Mr. Clarinet

"You're still going to kill us whatever," she sneered, French accent smothering American inflections.

Paul walked in, dragging Codada behind him by his cuffed legs.

Eloise cried out when she saw him. She tried to stand.

"Sit down!" Max thundered. "You will answer my questions or that child-raping scumbag over there will lose a lot more than his teeth. Understand?"

Max didn't wait for an answer.

"Charlie Carver? What did you do with him?"

"Nothing. We don't have him. We never had him. We never would have had him. You've come to the wrong people, detective."

"Have I?" Max got in her face. He'd come back to Charlie later. "Where is Claudette Thodore?"

"I don't know who she is."

Max pulled the picture out of his wallet and showed her. She glanced at it for a second.

"She wasn't one of mine."

"What do you mean?"

"I didn't work with her."

"'Work with her'? What do you mean?"

"I didn't groom her."

"'Groom her'?"

"Teach her etiquette—table manners—the things you need to know in polite society."

Max was about to ask her to expand on what she'd said, but Codada gurgled something from the floor.

"He says he'll talk now," Paul translated.

"Yeah? Well, I don't want to listen to him right now. Take him back."

Vincent dragged Codada out.

Max turned back to Eloise.

"Grooming—go, tell me."

"You mean you can't figure it out?" Eloise sniggered.

"Oh, I know what it is," Max sneered. "I just want to hear it from you."

"Our clients are all very wealthy men, people who move in high society circles. They like their product to be of a certain standard."

"Their 'product' being these children?"

"Yes. Before selling them we teach them table manners, and the correct way to behave around adults."

"As in saying 'please' and 'thank you' when they're being raped?"

Eloise didn't answer.

"Answer me."

"It's more than just that." She got defensive.

"Oh?"

"Ill-mannered people get nowhere in life."

"And you're what—doing them a favor, teaching them how to hold a knife and fork at some pedophile's dinner table? Give me a motherfucking break, Eloise!" Max shouted. "Why'd you do it, Eloise? I saw those tapes. I saw what happened to you."

"You saw, but you didn't see," she countered, boring into Max with hard eyes. "You should look again."

"Why don't you just fill me in on what I'm missing?"

"Maurice loves me."

"Bull-shit!" Max spat.

"Why?" she countered calmly. "What did you expect to find? A victim? A helpless, weeping adult-child? Someone right out of your training manual?" She was defiant and angry, her voice falling just outside a shout. Yet, in spite of this, her delivery was completely devoid of passion, as if she had been rehearsing this speech all her life and the words had lost their meaning to her, become a row of audio dots she had to follow until they stopped.

"It's easy for you to paint us all as innocent, vulnerable little victims, but we're not all the same. Some of us beat the system. Some of us come out on top."

"You call this coming out on top?" Max threw his hands around the room. "You're gonna die and you're gonna die bad."

"No one has ever treated me as well as him. Ever. In my whole life. I have no regrets. If I could change anything, I really wouldn't," she said calmly.

"Tell me about Maurice. How did he steal you? What was his technique?"

"He didn't 'steal me,'" she said impatiently. "He rescued me."

"Whatever." Max sighed. "Just tell me how he did it."

"The first thing I remember about him was his camera—he had a Super 8 then. It covered half his face. I used to see him in the mornings. Me and my friends would wave to him. He'd talk to us, give us things—candy, these little wire figurines he made of us. He paid me the most attention. He made me laugh. My friends were so jealous." Eloise smiled. "One day he asked me if I wanted to go away with him—go on a trip to a magical place. I said yes. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting next to him in a car. Best decision I ever made."

Max tried to swallow but his mouth was arid. She was right. She wasn't what he was expecting. He knew all about Stockholm syndrome, where kidnap victims fall in love with their captors, but he'd never encountered that in a child-abuse case before.

He was deeply confused—and lost and horrified, and the worst part was he couldn't help himself from showing it, letting her see into him, letting her have the edge on him, the authority.

"But—what about your family?"

She let out a sour laugh, her face rigid, her eyes cold and fixed.

"My family? You mean my 'apple-pie Mom and Dad,' like you have in America? Is that what you think when you speak of my 'family'?"

Max looked at her blankly.

"Well, it wasn't like that, let me tell you. The little I can remember I'd give anything to forget. Eight to a tiny one-room house, so poor the only thing I had to eat was dirt cake. Do you know what dirt cake is? It's a little cornmeal and a lot of dirt mixed together with sewer water and left outside to dry into a cake. That's what I ate every day."

She stopped and looked at him defiantly, goading him to come back at her with something bigger, to try and net her with some homespun morality.

When she saw he wasn't going there, something in her changed and became unsure. Then she breathed deeply through her nose, held in the air, closed her eyes, and lowered her head.

She held her breath for well over a minute, her eyeballs squirming back and forth behind her eyelids, her fingers screwing up the corners of her handkerchief, and her lips moving fast but soundlessly, either in prayer or conflict with her conscience. Then, one by one, the neurotic motions timed out: she put the handkerchief down on her lap and rested her hands, palms down. Her lips froze and her eyes rolled to a stop.