Mr. Clarinet

Charlie on the wall directly opposite.

Chantale introduced them and told her what their business was. The woman told Chantale to stand closer and talk into her ear. Max didn't blame her. He could barely hear her himself above the street din of people shouting over the traffic growling and beeping its way through the clogged road.

The woman listened and spoke loudly, the way the hard-of-hearing do, her voice still managing to sound muffled and trapped in her cheeks.

'She says she saw what happened. She was right here,' Chantale said.

'What did she see?' Max asked, and Chantale translated almost as soon as the words left the woman's mouth.

'She says she's heard you're paying people for their memories.'

The woman smiled and showed Max all that was left of her teeth?two curved brown-stained canines that looked like they belonged in the jaws of a vicious dog. She glanced over her shoulder into the open doorway behind her for a moment, nodded, and then, looking from Max to Chantale, addressed her interpreter in a lower voice. Chantale screwed her face up into a wry smirk and shook her head before relaying back to Max what she'd just been told.

'She wants more than you paid the last guy.'

'Only if what she says is true and any good.'

The woman laughed. She pointed a finger, crooked and spindly like a twig, at the opposite side of the road.

'That's where he was,' she said.

'Who?' Max asked.

'Big man?' she said, 'the biggest man.'

Vincent Paul?

'Have you seen him before?'

'No.'

'Have you seen him since?'

'No.'

'Do you know Vincent Paul?'

'No.'

'What's that you people call him?' Max said.

'Le Roi Soleil?' Chantale asked her and got a bewildered stare back. The woman didn't know what Chantale was talking about.

'OK. The man? What was he doing?'

'Running,' was the reply, then, nodding to the poster on the opposite wall, 'Running with that boy.'

'That boy?' Max said, pointing to the image of Charlie's face. 'You sure?'

'Yes,' she said. 'The man was carrying him over his shoulder, like an empty sack of coal. The boy was kicking and waving his arms.'

'What happened next?'

The woman showed Max her stained fangs again. Max reached into his pocket and showed her his roll of greasy gourdes. She held her hand out to him and beckoned with her fingers: pay me.

Max shook his head with a smile. He pointed to her and made a gabbing motion with his fingers: you talk.

The woman smiled at him again and then she laughed and made a remark about him to Chantale, which Chantale left untranslated, although it made her smirk.

The woman was well within her last quarter-century. Her hair, what little he saw of it escaping from under the green scarf she'd tied around it, was pure white, matching her eyebrows. Her nose was boxer-flat and the eyes were a shade darker than her skin, their whites beige.

'A car came out of the Cite Soleil road,' the woman told Chantale, pointing it out to them both. 'The big man got in the car with the boy and they left.'

'Did you see the driver?'

'No. It had black windows.'

'What kind of car was it?'

'A nice car?a rich person's car.'

'Can she be more specific? Was it a big car? What color was it?'

'A dark car with dark windows,' Chantale said. The woman carried on speaking. 'She says she'd seen it around here?a few times before the incident?always turning up that road.'

'Has she seen it since?'

Chantale asked her. The woman said no she hadn't and then said she was tired, that remembering things too far back made her sleepy.

Max paid out eight hundred gourdes. The woman quickly counted the money and gave Max a sly, conspiratorial wink, as if they shared a deeply personal secret. Then, stealing another glance over her shoulder, she divided the money up into each hand, dropping the five-hundred-gourde note down her dress and deftly slipping the balance in her shoe, her motions fast, her hands and fingers phantoms barely glimpsed. Max looked at the front of the woman's dress?faded and threadbare, patched and stitched up?and then down at her feet. She wore unmatched shoes, of different sizes and colors: one black, scuffing to gray and held together by fraying twine, the other originally a reddish brown with a busted clasp and bent buckle. They were so small they might have fitted a child. He didn't see how she could have stashed money in either shoe.

Max looked over into the shop doorway, to see what it was she'd been checking on. It was too dark to see inside and there was no sound coming from within, although he sensed someone was in there, watching them.

'The shop is closed,' the old woman said, as if reading Max's mind. 'Everything closes in time.'

Chapter 20

'SO WHAT DO you think? Did Vincent Paul kidnap Charlie?'

'I don't know,' Max said. 'No proof either way.'

They were sitting in the car, parked on the Rue du Dr. Aubry, sharing one of the bottles of water Max had packed in a portable cooler for the trip.

Chantale took a sip of the water. She was chewing a cinnamon Chiclet. A UN jeep went by, trailing a tap-tap.

'They blame Vincent Paul for everything here?everything bad that happens,' Chantale said. 'All the crime. A bank gets robbed??it's Vincent Paul. A car gets jacked??it's Vincent Paul. A gas station gets held up??it's Vincent Paul. A house gets broken into??it's Vincent Paul. Bullshit is what it is. It isn't him. But people here, they're so dumb, so apathetic, so scared, so?so damn backward?they believe what they want to believe, no matter how stupid and nonsensical. And these aren't the illiterate masses who are saying this, but educated people who should know better?the same people who run our businesses, the same people who are running the country.'

'Well, judging by the state of this place, that's no surprise.' Max chuckled. 'What do you think about him, Vincent Paul?'

'I believe he's mixed up in something very big, something very heavy.'

'Drugs?'

'What else?' she said. 'You know about the criminals Clinton's sending back to us? Well, Vincent Paul always sends someone over to the airport to pick up whoever's coming home.'

'Where do they go?'

'Cite Soleil?you know, the slum I told you about yesterday.'

'He who runs Sitay So-lay runs the country. Ain't that the way it goes?' Max said, remembering what Huxley had told him.

'Impressive.' Chantale smiled as she passed him the water. 'But what do you know about the place?'

'Some.' Max nodded and repeated much of what Huxley had told him.

'Don't ever go in there without a guide?and an oxygen mask. You go there on your own and get lost? If the people don't kill you the air will.'

'Will you take me?'

'No way! I don't know the place and I don't want to know it,' she responded almost angrily.

'That's too bad because I wanna go there tomorrow. Check it out,' Max said.

'You won't find anything?not just by looking. You need to know where you're going.'

'Ain't that the truth.' Max laughed. 'OK. I'll go there on my own. Just tell me how to get there. I'll be all right.' Chantale looked at him, worried. 'Don't worry, I won't tell your boss.'

She smiled. He took a pull on the water and tasted her cinnamon on the spout where her lips had been.

'What else can you tell me about Vincent Paul? What is it with him and the Carvers?' Max asked.

'Gustav bankrupted his father. Perry Paul was a big wholesaler. He had a lot of exclusive deals going with the Venezuelans and the Cubans, and he was selling things very cheaply. Gustav used his influence in the government to put him out of business. Perry lost everything and shot himself. Vincent was in England when it happened. He was quite young, but hatred's a genetic thing here. Whole families will hate each other forever because of their great-grandparents' falling- out.'

'That's fucked up.'

'That's