“THE WOMAN YOU know as Francesca Carver was once called Josephine Latimer,” Vincent began. “Francesca is her middle name. The rest of it came later.”
“I first met her in Cambridge, England, in the very early seventies. I was a student at the university there. Josie lived there with her parents. I met her in a pub one night. I heard her before I saw her—laughing, filling the place with laughter. I looked for her across the room and found her, staring right at me. She was stupendously good-looking.”
Vincent smiled warmly as he spoke through his memory, his head leaning back a little, staring more toward the ceiling than at Max.
“And you helped her skip the country so she didn’t have to go to jail for killing someone in a hit-and-run. I know,” Max broke in. “Question is: where’d he go? That damsel-in-distress-rescuing guy? The one who threw his life away for love?”
The question caught Paul off-guard.
“I didn’t throw my life away,” he countered.
“So you’d’ve done the same thing all over?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Paul smiled.
“A little regret’s always healthy,” Max said. “Why do you hate the Carvers?”
“Only Gustav.”
“What’s Allain doing right?”
“He’s not his father,” Paul answered. “When Josie and I arrived in Haiti, we went to my family home in Pétionville. My family lived on a large estate on top of a hill. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming, just to be on the safe side.
“When we got there we found that the whole place—that’s five big houses, one of which I remember my father building practically with his bare hands—the whole lot had been bulldozed by order of Gustav Carver. My father owed him money. He collected—and how.”
“That’s pretty extreme,” Max said.
“Carver has an extreme dislike of competition. If it had been a straight business debt, I could just about have accepted it as ‘fair.’ That kind of thing happens in business all the time. But this wasn’t business, this was personal. And when it’s personal Carver always plays to the absolute finish.”
“So what happened?”
“The short version: my family had two very successful businesses—import-export and construction. We were undercutting Carver on certain products, sometimes by up to fifty percent, sometimes more. People stopped buying from him and came to us. We also had a project to build a hotel for pilgrims going to Saut d’Eau, the sacred waterfalls. It was going to be low budget, but with the volume of business it was going to attract, we would have made a fortune. Gustav Carver was furious. He was losing face and a lot of money—and the only thing that man hates more than losing money is the people he’s losing it to.
“He secretly bought the Banque Dessalines. We’d taken out a loan for some business expansion. Gustav bought our debt and called it in. We didn’t have the cash on hand, so he shut us down, made us bankrupt. He took over the Saut d’Eau project and then he killed us financially, ruined my family’s reputation, smeared the Paul name.
“Then, to cap it all, after he’d literally reduced our world to rubble—do you know what he did? He used the bricks from our estate to build his bank. That was all too much for my father. He was a very proud man but he wasn’t a fighter. He shot himself.”
“Jesus!” Max gasped. If Paul wasn’t exaggerating—which Max doubted he was—he understood his hatred of Carver. “What about the rest of your family?”
“Two sisters and a brother, no longer in the country or ever likely to come back.”
“Your mother?”
“She died in Miami the day we arrived. Pancreatic cancer. I didn’t even know she was ill. Nobody told me.”
“Aunts, uncles, cousins?”
“I have no family in Haiti. Outside of my son—if he’s here.”
“What about your friends?”
“True ones are a rare commodity at the best of times, but in Haiti, unless they’ve known you all your life, ‘friends’ in the monied circles we used to move in have the habit of becoming scarce when you hit a lean patch and extinct if you’re ruined. To them, the only thing worse than not having any money is having had it and lost it. They shun you like your misfortune’s contagious. I asked one of my father’s ‘friends’ of long standing for some help—somewhere to stay and a small loan to tide me over until I got back on my feet. This was someone my father had helped out a lot in the past. He turned me down flat, said I wasn’t a viable risk,” Paul said bitterly. Max could practically see the loathing coming off him.
“So what did you do after you saw what had happened to your estate? Did you have any money?”
“No. Not a cent.” Paul laughed. “What I did have was Anaïs, my nanny. I was a virtual son to her. She’d cared for me ever since I was born. In fact, she’d helped deliver me. We were so close I swore she was my real mother. Knowing my father, I wouldn’t have been too surprised. He and my grandfather weren’t exactly advocates of monogamy.
“Anaïs took us in. She lived in a tiny little house in La Saline. We all slept and ate in the same room, washed at an outdoor tap. It was a life I’d seen but never thought I’d know, and as for Josie, well, she got a serious culture shock, but she used to say English prison was worse.”
“You never thought of going back to England, facing the music?”
“No.”
“What about her?”
Paul sat up and pulled his chair in closer to the desk.
“I wasn’t going to let the woman I loved go back to hell, not when I had the power to stop it.”
“So you did wrong to do right? At least you’re consistent.”
“What else could I have done, Mingus?”
“Do the crime you do the time.”
“Sorry I asked. Once a cop…”
“No,” Max cut him off. “She killed somebody because she was drunk behind the wheel. She was no saint. She wasn’t in the right. And you know that, same as me. Think about the victim’s family: flip the picture and it’s her getting killed in a drunk hit-and-run, and you’re left with the grieving. You’d see things very differently, believe me.”
“Those three kids you killed, do you think about their families?” Vincent asked icily.
“No, I don’t,” Max spoke through gritted teeth. “Know why? Because those three ‘kids’ raped and tortured a little girl for fun. I know they were fucked up on crack, but most crackheads don’t do that to people. Those shitheels didn’t deserve their lives. The guy Francesca killed is a whole different ballgame and you know it.”
Vincent pulled himself right in to the desk, cupped his massive fist in his palm and fingers and leaned over. Max saw his disarmingly pretty eyes again.
Neither of them spoke. Max held Vincent’s stare for the longest time. The big man finally broke the standoff. Max resumed his questioning.
“Anyone come out here looking for you? Cops?”
“Not that I knew of then, but it was only a matter of time before our trail led to here. We lived in La Saline for a year and a half. We were safe there. It’s the kind of place where you don’t go to unless you live there, or know someone, or have a well-armed military escort—or want to commit suicide. It’s exactly the same now.”
“How were the people toward you?”
“Fine. They accepted us. Obviously Josie might as well have come from outer space, but we never had a single problem all the time we were there.
“For a living we worked at a local petrol station, and then we ended up managing it. We did something quite innovative at the time here. We added a diner, a carwash, a garage, and a small shop. Anaïs ran the diner and Josie ran the shop. She dyed her hair brown. I only employed people from La Saline. We had to pay off a couple of Macoutes for protection—Eddie Faustin and his teenage brother, Salazar.
“I could tell Eddie had a serious thing for Josie. He’d be round there every day, bringing her something, always when I was out getting supplies. She always refused to take it, but in the nicest way, so as not to offend him.”
“What did you do about it?”
“What could I do? He was a Macoute—and one of the most feared ones in the country.”
“Must have pissed you off, being that weak?”
“Of course it did.” Vincent looked at him quizzically, trying to determine his angle.
Max didn’t have one. He’d wanted to get a rise out of Paul, deliberately unsettle him.
“Go on.”
“Business was good. Two years after we’d arrived, we moved out of La Saline and bought a small house in town. I thought we were pretty much safe. No one had come after us. We could relax a little. Josie had taken well to life in Haiti. She really took to the people and they to her. She never really got homesick, but obviously she missed her parents. She couldn’t even send them a postcard to let them know she was OK, but she accepted that that was the price to pay for her freedom.
“Things went wrong the morning Gustav Carver stopped for petrol. I refused to serve him. His driver got out, pulled a gun on me, and ordered me to pump gas. Of course, the minute he did that he and his car were suddenly surrounded by anybody who was around—some twenty people, some of them had guns, others machetes and knives. They would have killed him and old man Carver if I’d given the word, but what better punishment than to humiliate a proud man in front of the son of the man whose life he’d destroyed? I tell you it was sweet.
“I took the gun off the driver and told him and his boss to clear off my property. The driver had to push the car three miles in the hot sun to the next petrol station—because there were no cell phones then, car phones didn’t work out here, and we don’t exactly have emergency breakdown services to come and bail you out if you break down.
“Carver was looking at me through the back window like he wanted to kill me. Then he saw Josie and his expression changed. He smiled, at her, but—mostly—at me.
“I’m not sure if things would have been different if I’d let Carver fill his car up and drive away. It’s not the way I really live my life. I can’t imagine a situation where I’d ever kowtow to that evil bastard. If I did that, I might as well have driven those bulldozers through my family estate myself.
“But, all that day and the next, I kept expecting the worst, that a couple of carloads of Macoutes would come for me.”
Vincent broke off and looked away at the photograph of him and his father. His face was rigid, his lips pinched tight, his jaw clamped shut. He was trying hard not to explode—whether in anger or sadness, Max couldn’t tell. He doubted Paul had opened up to anyone in many, many years, so that all the emotions he’d felt at the time had been bottled up, sealed away and never given the space to dissipate.
“It’s all right, Vincent,” Max said quietly.
Paul took a few deep breaths, regained his composure, and continued.
“A few weeks later Josie went missing. Someone told me she’d gone off in a car with Eddie Faustin. I sent people out looking for her, but they couldn’t find her. I went to Faustin’s house. They weren’t there. I carried on looking. I combed the city, I went to all the spots Faustin hung out. She was nowhere to be found.
“When I got back home there was Gustav Carver, waiting for me indoors. After the petrol incident, Carver had done some digging. He had two Scotland Yard detectives with him, as well as a copy of Josie’s police record, and a whole bunch of English newspapers with headlines about her case and how she’d skipped the country. Some papers even claimed I’d kidnapped her, and had cartoons showing me as King Kong. Carver said it was a good likeness.
“He told me he’d had a long chat with Josie and that she’d understood her predicament and agreed to his terms. But it all hinged on me saying yes—or so he said. If I said no, the detectives would take Josie and me back to England. If I gave my consent they’d go away and say we weren’t in Haiti.”
“What did he want you to agree to—giving up Josie?”
“Yes. He wanted her for his son, Allain. She was to remain with him for the rest of her life, bear him children, and have absolutely no contact with me whatsoever. That was it. As for me, well, I was free, as long as I never made any attempt to see her or contact her ever again. Oh, and I had to personally pump Carver’s gas whenever he stopped by.”
“And you agreed?”
“I had no choice. I reckoned he would have sent me back to England and kept Josie in Haiti. At least, me staying in the country meant that I was close to her.”
“I don’t get it,” Max said. “Carver destroyed your father and everything your family had built up. Why not go the whole way and get rid of you too?”
“You obviously don’t understand the man, Mingus.” Vincent chuckled sourly. “You’ve been to his house? You’ve seen the Psalm haven’t you—in gold, near that picture of his dead wife? Psalm twenty-three, verse five?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“Did you read it?”
“Yeah, I know it: ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.’ It’s from the famous ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ Psalm. And?”
“I take it you didn’t do too well in RE.”
“RE?”
“Religious Education—sorry, you probably call it ‘Bible study.’”
“I did OK.”
“The meaning of psalm twenty-three, verse five, is this: in ancient times, the best form of revenge on your enemies wasn’t death or imprisonment, but for them to watch you living it up and having a good time. After all, isn’t success the greatest triumph over those who’ve hated you and wished you ill?”
Max was struggling to stay objective, neutral, even on his client’s side, but what Paul was saying, coupled with the things he’d heard and read about Gustav Carver, were tempting him out of his professional shell.
“So he kept you here so you could watch Allain step out with the love of your life?”
“Technically, yes,” Paul chuckled. “But…theoretically, no.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t stepping out with Allain.”
“But I thought…” Max stopped. He was lost.
“What kind of detective are you? I thought you were supposed to be good—no, the best.”
Max didn’t say anything.
“You mean you really didn’t notice anything at all?” Vincent was on the verge of laughing. “About Allain?”
“No, should I?”
“You’ve lived in Miami all your life, you’ve just spent seven years in prison, and you still can’t tell a queer a mile away!”
“Allain?!!?” Max was shocked all over again. Something else he hadn’t expected or seen coming. He could normally tell people’s sexual orientation, not that it was too hard to spot in America—especially Miami—where people tended to be more open and upfront about which way they swang. Had his skills deteriorated that much?
“Yes, Allain Carver is a homosexual—G-A-Y—a massissi, as we call them here. Actually, Mingus, I’m not so surprised you missed it. Allain’s very discreet and straight-acting.
“There had been rumors about him for years, but no proof. Allain’s never shat on his own doorstep. He just goes for long weekends in Miami, San Francisco, New York. Does his thing there, bottles it up over here.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve got photographic proof—videos too. Clyde Beeson took them for me. I employed him—anonymously, through a second party—about ten years ago.”
“Figures. He fishes for shit,” Max said. His head was still spinning. “So I guess coming out here is a big no-no?”
“Squared. You know what they say about gays? They say: ‘There aren’t any in Haiti—they’re all married with kids.’ It’s like that all over the Caribbean. Homosexuality is viewed as a perversion, a sin.”
“Poor Allain,” Max said. “All his money, influence, status, position—and he has to sneak around pretending he’s something he isn’t.”
“He’s not a bad guy,” Vincent said. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“So why did you get those pictures taken?”
“To smear him. I was going to plant the pictures in the Haitian press.”
“Why?”
“Ying and yang. The ying, to liberate Allain, free him of his secret. The yang—revenge on Gustav, to embarrass him. The timing would have been perfect: the old man was in poor shape. Baby Doc had fallen from power, his wife was dying, his health wasn’t good—I thought a little public humiliation would push him over the edge—you know, kill him with natural causes.”
“Why didn’t you see it through?”
“I couldn’t do that to Allain, exploit the poor guy’s sexuality, trample over him so I could get to his father.”
“How honorable,” Max sneered. “I can see where you’re coming from and God knows you’ve got as good a motive as any, but if you hate him that much why don’t you just shoot the bastard?”
“Once bitten, twice shy.”
“You tried that?”
“Eddie Faustin stopped the bullet.”
“That was you? Figures.” Max nodded. “So, Gustav married Allain to Francesca to put an end to the rumors?”
“Yes.” Vincent nodded. “And…”
“And?”
“That wasn’t all Gustav wanted her for. He also wanted her for himself—not just for sex, but for breeding. He desperately wanted a grandson. All he has is granddaughters and he’s backward enough to believe that men make better leaders.
“He spent most of a decade trying to get her pregnant. He referred to their sessions as ‘making a deposit.’” Vincent laughed bitterly. “Josie had two miscarriages, a stillbirth, a daughter who only lived for six months, but no son.
“We got involved again in the late eighties. When she got pregnant with Charlie, Gustav thought it was his, the country thought it was Allain’s, and I knew it was mine and Josie’s. Besides, I’ve got the results of a paternity test. She was barely sleeping with Gustav by then. She’d managed to limit him to the days when she was ovulating—although she’d lied to him about which days those were, so he was basically too early or too late.
“She had Charlie in Miami. Allain was with her. They’re actually very good friends, you know. He helped her get through the early years in that family. As far as he saw it, he and Josie were in the same boat—obviously at opposite ends.”
Max let out a deep breath.
“Why are you telling me this now? Why not earlier?”
“Because I’m telling you now. The time and place are right.”
“Why didn’t you tell Beeson or Medd?”
“Beeson I didn’t trust. Medd…I didn’t think he was good enough.”
“So I meet your standards?”
“Up to a point.”
“Thanks,” Max mumbled sarcastically, although he agreed with Paul. He wasn’t as good as he used to be. Or maybe he’d never been that good in the first place; or maybe he’d just got very lucky for a very long time, because a lot of breakthroughs were little more than that—luck, and the carelessness of the criminals who made it happen.
He put his doubts to one side. He’d go back to them later, sometime.
“What was your relationship with your son like?”
“I used to see Charlie once a week.”
“Who chose his name?”
“I had no say in it,” Paul said sadly.
Max took advantage of Paul’s moment of fragility to clear up something that had been bugging him since his first night in the country.
“What’s wrong with Charlie?” he asked.
“He’s autistic,” Paul replied quietly.
“Is that it?” Max was incredulous.
“It’s a big deal to us—and to him.” Paul sounded hurt.
“But why the secrecy?”
“Gustav Carver doesn’t know. And we didn’t know if we could trust you with the information.”
“Did Beeson or Medd know?”
“No.” Paul shook his head.
“When did you find out he was autistic?”
“We both knew something was wrong, pretty much from the time he started walking. He wasn’t communicative like a normal baby.”
“How did that make you feel, when you found out? When you were told?”
“We were both shocked and confused at first, but—”
“No, I asked how you felt.”
“Bad, at first. Because I knew there were things that I’d never be able to do with my son,” Paul said, his voice cracking a touch. “But you know, that’s life. It isn’t all yours. Charlie’s my boy, my son. I love him. That’s all there is to it.”
“How did you keep all that from Gustav Carver?”
“A lot of luck and a little cunning. He’s also not the man he once was. The stroke left him a bit soft in the head. But I’ll say this about him. He loves my boy with every ounce of his wretched body. Obviously he doesn’t know Charlie isn’t his, let alone about the autism—but take it out of that context and watching them together was really quite touching. The old man helped Charlie take his first steps. Josie showed me the video she shot, said it was almost a shame the child wasn’t his. She said the kid made him nicer. I don’t believe her. If he’d known the truth about my boy he would have beaten his brains out with his bare hands.”
“If that’s the case, why didn’t Francesca—Josie—and Charlie move in with you?”
“Josie didn’t want Charlie growing up in an environment like mine. And she’s right. Someone will probably punch my clock one day, Mingus. I know that. I wouldn’t want the two people I love most in the world getting caught in the crossfire.”
“Why don’t you quit, walk away?”
“You never quit this life of mine. It quits you.”
“That is true,” Max agreed. “Why’d you do it in the first place?”
“To get Josie back. I picked the fastest route to the kind of money and power I’d need to take on Carver if I had to. I took a look at how the Haitian military were smuggling Colombian-cartel cocaine in and out of the country and I saw ways it could be improved. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Wasn’t there another way?”
“To make a billion dollars in twenty years—in Haiti? No.”
“Your motive’s original—the reason you got started—I’ll give you that. Twenty times outta ten all you hear is some wannabe Scarface say, you know, he got into it ’cause of his neighborhood, ’cause he had no opportunity, ’cause his moms never loved his ass as much as her boyfriend did. Peer pressure this, socioeconomic conditions that. Blah-blah-blah. That’s all you ever hear. But you—out of everything you could’ve said, you tell me you turned to drug-dealing for love.” Max snickered. “That is some unbelievable shit, Vincent. And you know what is even more unbelievable? I believe you!”
“I’m glad you see the funny side.” Vincent fixed Max from the bottom of his sunken stare, the beginnings of a smile on his lips. “I’m putting you back in circulation this evening. When Allain asks where you were, you weren’t with me, understood?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Now, let’s talk a little more.”