by John Sweeney
Caesar lay at the far end of the ward, where some daylight seeped through grimy windows. He was mixed-race, thin, almost scholarly, with a high forehead and an honest, or honest-seeming, face – an accident of birth that had helped him through a dozen confidence tricks, maybe more. The whites of his eyes were locked on the ceiling; his body lay awkwardly, wrongly immobile, on the filthy sheets. A fly landed in the corner of his right eye and feasted on the liquid to be found there before his wife, a sweet-looking, mixed-race woman way too good for him, shooed it away with a none-too-clean cloth.
‘Paralysed?’ asked Joe in Spanish.
The woman crossed herself and told him that Caesar had been paralysed for two weeks now, and the doctors – the hospital – had no medicine to treat him, but they said there was very little they could do for him anyway. Joe had read that the Zika virus frequently paralyses the central nervous system; most people recover, though some faculties are impaired; a minority of cases die because the patient’s lungs stop working. Caesar looked touch-and-go. At the bottom of the bed lay a cot, and in it an infant girl in dayglo pink, fast asleep.
Caesar Umbrio or Red Narayan or Ken Fox had an interesting collection of aliases. He had run off with one million dollars – give or take a dollar or two – of money belonging to a syndicate fronted by Jerrard Drobb – ‘JayDee’ – a flaming-haired, half-Swedish, self-certified multimillionaire reality TV star, entrepreneur and candidate in the US presidential election. Team Drobb had flown Joe from LA to New York, economy. When Joe had got a cab from JFK, Drobb’s people had told him that it was assumed that he would have taken the subway, and would only recompense him for that route. Joe didn’t have a mean bone in his body but the chiselling struck him as odd. As Joe ascended in an Aztec silver-lined elevator in Drobb Domus, the billionaire’s signature skyscraper in Manhattan, he reflected that either Drobb was pathologically tight, or he wasn’t quite as rich as he said he was. Or both.
Joe had been ushered out of the elevator by a female flunkey in a business suit, dark-haired, long-limbed, her youth and beauty marred by some unspoken but noxious anxiety scribbled on her face. She turned and walked him through a penthouse suite the size of a small cathedral, with a view to die for over Central Park, and into a small side room with no windows, furnished by a silver-effect sofa of a certain age, marked by a dark stain the shape of Lake Superior. The little room’s walls were decorated solely with photographs of America’s great white hope: JayDee on the stump, JayDee laying concrete on some of his buildings, JayDee snipping ribbons, JayDee pressing the flesh, much of it female. Joe felt locked inside someone else’s narcissism, a self-love so vast it knew no horizon.
Drobb had kept Joe waiting for four and a half hours. Rich people, like border guards and policemen, confuse other people’s time with something of no value. Joe considered walking but stayed. He didn’t need the money but he did need the distraction.
Close on five hours in, Miss Anxiety returned, paddling her hands to suggest that Joe should stand to attention and then come out into the suite, like an aircraft handler guiding a jumbo. She paddled him through the cathedral to an office overlooking the great city of New York and there was JayDee: marmalade skin, tangerine hair. It was whipped up and piled over his scalp like an ice sculpture. He was tall, taller than Joe, and heavy. For a man with such heft, his hands were curiously small, like the flippers of a salamander or early lizard.
‘Great honour, Joe, great honour to meet you.’ His voice was soft, almost girlish.
For the rich son of a rich man, Drobb in the flesh seemed awkward, insecure, keen – no, desperate – to win Joe’s good opinion. Joe’s nostrils twitched. There was the memory of a scent in Drobb’s office, something that troubled his mind’s nose. He couldn’t quite trace it.
‘So glad you could be here today, Joe,’ continued Drobb. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ The sincerity of the compliment was real for that moment; but the moment passed very quickly. Miss Anxiety hovered, some unspoken agony in her eyes.
‘What’s eating you up, Flora?’ It was hard for Drobb to snarl given the light zephyr of his voice, but he managed it.
‘What shall I do about Mr Richards? He’s been waiting to see you for two and a half days, Mr Drobb.’
‘Let him wait a while longer.’
‘But Mr Drobb . . .’
‘Entertain him, show him your pussy, whatever.’ Her face twitched and she exited, the two men watching her walk out of the office.
‘Nice ass, but a nut job,’ said Drobb.
Joe said nothing but reflected inwardly that the problem of being a private detective was that the rich people who could afford to hire him made him feel ill. He thought hard about giving this job up, there and then, and telling Drobb to shove it. But something stayed his tongue.
‘You wanna know why you’re here?’
Joe nodded.
‘Ken Fox or Caesar Umbrio, whatever his name is, he’s a bad hombre, soldier. I had a Drobb project in the Caribbean. Investors piled in, they see the Drobb name, they know they’re getting a good deal, a fantastic deal. Ken took the money and ran. I want you to hunt him down and I want you to break him into little pieces.’
Joe wondered whether Drobb wrote his own words or had them scripted.
‘Ken stole from me. I trusted him and he took me for a ride. I want you to find him and clean him out and make him suffer, so that neither he nor any other wetback will dare rip me off ever again. Flora will handle the details. Great to meet, great to spend time with you.’ And then Joe felt his presence was no longer required.
Joe had backed away, talked through money and expenses with Flora, re-entered the Aztec silver elevator. Halfway down he slid a key against the silver lining. It was plastic.
And now, in a hospital in Caracas, Caesar’s wife was staring up at him. And then Joe remembered the lingering odour in Drobb’s office: lavender. Grozhov had been in Drobb’s penthouse. It was strange, thought Joe, how the memory of a smell could force a decision.
Joe didn’t take kindly to conmen like Caesar. They used their weasel ways against victims who found it incredibly difficult to realise that their trust in a fellow man could be so horribly misplaced. But he took in the paralysed man, the nursing wife, the infant at the bottom of the bed and, back home, the little girl in the white dress with the Minnie Mouse bunches. And the scent of lavender in Drobb’s office.
‘Caesar . . .’ Joe started, then stopped. He had to phrase this delicately and his Spanish wasn’t up to it. ‘Some money went missing in the Caribbean.’
‘Si,’ said the woman, her face wreathed with anxiety that Joe, who towered over her, had come to do a shakedown.
‘A man is looking for Caesar.’
‘A priest?’ asked the woman, a look of genuine fear etched on her face.
‘Maybe he thinks he’s some kind of a god, but he’s no priest,’ said Joe, who, as a lapsed Catholic, was confident in this territory. ‘The man wants to destroy Caesar.’ He walked around to her side of the bed and crouched down so that his face was close to hers. He didn’t want any of the other patients’ families to overhear what he was going to say next: ‘This man, he’s called Jerrard Drobb. He’s rich, he’s powerful, he may yet become the President of the United States. He’s going to ask me where the money is that Caesar took.’
‘Si,’ she said, her eyes wide with unease.
Joe held the palms of his hands out flat, bidding her to stay where she was. He walked to the station at the head of the ward where the nurses hung out morosely in the gloom. Twenty dollars did the trick, and he knew he had been ripped off. He returned with a piece of paper, dated and signed. Joe took out his phone and took a picture of the paper and then handed it to the woman.
‘What is this?’ she asked, the fear in her voice turning her words to dry husks.
‘It’s a death certificate. Caesar passed away a few minutes ago. He died of Zika’ – who knew, it could well be true in a few days – ‘but you need to h
ave a funeral.’
‘A real funeral?’ The anxiety hardened her face. Joe smiled his slow, slow smile and replied, ‘A pretend one. I can’t get money off a dead man. Even Drobb will understand that.’ He palmed her five hundred dollars. ‘But pretend the funeral well. If Drobb ever finds out that I faked Caesar’s death, then I’ll be in big trouble.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’
‘Thank you, mister,’ she said in English to Joe’s retreating back. ‘Thank you. You are a good man.’
No, I’m not, thought Joe. I kidnap children for money.
CARACAS, VENEZUELA
Joe walked back to the stairwell, the top of which was lined with windows, open to the sky, and glanced at a parallel stairwell at the far end of the hospital building. There he saw, three storeys below him, a dead man descending the steps.
What Joe did next was beyond stupid. Instead of using caution, quietly following the target and then running him to ground, he yelled out the name of the man he’d last seen slumped in a pool of his own blood, dead, in Damascus: ‘Humf!’
Humfrey DeCrecy looked up, startled, clocked Joe – their eyes locked – and then he started to really shift, jumping down the seven steps of a half-landing in one go, again and again. The race had started with Humfrey six flights ahead of Joe, and he was by far the lighter, leaner man. But Joe had been wrestling with his conscience for a month now, ever since he’d kidnapped Ham. He suspected something big was wrong, something missing in the story he’d been told.
And now a corpse was running from him, fast.
Joe took the stairs at a run, gripping the iron balustrade on the inside of the stairwell to pivot on each landing. Two landings down and his way was blocked by a family who, judging from their melancholy, had just lost a loved one; he did his best to ease past them, then accelerated down to the bottom of the stairs. On the ground floor, there was no sign of Humfrey. Joe jogged towards the hospital entrance, diving left to avoid a gurney racing towards surgery, bearing a gunshot victim cratered in blood, and zig-zagging between knots of relatives, bleary-eyed, despondent, slow to move.
Outside, the sun’s glare bleached out all detail until an immense rain cloud blotted it out in turn. Squinting into the shadows, he spotted a blur of movement, then clocked a cream Land Cruiser tearing out of the car park. Fat spots of rain began to fall and then thunder rumbled, and with a suddenness that Joe found bewildering, a wall of water was descending from the sky: Andes rain. The Cruiser slowed to exit the security cordon – a thick metal chain untied and then tied to a thick brick archway by a white-haired, frail guard who was in no hurry to get anything done – and Joe caught through the rain a glimpse of a thin, blond-haired man in the Cruiser’s oversize side mirror.
Joe raced to his Triumph, jumped on the bike, turned the key and fired up the engine. The rain fell in stair-rods, soaking Joe to the skin, making him blind. Although every second counted, he forced himself to don his helmet, its peak helping to screen the worst of the rain from his sight. Now he could see better, he realised the Cruiser was through the security cordon, the old man tying up the chain even though a funeral hearse and two ancient Chevrolets had just pulled up behind it. If he went the correct way and waited his turn, he’d lose the Cruiser.
To his left was the ghost of a garden, more a bank of earth turning liquid by the moment, that led up to a brick wall. Joe gunned the bike up the bank, his rear wheel spinning in the mud, and revved the machine to the max so that it crawled onto the wall’s top; once on solid brick it powered along, almost plunging off the wall. He squeezed the brakes, regained control, and zipped over the arch where the guard was inspecting the coffin in the hearse. On the far, public side of the wall was a kiosk with a sloping, corrugated-iron roof that dropped down to road level, a man selling soft drinks inside. Joe hit the brakes again and cut much of his speed, hoping that the roof would bear the weight of the Triumph. The metal creaked but held; he was down, and he flipped his wrist so the bike sashayed in and out of the traffic as the road turned into a flowing river. Ahead, through the blur of raindrops, he made out the Cruiser taking a very brave and very unpopular right at the lights. The road swivelled and careered uphill extraordinarily steeply, so that Joe thought he was riding up a waterfall. The Cruiser had the advantage of him: its wheels could grip, it had traction, while the Triumph slipped and slid as it would on an ice rink. Joe just, but only just, escaped going under the wheels of a water truck reversing towards a standpipe, but now the road switchbacked downhill and the Cruiser’s weight paid against it. Once, twice, the Cruiser almost lost control, clipping a telephone pole and taking out a chunk of the bumper of an Oldsmobile parked by the side of the road. Then it took a corner too fast, its wheels spinning helplessly, and it reared up and fell, the driver’s side wheels plunging into an ever-deepening ditch.
Humfrey, stunned and half-blinded by the crash, was struggling to open the passenger door to get out of the stranded Cruiser when he felt himself being lifted clean out of the vehicle. That was the end of the good news.
He didn’t see the punch coming. But he felt his arms being wrenched high up behind his back, so that his fingers were almost touching his neck, and then, terrifyingly, he felt his weight being pivoted so that his mouth was in the ditch, and he was held there for ten, twenty, thirty seconds.
Only then did the human see-saw swing back. Humfrey, gasping for air, gabbled but couldn’t speak.
‘Please . . . go . . . you’re killing me, you’re going to kill me, you Irish psycho!’
Over the sound of the rain and the rush of blood in his ears did he hear the reply: ‘That doesn’t matter, because you’re dead already.’
Humfrey’s face was shoved down into the torrent again, he was going to drown, and then it stopped, and just above the rasping of his breath he heard that soft Irish voice say, ‘Humfrey DeCrecy, just a word of advice. Don’t make me angry. You won’t like it if you make me angry. Talk.’
Humfrey did. It had never been planned, not as far as he knew. It was just an opportunity that had presented itself. He’d known and loved Jam, that was all true. He’d wanted to help her and when Joe had got in touch and asked about her being in ISIS, he’d made a phone call.
‘That is the one thing I told you not to do,’ said Joe. ‘Who did you call?’
Humf spat it out: ‘The CIA.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Joe.
‘The truth,’ said Humfrey. ‘They use me, very occasionally. I have a skill.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘I play dead people, remember. I’m the man who dies in the first five minutes. I’m good at it. From time to time, the Agency, they call me in, to play dead, in Paraguay, Antigua, Mozambique.’
‘Who in the CIA?’
Humfrey held his tongue.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ Joe continued. ‘When I was in the Rah, they sent me to do mortal combat training in North Korea. I was such the star student I killed the instructor. Who did you call in the CIA?’
‘I called a number. Then someone called me back, wanting to know more.’
‘Who called you back?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘You can’t say.’
‘No.’
Humfrey felt the mass of Joe’s strength on the small of his back, his mouth pivoting back into the stream so that he began to inhale water all over again. He stayed like that for thirty seconds, forty, fifty. When he came up, he was retching for air.
‘You can’t say?’ said Joe conversationally.
‘Zeke Chandler,’ said Humfrey.
‘Did you meet him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘An old guy, gap between his teeth. Looked stupid but wasn’t.’
‘You sure it was Zeke?’
‘Yeah.’
Humfrey stayed level for thirty seconds, a minute. He liked breathing air so he didn’t make a formal complaint.
<
br /> ‘So you play dead in the courtyard,’ Joe said. ‘Mansour kicks the crap out of you. And then what?’
‘Then I’m with the goons and I’m blindfolded, and someone puts headphones over my ears, loud, so I can’t hear a damn thing, and they take me up to a villa someplace in the hills overlooking Damascus. Then I’m switched, put into another car. These guys drive me to a harbour and it’s two days, three days in a sailboat, and then I’m in Cyprus and I’m given a ton of money and a one-way ticket to Caracas.’
‘Their choice?’
‘My choice.’
‘And the purpose of the charade? Mansour pretends to shoot you, kicks the shit out of Qureshi. He’s in on the act, too?’
‘I was given a kind of script. I was told to take the scimitar off the guy with the scarlet head-cloth; the others all wore black. Then some guy would shoot me. I get to do my bit, then it’s off to the Oscar party.’
‘You bastard,’ Joe growled. ‘I thought you were dead . . . When I got back to the States from this trip, I was all ready to break the news to your sister in Arkansas.’
‘Heh, it’s just showbiz.’
Joe ignored that, but asked a question that was now troubling him greatly: ‘So Jameela, she was in ISIS, for sure?’
‘I don’t know.’
