Magic City (7 page)

Thorn and the man collapsed in a grunting tangle.

His split-second plan was to club the man with the drill, but in the jumble of thrashing arms and legs and the scramble to their feet, a photograph fluttered from the stocky man's grasp and he clawed a small revolver from his waistband and was tipping it toward Thorn's stomach.

Thorn, on his feet, shot out his hand reflexively, rammed the screw bit into the man's upper arm, and mashed the trigger.

The man howled and buckled to his knees, and the pistol fell from his grip. Scooping it up, Thorn stepped back and directed it at the taller man.

“Raise your shirt,” Thorn said. “Turn around slow.”

“I'm unarmed,” the man said.

“I'm not saying it again. Raise your goddamn shirt.”

The man complied and made a slow rotation. Flat, hairless stomach. No sign of a weapon.

He knew he might regret it, but he'd had more than his share of misfortune with loaded guns, so he broke open the revolver, spilled the rounds into the grass, and sailed the pistol across Alex's hedge into a neighbor's yard.

He turned back to the tall man.

Blue Eyes hadn't budged. He simply stared at Thorn with his eyebrows raised a notch as if he were pondering some lofty issue that had nothing to do with the events unfolding before him.

Whimpering, the other one struggled to his feet, his left hand clasping the bloody wound.

When he caught sight of Thorn, his lips drew back in a snarl and he staggered in Thorn's direction.

Thorn lifted the drill and gunned the screw bit at his face.

“Want the next one in your forehead?”

“You bastard, you're going to regret the shit out of this. When I'm done with your ass, you'll wish you never laid eyes on me.”

“I'm already there,” Thorn said. “Now get out of here. Both of you.”

The chunky man glanced at the black-and-white photo lying faceup in the grass, then looked at his partner.

“You're standing there not doing nothing. You're supposed to be my ace boon coon. Have my back.”

Keeping a watch on the two, Thorn walked over to the photo and snatched it up.

“I'm going into the house now and I'm dialing the local constable. Maybe you'd like to stick around and explain this little episode to him.”

“Some tough nut you are, whining to the po-po.” The dark-haired man glared. “Why don't you stay out here, dawg? I'm about to open up a super-size can of whoop-ass.”

Thorn squeezed the trigger again, and the dark-haired guy drew back. His hand came away from his wound and swept in front of his face as though dragging aside a cobweb. There was some gray in the guy's hair. He was maybe three or four years younger than Blue Eyes. Though his speech and manner were more suited to a delinquent in his teens.

The tall one squinted at Thorn through the brilliance. Despite the circumstances, he gave off an air of stillness and resolve that struck Thorn as more menacing than his cretinous partner.

“Having that photo is a matter of great personal importance to me.”

“Yeah? Well, that doesn't cut a lot of slack with me.”

On the man's lips a wistful smile appeared.

“I can see we've employed the wrong approach. You're an honorable man. Sneaking inside your home was an affront to your civility.”

He spoke the words with a rational disinterest, as though he were reminding himself of the strange moral codes followed by others.

“Why do you want that photograph?”

“I seriously doubt you'd understand.”

“Try me.”

“I'm dying here, Snake,” the other man said. “I need a fucking doctor.”

“It's a family matter, none of your concern.”

The small man doubled over and retched into the grass.

“Snake?” Thorn said.

Snake spoke to the other man in a tone one might use with a slow child, while his eyes never unlocked from Thorn's.

“Go get in the car, Carlos. We're finished here.”

Carlos wiped the spittle from his lips and marched across the lawn, then down the sidewalk toward the cab.

In Thorn's pocket the phone buzzed.

“Last chance to give me the photograph,” Snake said.

Thorn stared at the man but said nothing.

“All right. Then we'll have to complete this transaction later.”

Thorn waited till he'd covered twenty yards before digging out the phone. He flipped it open and found the
ON
button.

“Thorn?” Alexandra said.

With a leisurely stride, Snake crossed the lawn.

“I'm here.”

She hesitated a moment, as if registering his tone.

“What's wrong? You okay? What's happened?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Everything's cool. Nice town you got here.”

“Talk to me, Thorn. I'm on the plane; they're about to shut the doors.”

Thorn watched Snake catch up to Carlos and fall in step beside him, heading back to the cab. Snake and Carlos, the names echoed somewhere in the dusty warehouse of Thorn's memory.

“Thorn?”

“It's okay,” he said. “I slipped off the roof. But I'm fine. Not even bruised.”

“Fell off the roof?”

“Listen, it's okay. I landed on my butt. Nothing's hurt.”

“You're lying to me, Thorn. Don't do that, don't lie. I can tell.”

The cab U-turned and rolled slowly past, neither man looking his way.

“Everything's cool. It's this damn phone. It makes me sound weird.”

“The phone?” she said. “It sounds like more than the phone.”

She was silent for several seconds, and Thorn could hear the murmur of passengers around her. He hadn't lied to her before, not about anything major. And he was trying to stay faithful to that history. Nothing but the truth, just slightly less than the whole of it.

Maybe he hadn't handled the two guys with the most dexterity. He'd have to sort that out later, critique his effort. But at the moment he wanted to keep Alexandra on her way to Tampa with a minimum of anxiety. Tell her as much truth as possible without alarming her.

“I'm gone for an hour and you fall off the roof.”

“The good news is, I found your leak. First panel I removed, there it was, rotted roofing paper.”

He raised the photograph and gave it a look.

“I don't believe this,” she said. “You could've broken your neck.”

“Hey, while I got you, let me ask you something. That photograph in the house, I was looking at it earlier. The black-and-white glossy of a boxing match, looks like Cassius Clay and Liston. Where'd that come from?”

“Photograph?”

“Yeah, Cassius Clay, before he became Ali.”

“It's Dad's,” she said. “Alan Bingham gave it to him, the guy across the street. A gift. Why?”

“Oh, nothing. It's a nice shot. I was looking to see if I'm in it.”

“What're you talking about?”

“February 1964. I was in the crowd that night. Dr. Bill was a big fight fan. He took me and Kate along. I think we were on the other side of the auditorium from this shot. We stayed that whole week in Miami. Very exciting time. Very memorable.”

“I'm getting off the plane,” she said. “You don't sound right.”

“I'm fine, I'm good,” he said. “Call me when you land in Tampa. I'll be wrapping up the roof about then.”

She weighed it for a few seconds. Thorn could hear an announcement over the plane's intercom. Seat backs and tray tables upright.

Alex sighed.

“Promise me you're not going to slip off any more roofs.”

“You have my word,” Thorn said. “I've had enough thrills for one day.”

“Okay,” she said. “Be careful, damn it. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Thorn shut the phone and slipped it in his pocket.

He plowed through the hedge and into the neighbor's yard and found the pistol. A .22 revolver. He sniffed the barrel. He was no expert, but it did have a smoky tang as though it might've been fired recently.

He went inside, set the pistol on a kitchen counter, then poked through the house until he was satisfied nothing had been disturbed. He paused at the refrigerator door where the Harbor House monthly schedule was fixed with colorful magnets. Printed in bold letters across the top of the schedule was the facility's address.

Snake and Carlos wanted the fight photo for a reason powerful enough to draw a gun. They'd known Lawton's name, but even though they seemed to have no special interest in him, just the same, it wouldn't hurt to drop in on the old guy. Maybe spring him for the day. Thorn would carry along the photo, see what Lawton had to say about it. It was, after all, his primary assignment this week, to look after the old man, make sure he was safe.

In the bedroom Thorn dug a denim shirt from his duffel and found Alexandra's car keys and went outside. He surveyed the street. All quiet, the taxicab gone, the lawns mown and blown.

He started down the walkway, then halted and went back to the house. He found the right key and locked the front door. For a moment he'd forgotten he was in the big bad city, land of locked doors and security alarms.

According to the address on the schedule, Harbor House was south on Old Cutler Road, almost to Black Point Marina. From his vague recollection, he made that roughly a twenty-minute drive.

 

The flight attendant blocked the aisle and raised her hands to halt Alex.

“Ma'am, we're about to shut the door and push back from the gate. We'll have to ask you to take your seat.”

A man in an aisle seat reached out and petted Buck behind the ears.

“I'm getting off the plane,” Alexandra said.

One of the male flight attendants was locking down the door.

“No one gets off once the door's shut.”

For the second time that morning, Alex dug into her purse and brought out her Miami PD identification. She opened it for the flight attendant to see.

“I'm getting off the plane,” she said. “Now step aside, please.”

The woman frowned and took a step backward.

“The door's closed,” the flight attendant said. “Now take your seat, or I'll have to call the captain.”

 

The queen had roused herself from winter hibernation
.

Paper wasp. Order
Hymenoptera,
family
vespidae,
genus
, polistes.
Slender, narrow-waisted, with long legs, reddish-orange body banded with yellow. A stinging wasp. Capable of multiple venomous strikes. Flex her abdomen, arch her back, drive the stinger into flesh, then pump toxic antigens from the venom sac. Dissolve red blood cells
.

Withdraw, then thrust and thrust again
.

It had been her father's obsession and became hers. Hymenoptera, wasps, ants, sawflies, hornets, yellow jackets. Nesting insects that lived in regimented colonies. Queen, worker, drone. Her father admired their industry, their mindless dedication to social order. No frivolous individualism. Their hives, their tidy world. Their happy obedience
.

Her father wished the human race could be so ordered and industrious. Wished his daughter was so dutiful
.

Now on this warm spring afternoon, she was in the attic, the dry tight space above the air-conditioned house, sitting in her rocker in the shadows, observing the newly awakened queen as she scraped grooves in the soft rafters, then chewed the wood pulp, mixed it with her spit to build her papery nest, cell by cell. Comb of hexagonal compartments, a frail gray flower blooming, attached by a single filament to an old pine beam
.

The queen would attack if her nest was disturbed. To defend her hive, the female wasp stings and stings and stings
.

At other times her pointed spike doubles as ovipositor, used for laying eggs. Same tube for birth and death, eggs and venom. Only the female of the species holds the power to replicate or kill
.

With the loaded pellet gun lying in her lap, she rocked her wooden chair and observed the queen, the diligent queen scraping furrows of wood from the rafters and chewing it to sticky mush, then sculpting the insubstantial nest, cell by cell. The soft buzz vexing the quiet, dusty light
.

Her daddy taught her all she knew of wasps and other things
.

Sting, sting, sting
.

Her daddy taught her more than any girl should know
.

“The deltoid muscle is torn, and there's penetration of the humeral circumflex artery with significant pulsatile bleeding when the drill bit exited.”

Dr. Javier Lopez-Lima dabbed at Carlos's wound with a gauze pad, then drew his hand aside so Carlos could take a look. Which he didn't.

Lopez-Lima was in his late sixties. The cigars stuffing his shirt pocket bulged through his lab coat. Half a century ago the guy had worked in Havana, before Fidel gave him the heave. A man whose surgical skills were honed by tweezering bullet fragments from the hides of American mobsters. A guy who'd seen his share of payments peeled off rolls of hundreds. That's where he learned his English, too, back in Cuba, from Trafficante and his boys.

“Luckily, the humeral circumflex artery is not large enough to allow total exsanguination. It appears the muscle itself has compressed the puncture and provided counter-pressure to the arterial flow.”

“So you're not going to bleed to death,” Snake told Carlos.

“But I'm about to blow chunks again,” Carlos said.

The nurse who'd been standing at Snake's elbow extended the stainless-steel pan, and Carlos emptied what was left in his stomach.

While he retched, Snake gazed at the anatomical poster on the far wall. A man stripped of skin, his bright pink museles exposed and all their Latin names noted. This was the clinic where Snake's mother had brought him, the clinic where his eidetic memory was diagnosed, and for that reason it was the only clinic Snake ever used.

Lopez-Lima turned back to Carlos.

“You finished whining?”

“My goddamn arm hurts.”

“The pain will go,” he said. “You'll be able to lift your arm in a day or two. Just be glad he didn't hit you in the armpit. You would've bled out by now. We'd be disposing of a corpse.”

“You believe this fucking Cubano?” Carlos grimaced at Snake.

Snake and Carlos were a hundred percent Cuban themselves, but over the decades they'd become more Anglo than Hispanic. Because of how they were raised. Lost their Spanish. Got a long, slow transfusion of cool, standoffish American blood. As much as Snake resisted, even some of Stanton King's southern gentleman bullshit rubbed off.

Snake walked over to a metal folding chair and sat. He watched Lopez-Lima bandage Carlos's arm while the nurse stood guard. His burned right hand was salved and wrapped in gauze. Snake looked around at the sterile room, the white walls, inhaled the tangy medicinal smell.

That harsh aroma whisked him back to the spring of 1963.

It is two years after the Morales family first arrived in Miami. He is in the examining room and the doctor has just diagnosed his condition.

“Remembering is good,” the doctor says. “It is a blessing you have received from our almighty God. You should be grateful, my boy.”

Nineteen sixty-three. He remembers every second. Every day. Snake is eleven years old, and wave after wave of his countrymen are washing ashore. Changing Miami overnight from what it was—a quiet town, no traffic, an easy tropical pace. Jewish grandmas and pale-faced Yankees milling around on the beaches and piers in summer clothes and silly smiles. Pinching themselves at their good fortune for landing in paradise.

But all that is changing.

Snake is pedaling his bike. It's nighttime. He's cruising down Biscayne Boulevard, whooshing fast, his legs pumping, he's full of spunk, down and down Biscayne to Pier 5, “World's Finest Fishing Fleet,” with the neon sailfish over the entrance. Smelling the salt water, and the tang of fresh-caught grouper and sharks and giant marlin hanging up.

Then he goes a few blocks west through the city center, dead at that hour of the evening. He heads into the black ghetto of Overtown, wanting to catch a glimpse of his amazing hero, Cassius Marcellus Clay, who lives in there while he trains at the Fifth Street Gym, a second-story sweatbox out on the beach. Living next to the Famous Chef restaurant, Clay thrives on the rowdy nightlife. Snake has seen him twice, bopping the streets, Pied Piper, doing magic tricks for trailing kids, while through the open front doors of the nightclubs boom the honeyed voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, B. B. King, Nat King Cole. Nineteen sixty-three Overtown is Harlem with palm trees.

Cassius is smack in the middle, reveling in the hot nights, the hot jazz. Sleek, handsome teenage kid who'd won Olympic gold, while to most local whites he's just another no-account nigger. Gaseous Cassius, the Louisville Lip. In 1963, Miami might as well be Mississippi, or anywhere in Old Dixie.

The crackers had hated niggers forever. Now they expand their hatred to include Cubans. Cubans like Snake. Anglos drive by with bumper stickers,
WILL THE LAST AMERICAN LEAVING MIAMI BRING THE FLAG
? Over time, most of those idiots leave, move north to some white-bread town where everyone agrees on everything. Good riddance, as far as Snake is concerned.

Snake pedals for a while and he thinks he sees Cassius in the distance, but the slender man in white pants and loose shirt ducks into the Harlem Square nightclub, a place Snake cannot go. Snake pumps to where he disappeared and, yes, a sizzle still hangs in the air like free-floating electricity. Music is shaking the ground. People are whooping. Cassius was there, all right.

Snake stays a moment, hair on his arms standing up, then he turns back and pedals from Overtown toward his home in Little Havana, just off Flagler. Heading west, the sky is a plush blue suede. Snake tastes the cinnamon air. Like inhaling spun candy.

Then he's home. His father and two of his men are in the Florida room in the chairs surrounding the Magnavox TV. They're smoking Chesterfield Kings, longer length, milder taste. He's holding forth on communists. In particular a Russian poet, Evgeny Evtushenko. Jorge Morales fancies himself a literary man. It is part of his romantic costume.

Jorge is explaining to his men that Nikita Khrushchev has permitted a few chosen writers to travel abroad, hoping to curry approval from the world's cultural elite. But Evtushenko takes advantage of this permissiveness and writes poems that harshly criticize the heirs of Stalin. Even better, while traveling through Europe, he wallows in Western decadence, attending parties on the arms of movie stars. Jorge Morales admires him for mocking Soviet repression. As Snake watches from the doorway, his father recites lines of the Russian poet: “I stride on, straightforward, irreconcilable, and that means—I am young.” He can quote “Baba Yar,” “There are no memorials at Baba Yar—the steep slope is the only gravestone. I am afraid.” His father knows every word. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, and Jorge Morales intones the words with deep-voiced bravado.

When he is finished the militiamen mumble in feigned respect. One of them claps feebly. It is clear to Snake they do not comprehend Jorge's enthusiasm. May even find it effeminate.

Behind Snake, Carmen has been watching the spectacle, and when he turns, he finds her there. Her mood is somber.

At her whispered request, he follows her to her room and she shuts the door behind them. She stands before him for a moment and Snake is afraid that she will do something sexual. He does not know how he might respond.

“What's wrong, Carmen? What's happened?”

“Will you promise me something, Snake?”

“Anything.”

“You need to make peace with the Lord.”

Snake says nothing.

“I won't always be here to guide you. You need to know Jesus Christ.”

“What do you mean you won't always be here?”

“When I'm gone,” she says.

“When you're gone?”

She looks away. Surely she must've been referring to the convent and had no premonition of what horror was coming only a few months away.

“Promise me, Snake. I can't bear to think of you living in sin.”

“I promise. Yes, of course.”

It is 1963. Carmen is overflowing with the Holy Spirit. Jorge is ablaze with political passion. Snake feels his own world teetering on some momentous brink. All around him the city he now calls his hometown is transforming. It is departing America, joining the larger world. The moment is thrilling and scary, and Snake feels voltage in the air. It is Magic City, where overnight the poor can become rich, weak become strong, where refugees produce white doves and wildly colored scarves from their meager hats.

Miami is up for grabs, and Snake is sitting front row.

Nineteen sixty-three. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are Antony and Cleopatra. Their romance is heroic, more grand than anything a movie screen can contain. Everything that year is bigger, louder, faster. Chrome behemoths with giant fins and supercharged engines cruise the highways. The Beatles and Cassius, Elvis, Reverend King and Malcolm X and the Kennedys crowd the stage. Men in space suits lift off from Canaveral and soar into the heavens. The mushroom cloud blooms darkly on the horizon. An era when everything is immense, passionate, more cataclysmic than ever before, and Jorge Morales and his daughter, Carmen, in their own ways are competing with those heroic proportions. Miami is their stage. Revolution, danger, excitement, the amazing power of Christ, all of it pulses in the walls of the house near Flagler Street. It is 1963. Before the fall. The tropical air is sugary with innocence and hope. Anything can happen. It is Magic City.

“Hey, Snake. You still with us?”

It takes a moment for that time to vanish. Like Snake is rising up through deep waters, seeing sunlight in the distance. Some shreds of memory linger. The jazz beat, the female voices filtering into the balmy night, the rumble of horsepower.

Carlos held out the cell phone. The doctor and nurse were gone.

“It's him,” Carlos said. “Wants to talk to you.”

Snake took the phone, closed his eyes.

Stanton King's voice was tense.

“What happened, Snake? Don't leave anything out.”

Snake drew a breath. Calmed himself. He needed time to sort this out before he confronted Stanton King with what he suspected. That only a few hours before Snake's father and mother and sister were slaughtered, Mayor Stanton King had been sitting thigh to thigh with one of the killers.

Snake was, above all else, methodical. A man whose passions were subordinate to rational consideration. He would find the photo, decipher its meaning, then do what was necessary, accomplishing each step with dispassionate focus. As Cassius had fought. Aloof, above the fray, deliberate, calculated, and merciless.

Snake kept the rage from his voice as he described the previous night's events.

Merrick Gallery, the fire in the alley, breaking into Bingham's house, destroying the photos, the cameras, shooting Bingham. Snake told him how he and Carlos waited till sunrise, watching from down the street. How they watched the old man leave in a nursing-home van, and later a young woman, probably his daughter, left as well. Then while Snake kept the roof guy occupied, Carlos snuck inside and found the photo. Then the roofer turned heroic, jumped on Carlos's back, disarmed him.

Carlos still sat on the stainless-steel table. He waved away a bug or two and gritted his teeth against the pain.

“And you left the photo behind?”

“The man was a badass. He assaulted Carlos with an electric drill.”

“An electric drill?”

“The Liston-Clay match. That's what a man got murdered for?”

King was quiet for a moment. Snake tamping down his fury.

“Destroying all the other photos, that was just a smoke screen, wasn't it? All you cared about was that one. Am I right?”

“It was not my intention that anyone should die,” King said softly.

Snake looked over at the muscle chart. A man completely skinned, his organs exposed to sun and air. How Snake felt at that moment.

King said, “You're smart, Snake. But you left that photo in the hands of a man who can identify both you and Carlos. That's not what an intelligent man would do. You also managed to make that picture even more important than it was before. Now it's evidence in a homicide investigation. The police will want to examine it. It will be scrutinized.”

“Carlos needed medical attention.”

The line was silent for several moments.

Then King said, “Well, thanks for your help, Snake. You two can resume whatever was occupying your attention. I'll take it from here.”

Snake hung up and Carlos said, “So?”

Snake unwrapped the gauze from his hand and dropped it on the floor.

“We will find the man who attacked you,” Snake said. “And do whatever is necessary to take possession of the photograph.”

Carlos grinned through his pain.

“That fucker,” he said. “I'm gonna put the smackdown on that butt face, for real.”