The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Joe looked in the distance, but saw only the framed, fully autographed Born to Run sleeve on his wall.

  ‘The buck’s gotta stop somewhere, Joe. Those people you two put away might not have been upstanding citizens, they might even have been monsters, but you, Mingus, Sixdeep and MTF had no right to do what you did. You all broke the law.’

  ‘So whatchu’ doin with me then?’ Joe asked, searching her eyes.

  ‘Because I believe you can change. And I believe you want to change. And I believe the good in you is sick of all this bad stuff you’ve done.’ She took his hand as she spoke. ‘You’ve got integrity, decency and self-respect, Joe Liston.’

  ‘You think so?’ Joe sneered with self-disgust. ‘You wanna know why I went along with this shit, Lina? Huh? You wanna know? ’Cause I wasn’t meant to make Detective. I was just a simple doughnuts and coffee Patrol cop, roustin’ hookers and pushers ten to twelve hours a day. I was the guy old ladies called out to get their cats off the roof. I was the guy kept the crowds back at homicide scenes. I was a uniform, not a brain.

  ‘See, it didn’t matter that I saw things the dicks missed. Didn’t matter that I talked to witnesses they didn’t bother with. Didn’t matter that a lotta the time I had a good idea who the perps were. ’Cause in the Miami PD it don’t matter how clever you are, or how good you are, or what good you could do if only someone gave you the chance, opened that door up a little to let you in. No, sir! It’s down to the colour of your skin. Sure, they just love to say they employ plenty of black folk, but what they don’t tell you is what they employ them as: Dispatch, Records, Patrol, Front Desk, Lock-up. That’s all we ever get. Sure, you’ll find one or two black Detectives, but it’s a damn small number. So, when I got that shield, it felt good–hell, I felt good. Proud of myself. I’d achieved somethin’.

  ‘And it was all thanks to Max. He didn’t owe me squat. He was the golden boy with the predestined future. I was supposed to show him the ropes, help him up his street IQ then fade away. He didn’t let it happen. He took me with him. He damn well refused to work with anyone else. You hear that, Lina? He refused. He told Sixdeep he’d rather stay in Patrol than work with some cracker who was gonna cut corners on a case so he could go watch a ballgame or ball some hooker. You talk about integrity and decency, that motherfucker’s got it in spades!

  ‘You say it’s about doin’ what’s right for me?’ he continued as the song ended and the needle left the vinyl and went back to its cradle. ‘But it ain’t just about that. See, every day in Miami innocent black folks get pulled over by a white or Latino cop. Sometimes it’s for a genuine reason, sometimes it’s because the cops just want someone they can fuck with. Black man starts to protest, they arrest him for assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and disturbing the peace. He gets hauled up before a judge, and all the jury see is the colour of his skin. If they’re lucky they go to jail. If they’re not they end up like McDuffie. And you know what? I hadn’a been a cop, that could’ve been me takin’ that shit, just because of havin’ the misfortune of bein’ born the wrong colour in this so-called civilized society of ours. Sixdeep, MTF, the way they do things–we do things–they’re all part of the problem, and a big part of the problem. And yeah, you’re right, Lina, I’m sick of it. Sick to my stomach. And they gotta be stopped. Simple as that. And that’s what I’m gonna do. But Max is gonna go down with ’em.’

  ‘Because he’s part of the same problem you’ve been talking about,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Joe answered and finished his wine.

  ‘I want to meet him,’ Lina said.

  ‘Who? Max?’

  ‘Yeah, Max. Your partner.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to put a face to him. I want to look him in the eye. I want to see what kind of person he is.’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘You have. But I want to know for myself.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a great idea,’ Joe said. ‘I’m gonna fuck this guy’s life up, and you wanna make nice?’

  ‘It’s about being sure. Because I’m going to go through this with you too.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Joe said. And right then a big part of him saw a chance that somehow he could find a way of accepting his well-paid desk job and paper over the humiliation with the material comforts a bigger salary would bring; that he wouldn’t have to take the hard option, that he could let it all pass. Lina might like Max as much as he did. Lina might talk him out of it for Max’s sake. But then, what about their case? He felt they were getting closer to cracking it every day. It wouldn’t be long now before the truth started to show itself.

  PART FIVE

  June–July 1981

  46

  ‘Guess you’re gonna have to go get yourself some whole new voodoo, Solomon, ’cause there ain’t no cops investigatin’ you,’ Eldon said without turning around, but keeping his eyes on the dark outline in his rearview mirror.

  Solomon didn’t answer.

  It was after 10.00 p.m., and Eldon was parked in a side road facing his house. The lights were on. He was beat. He’d had a long old day. He needed a hot bath and his bed. Instead he had this: Boukman doing his pop-up act in the back of his car for one of their talks. Eldon hated their ‘talks’ because talking wasn’t one of the nigra’s strengths. He had this thing for silence, for saying nothing, for being a conversational black hole. It pissed Eldon off and also made him ill at ease.

  Boukman was unique in that way. A lot of the people Eldon had done business with in the past had been talkative as hell. Some you just couldn’t shut up. The spics and guineas were the worst offenders; talked the whole fucken’ time, like they considered silence a personal affront. Niggers could talk some too–not that they talked properly, no they jived in that shouty sing-song way they had, like they was all trying to be James Brown. He’d stopped doing business with Jamaicans because of the way they talked–he couldn’t understand a single word they said, and when he got himself an interpreter, he couldn’t understand a word he said.

  The cop Boukman had asked him to look into was some guy who’d walked into Sam Ismael’s store a week ago, asking about calabar beans and the de Villeneuve tarot cards. The guy had claimed to be a researcher from the university and hadn’t given his name. Even if he had, it would’ve been a false one. Any cop investigating something on the sly wouldn’t exactly go and give out his real name, would he?

  All he had to go on was a description–short brown hair, blue eyes, under six feet tall, big build, 190–200 pounds, mid thirties–which narrowed it down to about 3,000 people, including Max and Brennan.

  Not that anyone was investigating Boukman. Eldon had checked, double-checked and triple-checked every department. The Feds too. It had taken four days–days when he’d been swamped with work because of all the planning and backstage politicking that was going on with the Moyez case. They were in limbo because the Turd Fairy was discussing the potential fall out of busting a major Colombian drug ring with his people in Washington. Some players weren’t comfortable arresting so many spics all in one go. Spics had that strange way of suddenly bonding together because they spoke the same lingo. And spies had too much political clout, so they had to be managed with care.

  Anyway, it was bullshit. Even if someone was looking into Boukman they wouldn’t get far. There wasn’t a single picture or accurate description of him on file. No criminal record, no social security number, no immigration documents. Nada, as the spics would say. Boukman didn’t officially exist. Some of this was down to Eldon erasing all and every trace of him, beginning with his one and only arrest in 1969 for cutting a nigra’s Adam’s apple out (charges were dropped due to lack of evidence), and continuing to this day, destroying any eye witness reports for anything remotely close to a positive ID and then letting Boukman know the source. But most of the Boukman myth was created by the nigra himself, and, Eldon had to admit, it was a masterstroke of pure fucked up ruthless genius
. Boukman used ‘doubles’ who didn’t remotely look like him–out of work actors and actresses, mostly, recruited through small ads–to impersonate him at meetings, and if anyone outside his tight inner circle clapped eyes on him he had them killed. Misinformation is the same as no information, and the dead don’t talk.

  ‘Maybe it’s someone you don’t know about,’ Boukman said, finally, in that toneless, emotionless, slightly French voice of his.

  ‘Highly unlikely,’ Eldon replied. ‘Nothing gets investigated in this city without me knowing about it well in advance. How did Ismael know it was even a cop?’

  ‘It’s in the cards,’ Solomon answered.

  Oh, then it must be true, thought Eldon. He yawned and stretched theatrically to let the damn nigra know his voodoo paranoia was boring him. Shit, if those things are so damned accurate why can’t you predict who’ll win the World Series and make yourselves some nice, easy, legal money instead? Because those things are horseshit–that’s why.

  ‘You’re takin’ this mumbo-jumbo crap way too seriously, you know that?’ Eldon said.

  Solomon didn’t reply, so they sat in a silence which dragged towards the uncomfortable–for Eldon at least. He wondered what Boukman was like with other people, the rest of his voodoo mob, or his woman–if he had one. He didn’t care exactly, but he was curious, wouldn’t have minded a little genuine insight into the man. In the thirteen years they’d done business they’d never had much in the way of small talk. Actually, they’d had none. The miniscule scraps of what passed for conversation between them involved big subjects, like drugs, delivery, money and death.

  The street outside was still. No cars in the road, no people walking around. The neighbourhood was just great that way. An oasis of tranquillity; everything bad happened to someone else, somewhere else, never here. Here it was safe, middle class and very white. If you saw a spic or a nigra they were delivering your mail or moving your furniture in or out.

  Eldon started humming Frank’s ‘Last Night When We Were Young’.

  ‘Only a fool mocks what he doesn’t understand,’ Solomon interrupted him.

  Eldon turned around at that, expecting to see Boukman behind him, but his guest had moved to the left–noiselessly as always–so he was close to the door, a form moulded out of darkness.

  ‘You know what I understand? I understand you’re born, you live, you die. With the livin’ part you do the best you can, for as long as you can and then you’re gone. Worm food or ash. That’s it. Simple.’

  No response.

  Jesus! thought Eldon, we could be here all night. He broke into a few bars of ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’. Frank had a tune for every asshole situation.

  ‘I want the photographs and names of every cop in Miami.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘If the cop’s from Miami, Sam can pick him out.’

  ‘Have you been listening to a word I said?’ Eldon was angry now. ‘There ain’t–any body–investigatin’–you.’

  Boukman didn’t reply, so more silence. Eldon peered into the darkness behind him, trying to see him, wanting to switch on the damn light, go eyeball to eyeball with this piece of shit. Eldon was mad. He wasn’t going to show Boukman his files. That was police business–his turf.

  He couldn’t see Boukman at all. He turned around, frustrated, crossed his arms and faced the windscreen, looking longingly at the warm yellow lights in his house.

  ‘Things have changed,’ Boukman said, his voice now almost in Eldon’s ear, making him jerk in shock. The fucker had moved again, right behind him. He’d felt his breath on his neck, the brush of ice-cold feathers.

  ‘Yeah? How so?’ Eldon snapped. Christ, was he pissed! Boukman had given him a fright–him!

  ‘We have a new supplier.’

  ‘Who? Baby Doc?’ Eldon laughed.

  ‘No. His father-in-law, Ernest Bennett. He’s bought Air Haiti and taken over trafficking from the Haitian army, which means no more Cessnas with small loads every two days. Now we’ll be using proper cargo planes–DC3s. That means five or six times the volume.’

  ‘How many plane loads?’ Eldon asked. His heart rate was up.

  ‘Two a day to begin with.’

  ‘Starting when?’

  ‘Next Wednesday.’

  Eldon thought about it. This was a serious step up. Solomon Boukman would become the single biggest importer and distributor of coke in Miami. Bigger than the Colombians and Cubans. It would mean a lot more money. Way more risk too. Risk everywhere. The Colombians and Cubans wouldn’t exactly like the competition. There’d be another war, far worse than the one going on now with Griselda Blanco’s people. Then there was the government. The Haitian link would eventually get found out and Reagan would probably hit them hard–topple Baby Doc, bomb or invade the country. But that was later. He’d be long gone before the first storm cloud rolled in. For now he’d make as much damn money as he could. DC3s! Jesus!

  ‘Why didn’t you mention this first?’

  ‘The photographs are a priority,’ Solomon replied.

  Sure they are, thought Eldon. I know you now. You’re nothing special. You scare like the worst of them. The stakes get higher so you get more paranoid, more suspicious. A predictable cycle. You can never be too cautious, true, but there was a fine line between caution and shooting your own shadow. He knew how this was likely to go. Boukman was one of those guys who killed their entire crews over a hunch. Trouble is, behaving like that only made them even more mistrustful than before because they were suddenly surrounded by people they didn’t know, didn’t go back with. The end was just around the corner.

  Still, there was business to attend to and in business there was always a little give involved before you took.

  ‘OK. I’ll get you what you want,’ Eldon said, after a suitably studied moment where he’d controlled the silence. ‘Not that it’ll do you any good,’ he added.

  A taxi pulled up outside Eldon’s house. Leanne got out and walked up to the front door, stopping to wave as the cab pulled away.

  Boukman leant forward. Eldon felt his icy breath on the side of his neck again. He didn’t move. He could feel Boukman studying his daughter, taking her in. He didn’t like it one darn bit, didn’t like what he knew was going through the nigra’s brain. Leanne was a beautiful girl. She turned a lot of guys’ heads. He wanted to yell at her to hurry the fuck up, find her keys in her bag and get in the house. He could hear Solomon breathing through his nose, the air sounding like something heavy being dragged up the passages.

  Leanne went inside and closed the door.

  Eldon let out a sigh of relief he was sure Boukman heard.

  ‘Bring me the pictures in three days,’ Boukman said, opening the car door.

  Eldon sat in the car long after Boukman had ridden off in the Mercedes that had been parked behind them. He couldn’t believe it–the creep had actually unnerved him. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

  47

  ‘Solomon Boukman–man or myth?’ Drake mumbled as he looked around his tower of Babel–a sandwich so big it could have fed a small elephant: six solid inches of pastrami, beef and turkey inter-layered with pickles, sauerkraut, onions, lettuce and piercingly bright yellow mustard, the whole structure topped and tailed with a thin slice of rye bread and held together by a long wooden skewer. Max had a Cuban coffee and his cigarettes.

  They were facing opposite directions in adjacent end-of-aisle booths in Woolfies on Collins Avenue, a vast diner with mirrored columns, plush red leather seats, art deco lamps, and a beige and brown tiled floor.

  ‘Word is he’s the crime lord of Miami. Got his finger in absolutely everything there’s a law against. Dope, prostitution, extortion, gamblin’, numbers, auto theft, etcetera, etcetera.’ Drake took the tower apart and partitioned it into five smaller sections, but his meal still looked daunting.

  ‘So how come I never heard of him before?’ Max asked. Today his informant had come dressed as a Brazilian socce
r player–yellow and green shirt, blue shorts, white tube socks. He had the boots and a ball by his side.

  ‘Thass juss it. Dependin’ on who you talk to, Boukman either exists or he don’t. Some folks are sayin’ the Haitians made him up so they could scare off the niggas that was preyin’ on ’em–kinda like a criminal scarecrow or sumshit. The Haitians say he’s for real. At least them simple ones straight off the boats do. The rich ones I deal with in Kendall think it’s all bullshit too.’

  ‘What about you? What do you think?’

  ‘I ain’t the cop here, Mingus. I juss tell you what I hear an’ see. But if you want me to take a worthless guess–a guy like that?–you’d-a had to have some paper on him by now. No one that big goes undetected. Leaves a trail.’

  ‘True,’ Max said, chasing his sweet, thick black coffee with a pull on his Marlboro.

  ‘Strange thing is, the people who say he’s real don’t know what he looks like. Or they do, but all the descriptions is different. Some of ’em say he’s white, some say he’s black, some say he’s Latino–and there was this one ole girl tole me he was Chinesey lookin’. And then no one can agree if he’s really a he or a she. Or an it. Or an evil genius midget man chile. I even heard he’s got two tongues. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Two tongues?’ Max laughed quietly. ‘The ladies must love him.’

  ‘What I thought.’ Drake shovelled a wedge of mixed meat and sauerkraut into his mouth.

  ‘So, all this you heard is just word-of-mouth stuff? Nothing concrete?’

  ‘All porch talk. Other thing I found out is that Boukman’s got hisself a gang. They call theyselves the Saturday Night Barons Club. The SNBC. You heard of ’em?’