“MY SISTER PATRICE—I used to call her ‘Treese.’ She had these beautiful eyes—green—like Smokey Robinson’s. Cat’s eyes on dark skin. People used to stop and stare at her she was so beautiful.” Huxley smiled.
“How old was she?”
“No more than seven. It was hard to tell things like age and dates and stuff, because we were illiterate and innumerate, like our parents and their parents before them, like everyone we knew. We grew up in Clarinette, dirt-poor. As soon as we could walk we were helping our parents with whatever they were doing to put food on the table. I helped my mother pick fruit. I’d put mangoes and genip in baskets; then we’d go down to the roadside and sell them to pilgrims going to Saut d’Eau.”
“What about your dad?” Max asked.
“I was scared of him. He was a real bad-tempered guy. Beat you over nothing. I’d look at him the wrong way and he’d get this thin stick and whip my little ass. He wasn’t like that to Treese, though. No. He worshipped her. Made me jealous.
“I remember the day the trucks came to the village—big trucks, cement mixers. I thought monsters had come to eat us up. My dad told us the men driving them said they were going to put up huge buildings and make everyone in the town rich. He went to work on the site. Perry Paul owned it then. I think the idea was to build some sort of cheap accommodation for the pilgrims who come to Saut d’Eau. Most come from very far and they’ve got nowhere to stay. He built the temple too. I guess he wanted to create some kind of voodoo Mecca.
“After Gustav Carver put Paul out of business, he took over the project. There was a management change. Things were different. This man arrived one day—strangest-looking man I’d ever seen—a white man with orange hair. You never saw him working. All he ever seemed to do was play with kids. He became our friend. We used to play soccer. He bought us a ball.
“He was a fun guy. He made all the kids laugh. He told us stories, gave us presents—candy, clothes. He was like a great dad and a big kid brother all rolled into one. He used to film us too with this Super 8 camera he had. It made him look like half his face was this black ugly machine with a protruding round glass eye—kind of creepy and funny at the same time. He filmed Treese most of all.
“One day he took me and Treese to one side and told us he was going away. We were real sad. My sister started to cry. And he said not to worry, he’d take us with him if we wanted to come. We said yes. He told us to promise not to tell our parents anything, otherwise he couldn’t take us.
“We agreed. We left the village that afternoon without telling anyone. We met our friend in a car all the way down the road. There was another man with him. We’d never seen him before. Treese started saying maybe we should go back. The stranger got out of the car, grabbed her, and threw her inside. He did the same to me. We both started crying as they drove off. Then they injected us with something, and I don’t remember much else that happened after that—how we got to the house on La Gonâve or anything.”
They’d passed the Carver estate and were heading uphill along a bumpy, potholed stretch of road. They’d had to stop once for a broken-down truck and another time for a man coming down the mountainside with his herd of skeletal goats.
“You saw the tape, right? The one I left for you? You watched it?”
“Where’d you get it?” Max changed gun hands.
“I’ll tell you later. You saw what was on it—the potion they gave us?”
“Yeah.” Max nodded.
“My memory’s pretty fucked up from that whole ‘indoctrination process.’ You couldn’t put me on a witness stand because whatever I’ve got up here”—Huxley tapped his cranium—“my brain is like spaghetti. I remember things like they were in a dream. I don’t know how much of it is disassociation and how much is down to the zombie juice they fed us.
“It wasn’t as strong as the stuff the voodoo priests make people catatonic with, but it was enough to make you lose all control of your senses. They used to feed it to us every day. Like communion. We’d go up, receive this green liquid in a cup, drink it.
“Then there was the hypnosis with music notes. Gustav Carver would sit in the middle of this all-white room and we’d stand around him in a circle, holding hands. He played his clarinet to us. And while he was playing we’d get our ‘instructions.’”
“What about your sister? Where was she in all this?” Max asked.
“I don’t know. The last time I remember seeing her was in the back of the car when we were kidnapped.” Huxley shook his head. “She’s most likely dead. We weren’t allowed to grow up.”
“How do you know this?”
“I’ll come to that too,” Huxley answered, and then resumed his story. “I was sold to a Canadian plastic surgeon called Leboeuf. He always looked at me like he was stripping me down to the bone. He made me watch him doing his operations. I learned how to cut people up. I got handy with knives. I taught myself to read out of medical books.
“Justice was on my side when I killed him, but it was also in Gustav Carver’s pocket because they never tied Leboeuf in with him. No one believed what I told them about being kidnapped in Haiti, about being brainwashed, about Tonton Clarinette, about my sister. Why should they? I’d just cut a man up into little pieces and redecorated the house with his insides.”
“What about when the cops searched the house for evidence, right after they’d found the body?”
“They didn’t find anything linked to Carver—or if they did, it never found its way out into the open. The old man had tentacles everywhere,” Huxley said. “I busted out of the hospital they had me in because Gustav tried to have me killed in there. No one believed a damn word I said. It was a nuthouse. I wasn’t surprised. By the time they did start thinking that maybe there was something in it, I was gone, a fugitive, on the run, a wanted man.
“I lived on the street. I hustled. I did what I had to do. I didn’t like some of it, but that’s the life I was handed. All the while I was on the run I started putting it together—what had happened, who was behind it. I remembered a person LeBoeuf had known—not someone from the surgery, a friend of his. Shawn Michaels. He was a banker.
“I tracked him down. I made him tell me about Carver’s business—how it worked, everything.”
“Then you killed him?” Max said.
“Yeah.” Huxley nodded. “I took his address book. He knew other pedophiles, people he’d recommended Carver’s service to.”
“You went after them?”
“I only got to one.”
“Frank Huxley?”
“That’s right. He had a stack of videotapes of what went on in La Gonâve and Noah’s Ark. The tape you found was a compilation I made—you know, a preview of forthcoming horrors.”
“What about the rest of the people in the address book?”
“They were too hard to get to.”
“What about Allain, when did he come into the picture?” Max asked.
“In Canada I lived out on the street most of the time. I knew a lot of hustlers,” Huxley said. “So did Allain. He went in for rough trade. We had mutual acquaintances. These two guys I knew were always bragging about this wealthy Haitian they were bangin’. I got curious. I found out who he was.
“I went to this bar Allain always went to to meet his pickups. We got talking. When I found out he hated his old man almost as much as I did, we were in business.”
“So you put together a plan to bring down the old man?”
“Essentially, yes. Our motives were very different. Allain was just this poor spoiled little rich boy whose daddy didn’t give him any love on account of his sexuality. He could’ve lived with this if one of his lovers hadn’t worked for the family’s law firm in Miami. He told Allain the old man had completely cut him out of his will. He’d left it all to his in-laws and closest lieutenants.
“The way the Carver business is set up is that if the old man is taken ill or has to go away somewhere urgently, responsibility for running things falls to the next most senior Carver in Haiti. Allain had covered for his father while he was away before, so he knew the ropes. He’d found out there was over half a billion dollars in various ‘rainy day’ cash accounts. As head of the Carver empire he could do what he wanted with the money—”
“But he needed the old man out of the way first?” Max finished.
“That’s right,” Huxley said. “Allain didn’t have the first fucking clue how to get at the money. The guy’s got cunning but no street smarts—and waaaay too many feelings. Mine are pretty much dead.”
“So it was your idea to kidnap the boy?”
“Absolutely,” Huxley confirmed proudly. “Most of it was. We’d kidnap the boy, hole him up somewhere very safe, bring in an outside investigator and steer him toward discovering Gustav.”
“By ‘steer’ you mean plant a trail of clues?”
“That’s right.”
“Or literally hand them to me like you did—”
“—out by the waterfalls? Yeah. That was me under that wig.”
“Suited you,” Max said sourly.
It was now dark. Huxley had killed his speed. They were the only people out on the road. Max had checked behind him to see if Vincent Paul’s escort had kept up. Max had been followed to the beach house, and then back to Pétionville. He couldn’t see anyone behind them.
“Of course it was important you got on with Vincent Paul too. He had to trust you, open up to you. He didn’t do that with Beeson and Medd.”
“Is that why you killed ’em?”
“I didn’t kill either of them,” Huxley began. “I made examples of them.”
“You cut Medd’s tongue out and stuffed him into a barrel—some fuckin’ example!”
“He choked to death,” Huxley corrected. “Look, I admit what I did was a bit…extreme—barbaric, even. But with reward money that big, we couldn’t afford to have every asshole and lucky-chancer coming out here and trying their luck. It acted as a deterrent. People got wind of what had happened to Beeson and suddenly they had better offers for jobs out in Alaska. Yours is a small world, Max. All you private eyes know each other.”
“But what did they do wrong?”
“Beeson was too close to the old man. He was reporting directly to him, bypassing Allain. Plus he fucked up with Vincent Paul. They didn’t hit it off. He was next to useless to us,” Huxley explained. “And Medd—he was almost there, but then he got suspicious about the clues he was getting. He told Allain it was all too obvious, too easy. It was only a matter of time before he found us out. I took preemptive action.”
“What about the Haitian guy?”
“Emmanuel? Emmanuel was a lazy motherfucker. Too busy fucking around to do any serious work. I would have cut his dick off myself, someone hadn’t thought of it first.”
“And then you got me?” Max said.
The road had flattened out. The surface was unusually smooth and the wheels seemed to glide along it, the car’s engine emitting a soothing hum. The stars had begun to appear in the sky, the galaxies so close they resembled rhinestone clouds. The whole way there Huxley had been calm and assured. Not once had he even asked Max what he planned to do with him. It had occurred to Max that they weren’t going to find Charlie Carver at all, that Huxley was taking him to the place where he’d cut up Beeson and Medd. If that’s what it was, it wouldn’t happen to him. He wouldn’t let it. He’d kill Huxley at the slightest hint of something going wrong. Not that he really believed Huxley had that in mind at all. Huxley had lived most of his life seeking revenge for his sister and for himself. Now he had it he didn’t really care what came next.
“You were the one I always wanted for this job,” Huxley said. “I’d followed your trial, every day. I read up about you. I really respected what you did. I felt like you were on my side, like if we’d ever meet up one day you’d be one person who’d at least understand where I was coming from, what I’d been through.”
“People feel the same way about their favorite rock stars.” Max punctured his bubble. “Take it a little further and it’s called stalking.”
“Guess your life’s made you a hardass too, huh?” Huxley laughed.
“My life’s been a failure,” Max said. “Any way you look at it. Doing what I did made no difference—except to me. It didn’t bring back the victims, it didn’t turn back the clock and give them back their innocence. It didn’t help their parents, their families. Not in the long run. Closure’s bullshit. You never recover from that kind of loss. You take your tears with you to the grave.
“And as for me—I lost the only genuinely good thing I ever had. My wife. She died when I was in prison. I never got to hold her again, touch her, kiss her, be with her—never got to tell her how much I loved her—all because of the life I’d led. All that ‘good’ I thought I was doing, it added up to one big zero. It put me in jail. If that ain’t failure, I don’t know what is.”
Max looked through the windshield, into the darkness.
“How come Gustav let Allain do the hiring?” he asked.
“He didn’t. That dinner you went to? That was your interview with Gustav. If he hadn’t liked you, you would’ve been on the next plane back to Miami,” Huxley said.
“That ever happen?”
“No. Allain and I chose well.”
They drove on in silence for a while. Max holstered the Glock.
“Tell me about Eddie Faustin?”
“Using him was my idea too,” Huxley said.
“How did you turn him? I thought he was loyal to the old man.”
“Everyone has their price.”
“What was Eddie’s?”
“Francesca. She was Faustin’s wet-dream girl. I told him if he helped us out he could have her—through his bokor—Madame Leballec. She was a good friend of my mother’s,” Huxley explained.
“Hold up,” Max said. “You told Mrs. Leballec to tell Eddie he could ‘have’ Francesca? So she was a fake?”
“Yes and no. She has some powers, but she’s a black magician—a witch. Lying’s part of their repertoire,” Huxley said. “She has many believers.”
“So, when we went to see her and Eddie’s ‘spirit’ told us to go to the temple—”
“—where you met me, and I gave you the box that had Eddie’s address in it, where you found the videotape.”
“You’d paid her to show us the way?”
“Yes. And, by the way, she’s no cripple either—and Philippe’s her lover, not her son. And please don’t ask me how she tricked the séance out, ’cause I don’t know,” Huxley said and then he laughed.
“Shit!” Max said. “OK—back to Faustin.”
“Eddie was deeply troubled. Paranoid that all the bad stuff he and his brother did when they were Macoutes was catching up with him. He was visiting Madame Leballec on a monthly basis to get his fortune read.
“And that’s where we came in. Allain paid Madame Leballec a lot of money to give Faustin a tailor-made fortune—one where he got the girl of his dreams and lived happily ever after.
“She told Faustin that a man he’d never met was going to approach him about a top-secret job. She told him he had to do it if he wanted his dreams to come true.”
“So you met him?”
“Yeah, one night outside the taffia shack where he went. When he heard what I was proposing he didn’t want to go along with it. He rushed off back to Madame Leballec. We’d anticipated that. She upped the ante. She persuaded Faustin that Charlie Carver was really a spirit who had escaped from Baron Samedi and had possessed the boy. The boy needed to be handed back to Baron Samedi’s envoy—namely me.”
“Bullshit!”
“He fell for it.”
“Christ!”
“Faustin was so stupid it was practically a talent. Factor in the superstition that everything that goes bump in the night is some madcap spirit and you’ve got the perfect fanatic.”
“OK, tell me about the kidnapping. Things didn’t go according to plan, did they?”
“In what way?” Huxley asked.
“The riot,” Max replied.
“No, that was planned. Faustin had a lot of enemies. We paid some of them to be where we told Faustin to be. He thought I was going to walk up to the car and take the child away.”
“The nanny—Rose—died.”
“Faustin killed her, we didn’t.”
“Did you intend for Faustin to die?”
“Yes.”
“Who took Charlie?”
“I did. I was in disguise, among the crowd attacking the car. I grabbed the boy, disappeared with him.”
They went through a small village of thatched huts. Max saw no signs of life whatsoever, except for a small, tethered goat, caught in the headlights, munching on a bush.
“So, who was Mr. Clarinet? Carver or Codada?”
“They both were. Codada filmed the kids and stole them to order. Carver stole their souls and sold their bodies.”
“What about that symbol? That bent cross with the broken-off arm?”
“You didn’t recognize that?”
“No.” Max shook his head.
“Manet’s Le Fifre. Remember that painting? The soldier boy with the flute? It was the organization’s badge, how they recognized each other. There was one hanging in the club you met Allain in. He sat you where you’d notice it. There was one in Codada’s office, when Allain took you to meet him. There was another in Noah’s Ark, right outside Eloise Krolak’s classroom. There’s one hanging in every club. The symbol is an outline of the painting. It was meant to be subliminal,” Huxley said and chuckled. “Maybe it was too subliminal.”
“You could’ve made this easier, just left me an anonymous note telling me who to look for.”
“No,” Huxley said. “It couldn’t be that easy. You’d have wanted to know who was behind the note. You would have found us.”
“But couldn’t you have just blown the whistle on the Carvers?”
“Here? You’d have better luck whispering to the deaf. And you know what happened in Canada. That wasn’t the way it was going to work,” Huxley said.
They continued in silence. Max tried not to think about the way he’d been played from the very beginning to the very end, and tried to focus instead on the positive outcome, that he would soon be freeing Charlie from his captors and reuniting him with his real parents. That was the main thing, the important thing, the only thing. That was why he’d come here.
He didn’t know what he was going to do about Huxley.
“What about Allain?” Max asked. “Where’d he go?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He never told me. We settled up and that was the last I saw of him. I don’t expect he’ll ever be found.”
“So you did get money out of it?”
“Yeah, sure. I didn’t want to go back to preying on horny faggots,” Huxley said. “We’re not too far now.”
Max checked his watch. It had turned eight p.m. In the distance he could see the lights of a town. He guessed they were close to the Dominican Republic.
“Unlike you, Max, I have no regrets. Mine might have been a poor life, a miserable life even—but it was my life. Not theirs—mine. And it was my sister’s life too. Our lives. Ours to keep, ours to live. They took it from us. They took her from me. So, I took it all from them.
“Allain didn’t give a shit about those kids. He was horrified and disgusted by what his father was doing, sure, but you know, it was always really just about him. Not anyone else. He just wanted to rip his dad off, piss in his face and steal his money. He used to say the only things worth doing in life are worth doing for money. I never understood that mentality.
“You say you made no difference, that you’re a failure? You shouldn’t think that way, Max. You killed monsters and saved the lives of the children they would have fed on. Just like I did.”
The road was taking them downhill, closer to the border. Gaining on his left, on top of a nearby mountain, Max saw the lights of a house.
“Charlie’s in there,” Huxley said and turned off the road.