King of Swords

'I wish,' she said, turning around. 'It's El Balcon — The lialcony — by Amelia Pelaez. She was an avant garde Cuban artist. She was famous in her homeland for murals.'

'Sorry,' Max said, 'I don't know too much about art.'

'It's all right. At least you don't pretend to.'

Max heard a hint of recrimination in her voice and guessed then she'd been lied to by someone close to her, maybe a boyfriend who'd cheated on her or had led her on pretending 10 be something he wasn't — in other words, by someone a little like him.

Although they were sitting real close on her couch in the (lead of night, there was an element of the forbidding about

ii her. He decided to hold back, be the passenger, take everything at her pace. He sensed that was the way she wanted things and that was fine by him.

'Do you remember all the cases you worked?' Sandra asked, putting down her cup on the table. Ś 'Sure.' Max nodded.

'Raffaela Smalls?'

ŚYeah.' He sighed. 'That poor poor kid.'

It had been in 1975. A black, twelve-year-old girl, fished out of the Miami River, naked, arms and feet bound, a bag over her head. She'd been raped and then hung.

'Don't tell me you looked all my cases up too? Same way you did my boxin'.'

'Sort of. I remember when it happened,' she said. 'I remembered your name coming up and thinking you were black on account of it.'

'It's a common misconception,' Max said.

'You never gave up on that case, did you?'

'Took two and a half years, yeah.'

'That's unusual in this city, in this state, a white cop being that dedicated to solving a black kid's murder.'

'I was just doin' my job. Me and Joe got handed the case.

Me and Joe solved it. There's criminals, there's crime, and we're cops. We do what we do. That's all there was to it.'

'The family said how nice you were to them, how you promised to catch the guy.'

'They were decent people who'd had a child taken away.

Ain't no black and white in that, Sandra. Just right and wrong. They deserved justice, and they got it.'

'Her uncle did it.'

'Piece of shit called Levi Simmons.'

'He claimed you and your partner roughed him up bad.'

'He also claimed he didn't do it.'

'He looked pretty beat up in his mugshots.'

Max didn't say anything.

312 'Did you rough him up?'

'He tried to make a move,' Max lied. 'We stopped him.'

'Innocent till proven guilty,' Sandra said.

'He was makin' a move,' Max insisted, looking her right in the eye, just as he had Simmons' defence lawyer in court when he'd thrown up the same accusation. 'We did what we had to do in the circumstances.' Max needed a break from examining his career history. 'Can I go and smoke on your balcony?'

'Be my guest.'

She came outside with him. The air was still warm, and a limpid breeze shook the leaves of nearby trees. She didn't have much of a view - more apartment buildings, mostly dark, directly opposite - and then Calle Ocho behind, almost deserted. It was still way quieter than Ocean Drive, where no one ever seemed to sleep if there was an argument to be had or a fight to be fought.

'You know, every day when I leave my home I know there's some poor bastard doin' the same thing, only they won't be comin' back,' Max said. 'They'll get caught in crossfire between rival posses of cocaine cowboys, or else some young kid'll roll up on 'em and blast 'em just to watch 'em fly in the air. That's the way it's gettin' around here now thrill kills, killing for kicks and braggin' rights. And that's a family they've left behind who'll look to me for answers, who'll look to me to put things right. And that's my job.

What I signed up for. Makin' things right.

'I know I ain't ever gonna make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. I'm past that rookie idealism.

(ime goes up, not down. Guns get bigger, more powerful, hold more bullets, kill more people. But in the end, if I can bring a little peace of mind to some dead person's wife or husband, if their kids can grow up knowing that the scumbag who killed their mommy or daddy's dead or in jail for life, I hen it's worth it. And that's what keeps me goin', no matter

3'3 how jaded I sometimes get. That's what keeps me goin'

every second of every day.'

She didn't say anything. She just moved a little closer to him and leant her head on his shoulder and they stood there together in silence while he finished his cigarette.

They went back inside and carried on talking. Personal stuff, trivial stuff. They joked and laughed a lot. With Sandra, Max felt happier and more relaxed and comfortable than he'd been since he could remember.

And then she asked him what had been bugging him over lunch.

He thought about it for a second, how he'd never brought his job into his private life, how he'd refused to talk about any of it with any of the women he'd been involved with.

He'd kept it to himself and in the end it was all they'd left him with - the stuff that never got mentioned. He decided then that more than anything, he wanted Sandra in his life and he wanted her to stay.