Mr. Clarinet

"Why don't you tell me 'bout that, what was 'really goin' on'—right from the start?"

"How much do you know?" Huxley asked. They were heading up the precarious mountain road. They passed a jeep in a ditch. Children were playing on it.

"Broad strokes—this: you and Allain kidnapped Charlie. Motive: to bring down Gustav Carver. Allain was in it for money first, then revenge. You were in it for payback then greenback, but payback before all else. How am I doin'?"

"Not bad." Huxley smirked. "Now, where do you want me to start?"

"Wherever you want."

"OK. Why don't I tell you all about Tonton Clarinette—Mr. Clarinet?"

"Go ahead. I'm all ears."

Chapter 66

"MY SISTER PATRICE—I used to call her 'Treese.' She had these beautiful eyes—green—like Smokey Robinson's. Cat's eyes on dark skin. People used to stop and stare at her she was so beautiful." Huxley smiled.

"How old was she?"

"No more than seven. It was hard to tell things like age and dates and stuff, because we were illiterate and innumerate, like our parents and their parents before them, like everyone we knew. We grew up in Clarinette, dirt-poor. As soon as we could walk we were helping our parents with whatever they were doing to put food on the table. I helped my mother pick fruit. I'd put mangoes and genip in baskets; then we'd go down to the roadside and sell them to pilgrims going to Saut d'Eau."

"What about your dad?" Max asked.

"I was scared of him. He was a real bad-tempered guy. Beat you over nothing. I'd look at him the wrong way and he'd get this thin stick and whip my little ass. He wasn't like that to Treese, though. No. He worshipped her. Made me jealous.

"I remember the day the trucks came to the village—big trucks, cement mixers. I thought monsters had come to eat us up. My dad told us the men driving them said they were going to put up huge buildings and make everyone in the town rich. He went to work on the site. Perry Paul owned it then. I think the idea was to build some sort of cheap accommodation for the pilgrims who come to Saut d'Eau. Most come from very far and they've got nowhere to stay. He built the temple too. I guess he wanted to create some kind of voodoo Mecca.

"After Gustav Carver put Paul out of business, he took over the project. There was a management change. Things were different. This man arrived one day—strangest-looking man I'd ever seen—a white man with orange hair. You never saw him working. All he ever seemed to do was play with kids. He became our friend. We used to play soccer. He bought us a ball.

"He was a fun guy. He made all the kids laugh. He told us stories, gave us presents—candy, clothes. He was like a great dad and a big kid brother all rolled into one. He used to film us too with this Super 8 camera he had. It made him look like half his face was this black ugly machine with a protruding round glass eye—kind of creepy and funny at the same time. He filmed Treese most of all.

"One day he took me and Treese to one side and told us he was going away. We were real sad. My sister started to cry. And he said not to worry, he'd take us with him if we wanted to come. We said yes. He told us to promise not to tell our parents anything, otherwise he couldn't take us.

"We agreed. We left the village that afternoon without telling anyone. We met our friend in a car all the way down the road. There was another man with him. We'd never seen him before. Treese started saying maybe we should go back. The stranger got out of the car, grabbed her, and threw her inside. He did the same to me. We both started crying as they drove off. Then they injected us with something, and I don't remember much else that happened after that—how we got to the house on La Gonâve or anything."

They'd passed the Carver estate and were heading uphill along a bumpy, potholed stretch of road. They'd had to stop once for a broken-down truck and another time for a man coming down the mountainside with his herd of skeletal goats.

"You saw the tape, right? The one I left for you? You watched it?"

"Where'd you get it?" Max changed gun hands.

"I'll tell you later. You saw what was on it—the potion they gave us?"

"Yeah." Max nodded.

"My memory's pretty fucked up from that whole 'indoctrination process.' You couldn't put me on a witness stand because whatever I've got up here"—Huxley tapped his cranium—"my brain is like spaghetti. I remember things like they were in a dream. I don't know how much of it is disassociation and how much is down to the zombie juice they fed us.

"It wasn't as strong as the stuff the voodoo priests make people catatonic with, but it was enough to make you lose all control of your senses. They used to feed it to us every day. Like communion. We'd go up, receive this green liquid in a cup, drink it.

"Then there was the hypnosis with music notes. Gustav Carver would sit in the middle of this all-white room and we'd stand around him in a circle, holding hands. He played his clarinet to us. And while he was playing we'd get our 'instructions.'"

"What about your sister? Where was she in all this?" Max asked.

"I don't know. The last time I remember seeing her was in the back of the car when we were kidnapped." Huxley shook his head. "She's most likely dead. We weren't allowed to grow up."

"How do you know this?"

"I'll come to that too," Huxley answered, and then resumed his story. "I was sold to a Canadian plastic surgeon called Leboeuf. He always looked at me like he was stripping me down to the bone. He made me watch him doing his operations. I learned how to cut people up. I got handy with knives. I taught myself to read out of medical books.

"Justice was on my side when I killed him, but it was also in Gustav Carver's pocket because they never tied Leboeuf in with him. No one believed what I told them about being kidnapped in Haiti, about being brainwashed, about Tonton Clarinette, about my sister. Why should they? I'd just cut a man up into little pieces and redecorated the house with his insides."

"What about when the cops searched the house for evidence, right after they'd found the body?"

"They didn't find anything linked to Carver—or if they did, it never found its way out into the open. The old man had tentacles everywhere," Huxley said. "I busted out of the hospital they had me in because Gustav tried to have me killed in there. No one believed a damn word I said. It was a nuthouse. I wasn't surprised. By the time they did start thinking that maybe there was something in it, I was gone, a fugitive, on the run, a wanted man.

"I lived on the street. I hustled. I did what I had to do. I didn't like some of it, but that's the life I was handed. All the while I was on the run I started putting it together—what had happened, who was behind it. I remembered a person LeBoeuf had known—not someone from the surgery, a friend of his. Shawn Michaels. He was a banker.

"I tracked him down. I made him tell me about Carver's business—how it worked, everything."

"Then you killed him?" Max said.