THE OLD WOMAN was as Francesca had described her, wearing a faded pink dress and sitting outside on the porch of a shoemaker’s shop at the far end of the Boulevard des Veuves. The shop was in a house whose front was covered in a mural depicting a black man in dungarees and rolled-up white sleeves, hammering the soles of a boot while a shoeless child looked on and an angel watched above them both, in the middle. It was the only indication of the shop’s trade. The doorway, although open, revealed only a deep, impenetrable darkness impervious to sunlight. Someone had put up a poster of Charlie on the wall directly opposite.
Chantale introduced them and told her what their business was. The woman told Chantale to stand closer and talk into her ear. Max didn’t blame her. He could barely hear her himself above the street din of people shouting over the traffic growling and beeping its way through the clogged road.
The woman listened and spoke loudly, the way the hard-of-hearing do, her voice still managing to sound muffled and trapped in her cheeks.
“She says she saw what happened. She was right here,” Chantale said.
“What did she see?” Max asked, and Chantale translated almost as soon as the words left the woman’s mouth.
“She says she’s heard you’re paying people for their memories.”
The woman smiled and showed Max all that was left of her teeth—two curved brown-stained canines that looked like they belonged in the jaws of a vicious dog. She glanced over her shoulder into the open doorway behind her for a moment, nodded, and then, looking from Max to Chantale, addressed her interpreter in a lower voice. Chantale screwed her face up into a wry smirk and shook her head before relaying back to Max what she’d just been told.
“She wants more than you paid the last guy.”
“Only if what she says is true and any good.”
The woman laughed. She pointed a finger, crooked and spindly like a twig, at the opposite side of the road.
“That’s where he was,” she said.
“Who?” Max asked.
“Big man…” she said, “the biggest man.”
Vincent Paul?
“Have you seen him before?”
“No.”
“Have you seen him since?”
“No.”
“Do you know Vincent Paul?”
“No.”
“What’s that you people call him?” Max said.
“Le Roi Soleil?” Chantale asked her and got a bewildered stare back. The woman didn’t know what Chantale was talking about.
“OK. The man? What was he doing?”
“Running,” was the reply, then, nodding to the poster on the opposite wall, “Running with that boy.”
“That boy?” Max said, pointing to the image of Charlie’s face. “You sure?”
“Yes,” she said. “The man was carrying him over his shoulder, like an empty sack of coal. The boy was kicking and waving his arms.”
“What happened next?”
The woman showed Max her stained fangs again. Max reached into his pocket and showed her his roll of greasy gourdes. She held her hand out to him and beckoned with her fingers: pay me.
Max shook his head with a smile. He pointed to her and made a gabbing motion with his fingers: you talk.
The woman smiled at him again and then she laughed and made a remark about him to Chantale, which Chantale left untranslated, although it made her smirk.
The woman was well within her last quarter-century. Her hair, what little he saw of it escaping from under the green scarf she’d tied around it, was pure white, matching her eyebrows. Her nose was boxer-flat and the eyes were a shade darker than her skin, their whites beige.
“A car came out of the Cité Soleil road,” the woman told Chantale, pointing it out to them both. “The big man got in the car with the boy and they left.”
“Did you see the driver?”
“No. It had black windows.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A nice car—a rich person’s car.”
“Can she be more specific? Was it a big car? What color was it?”
“A dark car with dark windows,” Chantale said. The woman carried on speaking. “She says she’d seen it around here—a few times before the incident—always turning up that road.”
“Has she seen it since?”
Chantale asked her. The woman said no she hadn’t and then said she was tired, that remembering things too far back made her sleepy.
Max paid out eight hundred gourdes. The woman quickly counted the money and gave Max a sly, conspiratorial wink, as if they shared a deeply personal secret. Then, stealing another glance over her shoulder, she divided the money up into each hand, dropping the five-hundred-gourde note down her dress and deftly slipping the balance in her shoe, her motions fast, her hands and fingers phantoms barely glimpsed. Max looked at the front of the woman’s dress—faded and threadbare, patched and stitched up—and then down at her feet. She wore unmatched shoes, of different sizes and colors: one black, scuffing to gray and held together by fraying twine, the other originally a reddish brown with a busted clasp and bent buckle. They were so small they might have fitted a child. He didn’t see how she could have stashed money in either shoe.
Max looked over into the shop doorway, to see what it was she’d been checking on. It was too dark to see inside and there was no sound coming from within, although he sensed someone was in there, watching them.
“The shop is closed,” the old woman said, as if reading Max’s mind. “Everything closes in time.”