The last one looked Puerto Rican, big, soulful Jesus eyes and a lion’s mane of perfectly curly hair his mama was probably really proud of. The cuffs of his army jacket hung past his hands and the white stick of a lollipop poked out of the corner of his mouth. There was an Electric Strawberry patch on his shoulder and ‘Narvaez’ on his name tape.
“I gave to Helping Hand already this week,” Conquer said, pushing back his chair again and relaxing a bit. “Shut the door behind you.”
“Yo,” said the tall one, who, Conquer noticed, was a bit cleaner and more Spanish than the other brother, “is you the magic man?”
“Say what?”
“People say John Conquer the detective is a magic man. A doctor. Un brujo.”
Conquer lit a cigarette and looked down the length of it at the kid through a cloud of smoke.
“What people?”
“Mama Underwood. She said John Conquer takes care of like, a certain kinda trouble.”
Mama Underwood. An Ifa priestess who moonlighted as a bookie for King Solomon’s numbers racket. She had practically raised him after his mama had died. He hadn’t spoken to her in a couple years.
He sighed.
“Yeah? What kind you got, kid?”
The Spanish kid turned to the white boy expectantly, but the kid just stared. That got to Conquer, that stare. He’d seen it in the eyes of kids in Quảng Ngãi Province in ’66. Kids who had seen shit they shouldn’t have.
The kid stepped gingerly past his friends, as if he was afraid Conquer would make a grab at him. He put a beat up notebook with a black cover on the desk, and his hand hovered over it.
Impatient, Conquer reached out and slid it closer, spinning it, flipping it open.
The notebook was full of that bubble letter rainbow squiggly shit that gave the Mayor and the pigs aneurysms and made every bus and train in the five boroughs a pastel-colored eyesore.
He paged through the nonsense quickly, disinterested.
“You want some free legal advice? Get rid of this thing. It’s incriminating –“
And then he cut himself off as he came to a startlingly weird picture. It was different than anything else in there, not stylized or colored with markers. This was done in pencil, various shades of gray. The kid had real talent, at least a future drawing those schlocky horror comics on the newsstand if he wanted it. The drawing was of a big-headed, long limbed thing ducking in the heavy shadows of a tunnel, cartoonishly big, black bug eyes shining out of the dark like a boogeyman. It gave him the creeps.
“That’s it!” exclaimed the Puerto Rican kid, stepping forward. “Yo, that’s the thing that killed Mad Bomber.”
“Who?”
“Our boy, Mike Bermudez, Mad Bomber. That’s what we called him.”
Mike Bermudez. That name sounded familiar.
“It got him in the One Tunnel,” said the black kid.
“What one tunnel?”
“Nah man, the One. On the 1 line? Between 137th and 145th? The station yard.”
The subway line. Then he remembered.
“That kid that got hit by a train a couple days ago?”
He had read about in the paper. These graffiti kids congregated in the underground train yards, where the city stored the cars overnight and off peak hours on the weekends, vandalizing the rolling stock in the dead of night. Apparently this Bermudez kid had slipped and fallen on the rail, knocked himself out, then got chewed up when the 1’s and 3’s rolled out for duty, before anybody noticed he was on the tracks.
“It wasn’t no train,” said the Puerto Rican kid, tapping the grotesque drawing in the graffiti book. “It was that. Baby Face seen it happen.”
Baby Face, obviously the quiet white boy. Mad Bomber.
“What are you all, some kinda gang?”
“Naw man, we don’t fuck with that shit,” said the dark one with the cornrows. “We All-city. NBA crew.”
He raised his eyebrows and glanced at their feet.
“Not with them shoes.”
“C’mon. We’re writers, man,” said the Puerto Rican. “We don’t flex, just bomb. That’s us,” he said, tapping one of the designs in the book, a jumble of letters incomprehensible to Conquer. “N-B-A. Notorious Bombs Away.”
“This is Rockwell 145, yo! W-A-R.” The dark one said, hyping his friend, as though that should have made Conquer put his shoes back on and straighten up in his chair. He slapped the shoulder of the Puerto Rican kid in the army coat. “Snoopy.”
The kid took the lolly out of his mouth, put it to his brow in salute (narrowly sticking it in his bushy eyebrows), and jammed it back in.
“And I sign Presto 125. They’re sellin’ our pieces at Franklin Furnace downtown, man. Sellin’ ‘em, you dig?”
“So what the hell does all that mean?” Conquer said, folding his hands.
“It means we can pay you, man,” said Rockwell, reaching into his school bag and taking out a brick of cash that made Conquer toe his shoes on a little under the desk.
The kid set the brick down on the desk. It must have been a couple hundred bucks in small bills. It reeked of spray paint from the bag, but that would be the Freedom National Bank’s headache.
“What’s the job, kid?” said Conquer.
“Go down in the tunnel and jap this motherfuckin’ thing that killed our friend.”
Conquer looked down at the book of doodling again, and took a good long look at the thing in question. He was half-ready to write this off as some crazy ghetto bugaboo story when he saw the faint design etched on its naked chest. A circle with some harrowingly familiar characters. There was something in the middle of it, a jagged mark, like a wound.
He looked at Baby Face, who only stared at that picture.
“Baby Face,” he said, getting his attention with a snap of his fingers that made the poor kid flinch. He touched the mark in the center of the shadowy thing’s chest. “You really see this?”
“I seen it, yeah,” the kid said quietly, unable to keep the tremble out of his voice. “I really seen it. It come at us outta the dark. Picked up Mike like nothin’ and…”
“I mean this,” Conquer interrupted, tapping the symbol. “This right here. You saw this on its chest?”
Baby Face nodded.
“Uh-huh. It had a cut in the middle even, like my uncle’s pacemaker scar.”
Conquer bit his lip and frowned. He looked at the others.
“You saw it too?”
Rockwell and Presto exchanged glances then shook their heads.
Conquer looked at Snoopy. His eyes darted to Baby Face and he shrugged.
“It’s real, man!” Baby Face asserted.
“Yo, if Baby Face says it’s real, it’s real,” Rockwell said defiantly, but Presto pursed his lips and looked doubtful, and Snoopy rubbed the corner of his eye and looked at his feet.
“Ease up, man, I believe you,” said Conquer. He stood up and slipped into his shoes.
The fact was, there was no way some kid could come up with an actual magic symbol like this outside of fucking around in Horrible Herman’s bookshop on West 19th in Chelsea. Maybe not even there. If Baby Face’s drawing was accurate, this was weird, experimental shit; a mish mash of complex Abramelin ritual, obscure, dark necromancy, and Thai black magic he had seen on I&I in Bangkok during the war. It was like somebody was skimming from a pretty expansive black library, picking what they wanted from it, making something new and possibly way worse than any of its elements.
Sometimes he felt himself directed, put into the path of unrighteous things by old forces he couldn’t name but which expected him to correct them. Maybe old gods, maybe his busybody Dahomeyan ancestors. Maybe in this case it was just old Mama Underwood, recognizing something beyond her understanding and pointing these kids in his direction.
Maybe so, but it wasn’t how he wanted to kick off his weekend.
He looked out the window a bit, at the gray buildings, thinking, then picked up the notebook and tossed it to Baby Face.
“How do you all get down into that tunnel?” Conquer asked. “Is there a way, without jumping the platform and walking the tracks?”
“We use a grate in the street on the corner of Broadway and 145th,” said Presto.
Conquer nodded and went to the office door and held it open.
“Meet me there tonight. Bring your art supplies.”
Rockwell and his friends looked at each other, and he and Presto broke into grins, while Baby Face just hugged his book. Snoopy nodded.
“What time, yo?” Presto said, going to the door.
“Midnight, baby. What else?” Conquer said. When the trains stopped running.
Presto nodded and pulled Baby Face along, Snoopy pushing him lightly from the back.
Rockwell paused and looked back at the cash on the desk.
Conquer went and tossed it to him.
“Pay me after. Can’t spend it if I’m dead.”
Rockwell stuffed the cash in his bag and raised a knobby fist.
“Black man!” he said, grinning, then went out into the hall.
Conquer shook his head and shut the door.
He spent the rest of the day in his apartment poring over his books. His blood was Dahomeyan, and Dahomeyan magic via Hoodoo and the Vodoun pathways was his inheritance, but magic wasn’t some mom and pop business. Lineage only went so far without practice. Try to impress an outer entity with who your grandfather was and watch what happened next. There were things out there that would wipe their ass with your birth certificate.
Just as this mystery ritualist had conjured something bad from a buffet line of dark traditions, Conquer took the Jeet Kune Do approach to his own knowledge. The Isis Knot on his belt buckle bespoke his origins, but the library at his pad betrayed the broadness of his studies. Magic was a touch and go business, very subjective. A good two headed doctor could divine a killer with grave dirt or lay a trick to make snakes to grow in a black man’s veins, but despite what white Hollywood said, no black bokor could make a white zombi. On the other hand, no Irish priest could read a Negro Pentecostal’s name in the Mass and cause him to shrivel up and die either.
The black man, the red man, the white man, the yellow, each had their magic given by their respective gods to enforce the internal laws of their own kind. Magic was as segregated as a Montgomery Greyhound bus.
Yet, most of it all came from the same place. It all had power. Sometimes people got crafty and jumped the tracks, sometimes traditions got blended and mixed, and to fight something hybrid, you had to unravel it like a ball of wool and trace the threads, so it helped to brush up on a broad array of knowledge.
Conquer had detected elements of at least three different magical systems compounded in that weird sigil on the thing in Baby Face’s notebook. He thumbed through the books he had, made a couple calls to cats he knew to fill in the gaps.
By ten ‘o clock he had a wastebasket overflowing with wadded scrap paper, a half-empty bottle of Black Label, and a countersign of his own invention he guessed might affect this thing, whatever it was. His pad smelled like a cathedral from the preparatory candle burning. He opened a window and had a cigarette while he watched the sporadic traffic on St. Marks down below.
He didn’t doubt the kids. What for? Skepticism was fine for a cat sniffing out insurance fraud, or some dude in a lab, but a second of hesitation engendered by doubt when something was coming out of the ether at you across a smudge in a magic circle and you could find your soul ripped out your body and going through the guts of something terrible.
He packed, among other things, his big Colt Python and his Model 10A High Standard 12-gauge loaded with five shells of silver buckshot. Silver was a catchall for some European born monsters, but he had no idea if it would do anything other than make a hell of a lot of noise. Anyway, if he was about to go creeping under the city, the shotgun had a flashlight.
He got into a red leather jumpsuit and took the burgundy Cordoba down to 145th.
“Yo Conquer,” said Pope, his voice crackling from the radio. “Where you goin’ all strapped like that? Huntin’ elephants?”
“Sheeyit, I wish it was an elephant.”
He spotted Rockwell, Snoopy, and Presto hanging around on Broadway with their satchels, looking shady as junkies.
A heap of a Plymouth went rattling from the curb in front of them and he slipped the big Chrysler in smoothly and got out, the kids wide-eyed.
“Damn, man,” Presto said, “who drives a boat like that in this city? You lucky that guy pulled away.”
“Luck ain’t nothin’ to do with it,” said Conquer, for he had a dressed mojo bag hanging from the rearview that guaranteed parking for him anywhere in the five boroughs. Better than a municipal sticker. He didn’t have to stick a sign that said NO RADIO in the window like some people either. Nobody would touch the car. Nobody could, even if they could look at it directly. If they did somehow manage to break in, the spirit of the previous owner, Pope, wouldn’t let it budge for anybody but him.
“Let’s go, man,” said Rockwell anxiously.
“Where’s that white boy?”
“He chickened, man. ‘Said he won’t go back down there,” said Presto.
Conquer shrugged and went around to the back of the car and popped the trunk, getting out the black duffel bag.
“What’s that?” Rockwell asked as he shouldered it and slammed it shut.
“Y’all got your tools, I got mine.”
He followed the kids to the corner and kept watch while Presto pried up the maintenance grate with a crowbar and shined a flashlight down at a set of iron rungs.
“Age before beauty,” said Presto.
“Shit, young blood. I got you beat on both counts,” Conquer said, and went down.
He had the shotgun out and the flashlight slicing the darkness by the time the kids had descended.
Presto whistled at the sight of the shotgun.
“Yo, you got anything heavy in that bag for me?”
“Too heavy for you, kid. Which way to the yard?”
The maintenance tunnel seemed to stretch forever in either direction, lit intermittently by low watt bulbs that cast the utilitarian architecture of pipes and bricks in a hazy orange glow between spots of impenetrable darkness.
Rockwell pointed south and started to lead the way with his own flashlight, when Conquer grabbed his sleeve.
“Hang on,” he said, unfolding a piece of paper.
It was the fruits of the day’s labors, a rendering of a complex protective sigil of his own invention, incorporating elements of magic squares, Thai characters, the Third Pentacle of Saturn, and a veve sacred to Maman Brigit.
“Yo, Conquer, this is kinda fresh, man. You do this?” Rockwell said, holding up paper.
“Yeah. I’m fuckin’ Rembrandt. I need you three to hit the walls every twenty feet or so, starting right here. And no goddamned artistic license, or it’s our asses.”
“Ain’t you never heard of stencils, man?” said Presto, wrinkling his nose at the complexity of the piece.
“The fuck I look like, your Arts and Crafts teacher? Can you do it, or not?”
“Yeah, I can do it,” Presto said, muttering, “Just, stencil’s would be quicker.”
“Well I’ll take that into consideration for next time,” Conquer said. “What about you?” he asked Snoopy.
Snoopy nodded and gave two thumbs up. He was still sucking on a lollipop. It couldn’t be the same one.
“Don’t talk my damn ear off, kid,” said Conquer.
“Yo, answer the man, Snoopy. Don’t disrespect your elders,” said Rockwell.
Snoopy took a Krylon can out of his pocket and rattled it, smiling around his lolly stick. He pressed the nozzle of his spray can in quick, short, bursts, mimicking speech, the hiss of the escaping paint cloud like a nervous snake in the echo of the tunnel.
Presto and Rockwell laughed.
“He says ‘sorry,’” said Rockwell.
They drew their b
andannas over their faces, offering him one. He kept watch as they worked, deftly and quickly throwing up perfect replicas of his symbol with only a few glances at the paper for reference. He had to admit he was impressed.
“Yo, feels weird throwin’ up another writer’s shit, man. You oughta sign this yourself, Conquer,” Presto said when they were done. “Could go all-city with this shit.”
“Golly, then I might die fulfilled,” Conquer said dryly. “Show me where your boy bought the farm.”
They went down the tunnel for a ways, stopping to throw up the sign as he had prescribed, till it opened up into a larger space of bracketed train tracks, five in all, parked with dozens of silent silver subway cars and awash in blue and white signal lights that reached almost to the old arched brick ceilings but not the black shadows that gathered like cobwebs there.
Everything about the 137th yard and everything in it was festooned with wild slashes of graffiti in every color and style, rendered in paint and marker. The place was like an ancient, sacred space scrawled with inscrutable hieroglyphs left by some long lost race. Not just the broad, bold signatures of ‘Zephyr’ and ‘Crash,’ but defiant declarations and plaintive votives from a people nobody cared to listen to; ‘No Time But Clocks,’ ‘Buff This Beame,’ and ‘Rolling Stock, Hear My Cry.’ Empty paint cans littered the tomb-like tunnels like canopic jars.
Interspersed, there were flashes of work even Conquer could appreciate; cartoon characters that looked like they had stepped off the screen, huge, big-legged, buxom brown women languishing across multiple train cars like the ladies sprawled above the bars in western movies. One piece, uninterrupted on a wall encroached by frenetic scrawling as though holding back the lesser works, was of a skinny cartoon kid with an afro spraying a picture on a train window of himself painting himself again on the window of a train, like the Norman Rockwell painting.
“That’s yours?” Conquer said.
“Yeah,” said Rockwell, looking wistful. “That’s where I first signed Rockwell….this place is like church for me, man. And a lot of other writers.” He trailed off a bit. “Mad Bomber’s tomb.”
Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1) Page 13