Mr. Clarinet

"People feel the same way about their favorite rock stars." Max punctured his bubble. "Take it a little further and it's called stalking."

"Guess your life's made you a hardass too, huh?" Huxley laughed.

"My life's been a failure," Max said. "Any way you look at it. Doing what I did made no difference—except to me. It didn't bring back the victims, it didn't turn back the clock and give them back their innocence. It didn't help their parents, their families. Not in the long run. Closure's bullshit. You never recover from that kind of loss. You take your tears with you to the grave.

"And as for me—I lost the only genuinely good thing I ever had. My wife. She died when I was in prison. I never got to hold her again, touch her, kiss her, be with her—never got to tell her how much I loved her—all because of the life I'd led. All that 'good' I thought I was doing, it added up to one big zero. It put me in jail. If that ain't failure, I don't know what is."

Max looked through the windshield, into the darkness.

"How come Gustav let Allain do the hiring?" he asked.

"He didn't. That dinner you went to? That was your interview with Gustav. If he hadn't liked you, you would've been on the next plane back to Miami," Huxley said.

"That ever happen?"

"No. Allain and I chose well."

They drove on in silence for a while. Max holstered the Glock.

"Tell me about Eddie Faustin?"

"Using him was my idea too," Huxley said.

"How did you turn him? I thought he was loyal to the old man."

"Everyone has their price."

"What was Eddie's?"

"Francesca. She was Faustin's wet-dream girl. I told him if he helped us out he could have her—through his bokor—Madame Leballec. She was a good friend of my mother's," Huxley explained.

"Hold up," Max said. "You told Mrs. Leballec to tell Eddie he could 'have' Francesca? So she was a fake?"

"Yes and no. She has some powers, but she's a black magician—a witch. Lying's part of their repertoire," Huxley said. "She has many believers."

"So, when we went to see her and Eddie's 'spirit' told us to go to the temple—"

"—where you met me, and I gave you the box that had Eddie's address in it, where you found the videotape."

"You'd paid her to show us the way?"

"Yes. And, by the way, she's no cripple either—and Philippe's her lover, not her son. And please don't ask me how she tricked the séance out, 'cause I don't know," Huxley said and then he laughed.

"Shit!" Max said. "OK—back to Faustin."

"Eddie was deeply troubled. Paranoid that all the bad stuff he and his brother did when they were Macoutes was catching up with him. He was visiting Madame Leballec on a monthly basis to get his fortune read.

"And that's where we came in. Allain paid Madame Leballec a lot of money to give Faustin a tailor-made fortune—one where he got the girl of his dreams and lived happily ever after.

"She told Faustin that a man he'd never met was going to approach him about a top-secret job. She told him he had to do it if he wanted his dreams to come true."

"So you met him?"

"Yeah, one night outside the taffia shack where he went. When he heard what I was proposing he didn't want to go along with it. He rushed off back to Madame Leballec. We'd anticipated that. She upped the ante. She persuaded Faustin that Charlie Carver was really a spirit who had escaped from Baron Samedi and had possessed the boy. The boy needed to be handed back to Baron Samedi's envoy—namely me."

"Bullshit!"

"He fell for it."

"Christ!"

"Faustin was so stupid it was practically a talent. Factor in the superstition that everything that goes bump in the night is some madcap spirit and you've got the perfect fanatic."

"OK, tell me about the kidnapping. Things didn't go according to plan, did they?"

"In what way?" Huxley asked.

"The riot," Max replied.

"No, that was planned. Faustin had a lot of enemies. We paid some of them to be where we told Faustin to be. He thought I was going to walk up to the car and take the child away."

"The nanny—Rose—died."

"Faustin killed her, we didn't."

"Did you intend for Faustin to die?"

"Yes."

"Who took Charlie?"

"I did. I was in disguise, among the crowd attacking the car. I grabbed the boy, disappeared with him."

They went through a small village of thatched huts. Max saw no signs of life whatsoever, except for a small, tethered goat, caught in the headlights, munching on a bush.

"So, who was Mr. Clarinet? Carver or Codada?"

"They both were. Codada filmed the kids and stole them to order. Carver stole their souls and sold their bodies."

"What about that symbol? That bent cross with the broken-off arm?"

"You didn't recognize that?"

"No." Max shook his head.