The King of Swords (max mingus) (8 page)

Jean knew he couldn't win. He knew it was over, that he was finished.

They were now spinning so fast they'd become an indistinct grey mass, but the purple light they were bathed in was hitting their waistcoat chains and belt buckles, and these were spitting out weird bright red, blue, green, yellow and orange reflections in the shape of deadly bats.

He was getting dozy. He felt part of himself fading away, slipping under, not even bothering to put up a struggle.

His stomach was killing him. He felt like he'd swallowed a live hungry rodent, scratching and clawing and biting him for all it was worth.

As they turned they began to chant: Vin Baron Baron l'ap vini icit, Vin Baron Baron l'ap vini icit, Vin Baron Baron vini icit, Vin Baron Baron l'ap vini icit

The lights were dazzling him now, burning his eyes like pepper spray. He felt tears running out of them.

The chanting went on as they spun around him:

SSSSO-LO-MON

SSSSO-LO-MON

SSSSO-LO-MON

T
here were more drums now, a whole battery of them, pounding, hurting his head, killing his stomach.

The chant had been picked up by others he couldn't see, getting louder.

SSSSO-LO-MON

SSSSO-LO-MON

Worked every time, thought Carmine, the chant. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Solomon, didn't even mention his name, but as they turned, the words ran one into the other and produced a new word people thought they recognized and chimed in with. The onlookers got swept up in the moment and began to repeat it.

The barons were now spinning so fast the colours had leached out into a thick dirty white cloud, while the reflections had blended into one another forming a thick crimson band around the middle of the circle.

The chant was growing ever louder and the pain in his stomach was intensifying, like he had a boxer in there, flailing away. He wanted to cry out, but he couldn't move his mouth.

And then Solomon appeared. He rose up slowly from out of the ground, a swirling red and orange light shining beneath him, like flames. He was dressed as the barons were, except all in white, right down to the make-up on his face.

Solomon crossed his arms over his abdomen and drew two long swords from under his coat. The blades caught the light and threw it into Jean's eyes, sharp and white and hot.

Solomon began whirling and twirling the blades through the air, slicing through the purple darkness.

Jean followed their deadly progress, feeling like someone getting sucked towards a spinning fan, dragged towards his death, their pull obliterating his resistance.

His terror had flatlined into panicked resignation. He hoped for the best he could. That he'd go out quick and clean. No pain.

But something else was happening to him too. Inside. The pains in his stomach were gone. He couldn't feel a thing.

And then he was drawn back to the man who'd come to kill him. He'd crossed the blades into an X and was drawing nearer. The light from the cross filled his eyes, warming them with its heat, blotting out his vision, until finally it was all he could see-pure white light.

His hearing faded. He could hear absolutely nothing.

He couldn't speak. He couldn't taste. He couldn't smell. He couldn't touch. He couldn't see.

He wasn't sure he was still breathing.

Was this it? Was this death?

Although it was difficult for him to move, chant and pay attention to what was going on, Carmine caught a glimpse of Solomon rising out of the ground and heard the excited gasps and screams of the simple-minded idiots watching from the balcony. They didn't realize this was an act, exactly like the circus or a pantomime.

He saw flashes of Solomon doing his dance, twirling his two lethal razor-sharp blades through the air like propellers, slicing, coming closer and closer to Jean Assad, as he sat there facing death without being able to so much as blink or scream.

The drums rose and rose to a booming crescendo of roaring cannon strapped to the back of a herd of stampeding bulls, before suddenly and quite abruptly dying back down to the same single, solitary heavy beat that had started the ceremony. The barons slowed their movements down one beat at a time, until, by the tenth, they were walking in step with the drummer.

At the twelfth beat Solomon swiftly raised and back-handed his swords across the middle of Assad's exposed throat, leaving a thin, dark, almost black line. By the fourteenth beat blood had geysered out of the veins and arteries, heavy jets and fine fountains, coating Solomon's painted face and white clothes.

Solomon then covered himself and the body with his cloak. Both were lowered down into the ground, prompting more screaming and shouting from the balcony.

Then the lights went out and the abattoir was plunged into darkness.

C
armine drove out to Miami Shores. There was a potential Heart working a bar off Park Drive which was popular with the rich old men who were members of the nearby country club. They'd go there after playing a few holes of golf. Carmine didn't understand golf. It wasn't a sport to him but a status thing white folks did once they hit a certain age or income bracket or both. Hitting a ball around and taking a leisurely stroll to where it had landed so you could hit it again-what was the whole damn point of that?

He drove down a pitch-black street where the lights were busted and all the houses were derelict and boarded up. Some had been demolished and were just piles of rubble surrounded by wire fencing. Desolate palm trees tilted over the road like drunks, their trunks hacked, drilled and graffitied, their leaves droopy and dirt-coated. He turned into another street where all the buildings had been levelled. The road was coated with thick dust. It reminded him of a picture he'd seen of Hiroshima after the bomb had hit it, nothing standing. All over Miami construction companies were blowing up or knocking down old buildings and then just leaving the mess right there instead of clearing it up and reconstructing.

Suddenly a car pulled out in front of him and he hit the brakes. He wasn't wearing his belt so the jolt threw him hard against the steering wheel and he smacked his forehead on the windshield.

'Motherfucker!' he yelled and punched the horn. The offending car drove off regardless.

'You still drive like an idiot,' a familiar voice said behind him. He turned around and saw the faint outline of someone in the back seat.

'Solomon!' Carmine hadn't noticed anyone when he'd got in the car after the ceremony, nor the whole time he'd been driving. 'How did you-how long you bin in here?'

'I get around,' he said. 'Keep driving.'

Carmine set off down the road.

'Put on your seatbelt,' Solomon said, his voice still the same, a clear, forced whisper, his words hollowed out and filled with silence.

Carmine plugged in the belt. He felt his boss's stare bouncing back at him from the rearview mirror, even though he couldn't see his eyes, let alone his face.

'Keep your eyes on the road. Concentrate,' Solomon said.

'Where we goin'?'

'Wherever you are.'

'I'm workin'. Got a possible Heart lined up.'

'A Heart? That's good. We need more of the high-class ones, less of the low,' Solomon replied.

'I hear that,' Carmine said. 'I'm doin' my best out here, you know?'

'Your best at what?' Solomon asked.

'My best at what I do, Solomon,' Carmine answered, mouth drying, a little tremor in his voice. He hoped Solomon hadn't found out about his and Sam's side project. They'd been so damned careful.

'How's your mother?'

'She's good.' Carmine searched the mirror quickly, but all he saw was a silhouette. He hadn't been face to face with Solomon in five or six years at least. They always met like this, in dark or shadowy places when Carmine least expected it and not often. Carmine had heard that Solomon had had extensive facial reconstruction, that he'd bleached his skin close to white and wore his hair straight and long, that he was so unrecognizable you could pass him on the street without knowing who he was, and that he used doubles and soundalikes to fool his enemies. Carmine wasn't really sure he wasn't talking to an impersonator right now.

'Send her my regards.'

'I will.'

'Take a left here.'

He turned onto North East 101st Street and drove on for a short while.

'Pull over after the Cordoba there.'

Carmine parked in front of a black Chrysler. The road was empty.

'I heard about that cop who assaulted you. We're looking into it.'

'It's no big deal,' Carmine spoke to the mirror. A sliver of stray light coming from the street had fallen across Solomon's mouth. It was bullshit what they'd said about him bleaching his skin; he'd probably started the rumour himself. He was into that-'misinformation' he called it.

'It is a big deal.' Solomon smiled.

And then Solomon licked his lower lip and Carmine saw what had always freaked people out. It wasn't something Solomon let everyone and anyone see, but it was the one thing about him that left the deepest impression, usually to the detriment of his other features. People who'd seen him went on and on about his eyes, their luminous quality, the way they looked through you, the way they saw your secrets, but none of them had ever seen Solomon Boukman's tongue. It was forked, split in two from the middle out, with its tips splayed and pointed and curved slightly downward, like two small pink talons. Carmine remembered when his mother had done that to him, sliced the thing down the middle on a butcher board with a knife. Solomon hadn't even flinched.

'You take care now, Carmine.'

'You too, Solomon.'

Solomon opened the door quietly and slid out of the car and made his way towards the Cordoba. As he walked he was slowly absorbed by the darkness, before disappearing into it completely.

'
Hey, no smokin' in the car. New ride, new rules,' Joe said as Max put his fourth Marlboro of the morning to his mouth. It was just after 8 a.m. They were driving to work in Joe's new car, a chocolate-brown '79 Lincoln Continental with a V8 engine, chrome wheels, fine beige leather seats, wood appliques in the cabin and two pine-tree air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. He'd won it a week ago in the SAW-Slain and Wounded-auction, where money was raised for the families of dead or disabled cops by selling the seized and confiscated property of criminals who'd been sent away for more than twenty years. And, as had been the custom since the auctions had started, a symbolic $100 donation was also made to the family of the first Miami Beach cop to be killed in the line of duty-David Cecil Bearden-shot dead by car thieves on 20 March 1928, at the age of twenty-four. The Continental only had 160 miles on the clock. It had briefly been used by a mid-level dope courier who was starting a seventy-eight-year stretch at Union Correctional.

'Smell gets in the upholstery, it don't come out. It'll bring the price down, time comes to sell,' Joe explained. They were on North East 2nd Avenue, stalled in a tailback caused by an earlier collision between a cement truck and a Winnebago. The truck had come off worst.

'I'll open the window,' Max said.

'The hell you will, Mingus. You're in my ride, you respect my rules. No fumar en auto,' Joe practised the Spanish he'd been learning off tapes for the best part of six months. Word was Miami PD brass were talking about setting up a fast-track promotion scheme where preference would be given to Spanish speakers, so Joe thought it best to get a head start. Besides, Spanish was most of what you heard on the streets nowadays. People could plot any old shit they wanted to if you couldn't understand what they were saying. Max had followed his partner's lead and bought a set of Berlitz tapes and books, but he hadn't as yet taken them out of the packaging. Why the hell should he learn a foreign language to talk to people in his own country? He'd pick up the basics as he went along, same as he did with street slang.

'There's worse outside, Joe. Pollution, exhaust, bird shit. That'll depreciate your car faster than any damn cigarettes.' Max grumpily put his smoke back in the pack. He'd showered, shaved and ironed his clothes but he still looked and felt like a wreck. Before he'd left his home he'd swallowed a mouthful of Pepto-Bismol to douse the burn in his stomach, but it was still smouldering. The doctor told him he didn't have an ulcer, just an acid build up caused by a cocktail of job pressures, booze, coffee and not eating a balanced diet at the right times of day. And he badly needed a damn drink. And a cigarette. 'Next thing, you're gonna tell me is they're bad for me.'

'They are bad for you.'

'You smoke cigars.'

'Not any more.'

'You quit?'

'Uh-huh,' Joe said smugly.

'No wonder you're actin' like such an asshole.'

Joe laughed.

'You should think 'bout quittin', Max. For real.'

'Think about it all the time. For real,' Max said gloomily. And he had. After the first cigarette of the day, he didn't like smoking. The next nineteen to thirty were all reflex and habit, things to do with his hands, things to relieve stress, things to help him think, things to do for the sake of something to do-the necessity of addiction. But that initial cigarette-the curtain raiser-was still one of the best three or four experiences he'd had outside of sex, his job and the boxing ring.

It had all the makings of turning into another nice spring day in Miami. The sky was a limpid clean blue, the sun was bright without being intrusive and there was a good but not forceful breeze cutting through the column of palm trees at the side of the road. January through to May were the best times to be in town, climatewise-warm but never hot, humidity low, rainstorms likely to last hours rather than days like they did in the summer.

The traffic was moving at a slow, loud, angry, crawl. Midtown to downtown, the cars were bumper to bumper, horns were being tooted, people were leaning out of their windows or standing up shouting and cursing, yelling, screaming. At least they hadn't started shooting each other, like they did in LA, but that couldn't be far off.

'You hear from Rene?' Joe asked. 'No.'

'You called her?'

'No.'

'You gonna?'

'No.'

'Best way. Clean break.'

'That's right: clean break.' Max nodded. 'What about you? How's your love life?' 'Not as bad as yours.' Joe laughed. He was a big man-six and a half feet tall and 245 pounds of mostly muscle and bone. He looked like a monument when he was standing still and a boulder when he was coming at you. His car seat was pushed way back to accommodate his long thick legs, and the wheel looked like ribbon in his wide hands; hands that were so solid and dense they looked like padded heavy bag mitts, barely a hint of bone showing anywhere, except for the obelisks he had for knuckles.

Unlike Max, Joe rarely used force on people. He didn't often have to. The sight of him alone made people think twice about messing with him, although the few times Max had witnessed him hit someone their bones had been as tough as matchsticks. Outside work and when he was with people he knew, Joe had a friendly cartoon bear's face which complemented his genial, disarming manner. On the street or in interrogations, however, it was a different matter: he had his game face on-that of a very big and very mean dog whose tail you'd just trodden on.

'So you met someone?' Max asked.

'Uh-huh,' Joe said smugly.

'That why you stopped smoking?' Max asked.

'New love, new leaf.'

'Sounds like she ain't wasted her time gettin' you by the balls, Joseph. She got a name?'

'Lina,' Joe replied. In the decade they'd known each other, Joe had had two serious relationships, both lasting close to three years. When they'd been on patrol he'd dated La-Shawna Harris, a radio dispatcher who'd sounded a lot better than she looked. That had finished when he and Max made Detective in 1973. Then Joe had met and moved in with a Dominican nurse called Marisol. They'd gotten engaged and set a wedding date, but then Joe found out that she already had a husband and two kids she was sending money to back home. He hadn't talked about the break-up all that much. The little he had said was straight off the nearest shelf-shit happens, life goes on and then we die, etc.-the kind of catchphrases people resort to when they want to keep their pain to themselves. Max could tell his friend had been hurt real deep. It was in his eyes and manner-the dull, wounded look in his stare, a general lack of enthusiasm for life and a quickness to cynicism. Before Marisolgate, Joe had believed that most people were basically good and if you helped them out they'd be grateful. Now he was closer to Max's outlook, which was that if you offered someone a helping hand you'd best take a rabies shot first because they'd probably bite you. He'd also become a better cop. When he'd been with Marisol, he'd never been the first through a locked door, always the second to go up to the window of a suspect vehicle. After the relationship was over, he threw himself into the job-first one through, last one out. Any hesitation, any half step was a thing of the past. But now Max guessed he'd revert to his old happy self once his new flame turned into a home fire and this worried him a little. For the last three years they'd been a kick-ass team, regular superheroes. They'd broken big cases, made solid collars and secured a 97 per cent conviction rate-the highest in Florida. They'd won commendations for the last four years. They were both on their way to big promotions. Before they'd done well, better than most, but once you'd done great, doing well was a poor substitute.

'What does she do?'

'She's a teacher. First grade.'

'When d'you meet?' Max asked.

'Two months ago.'

'Two months…' Max said, surprised Joe hadn't told him anything about her earlier. 'What? Was this like a you-start-off-friends then realize you got a hard-on kind of scenario?'

'I just wanted to be sure of her first.' Joe smiled. 'And I am now.'

'I'm happy for you, Joe. You deserve it. Where d'you meet?'

'You ain't gonna believe this, Max…'

'Try me.'

'Church.'

'Church? Since when do you-Joseph George Liston-go to church?'

'As of two months ago.'

'Yeah-right.'

Neither cop was a churchgoer, but whenever Max needed to think things through, be it a case, or a personal problem, he sought out the nearest and emptiest church. It was a habit he'd developed on the back of a whim during his first year as a detective. One hot afternoon, he'd decided he needed to find somewhere cool and dark to mull over the case of a serial rapist who was posing as a repairman to get into women's homes. He'd gone into the first nearest appropriate place he'd found-Plymouth Congregational Church on Coconut Grove. He'd cracked the case within five minutes of sitting there on a hard varnished pew, in the semi-darkness, the smell of candle smoke in his nostrils. He'd simply remembered something an eyewitness had said about the design of one of the victim's bedroom curtains, something he couldn't have known about unless he'd been inside the house. It had come to him within moments of homing in on all the information he'd absorbed, sifting it out, breaking it down and then breaking it down again. Ever since then, whenever he couldn't see straight, either professionally or personally, he'd go and sit in the nearest church and mull things over.

Meanwhile Joe would wait outside. Joe didn't believe in God and avoided going into churches. His father had been a preacher who drank and regularly beat his mother and all Joe's siblings, before leaving them for good one Christmas Eve. He was both impressed and worried by Max's church sessions. He was glad they helped him break cases, but he hoped to high hell his partner wouldn't get the Jesus bug along the way too and see the hand of God instead of his own fingering the perp.

'Told you you wouldn't believe it.'

'And, you're right, I don't. So, c'mon, where d'you meet her?'

'I just told you.'

'Stop pullin' my dick, Joe.'

'I ain't pullin' your dick.'

'You been goin' to church for two months and you ain't told me? You're pretty quiet for a born again Christian. Shouldn't you be standin' on your car roof shoutin' hosannah and hallelujah?'

'I ain't been born again, Mingus. Once was enough.' Joe chuckled, stepping on the gas. The traffic had begun to move faster now, although the cars were still jammed nose to tail. 'Remember when my moms broke her leg? She asked me to drive her to church. So I took her to this service she goes to on a Wednesday night and I went in with her and sat through the thing. The place was crowded, every seat taken. And after a while it hit me.' 'What?'

'Never in my life had I seen such a collection of fine, free and available women under the same one roof. So, the next day, I went back there by myself to get a closer look.'

'Get the fuck outta here, Joe!'

'I'm bein' serious. There are some fine chicks in them churches, Mingus, some fine chicks.'

'Did you say "church-ezz"? As in, you been to more than one?'

'Yeah, sure. The Baptist ones are the best for eye contact, chit-chat and hand-holding. They're informal, the preachers play guitars like they just sittin' around a campfire with a few brews. The worst ones are the Catholics. Uptight as hell. All the fine women are with their mammas.'

'You're a sick man, Joe,' Max said with genuine distaste. He may not have used churches for their actual purpose either, but the last thing he'd use them for was as a meat market. He had bars and clubs for that. 'You go to church to get right with God, not to get laid.'

'Ah, He don't mind. He ain't lobbed a thunderbolt at me.'

'Yet…' Max cautioned, half seriously.

'You should try it.'

'Fuck off.'

'See, you bein' white-and a cop-I know it's harder for you to get with the sisters nowadays, 'cause of McDuffie and the riots. But, you meet a sister in church-if she Christian enough to be in there then she gonna be Christian enough to look past your colour too.'

'I do all right as I am,' Max said, but Joe had a point. Post-McDuffie, people were sticking close to their own kind and hunkering down like they were under siege. It was harder for Max to get to talk to black women he fancied. Instead of the looks he used to get-interest mingled with suspicion and light unease-now he saw fear, resentment and sometimes outright hostility-and that was before he told them he was a cop. It didn't happen all the time, but it happened more often than not, and a lot more than it had a year ago.

McDuffie had even split the cops into unofficial racial factions, blacks in one corner, whites, Hispanics and Asians in another. Although, it being Miami, with its disparate, cross-pollinating racial mix, things hadn't been quite that clear cut. Black Hispanics had tried unsuccessfully to occupy a middle ground, before throwing their lot in where they had the most friends. Max and Joe were unaffected. Their friendship had long surpassed the point where they thought of each other in terms of race. In fact, Max had earned the respect of the black cops when he'd refused to give money to the McDuffie murder officers' defence fund, just like he'd refused to shake their hands when he'd accidentally run into them all in a bar one night. Instead he'd called them cowardly killer motherfuckers and told them he hoped they went to jail for life. Joe had had to get him out before things had turned seriously ugly.

'You do all right, huh?' Joe countered sarcastically.

'I do just fine,' Max insisted.

'You doin' just fine now?'

'Fuck you.'

Joe laughed, Max joined in a few beats later.

'My relationships don't last, Joe, because I am, a.) an asshole and, b.) a bastard. I start goin' steady with someone and end up fucking their best friends or their sisters or their first, second or third cousins. I don't commit, I'm thinkin' about work when I should be thinkin' about them, and the last thing I want to do right now is settle down. Race and religion ain't got a damn thing to do with it.'