MAX DROVE BACK to Miami and headed for Little Haiti.
When he was a kid in the 1960s, he’d had a girlfriend called Justine who lived in the area. It was called Lemon City back then, and was mostly white, middle-class, and great for shopping. His mother would often go there for Christmas and birthday presents.
By the time Max had become a cop a decade later, all but the poorest whites had moved out, the shops had closed or relocated, and the once-prosperous neighborhood had gone to seed. First the Cuban refugees had moved in, and then the more prosperous African-Americans from Liberty City had bought up the cheap houses. The Haitians started arriving in significant numbers in the 1970s, refugees from Baby Doc’s increasingly murderous regime.
There was a lot of tension between African-Americans and Haitians, often spilling into bloodshed—most of it the latter’s—until the newly arrived immigrants began to organize themselves into gangs and look out for one another. The most notorious of these was The SNBC, aka The Saturday Night Barons Club, led by Solomon Boukman.
Max had last come to the neighborhood when he was investigating Boukman and his gang in 1981. He’d driven through street after trash-choked street, past boarded-up stores and derelict or tumble-down houses, without seeing a soul. Then there’d been the riot he and Joe got caught up in.
Fifteen years later, Max was expecting more of the same, only worse than before, but when he got onto Northeast 54th Street, he thought he’d come to the wrong place. The area was clean and full of people walking streets lined with shops painted in bright, vivid pinks, blues, oranges, yellows, and greens. There were small restaurants, bars, outdoor cafés, and stores selling everything from clothes and food to wood sculptures, books, music, and paintings.
Max parked, got out of his car, and started walking. He was the only white face on the block but he had none of the anticipatory edge he would have had in a black ghetto.
It was late afternoon and the sun had started to set, giving the sky its first tinge of purple. Max walked down to a place his mother and father had taken him to in his teens, a furniture store on 60th Street they’d bought their kitchen table from. The store was long gone, but in its place stood the imposing Caribbean Marketplace, built as an exact replica of the old Iron Market in Port-au-Prince.
He went inside and walked past small stalls selling more food, CDs, and clothes, as well as Catholic ornaments. Everyone spoke Kreyol, the Haitian dialect composed of part-French and part–West African tribal tongues. The speech patterns sounded confrontational, as if its two composite parts were on the verge of full-scale argument with each other. Kreyol wasn’t spoken; it was half-shouted, the pitch edgy and intense, everyone sounding like they were getting the last word in before the fists started flying. Yet when Max checked the speakers’ body language, he realized they were probably doing nothing more threatening than gossiping or bartering.
Max walked out of the marketplace and crossed the road to the Church of Notre Dame d’Haïti and the neighboring Pierre Toussaint Haitian Catholic Center. The center was closed, so he went into the church. He might not have had much time for any notion of God in his life, but he loved churches. He always ended up going into them whenever he needed to think. They were the quietest, emptiest places he knew. It was a habit he’d picked up as a beat cop. He’d cracked many a case sitting in a pew with just the sound of his thoughts and a notebook for company. Churches had helped him focus. He’d never told anyone about this—including his wife—in case they’d thought he was a secret Jesus freak with a messianic-identity complex, or in case they turned out to be Jesus freaks themselves.
The church was empty, save for an old woman sitting in the middle pew, reading aloud from a Kreyol prayerbook. She heard Max walk in and turned to look at him without breaking off from her recital.
Max took in the wall of stained-glass windows and the mural depicting the journey of Haitians from their homeland to South Florida, watched over from the skies by the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. The air reeked of stale incense and cold candles and of the scented pink and white lilies pouring out of vases mounted on metal stands either side of the altar.
The woman, still reading aloud, never left Max with her gun-barrel black eyes. He could feel her stare like one can feel a security camera following one around a bank vault. He looked her over—small, frail, white-haired, with liver spots sprinkled on a sagging, deeply lined face. He tried the smile he used on potentially hostile strangers—broad, well-meaning, open, all lips and cheeks—but it fell flat on her. He retreated slowly down the aisle, feeling for the first time awkward and unwelcome. Time to go.
As he was leaving, he glanced over at a bookcase in the corner near the door. There were Kreyol, French, and English Bibles, as well as a variety of books about the saints.
Next to the bookcase was a large cork notice board, which took up most of the remaining wall. The board was covered with small pictures of Haitian children. On the bottom of each photograph was a yellow sticker bearing the child’s name, age, and a date. The children were all colors, aged between three and eight, boys and girls, many in school uniforms. Charlie Carver’s image caught the corner of his eye. A smaller print of the picture he had was tucked away in a right-hand corner, a face among dozens, easily lost. Max read the small print: Charles Paul Carver, 3 ans, 9/1994. It was the month and year he’d disappeared. He inspected the dates on the other photographs. They went back no further than 1990.
“Are you the police?” a man’s voice asked behind him, French-American accent, black intonation.
Max turned and saw a priest standing in front of him, his hands behind his back. He was slightly taller than Max, but slender and narrow about the shoulders. He wore round silver wire-rimmed glasses whose lenses reflected the light and hid his eyes. Salt-and-pepper hair, salt-and-pepper goatee. Late forties, early fifties.
“No, I’m a private investigator,” Max said. He never lied in church.
“Another bounty hunter,” the priest snorted.
“Is it that obvious?”
“I’m getting used to your type.”
“That many?”
“One or two, maybe more, I forget. You all pass through here on your way to Haiti. You and the journalists.”
“You’ve got to start someplace,” Max said. He could feel the priest’s stare probing beyond his eyelids. The priest smelled faintly of sweat and an old-fashioned soap, like Camay. “These other children—?”
“Les enfants perdus,” the priest said. “The lost children.”
“Kidnapped too?”
“Those are the ones we know of. There are many many more. Most Haitians can’t afford cameras.”
“How long’s this been happening?”
“Children have always gone missing in Haiti. I started putting photographs on the board very soon after I started working here, in 1990. In our other religion a child’s soul is highly sought after. It can open many doors.”
“So you think it’s a voodoo thing?”
“Who knows?”
There was a sadness in the priest’s voice, a weariness that suggested he’d gone through every possibility a million times over and come back empty.
Then Max realized that this was personal for the priest. He looked back at the board, and searched through the photographs that hung off it like scales, hoping to find a striking family resemblance so he could broach the subject. He found nothing so he went for it anyway.
“Which one of these is yours?”
The priest was initially shocked, but then he smiled broadly.
“You’re a very perceptive man. God must have chosen you.”
“I played the right hunch, Father,” Max said.
The priest stepped forward up to the board and pointed at a photograph of a girl right next to Charlie’s.
“My niece, Claudine,” the priest said. “I confess I put her there so some of the rich boy’s aura would rub off.”
Max took Claudine’s picture down. Claudine Thodore, 5 ans, 10/1994.
“Went missing a month later. Thodore? Is that your last name?”
“Yes. I’m Alexandre Thodore. Claudine is my brother Caspar’s daughter,” the priest said. “I’ll give you his address and number. He lives in Port-au-Prince.”
The priest took a small notebook out of his pocket and scribbled his brother’s details on a piece of paper, which he tore out and handed to Max.
“Did your brother tell you what happened?”
“One day he was with his daughter, the next day he was looking for her.”
“I’ll do my best to find her.”
“I don’t doubt that,” the priest said. “By the way, the kids in Haiti? They have a nickname for the bogeyman who’s stealing the children, Tonton Clarinette. Mr. Clarinet.”
“Clarinet? Like the instrument? Why?”
“It’s how he lures the children away.”
“Like the Pied Piper?”
“Tonton Clarinette is said to work for Baron Samedi—the vodou god of death,” Father Thodore said. “He steals children’s souls to entertain the dead with. Some say his appearance is part man, part bird. Others say he is a bird with one eye. And only children can see him. That’s because he was a child himself, when he died.
“The myth goes that he was originally a French boy soldier, a mascot—very common in those days. He was in one of the regiments sent to rule Haiti, back in the eighteenth century. He entertained the troops by playing his clarinet for them. The slaves working in the fields used to hear his playing and it made them angry because they associated the sound and the music the boy made with captivity and oppression.
“When the slaves rose up, they overpowered the boy’s regiment and took a lot of prisoners. They made the boy play his wretched instrument while they slaughtered his comrades one by one. Then they buried him alive, still playing his clarinet,” Thodore spoke gravely. It might have been folklore, but he was taking it very seriously. “He’s a relatively new spirit, not one I grew up fearing. I first heard people talking about him twenty or so years ago. They say he leaves his mark where he’s been.”
“What kind of mark?”
“I haven’t seen one, but it’s supposed to look like a cross, with two legs and half a beam.”
“You said children have ‘always’ gone missing in Haiti? You got any idea how many that is a year?”
“It’s impossible to say.” Thodore opened his palms to indicate hopelessness. “Things there are not like here. There’s nowhere and no one to report the missing to. And there is no way of knowing who these children are or were, because the poor don’t have birth or death certificates—that is only for the rich. Almost all of the children who go missing are poor. When they disappear it’s as if they never existed. But now—with the Carver boy—this is different. This is a rich society child. Suddenly now everyone is paying attention. It’s like here, in Miami. If a black child goes missing, who cares? Maybe one or two local policemen go looking. But if it’s a little white child, you call the National Guard.”
“With all due respect, Father, that last part, that’s not quite true, no matter how it sometimes appears,” Max said, keeping his tone level. “And it was never that way with me, when I was a cop here. Never.”
The priest looked at him hard for a moment. He himself had cop’s eyes, the ones that can tell sincerity from bullshit at a thousand paces. He offered Max his hand. They shook firmly. Then Father Thodore blessed him and wished him well.
“Bring her back,” he whispered to Max.