Kingston Noir (26 page)

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re reading Abu Rayhan Biruni, one of the great Persian mathematicians and philosophers.”

Proof displayed a copy of the book he had picked up. I snatched it from him.

“We’re of course not interfering with anything that could be used as evidence,” I said, handing the book back to Aziz.

Aziz fumbled it in his one good hand.

“Where’s your prosthetic today?” my brother asked.

Aziz turned away from Proof, who clearly unnerved him. “I’d really like it if you left now—and took him with you,” he said to me.

“Not just yet,” I said. “You didn’t get worried when Soledad didn’t come back last night?”

“She’s from Kingston—she knows her way around. Is she okay?”

He didn’t seem at all concerned—or surprised. “We have some evidence indicating she was in this room.”

“We’re study partners.”

“Nothing more?”

“She’s got a million jocks after her. Like I said, we’re just study partners. Not that it’s any of your business. I really don’t want to answer any more questions until—”

“Last time you saw her—where was she headed?” Proof asked.

“She always gets a million invites to parties. People kept slipping them under her door at the Marriott. She came over here to get away. What happened to her?”

“Did you see these invitations?”

“Sure. She even left a bunch.”

Aziz opened a desk drawer stuffed with papers and he pulled out some fl iers of various colors—red, blue, green, white. They were all invitations of one kind or another to clubs, dances, and various functions. Proof slipped one out of the pile. It was a handwritten note with an equation written on it.

I looked at Aziz.

“Beats me,” he shrugged. “I’m a history major.”

Proof peered at the invite. “Those are the Lotka-Volterra equations.”

That meant nothing to me and he knew it by the look on my face.

“A.k.a. the predator-prey formulae,” Proof continued. “They describe the interaction of two species where y is a predator, x is the prey. Lions eat sheep, lions increase, sheep decrease. Lions die off, sheep increase, lions eat more sheep, increase again. Circle of life, expressed in math.”

I escorted Proof by the arm out of earshot of Aziz. I wrote the Lotka-Volterra equations on my left palm.

“You used to do that when we were kids,” Proof grinned.

“Yeah, well, you got the math gene,” I shot back. “I had to do something to help me keep up. Back to the equations: just who is the lion and which is the sheep?”

“There’s more to it than that,” Proof replied. He held the invite closer to a floor lamp.

Below the Lotka-Volterra equations was the faint impression of something that had been scrawled in haste on whatever paper had once been on top of this one. I could only just barely make it out. The impression read:
dutty tower
.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means we’re going to Trench Town.”

Afternoon had arrived but the rain remained. As we drove into Trench Town the showers continued. The rain beat on the roof of the car like nyahbingi drums. Through the curtains of rain, at the intersections, I could see men under tinroofed stands cooking things on sticks over trash cans lit on fire.

“So what do you think Mama and Dada would have thought, you living here?” I wondered aloud, hoping to draw my brother into conversation. I had so many questions. I knew he was living in Trench Town, but where? Was he still doing any math? Did he have a woman?

Proof said nothing, but he stole another glance in the rearview mirror.

“What are you looking for?”

Proof didn’t answer and lit up a spliff.

“You can’t smoke that in here,” I complained.

“Nuh ramp wid mi! I need a smoke.”

“You think you’re the only one who could use one? That you’re the only one hurting?”

Proof kept smoking.

“Nobody blames you,” I began. “ATM robberies happen every day—truss mi. I get that it’s hard to deal with. But we’re from Cherry Garden, mon. What you doing in Trench Town?”

Proof exhaled so much ganja smoke I had to open a window. Rain poured through the crack as Trench Town passed.

“This was all low-income housing in the 1920s,” Proof said at last. “There used to be an actual trench that ran right through town. Like the canals in Venice, only filled with piss and shit.”

“You’re schooling me in stuff I know. I thought we were talking about you. And how you’re wasting your brain.”

“There’s history here that you can’t see. I’m learning things that can’t be taught.”

“Like how to fight like you’re in a video game?”

“It’s called Bangaran. It’s older than Capoeira.”

“Never heard of it. I think you made that up.”

“Truth. The Maroon warriors developed it in the seventeenth century. How do you think they managed to fight off the British for two hundred years?”

“So why do you need to know it?” I asked. “What war are you fighting?”

Proof smiled and kept blowing smoke.

I parked the car on a backstreet in Trench Town. It was early evening and we were in front of a seven-story apartment building that had been hit by Hurricane Ivan back in 2004 and now tilted at a twenty-degree angle like a hooker leaning against a lamppost. The Dutty Tower, people called the place. The building had been home to some minor stars on the Studio One record label and had been declared a national landmark years ago, and so developers, even ones who regularly paid off local public officials, couldn’t get the place torn down, even though it was perpetually on the verge of collapse. Squatters had colonized every floor and the general consensus was that it was a matter of time before one of them burned the building down.

We got out of the car. The rain hit us hard and sudden like a hotel shower with controls you can’t figure out. We ran up to the Dutty Tower and opened the front door.

Inside the building was a disaster. The air smelled like curry and ganja and Noah’s ark. The hallways were parallelograms clogged with junk—palm tree trunks, old motorcycle engines, tables, coils of wire. Goats wandered around, munching on whatever they could find. Homeless people—dreadlocked men and women, small children—milled around the passageways, or sat boiling pots and cooking meals. Some of them turned to me, looking at my uniform before turning back to their cooking pots, rolling papers, or tattered Bibles. To look a little less like a cop, I quickly stripped to the waist, leaving only my undershirt and soggy once-pressed pants.

“It’s going to take days to search inside this place,” I moaned to Proof. “Any ideas?”

“Do you have another spliff?”

“Can’t you get inspired without violating the drug laws of the island?”

Proof headed back out into the rain.

“Where are you going?” I shouted.

“I need to overstand.”

“A wha u a say?”

Proof headed through the open door of the Dutty Tower and I chased after him. Night had come and it was dark outside. The rain, if it was possible, was coming down even harder now.

“When I used to do math, it helped to look at a problem from a fresh angle,” Proof explained. “Do you have a torch?”

I got a flashlight from the car. Proof shined the light up at the leaning apartment building, illuminating one window at a time. The outside of the building was just as chaotic as the inside. The squatters had hung all sorts of things out of the windows—soaking wet laundry that someone had forgotten to bring out of the rain, clanging wind chimes, empty bird cages. Some windows were shuttered, others were cracked, some were lit, others were darkened, some had been painted green or yellow or black or bricked over. Proof let the light linger on one apartment on the seventh floor. The window had something odd painted on the outside:

z

“What’s the Z stand for?” I asked.

“That Z is not a Z. Look closely.”

“Is this some sort of math thing?”

“Actually, yes. But we’d better go up to the seventh floor—fast.”

The Z that was not a Z still looked like a Z to me. I copied the symbol onto my left palm as carefully as I could and followed him.

We tried to quickly make our way through the tangle inside of the Dutty Tower. The antiquated elevator wasn’t working—naturally—so we took the stairs, which were unlit. Proof led the way with his flashlight, every so often bumping into a child, a goat, or a dread heading in the opposite direction. Even though I was carrying my uniform folded up in my hand, people still eyed me with suspicion—I guess I still walked, talked, and smelled like a police officer. As for Proof, he got friendly nods and the occasional “Walk good, mon.”

“What are we looking for?” I asked as we passed the fifth floor. “What did that symbol mean?”

“The Bourbaki came up with it. ‘The dangerous bend.’ They used it whenever they wrote about an idea that could get people into trouble.”

We had reached the seventh floor. This portion of the Dutty Tower seemed mostly uninhabited. The hallway was dim, and the floor was clear, but when Proof pointed the flashlight at the ceiling, the air came to life. A dozen whatsits and whosits buzzed by my head in a stream of green and black and red.

One of the UFOs hovered before my eyes. With its long curling tail feathers, it was unmistakably a doctor bird. I’d just never seen them nest inside a building before. The bird buzzed away. Proof pushed on.

“Hold up!” I told him.

“What?”

“We don’t know what’s in that room. We have no backup, and you’re not a cop. If we’re gonna do this, we have to do it my way. Now get behind me.” I pulled out my gun.

Proof looked at me and my Glock 22. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a pen. He clicked it and moved beside me down the passageway.

We were in front of the room with the marked window. I tried the door handle—it wasn’t locked. Proof pushed it open, slowly.

The room was completely empty. It was a studio apartment with two large picture windows, one marked with the Bourbaki symbol that looked out over Trench Town. The room’s fixtures had been stripped—the electrical outlets had been pulled out, and there were holes where the faucets and toilets perhaps once were. But the most striking thing was painted on the wall opposite the window: a huge golden triangle, six feet tall, bordered in red flames. Beneath the image was a series of Roman numerals painted in black:

0 I I II III V VIII XXI

“Fascinating,” Proof breathed.

“You know what this means?”

“The flaming triangle is the symbol for the Black Star Brotherhood.”

“I know all the posses. I’ve never heard of that one.”

“That’s because it’s not exactly a posse. Have you ever fallen into a Wiki wormhole?”

“What?”

“A Wiki wormhole. You start looking into something on Wikipedia, and in that entry something else catches your eye, and then you read that entry and click on something else, and pretty soon you’re reading about latrines in seventeenth-century Holland and it’s four a.m. Well, at the bottom of the deepest, darkest Wiki wormhole you ever fell into is a thing called the Black Star Brotherhood.”

“Are they Garveyites?”

“Not exactly. Rastafari isn’t the only religion with roots in Jamaica. I heard some of this when I was doing my dissertation, but more from the Trench Town rastas. The Black Star Brotherhood is kind of a numerology cult that traces its history to Ancient Egypt. Basically, the members believe that math was started by Africans in Africa and we have to protect it from infidels. Legend has it that as the ancient library of Alexandria was burning down in 48 B.C., members of the brotherhood saved the scrolls and protect them to this day. You might want to write this down.”

Proof handed me his pen and I drew the triangle symbol with the flames on the palm of my right hand, and the Roman numeral sequence beneath that. “Let me get this straight. You think that the Black Star Brotherhood—”

The window to the apartment shattered. Proof hit the ground and I went down too.

Crawling on my elbows, I moved over to the window. I saw two men on the street in front of the Dutty Tower. I pulled a spyglass from my belt.

Peering through the small telescope, I could see the distinctive face tattoos. These were Croc Posse veterans. Lil Croc was known to be a superstitious man, fascinated by stories about obeah, duppies, and strange symbols. Perhaps that Z that was not a Z had attracted his men. He probably saw in a dream that Soledad was his destiny.

“Fuckery!” I cursed. “If we don’t find Soledad soon …”

When I turned around from the window, Proof was standing up, heedless of bullets and posse members, staring intently at the sequence of Roman numerals on the wall.

“Everything cook and curry,” Proof declared. “I know where Soledad is!”

I had to call for backup. The police arrived quickly, a surprise for Trench Town. The commissioner was among the first to show up, with a typically sour expression on his pitted face. He was accompanied by the hulking Officer Coconut who had a broken nose and a bruised ego, but had likely not said anything to anyone about the assault thanks to what Proof had picked from his pockets.