“Do not be afraid of anything this night,” the she-wolf told him. “As of this moment, you are one of the pack. You are one of us.” She breathed on him, and White Wolf lay down and fell fast asleep. The other wolves lay down around the boy and shared the heat of their bodies to keep him warm.
AFTER A TWO hour drive, McLeod found himself in an upper class neighborhood. Uncle Luigi’s estate made his ancestral home appear diminutive; yet although no roving guards roved around the perimeter, it looked heavily fortified. As the Mercedes pulled up to the iron gates, McLeod observed no less than four Federal agents taking pictures and making notes of his arrival. He was grateful for the heavily tinted windows that helped protect his identity. He might have some difficulty in explaining his presence here much less consorting with suspected violators of American law to his boss.
The driver entered a ten-car garage and parked in an empty stall before activating the garage door to insure further anonymity for McLeod. As he stepped out of the car, he was directed to a door that granted him access to the kitchen. The aroma of Italian food brought back memories of his childhood where he spent a good deal of growing up in an Italian home with one of his best friends.
“Your Uncle is in the drawing room,” a large man in a three-piece suit sitting at the kitchen table and reading today’s newspaper told him. “He’s waiting for you.”
Uncle Luigi stood up from his lounge chair as McLeod entered the room and crossed the open space to embrace his nephew. For a man in his seventies, he still seemed spry and active. “Come. Come. We sit down. We smoke a big cigar.” With an arm around McLeod’s shoulders, the elder led the young man to a leather cushioned couch.
“Now,” after both had lit up Cubans, “what’s the favor you need?”
McLeod told his Uncle everything that his team had discovered during the recent investigation.
“Ah,” Uncle Luigi surmised. “And you want me to tell you what I know, eh?” He puffed twice on his cigar before placing it in the ashtray and crushed out its life.
“You know what the word Mafioso means, eh, Junior? It’s a way of life. It’s family, honor, tradition, brotherhood. There are things I cannot tell you. You are not family, and still you are my family. Si, I know things. I can tell you only what you already know.
“My generation. Sure, we play the numbers. We make whiskey during prohibition. We provided gambling, and now it is legitimate. But we no do the drugs? That’s a bad business. The Council no want to have a part in drugs. The new generation? They are different. They no think like the old generation. They see fast money. They cannot see the bad effect drugs have on the youth of America. My family has no part in drugs!
“But, there are two families. They fight for control. This is a war, Junior. Don’t get in the middle of this war. I worry for you.”
He rose up from the couch and crossed over to a large mahogany desk and picked up a pen to write something on a piece of paper. Then he left the slip of paper on the desk.
“I cannot tell you what you wanna know. However, if you find something in this room—” He finished by shrugging his shoulders. “It was good to see you, nephew. You’re a bright boy! Next time, you come to the Miami house. It’s fine, too.” He turned and left the room.
McLeod smoked the better part of his cigar before putting it out in an oversized porcelain ashtray. Then he rose up from his seat and approached the desk. He palmed the paper his Uncle had written on and pocketed it. He retraced his steps back to the kitchen, found the driver, and was driven back to the safehouse. On his return to Boston airport, he ducked into a restroom and quickly discarded his disguise; when he emerged he was wearing his normal jeans and windbreaker.
He did not look at the slip of paper until he had returned to his hotel. His Uncle had written a name: Ricardo Alvarez. He pondered on the significance of the name and its relationship to this investigation. Obviously, his uncle was very fluent in the nefarious activities of the Miami families, since he owned and kept a second estate on the city’s outskirts. Uncle Luigi was not telling him everything he knew, keeping to the Mafioso code, but he did give him a nudge towards uncovering some dark truths that resisted the light of day.
This case was far from over, he determined, and there was a lot of work to do. Perhaps, he thought, using Welsh’s words in a different context, we have just begun to delve into the morass lying under the ‘tip of the iceberg. He then dialed his team for a quick meeting.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FISH
WHILE WAITING FOR his team to assemble, McLeod had time to contemplate the case further. There were too many loose threads dangling around, to his mind, that seemed interconnected from an intuitive perspective but remained an enigma. Before he could start knitting them all together into something he could present to his boss and possibly justify legal action by the Justice Department, he had to find the right tools and a logical starting point. He sat on the floor and drew his body up into a lotus position and relaxed, shutting out the physical world and allowing his mind to concentrate on the facts of this case and weave them into some kind of mosaic which later could become a recognizable picture. It was his form of brainstorming.
For a reason he did not question, his mind opened up that vault of memories stored in his subconscious and took him to the closing of his mother’s funeral service. Perhaps it was his spirit guide’s way of revealing the information or resources he needed at this point in his life.
He relived the moment, watching the extended family gather at the nondescript gravesite of his mother.
SHE WAS BURIED next to her husband in a large cemetery, a man White Wolf eventually accepted as a father-figure but who can never replace his Grandfather. His mother’s grave laid two rows in from the access road near a small hill that had been purchased by a well-to-do family as their ancestral burial plot. White Wolf did not care for the pitiful location: there were no trees to give shade or home to birds that could provide songs at least through half the year to serenade her spirit should she return or had not yet passed on to the Happy Hunting Ground to rejoin her kindred spirits. It was a sterile place: typical of the White Man’s concept of the world, and it disgusted White Wolf. The grass between the congested headstones had been clipped unnaturally short, while the only flowers in existence, already dying and fading, sat in recessed vases next to the marble slabs that encapsulated the deceased lives in a sentence or two: here this day, gone the next.
When the short service had concluded and the priest had departed, Grandfather called his large family close around him. White Wolf could read in the elder’s eyes a sorrow that expressed the axiom “A parent should never have to outlive his children.” But then, Grandfather had prepared for this day a long time ago. To the other family members, he was a stoic, perfect Indian who kept his emotions under control and unrevealed. It was only that special bond forged in childhood between White Wolf and his Grandfather that allowed him to view the thoughts behind the mask.
“There are secrets even within a family that cannot be told until the right time,” he told them in a serious voice, the kind a sage uses to pass his wisdom to his recalcitrant students. “Sometimes the pain is too great for the living to bear. The release in death of our inner souls from these robes that we wear for only a short time is absolved of any shame our souls might bear. Yet, the love we have for each other is stronger than the wrongs we think we commit in this world. For who knows the purpose of the Great Spirit, other than the Great Spirit? And who would dare question His Will? He has His mysterious ways. He accomplishes His Will through men and women, and no one has the right to say that His Way is right or wrong.
“The time has come when I am released from all vows and may now speak the truth that has been hidden from all of you. Only White Wolf has suspected the truth all these years. With the passing of my daughter, my tongue and heart are free to reveal that truth to you all.”
Grandfather addressed White Wolf’s two older brothers, pointing to a third man
standing apart from them and acclaimed, “This man is your half-brother. He is your mother’s first-born child.”
White Wolf’s heart swelled with pride. He looked at the man ten years his senior and was happy that his feelings about him all these years had been proven correct. Busting Teeth—or Buster, as the village called him—stood five-eight and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. He was all muscle, and there was not a White Man alive who could best him in a fair fight—or an unfair fight, for that matter, White Wolf conceded.
White Wolf fondly remembered Buster as a wild Indian, a true Indian. He had a short temper, and it did not take a lot to set that temper into motion. He had earned his name early in his childhood, as he would hit other children that had crossed him—intentionally or not—in the mouth; hence, the rattling and loss of teeth of his hapless victims. He was the type of Indian White Wolf looked up to as a hero, for Buster never took any nonsense from any man, Indian or White, and he only wished to grow up just like him. In many ways, he had, except that he had not fallen to the temptations of the strange and alien world that he had been forced to live in.
The White Man’s world had irreparably damaged Buster’s psyche, poisoning his body and mind with liquor and other vices. He had never been able to adapt to the White Man’s world the way White Wolf had, and neither could Buster return to the village where he was raised because of the addictions he had acquired and could not rid himself. He was an outcast in both worlds, adrift in a twilight zone of his own making.
Unable to leash his infamous anger, Buster’s lack of self-control landed him in jail quite a few times. White Wolf recalled, however, that it had never been an easy matter for the authorities to incarcerate this wild Indian. He once took on six highway policemen, three town deputies, and ten residents who had the misfortune one night in frequenting a local bar. He had laid most of them out; on the floor amongst the remaining tables that had miraculously avoided being crushed in the melee, two were draped over the bar, and a couple were lying outside on the sidewalk where they had landed after flying through the front windows and door. If the authorities had believed they could wear out the “Tasmanian Devil,” as they nicknamed him later, there were sadly mistaken, for he was like the Grecian demigod Anteus who could not be defeated as long as his legs touched the Earth who had been his mother and continually gained strength.
Once, while working as a mechanic, he became visibly upset during his attempts to fix a Volkswagen Beetle and turned the whole car upside down in frustration. When the owner returned and threw a volatile tantrum about the condition of his car, demanding restitution, Buster simply put the man inside the car and strapped him into the seat—upside down! Needless to say, Buster not only lost his job but also had to spend a few days behind bars to ponder his deviant ways. The Indian suffered the incarceration and yet, returned to his old habits.
Then there was a time when, while working in a lumber mill, that a ten-foot saw was not cutting right. No matter how much Buster had tried to adjust it, it would not operate properly, so he kicked the saw into a dozen pieces. That alone did not warrant his dismissal, but the foreman needed to have his jaw wired just for expressing his disapproval and using a few choice words that should have been left unsaid.
White Wolf walked up to his half-brother and smiled up at him. His two brothers, however, turned their backs on him, commenting to Grandfather that they wanted nothing to do with Buster. He was not family, they claimed. Of course, White Wolf reasoned, they did not understand anything of their heritage. He once accused them of being afraid of grass because they had become so much like the White Man. That they had turned away from their own flesh and blood was of no concern to White Wolf, for that only cemented a stronger bond with Buster.
White Wolf also knew that his Uncle Black Badger had raised Buster as a child and had taken care of him as if he were his own son. He had long suspected a familial relationship with Buster the first time he had met him in his Grandfather’s teepee, but an outing with both Black Badger and Buster had cemented his suppositions.
The three of them had gone deep into the woods together for a week’s hunting, packing only their bedding and rifles. White Wolf always enjoyed any excuse to get away from man’s habitation and become a part of the natural world. The hunt was also something special to him, for it pitted his skills against the animal he hunted. If he tracked and killed the animal, it was because he had honed his senses to become both the animal and match its strength to overcome it. And the kill was not just for the sport of taking a life: the animal gave its life to sustain others, and a silent prayer was always given to the animal’s spirit for the sacrifice of its meat and skin, which was shared with the entire tribe.
However, as darkness descended on the trio the first day and they had not yet been successful in their quest, Black Badger decided to make camp. White Wolf, being the youngest, was tasked to gather wood and branches to make both a fire and bedding for the blankets they carried.
“Don’t see much use for a fire,” White Wolf complained. “We didn’t bring anything to eat.”
Buster withdrew a flask from his back pocket and flashed a grin. “I’ve brought the drink.”
“We can eat fish,” Black Badger stated unconcernedly, as if the lack of provisions troubled him not in the least.
“How?” White Wolf questioned obstinately. “We didn’t bring any tackle.”
Black Badger laughed. “Seems Junior here needs a lesson in survival. Guess you haven’t been paying attention to your teachers, young Indian.” He looked up at his son. “Buster, you think you can get us a fish or two?”
“Sure,” Buster said as if the task were not trouble at all. He stood up and stretched out his frame. He unloaded his pack off his back and headed towards a stream not twenty paces away.
White Wolf followed him. He did not like the name his father had given him, which his Uncle had used in rebuke, for it identified him as nothing better than an ignorant White Man. Besides, he wanted to see if his half-brother could catch a fish without a pole and a hook. Any failure on Buster’s part would help take the sting out of his Uncle’s remark.
Buster casually rolled up his sleeves and his pants’ legs, kicked off his moccasins, and waded about a foot into the stream. Then he squatted and put his hands into the cold, running water, ignoring the discomfort of being wet and chilled. White Wolf smirked, thinking this was the oddest way of catching a fish, if not the dumbest. Were the fish supposed to come up to him and jump into his back pocket or cry out to him, “Take me! Take me!”? Still, he crept to the edge of the bank and tried to peer over his brother’s shoulder to watch his movements.
It was not long before a ten-inch long trout approached Buster. Soon, it was swimming between his hands, touching them as if they were not foreign to the stream. With a move that was startling fast, Buster scooped the fish out of the water and threw it out of the water onto the bank behind him.
White Wolf’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. “Impossible! You couldn’t do that again if you tried!” he exclaimed, but his mind was filled with something wondrous.
Buster turned his head back and eyed White Wolf with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Then he concentrated on the task at hand, and within a couple of minutes, a second fish landed on the bank next to the first. He stood up and shook the water off his arms and waded back onto the bank. “I think that’s enough. Now, where’s that firewood, Junior?”
White Wolf had been shamed, and he did not like the way he was feeling. Red-faced, he turned around and started collecting firewood and fallen tree limbs without a word. He was careful only to take the wood lying on the ground for it was not right to deprive a tree of a still living limb and then expect the tree to respect and protect him in the future. Uncle Black Badger took the firewood, built a small but adequate fire, accepted the gutted fish from Buster, and cooked them to perfection before dividing them equally between the three of them. White Wolf ate the fish with his Uncle and brother without spea
king, all the while trying to figure out how his brother had accomplished the impossible feat of catching the fish with his bare hands. He knew it was pure fantasy, but it did almost appear as if the fish had come to his brother, longing to be a part of their dinner fare.
The second day of hunting fared no better than the first, but instead of waiting for Buster to catch another pair of fish that evening, White Wolf declared that he was going to catch supper this night. He mimicked his brother’s actions by rolling up his sleeves and pants legs and wading into the stream sans moccasins. He put his hands in the water and waited patiently for the fish to arrive. After a seemingly endless wait, a seven-inch trout finally came within his reach, but he was not patient enough for the fish to become comfortable in its surroundings. He reached for the fish and ended landing face-forward into the water. He could hear the sniggling of his elders behind him as he picked himself up dripping wet. Ignoring his companions, he resumed his stance and waited for the next fish to come.
After six unsuccessful tries and now completely drenched, White Wolf was growing despondent in his attempts to accomplish an almost impossible feat. At that moment, just when the sun was dipping below the treetops and casting the world in shadow, Buster waded in beside him and squatted.
“You are trying to use brawn to convince the fish that they want to be eaten,” he told White Wolf. “You have to use your mind. The fish don’t really want to be eaten, although they know that this is their reason for being in the world. Still, they would like to live as long as possible before they sacrifice their lives.”
“What do you mean ‘use my mind?’”
“The fish know this stream. And why not? This is their home, their universe. And you must become one with their world. They know every rock, every blade of the plants growing on the bottom, even the trees that grow above the stream and provide shade. They also know who shares the stream with them: the other fish, frogs, the animals nearby, and even the insects that make this stream their home. You are the intruder. When you stick your hands into their water, they can sense you. They know that you do not belong. But that does not prevent them from being curious, as it is their nature. They will investigate your intrusion. Maybe you are a bigger fish they must greet as a brother. Or maybe you’re a rock that has decided to join the family of rocks already residing in the stream. They are also cautious of you, for you may be the man-thing they instinctively fear who has come to eat them.
White Wolf McLeod Page 4
