Benji and the Market Day Disaster

The Kingston market was too loud, too crowded, and too full of things happening simultaneously for anyone to track everything at once.

This was the thing about markets that most people forgot: they relied on attention. And attention, in a market with forty stalls and three hundred people and somebody’s radio and somebody else’s argument and the particular volume of vendors advertising their goods — attention was the first casualty.

Benji did not have this problem.

He had been moving through the market since six-thirty, which was before most of the stalls were fully set up, before most of the buyers arrived, before the noise reached the level at which tracking anything became difficult for anyone with only two ears. He had catalogued it section by section: the produce rows, the cooked food area, the fabric sellers, the corner where the three women sold fresh-squeezed juice and argued amiably with each other about whose was best.

He had also, by eight o’clock, catalogued a person who did not belong.

Not did not belong in the market — the market was for everyone. Did not belong in the pattern. The pattern of the market had a rhythm: buyers moved, vendors stayed. This person was doing something in between. Moving. Stopping. Appearing near stalls at moments when vendors were busy, hands occupied, back turned. Disappearing before anything was noticed.

Benji had been watching this person for forty minutes.

He needed the children.

The problem was the children were in Cliffside, and this was Kingston.

He sat down near the juice corner and thought.

Omar had not wanted to come to Kingston market. He had said this clearly and with good reasoning: it was far, it was Saturday, he had things to do at home, and the market in Cliffside was perfectly adequate for most requirements.

He had said all of this to his mother, who was going to the Kingston market regardless and who had simply pointed at the car.

Clevie had come because Clevie went everywhere Omar went on Saturdays, and also because he had heard there was a stall that sold the specific type of cornmeal porridge he had been thinking about since Thursday.

Nadine had come because her grandmother was visiting a friend in Kingston and there was a specific herbal remedy available only at a market stall that Miss Gloria used for her knees, and Nadine was the courier.

They arrived separately — Omar and Clevie with Omar’s mother, Nadine by bus with her grandmother — and found each other by the juice corner at half past eight, which was where they usually found each other in unfamiliar places because the juice corner of any market was always visible from the entrance and Nadine had established this policy in Standard Three.

Benji was sitting beside the juice corner when they arrived.

All three of them stopped.

“Kingston,” Clevie said.

“Kingston,” Benji agreed, by doing nothing.

“How,” Omar said.

Benji stood up and looked at them and then walked three steps toward the produce section and stopped.

“He wants us to follow him,” Nadine said.

“We’re in a Kingston market,” Omar said. “My mother is—”

“Is buying fabric,” Nadine said. “I saw her. She’ll be there for an hour. We have time.” She looked at Benji. “Show us.”

The person Benji had been watching was a young man, maybe seventeen, in a yellow t-shirt. He moved well — not running, not suspicious, just a young man in a yellow shirt at the market. He knew how to look purposeful. He knew how to pause in a way that looked like waiting, not watching.

Benji led them to a vantage point: the far end of the produce row, near a pillar, where they could see the full stretch of stalls without being near enough to any single stall to be noticed.

“What are we looking at?” Clevie said.

“Him,” Nadine said. She had already found the yellow shirt. “The one who’s not buying anything.”

Omar watched for ninety seconds.

“He’s circling,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Each time a vendor is busy — someone buying, someone arguing, someone not looking — he goes close.”

“Yes.”

“Has he taken anything yet?”

“I don’t know. Benji found him. If Benji found him, something’s already happened or he knows something is about to.”

“We can’t accuse someone of—” Omar started.

“We’re not going to accuse anyone,” Nadine said. “We’re going to watch.”

They watched.

At the third stall — a woman selling yam and dasheen, currently deep in negotiation with a buyer who was very committed to a lower price — the yellow shirt drifted close, and in the specific motion of someone reaching for a product to look at it, something else happened. Small, fast, precise.

“Money tin,” Clevie said.

“Yes,” Nadine said.

“He took from her money tin.”

“Yes.”

“Under the produce,” Clevie said. “She doesn’t even know.”

Nadine looked at Benji. Benji was already moving.

This was the part that Nadine had come to understand about working with Benji: he never moved toward the suspect. He moved toward witnesses. He moved toward people who had seen things without knowing they’d seen them, and he got them to stop and look at him, and in stopping and looking at him, they remembered.

He went to an old man selling pepper, two stalls down from the yam vendor, and sat directly on the old man’s foot.

The old man looked down.

“Dog,” he said. “Off.”

Benji stayed.

“Dog. Move from there.”

Benji stayed, and looked up at him with amber eyes, and the old man made the sound of a person surrendering, and bent down to move the dog himself. Which meant he was no longer looking at his own stall. Which meant he was looking, from low down, across the produce row.

He straightened up slowly.

He looked at the yellow shirt, who had moved to another stall.

Something changed in the old man’s expression.

He looked at the yam vendor, who was still in her negotiation.

He looked at Benji.

“You see it too?” he said, to the dog, quietly.

Benji looked at the yellow shirt.

The old man, whose name was Mr. Patrick and who had been coming to this market for thirty-seven years and who therefore knew a pattern when he saw one, straightened up fully and put his finger in the air and called, in the particular carrying voice of a market man who wants to be heard without appearing to shout: “Vincent. Vincent. Come, nuh.”

Vincent, who was a market security officer and old friend of Mr. Patrick’s, appeared from the far end of the row.

What happened next took about four minutes and involved Vincent, the yam vendor who had now registered that her tin was light, and two other vendors who, prompted by Mr. Patrick’s attention, suddenly recalled things they had noticed and not flagged because at the time it had seemed like nothing.

The young man in the yellow shirt got to the market entrance before Vincent caught up with him.

He had thirty dollars and a phone charger that didn’t belong to him.

The yam vendor’s name was Miss Winifred, and she was not the type of woman to be quietly grateful. She was the type of woman to be loudly grateful at length, which the three children found somewhat overwhelming and also, in an odd way, exactly right.

“Children catch him!” she announced to the produce row.

“We didn’t exactly—” Omar started.

“Children and a dog!” she said, looking at Benji, who was sitting beside Nadine and being noble about it. “Where you children from?”

“Cliffside,” Clevie said. “Portmore.”

“Portmore people,” she said. “Smart.” She pressed a large yam into each of their hands. “Take. Take.”

They took the yams.

Nadine looked at Benji.

Benji looked at the yams.

“Not for you,” Nadine said.

Benji looked at her with amber eyes.

“You don’t eat yam.”

He continued looking at her.

“Fine,” Nadine said.

Miss Winifred, who had observed this exchange, gave Benji a piece of salted fish from her lunch.

He ate it with great dignity.

Omar’s mother found them at eleven o’clock near the juice corner, carrying yams, with a dog sitting beside them.

She looked at the dog.

She looked at her son.

“Omar Fitzgerald Reid,” she said.

“I can explain the yams,” Omar said. “I cannot explain the dog.”

His mother looked at Benji for a long moment. Benji looked back at her with amber eyes.

She was a teacher, and she knew the expression of a creature who had done something and was confident it was the right thing.

“Is it a good dog?” she said.

“The best,” Nadine said.

Omar’s mother looked at the dog one more time, then at the yams, then at the juice vendor. “Get me a cup of June plum juice,” she said. “And someone tell me what happened.”

They told her what happened.

She listened to the whole thing, holding her June plum juice, and when they were done she said nothing for a moment.

Then she said: “The dog planned it.”

“Yes,” Nadine said.

“The dog — this dog — went to the old man specifically.”

“Yes.”

She looked at Benji. Benji looked at her with the expression of a dog who had done an ordinary thing and did not require an extended conversation about it.

“Get in the car,” she said. “All of you. The dog too.”

Benji was returned to Cliffside at noon.

He got out of the car, walked into the lane between the three houses, and lay down in his usual spot in the sun. As if he had been there all morning.

As if Kingston had not happened.

Omar watched him from the gate.

“He knew,” he said to Clevie. “He knew we were going to be at that market. So he went ahead.”

“He always goes ahead,” Clevie said.

“How does he know where we’re going to be?”

Clevie thought about this. “Maybe he doesn’t know where we’re going to be,” he said. “Maybe he goes where the trouble is and we’re always there too.”

Omar looked at the dog.

He opened his notebook.

He wrote: Theory: the trouble finds Benji. Benji finds us. We are somehow always in the same place as the trouble. Whether this is a coincidence or something else, I do not know. Clevie thinks it’s something else. I am keeping an open mind.

He read it back.

He wrote one more thing: Benji got a piece of salted fish today. He was correct to want it.