Read A Brief History of Seven Killings Online
Authors: Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings
A
BRIEF
HISTORY
of
SEVEN
KILLINGS
Also by Marlon James
The Book of Night Women
John Crow’s Devil
A
BRIEF
HISTORY
of
SEVEN
KILLINGS
Marlon James
A Oneworld Book
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2014
First published in Great Britain and the Commonwealth by
Oneworld Publications, 2014
Copyright © Marlon James 2014
The moral right of Marlon James to be identified as the Author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78074-587-9
ISBN 978-1-78074-588-6 (eBook)
Designed by Susan Walsh
Jacket author photograph © Jeffrey Skemp
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are
based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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To Maurice James
An extraordinary gentleman in a league of his own.
CONTENTS
December 2, 1976
December 3, 1976
February 15, 1979
August 14, 1985
March 22, 1991
CAST OF CHARACTERS
GREATER KINGSTON from 1959
Sir Arthur Jennings,
former politician, deceased
The Singer,
reggae superstar of the world
Peter Nasser,
politician, strategist
Nina Burgess,
former receptionist, presently unemployed
Kim-Marie Burgess,
her sister
Ras Trent,
Kim-Marie’s lover
Doctor Love / Luis Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas,
CIA consultant
Barry Diflorio,
CIA station chief, Jamaica
Claire Diflorio,
his wife
William Adler,
former field officer, CIA, now rogue
Alex Pierce,
journalist,
Rolling Stone
Mark Lansing,
filmmaker, son of Richard Lansing, former CIA director
Louis Johnson,
field officer, CIA
Mr. Clark,
field officer, CIA
Bill Bilson,
journalist, the Jamaica
Gleaner
Sally Q,
fixer, informant
Tony McFerson,
politician
Officer Watson,
police
Officer Nevis,
police
Officer Grant,
police
Copenhagen City
Papa-Lo / Raymond Clarke,
don of Copenhagen City, 1960–1979
Josey Wales,
head enforcer, don of Copenhagen City, 1979–1991, leader of the Storm Posse
Weeper,
gang enforcer, Storm Posse head enforcer, Manhattan/Brooklyn
Demus,
gang member
Heckle,
gang member
Bam-Bam,
gang member
Funky Chicken,
gang member
Renton,
gang member
Leggo Beast,
gang member
Tony Pavarotti,
enforcer, sniper
Priest,
messenger, informer
Junior Soul,
informer/rumored Eight Lanes spy
The Wang Gang,
gang based in Wang Sang Lands, affiliated with Copenhagen City
Copper,
gang enforcer
Chinaman,
gang leader near Copenhagen City
Treetop,
gang member
Bullman,
enforcer
The Eight Lanes
Shotta Sherrif / Roland Palmer,
don of the Eight Lanes, 1975–1980
Funnyboy,
gang enforcer and second-in-command
Buntin-Banton,
coleader and don of the Eight Lanes, 1972–1975
Dishrag,
coleader and don of the Eight Lanes, 1972–1975
Outside Jamaica, 1976–1979
Donald Casserley,
drug trafficker, president, Jamaica Freedom League
Richard Lansing,
CIA director, 1973–1976
Lindon Wolfsbricker,
American ambassador to Yugoslavia
Admiral Warren Tunney,
CIA director, 1977–1981
Roger Theroux,
field officer, CIA
Miles Copeland,
CIA station chief, Cairo
Edgar Anatolyevich Cheporov,
reporter, Novosti News Agency
Freddy Lugo,
operative, Alpha 66, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD
Hernán Ricardo Lozano,
operative, Alpha 66, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD
Orlando Bosch,
operative Omega 7, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD
Gael and Freddy,
operatives, Omega 7, United Revolutionary Organizations, AMBLOOD
Sal Resnick,
journalist,
New York Times
Montego Bay, 1979
Kim Clarke,
unemployed
Charles/Chuck,
engineer, Alcorp Bauxite
Miami and New York, 1985–1991
Storm Posse,
Jamaican drug syndicate
Ranking Dons,
rival Jamaican drug syndicate
Eubie,
head enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx
A-Plus,
associate of Tristan Phillips
Pig Tails,
enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx
Ren-Dog,
enforcer, Storm Posse, Queens/Bronx
Omar,
enforcer, Storm Posse, Manhattan/Brooklyn
Romeo,
drug dealer, Storm Posse, Brooklyn
Tristan Phillips,
inmate, Rikers, member of Ranking Dons
John-John K,
hit man, carjacker
Paco,
carjacker
Griselda Blanco,
drug lord, Medellín cartel Miami operations
Baxter,
enforcer for Griselda Blanco
The Hawaiian Shirts,
enforcers for Griselda Blanco
Kenneth Colthirst,
New York resident, 5th Avenue
Gaston Colthirst,
his son
Gail Colthirst,
his daughter-in-law
Dorcas Palmer,
caregiver
Millicent Segree,
student nurse
Miss Betsy,
manager, God Bless Employment Agency
Monifah Thibodeaux,
drug addict
Gonna tell the truth about it,
Honey, that’s the hardest part
—BONNIE RAITT,
“Tangled and Dark”
If it no go so, it go near so.
—
Jamaican proverb
Sir Arthur George Jennings
Listen.
Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you’re coming from and you’re always returning from it. You know where you’re going though you never seem to get there and you’re just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it’s a word missing an
ing
. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere, and you listen to them howl and hiss because we’re all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we’re all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there’s a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons. (1) We’re lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.
But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. This is what I wanted to say. When you’re dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours and there’s nothing to do but stray and wander awhile. Well, that’s at least what the others do. My point being that the expired learn from the expired, but that’s tricky. I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn’t fall, I was pushed over the ba lcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay. And I can’t say shut your trap, Artie Jennings, because every morning I wake up having to put my pumpkin-smashed head back together. And even as I talk now I can hear how I sounded then,
can you dig it, dingledoodies? meaning that the afterlife is just not a happening scene, not a groovy shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there’s nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won’t die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.
Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I’d rather listen to the longer dead. I see men in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you’re in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn’t stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.
If you don’t watch how you sleep, you’ll find yourself the way the living found you. Me, I’m lying on the floor, my head a smashed pumpkin, with my right leg twisted behind the back and my two arms bent in a way that arms aren’t supposed to bend, and from high up, from the balcony, I look like a dead spider. I am up there and down here and from up there I see myself the way my killer saw me. The dead relive a motion, an action, a scream, and they’re there again just like that, the train that never stopped running until it ran off the rails, the ledge from that building sixteen floors up, the car trunk that ran out of air. Rudeboys’ bodies bursting like pricked balloons, fifty-six bullets.
Nobody falls that way without being pushed. I know. And I know how it feels and looks, a body that falls fighting air all the way down, grabbing on to clumps of nothing and begging once, just once, just goddamn once, Jesus, you sniveling son of a mongrel bitch, just once that air gives a grip.
And you land in a ditch five feet deep or on a marble-tiled floor sixteen feet down, still fighting when the floor rises up and smashes into you because it got tired of waiting for blood. And we’re still dead but we wake up, me a crushed spider, him a burned cockroach. I have no memory of coffins.
Listen.
Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait. I once asked my Sunday school teacher, if heaven is the place of eternal life, and hell is the opposite of heaven, what does that make hell? A place for dirty little red boys like you, she said. She’s still alive. I see her, at the Eventide Old Folks Home, getting too old and too stupid, not knowing her name and talking in so soft a rasp that nobody can hear that she’s scared of nightfall because that’s when the rats come for her good toes. I see more than that. Look hard enough or maybe just to the left and you see a country that was the same as I left it. It never changes. Whenever I’m around people they are exactly as I had left them, aging making no difference.