Mr. Clarinet

It was now light. The road they were taking was a dirt track cut into a dry, barren plain of white rocks, boulders, and—once in a while—the carcasses of dead animals, picked clean and bleached pale. There were no trees or bushes in sight, only cacti. It reminded him of postcards he'd received from friends who'd taken a trip to the great southwestern states.

They drove up into the mountains. They were nothing like the ones he had back home. He'd been to the Rockies and the Appalachians, but these were completely different. They were brown, barren mounds of dead earth, being slowly but systematically eroded by every breath of wind, every drop of rain. It was hard to imagine that the whole island had once been rainforest; that this environmental catastrophe of a place had had life, that it had been the commercial cornerstone of a foreign empire. He tried to imagine what the people who lived in the mountains would look like, and he came up with an Ethiopian famine victim.

But he was wrong.

They might have been every bit as poor, but the country people lived somewhat better than the miserable souls in town. The children, although thin, didn't have the bloated bodies and starved, haunted looks of their Port-au-Prince counterparts. The villages they passed weren't anything like the desperate hovels of Cité Soleil. They were collections of small huts with thatched roofs and thick walls painted in bright colors—reds, greens, blues, yellows, and whites. Even the animals looked better off: the pigs less like goats, the goats less like dogs, the dogs less like foxes, the chickens less like anorexic pigeons.

The road got bad and they slowed to a crawl. They had to drive around potholes five feet deep, drive in and out of craters, creep around hairpin bends in case someone was coming their way. They saw no cars at all, but there were a few wrecks, stripped right down to pencil outlines. He wondered what had become of the drivers.

Despite the air-conditioning keeping the car cool, Max could feel the heat outside, pouring down out of the light blue, cloudless sky.

"Allain didn't tell you everything about Noah's Ark," Chantale said. "Not surprisingly—given your attitude."

"You think I was out of line, sayin' what I did?"

"You were both right," she answered. "Yeah, it's wrong, but look at this place. More people than crops."

"What didn't he tell me?"

"Background stuff, about the contracts. All the time those children are growing up, they're constantly reminded where they came from and who it was who took them away from that. They're taken to Cité Soleil, to Carrefour, to other nasty places. They get to see people dying of starvation and disease—not to teach them charity or compassion, but to teach them gratitude and respect, to teach them that the Carvers are their saviors, that they owe their lives to the family."

"So they're brainwashed?"

"No, not really. They're educated, taught the Carver creed along with their verbs and their multiplication tables," Chantale said. "Anyway, they're basically convinced that the minute they leave the Ark they'll end up in the slums with poor folk."

"So, when they turn seventeen or eighteen and the contracts come out they happily sign their lives away?" Max concluded. "So they trade Noah's Ark for the Carver empire?"

"That's right."

"How come they hired you?"

"Allain likes to hire outsiders," she said. "Apart from his servants."

"But this contract—it's not enforceable if you go overseas, right? Say you're studyin' in America and decide you wanna go work for JP Morgan instead of Gustav Carver, they can't stop you."

"No, they can't, but they do," she said, lowering her voice, as if someone were listening.

"How?"

"They have contacts everywhere. They're very rich, powerful people. People with influence. Try and break a deal and they break you."

"Have you known it to happen?"

"It's not something they exactly brag about or anybody finds out about, but I'm sure it's happened," Chantale said.

"What happens to the kids who don't conform? The problem kids? The ones who rebel in the back row of class?"

"Again it's not something they openly talk about, but Allain told me the kids who don't get with the program are taken back to where they were found."

"Oh that's real civilized," Max said bitterly.

"That's life. Life isn't easy anywhere, but here it's worse. It's hell. It's not like those kids don't know how lucky they are."

"You need to change jobs. You sound like your boss."

"Fuck you," she said under her breath. She turned the radio on and turned up the volume.

Max thought for a while about what he'd heard, then he switched off the radio.

"Thanks," he said to her.

"What for?"

"Opening up a whole new dimension to this investigation: Noah's Ark."

"You're thinking the person who kidnapped Charlie might have been expelled from there?"

"Or had his or her future destroyed by the Carvers, yeah. A life for a life. Third oldest motive in the book."

Chapter 35