Mr. Clarinet

"He secretly bought the Banque Dessalines. We'd taken out a loan for some business expansion. Gustav bought our debt and called it in. We didn't have the cash on hand, so he shut us down, made us bankrupt. He took over the Saut d'Eau project and then he killed us financially, ruined my family's reputation, smeared the Paul name.

"Then, to cap it all, after he'd literally reduced our world to rubble—do you know what he did? He used the bricks from our estate to build his bank. That was all too much for my father. He was a very proud man but he wasn't a fighter. He shot himself."

"Jesus!" Max gasped. If Paul wasn't exaggerating—which Max doubted he was—he understood his hatred of Carver. "What about the rest of your family?"

"Two sisters and a brother, no longer in the country or ever likely to come back."

"Your mother?"

"She died in Miami the day we arrived. Pancreatic cancer. I didn't even know she was ill. Nobody told me."

"Aunts, uncles, cousins?"

"I have no family in Haiti. Outside of my son—if he's here."

"What about your friends?"

"True ones are a rare commodity at the best of times, but in Haiti, unless they've known you all your life, 'friends' in the monied circles we used to move in have the habit of becoming scarce when you hit a lean patch and extinct if you're ruined. To them, the only thing worse than not having any money is having had it and lost it. They shun you like your misfortune's contagious. I asked one of my father's 'friends' of long standing for some help—somewhere to stay and a small loan to tide me over until I got back on my feet. This was someone my father had helped out a lot in the past. He turned me down flat, said I wasn't a viable risk," Paul said bitterly. Max could practically see the loathing coming off him.

"So what did you do after you saw what had happened to your estate? Did you have any money?"

"No. Not a cent." Paul laughed. "What I did have was Anaďs, my nanny. I was a virtual son to her. She'd cared for me ever since I was born. In fact, she'd helped deliver me. We were so close I swore she was my real mother. Knowing my father, I wouldn't have been too surprised. He and my grandfather weren't exactly advocates of monogamy.

"Anaďs took us in. She lived in a tiny little house in La Saline. We all slept and ate in the same room, washed at an outdoor tap. It was a life I'd seen but never thought I'd know, and as for Josie, well, she got a serious culture shock, but she used to say English prison was worse."

"You never thought of going back to England, facing the music?"

"No."

"What about her?"

Paul sat up and pulled his chair in closer to the desk.

"I wasn't going to let the woman I loved go back to hell, not when I had the power to stop it."

"So you did wrong to do right? At least you're consistent."

"What else could I have done, Mingus?"

"Do the crime you do the time."

"Sorry I asked. Once a cop…"

"No," Max cut him off. "She killed somebody because she was drunk behind the wheel. She was no saint. She wasn't in the right. And you know that, same as me. Think about the victim's family: flip the picture and it's her getting killed in a drunk hit-and-run, and you're left with the grieving. You'd see things very differently, believe me."

"Those three kids you killed, do you think about their families?" Vincent asked icily.

"No, I don't," Max spoke through gritted teeth. "Know why? Because those three 'kids' raped and tortured a little girl for fun. I know they were fucked up on crack, but most crackheads don't do that to people. Those shitheels didn't deserve their lives. The guy Francesca killed is a whole different ballgame and you know it."

Vincent pulled himself right in to the desk, cupped his massive fist in his palm and fingers and leaned over. Max saw his disarmingly pretty eyes again.

Neither of them spoke. Max held Vincent's stare for the longest time. The big man finally broke the standoff. Max resumed his questioning.

"Anyone come out here looking for you? Cops?"

"Not that I knew of then, but it was only a matter of time before our trail led to here. We lived in La Saline for a year and a half. We were safe there. It's the kind of place where you don't go to unless you live there, or know someone, or have a well-armed military escort—or want to commit suicide. It's exactly the same now."

"How were the people toward you?"

"Fine. They accepted us. Obviously Josie might as well have come from outer space, but we never had a single problem all the time we were there.

"For a living we worked at a local petrol station, and then we ended up managing it. We did something quite innovative at the time here. We added a diner, a carwash, a garage, and a small shop. Anaďs ran the diner and Josie ran the shop. She dyed her hair brown. I only employed people from La Saline. We had to pay off a couple of Macoutes for protection—Eddie Faustin and his teenage brother, Salazar.