Mr. Clarinet

The woman, still reading aloud, never left Max with her gun-barrel black eyes. He could feel her stare like one can feel a security camera following one around a bank vault. He looked her over—small, frail, white-haired, with liver spots sprinkled on a sagging, deeply lined face. He tried the smile he used on potentially hostile strangers—broad, well-meaning, open, all lips and cheeks—but it fell flat on her. He retreated slowly down the aisle, feeling for the first time awkward and unwelcome. Time to go.

As he was leaving, he glanced over at a bookcase in the corner near the door. There were Kreyol, French, and English Bibles, as well as a variety of books about the saints.

Next to the bookcase was a large cork notice board, which took up most of the remaining wall. The board was covered with small pictures of Haitian children. On the bottom of each photograph was a yellow sticker bearing the child's name, age, and a date. The children were all colors, aged between three and eight, boys and girls, many in school uniforms. Charlie Carver's image caught the corner of his eye. A smaller print of the picture he had was tucked away in a right-hand corner, a face among dozens, easily lost. Max read the small print: Charles Paul Carver, 3 ans, 9/1994. It was the month and year he'd disappeared. He inspected the dates on the other photographs. They went back no further than 1990.

"Are you the police?" a man's voice asked behind him, French-American accent, black intonation.

Max turned and saw a priest standing in front of him, his hands behind his back. He was slightly taller than Max, but slender and narrow about the shoulders. He wore round silver wire-rimmed glasses whose lenses reflected the light and hid his eyes. Salt-and-pepper hair, salt-and-pepper goatee. Late forties, early fifties.

"No, I'm a private investigator," Max said. He never lied in church.

"Another bounty hunter," the priest snorted.

"Is it that obvious?"

"I'm getting used to your type."

"That many?"

"One or two, maybe more, I forget. You all pass through here on your way to Haiti. You and the journalists."

"You've got to start someplace," Max said. He could feel the priest's stare probing beyond his eyelids. The priest smelled faintly of sweat and an old-fashioned soap, like Camay. "These other children—?"

"Les enfants perdus," the priest said. "The lost children."

"Kidnapped too?"

"Those are the ones we know of. There are many many more. Most Haitians can't afford cameras."

"How long's this been happening?"

"Children have always gone missing in Haiti. I started putting photographs on the board very soon after I started working here, in 1990. In our other religion a child's soul is highly sought after. It can open many doors."

"So you think it's a voodoo thing?"

"Who knows?"

There was a sadness in the priest's voice, a weariness that suggested he'd gone through every possibility a million times over and come back empty.

Then Max realized that this was personal for the priest. He looked back at the board, and searched through the photographs that hung off it like scales, hoping to find a striking family resemblance so he could broach the subject. He found nothing so he went for it anyway.

"Which one of these is yours?"

The priest was initially shocked, but then he smiled broadly.

"You're a very perceptive man. God must have chosen you."

"I played the right hunch, Father," Max said.

The priest stepped forward up to the board and pointed at a photograph of a girl right next to Charlie's.

"My niece, Claudine," the priest said. "I confess I put her there so some of the rich boy's aura would rub off."

Max took Claudine's picture down. Claudine Thodore, 5 ans, 10/1994.

"Went missing a month later. Thodore? Is that your last name?"

"Yes. I'm Alexandre Thodore. Claudine is my brother Caspar's daughter," the priest said. "I'll give you his address and number. He lives in Port-au-Prince."

The priest took a small notebook out of his pocket and scribbled his brother's details on a piece of paper, which he tore out and handed to Max.

"Did your brother tell you what happened?"

"One day he was with his daughter, the next day he was looking for her."

"I'll do my best to find her."

"I don't doubt that," the priest said. "By the way, the kids in Haiti? They have a nickname for the bogeyman who's stealing the children, Tonton Clarinette. Mr. Clarinet."

"Clarinet? Like the instrument? Why?"

"It's how he lures the children away."

"Like the Pied Piper?"

"Tonton Clarinette is said to work for Baron Samedi—the vodou god of death," Father Thodore said. "He steals children's souls to entertain the dead with. Some say his appearance is part man, part bird. Others say he is a bird with one eye. And only children can see him. That's because he was a child himself, when he died.