Mr. Clarinet

The drawers had all been opened, their contents piled on top of the desk: five bricks of used $100 bills, stacks of photographs, half a dozen CDs—each a different color—and two trays of floppy discs labeled 1961 through 1995.

Max went over to the bookcase, pausing at another portrait of Papa Doc, this one very different from the ones he'd already seen in the house. Here the dictator, dressed like Baron Samedi, in a top hat, tails, and white gloves, sat at the head of a long table in a blood-red room, staring straight at the viewer. Others sat around him, but their faces weren't shown. They were shadowy, ambiguously human forms, rendered in a shade of brown so somber it was practically black. In the middle of the table was a white bundle of some sort. He looked closer at the canvas and recognized a baby.

He looked away and moved over to the bookshelves. The books were arranged in blocks of color—blue, green, red, maroon, brown, and black—and had their titles stamped on the spines in gold letters. He homed in on a title: Georgina A. The book next to it was called Georgina B, the one after, Georgina C. He pulled it out and opened it.

No pages. The "book" was really a video case in disguise, like the kind of hollowed-out Bible he'd known junkies to stash their works and supplies in. Max took out the plain black cassette. A photograph of a scared-looking preteen girl was underneath. He opened cases A and B and found a different photograph in each. In the first, she was smiling at the camera, in the second, she looked confused.

He went through the rest of the shelves. Tapes everywhere, all of them stored in cases branded with girls' names. There were no boys anywhere, no Charlie or Charles A–C.

But he found Claudette T.

And he found Eloise.

"What've you got?" the woman asked from behind the desk. New York accent.

"Videotapes. What about you? What's on the computer?"

"Sales records—everything up to 1985 has been scanned from ledgers. And there's a database on the machine. This couple has been selling kids to men," she said.

"I'll come and look in a minute," Max said, going back to the television. He turned it on and fed Eloise A into the video player.

It was impossible to put a date on the footage, but there were only hints of the adult Eloise in the child whose face filled the screen for at least two solid minutes. She couldn't have been more than five or six then.

Max stopped the tape when the abuse started.

The woman at the desk had stopped working. Her expression, teetering between disgust and despair, told him she'd seen what he had.

"Let's see what you're working on?" Max asked, quickly going over to her.

She showed him her screen—an image of a blank sheet of paper divided into six vertical columns, headed Nom, Age, Prix, Client, Date de Vente, and Addresse. It was from August 1977, and showed which child had been sold to which client and where they'd been taken to.

He quickly scanned this last column: of the thirteen children listed, four had gone either to the U.S. or Canada, two had been taken to Venezuela, one apiece to France, Germany, and Switzerland, three to Japan, one to Australia. The buyers were identified by their full names.

They looked at the database.

It was quite a history.

The database was divided into years, and then subdivided into countries.

Apart from their names, addresses, dates of birth, occupations, and places of employment, there was also a record of the buyers' (called "clients" on the database) salaries, sexual orientation, marital status, number of children, and the names and addresses of their contacts in business, politics, media, entertainment, and other areas.

The first recorded transaction was dated November 24, 1959, when Patterson Brewster III, managing director of The Dale-Green Pickle and Preservatives Company "adopted" a Haitian boy called Gesner César.

The adoption cost $575.

The most recent adoption recorded was that of Ismaëlle Cloué by Gregson Pepper, a banker from Santa Monica, California.

The cost was $37,500 (S). (S) signified standard service—no frills, no benefits, no shortcuts, no special favors; the buyer chose his "item" (as the children were referred to in the database section listing their details), paid, and left with him or her. The price remained constant and there was no competition for the item.

If one or more other buyers were interested in the same child, then the sale went to auction (A), with the price starting at its current standard rate.

The highest paid for a child at an auction was $500,000 for a six-year-old girl, by the Canadian chief executive of an oil company based in Dubai. That was in March 1992.