The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

More important, really.

And funny, now that he thought about it--this one also involved children.

*

"Yeah?" Jax said into his cell phone.

"Ralph."

"S'up, dog?" Jax wondered if the skinny little pharaoh was leaning against something at the moment. "You get the word from our friend?" Meaning the character reference DeLisle Marshall.

"Yeah."

"And the Graffiti King's cool?" Jax asked.

"Yeah."

"Good. So where are we on all this?"

"Okay, I found what you want, man. It's--"

"Don't say anything." Cell phones were the devil's own invention when it came to incriminating evidence. He gave the man an intersection on 116th Street. "Ten minutes."

Jax disconnected and started up the street, as two ladies in their long overcoats, wearing elaborate church hats and clutching well-worn Bibles, detoured out of his way. He ignored their uneasy looks.

Smoking, walking steady with his gunshot-not-gangsta limp, Jax inhaled the air, high on being home. Harlem . . . looking around him at stores, restaurants and street vendors. You could buy anything here: West African woven cloth--kente and Malinke--and Egyptian ankhs, Bolga baskets, masks and banners and framed pictures of silhouetted men and women on African National Congress black, green and yellow. Posters too: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tina, Tupac, Beyonce, Chris Rock, Shaq . . . . And dozens of pictures of Jam Master Jay, the brilliant and generous vinyl-spinning rapper with Run-D.M.C., gunned down by some asshole in his Queens recording studio a few years back.

Jax was hit left and right by memories. He glanced at another corner. Well, lookit that. Now a fast food place, it had been the site of Jax's first crime, committed when he was fifteen--the crime that had launched him on the path to becoming righteously notorious. Because what he racked wasn't liquor or cigarettes or guns or cash, but a case of phat Krylon from a hardware store. Which he went on to use up over the next twenty-four hours, compounding the larceny with trespass and criminal property damage by spray-painting the graffitied bubble letters Jax 157 throughout Manhattan and the Bronx.

Over the next few years Jax bombed that tag of his on thousands of surfaces: overpasses, bridges, viaducts, walls, billboards, stores, city buses, private buses, office buildings--he tagged Rockefeller Center, right beside that gold statue, before getting tackled by two massive security bulls, who laid into him hard with Mace and

nightsticks.

If young Alonzo Jackson found himself with five minutes of privacy and a flat surface, Jax 157 appeared.

Struggling to get through high school, the son of divorced parents, bored to death with normal jobs, steady in trouble, he found comfort as a writer (graffiti guerrillas were "writers," not "artists"--what Keith Haring, the Soho galleries and claimer ad agencies told everybody). He ran with some local Blood posses for a time, but he changed his mind one day when he was hanging with his set on 140th, and the Trey-Sevens drove by, and pop, pop, pop, Jimmy Stone, standing right next to him, went down with two holes in the temple, dead 'fore he hit the ground. All on account of a small bag of rock, or on account of no reason at all.

Fuck that. Jax went out on his own. Less money. But a hell of a lot safer (despite spraying his tag on places like the Verrazano Bridge and a moving A train car--which was one phat story that even brothers in prison had heard of).

Alonzo Jackson, unofficially but permanently renamed Jax, dove into his craft. He started out simply bombing his tag throughout the city. But, he learned early that if that's all you do, even if you lay it in every borough of the city, you're nothing but a lame "toy," and graffiti kings wouldn't give you the time of day.

So, skipping school, working in fast food restaurants during the day to pay for paint, or racking what he could steal, Jax moved on to throw-ups--tags written fast but a lot bigger than bombing. He became a master of the top-to-bottom: doing the entire vertical height of a subway car. The A train, supposedly the longest route through town, was his personal favorite. Thousands of visitors would travel from Kennedy Airport into the city on a train that didn't say Welcome to the Big Apple; it offered the mysterious message: Jax 157.

By the time Jax was twenty-one he'd done two total end-to-ends--covering the entire side of a subway car with his graffiti--and had come close to doing a whole train, every graffiti king's dream. He did his share of 'pieces too. Jax had tried to describe what a graffiti masterpiece was. But all he could come up with was that a 'piece was something more. Something breathtaking. A work that a cluckhead crack addict sitting in a gutter and a Wall Street trader on New Jersey Transit could both look at and think, Man, that is so fucking cool.

Those were the days, Jax reflected. He was a graffiti king, in the middle of the most powerful black cultural movement since the Harlem Renaissance: hip-hop.

Sure, the Renaissance must've been def. But to Jax it was a smart person's thing. It came from the head. Hip-hop burst from the soul and from the heart. It wasn't born in colleges and writer's lofts, it came right from the fucking streets, from the angry and striving and despairing kids who had impossibly hard lives and broken homes, who walked on sidewalks littered with cookie vials discarded by the crackheads and dotted with brown, dried blood. It was the raw shout from people who had to shout to be heard . . . . Hip-hop's four legs delivered everything: music in DJ'ing, poetry in MC rapping, dance in the b-boy's breakdancing and art in Jax's own contribution, graffiti.

In fact, here on 116th Street, he paused and looked at the place where the Woolworth's five-and-dime had stood. The store hadn't survived the chaos after the famous blackout of 1977 but what had sprouted in its place was a righteous miracle, the number-one hip-hop club in the nation, Harlem World. Three floors of every kind of music you could imagine, radical, addictive, electrifying. B-boys spinning like tops, writhing like stormy waves. DJs spinning vinyl for the packed dance floors, and MCs making love to their microphones and filling the room with their raw, don't-fuck-with-me poems, pounding in time to the rhythm of a real heart. Harlem World was where the throw-downs started, the battles of the rappers. Jax had been lucky enough to see what was considered the most famous of all time: the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Five . . . .

Harlem World was long gone, of course. Also gone--scrubbed or worn away or painted over--were the thousands of Jax's tags and 'pieces, along with those by the other graffiti legends of the early hip-hop era, Julio and Kool and Taki. The kings of graffiti.

Oh, there were those lamenting the demise of hip-hop, which had become BET, multimillionaire rappers in chrome Humvees, Bad Boys II, big business, suburban white kids, iPods and MP3 downloads and satellite radio. It was . . . well, case in point: Jax was watching a double-decker tour bus ease to the curb nearby. On the side was the sign Rap/Hip-Hop Tours. See the Real Harlem. The passengers were a mix of black and white and Asian tourists. He heard snatches of the driver's rehearsed spiel and the promise that they'd soon be stopping for lunch at an "authentic soul food" restaurant.

But Jax didn't agree with the claimers bitching that the old days were gone. The heart of Uptown remained pure. Nothing could ever touch it. Take the Cotton Club, he reflected, that 1920s institution of jazz and swing and stride piano. Everybody thought it was the real Harlem, right? How many people knew that it was for white-only audiences (even the famed Harlem resident W. C. Handy, one of the greatest American composers of all time, was turned away at the door, while his own music was playing inside).

Well, guess what? The Cotton Club was fucking gone. Harlem wasn't. And it never would be. The Renaissance was done and hip-hop had changed. But percolating right now in the streets around him was some brand-new movement. Jax wondered what exactly this one would be. And if he'd even be around to see it--if he didn't handle this thing with Geneva Settle right he'd be dead or back in prison within twenty-four hours.