THEY DROVE TO the Boulevard des Veuves, where Charlie had been kidnapped.
They parked the car and got out. The heat fell over Max in a fine net of molten lava, baking his skin, boiling him inside. He broke out into an immediate rush of sweat, which flooded down his back and seeped through his shirt. Outside the bank the heat had been tempered by the breeze blowing straight off the sea, but here the air was flat, airless, and bone-dry, and the heat was so intense he could see it rippling in front of him in solid currents, blurring his view.
The sidewalks were raised high above the ground, their hazardous surfaces worn ice-smooth and mirror-bright by billions of footsteps and decades of neglect. They moved very slowly down the street that was jammed with people—some selling, some bartering, some buying, many hanging around and talking. Max heard his rubber soles squelching as he walked across the baked concrete. Everyone was looking at them, following them—especially Max, who sensed mass bemusement and incredulity coming at him, instead of the suspicion and hostility he’d been used to when going through the ghettos at home. Bearing in mind what had happened to him a few hours before, he avoided making eye contact. They stepped off the sidewalk and down into the road that was only slightly less congested.
If the whole city wasn’t already dragging itself around on what was left of its last legs, Max would have said that they were in a bad neighborhood. The Boulevard des Veuves had once been paved with small hexagonal stones. All but the ones still hugging the edges of the sidewalk were gone, ripped out, sometimes professionally, in geometric strips, or haphazardly, in clumps of one or two dozen. Every two yards there were drains—gaping square holes cut out of the curbs—and every four or five meters, parts of the road had collapsed and left huge, stinking, fly-infested black craters, which doubled as rubbish dumps and public toilets where men, women, and children would piss and shit in full view of everyone, not remotely disturbed by the passing traffic. The place stank of shit, rank water, putrefying fruit, vegetables, and carcasses.
There was dust everywhere, on and in everything, blowing down from the mountains that ringed the capital. The mountains had once been heavily forested, but successive generations had cut down all the trees for homes, carts, and firewood. The sun had dried up the once rich and fertile soil now left bare and exposed, and the wind had blown it back into Haitians’ faces. He tasted it on his tongue, and he knew if he closed his eyes just once and tried to plug into the place, he’d know exactly what it would be like to get buried alive in this godforsaken, fucked-over country.
Charlie’s face was plastered all over the street, the stark black-and-white posters offering a cash reward for information about his kidnapping, competing with larger, colorful ones advertising concerts by Haitian singers in Miami, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and New York.
He pulled down one of Charlie’s posters to start showing around. He noticed a small, hand-drawn symbol in black in the left-hand margin—a cross, slightly curved in the middle, with a round head, a split base, and two-thirds of its right beam missing. He looked at the other posters and saw that they were all scored with the same mark.
He pointed the mark out to Chantale.
“Tonton Clarinette,” she said. “That’s his sign. Means he took Charlie.”
They started canvassing the street for witnesses to Charlie’s kidnapping. First they went to the shops—small food stores with no air-conditioning and threadbare shelves; stores selling pots and pans and wooden spoons and ladles, hooch shacks, a bakery, a butcher’s with one dead, half-skinned chicken hanging up, a used auto parts place, another place selling only bright white chicken eggs—all producing a variant on the same answer: Mpas weh en rien—I saw nothing.
Then they quizzed people on the street. Both times Chantale showed them the poster and did the talking.
Nobody knew anything. They shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, replying in one or two phrases or long throaty outbursts. Max stood and watched, filtering the people they approached through interrogator’s eyes as they answered, looking out for the telltale signs of lying and concealing, but all he saw were exhausted, half-asleep men and women of indeterminable ages, confused by the attention they were getting from the white man and the light-skinned lady.
After more than an hour of this, Max thought of seeking out the shoemaker store Francesca had mentioned. He’d been looking out for it the whole while they’d been on the street, but he hadn’t seen anything even close. Maybe they’d passed it, or the store had closed down. At least half of the people he saw were barefoot, with feet so thick and deformed, so built up with waxy keratin about the sole and heel, he doubted they’d ever worn shoes.
They headed back to the car. An old man selling snow cones out of a wooden cart equipped with a cooler and bottles of brightly colored syrup was standing nearby, shoveling ice into a paper cup.
Max could tell he’d been waiting for them. He’d spotted the man out of the corner of his eye while searching the crowd, always on the periphery wherever they moved, pushing his cart, shaving the ice block in his box, watching them.
He started talking to Max as he approached. Thinking he was trying to sell them some of his polluted refreshments, Max waved him off.
“You want to listen to this, Max,” Chantale said. “He’s talking about the kidnapping.”
The man said he’d seen it happen, close to where they were parked, but on the opposite side of the road. His version of events followed Francesca’s very closely. Faustin had parked the car in the road and waited a long time. The snow-cone seller said he heard Faustin yelling at both women.
By then a crowd had gathered around the car. Faustin lowered the window and told them to mind their own business and get out of the way. When they didn’t move, he pulled out a gun and fired a couple of shots in the air. As Faustin was firing, Rose grabbed at his face from behind and tried to tear his eyes out. That was when he shot her.
Many in the crowd had by then recognized Faustin and they stormed the car, armed with machetes, knives, bats, metal pikes, and rocks. They smashed the windows, turned the car over twice, jumped on the roof, and began hacking into it. The man said close to three hundred people swarmed all over the vehicle.
The crowd dragged Faustin out through the roof. Although covered in blood, he was still alive, screaming for his life. They threw him into the mob. The man said they must have hacked the bodyguard into mincemeat, because all that was left of his body when the crowd moved on was a big puddle of blood and guts, with some cracked-off pieces of bone and bloody scraps of his clothes. He remembered, laughing, how they’d cut off his head, stuck it on a broomstick, and run off down toward La Saline with it. Faustin, he said, had an abnormally big tongue—easily as big as a cow’s or a donkey’s. They tried to pull it out of his head, as they’d done his eyes, but it was stuck so fast they left it dangling down his mouth to his chin, where it bounced and flopped around in the air as the crowd ran toward the slums with their trophy, singing and dancing all the way.
The snow-cone seller wasn’t too clear about what happened next. The people who’d stayed behind started stripping the car for parts. Then Vincent Paul and his men arrived in three jeeps and people scattered. Paul started shouting, running up and down the road, asking where the boy and the woman were. Someone pointed to where the mob had gone with Faustin’s head. They put Rose’s body in the back of the jeep and took off after the crowd at high speed.
The man said he never found out what happened next. The incident had taken place a few days before the American troops invaded the island, he said, when the Haitian army and militia were going around, randomly spraying poor neighborhoods with bullets and setting others on fire. So many wires had gotten crossed and much had been forgotten or ignored in that climate of dread and fear.
Max thanked him and gave him five hundred gourdes. The snow-cone seller looked at the money and pumped Max’s hand, promising to sacrifice a little something in his honor the next time he went to a temple.