by Lee Lamothe
“I don’t know,” Ray Tate said. “Maybe later. Let me look around, first.” He drank at his Guinness. He laid some track, pushing his nose to the side of his face and spoke like the Godfather. “Tell you what, amici, you guys brief me on Markowitz and if there’s some big drug capo behind it? We’ll put something together. We’ll take down the big cheeseboy.” He waited peacefully while Bonnacorso processed.
“Italians, right?” His face flaring red, Bonnacorso slapped his hand on the table and shook his head. “Slurs. You fucking guys, we’re all Mafia to you. You know we invented Chinese food? Fuck, we invented China. Look it up.”
“Hey, hey, I was only kidding, man. These guys we’re after aren’t Italian.” Ray Tate leaned forward confidentially. “These are white guys.”
“Whoa, whoa the fuck up there,” Bonnacorso sputtered. “You sayin’ Italians ain’t white men?”
Jackson shook his head sadly.
Ray Tate sat back, pleased.
Djuna Brown felt pretty good. She had a gun on her hip and she wasn’t in jail. Paris with Ray Tate lurked in her future. Although she kept up a brave face for him, going out on the streets made her a little nervous. But they were only grabbing money men and most of them were sad sacks like Abner Hussey. Paper crooks chased by paper cops.
Sitting behind the desk she stared at the photograph of Marko Markowitz. She picked up the phone and started making calls.
Criminal records showed Laszlo Markowitz had a half-dozen arrests going back to his teens. Break-in, break-in, robbery, robbery, assault bodily harm. Kids’ stuff, some slams in the Zeeland youth camps. An early stint for robbery. Until he reached his mid-twenties it was basic thuggery. Then it was drugs, drugs, and drugs. Possession of a weapon, a prohibited machine gun, dismissed. He’d spent four bucks at Craddock for one of the drug busts.
Intelligence had him in company with a dozen bikers and biker associates, some Italians from The Boot, some of the Ibrahaims who operated in Spicetown. In company with targets of investigations, the biker squad, the drug squad. Reports of him in company with Pavo Escobar, a drug suspect under investigation by the Canadians. An addendum showed Escobar was a dwarfish Colombian based in Bogotá, a player in the cartels. References were made to his organization in Canada; notify the RCMP-led Special Enforcement Unit of any contact.
Records showed Markowitz, through an accounting firm, paid taxes on two properties, a condo in Stonetown and a commercial building on Bridge Road, at the top end of Smoketown. He had two vehicles, both late-model Mercedes, both blue. A financial note indicated alternating insurance, eight months on one car, then four months on the other; a summer car and a winter car. He showed no outstanding loans and no liens on any of his possessions. Aviation showed him registered as the licensed owner of a Cessna.
Association litter was listed in bullet-point at the end of the criminal-intel report, names gleaned from running licence plates or off wiretaps on various people. Bankers; restaurant owners; marina operators; airline baggage humpers; Jerry Kelly, NFI, no further information; Julia Preston née Gurr, money trafficker; Gary Dorset cross referenced to some street gangs; members of the Riders motorcycle club.
Marko Markowitz knew a lot of people and he came up in a lot of other people’s business.
Djuna Brown noted everything into her laptop and decided she’d earned a power nap.
They lived in his apartment, where he’d been shot by the lesbian ex-cop who’d stalked Djuna Brown, where Ray Tate’s daughter and her friends had patched the bullet holes around the door and in the ceiling while he was on the in-and-out tubes in hospital.
It was one big room but crowded and they treated it like their studio and imagined Montparnasse bustled outside their window. Her computer and digital printer were on a card table beside the washroom, his easel was set up beside the north-facing window. On the walls were his three framed, precious Tony Calzettas, and thumbtacked randomly were her photographs of Paris, one of them of a lonesome straggly bearded Ray Tate wrapped in sweaters at his easel in a swirling blue dawn with landmarks merely shaped shadows behind him. The photograph itself looked like a painting created of all the hues of blues ever invented. Capturing it was her first truly lucky accident through the lens. His artworks from Paris were curled in tubes or tacked to walls. Charcoals, acrylics, pencil sketches.
There was no sign of the cop in the apartment unless you looked in the closet where their uniforms hung in plastic and a gun safe sat on the top shelf, a habit he’d formed when he lived in a suburban house with an always-angry wife and wandering, curious daughter.
They’d talked about moving to a bigger place but, expecting to be fired, didn’t want to commit to a lease. If they got fired, and maybe after she served some minor jail time for fraud, the plan was they’d head straight back to Paris. So they lived tight, a little too tight sometimes, but their minor verbal scuffles died on the narrow futon. They were lucky, and they knew how lucky they were.
She had taken to naps in Paris. They’d started each day early in the tiny shower and let that lead wherever it led. Then they’d go to the roof of the hotel; Ray Tate would paint or sketch and she’d snap away with her cool digital camera, documenting the gradients of dim of morning. When it got light enough, they went out to a café and even if it was still a little too cold they sat outside and drank milky brown coffee and ate flaky pastries and planned their days. Sometimes they were gawking and verbal, sometimes they simply sat easily and let the streets of Paris happen to them. Around mid-afternoon they’d return to their hotel and stretch out on the bed, yawning and then lightly sleeping so they could have another awakening together to take them into the evening.
The Stonetown riots sometimes crept up on her and she’d go out alone, telling Ray Tate she was going out for a wander. She’d sit, thinking, at a random curbside cafe and having a couple or three drinks, slowly dribbling water into the absinthe and watching it turn milky.
Her thoughts were always the same. Fragmented and disjointed and there was a gap in there like a black hole, a black hole where she did what she knew she’d done, but couldn’t remember the actual act of it. No matter how much she promised herself, and him, that she’d never become that person and go there again, who really knew?
Stonetown had been gunshots and whumps of exploding gas tanks, the crack of ball bearings and billiard balls on windows. There were screams of pain and whoops of anarchy. The thudding of cop boots measured in phalanxes, the rhythmic clacking of batons on shields. The air smelling of burning gasoline. She carried a shotgun. In Parsons Lane they were confronted by a terrified young cop. He drew down on them. Ray Tate tried to calm him, We’re cops, we’re cops. The young cop with his eyes wide in terror and his ears closed to Ray Tate’s words, opened fire, just spraying it out. She saw a bullet leave his Glock; it came straight at her face. She could see it oscillating and spinning and she could even see the smoke lazily drifting off it. And at the last second it … it just veered and took off her earring. She went down with a yell. Ray Tate yanked his gun from his boot and fired rounds into the young cop’s chest, in his police mind knowing the kid was fearful of the job, knowing he’d be wearing a vest. Hoping, anyway.
All that was clear. The problem came with the time afterward when some device in her brain spliced it, and spliced it wrong with a few pieces of film missing. She knew there were gaps in her movie after being fired at. But she’d left people in the streets, their hands blue with twist ties. She’d left people in the streets with no teeth. She didn’t remember her specific performance, but in her inner ear she could recall the sound of plastic baton on teeth, on bone. Someone begged her to stop; she swung her baton even more fiercely. Someone crawled away from her as well as they could with splintered shins. She heard the sound of herself laughing and screaming and whipping at them with the baton as though it was a saber.
And she remembered Ray Tate restraining her. The sound of his voice trying to calm her in the warren of alleyways. No, no, stop. I sai
d no. She remembered the look of horror in his eyes, a look that said he’d never seen her before, as if he was looking at some strange ugly creature which she supposed she was. She didn’t know, might never know, when the switch inside her went off, when a current of an entirely other energy flowed through her, when she became what she’d always seen as her enemy.
And how did she know something unknown wouldn’t trip it again?
Afterward, they talked about it periodically but he wasn’t able to help her out much. He’d seen what could emerge from the human heart; he’d seen what had emerged from his own when he’d had to drop the hammer. He’d sorted as well as he could. All he could do for her was to be there while she sorted for herself. Every cop who’d gone to the edge had some internal scaffolding to construct and ultimately had to do it alone. She talked, he listened. That’s all he had. The rest was up to her.
Paris was a rebirth, a long time of perfection, of ease with each other, with the endless discoveries of things between them, of things around them. Paris was delight upon delight upon delight. They met few people, mostly locals and some early tourists. They never said they were cops. They never thought they were, any longer. As long as the credit card worked, they were so gone.
When she needed her time to think about what she needed to think about, he left her to it. But at the end, packing up to head home, she was rolling his canvasses into cardboard tubes and she found a painting and she knew he’d been concerned and had followed her on her wanders. The painting was of her, sitting at a table and chair with spidery legs on their favourite street, rue Mazarine, a glass of white stuff in front of her. Her hair black and spiky and a purple scarf knotted at her throat under her pointy chin. Tiny in her bulky sweater, her ankle boots, her blue jeans. It was all as accurate as evidence, except her eyes were slightly exaggerated, wide with something, maybe fear, maybe not. She could tell he himself wasn’t yet sure what he was painting there, in those eyes. He wasn’t sure where she was looking, within or without.
She was curled naked under a duvet dozing lightly when he came in. She heard the Velcro rip from his ankle holster; the door to the closet opened and the gun thunked into the gun safe beside hers. The sliding of the zipper on his pants, the thumping off of his boots. He lay down beside her, the futon sagging dangerously, and he fitted himself to her, his face at the nape of her neck. She smelled beer.
“Ray? You shitfaced?”
“I be. Drug guys. What they don’t fuck, they drink. Give me an hour, we’ll go out for dinner.”
“You get what we need?”
His hands felt that she was naked.
“Yep. This Markowitz thing is going to be easy. Candy.”
Chapter 5
Late morning, the border crossing was sweltering. Every half-hour the Homeland Security teams jumped their dogs into and out of split forty-five gallon drums of water to cool them down. On the Mexican side the back-up of traffic into the U.S. seemed endless. Cars with billowing steam blowing from tired cracked radiators were pushed off to the side.
All the Mexican patrol officers knew the aid agency’s old sunburned Toyota wagon, and they knew it was worth some money. A beefy agent walked down the line to Zoe Preston and held out his hand.
She handed over the passport with two twenty dollar bills, and greeted the agent.
“You a terrorista, chiquita? A bomb strapped to your little body?”
“Not today. Today I do good.”
“Because, you know, we are a poor country without skyscrapers.”
“Poverty is God’s test,” she said sadly.
“Oh,” he said with aggressive surprise, “is that what the baby’s belly is saying? Those sounds I hear at night?” He examined the passport and returned it, minus the money, and waved out of the line-up and through the border point.
She drove with the windows down, the air conditioning off, both for mileage and because now, further from the traffic at the border crossing, the desert had that clean hot smell she loved, of baked sand and dry cactus. Someone’s abandoned Bob Dylan tape moaned and skipped in the deck on the seat beside her. She wore cheap plastic sunglasses for self-defence, her only concession to the climate.
Much of her job was driving. Transporting people. Transporting medicines. Transporting food. She liked driving. It gave her time to think, to remember, to grow an awareness of where she was, what she was doing. To realize how different it was from her father’s life and the world of her uncle Marko. Crooks, both of them. When she was small, Zoe Preston recalled, uncle Marko had shown up drunk and laughing with a bunch of mink coats draped over his arm. One for her with the warning she should wait a couple of days before wearing it to school, and one for her mom. In the newspapers the next day were reports of a cold storage being busted into and a hundred furs stolen.
She laughed, her long muscular arms taking the steering wheel through a particularly bad hairpin that jumped an arroyo. How disappointed he must be, her dad, Mr. Presto, at this cotton blouse and khaki shorts, these old straw sandals, a border-jumping commie wasting good smuggling space by taking medicine to the poor and the sick. But, maybe not.
Uncle Marko, though, now there would be argument endless. By the time Zoe’s mom left them after something bad had happened to her, Uncle Marko had been long estranged from Bobby Preston. She never knew why, then, but later found it was because Marko had graduated from the neighbourhood into the drug trade. There’d been deaths, there’d been disappearances. Marko became a name in the households of the underworld. She should hate him, she’d seen the ravages of the drug trade first hand, but she couldn’t.
Once, she’d asked Uncle Marko why her dad didn’t want him to come around anymore.
“You know what we do, right, kiddo? We do things that ain’t kosher. Your dad thinks he’s a good crook and I’m a bad crook. But you know what? We’re both dogs, just different kinds. I bite; he doesn’t. Still, dogs.” But Marko never rained on her dad, even after he was frozen out of the family.
Just outside the cluster of shacks where Medicine and Peace was headquartered a roadblock was arranged across the road. She sighed and found some American currency in her pockets and loaded twenty dollar bills into her passport.
Two men in uniform stared at her licence plate before approaching. Both were armed with machine guns, both wore bulging insect sunglasses, both had louche slouches and the quick sure movements of desert reptiles.
The men separated and the older of the two approached her window, his round cherubic face grim. He removed his sunglasses, and out of respect she removed hers. The little things of common courtesy, her dad always said.
He frightened her. Pat-down searches were occasional bribes, when she had to stand still while his investigative paws rubbed her to wetness, massaged her military-style shirt pockets to visible involuntary arousal, all carried out while looking away from her at the horizon, his voice chatting about other, unrelated, things as her face boiled.
“Juan, a pleasure.”
Without speaking he held his hand out and she passed him her manifest, clipped to a board, and her passport and her letters. The other man was at the rear passenger side window, irritatingly just out of the line of her peripheral vision, the nose of his machine gun on the edge of the window. She became afraid.
Juan tossed the clipboard and passport onto the road. “We have reason to believe this vehicle is being used to transport drugs.”
“It’s on the manifest, Juan. For toothaches and stomach remedies. As last month, as next.”
“Narcotics. Dona blanca, cocaina.”
She, a look of understanding coming to her face, sighed and reached up into the visor where a folded American hundred was secured by a rubber band. The man on the passenger side rapidly cocked the slide of his machine gun.
Become dumb, she thought, dumb and merry. This was bad, she knew, and was suddenly frightened. “No, no. A gift.”
Who smuggled dope into Mexico from Texas? It was like using a mask and a gun t
o deposit money into a bank.
Slowly she took down the hundred, secured it in her palm with her fingers, and flashed it at Juan. “With children, every day should be Christmas.” She sought mercy in familiarity. “Your Juanita is enjoying the new babies?”
Juan’s face gathered redness. Furious, he let his machine gun drop to hang by its strap behind his hip. He reached through the window and grabbed her by the throat with both hands. “Not today, the babies, puta. That you would use my post to traffic poison insults me and threatens the well-being of my family, my nation.”
She struggled against his hands, feeling herself strangling. She tried to speak. “No, no. Just the tooth and the tummy. Look, see.” The words were a gargle as he squeezed. She felt vomit rising in the place beneath his hands. Nothing in, nothing out; a sure description of death.
Beside her the other man opened the door and rummaged through boxes. He emerged with a clear plastic bag secured with black electrical tape. He dropped the bag on the ground and leaned across the set, stabbing the gun barrel into her rib cage. “Cocaina!”
Juan pulled Zoe Preston through the window, keeping his hold on her throat as she hit the ground, hard. He let go, stood up, and began kicking at her, picking his shots as she tried to contort into a form that would protect her organs, her groin, and her breasts. She was grunting, her throat still closed, and she could hear Juan grunting too, his kicks slowing as he examined her torso for a point of least defence.
The CD player skipped. “… life-life-life-life-life-life … time-time-time-time … blood-blood-blood …”
She wondered as she passed out if she should have after all stayed home and looked after her parents after they separated, instead of, as Uncle Marko said, depriving them of their precious duty to protect her.