Mr. Clarinet

The sewers in the street quickly flooded and belched waste back up on the streets, which ran black and brown. In the houses around him rooftop reservoirs filled up to the brim and spilled over or broke clean off their rusted fittings and crashed to the ground; power went and came and went again; pipes burst, trees were stripped of leaves, fruit, and even bark; a roof caved in. Confused and panicked people ran into equally dazed and terrified pets, cattle, and strays, all of them collapsing into struggling, thrashing, conjoined heaps. Then came the rats, hundreds of them, flooded out of their holes, scuttling downhill toward the harbor in a great wave of rank, diseased fur, squealing in panic and fear. Great blasts of thunder blew holes in the atmosphere and sheets of lightning followed, quickly flashing up every detail of the damaged, drowning streets, awash with mud and shit and teeming with vermin, before snatching the vision back into darkness as if it had been an illusion.

The rain stopped. Max watched the storm move out to sea.

* * *

Eloise Krolak didn't leave Noah's Ark until after six-thirty, when she was picked up in a silver Mercedes SUV with tinted windows.

Max tailed the car out through the city and along the mountain road to Pétionville. It was dark now. Traffic was heavy.

They slowed to a crawl at the end of a long, thick, red-neon streak of stalled taillights. Max was four cars behind.

The opposite side of the road was mostly free. Barely anyone seemed to be heading into the capital at this hour.

Except for the UN.

A convoy passed the traffic jam—two jeeps followed by a truck, then, moving slower, another jeep, whose occupant was shining a flashlight into each of the stalled cars.

The beam passed Max. He looked straight ahead and kept his hands on the wheel.

He heard the jeep stop.

Someone knocked on his window.

Max didn't have his passport on him, only his AmEx card in his wallet.

"Bonsoir monsieur," the UN soldier said. Blue helmet, uniform, young white face.

"Do you speak English?" Max asked.

The soldier caught his breath.

"Name?" he asked Max.

Max told him. He'd hardly finished saying his last name before the soldier had pulled a pistol and was aiming it at his head.

He was made to get out of the car. When he did, he was immediately surrounded by half a dozen men aiming rifles at his head. He put his hands up. They frisked him, took his gun, and frog-marched him off the road to where the truck and three jeeps were parked. Max protested his innocence, yelled at them to call Allain Carver or the American Embassy.

He felt something prick his left forearm and saw the syringe sticking out of his arm, the plunger going down, clear fluid going in, someone counting down in his ear.

He should have been worried, but the dope took care of that. He had no fear. Whatever it was they'd given him was beautiful shit.

Part 4

Chapter 44

"HOW ARE YOU feeling?" Vincent Paul asked Max, after he'd pointed for him to take a seat in an armchair facing his desk. They were in Paul's study—discreet air-conditioning, walls lined with bookcases, framed photographs, flags.

"Where am I?" Max asked back, his voice croaky.

He'd been in a room with no windows for two days. That was where he'd come to when the injection had worn off. His first feeling was panic: he'd checked himself all over for missing parts, scars, and bandages. Nothing had been done to him. Yet.

He'd had regular visits. A doctor and a nurse—plus three armed guards—had come to check him out. The doctor had asked him a bunch of questions. He'd spoken English with a German accent. He hadn't answered any of Max's questions. On day two, he stopped coming.

Max had been fed three times a day and given a daily American newspaper, in which nothing was ever reported about Haiti. He'd watched cable TV on the set at the foot of his bed. The morning they'd taken him to meet Vincent Paul, they'd shaved his face and head and given him his clothes back—washed and pressed.

"You should relax. If I wanted you dead I could have let those little kids rip you to pieces," Paul said in a low, deep voice Max felt in his gut. Paul was very dark, with eyes set so far back in his skull they were reduced to two moving, gleaming pinpoints of reflected light, as if he had fireflies buzzing around in his sockets. His face was barely lined. He looked mature but nowhere near the age Max guessed him to be: early fifties. Bald dome, long, fine nose, huge jaw, thick eyebrows, short, stout neck, no fat, all muscle, making Max think all at once of Mike Tyson, a mapou trunk, and a bust of a cruel tyrant with pretensions to greatness. Even seated, he was imposing, everything about him exaggerated and monumental.

"It's not dying that concerns me," Max said. "It's how much of me you'd leave alive."