Mr. Clarinet

He'd have to walk down the hill and try each of the streets until he came to the right one. He remembered being in simple, stupid situations like this when he was younger, always drunk and stoned when he hadn't scored. He'd always made it home. Safe and sound. He'd be OK.

But first he needed a drink. Just one—maybe a shot of that six-star deluxe Barbancourt old man Carver had offered him earlier. That would see him home, help him along his way, isolate him from the fear that was starting to whisper in his mind. He was seeing Clyde Beeson in his diaper again and asking himself what had happened to Darwen Medd. He was imagining Emmanuel Michelange with his dick scissored off and stuffed down his throat and wondering if he'd been alive when they'd done that to him. And he was thinking about Boukman, sitting there, somewhere on the street, maybe by one of those small fires, watching him, waiting.

From the outside, La Coupole was a small, bright-blue house with a rusted corrugated-iron roof whose eaves were hung with a string of flickering multicolored bulbs, similar to the ones surrounding the sign—two wooden planks with the bar name painted in white in a crude, jumbled script: part block, part cursive, part straight, part bent. Small spotlights were trained on the walls and highlighted the chips and cracks in the concrete. The windows were boarded up. Someone had spray-painted LA COUPOLE WELCOME U.S. in black on one of the boards, and painted a list of drinks and prices on the other—Bud, Jack, and Coke were on sale; nothing else.

Music was thudding from within, but it wasn't loud enough for him to make out more than the bass. It was the only noise in the street, although plenty of people—all of them locals—were hanging around outside the bar, talking.

A bald teenager in a grubby white suit with no shirt and shoes was sitting on an old motorbike. The seat was sprouting springs and foam from its four corners. The kid was surrounded by a semicircle of little boys, also bald, all of them looking up at him with awe and respect. The picture belonged in a church or a modern-art museum—Jesus cast as a Haitian slum kid dressed in a soiled John Travolta disco suit.

Max walked inside. The light was dim and rust-tinted, but he could make everything out. It was a lot bigger than he'd expected. He could see where they'd knocked down the back of the original house and built an extension because they either couldn't afford or hadn't bothered to paint the walls a uniform color. A third of the interior was the same blue as the exterior, while the rest was rough, unadorned, unsanded gray brickwork. The floor was plain cement.

Wooden tables and chairs stood around the edges of the room and clustered up in the corners. No two tables and chairs were matched. Some were tall and round, others squat and square, one was made up of four banged-together school desks, another was once part of a larger table that had been sawn in half and modified, while there was one table with brass-or copper-capped corners that looked suspiciously like an antique.

There were plenty of people inside, most of them white males. All off-duty American and—he supposed—UN troops. Max could spot his countrymen. Twice as big as their multinational counterparts; one part exercise, one part overeating, one part genes—hefty arms, broad shoulders, small heads, and no necks; just like him. Most of the few female soldiers who were around were put together the same way. They were all talking among themselves, telling stories and jokes, laughing, drinking only Bud or Coke out of bottles. They gave Max a blatant once-over when he passed them by. He stood out in his suit and shiny black shoes, overdressed in a room of jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers.

He made his way to the bar. There were no stools, only standing and leaning room. There was exactly one bottle on display behind the counter—standard Barbancourt rum, unopened, yellow-paper cap seal still intact. The beer and Cokes were being served out of a cooler.

Max surprised the barman by asking for rum. The barman got the bottle down, opened it, and poured out slightly more than a double measure in a clear plastic beaker. He was going to dump a handful of ice into it but Max shook his head no. He paid in dollars. Two bucks. No change.

The music was coming from the courtyard to the left, through a doorway with no door. An amused-looking Haitian DJ was manning a CD player behind a table, pumping some God-awful HiNRG with an androgynous singer rhyming "love" with "dove" in a German accent, while in front of him a few dozen off-duty peacekeepers were dancing like epileptics having fits on an ice rink.