Mr. Clarinet

"Chauffeur?" she said with a smirk. "No. This is a one-off. I'm on Allain's team. He offered me the rest of the day off if I picked you up."

The road bisected an endless dry plain, a dustbowl peppered with thinning, yellowy grass. Scenery flew by. He noted the dark mountains to the left and the way the clouds hung so low, so close to the ground they seemed to have broken their moorings and drifted loose from the sky, threatening to land. There were occasional lollipop speed signs—black on white: 60, 70, 80, 90—but no one was paying much attention to them, let alone staying to a particular side of the road, unless something bigger was coming the other way. Chantale kept to an even seventy.

Painted billboards, thirty feet high and sixty feet wide, stood on the roadside, advertising local and international brands. In between were smaller, narrower billboards for local banks, radio stations, and competing lottery syndicates. Once in a while, Charlie Carver's face appeared, those intense, haunted features blown up and planted high in black and white, eyes still staring straight into you. REWARD` was painted in tall red letters above the image; $1,000,000 below it. To the left, in black, was a telephone number.

"How long has that been up?" Max asked after they'd passed the first one.

"For the last two years," Chantale said. "They change them every month because they fade."

"I take it there've been a lot of calls."

"There used to be, but it's died down a lot since people worked out they don't get paid for making stuff up."

"What was Charlie like?"

"I only met him once, at the Carver house, before the invasion. He was a baby."

"I guess Mr. Carver keeps his private and professional life separate."

"That's impossible in Haiti. But he does his best," Chantale replied, meeting his eyes. He picked up a hint of sourness in her tone. She had a French-American accent, a grudging collision, with the former tipping over the latter: born and raised on the island, educated somewhere in the States or Canada. Definitely late twenties, enough to have lost one voice and found another.

She was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her wide mouth and taste those plump, slightly parted lips. He looked out of the window before he stared too hard or gave anything away.

There were a few people about, men in ragged shirts and trousers and straw hats, shepherding small flocks of pathetically thin, dirty, brown goats, others pulling donkeys saddled with overflowing straw baskets, or men and women, in pairs or on their own, carrying jerricans filled with water on their shoulders, or balancing huge baskets on their heads. They all moved very slowly, at the same lazy, listing gait. Farther on, they came to their first village—a cluster of one-room square shacks painted orange or yellow or green, all with corrugated iron roofs. Women sitting at the roadside in front of tables, selling melting brown candy. Naked children played nearby. A man tended to a pot cooking on a fire, billowing plumes of white smoke. Stray dogs nosing at the ground. All of this roasting under intense, bright sunlight.

Chantale flicked on the radio. Max was expecting more "Haďti, Ma Chérie" but instead heard the familiar bish-bosh-bullshit machine beat of every rap record ever made. A remake of "Ain't Nobody," a song Sandra had loved, ruined by a rapper who sounded like half the inmates in Attica.

"Do you like music?" Chantale asked him.

"I like music," Max replied, looking at her. She was pumping her head to the beat.

"Like what? Bruce Springsteen?" she said, nodding at his tattoo.

Max didn't know what to say. The truth would take too long and open up too many ways into him.

"I got that done when I didn't know better," he said. "I like quiet stuff now. Old-man stuff. Old Blue Eyes."

"Sinatra? That is old," she said, glancing across at him, her eyes taking in his face and chest. He caught her eyes straying down his shirt. It had been so long since he'd flirted. He'd known how to play situations like this in the past. He'd known what he wanted then. He wasn't so sure now.

"The most popular music here is called kompas. Compact. It's like one really long song that can go on for half an hour or more, but it's really lots of short songs put together. Different tempos," Chantale said, eyes fixed on the road.

"Like a medley?"

"That's it, a medley—but not quite. You'd have to hear it to understand. The most popular local singer is Sweet Micky."

"Sweet Micky? Sounds like a clown."

"Michel Martelly. He's like a mixture of Bob Marley and gangsta rap."

"Interesting, but I don't know him."

"He plays Miami a lot. You're from Miami, right?"

"And other places," Max said, checking her face to see how much she knew about him. She didn't react.

"And then there's The Fugees. You've heard of them, right?"

"No," Max said. "Do they play kompas?"

She burst out laughing—that laugh again.