WHEN THEY RETURNED to Clarinette, they asked anyone who looked old enough to remember, or give them a sensible answer, who had been in charge of the construction site they’d crossed over on their way to the stream.
The replies were the same from person to person:
“Monsieur Paul,” they all said. “Good man. Very generous. Built us our town and hounfor.”
Not Vincent Paul, Chantale explained, but his late father, Perry.
How long ago had they been working there?
No one was quite sure. They didn’t measure time in terms of years, but in what they’d once been able to do—how much they could carry, how fast they could run, how long they could fuck and dance and drink. Some said fifty years when they didn’t look much past forty, others said twenty years, a few claimed they’d been working on the building a hundred years ago. None of them had known what they were building. They’d followed orders.
Chantale estimated it would have been between the midsixties and the early seventies, before the Pauls had gone bankrupt.
What was Monsieur Paul like?
“He was a good man. Generous and kind. He built us houses and a hounfor. He brought us food and medicine.”
Like father, like son, Max thought.
Did any children go missing during that time?
“Yes. Two: the children of mad Merveille Gaspésie. The brother and sister both disappeared the same day,” they said, shaking their heads.
Then they all told the same story: the Gaspésie children used to play near the building works. They were youngsters, about seven and eight years old. One day they both vanished. People searched high and low, but they were never found. Some said they’d fallen into the waterfalls, others that they’d met Tonton Clarinette out by the graveyard.
Then one day—quite recently—their mother, Merveille, by now an old woman—went to all her friends’ houses, telling them her son had returned, and that they should all come and see him. She got together a large group of people and brought them back to her house, but when they arrived, there was no one there. She insisted the boy had returned, that he was well dressed and very rich. She showed them the thick roll of money he’d given her, all crisp, new bills. When she asked him what had happened, where he’d disappeared to, he said a man with a deformed face had taken him and his sister away.
The people didn’t really believe her, but they went along with her, because she was suddenly the richest woman in town. Privately, they said she was mad.
Merveille waited for her boy to return. He never did. She waited and waited and wouldn’t leave her house in case he turned up. She called his name out over and over again: “Boris.”
In the end, she went crazy. She started hallucinating and turned violent whenever people tried to help her. She had no other family and lost all her friends.
And then one day all the noises in her house stopped. When a group of people finally plucked up the courage to enter the house, she was gone and she hadn’t been seen since. No one knew what had happened to her. It was a mystery.
“So what do you think, detective?” Chantale asked, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin.
“About the missing kids? Maybe they were abducted, and maybe that woman’s son did come back—how else would she have gotten all that money?” Max said. “But you know, this whole story could just be another myth.”
They were in the car, eating the lunch Chantale had made—pork loin, avocado, and gherkin sandwiches on thickly sliced homemade bread, potato and red pepper salad, bananas and Prestige beer. The radio was on low, an American station playing AOR power anthems back-to-back—the Eagles, Boston, Blue Oyster Cult, Reo Speedwagon. Max flipped the dial to Haitian babble and left it there.
It was late afternoon. The light was starting to fade and the clouds were thickening above them, slowly sealing off the sky from view.
“What about Vincent Paul?”
“He’s still my main suspect. He’s the only constant, the one who keeps popping up everywhere. Perhaps he kidnapped Charlie to get back at the Carvers for an actual or perceived hurt to his family. Of course, I’ve got absolutely no proof of this.” Max finished off his beer. “I need to talk to Paul, but I’ve got a better chance having a one-to-one with Bill Clinton. Besides, I’m assuming Beeson, Medd, and that Emmanuel Michaelangel guy tried to do exactly the same thing, which could be why they ended up the way they did.”
“What if it’s not him?” Chantale said. “What if it’s someone you don’t know about yet?”
“I’ll have to wait and see. That’s what most detective work comes down to, you know, waiting and watching.”
Chantale laughed out loud and shook her head with a weary sigh.
“You really remind me of my ex-husband, Max. This is the kind of thing he used to say when he knew he was getting nowhere on something. He was a cop. Still is. Miami PD, in fact.”
“Yeah? What’s his name?” Max was surprised but almost immediately realized he shouldn’t have been. The voodoo aside, she was a straight arrow, conservative, a safe pair of hands—exactly the kind of woman most cops married.
“Ray Hernandez.”
“Don’t think I know him.”
“You don’t. He was still in uniform when you quit,” she said. “He knew all about you. Followed your trial every day. Used to make me tape the news when he was out on duty, case he missed something.”
“So you knew who I was? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What was the point? Anyway, I thought you’d guess Allain had told me the basics about you.”
“You got that right,” Max said.
“Ray despised you. Said you were a thug with a badge. You, Joe Liston, Eldon Burns, the whole MTF division. He hated the lot of you, hated the way you brought down the good name of the police.”
“What did he do, your Raymond? What division?”
“When he made plainclothes? First Vice, then Narcotics. He wanted Homicide but to get it he had to play ball with the kind of people who held you in high esteem.”
“That’s the way of the world. It’s all about politics, mutual dependencies, credit in the favors bank,” Max said. “You don’t get to where you want to be without breaking hearts and stepping on people.” He could imagine what type of guy her husband was—the kind of self-righteous, ambitious prick who’d end up working in Internal Affairs, because they promoted faster and rewarded backstabbing and betrayal. “How come you and him broke up?”
“He was cheating on me.”
“What an asshole!” Max laughed and she joined him.
“That he was. Were you faithful to your wife?”
“Yeah,” Max nodded.
“I can imagine.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You’re about as brokenhearted as I’ve seen anyone be,” she said.
“That obvious?” Max replied.
“Yes it is, Max,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “You didn’t come here to find Charlie. You didn’t even come here for the money. That’s what other people do. You came here to get away from your ghosts and all that guilt and regret you’ve been carrying around with you ever since your Sandra died.”
Max looked away from her and said nothing. He had no comeback for that, no ready denial. Her words had bitten into him and they’d bitten deep.
Outside, the doors of the temple had been opened and people were starting to make their way into it, casually drifting in, as if compelled by curiosity and a need for a fresh experience.
The drums had started up too, a slow beat that Max felt passing into his ankles, reverberating in the bone, filling his feet with the urge to move, to dance, to walk, to run.
Inside, the temple was far larger than he’d anticipated—big enough to accommodate two separate ceremonies, their hundred or more participants and observers, and, seated on four-tiered benches almost covering the entire circumference of the wall, an orchestra of drummers.
From the sight of them, he was expecting to hear pure chaos—the rhythms of downtown Port-au-Prince transcribed in tribal beats. Their instruments were all homemade—crudely fashioned hollow wood or modified oil drum, stretched animal hide fixed with nails, tacks, string, and rubber bands—but he recognized suggestions of tom-toms, snares, bongos, bass, and kettledrums there. The musicians were randomly placed—wherever there was room—and there was no one conducting or directing or shouting out cues; they watched the proceedings, listened in, and played along with their hands, keeping to the same beat, steady as a metronome, and making a sound no louder or quieter than distant thunder.
Max sensed this was just the prelude.
It was steam-room hot, thanks to the many bodies, the lack of ventilation, and the burning torches shedding amber light from their brackets on the wall. The air was so still and thick it was virtually painted on. Clouds of incense were wafting up toward the roof and then coming back down as light smog.
When Max breathed in deep to get more oxygen into his blood, he experienced a heady, near-narcotic rush, both sedative and amphetamine, a cool, soothing sensation in his back followed by a rush of blood to his eyes and a quickening of the heartbeat. He picked up a cocktail of natural smells—camphor, rosemary, lavender, gardenias, mint, cinnamon, fresh sweat, and old blood.
In the middle of the temple, people were dancing and chanting around a thick, twisted column of black rock, sculpted in the shape of an enormous mapou trunk, rising up from the ground and passing through a large, round hole in the roof, where it was topped by the cross they’d seen from the street. As with the real tree, there were dozens of lit candles stuck to the sculpture. Worshippers were walking around it, sticking their pictures, scraps of paper, ribbons, and candles on the rock, and then stepping into the mobile encirclement of bodies, falling into step, joining in the dance of swaying hips and nodding heads, adding their voices to the chants. Max tried to pick out what they were saying, find part of a word or phrase he could hold on to, but there was nothing discernible coming out of those mouths, only deep notes, held, extended, played with, and transformed.
The floor was bare earth, trampled flat by motion and baked hard by the heat. There were three large vévés, drawn in maize, two of snakes—one with its body wrapped around a pole and its tongue pointing out toward the temple entrance, the other swallowing its tail—and, in between them, a horizontal coffin, split into four sections, each containing a crucifix and an eye, both drawn in sand.
“Loa Guede,” Chantale said over the drums and the chanting, pointing to the vévé of the coffin. “God of death.”
“I thought that was the good Baron,” Max said.
“He’s god of the dead,” she said, meeting his eyes, almost leering at him. She was a little giddy, unsteady, like she was on her third drink of the night and starting to feel the booze kicking away her restraints. “You know what goes with death, Max? Sex.”
“He the god of that too?”
“Oh yeah.” She smiled and laughed her lusty laugh. “There’s going to be a banda.”
“A what?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t explain. She’d started to dance, shimmying from the calves up, her body undulating in smooth, slow waves, feet to head, head back to legs. He felt the drums in his thighs and hips now, inspiring him to dance with her.
Chantale took his hand and they started moving toward the mapou sculpture. He was dancing, despite himself, imitating those before him, the drums helping his legs and feet keep time, practically transforming him into a natural.
He sensed someone watching them but it was too dark and there were too many people looking their way to pick out the individual.
To the far right of the column, Max saw a group of people standing around a pond of bubbling gray water. Two half-naked boys were standing in it waist-deep, beckoning to the bystanders, some of whom were tossing coins into the pool. Then a woman in a light blue robe walked in. The boys grabbed her by the arms and plunged her under the water, holding her down hard, like they were trying to drown her, then letting go and staggering back out. The woman slowly reemerged, naked now except for her underwear and the thick, gray muck she was completely caked in. She got back onto solid ground, took a few steps forward, and then threw herself on the earth, writhing on her front and back, slapping the ground hard with her open hands, then throwing dirt all over her body and stuffing it into her mouth. Then she ran at the crowd of people gathered watching the worshippers dancing around the column, grabbed one of them—a man—by his shirt and spat a jet of purple fluid at his face. The man staggered backwards, crying, furiously rubbing at his face and eyes. The woman took hold of his wrist, pulled him over to the pond, and pushed him in. The two boys dunked him and kept him under until he’d stopped thrashing around. When they let go, the man slowly rose from the water. He too was the color of ash and milk—and stark naked. He crouched down on the ground and watched the dancers.
Chantale stepped up to the sculpture and stuck to it a picture of a woman sitting up in a bed. Then she lit a candle and fixed it to a groove in the rock. She mumbled a few words in Kreyol and then began to chant as those around her were doing. They joined in the circle of people moving around them.
The drums beat a little faster, the bass dominated, vibrating in Max’s thighs.
They danced. Max followed Chantale and all the others, shuffling, dipping his hips from side to side, touching the ground with his left hand, then his right, bringing them both together and separating them, as if miming an explosion. He could barely feel himself doing it. The stuff they were burning in the air had first loosened him up and now he was beginning to feel himself being separated from his body, his being floating around his cage of bone and sinew. His brain had powered down to all but its basic functions. His senses had been wrapped in cotton wool, stuffed in a tube, and dumped in a deep, warm river, where they were floating slowly away from him, getting beyond reach. He was watching them go and he didn’t care. This was bliss.
He heard the drums picking up the beat, he moved his feet a little faster. He heard himself joining in with the chanting, somehow finding a common note and sending it out from the bottom of his stomach. He wasn’t a singer. He’d never sung in church when he was a kid. Too embarrassed. First, he’d sounded like a girl, then his balls dropped and he sounded like he was belching. His dad had tried to teach him music, just the two of them at the upright piano one night, when he was five. No use. His dad had told him he was tone-deaf. Not anymore he wasn’t, not in here.
His eyes fell on Chantale. She looked so beautiful, so sexy.
They were moving faster now. Worshippers were starting to fall away from the circle. Women were standing quaking, eyes rolling, tongues out, foaming at the mouth, in the full grip of spiritual possession. Meanwhile, the muck-caked born-agains were running out of the pond, spitting purple jets at people in the crowd watching the dancers, and dragging them off to the gray waters.
Max felt simply wonderful now. He was smiling and heard laughter in his head, coming from deep within.
He was facing Chantale now, the two of them standing on their own, away from the circle. He was feeling the drum beats in his crotch. Chantale was looking right at him, grabbing and squeezing her breasts, gyrating and thrusting her crotch in and out. She pressed herself up against him and rubbed her hand all over the front of his trousers. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the pleasure of her touch fill him completely.
But when he opened them, she was gone.
In her place, he saw a man coming toward him. He was naked, his skin covered in dry, gray mud, cracked and flaking, the whites of his eyes turned brake-light red. He was sucking his cheeks rapidly in and out, purple juice dribbling out of gaps in his lips.
Max suddenly came to his senses, feeling like he’d been slapped out of a deep sleep.
Groggy and swaying on his legs, he tried to look for Chantale while keeping his eyes on the man. All around him the scene was beginning to change and change fast. He saw gray-caked men grabbing women from out of the dancing circle and throwing them to the ground, ripping their clothes off, raping them. The women weren’t putting up any resistance. Most seemed to be welcoming the assaults.
The drumming was now fast and loud, an arrhythmic attack, devoid of form and order, coming from everywhere, the noise falling on the middle of the temple like a hail of bullets and flaming arrows. The drums were now serrated wheels tearing into Max’s head.
He pressed his hands over his ears to kill the sound. Just then, the mud man ran at him and spat a stream of purple fluid straight at his face. Max ducked in time, missing most of the projectile, but he still caught a few stray drops on his knuckles. They burned like lava.
The mud man grabbed hold of his arm and tried to pull him forward. Max bent back and snapped three of the fingers gripping him and then he kicked the mud man hard in the chest. The mud man flew back, smashed on the ground, and slid a little way until he came to a stop. But he was up on his feet almost instantly, charging at Max again, red eyes ablaze with insane rage.
Max threw a combination of jabs and hooks at his assailant’s head, stopping his run and forcing him back. Then he hit him with two huge, fast uppercuts that connected in the same spot—right under the mud man’s chin—one after the other, a split second apart, lifting him off the ground and scrambling his senses. The guy was as good as done. Instead of landing more punches to his head, Max simply pushed him over, letting him fall, knocked-out cold.
He looked for Chantale. She wasn’t by the column. She wasn’t by the pond. He headed toward the crowd. They’d linked arms and weren’t letting him through.
Max backed off. The drums were killing his head, a million pummeling jackhammers running relay around his brain.
He turned around and went back toward the sculpture. She couldn’t be far. All around him, men and women were down on the ground, naked, fucking, multiple positions. The air reeked of sex and sweat.
He headed for the pond.
Then he saw Chantale standing near the water. A mud man had ripped off her shirt and was tearing off her bra. She was offering no resistance, watching the man’s titanic struggle with her underwear with a glazed look and a dumb, detached smile.
Max sprinted over and pushed the mud man headfirst into the pond.
He grabbed Chantale’s hand, but she pulled out of his grasp, slapped his face, and started ranting at him in Kreyol. He stood there, at a loss. Then she gripped his head and crushed her lips against his, snaking her tongue into his mouth, running it up and down his tongue, licking it, tasting it. And then she grabbed his crotch, drew him toward her, and started dry-humping him.
The pain left Max’s skull and the drum migrated back to his loins. He felt himself slipping again, surrendering, wanting nothing more than to fuck Chantale in the dirt.
He was watching her pulling down her jeans when a mud man smashed into him. They went down together, Max taking the brunt of the fall and their combined weight on his shoulder. The mud man tried to punch him, but it was a wild, bullshit strike and he missed completely. Max kneed him hard in the solar plexus, so hard he caught the blast of stinking air the blow forced out of the mud man full in the face.
The mud man withered away, puking bile on the ground. Max took hold of his neck and what he could hold of his skinny buttock, picked him up like light luggage, and tossed him toward the pool.
Chantale was still where he’d left her, only with another man—normal, but naked and glinting with sweat—standing in front of her, jerking off, getting himself hard, ready to rush her.
Max snatched Chantale by the arm and fast-walked her away, heading for the exit. At first, she snarled and kicked and tried to get away, but then, as they got closer to the crowd and farther from the ceremony, she stopped fighting, grew limp and then heavy, her legs dragging. Max asked her if she was OK. She didn’t reply. She tried to look at him through rolling eyes.
He hoisted her over his shoulder. He pulled out his gun and thumbed off the safety. The crowd didn’t budge.
Then, right in front of him, stood Dreadlocks. People were moving out of his way, opening up space.
Max didn’t slow down.
Dreadlocks came out of the crowd and headed toward them, carrying his blue-rose box before him in his hands.
Max raised his gun and sighted Dreadlocks’s head.
“Stop!”
Dreadlocks didn’t pay any heed. He pushed the box into Max’s chest and rushed past him. Max took the box in his free hand.
He glanced back.
Dreadlocks was gone, but five mud men were running toward them, brandishing machetes and knives.
With Chantale on his back, Max pushed, nudged, kicked, and stamped the rest of his way out of the temple.
Chantale slept most of the way back, dressed in Max’s shirt, her snores accurate facsimiles of busy-barnyard noises.
He drove with the window cranked open and the radio playing an all-night Haitian talk show. He couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but it was better than the wall-to-wall Bon Jovi all the other stations were blasting.
After five hours, he was back on the airport road, heading up to Pétionville. Chantale woke up and stared at Max as though she’d expected to find herself in bed at home.
“What happened?” she asked.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” Max switched off the radio.
“We were dancing in the temple—together.”
“Nothing after?”
Chantale thought about it for a while but drew a blank. Max told her what she’d missed, starting backwards with the box, editing out what had gone on between them, but sparing no detail in describing how he’d saved her from a potential rapist.
“I was never going to get raped, Max,” she said angrily. “It was a banda, a ritual orgy. People get possessed and they fuck each other’s brains out. No one knows what they’re doing.”
“Looked like rape to me—voodoo date rape, conscious or unconscious, whatever you wanna call it. The guy was tearin’ your clothes off,” Max said.
“People do that when they’re having consensual sex, Max. It’s called passion.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t know how you can just go fuck a stranger like that. He could’ve had AIDS. Jesus!”
“You mean you’ve never fucked strangers before, Max?”
“What? Yeah, but that isn’t the same thing.”
“Why? You meet a woman—where? In a bar, a nightclub? Music’s loud, you’re both loaded. You go someplace, you fuck, and in the morning you leave and never see each other again. Same thing—only with us, it has more meaning.”
“Right,” Max sneered sarcastically. “We decadent, soulless Americans just go around having empty one-night stands, but over here when you do it in a voodoo temple it’s a religious experience. You know what I think, Chantale? I think it’s a crock of shit. Fucking’s fucking. Rape is rape. And that guy was gonna rape you. End of story. No way would you’ve made it with some guy covered in mud, if you’d been in your right mind.”
“How would you know?” Chantale snorted.
Max didn’t respond. He gripped the wheel tight and gritted his teeth, wishing for a good long while that he’d left the ungrateful bitch to get gang-raped in the dirt.
He’d intended to let her stay at the house, but he drove fast through Pétionville and took the road down to the capital. At night, every big American city was lit up like a mini-galaxy. Port-au-Prince had a few grudging scraps of light floating in the black, like stray white butterflies caught in an oil slick, otherwise nothing. He’d never known a place so dark.