Mr. Clarinet

"I'm a businessman, not a charity worker. There has to be something in it for me. Risk versus reward." Carver reached for another cigarette. "How do you think we got to you, in prison? All those calls? Did you ever think of that?"

"I guessed you had juice."

"Joose!" Carver erupted in laughter, mimicking Max's accent. "Joose, you call it? Ha, ha! You damn Yankee Doodlers and your slang! Sure I've got joose, Mingus! I've got the whole fucking orchard—and the pickers and the pressers and the damn packagers! How about a prominent East Coast senator who's very good friends with someone on the damn Attica board? How's that for joose?"

Carver lit his cigarette.

"Why me?" Max asked.

"You were—in your prime—one of the best private detectives in the country, if not the best, if your ratio of solved-to-unsolved cases was anything to go by. Friends of mine sung your praises till they were blue in the face. You even came damn close to uncovering us once or twice in your earlier career. Damn close. Do you know that? I was suitably impressed."

"When?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out." Carver smiled as he blew pale-blue tusks of smoke through his nose. "How did you find out about me? Who broke? Who cracked? Who betrayed me?"

Max didn't reply.

"Oh come on Mingus! Tell me! What does it fucking matter?"

Max shook his head.

Carver's face dropped to an ungainly angry heap somewhere past his nose. His eyes narrowed to slits and blazed behind them.

"I order you to tell me the name!" he yelled, grabbing his cane from the back of the chair and pushing himself up.

"Sit down, Carver!" Max shot up from his chair, snatched the cane, and pushed the old man roughly back on his seat. Carver looked at him, surprised and afraid. Then he glanced at the cigarette burning in his ashtray and crushed it out.

"You're outnumbered here." He leered up at Max. "You could beat me to death with that"—he nodded at the cane—"but you wouldn't get out of here alive."

"I'm not here to kill you," Max said, glancing over his shoulder, expecting to see the maid coming for the ashtray and maybe others with her, rushing to their master's defense. There was no one there.

He dropped the cane on the couch and sat down.

Then heavy footsteps entered the room. Max turned around and saw two of Paul's men standing near the entrance. He held his hand up for them to stay put.

Carver saw them and snorted contemptuously.

"Looks like the odds just changed," Max said.

"Not really," Carver said.

"Your servants? You got them from Noah's Ark, didn't you?"

"Of course."

"They weren't good enough for your 'clients'?"

"That's right."

"They were lucky."

"Really? You call their life 'lucky'?"

"Yeah. They didn't spend their childhood getting raped."

Carver gave him a long look, scrutiny that gradually turned to amusement.

"How long have you been here, Mingus, in this country? Three, four weeks? Do you know why people have children here? The poor, the masses? It's not for the same cutesy reasons you have them back in America: you know, because you want to—most of the time.

"The poor don't plan to start families here. It just happens. They just breed. That's all there is to it. They fuck, they multiply. They're human amoebas. And when the babies are old enough to walk their parents put them to work, doing what they do. Most of the people in this country are born on their knees—born slaves, born to serve, no better off than their pathetic ancestors."

Carver paused for breath and another cigarette.

"You see—what I do, what I've done—I've given these kids a life they couldn't possibly hope to have, a life that their dumb, illiterate, no-hoper parents couldn't even have dreamed about because they weren't born with the brains big enough. Not all of them suffer. I've educated almost all the ones I couldn't sell, and all those who made the grade I've given jobs to. A lot of them have gone on to do very well for themselves. Do you know what I've helped create here? Something we didn't have before—a middle class. Not rich, not poor, but in the middle, with aspirations to do better. I've helped this country become that little bit more normal, that little bit more Western, in line with other places.

"And as for those I sold. Well, do you know how some of them end up, Mingus? The clever ones, the tough ones, the survivors? When they get old enough, they wise up and they play their sugar daddies like big fat pianos. They end up wealthy, set for life. Most of them go on to lead perfectly normal lives in civilized countries—new names, new identities—the past just a bad blurry memory—if that.

"You think of me as evil, I know, but I have given thousands of people honor, dignity, money, and a home. I've given them someone they can respect when they look in the mirror. Hell—I gave them the damn mirror too. In short, Mr. Mingus, I've given them life!"

"You're not God, Carver."

"Oh no? Well then, I'm the next best thing in a place like this—a white man with money!" he thundered. "Servitude and kowtowing to the white man is in this country's DNA."

"I beg to differ, Mr. Carver," Max said. "I don't know too much about this place, true. But from what I can see, it's been royally fucked over by people like you—you rich folk with your big houses and servants to wipe your asses. Take, take, take—never give a damn thing back. You're not helping anyone but yourself, Mr. Carver. Your charity's just a lie you tell people like me to make us look the other way."

"You're sounding just like Vincent Paul. How much is he paying you?"

"He's not paying me anything," Max said.

Carver held his eyes for a short moment and looked away, tightening his paw into a fist.

Max looked at the open cigarette box, and a mad craving suddenly leaped out of nowhere and jumped on his shoulders. He suddenly wanted a smoke, something to do with his hands, something to take the edge off what he was sitting through. Then he spied his glass of diluted whiskey and considered for a while downing that, but he shook off the temptation.

"I knew about little Charlie, you know," Carver said without turning to Max, addressing the bookshelves instead. "I knew the first time I saw him. I knew that he wasn't mine. She tried to keep it from me. But I knew. I knew he wasn't mine."

"How?" Max asked. He hadn't expected this.

"Not completely mine," Carver continued in the same tone, as if he hadn't heard Max's question. "Autism. It's a possessive illness. It keeps a little of the person for itself and never ever relinquishes what it has."