Mr. Clarinet

He dreamed he was back in the voodoo temple, caked in gray mud, fucking Chantale on the ground with the drums going crazy. Joe, Allain, Velasquez, and Eldon were dancing all around them. Then he saw Charlie sitting on Dufour's lap, staring at him. They were by the pond. He couldn't see Dufour's face, only his seated silhouette. He tried to stand but Chantale was holding him down, her arms and legs wrapped around him tight. He finally managed to get up and began walking toward Charlie, but he and Dufour were gone. In their place were the three kids he'd killed. They all had his gun in their hands. They aimed and fired at him. He went down. He was still alive, looking up at the cross through the hole in the roof. Sandra came and stood over him, smiling. She was holding a little girl by the hand. The girl was pretty but looked immensely sad. Max recognized Claudette Thodore—the missing niece of the priest from Little Haiti—and remembered that he'd forgotten to visit her parents.

He told the girl he'd go see them first thing in the morning, before he went looking for Faustin's house.

Sandra bent down to kiss him.

He reached up to touch her face and woke up with his hand in the air, fingers caressing nothing.

It was night again. He checked the clock. Seven p.m. He'd slept for a full twelve hours. His mouth was dry, his throat tight, the sides of his eyes wet. He guessed he'd cried in his sleep. Outside the crickets were chirruping and the mountain drums were telegraphing their beats straight to his stomach, dancing with his hunger, telling him he should eat.

Chapter 40

BEFORE SHE'D DISAPPEARED in November 1994, Claudette Thodore had lived with her parents, Caspar and Mathilde, on the Rue des Ecuries in Port-au-Prince, close to an old military barracks.

The Rue des Ecuries linked two busy main roads, but was practically shielded from view at either end by gigantic palm trees. It was one of those tiny, blink-and-it's-gone places only ever known to locals, or outsiders looking for a shortcut, who forget it as soon as they've passed through it.

Max had got directions from Mathilde. She spoke perfect English, with Midwest inflections, possibly Illinois, not a hint of Franco-Caribbean.

As they got out of the car, Max caught a smell of fresh flowers mixed in with mint. Up ahead stood a man with a bucket and a mop, washing the road. The farther down the road they walked the more the smell intensified and made Max's nostrils smart. The houses either side of them were hidden behind solid metal gates and walls topped with stiletto spikes and razor wire. Only the tops of trees and telegraph poles, the rims of satellite dishes and filaments of TV aerials poked over, but there was nothing else to see. Max guessed the houses were bungalows or single-story buildings. He heard the furious sniffing of dog snouts under the gates, sucking up their smell through the gaps, breaking them down into familiar and unfamiliar. None of the dogs barked to alert their masters of strangers in their midst. That's because, Max knew, they were attack dogs. They never made a sound. They let you come all the way into their terrain, too far in to get back out, and then they went for you.

The mop-man eyed them as they approached, not once stopping what he was doing. Chantale nodded and greeted him. The man didn't reply, just looked them up and down through slitted eyes and a scowl, his body language oozing tension.

"I bet he's got Syrian roots," Chantale whispered. "He's washing the street with mint and rosewater. It's a Syrian custom, meant to ward off evil spirits and attract good ones. There was an influx of Syrian merchants here about forty or fifty years ago. They opened these little boutiques that sold everything to the poor. Every morning they'd sweep the street around the shop and douse it in herbal potions to bring them luck, prosperity, and protection. A few of them obviously got it right because they made a lot of money."

The Rue des Ecuries was the cleanest street Max had seen in Haiti so far. There wasn't a scrap of garbage anywhere, no stray animals and vagrants at the sides, no graffiti on the walls, and not a single crater or pothole in the road, which was immaculately paved with gray stone. It could have been any quiet, prosperous, middle-class side street in Miami or L.A. or New Orleans.

Max banged on the Thodores' gate four times, as Mathilde had asked him to. Soon after, he heard footsteps coming from behind the wall.

"Qui lŕ?"

"My name's—"

"Mingus?" a woman asked.

A dead bolt snapped back and the gate was opened from the inside, groaning horribly on its hinges.

"I'm Mathilde Thodore. Thanks for coming." She beckoned them in and then made more infernal sounds as she pushed the gate shut. She was wearing sweatpants, sneakers, and a loose Bulls T-shirt.