Mr. Clarinet

"Two sisters and a brother, no longer in the country or ever likely to come back."

"Your mother?"

"She died in Miami the day we arrived. Pancreatic cancer. I didn't even know she was ill. Nobody told me."

"Aunts, uncles, cousins?"

"I have no family in Haiti. Outside of my son—if he's here."

"What about your friends?"

"True ones are a rare commodity at the best of times, but in Haiti, unless they've known you all your life, 'friends' in the monied circles we used to move in have the habit of becoming scarce when you hit a lean patch and extinct if you're ruined. To them, the only thing worse than not having any money is having had it and lost it. They shun you like your misfortune's contagious. I asked one of my father's 'friends' of long standing for some help—somewhere to stay and a small loan to tide me over until I got back on my feet. This was someone my father had helped out a lot in the past. He turned me down flat, said I wasn't a viable risk," Paul said bitterly. Max could practically see the loathing coming off him.

"So what did you do after you saw what had happened to your estate? Did you have any money?"

"No. Not a cent." Paul laughed. "What I did have was Anaďs, my nanny. I was a virtual son to her. She'd cared for me ever since I was born. In fact, she'd helped deliver me. We were so close I swore she was my real mother. Knowing my father, I wouldn't have been too surprised. He and my grandfather weren't exactly advocates of monogamy.

"Anaďs took us in. She lived in a tiny little house in La Saline. We all slept and ate in the same room, washed at an outdoor tap. It was a life I'd seen but never thought I'd know, and as for Josie, well, she got a serious culture shock, but she used to say English prison was worse."

"You never thought of going back to England, facing the music?"

"No."

"What about her?"

Paul sat up and pulled his chair in closer to the desk.

"I wasn't going to let the woman I loved go back to hell, not when I had the power to stop it."

"So you did wrong to do right? At least you're consistent."

"What else could I have done, Mingus?"

"Do the crime you do the time."

"Sorry I asked. Once a cop…"

"No," Max cut him off. "She killed somebody because she was drunk behind the wheel. She was no saint. She wasn't in the right. And you know that, same as me. Think about the victim's family: flip the picture and it's her getting killed in a drunk hit-and-run, and you're left with the grieving. You'd see things very differently, believe me."

"Those three kids you killed, do you think about their families?" Vincent asked icily.

"No, I don't," Max spoke through gritted teeth. "Know why? Because those three 'kids' raped and tortured a little girl for fun. I know they were fucked up on crack, but most crackheads don't do that to people. Those shitheels didn't deserve their lives. The guy Francesca killed is a whole different ballgame and you know it."

Vincent pulled himself right in to the desk, cupped his massive fist in his palm and fingers and leaned over. Max saw his disarmingly pretty eyes again.

Neither of them spoke. Max held Vincent's stare for the longest time. The big man finally broke the standoff. Max resumed his questioning.

"Anyone come out here looking for you? Cops?"

"Not that I knew of then, but it was only a matter of time before our trail led to here. We lived in La Saline for a year and a half. We were safe there. It's the kind of place where you don't go to unless you live there, or know someone, or have a well-armed military escort—or want to commit suicide. It's exactly the same now."

"How were the people toward you?"

"Fine. They accepted us. Obviously Josie might as well have come from outer space, but we never had a single problem all the time we were there.

"For a living we worked at a local petrol station, and then we ended up managing it. We did something quite innovative at the time here. We added a diner, a carwash, a garage, and a small shop. Anaďs ran the diner and Josie ran the shop. She dyed her hair brown. I only employed people from La Saline. We had to pay off a couple of Macoutes for protection—Eddie Faustin and his teenage brother, Salazar.

"I could tell Eddie had a serious thing for Josie. He'd be round there every day, bringing her something, always when I was out getting supplies. She always refused to take it, but in the nicest way, so as not to offend him."

"What did you do about it?"

"What could I do? He was a Macoute—and one of the most feared ones in the country."

"Must have pissed you off, being that weak?"

"Of course it did." Vincent looked at him quizzically, trying to determine his angle.

Max didn't have one. He'd wanted to get a rise out of Paul, deliberately unsettle him.

"Go on."

"Business was good. Two years after we'd arrived, we moved out of La Saline and bought a small house in town. I thought we were pretty much safe. No one had come after us. We could relax a little. Josie had taken well to life in Haiti. She really took to the people and they to her. She never really got homesick, but obviously she missed her parents. She couldn't even send them a postcard to let them know she was OK, but she accepted that that was the price to pay for her freedom.

"Things went wrong the morning Gustav Carver stopped for petrol. I refused to serve him. His driver got out, pulled a gun on me, and ordered me to pump gas. Of course, the minute he did that he and his car were suddenly surrounded by anybody who was around—some twenty people, some of them had guns, others machetes and knives. They would have killed him and old man Carver if I'd given the word, but what better punishment than to humiliate a proud man in front of the son of the man whose life he'd destroyed? I tell you it was sweet.

"I took the gun off the driver and told him and his boss to clear off my property. The driver had to push the car three miles in the hot sun to the next petrol station—because there were no cell phones then, car phones didn't work out here, and we don't exactly have emergency breakdown services to come and bail you out if you break down.

"Carver was looking at me through the back window like he wanted to kill me. Then he saw Josie and his expression changed. He smiled, at her, but—mostly—at me.

"I'm not sure if things would have been different if I'd let Carver fill his car up and drive away. It's not the way I really live my life. I can't imagine a situation where I'd ever kowtow to that evil bastard. If I did that, I might as well have driven those bulldozers through my family estate myself.

"But, all that day and the next, I kept expecting the worst, that a couple of carloads of Macoutes would come for me."