“Oh my God.”
“They had that wire up his heart and he had himself a massive. That’s the funny thing about Jimmy, everything about him was massive, even his death. Just thought you might like to know. Funeral’s Friday. Your people, Victor, they don’t mess around when it comes to burying their dead. A guy doesn’t even have time to cool before he’s in the ground.”
“But I just saw him yesterday. He can’t…”
“Some kids they showed up in our unit, we didn’t even want to know their names. You could see it in their eyes they wouldn’t last. I’m seeing that look right now, Victor.” He sucked his teeth again and chucked me on the shoulder. “See you at the funeral.” Then he turned and started walking away, holding his briefcase, walking off to bail out Cressi once again.
The weightlifter gave me a nasty wink and followed him down the corridor.
I watched them go and then fell to the wall, my back against the porous white stone, and covered my eyes with a hand while I shook. Jimmy dead. I had a hard time fathoming it. I actually liked the guy. But the news was worse than that. That tooth-sucking Earl Dante wanted me to pick a side without a scorecard, without a rule book, without even knowing what game we were playing. The way I looked at it, if I picked wrong I would be as dead as Jimmy and if I picked right I would be as dead as Jimmy. All I knew for sure was that I was on the wrong playing field and needed desperately to get out. When I had told Beth I had to flee the law or it would kill me, she didn’t know I was being literal as hell.
And I couldn’t help but think, as I shook against the corridor wall, that my fate in the coming mob apocalypse and my investigation of the dark secrets of the Reddmans would somehow become entwined. I was right, of course, but in a way I could never then have even vaguely imagined.
Part 2. Frogs
In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit
but in his face.
– DIOGENES THE CYNIC
15
Belize City, Belize
LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I went to Veritas again. I woke up sweating and shouting from the dream in my room at the guest house in Belize City. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force myself back to sleep. It is morning now and I have sat up all night in my underwear examining the contents of my briefcase, reviewing my mission. There are documents relating to bank accounts and bank records and the flow of great sums of money. There are documents from the State Department in Washington to present to the embassy here. There are pages from the diaries of a dead woman and a letter from a dead man and last night, when I read them together, I felt the same shiver roll through me as rolls through me whenever I read them together, which is often. They are the plainest clues I have as to what curse it was that actually afflicted the Reddmans, those and a carton of ancient ledgers that are still in my office in Philadelphia. The full truth will never be learned, but the man I seek in Belize has much of it, along with my share of the Reddman fortune.
Belize City is a pit, and that is being kind. Antiquated clapboard buildings, unpainted, weathered, streaked with age, line the warrens of narrow streets that stumble off both banks of the rank Belize River. Laundry hangs from lines on listing porches, huge rotting barrels collect rain-water for drinking, the tin roofs citywide are rusted brown. The city is crowded with the poor, it smells of fish and sewage and grease, the drivers are maniacs, the heat is oppressive, the beggars are as relentless as the mosquitoes. It is absolutely Third World and the food is bad. My guest house is right on the Caribbean but there is no beach, only a grubby strip of unpaved road called Marine Parade and then a cement barrier and then the ragged rocks that break the water’s final rush. It is dangerous, I am told, to walk in certain sections at night and those sections seem to change with whomever I talk until the map of danger has encompassed the whole of Belize City. Still, last night I put on my suit and took hold of a map of the town and a photograph from my briefcase and walked west, away from the Caribbean, into the dark heart of the city to see if anyone had seen anything of the man I am stalking.
The night was hot, the air thick, the streets as unenlightened as poverty. Cars cruised past, slowly, like predators. Pickup trucks veered by, teenagers jammed into the beds, shouting at one another in Creole. Guards stared somberly from behind chained gates. A rat scurried toward me from an open sewer, halted and sniffed, scurried back. I stopped at two nightspots, three hotel bars, a wooden shack of a club that overlooked the Caribbean, black as fear in the night except for the relentless lines of iridescent froth dying on the rocks. I had been told the shack club was habituated by lobstermen and sailors and I had wanted especially to visit it, wondering if my prey was sailing on a luxury yacht somewhere off the Belizean cayes. In each joint I bought for myself and whoever was nearby a bottled beer with a Mayan temple on the label, a Belikin, and made what conversation I could. When I showed the picture I tried to see if I could detect anything beneath the denials and the shaking heads, but there was nothing, a whole night of nothing, though I had known from the start that I was trawling bait more than anything else.
Back in my room, I took off my clothes and turned the fan to high and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the moving air to cool my sweat. I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep only to awake with a shout a few hours later when I dreamt of Veritas.
Now the dawn is just starting to ignite. I lie down again and try to sleep but it is impossible. I watch the sun rise yellow and hot out of the ocean and feel its burgeoning heat. I shower in cold water and think of cool Alaskan glaciers but am already in a sweat by the time I tighten my tie.
When I reach the Belize Bank on Regent Street I am exhausted from the heat and my lack of sleep. I have already visited the quaint white clapboard American Embassy, like a Southern manse dropped in the middle of the Third World, and had a long talk with a junior official named Jeremy Bartlett about my problem. He was freshly scrubbed and amiable enough as he listened to my story and examined my documents but there is something about State Department personnel that leaves my teeth hurting. There must be hundreds of English majors hidden in the basements of embassies all over the world, toiling away at ingenious, long-winded ways of saying, “There’s nothing I can do.” I took his card and asked for one tiny favor and he looked at me awhile and I left before he could find a new way to say no.
After the embassy, I crossed the swing bridge to the southern part of the city and visited a Belizean lawyer with whom I had been in contact. His office was across the street from the Supreme Court building and above a tee shirt shop. He gave me a long explanation of Belize ’s robust asset protection laws, which left me feeling doubtful, but then he told me of his uncle, who was a clerk of the Supreme Court and who could manage anything with proper incentive. I wrote out a check and signed certain documents and paid certain fees and picked up certain other documents. Then it was on to the bank.
The Belize Bank building on Regent and Orange streets is almost modern, with a bright jade-green sign. It presides at the head of a rather ragged business district, its white cement and dark marble facade standing out like a shiny penny against the general disrepair of the rest of the city. In the bank I ask to speak to the assistant manager and am taken to a desk on the second floor. The man I talk to is older and distinguished, with gray hair and a proper British accent. His suit is pale beige and perfectly pressed. His face is powder dry; mine glistens, I am sure, with my sweat.