Mr. Clarinet

"You mean Charlie's not his grandson?"

"No!—and how dare you!" she snapped. She looked disgusted. Her face flushed light purple, stare-stabbing him. She took a short drag on her cigarette and dumped it in a cup half-filled with water she'd taken to using as an ashtray. The butt hissed as it went out.

"Sorry." Max smiled at her. "Just checking."

She'd walked right into it. Good—a weakness. He didn't know if he'd hit a raw nerve buried under a truth or upset an applecart of prudishness. He was stabbing in the dark, testing the depth of her sincerity. So far, she was holding up.

"Tell me what you want to tell me, Mrs. Carver."

"I want your word."

"Are you sure?" Max asked.

"You haven't much else to offer me, have you?"

He laughed. Stuck-up bitch. She wanted his word? Sure, why not? What was the big deal? He could always break it. It wouldn't be the first time. Words, promises, handshakes, and vows meant nothing to him outside friendship.

"I give you my word, Mrs. Carver," Max said, sounding sincere and reflecting it in the steady eyes he fixed on Francesca. She appraised him and seemed satisfied.

The cassette recorder was on and picking up everything she was saying.

"You were on the right track, back there in the house, about Eddie Faustin," she began. "He was involved in the kidnapping. He was the inside man."

"You came here to tell me that?"

"I wanted to speak to you freely. I couldn't talk to you in front of Gustav. He won't hear a bad word about Faustin. The man took a bullet for him and that makes him a saint in Gustav's book," Francesca said, pulling hard on her cigarette. "He's so stubborn. No matter what I told him happened during the kidnapping, he just dismissed it completely—said I couldn't possibly remember anything because I'd been knocked out. And even afterwards, when we went through Faustin's quarters and found what he had in there—"

She broke off and held her forehead in her fingertips, rubbing circles around her skin. It looked more dramatic than therapeutic.

"What did you find?"

"Faustin used to live in the old stables, behind the main plantation house. They were converted into small apartments for the family's most trusted restavecs. After the kidnapping his apartment was emptied and they found a doll—a voodoo doll—in a box under his bed. The doll was of me."

"Did he hate you?"

"No. This was a love—or lust—charm. It was made with my real hair, and the wax was embedded with my fingernail and toenail clippings. He'd collected them, or paid one of the maids to collect them."

"Did you ever suspect he was doing that?"

"Not at all. Faustin was a trusted employee. Always polite, very professional."

"You didn't feel that he had any desires for you—ever catch him looking at you—er—inappropriately?"

"No. Servants know their place here."

"Sure they do, Mrs. Carver. That's why Faustin helped kidnap your son," Max slipped in sarcastically.

Francesca flushed angrily.

Max didn't want to piss her off too much, in case she clammed up. He moved it along:

"What happened on the day of the kidnapping?"

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another almost immediately.

"It was on the morning of Charlie's third birthday. You could see the American warships that were bringing the invading troops, right there on the horizon, opposite Port-au-Prince harbor. Everyone was saying the Americans were going to bomb the National Palace. There was rioting and looting going on in Port-au-Prince. People would leave their homes in the mountains and walk down to the city with carts and wheelbarrows to carry the stuff they were looting from shops and houses in the capital. It was anarchy.

"You'd know how bad it was by smelling the air. If you picked up the smell of burning rubber, it meant looting and rioting was going on. Protesters closed off roads with barricades of burning tires. Sometimes you could look out and see these two or three columns of thick black smoke stretching all the way from Port-au-Prince up to the sky. That would mean it was really bad.

"And it was really bad when we drove into town in the bulletproof SUV that morning. Rose was sitting in the front with Eddie Faustin. I was sitting in the back with Charlie. He was happy. He let me play with his hair. I was running it in and out of my fingers. We were going to the Rue du Champs de Mars, not too far from the National Palace.

"It was very very dangerous in town that day. Constant gunfire. I lost count of the bodies we passed in the streets. Faustin said we needed to stop somewhere secluded and wait for the shooting to stop, so we parked in the Boulevard des Veuves. It's usually packed, but that day it was deserted. I knew something was very wrong with Faustin. He was sweating a lot and he'd been looking at me in the rearview mirror the whole drive down.