"Never knew him," Chantale said. "My mother got pregnant during a ceremony. She was possessed by a spirit at the time, so was my father. It's called 'chevalier.' It means 'knight' in French, or 'ridden by the gods' in our language."
"So you're a god's child?" Max quipped.
"Aren't we all, Max?" she countered with a smile.
"That ever happen to youChevrolet?"
"Chevalier not Chevrolet," she corrected him with mock indignation. "And no. It hasn't. I haven't been to a ceremony since I was a teenager."
"There's always time," Max said.
She turned and gave him a look he felt in his crotchbedroom eyes coupled with a searching gaze. He couldn't stop his eyes from slipping down to her mouth and the small, dark brown mole under her bottom lip. It wasn't perfectly oval, more like a comma that had been knocked on its back. Not for the first time he wondered what she was like in bed and guessed she was spectacular.
* * *
It was now light. The road they were taking was a dirt track cut into a dry, barren plain of white rocks, boulders, andonce in a whilethe carcasses of dead animals, picked clean and bleached pale. There were no trees or bushes in sight, only cacti. It reminded him of postcards he'd received from friends who'd taken a trip to the great southwestern states.
They drove up into the mountains. They were nothing like the ones he had back home. He'd been to the Rockies and the Appalachians, but these were completely different. They were brown, barren mounds of dead earth, being slowly but systematically eroded by every breath of wind, every drop of rain. It was hard to imagine that the whole island had once been rainforest; that this environmental catastrophe of a place had had life, that it had been the commercial cornerstone of a foreign empire. He tried to imagine what the people who lived in the mountains would look like, and he came up with an Ethiopian famine victim.
But he was wrong.
They might have been every bit as poor, but the country people lived somewhat better than the miserable souls in town. The children, although thin, didn't have the bloated bodies and starved, haunted looks of their Port-au-Prince counterparts. The villages they passed weren't anything like the desperate hovels of Cité Soleil. They were collections of small huts with thatched roofs and thick walls painted in bright colorsreds, greens, blues, yellows, and whites. Even the animals looked better off: the pigs less like goats, the goats less like dogs, the dogs less like foxes, the chickens less like anorexic pigeons.
The road got bad and they slowed to a crawl. They had to drive around potholes five feet deep, drive in and out of craters, creep around hairpin bends in case someone was coming their way. They saw no cars at all, but there were a few wrecks, stripped right down to pencil outlines. He wondered what had become of the drivers.
Despite the air-conditioning keeping the car cool, Max could feel the heat outside, pouring down out of the light blue, cloudless sky.
"Allain didn't tell you everything about Noah's Ark," Chantale said. "Not surprisinglygiven your attitude."
"You think I was out of line, sayin' what I did?"
"You were both right," she answered. "Yeah, it's wrong, but look at this place. More people than crops."
"What didn't he tell me?"
"Background stuff, about the contracts. All the time those children are growing up, they're constantly reminded where they came from and who it was who took them away from that. They're taken to Cité Soleil, to Carrefour, to other nasty places. They get to see people dying of starvation and diseasenot to teach them charity or compassion, but to teach them gratitude and respect, to teach them that the Carvers are their saviors, that they owe their lives to the family."
"So they're brainwashed?"
"No, not really. They're educated, taught the Carver creed along with their verbs and their multiplication tables," Chantale said. "Anyway, they're basically convinced that the minute they leave the Ark they'll end up in the slums with poor folk."
"So, when they turn seventeen or eighteen and the contracts come out they happily sign their lives away?" Max concluded. "So they trade Noah's Ark for the Carver empire?"
"That's right."
"How come they hired you?"
"Allain likes to hire outsiders," she said. "Apart from his servants."
"But this contractit's not enforceable if you go overseas, right? Say you're studyin' in America and decide you wanna go work for JP Morgan instead of Gustav Carver, they can't stop you."
"No, they can't, but they do," she said, lowering her voice, as if someone were listening.
"How?"
"They have contacts everywhere. They're very rich, powerful people. People with influence. Try and break a deal and they break you."
"Have you known it to happen?"
"It's not something they exactly brag about or anybody finds out about, but I'm sure it's happened," Chantale said.
"What happens to the kids who don't conform? The problem kids? The ones who rebel in the back row of class?"
"Again it's not something they openly talk about, but Allain told me the kids who don't get with the program are taken back to where they were found."
"Oh that's real civilized," Max said bitterly.
"That's life. Life isn't easy anywhere, but here it's worse. It's hell. It's not like those kids don't know how lucky they are."
"You need to change jobs. You sound like your boss."
"Fuck you," she said under her breath. She turned the radio on and turned up the volume.
Max thought for a while about what he'd heard, then he switched off the radio.
"Thanks," he said to her.
"What for?"
"Opening up a whole new dimension to this investigation: Noah's Ark."
"You're thinking the person who kidnapped Charlie might have been expelled from there?"
"Or had his or her future destroyed by the Carvers, yeah. A life for a life. Third oldest motive in the book."
Chapter 35
TO MOST HAITIANS, Saut d'Eau is a place where the waters have miraculous healing properties. The story goes that on July 16, 1884, the Virgin Mary appeared before a woman who was standing in the stream, washing her clothes. The vision then transmogrified into a white dove that flew off into the waterfall, forever imbuing the cascade with the powers of the Holy Spirit. Since then Saut d'Eau has attracted thousands of visitors every year, pilgrims who came to stand under the blessed waters and pray out loud for cures to illnesses, relief from debts, good crops, a new car, and quick solutions to U.S. visa problems. The anniversary of the Virgin's appearance is also celebrated with a famous festival around the waterfall, which lasts all day and all night.
When he first set eyes on the place, Max almost fell for the legend himself. The last thing he expected to find after hours of driving through the arid wilderness was a small piece of tropical paradise, but that was exactly what it wasa proverbial oasis, a mirage made real, or a sanctuarya reminder of the way the island had once been, and all it had lost.