Mr. Clarinet

"They say Eddie died bad. Is that how he paid?"

"Eddie owed a lot."

"Want to tell me about it?" Max prompted.

"He came to me with all his problems after he got the job with Carver. I helped him out."

"What kind of problems?"

"The usual—women, enemies."

"Who were his enemies?"

"Eddie was a Macoute. Almost everyone he'd ever beaten and robbed wanted him dead. And then there were families of people he'd killed, women he'd raped, they were out to get him too. It's what happens when you lose power."

"What did you get out of him in return?"

"You wouldn't understand—and it's also none of your business," she said firmly and waited to see Max's reaction.

"OK," Max said. "Tell me about Eddie and Francesca Carver."

"Some things in life you just can't ever have. I tried to warn him against pursuing that madness. I didn't see a good end for it. Eddie wouldn't listen. He had to have her, the same way he'd had to have everything else in his life. He thought he was in love with her."

"Wasn't he?" Max asked.

"Not Eddie." She chuckled. "He knew nothing about that. He'd raped all the women he hadn't paid for."

"And you worked for him?"

"And you haven't worked for bad people?" She laughed deeply, in the middle of her throat, without opening her mouth. "We're not that different, we're both for hire."

As far as Max could tell, she had nothing to hide, but she was keeping things from him just the same; he sensed it, some vital piece of information slipping through the cracks of everything she was saying.

"How did you try and bring Eddie and Mrs. Carver together?"

"What didn't I try? I tried everything I knew. Nothing worked."

"Had that ever happened to you before?"

"No."

"Did you tell Eddie?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"He wasn't paying me to fail," she said.

"So you lied to him?"

"No. I tried something else—a rare ceremony, something that's only done in desperation. Very risky."

"What was it?"

"I can't tell you," she said. "And I won't tell you."

"Why not?"

"I'm not allowed to discuss it."

She looked a little afraid. Max didn't push her.

"Did this thing work?"

"Yes, at first."

"How?"

"Eddie told me he had a chance to take off with the Carver woman."

"'Take off'? Like elope?"

"Yes."

"Was he more specific?"

"No."

"And you didn't ask because it didn't interest you?" Max said.

She nodded.

"So how did it go wrong?"

"Eddie's dead. It can't go more wrong than that."

"Who told you he was dead?"

"He did," Mercedes said.

"Who? Eddie?"

"Yes," she answered.

"How'd he do that?"

She pulled herself back closer to the table.

"Do you really want to know?"

Close up, she smelled of menthol cigarettes.

"Yes," Max said. "I do."

"Are you of a nervous disposition?"

"No."

"Very well," Mercedes rolled her chair back and talked to Philippe quietly in Kreyol.

"Could you two get up and step away from the table so's we can set up," said Philippe, getting up from his stool and pointing vaguely to his right.

Max and Chantale went and stood close to the door. The wall space was entirely taken up by wooden display shelves, screwed to the wall, starting close to the ceiling and ending just above the floor. There were twenty individual compartments, each displaying a thick, cylindrical, glass jar filled with clear, yellowy liquid, which held its contents in perfect suspension. Max scanned them randomly, noting a huge egg, a black mamba, a small human foot, a bat, a human heart, a fat toad, a chicken's claw, a gold brooch, a lizard, a man's hand

"What are these for?" Max whispered to Chantale.

"Spells. Good and bad. My mother's got a few of these. The egg can be used to make a woman fertile or barren," she said, then pointed to the foot, which Max noticed was professionally amputated above the ankle. "The foot can be used to cure broken bones or to cripple someone." Then she directed Max's attention to the hand, shriveled and grayish-green in color. "That's a married man's hand. See the wedding ring?" He saw the faded gold band hanging loose at the bottom of the second-from-last finger. "It can either make or break up a marriage. Everything you see here has two possible uses. It all depends on who's asking and who's casting. The good spells are done before midnight, the bad after. But I don't think a lot of good gets done around here."

"How did they get these?" Max asked.

"They bought them."

"Where from?"

"Everything's for sale here, Max," she said.

He looked back at what the Leballecs were doing.

Philippe had removed the cloth from where they'd been sitting, revealing the varnished wooden table it had been covering. There were markings of various sizes on the surface, indentations painted black. First and most prominent, set in two arches in the middle, facing Mercedes, were the letters of the alphabet: capitals running A to M, and then N to Z. Below, in a straight line ran numbers one to ten. In either upper corner were the words OUI and NON, and on the opposite side was carved the word AUREVOIR.

"Is that what I think it is?" Max asked Philippe.

"It ain't Monopoly."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"You said you wanted to know." Philippe smiled. "This is knowledge. You two wanna come over here."

Max hesitated. What if this was bullshit?

So what if it was, he told himself—bullshit only hurts the believer.

"I thought you charged for this kind of thing?" Max said, not moving.

"So you're going to do it?" Mercedes asked.

"Yeah."

"Good," Mercedes smiled. "Then consider it a gift from me to you. You're much more of a man than your predecessors—Mr. Beeson and Mr. Medd."