Rouge, run by his ex-Macoute friends. One or two muttered that they'd seen him taking Charlie's soiled nappies out of the rubbish, while the last person they interviewed claimed he'd overheard Faustin talking about a house he owned in Port-au-Prince.
* * *
They finished the interviews in the late afternoon. As they drove down the mountain toward Petionville, Max opened the windows and let the air in. Chantale looked exhausted.
'Thanks for your help?again,' he said, and then added, awkwardly, 'I don't know what I'd do without you.'
'Feel like getting a drink?' she offered, with a hint of a smile.
'Sure. Where do you suggest?'
'I'm sure you've got
'How about Eddie Faustin's old hangout?'
'You take me to the classiest joints,' she said and laughed her lusty laugh.
Chapter 31
NWOI ET ROUGE was named after the colors of the Haitian flag under the Duvaliers. Black and red. Papa Doc had changed the flag's original blue to black to cement the country's complete break with its colonial past, to better reflect the country's largest ethnic majority, and to underline his beliefs in
To Max, the flag recalled that of the Nazis, whose colors it shared. The coat of arms?cannons, muskets, and flagpoles dominated by a palm tree crowned with a ski hat?could have been the work of a stoned surfer with a yen for eighteenth-century military history. Who the fuck would ever take a place like that seriously?
The flag was proudly displayed behind the bar, between framed photographs of Papa and Baby Doc. Papa was dark and white-haired, his thick, black-rimmed glasses slightly humanizing a pinched face whose features suggested a limitless capacity for cruelty. His son, Jean-Claude, was a doughy lump with soft, Arabic features, bronze skin, and dopey eyes.
The bar was in a stand-alone one-room house on a stretch of road between the end of the mountain and the start of Petionville. It was easy to miss, yet easy to find if you were looking for it.
When Max had stepped in with Chantale, the first thing he'd noticed hadn't been the flag or the portraits, but the heavyset old man sweeping the floor around a wide pool of light cast by a single lightbulb, burning so brightly at the end of its flex, it seemed almost liquid, a drop of molten steel gathering volume before dropping to the ground and burning a hole all the way through the cement floor.
'Bond-joor.' Max nodded.
There was a watercooler behind the bar, a long row of clear bottles lined up next to it, and, at the very end, right before a tall fan, Max read the word TAFFIA, written in crude block capitals on a blackboard. Below were two equations:
Max searched the bar for seats and saw none at all. There were small towers of crates stacked against the walls. He guessed the patrons arranged those as stools and tables. This was drinking at its most rudimentary, frontier-style.
The man looked at Chantale and started talking to her, his voice making the sounds of a train going off the rails and rolling down a long, steep hill, dumping its cargo of logs with every turn and bounce and crash. Max heard the name 'Carver' crop up twice in the spill.
'He says if you're looking for the Carver boy too, you're wasting your time with him,' Chantale translated. 'He'll tell you what he told the others.'
'What's that?' Max asked the man, trying to meet his eye but failing to, because the way he stood under the bulb drowned them in shadows. The man replied, laughed, and waved.
'He hasn't got him. Good-bye.'
'Very funny,' Max said. His head was beginning to sweat. He felt the sweat sprouting all over his scalp, neighboring droplets fusing, seeking out others, finding them, fusing, building up, getting set to run. The bar stank of stale smoke, sweat, and, above all, of ether.
'Why did they think you had the boy?' Max asked.
'Because of my great friend, Eddie Faustin,' the man answered and pointed off to his right.
Max went over to where the lightbulb's reflection marked out a single photograph in a frame. He recognized Faustin straightaway?he'd inherited the family resemblance to a furious donkey: big head, bulbous nose, protruding chin, eyes, and ears, and a genetically transferred scowl with flared nostrils and fully exposed upper teeth. Faustin wasn't a big guy. His body was slight, too small for his head. Max was surprised he'd survived the bullet he'd taken for Carver.
In the picture, he was standing between two people?his brother, Salazar, and the barman, who had a revolver in his hand and one booted foot parked on a dead body. Jagged exclamation-marks of blood splashed the ground near the corpse's head and back. The hands and feet had been tied. The trio were smiling proudly for the camera.
'Those were good times,' the barman said.
Max turned and saw him smirking through a few crooked teeth with plenty of empty space in between them.
'Who took the picture?'
'I can't remember,' the barman replied, leering at Chantale as she translated, the space around his eyes twitching as his head moved gently up and down her curves, his grip fastening on his broomstick.
Just then, there was a quiet
The man chuckled and swept the moth into the pile he was building. When Max looked at it, he saw it was made up of nothing but dead moths. The broom was crude and homemade?a long stick with a bunch of dried reeds wrapped around the end for a brush.
'What's your name?'
'Bedouin,' the man said, straightening up a little.
'Bedouin?
'What is it?' Max asked her, moving in.
'I'll tell you later,' she said. 'When we're out of here.'
Another moth self-destructed on the bulb. It fell on Max's head, bounced off, and landed burning and kicking on his shoulder. He flicked it off. Desyr tutted and said something under his breath as he walked over with his broom and swiped the dead insect deftly across the floor into the pile as though it were a puck.
'Taffia?' he said to Max, making a drinking motion with his hand.
Max nodded and followed Desyr to the bar. Desyr got a paper cup from under the counter and held it under the water cooler. The liquid came out, releasing an air bubble inside the plastic bottle and a sharp, chemical smell that was similar to gasoline.
Desyr handed the paper cup to Max. Max took it. The fumes stung his eyes.
'People
Desyr chuckled.
'Yeah. They also clean and run their engines on it when they can't get gas. Runs almost as well. It's a hundred-and-eighty-proof rum. Be
Max took a very small sip of taffia. It was so strong it was tasteless and burned his tongue all the way down to his throat.
'Jesus!' Max said, wanting to spit it out.
Desyr laughed and motioned to Max to throw it down his throat in one go. Max sensed that this might win him a little credibility with the bar owner, and he might tell him something more about Faustin and the kidnapping. There was only about a finger of booze in the cup.
He took a deep breath and tossed back the taffia. It hit the ends of his mouth like a firebomb and proceeded to burn its trail all the way down into his stomach.
The alcohol rush was almost instantaneous?the equivalent of five double bourbons on an empty stomach smashing into him all at once, filling his head with a dizzy euphoria. His vision blurred and swayed as his eyes tried to regain focus. Tears ran down his face and blood rushed to his head. His temples pounded. His nose dripped. The hit was like coke and
