Mr. Clarinet

right?'

'You got me!'

They got back in the car and she drew him a map. She told him to get some surgical masks and gloves?which he'd find in one of the two main supermarkets?and to be prepared to throw his shoes away if he planned on leaving his car and walking around. The ground was quite literally made of shit?animal and, most of it, human. Everything that breathed in the slum had a textbook's worth of diseases on it and in it and all around it.

'Be real careful out there. Take your gun. Don't stop your car unless it's absolutely necessary.'

'Sounds like what they used to tell folk about Liberty City.'

'Cite Soleil is no joke, Max. It's a bad bad place.'

He drove her to the Banque Populaire and watched her and her ass until she'd gone through the entrance. She didn't turn around. Max wasn't sure if that still meant something now.

Chapter 25

HE CALLED ALLAIN Carver from the house and gave him a rundown of what he'd done, whom he'd talked to, and what he was planning to do next. He could tell from the way Carver listened?grunting affirmatively to let Max know he was still on the line, but asking no questions?that Chantale had briefed him thoroughly.

Next, he called Francesca. No answer.

* * *

Sitting out on the porch, notebook in hand, he played his interview tapes.

The questions came to him.

First up: Why had Charlie been kidnapped?

Money?

Absence of a ransom demand ruled that out as a motive.

Revenge?

A strong possibility. Rich people always had their fair share of mortal enemies. It came with the territory. The Carvers, with their history, must have had a phone book's worth.

What was wrong with Charlie?

He hadn't started talking yet. Some people start slow. Shit happens.

What about that thing with his hair?

He was a little kid. One of the few things Max remembered his dad telling him was how, when he was a baby, he used to cry every time someone laughed. Shit happens, then you grow up.

Sure, but Dufour had found something.

Did the kidnappers know what it was?

Maybe. In which case, the motive became blackmail. The Carvers hadn't mentioned anything about that, but that didn't necessarily mean it wasn't going on. If there was something really wrong with the kid, Allain and Francesca were probably keeping it from Gustav because of his fragile health.

Why hadn't Francesca told him about Charlie's condition herself?

Too painful? Or she didn't think it was relevant?

Had the kid been kidnapped for black-magic purposes?

Possibly.

He'd have to start checking up on the Carvers' enemies and then cross-reference them against involvement in black magic. But how was he going to do that? The country was upside down, running on a faint pulse. There was no police force to speak of, and he doubted there were any criminal records or files he could go through.

He'd be doing it the hard way, looking under every rock, chasing every shadow.

What about Eddie Faustin?

Eddie Faustin had been involved. He was a major player. He'd known who was behind the kidnapping. Find out who he knew.

Who was the big guy the shoemaker woman had seen?

Faustin? He was supposed to have been killed and beheaded near the car, so it may not have been him. But if he shared the same genes as his mother and brother, he wasn't a big man. Both Faustins were medium build, soft going on flab.

Of course, Vincent Paul had been on the scene.

Was Charlie alive?

He only had Dufour's word on that, and, unless Dufour was the kidnapper or was holding him captive, he dismissed the claim and continued to presume him dead.

Did Dufour know who'd kidnapped Charlie?

As before.

How serious was his hold on Francesca?

She was rich and vulnerable, ripe for exploitation. It happened all the time, phony psychics and mystics taking advantage of the lonely, the bereaved, the chronically self-obsessed, the nadve, the plain fucking dumb?all promised a glorious future for just $99.99 plus tax.

What if Dufour was the real deal?

Stick to what you know.

Was Dufour a suspect?

Still unresolved. Yes and no. A man that close to Papa and Baby Doc must have had the juice to pull off a simple kidnapping. He was bound to know a few unemployed Tonton Macoutes, starving for cash and pining for their glory days, who would have done it at the drop of a hat. They used to abduct people all the time. But what would be his motive? At his age, with very few more years of life left? Had Gustav Carver fucked him or his family over in the past? He doubted it. Gustav would not have messed with one of Papa Doc's favorites. Still, for now, he couldn't rule anything out.

* * *

Later he tried to sleep but couldn't. He went to the kitchen and found an unopened bottle of Barbancourt rum in one of the cupboards. As he took it out, he spotted something tucked away in the corner. It was a four-inch-tall wire figurine of a man in a straw hat, standing with his legs apart and his arms behind his back.

Max stood it up on the table and inspected it as he drank. The figure's head was painted black, its clothes?shirt and trousers?dark blue. It wore a red handkerchief and carried a small bag, like a school satchel, slung across its shoulder. The pose was militaristic and the look that of a color-coordinated scarecrow.

The rum went down well, filling his belly with a soothing warmth that soon seeped into the rest of him and translated into a pleasant feeling of utterly groundless hope. He could see himself getting used to the stuff.

Chapter 26

NO MATTER WHAT Huxley and Chantale had told him about Cite Soleil, nothing could have prepared him for the horrors that paraded past his windshield as he waded into the slum. A small part of him, once hard and rigid in its ways, broke off and drifted toward the place where he hid away his compassion.

At first, as he was going in, driving down the narrow, soot-covered track that served as a main thoroughfare, he saw a shantytown maze, thousands of densely packed one-room shacks stretching out as far as the eye could see, east and west, horizon to horizon, no clear way in or out, just trial, error, and lucky guesses. The more he saw of the shacks and the closer he looked at them, the more he realized that there was a sort of pecking order in the slum, a class system for lowlifes. About a quarter of the homes were adobe huts with corrugated-iron roofs. They looked fairly sturdy and usable. Next down were huts that had thin planks of wood for walls and light-blue plastic sheeting for roofs. A medium wind would probably carry them and their inhabitants out to sea, but at least they were better off than the bottom layer of the slum's housing pyramid?homes made out of patched together cardboard, a few of which collapsed as soon as Max looked at them. He supposed the adobe huts belonged to veteran slum dwellers, those who'd survived and crawled to the top of this shit heap. The cardboard shacks belonged to the new arrivals and the weak, the vulnerable, and the almost dead, while the wooden ones were for those in-between gutters.

Thick plumes of black charcoal smoke came out of crude holes in the middle of the roofs and dispersed into the sky, forming a zeppelin-shaped pall of gray smog, which hung over the area, churning but not breaking up in the breeze. As Max passed, he felt the stares coming his way from the huts, hundreds and hundreds of pairs of eyes falling on the car, cutting through the windshield, peeling him down to his basic core?friend or foe, rich or poor. He saw people?thin, wasted, bone shrink-wrapped in skin, clinging to the edges of extinction?leaning against their hovels.

Randomly spaced between blocks of shacks were areas that hadn't yet been claimed and built on, where the ground was a cross between a mammoth garbage dump and a snapshot of World War I killing fields, postconflict?broken, muddy, blasted to fuck, strewn with death and despair. In some areas the muck was piled into imposing great mounds where children with insect-thin legs, distended bellies, and heads too big for their necks played and scavenged.

He passed two horses, hooves buried in muck, barely moving, so emaciated he could clearly see their rib cages and count the bones.

There were open sewers everywhere, gutted cars and buses and trucks serving as homes. All the windows in his car were shut and the air- conditioning was on, but the sharp stench of the outside still crept in?every bad, evil smell mixed into one and