The King of Swords (max mingus) (13 page)

J
oe sipped the cup of coffee he'd poured himself ten minutes ago and had only just remembered. It was now tepid and tasted like caffeinated dishwater. He was waiting for Max to come back from the Well, his mind doing bitter laps as it churned over the events of the morning.

He knew for sure now Sixdeep was going to get rid of him. And knowing the way Sixdeep's mind worked, it wouldn't look like he'd been fired at all. He'd get a desk job in a departmental backwater like Archives, Complaints, Traffic, or maybe even Public Relations, which would mean no recognition and slow death by stalled career. The only people he knew who worked desk jobs were women, former cops who didn't want to retire, the disabled and people who didn't want to be cops at all but liked the uniform. Once you were behind a desk it was next to impossible to get back on the street. You were deemed soft and out of step. It had happened to three MTF detectives before, the ones who'd fallen foul of Sixdeep, who hadn't toed the line and gone along with his way of doing things-Meredith, Allen and Gonzalez. Meredith had been made deputy head of police kennels. He had a well-known allergy to dogs. He quit the force on medical grounds a month later.

It would play out something like this: they-that was him and Max, but mostly Max-would 'crack' Moyez. Which meant they'd patsy-out the case on some evil scumbags every jury in the world would just want to find guilty and that would be it-case closed, radioactive headlines, another positive notch on the stats board and Sixdeep looking better than ever, the Saviour of Miami or some crap like that. And while the real perps got away clean, they-Max and Joe, but mostly Max again, because he was more photogenic and, let's face it, white-would get feted as heroes; medals would be pinned on their chests and they'd appear on a few local talkshows. They'd be flavour of the week, All-American Heroes, the Good Guys. Then, when it had all died down, Sixdeep would call Joe into his office. His next boss would be sat in one of the two chairs facing his desk. Sixdeep would say congratulations he'd got a promotion. New bossman would then stand up and clap him on the back and shake his hand and say, 'Welcome to the team! Good to have you on board!' If he refused to go Sixdeep would tell him it was his way or the highway, and nothing in-between.

Christ, he hated him!

But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. OK, there was. He didn't have to stay and take it. He could quit and go into another line of work. But what would he do? Drive a truck? Security? Run a bar? Bullshit! He didn't want to do that. He wanted to stay a cop-and a Detective too. He was good at what he did. Damn good. A lot better than any of these motherfuckers gave him credit for-except Max. Max was his biggest fan, his staunchest supporter. He'd never taken solo credit for anything. It had always been the two of them.

Joe remembered the day he'd first met Sixdeep. He was in the locker room, getting dressed and waiting to meet his new partner when he heard all conversation stop and saw everyone around him suddenly get busy doing something. Sixdeep had walked in. He was head of Robbery and Homicide at the time, but already a long-established legend. Joe had never met him, just seen his picture in newspaper reports. It was two weeks to the day after Joe had buried his partner Rudi Saunders, shot dead while they were making a routine stop.

'Joe Liston? Eldon Burns. Sorry for your loss.' He held his hand out. 'I lost my partner too. Four guys turned him into a teabag for kicks. It's a tough break, but life has to go on and we've got a job to do. Here's someone I want you to meet. Came top in his class in the academy. Joe Liston meet Max Mingus, your new partner.'

Max had been so green that day, a scared and embarrassed look on his face, standing next to Sixdeep in his new, fresh-out-of-the-plastic uniform, his shiny shoes and his left-parted regulation-cut hair. Still made Joe laugh when he recalled the image and juxtaposed it with the way Max was now, a decade older and wearing every second of it.

He'd known what it had all meant: Sixdeep was making him responsible for Max. At the time, Joe had a great record on Patrol. He'd made an over the average number of arrests and every one of them had resulted in a conviction because he was thorough and meticulous about detail and procedure. He didn't cut corners. He interviewed every witness and wrote down everything they said (he'd aced the departmental shorthand course). Sixdeep wanted Max to learn everything he could from him and then move on to bigger and better things. Max was the chosen one, the heir.

Sometimes Joe wished he and Max hadn't become friends, that Max had simply moved on after his time was up. That way Joe would've stayed in Patrol and eventually made sergeant. Oh, it was a tough job, the hardest. You were a soldier, right there on the front line, street level with the criminals, the one most likely to take a bullet. But there were no politics inside your car. It was you and the guy you rode with. You made it work.

Joe looked around his office-one huge, strip-lit, open-plan space of pale green carpet tiles and off-white walls, soundproofed to keep the noise of forty overworked, over-caffeinated, stressed-out detectives from leaking upstairs into the meeting rooms or downstairs into Files and Records. Today it was a third full, but its unmistakable polyrhythm was present and correct, like several very familiar tunes being played at the same time, over and over at low volume-shouting, swearing, singing, conversations, phones ringing, phones being talked into, phones being slammed down, all underpinned and locked in by the stop-start metallic babble of various proficiencies of typing. The office was windowless and the lights were always on, 24/7, 365 days a year, so the only way you could tell whether it was day or night in there was by checking who was in the office against the shift roster. It was air conditioned to the point of making you shiver, and completely smoke free. If you wanted a cigarette you took the elevator two flights down and went and stood out on the balcony.

They were nominally managed by Captain Gabriel Ortiz and his two Lieutenants, Jed Powers and Lou Barlia. Ortiz was in his late fifties, celebrating his thirtieth wedding anniversary and looking forward to becoming a grandfather for the second time. He was short and stocky, with meaty hands, a barrel chest, gold-rimmed specs and jet-black hair that was badly dyed because he missed the greys at his nape. He always had his head buried in and behind a huge pile of papers. His main responsibility was triple checking all the reports and then signing them off. Powers and Barlia ran the Detectives through their oral witness statements and rehearsed them for shooting boards, IA hearings and court appearances. Every angle was covered, scenarios were improvised, scripted and learnt so the stories, when they came to be delivered for the record, were without contradiction. They even worked on the tone. It was like being forced to take a lead role in a play. Once, when there was a majority black jury that needed to be swayed, Joe had been told to mangle his syntax to make his speech more 'ethnic'. He found it offensive as hell, but they got the conviction they wanted so it was deemed to have worked.

Joe and Max sat at the back, in the furthest right-hand corner. Their territory was marked out by a giant blow-up of Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run album sleeve which took up half the wall behind their desks. It had been MTF's gift to Joe on his birthday last year.

Joe loved Bruce. He'd first heard him in October 1973: his second album, The Wild, the Innocent amp; the E Street Shuffle, was playing in a bar he'd gone drinking in after breaking up with his then girlfriend, a waitress called Bernadette. They hadn't been together long, three weeks and a couple of days, so the split wasn't too hard to take, and, truth be told, he was quietly relieved to be rid of her because he didn't think she was right in the head. That night she'd told him she was becoming a Buddhist and that his being a cop was all wrong for her karma. He'd nodded, wished her all the best and gone for a beer. As he was getting through his first bottle a documentary on world religions had come on the TV-focus: Buddhism. Ten minutes were devoted to the famous case of the Saigon monk who, in 1963, had soaked himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in protest at the government's anti-Buddhist policies. The image of the burning monk had come on at the very moment Joe heard the words to the song that was playing on the jukebox-4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)-Bruce singing about how a waitress he'd been seeing wouldn't set herself on fire for him. Joe had laughed out loud. He'd been a Bruce fan from that moment on and never looked back.

Theresa came over with a FedEx package addressed to him and Max.

It was a copy of the Nora Wong file, from the NYPD.

Joe opened it. A stack of photographs slipped out and splashed across his desk with a wet plop. Glossies. The photographer was the conscientious kind: he or she had taken two of everything.

Torture was commonplace in Miami these days, but Joe had never seen anything like this. It looked like a pack of ravenous killer dogs had been let loose on the victims. They'd suffered all the way to death's door, their expressions frozen in extremes of agony. Blood everywhere. A twisted carnage of rape and then disfigurement; flesh ripped from faces clean through to muscle and bone, exposing the head's inner workings, reminding him of vandalized billboards with strips of one poster torn off and showing part of the one underneath and the one underneath that. The woman had been scalped. And they hadn't spared the children-if anything they'd got it worse.

Sickness gripped and squeezed and twisted his stomach. He gasped as the breath went out of him and the vomit reflex constricted his throat. Sweat prickled his brow. He stood up, his legs weak, hollow, trembling. He went to the bathroom. He tried, but couldn't puke. Nothing came out. He splashed water on his face and breathed deeply. His hands were trembling.

Back in the office he took Max's pint of Wild Turkey out of his bottom drawer and had a long swig.

Then he grouped the pictures together and turned them over.

He read the reports. The bitemarks were human. The assailant had worn dentures modelled on piranha jaws. There were also high concentrations of sugar in the wounds, indicating the assailant had eaten large amounts of candy directly before each of his attacks.

Then he looked through the list of recovered evidence and something caught his eye. Something familiar. He cross-referenced it with a photograph.

'Jesus!'

He picked up the phone.

'
Is this your first child?' Max asked Marisela Cruz. They were sitting at a wooden table in one of the interview rooms in the two-floor detention building, behind the hangars. There was a small square window through which they could see the stars and stripes fluttering on a nearby flagpole and beyond it planes taking off against a clear blue sky.

'Es este su primer bebe?' Pete translated. He was sat beside her, speaking low and tenderly, father to young daughter, a safe haven between her and the blue-eyed, mean-faced gringo cop opposite.

'Si.' She nodded. Marisela was very pale and very, very scared. She had long, lank black hair that went with the shadows under her dark brown eyes, bloodshot from crying and sleeplessness. She was dressed in faded blue jeans, a thin grey sweatshirt and flip flops. She had the acrid pine stench of prison soap on her. With make-up on she'd looked like a perfume model in her mugshots, dressed as she had been in a pinstriped business suit and blouse, a little too perfect according to the customs officer who'd pulled her over.

In the middle of the table was a small pyramid of twenty-one latex balloons filled with cocaine recovered from her guts. It amounted to over half a kilo, pure and uncut. They'd fed her laxatives in her dinner and water, just like those who'd paid her to transport the drugs would have done. Only low-level players used mules. The big timers were bringing it in by the boat and plane load.

'You're in a lot of trouble, Marisela.'

'Usted esta en muchos de apuro.'

She met Max's eye and quickly looked at Pete. 'Se. "How old are you?'

'?Cuantos aos tiene?'

'Tengo veinte aos.'

'Says she's twenny.'

That's what it said on her forged Argentinian passport. Max gave her his full-beam I-don't-believe-you stare.

'No mienta. Hara cosas peores,' urged Pete. Don't lie. It'll make things worse.

'Diecisiete.'

'Seventeen.'

'How old is your mother?'

'?Cuantos aos tiene su madre.'

'?Mi madre?'

'Si, your madre. How old is she?'

'Treinta dos.'

'Thirty-two.'

'Look at me, Marisela,' Max said, taking the girl by the chin and holding her head until they locked eyes. 'You'll go to prison for thirty years. You'll be older than your mother is now when you get out. Your baby will be born in prison and taken away from you. You won't see your child again. By the time you get out it'll be an adult. And who wants to know a mother who's been to prison for smuggling drugs?'

She talked to Pete. She grabbed his hands and held them tight. She told him she'd been put up to this by her boyfriend, Miguel. He lived in Miami. He'd given her money and some nice clothes. He'd told her she'd get a lot more on delivery. She said she was sorry. Over and over again, that she didn't know what she was doing, that if she knew what was in the balloons she would've said no. Max could almost have believed her if he was hearing this for the first time instead of the millionth. Her words dissolved into pleas and sobs. He waited until she'd finished, giving her a hard impassive look that let her know none of what she said or did would make any difference.

'Marisela, there's a simple solution to your problems,' he said. She wiped her eyes and nose with her hands. 'If you do exactly as I say, you can have your baby here, and then afterwards you can go home, back to Colombia. Would you like that?'

'Si.'

Then she grabbed Max's right hand with both of hers and squeezed them tight and went into a quickfire monologue, crying the whole while she spoke. 'Same shit,' Pete said when Max looked to him for a translation.

'OK. OK. I know you're sorry and I believe you.' Max quieted her and turned on his soothing voice, 'You are going to help us catch the man who brought you and others like you into our country with drugs.'

'Miguel?' she asked.

'Not, Miguel, no. The man he works for. The man who paid him to recruit you.'

'No le conozco.' She looked lost. I don't know him.

'You will,' Max said. 'Don't worry. It'll all make sense.'

After Max had explained to her that she would be moved to a safehouse the next morning, a guard came and escorted her out of the room and back to the cramped hot cell she was sharing with six other girls, mules like her.

Max and Pete lit cigarettes.

'You know, they'll probably kill her family in Colombia if she testifies.' Pete blew out a stream of smoke.

'We'll keep her anonymous.'

'Not for long. Money talks. And those narcotrafficantes have got a lot of it. Plus they got long arms. Reach anyone anywhere.'

'This is an MTF operation, Pete.'

'You guys…' Pete smiled and shook his head.

'There'll be a place in heaven for you for this, for sure.'

'Or hell. Right next to you and Eldon.'

'Have some faith in the system, will ya?'

'That's just it, Max. I do.'

Max drove out to the 7th Avenue gym to see Eldon, who'd gone there for a workout.

Post-McDuffie, the area was fast turning into a ghost town. The money was fleeing and with it the life and soul of the neighbourhood: half the stores had either been burnt down or were boarded up with 'CLOSED-FUCK YOU amp; THANKS A LOT' painted across their fronts in white. The ones that were open weren't doing much business because there was next to no one around on the wide streets. The few people he passed were either drunks and junkies weaving across the sidewalk in slow stumbles, teetering on the verge of collapse, or else locals moving at jogging speed, heads down, shoulders tensed, as if trying to get home before a coming storm. Traffic was sparse.

Max parked his brown Camaro next to the only cars on the lot-Eldon's Oldsmobile and Abe Watson's brand new Chevy Monte Carlo.

He walked into the gym, and, as usual, the feel of the place in mid-training session electrifed his senses and took him right back to his teens, when he used to push hurriedly through the same door, duffel bag in hand, heart full of ambition and a head full of dreams.

Unlike most boxing gyms, which tended to be cramped and close to decrepit, 7th Avenue was cavernous, with a high, vaulted ceiling fitted with powerful fans to keep a chill breeze wafting through the building at all times. It made no difference whatsoever to the smell that greeted everyone when they came in-a heady blast of fresh and stale sweat, dry blood, liniment, rubbing alcohol, rubber, antiseptic and new and old leather, bound together by an atmosphere of intense concentration and calibrated violence.

Max crossed the floor and headed towards the match-sized ring in the middle of the gym where Abe was putting Eldon through his paces. Eldon was in a faded yellow T-shirt, sweatpants and boxing boots. He was working on the pads, firing jabs, hooks, uppercuts and crosses into Abe's hands. He was slow, compared to everyone else in the room, but he could still move and his punches were powerful and accurate, the force of each making Abe shudder all the way down to his toes. Abe never lost his balance or composure, just calmly switched the gloves around, called out a punch or a combination. Eldon was red-faced, soaked in sweat, his hair plastered across his forehead, breathing hard. When caught out he'd mumble or curse under his breath and fire a harder shot than was necessary into the mitt, prompting Abe to congratulate him on hitting like a man.

When the buzzer went Eldon walked to his corner, where one of the assistant trainers handed him a towel and bottle of water. Abe saw Max standing ringside and came over.

'Hey, Max!' He smiled. 'Long time.'

It was true. It had been nine months since they'd last seen each other. Max and Abe had never been close the way he was with Eldon, but he'd been around Abe just as long and felt a strong bond with him. Abe wasn't the most demonstrative guy in the world. He rarely showed his emotions, positive or negative, but once, when Max had won his very first Golden Gloves championship against Alonzo Wilson, an opponent everyone had expected to defeat him, Abe had put his arm around him, congratulated him and told him how proud of him he was. That had meant the world to Max, more than the two whores Eldon had bought him as a reward.

'How's it goin', Abe?'

'Ah, you know. Same-O, same-O.'

He was a tall slender man with greying hair and a shining bald spot in the middle. He kept his moustache neatly trimmed. There was an air of sadness about him, his face dragged heavily and reluctantly behind each expression and his eyes seemed to be either on the verge of tears or recovering from them. He hadn't really been the same since his eldest son, Jacob, had died from a heroin overdose in 1977. Jacob, once a promising basketball player, had come back from Vietnam in a wheelchair after he'd taken a bullet in his lower spine. He'd been in near constant pain, which he'd used increasingly large doses of street heroin to quell.

'Any pugs I should be watching out for?' Max asked.

'Some.' Abe cast his eyes around the gym, where about twenty fighters from their teens to their early twenties were going through their paces. 'These kids comin' up now, they ain't hungry like they used to be. That do-or-die drive just ain't there no more. They want the victory and the rewards that go with it, but they just don't wanna run to the finish line. They wanna drive there instead-preferably in the back.'

Eldon came round the side of the ring, wiping his face with a towel.

'Don't be a stranger.' Abe took his cue with a nod to Max, and then slipped under the ropes and walked over to observe a fighter putting combinations together on the heavybag.

'What've you got?' Eldon asked. They never talked business on the phone, unless it was above board.

Max told him about Octavio Grossfeld, stressing the German parentage and Lehder's Nazi sympathies.

'Good. Very good. That's my boy. We'll just have to amp the Nazi angle and the kikes'll have a field day. Reagan'll love us for this. I can see those headlines now: "Drugs-the new Holocaust".' Eldon smiled broadly and gave Max a one-armed hug. Great drops of sweat broke out on his forehead and cascaded down his face, lingering off the edges of his chin and jaw and nose like big transparent warts before falling and splattering to the ground. His T-shirt was soaked through and he was giving off the acrid and slightly sulphurous smell of people who eat too much protein.

'Bring Grossfeld in the day after tomorrow. Early morning. Plant if you have to,' he said.

'OK.' Max made to go but caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye that made him stop and turn to his right where the speedbags were. A young black boy in grey sweats, around eight or nine, was standing on a chair, hitting methodically, left fist to right. 'Who's that?' Max said.

'I was just about to introduce the two of you.' Eldon beamed, then turned the boy's way. 'Frankie!'

The boy stopped what he was doing, jumped off his chair and came running over. He was a cute-looking little kid, Max thought, with a skinny face and large eyes that were both innocent and very sharp, as if he was already living on his wits.

'This here is Frankie Lafayette,' Eldon said, putting his wet hand over the boy's shoulder and shaking it playfully. 'Found him here a month ago.'

'You hit him in the face?' Max asked the kid. Frankie didn't reply, just looked up at Eldon.

'His English ain't so good yet. Abe found him here one Monday morning, sleeping in the ring. He walked in one day and hid out until everyone'd gone.'

'Where are his parents?'

'Who knows? He says they're back home in Haiti. He came over here on a boat. Illegals. They're comin' here all the time, just like the Cubans. He's a natural. God knows what he'll do; how far he'll go.' Eldon looked down at Frankie, smiling. Frankie smiled back. 'I'm seriously thinking of adopting the little bastard.'

'What?'

'Becoming his legal guardian. He ain't got anyone else,' Eldon said.

'How does Lexi feel?' Lexi was Eldon's wife.

'She's thrilled. You know, we never had boys, so it'll be a change. Plus the girls are all growing up fast, so it'll be good for her.'

Max wanted to ask Eldon what would happen if it turned out that Frankie didn't want to box. What would he do then? Dump him in the sea and tell him to swim back home? But he didn't want to jinx the kid's future, or say anything bad around him, even if he wouldn't be able to understand. The kid was entitled to keep however much of his innocence a place like Haiti had left him with. And he seemed happy enough with Eldon.

'You know what, Max? Frankie here reminds me of you, the way you were. All that natural aggression, all that raw talent just waiting to get shaped and directed,' Eldon said, his big flushed face slippery and shiny with sweat, his smile dazzling in its cosmetic whiteness.

Max remembered his past life, here in the gym, all that optimism for the future, the great things he was going to do, the titles he was going to fight for and unify and he felt a little sick for everything he'd lost and missed out on, and for where those failed dreams had led him. And suddenly he feared for Frankie and what would become of him if he didn't live up to his brightest hopes. Would he too become a cop who drank too much, slept too little and really couldn't remember when exactly he'd crossed the line?

'You know how to pick 'em, Eldon,' he said wearily, a little sarcasm trickling into his tone.

'Of course I do,' Eldon replied with a laugh, 'look at you.'