Nick Stone - Mr. Clarinet

"And you believe this?"

"Maurice said Baron Samedi used to appear in the room during the ceremony."

"Yeah? Sure it wasn't the same guy was in that James Bond movie?"

"You can mock all you want, Mr. Mingus, but Le Docteur Duvalier was a very powerful man-"

"-who killed children-defenseless, innocent children. I don't call that 'powerful,' Eloise. I call that weak, and cowardly and evil," Max interrupted.

"Call it what you want," she bristled. "But it worked. No one killed him. No one overthrew him-and your people never invaded our homeland."

"I'm sure there are more earthly reasons for that, and your Doc is dead," Max said. "Talk to me about Carver and Codada. The child kidnapping. At what point did it become a business?"

"Once Le Docteur Duvalier was in power, he rewarded Monsieur Carver with business contracts and monopolies. Maurice became security advisor. Many people who had originally backed the president fell out of favor with him, but this never happened to Monsieur Carver or Maurice. They were at his bedside when he died."

"Touching," Max quipped. "So Carver built his modern business empire on the backs of kidnapped children?"

"Not to begin with. It was just expansion, growth, like they cut down forests to build roads and towns. Le Docteur Duvalier needed to make his offerings to keep going.

"Maurice told me Monsieur Carver saw the business potential when a CEO from a bauxite mining company came to Haiti. The island is naturally rich in bauxite. Monsieur Carver got involved in a potential deal, but he was up against a mining conglomerate from the Dominican Republic. He hired a private detective to do some research into the company, investigate its management. The managing director was a pedophile. He liked little Haitian boys.

"He kept a young boy in a house in Port-au-Prince. During the week the boy went to a private school. He was taught etiquette-table manners, the correct way of conducting himself in civilized company-"

"Just like you taught?" Max interrupted.

"Yes."

Max could see more pieces of the awful puzzle coming together. It suited Carver's MO: he wasn't a creator, he was a parasite. He'd been born into wealth and had set about acquiring more, not through entrepreneurship but by buying or bulldozing his way into ownership of businesses others had devoted their lives to setting up and running.

He thought of the old man, his house, his bank, his money. He felt suddenly irrelevant, canceled out. What was he now? A man who did good things for bad people?

"Go on," he murmured.

"The managing director was a family man, old money, with good connections in the Dominican government. A scandal like that would have ruined him."

"So-don't tell me-Gustav Carver presented the man with the evidence and made him pull out of the deal?"

"Yes, sort of, but not quite," Eloise said. "Monsieur Carver didn't know anything about bauxite mining, so he brought the Dominicans in as partners anyway."

"And, seeing the success he'd had, and probably working out that pedophiles are an elite little group who tend to know each other, he started providing the Dominican or his 'friends' with fresh 'supplies'?" Max followed on.

"That's correct."

"And these 'friends' were either businessmen who Carver could cut deals with or connected to the kinds of people who could help him expand his empire?"

"That's it."

"So, he got them children and they gave him contracts and money in exchange?" Max asked.

"And-most importantly-more connections-others like them, or others not like them-very very powerful people. Monsieur Carver acquires people. It's how he built his business empire into what it is-and not just here, in Haiti. He has interests all over the world."

She stopped talking and opened up the handkerchief in her lap and folded it, very neatly, from left to right, into a triangle, which she doubled up to make another. She smoothed out the surface of the shape, admired it, and undid it, working backwards.

"But there's more to it than just money and clout, isn't there?" he resumed. "The sweet dirt he has on them, these high-up, powerful people? He must have enough to bury them ten times over. He owns them. He has power over them. They're his slaves. He tells them to jump, they ask 'how high?' Right?"

Eloise nodded.

"What about Allain Carver?" Paul looked at Eloise. "Is he involved in this?"

"Allain? No. Never!" She smirked and then sniggered.

"What's so funny?" Max stared at her. Her smirk was irritating the hell out of him-it was the I-know-better look teachers had.

"Monsieur Carver called Allain his 'dickter'-daughter with a dick. He said if he'd known Allain would turn out a faggot, he would have given him away to one of his clients-for free." She laughed.

"Fancy that," Paul cut her off. "He thinks gays are perverts but pedophiles aren't."

She tried and failed to hold his look. She went back to her handkerchief, which she rolled, like pastry, into a cylinder.

"So Allain didn't know anything?" Max picked up again.

"I didn't know anything about it, Max," Paul said. "I believe her. I know Allain. He doesn't even know about most of his father's legitimate businesses. I've got the inside track, remember? Gustav kept this one really secret. To be doing something like that in a place this small-and still keep it secret. That takes some doing. And to keep it so hidden that even I haven't heard about it…"

"Everyone was implicated," Eloise said. "That's why no one spoke about it. And with his connections, if something ever did look like it was going to get out…"

"He'd crush it into nothing," Paul finished.

Max thought about Allain. Unless he found evidence that completely exonerated him, Max decided he'd interrogate him about what he did and didn't know, all the same, just to be sure.

"Tell me about Noah's Ark."

"No one suspected a thing. Everyone thought it was just a simple charity-and it was, for the wrong children."

"What do you mean by 'wrong children'?"

"The surplus-and the ones that didn't get sold."

"Where did they end up?"

"Monsieur Carver found jobs for them."

"Nothing wasted." Max looked at Paul. Paul's face was rigid, his jaws clamped shut, his lips pressed tightly together. From the way he was standing, six-fingered hands half-formed into fists, Max knew he was getting ready to blow. He hoped he'd have time to get everything out of Eloise before Paul tore her head off.

"When did you start 'grooming' the children?"

"I must have been fifteen or sixteen. Monsieur Carver was very proud of me. He called me. I was his favorite." She smiled, her eyes tearing up and at the same time glowing with a cold, burning pride.

"Monsieur Carver already knew something about vodou potions, the ingredients that go into making the serum they give to people to turn them into zombies. He'd studied up on all that kind of stuff. He's a trained hypnotist, you know. He told me he'd always worked on children-poor slum kids."

"How? Sexually?"

"He taught them manners."

"So was it Carver's idea to take these rough kids and shape them-'groom them'-into obedient sex slaves with perfect table manners, so they'd pass in those upper circles?"

"Yes. No one buys a half-finished car."

"Is he still doing it? Hypnotizing kids?"

"Once in a while, yes, but he's passed his skills on to people in La Gonвve."

Max stared at a long, thin crack running down the length of the wall in front of him, breaking his concentration and letting his mind wander. He was feeling angry now, bitterly sick to his stomach. He was seeing himself back at Gustav's side, looking at Mrs. Carver's portrait, empathizing with the old man because they were both widowers who'd lost what they'd loved the most. He'd cherished the image, held it up as proof that Gustav Carver wasn't a monster but a man…still a human being. Not even the things Vincent had told him about the old man had completely destroyed the image. But this-what he'd heard now, what he was listening to-had dissolved his fondness for the old man in acid. He wished she was lying. But she wasn't.