Mr. Clarinet

"No. No one I know's ever seen him. When are we going to look for him?"

"How about tomorrow?"

"How about the day after? It's a long trip over bad road. We'll have to leave here early—three or four in the morning," she said, looking at her watch. "You can get some rest, sleep off the taffia, go at it fresh."

She was talking sense. He'd need a clear head if he was going to the place where one of his predecessors had disappeared and the other had returned from with his torso opened up from neck to navel.

Chapter 33

"IT'S NOT THAT we don't care. We do—only we appear not to. And appearance is everything," Allain Carver said with a grin. He'd woken Max up three hours earlier with a phone call telling him to meet up at Noah's Ark.

Max was badly hungover, feeling much worse than he had the night before, with a sack of greasy cannonballs for a stomach and a headache that felt like someone was using his skull for a mixing bowl. He couldn't understand it. He was pretty much OK when he'd got out of bed, but the sickness and the pain had kicked in the minute he'd finished his first cup of coffee. He'd taken four extra-strength migraine pills, but they hadn't done a thing.

Noah's Ark was situated on a sideroad off the Boulevard Harry Truman. Carver led Max and Chantale through a small wrought-iron bar gate and up a white footpath bordered with dark-blue bricks. They crossed a lush lawn, part-shaded by leaning coconut palms and dotted with sprinklers whose mist made miniature rainbows above the ground. To the right was a small playground with swings, seesaws, a slide, and a climbing frame.

The path ended at the steps of an impressive two-story house with bright, whitewashed walls and a navy-blue tiled roof. The window frames and the front door were also navy blue. The institution's emblem—a dark blue boat with a house in the middle of it instead of a sail—appeared as a relief on the wall above the door.

Once inside, they came face-to-face with a mural of a white man in a safari suit. He held two seminaked Haitian children—a boy and a girl, dressed in rags—by the hand. He was leading them away from a dark village whose inhabitants were all either dead or hideously deformed. The man was looking straight at the viewer, his jaw set in grim determination, his face assuming a heroic cast. The sky behind them was stormy with blades of lightning splitting the horizon and spears of rain attacking the diseased township. The man and his charges were dry and bathed in the golden hue of a rising sun.

"That's my father," Allain said.

When Max looked a little harder, he indeed recognized Gustav in his younger days, albeit in a very flattering light, making him look a lot more like his son than his true self.

As he led them down a corridor into the heart of the institution, Carver explained that Gustav had played a big part in helping his friend François Duvalier cure the population of yaws—a highly contagious tropical disease that, untreated, caused its victims to be covered in painful, runny sores before losing their noses, lips, and eventually limbs, which withered up into the color and shape of unattended cigarette ash before dropping off. He'd bought all the medicines and supplies from America and helped them reach Duvalier. On a visit to the village depicted in the mural, Gustav had come across two orphans, a boy and a girl. He decided to rescue them and look after them. This later led to the establishment of a Carver-funded orphanage school.

The corridor they walked down was lined with annual school photographs going back to 1962. Farther on, there were wide corkboards covered with children's drawings, grouped into age ranges starting at four and ending at twelve. There were so few sketches in the teenage category that they had all been grouped on the board they didn't even half fill, and even those had been done by only two people, both exceptionally gifted.

Carver went on to explain that Noah's Ark cared for children from birth through their teens or college graduation. They were fed, clothed, housed, and educated according to either the French or American curriculum. French was the primary language in Noah's Ark, but pupils who showed an aptitude for English—as many unsurprisingly did, with the prevalence of American television and music in their lives—were steered toward the American system. French classes were taught downstairs, English upstairs. Once they had finished their formal education, those who wanted to were sent to college, fully funded by the Carvers.

There were classrooms on either side of the corridor. Max looked through the windows in the doors and saw small, even-numbered groups of pupils, boys and girls, all dressed in smart uniforms of blue skirts or shorts and white blouses or shirts. They were all immaculately turned out and paid complete attention to their teachers, even in the back rows. Max couldn't imagine any classroom in America being so orderly, so disciplined, and so interested in their lessons.