The King of Swords (max mingus) (7 page)

He took off his robe and hung it on the hooks by the towel rack. He felt his skin rise in goosebumps even though the bathroom was warm. Sometimes she came straight out and told him what was bugging her but usually she liked to wait, hold on to it, let it brew and ferment and build some more in her head, circling him all the while before getting to the point. It was always worse when she prolonged it because he could always sense her fury, always knew what was coming. He could virtually see the rage massing behind her brow, those dark and very deadly legions of anger she had total command over, which she could unleash or withdraw at the drop of a hat.

'Wait,' she said as he was about to step into the water. 'Turn around.' He did as she asked. He'd never been ashamed of standing naked before her. She'd seen him naked every day of his life since the day of his father's murder. 'What's that?' She was pointing at the cauliflower-shaped bruise in the middle of his abdomen.

'Someone hit me,' Carmine said.

'Who?'

'A cop.'

'Why?'

'I don't know,' Carmine said. He hadn't told her about the waitress. She'd been intended for the other Deck he was building, the one his mother didn't know about.

'Did you provoke him?'

'Of course not.'

'Where did this happen?'

'Out near Coconut Grove.'

'Were you working?'

'Yeah.'

'Did he see you working?'

'No. It wasn't like that.'

'And his name? What is his name?'

'He didn't tell me that.' Carmine chuckled at the stupidity of the question. She gave him one of her fierce black-eyed looks, the kind that could cut through walls.

'Was he in uniform?'

'Plainclothes.'

She came up close to him and touched the heart of the bruise. It smarted and he caught his breath as memories of the pain echoed back through his body. Sam had given him an ice pack for it at the shop, but it hadn't helped much.

'Did he take the seeds?'

'No. I've put them in the kitchen.' Luckily for him Sam had ordered plenty of extra calabar beans. Failure to bring them back would have provoked the ShitFit to end all ShitFits, because it would have meant they couldn't go through with tomorrow night's ceremony.

She put her nose close to the bruise and breathed in deep and long through flared nostrils. Eyes closed, she held her breath and tilted back her head and rocked it gently from side to side, moving her mouth like she was tasting what she'd inhaled. Then her face turned sour and she opened her eyes and breathed out.

'This cop drinks,' she said. 'He will be a problem to us. A big problem.'

'How?' he asked.

'I don't know yet,' she said. 'Now get in the bath.'

She'd washed him every evening at 6 p.m. sharp since the day of his father's murder. He knew it was way wrong, that it shouldn't be happening at his age, but who was he to stop her, to protest or even complain? He'd tried to, in his late teens, but she'd said that because she was his mother she had a right to wash him, even when they were both old. For most of his life he'd gone along with whatever she'd said and done, whatever she'd asked of him without question, not because he'd wanted to but because it was the easiest way. The alternative didn't bear contemplating. A long long time ago he'd tried his hand at rebellion and the consequences had been disproportionately severe.

The water was cooking him, as always, but he was used to it now. Just like he was used to the hard scrubbing brush she cleaned him with. Years ago, when she'd first bought the brush, the bristles had been fairly soft, but two decades of calcified soap had turned them into mini stalagmites which tore hairline strips out of his skin, especially around the bonier parts of his body. His back and chest were covered with a latticework of fine interwoven pale scars, which, when they caught the light, made his upper body seem enveloped in a wet gossamer web, like he was a spider's prey.

She soaped the brush with Dettol soap and scrubbed his neck, shoulders, arms and upper back first. Then he stood up and she handed him the soap so he could wash his cock, balls and ass with his hands, the only concession to self-administered hygiene she'd permitted him in the past ten years, after allowing him to wash his face and brush his teeth. They didn't talk at all. The bathroom filled with the sound of the bristles' shallow scrapings on his skin, almost the noise of a saw inching through a plank of wood, accompanied by her two lockets, the shhhh-put of the lockets clapping together under her blouse, keeping time with her motions and the swing of her heavy pendulous breasts. The bristles dislodged scabs from still tender healing skin and bit deep into old wounds. He stared hard at the aquarium, disassociating his mind from the sparks of pain flying through his nerves. He concentrated on a group of half a dozen oranda goldfish swimming in the middle of the tank. They were graceful fish, like amphibian roosters with their feathery dorsal fins and bushy tails, and traffic-signal-red heads and the metallic orangey-blue of their bodies. He watched them move in single file, equidistant one from the other, simple and perfect. And then, as he stood up, he noticed a flutter at the end of the line as the last oranda collided with the one in front. That goldfish dropped down an inch allowing the last one to take its place in the chain. It hovered without moving for a moment, seemingly confused, before swimming upwards and rejoining the line. It never recovered its pace. It perpetually lagged behind, only following the group in quick spurts, where it would catch up and briefly regain formation before dropping out. When Carmine looked harder at the oranda he thought he noticed an off-coloured patch on its side, a small dull grey mark close to its dorsal fin. But it was gone before he could see for sure.

She washed his feet and legs last, and then he stepped out of the water and onto the floor. Later he'd have to empty the tub, clean and disinfect it and then dry it before carrying it downstairs to the basement where he lived.

After washing him, his mother dried him vigorously top to toe with a white towel, except for the parts he'd washed himself, which he did once she'd finished with him.

'The ceremony's for tonight,' she said.

'But it's Friday.'

'It's happening after midnight.'

'After midnight…' Carmine knew that meant it would be a sacrifice as opposed to a simple execution-which meant this would be a Saturday Night Barons Club and he'd have to attend in full dress. 'Who is it?' But he knew before she told him.

'Jean Assad. You know how Solomon feels about thieves and drug addicts in the organization.' She fixed him with one of her immobile, cut-through-anything looks. Carmine met her stare but, as usual, found he couldn't hold it and looked away at the gleaming white bidet. He'd known Jean Assad in Haiti and they'd been on good if distant terms in Miami. Jean had been on the run for six months.

'Where'd they find him?'

'In Canada,' she said. 'L'imbecile. Thought he could escape us.'

T
he cigar tube of calabar beans was waiting for her in the middle of the kitchen table. The tube reeked of Carmine's fear, a thin metallic smell of old coins and vinegar that came from him whenever he'd done something wrong. It was so strong she could smell it from the doorway. Eva wondered if he hadn't momentarily lost the tube on his way over. It would be just like him. Clumsy.

Eva went to the cupboards under the sink and pulled out one of the brand new, white plastic chopping boards she used for her potions. She then took out a scalpel and a mortar and pestle, also all new, and brought them over to the table. She opened the tube and emptied the contents on the board-oval shaped like American footballs with the ends filed down, their shiny maroon-brown skins the colour of eggplant crossed with chocolate, hard on the outside, deadly on the in, eight like she'd asked for. She put seven back in the tube and closed it.

After she was done making the potion she'd incinerate everything to make sure it wouldn't end up getting mixed with food. The beans were poisonous. It took just half a bean to kill a man. She'd once fed one to someone in a fresh salad and watched him croak. It hadn't been pretty. First he'd salivated uncontrollably, spit bubbling out of his mouth like he'd swallowed a stream, then his eyes and sweat glands had opened up, as the poison had gone into his veins and arteries, gradually constricting them as it flowed, closing down his blood flow and slowing down his heart, beat by beat, until all the life in him was throttled from within. It was said, by people who'd seen someone die of calabar poisoning, that once the poison started closing down the inner circuits, they had heard the flapping of wings. The closer to death the louder the flapping became until the final five minutes, when their faces froze completely and the only movement came from their eyes, which were still fully conscious. Many said they looked upwards, high above them, in mid-space, and their eyes were utterly terrified. Her victim had got that look too.

She went over to the refrigerator and took out a black clay bottle of holy water and poured it into a metal stewpot, which she then set on the gas hob and lit. As the water began to heat, she quartered the bean, put it into the pestle and ground it to a sticky paste, which was then put to one side of the table.

She went back to the cupboard under the sink and took out a packet of handmade, specially designed Charles de Villeneuve tarot cards, imported from Switzerland. They were the only ones she ever used. The packet was brand new. The cards came in an elegant dark brown wooden box which contained the cards in a drawer lined with purple baize, which never failed to remind her of a huge matchbox merged with a coffin. The cards were wrapped in a black velvet drawstring bag, closed at the side with a red wax seal bearing the company's insignia, this time reminding her of the Smith amp; Wesson logo on the grip of her.38. The cards were thick, high-quality cardboard. The backs were mostly black with a deep crimson border and a small, almost cartoonish image of the sun, rendered, in gold leaf, as a round, slightly cross-eyed face set in the middle of sprouting rays. Without turning them over, she fanned the pack out on the table and counted anti-clockwise from the beginning. The manufacturer always packed the cards in the same order. Minor Arcana last, in suits-first Cups, then Coins, then Swords, then Wands. Fourteen cards in each suit, face cards first, then the numbers: King to Ace. She found the card, turned it over and smiled.

The King of Swords.

Depending on the reading she was giving, the King of Swords could either be a powerful and influential ally and friend or a fearsome enemy, one who would stop at nothing and use force if he had to.

The thing she loved second about the de Villeneuve cards-apart from their magical powers which, if the person using them had the right amount of faith, could turn them into periscopes into the future-was their rich and vibrant colours. They reminded her of the voodoo paintings she'd grown up with in Haiti.

She put the card on the chopping board, then gathered up the rest and put them in a black refuse bag. She took the scalpel and sliced the card lengthwise into six strips. She then sliced each strip a dozen times, so she had something close to confetti. She added the card to the pestle and mixed it in with the ground calabar beans, before scraping the contents out into the now boiling water.

Once complete, the potion would have to settle and cool for a few hours before being fed to its recipient.

Eva was about to begin to speak her spell when she heard Carmine lumber past the door with the tub on his back, heading for the basement where he lived, out of sight and sound. He made as little noise as possible, like he always had, the little creep; even at his age he was still as terrified of her as he had been when he'd been a little boy-terrified of little old her, fifty-four years old, under five feet tall without her lifts and ninety-eight pounds soaking wet. Pathetic.

Carmine went to the basement and put the tub down on the floor. There were no windows in there and it was pitch black without the light, but that was always comforting to him after the harsh, sterile whiteness of the bathroom. He took off his dressing gown and threw it where the leather armchair was ready to receive it. He knew every inch of the room so well he could find the smallest things in the dark. It was a trick Solomon Boukman had taught him, back when they'd been as close as brothers, before the organization had grown into the multi-tentacled monster it was now and he'd evolved with it and in the process grown cold and distant, even with those he'd come up with, those who knew him best and would do anything for him.

Still, standing there naked, back in his world, Carmine couldn't help but smile a little at his cleverness and cunning. He may be pathetic in his mother's eyes, but he was fooling her this time, and fooling her good. Every tyrant must fall. She was no exception. And her fall would be mighty, all the way back to hell.

J
ean Assad opened his eyes and immediately wished he hadn't. He'd woken up in the heart of the abattoir, with mere moments left to live. He prayed-no begged-that Solomon would show him mercy and do him quick; that he'd forget all about the bad stuff that had brought him down here and remember the good: their long history together, the way he'd been there with him from the start, always loyal and dependable, always a believer. Yet one look at them all, the diadem of bleak accusatory eyes bearing down on him through the death's head paint, and he knew it wasn't to be. He was going out the bad way.

He'd heard rumours about this place, about the things that went on down here, but he'd never believed any of them, ever. He was as superstitious as any Haitian, but he hadn't bought into those stories people came out with about the circle of twelve giant Baron Samedis and the man sat in the middle and what happened to him.

It was all true. So far.

He couldn't move at all, not a muscle, except for his eyes. The rest of him was frozen, locked down, paused between heartbeats. His body felt unbelievably heavy, bones made of mercury-filled lead, propping up skin weighted down with cannon balls. He couldn't open his mouth. His lips and jaw wouldn't part. So he was breathing through his nose, and that with great difficulty, the air having to scrape its way through tightly blocked nostrils, barely making it into his lungs. And then there was a great painful, immovable mass at the bottom of his stomach, like he'd eaten a huge meal his digestive juices just couldn't break down; it was hanging around in his gut, going nowhere, slowly festering.

He looked up and all around him, as far as he could. He met twelve pairs of eyes looking down with interchangeable hatred and contempt. He couldn't tell old friends from lifelong foes, but he was sure they were both there, side by side-that's what he'd heard happened. Their faces were completely unrecognizable under the make-up-half pancake-white from forehead to upper lip, then black from there to the lower neck, taking in the mouth, ears, nose and around the eyes. They were dressed identically too, in top hats, tailcoats, pinstriped grey trousers, white ru?ed shirts, black gloves. He couldn't understand how come they were so tall-at least twelve or fifteen feet high. Or was it just the way he was sat, or the state of mind he was in, or something they'd given him to mess with his head?

How long had he been here? The last thing he remembered was waking up in bed in Montreal, blinding flashlight in his eyes, gun to his temple, man's voice: 'Get up! You gots places to be.'

He knew they'd find him eventually. He'd known that when he'd gone on the run, the realization that it didn't matter how far he got, how deep down he hid, sooner or later he'd be caught, sooner or later he'd be made to pay for what he'd done. Still, he'd been real careful at first, moving around a lot, never staying in one place longer than two days, avoiding the ghettos, avoiding all Haitians and Dominicans, staying out of small towns, but what was it he'd heard said time and time again? 'When Solomon Boukman is after you, the world becomes a small place with glass walls.' He might have stayed on the run longer if it hadn't been for his habit. Smack: needle not foil. That had narrowed down their search. The only way a junkie can stay underground is if he's got a big enough stash, or else if he kicks. He hadn't done either. A junkie's got to go out to cop. They'd just pulled on that chain around his arm and reeled him in. Who'd sold him out? The dealer he'd copped his last dose from? That shit had been suspiciously good, so good he'd got a rush just holding the loaded syringe. Before he'd gone under his last thoughts had been paranoid ones. Montreal wasn't famed for the quality of its smack. The stuff he'd been shooting up until then had been a modest stone, enough to get him under the surface but nowhere near the quality of the dope he'd boosted in Miami. That had sent him all the way down to the warm silk cocoon where time stopped and nothing mattered and he was free of everything. Same as his final hit had done. Right before he'd nodded out, he'd wondered if Solomon hadn't finally found him, if his people weren't going to come through the door the moment he'd slipped away from himself, but then the smack had melted his every worry away like hot coffee dissolves sugar cubes. And then they had come for him. Just like he'd thought. And here he was now, waiting to meet the King of Swords, waiting to die.

A bright light was trained on him from behind, illuminating his immediate surroundings: a cold grey cement floor with reddish brown markings painted thickly on it-a cross to the left, a star to the right, a long vertical line dividing them. It was a giant veve, a voodoo symbol used, in part, to invoke gods and spirits in ceremonies. Usually a veve was drawn in flour, sand or cornmeal, but this one had been painted in what looked like blood. Beyond that stood the barons, facing him. His feet were in a metal fire bucket, filled with water. His hands were resting on his thighs, palms down.

He saw that he was completely naked and that his arms, legs and what he could see of his chest were completely hairless and oddly shiny. Then he noticed that there were no bindings of any kind on him. He was technically free to stand up.

He felt ashamed of his nakedness and wanted to cover up, but he couldn't move his hands that short distance to his crotch. Then he tried to take his feet out of the bucket, but they stayed where they were, without even a suggestion of motion about them. Then he attempted to lift his arms. Nothing happened. He tried again. He heard the command come down from his brain, clearly, urgently and in his own voice, but it had no effect; his authority disappeared into cold meat and bone. His arms and legs stayed exactly where they were. He couldn't feel a single damn thing. He wasn't even getting the cold shakes from smack withdrawal. It was as if his being had become completely disconnected from his body and was now imprisoned in it; only death would release it.

Jean Assad, you poor motherfucker, thought Carmine, looking down at him on the chair, a born again baby; skin greased up and gleaming, frozen out of his body by the potion, his lips sewn tight together, his nose part-stitched so he could still get some air, still alive enough for Solomon to come and snatch his soul. Assad was sat in the middle of the sacrificial veve-the symbol drawn in his own blood.

Jean le Chat, they'd called him in Haiti-the Catman, for short. Back then he'd made his living stealing cats and kittens, black ones in particular, to sell to the hougans and mambos to use in their fortune telling. The most popular and reliable method was for the priest or priestess to kill the cat and leave its body on a grave for the night. The next morning they would fry and eat the animal's guts with squill and galanga root, and then they'd see into the future.

That was how the Catman had met Carmine's mother. He used to come round to the house in Haiti with a thick, wriggling burlap sack on his back, his hands and face always scratched and bleeding. His mother would choose a cat, usually the wildest and most vicious, the ones who went for her with tooth and claw, the ones with strongest spirits who'd take a good while to kill. Carmine remembered Jean's gap-toothed grin, the way he didn't say much, just smiled, and his unusually soft hair. It was said he was the bastard son of one of the wealthy Syrians his mother had worked for as a maid-hence his family name. Ask him about it and he'd shrug his shoulders and say he really didn't know and he cared even less. He was who he was, he said, and that was the best he could do. Who knew where names came from?

On Eva Desamour's advice, Solomon had brought Jean Assad into his enterprise, a year or so after it got started. He did petty minor-league stuff-shoplifting and housebreaking mostly. He was good at it, but he'd never be better than his limitations. He had neither the ambition nor the balls or brains to progress to new, more complex areas, so he stayed strictly bottom rung, doing exactly as he was told, without question; a dependable soldier-as long as you didn't expect too much. When Solomon expanded into drugs and had to divide his enterprise into sub-sections, he got Jean to be a driver for one of his call-out dealers, the ones who sold to the wealthy, upwardly mobile crowd. Jean loved the job, loved the driving around in the air-conditioned Cadillacs he kept real clean inside and out, loved wearing a nice suit like he was somebody special. He thought he'd been promoted. He used to tell people he was starting to feel American.

Then he'd killed Tamsin Zengeni, the dealer he worked for. He beat her to death with a tyre jack and stole her smack stash.

No one understood it at first. No one had known the Catman used drugs, let alone that he was a junkie. Solomon had started digging. He found out that Assad had been buying heroin from one of Solomon's other dealers, a guy who worked in the Broward County division called Ricky Maussa. There were strict rules about drug use in the organization. Solomon had executed Maussa and his entire crew in the same way he was going to execute Jean. Carmine remembered the ceremonies. Maussa and his crew had been made to watch as one by one Solomon killed them, starting with the most recent recruit and moving upwards. Maussa had pleaded his innocence, that he hadn't known Assad's identity, but that in itself was no excuse. All Solomon's dealers had to be sure their customers weren't narcs, stoolies, rival gang members or one of their own.

Carmine found it impossible to hate Jean Assad. Jean had always been cool with him. He'd intervened more than once when his mother had been beating up on him. He wasn't scared of her like everyone else was. He'd even told her she was taking it too far.

Carmine cast a sweeping gaze about the room. The eleven other barons were stood around the figure they towered above, motionless on their stilts, expressions of sealed-in impassivity. As usual he couldn't recognize anyone he knew under all the make-up, and he was sure it was the same for everyone else. They all looked identical. They were the same height-thirteen feet tall-and, thanks to padding and clever tailoring, the same shape. Even their hands, encased in black gloves, were equal in length and width.

When the ceremony was over, they'd all walk out and go off into individual cubicles. They weren't allowed to talk until they were well outside the building, back to being gangster civilians. Those were the rules. Break them and you ended up here, in the middle of the circle. It had happened once before, a long while ago, never since.

There were people watching from a long balcony off to the left; a small select crowd, mostly new recruits, children as young as ten, and a lot of the newly arrived island immigrants, fresh off the boat; Haitians, obviously, but Cubans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Bajans, people who'd talk about what they'd seen, evolve the myth. This was mostly for their benefit. Get them young, dumb or impressionable, tell them the myth, show them some magic, get them to spread the word, exaggerated and distorted so no two versions matched, even though they meant precisely the same thing. This was the key to Solomon's power, making people think he was more than just flesh and blood like them, making them believe that he was other, a demon-Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death, reborn as a Miami gang leader.

Here was the popular misconception about Solomon Boukman's organization, that it was actually called the Saturday Night Barons Club or SNBC for short. It wasn't. That was the name of the ceremony.

The organization itself didn't have a name. It never had. This was deliberate. A gang with a name is an immediate target, a recognizable entity, just begging to be shut down. If you don't know your enemy's name, how can you find him? Solomon had wanted to differentiate it as much as possible from American gangs, which cops and rivals were used to dealing with and approached in the same way. As for a structure, it didn't really have one. It was Solomon and a few key allies, most of whom didn't know each other. People were never sure who was working for Solomon Boukman and who wasn't.

The drums began-one beat, three seconds apart-a deep echoey sound like that of a heavy load hitting the bottom of a long deep dry well. At the beginning they hadn't had any accompaniment, then they'd used tapes of authentic voodoo drummers recorded in the Haitian mountains, and now Solomon had flown the drummers over and set them up in Miami. When they weren't playing the ceremonies they worked the club circuit from New York to New Orleans.

At the twelfth beat the barons linked hands with a flutter and slap of leather on leather. Then the light behind the Catman went out. For a moment they stood linked together in complete darkness. Carmine could feel the nervous pulse of the guy to his left; he heard him swallow and breathe a little harder through his nose. It was probably his first time here.

When the drum was struck for the thirteenth time a dark but powerful purple light gradually came on, bathing the circle in its rich, almost liquid glow.

At the fifteenth drum beat the barons began to move, slowly, anti-clockwise, one step at a time, one step per drum beat.

Christ! Jean thought. He's coming.

The giant figures were moving around him, turning slowly but deliberately like the mechanism of some ghastly machine; a complex lock gradually opening, unlocking horror.

He was scared now, real scared; scareder than he'd ever been-absolutely and utterly terrified.

He knew what was about to happen, those things he hadn't believed before-slicing your neck, drinking your blood while you were still alive, draining your life out of you before your very eyes. Then they'd take his soul.

The drum was beating faster. He could feel it in his stomach, stirring the contents, making them jump, making them come to life. He suddenly felt like he'd swallowed a sack of live toads, and they were hopping around inside him, jumping at his stomach, trying to get out. It was hurting him real bad, not nausea, but pain like he'd been punched by a cast-iron fist.

The drum got faster. Another joined in, slipped in behind it, a snare, building up a rhythm. The barons were moving in time, picking up speed. They were starting to blur, the whites into blacks, losing their shape. He tried to focus on one and follow him, but he couldn't move his head. He tried closing his eyes but he couldn't do that either. He tried looking away, but even that wasn't an option.