The King of Swords (max mingus) (9 page)

'You ever even been out with a white girl?' Joe asked.

'Nope, never. First girl I ever kissed was black. She was called Jasmine. She was my first girlfriend, I guess. And you know what they say, "Once you go black, you never go back." Well, it's true-as I found out at the age of six.'

'You never been with a white girl, how would you know the difference?'

'I don't want to know the difference, Joe. I love black women and brown women. Ain't nothin' finer in my eyes. That's what I like, same as guys who only go for blondes or brunettes. Where's this all coming from anyhow?'

'Just thinkin' ahead that's all. If you wanna get beyond Captain by the time you're forty, you gonna need to get with the programme a little. Conform. See, the police is one racist minefield, the further up you climb. Everywhere you step there's a redneck with two heads. You're Miami PD's rising star, the cop every rookie with a brain wants to be. And there you are, bringing black girls to the ball every damn year. Some of the black cops don't like it 'cause they say you stealin' their women, and the white folks don't like it 'cause they racist assholes. Say, sooner or later, against your better judgement, you meet the right girl, and that girl happens to be black, you're gonna have to choose between her and this.'

'So what are you sayin'? I should get myself an Aryan cheerleader or somethin' to improve my career prospects? That's reverse racism.'

'Don't have to be a white girl. How about a Latina?'

'I have been out with Latinas.'

'Mingus, they was black Latinas.'

'I'm a cop, Joe, a policeman not a politician. I ain't never gonna be a politician. That's for them pansies over at IA. I'll go out with who I damn well please. And anyhow it's no one's damn business. You seen the Chief's wife? She looks like a fossil. No wonder the old guy looks so miserable, that's what he wakes up to every morning. If she's what you're tellin' me I've gotta marry to get ahead in this job I'll quit and become a lifeguard.'

'Plenty of hot white girls out there, Mingus,' Joe said.

Max looked out of the window. The traffic was flowing without pause into the heart of downtown, its buildings catching and reflecting the sunlight and sky like scraps of broken mirror.

'Tell you what, Joe. You run for office and leave the women and the police work to me, OK? Then, when they make you God or Mayor, you can make me Chief. How's that sound?'

'Sounds great.' Joe sighed, shaking his head.

'This girl of yours, Lina? She know you ain't really a Jesus freak?' Max asked.

'We don't talk about religion, Mingus.'

'You mean you avoid the subject?'

'Fuck you,' said Joe. They both laughed.

They stopped at the lights near the Freedom Tower, one of the oldest and grandest buildings in Miami, 225 feet of Mediterranean revival architecture bearing more than a close resemblance to the Giralda Bell Tower in Seville, Spain. There was graffiti on the walls and most of the windows were broken. The giant red on white 'For Sale' sign draped around the middle of the building seemed more like a plea than an offer.

'This town's goin' to shit,' Max commented, 'and it just keeps gettin' worse and worse. Don't know how bad things have gotta get before they get better.'

Max just didn't know what he could be throwing away, thought Joe. Pissed him off sometimes, the way he just scoffed at the opportunities being presented to him on a plate, his for the taking. Fuckin' white people just didn't know how easy they had it. Or maybe they were just too used to it. Walk right through doors that opened without them even knowing they were closed to almost everyone else.

Max had everything going for him. He was widely recognized as being the most talented cop on the force. No one came close to him. He also had the right connections. Eldon Burns wasn't just his boss, he was also his mentor. Burns was the most powerful cop in Florida, some said even the whole of the South. He had everyone's ear. Rumour had it he even knew Reagan. It was Burns who'd persuaded Max to join the police. And it was Burns who watched over him like a guardian angel with six guns-not that he'd ever needed to intervene, because once Max was on the streets he took to the job like he'd been doing it for a hundred years, and doing it well. As long as Burns was there, Max would rise up the ranks, probably make Major by the time his boss stepped down. Then the rest would be up to him, and that would be a tough climb-politics not police work got you those top jobs, as Max well knew, and thought he was having none of it.

If Joe had been in Max's shoes, he would've played the game, made the necessary sacrifices and given the powers that be what they wanted. You couldn't get anywhere in life without losing a little of yourself, without giving some part of yourself away that you would have liked to have held on to. But that was just the way it went. The trick was to make sure you got what you wanted for what you lost. Max didn't know anything about that kind of deal yet: the circumstances that would force someone to the point where they had to cut part of themselves off to move on up. Maybe he never would. Joe had burnt virtually every bridge he'd ever crossed to get to where he was today. He didn't talk to his four brothers because he was a cop, and most of his childhood friends had disowned him when he'd told them he was signing up with the PD; they'd called him a house nigger and an Uncle Tom. Not that they'd exactly turned out too right since. Two of his brothers were dead, one in 'Nam, the other of an OD. One was in prison for dealing, the other was on welfare. Those of his friends who weren't behind bars were either dealing drugs or hooked on them, or else were pimping, or walking around in the middle of the day, drunk. Liberty City was a hard rut to climb out of. Ghetto gravity pulled at you the hardest. You had to be tough and determined to get loose of it. Most weren't. They were either genuinely happy where they were or too scared or weak or stupid to see it for the deadly shithole it was.

Joe had barely touched on this with Max. He'd mentioned that he was estranged from most of his family, but hadn't gone into it too much. It was best to have some secrets.

Max was his closest friend. Unlike a lot of white and even a good few Latin cops on the force, he wasn't a racist. He never talked down to black people, never discriminated against or for them. This was probably because when he'd been growing up most of his friends had been black, on account of his being around the kids of his dad's jazz band colleagues. Joe had never said it out loud, but he reckoned Max's attraction to black women was in part due to the fact that his moms had always hated them after his dad left her for a sister he'd met on the road. Changing his habits would be hard, but Joe was determined to make him see sense. He wanted Max to fulfil his potential as a cop, and he himself wanted to get as far up the ladder as he could. He wasn't part of Burns' inner circle the way Max and certain others were. All those guys were hotshots, current or future, kings and their heirs. Joe was therefore relying on Max to do well so he could follow in his wake and move up with him. It was thanks to Max refusing to work with another partner, that he'd made Detective, and again thanks to Max that he'd been brought into MTF. He knew he was succeeding on Max's terms, rather than his own, and that his progress wouldn't have been as quick otherwise, but for now that suited him just fine; it was up instead of down, right where he wanted to be and where he wanted to stay. Besides, he'd met the woman he was going to marry and settle down with. They were already talking about moving in together.

Despite the traffic, Max and Joe still had twenty minutes to spare before their shift started. Usually they timed it so they had around twice that so they could stop off at Sandino's Grill-a cafe run by a seventy-year-old Cuban called Cristobal who sat outside from opening time to closing time on a foldaway chair in a beige or olive-green cotton suit, panama hat, sparkling shiny black leather shoes and a gold-topped mahogany cane, smoking cigars, watching and chatting to passers-by. Max had thought it an eccentricity of his, a way he'd chosen to spend his retirement, but it was how he drummed up business. He'd greet people he saw every day and, sooner or later they'd start talking and before long they were his regulars. He knew them all by name. The cafe was run by his identical twin sons, who did the cooking and waiting. They were called Benny and Tommy. You never knew who was serving and who was cooking.

Max and Joe had breakfast at Sandino's most mornings, before or after their shifts ended, but today they only had time for black coffee and Cuban sandwiches to go.

The cafe was cool and sombre inside, with polished wooden tables and a varnished floor. The walls were draped with the Cuban flag and map, as well as framed black and white photographs of the island, pre-Fidel. Cristobal had played drums in his youth. There were pictures of him in a white tux and black bow tie, playing with an assortment of bands-trios, quintets, sextets, big bands. There were pictures of a smiling Cristobal surrounded by beautiful young women, shaking hands with priests, soldiers and-on two different occasions-with a young Frank Sinatra. He told a great story about how early one morning in 1947, Sinatra had walked into a club in Havana where he and his two brothers were playing. He'd got up on stage with them and sung a few songs-'Close To You', 'One For My Baby' and 'These Foolish Things'. Cristobal-the only one of the three who could speak any English-had kept in touch with the singer ever since. Sinatra had made a habit of coming by Sandino's whenever he was in town, usually right after closing time, when there was no one around.

Max and Joe sat down at a window table as they waited for their sandwiches to be made by Benny or Tommy. Max gratefully lit a Marlboro, took the first drag and held it in his lungs for a few seconds before slowly expelling the smoke through his nostrils and then his mouth. He took a sip of his Cuban coffee and looked at Joe, expecting to see disapproval. Joe's eyes were glued to the TV behind him. Max hadn't paid it any mind. Breakfast news, same as what was in the paper.

'Well, look at that.' Joe tapped him. 'Dean Waychek.'

Max turned around and saw Dean Waychek's face-thin, pockmarked, goateed, bespectacled. The picture cut to a reporter standing outside the entrance of the Alligator Moon. Behind him were two police cruisers and an ambulance. The reporter said Waychek had been shot seven times.

'Ain't that a shame,' Max murmured.

'Couldn't have happened to a nicer person,' Joe said. 'No one's gonna be in a hurry to catch his killer either.'

He looked at Max searchingly for a second.

'What?' Max asked.

'You kinda quiet.'

Suddenly they heard police sirens outside. Lots of them. Joe got up and looked out of the door.

'Something's happening at CC,' Joe said, meaning the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, two blocks away and right opposite their headquarters.

'The Moyez trial. That started up again today, right?' Max said as the two went back to the car to get their bulletproof vests out of the trunk. 'Isn't today Pedro de Carvalho's big moment on the stand?'

'Yeah.' Joe nodded.

'Shit.'

8
a.m. and a nice day in Miami, Bonbon smiled as he looked out of the window of the Mercedes, which was stuck in traffic, right close to the Freedom Tower. When he'd first arrived in Miami off the boat, they'd sent him there to get himself checked out and naturalized. When he told the immigration officials he was Haitian they didn't believe him, because all the Haitians they dealt with were skinny-ass famine victims.

He reached into the brown paper bag between his legs and took out a piece of candy wrapped in red and white striped plastic. This was his favourite kind of confectionary, imported straight from Haiti, where he'd first tasted it as a kid-a white, almond-flavoured oval filled with liqueur. But, in truth, he loved all kinds of candy. He ate it all the time, morning, noon and night, which was how and why he'd got his name. He liked it. His habit defined him. He was 255 pounds of fat packed onto a big-boned six-foot frame. He was still quick on his feet and didn't get out of breath as long as he didn't have to run up too many stairs, not that people expected him to do too much of that. The parts he played were more particular.

Candy had taken all Bonbon's teeth, so he wore dentures. He'd got real creative here, letting his imagination and wallet run wild. He had eight sets for different occasions. For partying he favoured his gold or diamond-studded ones. He loved to dance. His moves may have been limited to a side-to-side shu?e and a few hand claps and finger clicks, but he had a great sense of rhythm and his timing was perfect. When he was working he wore either standard dentures, like the ones he was wearing now, or, if he had to regulate someone for Solomon he wore the sharp pointy ones he'd had modelled on piranha teeth. Usually the sight of those things in his mouth would be enough to freak any motherfucker out enough for them to do any damn thing that was required, but once in a while he met resistance; the brave types who thought he was all bluff and no blow. He'd shown them right. One time he'd bitten a guy under his left ear and ripped an inch-wide strip of skin clean off his skull all the way past his nose. Then he'd taken some pictures of the fucker's face and had 'em made up as postcards to send to people ahead of his visits. Sometimes it paid to get a little savage and bloody.

He chuckled to himself and looked over at Marcus, the driver, then shifted his bulk around.

Sitting in the back were his deputies Danielle and Jane. Jane was the darker and prettier of the two. She had long slender legs and liked to show them off every chance she got. She had on a short leather skirt and a black bolero jacket with a white blouse done up to the collar. She was originally from the town of Banica on the border with the Dominican Republic, where her pops came from. She spoke four languages-Spanish, Kreyol, French and English. Bonbon had known Danielle since they were kids. She'd been a skinny little thing back then, arms and legs you could pick your teeth with, always half dead from hunger. Like a lot of kids who'd come up in the slums and then had money, she'd gone from bone to blubber in no time. He didn't blame her. Before coming to America the only meat she'd eaten had been rats and mice. She wore her clothes loose and long to hide the bumps. She and Jane were lovers and had been ever since they'd met, twelve years ago. The Kreyol word for their kind was madivine, but he didn't ever use it to their faces. He had too much respect for them and he liked their style. They had his back. They could get as mean and nasty as the best guys he knew but, when he asked them to, they put on the sweetest, most sensual shows for him. Nothing he liked better than watching two or three girls together, especially if one of them was getting turned out. He liked to see the new-to-its fight it-and when girls fought each other, man did they fight. They didn't quit either, kept on coming back at you, again and again. Sometimes watching them fight was better than the sex that followed.

In-between Jane and Danielle, wearing a nice new grey suit, white shirt and tie was Jean Assad, the Catman. He didn't look too bad, considering what had been done to him. There he was, bolt upright, legs pressed tightly together like he didn't have no nuts, hands palm down on his thighs, just like he'd been in the last SNBC. His face was stone-expressionless, no motion-and his eyes were gone, relating to nothing they were seeing, the life in them locked away. Back in Haiti he'd heard houngans say that zombies got that look they had because all they could see was the gap between this world and the next.

When the lights changed they drove on towards the courthouse.

They stopped the Mercedes and waited near a phone booth on North West 2nd Street, right behind the courthouse.

At a few minutes before 10 a.m., Bonbon got out of the car and walked over to the booth. He was dressed in a black pinstriped suit, white shirt, red tie and dark grey waistcoat. He might have gone unnoticed on a street predominated by business types running to meetings and lawyers and their clients going to and from court, most dressed elegantly, some expensively so, but his hat and the way he wore it made people do a double-take. It was a black stovepipe top hat with a red and white candy-striped band around it. It added a good half foot to his height and an air of undertaker-cum-ringmaster to his appearance.

The phone call came dead on ten. Everyone in the organization wore the same Swiss-made Compuchron digital watch with the red LED screen, all synchronized to the exact same time.

Bonbon picked up the receiver.

'Pale map koute,' Bonbon said. Talk I'm listening.

'Yo tout la,' a man's voice answered at the other end. They're all there.

'Seten?'

'M'seten.' The reply. He was sure.

Bonbon got back in the car and nodded to Marcus.

They drove over to the courthouse and stopped opposite the entrance. Danielle opened the door and got out. Bonbon turned around to look at Jean Assad.

'Allay netwaye fatra andedan,' Bonbon said, slowly and clearly as he'd been instructed.

Without his face changing from its impassive frozen mask, Jean Assad slid off his seat and out of the car and walked away towards the courthouse, Danielle following him a few paces behind.

When she returned they drove a little further down West Flagler Street and found a parking space which gave them a clear view of the courthouse's impressive white granite steps.

Bonbon unwrapped another almond oval and slipped it in his mouth.

The murders of officers Patti Rhinehart and Leo Crews on the evening of Tuesday 6 March 1979 were considered among the most brutal in the history of the Miami Police Department. They shocked everyone, from hardened cops who thought they'd seen it all, right down to the raw recruits who heard about it in the academy and quit there and then.

Victor Moyez, a drug dealer from Venezuela, had just concluded the biggest deal in his fifteen years of shipping first cannabis then cocaine from his country to Florida. Instead of dealing with the Cubans or the Jamaicans or the Overtown and Liberty City crews, he'd gone and cut himself a deal with the new player on the scene, a Haitian who had plenty of money and an awesome distribution network, but who was notoriously difficult to get close to. It had taken Moyez and his people over a year of negotiations just to set up an initial meeting, and then another year to work out terms. It was a double victory for Moyez, firstly, because under his previous deals he'd had to guarantee his drug shipments from Venezuela right up to Miami and regularly lost a good third or more to US customs. Under the new deal, his cocaine was getting flown to a private airfield in Haiti and unloaded there. His new contact would oversee its passage to Miami. The Haitian had also agreed to launch two new projects Moyez was developing on the streets-cocaana de mendigo-beggar's cocaine-a very cheap variety of freebase coke aimed at the breadline masses instead of the trustfunders. The other project was Erythroxylon Moyez, a cross between two rare coca plants with a 2-2.5 per cent content of the ether-soluble alkaloids forming the basis for cocaine. It was hoped that the cross-if successful-would result in a doubling of the alkaloid content, meaning he could manufacture either stronger cocaine or more cocaine from less plants. If either or even both took off they'd completely revolutionize the industry and he-Moyez-would be in pole position to make another fortune before the imitators began fighting back.

The only thing that had troubled Moyez about the deal was the Haitian himself. He'd never seen him. Or, rather, he didn't know which-if any-of the three people who'd called themselves Solomon Boukman was actually the real deal. It certainly wasn't the blond-haired surfer dude he'd initially made contact with in the Biltmore suite. And it might not have been the middle-aged black lady he'd met in Fort Lauderdale, also calling herself Boukman. And it quite possibly wasn't the old man who'd concluded the deal that day in a house in Coral Gables speaking only in Spanish. He'd heard that was how the Haitian did his business, never personally, only through spokespeople-or, sometimes he'd deal with you direct but you'd never know it was him for sure because of all the other people you'd spoken to. The dumber folk said Boukman must be the Devil himself to be able to do that, but he didn't believe that for a minute. The Devil wouldn't need to do business deals with people like him. Still, he'd felt that bit uneasy throughout the whole deal, for the first time in his life an inferior part of a greater whole, not in control of his destiny, at the mercy of overpowering forces. Whatever it was with this guy, it was a freaky situation.

That had been furthermost from his mind once the deal was done, because Moyez had thrown a party in his stretch limo with a few hookers, champagne, half a kilo of cocaine and music. They'd driven around Miami in the small hours of the morning. Moyez, bored that the speed of the vehicle wasn't matching that of his heartbeat, ordered his driver to go faster and faster until the limo was doing a steady hundred.

It was then that Patti Rhinehart and Leo Crews had pulled the limo over and met their respective fates. Moyez, blitzed on coke and champagne and pissed off that his party had been interrupted, ordered his men to bundle the two police officers into the limo and steal their car. The officers had been driven out to a warehouse and tortured with ice picks, razor blades, cigarettes and-as was Moyez's speciality-scorpions. The autopsy revealed traces of both scorpion venom and an anti-serum; in other words the cops had been stung repeatedly by the scorpions, experienced all the symptoms brought on by their venom-from severe stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhoea to difficulties in breathing-before being cured so they could be stung again. The officers were tortured for ten days before finally being killed with their own revolvers. Their bodies were then dressed in their uniforms and put in the trunk of their patrol car, which was driven to police headquarters and parked outside.

Moyez had gone back to Venezuela but left one of his trusted lieutenants, Pedro de Carvalho, in Miami to act as a liaison with Boukman.

One night de Carvalho got into an argument with a man in the bathroom of a nightclub. The argument had escalated into a fight which de Carvalho had been losing until he'd pulled a gun on his assailant. Unbeknown to him the man was an off-duty cop. When de Carvalho walked out of the club he'd found the police waiting for him, guns drawn. They searched him on the spot and found his most prized possession on a chain around his neck-Patti Rhinehart's badge. De Carvalho was arrested for the officers' murders.

Facing the electric chair, de Carvalho had cut a deal with the DA. He would lure Moyez back to Miami and testify against him in open court. His sentence would be commuted to twenty years, served in a soft prison in New England.

It was cold in the courtroom because the air conditioning had been turned all the way up to regulate the heat generated by the hundred or more members of the public crammed close together into the uncomfortable seats-among them dozens of antsy TV, newspaper and radio reporters-as well as the extra lights for the two film crews from rival networks who were covering the trial.

Today was the big day, the trial's decisive episode, Pedro de Carvalho's star turn on the stand.

The TV cameras were trained on Victor Moyez, a squat and compact man with swarthy weatherbeaten skin, dark eyes, whose intensity was undiminished by the pebble specs he'd worn throughout the trial, and a black beard, with a streak of white running from his chin to his left jaw, so heavy it obscured his mouth. Were it not for the crisp, tailor-made double-breasted navy-blue suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, he could have passed for a political prisoner gone slightly insane during confinement.

Some of the more perceptive journalists who'd been following the trial since it had started the previous month, noted how Moyez wasn't simply calm and composed, but actually appeared to be enjoying himself, chuckling as he listened to the translation of the charges against him through headphones, sometimes laughing out loud and clapping his hands as the more daring or violent episodes of his life were described. Flanked by his two lawyers, Harvey Winesap and Coleman Crabbe of Winesap, Mcintosh, Crabbe amp; Milton of Park Avenue, New York, the country's most in demand narco lawyers, rumoured to cost upwards of $2,000 a day, he seemed inordinately relaxed for someone facing either the death penalty or life in an American penitentiary, most probably Marion, Illinois.

Moyez had every reason to be relaxed. In the next few hours, he'd be a free man. When Pedro de Carvalho took the stand to sing his traitor's hymn, he'd get the shock of a lifetime. His beloved mother, sisters and young daughter would be brought in by two of Moyez's lieutenants and sat in the front row, right in his sightline. Moyez had had them kidnapped and brought to Miami. De Carvalho knew what it would mean for them if he opened his mamaguebo mouth.

He'd have to retract everything and the case would collapse. He was all the gringos estupidos de mierda had.

At least everyone agreed about what happened in the first five minutes of the trial-and even if they hadn't, the two cameras captured it all very clearly. The state called Pedro de Carvalho and out of a door to the left of Judge Leo Davidtz emerged a short and pale-looking man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the puffy-faced, mustachioed bandido of his widely circulated mugshot. De Carvalho's round, double-chinned mien had shrunk back to skin and bone, and he'd lost the facial hair too, revealing a prodigious overbite which made his head look like that of a shrunken Inca. He stopped when he came face to face with his old boss, and for a good few moments stood stock still, like he'd grown out of the ground, staring at him, while his expression began to crumble into tremors and tics. Had he been allowed to stand there any longer he probably would have screamed or burst into tears or both, but courtroom guards moved him along to the witness stand.