He had a shower and made a pot of coffee. He was halfway through his first cup when the phone rang. It was Chantale.
She sounded relieved when she heard his voice. They had a long talk. Max told her the same lie he'd told Allain. He didn't know how much he could trust her. How much did she know about Charlie? And what about Allain? Had she guessed he was gay? Women were supposed to be able to spot that kind of thing.
Chantale told him that her mother's condition was deteriorating. She didn't think she'd last until Christmas. Max used that as an excuse to tell her not to come by the next day. He didn't want her around while he tailed Eloise. He said he'd cover for her with Allain. She said OK, but her voice said it wasn't.
After they were done, he went and sat out on the porch. The dark air was alive with the chatter of the nocturnal insects. A light wind was blowing behind the house, caressing the leaves and carrying with it the sweet fragrance of jasmine and burning trash.
He thought things through:
Vincent Paul didn't kidnap Charlie.
So, who did?
Was it one of Paul's enemies or one of Carver's?
If it was the last, did they know the truth about Charlie's parentage?
What about Beeson and Medd?
They must have come a lot closer than he had and they'd paid for it.
The thought of Beeson getting to something before him stirred up the dormant vestiges of his competitive pride. He got close to angry, imagining the sweaty little ferret almost cracking the case when he couldn't seem to get to first base.
Then he remembered what had happened to his old rival and he let the thought go.
He needed to talk to Beeson again, find out what he knew. He'd ask Joe to bring him in.
Until then, all he had to go on was Eloise Krolak.
Whether or not she was connected to Charlie's disappearance was something he'd soon find out.
Chapter 48
THE FOLLOWING EVENING Max watched Eloise being picked up outside Noah's Ark by the silver SUV. It had just turned six p.m. He tailed the car to Pétionville, where it pulled into the driveway of a two-story house on a tree-lined residential street near the town center.
Max drove down the road, trained his sights on the house, and parked at the end.
After an hour, he took a walk to check the place out. It was pitch-black outside. Not only was the street completely deserted, but no one seemed to be living in any of the other houses either. There wasn't a single light coming from any of them. And neither did he pick up a single sound, other than the song of the cicadas and the branches creaking above his head. It was eerily quiet. He didn't even hear the mountain drums.
He inspected the house from the opposite side of the road. A TV was on in an upstairs room. He wondered if Eloise was watching a video like the one he'd found.
He returned to the Land Cruiser.
* * *
The SUV pulled out of the house just after seven a.m. They were almost immediately held up in traffic. Pétionville was already teeming with people milling around the indoor marketa wide, mustard-colored building with a rusted brown tin roof. The streets were already open for business, men and women of all ages selling fish, eggs, live chickens, dead chickensplucked and unpluckedmounds of questionable-looking red meat, homemade sweets, potato chips, soft drinks, cigarettes, and booze. The country might have been limping and crawling through the ages, but there was a vibrancy about the people in the early morning Max hadn't ever felt in any American city.
It took them twenty minutes to get on the road to Port-au-Prince and another fifty to make it to the capital. Eloise got out in front of Noah's Ark and waved to the SUV as it drove away to the Boulevard Harry Truman with a honk of the horn.
Max followed the vehicle along the coastal road. As the Banque Populaire came into view, the SUV indicated that it was turning right into the entrance reserved for staff and VIPs.
Max sped past as the SUV entered through the gates, then he did a U-turn and headed back toward the bank. He drove around the building until he found the customer entrance.
As he was rolling into the public parking lot, he saw someone he recognized walking toward the main doors. The person stopped in midstep, turned around, and started heading back in the direction they'd come from.
There was only a medium-sized hedge separating the two parking lots, staff, and general public. Max could clearly see the SUV and the figure hurrying toward it.
It all made so much sense.
He suddenly understood why Claudette had drawn her kidnapper orange.
It was his hairthat ginger afro.
The Orange Man.
Maurice Codada, the head of security.
* * *
That evening Max called Vincent Paul and told him everything he'd found out. Paul listened in silence.
"We'll go get them in a few hours' timeearly tomorrow morning," Paul said quietly. "I want you to interrogate them. Get everything you can out of them. Do whatever you have to, to get them to talk."
Chapter 49
MAX WAS COLLECTED by Paul's men shortly after three a.m. and driven to the Codada-Krolak house. The couple were being held separately in the basement.
Max checked on both of them before going to inspect their house.
* * *
Max crossed a red-and-black-tiled foyer that led into an open-plan living-room area, furnished with a huge TV, a video recorder, a sofa, several armchairs, and a few potted palms.
On the right was a well-stocked bar, complete with upholstered stools. Max checked behind it. He opened the till. It was stuffed with banknotes and coins. The notes were gourdes with Papa and Baby Doc's faces on them. He found a loaded .38 under the bar, as well as a small stack of CDs of Haitian and South American music. Hanging on the wall next to the bar was a Papa Docera Haitian flag, black and red instead of blue and red. He understood then that it went with the design of the tiles.
The Duvalier theme continued upstairs. Dozens of black-and-white photographs hung in the corridorsa younger Papa Doc in a white coat, smiling from the middle of a group of poor people, all of them abject and miserable in their clothes and surroundings, yet smiling quite happily. Many, Max noticed, were missing limbs, hands, and feet. It must have been taken at the time of the yaws epidemic. At Duvalier's feet sat a group of tough-faced young children, all of them black except for onea light-skinned boy with freckles. It was Codada.
Max followed Codada's evolution from child thug to man thug. He posed with Bedouin Désyr and the Faustin brothers, now in Macoute uniformsnavy-blue shirts and pants, bandannas around their necks, guns in their belts, eyes hidden behind thick wraparound shades, booted feet on dead bodies, all smiles.