Mr. Clarinet

The servants themselves were so alike in their smiling, benign deference, Max had a lot of trouble remembering any of them after one'd left the room and the next one came in.

They took a break for lunch, which was brought up to them—grilled fish so fresh they could still taste the sea in the meat, and a salad of tomatoes, kidney beans, and red and green peppers.

When they'd finished, Chantale rang the bell that had come with their food. The servants came into the room and cleared the plates.

"I meant to ask you about Noah's Ark?" Max said to Chantale, spotting the words as he rifled through his notebook for a clean page.

"Ask the next person who walks in," she said curtly. "They'll know more about it than me. They all come from there."

He did just that. The next interviews were with Allain and Francesca's retinue. Noah's Ark, he learned, was an orphanage school in Port-au-Prince, owned and run by the Carvers. The family recruited not just their domestic staff from there but virtually everyone who worked for them.

The new interviewees were different from Gustav's servants: they had clearly discernible personalities.

They opened up about Faustin. They described how they used to see him going through Francesca's rubbish, stealing things from the bins and taking them back to his room. When they'd cleaned out his room after his disappearance, they'd found a voodoo doll he'd made out of her hair, fingernail clippings, tissues, old lipstick tubes, and tampons. Some told Max they'd heard rumors that the bodyguard picked up light-skinned Dominican whores in Pétionville and paid them extra to wear long, blond wigs while he fucked them. Many said they'd often seen Faustin entering or leaving a bar called Nwoi et Rouge, run by his ex-Macoute friends. One or two muttered that they'd seen him taking Charlie's soiled nappies out of the rubbish, while the last person they interviewed claimed he'd overheard Faustin talking about a house he owned in Port-au-Prince.

* * *

They finished the interviews in the late afternoon. As they drove down the mountain toward Pétionville, Max opened the windows and let the air in. Chantale looked exhausted.

"Thanks for your help—again," he said, and then added, awkwardly, "I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Feel like getting a drink?" she offered, with a hint of a smile.

"Sure. Where do you suggest?"

"I'm sure you've got just the place in mind." She smiled.

"How about Eddie Faustin's old hangout?"

"You take me to the classiest joints," she said and laughed her lusty laugh.

Chapter 31

NWOI ET ROUGE was named after the colors of the Haitian flag under the Duvaliers. Black and red. Papa Doc had changed the flag's original blue to black to cement the country's complete break with its colonial past, to better reflect the country's largest ethnic majority, and to underline his beliefs in noirisme—black supremacy; beliefs that didn't extend to the woman he married—Simone, a light-skinned mulattresse. For many people, the revised flag's colors came to symbolize the darkest, bloodiest period in the country's already turbulent and violent history.

To Max, the flag recalled that of the Nazis, whose colors it shared. The coat of arms—cannons, muskets, and flagpoles dominated by a palm tree crowned with a ski hat—could have been the work of a stoned surfer with a yen for eighteenth-century military history. Who the fuck would ever take a place like that seriously?

The flag was proudly displayed behind the bar, between framed photographs of Papa and Baby Doc. Papa was dark and white-haired, his thick, black-rimmed glasses slightly humanizing a pinched face whose features suggested a limitless capacity for cruelty. His son, Jean-Claude, was a doughy lump with soft, Arabic features, bronze skin, and dopey eyes.

The bar was in a stand-alone one-room house on a stretch of road between the end of the mountain and the start of Pétionville. It was easy to miss, yet easy to find if you were looking for it.

When Max had stepped in with Chantale, the first thing he'd noticed hadn't been the flag or the portraits, but the heavyset old man sweeping the floor around a wide pool of light cast by a single lightbulb, burning so brightly at the end of its flex, it seemed almost liquid, a drop of molten steel gathering volume before dropping to the ground and burning a hole all the way through the cement floor.

"Bond-joor." Max nodded.

"Bon-soie," the man corrected him. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, loose, faded blue jeans held up by red suspenders, and a pair of worn open-toe sandals. He'd swept the dirt into a small, brownish pile to his left.

There was a watercooler behind the bar, a long row of clear bottles lined up next to it, and, at the very end, right before a tall fan, Max read the word TAFFIA, written in crude block capitals on a blackboard. Below were two equations: