Richard’s employee. In between, Manuela would be forgotten about and the trial would be more about the kids. The media would get hold of it and make it into this big indictment of African-American youth. They’d get fifteen to twenty. They’d get raped in prison, sure. The men would get AIDS. Maybe. But for all their wasted, rotted lives, Manuela’s would go unlived.
“I found the girl first. It wasn’t hard. She was out turning tricks for rock. She took me to the other two. They were holed up in Harlem. They thought I was a cop. They confessed everything, down to the last shitty detail. I heard them out, made absolutely sure it was them…And then I shot ’em.”
“Just like that?” asked Allain, looking horrified.
“Just like that,” Max said.
He’d never told anybody this much about the Garcia case, and yet it had felt right. He wasn’t after absolution or even understanding or empathy. He’d just wanted to free himself of the truth.
Gustav was beaming at him. There was a twinkle in his eye, as if he’d been both moved and invigorated by the story.
“So, you pleaded guilty to manslaughter, yet you committed premeditated cold-blooded murder? You received a very light sentence. The same system you criticized looked after you,” Gustav said.
“I had a good lawyer—” Max said, “—and a great shrink.”
Gustav laughed.
Allain laughed too.
“Bra-voh!” Gustav barked joyfully, his approval echoing around the room, coming back in sets of two and three, giving Max a small yet highly appreciative spectral audience.
Allain stood up and joined in.
Max was part amused, part embarrassed, part wishing himself away. The two Carvers were no better than the redneck vigilante freaks who’d written to him in jail. He wished now he could have taken it all back, fed them the same line of crap he’d fed the cops and his lawyer, about self-defense with intent.
Francesca broke up the fun.
“I knew it,” she said venomously, eyes turned to slits, rounding on Max. “This isn’t about Charlie at all. It’s about them.”
“Francesca, you know that’s not true,” Allain said patronizingly, as if he were scolding a child for telling a blatant lie. He gave her a cutting, get-back-in-line look that made her lower her head.
“Francesca’s understandably upset,” Allain explained to Max, leaning over to him, cutting her off.
“Upset! I’m not upset! I’m beyond upset!” Francesca screeched. Her face was crimson, her blue eyes bulged, more washed-out-looking than ever. The pulsing vein in her temple had turned purple, forming a bruise-colored whorl. Like her husband, she had an English accent, only hers was the real deal, no East Coast edges or lopsided-sounding vowels.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” she said to Max. “They didn’t bring you here to find Charlie. They think he’s dead. They have all along. They brought you in to find the kidnappers—to find whoever it is who dared go up against the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-owning Carver clan! That story you just told confirms it all. You’re no ‘private detective.’ You’re nothing more than a glorified hit man.”
Max looked at her, feeling chastised and embarrassed. This wasn’t what he’d expected.
In some ways, she was right. He had a short fuse. He acted on his impulses. His temper got the better of him, and yes, it had sometimes clouded his judgment. But that was then, when he still cared, before he’d fallen foul of his own system.
“Francesca, please,” Allain said, appealing to her now.
“God damn you, Allain!” she yelled, throwing down her napkin and standing up with such force her chair flew back and fell over. “I thought you promised to find Charlie.”
“We’re trying,” Allain said, pleading.
“With him?” Francesca said, pointing at Max.
“Francesca, please sit down,” Allain said.
“Damn you, Allain—and damn you too, Gustav!—damn you and your damn family!”
She shot Max a tearful, hate-soaked look. The veins in the corners of her eyes pushed up against her skin like early-morning worms. Her lips were trembling with rage and fear. Her anger made her look younger, less damaged and vulnerable.
She turned and ran out of the room. Max noticed she was barefoot and had a small tattoo over her left ankle.
Silence followed the explosion, a big pall of nothing that settled over the scene. It was so complete, so still in the room that Max could hear the Doberman’s paws scrabbling on the gravel path outside, the crickets chirping in the night.
Allain looked humiliated. He was blushing. His father sat back in his chair, watching his son’s discomfort with an amused expression playing on his thick lips.
“I’m sorry about my wife,” Allain said to Max. “She’s taken this whole business very hard. We all have, obviously, but she’s—it’s hit her particularly hard.”
“I understand,” Max said.
And he did. There were two kinds of victim-parent: those who expected the worst and those who lived in hope. The former didn’t crack; they lived through their loss, grew thicker skins, became mistrustful and intolerant. The latter never recovered. They broke up and they broke down. They lost everything they’d ever loved and lived for. They died young—cancers, addictions, intoxications. Max could tell casualties from survivors the moment he met them, on the threshold of their greatest grief, not yet stepped over. He’d never been wrong, until now. He’d thought the Carvers would be OK, that they’d pull through. Francesca’s outburst had changed his mind.
He put another grillot in his mouth.
“She was with Charlie in the car when he was kidnapped,” Allain said.
“Tell me what happened,” Max said.
“It was just before the Americans invaded. Francesca took Charlie in to Port-au-Prince to see the dentist. On their way there the car was surrounded by a hostile mob. They smashed the car up and took Charlie.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was knocked out. She came to in the middle of the road.”
“Didn’t you have security?” Max asked.
“Yes, the chauffeur.”
“Just him?”
“He was very good.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed,” Allain said.
“Tell me,” Max said to Allain. “Was your wife on TV here a lot? Or in the papers?”
“No—maybe just once, at a function for the U.S. ambassador a few years ago. Why?”
“What about your son? Was he in the press?”
“Never. What are you getting at, Max?”
“Your driver.”
“What about him?”
“What was his name, anyway?” Max asked.
“Eddie. Eddie Faustin,” Allain answered.
Faustin? Max’s heart skipped a beat. Was this Faustin any relation to Salazar Faustin of The SNBC? He didn’t want to start down that path just yet.
“Could he have planned Charlie’s kidnapping?”
“Eddie Faustin didn’t have the brains to tie his laces, let alone plan a kidnapping,” Gustav said. “But he was a good man. Very very very loyal. He’d break his back for you and wouldn’t even ask you for an aspirin to take away the pain. He took a bullet for me once, you know? Didn’t complain. He was back at work a week later. He and his brother used to be Macoutes—you know, the militia? Not a lot of people liked them—because of things they did under the Duvaliers—but everyone feared them.”
Yes: same guys. Max remembered. Salazar was ex–Haitian secret police. They’d trained him in viciousness. Those stories he’d told them in interrogation—initiation ceremonies where they’d had to fight pit bulls and beat people to death with their bare hands. Same people. One big happy family. Keep it to yourself.
“Maybe people were out to get him,” Max said.
“We thought of that, but they could have come for him anytime. Everyone knew he worked for us. Everyone knows where to find us,” Allain said.
“Including the kidnappers, right? Are you sure he couldn’t have been behind it—or maybe involved?” Max said to Gustav.
“No, Eddie wasn’t involved and I’d stake my life on it,” the old man said. “No matter how clear-cut it appears.”
Max trusted Gustav’s judgment—to a point. There were many ingredients to a kidnapping—the safe house, the abduction planning, victim stakeout, abduction, getaway. You needed a calm, calculating, orderly, fairly rational brain to put them all together and make them work. You needed to be ruthless and cold-blooded, too. Gustav Carver wouldn’t have had someone that intelligent so close to him. Most bodyguards were dumb lunks with great reflexes and nine lives. And Eddie Faustin must have been every bit as dumb as his former boss said, to have carried on working after taking a bullet.
If Eddie was involved in the kidnapping, he had been manipulated into it. The mob was possibly a distraction, deliberately organized to kill Eddie and get him out of the way, while the kidnappers quietly made off with the kid. Were they part of the mob, or did they drive up and take the kid?
Wait a minute—
“Where was Eddie’s body in relation to Mrs. Carver?”
“There was no body,” Allain said.
“No body?”
“Just a pool of blood near the car. We think it’s his.”
“All blood looks the same. It could’ve been anyone’s,” Max said.
“True.”
“For now I’ll treat Eddie as a missing person too,” Max said. “What about witnesses? Your wife?”
“She only remembers up to the mob attacking the car.”
“So if Eddie’s alive, then he’d know who took Charlie.”
“That’s a big ‘if,’” Gustav interrupted. “Eddie’s dead. The mob killed him, I’m sure.”
Maybe, thought Max, but maybes didn’t solve cases.
“What was Eddie’s brother called?”
“Salazar,” said Allain, glancing over at his father.
“The same one you arrested,” said Gustav, as if on cue.
“You’re very well informed,” Max said. “I guess you also know they all got deported back here?”
“Yes,” said Gustav. “Does that bother you?”
“Only if they see me first,” Max said.
There was a moment’s silence. Gustav smiled at Max.
“You’ll have a guide,” Allain said. “Someone to show you around and act as your interpreter. In fact, you’ve met her. Chantale.”
“Chantale?” Max said.
“She’s going to be your assistant.”
Gustav guffawed and winked at Max.
“I see,” Max said. “She doesn’t look like the sort who has a ghetto passkey.”
“She knows her way around,” Allain said.
“That she does!” Gustav laughed.
Max wondered which of the two she’d fucked. He guessed Allain, because Allain was blushing to the roots of his hair. Max felt stupidly jealous. Carver’s money and status was an aphrodisiac. Max tried to picture Chantale and Allain together and couldn’t. Something didn’t fit. He chased her from his mind, told himself to focus, to think of her as a colleague—a partner, a life-support unit, same as when he was a cop. That was always a passion-killer.
He ate another grillot but the meat had gone cold and rock-hard. He was still hungry. He ate some tomatoes.
“My son hasn’t had a lot of luck with assistants,” Gustav said.
“Father!” Allain started.
“I think you should tell Max what he’s up against, don’t you? It’s only fair to him, isn’t it?” Gustav said.
“I met Clyde Beeson, if that’s what you mean,” Max said.
“I was thinking more about the unfortunate Mr. Medd,” Gustav said.
Allain looked uncomfortable. He eyed his father angrily.
“When did he come into the picture?” Max asked.
“January, this year,” Allain said. “Darwen Medd. Ex–Special Forces. He’d tracked drug cartel members in South America. He didn’t get very far before he—”
Allain trailed off and looked away from Max.
“Medd disappeared without a trace,” Gustav said. “The day before he vanished he told us he was going to Saut d’Eau—it’s like a voodoo version of Lourdes—a waterfall you go to purify yourself in. Charlie had apparently been sighted there.”
“And you never heard from him again?”
Allain nodded.
“Do you know who gave him the information?”
“No.”
“Did you follow it up—the waterfall lead?”
“Yes. A false one.”
“Did you pay Medd a lot of money upfront?”
“Less than you.”
“And you checked the airport—?”
“—and the ports, and the border—no sign of him.”
Max didn’t say anything. There were more than just official exits out of any country and Haiti was no different. The boat people who washed up on the Florida coastline every day were proof of that. And then Medd could quite easily have slipped into the Dominican Republic over the border.
But—assuming he was still alive—if he had left the country, why had he wanted to get out so quickly, without telling Carver?
“You’re not telling him everything, Allain,” Gustav growled at his son.
“Father, I don’t think that’s relevant,” Allain said, avoiding looking at either of them.
“Oh, but it is,” Gustav said. “You see, Max, Medd and Beeson had a predecessor—”
“Father—this is not important,” Allain said, all bared teeth and fierce eyes and clenched fists.
“Emmanuel Michelange,” Gustav said, raising his voice to a boom.
“Did he disappear too?” Max asked Allain, trying to draw him away from his father’s orbit, hoping to divert another family explosion before it happened.
But the question caught Allain off-guard, and panic crept into his eyes.
Gustav stirred. He was going to speak, but Max quickly signaled for quiet with his index finger to his lip.
Allain didn’t notice. He’d turned pale. His eyes were fixed but unfocused, his mind gone from the present, digging back through time. He didn’t get too far before he drew up a bad memory. Sweat had pooled in the lines on his forehead.
“No, just—only Medd disappeared,” Allain said, his voice fluttering. “Manno—Emmanuel—was found in Port-au-Prince.”
“Dead?” Max said.
Allain replied, but the effort was so slight the word got caught in his throat.
“Was he split in two?” Max offered.
Allain lowered his head and held it up between his thumb and forefinger.
“What happened, Mr. Carver?” Max said, firmly but staying on the right side of empathy.
Allain shook his head sadly.
“Mr. Carver, please,” Max said in the same tone, only leaning over to create a sense of intimacy. “I know this is hard for you, but I’ve really got to know what happened.”
Allain was silent.
Max heard something dragging across the floor near Gustav’s seat.
“TELL HIM!” Gustav erupted from the end of the table.
Max and Allain looked up in time to see the old man standing up in his place and bringing his cane down through the air.
There was a huge crash as the cane met the table and place setting. Glass and crockery smashed and flew across the room in shards and splinters.
Gustav stood over the table, angry, tottering, and malevolent, his presence filling up the room like toxic gas.
“Do as I say and tell him,” Gustav said slowly and loudly, raising his cane and pointing it at Allain. Max saw squashed kidney beans and grains of rice stuck to the edges of the stick.
“No!” Allain shouted back at him, pushing himself out of his seat by the points of his fists, glaring at his father, rage hammering at the insides of his face. Max got ready to jump between them if the younger man attacked the older.
Gustav looked back at him, defiantly, an unflustered smirk cresting his jowls. “Emmanuel Michelange,” Gustav said, wiping his cane clean on the tablecloth and resting it by his chair, “was the one and only local we enlisted—” He growled the world out like it was a hair-ball he was hawking up. “I was against using the natives—dumb and lazy is what they are—but junior here insisted. So we gave it a try. He was next to useless. Lasted two weeks. They found him in his jeep in Port-au-Prince. They’d taken the wheels and engine out—and much more. Emmanuel was sitting there, in the driving seat. His penis and testicles had been cut clean off—actually, not clean off—they’d used scissors.”
Max felt fear bundle up in his stomach and trickle toward his balls.
Gustav was staring at Allain the whole time he was talking. Allain was staring back at him, fists still clenched, but Max could tell he wasn’t going to use them. His father had known it all along.
“Michelange was asphyxiated on his own genitalia,” Gustav said. “His penis was blocking his throat. And each testicle was lodged in either cheek like so—”
Gustav demonstrated by putting his index fingers in his mouth and pushing out his cheeks. He looked grotesque but hilarious. Then he stuck his tongue out at his son and wiggled it from side to side. Now his resemblance to a gargoyle was uncanny.
“That’s something Chantale won’t have to worry about, I suppose,” Max said.
Gustav roared with laughter and slapped the table.
“AT LAST!” he bellowed. “SOMEONE WITH OOOMPH!”
“You bastard!” Allain shouted. Max thought it was at him, but the son was still looking at his father. He stormed out of the room.
A ghastly stillness descended on the big room again, a vacuum within a vacuum. Max looked down at his unfinished food and wished himself away.
Gustav sat down and called to the maids. They came in and cleaned up around him; then they cleared away the plates.
On her way back from the kitchen, one of the maids brought Gustav the silver cigarette box, lighter, and an ashtray from the living room. He spoke to her again, mumbling, so she had to bend over to hear him. The old man cupped her shoulder as he spoke to her.
The maid left the room and Carver took an unfiltered cigarette from the box and lit up.
“I used to smoke forty a day before my first stroke,” Gustav said. “Now I’m down to just the one—keeps the memory alive. You?”
“I quit.”
Gustav smiled.
Some people are born smokers. Carver was one of them. He loved his habit. He inhaled the cigarette smoke and held it in his lungs, getting the most out of each puff before slowly exhaling.
“Sorry you had to witness that earlier. All families argue. It’s rough but healthy. Do you have any family, Mr. Mingus?”
“No. My mother’s dead. I don’t know where my dad is. Probably dead too now. I guess I got cousins and nephews and stuff, but I don’t know them.”
“What about your late wife’s family? Are you in touch with them?”
“On and off,” Max said.
Gustav nodded.
“Allain got upset about Emmanuel because they were childhood friends. I put Emmanuel through school, college. His mother was Allain’s nanny. He loved her more than he loved his own mother,” Carver said. “In Haiti we have a servant culture. We call them restavec. It’s Kreyol for ‘stay with,’ derived from the French rester—to stay—and avec—with. You see, we don’t pay our servants here. They live with us, ‘stay with’ us. We clothe them, feed them, give them decent accommodation. And in return they cook, clean, do things around the house and garden. It’s feudal, I know.” Carver smiled and showed his caramel-colored teeth. “But look at this country. Ninety-eight percent of the population are still rubbing two sticks to light a fire. Have I offended you?”
“No,” Max said. “Prison was kind of like that. Bitch culture. You’d see people getting bought and sold for a pack of smokes. A cassette player’d buy you a blow job for life.”
Gustav chuckled.
“It’s not as barbaric here. It’s a way of life. Servitude is in the Haitian gene. No point in trying to reform nature,” Carver said. “I treat my people as well as possible. They all have bank accounts. I put all their children through school. Many have gone on to be modest middle-class achievers—in America, of course.”
“What about Emmanuel?”
“He was very bright, but he had a weakness for women. Stopped him concentrating.”
“His mother must have been proud.”
“She would have been. She died when he was fifteen.”
“That’s way too bad,” Max said.
Gustav stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. The maid returned. She brought something over to Max and put it on the table in front of him. Frank Sinatra’s Duets CD, personally autographed to Gustav in blue ink.
“Thank you very much,” Max said.
“I hope you enjoy it,” Carver said. “There should be a CD player in your house.”
They looked at each other across the table. Despite witnessing the old man’s undeniable cruelty, Max liked him. He couldn’t help himself. There was a fundamental honesty to him that let you know where you stood.
“I’d offer you coffee but I feel like turning in,” Carver said.
“That’s OK,” Max said. “Just one more thing: What can you tell me about Vincent Paul?”
“I could talk about him all night—although most of it wouldn’t interest you,” Carver said. “But I’ll tell you this one thing: I think he’s behind Charlie’s kidnapping. He’s not only someone I think could have organized it, but the only one who would.”
“Why’s that?”
“He hates me. Many do here,” Carver grinned.
“Has he been questioned?”
“This isn’t America,” Carver guffawed. “Besides, who’d dare go talk to him? The mere mention of that ape’s name makes brave men shit their panties.”
“But, Mr. Carver,” Max said. “Surely you—a man in your position—you could’ve paid people to…”
“To what, Max? Kill him? Arrest him? On what ‘charge’—to put it in your terms?—suspicion of kidnapping my grandson? Doesn’t hold water.
“Believe me, I looked at every way to bring Paul in—‘for questioning,’ as you say. Can’t be done. Vincent Paul’s too big a deal here, too powerful. Take him down for no reason and you’ve got a civil war on your hands. But, with proof, I can move on him. So get it for me. And bring back the boy. Please. I implore you.”