Mr. Clarinet

Even though he didn't have a clue what he'd do when he got to Miami, he felt better now that he was heading somewhere familiar.

He thought about taking a shower and getting something to eat, and maybe that haircut if he could find a place.

The phone rang.

"Mr. Mingus?"

"Yes?"

"Allain Carver."

Max didn't say anything. How had he found him here?

Dave Torres. He was the only one who knew where Max was. How long had he been working for Carver? Probably since Max had asked him to stop the calls he was getting in prison. Instead of going to the authorities, Torres had gone to the man himself. Double-dealing scumbag never missed an opportunity to make a buck.

"Hello? Are you still there?"

"What's this about?" Max said.

"I have a job you might be interested in."

Max agreed to meet him the next day. His curiosity was back.

Carver gave him an address in Manhattan.

* * *

"Mr. Mingus? I'm Allain Carver."

First impression: imperious prick.

Carver had stood up from behind an armchair when Max had walked into the club. Instead of coming over, he'd taken a few steps forward to identify himself and then stood where he was, arms behind his back, in the style of royalty meeting an ambassador from a former colonial state, now hopelessly impoverished and in dire need of a handout.

Tall and slender, dressed in a well-tailored navy blue wool suit, light blue shirt, and matching silk tie, Carver might have strolled in off a 1920s-set musical where he'd been cast as an extra in a Wall Street scene. His short, blond hair was slicked back from his forehead and parted down the middle. He had a strong jaw, long, pointed face, and tanned skin.

They shook hands. Firm handshake, soft, smooth skin unperturbed by manual labor.

Carver motioned him to a black-leather-and-mahogany tub chair set in front of a round table. He waited until Max had sat down before he took his place opposite him. The chair was high-backed and finished some two feet above his head. He couldn't see to his left or right without leaning all the way forward and craning his neck out. It was like being in his own booth, intimate and secretive.

Behind him was a bar that stretched the width of the room. Every conceivable spirit seemed to be lined up there—green, blue, yellow, pink, white, brown, clear, and translucent bottles glinting as gaily as plastic-bead curtains in a well-heeled brothel.

"What would you like to drink?"

"Coffee, please. Cream, no sugar."

Carver looked over to the far end of the room and raised his hand. A waitress approached. She was fashion-model thin, with high cheekbones, pouting lips, and a catwalk strut. All the staff Max had seen so far looked like models: both the barmen had that slowburn, stubbled seducer look advertisers used to sell white shirts and cologne, while he could have seen the receptionist in a clothes-store catalogue, and in another life, the security guy monitoring the CCTV screen in a side office might have been the Diet Coke break guy on the construction site.

Max had almost missed the club. It was in an anonymous five-story townhouse in a cul-de-sac off Park Row, so anonymous that he'd walked past it twice before he'd noticed the number 34 stamped faintly into the wall near the door. The club was three flights up in a mirrored elevator with polished brass handles running around the middle and reflections accordioning to infinity. When the doors opened and he'd stepped out, Max thought he'd arrived in the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.

The interior was vast and very quiet, like a library or a mausoleum. All over the thickly carpeted floor, black tub chairs sprouted like burned-out oak stumps in a desecrated forest. They were arranged so you only saw their backs and not the people in them. He'd thought they were alone until he saw clouds of cigar smoke escaping from behind one of the chairs, and when he looked around more closely, he saw a man's foot in a beige slip-on beyond another. A single framed painting adorned the wall nearest to them. It was of a young boy playing a flute. He was dressed in a ragged, Civil War–era military uniform a good ten years too big for him.

"Are you a member here?" Max asked, to break the ice.

"We own it. This and several similar establishments around the world," Carver replied.

"So you're in the club business?"

"Not particularly," Carver answered with an amused look on his face. "My father, Gustav, set these up in the late fifties to cater for his best business clients. This was the first. We have others in London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlin—and elsewhere. They're a perk. When individuals or their companies do over a certain amount of net dollar business with us they're offered free lifelong membership. We encourage them to sponsor their friends and colleagues, who of course pay. We have a lot of members, turn a good profit."

"So you can't just fill out a form?"

"No," Carver chuckled.

"Keep the peasants out, huh?"

"It's just the way we do business," Carver said dryly. "It works."