“IT’S NOT THAT we don’t care. We do—only we appear not to. And appearance is everything,” Allain Carver said with a grin. He’d woken Max up three hours earlier with a phone call telling him to meet up at Noah’s Ark.
Max was badly hungover, feeling much worse than he had the night before, with a sack of greasy cannonballs for a stomach and a headache that felt like someone was using his skull for a mixing bowl. He couldn’t understand it. He was pretty much OK when he’d got out of bed, but the sickness and the pain had kicked in the minute he’d finished his first cup of coffee. He’d taken four extra-strength migraine pills, but they hadn’t done a thing.
Noah’s Ark was situated on a sideroad off the Boulevard Harry Truman. Carver led Max and Chantale through a small wrought-iron bar gate and up a white footpath bordered with dark-blue bricks. They crossed a lush lawn, part-shaded by leaning coconut palms and dotted with sprinklers whose mist made miniature rainbows above the ground. To the right was a small playground with swings, seesaws, a slide, and a climbing frame.
The path ended at the steps of an impressive two-story house with bright, whitewashed walls and a navy-blue tiled roof. The window frames and the front door were also navy blue. The institution’s emblem—a dark blue boat with a house in the middle of it instead of a sail—appeared as a relief on the wall above the door.
Once inside, they came face-to-face with a mural of a white man in a safari suit. He held two seminaked Haitian children—a boy and a girl, dressed in rags—by the hand. He was leading them away from a dark village whose inhabitants were all either dead or hideously deformed. The man was looking straight at the viewer, his jaw set in grim determination, his face assuming a heroic cast. The sky behind them was stormy with blades of lightning splitting the horizon and spears of rain attacking the diseased township. The man and his charges were dry and bathed in the golden hue of a rising sun.
“That’s my father,” Allain said.
When Max looked a little harder, he indeed recognized Gustav in his younger days, albeit in a very flattering light, making him look a lot more like his son than his true self.
As he led them down a corridor into the heart of the institution, Carver explained that Gustav had played a big part in helping his friend François Duvalier cure the population of yaws—a highly contagious tropical disease that, untreated, caused its victims to be covered in painful, runny sores before losing their noses, lips, and eventually limbs, which withered up into the color and shape of unattended cigarette ash before dropping off. He’d bought all the medicines and supplies from America and helped them reach Duvalier. On a visit to the village depicted in the mural, Gustav had come across two orphans, a boy and a girl. He decided to rescue them and look after them. This later led to the establishment of a Carver-funded orphanage school.
The corridor they walked down was lined with annual school photographs going back to 1962. Farther on, there were wide corkboards covered with children’s drawings, grouped into age ranges starting at four and ending at twelve. There were so few sketches in the teenage category that they had all been grouped on the board they didn’t even half fill, and even those had been done by only two people, both exceptionally gifted.
Carver went on to explain that Noah’s Ark cared for children from birth through their teens or college graduation. They were fed, clothed, housed, and educated according to either the French or American curriculum. French was the primary language in Noah’s Ark, but pupils who showed an aptitude for English—as many unsurprisingly did, with the prevalence of American television and music in their lives—were steered toward the American system. French classes were taught downstairs, English upstairs. Once they had finished their formal education, those who wanted to were sent to college, fully funded by the Carvers.
There were classrooms on either side of the corridor. Max looked through the windows in the doors and saw small, even-numbered groups of pupils, boys and girls, all dressed in smart uniforms of blue skirts or shorts and white blouses or shirts. They were all immaculately turned out and paid complete attention to their teachers, even in the back rows. Max couldn’t imagine any classroom in America being so orderly, so disciplined, and so interested in their lessons.
“So what’s the catch?” Max asked as they headed to the next floor.
“Catch?”
“The Carvers are businessmen. You don’t give money away. What do you get out of it? It can’t be publicity because you’re too rich to care what people think about you.”
“Simple,” Carver said with a smile. “They finish their studies, they come and work for us.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, we have many businesses—worldwide, not just here. They can work in the U.S., the U.K., France, Japan, Germany.”
“What if they get a better offer elsewhere?”
“Ah—there’s what you’d call a ‘catch.’” Carver laughed. “From the age of sixteen all pupils at Noah’s Ark sign a contract, stating that upon completion of their studies, they will either work for us until they have repaid our investment in them—”
“Investment?” Max said. “Since when’s charity been about investing?”
“Did I ever say this was a charity?” Carver said.
Max heard English being spoken in a mixture of American and Franco-Haitian accents as they toured the next floor, looking into the classrooms, seeing the same model pupils.
“It usually takes a period of six to seven years to repay our investment—more for girls, eight or nine years,” Carver said. “Of course they can simply repay us the full amount in one go and they’re free.”
“But that doesn’t ever happen because where are they gonna get that kind of cash from?” Max said, anger in his tone and eyes. “I mean, it’s not like they’re like you, Mr. Carver? Born breathing in silver and gold.”
“I can’t help being born rich any more than they can help being born into poverty, Max,” Carver replied, his thin lips smiling uneasily. “I understand your misgivings, but they’re perfectly happy with the arrangement. We have a ninety-five percent retention rate. Take—for example—the person teaching here.” He pointed to a petite, light-skinned woman in a roomy olive-green dress that seemed to have been designed with a monk in mind, so close was it to a habit. “Eloise Krolak. One of ours. She’s the headmistress here.”
“Krolak? Is that Polish?” Max asked, studying the headmistress a little closer. Her hair, pulled back in a severe bun, was black save a halo of gray at the roots. She had a small, protruding mouth and a slight overbite. When she spoke, she resembled a rodent gnawing at a piece of soft food.
“We originally found Eloise outside the town of Jérémie. A lot of the people are very light-skinned. Many have blue eyes like Eloise. They descend directly from a garrison of Polish soldiers who deserted Napoleon’s army to fight for Toussaint L’Ouverture. Once they’d helped overthrow the French, Toussaint gave the soldiers Jérémie as a reward. They intermarried and produced some quite beautiful people.”
With exceptions, Max thought, looking at the headmistress.
They moved on to the next floor. Carver showed them the mess hall and the staff areas—a common room and a variety of offices.
“Where do the kids sleep?” Max asked.
“In Pétionville. They’re driven in every morning and taken home at the end of the day,” Carver said. “This is the junior house. Up until twelve. There’s another Noah’s Ark on the next road.”
“You only told me about the successful ones, right? The smart ones?” Max said.
“I don’t follow.”
“Your servants came from here too, right?”
“We can’t all be high flyers, Max. Airspace is limited. Some of us have to walk.”
“So, how do you separate them? High and low? Do the low walkers show an aptitude for shining shoes?” Max said, trying and failing to keep the indignation out of his voice. Here was a people whose ancestors had gone to war to free themselves from slavery, and here were the Carvers as good as putting them right back where they’d started.
“You’re not from here so you don’t understand, Max,” Allain replied, an impatient edge to his voice. “We make a commitment to each and every one of these kids here for life. We look after them. We find something for them to do—something that suits them, something that earns them money, something that gives them dignity. The jobs we provide allow them to build or buy a house and some clothes, allows them to eat and have a better standard of living than ninety percent of the poor bastards you see in the streets. And if we could help all of them, believe me we would. But we’re not that rich.
“You’re judging us—this place—what we’re doing—by your American standards—this empty rhetoric of yours—liberty, human rights, democracy. They’re just empty words to you people. You talk of these things, yet blacks in your country only got the same rights as you less than forty years ago,” Carver said, lowering his voice but driving his point home with well-aimed fury. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the sweat that had accumulated on his upper lip.
There were things Max could have said right then in defense of his homeland, about how America at least offered people a choice, about how anyone with enough will, determination, discipline, and drive could make a success of themselves there, and how it was still the land of opportunity. But he didn’t go there. This wasn’t the time and place for a debate.
“Ever make a mistake?” Max asked instead. “Have an Einstein cleaning your toilet all his life?”
“No. Never,” Carver replied defiantly. “Anybody can be an idiot but not everybody can be intelligent.”
“I see,” Max said.
“You don’t approve, do you? You don’t think it’s fair?”
“As you said, Mr. Carver. This ain’t my country. I’m just a dumb-ass American with a head full of rhetoric and no right to talk about right and wrong,” Max replied sarcastically.
“The average life expectancy here is around forty-eight. That means you’re middle-aged at twenty-four.” Carver’s tone got back on an even keel. “People who work for us, who go through our system, they live beyond that. They get old. They see their children grow up. Just like people are meant to.
“We are saving lives and we are giving lives. You might not understand but the whole of Europe used to run that way before the French Revolution. The rich looked after the poor.
“Do you know that when they see us coming, people abandon their children so we might pick them up and give them a better life? It happens all the time. What you see here may look bad from a distance, Max, but close up it’s really quite the opposite.”