CLARINETTE WAS A village on its way to becoming a small town. The bulk of it was situated on top of a hill overlooking the waterfalls, but the slopes of those hills were littered with a tumble of one-room houses, huts, and clapboard shacks so randomly ordered that, from a distance, they made Max think of a forgotten cargo of cardboard boxes spilled out of a long-gone truck.
People stopped to stare at them as they got out of the car. The adults scoped them out from head to toe, checked out the Land Cruiser, and went on about their business as though they’d seen it all before but were still interested in the upgrades. The children all ran away. They were especially scared of Max. Some went and got their parents, to point him out to them, others went and got their friends, who all came in cowering three-foot gangs and then ran off screaming as soon as he looked at them. Max wondered if their fear of him was only due to their never having seen his kind before, or if suspicion of the white man was something that had been passed down in the genes, mixed into the DNA.
Clarinette’s tallest building was its imposing church—a mustard-yellow ring of reinforced concrete, topped with a thatched roof and a plain black cross. Four times the size of the next-biggest structure—a blue bungalow—it dwarfed the other amateurishly constructed clay and tin hovels clumped untidily around it. Max guessed from the way the church was positioned, right in the center of the village, that it had been built first, and then the community had evolved around it. The church didn’t look much more than fifty years old.
The top of the cross scraped the clouds that hung incredibly low here, sealing the village in an impenetrable veneer of dusk, which the sun, although at its fullest, couldn’t overcome. The gradual erosion of the nearby mountain ranges had brought the sky that little bit closer to the touch.
There was a freshness to the air, healthy nuances of oranges and wild herbs undercutting the smells of woodfires and cooking. In the background, over the hubbub of people going about their business, was the constant sound of the waterfall a few miles below, its great roar rendered as a persistent gurgle, water running down a drain.
They walked through the village, talking to people along the way. No one knew anything about Charlie, Beeson, Medd, Faustin, or Leballec. They weren’t lying, as far as Max could see. Questions about Tonton Clarinette produced only laughter. Max wondered if Beeson and Medd had really come here, if Désyr hadn’t deliberately misled them.
As they got closer to the church, they heard drumbeats coming from inside. Max sensed the rhythms going straight into his wrists, midtempo bass notes catching in his bones and creeping into his veins, getting in sync with his pulse beats before they eked down into his hands and fingers and moved up and down them, making him clench and unfurl his fists as though he had pins and needles.
The door to the church was padlocked. There was a notice board fixed to the wall, with a prominent picture of the Virgin Mary on it. Chantale read it and smiled.
“This place isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t a church, Max,” she said. “It’s a hounfor—a voodoo temple. And that isn’t the Virgin Mary, it’s Erzilie Freda, our goddess of love—our Aphrodite, one of the most exalted goddesses.”
“Looks like the Virgin Mary to me,” Max said.
“It’s camouflage. Back when Haiti was a French slave colony, the masters tried to control the slaves by eradicating the voodoo religion they’d brought over from Africa and converting them to Catholicism. The slaves knew there was no point in resisting the masters, who were heavily armed, so they apparently went along with the conversions—only they were very cunning. They adopted the Catholic saints as their own gods. They went to church just as they were supposed to, but instead of worshipping the icons of Rome, they worshipped them as their own loas. St. Peter became Papa Legba, loa of the lost, St. Patrick was prayed to as Damballah, the snake loa, St. James became Ogu Ferraille, the loa of war.”
“Smart people,” Max said.
“That’s how we got free.” Chantale smiled. She looked back at the notice board for a moment and then returned to Max. “There’s a ceremony today at six. Can we stay for it? I want to make an offering for my mother.”
“Sure,” Max nodded. He didn’t mind, even if it meant making the trip back to Pétionville in pitch darkness. He wanted to see the ceremony, just to satisfy his curiosity. At least he’d come away with something from this place.
They left the main village and walked east where two mapou trees grew, Max marveling at how tranquil and quiet the countryside was after the capital.
They came to a low, long, sandstone wall that had been abandoned before completion. The structure’s south-facing end, had it been finished, would have given people on its upper floors a clear and spectacular view of the waterfalls a mile down.
“Who’d want to build here? It’s out in the middle of nowhere,” said Chantale.
“Maybe that was the whole point.”
“It’s too big for a house,” Chantale said, following the wall with her eyes all the way back toward the mountains behind the village.
Both mapou trees were adorned with burned-out candle stubs, ribbons, locks of hair, pictures, and small scraps of paper with handwriting on them. A little farther on, a shallow stream trickled quietly down to the chasm of Saut d’Eau. It would have been an idyllic scene were it not for the two rottweilers playing right in the middle of the water.
Their owner, a short, thickset man in jeans and a crisp white shirt, was standing on the other side of the stream, watching both his dogs and Max and Chantale, seemingly at the same time. He was holding a Mossberg pump shotgun in his left hand.
“Bonjour,” he called out. “American?”
“That’s right,” Max said.
“You with the military?” the man asked, a hint of New Jersey in his accent.
“No,” Max replied.
“You visit the falls?” the man asked, walking along his side of the bank so he could face them. The dogs followed him up.
“Yeah we did.”
“You like ’em?”
“Sure,” Max said.
“Got nuttin’ on Niagara?”
“I don’t know,” Max said. “Never been.”
“There’s some flat stones up ahead’ll get you over this side without you needing to step in the water.” The man pointed to some vague spot in the water. “That is, if you’re meaning to come this way?”
“What’s over there?” Max asked, not moving from under the shade of the trees.
“Just the French cemetery.”
“Why ‘French’?”
“Where the bodies of French soldiers are buried. Napoleon’s men. See all this land? Used to be a tobacco plantation. There was a small garrison stationed back where the town is. One night the slaves rose up and took control of the garrison. They brought the soldiers here, right where you stand, between those two mapoux.
“One by one they made ’em kneel down on a vévé dedicated to Baron Samedi—that’s the god of death and graveyards—and they slit their throats,” the man said, drawing his finger across his throat and clucking his tongue as he completed the motion. “They drained their blood and made it into a potion, which they all drank. Then they put on the soldiers’ uniforms, painted their faces and hands white—so’s they’d fool anyone watching them from a distance—and they went on the rampage, killin’, rapin’, and torturin’ every white man, woman, and child they found. Not one of them got so much as a scratch on him. When they was done and free, they all come back here and settled down.”
Max looked at the trees and the ground where he stood, as if something about them could betray their history; then, finding nothing remarkable there, he and Chantale followed the bank until they found the raised stepping stones that led across the stream.
The man and his dogs came to meet them. Max put him at about his age, midforties, maybe a few years older. He had a dark moon face and small, sparkling eyes that were full of mirth, as if he’d just regained his composure after hearing the funniest joke ever told. His forehead was heavily lined and there were deep brackets around his ears, light furrows continuing the ends of his mouth, and a spray of silver stubble around his jaw. He looked strong and healthy, with thick arms and a barrel chest. He could have been a professional body-builder in his youth, and, Max imagined, he still worked out now, pumping serious iron a few times a week to keep his flame alive and the flab at bay. They’d never met before but Max already knew him—his posture, his build, and his stare gave him away: ex-con.
Max held out his hand and introduced himself and Chantale.
“The name’s Philippe,” the man said and laughed, flashing the best set of teeth Max had seen on a local. His voice was hoarse, not through shouting or any infection, Max reckoned, but through lack of use, no one to talk to, or not much worth saying to the ones he was with. “Come!” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s go see the cemetery.”
They crossed a field and another stream until they came to a wild orange grove whose powerful, heady smell had left its trace around the village. Philippe navigated his way through the trees, sidestepping piles of sweetly rotting fruit, naturally grouped into loose shapes, part-square, part-circle, where they’d dropped off the branches and bounced and rolled to a stop. The oranges were the biggest Max had ever seen, the same size as grapefruit or small honeydew melons, their skin thick and dull with a slight blush creeping out from the stem. Their insides, where they’d burst, were flecked with red. The orchard was buzzing with flies, all feasting on the abundance of putrefying sugar.
The cemetery was some way in, a large rectangle of tall, thick grass and headstones—ostentatious and modest, straight and crooked, enclosed by a waist-high metal-bar fence and entered through one of four gates at the side.
The soldiers were all buried side by side, sixty bodies in five rows of twelve, their resting places marked out by big, gray rocks of roughly the same size with smoothed-down surfaces and the surnames chiseled in deep, crude capitals.
“I didn’t tell you everythin’,” Philippe said, as he led them past the makeshift tombstones. “The slaves didn’t just drink their blood and steal their uniforms, they took their names too. See?” he pointed out a rock with the name VALENTIN gouged into it. “Ask around town and every name you hear’ll come right back to this place.”
“Wasn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Max asked. “If they wanted to be truly free, what would they want with the slave masters’ names?”
“Contradiction?” Philippe smiled. “It was all about eradication.”
“So why leave this behind? Why bury the bodies?” Max asked.
“Haitians are big on respect for the dead. Even white dead. Didn’t want to get haunted by no French-speakin’ ghosts.” He smiled and looked at Max. On the walk over, Max had undone the trigger guard on his holster.
“Somethin’ went wrong somewhere, though,” Philippe said as he led them to a wide clearing that separated the soldiers’ graves from the other tombstones in the cemetery. A single rock stood in the middle, marking out a plot of dry, bare, reddish-brown earth where no grass grew. No name was carved into it.
“Napoleon’s army had a lot of boys in it—some as young as eight, orphans who got conscripted. The garrison here was real young. The commanding officer was twenty,” Philippe said, looking down at the grave. “That there is where they buried the garrison’s mascot—don’t know how old he was, but he wasn’t more’n a boy. Don’t know his name neither. He used to play the clarinet to the slaves working these fields. They took care of him last.
“They made him play his clarinet while they strung his buddies up by the legs and opened their throats into a bucket. They didn’t do that to him. They put him in a box and buried him alive right here.” Philippe touched the ground with his foot. “They say they heard him playin’ his clarinet long after they’d put the last fistful of dirt down over his head. Went on for days, this thin music of death. Some people say when there’s a strong wind blowin’ through here, they hear the sound of the clarinet mixed in with the stench of these oranges here no one wants ’cause they feed off the dead.”
“What went wrong with the spell?” Max asked.
“If you believe in that kind of stuff, Baron Samedi turns up to claim the bodies the slaves have offered him and he finds the kid still alive. He adopts him as a sidekick, puts him in charge of his children’s division.”
“So he becomes the children’s god of death?”
“Yeah—only he isn’t a god as such, ’cause no one worships him like they do the Baron. He’s more a bogeyman. And he don’t wait for the kids to die neither. He just takes ’em alive.”
Max remembered what Dufour had told him about going to the source of the Mr. Clarinet myth to find out what had happened to Charlie. He was here, at the source, where the myth had sprung. So, where was the answer?
“How do you know all this? About the soldiers and stuff?”
“I grew up with our history. My mother told me when I was a kid. Her mother before that, and so forth, all the way back. Word of mouth keeps things alive better than books. Paper burns,” he replied. “Fact, unless my radar’s all wrong, my mother’s the one you come here looking for, right?”
“Your mother?” Max stopped, confused. “What’s your last name?”
“Leballec,” Philippe smiled.
“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“You didn’t ask.” Philippe chuckled. “You come ’bout the boy, right? Charlie Carver? Same as them other white guys did.”
Just then, Max heard heavy footfalls and twigs snapping in the orchard right behind him. He turned around and saw three large oranges rolling across the ground toward the fence.
“So your mother’s the—?”
“—bokor, yeah, that’s right. Bet you wasn’t ’spectin’ that, right? Woman be up in here, runnin’ shit? Women do everythin’ in this country ’cept run the damn place. They did, Haiti wouldn’t be on the train to Shitsville like it is now.” Philippe nodded.
“Where is she?” Max asked.
“A short way away.” Philippe nodded his head eastwards and started walking; then he stopped and turned around and looked Max right in the eye. “When you get out?”
“When did you?” Max asked back. He could always tell an ex-con from the tension in their neck and shoulders, the way their bodies were in a permanent state of alert, ready to fend off an attack. Philippe had it in spades, and so did Max.
“Two years back.” Philippe grinned.
“They deport you?”
“Sure did. Only way I was ever gettin’ out this side of a body bag. I was one of the first they sent over, the guinea pig.”
“You ever meet someone called Vincent Paul?”
“Nope.”
“Know who he is?”
“Yup. Sure do.”
Philippe motioned with his thumb for them to get going, took a few steps forward, then stopped again.
“’Case you wonderin’ what it was I did—it was a murder,” he said. “Pre-meditated. Got into some shit with a guy. Escalated into a no-way-out situation. One day I just rolled up to him and blew him away. Only part I regret’s gettin’ caught. You?”
“Same ballpark,” Max said.