Twenty minutes later, they came to their first town, a dusty pit of peeling, battered buildings and roads even more damaged than the ones they'd come down.
The Land Cruiser slowed as it turned into the main street, which was choked with people; the dirt-poor, wearing international-charity clothes that slipped off their waists and shoulders, walking on shoeless feet calloused and deformed into human deep-sea-diver boots, all moving at a plod dictated more by habit than urgency or purpose. They looked like a defeated army, a conquered people, broken in two, shuffling off into a nonfuture. This was Haiti, barely a footprint out of slavery. Many were pushing crude carts cobbled together from planks, corrugated iron, and old tires stuffed with sand, while others carried big woven reed baskets and old suitcases on their heads and shoulders. Animals mingled freely among the people, at one with them, their equals: black pigs, sunstroked dogs, donkeys, skinny goats, cows with protruding ribs, chickens. Max had only seen this sort of poverty on TV, usually in news clips about a famine-hit African country or a South American slum. He'd seen misery in America, but it was nothing like this.
It killed his hard-on.
"This is Pétionville," Chantale said. "Home sweet home for as long as you're here."
They drove up a steep hill, took a left, and rolled slowly along a heavily potholed side road flanked by tall, whitewashed houses. Two palm trees stood at the end of the road, where it curved off and led back down into the middle of the suburb. In between the trees was the entrance to a drive. IMPASSE CARVER was painted on either trunk in black lettering.
Chantale turned into the drive, which was dark because it was lined on both sides with more palm trees, sprouting in front of high walls, whose leaves intertwined under the sky and filtered the light through in a murky, aqueous green haze occasionally broken up by sharp bolts of bright sunlight. The ground was perfectly smooth and even, a relief after the ruptured streets they'd driven down.
Max's house was at the far end of the drive. The gate was open and Chantale turned into a concrete courtyard overhung with more palm trees. He saw the house in the background, a single-story orange building with a sharply sloping corrugated iron roof, built three to four feet off the ground, with half a dozen wide stone steps leading onto a porch. Bougainvillea and oleander bushes grew close to the walls.
Chantale parked the car. The bodyguards rolled into the courtyard moments later.
"The Carvers have invited you to dinner tonight. You'll be picked up around eight," she said.
"Will you be there?"
"No, I won't," she said. "Come. Let me show you around the house."
She showed him around as an estate agent would a first-time buyer, telling him more than was strictly necessary and enthusing about fittings and appliances. It was a small housetwo bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The place was spotless, the tiled floors polished and shiny, a smell of soap and mint hanging in the air.
When she was done, she told him to take a walk around the gardens out back and took her leave of him with a handshake and a smile, both still thoroughly professional, although he thought he detected a degree or two of warmth in there too. Or was he misreading signs? Or was it wishful thinking, the fantasies of a widower who hasn't had sex in seven years, getting turned on by a beautiful woman's touch, no matter how slight?
Chapter 9
NIGHT FELL QUICKLY in Haiti. One minute it was late afternoon, still broad daylight, then a second later it went dark, as quick as though someone flipped a switch.
Max had been inspecting the grounds behind the house. There was a Japanese-style rock garden, immaculately presented and tended to, with paving stones leading across green-marble gravestone chips to a square granite slab set with a large, round, white metal-mesh table and six matching chairs. The chair seats were slightly dusty, as was the top of the table, which had flecks of red candle wax in the center. He imagined a couple might have sat there at night, sipping cocktails by candlelight and maybe holding hands and savoring the moment. He'd thought of Sandra, who'd liked doing things like that. Savoring the moment, cherishing it, holding his hand like she was holding on to time itself and pausing its hand midturn, claiming the moment as hers. He remembered their first anniversary, eating barbecued fish in the house they'd rented in the Keys. They'd watched sunsets and sunrises every day and danced on the beach to the sound of the waves. He wondered what she'd make of Haiti so far. It was one place she'd never mentioned.
The garden was bordered with young palm trees, maybe two or three years old at the most, still thin and breakable, only just finding their girth. A row of mango, orange, and lime trees marked the end of the grounds. Between these ran a high fence capped with coils of razor wire. The fence was electric; it hummed constantly, like the dying vibrations of a struck tuning fork. It had been disguised from both inside and out by deep green ivy. He walked to the far end of the fence until he reached a twenty-foot white wall, also capped with razor wire. The ground in front of the wall was strewn with broken glass, half buried in sand. He found a gap in the fake fence 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 Pétionville, 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 secondsdomm domm domm domm.
It was a bass drum, its sound carrying through the raucous chaos of the night, insistent and strong, like a giant's heartbeat.