The Columbus Affair: A Novel

CHAPTER THREE

BÉNE ROWE LISTENED FOR HIS DOGS, PRIZED BLOODHOUNDS OF expensive stock. They were first imported to Jamaica from Cuba three hundred years ago, descendants of hounds ferried across the Atlantic by Columbus. One celebrated story told of how, during Ferdinand and Isabella’s successful fight to retake Grenada from the Moors, the great beasts had feasted on Arab children abandoned at the doors of mosques. That supposedly happened barely a month before the bastard Columbus first sailed to America.

And changed everything.

“Da dogs are close,” he said to his companions, both trusted lieutenants. “Mighty close. Hear the bark. It quickens.” He flashed a smile of shiny white teeth, on which he’d spent a lot of money. “Dem like it when the end nears.”

He mixed his English with patois, knowing that his men were more comfortable with the common dialect—a mutilation of English, African, and Arawak. He preferred proper English, a habit ingrained into him during his school days and insisted upon by his mother. A bit uncommon for him and her since, generally, they liked the old ways.

His two men carried rifles as they trudged the Jamaican high ground into what the Spanish had named the Sierras de Bastidas—fortified mountains. His ancestors, runaway slaves, had used the hills as a fortress against their former masters. They’d called themselves Katawud, Yenkunkun, Chankofi. Some say the Spanish named those fugitives cimarrons—untamed, wild—or marrans, the label given to hunters of sows and hogs. Others credited the French word marron, which meant “runaway slave.” No matter the source, the English eventually mangled the word into Maroons.

Which stuck.

Those industrious people built towns named for their founders—Trelawny, Accompong, Scott’s Hall, Moore, and Charles. They mated with native Taino women and forged paths through virgin wilderness, fighting pirates who raided Jamaica with regularity.

The mountains became their home, the forests their allies.

“I hear Big Nanny,” he told them. “That high yelp. It’s her. She be a leader. Always has been.”

He’d named her for Grandy Nanny, a Maroon chieftainess of the 18th century who became a great spiritual and military leader. Her likeness now appeared on the Jamaican $500 note, though its image was purely imaginative. No accurate description or portrait of her existed—only legends.

He envisioned the scene half a kilometer away. The dogs—equal to the mastiff in bulk, the bloodhound in agility, and the bulldog in courage—red, tawny, and spotted with bristled coats, running aligned, all four behind Big Nanny. She never allowed any of the males to dart ahead, and, as with her namesake before her, none challenged her authority. One that tried had ended up with a broken neck from her powerful jaws.

He stopped on the edge of a high ridge and surveyed the distant mountainsides covered in trees. Blue mahoe dominated, along with rose apple, mahogany, teak, screw pine, and thick stands of bamboo. He caught site of a fig tree, tough and stubborn, and recalled what his mother had taught him. “The fig dominates. It says to those who challenge it, ‘My will to power rests in your will to endure.’ ”

He admired that strength.

He spotted a group of workers on one of the mountainsides, arranged in a line, swinging picks and hoes, tools flashing in the sun. He imagined himself here three hundred years ago, one of Columbus’ misnamed Indians, toiling for the Spanish in slavery. Or a hundred years later, an African subrogated for life to an English plantation owner.

That had been the Maroons—a mixture of the original Tainos and the imported Africans.

Like himself.

“Yu wi go toward ’em?” his chief lieutenant asked.

He knew his man feared the dogs but hated drug dons, too. Jamaica was overwrought with criminal filth. The don presently half a kilometer away, being hunted by a fierce pack of Cuban bloodhounds, thought himself immune to authority. His armed henchmen had turned Kingston into a war zone, killing several innocents in the crossfire. The last straw was when a public hospital and school came under fire, patients forced to cower under their beds, students taking their exams with bullets whizzing outside. So he’d lured the don to a meeting—a summons from Béne Rowe was never ignored—then brought him into the mountains.

“A wa yu a say?” the insolent don asked in patois.

“Speak English.”

“You ashamed of who you are, Béne?”

“Ashamed of you.”

“What do you plan to do? Hunt me down?”

“A no mi.” Not me.

He intentionally switched to patois to let this man know that he remembered from where he came. He pointed to the dogs baying in their cages atop the trucks. “Dem will do dat for me.”

“And what will you do? Kill me?”

He shook his head. “Da dogs will do dat, too.”

He smiled at how much the bastard’s eyes had widened, pleased to know that someone who murdered for little or no reason actually knew fear.

“You’re not one of us,” the don spit out. “You forgot who you are, Béne.”

He stepped close, stopping a few inches away from an open silk shirt, tailored trousers, and expensive loafers. He supposed the ensemble was intended to impress, but little about this fool did. He was thin as sugarcane, with one bright and one glassy eye, and a mouthful of bad teeth.

“You’re nothing,” he told the don.

“I’m enough you think I should die.”

He chuckled. “That you are. And if I thought you worthy of respect, I would shoot you. But you’re an animal, one the dogs will enjoy hunting.”

“The government pay you to do this, Béne? They can’t do it, so they get you to?”

“I do it for me.”

The police had tried to arrest the no-good twice, but riots in Kingston had broken out each time. So sad that criminals had become heroes, but the dons were smart. As the Jamaican government failed to care for its citizens the dons had stepped in, handing out food, building community centers, providing medical care, ingratiating themselves.

And it worked.

People were willing to riot in order to prevent their benefactors from being jailed.

“You have thirty minutes before I open the cages.”

The man had lingered, then realized this was serious and fled.

Just like a slave escaping his master.

He savored a lungful of the clean, mountain air. Rings of azure haze, thick as milk, had settled around the far peaks. Three topped 2,000 meters, one nearly 2,500. They ranged east to west, separating Kingston from the north coast. So prominent had been their foggy halo the English had renamed them the Blue Mountains.

His two men stood beside him, rifles resting on their shoulders.

“The other problem of the day,” he said, keeping his gaze outward. “Is he coming?”

“On da way. They’ll wait at da trucks until we ready.”

All of the land for kilometers in every direction belonged to him. Most Maroons farmed a few square meters of somebody else’s property, paying a yearly stipend for the privilege. Now he owned tens of thousands of acres and allowed them to work it for free.

The dogs continued to bark in the distance.

He checked his watch.

“Big Nanny is gettin’ close. She rarely lets the bait run more than an hour.”

Fierce, long-legged, and blessed with amazing endurance and strength, his hounds were well trained. They were also skilled climbers, capable of scaling tall trees, as today’s target would shortly discover if he foolishly thought high branches would offer him security.

Cuban bloodhounds had been bred long ago for one purpose.

Hunting black fugitives.

His were more progressive and hunted both black and white. But like their ancestors, they killed only if the prey resisted. Otherwise they confronted, barked, and terrified, holding the target for their master’s arrival.

“We’ll move toward them,” he said.

He led the way back into the forest. No trail existed, just dense and healthy vegetation. One of his men produced a machet and hacked a path. With that word he always reverted to patois and left the e off the end. Funny how with some things he could not help himself.

A wind snarled its way through the branches.

How easy it would be to hide amid these ferns and orchids. No one would ever find you. Which was why the British had finally imported the hounds to hunt their runaways.

Scent knew no boundaries.

They plunged on in the direction of the dogs. His man with the machet advanced, hacking the foliage. Thin slices of bright sunlight found the earth.

“Béne,” his other man called out.

A thick carpet of leaves provided a springy softness to every step, which also allowed songbirds to be heard. Rocks and stones beneath the mulch worked his soles, but he’d worn heavy boots. He fought his way through the low-hanging limbs and found his men at a patch of cleared ground. A rose-colored ibis sprang from one of the far trees, its wings flapping as they grabbed air. Orchids colored the clearing beneath a canopy of high limbs.

He spotted rubble scattered among the ground ferns.

The dogs had started to howl.

Signaling success.

They’d cornered the prey.

He stepped close and bent down, examining the stones, some larger and embedded in the earth, others mere pieces. Lichens and mold infected the surfaces, but the faint outline of what had once been letters could be seen.

He recognized the script.

Hebrew.

“There are more,” his men said, as they’d fanned out.

He stood, knowing what they’d found.

Tombstones.

A cemetery they’d not known existed.

He chuckled and smiled. “Oh, it is a good day, my friends. A good day. We have stumbled upon a treasure.”

He thought of Zachariah Simon, and knew he would be pleased.