by Dale Lucas
Double shit. They weren’t here to make arrests. They were here to blackmail the Queen Bee.
“Top o’ the mornin’, Mr. Mann.”
Gideon scowled. “Officer Heaney.”
“What’a ya got there?”
Gideon made a big show of reading the crate’s stenciling. “Dutch porcelain. Fragile, apparently.”
“It is, at that,” Heaney answered. “Take many shipments of porcelain in the wee hours of the mornin’, do ye?”
“Madame Marie’s a collector,” Gideon offered.
Heaney marched forward, mounting the steps onto the raised loading platform and standing an arm’s length from Gideon. He peered into the open crate, studying the contents. As Gideon took two steps back, sickened being so close to the little fat fuck, he noted new faces just inside the loading dock, in the shadows of the ground floor storeroom.
White faces. More cops. They’d come in from the front too.
Big show of force, Gideon thought, and no booze to arrest us with. It’s a message. It’s a threat.
“Now, Mr. Mann,” Heaney said, cocking his hat back on his melon head, “I hope ye don’t take me for a fool.”
“And I hope you don’t take me for a queer,” Gideon said.
Heaney stared, not grasping Gideon’s meaning.
Gideon should have bitten his tongue. He didn’t. “I don’t feel like getting fucked by you this early in the morning.”
His next thought was to tell the boys to stay cool; to keep their hands in the open, let him talk tough; but they were not, under any circumstances, to challenge the cops.
But he heard a thunder of footfalls and felt something hard and solid—a billy club, no doubt—connect with his skull, and down he went, without getting a chance to say any such thing.
The world went black. Vaguely, he heard a lot of voices raised in threat; the ka-chak of scatterguns pumped and shells filling empty chambers. Then, cutting through the gradually-clearing haze, Officer Heaney barking, “Cool off, the lot’a ye! You black bastards, you drop those smokers, here and now!”
Gideon blinked. He was on his knees. He looked around. Heaney’s red face showed fury not only at Gideon’s men, but also at the cops themselves. No doubt, he’d told them to play it cool; hadn’t meant for Gideon to get whacked before he’d given an order. Sense was returning. Gideon’s head throbbed. He stared at the cement of the loading dock between his two hands, which held him up on his knees.
Heany bent over him. He smelled sour old whiskey on the spud-eater’s breath. “I’ll not take such talk from you, you black bastard. You’re just lucky I’m not queer for your dark sort, else I’d have already rammed this billy bat of mine up your puckered black arsehole.”
“Get to the point,” Gideon growled.
“You were expecting somethin’ else in those crates, weren’t you?”
Gideon drew a deep breath. “Mayhap.”
“French brandy? Bubbly from the old country? Oh, such a great quantity of contraband probably set your precious colored Queen back a heft, didn’t it?”
“But I’ll bet you’d be willing to find our missing contraband for us, wouldn’t you, Officer Heaney?”
“That’s what we do, lad. Serve and protect. Dole out justice, and see wrongs righted.”
“For a price.”
“Call it a retainer. There are a great many nefarious sorts in this city, boyo. Could take us some time—our own personal time, off the clock, mind ye—to find the blackguards that absconded with your very illegal crate full of very illegal, and expensive, booze.”
“You’re wasting my time,” Gideon snarled, finally raising his eyes to meet Heaney’s watery gaze, though he still couldn’t quite focus. He felt a knot rising on his skull; felt warm blood staining his collar. “What’s your price?”
“Twenty five percent of your shipment—the goods them-selves—along with, say, one hundred dollars for each crate recovered and delivered.”
Fucked, good and proper. The price was just high enough to hurt, but just low enough that not to pay it was foolish. They had a gin joint to run here; a classy place; they needed booze or they’d never be able to compete.
“I ain’t the Queen,” Gideon said. “I can’t give you an answer.”
“Excuse me if I cry bullshit, boyo. If you ain’t keeping your queen’s twat happy with your big, black dick of yours, I know you’ve at least got her trust, elsewise you wouldn’t be out here, in the early dawn, waiting for such an important delivery. You can speak for her, to me, man to man, and I’ll wager she’ll accept it.”
Gideon wanted to gouge out the bastard’s yellow, besotted eyes; he wanted to close his hands on Heaney’s soft, double-chinned throat and squeeze until the Finn’s eyes rolled like marbles and his tongue wagged like a stray dog’s tail; he wanted to shove the barrel of a heater down his throat and pull the trigger, again, and again, and again...
“What’ll it be, lad?”
Gideon sighed. Once again, it sounded like a temperamental tiger’s snarl. “No delivery in twenty four hours, no pay. After that, you can jar that cognac and pickle your sick old Irish liver in it, for all I care.”
Heaney stood tall again, looming over the still-on-his-knees Gideon. “You give good lip for a nigger, boyo. It’s been a pleasure doin’ business with ye.”
And with a sickeningly polite cock of his hat, Heaney dismissed himself and gave the signal to his men to fall back. In moments, the cops had receded, withdrawn back into the club or into their cars, and scattered into the foggy early morning.
Two of the fellas helped Gideon to his feet. He shook them off, sick at himself, and did the only thing he could do.
He toppled the nearest crate of porcelain off the loading dock with a swift kick and roared like a caged lion as the myriad contents shattered on the concrete.
XX
While Gideon brokered trade with Officer Heaney aboveground, two stooges named Maurice and Abe were stuck in the basement, cleaning up the mess of toppled shelving left over from the prowler the night before. They would’ve preferred a task up top because the cavernous basement of Aces & Eights creeped them both out fierce. If they had been on booze duty, they would’ve had their hands on bottles of fine hooch, and could maybe pocket something to take home. Ditto if they had been relegated to the kitchens: at least there they would’ve been trying the recipes the new staff of chefs and line cooks were whipping up. Hell, even if they were put on the stage or the floor, they would’ve been free to roam, and it wouldn’t just be the two of them.
But Gideon, by way of the Queen Bee, put them on cellar duty; so here they were, rebuilding and erecting, one by one, the toppled battalion of enormous shelves that made up the huge larder and storage pantry underground. They were to put the racks back up—and this time, to bolt them to the rafters. So right now, it was just the two of them, setting up the steel girders that made up the bones of the industrial shelving, bolting the reinforced wooden shelves in place within the girders, then securing each construction to the cement floor and the oak rafters in the ceiling above.
It was slow, it was boring, and no matter how many lanterns they cribbed from above, or how high the morning sun got outside, the darkness in the cellar never seemed to recede. Truth be told, Abe felt a weird chill in the air, too; something untoward and unnamable that tickled the nape of his neck and tensed his nuts. But he just chalked that up to the shadows and the dust and the smell of the old cellar and tried to concentrate on moving their task along and being done with it.
So here he stood, spotting Maurice as the younger man climbed his ladder to put the topside bolts in the rack they’d just finished—their fourth, of a projected eight. Just their luck. They’d be down in this goddamned basement until lunch.
The ladder swayed a little. Abe held it, but it was Maurice who steadied it. The kid had good balance, and the height—
the basement had twelve foot ceilings—didn’t bother him. He went to work with a crescent wrench on the
rafter bolts that would hold the top end of the rack in place.
“I’m gonna bring Maisey up here some night,” Maurice said for the umpteenth time. “Yessir, she’d roll over and stick that bucket of hers in the air after a night upstairs.”
The ladder swayed again. Maurice corrected and Abe tightened his grip. “Don’t lean out so far, boy,” Abe said. “You hit this concrete floor from where you at, you’ll crack your goddamn head.”
“I’m copacetic,” Maurice tossed back. “Just hold it. Shit, Abe, you sound like my mama.”
Abe studied the shadows in the darker recesses of the basement around them. What was it down here that gave him the creeps? He wasn’t some country cane-break nigger just up from the Old South... he’d been born and bred in a Detroit tenement; moved to Harlem just after the turn of the century, word getting out that this was where all the Negroes were headed; where all the opportunities would be. He’d tired of Detroit and he wanted to see what a Negro metropolis might look like, so he landed here, and he fell in love with it.
But the point was, he didn’t go in for that superstitions old-world hoodoo bullshit that so many of the down-South fellas and their gals went in for. So what had him so on edge? What was it about one musty old basement—no matter how dark, how large, how hungry it seemed—that so distressed him? He was starting to feel the edge on his nerves seeping into his bones, humming like electricity in his joints and fingertips.
And why the hell was it so cold down here? The boiler was just yards away, after all, squatting like a fat old iron toad in its hollow log. If anything, it should be warmer down here than anywhere else in the building.
“You ever had a girl got hot on dancin’, took you for a roll all night long with the sweat still on her, then woke your ass up Sunday mornin’ tried to make you go to church? Maisey does that shit and—”
“You done yet?” Abe interrupted. “Shit, boy, if you’d just do what you gotta do and stop beatin’ your gums—”
Maurice looked down at him from his perch atop the A-frame ladder. “Damn, Abe, what got into you?”
“We got a lot of damn racks to raise, Reesey, and we barely started.”
“Well hand me that other crescent. I gotta brace this bolt from both ends while I get it tight.”
Abe shook his head. It was gonna be a long day.
He left the ladder, took exactly three short, shuffling steps toward the tool box, and bent to grab the very crescent that Maurice was suggesting. What happened then happened fast, and Abe would never stop being confused and puzzled by the whole mess.
He bent. The nearest kerosene lamp was at his back, about three feet away, and as he bent, lamp behind him, a shadow darted, quick and fleet, across the ghostly light spilling forth from it. The shadow crossed his peripheral vision just as Abe laid hands on the wrench, and he shot upright and spun around, thinking that one of the jokers from upstairs had arrived and was trying to sneak up and spook him while his back was turned.
Then he heard the scoot of the ladder. As he turned full round, he saw the whole mess teetering, as though someone had given it a heavy shove from the floor. Maurice started to curse, and Abe got a quick glimpse of his face—enough to know that the kid didn’t even realize Abe wasn’t below him anymore.
Then Maurice and Abe’s eyes met across the space between them. Abe saw it in the kid’s piebald gaze: What are you doin’ way over there, Abe? he seemed to ask. Who just shoved this ladder I’m standin’ on?
Then the whole mess toppled, and Maurice gave a loud, hoarse cry, and down he went, head first, toward the bare concrete floor.
Abe had time to lunge forward, but his front foot didn’t even move. Maurice’s brown melon head impacted with a hollow thwack on the concrete and a warm, wet flower of blood shot every which way, painting Abe’s clunky old work shoes and the cuffs of his dungarees.
And then it was all over. There wasn’t a sound to be heard except for the slow burble of Maurice’s blood, shooting out of his cracked head in hitching streams, spreading in an ever-widening pool across the concrete floor.
Abe ran for help, leaving his young companion where he lay, body still twitching as the last light crept out of his half-open eyes.
XX
It was barely eleven o’clock when Madame Marie arrived at Mambo Rae-Rae’s Voodoo Botanica on 135th Street near 8th Avenue. The place was a hole-in-the-wall, barely the size of a newsstand, but it was chock full of the tools of the trade: veve flags and medallions, gris-gris sacks, fresh and dried botanicals, magic water, perfumes, oils, statues and lithographs of saints, and glass-chimnied, slow-burn candles. There was barely room for two or three customers to enter the store and linger beside the littered counter. Knowing how such places operated, Madame Marie assumed there was probably a back room where the mambo kept the good stuff: namh-charged reliquaries, govis, assons, mummified animals and more powerful magicks that only the most desperate or well-to-do vodouisants might come seeking or know how to properly employ.
The lady of the house leaned behind the counter, one foot propped on a stool she usually sat perched on. She was smoking a clove-spiced cigar and staring at Madame Marie like the Queen Bee’s presence was both the most amusing and most banal thing she’d ever seen. The Queen Bee had no direct experience with this woman, but she’d heard plenty of talk about her, and knew her to be one of the more trusted mambos uptown.
Rae Gooden was her name, and the Queen Bee could already tell that the mambo knew who she was.
“Here come the Queen Bee,” Mambo Rae said, “buzzing into my hive. Harlem’s Miss Anne in linen and lace. What you doin’ in my botanica, Queen Bee?”
“I’ve got a problem,” Madame Marie said.
“Everybody got problems,” Mambo Rae countered. “What makes you so special?”
Madame Marie lost her patience. Her hand dove into her purse, dug out a wad of bills, and laid them on the counter. “I need a cleansing.”
Mambo Rae’s eyes were alight at the sight of all that green, but she fought to play it cool. She might be a businesswoman, but clearly she wanted to make the Queen Bee sweat and relish her newfound power. “Hire a housemaid,” she said.
“Cut the crap, Ms. Gooden,” the Queen Bee snarled. “There’s something nasty in my club, and I need it gone. Yesterday.”
“Call the preacher.”
“I may have to,” the Queen Bee said. “But I’d like to start with you.”
“Why you wanna do that?”
“Because maybe it’s one of yours,” the Queen Bee said.
“One of mine?” Mambo Rae asked, eyes widening. “Queen Bee, they not mine. They ours. ‘Less you lily white under all those pretty, bloomin’ vines.”
“You know what I mean,” the Queen Bee snapped. “Maybe it ain’t just a devil that runs at the first cry of Jesus Christ. Maybe it’s something older. Something meaner. Something only folk magic’s gonna pry out.”
“Folk magic,” Mambo Gooden said, and drew a long drag from her cigar. “How quaint. That must amuse you to no end, watch-ing all us little darkies scurry round and say our funny blessings in funny tongues to funny gods. Must be nice, being so modern and civilized and all.”
The Queen Bee swept up her wad of cash and headed for the door. “I don’t have time for this. Good day.”
“Cool your heels, Queen Bee,” the mambo said. “Can’t you take a joke?”
“At a time like this?” Madame Marie said. “No, miss, I cannot.”
“Come in the back,” the mambo said. “We’ll gather some mojo and be on our way.”
XX
House, despite his size, felt remarkably vulnerable surrounded by all these spaghetti-eaters, even with Wash and Timmons by his side. Nasario had sent a car, saying Soccorro wanted to talk about the hit on the cathouse the night before. House already had some inkling of what the old don wanted to discuss, and he wasn’t disappointed.
“Who was he?” the wheezy old bulldog said.
“Who was who?” Ho
use asked.
“Don’t crack wise,” Nasario answered, standing at his rotund master’s side. “The spook in white-face. The one that fritzed the roll. Who was he?”
House lowered his eyes and sighed. “Fella in a top hat and braids, sporting a skull face and pistols?”
Nasario pressed. “One of the Queen’s?”
House shook his head. “She says no. She’s got no reason to lie.”
The old don looked completely befuddled. “Who is he then?” he rasped, looking for the first time like something really, deeply troubled him. “This is no good, Papa. This is a disaster. When we made alliance, we had no inkling that you had personal enemies who might interfere—”
“How can he be my personal enemy if I never met the man?” House countered.
Nasario didn’t like that. “Don’t crack wise, sambo. You’re a hood, same as everyone in this room. You should know, same as we do, sometimes we make enemies we don’t know.”
“Well, then,” House said. “Clearly, I’ve done just that. Gimme some time, I’ll flush him out.”
“Time?” Soccorro asked, leaning forward. “There is no time. My men are dead. They died on your turf, doing a favor, we thought, for you, at your behest.”
“That goes on the bill,” Nasario said.
House smiled in spite of the seriousness of the situation. “Start me a tab.”
“You think this is funny, sambo?” Nasario growled. “Our men, dead on your turf, on your errand. Your problem. We need a solution, and we need it fast.”
House nodded. “We’ll flush him out. Didn’t I say so?”
“Flush him out,” Soccorro said quietly, a mandate of the highest order.
“Flush him out,” Nasario added, “and put him in our hands. This spook son of a bitch made this business personal now, especially if he ain’t with a crew. You lay hands on him, you deliver him to us, preferably alive.”