Mr. Clarinet

They drove on in silence for a while. Max holstered the Glock.

"Tell me about Eddie Faustin?"

"Using him was my idea too," Huxley said.

"How did you turn him? I thought he was loyal to the old man."

"Everyone has their price."

"What was Eddie's?"

"Francesca. She was Faustin's wet-dream girl. I told him if he helped us out he could have her—through his bokor—Madame Leballec. She was a good friend of my mother's," Huxley explained.

"Hold up," Max said. "You told Mrs. Leballec to tell Eddie he could 'have' Francesca? So she was a fake?"

"Yes and no. She has some powers, but she's a black magician—a witch. Lying's part of their repertoire," Huxley said. "She has many believers."

"So, when we went to see her and Eddie's 'spirit' told us to go to the temple—"

"—where you met me, and I gave you the box that had Eddie's address in it, where you found the videotape."

"You'd paid her to show us the way?"

"Yes. And, by the way, she's no cripple either—and Philippe's her lover, not her son. And please don't ask me how she tricked the séance out, 'cause I don't know," Huxley said and then he laughed.

"Shit!" Max said. "OK—back to Faustin."

"Eddie was deeply troubled. Paranoid that all the bad stuff he and his brother did when they were Macoutes was catching up with him. He was visiting Madame Leballec on a monthly basis to get his fortune read.

"And that's where we came in. Allain paid Madame Leballec a lot of money to give Faustin a tailor-made fortune—one where he got the girl of his dreams and lived happily ever after.

"She told Faustin that a man he'd never met was going to approach him about a top-secret job. She told him he had to do it if he wanted his dreams to come true."

"So you met him?"

"Yeah, one night outside the taffia shack where he went. When he heard what I was proposing he didn't want to go along with it. He rushed off back to Madame Leballec. We'd anticipated that. She upped the ante. She persuaded Faustin that Charlie Carver was really a spirit who had escaped from Baron Samedi and had possessed the boy. The boy needed to be handed back to Baron Samedi's envoy—namely me."

"Bullshit!"

"He fell for it."

"Christ!"

"Faustin was so stupid it was practically a talent. Factor in the superstition that everything that goes bump in the night is some madcap spirit and you've got the perfect fanatic."

"OK, tell me about the kidnapping. Things didn't go according to plan, did they?"

"In what way?" Huxley asked.

"The riot," Max replied.

"No, that was planned. Faustin had a lot of enemies. We paid some of them to be where we told Faustin to be. He thought I was going to walk up to the car and take the child away."

"The nanny—Rose—died."

"Faustin killed her, we didn't."

"Did you intend for Faustin to die?"

"Yes."

"Who took Charlie?"

"I did. I was in disguise, among the crowd attacking the car. I grabbed the boy, disappeared with him."

They went through a small village of thatched huts. Max saw no signs of life whatsoever, except for a small, tethered goat, caught in the headlights, munching on a bush.

"So, who was Mr. Clarinet? Carver or Codada?"

"They both were. Codada filmed the kids and stole them to order. Carver stole their souls and sold their bodies."

"What about that symbol? That bent cross with the broken-off arm?"

"You didn't recognize that?"

"No." Max shook his head.

"Manet's Le Fifre. Remember that painting? The soldier boy with the flute? It was the organization's badge, how they recognized each other. There was one hanging in the club you met Allain in. He sat you where you'd notice it. There was one in Codada's office, when Allain took you to meet him. There was another in Noah's Ark, right outside Eloise Krolak's classroom. There's one hanging in every club. The symbol is an outline of the painting. It was meant to be subliminal," Huxley said and chuckled. "Maybe it was too subliminal."

"You could've made this easier, just left me an anonymous note telling me who to look for."

"No," Huxley said. "It couldn't be that easy. You'd have wanted to know who was behind the note. You would have found us."

"But couldn't you have just blown the whistle on the Carvers?"

"Here? You'd have better luck whispering to the deaf. And you know what happened in Canada. That wasn't the way it was going to work," Huxley said.

They continued in silence. Max tried not to think about the way he'd been played from the very beginning to the very end, and tried to focus instead on the positive outcome, that he would soon be freeing Charlie from his captors and reuniting him with his real parents. That was the main thing, the important thing, the only thing. That was why he'd come here.

He didn't know what he was going to do about Huxley.

"What about Allain?" Max asked. "Where'd he go?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. He never told me. We settled up and that was the last I saw of him. I don't expect he'll ever be found."

"So you did get money out of it?"

"Yeah, sure. I didn't want to go back to preying on horny faggots," Huxley said. "We're not too far now."

Max checked his watch. It had turned eight p.m. In the distance he could see the lights of a town. He guessed they were close to the Dominican Republic.

"Unlike you, Max, I have no regrets. Mine might have been a poor life, a miserable life even—but it was my life. Not theirs—mine. And it was my sister's life too. Our lives. Ours to keep, ours to live. They took it from us. They took her from me. So, I took it all from them.

"Allain didn't give a shit about those kids. He was horrified and disgusted by what his father was doing, sure, but you know, it was always really just about him. Not anyone else. He just wanted to rip his dad off, piss in his face and steal his money. He used to say the only things worth doing in life are worth doing for money. I never understood that mentality.

"You say you made no difference, that you're a failure? You shouldn't think that way, Max. You killed monsters and saved the lives of the children they would have fed on. Just like I did."

The road was taking them downhill, closer to the border. Gaining on his left, on top of a nearby mountain, Max saw the lights of a house.