Mr. Clarinet

After five hours, he was back on the airport road, heading up to Pétionville. Chantale woke up and stared at Max as though she'd expected to find herself in bed at home.

"What happened?" she asked.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Max switched off the radio.

"We were dancing in the temple—together."

"Nothing after?"

Chantale thought about it for a while but drew a blank. Max told her what she'd missed, starting backwards with the box, editing out what had gone on between them, but sparing no detail in describing how he'd saved her from a potential rapist.

"I was never going to get raped, Max," she said angrily. "It was a banda, a ritual orgy. People get possessed and they fuck each other's brains out. No one knows what they're doing."

"Looked like rape to me—voodoo date rape, conscious or unconscious, whatever you wanna call it. The guy was tearin' your clothes off," Max said.

"People do that when they're having consensual sex, Max. It's called passion."

"Yeah? Well, I don't know how you can just go fuck a stranger like that. He could've had AIDS. Jesus!"

"You mean you've never fucked strangers before, Max?"

"What? Yeah, but that isn't the same thing."

"Why? You meet a woman—where? In a bar, a nightclub? Music's loud, you're both loaded. You go someplace, you fuck, and in the morning you leave and never see each other again. Same thing—only with us, it has more meaning."

"Right," Max sneered sarcastically. "We decadent, soulless Americans just go around having empty one-night stands, but over here when you do it in a voodoo temple it's a religious experience. You know what I think, Chantale? I think it's a crock of shit. Fucking's fucking. Rape is rape. And that guy was gonna rape you. End of story. No way would you've made it with some guy covered in mud, if you'd been in your right mind."

"How would you know?" Chantale snorted.

Max didn't respond. He gripped the wheel tight and gritted his teeth, wishing for a good long while that he'd left the ungrateful bitch to get gang-raped in the dirt.

He'd intended to let her stay at the house, but he drove fast through Pétionville and took the road down to the capital. At night, every big American city was lit up like a mini-galaxy. Port-au-Prince had a few grudging scraps of light floating in the black, like stray white butterflies caught in an oil slick, otherwise nothing. He'd never known a place so dark.

Chapter 39

IT WAS STILL dark when he got back, but the insects had gone to ground and the birds had started singing in the courtyard. Daylight was on its way.

There was a message on the answering machine from Joe. It was too early to call him back.

* * *

Inside the box Dreadlocks had given him, Max found a croc-hide billfold containing numerous cards—ATM, AmEx, VISA, MasterCard, library, blood donor, Gold's Gym. They all belonged to Darwen Medd.

Max also found half a dozen black-on-white business cards held together by a paper clip. If he was still alive, Medd worked out of Tallahassee, where he specialized in missing persons and corporate affairs. The latter was probably a recent diversification, something he was gradually setting himself up in so that he'd still be working when he got too old and too slow to look for runaways and abductees. Working in the business sector was safer and paid a lot better. You sat at a desk and followed paper trails by phone, fax, and computer. The only fieldwork involved was meeting your client for lunch, dinner, or drinks. If you were good, you never stopped working. Some companies kept you on a retainer. The better you were the more you were retained. It was a nice life. Boring as hell, but something Max had once been planning to move into himself.

There was no money in the wallet but, tucked in a corner of the change pocket, he found a single folded piece of paper.

It was a page torn from a Haitian phone book dated 1990. Letters I–F, one section circled in blue ballpoint: all the Faustins in Port-au-Prince—thirteen of them.

Medd had been on the same track.

Who was Dreadlocks? Why did he give Max the box?

Was he Medd? No. Dreadlocks was a black man. He was crazy, and quite possibly mute. He hadn't made a sound near the falls, nor in the temple.

Perhaps Dreadlocks had seen Medd at the waterfalls when he'd visited Mercedes Leballec. Maybe Medd had befriended him. Or maybe he'd just found Medd's body and taken his wallet. Or maybe he'd just found the wallet. He'd sealed it in a box and given it to the first white man he saw at Saut d'Eau.

It occurred to Max that the best way of finding out was to go back to Saut d'Eau and ask him, but he wasn't going to go back there again, not if he could help it.

* * *

At six-thirty he called Joe. His friend answered on the second ring. Joe was in the kitchen with the TV news on low. Max could hear his two girls in the background.

They talked and joked, Joe doing most of it. He had a three-dimensional life. Max only had what he was looking for.