“Me name be Trejean,” my Jamaican captor informed me when we were ensconced on the rich leather mid-vehicle seat in the white Escalade. He gestured to our driver. “Dat lily-brown Portugee behin’ de wheel be Hiho.”
The white biker type seated beside Hiho introduced himself through a yellow beard. “I’m Dal, the brains of this crew.”
“Dal be a jesta, a samfi man,” Trejean said. “We put up wit his foolery ’cause he be fambly.”
The three of them were young, probably still in their twenties. As seemingly different as their modes of dress. Under his gray jacket, Trejean wore a black tee and narrow black trousers. From what I could see of Hiho, he preferred a hipster narrow-brim purple hat, a pale rose silk shirt, and suspenders matching the color of the hat. Dal opted for a leather wifebeater that left his heavily larded, muscular arms on display in all their naked glory. There was a tattoo of a pretty bespectacled woman near his left shoulder that looked suspiciously like Sarah Palin.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Dal the jester said.
I turned for a final woeful look at the rapidly diminishing police headquarters building where Lieutenant Oswald was no doubt assuming I’d blown her off. I saw that the silverish van of my primary kidnappers, having loitered much too long in the passenger zone, finally was attracting the scrutiny of two uniformed officers.
Great work, guys. Keep that traffic flowing.
“All fruits ripe,” Trejean said. At least that’s what it sounded like. He had positioned himself with his back to the left side of the big SUV, facing me. “Yu nuh easy,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Jamaican jibber-jabber,” Dal explained. “Tre thinks you look worried. Shit, man, you’ve got nothing to worry about. We’re protecting your ass.”
“Is that what just happened?”
“What else? Those boys were bad hombres. They were going to …” Dal pointed a thumb-and-finger gun at me and made the appropriate bang-bang noise.
“And you boys?”
“You’ve just been rescued by the A-Team,” Dal said.
Hiho giggled. “Love it when plan come together,” he said, the first peep out of him. A TV fan. Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think Hannibal Smith ever giggled when he recited that line.
“Not that I’m ungrateful,” I said, “but why rescue me?”
“Info above our pay grade,” Dal said. “We’re told to keep you alive, that’s what we do.”
Trejean chuckled. “Dal bad bwoy. Las’ night, snap that hot-steppa’s neck.”
“Hot-steppa?”
“In Jamaican lingo, a hot steppa is a criminal hot-stepping from the cops,” Dal explained. “He’s talking about the wrong-o who tried to light up you and the blond lady last night on the Near North. We took care of him.”
“Bad bwoy, Dal,” Trejean said, as if it amused him.
“Tre’s ribbin’ me because we weren’t supposed to get fatal on him until we found out who hired him. But the guy just wouldn’t cooperate—”
“He tess Dal.”
“Yeah. He tested me, all right. I may not look it, but I’m pretty even-tempered. That prick head-butted me. Made me see red, and I took that hard head and twisted it. A little too much.”
“A fuckery, dat,” Trejean said dismissively. “Car odah so bad, made us gwine adoor.”
“Ruined my ride,” Hiho said.
“My bad,” Dal said. “See, when his neck popped, the guy voided himself, front and back. Left the car smelling like a French pissoir.”
“Worse,” Hiho said.
“We had to dump that set of wheels.”
“That would’ve been a black SUV?” I asked.
“Yess. Black Beauty,” the newly chatty Hiho said. “Noble goddamn machine. A real machine. Not like this … this pale white marshmallow.”
“Hiho’s not a big fan of luxury,” Dal said. “He believes in what my mom used to call a spartan lifestyle.”
“The purple hat had me fooled,” I said.
“You don’t like my hat? Fuck you, Mister GQ.”
“Actually, Hiho,” Dal said, “it’s not a great color for a man of your complexion.”
“Fuck you, too, smartypants.”
Great, I was now in an episode of Project Runway. As amusing as my kidnappers were, I decided the wise thing would be for me to get my Sherlock Holmes on and start observing.
We’d been traveling west on Madison for a while, but Hiho had made a few turns and now we were passing a tall red-brick building with giant O’s filling its display windows. Oprah Country. The next block was completely given over to the talk show queen’s Harpo Studios.
“You being in TV,” Dal said, “I guess you know her, huh?”
“We met once or twice,” I said.
“What’s she like?”
“The meetings were brief. She seemed pretty much like on the show.”
“They say studio haunted by woman they call the Gray Lady,” Hiho said. “Place built on a morgue fulla dead bodies.”
“Shut up, dat,” Trejean said, obviously no fan of ghost stories.
“Wasn’t a morgue, exactly,” Dal said. “Used to be an armory. Back in the early 1900s a big ship capsized on the lake and they stored some of the victims there. I think that’s how it went.”
“Dal got de ed-u-cay-shun,” Trejean said.
Hiho took a few more turns and we were in a Starbucks/hair salon/boutique fashions commercial area. He maneuvered the white Escalade down a narrow drive between a three-story yellow plaster building with a green awning and a white wooden two-story that, according to a shiny brass plate, housed THE LEGAL COUNCIL. I made a mental bet with myself that our destination would not be a building in which anything even remotely “legal” would transpire. And I was right.
Hiho parked near the loading area of the yellow building. He and Trejean remained with the Escalade while Dal walked me toward closed double doors in comradely fashion, his big, moist arm heavy on my shoulders.
A sign beside the doors read: UBORA EMPLOYEES ONLY. PATRONS PLEASE USE THE MAIN ENTRY.
“It’s okay,” Dal said, opening the door. “You’re with me.”
“What’s Ubora?” I asked.
Dal smiled. “The sign out front says it’s an international gallery of fine art. Me, I don’t even care much for comic books.”
We entered a large shipping area. Sawdust and plastic Bubble Wrap formed little and big mounds on the floor beside various basic tools, thin bare-wood crates, and heavy cardboard boxes. With a soft vocal—Norah Jones, I think—playing through the speakers, three sullen males and two sullen females, all of them brown-skinned, young, and wearing green T-shirts under red bib overalls, were taking their own sweet time carefully crating a stack of oil paintings. They gave us the brief glances that our importance to their lives required, then returned to their tasks.
The paintings they wrapped so listlessly were news magazine–size and outlined by identical gold-leaf rococo frames. Each was a portrait of a different rabbi.
“What’s that all about?” I asked.
“The rabbis?” he said with a shrug. “It’s the art world. Go figure.”
After three flights up in the service elevator we arrived at a tastefully appointed reception area with indirect lighting that, combined with the powder-blue walls, gave the room the color of the sky in Dehiwala Town, Sri Lanka, at sundown. As best I could remember.
The couches and chairs were of soft white leather. Sand dunes?
A baby spot cut through the Sri Lanka–ish glow like a giant, well-aimed moonbeam calling attention to a very blond woman seated at the reception desk. She was something to see, perched ramrod stiff on her chair, looking pale and lovely in a soft yellow dress with a scoop neck. She reminded me of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, minus the neurosis. Her only visible flaw was the ugly sliver of black plastic stuck in her right ear.
“Hi, Sugar Tits,” Dal said. “Buzz the boss that I’m here to deliver the male.”
“Is that a new gold tooth, Dal?” she asked. “Oh, no, I see. It’s just leftover lunch.” She pressed a button on the console resting on the desk. After a few beats, her lips moved, and I guessed she was saying something into her earphone, but I couldn’t hear a peep.
She pressed another button, and the door to the left behind her swung open. Dal winked at me and used his left hand in a sweeping gesture to suggest I enter in front of him.
Time to head down the rabbit hole. Whoever was waiting on the other side, I doubted it’d be Elmer Fudd.