Mr. Clarinet

The SUV pulled out of the house just after seven a.m. They were almost immediately held up in traffic. Pétionville was already teeming with people milling around the indoor market—a wide, mustard-colored building with a rusted brown tin roof. The streets were already open for business, men and women of all ages selling fish, eggs, live chickens, dead chickens—plucked and unplucked—mounds of questionable-looking red meat, homemade sweets, potato chips, soft drinks, cigarettes, and booze. The country might have been limping and crawling through the ages, but there was a vibrancy about the people in the early morning Max hadn't ever felt in any American city.

It took them twenty minutes to get on the road to Port-au-Prince and another fifty to make it to the capital. Eloise got out in front of Noah's Ark and waved to the SUV as it drove away to the Boulevard Harry Truman with a honk of the horn.

Max followed the vehicle along the coastal road. As the Banque Populaire came into view, the SUV indicated that it was turning right into the entrance reserved for staff and VIPs.

Max sped past as the SUV entered through the gates, then he did a U-turn and headed back toward the bank. He drove around the building until he found the customer entrance.

As he was rolling into the public parking lot, he saw someone he recognized walking toward the main doors. The person stopped in midstep, turned around, and started heading back in the direction they'd come from.

There was only a medium-sized hedge separating the two parking lots, staff, and general public. Max could clearly see the SUV and the figure hurrying toward it.

It all made so much sense.

He suddenly understood why Claudette had drawn her kidnapper orange.

It was his hair—that ginger afro.

The Orange Man.

Maurice Codada, the head of security.

* * *

That evening Max called Vincent Paul and told him everything he'd found out. Paul listened in silence.

"We'll go get them in a few hours' time—early tomorrow morning," Paul said quietly. "I want you to interrogate them. Get everything you can out of them. Do whatever you have to, to get them to talk."

Chapter 49

MAX WAS COLLECTED by Paul's men shortly after three a.m. and driven to the Codada-Krolak house. The couple were being held separately in the basement.

Max checked on both of them before going to inspect their house.

* * *

Max crossed a red-and-black-tiled foyer that led into an open-plan living-room area, furnished with a huge TV, a video recorder, a sofa, several armchairs, and a few potted palms.

On the right was a well-stocked bar, complete with upholstered stools. Max checked behind it. He opened the till. It was stuffed with banknotes and coins. The notes were gourdes with Papa and Baby Doc's faces on them. He found a loaded .38 under the bar, as well as a small stack of CDs of Haitian and South American music. Hanging on the wall next to the bar was a Papa Doc–era Haitian flag, black and red instead of blue and red. He understood then that it went with the design of the tiles.

The Duvalier theme continued upstairs. Dozens of black-and-white photographs hung in the corridors—a younger Papa Doc in a white coat, smiling from the middle of a group of poor people, all of them abject and miserable in their clothes and surroundings, yet smiling quite happily. Many, Max noticed, were missing limbs, hands, and feet. It must have been taken at the time of the yaws epidemic. At Duvalier's feet sat a group of tough-faced young children, all of them black except for one—a light-skinned boy with freckles. It was Codada.

Max followed Codada's evolution from child thug to man thug. He posed with Bedouin Désyr and the Faustin brothers, now in Macoute uniforms—navy-blue shirts and pants, bandannas around their necks, guns in their belts, eyes hidden behind thick wraparound shades, booted feet on dead bodies, all smiles.

He stopped at a series of photographs showing Codada supervising a construction site. His mouth dropped open. Clarinette's temple was somewhere in the background of almost every shot.

He looked in the master bedroom. Codada and Eloise Krolak slept in a four-poster bed with a huge TV at the foot of it.

A small framed painting of a boy in a blue uniform with red trousers playing a flute hung on one wall. Max instantly recognized it as the same painting that had been hanging on the wall of the Manhattan club he'd first met Allain Carver in, right near where they'd been sitting. He'd seen it elsewhere too—Codada's office in the bank.

He took the painting down and turned it over. There was a label on the back:

"Le Fifre, Edouard Manet."

Max heard voices in the corridor. Two of Vincent's men were coming out of a room at the end.

He walked down to it. It was a large study, furnished with a desk and computer nearest the door, a library of bound books at the far end, and, in between, a dark green leather armchair and another big television set. A woman was there, working at the computer.