"How long've you been in Haiti, Mrs. Carver?" Max asked, his voice filling the room. Father and son looked his way, then Francesca's.
"Too long," she said quickly, just above a whisper, as if implying that Max shouldn't be talking to her. She didn't turn her head to look at him, merely glanced his way out of the corner of her eye.
Max swallowed the ham with a loud, hard gulp. It hurt his throat going down. There was another slice to go but he didn't touch it.
"So, tell me, Maxwhat was prison like?" Gustav barked across the table.
"Father!" Allain gasped at the old man's brusqueness and indiscretion.
"I don't mind talking about it," Max said to Allain. He'd been expecting the old man to ask him about his past.
"I shouldn't have taken the Garcia case," he started. "It was too close, too personal. My wife and I knew the family. They were friends. Her friends first, then mine. We babysat their daughter, Manuela, sometimes."
He saw her again, now, in front of him. Four years old, her grownup features budding, crooked nose, brown eyes, curly brown hair, impudent smile, always talking, a little Inca. She'd loved Sandra, called her "Auntie." Sometimes she'd want to come and spend the night with Sandra even when her parents were with her.
"Richard and Luisa had everything most people wish for. They were millionaires. They'd been trying for a baby for years. There'd always been complications. Luisa had had three miscarriages and the doctors told her she couldn't get pregnant againso, when Manuela came along they thought it was a miracle. They loved that little girl."
Manuela hadn't liked Max much, but she'd inherited her father's smooth, diplomatic skills and, even at that age, she'd understood the importance of not offending people unless you were sure you could get away with it. She'd been polite to Max and called him "Uncle Max" to his face, but when she thought he couldn't hear she referred to him as "Max" or "he." It had always made him smile, hearing the future adult in the child.
"They contacted me as soon as they got the ransom demand. I told them to go to the cops, but they said the kidnappers had warned them not to or the girl would die. Usual TV-movie shit," Max said, talking to the room. "Never trust a kidnapper, least of all one who tells you not to go to the cops. You'll find they don't know what they're doing, and nine times out of ten the victim gets hurt. I told Richard all this, but he still wanted to play it by their rules.
"He asked me to be the bag man. I was to drop the ransom off and wait for the kidnappers to call and tell me where to find Manuela. I delivered the money near a pay phone in Orlando. Some guy on a motorbike picked it up. He didn't see me. I was hiding across the street. I got his registration, make of the bike, his basic physical description.
"The call never came. I ran the bike details by a cop friend of mine on the job. It belonged to one of Richard's employees. I got the information I needed out of him and turned him over to the cops.
"He told me Manuela was being held at a house in Orlando. I went there and she was gone," Max said. He saw Francesca Carver twisting her napkin tight under the table, loosening it and then twisting it again with a hard wrench of her hands.
"The ransom guy had given me the names of his accomplices. Three of them, still teenagers. Seventeen. Two boys, a girl. Black. All three had records. The girl was a runaway, turned hooker. One of the boys was the ringleader's cousin."
The maids came in and cleared away the plates and refilled the glasses with water and juice. Allain and Gustav were giving him their full, undivided attention. He felt them hanging on his every word. Francesca wasn't looking at him. The vein in her temple was throbbing again.
"There was a manhunt, first state, then national, the FBI got involved. They spent six months looking for Manuela and the kidnappers and they found nothing. I was out looking for her too. Richard offered me a million dollars. But I did it for free."
Max remembered his search all too clearly, mile after black-and-white mile of endless highway and freeway, hours and days of nothing but road, sitting in rented cars, all of them with different defectsno air-conditioning, no heating, no left indicator, slow gear change, no radio, radio too loud, fast-food fumes of previous occupants; the motel rooms, the TVs, the plane rides; the tiredness, the legal speed pills washed down with pots of coffee, the calls home, the calls to the Garcia family; despair growing ever longer in him like an afternoon-to-early-evening shadow. He was feeling it all over again, distanced, diluted in time, but its trace still potent enough.
"I've seen some pretty fucking horrible things in my time. I've seen people do things to each other you couldn't imagine. But all that time it was kind of OK. It was part of my job. It came with the territory. It was something I could leave behind at the end of every shift, wash off and dive back into a few hours later.
"But when it's personal it hits you bad. Those few hours' downtimethat space between doing your job and not doing your jobthat disappears. You're not a professional anymore. You're right there with the next of kinthe moms and dads, the husbands and wives, the boyfriends and girlfriends, the roommates, the petscatching some of all those tears.
"Do you know they train you as part of the detective's course, in the art of breaking bad news? They train you in professional sympathy. Some out-of-work Hollywood acting coach trained me. I was top of my class. I oozed professional sympathy at the drop of a hat. I tried to ooze some of that sympathy on myself. Didn't work.
"I found Manuela Garcia almost a year after her kidnapping. In New York. She'd been dead six or seven months. They'd done things to her. Ugly things," Max said. He stopped himself in time from giving the details.
The maids brought in the main course. All Haitian food: grillotcubed pork fried in garlic, pepper, and chili, and served with a lemon dressing; slivers of plantain, fried golden brown; a choice of either cornmeal and thick kidney-bean sauce, or riz dion-dionrice with local mushrooms. There was also a tomato salad.
Max couldn't be sure if the Carvers ever really ate native, or if the food hadn't been specially prepared for him, as an induction. They weren't putting much of it on their plates. He had the rice, plantain, grillot, and a hefty dollop of tomato, which he dumped into his dinner plate, ignoring the salad side-plate. He noticed his gaffe when Francesca put a few sliced tomatoes into the salad plate and a single grillot on her main plate. He didn't let it bother him.
Allain Carver had the same as him. Francesca cut her pork cube into tiny fragments that she fanned out in her plate and looked at intently, as if divining her fortune.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Max tried to take his time over it, but he was hungry and the food was delicious, the best he'd eaten in over eight years.