Red Tide (11 page)

He opened the car door. “Let’s go see what Honore has on the menu today.”

The inside of 
L’arbre
 should have been dark because there were no windows. But there was so much bright paint on the walls—yellow, lavender, gold, red—that the place seemed lit up brighter than a ballroom.

Along one wall was a mural painted in that unmistakable Haitian style, primitive figures done in a sophisticated way. It showed a huge scene of Haitian life stretching from one wall to the other. In the middle was a giant tree. Its roots went down into a hell with a top-hatted devil, its branches reached up to a pale God, surrounded by a saucer of golden light.

Wrapped around the tree was a snake, and all around were Haitians chopping wood, riding brightly painted buses, making love, dying, cooking and eating, dancing, building houses, fishing, tending animals, playing soccer. The painting took up the whole wall and dominated the room.

“Wow,” I said to Deacon.

“Honore did that,” he said. “That’s where the place gets its name.” He nodded at the large tree in the middle. “Tree of Life,” he said. “Luh Arbruh Vee-ay.”

“Deacon!” a happy voice called from the back. He pronounced it, “Dee-CONE.” A tall man, very thin and very black, rushed out of the kitchen and swept down on us.

Deacon took his hand and shook it, looking like he was doing it to hold off a hug. “How’s it going, Honore?” he asked.

Honore spread his arms wide. They took up most of the restaurant. “But now you have save my life, beautiful. Of course it is impossible to make any money with things as they are. But—” And he gave a shrug that said oh well, who cares, other things are more important, life is good, come on in, I have my health, and lunch is ready. It was an amazing shrug.

“This is my friend Billy Knight,” the Deacon was saying. “He has a couple of questions you might be able to answer.”

Honore held up a finger. “No,” he smiled. “You will not ask on an empty stomach. Come,” he said, and led us to one of the three booths, the one closest to the kitchen.

We sat. People kept appearing at the table and Honore spoke to them in Creole. One or two of them must have been working at the restaurant, because food started to appear very soon, in lots of small dishes, as if we were supposed to try a little of everything on the menu.

While we ate, Deacon and Honore traded news with each other and the parade of people that kept swinging by the booth. And then, almost like there had been some signal I couldn’t see, the food stopped coming and so did the people.

“Now,” Honore said. “I am happy to answer questions, Bee-lee.” It took me a second to realize that 
Bee-lee
 meant me.

“A friend of mine found a body in the Gulf Stream,” I said. “A Haitian refugee.”

“The Black Freighter,” Honore said.

I looked at Deacon. “I told you he’d know, buddy,” Deacon said.

“What’s the Black Freighter?” I asked Honore.

“First, it is my time to question. Are you investigating this also, Deacon?”

Deacon shook his head. “I’m sorry, Honore. I’m not allowed to get in on this. Officially, I’m just on my lunch break right now. And Billy is just a private citizen, asking a few questions.”

He studied me for a moment. “How much do you know about my country?” he asked me.

“It’s half an island. It doesn’t have any topsoil. The world’s first black republic. Um, Toussaint L’Overture. Papa Doc. Voodoo. I like the music.”

“Very good,” Honore said, making a face like he’d bitten something sour. “Few people know so much.” He waved a long, thin arm. “And yet this is almost nothing.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“The history of my people is a dictionary of new ways to suffer. We have a genius for it,” he said. “This new thing should be no surprise. And even so.” He looked away, took a sip from his water glass, folded his hands in front of him. “You mention voodoo, my friend. Do you know what is a 
bocor
?”

“No.”

“In voodoo, there is good magic and there is bad magic. The good, it is like church, yes? A regular service, with a regular congregation, the rituals and offerings and prayers. This is done by a 
papa-loa
. A voodoo priest. Most of the time he will not throw a curse for you for money. Because he worries to keep in, ah, what is the word. In 
balance
. He must balance all the things of this world and the next, you see? A curse will upset this balance and the 
papa-loa
 will not do it. For this you must see a 
bocor
. How is it called, a man-witch. A warlock? A sorcerer?”

“Sorcerer works for me,” I said.

“Just so. And this man, the 
bocor
, he does the dark things for money. Help you steal a man’s wife with a love spell. Make your enemy sick. Make a rival to be a zombie. Do not laugh,” he said, raising a long bony finger. “I have seen them. It is not a funny thing, not pretty. It is not a thing for your movies, with the arms out, so—” And he did a pretty good imitation of a Hollywood zombie.

“The 
bocor
 can make a powder,” Honore said. “If you eat this powder, or breathe it, or so much as touch it, you are like a dead man but still alive. Then it wears off and you are stupid for a while. He gives you more powder, controls you. You are his slave, like an animal.”

“And this guy on the Black Freighter is doing this?” I asked him.

“He is a 
bocor
. One of the worst. This we know. If he does this, what might be his name—” Honore shrugged. It was a close cousin to his first shrug, saying thirty or forty different things at once. “No one knows his name, or the name of his ship.”

“Then how do you know he’s a 
bocor
?”

Honore gave me a look of great pity. “Who else could do this thing?” he said. “There are so many who speak of it that one day—pfft—it is a fact and everybody knows it. You may say rumor if you like.” The shrug again. “This is another of the small things that separate our worlds. In my world, a rumor reaches a certain moment where it is so persistent that it becomes true. And all the rumors of the Black Freighter say the captain is a 
bocor
.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell me what you know about this guy and his Black Freighter.”

“There are many stories,” Honore said slowly, as if sorting it out while he spoke. “Some of them—it is how mothers frighten their children to be good, yes? Get a good grade or the Black Freighter comes for you.”

“And the rest?”

He smiled. “The rest of the stories say, there is a freighter who takes refugees to America. He takes their money, loads them onto his ship, and no one ever sees them again. He sails away full of people and comes back empty. Perhaps this is just a rumor.” He spread his hands to show it was possible, but he didn’t look convinced.

“What do you think?”

Honore raised his eyebrows. “Me? I think there is a very bad man, a 
bocor
, throwing people into the ocean and taking their money. I think he says, I take you to Miami, to America, but he only takes them half way. Such a one, he would have to enjoy the killing. Perhaps more than the money, who can say. And I think he will go on doing this, until someone stops him, or my country runs out of people who want to come here so much they do not care about the stories of the Black Freighter.”

I looked at Deacon. He was pushing a small piece of bread around his plate with a knife. I looked back at Honore. He was looking at me the same way Deacon was looking at the bread.

“All right,” I said. “If you were going to look for the Black Freighter, where would you start?”

“Here,” Honore said, jabbing his finger down onto the table. The silverware rattled. “Right here, in Miami. He comes here after he dumps the people. He takes back stolen bicycles, old televisions.” He shrugged.

“Miami River?” I asked Deacon.

He looked up from his bread. “Be my guess,” he said. “A small, independent freighter, that’s where he’d have to be.”

“You know anything else that might be helpful?” I asked Honore.

He showed two rows of perfect teeth. “Voodoo comes from an old African word,” he said. “It means snake.”

• • •

Deacon drove me back to the parking lot where I had left my car. The late afternoon shadows were slanting across the tightly packed rows. It made the crummy shopping center look like some romantic old picture.

Deacon nosed into an empty spot. We looked straight ahead. Twenty feet away on the sidewalk a couple of kids came out of a store, stared at Deacon’s car, and went back in the store again. One of the eight radios on the front seat crackled. Another one answered it.

“You look into this, I got to tell you, I can’t help you.”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“They might even send me after you, to stop you from doing anything that might cause them some political embarrassment.”

“Are you telling me to go home and forget about this?”

“Hell no, buddy. I’m just telling you the way things are.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“That’s your problem.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well how important is this to you? Why are you doing it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I am doing it. I just said I’d look into it a little.”

“And now you have. You can go back and tell your friends they were right, there’s a bad guy in the Gulf Stream doing some murders. Then what?”

I shook my head. I didn’t have any idea then what. I wasn’t a cop anymore. This wasn’t any of my business.

On the other hand, “Not My Job” seemed to be a popular song right now. Nobody wanted this. Nobody wanted to hear it, but somebody was getting away with murder, and they would keep getting away with it, just because they’d found a little crack in the political set-up where nobody wanted to look. And damn it, somebody ought to care.

“This purely bothers the hell out of you, doesn’t it?” Deacon said.

“Yeah. It does.”

“Not scared of that bad magic?”

“I’ll get some holy water.”

He was quiet for a minute. Maybe the crack about holy water bothered him. I knew he was serious enough about his religion that he probably gargled with the stuff.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. “Or even if I should do anything.”

“Sure you do. You got a little voice inside you telling you what you should do. I know that, I got the same thing. Now, I can’t listen to it for you. But I know it’s there, and so do you. And we both know what it’s saying.” He held up a thumb and forefinger and dropped the thumb, pow. “It’s got you. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, and not a thing I can do to help you. All I can do is bust you if you listen to it.” He gave me his best smile, which would have scared the hell out of me if we weren’t on the same side. “On the other hand, there’s worse things than a few days in the pokey.”

“Like being thrown into the Gulf Stream alive and drowning?”

“That’s one thing, buddy.”

When Deacon had left, I drove around the Miami streets for a while. I found myself down by the Miami River. There’s a big shanty town there, maybe thousands of people living in elaborate huts built from packing cases, refrigerator boxes, palm fronds—anything to keep off the rain and the hot Miami sun.

Many of the people living there were Haitian—dangerously thin black people. This was paradise to them. Back home it was impossible to find a box that nice to live in. They were willing to do anything, risk everything to get here. Just to live in a box under the highway. Drink Coca-Cola and send their kids to school.

I drove on, along the river, past a few of the rusty old hulks tied up by the warehouses. In the old days they called them tramp steamers. I wondered what they were called now. Tramp diesels didn’t have the same good ring to it.

One of the ships was getting ready to leave. Black smoke trickled from the smoke stack. The deck was piled high with cargo and the ship rode low in the water. Several hundred bicycles were lashed to the outside of the crates on deck. That probably meant they were going to Haiti. There was a very good trade in used bicycles between Miami and Haiti, no questions asked. If your twelve-speed mountain bike vanished from the light post where you had chained it, it probably got re-painted overnight and you could find it on the deck of one of these ships.

Maybe this was the killer ship. The Black Freighter. Maybe they took down a cargo of bicycles and loaded in refugees. Just like the old triangular trade; unload the cargo, collect the cash. Load in the people, collect the cash.

And take the people halfway, dump them in the Gulf Stream. Big savings, less risk. You almost had to admire the cold-blooded efficiency of it. Miami in the 1980s and ’90s had perfected this kind of MBA crime, where human life was simply a small marker on the board. If killing somebody was the best way to increase profits, nobody hesitated anymore. People were killed for their car keys. Hell, people were killed for their shoes. Why not for a few thousand dollars?

And the only question was, what the hell should I do about it?

The drive from Miami to Key West took almost as long going the other way. There was only one difference. On the way up, I had been kicking myself for taking seriously the brainless idea that somebody was getting away with wholesale murder in the Gulf Stream. On the way back, I was trying to figure out what to do about it.

I wondered how all this had happened. And why it was happening to me. A few weeks ago I was sweating, worrying about how slow business was, wondering when I was going to hit Tiny or make up with Nancy.

Now I was trying on armor, looking for a white charger. And trying to please the princess and Nicky the Wizard. Whoever said life was funny was a sadistic bastard.

It might have been all the driving, the rhythm of the tires on the road and the miles rolling past with the sun going down. But as it got darker I started to feel like I was dreaming. Everything that had happened in the last few weeks pushed back into my mind. It was all gumming up together, turning into one glob of pain and uncertainty.