Mr. Clarinet

"Listen, I wasn't bothering you, but you are bothering me," Max barked, loud enough to make people leave their conversations and look over. "And you mention my wife again and I will tear your head off and shit in the stump. You got that?"

Huxley nodded, looking petrified. Right then Max could have played with Huxley's fear, toyed with it, stirred it into terror and offloaded a few grudges that way, but he let it go. The guy—and all those media guys—had just been doing their jobs and chasing promotions, same as everyone born with ambition and enough ruthlessness to trample over people to get there. If he'd been an upright cop, never cut any corners, done absolutely everything by the book, the press would have been on his side, championing his cause—and he still would have done prison time for manslaughter. Either way he'd have lost.

Max needed a piss. He hadn't had one since he'd been driven to the Carvers'. The tension of the evening had distracted him from his expanding bladder. He looked around the bar, but there didn't seem to be any obvious doorway people disappeared through, let alone anything marked out. He asked the barman, who tilted his head right to a spot behind where the prostitutes were standing.

Max walked over. The girls perked up and smoothed and straightened their dresses with lightning downstrokes and turned on their open, inviting stares. Their looks reminded him of Huxley's look—instant, one-spoon-and-stir friendship, trust, and discretion, all available for the asking, as long as you paid the price—a salesman shedding his soul piece by piece with every successful deal. Journalists and whores slept in the same bed. Mind you, he thought, how much different was he? Working for the people he had worked for? Looking the other way as he cleaned up their messes? We all did things we didn't want to do, for money. It was the way of the world—sooner or later, everything and everyone was for sale.

There were two bathrooms, male and female gender symbols sloppily painted in bright blue and pink on doors fitted at ankle height above the sloping, dusty floor. In between them was a room behind a wooden-bead curtain. There was an open camp bed with a bare pillow on it and an overturned box of Bud with an oil lamp on it. Max guessed it was where the barman or caretaker slept.

Inside the cubicle, a polished black cistern was fitted low, level with Max's face. The toilet didn't have a seat and there was no water in the bowl, just a black hole. He pissed a long stream and heard it gurgle where it hit something soft and wet and hollow a few feet under. It smelled faintly of ammonia and rotten flowers—the scent of the industrial-strength lime and disinfectant they were throwing down after the day's sewage.

Max heard someone walk past the cubicle, light a cigarette, and inhale deeply. He stepped out and saw Shawn Huxley in the corridor, close by, back to the wall, one foot up against it.

"Was that interesting? Listening to me piss? Did you get it on tape?" Max sneered. He was drunk, not badly, but enough to recalibrate his center of balance.

"The Carver boy," Huxley said. "That's why you're here, right?"

"What if I am?" Max replied, getting up in Huxley's face, unintentionally spraying him with spit. Huxley blinked but didn't wipe it off. Max focused on a small pearly drop hanging off the edge of the journalist's mustache, close to his lip. He'd catch it if he stuck his tongue out.

Max was drunker than he thought. He'd mistaken the point of stopping and turning back for the point of no return. It had been a very long while. When he spit in people's faces he'd already lost control.

"I can help you out," said Huxley, dragging on his cigarette.

"Don't need you," Max replied, looking Huxley over. The journalist was even slighter in bright light, as if he lived on a diet of celery, cigarettes, and water.

"I've been here close to three years. Arrived a few months before the invasion. I know my way around. I know the people—how to work their combinations, make them open up."

"I've got one better." Max smiled, thinking of Chantale.

"That could be the case, but I think I'm onto something that could be tied in with the kidnapping."

"Yeah? What's that? And how come you haven't followed it through, all the way to the reward money?" Max asked.

"It's not something you can do alone," Huxley said, dropping the cigarette he'd smoked to the filter on the floor and grinding it out under his heel.

Max couldn't be sure Huxley was for real. That was the trouble with journalists. You couldn't trust them, not ever. Most of them were born backstabbers with more faces than diamonds.

What's more, why was Huxley offering to help him? Journalists never helped anyone but themselves. What was Huxley's angle? Probably financial, Max guessed. The Charlie Carver case wasn't exactly going to make the front pages in North America.

Max decided to go along with Huxley—albeit guardedly. He was in a foreign country that seemed to be losing its grip on the twentieth century and falling backwards through time. Huxley could be useful to him.

"You meet any of my predecessors?" Max asked.

"The short guy—sleazy-looking dude."

"Clyde Beeson?"

"That's him. I saw him around my hotel a lot—"

"Hotel?"

"The Hotel Olffson—where I'm staying."

"What was he doing there?"

"Hanging around the journalists, picking up scraps."

"Sounds about right," Max muttered. "So how did you know where he was headed?"

"I heard him asking someone at the bar for directions to the waterfalls one night."

"Waterfalls?" Max stopped him, remembering where Medd had gone. "The voodoo place?"

"Yeah. Said he was following up a lead. Last time I ever saw him," Huxley said. "Did you know him?"

"Florida PI, what do you expect?" Max replied.

Beeson went to the waterfalls too. What kind of lead were they chasing?

"Were you friends?" Huxley asked.

"No, the opposite," Max said. "I went to see him before I came out here. He was pretty fucked up, to say the least."

"What happened to him?"

"Don't ask."

Huxley looked Max right in the eye and pulled an ambiguous smile—part knowing, part amused—the sort that people used when they wanted you to think they knew more than they did. Max wasn't going to fall for that shit. He'd used it himself.

"Did Beeson mention Vincent Paul to you?"

"Yeah he did," Max said.

"Vincent Paul, Le Roi de Cité Soleil. That's what they call him, the scared rich folk—after Louis XIV, the glamorous French king. It's meant as an insult."

"How so?"

"Vincent lives in or around Cité Soleil—Shit City, as I call it. It's this gigantic slum outside of Port-au-Prince, by the coast. Makes your 'hoods back home look like Park Avenue. In fact, there's nothing like Cité Soleil anywhere in the world. I've been to slums in Bombay, Rio, Mexico City—paradise in comparison. Here you're talking close to half a million people—that's near ten percent of the population—living on six square miles of shit and disease. Literally. Place even has its own canal. 'The Boston Canal,' they call it. It's filled with old oil from the power plant."