who'd take a good while to kill. Carmine remembered Jean's gap-toothed grin, the way he didn't say much, just smiled, and his unusually soft hair. It was said he was the bastard son of one of the wealthy Syrians his mother had worked for as a maid hence his family name. Ask him about it and he'd shrug his shoulders and say he really didn't know and he cared even less. He was who he was, he said, and that was the best he could do. Who knew where names came from?
On Eva Desamour's advice, Solomon had brought Jean Assad into his enterprise, a year or so after it got started. He did petty minor-league stuff shoplifting and housebreaking mostly. He was good at it, but he'd never be better than his limitations. He had neither the ambition nor the balls or brains to progress to new, more complex areas, so he stayed strictly bottom rung, doing exactly as he was told, without question; a dependable soldier - as long as you didn't expect too much. When Solomon expanded into drugs and had to divide his enterprise into sub-sections, he got Jean to be a driver for one of his call-out dealers, the ones who sold to the wealthy, upwardly mobile crowd. Jean loved the job, loved the driving around in the air-conditioned Cadillacs he kept real clean inside and out, loved wearing a nice suit like he was somebody special. He thought he'd been promoted.
He used to tell people he was starting to feel American.
Then he'd killed Tamsin Zengeni, the dealer he worked for. He beat her to death with a tyre jack and stole her smack stash.
No one understood it at first. No one had known the Catman used drugs, let alone that he was a junkie. Solomon had started digging. He found out that Assad had been buying heroin from one of Solomon's other dealers, a guy who worked in the Broward County division called Ricky Maussa. There were strict rules about drug use in the organization.
Solomon had executed Maussa and his entire crew
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in the same way he was going to execute Jean. Carmine remembered the ceremonies. Maussa and his crew had been made to watch as one by one Solomon killed them, starting with the most recent recruit and moving upwards. Maussa had pleaded his innocence, that he hadn't known Assad's identity, but that in itself was no excuse. All Solomon's dealers had to be sure their customers weren't narcs, stoolies, rival gang members or one of their own.
Carmine found it impossible to hate Jean Assad. Jean had always been cool with him. He'd intervened more than once when his mother had been beating up on him. He wasn't scared of her like everyone else was. He'd even told her she was taking it too far.
Carmine cast a sweeping gaze about the room. The eleven other barons were stood around the figure they towered above, motionless on their stilts, expressions of sealed-in impassivity. As usual he couldn't recognize anyone he knew under all the make-up, and he was sure it was the same for everyone else. They all looked identical. They were the same height - thirteen feet tall - and, thanks to padding and clever tailoring, the same shape. Even their hands, encased in black gloves, were equal in length and width.
When the ceremony was over, they'd all walk out and go off into individual cubicles. They weren't allowed to talk until they were well outside the building, back to being gangster civilians. Those were the rules. Break them and you ended up here, in the middle of the circle. It had happened once before, a long while ago, never since.
There were people watching from a long balcony off to the left; a small select crowd, mostly new recruits, children as young as ten, and a lot of the newly arrived island immigrants, fresh off the boat; Haitians, obviously, but Cubans, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Bajans, people who'd talk about what they'd seen, evolve the myth. This was mostly for their benefit. Get them young, dumb or impressionable, tell
them the myth, show them some magic, get them to spread the word, exaggerated and distorted so no two versions matched, even though they meant precisely the same thing.
This was the key to Solomon's power, making people think he was more than just flesh and blood like them, making them believe that he was other, a demon Baron Samedi, voodoo god of death, reborn as a Miami gang leader.
Here was the popular misconception about Solomon Boukman's organization, that it was actually called the Saturday Night Barons Club or SNBC for short. It wasn't. That was the name of the ceremony.
The organization itself didn't have a name. It never had.
This was deliberate. A gang with a name is an immediate target, a recognizable entity, just begging to be shut down.
If you don't know your enemy's name, how can you find him? Solomon had wanted to differentiate it as much as possible from American gangs, which cops and rivals were used to dealing with and approached in the same way. As for a structure, it didn't really have one. It was Solomon and a few key allies, most of whom didn't know each other.
People were never sure who was working for Solomon Boukman and who wasn't.
The drums began one beat, three seconds apart a deep echoey sound like that of a heavy load hitting the bottom of a long deep dry well. At the beginning they hadn't had any accompaniment, then they'd used tapes of authentic voodoo drummers recorded in the Haitian mountains, and now Solomon had flown the drummers over and set them up in Miami. When they weren't playing the ceremonies they worked the club circuit from New York to New Orleans.
At the twelfth beat the barons linked hands with a flutter and slap of leather on leather. Then the light behind the Catman went out. For a moment they stood linked together
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in complete darkness. Carmine could feel the nervous pulse of the guy to his left; he heard him swallow and breathe a little harder through his nose. It was probably his first time here.
When the drum was struck for the thirteenth time a dark but powerful purple light gradually came on, bathing the circle in its rich, almost liquid glow.
At the fifteenth drum beat the barons began to move, slowly, anti-clockwise, one step at a time, one step per drum beat.
Christ! Jean thought. He's coming.
The giant figures were moving around him, turning slowly but deliberately like the mechanism of some ghastly machine; a complex lock gradually opening, unlocking horror.
He was scared now, real scared; scareder than he'd ever been absolutely and utterly terrified.
He knew what was about to happen, those things he hadn't believed before slicing your neck, drinking your blood while you were still alive, draining your life out of you before your very eyes. Then they'd take his soul.
The drum was beating faster. He could feel it in his stomach, stirring the contents, making them jump, making them come to life. He suddenly felt like he'd swallowed a sack of live toads, and they were hopping around inside him, jumping at his stomach, trying to get out. It was hurting him real bad, not nausea, but pain like he'd been punched by a cast-iron fist.
The drum got faster. Another joined in, slipped in behind it, a snare, building up a rhythm. The barons were moving in time, picking up speed. They were starting to blur, the whites into blacks, losing their shape. He tried to focus on one and follow him, but he couldn't move his head. He I ried closing his eyes but he couldn't do that either. He tried looking away, but even that wasn't an option.