“HOW ARE YOU feeling?” Vincent Paul asked Max, after he’d pointed for him to take a seat in an armchair facing his desk. They were in Paul’s study—discreet air-conditioning, walls lined with bookcases, framed photographs, flags.
“Where am I?” Max asked back, his voice croaky.
He’d been in a room with no windows for two days. That was where he’d come to when the injection had worn off. His first feeling was panic: he’d checked himself all over for missing parts, scars, and bandages. Nothing had been done to him. Yet.
He’d had regular visits. A doctor and a nurse—plus three armed guards—had come to check him out. The doctor had asked him a bunch of questions. He’d spoken English with a German accent. He hadn’t answered any of Max’s questions. On day two, he stopped coming.
Max had been fed three times a day and given a daily American newspaper, in which nothing was ever reported about Haiti. He’d watched cable TV on the set at the foot of his bed. The morning they’d taken him to meet Vincent Paul, they’d shaved his face and head and given him his clothes back—washed and pressed.
“You should relax. If I wanted you dead I could have let those little kids rip you to pieces,” Paul said in a low, deep voice Max felt in his gut. Paul was very dark, with eyes set so far back in his skull they were reduced to two moving, gleaming pinpoints of reflected light, as if he had fireflies buzzing around in his sockets. His face was barely lined. He looked mature but nowhere near the age Max guessed him to be: early fifties. Bald dome, long, fine nose, huge jaw, thick eyebrows, short, stout neck, no fat, all muscle, making Max think all at once of Mike Tyson, a mapou trunk, and a bust of a cruel tyrant with pretensions to greatness. Even seated, he was imposing, everything about him exaggerated and monumental.
“It’s not dying that concerns me,” Max said. “It’s how much of me you’d leave alive.”
Max wasn’t outwardly nervous, but inside he was wired with anticipation. Very little in his life had prepared him for a moment like this—captured, utterly at the mercy of a foe. He didn’t know what was around the next corner. If Paul carved him up and turned him into Beeson, he thought, he’d blow his brains out first chance he got.
“I don’t follow.” Paul frowned. The hands that had crushed and torn a man’s testicles from his body were folded across his lower chest, abnormal in their girth, intimidating in their size, hands nature had made so big they’d needed each an extra pinkie to keep in proportion. And he’d had a manicure. His nails glowed.
“You carved up one of my predecessors so he can’t hold his shit,” Max said.
“I don’t follow,” Paul repeated slower.
“Didn’t you—or one of your guys—split Clyde Beeson in two and rearrange his insides?”
“No.”
“What about that Haitian who was working the case? Emmanuel Michaels?”
“Michel-ange—” Paul corrected him.
“Yeah.”
“—who was found by the docks with his penis stuffed down his throat and his balls in his cheeks?”
“Was that you?”
“No.” Paul shook his head. “Michelange was fucking somebody’s wife. The husband had him taken care of.”
“Bullshit!” Max reacted instinctively.
“If you ask around you’ll see that it’s not. It happened two weeks into his investigation.”
“The Carvers know about this?”
“They would if they asked around,” Paul said.
“How did they know it was the husband?”
“He confessed to it. He did it in his bedroom, with his wife watching.”
“Who’d he confess to?” Max asked.
“The UN.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“They take him in?”
“Sure. For as long as it took him to tell them what he’d done. Then they let him go. He runs a hotel and casino near Pétionville. Doing well. You can talk to him, if you want. The place is called El Rodeo. His name is Frederick Davi.”
“What about his wife?”
“She left him,” Paul answered, face deadpan, his eyes laughing. Max carried on his questioning.
“OK. Darwen Medd? Where is he? Did you kill him?”
“No.” Paul shook his head, looking surprised. “I don’t know where he is. Why would I want to kill him?”
“A warning. Like the one you sent out to the UN rapists,” Max said through a dry mouth.
“That wasn’t a warning. That was punishment. And there hasn’t been another rape by the occupiers since,” Paul said and smiled. “I knew you were following me that time. You weren’t hard to miss. Good cars stand out here.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I’ve got nothing to hide from you,” Paul said. “Tell me more about your predecessors.”
Max explained. Paul listened, his face solemn.
“It wasn’t me. I assure you. Although I can’t say I’m sorry to hear about Clyde Beeson.” Close up, Paul’s accent favored English over French. “Pathetic little toerag. A lump of greed waddling on those two stumps he calls legs.”
Max managed a smile.
“So you met him?”
“I had them both brought here for questioning.”
“Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?”
Paul smiled but didn’t answer. He had a mouth of bright white teeth. He suddenly looked disarming and pleasant, almost boyish, the kind of person you could imagine doing good deeds and meaning them.
“What did they tell you?”
“What you’re going to tell me: how the investigation is progressing.”
“You’re not my client,” Max said.
“How much do you know about me, Mingus?”
“That you’ll torture the information out of me.”
“Something we have in common.” Paul laughed, picking up a file from his desk and holding it up. It had Max’s name on it in bold capitals. “What else?”
“You’re a major suspect in the kidnapping of Charlie Carver.”
“Certain people think my name’s a euphemism for everything that goes wrong here.”
“Witnesses placed you at the scene.”
“I was there.” Paul nodded. “But I’ll get to that.”
“You were seen running away with the kid in your arms.”
“Who told you that? That old woman outside the shoe place?” Paul chuckled. “She’s blind. She told Beeson and Medd the same thing. If you don’t believe me, go and check when we’re done. And you might want to look in the shop too. She keeps her dead husband’s skeleton in there in a glass case, opposite the door. You’d swear someone’s watching you.”
“Why would she have lied to me?”
“We lie to white people here. Don’t take it personally. It’s in the DNA.” Paul smiled. “What else do you think you know about me?”
“You’re a suspected drug baron, you’re wanted in connection with a missing person in England, and you hate the Carvers. How am I doing so far?”
“Better than your predecessors. They didn’t know about England. I take it you got that from your friend”—Paul flicked through some pages in the file until he came to the one he wanted—“Joe Liston. You two have a lot of history, don’t you? The MTF, ‘Born to Run,’ Eldon Burns, Solomon Boukman. And that’s just when you were in the police. I have a lot more information on you.”
“I bet you got everything there is to get.” Max wasn’t surprised that Paul had looked into him, but hearing him mention Joe got him worried.
Neither said a word. They studied each other, Paul leaning right back in his chair so even the reflection vanished from his eyes and left Max looking deep into two barrels.
The silence widened and then congealed around them. Max couldn’t hear anything going on outside. The room was probably soundproofed. There was a long couch with cushions piled up on one side, a book beside it on the floor, open, facedown. The couch was as wide as a single bed. He imagined Paul lying there and reading, engrossed in one of the many bound volumes on his shelf.
The room was closer to a museum than an office or a study. A framed Haitian flag hung on one of the walls—tattered and dirty, with a burn hole in the white center. Facing it was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of a tall, bald man in a dark pinstriped suit holding a young child’s hand. They were looking at the world with level, questioning stares—especially the child. Behind them, blurred, was the Presidential Palace.
“Your father?” Max motioned to the picture. He’d guessed from the eyes that they were related, although he was a lot lighter than his son. He could have passed for Mediterranean.
“Yes. A great man. He had a vision for this country,” Paul said, fixing Max with a stare he could feel but barely see.
Max got out of his chair and went over to the photograph for a closer look. There was something very, very familiar in the father’s face. Vincent was wearing the same clothes as his father. Neither was smiling. They looked as though they’d been stopped hurrying somewhere important, and had posed out of politeness.
Max was sure he’d seen Perry Paul before—no, certain of it. But where?
He returned to his seat. A thought began to form in his mind. He dismissed it as impossible but it came right back at him.
Vincent Paul sat forward, smiling as if he’d read Max’s mind. The light finally reached his eyes and revealed them to be a pale hazel color with a hint of orange about them—surprisingly delicate, pretty eyes.
“I’m going to tell you something I never told the other two,” Vincent said quietly.
“What?” Max asked, as a cold wave of anticipation began to build up around his shoulders.
“I’m Charlie Carver’s father.”