Mr. Clarinet

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'Do you think Vincent Paul's got anything to do with Charlie Carver's disappearance?' Max asked.

'Why don't we meet up tomorrow or the day after and have a long talk, see what we can see, maybe work out a way of helping each other,' Huxley said, smiling. He crushed his new cigarette out.

Max realized Huxley had been leading up to this moment, feeding him bigger and bigger scraps of information, getting him hungrier and hungrier before closing the kitchen and rewriting the rules his way. He'd been played.

'What's in it for you?' Max asked.

'My Pulitzer.' Huxley smiled. 'I'm writing a book about the invasion and its aftermath?you know, the bullshit you'll never read about in the papers. You wouldn't believe what's been going on here, what people have been getting away with.'

'Like what?'

Just then, Buzz-cut walked in. He looked over at Max and Huxley and smiled snidely, showing wolfish canine teeth.

'Hello ladies,' he sneered.

He tossed Max a disgusted look. His gray-green eyes might have been attractive had they not been so small and cold, icy-bright pinpricks in a face that breathed meanness.

He walked into the room between the cubicles. They heard him draining his bladder all over the bed and the box and the floor. They looked at each other. Max saw contempt in Huxley's eyes?but it ran deep, all through him, from the very bottom of his heart.

The soldier finished and came out of the room, zipping himself up. He shot them another look and belched long and loud in their direction.

Max looked at him, gave him the right amount of attention, but was careful not to lock eyes with him. Most people you could stare down if you let them think you had nothing to lose; others you had to let stare you down, no matter how much you knew you could fuck them up. It was all about choosing your moment and reading your people. And this was all wrong.

Buzz-cut walked out of the corridor and back to the bar.

Huxley took out another cigarette. He tried to light it but his hands were shaking worse than a detoxing wino's. Max took the lighter from him and worked the flame.

'It's shit like that?shit like him?I'm writing about,' Huxley spat through his first cloud of smoke, his voice quivering with anger. 'Fucking Americans should be ashamed of themselves having a scumbag like that fighting in their name.'

Max agreed with him but didn't say so.

'So you are Haitian, Shawn?'

Huxley was taken aback.

'You see a lot, don't you, Max?'

'Only what's there,' Max said, but he'd only just guessed.

'You're right: I was born here. I was adopted by a Canadian couple when I was four, after my parents died. They told me about my heritage a few years back, before I went to college,' Huxley explained.

'So this is like a Roots-type thing for you?'

'More a fruit-from- the-tree-type thing. I know where I came from,' said Huxley. 'Call this?what I'm doing?giving a little something back.'

Max warmed to him. It wasn't just the rum or their shared loathing of Buzz-cut. There was a sincerity about Huxley you didn't find in the media: maybe he was new to the game and still had most of his cherry or maybe he hadn't wised up that it was a game at all, thought he was on a mission, chasing 'the truth.' Max had had ideals once, when he'd started out as a cop, young enough to believe in bullshit like people's inherent good and that things could improve and change for the better; he'd fancied himself some kind of superhero. It had taken him less than a week on the streets to turn into an extreme cynic.

'Where can I reach you?' Max asked.

'I'm at the Hotel Olffson. Most famous hotel in Haiti.'

'Is that saying anything?'

'Graham Greene stayed there.'

'Who?'

'Mick Jagger too. In fact I'm in the same room he stayed in when he wrote 'Emotional Rescue.' You don't look too impressed, Max. Not a Stones fan?'

'Anyone important been a guest of the place?' Max smirked.

'None you'd know.' Huxley laughed and handed him his business card. It gave his name and profession, and the hotel's address and phone number.

Max palmed the card and slipped it in his jacket pocket, next to the signed Sinatra CD Carver had given him.

'I'll be in touch as soon as I've found my bearings,' Max promised.

'Please do that,' Huxley said.

Chapter 13

MAX LEFT LA COUPOLE at around two a.m. The Barbancourt rum was making his head reel, but not in an unpleasant way. Booze had always promised to take him up someplace good only to fuck with his controls and leave him stranded midway, tasting the inevitable crash. This was a different kind of drunk, closer to an opiate float. He had a smile on his face and that good feeling in his heart that everything would be all right and the world wasn't such a bad place really. The booze was that good.

Dark telegraph poles leaned out of the concrete, tilting slightly forward, toward Petionville's brightly lit center. The wires were slung so low and loose Max could have touched them if he'd wanted to. He was walking in the street, barely feeling his footsteps, bracing his body against the downward pull of gravity, which threatened to send him sprawling flat on his face. Behind him, people were coming out of the bar, spilling conversation and laughter, which faded to murmurs and splutters in the deep silence that confronted them. Some Americans tested the rigidity of the stillness with a one-off scream or shout or a bark or a meow, but the quietness sucked the noise into more silence.

Max didn't know exactly which street he had to turn down. He couldn't remember how many he'd passed on his way up before he'd noticed the bar. He was close to the center of town, but not that close, somewhere in the middle. He passed one road, looked down it but it wasn't the right one. There was a supermarket on the left and a graffitied wall to the right. Maybe the next road. Or the next. Or the one before. He'd meant to ask Huxley for directions, in between one of the four or five other drinks they'd had together. He'd forgotten. Then he'd stopped caring sometime after he'd lost count of the drinks he'd had. The Barbancourt had told him he'd find his way home no problem. He carried on walking.

His shoes were starting to pinch the sides of his feet and scrape off the flesh on his heels. He hated them, those nice, new, shiny, leather slip-ons he'd bought at Saks Fifth Avenue at Dadeland Mall. He should have broken them in before he'd put them on. He didn't like the clack-clack the heels were making in the road. He sounded like a young horse in its first shoes.

And then there were the drums?not any closer than when he'd first heard them, but clearer, the sound raining down from the mountains like rusty cutlery; a full battery of snares, tom-toms, bass drums, and cymbals. The rhythms had a jagged edge. They'd gone straight for the drunk part of his brain, the part he'd hit when he'd fallen off the wagon, the part that would hurt like a motherfucker in the morning.

Someone tugged at his left sleeve.

'Blan, blan.'

It was a child's voice, hoarse, almost broken, a boy's.

Max looked from side to side and saw no one. He turned around and looked back up the road. He saw the bar's lights and people in the distance, but nothing else.

'Blan, blan.'

Behind him, the other way, downhill. Max turned around, slowly.

His brain was on the graveyard shift, everything taking its time to fall into place, adjust, calculate. His vision had dancing ripples before it, as if he were at the bottom of a deep lake, watching pebbles falling through the surface.

He barely made the boy out in the darkness, just a hint of silhouette against the orange neon.

'Yes?' Max said.

'Ban moins dollah!' the boy shouted.

'What?'

'Kob, ban moins ti kob!'

'Are you?hurt?' Max inquired, stumbling in and then out of cop mode.

The boy came right up to him. He had his hands out.

'Dollah! Ban moins dollaaarrrggh!' he screamed.

Max blocked his ears. The little fucker could scream.

'Dollah?' Money. He wanted money.

'No dinero,' Max said, putting his hands up and showing the boy his empty palms. 'No money.'

'Ban moins dollah donc,' the boy