Mr. Clarinet

"You can't teach a man his nature, Joe."

"I hear that. But you can teach him sense from none-sense. And some of that shit you pulled back then, man? That was some senseless none-sense."

Those parental tones again. Max was close to fifty, two-thirds of his life as good as gone. He didn't need a lecture from Joe, who was only three years older than he but had always acted like it was ten more. Anyway, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. What had happened had happened. There was no undoing any of it. Besides, Joe was no saint. When they'd been partners, there had been as many brutality complaints against him as there were against Max. No one had given a flying fuck or done anything. Miami had been a war zone. The city had needed to meet violence with violence.

"We cool, Joe?"

"All-ways." They hugged.

"See you when I get back."

"In one piece, man—the only way I wanna see ya."

"You will. Give my love to the kids."

"Take care, brother," Joe said.

They went their separate ways.

Opening the door of his rented Honda, Max realized that Joe had called him "brother" for the first time ever in all of the twenty-five years he'd known him. They might have been best friends, but Joe was a segregationist when it came to his terms of endearment.

That's when Max guessed things were going to be bad in Haiti.

Chapter 4

AT THE HOTEL, Max took a shower and tried to catch some sleep, but it wouldn't come.

He kept on thinking about Boukman walking free while he was in prison, Boukman laughing in his face, Boukman slicing up more kids. He didn't know what pissed him off more. He should have killed him when he had the chance.

He got up, turned on the light, and grabbed Joe's file on the Carvers. He started reading and didn't stop until he'd finished it.

* * *

Nobody seemed particularly sure where the Carvers came from, nor when they first appeared in Haiti. One rumor stated that the family were descendants of Polish soldiers who deserted Napoleon's army en masse to fight alongside Toussaint L'Ouverture's insurgents in the 1790s. Others linked the family to a Scottish clan called the MacGarvers, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived on the island, where they owned and ran corn and sugar-cane plantations.

What is known is that by 1934, Fraser Carver, Allain's grandfather, had become a multimillionaire—not only the richest man in Haiti but one of the wealthiest men in the Caribbean. He'd made his fortune by flooding the island with cheap essential foods—rice, beans, milk (powdered and evaporated), cornmeal, cooking oil—bought for him at a huge discount by the American military and shipped into the country for free. This very quickly drove many traders out of business and eventually gave Carver the monopoly on virtually every imported foodstuff sold in the country. He opened the country's second national bank—the Banque Populaire d'Haďti in the late 1930s.

Fraser Carver died in 1947, leaving his business empire to Allain's father, Gustav. Gustav's twin, Clifford, turned up dead in a ravine in 1959. Although the official cause was given as a car accident, no vehicle, wrecked or otherwise, was found near the body, whose every bone appeared to have been broken at least once. The CIA report quoted an unnamed witness who saw members of the militia—the FSN or Tonton Macoutes, as they were more commonly known—grab Clifford off a residential street and bundle him into a car. The report concluded that Gustav Carver had had his brother killed with help from his friend and close associate, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the country's president.

Gustav Carver had first met François Duvalier in Michigan in 1943. Duvalier was one of twenty Haitian doctors sent to the city's university to train in public-health medicine. Carver was in town on business. They were introduced by a mutual friend, after Duvalier, who knew of the family by reputation and legend, insisted on meeting Gustav. Carver later told a friend about this meeting and said he was convinced that Duvalier was bound for greatness, a future president of Haiti.

By then three quarters of the country's population were plagued by yaws, a highly contagious and crippling tropical disease, which ate away at limbs, noses, and lips. Its victims were invariably the shoeless poor, as the disease entered their bodies through their bare feet in the form of a spirochete.

Duvalier was sent to the most infected area of Haiti, the Rural Clinic of Gressier, fifteen miles southwest of Port-au-Prince. He quickly ran out of the penicillin he needed to cure the sick and sent for more supplies from the capital, only to be told that their stock was almost depleted and that he would have to wait another week for supplies to come in from the United States. He sent a message to Gustav Carver for help. Carver immediately dispatched ten truckloads of penicillin, as well as beds and tents.

Duvalier cured the entire region of yaws and his reputation spread among the poor, who hobbled great distances on crumbling legs, to be cured. They nicknamed him "Papa Doc." Thus "Papa Doc" became a popular hero, a savior of the poor.

Gustav Carver funded Duvalier's 1957 presidential election campaign, and supplied some of the muscle to bully voters who couldn't be bribed into supporting the good doctor. Duvalier eventually won by a landslide. Carver was rewarded with more monopolies, this time in the country's lucrative coffee and cocoa businesses.

Haiti entered another dark age when Papa Doc declared himself "president for life" and went on to become the most feared and reviled tyrant in the country's history. Both the army and the Tonton Macoutes killed, tortured, and raped thousands of Haitians—either on the orders of the government or, more often than not, for personal reasons, usually to steal a plot of land or take over a business.

Gustav Carver continued to build his vast fortune, thanks to his coziness with Duvalier. The latter not only rewarded him with more monopolies—including sugar cane and cement—but also had accounts in Carver's Banque Populaire d'Haďti, where he regularly deposited the millions of dollars in U.S. aid he received every three months, then siphoned most of it to Swiss bank accounts.

Papa Doc died on April 21, 1971. Jean-Claude took his father's place as "president for life" at the age of nineteen. Although nominally in power, Baby Doc had absolutely no interest in running Haiti and left it all to his mother, and later his wife, Michele, whose wedding to Baby Doc made the 1981 Guinness Book of World Records as the third most expensive ever; while in the same year, an IMF report rated Haiti the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

* * *

Miami dawn. Max finished reading and stepped out onto the balcony. Like the best businesspeople, the Carvers were ruthless opportunists. And like the best businesspeople, they'd have a phone book's worth of enemies.

The feeble sunlight had yet to fade out most of the stars, and the breeze still had the chill of night about it, but he was sure it was going to be a nice day. Every day out of prison was a nice day.