He felt something prick his left forearm and saw the syringe sticking out of his arm, the plunger going down, clear fluid going in, someone counting down in his ear.
He should have been worried, but the dope took care of that. He had no fear. Whatever it was they'd given him was beautiful shit.
Part 4
Chapter 44
"HOW ARE YOU feeling?" Vincent Paul asked Max, after he'd pointed for him to take a seat in an armchair facing his desk. They were in Paul's studydiscreet air-conditioning, walls lined with bookcases, framed photographs, flags.
"Where am I?" Max asked back, his voice croaky.
He'd been in a room with no windows for two days. That was where he'd come to when the injection had worn off. His first feeling was panic: he'd checked himself all over for missing parts, scars, and bandages. Nothing had been done to him. Yet.
He'd had regular visits. A doctor and a nurseplus three armed guardshad come to check him out. The doctor had asked him a bunch of questions. He'd spoken English with a German accent. He hadn't answered any of Max's questions. On day two, he stopped coming.
Max had been fed three times a day and given a daily American newspaper, in which nothing was ever reported about Haiti. He'd watched cable TV on the set at the foot of his bed. The morning they'd taken him to meet Vincent Paul, they'd shaved his face and head and given him his clothes backwashed and pressed.
"You should relax. If I wanted you dead I could have let those little kids rip you to pieces," Paul said in a low, deep voice Max felt in his gut. Paul was very dark, with eyes set so far back in his skull they were reduced to two moving, gleaming pinpoints of reflected light, as if he had fireflies buzzing around in his sockets. His face was barely lined. He looked mature but nowhere near the age Max guessed him to be: early fifties. Bald dome, long, fine nose, huge jaw, thick eyebrows, short, stout neck, no fat, all muscle, making Max think all at once of Mike Tyson, a mapou trunk, and a bust of a cruel tyrant with pretensions to greatness. Even seated, he was imposing, everything about him exaggerated and monumental.
"It's not dying that concerns me," Max said. "It's how much of me you'd leave alive."
Max wasn't outwardly nervous, but inside he was wired with anticipation. Very little in his life had prepared him for a moment like thiscaptured, utterly at the mercy of a foe. He didn't know what was around the next corner. If Paul carved him up and turned him into Beeson, he thought, he'd blow his brains out first chance he got.
"I don't follow." Paul frowned. The hands that had crushed and torn a man's testicles from his body were folded across his lower chest, abnormal in their girth, intimidating in their size, hands nature had made so big they'd needed each an extra pinkie to keep in proportion. And he'd had a manicure. His nails glowed.
"You carved up one of my predecessors so he can't hold his shit," Max said.
"I don't follow," Paul repeated slower.
"Didn't youor one of your guyssplit Clyde Beeson in two and rearrange his insides?"
"No."
"What about that Haitian who was working the case? Emmanuel Michaels?"
"Michel-ange" Paul corrected him.
"Yeah."
"who was found by the docks with his penis stuffed down his throat and his balls in his cheeks?"
"Was that you?"
"No." Paul shook his head. "Michelange was fucking somebody's wife. The husband had him taken care of."
"Bullshit!" Max reacted instinctively.
"If you ask around you'll see that it's not. It happened two weeks into his investigation."
"The Carvers know about this?"
"They would if they asked around," Paul said.
"How did they know it was the husband?"
"He confessed to it. He did it in his bedroom, with his wife watching."
"Who'd he confess to?" Max asked.
"The UN."
"And?"
"And what?"
"They take him in?"
"Sure. For as long as it took him to tell them what he'd done. Then they let him go. He runs a hotel and casino near Pétionville. Doing well. You can talk to him, if you want. The place is called El Rodeo. His name is Frederick Davi."
"What about his wife?"
"She left him," Paul answered, face deadpan, his eyes laughing. Max carried on his questioning.
"OK. Darwen Medd? Where is he? Did you kill him?"
"No." Paul shook his head, looking surprised. "I don't know where he is. Why would I want to kill him?"
"A warning. Like the one you sent out to the UN rapists," Max said through a dry mouth.
"That wasn't a warning. That was punishment. And there hasn't been another rape by the occupiers since," Paul said and smiled. "I knew you were following me that time. You weren't hard to miss. Good cars stand out here."
"Why didn't you do anything?"
"I've got nothing to hide from you," Paul said. "Tell me more about your predecessors."
Max explained. Paul listened, his face solemn.
"It wasn't me. I assure you. Although I can't say I'm sorry to hear about Clyde Beeson." Close up, Paul's accent favored English over French. "Pathetic little toerag. A lump of greed waddling on those two stumps he calls legs."
Max managed a smile.
"So you met him?"
"I had them both brought here for questioning."
"Shouldn't it have been the other way around?"
Paul smiled but didn't answer. He had a mouth of bright white teeth. He suddenly looked disarming and pleasant, almost boyish, the kind of person you could imagine doing good deeds and meaning them.
"What did they tell you?"
"What you're going to tell me: how the investigation is progressing."
"You're not my client," Max said.
"How much do you know about me, Mingus?"
"That you'll torture the information out of me."
"Something we have in common." Paul laughed, picking up a file from his desk and holding it up. It had Max's name on it in bold capitals. "What else?"
"You're a major suspect in the kidnapping of Charlie Carver."
"Certain people think my name's a euphemism for everything that goes wrong here."
"Witnesses placed you at the scene."
"I was there." Paul nodded. "But I'll get to that."
"You were seen running away with the kid in your arms."