Mr. Clarinet

"They fuck you in jail?"

"What?"

"Was you some nigger's bitch? Some nigger call you 'Mary'? You get some o' that ole jailhouse lurve from the booty bandits, Mingus?"

"No."

"Then what the fuck special happened to you, make you come over all sympathetic? Old-school Max Mingus woulda said I got what I deserved, woulda kicked me in the teeth and wiped his foot on my face."

"Take care of yourself, Clyde," Max said. "No one else will."

Then he got in his car and drove away, feeling numb.

Chapter 6

MAX DROVE BACK to Miami and headed for Little Haiti.

When he was a kid in the 1960s, he'd had a girlfriend called Justine who lived in the area. It was called Lemon City back then, and was mostly white, middle-class, and great for shopping. His mother would often go there for Christmas and birthday presents.

By the time Max had become a cop a decade later, all but the poorest whites had moved out, the shops had closed or relocated, and the once-prosperous neighborhood had gone to seed. First the Cuban refugees had moved in, and then the more prosperous African-Americans from Liberty City had bought up the cheap houses. The Haitians started arriving in significant numbers in the 1970s, refugees from Baby Doc's increasingly murderous regime.

There was a lot of tension between African-Americans and Haitians, often spilling into bloodshed—most of it the latter's—until the newly arrived immigrants began to organize themselves into gangs and look out for one another. The most notorious of these was The SNBC, aka The Saturday Night Barons Club, led by Solomon Boukman.

Max had last come to the neighborhood when he was investigating Boukman and his gang in 1981. He'd driven through street after trash-choked street, past boarded-up stores and derelict or tumble-down houses, without seeing a soul. Then there'd been the riot he and Joe got caught up in.

Fifteen years later, Max was expecting more of the same, only worse than before, but when he got onto Northeast 54th Street, he thought he'd come to the wrong place. The area was clean and full of people walking streets lined with shops painted in bright, vivid pinks, blues, oranges, yellows, and greens. There were small restaurants, bars, outdoor cafés, and stores selling everything from clothes and food to wood sculptures, books, music, and paintings.

Max parked, got out of his car, and started walking. He was the only white face on the block but he had none of the anticipatory edge he would have had in a black ghetto.

It was late afternoon and the sun had started to set, giving the sky its first tinge of purple. Max walked down to a place his mother and father had taken him to in his teens, a furniture store on 60th Street they'd bought their kitchen table from. The store was long gone, but in its place stood the imposing Caribbean Marketplace, built as an exact replica of the old Iron Market in Port-au-Prince.

He went inside and walked past small stalls selling more food, CDs, and clothes, as well as Catholic ornaments. Everyone spoke Kreyol, the Haitian dialect composed of part-French and part–West African tribal tongues. The speech patterns sounded confrontational, as if its two composite parts were on the verge of full-scale argument with each other. Kreyol wasn't spoken; it was half-shouted, the pitch edgy and intense, everyone sounding like they were getting the last word in before the fists started flying. Yet when Max checked the speakers' body language, he realized they were probably doing nothing more threatening than gossiping or bartering.

Max walked out of the marketplace and crossed the road to the Church of Notre Dame d'Haďti and the neighboring Pierre Toussaint Haitian Catholic Center. The center was closed, so he went into the church. He might not have had much time for any notion of God in his life, but he loved churches. He always ended up going into them whenever he needed to think. They were the quietest, emptiest places he knew. It was a habit he'd picked up as a beat cop. He'd cracked many a case sitting in a pew with just the sound of his thoughts and a notebook for company. Churches had helped him focus. He'd never told anyone about this—including his wife—in case they'd thought he was a secret Jesus freak with a messianic-identity complex, or in case they turned out to be Jesus freaks themselves.

The church was empty, save for an old woman sitting in the middle pew, reading aloud from a Kreyol prayerbook. She heard Max walk in and turned to look at him without breaking off from her recital.

Max took in the wall of stained-glass windows and the mural depicting the journey of Haitians from their homeland to South Florida, watched over from the skies by the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. The air reeked of stale incense and cold candles and of the scented pink and white lilies pouring out of vases mounted on metal stands either side of the altar.