Mr. Clarinet

"Yes it does. We go an extra mile to help a friend and an extra twenty to bury a foe."

Chapter 18

THEY DROVE TO the Boulevard des Veuves, where Charlie had been kidnapped.

They parked the car and got out. The heat fell over Max in a fine net of molten lava, baking his skin, boiling him inside. He broke out into an immediate rush of sweat, which flooded down his back and seeped through his shirt. Outside the bank the heat had been tempered by the breeze blowing straight off the sea, but here the air was flat, airless, and bone-dry, and the heat was so intense he could see it rippling in front of him in solid currents, blurring his view.

The sidewalks were raised high above the ground, their hazardous surfaces worn ice-smooth and mirror-bright by billions of footsteps and decades of neglect. They moved very slowly down the street that was jammed with people—some selling, some bartering, some buying, many hanging around and talking. Max heard his rubber soles squelching as he walked across the baked concrete. Everyone was looking at them, following them—especially Max, who sensed mass bemusement and incredulity coming at him, instead of the suspicion and hostility he'd been used to when going through the ghettos at home. Bearing in mind what had happened to him a few hours before, he avoided making eye contact. They stepped off the sidewalk and down into the road that was only slightly less congested.

If the whole city wasn't already dragging itself around on what was left of its last legs, Max would have said that they were in a bad neighborhood. The Boulevard des Veuves had once been paved with small hexagonal stones. All but the ones still hugging the edges of the sidewalk were gone, ripped out, sometimes professionally, in geometric strips, or haphazardly, in clumps of one or two dozen. Every two yards there were drains—gaping square holes cut out of the curbs—and every four or five meters, parts of the road had collapsed and left huge, stinking, fly-infested black craters, which doubled as rubbish dumps and public toilets where men, women, and children would piss and shit in full view of everyone, not remotely disturbed by the passing traffic. The place stank of shit, rank water, putrefying fruit, vegetables, and carcasses.

There was dust everywhere, on and in everything, blowing down from the mountains that ringed the capital. The mountains had once been heavily forested, but successive generations had cut down all the trees for homes, carts, and firewood. The sun had dried up the once rich and fertile soil now left bare and exposed, and the wind had blown it back into Haitians' faces. He tasted it on his tongue, and he knew if he closed his eyes just once and tried to plug into the place, he'd know exactly what it would be like to get buried alive in this godforsaken, fucked-over country.

Charlie's face was plastered all over the street, the stark black-and-white posters offering a cash reward for information about his kidnapping, competing with larger, colorful ones advertising concerts by Haitian singers in Miami, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and New York.

He pulled down one of Charlie's posters to start showing around. He noticed a small, hand-drawn symbol in black in the left-hand margin—a cross, slightly curved in the middle, with a round head, a split base, and two-thirds of its right beam missing. He looked at the other posters and saw that they were all scored with the same mark.

He pointed the mark out to Chantale.

"Tonton Clarinette," she said. "That's his sign. Means he took Charlie."

They started canvassing the street for witnesses to Charlie's kidnapping. First they went to the shops—small food stores with no air-conditioning and threadbare shelves; stores selling pots and pans and wooden spoons and ladles, hooch shacks, a bakery, a butcher's with one dead, half-skinned chicken hanging up, a used auto parts place, another place selling only bright white chicken eggs—all producing a variant on the same answer: Mpas weh en rien—I saw nothing.

Then they quizzed people on the street. Both times Chantale showed them the poster and did the talking.

Nobody knew anything. They shook their heads, shrugged their shoulders, replying in one or two phrases or long throaty outbursts. Max stood and watched, filtering the people they approached through interrogator's eyes as they answered, looking out for the telltale signs of lying and concealing, but all he saw were exhausted, half-asleep men and women of indeterminable ages, confused by the attention they were getting from the white man and the light-skinned lady.