Conquer (The John Conquer Series Book 1)

by Edward M. Erdelac

  He gestured to a photo of the stern looking, dark haired Japanese man in a black gi on the wall between Brother Malcolm and Dr. King.

  The kid stared at the portraits for a while.

  “You’re welcome to train with us,” said Baba Hamilton. “But you leave your colors in the street out front.”

  That snapped the kid out of his trance.

  “Naw, I ain’t here for that. I’m lookin’ for O.G. Juju.”

  “There’s nobody here by that name, son,” said Baba Hamilton.

  But he was wrong.

  Juju, warlord and co-founder of the 167th Street Black Enchanters, was there.

  Conquer had started the outlaw club back in the day with a couple of like-minded fools, fresh from Vietnam and scratching to survive in the tenements of the South Bronx, boosting cars, mugging suckers, and raising hell in a loser’s race whose only prize was a bunk at Attica. He was a long way from that ragged edged, wild-eyed twenty year old cut-sleeved kid, jumping in minor leaguers, rumbling with the Savage Nomads and the white gangs from the North Bronx, torching buildings and butting heads with King Solomon’s pet crews.

  In a sense, no, the kid that had gone by the name Juju was gone.

  Hell, Baba Hamilton wasn’t always right, but he was never wrong.

  Conquer set his end of the coat rack down and walked up next to Baba Hamilton.

  “Who’s asking for him?”

  The kid looked him over.

  “So are you him?”

  Conquer said nothing. He could feel Baba Hamilton’s disapproval radiating like a hot stove.

  The kid shuffled his ripped Pro Keds. They looked like they’d been pried off the feet of a bombing victim.

  “I’m s’posed to tell him Preacher’s dead.”

  Conquer sucked wind, as though the kid had sunk brass knuckles into his belly. ‘Preacher’ Benny Galarza had been one of two other founders of the Black Enchanters, and Vice President of the gang. He’d been a Marine too, fresh back in the world from ’Nam, not so crazy as Conquer or their president, Black Adam, or most of the young assholes they’d jumped in. Preacher had always been about tempering them. He’d always been about making peace. Even after the Golden Guineas from Buhre Avenue had jumped him and branded a pair of G’s on his cheek with a wire hanger, he’d been against retaliation. He’d got a silver star at Khe Sanh, so he was no pussy. He’d just always had a calmer head, always been about helping the community, keeping King Solomon’s dealers out of the neighborhood by any means necessary. He’d been the peg that grounded them, the safety on their gun.

  When Black Adam had been thrown off a roof six years ago by the Nomads, it was like all Conquer’s rage had gone over the edge with him. He’d quit the gang with Preacher’s blessing. Baba Hamilton had been the first place he’d gone. Baba had made him swear an oath never to return to that life, to have no contact with anyone still in it. He’d helped him enroll in NYU, got him odd jobs, counseled him to get his license, turned him around. But none of that would have happened if Preacher had decided to sic the Enchanters’ gestapo on him for wanting to quit.

  “Who told you to tell me that?” Conquer demanded.

  “Preacher did,” said the kid.

  Conquer narrowed his eyes.

  “Go wait downstairs.”

  The kid left.

  Conquer went to the changing room without a word.

  Baba Hamilton came in when he was sitting in the single folding chair, buttoning his shirt.

  “What’s your word worth, John?” he demanded.

  “Look at me, Baba,” said Conquer. “You think I’m about to trade my threads for cut sleeves and dirty jeans? Preacher was a friend.”

  “You came to me like a wild animal,” said Baba Hamilton. “You really think you can dip your feet in that world and not get pulled back down?”

  “You don’t think I can?” said Conquer, shouldering into his oxblood leather jacket. “That kid downstairs is out in the jungle. He’s like I was, sure, like a bunch of the kids you’ve taken in. But if he’s like we were, doesn’t that mean he could be any one of us?”

  “The difference is, he’s got to want to be,” said Baba Hamilton.

  “Sometimes the mountain’s gotta come to Muhammad, Baba.”

  “Careful, brother. That door don’t open both ways,” he said, when Conquer shrugged past him for the exit.

  “Well, maybe you ought to get it fixed. Brother.”

  He left his gi and his black belt on the folding chair. Either it would be in his locker when he came back, or it wouldn’t.

  * * * *

  Jeet Kune Joe was sitting on a fire hydrant out front, skinny arms folded to accentuate his stringy muscles, glaring at a blue and white squad car idling at the curb.

  “Hey Conquer!” shouted the white cop within.

  It was Mike Carmody. When Conquer came over and ducked his head in, he saw the shotgun on the front seat, and Carmody’s service pistol jutting wishfully from between his legs. Carmody was the kind of cop whose neck glowed red when he had to cross the Harlem River. He hated Harlem like Conquer hated a cotton field.

  “Hey Carmody, you lynched anybody yet this morning?”

  “Day’s still young,” said Carmody. “Hop in the back. The lieutenant wants you.”

  The lieutenant was Lou Lazzeroni, who sought his advice whenever anything beyond the pale turned up. That had been happening a lot lately.

  “You think you goin’ ever get me in the back of this heap, Carmody? Think again. I got my ride. I’ll follow. Where we goin?”

  Carmody grimaced, and looked past him down the block.

  “172nd and Bryant. Hurry up.”

  Conquer followed his blue eyes to a well-formed Puerto Rican girl in melon hot pants crossing the street. He tisked and shook his head.

  “Don’t be eyeballin’ them sisters too intently, officer,” Conquer said, nodding to the .38 tucked between Carmody’s legs, “Or your gun might go off.”

  “Fuck you, Conquer,” Carmody snarled.

  He flicked lights and siren on, and squealed away from the curb.

  Conquer laughed boisterously through the cloud of exhaust.

  “Back at you, baby!” he called.

  He turned and fished for his keys. The kid was still sitting on the fireplug, scowling.

  “Got a stop to make, kid,” Conquer said. “C’mon and ride with me.”

  “Yo, I didn’t know you was step’n’fetchin’ for the pigs now, Juju.”

  “Cut that shit, boy,” Conquer said seriously, and gave him a look that made him glance away, though, Conquer had to admit, not right away. “Look, you just another motherfucker wants my ear today. I’ll give you your time, but you gotta stand in line.”

  “Just thought Enchanters come first, is all.”

  “That’s politics, little man.”

  “I ain’t no politician, though.”

  They crossed the street to the burgundy Chrysler Cordoba and he could tell the kid took special pleasure sinking into that Corinthian leather.

  “Yo, you could afford a ride this butter on a dick’s pay?”

  “Police auction,” said Conquer, turning the key. He didn’t tell him it came with the ghost of a pimp who liked to command the radio dial. You get what you pay for. He lowered Marvin Gaye as they merged into the 125th traffic. “What do I call you, man? Jeet Kune? Joe?”

  “Just J.K., man.”

  “What’re you? Gestapo?”

  “Shit no. I’m vice president.”

  The Black Enchanters had slipped a long way since he was with them, Conquer decided.

  “Who’s president? Not Preacher.”

  “Nah, not Preacher. He was retired, man. Doin’ social work, you dig? Our president’s Essangui.”

  The name didn’t ring any bells, not as a name, but the word nagged him, like he’d heard it somewhere. Conquer could tell by J.K.’s tone he wasn’t a fan of the new management.

  “You said Preacher told you to tell me
he was dead. How’d he pull that off?”

  “He told me to go and tell you if he bought it, man, you know? Like, in the event of. Last will and tenement-like. I ain’t no psychic or nothing.”

  Well, that was a relief.

  “How’d he get it? When?”

  “Yesterday, man,” said J.K. “Somebody shot him outside Mustafa’s bookstore. He wasn’t even packin’ nothin’ but a couple books for the Boys Club on Hoe Avenue. Pinned the books right to his chest.”

  “Pinned ’em? How?”

  “Shot him with an arrow.”

  Conquer looked at the kid, frowning.

  “An arrow?”

  “Yeah. Some motherfucker out there think he Robin Hood. You ain’t heard? Yo, Preacher was the third one in like, three days.”

  “Who else?”

  “The warlord of the Harlem Saigons got one in the eye right outside their clubhouse,” said J.K. “And the vice president of the Ministers got it through both fuckin’ ears. Like that goofy white dude on TV.”

  Conquer shook his head. Arrows. That was weird.

  * * *

  The Bronx was Dodge City; hell on earth.

  Old man Robert Moses, against all logic (unless you subscribed to the theory that the effect on the city’s blacks and Latinos was deliberate) had shot the Cross Bronx Expressway like a cyanide-tipped bullet through the belly of Tremont, shunting the poor into overcrowded tenements and dooming the rest of the South Bronx to a slow, festering decline. The whites could afford to flee to Westchester and the North Bronx, and Moses had led them there like his namesake, leaving the poor to the mercy of the slumlords, cats who cut heat in the winter and power in the summer, and hired punks like the Black Enchanters to burn their buildings for insurance money. Even now the rubble-strewn ghost town smoldered like an industrial quarter churning out misery day and night. Except nobody much got paid anymore, unless the exchange rate for blood was favorable.

  The cops at the corner of 172nd and Bryant looked less like NYPD than they did limeys anticipating another Rorke’s Drift. There were three S.W.A.T. vans, the guys in their blue vests and baseball caps and M-16’s pointed outward, aiming for any black or brown face that showed itself in the broken windows of the empty gray buildings.

  Rolling up on that was like coming to a military checkpoint in Saigon, and Conquer was the wrong color. He showed his hands as he slowed to a stop, the S.W.A.T. rifles trained on him, and he urged J.K. to do the same.

  Carmody, of all people, sauntered over to the car and waved, smiling, enjoying the look on Conquer’s face as he came slowly out of the car, motioning for the kid to stay put.

  “I toldja to hurry up,” he said, and led him through the cordon to where Lou Lazzeroni stood sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with a couple other plainclothes men. They were grinning and yucking it up there in the huddle.

  Lou saw him and excused himself from his fellow detectives, the smile falling away as soon as he was with Conquer.

  “Thanks for comin,’ John.”

  “This is way out of your jurisdiction. What happened? Somebody kill the mayor?”

  “Wishful thinking,” Lazzeroni said, leading Conquer and Carmody over to a bulky form lying in a puddle of blood beneath a slick yellow sheet in front of a meat packing place. “What do you know about gorillas?”

  “What do you mean, like paramilitary?”

  “Nah, gorillas. As in African.”

  “What kinda racist shit is that to ask me, Lou?”

  Carmody laughed.

  Lou crouched by the body and held up the sheet without further ado.

  Underneath was a broad, stout corpse, headless, handless, and flayed of its skin, with a big ragged hole cut in its chest. It looked like a dead weightlifter until Conquer got a look at the feet, which looked like oblong human hands.

  “What the hell?” Conquer exclaimed.

  “Fuckin’ Bronx,” Carmody said.

  “Go get me a coffee, Mike.”

  “You got a coffee,” said the patrolman.

  Lazzeroni drained it in a gulp and tossed the cup to him.

  Carmody blew out his lips and bopped off, dragging his heels and shaking his head.

  “I wanted you to see it before they carted it away,” Lou said lowly. “Any ideas?”

  “Bushmeat?” Conquer said, pointing to the meat packing place across the street. Sometimes people smuggled in rare game meat. Ghanians in Concourse Village paid good money for a taste of home. King Solomon sometimes arranged for caribou and elephant and who knew what else to find its way to the African eateries in Harlem. “Maybe some butcher’s moonlighting?”

  “That’s what the rest of the guys are saying. I’m no butcher, but it seems like they left all the best cuts,” said Lou.

  That was true. The hams and the muscles were all perfectly intact. And now it nagged him.

  “It’s not a fresh kill,” Conquer observed. The blood had congealed and maggots wriggled in the open spaces. “Been laying somewhere a couple days. How was it killed?”

  “No marks other than the postmortem cuts. I’m guessing a bullet to the head or something but… no head.”

  “Who’s missing a gorilla?”

  “We haven’t figured that out yet either. Bronx Zoo hasn’t got any gorillas unaccounted for. Who could get a gorilla into NYC with no paperwork?”

  “King Solomon.”

  “Yeah,” Lazzeroni admitted. “Seems like a lot of trouble, though, to just leave it laying in the street.”

  Conquer shook his head and lit a cigarette.

  “I don’t know, Lou. Give me a day or so. I’ve got something going myself.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, what do you know about a guy playin’ Robin Hood with the gangs?”

  “Robin Hood?”

  “Yeah you know,” he said, mimicking the action, “with a bow and arrow.”

  “Oh yeahhhh… I heard something about that,” said Lou, snapping his fingers rapidly. “Some dago kid at Lehman High, right? I guess Kill Whitey Day got out of hand.”

  Conquer shrugged.

  “How about a dude named Galarza out in front of Mustafa’s on 125th yesterday? They called him Preacher.”

  Lou sucked his teeth and shook his head.

  “Nah, John, I didn’t hear anything.”

  Of course he hadn’t.

  “Sorry. Friend of yours? Want me to look into it? Stanforth might have handled it….”

  “Forget it.”

  An Italian kid bought it with an arrow in Westchester Square, it was news. He was trash, so maybe not the six ‘o clock news, but it still aired. A Puerto Rican community activist outside a Harlem bookstore, not even the cops outside of the crime scene knew about it.

  “Sorry to waste your time,” Lou said. “You call me if you think of anything?”

  Conquer raised a hand and went back to his car.

  “Yo what was that about?” J.K. wanted to know as Conquer slid back behind the leather wrapped wheel.

  “Nothing. So who had a beef with Preacher?”

  “Man, I don’t know. Everybody loved him, you know? He talked the Saigons out of movin’ in on our turf once, organized a block party. He was about gettin’ people together. Used to talk to me about takin’ a bigger role.”

  “Bigger than vice president?”

  “I mean like, bigger in like, doin’ more you know? Like what the Ghetto Brothers done. Positive shit. Turnin’ the Enchanters in a new direction. He still taught us that mystic Santeria shit. Used to bless us, you know?”

  The Black Enchanters had been founded on ‘that mystic shit’. Conquer had brought that to the table, teaching the kids in the gang how to work minor magic, mojo hands and stuff to keep the pigs looking the other direction, to unlock cars, protect themselves. Black Adam had brought cunning, and muscle. And Preacher had brought conscience and Santeria. His grandmother had been some kind of priestess.

  “Your president don’t deal in that?” Conquer said, surprised.<
br />
  That had been the Enchanters’ whole thing. The Savage Skulls spun a .32 caliber revolver and passed it around for initiation. The Nomads beat you down till a Grand Funk Railroad 45 finished spinning. The Enchanters jumped you in while a white candle burned down and somebody beat the drums. Some of them swore they had visions when they came through the Enchanters’ Apache line.

  “Not really,” said J.K.

  “Like the mojo hands?” Conquer asked, gesturing to J.K.’s chest. “I noticed right off you didn’t have one.” In his day, all the Enchanters had prepared and worn one.

  “He threw all that old shit out,” said J.K. “Started teachin’ new traditions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like cuttin’ off an enemy’s ear. Or knockin’ his teeth out, make a necklace out of ’em. Dude’s stone cold outlaw, dig?”

  “You done all that?” Conquer said, looking him over.

  “Not yet. That’s why Essangui passed me over. He was warlord till about a month ago, when our last prez, Mau Mau, got pinched for assault. He’d been whippin’ the gestapo into all this hardcore blood and death shit for months though, and they voted him in.”

  “Essangui, huh?” Conquer said, mulling over the name again. Where had he heard it?

  “Yo, where we going?” J.K. asked as the view outside the window got unfamiliar.

  “Where’s a black man go to get educated in Harlem?”

  J.K. shrugged.

  “I’m Puerto Rican,” he said.

  Conquer didn’t relish hanging around the Bronx, and the gorilla thing had captured his attention, so he headed back to Harlem, sticking his foot in the door of Hekima Books just as old Mustafa was turning the closed sign and pushing it shut.

  “What do you want, John Conquer?” the barrel chested old man in the voluminous black dashiki and dark sunglasses whispered, in that untraceable accent that presumably originated somewhere on the African continent.

  Alagba Mustafa. He’d been around forever. You always had to lean in to hear him, and you never saw his eyes. The kids in the neighborhood had all thought he was blind till he’d whacked a young thug’s knuckles with a rattan cane for dipping into the till right in front of him.