The next image was taken inside the buildinga spacious hall with sunlight streaming in through high windows.
A line of children, alternating between boys and girls, all aged under ten, were walking up to a table draped in a red-and-black silk cloth. The children were immaculately dressed in black and whiteblack skirts and white blouses for the girls, black suits and white shirts for the boys. They approached the table and drank from a large, gleaming gold chalice, exactly as they would have done at Holy Communion, except there was no host to swallow and no priest officiating, only a man stepping up to the table after every child had drunk and, with a gold ladle, topping up the receptacle with a thin, greenish liquid.
He saw the boy from the beginning of the video stepping up to the chalice, taking it between his hands, and draining it. Then he put the chalice back exactly where he'd found it and stared right into the camcorder. His eyes were dead space, twin vacuums sealed in a skull; every ounce of life, thought, and personality they'd possessed in the earlier shots was gone for good. The boy left the table and followed the line of children leaving the hall, his walk slow and labored, as if he had someone inside him pulling levers to make him move. All the children moved the same way, with old steps.
Max knew what the liquid was. He'd had it. He knew what it did. It was a potionzombie juice.
Like in the movies, voodoo zombies were technically the living deadonly they weren't really dead at all, but in a deep catatonic state. They were normal people who had been poisoned with a potion that completely incapacitated them. Their minds were working. They were fully conscious, but they could neither move nor speak. They didn't even appear to be breathing. They had neither a heartbeat nor a discernible pulse. After they'd been buried, the houngan or bokorusually the person responsible for their conditionwould dig them up and give them an antidote. They would regain consciousness, only not as the people they were before, but as near vegetables. The priest hypnotized the zombies and made them his slaveseither for himself or whoever was paying him. They did whatever they were told.
Boukman had used zombies.
Max pressed PLAY.
The boy was back in the front row of another classroom, only this time his eyes were barely moving and his face was expressionless, his features not registering that he was taking in a single thing about the proceedings. The camera pulled away and showed someone addressing the class from the left.
It was Eloise Krolak, the principal of Noah's Ark.
"You fuckin' bitch," Max whispered, freezing the tape as her face came clearly into view. Her features were pointed and severe, almost rodentlike in their alignment.
He knew from then on that the rest of the tape would only get worse.
He hit PLAY.
He was right.
When it was finished, Max sat there watching the static on the screen, unable to move. He stayed where he was for a long time, shaking.
Chapter 43
MAX CONSIDERED TELLING Allain about the tape, but he held off. He'd gather his evidence first.
He copied the tape, packed the original up with the figurines, and drove to the FedEx office in Port-au-Prince.
He let Joe know what was coming. He also asked him to see what he could find on Boris Gaspésie.
He drove to Noah's Ark. He parked up the road and fixed his mirror so he could see the gate.
He walked in and checked to make sure Eloise Krolak was there. He saw her addressing her pupils the same way she was talking to the zombie kids in the video. He thought back to the video, to the things he'd seen being done to those children. He felt suddenly sick.
He went back to his car and waited for her to come out.
* * *
In the afternoon it rained.
Max had never known rain like it. In Miami it pouredsometimes all day, all week, sometimes all goddamn monthbut the rain fell and dribbled away into puddles or disappeared into the ground and back into the air.
In Haiti rain attacked.
The sky went near black as rain swarmed out of dense storm clouds and swooped down on Port-au-Prince, drenching the city to its foundations, turning bone-dry earth to running mud within seconds.
The sewers in the street quickly flooded and belched waste back up on the streets, which ran black and brown. In the houses around him rooftop reservoirs filled up to the brim and spilled over or broke clean off their rusted fittings and crashed to the ground; power went and came and went again; pipes burst, trees were stripped of leaves, fruit, and even bark; a roof caved in. Confused and panicked people ran into equally dazed and terrified pets, cattle, and strays, all of them collapsing into struggling, thrashing, conjoined heaps. Then came the rats, hundreds of them, flooded out of their holes, scuttling downhill toward the harbor in a great wave of rank, diseased fur, squealing in panic and fear. Great blasts of thunder blew holes in the atmosphere and sheets of lightning followed, quickly flashing up every detail of the damaged, drowning streets, awash with mud and shit and teeming with vermin, before snatching the vision back into darkness as if it had been an illusion.
The rain stopped. Max watched the storm move out to sea.
* * *
Eloise Krolak didn't leave Noah's Ark until after six-thirty, when she was picked up in a silver Mercedes SUV with tinted windows.
Max tailed the car out through the city and along the mountain road to Pétionville. It was dark now. Traffic was heavy.
They slowed to a crawl at the end of a long, thick, red-neon streak of stalled taillights. Max was four cars behind.
The opposite side of the road was mostly free. Barely anyone seemed to be heading into the capital at this hour.
Except for the UN.
A convoy passed the traffic jamtwo jeeps followed by a truck, then, moving slower, another jeep, whose occupant was shining a flashlight into each of the stalled cars.
The beam passed Max. He looked straight ahead and kept his hands on the wheel.
He heard the jeep stop.
Someone knocked on his window.
Max didn't have his passport on him, only his AmEx card in his wallet.
"Bonsoir monsieur," the UN soldier said. Blue helmet, uniform, young white face.
"Do you speak English?" Max asked.
The soldier caught his breath.
"Name?" he asked Max.
Max told him. He'd hardly finished saying his last name before the soldier had pulled a pistol and was aiming it at his head.
He was made to get out of the car. When he did, he was immediately surrounded by half a dozen men aiming rifles at his head. He put his hands up. They frisked him, took his gun, and frog-marched him off the road to where the truck and three jeeps were parked. Max protested his innocence, yelled at them to call Allain Carver or the American Embassy.