Nick Stone - Mr. Clarinet

Max sat close to the armchair.

Carver leaned across to the coffee table and picked up a silver box filled with unfiltered cigarettes. He took one out, put the box back, and picked up a smoked-glass ashtray with a silver lighter inside it. He lit up, took a deep drag, and held on to the smoke for a few seconds before letting it out slowly.

"From the Dominican Republic, these," Carver said, holding up the cigarette. "They used to make them here. Hand-rolled. There was a shop in Port-au-Prince run by two women-ex-nuns. Tiny place called Le Tabac. All they did all day was sit in the window and roll cigarettes. I watched them once for about an hour. I just sat in the back of my car and observed them at it. Pure concentration, pure dedication. Such craft, such skill. Customers would come in all the time and interrupt them to buy a couple of cigarettes. One would serve while the other carried on. Me? I'd buy two hundred. The amazing thing is that all of those cigarettes were identical. You couldn't tell them apart. Amazing. Such precision, dedication. You know, I used to make all my employees sit outside the shop to watch those ladies work-to teach them to adopt virtues like diligence and attention to detail in their work for me.

"Those cigarettes were wonderful. A deep, rich, and very satisfying smoke. The best I've ever had, I think. These aren't too bad, but there's nothing like the original."

"What happened to the shop?" Max asked out of politeness rather than interest. He had to cough and clear his throat to make his voice heard-not that there was a blockage. He was getting nervous, dark energy coursing through him, muscles tightening, his heart pumping ever harder and louder.

"Oh, one of them got Parkinson's disease and couldn't work anymore, and the other closed up the shop to look after her. Or so I heard."

"At least it wasn't cancer."

"They didn't smoke." Carver laughed as the maid reappeared with a bottle of whiskey, water, ice, and two glasses on a tray. "I always drink and smoke at this time of year. Damn the doctors! What about you? Care to indulge?"

Max said no with a shake of his head.

"But you will join me for a drink?"

An order, not an offer: Max nodded and tried a smile, but the insincerity made his lips coagulate into a crumpled pout. Carver shot him another curious look, this one laced with suspicion.

The maid deflected attention off him by pouring the drinks. Carver took his whiskey neat. Max took it with ice and water almost to the brim. When she was gone, they clinked glasses and toasted each other's health, the coming year, and a happy conclusion to Max's investigation. Max pretended to take a sip.

He'd sat at home trying to work out the best way to tell Carver that he was taking him in. He'd contemplated just walking in and confronting him with what he knew and then marching him out to his car. But he'd nixed that, because he wasn't a cop.

He'd decided to get Carver to confess to what he'd done, own up to having masterminded the sex ring, and even explain his actions and justify them. He'd spent the entire day planning it, how he'd lure Carver further and further into implicating himself, all the while shutting off every escape route until the old man's admission of guilt became a formality, the symbolic toppling of the chessboard king.

All day in the house, he'd worked up his strategy, anticipating the many possible turns the confrontation would take and preparing the response he'd have waiting at every corner. He rehearsed his questions and worked on his voice until he reached the light, conversational, friendly, open, seemingly unguarded tone he was looking for: all bait and no hook.

Paul had called in the afternoon, told him to go get the old man after they'd taken the house in La Gonвve. He'd arranged for Allain to phone him on the pretext of inviting him up to the house for an update. Paul said that Allain was pretty broken up at having to make the call. To him, it was his father he was betraying, not a criminal he was setting up for the fall.

By nightfall, everything was straight in his head. He'd showered, shaved, and changed into a loose shirt and pants. At around nine Allain had called. Max guessed Paul's operation had been a success.

As he was driving out of the house, he'd been stopped by some of Paul's men in a jeep. They'd handed him an unsealed envelope and told him he was to give it to Gustav when the time was right.

Then they told him he'd have to wear a wire when he saw Gustav.

That had upset everything-at least in his head.

He'd never worn a snitch socket in his life. He'd been on the other end, listening in. They were leads you put on vermin to take you to bigger vermin.

He was told it was for his own protection, that he couldn't go in there carrying a walkie-talkie.

Yes, sure, that made perfect sense, but it was the rest he objected to-being Paul's stoolie, getting Gustav Carver to incriminate himself on tape, to confess and sign his death warrant.

He'd thought about it-not long, because he didn't have much time and he really didn't have any option but to accept what he couldn't refuse.

They'd all gone back to the house. He'd shaved his chest and they'd taped the mic just above the nipple, the wire running down his torso and curling around his back like an elongated leech, stopping at a receiver and battery clipped to his trousers.

They ran a test. He heard his voice loud and clear.

They walked back to their cars. He asked how things had gone in La Gonвve. He was told they'd gone very well.

On his way driving up to the Carver estate, he decided that the thing he wanted most of all for Christmas was to be done with this, with Haiti, with Carver, with this case.

He accepted that his case was over: Charlie Carver was dead and his body would most likely never be recovered. The mob that had killed Eddie Faustin had trampled him to death.

That fit, that made sense, and added up quite tidily, at least on paper.

It would do, but it wasn't really enough. Not for him, not if he wanted to sleep easy for the rest of his life.

He needed more proof that the boy was dead.

But how would he get it? And why?

Then again, whom was he kidding with that bullshit now? He wasn't a private detective anymore, remember? That was all over. He was finished. Hell, he'd been finished from the moment he'd shot those kids in New York. He'd crossed a line you didn't come back from. He was a convicted murderer; he'd taken three young lives in cold blood. That canceled out everything he'd once been and much of what he'd stood for.

And now he was setting up his former client. He'd never ratted out a client before and he'd never known an investigator who had-not even Beeson. It was something you didn't ever do, part of a long code of inviolable ethics, all of it unwritten, all of it handed down in whispers and winks.

Carver was, not surprisingly, drinking a very good scotch. Max could smell the quality coming out of his glass, even under all the water it had been doused with.

"Allain and Francesca will be down shortly," Gustav said.

No they won't, thought Max. Max had passed them both on his way up, being driven away by Paul's men.

"So? How's the investigation going?" Gustav asked.

"Not too well, Mr. Carver. I think I've hit a dead end."

"It happens in your profession, I'm sure, as it happens in most professions that require brains and drive, no? Go down a road and hit a block, what do you do? You go back to the start and find another way around."

Carver drilled Max with a fierce look from his practically black eyes. The old man was dressed as Max remembered him from the last time they'd met-beige suit, white shirt, black shoes buffed to a dazzle.

"Is this constipation of yours a very recent thing? Allain told me, not a few days ago, that you were onto something-close to a breakthrough?" Carver's voice had an undertow of contempt about it now. He crushed out his cigarette and put the ashtray on the table. A maid came almost immediately and replaced the ashtray with an identical, clean one.