Mr. Clarinet

Max checked on how the executives were doing with the women. He saw the blonde and one of the men at a table near the back. Their jackets were off. The man had rolled up his sleeves and taken off his tie. The woman had on a sleeveless black halterneck. From her well-toned and proportioned arms, Max saw she worked out regularly. The man was making his move now, leaning closer to her across the table, touching her hand. He was making her laugh too. It probably wasn't even that funny, but she was interested in him. Her friend was gone, so was the man's competition—probably separately; losers rarely left together.

Max and Joe talked some more: who'd retired, who'd died (three—cancer, bullets, drunk and drowned), who was married, divorced, what the job was like now, how things had changed post–Rodney King. They laughed, bitched, reminisced. Joe told him about the fifteen Bruce Springsteen concerts he'd seen while Max had been away. Mercifully, he kept the details to a minimum. They drank more Diet Cokes, scoped out the lounge couples, talked about getting older. It was good, it was warm, time passed quickly, and Max forgot about Boukman for the whole while.

By two o'clock, the bar had emptied of all but a few drinkers. The couple Max had been watching had left.

Joe and Max made their way out.

It was cool and slightly breezy on the street. Max took in a deep breath of Miami air—sea, mixed with swamp and mild traffic fumes.

"How does it feel? Bein' out?" Joe asked.

"Like learning to walk and finding out you can still run," Max said. "Tell me something? How come you never came to see me?"

"Did you expect me to?"

"No."

"Seein' you in there would've messed with my moral compass. Cops don't go to jail," Joe said. "Besides, I felt kinda responsible. Not teachin' you some restraint back in the day, when I could've."

"You can't teach a man his nature, Joe."

"I hear that. But you can teach him sense from none-sense. And some of that shit you pulled back then, man? That was some senseless none-sense."

Those parental tones again. Max was close to fifty, two-thirds of his life as good as gone. He didn't need a lecture from Joe, who was only three years older than he but had always acted like it was ten more. Anyway, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. What had happened had happened. There was no undoing any of it. Besides, Joe was no saint. When they'd been partners, there had been as many brutality complaints against him as there were against Max. No one had given a flying fuck or done anything. Miami had been a war zone. The city had needed to meet violence with violence.

"We cool, Joe?"

"All-ways." They hugged.

"See you when I get back."

"In one piece, man—the only way I wanna see ya."

"You will. Give my love to the kids."

"Take care, brother," Joe said.

They went their separate ways.

Opening the door of his rented Honda, Max realized that Joe had called him "brother" for the first time ever in all of the twenty-five years he'd known him. They might have been best friends, but Joe was a segregationist when it came to his terms of endearment.

That's when Max guessed things were going to be bad in Haiti.

Chapter 4

AT THE HOTEL, Max took a shower and tried to catch some sleep, but it wouldn't come.

He kept on thinking about Boukman walking free while he was in prison, Boukman laughing in his face, Boukman slicing up more kids. He didn't know what pissed him off more. He should have killed him when he had the chance.

He got up, turned on the light, and grabbed Joe's file on the Carvers. He started reading and didn't stop until he'd finished it.

* * *

Nobody seemed particularly sure where the Carvers came from, nor when they first appeared in Haiti. One rumor stated that the family were descendants of Polish soldiers who deserted Napoleon's army en masse to fight alongside Toussaint L'Ouverture's insurgents in the 1790s. Others linked the family to a Scottish clan called the MacGarvers, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived on the island, where they owned and ran corn and sugar-cane plantations.

What is known is that by 1934, Fraser Carver, Allain's grandfather, had become a multimillionaire—not only the richest man in Haiti but one of the wealthiest men in the Caribbean. He'd made his fortune by flooding the island with cheap essential foods—rice, beans, milk (powdered and evaporated), cornmeal, cooking oil—bought for him at a huge discount by the American military and shipped into the country for free. This very quickly drove many traders out of business and eventually gave Carver the monopoly on virtually every imported foodstuff sold in the country. He opened the country's second national bank—the Banque Populaire d'Haďti in the late 1930s.