Nick Stone: Mr. Clarinet

Max had almost missed the club. It was in an anonymous five-story townhouse in a cul-de-sac off Park Row, so anonymous that he'd walked past it twice before he'd noticed the number 34 stamped faintly into the wall near the door. The club was three flights up in a mirrored elevator with polished brass handles running around the middle and reflections accordioning to infinity. When the doors opened and he'd stepped out, Max thought he'd arrived in the lobby of a particularly luxurious hotel.

The interior was vast and very quiet, like a library or a mausoleum. All over the thickly carpeted floor, black tub chairs sprouted like burned-out oak stumps in a desecrated forest. They were arranged so you only saw their backs and not the people in them. He'd thought they were alone until he saw clouds of cigar smoke escaping from behind one of the chairs, and when he looked around more closely, he saw a man's foot in a beige slip-on beyond another. A single framed painting adorned the wall nearest to them. It was of a young boy playing a flute. He was dressed in a ragged, Civil War-era military uniform a good ten years too big for him.

"Are you a member here?" Max asked, to break the ice.

"We own it. This and several similar establishments around the world," Carver replied.

"So you're in the club business?"

"Not particularly," Carver answered with an amused look on his face. "My father, Gustav, set these up in the late fifties to cater for his best business clients. This was the first. We have others in London, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Berlin-and elsewhere. They're a perk. When individuals or their companies do over a certain amount of net dollar business with us they're offered free lifelong membership. We encourage them to sponsor their friends and colleagues, who of course pay. We have a lot of members, turn a good profit."

"So you can't just fill out a form?"

"No," Carver chuckled.

"Keep the peasants out, huh?"

"It's just the way we do business," Carver said dryly. "It works."

There were traces of East Coast WASP wrinkling Carver's otherwise crisp English accent, an unnatural reining in of some vowels and an overexaggeration of others. English school, Ivy League diploma?

Carver resembled a matinee idol manquй, looks fading agreeably. Max placed him as his own age, maybe a year or two younger; balanced diet-healthy. There were lines on his neck and crow's-feet etched at the ends of his small, sharp blue eyes. With his golden skin he could have passed for white South American-Argentinean or Brazilian-bloodlines going all the way back to Germany. Untouchably handsome but for his mouth. That let him down. It resembled a long razor cut where the blood had just started to bubble but not yet run over.

The coffee came in a white porcelain pot. Max poured himself a cup and added a measure of cream from a small jug. The coffee was rich and strong, and the cream didn't leave a greasy slick on the surface; it was connoisseur stuff, the kind you bought by the bean and ground yourself, not the average brews you picked up in the supermarket.

"I heard about your wife," Carver said. "I'm sorry."

"Me too," Max countered curtly. He let the subject die in the air, then got down to business. "You said you had a job you wanted me to look at?"

Carver told him about Charlie. Max heard the basics and flat-out said no. Carver mentioned the money and Max quieted down, more out of shock than greed. In fact, greed didn't even enter into it. While Carver was talking numbers, he handed Max a manila envelope. Inside were two glossy black-and-white photographs, a headshot, and a full-length bodyshot-of a little girl.

"I thought you said your son was missing, Mr. Carver?" Max said, holding up the picture.

"Charlie had a thing about his hair. We nicknamed him Samson because he wouldn't let anyone go near it. He was born-somewhat unusually-with a full head of the stuff. Whenever anyone tried to sneak up on him with a pair of scissors he screeched-this deafening howl. Quite terrifying. So we left it alone. I'm sure he'll outgrow the phobia eventually," Carver said.

"Or not," Max said bluntly, deliberately.

Max thought he saw Carver's face change for an instant, as a shadow of humanity stole away a fragment of his all-business composure. It wasn't enough to make him warm up to his potential client, but it was a start.

Max studied the headshot. Charlie didn't look anything like his father. His eyes and hair were very dark and he had a large mouth with full lips. He wasn't smiling. He looked pissed off, a great man interrupted in the middle of his work. It was a very adult look. His stare was intense and stark. Max could feel it prodding at his face, humming on the paper, nagging at him.

The second photograph showed Charlie standing in front of some bougainvillea bushes with almost the same expression on his face. His hair was long all right, bow-tied into two drooping bunches that poured over his shoulders. He was wearing a floral-patterned dress, with frills on the sleeves, hem, and collar.

It made Max sick.

"It's none of my business and I ain't no psychologist, but that's a sure-as-shit way to fuck a kid's head up, Carver," Max said, hostility upfront.

"It was my wife's idea."

"You don't seem the henpecked kind."

Carver laughed briefly, sounding like he was clearing his throat.

"People are very backward in Haiti. Even the most sophisticated, well-educated sorts believe in all kinds of rubbish-superstitions-"

"Voodoo?"

"We call it vodou. Haitians are ninety percent Catholic and a hundred percent vodouiste, Mr. Mingus. There's nothing sinister about it-no more than, say, worshipping a half-naked man nailed to a cross, drinking his blood and eating his flesh."

He studied Max's face for a reaction. Max stared right back at him, impassive. Carver could have worshipped supermarket carts, for all he cared. One person's God was another person's idea of a good joke, as far as he was concerned.

He looked back at the photograph of Charlie in his dress. You poor kid, he thought.

"We've looked everywhere for him," Carver said. "We ran a campaign in early 1995-newspaper and TV ads, billboards with his picture on them, radio spots-everything. We offered a substantial reward for information, or, better still, for Charlie himself. It had predictable consequences. Every lowlife suddenly came out from under a rock and claimed they knew where 'she' was. Some even claimed they'd kidnapped 'her' and made ransom demands, but it was all-the sums they wanted were trivial, way too small. Obviously, I knew they were lying. These peasants in Haiti can't see past the ends of their noses. And their noses are very flat."

"Did you follow up on all the leads?"

"Only the sensible ones."

"First mistake right there. Check everything out. Chase every lead."

"Your predecessors said that."

Bait and hook, Max thought. Don't go there. You'll get drawn into a pissing contest. Still, he was curious. How many people had already worked on the case? Why had they failed? And how many were out there now?

He played indifferent.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. Right now we're just having a conversation," Max said. Carver was stung, brought down to a level he usually didn't frequent. He must have been surrounded by the sort of people who laughed at all his jokes. That was the thing about the very rich, the rich born and bred: they swam in their own seas and didn't breathe the same air as everybody else; they lived parallel, insulated lives, immune to the struggles and failures that shaped character. Had Carver ever been forced to wait until next month's paycheck for a new pair of shoes? Been turned down by a woman? Had property repossessors knocking on his door? Hardly.

Carver told him about the danger, brought up the predecessors again, hinted that bad things had happened to them. Max still didn't rise to it. He'd gone into the meeting a third of the way determined not to take the job. Now he was almost at the halfway mark.