foliage and peered through. The house backed onto a ravine that ran the length of the estate. His half was marked out and separated by a retentive wall. The opposite end was a high ridge of dark earth. Tall trees grew out of the ground, but they were all bent precariously over the ravine, tilted at painful acute angles, half their roots sprung from the soil and grasping at thin air, as if they'd been uprooted by an avalanche that had frozen in midcascade. A slick of stagnant, oily black water filled the bottom of the ravine. In front of him was a Texaco petrol station and a kind of diner.
He heard noises from the street. Every town had its particular traffic timpani. In New York, it was car horns and sirens, gridlocks and emergencies. In Miami, it was the smoother sound of moving traffic, breaks and skids, backfiring motorbikes and belching lowriders. In Petionville, the cars rattled as though they were dragging busted fenders along their broken-up roads, and the horns sounded like out- of-tune alto-saxophones.
He was standing there staring at the outside world when night had fallen and caught him by surprise.
* * *
He was grateful when he couldn't see anything anymore. The air around him was chiming with crickets and cicadas, the inky darkness punctuated by fireflies, tiny lime-green flares burning for a meager second before disappearing forever.
The skies were clear and he could see thousands of stars splashed out above him, closer than he'd ever seen them in America, a glittering white spray that looked almost within reach.
He headed back up to the house. As he did, a whole new sound made him stop in his tracks. It was a faint, faraway sound. He listened. He waded past the insects and the traffic and the sounds of breadline, shantytown humanity hunkering down for another night in the shit-shack motel.
He found it. He turned a little to the right. There it was, coming from someplace above the town. A single drumbeat, repeated every ten or twelve seconds?
It was a bass drum, its sound carrying through the raucous chaos of the night, insistent and strong, like a giant's heartbeat.
Max felt the sound pass into his body, the rhythm of the lonesome drum seeping into his chest and then flowing into his heart, the two beats briefly becoming one.
Chapter 10
THE MEN FROM the airport picked Max up for dinner. They drove out of the estate, down the street, and then took a left at the end and headed up the steep road that would take them up into the mountains. They passed a bar, its name framed in a proscenium of brightly colored bulbs: LA COUPOLE. Six or seven white men, beer bottles in hand, were hanging around outside, talking to some local women in tight short skirts and dresses. Max recognized his countrymen straightaway from their matching clothes?khakis, like his, and the same cut of shirt and T-shirt he'd packed for the trip. GIs on leave, the conquering army, getting wasted on U.S. taxpayers' dollars. He made a mental note to stop by the bar when he was done meeting his clients. The search for Charlie Carver would start tonight.
* * *
The Carver estate doubled as a banana plantation, one of the highest-yielding in Haiti. According to a footnote in the CIA report, the family plowed the profit it made from the annual harvest into its philanthropic projects, notably Noah's Ark, a school for the island's poorest children.
The Carvers' home was a striking four-story white-and-pastel-blue plantation house with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up to the brightly lit main entrance. In front of the house was a well-tended lawn with a bubbling fountain and a fish-filled saltwater pool in the middle and park benches set around its edges. The area was floodlit like a football stadium, from manned high towers set in the surrounding trees.
A security guard armed with an Uzi, and a Doberman on a button- release leash met them as they drove around the lawn to the staircase. Max hated dogs, always had, ever since he was chased by one as a child. The dumb ones tended to pick up on this and they'd growl and bark and bare their teeth at him. The trained ones bided their time and waited for the signal. This one reminded him of a police attack dog, standing obediently by its master's side, lining up homicidal thoughts, trained to go for the balls and throat?in that order.
* * *
A maid showed Max into the living room, where three of the Carvers sat waiting for him: Allain, an old man Max guessed was Gustav, and a blonde he supposed was Charlie's mother and Allain's wife.
Allain got up and walked over to Max, his leather heels clicking across the polished black-and-white tiled floor, hand already extended. He was flashing the same professional smile, but otherwise appeared markedly different from the cool creature Max had met in New York. He'd washed the pomade out of his hair, and with it had gone a good five years off his age and most of his gravitas.
'Welcome, Max,' he said. They pumped hands. 'Good trip?'
'Yeah, thanks.'
'Is your house OK?'
'It's great, thanks.'
Carver sounded like a preppy hotel manager, in his brown brogues, khakis, and short-sleeved light-blue Oxford shirt that complemented his passionless eyes. He had thin, freckled arms.
'Come on over,' Carver said and led Max across the room.
The Carvers were sitting around a long, solid-glass coffee table with five neat cubes of magazines on the bottom shelf and a vase stuffed with yellow, pink, and orange lilies on top. Gustav was sitting on a gold-trimmed black-leather armchair, the woman on a matching chair.
The place smelled of furniture polish, window cleaner, floor wax, and the same disinfectant they used in hospital corridors. Max also picked up a faint stench of stale cigarettes.
He wore a beige linen suit he'd bought off the rack at Saks Fifth Avenue in Dadeland Mall, an open-necked white shirt, black leather shoes, and his Beretta, clipped to the left side of his waist. They hadn't frisked him before he'd gone in. He made a note to tell the Carvers this, if he finished the job with any affection for them.
'Francesca, my wife,' Allain said.
Francesca Carver smiled limply, as if offstage arms were desperately winding up her smile at great strain. She took Max's extended hand in a cold, clammy clasp, which briefly reminded him of his and Joe's patrol-car days, when they'd 'shit-sifted'?hand-searched for drugs hidden at the bottom of backed-up toilets. Most of the time they'd had to use their bare hands, because they hadn't brought gloves to the bust. He remembered how month-old sewage had the same texture as cold, raw hamburger?the same feeling he was getting from Mrs. Carver's hand.
Their eyes met and locked. Her irises were a light, washed-out shade of blue that registered faintly against the whites, like the ghost of a long- forgotten ink drop on laundered fabric. Her look was pure beat cop?wary, probing, doubtful, edgy.
Francesca was beautiful, but in a way that had never done it for him?a distinguished, distant beauty that spoke status, not sexiness. Delicate, porcelain-pale skin; perfectly balanced features, with nothing bigger or smaller than it should be, everything symmetrical and in exactly the right place; high, sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin, and a slightly upturned nose that was the perfect platform for a disdainful or withering look. Manhattan WASP, Florida belle, Palm Springs princess, Bel Air blue blood?Francesca Carver possessed the sort of face that launched a dozen country clubs and required annual membership or good connections to get close to. Her life, he imagined, was four-hour lunches, crash diets, monthly colonic irrigations, manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, liposuction, twice-weekly trips to the hairdresser, a nanny, a personal trainer, a daily/weekly/monthly allowance, limitless reserves of small talk. She was Allain Carver's perfect foil.
But all was not completely right about her. A few things let her down and fractured the facade. She was drinking what must have been four straight shots of neat vodka out of a large tumbler; her dark-blond hair was packed into a tight, severe bun that exposed her face and drew attention to its thinness and pallor, to the shadows under her eyes and the vein in her left temple, thumping away under her skin, her pulse accelerated, tense.
She said nothing and their exchange remained wordless. Max could tell she didn't approve of him, which was odd, because parents who called him in to look for their missing children usually regarded him as though he was the next best thing to a superhero.
'And my father, Gustav Carver.'
'Pleased to meet you,' Gustav said to Max. His voice was gravelly and expansive, a smoking shouter's voice.
They shook hands. The elder Carver displayed a lot of strength for someone his age, who'd also suffered a stroke. His handshake, applied with minimum effort, was a bonecrusher. He had a forbidding set of paws, the size of catcher's mitts.
He took the heavy black-and-silver-topped cane he'd rested across the arms of his chair and rapped on the couch to his left, close to him.
'Sit with me, Mr. Mingus,' he growled.
Max sat down close enough to the old man to smell mild menthol coming off him. Father looked nothing like son. Gustav Carver resembled a gargoyle, at rest between demonic eruptions. He had a huge head with a swept-back, brilliantined mane of thick silver. His nose was a broad beak, his mouth thick-lipped and bill-shaped, and his small, dark brown eyes, peering under the drapes
