elegant three-story structures?hung back from view, dark and shadowy symmetrical blurs, stripped of all features, corroded by their sudden influx of poverty, fit only for the wrecking ball. They were now home to small villages of people?old and very young, dressed almost identically in rags that barely preserved their dignity and sometimes differentiated their gender. They all followed the passing car as one, a flock of blank and hollowed stares clustering around the windows.
Dufour lived in the very last house on the road that turned out to be a cul-de-sac. His house was completely different from the rest. It was a dull pink, with a blue frill running along the tops and bottoms of its balconies, and the shutters?all closed?were a bright white. Green grass covered the front yard, and a rock-and-plant-lined path led up to the porch steps.
A group of maybe a dozen children were playing in the road. They all stopped what they were doing, and watched Max and Chantale get out of the car.
Max heard a whistle behind him. He saw a young boy sprint across the grass and disappear around the side of the house.
As they started walking toward the path, the children in the road came together in a tight group and barred their way. They all had rocks in their hands.
Unlike all the other kids he'd seen in the streets, these were dressed in proper clothes and shoes, and they looked healthy and clean. They couldn't have been more than eight, but their faces were hard with experience and wisdom beyond their years. Max tried to smile disarmingly at a girl with bows in her hair, but she gave him a ferocious stare.
Chantale tried talking to them, but no one answered or moved. Grips tightened on the rocks and young bodies tensed and shook with aggression. Max looked at the ground and saw they had plenty of ammunition if they needed it. The road was a quarry.
He took Chantale's arm and moved her back a few steps.
Suddenly they heard a whistle from the house. The boy ran back shouting. Chantale let out a sigh of relief. The children dropped the rocks and went back to their game.
Chapter 22
A TEENAGE GIRL with a warm smile and braces on her teeth opened the door and let them in. She motioned for them to wait in the yellow-and- green-tiled foyer while she ran up an imposing flight of wide, carpeted stairs that led to the first-floor landing.
The house was initially pleasantly cool after the baking heat of the outdoors, but once they were acclimated, the cool turned out to have a chilly edge. Chantale rubbed her arms to warm herself up.
Although there was a skylight that illuminated the foyer, Max noticed an absence of any lights?electrical or otherwise?and there were no switches of any kind on the walls. He could barely make out anything farther than five feet in front of him. The darkness teemed all about them, almost solid, practically alive, waiting at the edges of the light, ready to pounce on their spot as soon as they left it.
Max noticed a large oil painting on the wall?two Hispanic-looking men with thin, near-ossified faces stood behind a pretty, dark-skinned woman. They were all dressed in Civil War?era clothes, the men resembling Mississippi gamblers in their black frock coats and gray pinstriped trousers, the woman in an orange dress with a white, ruffled collar and a parasol in her hand.
'Are any of those guys Doofoor?' Max asked Chantale, who was studying the portrait quite intently.
'Both,' she whispered.
'Has he got a twin brother?'
'Not that I've heard.'
The girl reappeared at the top of the stairs and beckoned them up.
As they climbed the stairs, Max noticed that the walls were hung with framed photographs, some black-and-white, some dated, some sepia-toned, all of them hard to properly discern in the light that seemed to get dimmer the farther away they got from the floor, despite their relative nearness to the skylight. One photograph in particular caught Max's eye?a bespectacled black man in a white coat talking to a group of children sitting outdoors.
'Papa Doc?when he was good,' Chantale said when she noticed what Max was looking at.
The girl led them to a room whose door was wide open. Inside, it was pitch-black. Still smiling, she took Chantale's hand and told her to take Max's. They shuffled in, seeing absolutely nothing.
They were taken to a couch. They sat down. The girl struck a match and briefly lit up the room. Max caught a short glimpse of Dufour sitting right in front of them in an armchair, a blanket over his legs, looking right at him, smiling; and then it went dark as the match subsided to a small flame which was transferred to the wick of an oil lamp. He couldn't see Dufour anymore, which wasn't a bad thing, because the little he'd seen of him hadn't been pleasant. The man reminded him of a monstrous turkey, with a long and sharp nose that seemed to start from right in between his eyes, and a loose and floppy pouch of flesh dangling under his lower jaw. If he wasn't a hundred years old, he couldn't have been far off.
The lamp gave off a feeble, bronze glow. Max could see Chantale, the mahogany table in front of them, and the silver tray bearing a pitcher full of chilled lemonade and two glasses with blue patterns around the middle. They couldn't see Dufour or anything else of the room.
Dufour spoke first, in French, not
'I'm sorry for the darkness but my eyes no longer see like they did. Too much light gives me terrible headaches,' Dufour said in French, and Chantale translated. 'Welcome to my house, Mr. Mingus.'
'We'll try not to take up too much of your time,' Max said as he set his tape recorder and notebook and pen down on the table.
Dufour joked that the older he got the smaller things became, remembering an era when tape recorders were cumbersome reel-to-reel players. He told them to try the lemonade, that he'd had it made for them.
Chantale poured them each a glass. Max was amused to see that the designs on the glasses were oriental ones, showing men and women in various sexual positions, some commonplace, some exotic, and a few requiring the suppleness of professional contortionists to pull off. He wondered how long it had been since Dufour had had any sex.
They made small talk as they sipped their drinks. The lemonade was bittersweet but very refreshing. Max tasted both lemon and lime juice mixed together with water and sugar. Dufour asked Max how long he'd been in the country and what he thought of it. Max said he hadn't been in Haiti long enough to form an opinion. Dufour laughed loudly at this but didn't define his laughter with a quip or a retort.
Chapter 23
MAX OPENED HIS notebook and pressed RECORD.
'When did you first meet Charlie Carver?'
'His mother brought him to me a few months before his disappearance. I don't remember the exact date,' Dufour said.
'How did you meet her?'
'She found me. She was
'How so?'
'If she hasn't told you, neither can I.'
His response to the latter had been polite but firm. There wasn't much life left in Dufour but Max could detect an iron will propping up his crumbling body. Max was playing the interview like a conversation, keeping his tone neutral and his body language relaxed and friendly?no arms on the table, no leaning forward, sitting back in the couch: tell me everything, send it my way.
Chantale was the opposite, virtually coming off her seat, as she strained to hear the old man, because the little that remained of his voice faded in and out, rising, when it did, to no louder than the hoarse hiss of hot grit hitting a snowbound road.
'What did you make of Charlie?'
'A very clever and happy boy.'
'How often did you see him?'
'Once a week.'
'The same day and time every week?'
'No, they changed from week to week.'
'Every week?'
'
The sound of a lid being unscrewed came from Dufour's direction, then a smell of kerosene and rotting vegetables overtook and flattened the pleasant scent of fresh lime that had been the room's only perfume. Chantale screwed up her face and moved her head out of the way of the worst of the stench. Max paused the tape recorder.
Dufour said nothing by way of explanation. He rubbed his palms, then his wrists and forearms, and then he did his fingers one by one, popping their respective knuckles when he was finished. The smell
