I found her on the small spit of sand next to the restaurant. She was looking out over the water and throwing rocks with a controlled fury. A light, easy chop moved across the water and Anna skipped a rock across the top of a whitecap. It seemed like a good idea not to say anything, so I didn’t. She didn’t look up or acknowledge that I was there, just threw a couple more rocks.
“You are most furyfying man I am knowing ever,” she said at last. She flung another rock far out into the water. “I am now knowing what is inside you, I think. Nicky is knowing this too, better as you. Inside you is wonderful strong man who can do what no one else can do. But you are not knowing this. Instead you are acting as the little boy. Instead you are saying, is too big the problem and too small the me. Is nothing that can be done by me. And this is cow-shits.”
“What is it you think I should do?”
She turned to me, a look of angry surprise on her face. “But how am I knowing this? If I am knowing, I am doing it. You are once a policeman, you have guns and boats. Why do you not stop the killings?”
A little light flickered on in the back of my head. “You’ve been talking to Nicky,” I said.
“Yes? And this is now bad to talk to him?”
“Only if you believe him.”
She turned away again, stooping to pick up some rocks. She threw one. “What I believe—is there are dead bodies. If is by accident they are dead, fine. You will find this out, feh—” she made a kind of final gesture with one hand, “—is over.”
She flung down the rocks and turned to me, stamping her foot. “But God-damness, if is not accident, it is an evil. A killing of so many—! And you must stop it.”
“There are police to do that. Not me. I’m just a fishing guide, I don’t—”
“No. Listen. I come here to this country to escape a very bad thing. And it is getting very bad there because everyone is saying the same. This is not my problem. This has to do with those others, not with me. I know this because I am saying it. And of a sudden are the soldiers there, inside my house, killing my family.”
“This is different.”
She shrugged. “Is always different. And so is always the same.”
I picked up a rock and threw it. It went further than Anna’s. That was one thing I could feel good about. “Yes, but—” I started, and then I stopped again. I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t hurt. “This isn’t like what happened to you,” I said.
“And how can you say so?”
“Because there are no armies and no cities. There are Haitians every day who try to cross to America. In tiny boats, inner tubes, anything that floats. Some of them don’t make it. And there’s nothing to say that these bodies were any different. There’s no sign of violence. There’s not even any footprints. Only a few bodies and a big ocean.”
“And so you do not even try?”
“Let me finish. Just say for a minute that you and Nicky are right, that somebody is routinely killing Haitian refugees.”
“Yes, we are right.”
“Fine. Exactly what is it you want me to do?”
She shook her head at me like I was stupid. I was beginning to feel like I was. “You will find them and stop them,” she said.
“Find ’em and stop ’em. Sure, that sounds easy.”
She spun on me, very fast, and threw a punch. She did not hit like a girl. I rubbed my arm and looked at her. “If was it easy, Nicky would doing it. Jesus shit, you are the one who is knowing this things, why do you behave so? To fail at this, okay, too bad, I am sorry but something was done about it. But to not try because is looking too difficult, when people are being killed and no one is caring—feh!”
“To fail at this, I will be killed,” I said.
“Then you must not fail,” she said. “I will not let you.”
“I’ll take a look,” I said. “No promises, no hero stuff. Just a few questions to see what’s going on.”
She frowned, then nodded. “Good,” she said. “That will be good.”
Chapter Twelve
The trip up to Miami is a long one by car, but I like it that way. The harder it is for the idiots to get down to Key West, the fewer of them we’ll have roaming Duval Street.
Of course, nowadays they come by air, and by water, and even by bicycle, and there are more of them every year. Soon our small island will sink into the ocean from the weight of so many people. And in a few hundred years, divers will still be poking through the sunken wreckage and bringing up T-shirts and beer mugs.
But for now, the road from Key West to Miami was mostly only one lane each way, and if you timed it right the traffic wasn’t too bad. Except that I usually ended up behind a long line of RVs, breathing thick exhaust and plodding along at thirty-five miles an hour. But it was better than the Santa Monica Freeway. And the long trip gave me time to think.
What I mostly thought was that I was on a fool’s errand. A dumb, pointless quest to save a maiden from an imaginary dragon. And why? So Anna would sleep at night? Maybe with me?
But Anna was right about one thing. Checking this out wouldn’t be that hard for me. At least I had a place to start. If any U.S. law enforcement organization was looking into this, from the Coast Guard to the Cub Scouts, they would be doing it out of Miami. And if anybody in Miami knew anything about it, the Deacon would know, too.
He was called Deacon because he was a lay minister and the only thing he was more serious about was stopping crime. Deacon was a supervisor in the F.D.L.E., the Florida state equivalent of the FBI. The bureaucrats kept trying to promote him out of harm’s way, since he had a habit of getting into gunfights. Always justifiable, and he always won. But the new breed of law enforcement administrators preferred quieter law enforcement and tried to maneuver him into a chair in the office.
So far he had dodged it. Deacon had turned down promotions a couple of times so he could stay on the street. His life was a kind of constant struggle, stuck between the bad guys on the street and the suits in the office. He stayed out of the office as much as possible.
I knew Deacon’s mobile phone number and as soon as I got into Miami I called him. We arranged to meet in the parking lot of a shopping center on the edge of Liberty City, and I hadn’t been there more than ten minutes before he pulled in.
“Hey, buddy,” he called out the window of his big blue Chevrolet. He was about 5’9” tall and had a shaved head. One ear was pierced, with a small diamond stud in it. He wore a neat beard and he was the toughest man I had ever met. He looked at me now with the same eyes you see in the old pictures of the great frontier lawmen. Cold blue eyes that have seen everything, eyes that look at life down the barrel of a gun.
I walked over and leaned on his car. “Hi, Deacon.”
He shook my hand, looking at me hard while he did. “You don’t look good, Billy,” he said. “Run into some tough tarpon down there?”
“It’s been a rough summer.”
“Lot of that going around, buddy. You want me to straighten it all out for you?”
“Can’t shoot this one. Just have to live through it to the other side.”
“Well then, why’re you taking up my time? I got bad guys to catch.”
“I’ve got a little problem some friends asked me to look into,” I told him. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Uh-huh.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off me yet. “You wouldn’t be doing a little investigating without a license, would you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, good,” he said, looking pleased. “God put you here to be a street cop and fight bad guys, same as me. You know that in your heart.”
“Maybe so.”
“No maybe, son. How long you in town?”
“Just until I get a couple of answers.”
“Well, get in, let’s see what we can come up with.”
I went around to the other side and climbed into the car. There wasn’t a lot of room. Deacon had eight radios and two cellular phones crowded into the
front seat, plus a stack of forms on three different clipboards.
“They’re keeping you busy?” I said with a nod at the heap of hardware.
“I’m heading up a new task force called SCAT,” he said. “Street Crime Attack Team. I got to coordinate the troopers, the Sheriff, Metro and my boys. Everybody on a different frequency. No wonder the bad guys are winning.” He shook his head. “We know damn well when somebody’s done a crime, and we know how to catch ’em, how to stop ’em from doing it again—and the suits won’t let us. Instead, they keep coming up with cute new acronyms so they can justify their budgets. When all it would take would be a couple of good street cops with a free hand. But hell, Billy,” he said with a sigh, “that’s my problem. What’s yours?”
I told him and he listened. He was a good listener. He didn’t take his eyes off me for even a second, and I don’t think he blinked. Just stared straight at me with those gun-fighter’s eyes. If I wasn’t sure he liked me I would have been ready to confess whatever he wanted confessed. I laid out the three or four facts I had and threw in a couple of guesses.
“That all you got?” he asked me when I was done.
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s not much, I know. Like I say, there’s probably nothing to it.”
“Oh, there’s something to it,” he said. “No doubt about that.”
I looked at Deacon. He was smiling, but he wasn’t kidding. “Somebody is killing boat loads of people?”
“Don’t look so shocked, buddy. There’s a lot of money in refugees.”
“If you don’t get caught.”
“Uh-huh. And most people get caught on this end, when they’re unloading. That’s the hard part. Nobody stops you loading ’em in back in Haiti. Nobody boards your ship in the Gulf Stream and makes you turn around and take ’em back.”
“So if somebody loads them in and then just dumps them—”
“Then they got a low-risk money machine.”
“How much money?”
He shook his head. “In Haiti, ten bucks is a big deal, a month’s wages. So I don’t know how they do it, but those people scrape together two or three thousand dollars for a trip across to America.”
“Two or three thousand each?”
“That’s right. And figure between fifty and two hundred head per trip. It looks like somebody’s figured a pretty good way to maximize his profit.”
I worked up the numbers and shook my head. It was a lot of money. “All right,” I said. “Who’s working on it, and what have they got?”
He gave a soundless little cop laugh. “It’s not quite that simple, buddy,” he said. “I guess you’ve been a fishing guide so long you forgot how things are.”
“Maybe so. How are they?”
“First, you got to understand that there’s nothing definite to go on here. Just a pile of bodies that’s easy to write off as refugees who drowned trying to come across.”
“And nobody is working around the clock to make the connection?”
“Buddy,” Deacon said with a tired shake of his head, “Unless a sworn officer actually stubs his toe on the perpetrator while he’s committing the crime, ain’t nobody ever going to make a connection.”
“Except you.”
He shrugged. “They keep me in between two very narrow lines, Billy. I can’t just put on my cape and fly around looking for wrongs to right.”
“So this just goes on.”
“If it’s happening, it’s happening in international waters. Out in the great dark deep. The State won’t touch it. Everybody in Tallahassee is pissed off at the Feds because we’re going broke paying for all the immigrants, which is a federal problem, but the Feds won’t help. So F.D.L.E. can’t touch it, Metro doesn’t want it, Sheriff says he can’t handle it, and Marine Patrol says they’re not authorized.
“The Feds won’t get involved unless there is a direct threat to U.S. citizens, which they figure at this point won’t happen unless more of these guys make it to shore and start taking jobs away from taxpayers. And since there ain’t so much as one syllable of public protest on anything to do with any immigrant group that isn’t Cuban, nobody is being forced into doing anything.”
“So everybody knows something’s happening,” I said.
“They suspect the hell out of it.”
“But nobody wants to do anything about it.”
He winked. “Too many forms to fill out, buddy. And too many people to file ’em with that don’t want to hear about it.”
“All right,” I said. “What do you know?”
“Not a thing. But I’ll tell you what I think,” he said.
“Tell me.”
He held up a finger. “First, we’re talking about one boat.” Another finger. “Probably one of those old rust-bucket freighters out of the Miami River. And one other thing I guaran-damn-tee you, buddy,” he said, holding up his open hand now and closing it into a fist.
“What’s that?”
“We’ve got a file on this guy somewhere. Because what it looks like to me is, he’s smuggling refugees, and he’s taking their money and loading ’em onto his boat, and then dumping ’em into the ocean, still alive. ’Cause every one of ’em, they died from drowning.” He winked. “You didn’t hear that from me.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“And somebody who can do that is a cold killer, and you don’t come at that from nowhere. You don’t just decide one day you’re gonna murder five or six hundred people.”
“How many?” I couldn’t believe the number. It was worse than even Nicky imagined.
Deacon shrugged, but I could tell it bothered him. “Just a guess they’ve put together, based on some things you don’t want to know about.”
“So I didn’t hear that number from you, either.”
“You got that right, buddy.”
I thought about it for a minute. Then I shook my head; it wasn’t quite tracking. “That’s it? Five hundred dead and that’s all you’ve heard about this?”
“Like I say, Billy, I’m kind of in a tight place right now.” He looked at his watch. “How’d you like a bite to eat?”
I stared at him. He seemed serious. “I didn’t think you got hungry,” I said. “When did this start?”
“Started when I found this great little Haitian place a few miles from here,” he said. “It’s kind of a community center for refugees. Guy who runs it knows everybody in Little Haiti, and everything that’s going on,” he added with a lot of significance.
“I could use a bite to eat,” I said.
Chapter Thirteen
L’Arbre Vie slouched on a corner in Little Haiti next to a shop with a long line of dried roots in the window. It looked like the whole row of buildings would have fallen down if it hadn’t been held up by so much bright yellow and red paint.
Deacon angled the car to the curb in front of the restaurant and as he put it in park, people were already smiling and waving at him.
Deacon shook his head. “No ghetto like this in the world,” he said. “You can walk the street at 3 A.M., dead drunk, and like as not they’ll give you a cup of coffee and call you a cab.”
“They know you here,” I said.
“Last year I kind of helped Honore out of a little bind. He’s important to the community here, so I guess they all remember me.” He chuckled. “Took them some getting used to. You got to realize that most of these people, cop means a ton-ton macout. They ain’t exactly in any hurry to call 9-1-1 when they got a problem.”
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.