The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  ‘Later.’ Max sat himself up on the hospital bed and took a sip from a glass of water.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘Hungry.’ He started to smile, but pain tore into his lips as his skin stretched, so he let his mouth droop.

  Yesterday morning he’d been rushed from Eldon’s office to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where they’d pumped his stomach. While this was happening, Joe had contacted Raquel Fajima about working up an antidote to the poison that had already got into Max’s system. She’d quickly given him a list of things to ask the doctors for and had rushed over to help them prepare it.

  When the anaesthetic had worn off, Max had come to screaming, thinking he was still in the middle of the ceremony. He’d been restrained and shot up with a sedative that had knocked him out until the early evening. When he’d next opened his eyes it was to Eldon, Joe and Sandra all standing around his bedside.

  A doctor had examined him and told him he’d have to stay in hospital for at least a week to undergo tests, assessments and evaluations.

  After she’d left, Joe told him what had happened. Max was shocked and bewildered. He had no recollection of anything beyond thinking of the sunset.

  ‘Looks like we both gave each other a fright,’ Max said.

  ‘Hopefully one cancels out the other.’ Sandra took his hand. ‘And we can get on with our lives.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to apologize for, baby.’ She kissed him on the forehead and ran her hand softly over his bald dome and smiled. ‘Except for this. It’s not a good look, Mr Kojak.’

  Max laughed, accidentally smiled and then winced in pain.

  ‘You remember anything else?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, but…I had this dream this morning. It was like a continuation of the last thought I had at the ceremony, before everything went blank–bein’ on the beach watching the sunset.’ He took her hand. He thought hard about what he was about to tell her, and how he was going to have to explain it. He could, of course, keep it from her. It would have been the easiest thing to do, to lie with omission, but it was something she needed to know about him.

  ‘In my dream, I’m not on the beach any more. I’ve moved on. I’m in this room. This dark room, no windows or doors. The kind you can’t ever enter or leave. And I’m floatin’ above this table, and there’s these three men sat around it. They’ve all got bullet holes in their chests. And they’re all lookin’ up at me. No expression, just lookin’. Only their eyes are as dead as they are. No light, no blood, no soul. Nothing inside. And then one of them pulls out a spare chair and pats it, as in–“Come, join us”. And I’m hovering there, above them, not moving. And I don’t know what to do. And that lasted all through the rest of the dream, until I woke up.’

  ‘Who were the men?’

  And so he told her about the people he’d taken out to the Everglades. He explained what they’d done, told her about how MTF sometimes worked, and what he’d felt he had to do in the circumstances. She listened carefully and silently, her reactions minimal.

  When he’d finished he told her the truth about MTF and the Moyez killing, and how he and Joe had found out about Boukman.

  ‘I guessed as much–about those…those three men–from the things you said on our first night together,’ Sandra said at the end. ‘Do you still agree with what you did?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Max replied. ‘I don’t think it’s wrong they’re dead. Only how. And why. But I had no choice.’

  ‘So, if you could do it again–would you do or undo?’

  ‘I’d look for another way,’ he said. ‘If there was one.’

  ‘And if there wasn’t?’

  ‘I’d try to find one. And I’d try real hard.’

  She came over to him and they hugged and kissed.

  Then there was a single knock at the door and Joe walked in, out of breath and sweating.

  ‘Hey, Max, hey, Sandra. How you doin’, partner?’

  ‘I’m doin’ OK,’ Max replied.

  ‘That’s good. Listen, I can’t stay,’ Joe said. ‘I was on my way over here and I got a message ’bout a lead just turned up.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the morgue.’

  ‘Wait up,’ Max said, ‘I’m comin’.’

  77

  ‘THE MOST WANTED MAN IN MIAMI’ screamed the front-page headline of Wednesday’s Herald. Printed below, dead centre, across three columns was Solomon Boukman’s photograph. Stripped of its myths and connotations–and the $150,000 reward for information resulting in capture–his physiognomy was unremarkable, bereft of a single defining locus, one that could easily be mistaken for a hundred others: dark and thin, clean shaven, short hair, blank eyes, a hint of a smile about the lips.

  A sidebar gave Boukman’s particulars:

  Race: Black/Haitian

  Height: 5 ft 10 in

  Build: Medium

  Age: 30–35

  Distinguishing features: Split/forked tongue

  Very likely armed and highly dangerous. Do not approach. Call 911.

  There was, of course, no mention of how the police had come by the photograph. It had been found in a condom in Carmine Desamours’ stomach, neatly cut up into numerous squares, each with a number on the back for quick assembly.

  That same morning Max met Drake in Al & Shirley’s on 5th Street. Or what had been Al & Shirley’s. It was now under new ownership and called Espléndido. The decor hadn’t changed, but it was dirtier and the windows were starting to get filmed with grease. The prices were lower and the menu was exclusively in Spanish.

  Drake had come to breakfast dressed like a boxer in training–Everlast boots, grey sweatpants and a matching hooded sweatshirt with cut-off sleeves. His hands were wrapped and he had a leather jump rope draped around his shoulders. Max wanted to laugh at his informant’s latest athletic get-up: with his willowy frame, stringy arms, long neck and prominent jaw, Drake looked about as convincing a fighter as Elvis had in Kid Galahad.

  ‘Boukman’s holed up in Lemon City,’ Drake mumbled through mouthfuls of scrambled eggs and diced ham.

  ‘Anywhere specific?’

  ‘He’s movin’ around,’ Drake said. ‘Stupid place to be, you ask me. It’s real hot there right now.’

  It sure was. Max had seen it all on the news and heard about it from the cops, who were now on tactical alert in case things kicked off and they had another McDuffie on their hands. On Monday, raids had been carried out all over Lemon City. Dozens of illegal Haitian immigrants had been arrested and taken to a detention centre close to the Port of Miami, where they were being held and interviewed before being shipped back to their homeland. It was like Mariel in reverse.

  The raids were met with almost immediate hostility–police cars and trucks had been stoned and people had been beaten by police as they’d either resisted arrest or tried to intervene to stop their relatives and friends being taken away. Then, yesterday night, a forty-year-old taxi driver called Evans Ducolas had died of a heart attack in the back of a police car after being hauled away as a suspected illegal. It turned out that Ducolas wasn’t an illegal at all: the previous month he’d received his Green Card. Community leaders had organized a street protest for this afternoon.

  ‘I heard Boukman kidnapped some cop’s old lady–and fucked the cop up real bad. Wasn’t you, was it?’

  ‘No,’ Max said. ‘I had a fight with a barber, fell down some stairs and cut myself shaving. All at once.’

  ‘What you shave with? Chopper blades?’ Drake laughed.

  78

  ‘Why in the fuck would he hide out here? First place he’d know we’d look for him, right?’ Max said as they cruised slowly around the red-roofed buildings of Edison Courts between North West 62nd and 67th Streets.

  ‘Maybe he’s dumb,’ Joe suggested.

  ‘He ain’t dumb.’

  ‘Think he’s one of those guys wants to get caught?’

  ‘Nah.’ Max shook
his head. ‘Boukman wanted to get caught he’d walk right into MTF and put his hands in the air. If he’s here, he’s here for a reason.’

  An hour before they’d set out the summer rain had come down in a hard and heavy burst, but now the sun was back out, intense and blazing, and the water was evaporating into a fine mist which wafted over the street, a spectral veil tinged with rainbow colours.

  There were plenty of people around, all streaming out of their homes and heading towards the demonstration now gathering on North West 54th Street. They stopped to look inside the black Chevy Monte Carlo Max and Joe were driving, instantly recognizing them as cops, collective curiosity giving way to worry and hostility.

  So far they’d had no luck whatsoever asking random bystanders if they’d seen Boukman. They’d been met with blank stares, shakes of the head, firm ‘Nos’ and straight-up ‘Fuck yous’.

  ‘Know what this reminds me of?’ Max asked.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Liberty City the previous year, right before the not guilty verdict came in, the entire neighbourhood on lockdown as people–already expecting injustice to prevail–got set to explode. There was the same edgy stillness in the air now, of anger massing on a hair-trigger.

  Max and Joe were both wearing bulletproof vests. Max had a pair of loaded Remington combat shotguns across his lap. The police were on tactical alert and a chopper was circling the area.

  ‘Can’t say I blame ’em,’ Joe said. ‘Haitians have had a bum rap in this city from the minute they got here. Cubans? We fish ’em out the water, give ’em a towel and a tow, a pat on the back and a Green Card. Haitians–we send right back. Ain’t right. Ain’t fair. Haitians have got it as hard, if not harder in their homeland than they do in Cuba. Except Baby Doc’s a fascist dictator instead of a commie, so our government supports him. And you know what makes the way we treat Haitians all the more fucked up? Haiti helped America out in the War of Independence.’ ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Absolute truth.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I read about it.’ Joe looked across at him. ‘You should read some too, Max. Educate yourself. These are all your people–our people–out here, in this city. The ones we signed up to protect and serve. You’ve got to know where they’ve been to understand where they’re coming from.’

  ‘You sound like Sandra.’ Max sighed.

  ‘As in intelligent and informed?’

  ‘As in gettin’ on my case.’

  ‘She’s right to. You’re clever, but you don’t know shit. If ignorance is bliss, you’re just about the smiliest motherfucker I know,’ Joe said.

  Two men were lying dead in Leogane Hardware on North East 2nd Avenue. The first–dressed in khakis and a white T-shirt–was bundled up on his side in a corner close to the entrance. A part of his head was oozing thickly down the middle of the door. There was a gun down his waistband and a black leather sports bag at his feet. The other man–substantially older–was lying behind the store counter, a chrome .44 Magnum in his hand and a fresh, still seeping bullet wound in his chest.

  ‘Robber popped the owner at point-blank range, probably after he got what he was looking for,’ Officer Alonzo Penabaz said, matter-of-factly, as he looked from the old man to the open and empty register. ‘Only he didn’t put him all the way away, ’cause the owner had time to get the big payback.’

  Penabaz had heard the shots. He and his partner Otis Mandel had been stationed in a prowler at the juncture of 54th Street, watching the demonstration growing ever bigger like a giant simmering amoeba. They were a nominal, deliberately low-key presence meant to project due sensitivity and respect to the community, after the barrage of press criticism over the death of Evans Ducolas. Yet there were two choppers overhead, riot units positioned on Lemon City’s boundaries and the National Guard was on standby, ready to move in at a moment’s notice if the protest turned violent.

  ‘What was the take?’ Penabaz asked Mandel, who was gawping into the open sports bag like he usually gawped at hot tail–mouth open, lower jaw slightly trembling, tongue licking the back of his lower lip.

  Mandel took out two bricks of money.

  ‘That ain’t all of it. Must be at least ten to fifteen Gs in here. Hundreds and twenties,’ Mandel said, ri?ing through the contents.

  Penabaz wolf-whistled and grinned.

  ‘What do you wanna do, Officer?’ he asked Mandel.

  ‘Book it into evidence–of course.’

  ‘After you.’ Penabaz grinned.

  ‘What about this?’ Mandel waved a finger over the carnage.

  ‘We’ll call it in when we get back to the car. They won’t send no one out here till this blows over or…blows up. Let’s roll.’

  They walked out of the store, both already making plans for what they were going to do with the money. Mandel was thinking of that seriously sweet pussy a G would buy–maybe some nice clothes too, for the occasion; Penabaz would square his two bookies and lay some new bets.

  It was sunny but the clouds were stealing the blueness back out of the sky again. Miami in the summer was always like this: overbearing heat and then overbearing rain that did nothing whatsoever to clear the air, simply made it worse.

  Up ahead of them a lot of people were streaming into 54th Street, and a few too many were gathered around their empty prowler, but both men’s sense of danger–imminent or imagined–was doused by their mutual and individual money-spending daydreams.

  ‘Hey! ’

  A woman’s voice behind them registered, but they didn’t turn around.

  ‘Hey! Police! Over here! Over here!’

  They stopped and turned around.

  A big woman in a bright yellow dress was running towards them, waving both her arms in the air.

  ‘Roro’s dead! Roro’s dead! Boulette shot him! I saw the whole thing! I saw the whole thing!’ she blurted out, panting and agitated, when she reached them.

  ‘Who got shot, ma’m?’ Penabaz asked her.

  ‘Roro! ’ the woman screamed. She was in her twenties, light-skinned, flushed red, eyes bugging out, close to hysterical. ‘Back there in that hardware store! You’ve gotta come now!’

  ‘Who’s Ro-ro?’

  ‘Roro–the store manager. My boss! He’s dead! He got shot!’

  ‘Which store, mam?’ Penabaz spoke slowly and calmly, giving himself time and space to think–only he was fresh out of ideas and points of reference: this kind of thing hadn’t happened before. They’d always got away clean.

  ‘Back up there!’ The woman pointed up the road.

  ‘Someone was shot, you say?’ Penabaz asked.

  ‘YES!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘Come quick!’

  Penabaz disengaged his arm and gave her a stern look. The woman wilted a little.

  People were suddenly appearing out of nowhere, coming from houses and parked cars, coming down the street, all slowing and then stopping to see what was going on, gradually congealing into an audience.

  ‘We can’t do that right now, mam,’ Penabaz said. ‘We’ve got to watch 54th.’

  ‘You can’t…what?’

  ‘Orders, mam, sorry. But we’ll call it in and some officers will be over to assist you.’

  ‘You mean…you ain’t even gonna come look!’

  The woman was almost in tears.

  ‘Orders, mam. I’m very sorry.’ Penabaz laid a comforting paw on her shoulder. He took a notebook out of his breast pocket. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Garcelle,’ the woman said. ‘Garcelle Tomas–no “H”.’

  ‘What’s the name of the store?’

  ‘Orders my ass!’ a man grumbled loudly from within the thick semi-circle of people standing around watching. A few people laughed.

  Penabaz didn’t catch what Garcelle said, but he scribbled nonsense on his pad.

  ‘You just don’t give a fuck!’ someone else accused, louder, bolder.

  ‘One less nigger to worry about!’ yelled another.

  ‘Right on! Tell it
, brother, tell it!’

  Penabaz looked at the crowd and tried to project authority, but the size of it–close to thirty people now–shocked and shook him. He glanced at Mandel and saw fear all over his partner’s face.

  ‘We’re gonna call it in right now, mam, don’t worry,’ Penabaz said to Garcelle, as firmly as he could manage against the anxiety fast flooding into him.

  He started heading for the car, Mandel following.

  ‘HEY!’ Garcelle shouted, coming after them, the crowd following. ‘What, what’s that?’

  The cops pretended they hadn’t heard her and carried on walking, but faster.

  ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here,’ Mandel whispered to Penabaz.

  Garcelle grabbed Mandel’s arm and stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘THAT’S RORO’S BAG YOU CARRYIN’!’ she shouted.

  ‘Wa-hat…th-th-this?’ Mandel stammered, pointing at the bag.

  ‘Yeah–THAT! That is money for when he retired. He was gonna build himself a place back home in Haiti! Boulette came in and robbed him. Only Roro shot him before he could get away. Now you the thieves!’

  The crowd fanned out and encircled the three of them.

  ‘You’re m-m-mistaken,’ Mandel said. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘You paint a little white monkey under your bag, Officer?’

  ‘Wah-what?’

  ‘Roro did. A little white monkey. Bet if you turn that bag over there’ll be a little white monkey on there. It was Roro’s mark, on account of how he was always eatin’ bananas. Go on and show me under the bag. If the monkey ain’t there, you can go on your way. If it is there, then you a thief–Officer. Show me the bag. Come on!’

  Mandel looked to Penabaz for a lifeline.

  ‘SHOW ME THE BAG!’ Garcelle shouted.

  Shaking, Mandel lifted up the bag.

  On the underside was a small painting of a chimp in profile, eating a banana under a palm tree.

  ‘Thief!’ Garcelle spat at him. ‘Gimme that bag!’

  Then Penabaz intervened, holding up his hands.

  ‘This isn’t the way it looks at all, mam. We were taking this bag away for safekeeping.’