Mr. Clarinet

"We didn't—I mean, our parents did, in the early sixties, because of Papa Doc. My dad had some friends with links to dissident groups in Miami and New York. They tried to mount a coup, which failed. Papa Doc didn't just round up the culprits, but all their families and friends and their friends and family. Just to make sure. That was his way. Our parents guessed it was only a matter of time before the Macoutes came for all of us, so we got out."

"Why did you want to come back?" Max asked. "Chicago's not a bad place."

"What I been tellin' myself every time I kick myself," Caspar grumbled.

Max laughed, more out of encouragement than mirth. Caspar dead-eyed him back. Nothing was shaking him out of his grief.

"I think we both grew up in America with this sense of loss for what we'd left behind," Mathilde explained. "We always called this place 'home.' We had all these really fond memories of old Haiti. Especially the people. There was a lot of love here. Before we got married we swore we'd come back to live here one day—we swore we'd come 'home.'

"We used some of the insurance money to buy into a store opposite a gas station, selling cut-price food and basic essentials to the poor. People didn't like us coming over here and just opening up a business and making money. They've got a word for us here. They call us 'diaspora.' It used to be an insult, like we'd chickened out, turned our backs on the country and only came back when things were good. Nowadays it's just another word, but back then—"

"Then it was all we heard," Caspar interjected. "Not among the everyday people—they were always cool to us, kind folk, mostly. We had a good relationship with them. Way we operated wasn't too different from the way Koreans operate in the black neighborhoods in Chicago—employ a few locals, treat 'em well, be respectful to everyone. We had no problem there at all. But the ones like us—with the businesses, our peers and neighbors—we lived up in Pétionville then—they made it clear they didn't like us around. Called us all kinds of trash. See, the only way they woulda respected us was if they'd known us all their lives."

"So we ignored it and kept ourselves to ourselves, worked hard, treated people as best we could. After a while we moved down here. It was better. Our neighbors are people like us—immigrants, outsiders," Mathilde said, patting Caspar on the arm for him to calm down. "It's nice here. Real clean too."

"We're a tight community," Caspar said. "We operate a 'zero-tolerance policy' here."

"Against who?"

"Everyone we don't know. They're discouraged from, you know, settling down here. It's OK for them to pass through, as long as they do it quick. Animals and especially people. Plus we all take turns in sweeping the street, morning and evening, before sundown. We all look out for each other."

Caspar allowed himself a small, knowing smirk that told Max that he enjoyed busting the heads of those luckless homeless folk who bedded down in his street for the night. It was probably the only thing that made him feel good anymore. A lot of ex-cops Max had known were like that. They missed the juice of being out on the street and took the kind of jobs where they could still just about get away with roughing people up—club security, corporate muscle, bodyguards. Caspar was probably reverting to the person he'd been before happiness had intruded into his life and blown him off course.

"We've been happy here," Mathilde picked up. "Claudette made it complete. I had her a few months after we moved in. We hadn't been planning on starting a family, and I even thought I was too old, but she came into our lives and lit up all sorts of places in us we didn't know were there."

She stopped and looked at her husband. Max couldn't see her face but he knew from the way Caspar's look softened that she was about to dissolve in tears. He put his arm tenderly around his wife's shoulders and pulled her to him.

Max glanced away toward the pictures on the wall above them. They were good people. Mathilde, especially. She was the guts and brains of the pair, the one who kept her husband in check, the one who kept their show on the road. She'd been the disciplinarian in the family, which was why her daughter had preferred her father, who no doubt caved in at her first demand. He thought of Allain and Francesca Carver. They were a million miles apart, heading in opposite directions, no warmth or closeness between them, despite their grief. He'd known the loss of a child to wreck the strongest of marriages as easily as it pushed the most dysfunctional ones over the finish line. Claudette's disappearance, however, had united the Thodores, reaffirmed, in the darkest way, the thing that had brought them together.

He focused on a medium-sized photograph of Claudette on a swing, being pushed by her father, while the Doberman watched from a corner.

Mathilde blew her nose and sniffed.