Mr. Clarinet

trunk for Max to put his bags in. The men got into the car behind.

Max sat in the front seat next to her. She turned on the air-conditioning. He broke out into a heavy sweat as his body fought to acclimatize after the heat of the airport.

He looked at the airport entrance through his window and saw the con he'd been on the plane with, standing near the entrance, rubbing his wrists and taking in his surroundings, looking left and right. The man looked lost and vulnerable, sorely missing his cell, the safety of familiarity. A woman sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a pair of battered, ruptured sneakers was talking to him. He shrugged his shoulders and held up his empty palms in a sign of helplessness. There was worry in his face, a dawning fear. If only the punks and the hardmen could see him now, cornered by the free world, life calling his bluff. Max entertained the notion of playing good Samaritan and giving the con a lift into town, but he let it slide. Wrong association. He'd been to prison but he didn't consider himself a criminal.

Chantale seemed to read his mind.

'He'll get picked up,' she said. 'They'll send a car for him, like we did for you.'

'Who's 'they'?'

'Depends which bit of porch talk you eavesdrop. Some people say there's an expat criminal collective operating here, like a union. Whenever someone comes in from a U.S. prison, they get picked up and assimilated into the gang. Other people say there's no such thing, that it's all really Vincent Paul.'

'Vincent Paul?'

'Le Roi de Cite Soleil?the King of Cite Soleil. Cite Soleil is the biggest slum in the country. It's next to Port-au-Prince. They say he who rules Cite Soleil rules Haiti. All the changes of government have started there?including the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier.'

'Was Paul behind that?'

'People say all sorts of things. They talk a lot here. Sometimes it's all they do. Talking's like a national pastime, what with the economy being the way it is. No jobs. Not enough to do. More time than purpose. You'll notice,' Chantale said, shaking her head.

'How do I get to meet Vincent Paul?'

'He'll come to you if it gets to that,' Chantale said.

'Do you think it will?' Max asked, thinking of Beeson. Had Chantale collected Beeson from the airport? Did she know what had happened to him?

'Who's to say? Maybe he's behind it, maybe he isn't. He isn't the only person who hates the Carver family. They have a lot of enemies.'

'Do you hate them?'

'No,' Chantale said, laughing and locking eyes with Max. She had beautiful, doelike eyes and a telling laugh?loud, raucous, vulgar, smoky, knowing, and irresistibly filthy; the laugh of someone who got drunk, stoned, and fucked complete strangers.

They drove off.

Chapter 8

THE ROAD AWAY from the airport was long, dusty, and milky gray. Cracks, fissures, gaps, gouges, and splits shattered the road surface into a crude latticework that frequently converged into random potholes and craters of differing sizes and depths. It was a miracle the road hadn't long ago fallen apart and regressed to dirt track.

Chantale drove deftly, swerving around or away from the biggest holes in the road and slowing down when she had to roll over the smaller ones. All of the cars in front of them, and on the opposite side of the road, were moving the same way, some negotiating the road like classic drunk drivers, steering more dramatically than others.

'First time in Haiti?' she asked.

'Yeah. I hope it's not all like the airport.'

'It's worse,' she said, and laughed. 'But we get by.'

There were, seemingly, only two types of car in Haiti: luxury and fucked-up. Max saw Benzes, Bimas, Lexes, and plenty of jeeps. He saw a stretch limo. He saw a Bentley followed by a Rolls-Royce. Yet for every one of these there were dozens of rusted-out, smoke-belching sand trucks, their holds full of people?so full, some were hanging off the sides, others clinging to the roof. Then there were the old station-wagons brightly painted all over with slogans and pictures of saints or field workers. These were taxi cabs, Chantale told him, called tap-taps. They too were filled with people and loaded on top with their belongings?crammed baskets, cardboard boxes, and cloth-wrapped bundles. To Max, it looked like everyone was fleeing the scene of a natural disaster.

'You'll be in one of the Carver houses in Petionville. It's a suburb half an hour out of Port-au-Prince. The capital's too dangerous right now,' she said. 'The house has a maid called Rubie. She's very nice. She'll cook for you, wash your clothes. You'll never see her?unless you spend all day indoors. There's a phone, TV, and a shower. All the essentials.'

'Thanks,' Max said. 'Is this what you do for the Carvers?'

'Chauffeur?' she said with a smirk. 'No. This is a one-off. I'm on Allain's team. He offered me the rest of the day off if I picked you up.'

The road bisected an endless dry plain, a dustbowl peppered with thinning, yellowy grass. Scenery flew by. He noted the dark mountains to the left and the way the clouds hung so low, so close to the ground they seemed to have broken their moorings and drifted loose from the sky, threatening to land. There were occasional lollipop speed signs?black on white: 60, 70, 80, 90?but no one was paying much attention to them, let alone staying to a particular side of the road, unless something bigger was coming the other way. Chantale kept to an even seventy.

Painted billboards, thirty feet high and sixty feet wide, stood on the roadside, advertising local and international brands. In between were smaller, narrower billboards for local banks, radio stations, and competing lottery syndicates. Once in a while, Charlie Carver's face appeared, those intense, haunted features blown up and planted high in black and white, eyes still staring straight into you. REWARD` was painted in tall red letters above the image; $1,000,000 below it. To the left, in black, was a telephone number.

'How long has that been up?' Max asked after they'd passed the first one.

'For the last two years,' Chantale said. 'They change them every month because they fade.'

'I take it there've been a lot of calls.'

'There used to be, but it's died down a lot since people worked out they don't get paid for making stuff up.'

'What was Charlie like?'

'I only met him once, at the Carver house, before the invasion. He was a baby.'

'I guess Mr. Carver keeps his private and professional life separate.'

'That's impossible in Haiti. But he does his best,' Chantale replied, meeting his eyes. He picked up a hint of sourness in her tone. She had a French-American accent, a grudging collision, with the former tipping over the latter: born and raised on the island, educated somewhere in the States or Canada. Definitely late twenties, enough to have lost one voice and found another.

She was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her wide mouth and taste those plump, slightly parted lips. He looked out of the window before he stared too hard or gave anything away.

There were a few people about, men in ragged shirts and trousers and straw hats, shepherding small flocks of pathetically thin, dirty, brown goats, others pulling donkeys saddled with overflowing straw baskets, or men and women, in pairs or on their own, carrying jerricans filled with water on their shoulders, or balancing huge baskets on their heads. They all moved very slowly, at the same lazy, listing gait. Farther on, they came to their first village?a cluster of one-room square shacks painted orange or yellow or green, all with corrugated iron roofs. Women sitting at the roadside in front of tables, selling melting brown candy. Naked children played nearby. A man tended to a pot cooking on a fire, billowing plumes of white smoke. Stray dogs nosing at the ground. All of this roasting under intense, bright sunlight.

Chantale flicked on the radio. Max was expecting more 'Hadti, Ma Cherie' but instead heard the familiar bish-bosh-bullshit machine beat of every rap record ever made. A remake of 'Ain't Nobody,' a song Sandra had loved, ruined by a rapper who sounded like half the inmates in Attica.

'Do you like music?' Chantale asked him.

'I like music,' Max replied, looking at her. She was pumping her head to the beat.

'Like what? Bruce Springsteen?' she said, nodding at his tattoo.

Max didn't know what to say. The truth would take too long and open up too many ways into him.

'I got that done when I didn't know better,' he said. 'I like quiet stuff now. Old-man stuff. Old Blue Eyes.'

'Sinatra? That is old,' she said, glancing across at him, her eyes taking in his face and chest. He caught her eyes straying down his shirt. It had been so long since he'd flirted. He'd known how to play situations like this in the past. He'd known what he wanted then. He wasn't so sure now.

'The most popular music here is called kompas. Compact. It's like one really long song that can go on for half an hour or more,