NWOI ET ROUGE was named after the colors of the Haitian flag under the Duvaliers. Black and red. Papa Doc had changed the flag’s original blue to black to cement the country’s complete break with its colonial past, to better reflect the country’s largest ethnic majority, and to underline his beliefs in noirisme—black supremacy; beliefs that didn’t extend to the woman he married—Simone, a light-skinned mulattresse. For many people, the revised flag’s colors came to symbolize the darkest, bloodiest period in the country’s already turbulent and violent history.
To Max, the flag recalled that of the Nazis, whose colors it shared. The coat of arms—cannons, muskets, and flagpoles dominated by a palm tree crowned with a ski hat—could have been the work of a stoned surfer with a yen for eighteenth-century military history. Who the fuck would ever take a place like that seriously?
The flag was proudly displayed behind the bar, between framed photographs of Papa and Baby Doc. Papa was dark and white-haired, his thick, black-rimmed glasses slightly humanizing a pinched face whose features suggested a limitless capacity for cruelty. His son, Jean-Claude, was a doughy lump with soft, Arabic features, bronze skin, and dopey eyes.
The bar was in a stand-alone one-room house on a stretch of road between the end of the mountain and the start of Pétionville. It was easy to miss, yet easy to find if you were looking for it.
When Max had stepped in with Chantale, the first thing he’d noticed hadn’t been the flag or the portraits, but the heavyset old man sweeping the floor around a wide pool of light cast by a single lightbulb, burning so brightly at the end of its flex, it seemed almost liquid, a drop of molten steel gathering volume before dropping to the ground and burning a hole all the way through the cement floor.
“Bond-joor.” Max nodded.
“Bon-soie,” the man corrected him. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, loose, faded blue jeans held up by red suspenders, and a pair of worn open-toe sandals. He’d swept the dirt into a small, brownish pile to his left.
There was a watercooler behind the bar, a long row of clear bottles lined up next to it, and, at the very end, right before a tall fan, Max read the word TAFFIA, written in crude block capitals on a blackboard. Below were two equations:
Max searched the bar for seats and saw none at all. There were small towers of crates stacked against the walls. He guessed the patrons arranged those as stools and tables. This was drinking at its most rudimentary, frontier-style.
The man looked at Chantale and started talking to her, his voice making the sounds of a train going off the rails and rolling down a long, steep hill, dumping its cargo of logs with every turn and bounce and crash. Max heard the name “Carver” crop up twice in the spill.
“He says if you’re looking for the Carver boy too, you’re wasting your time with him,” Chantale translated. “He’ll tell you what he told the others.”
“What’s that?” Max asked the man, trying to meet his eye but failing to, because the way he stood under the bulb drowned them in shadows. The man replied, laughed, and waved.
“He hasn’t got him. Good-bye.”
“Very funny,” Max said. His head was beginning to sweat. He felt the sweat sprouting all over his scalp, neighboring droplets fusing, seeking out others, finding them, fusing, building up, getting set to run. The bar stank of stale smoke, sweat, and, above all, of ether.
“Why did they think you had the boy?” Max asked.
“Because of my great friend, Eddie Faustin,” the man answered and pointed off to his right.
Max went over to where the lightbulb’s reflection marked out a single photograph in a frame. He recognized Faustin straightaway—he’d inherited the family resemblance to a furious donkey: big head, bulbous nose, protruding chin, eyes, and ears, and a genetically transferred scowl with flared nostrils and fully exposed upper teeth. Faustin wasn’t a big guy. His body was slight, too small for his head. Max was surprised he’d survived the bullet he’d taken for Carver.
In the picture, he was standing between two people—his brother, Salazar, and the barman, who had a revolver in his hand and one booted foot parked on a dead body. Jagged exclamation-marks of blood splashed the ground near the corpse’s head and back. The hands and feet had been tied. The trio were smiling proudly for the camera.
“Those were good times,” the barman said.
Max turned and saw him smirking through a few crooked teeth with plenty of empty space in between them.
“Who took the picture?”
“I can’t remember,” the barman replied, leering at Chantale as she translated, the space around his eyes twitching as his head moved gently up and down her curves, his grip fastening on his broomstick.
Just then, there was a quiet fff-fut, as something struck the lightbulb and fell to the ground with a faint trail of smoke. It was a moth, wings instantly burned useless by the bulb. It lay on its back for a moment, struggling furiously in the air before it ceased all motion.
The man chuckled and swept the moth into the pile he was building. When Max looked at it, he saw it was made up of nothing but dead moths. The broom was crude and homemade—a long stick with a bunch of dried reeds wrapped around the end for a brush.
“What’s your name?”
“Bedouin,” the man said, straightening up a little.
“Bedouin…Désyr?” Chantale asked, her tone dropping to a hush.
“Oui. Le même.”
“Dieu…” Chantale whispered, stepping back.
“What is it?” Max asked her, moving in.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “When we’re out of here.”
Another moth self-destructed on the bulb. It fell on Max’s head, bounced off, and landed burning and kicking on his shoulder. He flicked it off. Désyr tutted and said something under his breath as he walked over with his broom and swiped the dead insect deftly across the floor into the pile as though it were a puck.
“Taffia?” he said to Max, making a drinking motion with his hand.
Max nodded and followed Désyr to the bar. Désyr got a paper cup from under the counter and held it under the water cooler. The liquid came out, releasing an air bubble inside the plastic bottle and a sharp, chemical smell that was similar to gasoline.
Désyr handed the paper cup to Max. Max took it. The fumes stung his eyes.
“People drink this?” he asked Chantale.
Désyr chuckled.
“Yeah. They also clean and run their engines on it when they can’t get gas. Runs almost as well. It’s a hundred-and-eighty-proof rum. Be very careful with that. It can make you go blind,” Chantale replied.
Max took a very small sip of taffia. It was so strong it was tasteless and burned his tongue all the way down to his throat.
“Jesus!” Max said, wanting to spit it out.
Désyr laughed and motioned to Max to throw it down his throat in one go. Max sensed that this might win him a little credibility with the bar owner, and he might tell him something more about Faustin and the kidnapping. There was only about a finger of booze in the cup.
He took a deep breath and tossed back the taffia. It hit the ends of his mouth like a firebomb and proceeded to burn its trail all the way down into his stomach.
The alcohol rush was almost instantaneous—the equivalent of five double bourbons on an empty stomach smashing into him all at once, filling his head with a dizzy euphoria. His vision blurred and swayed as his eyes tried to regain focus. Tears ran down his face and blood rushed to his head. His temples pounded. His nose dripped. The hit was like coke and amyl nitrate and smelling salts all rolled into one. Only he didn’t feel remotely good. He gripped the bar but his palms were sweaty and his hands slid back. He felt a turbulence in his stomach. He breathed deep, smelling nothing but the taffia. What the fuck was he thinking drinking that shit?
“Bravo blan!” Désyr shouted and clapped his hands in front of him.
“Are you OK, Max?” Chantale said in his ear as she placed a steadying hand against his back.
“Fuck’s it look like?” he heard himself think but not speak. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly, then another, and another after that. The air coming out of his mouth was hot. He repeated his breathing, keeping his eyes locked on Désyr, who was watching him with high amusement, no doubt waiting for him to keel over.
The nausea passed, as did the spinning in his head.
“I’m OK,” he said to Chantale. “Thanks.”
Désyr shook another cup at him. Max waved his hand no. Désyr laughed and spilled more capsized-train talk Chantale’s way.
“He says you’re not only the only white man who’s ever drunk taffia without passing out—very few Haitians have ever managed it.”
“That’s great,” Max said. “Tell him I’ll buy him a drink.”
“Thank you,” Chantale said, after she’d asked Désyr. “But he doesn’t touch the stuff.”
Max and Désyr both laughed at once.
“Eddie Faustin drank here, didn’t he?”
“Oui. Bien sûr,” Désyr said, taking a bottle of Barbancourt from under the counter and pouring some out into a paper cup. “Before he died he drank more than usual.”
“Did he say why?”
“He was coming to the end of his future and this made him nervous.”
“He knew he was gonna die?”
“No. Not at all. He told me his houngan had predicted things for him—good things, women things,” Désyr said, leering at Chantale and sipping his rum. He took a tobacco pouch out of his trouser pocket and rolled himself a cigarette. “He was in love with the blond Carver woman. I told him it was madness, impossible—him and her?” He struck a match on the countertop and lit it. “That’s when he went to Leballec.”
“This his hoone-gun?”
“He only deals in black magic,” Chantale explained. “They say you go to him if you’re ready to sell your soul. He doesn’t accept cash like the other black magicians do—he takes…I don’t know. Nobody knows for sure, except those who’ve gone to him.”
“Did Faustin tell you what happened when he went to see Le—the hoone-gun?” Max asked Désyr.
“No. But he changed. Before he used to talk and laugh about old times. He used to play dominoes and cards with us, but not after he’d been to see Leballec. He’d stand where you are now and just drink. Sometimes he’d drink a whole bottle.”
“Of that shit?”
“Yes. But it didn’t affect him.”
Max started to think that maybe the houngan had asked Faustin to kidnap Charlie.
“Did he ever talk to you about the boy? Charlie?”
“Yes.” Désyr laughed. “He said the boy hated him. He said the boy could read his mind. He said he couldn’t wait to get rid of him.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. But he didn’t steal the boy.”
“Who did?”
“Nobody took him. The boy’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve heard that he was killed by the people who attacked the car. They trampled him to death.”
“No one found the body.”
“Cela se mange,” Désyr said and extinguished his cigarette by pinching the burning tip.
“What did he just say, Chantale?”
“He said…”
“Le peuple avait faim. Tout le monde avait faim. Quand on a faim on oublie nos obligations.”
“He said…” Chantale began. “He said they ate him.”
“Bull-shit!”
“That’s what he said.”
The taffia had filled Max’s stomach and chest with a strong heat. He could hear the low murmur of digestive gases as they worked their way up his gut.
“This Le—”
“—Ballec,” Chantale finished.
“This Le-Ballack? Where does he live? Where can I find him?”
“Far from here.”
“Where?”
Another train accident, this one prolonged, because Chantale kept on either interrupting him or asking more questions. Max listened out for familiar words. Désyr said “oh” a few times, Chantale said something like “zur.” Then he heard something he recognized.
“Clarinette.”
“What did he say about clarinet?” Max interrupted them.
“He says you’ll find Leballec in Saut d’Eau.”
“The voodoo waterfalls?” Max asked. Where Beeson and Medd both went before they disappeared. “What about the clarinet?”
“It’s a town—a small town—closest to the waterfall. It’s called Clarinette. It’s where Leballec lives. Faustin used to go there to see him.”
“Have you heard of this place, Chantale?”
“Not of the town, but that doesn’t mean anything. Someone sets up a home on a piece of land here, gives it a name, it becomes a village.”
Max looked at Désyr.
“You told the others about this place, didn’t you? The other blanks who came here?”
Désyr shook his head.
“Non monsieur.” Then he chuckled. “I couldn’t. They failed the taffia test.”
“They pass out?”
“No. They refused to drink my drink. So I told them nothing.”
“So, how come they went to So—to the waterfalls?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t tell them. Maybe somebody else did. I wasn’t Eddie’s only friend. Were they looking for Leballec?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then maybe they went there for another reason.”
“Maybe,” Max said.
Another moth flew into the bulb and dropped to the floor. Very soon after, Max heard another go the same way, and then, almost simultaneously, two moths smacked into the light and made it shudder and shake.
Désyr clapped a friendly paw on his shoulder.
“I like you, blanc, so I’ll tell you this: if you go to Saut d’Eau, make sure you leave before midnight passes. White magic—good magic—honest magic is done before midnight,” he said, addressing Chantale directly. “Black magic is done after midnight. Don’t forget it.”
“Why are you helping me?” Max asked.
“Why not?” Désyr laughed.