Mr. Clarinet

The room should have been boiling hot, but the temperature was the bearable side of chilly, thanks to the air-conditioning running on full power and an overhead fan they could hear clicking and grinding above them. The artificial breeze caused the flames to undulate gently on their wicks, making the walls appear to be turning slowly around them, like a great, shapeless beast stalking its prey and biding its time, waiting for its moment, savoring the dread.

Philippe did the introductions. His voice was tender and his body language respectful when he addressed his mother, telling Max she was someone he loved and feared in equal measure.

"Max Mingus, may I introduce you to Madame Mercedes Leballec," he said and stepped off to one side.

"Bond-joor," Max said, automatically and unconsciously bowing his head. There was an innate authority about her, a power that thrived on the humility and intimidation of others.

"Mr. Mingus. Welcome to my house," she spoke in French-accented English, slowly and graciously, enunciating each word in a smooth voice that came across as studied and mannered, one she specially laid on for strangers.

Max placed her in her late sixties or early seventies. She was wearing a long-sleeved blue denim dress with pale wooden buttons down the front. She was completely bald, her cranium so smooth and shiny it seemed as if she'd never had hair. Her forehead was high and steep, while her facial features were cramped close together, squashed down, smaller and less defined than they should have been. Her eyes were so minute Max could barely find their whites, their movements those of shadows behind spyholes. She had neither eyelashes nor eyebrows, but wore an abstract version of the latter in the shape of two bold, arcing, black strokes beginning at the edges of her temples and tapering down to points that almost met in the gap between her forehead and the start of her flat, funnel-shaped nose. Her mouth was small and made a fishlike pout; she had a firm jaw and a chin so deeply clefted it resembled a hoof. She made Max think of an eccentric and slightly scary reclusive old movie queen, postchemotherapy. He shot a quick, comparative look at Philippe, now slouching on a stool behind her, his hands on his lap. He couldn't see one iota of a resemblance.

She bade them to be seated with a regal sweep of her hand.

"You're looking for the boy? Charlie?" she spoke as soon as they'd taken their places.

"That's right," Max replied. "Do you have him?"

"No," Mercedes answered emphatically.

"But you know Eddie Faustin?"

"Knew. Eddie is dead."

"How d'you know he's dead? They never recovered his body."

"Eddie is dead," she repeated, wheeling her chair up closer to the table.

Max noticed the big stainless-steel whistle she was wearing on a string around her neck. He wondered whom it was for—the dogs, Philippe, or both.

"Eddie ever tell you who he was working for—or with?"

"We wouldn't be sitting here right now if he had."

"Why's that?" Max asked.

"Because I'd be rich and you wouldn't be here."

Something behind her left shoulder caught Max's eye. It was a life-size brass sculpture of a pair of praying hands, standing upright in the middle of a draped table. The table was flanked by two long candles on Delphic column–styled sticks. A chalice and an empty, clear, glass bottle were placed either side of the hands. A dog skull, a dagger, a pair of dice, a metallic sacred heart, and a rag doll were arranged behind them in a semicircle. But the display's focal point was the objects he noticed last of all, placed directly below the hands on a brass dish that might have been a communion-wafer plate: a pair of porcelain eyes, the size of ping-pong balls, with bright blue irises staring right into his.

It was an altar used in black-magic ceremonies. He remembered finding a lot of them in Miami back in the early eighties, when the Cuban crime wave hit and broke all over the city; bad guys prayed to bad spirits for protection before they went off and did bad things. Most cops had loudly dismissed the altars as superstitious bullshit, but deep down they'd been more than a little creeped out by them. It was something they didn't understand, an influence they couldn't curtail.

"So, Eddie said nothing at all about the people he was working for?" Max continued.

"No."

"Not one single detail? Didn't he even tell you if he was working for a man or a woman? If they were black or white? Foreign?"

"Nothing."

"Didn't you ask?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I wasn't interested," she answered in a flat, matter-of-fact way.

"But you knew what was going down?" Max leaned a little over the table, just like he used to do when he was shaking down a stubborn witness in the interrogation room. "You knew he was gonna kidnap that kid."

"It was none of my business," she replied very calmly, completely unruffled.

"But surely you thought it was wrong, what he was doing?" Max insisted.

"I'm no one's judge," she answered.