Rum Runner eBook_for Epub_Revised

by dannal

  “Wow,” Isobel said, and Max wasn’t sure if she was feigning fascination, or if she was genuinely impressed. “Do you work in a rum museum or what?”

  “No,” Max said coyly. “But there are a couple of rum museums on the island. Actually, I’m in accounting.”

  This time Isobel Greer laughed out loud, in a playful, boisterous way that Max appreciated. “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “It pays the bills. You know.”

  “You are quite the interesting gentleman, Maxwell Craig,” she said, twirling a bit of her blonde hair around her finger.

  “When I first heard your accent, I instantly thought your hair should be red,” Max said, suddenly wondering if it sounded insulting.

  “Sure, stereotype me. An’ you should have plastic pocket protectors with pens, pencils, and…protractors, and such. Mr. Accountant.”

  This girl is so much fun, Max thought to himself.

  “On the topic of pockets, why do you wear this long sleeve black shirt thing?” Isobel asked. “It looks like the proper kind of shirt for the Caribbean. What is that, nylon or rayon? But usually they’re turquoise or pink, sorry, salmon—but you’ve got black, and your sleeves are down to your wrists.” She picked up his hand and turned it over in hers. “And you’ve got it buttoned down like you’re going to church or something.”

  “You know how it is, you lock yourself into a certain look and it’s hard to do anything else.”

  Angelique brought Isobel her food. Isobel appeared very surprised to see the whole fried fish with head and tail still on.

  “Bon appetit,” Max said, standing up from the table.

  “You’re leaving?” Isobel said, sounding disappointed. She put her sunglasses back on. “Pity, we were just starting to have fun.”

  “I’ve got to catch up with my business associate for a meeting this afternoon,” Max said, putting on his tortoise shell wayfarer sunglasses.

  “Ooh,” Isobel cooed. “Top secret accounting business. How exciting.”

  “I don’t know how you found this place,” Max said, tipping his sunglasses down to look at Isobel, “but I’m really glad you did.”

  “Cab driver brought me,” she said. “I think he was looking for a nice, out-of-the-way place to deliver me, to run up his fare as much as he could. Seemed like we drove around in circles first for about twenty minutes, though.”

  Max chuckled and nodded.

  “Hope to see you again,” Isobel said.

  “I’m in here every day,” Max said. “So it’s almost a certainty. If you can find it again.”

  “See you again, then, Maxwell Craig,” Isobel said, her bright eyes flickering like stars.

  On his way out, Max stopped by the bar, where Angelique was mixing drinks for a group of four young women, likely tourists from the U.S., who filled a table out on the beach. “What’s-his-name hasn’t bothered you again, has he?”

  Angelique smiled and shook her head, before throwing her arms around Max’s neck in a sweet embrace.

  “You tell me if he comes around you again, okay?” Max looked deathly serious. “You tell me, don’t let it slide.”

  The young waitress nodded. “Merci, Max.”

  Max headed for the door, almost missing altogether the person who sat in the shadows at Max’s regular table. As Max’s fingers gripped the doorknob of the door separating Maisie’s back wall from the outside world, the man at the table stood up and placed a firm hand on Max’s shoulder.

  An impulse of reflex made Max reach for his right hip.

  “Whoa!” the man said, throwing up his hands with a concerned frown.

  Max wheeled around and almost instantly recognized that the man wore the uniform of the Gendarmerie Nationale. He also ascertained that this man was not your typical gendarme sergeant or corporal; this one’s shoulder insignias indicated he was a rank much higher up. A major? A colonel?

  “I don’t know what you have under your shirt, but let’s keep it in your pants, no?” the gendarme said with a good-natured chortle.

  Max relaxed his arm and let it swing down comfortably to his side.

  “Maximilian Craig? I’m Colonel Travere, head of the Gendarmerie Nationale here on Martinique. I’ve been looking for you.”

  Max offered Colonel Travere a seat at the small yellow table in the dim corner of Maisie’s Beach Café. As they took their seats, Max wondered if the gendarmerie was onto him for the theft of The Cash Settlement the night before. It had been a brazen act, stealing the boat, and Max now wondered if it had come back to bite him in the end.

  Josue had wiped the boat down well and scrubbed it with a long-handled brush, using two bottles of bleach to eliminate any physical evidence he and Max might have left behind them. Then the stealthy Haitian had dumped it at a private dock near St. Pierre, way over on the other side of the island. Other than ripping out some of the expensive boat’s electronics, letting the cops blast a hole in the roof, and using up a hell of a lot of someone’s gas, the vessel had been returned relatively unscathed.

  “Anything he wants,” the colonel called to Angelique. The law officer held up his hand like a kid in elementary school. “It’s on me.”

  “Angelique, do you still have that bottle of Trois Rivières 1953?” Max asked the young waitress.

  “No,” Angelique said, a slight smirk curling her lips. “Some business guy from New York, or maybe it was Newark, bought the last.”

  “Thank heavens for that,” Travere said, taking off his black and white kepi and placing it down on the table. “I didn’t bring my checkbook with me.”

  Max figured the colonel was about fifty. Close inspection of the man’s toned arms and a lack of a bulging midsection suggested him to be much fitter than a typical man of his age, even a lawman. Wispy streaks of light gray marked the colonel’s short wheat-colored hair, and a roadmap of thin wrinkles in the tanned skin around the man’s eyes seemed to be the only things betraying his true age, and likely keeping folks from thinking him a much younger man.

  “Just another Ti’ Punch,” Max said, leaning against the wall and trying to appear relaxed. He checked the face of his Bulova Precisionist in a disinterested fashion.

  “Make it two,” Travere said to Angelique. “I hear you make a very good one here.”

  Max noticed Isobel Greer over at her table, trying to make sense of her whole fried fish, picking at it suspiciously with her knife and fork. Once in a while she would shoot a glance in Max’s direction, no doubt wondering why this cop was questioning him. Max wondered the same.

  “What can I do for you, Colonel?” Max asked, doing his best not to sound annoyed.

  “I’ve heard about you around the island, Maximilian, and I very much wanted to meet you. I suppose, you could say, your reputation has preceded this meeting.”

  Max couldn’t get over how “French” it sounded when the colonel said Maximilian. “It’s actually Maxwell,” Max said.

  Colonel Travere looked Max in the eyes. The gendarme had piercing light green eyes, likely trained to elicit submission from whoever dared gaze into them. “How did your parents decide upon that? Ah, merci,” he said, as Angelique handed him his cocktail. She set one in front of Max as well, who quickly took a sip.

  “Honestly, Colonel, I think my folks were making breakfast one morning, opened a fresh coffee can, and said, ‘Hey, I know, let’s call him Maxwell.’”

  It took the colonel a moment, but at last he chuckled. “Ah, yes. Could have been worse; you might have become Folgers Craig.”

  This time Max laughed. The colonel seemed like a nice guy, a guy whom Max might have been friends with, had the colonel’s own mission not have been quite so diametrically opposed to Max’s.

  “So what of this reputation you’ve heard about?” Max asked. “Did I file some tax returns for some of your friends or colleagues and they recommended me to you?”

  “No, I recently enjoyed some of your wonderful product?” the colonel said furtively, glancing from side t
o side, as if they were speaking of dangerous and clandestine matters. “It is among the best I have ever had.”

  “I’m not following,” Max said, doing his best to sound cordial, despite feeling his patience running thin.

  “The Fleur de Lis brand. I enjoyed a couple of drams with a colleague the other night, at his home in Les Trois-Ilets. What struck me was how your rum was so different than the other rhum agricoles produced on the island, very nuanced, unusually earthy. And yet it’s made from cane grown here, cut here, fermented here, distilled here. I simply had to meet the man who made the rum.”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I work in accounting. I have a home office in my villa. I don’t know what you’ve heard—”

  “Very well,” the colonel interrupted. “I am not here to threaten you or anything. But perhaps to maybe suggest that you think about making your operation legit.”

  “Hmmm,” Max said thoughtfully, not sure what the colonel’s motives were. Was he actually being nice to him, or was this simply a shakedown?

  “Hey, Max, I’ve heard other rumors about you swirling around the island, particularly around these parts, and I’m afraid I’d be remiss if I did not ask you about them,” Colonel Travere said, slowly swirling the two ice cubes around in his glass.

  “Ask me anything,” Max said, pretending he had nothing to hide from the gendarmerie commander.

  “I’ve heard stories, like the one about the waitress’ boyfriend stalking her,” Travere said. “The rumor is you beat the living piss out of the guy, to let him know it wasn’t a good idea to keep bothering her.”

  Max shrugged his shoulders lightly. He looked the gendarmerie colonel square in the eyes.

  “There is another account of a drunken fisherman wrestling a young local woman to the ground on a beach near Château Dubuc,” Colonel Travere said, peering at Max with his laser-like green eyes. “Apparently, after smacking the girl around a bit, the man was trying to rape the woman when—according to witnesses—a man with black hair and black clothing beat up the man pretty bad, threw the fisherman into his own skiff, and took off with him to destinations unknown. No one has seen or heard from that particular fisherman since that moment,” Travere said suspiciously.

  Max looked at Travere with a sober expression. He took a sip of his drink.

  Travere gave a light nod. “All right, then. Enough about you. I moved here a few months ago from Paris,” he said, smoothing out his close-cropped military-style haircut with his hand. “My wife’s parents had moved there from Martinique in the fifties. They were native Martinicans. Long story short, my wife inherited some land here, up north. Nothing spectacular, fifty acres of flat land in Saint-Marie—not far from the Saint James distillery, actually. The property has a good-sized villa, but it needs some work. If you were to ask my wife, it is her roots to the island that brought us here.”

  “That wasn’t the real reason?” Max suggested.

  “Just between you and me, Maxwell, it was the rum,” the colonel said, easing back in his chair with a satisfied expression, and bringing his glass to his lips.

  “The rum?” Max said, surprised.

  “Yes, my friend, the rum. My wife and I—her name is Adeline, by the way—lived busy lives in the city, she working in accounting herself, me chasing down terrorists and international criminals in the City. We came to Martinique for a holiday a few years back. I had never had the pleasure of having tasted rhum agricole before. My first sip opened my mind to a whole new world of rum drinking possibilities.

  “If you ask Adeline, she will tell you I became obsessed with the stuff. Every Friday I would stop at a small spirits shop at a busy crossroads near my office; I would buy a new bottle of AOC rhum agricole Martinique each time and spend much of the weekend enjoying it. I would sit on my balcony and think about the men cutting the cane, what hard back-breaking work it must have been. I’d think of them crushing the cane, extracting the sweet juice, and fermenting it before distilling it in their big column stills. My mind would go crazy thinking about all of those oak barrels sitting in aging rooms here on the island, just waiting to be uncorked and release their magic.

  “I suppose the rum itself made me long for my wife’s roots,” Travere added. “Funny, no? They are not even my own roots here on the island, but I longed for them as if they were.”

  “You are a real connoisseur,” Max said, feeling a measure of respect for the colonel, “aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that I have a sophisticated palate for tasting, or anything like that,” Colonel Travere said, sounding strangely sheepish, for as powerful a man as he obviously was. “I just know what I like, you know? There is nothing else in the world quite like rhum agricole Martinique.”

  Max nodded. “It is special.”

  “Angelique,” Max said, spontaneously, “would you bring the colonel and me a glass of Clément 1976?”

  “Certainly.”

  “It’s on me, Colonel,” Max said, feeling as if he were starting to like the commander of the gendarmerie on Martinique. He was not sure if he was springing a trap that Travere was setting for him, or if he was just being foolish. Yet a small part of him wondered if the colonel might become an asset. Max’s underground brand of unregulated rhum agricole could grow exponentially with a powerful gendarme on his side. “But only because I know you can appreciate it.”

  “Merci beaucoup.”

  Angelique brought the half-empty bottle of well-aged rum, placing it on the table with a couple of tasting glasses. “Enjoy.”

  “Honestly, Colonel,” Max said, pouring out the scarce amber liquid, “this is a bit more drinking than I usually do before one o’clock. But, if I’m honest, I must admit I feel a sort of kinship with you.”

  “And I shouldn’t be drinking at all, Max. May I call you Max?” Colonel Travere took his glass with relish, lifting it to his nose and embracing the aroma of the spirit made on the island decades ago. “After all, I am on duty.”

  “Your English is very good, Colonel,” Max said. “Your French accent is unmistakable, but you don’t mispronounce words the way a lot of non-native English speakers do.”

  “I studied English all through university,” Colonel Travere said, seeming to want to savor the aroma of his rhum agricole forever. “I wanted to master it before I started working. I suppose I thought it could take me places someday.”

  “Like the States?” Max asked.

  “Possibly. But I believe I have found the place that I belong here on the island. It’s funny how something can lead you on one path or another, no? Like, one big choice you make, or a major event in your life can change its entire course, you know?”

  “Believe me,” Max said, before draining his glass, and starting to pour another, “I know.”

  Momo gazed down at his smartphone, its white display shockingly bright against the darkness of his musty bedroom. “He’s what?” Momo asked the phone, which was switched onto speakerphone mode.

  “Brain dead,” the disembodied voice said through the phone’s speaker. “Big Flow is brain dead. Turn on channel six!”

  Momo walked to his living room, kicking an empty bottle in the darkened hallway. He fumbled around for the remote to his eighty-inch flat screen. He clicked it on, and his eyes strained to adjust to the brightness of the television, but he swiftly toggled through the channels until he heard the words, “suspected leader of an ultra-violent Haitian street gang, died today at Mercy Hospital Miami, succumbing to numerous gunshot wounds, including at least one to the head.

  “Pierre Bruno, or Big Flow as he was known on the streets of the Little Haiti area, apparently engaged members of a rival street gang in a gunfight in the parking lot of a Monty Maximus Pizza restaurant in the Key Biscayne area late this afternoon. Witnesses counted dozens of shots exchanged between gang members, with Big Flow and two members of an unnamed street gang also killed in the altercation.

  “Our own Tawny Abernathy has spent several months preparing an in-depth look at
the enigmatic and often brutally violent street gang known as Ti Flow.”

  Momo’s eyes were huge and his mind raced as he watched the investigative news package begin to roll. He stumbled backwards and sat down on his leather sofa. A partial bottle of warm Prestige beer sat on the side table, and Momo absent-mindedly picked it up and drained it.

  “In Port-au-Prince, a lot of the guys speak French Creole.” Momo recognized the speaker, it was Big Flow, and he was speaking in front of the courthouse, just last year. “And the name Ti Flow is loosely translated from the French word petite, meaning small, and fléau, which means scourge. Ti Flow ain’t a big scourge that gonna kill everybody, but a smaller one that takes care of business here, in our corner of Miami, you know what I’m saying. You wanna join Ti Flow, you better have pride in the homeland—don’t forget where you, or your parents, or your grandparents come from—and you better be ready to be the scourge.”

  “That was the charismatic leader of Haitian street gang Ti Flow, who ironically goes by the name Big Flow, speaking about the origin of the gang in his own words after having been acquitted of a laundry list of charges which included kidnapping, murder, racketeering, and torture,” Tawny Abernathy said in voiceover as b-roll of several Haitian gang members beating up a member of a rival gang rolled across Momo’s TV.

  Momo’s mind swirled. He knew if he was going to take action, he needed to take action quickly, lest he lose his advantage to another member of the gang. Ti Flow was now a body without a head; it was time to show the rest of the gang who the alpha dog now was.

  Momo stepped outside, and walked into the middle of Lemon Street. The hot June night evaporated the rain that had fallen earlier in the evening, causing wisps of ghostly mist to rise up off the graying asphalt, floating toward the streetlights overhead.