"How long has that been up?" Max asked after they'd passed the first one.
"For the last two years," Chantale said. "They change them every month because they fade."
"I take it there've been a lot of calls."
"There used to be, but it's died down a lot since people worked out they don't get paid for making stuff up."
"What was Charlie like?"
"I only met him once, at the Carver house, before the invasion. He was a baby."
"I guess Mr. Carver keeps his private and professional life separate."
"That's impossible in Haiti. But he does his best," Chantale replied, meeting his eyes. He picked up a hint of sourness in her tone. She had a French-American accent, a grudging collision, with the former tipping over the latter: born and raised on the island, educated somewhere in the States or Canada. Definitely late twenties, enough to have lost one voice and found another.
She was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her wide mouth and taste those plump, slightly parted lips. He looked out of the window before he stared too hard or gave anything away.
There were a few people about, men in ragged shirts and trousers and straw hats, shepherding small flocks of pathetically thin, dirty, brown goats, others pulling donkeys saddled with overflowing straw baskets, or men and women, in pairs or on their own, carrying jerricans filled with water on their shoulders, or balancing huge baskets on their heads. They all moved very slowly, at the same lazy, listing gait. Farther on, they came to their first villagea cluster of one-room square shacks painted orange or yellow or green, all with corrugated iron roofs. Women sitting at the roadside in front of tables, selling melting brown candy. Naked children played nearby. A man tended to a pot cooking on a fire, billowing plumes of white smoke. Stray dogs nosing at the ground. All of this roasting under intense, bright sunlight.
Chantale flicked on the radio. Max was expecting more "Haďti, Ma Chérie" but instead heard the familiar bish-bosh-bullshit machine beat of every rap record ever made. A remake of "Ain't Nobody," a song Sandra had loved, ruined by a rapper who sounded like half the inmates in Attica.
"Do you like music?" Chantale asked him.
"I like music," Max replied, looking at her. She was pumping her head to the beat.
"Like what? Bruce Springsteen?" she said, nodding at his tattoo.
Max didn't know what to say. The truth would take too long and open up too many ways into him.
"I got that done when I didn't know better," he said. "I like quiet stuff now. Old-man stuff. Old Blue Eyes."
"Sinatra? That is old," she said, glancing across at him, her eyes taking in his face and chest. He caught her eyes straying down his shirt. It had been so long since he'd flirted. He'd known how to play situations like this in the past. He'd known what he wanted then. He wasn't so sure now.
"The most popular music here is called kompas. Compact. It's like one really long song that can go on for half an hour or more, but it's really lots of short songs put together. Different tempos," Chantale said, eyes fixed on the road.
"Like a medley?"
"That's it, a medleybut not quite. You'd have to hear it to understand. The most popular local singer is Sweet Micky."
"Sweet Micky? Sounds like a clown."
"Michel Martelly. He's like a mixture of Bob Marley and gangsta rap."
"Interesting, but I don't know him."
"He plays Miami a lot. You're from Miami, right?"
"And other places," Max said, checking her face to see how much she knew about him. She didn't react.
"And then there's The Fugees. You've heard of them, right?"
"No," Max said. "Do they play kompas?"
She burst out laughingthat laugh again.
Her dirty bellow echoed around his brain. He imagined himself fucking her. He couldn't help it. Eight years and nothing but his hand for relief.
Now he had a problema hard-on. He stole a quick glance at his crotch. It was a major onea rock-solid sundial he felt poking right past the fly of his shorts and pushing against his trousers, setting up a tepee over his groin.
"So tell me about The Fugitives?" he said, almost gasping.
"Fugees," she corrected with a giggle, and then she told him: two guys and a girl, the singer. The guys were Haitian-Americans and the girl was African-American. They played hip-hop soul, and their latest album, The Score, had sold millions worldwide. They'd had big hits with "Ready or Not," "Fu-Gee-La," and "Killing Me Softly."
"The Roberta Flack song?" Max said.
"The same one."
"With rapping over it?"
"NoLauryn sings it straight, Wyclef says, 'One time one time' all the way throughbut it's set to that hip-hop beat."
"Sounds terrible."
"It works, trust me," she said defensively and a little patronizingly, as if Max wouldn't get it anyway. "Lauryn can really sing. I'll try and find it on here. They're live on the radio."
She turned the radio dial and flipped through stations playing snatches of funk, reggae, calypso, Billboard Top 40, Kreyol language, hip-hop, but she couldn't find The Fugees.
As she leaned back, Max stole a glance at her chest. His eyes passed through the gaps between the buttons of her blouse: white push-up bra with lace-trimmed cups, small, teak-colored breasts puffing over the edges. He noticed the traces of a smile in the corners of her lips. She knew he was looking her over and liking what he saw.
"So what about you?" Max asked. "Tell me about yourself. Where did you study?"
"I majored in economics at Miami University. Graduated in 1990. I worked for Citibank for a few years."
"How long have you been back?"
"Three years. My mom got sick."
"Otherwise you would've stayed in the U.S.?"
"Yeah. I had a life there," she said, a hint of regret waving behind her professional smile.
"So what do you do for Allain Carver?"
"Personal assistant stuff mostly. They're thinking of getting me into marketing because they want to launch a credit card, but that's on hold until the economy picks up. The U.S. is supposed to be coming up with this aid package, but we haven't seen dollar one yet. Don't suppose we ever will."
"You don't like us much, do you?"
"I don't know what you people think you're doing here, but it isn't making things any better."
"Nothing like getting off to a positive start," Max said and looked out of his window.
* * *