Jean 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.
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: