Mr. Clarinet

They found a store and bought a few sacks of maize, rice, beans, and plantain. They came back and left it in the front yard. The children and adults looked at them curiously and carried on eating their meal.

Max and Chantale moved on. By late afternoon, they'd finished. They'd talked to two old ladies, who'd offered them lemonade and stale cookies, a man on his porch looking at a year-old newspaper, a mechanic and his son, a woman who asked them to read to her from a German Bible, another who thought Max was a priest. Max was now sure the house in Carrefour belonged—or had belonged—to Eddie Faustin.

After he'd taken Chantale home, he drove back there.

Chapter 42

MAX WAITED UNTIL nightfall; then he went around to the back of the house, climbed over the wall, and dropped down into a garden of dead grass and withered bushes.

He picked the two back-door locks and let himself in.

He turned on his flashlight. Inside, the dust lay so thick and soft it looked like Christmas-card snow. No one had been here in a long while.

There were two floors and a basement.

He went upstairs. Large rooms with plenty of good-quality furniture—cupboards, closets, chest of drawers, tables, and chairs, all in mahogany, clawed brass-feet on everything. Marble or glass coffee tables. Brass beds with still-hard mattresses, well-upholstered armchairs and sofas.

The place had barely been lived in, but whoever had owned the house must have felt safe enough here, at the edge of the slum, a few feet away from a cauldron of poverty, desperation, and violence. There were no bars on any of the windows. Max guessed the owners were locals, well known in the slum; fuck-with-us-at-your-peril feared—Eddie Faustin, ex-Macoute? Maybe? No way to confirm it yet.

He went down to the basement. It was hot and humid, a rancid scent in the air. His flashlight picked out the damp on the walls, the bricks greasy with moisture. There was something on the ground.

He found a light switch. A single bulb on a cord lit up the large, black, kite-shaped vévé on the ground. It had been drawn in blood. The vévé was divided into four sections, a different symbol in the first three, a photograph in the last. The photograph was of Charlie, sitting in the back of a car—possibly an SUV—looking straight at the camera.

He read the vévé clockwise—first the Mr. Clarinet symbol, followed by an eye, a circle with four crosses and a skull in it, and, last, the photograph. There was a corolla of purple wax in the center of the vévé. Assuming this was Eddie Faustin's place, he'd most likely performed the ceremony before he'd kidnapped Charlie.

Max slipped the picture into his wallet.

The basement was otherwise empty.

He was about to leave the house when he remembered there were things he'd left unchecked. He went back upstairs. The dust was so thick it muffled his steps. He sneezed twice.

He found nothing.

He tapped the walls. Solid. He looked under the chairs. He moved the furniture. He broke sweat shifting the heavy cupboards.

He pushed an oak closet.

He heard something fall on the floor.

It was a videotape.

* * *

Back in Pétionville, Max played the tape.

It began with a boy walking down a street. He was dressed in the Noah's Ark uniform—blue shorts and a short-sleeved white shirt—and carrying a satchel on his back. Max put his age at between six and eight years old.

He was being filmed from inside a car.

The screen fizzled into black and a new image cut in: a group of about twenty children, all in uniform, gathering in front of the gates of Noah's Ark. The camcorder panned across the crowd, laughing and playing, some children chasing each other, some paired off, others grouped together talking, until it found the boy from the first shot, chatting with two friends. It zoomed in on his face—cute rather than pretty—and then on his mouth, wide, smiling—and then it pulled away, capturing the boy's head and torso and a little of the background, and then it moved to the boy's right, just above his shoulder, and settled on a little girl, bending over to tie her shoes. A boy had lifted her skirt all the way up her back and he and his friends were laughing. The girl was as oblivious to the boys as she was to the cameraman recording her humiliation. When she stood up and her skirt fell back into place the boys ran away laughing.

The next image was of the boy in class, from outside, the cameraman standing somewhere on the left, hidden by bushes which blew in and out of the shot. The boy was listening to the teacher, making notes, often raising his hand. His face lit up whenever he knew an answer, a mixture of pride and happiness stealing into his features. If he was picked to answer, he'd smile as he spoke and carry on smiling afterwards, savoring his triumph. He was a front-of-the-class kid, one mature and disciplined enough to understand the importance of studies and the value of education, one who probably never got into trouble and would have made his parents proud—if they were around to see him. He had lively, clever, inquisitive eyes; eyes that wanted to know about all they could see.

Static suddenly filled the screen and then it went black again. It stayed that way for a long time.

Max let the tape run. His heart was pounding and he was getting a familiar fluttering in the pit of his belly, something he hadn't had since his early days as a detective, when he was on the verge of making a grim discovery; one part anticipating the find, one part fearing it, one part knowing it would be worse than before. At the start, it had always been more horrific than anything he'd imagined, the lengths one human being would go to to ensure the utmost suffering of another. Before he'd gone to jail, he was numb to it, immune, the limits of his imagination ending at the pit of hell. If he'd found someone dead of a single gunshot to the head, he'd consider the murderer a paragon of mercy and compassion—of all the things they could have done, they'd chosen the quickest, simplest way of taking life.

Prison had returned those first-time feelings to him, intact, as if all those years of going through the leftovers of monsters' feasts had happened to another.

The screen went white for a few seconds, then, briefly, blue, before a completely different place appeared—a concrete building the size of an aircraft hangar set in the middle of lush vegetation. Max paused the tape and studied the frozen, flickering image. It didn't look like anywhere in Haiti. There were trees all around the structure, an abundance of green, a health and vitality to the surrounding land.

He hit PLAY.

The next image was taken inside the building—a spacious hall with sunlight streaming in through high windows.