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.
Meanwhile the cameras had swung to Moyez, sitting back in his seat, hands folded across his chest, smiling so hard at his former charge that his beard had assumed a boat-like shape.
De Carvalho took his oath, sat down and reached for the glass of water on the edge of the stand, but knocked it over. Moyez laughed out loud. The judge scowled at him.
The guard nearest de Carvalho picked up the glass and went to refill it. The DA stood up and began to go through the preliminaries, asking the witness his name, age, place of birth and relation to Moyez.
De Carvalho had begun to answer when he heard the main courtroom door open and glanced to see who had walked in.
No one paid much attention to the bald black man who came into Court 15. He was dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and black and white striped tie. He didn't stand out too much unless you looked at his face and noticed that his eyebrows and eyelashes were missing. But then people in the courthouse didn't stare too hard at each other because they never knew who they might be looking at and what the person might do. The black man was virtually invisible here, just another guy in a suit in a place where almost everyone wore one.
The man proceeded up the aisle between the pews.
Although the first five rows nearest the defendants were full, the man was able to find a seat in the middle of the third row because two people-a man and a woman, both blond-parted to give him a seat. The man took his place as the DA was asking de Carvalho about his association with Victor Moyez.
When he saw the black man walking in instead of de Carvalho's family, Moyez scowled at Coleman Crabbe. Crabbe made a small placating gesture and gave his client his most reassuring smile. They'd be here shortly. Everything was going to plan. Not to worry.
Moyez turned his furious look on de Carvalho who was telling the DA how he'd first met Moyez in the town of Cabimas when he'd been looking for work in the oil re-fineries. De Carvalho caught his boss's eye and the words, up until then coming in a fluent flow, suddenly curdled in his throat and stopped.
Then Moyez saw his deputy's eyes leave him and move to his left, towards the courtoom door. His face suddenly turned ashen.
Moyez smiled and the edges of his beard stretched outwards with glee.
The man in the grey suit stood up slowly, as if he was trying to leave while causing the least disturbance. Then he raised his right hand and shot Victor Moyez through the back of the head with a.357 Smith amp; Wesson Magnum. Moyez's face exploded all over the legal papers piled up on his table and his body fell forward.
In the next five seconds the gunman felled Winesap with a shot through the cheek as he turned his head in instinctive curiosity to look at where the first bullet had come from, without properly realizing what had just happened to his client. Coleman Crabbe was quicker. He managed to crawl under the table and curl himself into a foetal ball, with his arms covering his head, but the gunman killed him with a shot that smashed through his overlapped hands and punctured his brain.
There was pandemonium in the courtroom as everyone hit the ground. Then the guard nearest the judge-who'd also thrown himself to the floor-shot the assassin four times, the bullets all hitting him in the heart in close formation. He dropped his revolver, tilted backwards on his heels and then collapsed forward, going head first over the pew onto the people cowering below.
Bonbon let the phone in the booth opposite the courthouse ring twice before answering. He heard what he needed to hear and walked back to the car as the air around him began to swarm with the sound of approaching police sirens.