Mr. Clarinet

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Part 2

Chapter 7

THE FLIGHT OUT to Haiti was held up for an hour while it waited on a homeward-bound con and his two armed guards.

Inside it was packed to near capacity. Haitians?mostly men?heading home with bags of food, soap, and clothes, and boxes and boxes of cheap electrical goods?TVs, radios, video recorders, fans, microwaves, computers, boom boxes, which they'd half-or quarter-jammed into the overhead luggage compartments.

The stewardesses weren't complaining. They appeared to be used to it. They picked their way past the brand-name obstacles with straight-backed poise and stuck-on professional smiles, always managing to squeeze through without creasing their bearing, no matter how tight the space.

Max could tell the visiting expats apart from the natives. The former were tricked out in standard ghetto garb?gold chains, earrings, and bracelets; more on their backs and feet than they had in the bank?while the latter were dressed conservatively?cheap but smart slacks and short-sleeved shirts for the men, midweek church dresses for the women.

The atmosphere was lively, seemingly unaffected by the delay. The conversations rolled out loud and clear, Kreyol's dueling rhythms bouncing back and forth off each other and from all corners of the plane. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The voices?deep and guttural?collectively drowned out the in-cabin preflight Muzak and all three pilot announcements.

'Most of those people live in houses with no electricity,' said the woman sitting next to Max, in the window seat. 'They're buying those things as ornaments, status symbols?like we'd buy a sculpture or a painting.'

She told him her name was Wendy Abbott. She had lived in Haiti for the past thirty-five years with her husband, Paul. They ran an elementary school in the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince. It catered to both the rich and the poor. They always made a profit, because very few of the poor believed in education, let alone knew what it was for. Many of their pupils either went on to the Union School, where they were taught the American curriculum, or to the more expensive and prestigious Lycee Francais, which prepared them for the French baccalaureat.

Max introduced himself and left it at his name.

The con came on board, led in by his two escorts in a loud clunk-chink clunk-chink of thick chains. Max read him: heavy- duty denim pants, no belt, loose white T-shirt, blue-and-white headscarf, no gold, no ice?low-ranking gangbanger, probably caught selling rocks or coming back from his first kill, reeking of chronic and gun smoke. Strictly small-time, hadn't even left the second rung of the ghetto ladder. He was still in his prison clothes, because he'd outgrown his court ones working out in the yard. He puffed his chest out and kept his cellblock face on, but Max could see his eyes running to panic once he'd taken in the crowd on the plane and absorbed his first big whiff of freedom without parole. He'd probably expected to die in prison.

'I wonder if he knows what an insult he is to his heritage??returning to Haiti as his forefathers arrived?in chains,' Wendy said, looking at the con.

'I shouldn't think he gives a shit, ma'am,' Max replied.

Up until then the con had kept his gaze locked in some vague middle distance, not focusing on anyone or anything in particular, but he must have felt Max and Wendy's stare, because he looked their way. Wendy dropped her gaze almost as soon as she made eye contact with the prisoner, but Max went eyeball-to-eyeball with him. The con recognized his own kind, smiled very faintly, and nodded to Max. Max acknowledged the greeting with an involuntary nod of his own.

None of that would have happened in prison, a black con bonding with a white one?unless he was buying or selling something, most usually dope or sex. Once you were locked up, you stuck to your own kind and didn't mix and mingle. It was like that and no other way. The tribes were always at war. Whites were the first to get gang-raped, punked-out, and shanked by blacks and Latinos, who saw them as symbols of the judicial system that was stacked against them from the day they were born. If you were smart, you unlearned any liberal views you had and got in touch with your prejudice as soon as the cell door slammed behind you. That prejudice?the hatred and fear?kept you alert and alive.

The guards sat the con down and took their places either side of him.

The plane left Miami International ten minutes later.

* * *

Shaped like a lobster's pincer with most of the top claw chewed off, from the air Haiti looked completely out of place after the dense, luscious green of Cuba and all the other smaller islands they'd flown over. Arid and acidic, the country's rust-on- rust-colored landscape seemed utterly bereft of grass and foliage. When the plane circled over the edges of the bordering Dominican Republic, you could clearly see where the two nations divided?the land split as definitely as on any map: a bone-dry wasteland with an abundant oasis next door.

* * *

Max hadn't slept much the night before. He'd been in Joe's office, first photocopying the old files on Solomon Boukman and The SNBC, then looking up the former gang members on the database.

Although he'd founded The SNBC, Boukman was a delegator. He had had twelve deputies, all fiercely loyal to him and every bit as ruthless and cold-blooded. Of these, six were now dead?two executed by the State of Florida, one executed by the State of Texas, two shot and killed by police, one murdered in prison?one was serving twenty-five to life in maximum security, and the remaining four had been deported to Haiti between March 1995 and May 1996.

Rudy Crcvecoeur, Jean Desgrottes, Salazar Faustin, and Don Modse had been the most fearsome of Boukman's subordinates. They were the enforcers, the ones who watched over the gang, made sure no one was stealing or snitching or shooting off their mouths where they shouldn't. Modse, Crcvecoeur, and Desgrottes had also been directly responsible for kidnapping the children Boukman sacrificed in his ritual ceremonies.

Salazar Faustin was in charge of The SNBC's Florida drug operation. He was a former Tonton Macoute?one of Duvalier's private militia?who had used his connections in Haiti to set up a highly efficient cocaine-smuggling network in Miami. The drugs were bought direct from the Bolivian manufacturers and then flown into Haiti on two-seater passenger planes, which landed on a secret airstrip in the north of the country. The pilot was changed and the plane was refueled and flown on to Miami. U.S. customs didn't bother to check the plane, because they thought it was only coming from Haiti, a non-drug-growing zone. Once in Miami, the cocaine was taken to the Sunset Marquee, a cheap hotel in South Beach, which Faustin owned and ran with his mother, Marie-Felize. In the basement, the cocaine was cut with glucose and distributed to The SNBC's street dealers, who sold it all over Florida.

Both Salazar and Marie-Felize Faustin received life sentences for drug trafficking. They were deported on the same day?August 8, 1995?tearfully reuniting at the airport.

* * *

They landed at two-forty-five in the afternoon. Airport staff in navy-blue overalls wheeled a white ladder up to the plane doors. They'd have to walk across the tarmac to the airport building, an unimposing and untidy rectangular structure with cracked and flaking whitewashed walls, a flight tower sticking out of it to the right, three empty flagpoles in the middle, and WELCOME TO PORT-AU-PRINCE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT painted across the bottom front, above the entrances, in crude, black block capitals.

The pilot asked the passengers to wait for the prisoner to leave the plane first.

The door opened. The guards, both now wearing sunglasses, stood up with the con and led him out of the aircraft.

* * *

When Max stepped off the plane, he was surprised by the heat that smothered him in a dense, airless blanket. Not even the slight breeze that was blowing could dislodge or loosen it.