HebrewPunk, page 7
“Thanks.” I accepted the steaming mug of coffee and sipped the hot liquid.
“You want a pastrami and gherkin on rye with it?”
I smiled and lit a cigarette. “You know I do,” I said.
“Sure thing, boss.”
For the next ten minutes we didn’t talk; I drank the coffee and settled down to enjoy Motty’s creation. When I was done, I lit another cigarette and sat there, enjoying the momentary peace.
“Did Manning say what he wanted?”
Motty shook his head. “Said he needed to see you. Urgent like. Said you know where to find him.”
I did. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to.
As I sat in the rare sunshine, a half-smoked cigarette in my hand and a new mug of coffee on the counter beside me, I found myself going back to the night on the twenty-seventh of November and the Victory Ball, when lights were once again allowed to dispel London’s after-hours darkness.
Billie wore a frock designed by one of her cohorts, Reggie De Vaulle: she looked stunning in it, like a butterfly awakened from a cocoon all ready to fly and dazzle. In the early evening she appeared in Freedom of the Seas. I was in the audience that night, and when the curtain fell I had felt a premonition, a fear. The curtain was about to permanently close on Billie Carleton.
The Victory Ball glittered with the ladies’ jewels; the Brigade of Guards played Rule Britannia. Then came the dancing.
It was a night that lasted forever. The dancing didn’t stop and neither did the trips to the lavatories, where men and women separately took cocaine to fuel their dancing. Billie had her gold box with her, and by the end of the night it was nearly empty. I danced with her once, and then she disappeared into the crowd.
It was a night that women ruled supreme. A night to welcome in a new era and lay to rest the old. Too many men had been lost on the battlefields of the Great War, and the change this had wrought was profound and, for many, unsettling. Billie danced all night, and the women of London danced all around her.
“Boss?” Motty’s voice shook the memories away like drops of falling water. “I don’t know what Manning was after, but there is something you should know.”
I picked up the cigarette but it had run too low to smoke. I let it drop and helped myself to another. “What is it?”
Motty scratched his dark beard. He looked at me carefully. “Last night the boys were down by the Isle of Dogs. Helping remove a late night shipment, if you know what I mean.” He smiled to himself. “They were nearly finished when they heard a dog barking at the river, loud enough to raise the dead.” His smile vanished. “Or so they thought. You and I both know it takes more than a bark to…”
“Yes.”
“They went over to check what the noise was about. When they came close enough, they saw it. It was a corpse.”
I sipped the coffee. Corpses were not an unknown cargo on the Thames. They came floating up, bloated with gas, and lodged themselves in the reeds on the bank amidst the rest of the rubbish thrown into the river. For a corpse to remain unseen, it would need to be weighed down; letting it rise from the depths meant one of two things. Either the killer or killers were amateur, or they wanted the corpse to be found, as a message or a warning or both.
“Go on.”
“It was a black man,” Motty said. “His body was covered in faint blue tattoos from head to foot. Serpents and dragons and lizards; the boys said they seemed to move of their own accord, the lines glowing faintly in the moonlight.” He sighed and rubbed his chin. “Boys.”
I tapped the ash from my cigarette and waited. I had long ago found that Motty was not one to be hurried along. “Go on.”
He lowered his voice. “It was a sangoma, Tzaddik. A houngan. Alfy Benjamin recognised him, even though the face of the corpse was frozen like a mask carved with fear. Alfy said he looked like he screamed for a long time; he said he looked as if, even in death, he was still screaming.”
“You say Alfy recognised him?” I said. Possibilities were resolving themselves in my head, worrying me. “Where did he come across a houngan?”
Motty’s answer was the one I was expecting. “In prison,” he said. “Two, three years back. This guy was doing life with hard labour for some muti that went very wrong. Three people died, and a baby.”
“I remember.” There were rumours of a cover-up, that it was someone at Cabinet level who ordered the botched ritual. The houngan, as far as I could remember, remained quiet on that front. “What did the boys do?”
Motty shrugged. “What could they do? They cleared out as fast as they could. But I don’t like it, Tzaddik. He was a powerful sangoma, that one was. Alfy, he said he saw him draw a window once on the wall of his cell. Said the window came alive, that there were things on the other side of that window he never wanted to see as long as he lived. Someone like that… Someone like that doesn’t turn up floating in the river, Tzaddik. Not unless…” He left the thought unspoken.
Motty had given me a lot to think about. It seemed the story Chang fed me was at least partially true, and that meant I had to find Manning and get the truth out of him in turn. What worried me, though, was that the houngan was sent down the river as a warning: as a message, addressed to me. The Feng-Huang was after me. I just hoped he would stop skulking in the fog long enough for me to kill him.
“Thanks Motty,” I said. “You and the boys try and keep out of this, all right? Keep out of trouble for a few days.”
Motty winked at me across the counter. “We’ll keep our noses clean,” he said, mimicking putting snow to his nose and snorting it. “Don’t you worry, Tzaddik.”
I shook my head and walked out, into the dregs of the sunshine. Shadows were gathering over the old stone buildings and the alleyways, and I wondered if it would ever be possible to be rid of them. London was such a city, in which light and shade were inexorably bound. I feared the darkness that was circling around me, stalking me in the shape of the Feng-Huang. And I feared the thought of Billie, a ghost forced to return to the scene of her death. The dead should be left alone, should be left to death. To force them into a semblance, a mockery, of life, that was a crime, and for that violation I knew I would have to act.
* * *
The Montmarte Café was dark and smelled of vinegar and smoke. I came up to the counter and greeted Zenovia Iassonides, patron of the Soho Church Street establishment and Manning’s unofficial business partner.
In the corner, two chorus girls were going over a script while blowing enough snow into their nostrils to kill an elephant. Cocainomaniacs, the papers called them, and they came to the café for Zenovia’s true trade, not for her cooking.
She greeted me with a closed face. Zenovia was a hard woman to read.
“I’m looking for Manning,” I said.
She snorted, and brushed a strand of greying hair from her temple. “Who isn’t?”
I ignored that. “Is he here?”
Her hand took in the small, dank room and its shabby occupants. “Do you see him anywhere?”
I wasn’t in the mood for games. “He wanted me to get in touch with him, and this is where he said he’d be.” I paused, then added, “Please don’t answer that with a question.”
She unexpectedly laughed. “It’s good to see you, Tzaddik. Where have you been hiding?”
“In broad daylight,” I said, and she smiled and nodded. “Best place to hide, Tzaddik. Best place to hide.”
I thought of Manning’s story, of Billie Carleton’s ghost, and of the Feng-Huang walking the streets of London. It was not I who was hiding but Manning, and in his place, I thought, wouldn’t I be hiding too?
“Come with me.” She opened the latch on the counter and I came through. She took me to a small door underneath a wooden staircase that looked riddled with worms. She pushed the door open and pointed me in.
“Watch your step on the stairs,” she said. “There isn’t much light down there.”
I thanked her and stepped through, and she closed the door behind me and left me in darkness.
The steps were stone, and old. I could feel a chill coming off them and taste moisture on my tongue. It was damp and humid and yet increasingly cold as I descended.
At the bottom of the stairs I stopped and let my eyes adjust to the scant lighting. There was a table there, covered in a grimy red cloth, with a single candle on it. There was a small cabinet, with nothing but a handgun on it, and a narrow bed.
“Edgar…” I said.
The body on the bed jerked up, a hand grabbing the gun from the cabinet and pointing it at me.
“It’s me.”
He looked at me with wild, unseeing eyes before some sort of sanity returned and he lowered the gun. “Won’t do much good against you anyway,” he said in an almost inaudible voice.
“No,” I agreed. “And it won’t do you much good against a loa, either.”
His head snapped up. “What are you talking about?”
“Put the gun away,” I said. He hesitated, then put it back on the cabinet.
“Good.” I scanned the small subterranean room. “Do you have any opium down here? Or some alcohol?”
He grunted and reached for a drawer in the cabinet, pulling out a bottle of red wine and handing it to me.
I uncorked it and found two dirty mugs under the bed, which, after some thought, I poured the wine into.
“Drink this,” I said. “I need you calm.” I waited as he gulped down the red liquid. “You look like shit.”
Some of Manning’s old fire came back to him when he answered.
“Fuck you.”
“Ah.” I lit a cigarette and offered it to him, lighting another for myself. I hoped the smell of smoke would help mask the mouldy, decaying atmosphere of the cellar, but in the event I can’t say the effort was overly successful.
“Now,” I said. “Tell me the truth. Tell me about the loa.”
I looked at him and waited. His face changed, anger receding as a kind of dead man’s hope crept into his eyes. Yet the overwhelming emotion on his face was fear.
“Tell me about the loa.”
I did not want to use the word of my people, mal’ach. Angel. To do so would be to perpetuate a Christianised image of the word: of saintly, holy beings, granting peace and tranquillity and the touch of God. Those angels stared down at people from Church windows and from the pages of thousands of religious tracts, and I had no doubt it would have been a better, more just world if it were true.
“How much do you know?”
My patience was gone. It was not my job to play nursemaid to a man who had put me in danger, and it had been a long, long day besides. My fist hit his face and sent him reeling back, the cigarette dropping from his lips onto the floor. I grabbed him by the throat, lifting him up in the air and pinning him against the wall.
I watched as his feet tried to find purchase and failed.
“Don’t fuck me about,” I said. Each word was like a jagged knife I wanted to run across his neck. “You fucked up, Eddie. You fucked up big time. Now tell me what I need to know or you are going to find your skeleton in this cellar for the next hundred years with nothing but Billie Carleton’s ghost for company. Do you understand?”
He was turning blue, but still he tried to nod.
“Good.”
I opened my fingers, let him drop onto the bed, where he lay holding his throat and coughing. He tried to reach for the wine, but I knocked it out of his hand. The wine spilled like a pool of blood on the decaying mattress.
“Talk.”
His words when they came were barely more than a whisper. “Prison was hard. They treated us like dogs. Worse, because the English value their dogs. They treated us like cattle, like we were nothing more than animals destined for the meat grinder. The wardens beat us, and at night the screams of the weaker prisoners could be heard echoing throughout the prison. We didn’t treat each other any better.”
He coughed and this time I poured him some wine. He drank it quickly and continued. “There was one prisoner nobody else dared treat this way. Not the wardens, not the prisoners. His name was Beauregard. Saturday Beauregard.” Manning drew a shape in the air with his hands. “He was a big, mean badman. A bull bucka.” He saw my expression. “Someone who butts heads with a bull, Tzaddik. A bully, and that’s exactly what Saturday Beauregard was. That, and a houngan, a horse for Baron Samedi. I saw him when he was possessed, and you knew then that the only thing keeping him in prison was that he liked it. He liked it! He enjoyed ruling the prisoners and the wardens. He had a good life, like a king. And he liked breaking the weaker men most of all. The loudest screams always came from his cell.” Manning shivered when he spoke, and his eyes looked haunted by memories. I offered him a cigarette, and he took it.
“Anyway, I got on with him all right. There were few enough black men in that prison, and Saturday was our boss. He had strange powers, but he was still a man. He liked talking, and he liked to hear stories, too. Also, he was a heroin addict. I think that was one reason he didn’t escape. He needed a regular supply, and once he had the drug he didn’t care much for anything. I still had my contacts, of course—I was only sent down for eighteen months—and so I ended up being his main supplier.”
I listened. A strange feeling was forming again at the back of my head as if we were being watched. I got up and checked the stairs, but we were alone. I sat back down and let Manning continue.
“One night I slept badly. I dreamed, and in the dream I saw Billie, not dead but alive, walking toward me across a stormy sea. She seemed to walk on the waves, her hands reaching out to me, but when she finally came close enough to touch, her hands were as cold as marble and her hug was ice. I woke up then, and couldn’t return to sleep. In the morning, Saturday picked up on it, and I was forced to tell him about the dream, and about Billie.”
The feeling in the back of my head intensified. I stood up but again there was nothing. The cellar was silent save for Manning’s voice.
“He knew who she was, and he enjoyed my discomfort. I think that’s when he had his idea, though he only approached me several weeks later. When he found me he was shaking. He needed more heroin, and he had a proposition for me.” There was something in Manning’s face that made me think of an old clock, badly broken. I gave him another cigarette, and he continued.
“He said he could bring her back from the dead. That he had the power to negotiate with the Baron. In exchange, I would supply him with all the heroin I could get hold of, for free. I thought he was mad.
“You might not know what it’s like when you’re incarcerated, though I suspect that you do. For me, trapped in that prison, racked with dreams and held captive by a constant, dull fear, the thought was soon too much to bear. All I could think of was Billie, Billie’s warmth against mine, Billie’s laugh that was like a spring garden, Billie’s humour, Billie’s touch…
“After a week of that, I went back to Saturday, and I said yes.”
I didn’t hear any more. When the last word left his lips a cold, damp wind blew through the basement and the candles were extinguished. I heard the door at the top of the stairs move on its hinges as if caught in a storm, beating out a rhythm as it banged against the frame.
Without conscious thought I pushed Manning down, reached for his discarded gun, and in one move turned around and shot the figure standing at the bottom of the stairs.
* * *
He fell with a grunt of pain.
Human, then, and not the dark shape with the burning green eyes that I had half expected to be there.
More shapes moving on the stairs.
The gun rang out, once, twice, and two of them fell, but more kept coming in.
“Is there any way out of here?” I shouted to Manning.
One of the intruders reached the bottom and attacked. I felt a knife cut through my clothes and penetrate my skin. I twisted, broke the man’s wrist, and plunged the knife into his eye.
More, jumping down from the staircase. There was a tattoo on the man’s wrist, the one I had just killed.
A sword was thrust at my head. I ducked, kicked out at the attacker’s face, and at his knees. He dropped with a scream, and I wrenched the sword out of his hand, using it to inflict wounds on two more of the attackers as they jumped down.
Then I was choking. Fingers were wrapped around my throat from behind, thumbs pressing into my windpipe. My elbow connected with the attacker’s chest but didn’t remove the pressure. I struggled, then found the pressure had lifted, and I could breathe again. Turning around, I saw my attacker on the floor, a bloodied gash in his head.
Above him stood Manning, and he was grinning.
“There’s a way out through the sewers,” he said. “If you could hold them for just a minute…”
He pulled the bed away from the wall. I turned back and into the whirling blade of another of the assassins. I broke his nose and watched him collapse. It was becoming difficult to move with all the bodies around, and more and more of the silent assassins were coming in through the door.
“Come on!”
Manning removed the bed; below it was a rug and a wooden box, which he opened. He pushed the rug with his foot, revealing a trapdoor. I ran towards him in a crouch.
“Get down there, I’ll follow you,” he said. There was a stick of dynamite in his one hand, a lighter in the other. He must have had them hidden in the box.
Edgar Manning, always prepared.
I jumped down the hole.
* * *
An explosion of heat above me and Manning dropped like a lead balloon, knocking into me. I fell into rancid water; a rat scuttled by, startled by the commotion.
It was a big rat.
“Who the fuck were those people?” Manning said as he got up. He looked dazed, but the grin on his face showed that, all of a sudden, he was enjoying himself.
I told him about the tattoo I’d seen. Manning let out a whistle. We were moving as fast we could through the sewers: the smell of excrement and waste was overpowering, and dirty water kept dripping on our heads and clothes from the metal ceiling of the pipe we were in. “Tongs? I didn’t expect that.”
