Mr. Clarinet

He headed back up to the house. As he did, a whole new sound made him stop in his tracks. It was a faint, faraway sound. He listened. He waded past the insects and the traffic and the sounds of breadline, shantytown humanity hunkering down for another night in the shit-shack motel.

He found it. He turned a little to the right. There it was, coming from someplace above the town. A single drumbeat, repeated every ten or twelve seconds—domm…domm…domm…domm.

It was a bass drum, its sound carrying through the raucous chaos of the night, insistent and strong, like a giant's heartbeat.

Max felt the sound pass into his body, the rhythm of the lonesome drum seeping into his chest and then flowing into his heart, the two beats briefly becoming one.

Chapter 10

THE MEN FROM the airport picked Max up for dinner. They drove out of the estate, down the street, and then took a left at the end and headed up the steep road that would take them up into the mountains. They passed a bar, its name framed in a proscenium of brightly colored bulbs: LA COUPOLE. Six or seven white men, beer bottles in hand, were hanging around outside, talking to some local women in tight short skirts and dresses. Max recognized his countrymen straightaway from their matching clothes—khakis, like his, and the same cut of shirt and T-shirt he'd packed for the trip. GIs on leave, the conquering army, getting wasted on U.S. taxpayers' dollars. He made a mental note to stop by the bar when he was done meeting his clients. The search for Charlie Carver would start tonight.

* * *

The Carver estate doubled as a banana plantation, one of the highest-yielding in Haiti. According to a footnote in the CIA report, the family plowed the profit it made from the annual harvest into its philanthropic projects, notably Noah's Ark, a school for the island's poorest children.

The Carvers' home was a striking four-story white-and-pastel-blue plantation house with a wide, sweeping staircase leading up to the brightly lit main entrance. In front of the house was a well-tended lawn with a bubbling fountain and a fish-filled saltwater pool in the middle and park benches set around its edges. The area was floodlit like a football stadium, from manned high towers set in the surrounding trees.

A security guard armed with an Uzi, and a Doberman on a button-release leash met them as they drove around the lawn to the staircase. Max hated dogs, always had, ever since he was chased by one as a child. The dumb ones tended to pick up on this and they'd growl and bark and bare their teeth at him. The trained ones bided their time and waited for the signal. This one reminded him of a police attack dog, standing obediently by its master's side, lining up homicidal thoughts, trained to go for the balls and throat—in that order.

* * *

A maid showed Max into the living room, where three of the Carvers sat waiting for him: Allain, an old man Max guessed was Gustav, and a blonde he supposed was Charlie's mother and Allain's wife.

Allain got up and walked over to Max, his leather heels clicking across the polished black-and-white tiled floor, hand already extended. He was flashing the same professional smile, but otherwise appeared markedly different from the cool creature Max had met in New York. He'd washed the pomade out of his hair, and with it had gone a good five years off his age and most of his gravitas.

"Welcome, Max," he said. They pumped hands. "Good trip?"

"Yeah, thanks."

"Is your house OK?"

"It's great, thanks."

Carver sounded like a preppy hotel manager, in his brown brogues, khakis, and short-sleeved light-blue Oxford shirt that complemented his passionless eyes. He had thin, freckled arms.

"Come on over," Carver said and led Max across the room.

The Carvers were sitting around a long, solid-glass coffee table with five neat cubes of magazines on the bottom shelf and a vase stuffed with yellow, pink, and orange lilies on top. Gustav was sitting on a gold-trimmed black-leather armchair, the woman on a matching chair.

The place smelled of furniture polish, window cleaner, floor wax, and the same disinfectant they used in hospital corridors. Max also picked up a faint stench of stale cigarettes.

He wore a beige linen suit he'd bought off the rack at Saks Fifth Avenue in Dadeland Mall, an open-necked white shirt, black leather shoes, and his Beretta, clipped to the left side of his waist. They hadn't frisked him before he'd gone in. He made a note to tell the Carvers this, if he finished the job with any affection for them.

"Francesca, my wife," Allain said.