Every Man a King

11

While waiting on the bus bench I got a call from Roger Ferris.

“How’s it going, Joseph?” he asked me.

“The sun is out and the game’s afoot,” I said, feeling good about finally being able to use the latter phrase.

“Can I be of any help?”

“You can put your people on looking up the probable alias Thad Longerman.”

He asked about the spelling but all I could give were phonics.

“And another thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to need an interest-free short-term loan.”

Buxom Tex Bradford showed up for work at 3:48 p.m. At 4:16 I pushed open his metal-reinforced glass door. There were waist-high glass showcases before me to my right. They were pristine and empty. Tex was standing behind a counter to my left. He was posing there like some kind of actor in a play just before the curtains were to rise.

“Can I help you?” he asked. There was no friendliness to the offer.

“D’Artagnan Aramois,” I said.

“What about him?”

“He told me that you could supply me a dozen coffins and government seals for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“We usually oversee sending our own products abroad,” the huge man muttered.

“My clients are sending their remains to Haiti.”

I’m five-eleven weighing 199 pounds. When Tex moved around the useless counter I could tell he was near six foot four and his weight, twenty-one stone at least.

“How many did you say?” he asked.

“Aramois told me that I get an even dozen coffins for twenty-five.”

“We call d’Artagnan’s boxes items,” he said, almost reluctantly. “It’s twenty-five for twelve items when we send them, but that price doubles if we leave it in the client’s hands.”

“Oh,” I said, feigning uncertainty. “Fifty thousand is an awful lot.”

“There’s no give on it either.”

“I see.”

I was making some headway with the bodybuilder. My apparent parsimony made him feel that I was a real contender rather than a ringer sent in to bring him down.

“It seems that if I did all the work it should cost me even less,” I suggested.

“You’d think so,” Tex agreed. “But in this business it’s a liability to allow the items and their seals out of our hands.”

“Huh,” I fretted. My left eye, of its own accord, started to flutter. “I’m told I can move certain materials that are forbidden by the Patriot Act when protected by your units and seals.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tex said in a flip tone. That’s what warned me.

Putting my right arm akimbo, I said, “Then maybe I should talk to your partner.”

“What partner?” Tex asked, looking from side to side.

“You know,” I said, “Curt Holiday.”

That’s when Tex swiveled his head to regard me.

Speed and accuracy, stealth and strength, and an arsenal of specialized weapons are all keys to any physical contest between most animals — although it helps to also have the indomitable will of the honey badger. With humans, however, there’s an extra added element — specific intent.

Tex was quite a bit faster than I had imagined. He grabbed me by the throat before I knew what he was doing.

There I was, three or four inches off the floor, choking. My eyes felt like they were about to pop out of my head and my thoughts were nearly useless. I believed that his intent was to incapacitate me because he needed to know why I was there before killing me.

I’d had my hand on my hip because there was a gun there, a .45 with no kind of muffler system. While my grip on consciousness was quickly fading, I held the side of the pistol next to Tex’s left ear and fired — twice.

The big man yowled and fell to his knees. With my last clear thought I slammed the side of the pistol into Tex’s temple. He toppled over and I, unwillingly, fell down next to him.

That was a serious situation. Whichever man regained his wits first would win the impromptu contest. If he won I would be tortured and probably killed. If I revived first he, Tex, might lose his business, his freedom, and possibly even his life.

Luckily the struggle for breath that I was experiencing brought me awake at a quicker pace. Within three minutes I was up on my knees. When four minutes had passed I hit Tex one more time to make sure that he’d stay down.

I secured the metal-reinforced front door and then made it to a back room, where, after a few minutes of scrounging around, I found a packet of files that was identified by the initials C.H. I would have liked to search further but the gunshot had been loud and I was quite sure the neighbors would have called the cops.

So, taking the foot-thick pack of files, I made it out a back door, crossed two blocks over, and located my car.

Driving across the line that divided the Bronx from Manhattan, I was fairly certain that I’d be out of trouble. Tex was a smuggler, a security threat, a defiler of the dead, and very likely guilty of even worse crimes. He’d tell the police a story that’d have them running in circles for weeks.

While taking the Verrazano Bridge to Staten Island I was trying to make sense of the bind that Quiller was in. I supposed that d’Artagnan Aramois, Tex, Thad Longerman, and, of course, poor deceased Curt Holiday might have been working for what Quiller called the Deep State. But the quartet of thugs and thieves, murderers and kidnappers, seemed more like simple criminals, their actions based on the motive for profit rather than false nationalism.

Once on the island that contained the fifth borough I headed for Pleasant Plains. There I went to a medium-size deconsecrated church that was surrounded by a high stone wall and protected by all kinds of advanced and old-time defenses. Recently Melquarth had added six Rottweilers to guard the grounds of the church.

I pressed the bell at the outer gate while the deeply suspicious canines paced on the other side. They knew me but I was not their master.

“Hey, Joe,” Mel said as he strode toward the gate.

The dogs wandered off when they heard their master call to me. He opened the gate and I drove in.

The nave of the deconsecrated church still had twelve rows of pews that led up to the raised altar. Rather than a podium for the minister’s sermon Mel had set up a table with a Go board built into it. The pieces were made from very high-quality jadeite gems, apple green and snow white. Before any salient conversation, we played a game that lasted around an hour and a half.

Forcing myself into the logic of strategy and the promise of theoretical victory calmed me down a bit.

When the moves began to take longer and longer, a conversation developed.

“I don’t know which is worse,” Melquarth said while considering his strategy or mine.

“The Russians or the alt-right?”

“You or me.”

“Has to be you, Mr. Frost. I’m on the side of law and order.”

“You are a Black man, are you not?” the white ultra-criminal asked.

“So?”

“Rather than enforce the law, more often than not the system jams itself down the throats of people of your ilk.”

“Sometimes,” I agreed.

Mel smiled, picked up a green jewel, and threatened a small cadre of my pieces.

“They got you outnumbered, Joe, and here you go trying to live by some rule.”

“We all got rules, Mel.”

The thief, killer, blackmailer, and all-around madman looked up into my eyes. He liked me. He’d murdered his father and burned away the body in the basement of a property he owned in Lower Manhattan, and yet I considered him a friend.

“I know it seems like that,” he said. “I mean, yeah, sure, we all got rules, but that’s not what makes the things we do so complex.”

I knew the man, understood what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, but still I asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s the unexpected exceptions we have to our own commitments. You’re not a killer, a murderer, but you might become one. You easily could. I’m not a sane man, a company man. I’m a lone wolf, but that don’t mean I might not find myself in a domestic situation one day.”

“What’s goin’ on with you, Mel?”

The now-and-then maniac smiled, placed another green jewel in an unexpected square, and said, “I think I got the upper hand here.”

He wasn’t going to divulge the thought process behind secrets about himself; he rarely did.

“I concede,” I said.

“I could go talk to Cormody for you,” Mel offered.

“You could.” I was in an agreeable mood. “But I think I want things to play out the way they are now. I mean, if you go in all gangbusters they might clam up. You know what I mean?”

“You wanna play another game?”

“No.”

“Who cares about what happened to get Quiller where he is?”

“My employer does.”

“Could get you killed.”

“If that was the outcome, you’d protect Aja, wouldn’t you?”

He gazed at me for a very long time.

“With my life,” he said at last.

“That’s all I can ask for.”

There was another long pause. This time Mel was looking inward. At the end of this self-evaluation he nodded.

“You’ll never make a good general, Joe, but you’re one hell of a guerrilla.”

Later on Mel went downstairs to work on refurbishing antique watches that he sold from a little shop in the West Village. I stayed at the Go table perusing the documents stolen from the cowboy, Tex.

It was the most eclectic set of documents I had ever examined. First there was very little English used where language was inserted. Much of the prose was in Spanish, German, and French, but there were also entire pages filled with symbols from Asia and the Middle East.

Mostly there were snapshots of people, mostly men, taken from clandestine angles. There were also maps showing locations both circled and underlined by red pencil markings. I was pretty sure that this was the diary of a hit man.

Outside of the covering initials I didn’t see the name Curt Holiday scrawled or printed anywhere; that was business as usual. What surprised me was that Tex had kept these documents at all. What use could they have been to him or his masters?

When I got to the bottom of the stack I realized that that was where I should have started. This five-sheet file started off with a picture of Alfred Xavier Quiller with Mathilda Prim on his arm. He had on a dark suit, the kind that cowboys wore in the late nineteenth century when attending a wedding or funeral. She was dressed in a white lace gown that dimmed anything and anyone else in her vicinity.

The back side of that page was an architectural map that I was sure depicted the compound where Quiller lived in the West African nation of Togo.

I considered that last file for half an hour or more. When there was nothing else to glean, I took out a burner and entered a number.

“What’s up?” answered Melquarth Frost.

“I’m headin’ out, man. You mind if I leave my car in your garage?”

“Call me when you land.”