Every Man a King

16

I spent the next few days walking around the southern city. Atlanta’s a good-looking town even when it’s hot and sticky. It’s very southern down there, so people talk to you and seem to really mean what they say. They look in your eyes with a greeting on their lips.

The other two things about ATL were that it is modern and also Black with a deep progressive culture. A town that awakened one morning with the realization of who and what it was with no regrets or antipathies.

I spent long nights in the Airbnb asking questions of the Internet. There were few solid answers. No connection between Zyron International and Rembert Cormody, the Men of Action, or any other alt-right or nationalist group — at least no connection that I could find. Alfie Quiller hadn’t been public about prisons, private or otherwise, and the U.S. government hadn’t said anything new about him for months.

Mathilda Prim graduated summa cum laude in information studies from Syracuse University in 2011 and was not heard from again until 2019, when she was granted a master’s degree from Harvard in something called theoretical chemistry. It was just a name on a list of Ivy League accomplishments. There was no evidence that that name was my Mattie, but I thought it might be.

George Laurel was no more than three lines in an obituary published in a small newspaper from La Jolla, California. It seemed that his death was tragic but I could get no more about it. His father was already dead at the time of the publication and his mother, Nora Blandford Laurel, had died in 2000.

On the morning I woke up to find Lula gone I also received a text from Rags. He sent a locker number and its electronic combination. At the bus station we decided on before coming south, I used the code on locker 1011B. There to find a rather elegant pigskin briefcase.

When I got home I opened the attaché to find a newspaper wrapped around a nine-millimeter FN 509C semiautomatic. There were also six loaded clips.

The gun took my breath away. It was reliable, concealable, and expensive, but my inner gasp was because accepting that weapon meant that things had turned a corner. I was no longer snooping. Now I was at the precipice of war.

The underground newspaper wrapped around the pistol was called the Rotten Peach. A publication for the more adventurous Atlantan, it was composed of explicit personal ads, stories of police violence, veiled warnings about drugs on the street, sex offers, and other promises of ecstasy. On the second day in town I put a personal ad in the virtual version of the Rotten Peach.

At 5:39 p.m. on the third day I went to Wreckless Dancers strip club. It was lesser known than some of the famous joints, but WD had space and really lovely women. The food and drink were good too. I was sipping Cordon Bleu from a generous snifter and munching on chicken wings. It was early and the night shift was just arriving. There weren’t many customers then — the lunch crowd had gone and the nighthawks were still preening somewhere.

“Hi, mister,” a lovely honey-colored woman said. She was wearing one big synthetic feather that covered everything but a generous nipple. “You want a dance?”

“What’s your name?”

“Tantalea.”

“That’s a great name.”

She smiled and said, “Thank you.”

“I tell you what, Tantalea.” I handed her a fold of three hundred-dollar bills. “I have a meeting and need to be left alone except for drinks and such.”

As the lovely woman counted, her smile broadened.

“What’s your name, honey?”

“Joe.”

“Your wish is my command, Mr. Joe.” From then on she was the only person I had to talk to.

I sipped my cognac and chatted with Tantalea from time to time. Mr. Joe was a contractor from Newark, in Georgia to build a small bridge for a rich man’s estate down near Savannah.

I like strip clubs because they never tempt me. The naked dancing and money changing hands, drinking and loud talk, the smells both natural and artificial, and the constant beat of the bass were all just fine, normal, expected. What excited me was the unforeseen, the newly formed.

So sitting there, mostly unmolested, I floated in the sensory environment of red lights and Black faces, confident hilarity and relief from the hard edges of life.

An hour or so later a familiar voice called, “Hey, Joe.”

“Rags.”

“Why you got us meetin’ here?”

“When in Atlanta...” I said.

Rags nodded and took a seat at my little table. He was wearing a tan suit with a one-button jacket and a black T. His shoes looked to be woven from straw and his socks were most definitely red.

“It’s not a place I would have chosen,” he said. “But nobody’s gonna ask what we’re talkin’ ’bout.”

“You get in touch with that woman with the pink bag?” I asked.

“Jesse Martin? Naw. She was just lonely and I had work to do.”

“How’s that goin’?”

And so we got into it.

Rags had taken a room in the Bentley Hotel to keep tabs on Ben Ingram. He’d been following the prison master for two days.

“He’s mostly unpredictable,” Rags reported. “But he does seem to go to the same little hole-in-the-wall café every day around one forty-five and then has his first meeting at two.”

“What kinda meetings?”

“All kinds. Men and women, singles and pairs, now and then there’s even a trey. Sometimes a few sheets of paper change hands but not too much. It’s all pretty dry.

“I followed one of the men who met with him.”

“Oh?”

“Dark guy but not Black. I thought maybe Arab but he turned out to be from Brazil. He went to a hotel in the business district called the Antietam. I took a chance and followed him in. It was one of those old-time places where they hold your key behind the front desk. I had my briefcase camera running so later I could enlarge the picture enough to see that the guy was in room 204.

“When the dude went out that evening I jimmied my way in.”

Rags handed me an envelope with pictures. The first was of an open passport issued to a Goncalo de Jesus. He was a good-looking man with a little too much mustache for my taste. There were a few papers printed in Portuguese and another sheet that had eighteen thumbnail photographic portraits with a name underneath each.

“I’ll try and get the letter translated,” I said.

“Don’t bother. It says that the people in the pictures have been transferred from government custody to a site somewhere in Austria, where they will be debriefed.”

“How good is your Brazilian Portuguese?” I asked.

“Okay. Why?”

“I kind of doubt they’d let Zyron run their own prison in Austria.”

“I was thinkin’ that. Maybe Austria is a code for someplace else.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Joe,” Tantalea said.

“What is it, hon?”

“There’s a white man here says he wants to join you two.”

Standing maybe thirty feet away in semidarkness, Gladstone Palmer was as recognizable as a beacon in a storm. Lean and six foot one, the NYPD dispatcher smiled and raised a hand of recognition.

“He’s ours,” I told the feathered beauty.

Tantalea went to retrieve the third member of my unofficial covert mission.

He walked behind her like visiting royalty surveying a recently acquired colony.

“Hey, boyo,” he said upon arrival.

Gladstone was always smiling, or at least getting ready to do so. He was almost a caricature of your classic Irishman. His hair couldn’t decide whether to be red or brown. I would have called it cinnamon. His eyes were green, of course, and his skin as close to white as a Caucasian can get.

“I’m in love,” he said before he sat, watching Tantalea walk away.

“Glad, I’d like you to meet Richard Naples.”

Holding his hand across the table, my cousin said, “Call me Rags. I know you, don’t I?”

“Maybe you saw me somewhere,” Glad said on a grin. “So what do the great minds have to tell a poor Paddy from the Lower East Side?”

We filled him in on the important points.

“So you made it up the stairs and into his room?” Glad beamed at Rags. “Weren’t you afraid of the vids?”

“I wasn’t gonna kill him so I really didn’t have all that much to hide.”

Glad grunted pleasantly.

Looking at him brought to mind when he had sent me on a mission that was a frame. The plan at first was to kill me, but Sergeant Palmer put me in Rikers and then talked the powers that were, at that time, into letting me go. In the end all I lost was my profession, my family, and my faith in the world in general.

“You get here this morning, Glad?” I asked.

“No. I decided to come down a day or two early.”

“Why?” I didn’t like that.

“A few days ago I called down to talk to Craig Stork,” he said.

“That’s Sergeant Stork from Staten Island?”

“Now he’s Assistant Warden Stork down around Galveston. Making six figures at a Zyron prison. I called him and said that I was thinking about changing jobs. He asked if I wanted national or international. After a little back-and-forth he told me to come down and talk to Ben Ingram. So I made an appointment.”

“You actually talked to the man?” I asked.

“Talk?” Glad said. “I had a meeting with him.”

“That’s where I saw you,” Rags remembered out loud.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked both men.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Rags told me.

Turning to Glad I said, “I just wanted you for backup.”

“I can do that too.”

That was the good and bad about my friend and traitor. He did things his own way, which sometimes was a boon and others a bust.

“What did he say?”

“He said that there was a position in the corporation called high marshal. A kind of enforcer who moves between countries trying to keep the peace and assess threats. Stork told him I was good at keeping balls in the air — in the air and the nutcracker too.”

“Was he any more specific?”

“He said that there were times when a high marshal had to work outside of local law. Times when there might be a higher calling.”

“And how much would you be paid for all this?” That was Rags.

“I’d get a base salary of two hundred seventy-five and then bonuses in cryptocurrency. That could go up to near a million. I tell ya, it was mighty tempting.”

“Did you take him up on it?” I asked, my teeth feeling and tasting like iron nails.

My old dispatcher gauged me with shamrock eyes. He understood the question and knew the consequences harbored in my heart.

“No, brother,” he said. “I wouldn’t betray you and I wouldn’t work for a company that big anyway. On the force we’re all friends. You eat at people’s houses and know their children’s names. You would put down your life for a brother in blue. We’re not a business, we’re a church.”

“Damn,” Rags said. “You’re good.”

“Just a cop,” Glad replied. “Honest or not.”

We worked out a plan for the next day. What it lacked in brilliance it made up for with simplicity. That done, we ordered a round of drinks, ready to call it a night.

That was before sloe-eyed Lula came in with three girlfriends.

That kismet thing was still working. The moment I noticed her she turned to see me. I smiled, instantly dispelling her first instinct, which was to run. Instead Lula grinned and said something to her girlfriends. They conferred for fifteen seconds or so, casting glances in our direction, then forded the now crowded room, headed for our table.

I got to my feet feeling a little giddy. Women have always been my weakness.

Lula was the first to get to us. She kissed me on the lips.

“Hi, baby,” she said.

“Lou.” I guess I just like nicknames. “These are my friends Glad and Rags.”

“Glad rags,” an astute white associate of Lula’s said. “I’m Roxanne and this is Nona and Chichi.”

Roxanne was tall and blond, naturally so. Nona was very dark-skinned, where Chichi was a deep amber Mexican lass. These ladies spent at least three hours readying for Wreckless and now they bubbled over with cleavage, conversation, and laughter. I ordered three bottles of champagne thinking that this might well be my last night.

Gladstone left with the white girl, no surprise there, while Rags went off with the other two. There were many things I didn’t know about my cousin. I made up my mind that night to find out what they were.