by K. T. Tomb
Chapter Six
The bartender was released immediately, but due to the confusing nature of the bar brawl Manny and the Germans were taken in for questioning.
The police hadn’t brought enough handcuffs for everyone, but the police station was less than fifty yards up the street so the officers felt comfortable escorting the disturbers of the peace on foot and unfettered. The tourists looked crestfallen and shot angry glances at the young black man with the fake mustache hanging from his cheek who had started all the trouble.
Manny felt bad for them. It wasn’t like he meant for them to be arrested too, but an angry si-foot German is a formidable foe, as Manny’s rapidly swelling right eye and busted lip could attest.
Carrying his left shoe that was dislodged in the ruckus, he was kept separate from his opponents in pugilism by two of the military volunteers in green shirts. It looked like the Salem Police Force was barely equipped to handle shoplifting and paperwork, let alone a full-fledged wrestling match.
A pair of police officers wearing blue shirts took the front and back of the group so they could keep an eye on things, leaving the escort duty to the additional strength borrowed from the Governors’ guard. Shopkeepers stood at the front of their stalls, and children hung out of upper windows, making cat calls and laughing at the high drama in the small town.
This time, the soldier who had barred Manny’s entry earlier in the day stood aside, and showed no sign of recognizing him; either this was due to the combination of his beaten face and huge wig, or else the scene of young white tourists being arrested was more interesting.
Inside the police station was considerably cooler than it had been outside. Manny was seated in an annex to the entrance hall to keep him somewhat apart from his co-accused. The Germans began to make their case to the desk sergeant, with some difficulty. Manny supposed that learning English as a second language in school had not adequately prepared them for describing someone acting like a lunatic and impersonating Hitler.
Left alone, Manny looked around to see if he could find anything that would lead him to the next clue. This building must be important, somehow, if it merited the first mention on Marlowe’s map. From his seat, he couldn’t see much, so he decided to risk a peek around the corner.
In the main entrance, the desk sergeant sat behind a cheap table, looking vaguely perplexed as the Germans told their story in their language, and then the girl who had spoken the best English in the bar translated it for the sergeant. It was not an easy job for him to make sense of it all. Behind him were two signs, an arrow pointing diagonally down and to the left, over a heavy, ancient door which read ‘Cells’ in block letters. Next to a flight of stairs going up, the sign read ‘offices’, and pointed up.
Manny reasoned that the clue was unlikely to be in the offices, with trained police officers in them every day for a century; the clue would surely have been discovered. There was a door on both sides of the corridor, between where Manny sat and the desk sergeant. He could see into the one on the far side; the door was open, but it was empty, with a blank blackboard on the wall.
The door on the side where Manny sat was closed. In his little annex by the front door, there was nothing save the bench he was on, and an open window which was too small to climb out of. He had examined the size of it from his exterior reconnaissance earlier that day. The front door was opposite him and was wide open. It struck Manny that albeit this was his first time being arrested in any country, things were done quite a bit differently back home.
Home seemed a long way away now. What was he doing here, on this island where his ancestors had been indentured workers, then freemen and landowners and then…emigrants? If anything, he felt less sure than ever that he was on the right track. He’d probably just end up being deported and be right back where he started; disgraced, penniless and at the mercy of his family for the rest of his life.
Maybe his plan wasn’t quite the stroke of genius he’d thought it was. What was the law like here? Maybe getting into a fight in a bar in Montserrat carried a heavier penalty than back home.
His mind was racing with terrible images of being waterboarded, or electrocuted, or beaten with clubs. He realized he was staring into space when movement on the stairs from the offices above shook him from his paranoid reverie. It was the fat white guy the taxi driver had called the Governor, with the man named Eze and two others, both dressed in the now familiar green uniform of the volunteer army. Manny tucked his head back around his corner, and heard their footsteps clacking on the stone floor towards him.
The group of men didn’t pass him, however. He heard them stop, and some keys jangling as they were produced from their bunch. The door to the room immediately behind him opened, and closed, and then he heard the clunk of a bolt being thrown into place. Whatever the men wanted to do, they didn’t want to be overheard doing it. With little else to do but give in to his urge to eavesdrop, Manny slid along the bench towards the open window, and stood up to look out. He could just about stick his head out of the small opening if he craned his neck, and stood on tiptoes. He saw the window of the locked room, a mere six feet or so away, and much lower. It was closed, and just as he about gave up on the idea, it slid open, and voices came so clearly from it that it seemed as if there was no wall between them at all. He relaxed and stood casually beside the window with his back to the wall, listening intently.
He could hear an English accent that sounded more than a little funny to Manny’s ear.
“Thank you, Eze, it’s far too hot today for my taste. Our guest hasn’t said anything yet, has he?”
Eze replied, in a deep baritone rumble.
“Nah, Mr. Quincy. These boys worked him good, but no telling what he knows. Maybe he don’t know anything at all.”
“He knows something, of that I have no doubt. I don’t have time to wait for him to break. If we keep him too long, Beijing will play hell with the Foreign Office, and that will cause us problems for the future of our operations here. We can’t let him go, either. If the Columbians really are looking for this fellow, they’re probably on their way here as we speak. You can see our predicament, Eze.”
“Oh, I do see, sir. You’re saying that if Mr. Kang decided to end it all tonight, we could tell the Chinese the sad news and no information that would be bad for business would be heard by anybody, right?”
Eze chuckled, sounding more like a truck engine firing up than a man, such was the reverberation caused by his barrel chest.
“Eze, of course I didn’t say anything like that. I take it there are gentlemen in your care downstairs who would be happy to help us out in exchange for a pardon from the crimes that brought them here?”
Manny shivered. He didn’t really understand what he had heard, but it amounted to conspiring to murder, that was for sure. All that stuff about Columbians and Chinese and business? What business could a British Governor be involved in that would lead him to order a man’s death? Manny didn’t even want to know. He slipped away from the window, and that happened to be just as the room next door emptied of its occupants and the Governor, flanked by his guards, walked right past him. Eze had apparently gone the other way, towards, what Manny now knew were the cells.
The Governor looked at Manny, and he felt scrutinized like a bug on a slide, as the rotund British man’s eyes flickered over his features, taking in his bruised face and ridiculous hair. Manny felt sure that this was a person who never forgot a face. As the men marched out the front door, a constable came down the hall and took Manny to speak to the Sergeant.
He was processed much faster than the Germans, who were no longer there. They must have left while he’d had his head out the window. He must have looked just as insane as he had in the bar, evidently trying to escape out of a tiny window instead of the wide-open front door. Within a few minutes, he was being led down the stairs toward the cells.
As they started to walk down the worn stone steps, they had to stop and go back as Eze came up. He was so
wide that there was no way another person could pass him. His face was impassive, as if he hadn’t just given instructions for a man to be killed that day.
On their second attempt, Manny was led to the basement cell. It was dark and cool, away from the still blazing late afternoon sun. Practically the entire room was one communal cell, bars running for a full thirty feet from one wall to the other, and in the gloom Manny could see the back wall thirty feet away, making the room one big square, but far too low-ceilinged to form a cube. Dark shapes congregated to the left, there could have been anything from five to fifteen men there, such was the poor lighting offered in this ancient dungeon.
At the center of the far wall was a single toilet, and to the right, there was another dark figure standing on its own. The Sergeant opened the iron-barred gate, and Manny stepped through, to spend what he hoped would be his one and only night in a Montserrat jail cell.
Chapter Seven
When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Manny could make out seven other men in the cell with him.
Six of them stood together on one side while the other who stood across the room from them was badly beaten, He was still recognizable as the Chinese man who had been in the SUV when it arrived in Salem earlier that day.
His nose had been broken, and blood had matted his hair. One ear had been twisted as if with pliers and, either as a result of or in addition to the broken nose, one eye was quite blackened.
The Chinese man didn’t look at him once.
He paid full attention to the other prisoners. The other prisoners, however, were interested in Manny. No sooner had the sergeant left the cell and closed the door behind him, than the prisoners moved in like a pod of killer whales, and Manny was the baby seal. Manny put up his hands in a placating gesture, but before he could even speak, the air was forced from his body by a rock-solid gut punch. He hadn’t even seen coming.
This guy was fast.
“Uttt…..”
The urge to vomit was nearly too much for Manny to contend with. He sank to his knees. If he could breathe maybe he could talk his way out of the predicament, but his lungs burned.
“Boy, we got business here tonight, bad business, but with you here, that means a witness, and we can’t be having that now, can we?”
The man who had hit him leered out of the gloom. His face was a mass of scarring around the mouth, and wild, bloodshot eyes. The guy was definitely on some sort of chemical enhancement, judging by how hard he hit. He gave Manny a two-fisted club over the back of the head and stars burst everywhere. It looked like a constellation had fallen into the cell and was burning his retinas away.
Manny screwed his eyes up and prepared for the next blow, which came as a volley of kicks from all sides as he crumpled into a fetal position, trying desperately to protect his head and ribs. He was going to die here, for nothing. No treasure would come his way. Grampy had gotten him killed, under the most ignominious circumstances. These men would snap his neck, and his family would only know that he had been killed in a jail fight after racially abusing tourists and being arrested. The shame of those thoughts was as unbearable as the pain.
The beating was only punctuated by the grunts of exertion from his attackers until one of them screamed; not in anger, but in agony. Manny thought maybe one of them had broken a toe on his head, until a cacophony of yells and thudding blows erupted around him and this time, he was not the recipient. Manny chanced a quick glance up from the crook of his elbow and saw the prisoners facing away from him now. The reason why was revealed in a blur of flying feet and palms, delivered with terrible speed by the diminutive, broken-nosed Chinese man.
A man dropped to one knee following a stinging blow to the throat, he puked on the floor, and tried to grab his enemy, but he was already gone, moving in a strange circular pattern, scissoring his legs and keeping the men he was attacking at a distance, preventing them from rushing at him for fear of being on the receiving end of another vicious blow.
Another man was already on the floor, stomach down with his head at an unnatural angle and blood was bubbling from his mouth. Gingerly, Manny raised himself to his feet, glad for the respite. The Chinese man parried a clumsy hook thrown high, grabbed the wrist that threw it and, pivoting swiftly, launched the owner of the arm through the air. The wrist remained in his hand, and as the much larger man landed, a sharp kick broke his arm at the elbow. A piercing scream left him, as did the sharp end of his shattered humerus with an accompanying gush of blood. The fight had been going on for mere seconds, and three men were already out for the count. Manny didn’t think he could have taken even one of them.
The Chinese man clearly had some serious skill, but in what? It was nothing Manny had ever seen in any Bruce Lee or Jet Li movies, it was far too fluid. It seemed impossible for the slower, bigger men to land a punch, and he was capitalizing on every mistake, every over-balanced move they made. Another man went down with a broken nose, followed by a strange double kick that connected once at the jaw, and then he snapped the foot out again and back-heeled the man hard in the face.
The remaining three opponents were warier now, and with more room to maneuver, the pace of the fight changed. Two guys kept the martial artist at a distance, while the one with the scarred mouth went at ripping the copper piping from the wall above the toilet. Water sprayeded everywhere as it broke. Now, armed with his makeshift spear, Scarface waded into battle swinging.
Mr. Kung-Fu was agile enough to dodge him, but Manny knew it was only a matter of time before he was cornered; once he was done, Manny’s goose would be cooked.
He had to act, now, while they weren’t looking at him and were focused on his new ally. He waited, as the three prisoners, now emboldened with their new weapon, backed their adversary closer to the rear wall. Spraying water covered them all, and Manny took his shot. Charging, he aimed a flying dropkick at the scarred man which connected with the small of his back. Manny fell hard to the floor, banging his head hard on the stone surface. With one eye shut to blot out the returning supernova in his brain, Manny saw Scarface reel forwards, the brass spear pointed away from the Chinese man for a second and in that second, events took place so fast that Manny wasn’t sure if what he had seen was real. Scarface took a hard palm to the chest, throwing him back with a grunt of pain, and then his allies swooped in for the attack.
Both of their punches were deflected high by quick motions that flowed as smoothly as a gentle stream around a boulder. Then a vicious headbutt followed and, using the momentum of his forward-thrown head, the Chinese man snapped a rear-aimed kick out past the side of the other, hooked his heel around the back of his neck, pivoted and smashed him face first into the ground. Scarface had barely recovered from the blow to his sternum when the rising Chinese man used his off-balance body to scoop him at the groin and under the armpit, and launched him face first into the toilet. The cheap porcelain shattered in a flurry of fragments and further flooding. The room was quiet save for the sound of water and the cries of the few conscious injured.
Manny was helped up by the arm. He felt like he had been run over, twice, by his grandfathers’ old Jaguar town car. The Chinese man spoke in perfect English, which helped Manny realize he had lost hearing in one ear for the moment.
“Thanks for the assistance there, I think they might have overtaken me with that piece of pipe if you hadn’t jumped in.”
Manny laughed.
“Dude, it’s no worry you saved my life, I was dead for sure.”
“Well, seven to one is not a fair fight. I don’t like that.”
“Yeah… not fair to anyone who fights you, anyway. Who are you? What the hell was all that ninja stuff? What are you doing here?”
Manny was coursing with adrenaline, and he knew he was jabbering.
“Well, you seem to be ok, judging by how much you talk. Call me Kang. That ‘ninja stuff’ is not ninja stuff. Ninjas are Japanese, I am Chinese. Do you know the difference?”
Well. Manny thought that was
kind of a messed up thing to say, but seeing as the guy had just saved his life, he didn’t press it.
Kang continued, “That was a mix of styles, Baguazhang and a little Krav Maga. It’s quite effective against untrained attackers like these. I am here because the Governor invited me.”
Manny had somehow forgotten in the heat of the moment, or perhaps it was the beating of the moment, that he had overheard the conversation ordering Kang’s death not thirty minutes earlier.
“Oh yeah, the Governor wants you dead, man. He set these guys up to kill you in exchange for being let out of here with no charge. Kind of a crappy thing to do, if you ask me,” he said.
Kang shrugged again, noncommittally.
“Yes, I had suspected as much. It happens, in my business, when powerful men are afraid of losing what they have. By the way, did you realize that your hair is coming off?”
Dopily, Manny raised his hands to his head. The wig had slipped from where it had been glued and was now attempting to escape via the back of his skull. He pulled the wig off his head. It had done what he needed it to. Naturally, he had anticipated being searched when he was booked into the prison, so Manny had hidden his bag with all of his possessions behind the Wide Awake Club prior to his arrest. The one thing he had to bring with him into the jail was the treasure map, which in a stroke of inspiration he had decided to affix to the inside of the wig before he theatrically glued it in place. The map was still there, stained with sweat and a little blood now, but intact.
Kang turned to check on his fallen enemies. Most of them were not moving, but the one with the shattered arm was whimpering and scootching across the floor to prop himself against the wall, eying Kang warily. Kang ignored him, and moved over to Scarface’s prone body, still face first in the hole left by the destruction of the prison toilet.
Kang, with some difficulty now that his opponent was not supporting himself at all, heaved the body out of the way. Manny could see the ruin of his face as Kang flipped him over. He’d never seen a dead body before, and now he was sure he was in a room with at least two, probably more. Nausea returned for entirely new reasons.
