Mr. Clarinet

Max walked inside. The light was dim and rust-tinted, but he could make everything out. It was a lot bigger than he'd expected. He could see where they'd knocked down the back of the original house and built an extension because they either couldn't afford or hadn't bothered to paint the walls a uniform color. A third of the interior was the same blue as the exterior, while the rest was rough, unadorned, unsanded gray brickwork. The floor was plain cement.

Wooden tables and chairs stood around the edges of the room and clustered up in the corners. No two tables and chairs were matched. Some were tall and round, others squat and square, one was made up of four banged-together school desks, another was once part of a larger table that had been sawn in half and modified, while there was one table with brass-or copper-capped corners that looked suspiciously like an antique.

There were plenty of people inside, most of them white males. All off-duty American and—he supposed—UN troops. Max could spot his countrymen. Twice as big as their multinational counterparts; one part exercise, one part overeating, one part genes—hefty arms, broad shoulders, small heads, and no necks; just like him. Most of the few female soldiers who were around were put together the same way. They were all talking among themselves, telling stories and jokes, laughing, drinking only Bud or Coke out of bottles. They gave Max a blatant once-over when he passed them by. He stood out in his suit and shiny black shoes, overdressed in a room of jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers.

He made his way to the bar. There were no stools, only standing and leaning room. There was exactly one bottle on display behind the counter—standard Barbancourt rum, unopened, yellow-paper cap seal still intact. The beer and Cokes were being served out of a cooler.

Max surprised the barman by asking for rum. The barman got the bottle down, opened it, and poured out slightly more than a double measure in a clear plastic beaker. He was going to dump a handful of ice into it but Max shook his head no. He paid in dollars. Two bucks. No change.

The music was coming from the courtyard to the left, through a doorway with no door. An amused-looking Haitian DJ was manning a CD player behind a table, pumping some God-awful HiNRG with an androgynous singer rhyming "love" with "dove" in a German accent, while in front of him a few dozen off-duty peacekeepers were dancing like epileptics having fits on an ice rink.

Max felt eyes on him. He turned his head and followed the feeling back to a dark corner near the bar. Two Haitian women were smiling at him, catching his eye, beckoning him. Prostitutes. They had the same look the world over. He felt a tug in his groin, a pull on his balls. Black women and brown women were his favorites, the ones he always gravitated to, the ones who made him stop and do a double take.

One of the whores started coming over to him, walking awkwardly in a too-tight black dress and tall silver heels. He realized he'd been staring at them without seeing them, all the while playing host to his memories and fantasies. They'd sensed his need in an instant, smelled the curdled lust on him. Max stared the woman in the eye and stopped her in her tracks, her smile giving way to a worried look. He shook his head and looked away, back at the DJ and his dancers.

He sipped his drink. The rum was surprisingly good: sweet and mellow on his tongue, easy on his throat. Instead of the bare-knuckle hook to the gut he was expecting, it gave him a cozy, comforting feeling. The embrace was warm and familiar.

You never really got over an addiction. You could stay clean for the rest of your life, but it was always there, the impulse to start again, shadowing you, walking parallel, ready to catch you if you slipped. It was best to quit a habit when the high was still greater than the low and the pleasure outweighed the pain. That way you kept good memories and had no regrets, like people you meet and leave behind on vacation.

Max hadn't been an alcoholic, but he'd been getting there. He'd had a drink at the end of every shift, no matter when they'd finished up. As early at seven or eight in the morning, he and Joe would find the first open bar and sit with people knocking one back on their way to work, and others getting ready to find breakfast after an all-night binge. It was always only the one drink in the mornings—a shot of Irish whiskey, neat, no rocks.

He'd drunk a lot when he'd gone out, but never so much that he'd lost control. It had helped him forget he was a cop and lose the telltale aura of battered rectitude and all-seeing otherness cops have about them. It had eased him through difficult social situations. It had gone well with meals and lonely nights. And it had helped him get laid. A lot.

Max had never taken his pleasures by halves. He'd smoked a pack of red Marlboros a day, more when he was drinking and even more when he was on the verge of cracking a case. He'd smoked plenty of reefer with Joe, too—good Jamaican shit that never failed to put him in a good place. Joe had stopped when he'd read that smoking too much weed made a man psychotic and gave him tits. Max dismissed it as a scare story dreamed up by the FBI's PR department, and carried on regardless.

Sandra had helped him quit it all—booze, weed, cigarettes, and his job.

Then she'd said yes to marriage.

The night before his wedding he'd deliberately slipped off the wagon. He'd bought a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Marlboros. He'd been free of both for a year, but he wanted to say good-bye to his old ways in style, just the three of them—cigarettes, booze, solitude—together one last time.

He'd driven out to Ocean Drive, sat by the sea, and got reacquainted. The cigarette had tasted horrible, the booze had scalded his throat, and he felt like a freak looking for trouble out there on his own in the sand, with the cruisers, petty criminals, beach bums, and dumb-ass tourists looking to get mugged. He'd doused his cigarette in the bottle, screwed it shut, lobbed it out into the sea, and walked away, feeling more stupid than satisfied.

Now the bottle had washed back.

No one was smoking in the bar. Max finished his glass and ordered another.

The drink was loosening him up, helping him to relax and think.

The Carvers: Gustav was scary, but remarkable. Max admired him. The old man ran the show, despite his illness. They'd have to pry the strings from his cold dead hand.

Allain was probably a nicer guy. He'd had other ideas about their business, a more inclusive way of running things. Though he was crushed at home, he wasn't lacking in courage.

There wasn't a lot of love between father and son—maybe none whatsoever—but there was respect—at least from Allain's side—and there was Charlie. Charlie Carver was holding the family together, uniting them.

And the same went for Francesca Carver. She hated him but he saw where she was coming from and he empathized with her, even pitied her. She wanted out of her marriage and out of the Carvers and out of Haiti, but she wasn't leaving without her boy—either literally or figuratively; not until she'd found out what had happened to him, not until she'd got closure.