Mr. Clarinet

"Carter came over, TV cameras rolling. He meets with General Cedras and his wife. And it's Mrs. Cedras who does the negotiating. She gets Carter to agree to pay each member of the junta ten million dollars, guarantee them safe passage out of the country and immunity from prosecution. Done deal.

"Then she wants the U.S. to protect their houses. And she negotiates with Carter for the U.S. government to rent out their houses to embassy staff. Done deal. And finally—and this is where it almost fell apart—Mrs. Cedras wanted her black leather sofa freighted out to Venezuela, where they were all moving to. Carter said no deal. Why? Because Carter wasn't authorized to pay for a moving company. Everything else was fine, but not that.

"They argued and bickered and it went back and forth. Finally, when it looked like it was going to be a deal breaker, Carter called Clinton and got him out of bed to explain the situation. Clinton was pissed off. He really chewed Carter out, screamed at him so loudly people said they could hear what he was saying in the other room. Anyway, Clinton OK'ed it and the sofa went into exile with the junta."

Max burst out laughing.

"Bullshit!"

"True rumor," Chantale said.

They laughed.

The Presidential Palace itself was a gleaming, expansive, two-storied, brilliant white edifice. It soaked up and part-reflected the sunlight so that it appeared luminous when viewed against its dark backdrop of surrounding mountains. The red-and-blue Haitian flag hung from a mast above the main entrance.

They drove around a pedestal mounted with a statue of General Henri Christophe, one of Haiti's first leaders, on his horse, facing the palace and the U.S. troops. Groups of young Haitian men sat or stood around the bottom of the pedestal, clothes fluttering off skinny limbs, eyeing their occupiers, watching the traffic, or staring vacantly into space.

The rest of the city, what he saw of it, was a dump—a rancid, rusted, busted-up, busted out ruin of a place. Port-au-Prince wasn't just in bad shape, it was in no shape at all. Reeling, tilting, tottering on the verge of collapse, virtually everything about the place needed a million-dollar face-lift or, better still, a complete demolition-and-rebuilding job. A row of gingerbread houses—doors long gone, shutters hanging off hinges—in what must once have been a wealthy part of town, stood filthy and derelict, squatted in by God knew how many people, some of whom Max saw hanging off the balconies.

There were no traffic lights anywhere. Max had seen exactly one set since they'd left Pétionville, and those weren't working. The streets, like almost every street he'd seen in Haiti, were cracked and potholed. The cars that rolled down them were belching, farting, patched-together, wrecking-yard salvage, bursting with people. A few colorfully painted tap-taps went by, hooting, overloaded with people and their possessions, bundled up in sheets and clothes and heaped on the roof, along with as many passengers as could fit on. And then there were the occasional luxury cars, tens of thousands of dollars of imported high-maintenance automobile daintily threading their way across the wrecked roads with their sudden craters and bumpy surfaces.

The city made Max sad in a way he'd been before. Through the detritus, the near rubble, Max saw a few proud and fine grand old buildings that must have looked glorious in their prime and would have been impressive again if restored. Yet he couldn't see this ever happening. If capital cities are meant to be shopwindows for the rest of the country, then Port-au-Prince was a car showroom that had been looted and set on fire and left to burn, nearly unnoticed, until rain had finally come and doused the flames.

"I remember when the pope came here," Chantale said, turning down the radio. "It was in 1983, a year before I went to the States. Jean-Claude Duvalier—Baby Doc—was still in power. Well, it was really his wife, Michele. She was running the country by then.

"She cleaned the streets up, all the ones you see here. They were full of beggars and merchants who sold their stuff off big wooden tables. She made them pack up and move elsewhere, where the pope couldn't see. There were handicapped people here too—physical and mental—they used to camp out here and beg at the roadside. She got rid of them too. The streets were resurfaced and whitewashed. A few hours before the pope drove down in his motorcade, Michele had the road hosed down with Chanel perfume. I was standing right there when it happened. The smell was so strong it gave me a headache and stayed in my clothes for months and months, no matter how many times my mother washed them. I've had a Chanel allergy ever since. If someone's wearing it I get headaches."

"What did they do with the handicapped people?"