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CAHOKIA

JAZZ

FRANCIS SPUFFORD

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In respectful memory of Professor Kroeber’s daughter

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Contents

1. Title Page

2. Dedication

3. Map of the City of Cahokia

4. Epigraph

5. MONDAY

6. TUESDAY

7. WEDNESDAY

8. THURSDAY

9. FRIDAY

10. SATURDAY

11. The House of Hashi Family Tree

12. Notes and Acknowledgements

13. Photo Credits

14. About the Author

15. By the Same Author

16. Copyright

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Three words you must bring with you when you arrive in Cahokia. The rest can wait, but these name the people. A takouma – is a person native to the continent. A taklousa – is a person of African ancestry. A takata – is a person of European extraction. Every citizen you meet will use these words, so you must too!

From ANOPA PHRASES FOR YOUR BUSINESS TRIP!
issued by the Better Business Bureau of Cahokia

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1

MONDAY

2

When the men with the brands approached me, I said to myself the words of the Epistle of John, ‘Whoever fears has not reached perfection in love’. But indeed I did fear, to my shame, remembering the long death of Fr Baltasar the night before and how his body more resembled a charred log than anything human, before his soul was suffered to depart it. But such is the grace of God towards even those most unworthy of it that He reached out to me in the very moment of my cowardice, and showed me what I must do. For, observing how those around me gazed at me solemnly, as if about to receive something from me, my mind was opened, and I saw that the cruel death they purposed to inflict was perceived by them to be a kind of transferring of virtue, from the victim to the whole people assembled. Words were given me, and I said in a loud voice: ‘How much greater a gift was it, when the son of the Great Sun of Heaven himself consented to die a slow and anguished death, to make good all the lacks of man, and to permit men to share in his greatness, and his pity, and his power, so that all they who live and who govern in his name may receive a sign of favour, in which to thrive, and to conquer?’ And at this, the prince of the city waved back the men with the brands, and said: ‘We will hear this tale. Speak more to us concerning these things.’

Sebastian Villanova SJ to the Father Provincial of the Mexican Province, 1605

(Jesuit Relations vol. XXVII, North American Missions III: Cahokia)

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1

With the building dark beneath it, the skylight on the roof of the Land Trust was a pyramid of pure black. Down the smooth black of the glass, something sticky had run, black on black, all the way down into the crust of soft spring snow at Barrow’s feet, where it puddled in sunken loops and pools like molasses. On top, a contorted mass was somehow pinned or perched. But the moon was going down on the far side of the Mound, and dawn was an hour and more away. The whole scene on the roof was a clot of shadows, and the wind was full of wet flakes. Along the way, at the small obstacle of a couple of cops on a roof, the snow caked Barrow’s coat and got in his eyes, plastered Drummond’s back where he’d turned it as a windbreak. Drummond was trying for a flame from his lighter, but even with his hat shielding the flint every spark was instantly quenched.

‘Joe, can you go git the patrolman’s flashlight?’

‘Sure, Phin. Hold on.’

Barrow stepped carefully back towards the little hutch holding the door to the stairs. There was already a mess underfoot. As he expected, the uniform who’d called them in, from the phone down in the lobby, was waiting only a few steps down, on the narrow flight winding round the top of the elevator shaft. Just behind him was the night janitor who’d found the door unlocked originally. She’d gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creek-side to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you’d call avid. The janitor a heavyset taklousa in her forties, had her mouth clamped shut to hold in shock or nausea. The patroller, only twenty or so, was doing the classic takouma stone face – the set pose for male strength when something bad happened. He’d been out to the skylight too. Not rubberneckers, not spectators. Yet 4there they still were, keeping close; commanded somehow by the presence of death, compelled to wait attendance where it had visited. It took death repeated over and over, in Barrow’s experience, death repeated in quantities too great for meaning, to wear that solemnity away. It took a war. Soldiers could learn to just walk on by in the presence of death, not many other people.

‘Gimme your flashlight, tastanagi.’

‘Yessir.’

‘Just “Detective”.’

‘Yes, Detective. Sorry, Detective.’

Perhaps not even twenty, thought Barrow.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘had the snow started when you went out?’

‘Not really. Just a few flakes, maybe?’

‘But nothing on the ground.’ ‘No.’

‘Uh-huh.’ So, nothing to be learned from footprints; no reason to worry about churning the snow. He turned.

‘Officer?’ said the janitor. ‘I need to go soon. My babies will be waking up, and my man’s on the early shift.’

‘You must wait in case there are questions!’ the patroller said to her.

‘Yeah, stay put,’ said Barrow.

He went back out, jiggling the flashlight. It made a tinny rattling sound, from a loose contact. For a moment, the scene remained as it had been, whirling and blind, the snow that had congregated wormily in the dim blue streetlamps down on Creekside Drive blowing up and over the three sister-towers of Water and Land and Power, and spattering the looming bulk of the Mound behind them, and weaving away in lines of flickering grey over the dark immensity of the Plaza beyond. Fifty-seven varieties of dark. Then the switch caught. In the beam, the flakes turned to pearly swimmers. And what had been black on black leapt out into scarlet.5

‘Whoa,’ said Drummond. ‘Messy.’

‘Yep,’ said Barrow. ‘Phin, you’re standing in it.’

‘Shit,’ said Drummond, backing, and crouching to swipe the porridge of blood and snow off his black oxfords.

The huddled object on the skylight still didn’t make complete sense. A body, of course, and one which had bled out in gouts down the glass; oozed in the other ways death inflicted, judging by the smell reaching Barrow’s nose through the chill of the snow and the city’s usual bouquet of coal smoke and river. But though at one end it terminated in a pair of ordinary man’s legs, dressed in the pants of a dark blue suit, at the other it seemed to have a bundle rather than a head, and from the wreck of the chest between, where blood seemed to have exploded more than just run, rose a shape like a pair of fans, or fish’s fins. Rope ran a couple of times round, hog-tying the corpse to the summit of the glass, and forcing the violated chest up.

Barrow squinted, and the scene resolved itself. The bundle at the head end was the dead man’s clothes, shirt and jacket and coat pulled inside out over his face. The peculiar fans were his ribs, cracked open and somehow pulled wide. Since he was the one holding the light, Barrow stepped closer and shone the beam in, on a cavity full of red ruin and streaked bone, with the tangle of liver and guts visible at one extremity, and a frosting of granular pink, from the snow. The best you could say for the view was that it was tidier than the effect of a shell burst. But there was less in the hole than there should have been: this was obvious. It was a cavity reamed out, a space from which something had been torn.

‘Any more, uh, pieces, rounda side you’re on?’ Barrow said.

‘Pass the light,’ said Drummond, and paced a circuit, lighting up each black blob in the slush till one of them proved more solid, a slick red-brown lump protruding ragged tubes. ‘Well. Seems like this gentleman done mislaid his equipment for Valentine’s Day.’

‘Cold, Phin.’6

‘I’m on a roof, in the snow, lookin’ at an e-visserated corpse. At 4 a.m., dammit. When I could be—’

‘Not this again.’

‘—when I could be in Cal-i-forn-i-ay. In the soft and velvet night. Maybe out under those big ol’ stars. In a hammock.’

‘Just shut up.’

‘In my grove of orange trees …’

‘You ain’t got a grove of orange trees.’

‘No, but I will.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Man’s gotta have a dream, Joe. Where’s yours?’

‘Back in my bed. I left it there when I got up, do this job. This job you got me signed up for, case you don’t remember. So quit belly-aching.’

‘Who’s belly-aching? I’m trying to inject a little ro-mance, here, is all, brother. But okay, okay.’

Drummond found his flask and poured a small dash of corn liquor over the cleanest-looking bit of skin at the side of the shattered chest. The blood streaked away, leaving a bare spot of flesh – scrawny, middle-aged, most definitely in its chicken-neck paleness takata – to which he applied a forefinger, making a little vaudeville business of drawing up his sleeve first.

‘Well?’

‘Not quite stone cold, but getting on.’

‘Few hours, then.’

‘Yeah. Midnight, one o’clock maybe. Though it’s a cold night.’

‘Lucky for us,’ said Barrow.

‘Whaddaya mean?’

‘I mean think how this’d smell in August.’

‘True. True. And that is why the good Lord created see-gars, to block the noses of the police. But I cain’t light up in this, dammit,’ said Drummond, waving a hand in the flying flakes.7

Normally, it was true, he would have had a stogie wedged in his wide mouth by now, talking nineteen to the dozen around it and sending up blue smoke in puffs and swathes like a curtain between him and whatever his hands were doing. Smoke and nonsense as the two of them rolled over the body of a drunk in an alley hit a little too hard when someone stole his wallet. Smoke and nonsense as they heaved the deadweight from a bathtub, in an apartment buzzing with flies where a wife-beating had tipped into homicide. Smoke and nonsense when they fished up a citizen from the brown water after a fight on a riverboat. Or, increasingly, when they went out with the meat-wagon to a waste lot, to retrieve the bullet-chewed remains of a moonshiner, curious about causes and culprits or absolutely not, depending on what arrangement Drummond had made just then with the opposing sides in the liquor war. Barrow left that stuff to him. He took the money and preferred not to know. Traditionally, it was Benny Shokcha’s takouma mob that had the department in its pocket, but the takata were getting themselves organised at scale, with shipments coming in now from the Illinois state line, and by freight car all the way from Canada. All standard business for the Murder Squad; and all of it Drummond would face with a smokescreen of smoke and a smokescreen of words, the set of his features as he gripped the butt making him look comically startled. He had a funny-pages face anyway, lips and eyes and nose drawn on a little too big and simple for his skinny white-trash head, and a cowlick of straw-coloured hair flopping on his forehead. But no cigar now, and whatever this rooftop gutting turned out to be, it was not a standard death.

‘This is real … elaborate,’ said Barrow. ‘I mean, doing someone like this? Doing it up here?’

Drummond shrugged. ‘Better see who it is. The why’s usually in the who.’

‘Yeah.’8

Drummond held out the flashlight. ‘Your turn, brother,’ he said.

Barrow peeled back the layers of cloth around the corpse’s head, sodden with blood and now stiffening. A white (formerly white) office shirt, not expensive, darned here and there; a dark blue suit coat, also cheap, also shiny with wear; last an overcoat in dark wool, the lining discoloured cotton not silk, one of the buttons not quite matching. Not a bum’s wardrobe, but an outfit for respectability kept up on a tight budget. A clerk, not a tycoon. And when he pulled up the last heavy layer, that seemed to be who Barrow was looking at, though it took a while to get to an impression of what the living face had been, from the mask of gore that struck him first. The throat had been cut, deeply, gapingly, in a crescent-shaped gash from which all the life must surely have gushed out before the killer set to work on the man’s chest. It made it hard to attend to the small, weak, upside-down middle-aged chin, just as the streams of blood that had run into the astonished mouth, and coated its fixed shriek, made it hard to notice the small teeth with many fillings and gaps, and the rivulets pouring down the face to pool in the eye-sockets disguised the careful shave, the anxious little eyes, the lines of fretfulness around them. Dead, the face was lurid and terrible; alive, it must have been mild, petulant, inoffensive, one it was hard to imagine someone taking enough exception to, to think its owner should be spectacularly butchered on a roof.

The way the body was draped, with the head tipped back further than it had ever done in life thanks to the slashed throat, kept the dead man’s thinning hair and forehead more or less right underneath him, out of the blood flow, and it wasn’t until Barrow crouched and played the flashlight beam down there that he found there was a word smeared on the forehead, written by the looks of it with a fingertip dipped in the mess above. Capitals. B-something.

‘Phin, come look. Can you make that out?’

‘What?’9

‘There. On his head.’

Drummond squatted next to him, hat pushed back for a better view. Barrow watched his comical blue eyes widen.

‘I can get B–A–S – something,’ Barrow said. ‘Maybe, “Basil” – like the name?’

‘No,’ said Drummond. ‘Now, this is gonna be complicated; you’ll see if it isn’t. This is gonna be a can of trouble opening up right here. That’s not an English word, that’s Anopa. Bashli, is what it says.’

‘And what’s that mean?’ Drummond was Barrow’s guide to the speech of the city. He’d only been there six months longer, but he’d grown up down to the south-west, in the Ozarks, in the white end of the great human mixture of the central states, and therefore in the long shadow of Cahokia. Words from Anopa had been in the air, along with stray phrases of Louisiana French, railroad slang in Navajo from the Dinetah and horsebreakers’ terms in Comanche. It wasn’t what you’d call a complete vocabulary, but two years on the Murder Squad had filled it out some: it was enough to be a serviceable help, working streets where half the people talked it at least some of the time.

‘It means, like, “hit”. Or prob’ly, right here, “cut”. Or just “knife”, even. It’s all one word. Complicated thing is, it’s also what the Warriors like to paint on walls. Bashli! That’s their big slogan.’

‘“Cut”?’

‘Like, ah, cut the cord, cut the connection? Cut the city back out of the US, get it independent again. Takouma craziness.’

‘But they write it on walls, not on bodies.’

‘Till now,’ said Drummond, levering himself back to his feet. As he did so, his head swayed into the full beam of the flashlight, and Barrow saw that the smooth yellow of his hair had gone matted, almost crunchy at the front. ‘This is gonna stir things right up, you see if it doesn’t. Crazy times a-coming, my friend.’10

‘Phin, though? I think you musta wiped your hands in your hair? You’ve gotten the blood all up in there.’

‘Goddammit!’ cried Drummond, leaping away and groping at his head with more disgust than Barrow would have expected, from a vet, from a joker in the face of death. Funny what got to people. Drummond gazed wildly around the roof, as if looking for something to wipe himself on. But the snow was only making slush, as fast as it fell.

‘Seems like we’re gonna need a picture of this before we move him,’ said Barrow. ‘Why don’t you go down, call the precinct, say we want a photographer, then find somewhere to wash up? There’s gotta be bathrooms.’

‘Yeah. Yeah. Okay,’ said Drummond, and made hastily for the door, holding his hands out in front of him and shaking them in the air.

Still the search of the corpse’s pockets to do. If this had been a body in an alley, the billfold would have gone with whoever did the deed. If it had been a three-day-old stiff from the river, hauled up waterlogged and swollen, the fingers of the current might well have picked through the openings of the suit as it had through mouth and ears and eyes, and sent papers, coins, keys, spinning off downstream or into the Mississippi mud forever. But with a murder set out deliberately on display like this – like display was its point, like it was someone’s idea of theatre – Barrow thought that maybe after all the why might not be in the who. Maybe whoever had done this hadn’t cared too much who they’d done it to. So he wasn’t totally surprised, feeling through the clammy stiffness inside the suit coat, to find the square shape of a wallet still in the inside breast pocket.

He tugged it out, and shuffling back made a plank of one wide knee where he could flap away the snow and inspect the contents by the cone of yellow light. Wallet worn and many years old, like the 11suit, pigskin now damp and stained. Four bucks, which Barrow pocketed himself: Murder Squad perquisites. Couple of streetcar tickets. A photograph of a sour-looking woman with marcelled hair and a boy of three or four on her lap. A stub for a concert at something called the Kappa-Choral League, way over on 5th Street towards the river, in what, Barrow calculated, was probably Germantown. A receipt for watch repair, also from Germantown. And, ah yes, a prescription from a doctor in the same district, not yet filled, for asthma medicine, in the name of Mr Frederick Hopper.

‘Hey there, Fred,’ said Barrow.

He stood up, clicked off the light, stretched out the kinks. Cracked his big neck left, right. The white and scarlet underfoot had gone back to a dim blue puddled with black. Over to the east, the very first lightening of the sky was behind the clouds like an ache. He yawned, tired again. Sleep had gone away, with the hurry, and the blood, and the death smell: now it was making itself felt again, as a deep soft velvet layer at the bottom of his mind into which the rooftop and the body wanted to fold up, tumble down, melt away, lose their hard edges and be gone. A cup of coffee soon would be good. Likely, if Drummond was right – and he usually was, about the ins and outs of the city – then the clear next thing to do would be to roust out these Warriors, wherever they might be, and to shake them till something fell out. Till everything fell out, by the usual process. That being the use of his own fists. The why and the how and the what and the when. Or close enough standins. That would be the end to work this from.

Still, it was a puzzle to think about, how Fred here had been got up onto the roof of one of the Three Sisters, in the middle of the night, through locked doors. (How many of those? The near door, onto the roof itself: but how many others, to make your way into, and then up, the Land Trust?) And had he been a dead weight, already stunned or bound before being brought out to 12the skylight? He couldn’t have been literally dead already, because he’d done his bleeding here. Or was he awake, and to some degree co-operative, not knowing what was waiting for him when he agreed to accompany his killer? To meet them up here perhaps? That was a grim thought. Fred unknowing, Fred not alarmed, making his own way in his tidy old suit to his butchering, up to the rooftop in the cold spring night with no-one to see, no-one to hear him, no-one to help when the penny dropped. Unless there was someone to see, of course, besides the killer. Could there have been? Barrow walked around the edges of the roof, looking out into the dark and the streaking snow.

The roofs of Water on one side, Power on the other, were level with Land. The buildings were identical. But it would take as much ingenuity to get up there in the small hours as it had to ascend Land, and why would anyone have? Immediately behind the towers, the roof looked very slightly down onto the grass summit of the Mound – but nobody would be, could be, up on there. It was sacred takouma stuff, literally sacred turf, and the buildings around it deliberately hemmed it in close, in a collar of unclimbable walls. The only access was by the ceremonial iron gates down on the Plaza, opened on saints’ days and for the great feasts, and at no other time. Otherwise, the only conceivable view of the rooftop was from the big houses on the far side of the Creek; from the Creekside Drive mansions. There was, in fact, a light showing at a top-floor window of one of them, just under the long flat line of the eaves. An orange glow, uncurtained, from a square box of a casement between the tips of cypress trees. Very square; very plain. But on Creekside Drive it was going to be rich people’s plain, rich people’s simple. Someone was awake over there. How long for, though? And would the angle from the second floor over on the far side let you see anything up on the tenth, on this side of the creeping creek water; and would the glare of the room’s light blank out any chance of glimpsing tiny 13black figures in the distance acting out a tiny black horror?

He went back to the door.

‘Hey. Coupla questions’ – nodding the beat cop and the janitor lady out onto the rooftop.

They sidled reluctantly out, and Barrow ushered them to the parapet on Creekside, away from the body, purposely planting his own bulk between them and it as if to cancel its presence.

‘That light down there. Was it on, can you recall, when you was out here the first time?’

‘I – no – I’m afraid I don’t know, Detective,’ said the boy. ‘I didn’t notice?’

‘Yeah, it was on,’ said the taklousa unexpectedly. ‘I see it most nights. Goes off round now, usually. Sometimes it’s off when I’m leavin’, sometimes it’s still on. But it’s always on when I arrive, and then through the night. Burnin’ the midnight oil, like they say. But now I gotta go, Officer, I really do gotta. Please.’

‘Jus’ one more minute,’ said Barrow. ‘So when you came out here, Miz—’

‘Jackson. Eulalia Jackson—’

‘—when you came out tonight, Miz Jackson, checking out the open door, what time was that?’

‘Two forty-five, three o’clock?’

‘That light was on then, is what you’re saying?’

‘Musta been.’

Barrow sighed. ‘Musta been, or was?’

‘Was! Was! Now can I go?’

‘We’ll walk down, do the rest on the way,’ said Barrow. ‘You got this lady’s address, right, tastanagi?’

‘Yessir! – Yes, Detective.’

‘Okay. Now you walk the Creek every night, right? So what house is that, with the light on?’

The patroller stared.14

‘What do you mean, sir?’ he said, as if Barrow had set him an impossible task, or started speaking in the language of the birds.

‘I mean,’ said Barrow, ‘what number Creekside Drive is … that?’

‘He’s just amazed you don’t know,’ put in the janitor. ‘I’m amazed you don’t know. Ain’t you a takouma?’

Barrow ignored this. ‘What number?’ he repeated to the boy.

‘It is … number 40, of course,’ said the boy stiffly, as if he was afraid he was being laughed at. ‘It is the House of the Moon, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Barrow. ‘– Okay, down we go.’

He stopped them just inside the rooftop door, to look at the lock. Clean, no signs of scratching or forcing.

‘Who has keys to this?’ he asked the taklousa.

‘How should I know, honey?’ she said. ‘I’m just here nights. I come in through the side door, pick up the buncha keys from the nail in the cleaning closet, put ’em back when I’m done.’

‘And they was there, in the usual place, when you came in tonight?’

She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

At the foot of the top flight, they found her electric polisher, abandoned when she felt the cold breeze blowing down through the open door above. Behind it, the cross-corridor was shined, with the frosted glass doors of the offices faintly reflected in it; in front was a small remaining dull patch.

‘I suppose you done the whole building, ’fore you got up here?’

‘That’s right,’ she said, coiling the cord. ‘Getting ready for the week.’

‘Notice anything unusual?’

‘’Cept for the poor soul on the roof, you mean? Nope. Now I got to get this put away.’

She was trundling the polisher towards the elevator door.

‘How about you? See anything outta the ordinary?’ he asked the boy.15

‘Just this lady shouting “Help! Help!”,’ said the patroller, on whom some defiance seemed to have rubbed off. ‘I didn’t stop to look around.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Barrow. ‘Wait a minute – the elevator’s running?’ He and Drummond had come up the stairs.

‘I sure as hell don’t carry this thang up and down the stairs,’ said the janitor. ‘You know how much it weighs? I gets in the building, and I turns on the power down in the lobby with one of these keys – this one.’

‘And that’s what you did this evening?’

‘Yeah, I – no. No, it was already on tonight, come to think of it. That is kinda strange.’

She frowned. The elevator car came with a soft ringing, and before the other two could step forward into the lighted golden box, Barrow went down on his knees and surveyed its floor with his head on one side to get his eyes right down low. Again, his bulk blocked the way all by itself. No blood drips, tracks or stains on the linoleum; no obvious drag marks from the shoes of an unconscious man either, only the ordinary scuffing of a busy surface in a busy building.

‘If you’re done prayin’ …?’ said the janitor.

‘Ma’am, I can always decide you need to come on downtown, give a nice long statement.’

‘Okay, okay.’

They and the polisher squeezed in, a tight fit, with Barrow’s head and shoulders projecting above the press as he was used to them doing in every crowd. He took off his hat, or it would have knocked against the lamp in its glass shade, up in the vault of the car. In the little container of light they hummed down the building, dark corridors going by, the glow from above gilding the ironwork leaves and corncobs of the cage and dyeing the smooth planes of Barrow’s head to a tawny orange.16

The lobby of the Land Trust was still in a state of night-time peace, with only a few points of light from the switchboard at the desk. The statues holding up the walls were in darkness, and the blue of the streetlamp outside washed faintly in through the glass doors across the first few feet of the mosaic floor, transposing the sunburst pattern into dim gleams: the sun by owl-light. But there was a bright line under one of the side doors, and the sound of running water. Drummond came out with his hair wet, shaking his hands.

‘On their way,’ he said.

‘Good, good,’ said Barrow. ‘Two-three things. Body is one Fred Hopper, it turns out. Miz Jackson says the juice was switched on for the elevator when she got here, so seems like the killer knew their way round the building, or Fred did. And someone over the street stays up all night, so just a chance they saw something.’

‘From that distance?’ said Drummond sceptically. ‘In the dark?

In the snow?’

‘Snow hadn’t started. But yeah, long shot.’

‘What address?’ said Drummond.

The patroller was standing close.

‘I got it,’ said Barrow; and the boy nodded slightly, as if approving his discretion.

‘Right,’ said Drummond, puzzled but playing along.

‘Can I go now, Officers?’ said the janitor.

‘Just as soon as you show us where this switch for the power is.’

Wheeling the polisher, she led them round the back of the lobby to a service door into the elevator shaft. There was a brass plate there with a simple ring-shaped slot in it. She chose a zinc key with a hollow round end, put it in, turned it: an electric hum Barrow hadn’t even noticed, disappeared. She turned it back: it came on again.

‘We should maybe fingerprint that?’ said Barrow.17

‘No point,’ said Drummond. ‘You’ve shined that up fresh tonight, haven’t you, darlin’?’

‘Sorry,’ said the janitor, shrugging. ‘I starts off down here, and works up.’

‘Oh, you couldn’t know,’ said Drummond, comfortably. ‘Anyways, like I said upstairs’ – he gave Barrow a significant look – ‘I think we know where to start lookin’, without too much need to be digging for clues.’ He grinned when he said the last word.

‘The keys, though,’ said Barrow. ‘That’s gotta be something. Either Fred had one, or our perp did.’

‘Yeah …’ said Drummond. ‘’Fraid I gotta disappoint you here again, partner. There’s a key like that for every elevator in the city – and they’re all the same. I got one, for the one at the PD. You got one too. Look on your ring.’

Barrow dug out his keys from his hip pocket, and there indeed was the same simple grey shape. ‘Shit.’

‘Oh well. Excellent detectorin’, though!’

‘Fuck you, Phin.’

There was a banging from the lobby, and when they went back around, one of the department’s Black Marias was pulled up outside, and a squad car, headlights on both shining in through the glass. Already the stillness was gone; and when the patrolman had unlocked the lobby doors, the space was abruptly busy with cop business, stretcher-bearers heading for the elevator, the yawning photographer toting his tripod and flashgun, a couple more uniforms moving in and the original tastanagi murmuring to them, the janitor buttoning her coat and bustling off.

‘I know I said “complicated”,’ Drummond said quietly to Barrow, taking him aside, ‘but I meant the politics. Not that we gotta do a load of Sherlock Holmes shit. And you can leave the politics to me. Seriously. We do this the usual way, and what I need from you’s gonna be the usual thing, big guy. I can count on you for that, right?’18

‘Sure, Phin.’

‘Okay, then.’

‘So, you think, don’t bother with the whole witness thing, over the road.’

‘Not really. – What was that thing back there, though, with the uniform and the address? I didn’t get that.’

‘Oh,’ said Barrow, and explained.

‘My, my,’ said Drummond. ‘Yes, he’d have thought you’d have known that, see, with you looking takouma and all. All the takouma do.’

‘What is it then, this “House of the Moon”?’

‘Why, it’s where the Moon lives, of course.’

‘Phin.’

Drummond took pity.

‘The Moon as in, the niece of the Sun – the Man of the Sun; the head honcho, the takouma big cheese. The fellow in the palace? He’s the Sun, so she’s the Moon, see? Nearest thing there is in the city to an heir. I mean, technically that’s Frankie Blackhawk, but he’s off in Hollywood making moving pictures, and we don’t approve of that, oh dear me no. She’s a little bit modern – runs a kind of boutique on 3rd, real classy – but your traditional takouma, they think she’s all right, even if she does flit around, turn up in the society pages in New York and all that.’

‘A takouma swell, then.’

‘More like a takouma princess. And that’s where you saw the light was on? Well, now. It’s probably nothing, probably nothing, but maybe we should check it out, at that.’

‘Why?’

‘For your education, bro; for your ed-u-cation. Don’t you wanna meet a princess?’

Barrow grunted.

After a couple of minutes, the elevator bell chimed again, and 19the photographer came back out, swallowing hard. The stretcher-bearers could be heard still several flights up, coming down the stairs with their bloody cargo.

‘Not pretty, is it?’ said Drummond cheerfully to the snapper. He seemed to have gotten all his good humour back. ‘You get a good one of the word on the poor guy’s head?’

‘Yeah,’ was all the photographer said. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and walked on by. But at the lobby door, as the uniforms unlocked for him on his way back to the car, a quick-footed little man in a striped suit and spats, with a face like an intelligent cat, ducked under the blue arm opening the door and came trotting across towards them.

‘And here comes trouble, right on time,’ said Drummond under his breath. ‘Just like I said. – Hi, Mickey. Don’t recall issuin’ you an invitation to the crime scene.’

‘Crime scene? Crime scene?’ said the small man, talking as fast as he walked. ‘What crime is that, Detective? I just happened to be passing.’

‘Sure you did. At 5 a.m. In a snow storm. Joe, this is Mickey Casqui: metro beat guy for Tamaha, sometimes stringer for the English-language press as well, when the story’s good enough. Talk to him, you’re talking to the world. Mind you, the world may not hear exactly the same words you said. He’s got a fertile little mind, has Mickey. Mickey, meet Joe Barrow. He don’t say much.’

‘Is that right?’ said Casqui, looking up at Barrow. ‘One of those pairings, hey?’ He put his hands up in a square, as if framing a picture, and looked at the two of them through it. ‘Crime-Fighting Duo: Motormouth and the Monolith. Hmm, maybe not. Chokhalbi accami-hi atli, tastanagi?’ he added suddenly, dartingly, to Barrow.

‘Sorry, he no speakee,’ said Drummond.

‘Hmm,’ said Casqui again, if anything more interested.

But then the stretcher party reached the bottom of the stairs, 20and the nature of the crime became obvious from the bundle they bore, even with the corpse covered. Casqui was over there and questioning the bearers in rapid Anopa, getting answers too, before Drummond could intervene.

‘Hey. Hey. You want to know somethin’, talk to me,’ said Drummond.

‘Just getting the picture,’ Casqui said, unrepentant. The stretcher went on by to the doors and he turned back to them. ‘Body was on the roof, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not your usual spot for a death, civil service joint like this, eh?’

‘Not much that’s usual ’bout this one.’

‘A-huh?’ said Mickey Casqui. ‘Like what?’

‘Nah, you can do your own dirty work, Mickey.’

‘C’mon now; little assistance for the fourth estate.’

‘For the say what now?’

‘All I’m saying is, let me in on your thinking here, gentlemen. A dead takata on the Land Trust roof. Not a gang hit: wrong place.’ Casqui held up a neat, small, manicured hand and started folding down fingers as he checked off possibilities, all the while staring closely at Drummond’s face. Drummond smiled at him with a sort of appreciation – one bullshitter enjoying the performance of another. ‘Not a robbery in progress: who’d come in here to steal anything, unless they were short of carbon paper. Not a suicide, unless the guy was real determined, ’cause I hear he was all cut up.’

‘Gutted,’ said Drummond.

‘What, literally?’

‘Almost.’

‘So what does that leave, then?’ Casqui quivered the next finger on his hand that was still standing, his fourth, to indicate that it was trembling between possibilities. ‘Crime of passion?’ He pursed 21his lips, he raised his eyebrows: a pantomime of alacrity, with some real alacrity behind it.

‘Wouldn’t that make a nice front page?’ said Drummond. ‘Sorry, Mickey, I don’t think so. Victim didn’t seem like the type to drive a woman mad, make a husband jealous.’

‘No?’

‘Well, you looked at him closest, Joe. What would you say?’ said Drummond turning ceremoniously to Barrow. Casqui transferred his bright gaze.

‘Uh – yeah, quiet little guy; forties; bad teeth; cheap suit. Liked to go to concerts, looks like.’

‘You got an ID?’

‘You want more,’ said Drummond, taking back the conversation, ‘you come into the department when we got this booked, in an hour or so. We’ll give you a statement then.’

Casqui folded down his fourth finger. ‘Okay, not an affair of the heart, then—’

‘Well, now …’ said Drummond, grinning. ‘What’s that?’

‘Let’s say, the vic could be described as … heart-broken. Downhearted. ’Cause this was a heartless crime.’

‘Phin—’ said Barrow.

Drummond flapped a hand at him, and he shut up.

‘You mean …?’ said Casqui, with a wince. ‘Ooh. Okay.’

‘But I don’t think the reason was ro-mance; not by a country mile.’

‘What, then?’ said Casqui, looking at his thumb.

‘You missed one out. Politics.’

‘Yeah?’ said Casqui sceptically. ‘Funny spot for it.’ It was in the river districts, where the factories stood, that strikers murdered scabs and Pinkertons murdered strikers. Not here, in the old core of the city.

‘Not that kind of politics.’22

‘What, then?’

‘Let’s just say there was a well-known word written on the body, Mickey, real large, in … red. Someone sending a message.’

‘Phin!’ said Barrow. But Drummond was looking with satisfaction at Casqui, whose mobile face had gone quite still, as if all the animation had drained suddenly out.

‘What language?’ he asked.

Drummond shrugged and smirked.

‘What language?’

‘You wanna know more, come to the department, like I said.’

‘We’re ready to go, Detectives,’ said one of the uniforms. Outside the doors, the corpse was all loaded away, and the Black Maria’s engine had started up. ‘You come on out, we can lock up.’

‘I’m going to need to see the scene,’ said Casqui, and his voice like his face was blank.

‘Sorry,’ said Drummond, ‘you heard. Time to be moving.’

Casqui reached out his wallet with fingers turned hesitant.

‘I’m listening,’ said Drummond. ‘Fact, I think we’re all listening, Mickey.’

Casqui sighed, and pulled out all the paper money he had: four of the black-and-red United States tens with the bison on the back.

‘Ain’t that nice,’ said Drummond. ‘A whole herd.’ He disappeared two of the bills, and handed one each to the uniform and to Barrow.

‘Okay,’ he said to Casqui. ‘That buys you five minutes on the roof. You take him, Joe – I’m gonna go in, get the body booked. Keys?’ he asked the uniform. ‘Give ’em to my partner here.’

‘Quick call first?’ said Casqui, nodding to the desk.

‘Yeah, yeah: hold the front page, right?’ said Drummond. ‘Now Joe,’ he went on, when the journalist had stepped away, ‘you don’t need to say nothin’ when you’re up there. No Sherlock Holmes. 23Just stand there looking tough; you know you’re good at that. See you at the precinct.’

‘But Phin,’ said Barrow, ‘why’d you give him all that?’

Drummond reached up and patted him on the shoulder.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘When didn’t I ever look out for you?’

The building was quiet again, a few minutes later, when Barrow rode up in the elevator with Mickey Casqui, only now there were beginning to be threads of early-morning sound creeping in from the city beyond: distant birdsong, a tentative rumble of traffic. Casqui was quiet too. He held his hat in his hands, and gazed upwards at the top of the car as if he could make it move faster that way. He avoided Barrow’s gaze. And when they reached the roof he paused on the threshold and crossed himself, which surprised Barrow. Pious takouma did that reflexively under stress, in this intensely Catholic city, but it wasn’t a category he’d have put the journalist in. The snow had stopped, the mush underfoot had mostly melted, and the light of a raw March day was pushing the night away. The sky was grey-bright over towards Morningside, beyond WNCK’s radio tower on the bluff, but riverwards still a gloom stuck with the shrivelled glints of streetlamps.

Casqui, it turned out, wanted to do a tour of the roof’s four faces not unlike the one Barrow had made earlier, taking in the lay of the land. He looked out in turn over the Mound, the two adjoining towers and the Creek, before approaching the skylight.

‘Body was there, right?’ he said to Barrow – the first words out of his mouth in minutes.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow. There didn’t seem any harm in confirming it, when a slick of drying red-brown still showed clearly on the glass apex, streaked and spread by the snowfall.

‘It would be,’ said Casqui. ‘“An open square on which stood something like a platform.”’

‘What’s that?’ said Barrow.24

‘An old book,’ said Casqui. ‘You find anything else up here – apart from his innards, I mean? Anything that didn’t belong?’

‘Like what?’

‘You’d have known it if you’d seen it. No?’

Barrow gave him a poker face, but he still seemed to learn from it.

‘Well, that’s something,’ he said. Carefully, pulling up the cuffs of his striped pant-legs to reveal green silk socks, he squatted in front of the skylight to look at the mess close up. Somehow the neatness, the fastidiousness of the gesture brought his resemblance to a cat strongly back, especially when he brought a pawlike little fist up to his mouth, and rubbed his upper lip thoughtfully with his knuckles. He muttered something under his breath.

‘Say what?’ said Barrow. ‘“Hoochy-coochy”?’

Casqui looked up at him with a gleam of returning humour.

‘You really don’t know any Anopa, Detective?’

‘No,’ said Barrow.

‘In the interests of better relations between police and press, then – I said, Maria Himita, housha isishi. Which is: “Mother of God, that’s a fuck of a lot of blood.” All clear now?’

Casqui got up and went and looked down over the Creekside face of the building one more time. He seemed to like what he saw, because he put his hat back on at a jaunty angle, and waved two fingers to the door.

‘Allons-y,’ he said. ‘That’s French, by the way. – I’m done.’

‘Got your money’s worth?’ Barrow said.

‘Maybe.’

In the elevator going down, Casqui tapped his feet on the floor in two rhythms, syncopating.

‘Drummond told you not to talk to me, huh?’ he said.

Barrow said nothing.

‘You do everything Phineas Drummond tells you?’25

Barrow made him wait. The elevator hummed. Then he leaned down over the little man, looming. Casqui flinched slightly, in spite of himself. They reached the lobby.

‘… No,’ said Barrow.

Casqui laughed, but he was out with a sidestep as soon as the doors opened.

‘Okay,’ he said, dancing backwards towards the lobby doors, where a new vehicle was visible, drawn up by the marble steps in the dishwater light of dawn. ‘You don’t wanna talk to me, fine; but there’s someone here wants a word who you should really listen to.’

Out of the doors, which Barrow locked behind them with the janitor’s key, into the cold air; and the car was a limousine, huge and long and low, a black and maroon Duesenberg. From the driver’s compartment climbed a takouma in chauffeur’s uniform who was, by a large margin, the biggest individual Barrow had ever seen. He himself was big; this guy was immense, a human boulder. He must have been seven feet tall. His forehead was like a rockface, and he had raised the impassivity that the patroller had still been practising to a state of granite perfection. Casqui said something quick to him, in Anopa of course, and the giant rumbled something back. Casqui tipped his hat and was gone. Barrow looked at the chauffeur – looked up at him. The chauffeur pointed a glove the size of a baseball mitt at the rear door.

‘Get in, little brother,’ he said. ‘The Man wants to speak with you.’

‘I’m on my way to the Police Department,’ said Barrow.

‘Yes. Get in.’

Drummond was not there to give a ruling. Barrow got in. And there in a half-light smelling of musk and violets, at the far end of a long supple leather seat like a couch in a gentlemen’s club, sat a takouma of about sixty, but without a single white strand in his loose 26black hair. He was wearing an astrakhan coat. His face was long and ascetic, with lidded eyes and a nose like the keel of a ship. Round his neck he had the insignia of a papal knight, set in intricate enamel with creatures writhing around it at the four compass points. From heavy gold roundels in the lobes of his ears, red mischievous faces craned forward. His name was Sebastian Cuauhtemoc Hashi, and Barrow had seen his face in a thousand official portraits on a thousand takouma walls. He was the hereditary shareholder of the Cahokian Pacific Railroad, the honorary colonel of the Cahokian National Guard, the brother of the cardinal-archbishop of Cahokia, the father of Senator Augustine Hashi. When Cahokia had issued money of its own, and the face of his uncle the previous Cuauhtemoc had appeared on it, ‘Prince’ had been printed before his name. This Cuauhtemoc had no title; was in theory only citizen Hashi of the United States of America. But he remained the fellow in the palace. He was still the Man of the Sun.

2

‘Good morning, Detective,’ said the Man of the Sun, and Barrow was surprised to find that his voice was a Boston Brahmin drawl, with vowels as aristocratically deformed as if an ottoman had been dragged on top of them. There had been an officer in the 131st Infantry who talked like that, but he didn’t have long hair and earrings and a face the colour of old, oiled wood.

‘Good morning, uh, sir,’ said Barrow, and waited to be told what he was doing there. But he was gazed at as if patient curiosity was the Man’s main order of business. He tried again: ‘Mickey Casqui called you, I guess?’

‘Yes he did.’

‘Why?’27

‘He thought I should speak with you. Coffee?’

There was a silver flask and two china cups waiting in the felt-lined hollows of a little fold-down side table.

‘I got to get to the precinct house,’ said Barrow.

‘We’re giving you a lift. – Oscar, to the Police Department on 5th Street, please; the slow way. – No cream or sugar, I’m afraid. Just the plain java, as I believe you young people call it. Would you pour?’

The car bumped off the cobbles in front of the Three Sisters, and then purred away in the dawn along the winding stone embankment on the south side of the Creek, in the direction of the business district. Barrow poured for the Man, feeling as clumsy as a bear at a tea-party, a stevedore in a parlour. The cup was received in a black-gloved hand. He poured for himself, only a couple of inches of liquid, and sipped. It was hot and thick, and about twice as strong as any coffee he had ever tasted. He could feel himself becoming more awake after just one mouthful.

‘There now,’ said the Man approvingly, as if he could see the sudden straightening of Barrow’s thoughts to attention. ‘Yes. Casqui recognised this … case you have … as one of the situations I am always looking out for. What can you tell me about the body?’

‘Sir,’ said Barrow, ‘with all respect: I don’t work for you. I work for the city.’

‘There’s a difference?’ said the Man. ‘Many takouma would disagree with you.’ He smiled, and his teeth were revealed to be large, and ivory-yellow, except for the eyeteeth, which were gold.

Because they’re fools, supplied Drummond’s voice in Barrow’s head. Out loud, he only shrugged.

The Man nodded as if he were making a mental note.

‘I see you don’t count yourself in that number. What is it that has your loyalty, then, Detective? Are you a man with a cause, a man with an idea? I hear that these days our cops do the bootleggers’ 28bidding quite as much as the mayor’s. If I looked in your bank-book, would I find more money than your wages – your wages from the city – could quite account for? Hey?’

‘It’s my partner you wanna be speaking to,’ said Barrow. ‘You should – you should come into the precinct house, and talk to him. Sir.’

‘That would be Detective—?’

‘Drummond.’

‘Ah, you’re loyal to him, anyway. Or maybe you just like to hide behind him. But no; it’s you I want to be speaking to. It’s you I am speaking to.’

They had reached the junction with Union Avenue where, to reach the precinct, they should cross under the elevated tracks and jink north. Instead, the chauffeur swung them round to the left, and in the blue shadow of the tracks, with a seemingly limitless string of coal cars rumbling overhead and making the steel gantries ring and shake, they rolled down Union. It was the dividing line just here between the old core of takouma Cahokia, and the new commercial and industrial city that had grown in the fifty years since Accession. On the old side, the first takouma men in overalls were starting to emerge from the low, dense alleyways of the Quarters, and to congregate at the streetcar stops; on the new side, where the buildings were five, six, seven storeys high, the metal shutters on the stores at street-level were just beginning to be cranked up, and a trickle of clerks and shopgirls, takouma and taklousa and takata, were already getting off the streetcars.

‘Because of my face, right?’ said Barrow, with a spurt of weary anger. ‘Because you think I’m takouma. But whatever it is you think I am, I’m not, sir. I’m not from here, okay. Now, could you please set me down. I’ll walk to the precinct.’

‘Then where are you from, Detective?’ asked the Man, ignoring the last part of this entirely.29

‘Nebraska,’ said Barrow.

‘And where in Nebraska?’

Barrow muttered something.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Barrow, Nebraska!’

‘Named after the town – ah, an orphanage child. That makes sense. So you are Thrown-Away Boy then, Detective. No wonder you don’t speak Anopa.’

The chauffeur made a bass sound that could have been a chuckle.

‘What?’ said Barrow. ‘I’m sorry, what?’

They were approaching a red light, and he meant to get out when they drew up at it, but the light changed, they swept by, and then they were out in the traffic circle of Grant Square, where the car tracks tangled like steel knitting. Double thump, double thump over the rails, under the mighty spire of the Panton Leslie building, past the block-long frontage of Blumfeld’s, with the spring fashion in its windows.

‘A legend,’ said the Man. ‘One which, of course, your mother couldn’t teach you, if you had no mother. – I’m sorry, Detective; I have no wish to mock. I would tell it to you now, but we are a little pressed for time.’

Grant was half a square, really, for the Union Station lay slant across the middle, with all its tracks and trains upstairs. The roadway ran in a tunnel beneath, cloudy with fumes; then emerged into the square’s mirror-image other half as if surfacing in another world. The buildings that hemmed this other triangle of ground were all the brick and stucco of the Quarters again, except in the eastern corner, where the grand stone arch stood that had once been the city’s triumphal doorway. There were angels all over it, crowded as thick as pigeons in a dovecote but eroding in the polluted air. The clouds from which the sleet had blown before dawn were pushing away on a morning breeze, and here and there a fitful 30gleam of sunlight penetrated. At the other end of the day the sun might have picked out the details of the Arch in yellow relief, but now the light was behind it, and it was left as a dark mass, spiky and uneven. The chauffeur stopped to allow some more factory-bound takouma to cross, and they recognised the limousine, bobbing their heads gravely to the Man as they passed. He raised a hand and nodded in return; Barrow drew back in the seat as far as he could.

‘Urbs antiqua fuit,’ said the Man. ‘“There was a very ancient city”, Detective. And yet in this case, urbs antiqua est.’

‘I don’t think he knows Latin either, boss,’ said the chauffeur.

‘Surely everyone picks up a little at Mass? No?’

‘I’m not religious,’ said Barrow.

‘Ah. Blame my Jesuit schooling, then. – My point, Detective, is that this very ancient city is not over. It is not in the past. It persists, it endures, it survives. Look at it: another day begins, and the city begins again with it. And as you see there are many who do still believe that it is in my charge that it persists. That it is up to me to bring it safely through each day to nightfall.’

The crowd passed, and the chauffeur drove on. It seemed that the plan was to skirt the old town, not to go in through the Arch. The chauffeur took the south-eastern exit onto the long straight of Moctezuma Boulevard. First there was the dense brick body of the Quarters on both sides, threaded with the unmappable capillaries of a thousand alleyways. Then the misty green of the park began.

The Man leaned forward and fixed Barrow with his gaze. This meant there were now three faces looking at him: the Man’s own, intent and measuring, and on each side the little red faces in his ears, one sneering, the other with its mouth in a wide-open O of shock. Barrow saw nothing there he knew or recognised, but it was hard to evade the eyes that were on him.

‘I am asking for your help in this endeavour, Detective,’ said the Man. ‘Won’t you help me?’31

‘I don’t get what you mean,’ said Barrow, clearing his throat. ‘I mean, I get that you’re like the lord high … wizard to the takouma, and I’m supposed to do what you say because you say it. But what do you want?’

The chauffeur had made a kind of growling noise in the middle of this, but the Man put out a suppressing hand toward the front seat, without breaking eye contact.

‘I want you to tell me about the body on the roof, Detective.’

‘Didn’t Mickey Casqui give you all the dope about that already?’

‘He didn’t actually see it; and besides, he’s a newspaperman not a policeman, so you’ll have noticed different things.’

‘I really think you ought to get all that from the precinct?’

The Man sighed, and looked away, as if for counsel. They had passed the lake at the end of the park, and the peculiar pink wedding-cake of the Mormons’ temple was coming up ahead at the junction. They turned left again – yes, the chauffeur was driving a circle round the old city, orbiting with it always on the left – and the long sooty canyon of State Street opened up ahead of them.

‘Let’s try this another way,’ said the Man. ‘What do you think I’m saying to you, Detective?’

‘Uh, that this is some kind of takouma thing we’ve run across, with the writing and the blood and all – and you want us to butt out; to quiet it down and not ask too many questions, probably. You’re making sure I know how important you are. I’m still waiting for the stick and the carrot. In a minute you’re gonna threaten me. Then you’ll offer me something.’

‘I see,’ the Man said. ‘You have a very transactional attitude to life, don’t you? All about what’s in it for who, and who gets what. – By the way, I don’t threaten people; Oscar does that for me.’

‘That’s the way I’ve found the world works.’

Oscar sounded the horn and they accelerated smoothly round a streetcar, tyres hissing. On the right, the dome of the Statehouse 32flashed by, and there was a momentary glimpse on the other side up the tree-lined axis of Christ-the-King to the open space of the Plaza and the three lumps of palace, cathedral and Mound beyond: the exact reverse of the view in snow and darkness from the top of the Land Trust.

‘Yes,’ said the Man. ‘But you’re missing a dimension. Symbolism, Detective; what things mean. That very often alters all the practical calculations about who gets what – more often than you’d think. I spend my days on symbolism, Mr Barrow, because of course unlike my ancestors I am a symbolic king, not a real one. And yet that is not nothing, Mr Barrow. Sometimes, symbols move solid objects; sometimes they act on flesh and blood. If you don’t pay attention to what things mean, you miss a piece of the puzzle. Without the meaning of things, without the stories people tell about them – that people believe about them – you can’t understand events, Detective. You can’t understand this city.’

How the rich do like to talk, Barrow thought. Beyond the Man’s talking profile, slightly rippled by the thick glass, the great gates of the Legion Barracks slid by, bolted now, with the carved slogan on the archways darkened by Cahokia’s smoky air to black on grey. JUS IN BELLO, JUS IN BELLO, JUS IN BELLO, they said.

‘And do you know what effect it has on me, dealing with myths and symbols all day long? It makes me sceptical. It makes me distrust a story that is being thrust under my nose, neat and obvious. I don’t know the details – you won’t oblige me by sharing them – but I suspect that the poor soul you found on the Land Trust roof was put there to tell a story like that. So no, Detective, I don’t want you to tidy this case away. I want you to un-tidy it. I want you to resist obvious answers. – A little quicker, please, Oscar.’

They had been slowing for the lights at the end of the block. Instead the chauffeur unhesitatingly ran the red, and swerved left 33across the intersection straight through the cross-traffic. There was not much of it, yet, but a truck and several automobiles still had to screech to a halt to let them by. The Man sat bolt upright, oblivious to everything except what he was saying. The Duesenberg barrelled on back up north towards the WNCK tower on the bluff in the distance, and the Creek again.

‘I want you to ask all the questions you can,’ he went on, ‘for the sake of the city’s peace. Bother people. Knock on any door. Be as rude as you need to be. I suspect that won’t be a problem for you. – And, for what it’s worth, I want you to know that you have my authority to do these things.’

The Man drew a billfold out of his breast pocket, and picked out of it a business card with nothing on it but his name in fine italics, and a telephone number. He unscrewed the cap of a thick black fountain pen and wrote on the back in cursive capitals SOBAHISHI OHA, with the initials of his last two names smaller underneath: CH. ‘That means “give help in every way”,’ he said. ‘Literally, “to help” and then “all”.’ He waved it in the air to dry the ink and handed it to Barrow, who took it as if it might burst into flame. ‘Show that wherever it would be useful.’

‘I’m going to tell my partner about this,’ he said.

‘That’s up to you. But the card is for you, and you only; it is you that I am asking to do me this favour. You see? No stick; no carrot. Just a gesture of trust. Now – would you tell me, please, what was written on the body in Anopa?’

‘It said, uh, Bashli,’ said Barrow, not quite sure why he was doing so.

The Man’s poker face was very good but it seemed to Barrow that at this he relaxed slightly. Certainly, he glanced forward to meet the chauffeur’s eyes in the driving mirror.

‘Thank you, Detective,’ he said, and patted Barrow’s knee once, feather-light, with his gloved hand. ‘We’ll take you to the precinct now.’34

Back they turned onto Creekside, and rolled past Power, Land and Water again, where there was now a stir of clerks arriving. The urgency seemed to have gone out of the driving too. The Man sat back and sank into his astrakhan, having seemingly said all he wanted to. But when they crossed Union this time, rather than coal wagons clanging across on the elevated tracks, it was a gliding procession up above, long and low and grey and gold, of the Pullman cars of the Cahokian Pacific’s westbound Trans-Continent Limited, easing into Cahokia from DC in time for breakfast. The Man looked at his wristwatch.

‘On time,’ he said. Then he raised a finger, and looked at Barrow again. ‘Case in point, Detective,’ he said. ‘The official name of that train may be the Trans-Continent, but everyone in the city calls it …?’

‘The Usunhiyi,’ said Barrow. It was an Anopa name you couldn’t fail to know: the train went by overhead twice a day, westbound and eastbound, as inevitable as the transit of the sun.

‘Which, as you probably don’t know, means “The Evening Land”. An ill-starred name. It goes west, you see, and west is the direction of sunset and endings. West is where the dead go. Now of course all the takouma members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters know perfectly well with the practical part of their minds that they’re not going to the land of the dead every time they work the westbound service. They’re going to California, and will come back safe and sound. But all the same, we have to pay them slightly more for the western route, to compensate for the omen. Symbolism, you see, Detective. It has consequences. It gives a nudge to the world. It makes things happen. And … here we are. Goodbye, Detective. Good luck.’

They were parked at the curb on 5th Street in front of the Police Department. Without moving, the Man somehow withdrew, receded, sank away into the far distance in his black coat on the far side 35of the limousine, as if he were now too far off for ordinary mortals to speak to. The conversation Barrow had been having with him became, retrospectively, impossible: something it was not at all likely could have happened.

Oscar the chauffeur opened the back door and Barrow got out, suddenly surrounded by the racket of a city morning getting busier. Engines, footsteps, bells, voices in two languages. A news vendor by the department’s steps was cutting the string on new bundles of papers. DESERET TALKS STALL ON TARIFFS, POLYGAMY said the sober Chronicle. PRES TO PROPHET: ONE WIFE, BUD! bawled the Post in return. President Harding’s negotiations with the Mormon republic had held the headlines on and off all month.

‘Little brother?’ said the chauffeur. ‘Tread carefully.’

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow, tired of mysteries. ‘Yeah. – Why does he have those weird earrings with the faces?’

‘To frighten the giants,’ said the chauffeur, and laughed at Barrow’s expression.

3

The first floor of the precinct house was the usual orderly hive, with the blue bees of the night shift coming in and the blue bees of the day shift heading out, doing the slow cop walk that could be kept up for hours without stopping or hurrying. But as Barrow scooted up the scuffed and echoing stairs to the detectives’ pen, he found a strange silence ahead of him. No typewriter chatter or typewriter bells, no bass mutter of men together, no creak of overstrained chair legs, no laughter or swearing or cries.

‘They’re all in with the miko,’ said Miss Chokfi, the departmental telephonist, leaning her bobbed head out of her little wooden 36alcove and covering the mouthpiece of her headset with her hand. ‘Hold, please. – You’re to go right in.’

‘Thanks, Little Rabbit,’ said Barrow, which was Drummond’s name for her, based apparently on the meaning of her surname in Anopa. She was a small, round takouma, very young, who blushed easily. She blushed now, and ducked her head.

The pen was like a ship abandoned in the middle of a battle. Mugs still steaming on desks, a cigarette still burning in an ashtray, but no people, except one drunk suspect slumped in the chair he was handcuffed to, and, sitting in silence over against the wall, Mickey Casqui along with a woman Barrow hadn’t seen before, a redhead in a mannish rust-coloured suit. Casqui had one black-and-white spat up on his other knee and was scraping the tip of his tongue with a fingernail. When he saw Barrow, he extended the scraping finger and pointed it onwards.

The captain’s office was crowded with more people than there were chairs. Fussner the medical examiner had been given one, and so had the miko’s deputy, Lieutenant Doyle, and behind his desk sat Captain Nakbateroli himself, his hands spread on the desk as if without the pressure it might get up and gallop off; but against the glass walls leaned all the other detectives of the day shift, Everard and Bunce, Yanasa and Tali, and of course Drummond. Everyone but Dr Fussner had a cigarette lit, and the air was the colour of a pencil-lead already. Fussner waved his hand irritably in front of his face but it only stirred the cloud.

‘—keep a lid on this thing?’ the captain was saying. ‘I don’t see why this can’t be handled on the quiet. That’s what we do when you boys are picking up after the bootleggers, or when things turn rough in the Seventh Ward.’ A heavily handsome takouma with gleaming hair, he enjoyed the status and the persona of authority, but not the uncertainties. Also, he came from Quizquiz, not from here, and working out which of the city’s different powers he was 37supposed to be propitiating made him anxious at the best of times. No-one knew what he had been like as a street cop. That had been in Quizquiz too, and a long time ago. ‘Nobody wants to hear about red killing white,’ he went on, ‘or white killing red.’

‘You sure about that, miko?’ said Yanasa, whose voice had been left hoarse and squeaky from childhood mumps. ‘Seems like a lot of people are going to be real keen to hear. The Klan are going to be all over this.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ said the captain impatiently. ‘If we let ’em. So, we don’t let ’em.’

‘Yeah, but this isn’t a stiff in a vacant lot, or inna alley; this ain’t business as usual, Cap.’ Drummond speaking. ‘This one was put out to be found – to be real obvious, real hard to ignore.’

‘Yeah,’ said Yanasa. ‘Like, right next to the Mound. Sotolaykate chokma, at least we’re spared that.’

‘And it’s out, is the thing,’ said Drummond. ‘Already. It’s too late to sit on it, miko. I don’t know who tipped off Mickey Casqui’ – a sly grin, here, since it was known that Nakbateroli himself was generally the department’s leaker, in the name of securing the good opinion of the press, and there was something sourly pleasing to them all in seeing the arrangement blow up a little in his face – ‘but he’s on it now. He’s got his teeth in.’

Because you made sure of it, thought Barrow, still puzzled. But Drummond must have come up with some angle that would pay off; it was up to him to back the play.

‘He’s pretty excited,’ Barrow confirmed.

‘Yeah; and now he’s out there with the dame from the Post, uh, uh—’

Drummond snapped his fingers in frustration.

‘Anderson,’ supplied Tali.

‘Titian-haired Anderson,’ said Everard unexpectedly.

‘What the fuck?’ said Bunce.38

‘Hey, some of us appreciate the finer things, know what I mean? She did the story onna—’

‘Maybe get back to the matter at hand, gentlemen?’ said Doyle.

‘Yeah, shut up,’ said Nakbateroli. ‘Drummond?’

‘I’m saying, miko, those two are just the beginning. We’re gonna have press coming down on us from all over. Sky’s gonna be full of vultures.’

‘So what you’re saying, we got to handle this thing quickly; and we got to be seen to be handling it,’ said Nakbateroli, giving a slight smile and looking resolute.

‘Yessir; and that’s why I’m sayin’, you need to put me and the big guy on it full time, till it’s done.’

‘Hold on now,’ said Doyle. ‘Before we get into the practicalities – are you all in on this Warriors angle? Are you sure about that?’ He was looking at Drummond over the top of his half-moon spectacles, calm and amiable and silver-haired Irish: but old Cahokia Irish, not part of the newer influx from Chicago. His grandfather had been one of the original patrikiotaks, recruited straight off the coffin ships to fight the city’s wars against Protestant America. He worshipped at the old Brigade church of St Patrick’s, where the battle flags of the heroic past, worn thin now, were draped in honour along the nave.

‘Isn’t it the obvious lead?’ said Drummond. ‘Starin’ us right in the face. Right there on the stiff’s face, for that matter?’

‘Doesn’t make sense to me, miko,’ Yanasa put in. ‘We know the Warriors, me and Tali, a little bit; they’re on our patch, down in the docks, if they’re anywhere. (And if that’s the way we’re going, it should be us taking the lead.) But they’re small-time; they ain’t killers, that I’ve ever heard. Write on a wall and run away, that’s the style. Throw some red paint—’

‘—blood—’ said Drummond.

‘—whatever. Biggest thing they ever did was make a mess of the Victories, onna Plaza.’39

‘That was them?’ said Nakbateroli.

‘Couldn’t prove it, but – yeah. Nuisance, not felony, see. Coupla hours scrubbing for the sanitation boys. Nothing like this. And the rest of the time, what, they’re drumming in the park. Runnin’ a soup kitchen. Buncha old men and dreamers, basically.’

‘Then we shake ’em up a bit and see what falls out,’ said Drummond. ‘But it’s got to be done, miko, ’cause it’s gonna be the first thing the press grabs at.’

Fussner coughed. ‘Do you actually need me here for this? You pulled me out when I’d only had time to take a first glance at the body, so I assumed it was urgent. But if you’re busy, I’ll get back to it.’

‘No, no, Doctor,’ said Nakbateroli. ‘Tell us what you’ve got so far.’

‘Well, not much but the obvious first impressions. Victim was killed by the throat-cutting; opening his chest happened post-mortem. Don’t know what that was for but it wasn’t part of the murder, just someone being … spectacular, I guess. Oh, one funny thing: there’s small crumbs of something black in the chest cavity. A foreign body.’

‘Like what?’ said Nakbateroli.

‘Don’t know, till I get it under the microscope. Something hard. Grit? Glass, even.’

‘Prob’ly roofing tar,’ said Drummond, rolling his eyes.

But the miko had brightened at the thought of a clue, a properly mysterious clue, to serve to the press. ‘Thanks, Doctor. No need to, ah, detain you further.’

Fussner gratefully exited.

‘It’s the shaking up I’m not sure about,’ said Doyle, once the door was shut. ‘We don’t know where this is going to go.’

‘No, no, Drummond is right,’ said Nakbateroli. ‘We need quick results, here, most of all. We need a perpetrator, we need answered questions, so it can all be rolled up. Right, so: let’s get these boys’ hands free so they can work fast.’40

‘Well,’ said Drummond, ‘Ev and Buncie can take the cement works thing, and the two hobos by the Bridge—’

‘Gee, thanks,’ said Everard.

‘—and Y an’ T can have the stiff in the drugstore basement, where all the cartons say “Pepto-Bismol” and all the bottles in ’em turn out to be mysteriously full of gin. – C’mon, guys, that’s a nice little number and you know it; I’d be doing you a favour handing off that one, and you know it.’

‘But still, we’re the ones with the know-how, where the Warriors’re concerned,’ said Yanasa.

‘And I will respect your expertise,’ said Drummond. ‘I will li-aise with you like crazy. There will be more li-aising than you can shake a stick at. But: our body, boys. Sorry.’

‘You better firm up the ID on the corpse, first,’ said Doyle. ‘Get something better’n, what was it, a library card?—’

‘—prescription—’ Barrow said.

‘—proves that he’s this Fred Hopper. Find an address; see if there’s a grievin’ family.’

‘Captain?’ said Miss Chokfi, putting her head round the door, having caught the very end of this. Sixteen male eyes turned towards her, in stares ranging from paternal to lubricious.

‘Hi, honey,’ said Everard.

‘Hi, bunny,’ said Drummond.

‘What is it?’ asked Nakbateroli.

‘I think maybe you don’t need to go looking for an address? The Land Trust was just on the phone? They’re saying they’ve got a clerk named Frederick Hopper, didn’t turn up to work today? Apartment 16, Schmitz Building, 2210 2nd Street.’ She handed in a slip of paper and fled.

‘Well, that explains the elevator, if he actually worked there,’ said Barrow.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Drummond with the frown.41

But the miko slapped the table in good humour. ‘You see?’ he said. ‘We’re on the move already! Okay, let’s meet the press.’

He heaved himself up, belly in his uniform shirt squeaking against the desk edge like a rubbed balloon, and led the way out. As they all followed, Barrow drew Drummond aside.

‘Phin, something funny: I just got taken for a car ride by, get this, the Man himself.’

‘The—?’

‘The Moon’s uncle. The top takouma. Him. Mickey Casqui set it up. I came down from the roof and there was his limo, waiting. Bodyguard said, “Get in, tastanagi.” So I got.’

‘No shit,’ said Drummond, and gave a silent whistle. ‘Right to the top, huh. I didn’t expect this to escalate that fast. So, what did he want?’

‘I don’t exactly know. I thought it was going to be, you know, the squeeze. Or the same old line about me being takouma, and why I should do what I was told, and there was some of that. But he talked Latin; gave me this speech about the city. Said he wanted us to ask questions and kick down doors.’

‘A-huh,’ said Drummond, and he nodded to himself like he was taking the information in, and maybe putting together the jigsaw inside his head in a new way, as a result. ‘A-huh.’

‘And he gave me his card—’

‘Tell me the rest later, okay? We need to hear this.’

Nakbateroli had planted himself in front of the two reporters with his arms crossed and his detective squad flanking him. Casqui and Anderson had their notebooks out.

‘As you’ll have heard, a body was found this morning on the roof of the Land Trust building. The poor soul in question had been grievously mishandled, and we are, of course, treating the death as murder.’

‘Good to know you’re not treating it as shoplifting,’ murmured 42Anderson. Her voice startled Barrow by reminding him slightly of the Man’s. Not quite as strangulatedly Bostonian, but still an East Coast voice: a voice with friends called Kip and Muffy. It came from lips outlined in fire-engine scarlet, adding along with the clothes and the hair to a general foxiness.

‘Maybe littering,’ said Casqui.

‘But though this is a puzzling and terrible case, showing signs of a violence amounting to frenzy’ – the captain paused, to allow them to get down frenzy, smiling slightly at his ability to speak Newspaper – ‘I am confident that the perpetrator of this, uh, cruel outrage, will very shortly be apprehended. My message to the people of the city this morning is that there is no cause for concern. We are on the trail, and y’all are in safe hands.’

‘In – safe – hands,’ repeated Anderson, scribbling away, with eyebrows raised high on her milky face like lines of rust. ‘No – cause – for – concern. Tell me, Captain, don’t you think it will be slightly concerning to the citizens that this act of frenzy took place in the very heart of the city? Very nearly on what you takouma citizens call hallowed ground?’

‘Well, yes – no – I don’t mean we aren’t concerned. Not at all. We are taking this very seriously indeed, young lady. As a takouma myself, I’m shocked.’

‘Are you? You can’t be completely surprised, though, Captain, can you?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Nakbateroli, frowning.

‘I mean,’ said Anderson, enunciating with relish, ‘that we have here, let me see: the top of a pyramid – or as near as dammit; as near as anyone could get to one – and a body torn open there, in the style of a human sacrifice – in a city founded by Aztec royalty – and still ruled by Aztec royalty.’

‘Mr Hashi does not rule Cahokia,’ said Doyle.

‘If you say so,’ said Anderson with a wink.43

‘I didn’t think we’d released anything about the injuries?’ said the miko, confused.

‘Sorry,’ said Mickey Casqui, carefully not looking at Drummond. ‘I worked it out from the mess on the roof. And we in the press do talk to each other, you know. While we’re on the subject of royalty, though – have you been contacted about this case by the palace? Or for that matter by the Statehouse?’

‘No?’ said Nakbateroli, clearly wondering what he had missed.

‘No political interference at all, Captain?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you,’ said Casqui, making neat little notes with a gold pencil.

‘So,’ said Anderson, ‘if someone has revived the ancient tradition of blood sacrifice—’

‘There is no evidence of that at all,’ said Doyle, more sharply. ‘This is a pious city, a blessed city, under the wings of the holy angels.’

‘If you say so,’ said Anderson again. ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed many halos in the street. But perhaps I’ve been in the wrong company.’

‘Perhaps you have,’ said Doyle, with real dislike. Anderson blinked.

‘What can you tell us about the victim?’ said Mickey Casqui.

‘We’ve yet to perform the sad duty of informing the poor man’s widow,’ the captain said, ‘so I can’t give you his name yet. But, a clerk employed at the Land Trust itself. – A takata, yes.’

‘And what was he doing up there, in the middle of the night?’

‘We … don’t yet know. There were no signs of forced entry.’

‘So, what, he met his killer there voluntarily?’

‘We don’t know that either.’

‘Would it be fair to say,’ asked Casqui, holding one hand in the air and drawing two fingers on the other hand away from it, as if unrolling a banner headline, ‘PD FLUMMOXED?’44

‘It would not,’ said Doyle.

‘No, no,’ Nakbateroli said. ‘We have a solid lead, and with, uh, two of my best detectives dedicated to the case full time until it is solved, we are confident of a quick resolution.’

‘Really? Which ones?’ said Anderson, looking around the room with a twist of her scarlet lips.

‘Detectives Drummond and Barrow,’ said Nakbateroli. Barrow nodded to her from his height. Drummond grinned.

‘Hey, Miss Anderson,’ he said. ‘Everard here really admires your Titians.’

Everard groaned. ‘You’ll have to excuse my colleague here. He is a lout. He has no finesse.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Anderson. ‘I think it’s sweet, to see someone trying so hard to master innuendo. Keep at it, Mac. Them words are troublesome, ain’t they?’ – said in a creditable imitation of Drummond’s hillbilly twang. ‘But you keep at it, and I’m sure you’ll get there in the end.’

‘A solid lead?’ said Casqui.

‘We’re exploring a definite angle on the killing, but I am not at liberty to discuss it at this point. Once we got our suspects in custody, I can say more,’ said the captain.

‘Suspects plural? You’re not looking for an individual lunatic, then?’ asked Anderson.

‘No. A group. On the basis of certain markings found on the corpse, we are investigating a group of, let’s say, takouma extremists?’

‘Extremists with a taste for ancient history,’ murmured Anderson. ‘What “markings”, please?’

‘We are not disclosing that at this time,’ said Doyle hastily, before Nakbateroli’s desire to please could get the better of him.

‘Okay; okay,’ said Anderson, writing busily.

‘Do you have anything, from the medical examination, say, which would contradict this theory of “Aztec sacrifice”?’ put in Casqui.45

‘The full medical examination is still under way,’ said Nakbateroli.

‘All right,’ said Casqui.

‘So I think that’s all for now,’ said Doyle.

‘But,’ added the captain, eager to be able to offer an intriguing detail, ‘we do already know that there appear to be fragments of an unidentified, hard, black substance found in the victim’s wounds?’

‘Flakes – from – an – obsidian – knife,’ said Anderson happily, and went on writing.

4

Driving westward up the endless line of 2nd Street in one of the department’s open-topped Fords, Drummond in the passenger seat kept twisting round to check the view out the back of the flivver. Whatever it was he was looking for in the workday hum of streetcars, delivery trucks, autos and pedestrians, he kept not finding it.

‘What’s up?’ said Barrow.

‘Just makin’ sure that dame ain’t following us, so’s she can get at the widow.’

‘I thought you wanted the story out?’

‘Yeah, but why should she get it? Bitch.’

Barrow, diagnosing hurt feelings, kept his mouth shut. In particular he didn’t report that when Drummond had been on the other side of the pen getting an address from Yanasa to give them a starting-point for the Warriors, Anderson on her way out of the building had leaned over his own desk in a cloud of eyelashes and perfume and russet tweed, and said ‘Friend of yours?’, nodding at Drummond’s back. ‘I guess.’ ‘Me, I prefer friends who aren’t assholes,’ she’d said.

‘Widow, then Warriors, right?’

Drummond grunted, and yawned.46

They were entering a section of the city which for block after block was essentially all takata, and might have been located anywhere from Chicago to Columbus. It was an illusion that broke down, Barrow knew, as soon as you got out beyond the city limits, and found that what surrounded you was the tight, ancient net of embankments and maize fields and canals and steeples. But here, headed west toward the end of 2nd, with the faraway levee only a distant notch and the tenements going by with peeling oxblood paint and fire escapes, and railroad crossings feeding the freight yards of the Union Cartridge and Al-Az and Monsanto plants looming on the left – here, what mattered was that this block was Polish and the next was Slovak, this block was Italian with corner groceries selling olive oil, and the one afterwards and then five, ten, fifteen more after that were German, with at least as many varieties of wurst for sale and neat little Lutheran churches streaked black by factory smoke. Here, you might be able to persuade yourself that it was the four Quarters behind you, and the palace, and the Mound, and the Saturday roar of the Ballcourt, which represented the interruption to normality.

The Schmitz Building, even less grand than its name, was an L-shaped walkup in brick on the south side of the street. It wasn’t a flop, but everything about it said cheap. The dingy upstairs corridor had the distinctive smell that declared that these were the doors to cold-water apartments, where human washing could only be accomplished by the painstaking boiling of kettles, and therefore was often left unfinished.

Apartment 16 was at the end, and Barrow was resignedly preparing the knock, the formula of sympathy, the questions required to get them the hell out of the misery they were about to inflict. But the door flew open before he raised his hand, and there stood the woman with marcelled hair from Hopper’s photograph, only still more beaten-down and desperate looking, and clutched against 47her the boy from the picture too, colourlessly pale, with protruding eyes. She had a very old pistol in her hand, and was pointing it at them. Mostly at Barrow, as the bigger target. The barrel was shaking.

‘Get away, you devils!’ she said. ‘I’ve got nothing for you!’

‘Ma’am,’ said Drummond carefully, ‘we’re the po-lice. I don’t know who you was expectin’, but we are the po-lice. Cahokia PD. I’m going to get out my badge to show you – just my badge. There now, you see? That’s my name, there. Detective Drummond. And this here is Detective Barrow. He’s a big fellow, but he don’t mean no harm.’

‘I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news for you,’ said Barrow, and the gun barrel, which had been drooping, jerked back up towards him, apparently at the mere sound of his voice.

‘Now then, ma’am, it’s time to put down your shooting-iron, hey? You don’t want to shoot two po-lice, do you, ma’am; that would just be a world of trouble for you.’

He was using what he’d once described to Barrow as his chicken-killing voice. ‘You got to speak them soft, or they don’t let you git close enough to put your hands round their necks,’ he’d said.

She lowered the weapon. Barrow wondered if Drummond would back-hand her: but he only snatched the piece with a snake-quick hand.

‘That was a fool thing to do, woman,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking of?’

‘I thought you had Frederick,’ she said, looking as limp as people generally did after, rather than before, news was broken to them. ‘He owes money, you see, and he didn’t come home last night.’

‘Yeah? Who’d he borrow from?’

‘A thug called Weiss,’ she said, naming a local lieutenant in one of the takata booze syndicates.

Drummond sucked his teeth and shook his head. ‘That’d do it,’ he said. ‘But that’s not why we’re here. I’m sorry to have to tell you 48that your Frederick has met with a misadventure of an entirely different kind.’

‘He’s been in an accident? O Lord, we can’t afford medical bills as well as everything else—’

‘No,’ said Barrow. ‘Mrs Hopper, he’s dead.’

‘Oh, what?’ she said, and her hand wavered up to cover her mouth.

‘Mama?’ said the boy.

‘Would you let us in, please,’ said Barrow, ‘and we’ll explain.’

She stepped aside, and they filed into a room of extraordinary bareness, with a fold-up bed and a scratched table and a woodwormed closet and three mismatched chairs, all of which looked to have come from the poorest kind of second-hand store. There was a small blue jug on the table, with daisies in it.

‘Are you an Injun?’ the boy asked Barrow.

‘Yes,’ he said. It seemed simpler. ‘Mrs Hopper, is there a neighbour who could mind your boy for a few minutes?’

‘I suppose Irene next door …’

‘That would be a good idea.’

She took the child out, and could be heard negotiating with an elderly voice up the hall. Then she came back and sat down at the table and looked up at them. Well; at Drummond, though he was flittering round the empty room and tapping the closet door and looking out of the dusty window into the lot behind. It was Barrow who was standing still, gazing down at her. Her face was drained, not so much as if the news had affected her, as that by being one more blow when she was already staggering under many, it had pushed her into a place of blankness, sheer stunned astonishment.

‘I’m afraid your husband has been murdered at his place of work,’ said Barrow. ‘His body was found there this morning, up on the roof.’

‘What?’ she said again faintly. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Drummond over by the window, taking 49out a cigarette and then thinking better of it. ‘That’s the puzzle, ma’am. What was he doing there? Any light you can shed?’

‘I don’t see why they’d have taken him there,’ she said. ‘They meet at Hamelin’s. The drugstore.’

‘Weiss’s boys, you mean?’ said Drummond, after a hesitation. ‘Sorry; took me a moment to catch your meaning. No ma’am, not them. This ain’t them, we don’t think.’

‘Then I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Murdered. Murdered. Who else’d wish him harm but them? We don’t know anyone here. We haven’t been here but a month or two. ’Cept—’ She stopped herself, and shot the briefest of glances at Barrow, full of suspicion.

‘Except who?’ said Drummond.

‘No-one,’ she said. ‘Just his, you know, his, ah, lodge brothers, who looked out for him.’

‘Oh, he was a mason?’

‘Like that,’ she said.

‘How did he spend the day yesterday?’ said Barrow. ‘When did you see him last?’

‘It was an ordinary Sunday,’ she said. ‘He went to church with us, he came for a walk in the afternoon with us. He ate his supper with us,’ she said. ‘Right there.’

‘And what did he do, after?’ asked Drummond.

‘He said, “Marlene, now I’m going to settle accounts.” That’s what he said, “settle accounts”. And he smiled at me. And he put on his hat and off he went. I thought he’d gone to Hamelin’s, like I said.’

‘Did he have the money to pay them back?’ asked Barrow.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, eyes on the table top.

‘Sure you do,’ Barrow said. ‘You two were counting every cent, weren’t you? You’d’ve known if he’d come into enough to get clear with Weiss. And he hadn’t, had he? So what was—’

‘Now you don’t get to speak to me like that!’ she cried suddenly, 50pointing a trembling finger at Barrow but not turning her eyes the way the finger pointed. ‘Looking down your redskin nose at me, like I was dirt. I may not be much, but I’m a white woman. You show me some respect. Make him show me some respect!’ she said shrilly to Drummond.

‘Now, Joe,’ said Drummond solemnly, ‘you behave yourself, y’hear? What am I always tellin’ you about the importance of manners?’

‘Ma’am,’ said Barrow, ‘I’m sorry if I offended. We’re just trying to catch whoever it was that hurt Mr Hopper.’

‘Oh, that’s much better,’ said Drummond. ‘Well done, Joe.’

‘Shut up, Phin,’ said Barrow.

Drummond grinned, and to hide it, as much as anything else, opened the door of the closet. Then he put his head on one side. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and beckoned Barrow with a finger. Barrow leaned across and looked in. Among the faded and darned garments a white cotton robe was hanging, with a tilted cross in red and white on the breast, and a pointed hood with round eye holes.

‘Your Frederick was in the Klan,’ observed Drummond. ‘So that’s who else he knew in the city. What Klavern?’

‘Are you …?’ said the widow.

‘Naw,’ said Drummond, ‘I ain’t much of a joiner.’

‘Then I can’t say a word,’ she said. ‘Not that it’s anything to be ashamed of.’

‘Of course not,’ said Drummond. ‘Why, it’s a fine ol’ American organisation, dedicated to fine ol’ American values.’

‘You’re mocking me,’ she said, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong with the Klan? Why, back in Ohio, all of Freddie’s friends were in; everyone in First Methodist, and most of the Presbyterians too.’

‘It’s just his way,’ said Barrow. ‘Ma’am. Don’t you mind him. Now can I just ask—’

‘I’m not talking to you,’ she said. ‘What kind of a place is this, 51where they send a savage to tell a decent woman that she – that she—’

Her face quaked, then emptied again.

‘We shouldn’t have come here,’ she said. ‘Savages and papists and foreigners and drinkers, and people so mixed up you can’t even tell what they are.’

‘Why didja come?’ said Drummond. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Frederick was a salesman. He travelled in ether for dentists. But he couldn’t make it work somehow, no matter how he tried.’

Barrow thought of the state of Hopper’s teeth, and could see how it would be easy to resist buying dental supplies from the man.

‘So … someone said, there were these openings here in government work a white man could get, even with all the pope-ism and the corruption. Safe, steady work, with a pay check to count on. So we came. But we were down so far by then we couldn’t get back up; and Frederick said at the office it was real strange. They had this, I guess, like a ceremony? He said one day they came at him in masks, and danced around him without saying a single solitary word. Like they weren’t even really Romans. Just pagans underneath.’

Barrow thought of the photographs he had seen of Klan picnics where everyone on a Ferris wheel was hooded, and of Klan displays at county fairs where the white-robed crowds arranged themselves in faceless crosses, circles, processions. He wondered why none of that had struck Fred as strange.

‘And then he borrowed the money,’ she concluded. As if the mention of the debt was something familiar to be held on to, if not exactly a reassurance, she made a visible effort to pull herself together.

‘I’ll get my coat,’ she said. ‘We’ll pay our respects.’

‘No,’ said Barrow, ‘that’s … not a good idea.’

Again she looked at Drummond, not at him.52

‘Why not?’

‘He’s kind of messed up,’ said Drummond.

‘“Messed up”?’ she said. ‘Messed up how? What happened to him?’ The pitch of her voice was rising. Soon, Barrow could tell, the blankness would crack, and let out the howl behind.

‘Something ugly,’ he said carefully. ‘But it will’ve been over real fast for him, and he won’t have known anything about the rest. So you should try not to worry your mind. Don’t read the papers. Don’t let the boy see the papers either.’

‘What?’ she said, higher still. ‘Why? What are they going to say about Frederick? What did they do to him?’

‘Well,’ began Drummond.

‘Just don’t read them, ma’am,’ said Barrow. ‘Now, listen. Weiss will be after you for the money next. Have you got relatives – anyplace you can go to?’

‘A sister in Syracuse? But—’

‘My advice, don’t stay for the funeral. We’ll see it’s done decent and let you know where they put him. You need to leave town. Pack up now, and get on a train today. Here, I’ve got the money for you that Mr Hopper had in his wallet.’

He counted out Hopper’s four dollars, and on an impulse added the ten from Mickey Casqui and a couple of bucks of his own. The widow looked at the bills on the table.

‘How do I know this is all of it?’ she said.

*

Drummond was laughing as they walked out to the car. The sky had closed over again into a ruffled grey.

‘Ain’t that a perfect exhibition of the human animal,’ he said. ‘Husband not yet buried, and she’s dickering over a few dollars.’

‘You really are an asshole,’ said Barrow. The electric starter on the Model T was playing up, and he had to crank the motor. Drummond stretched and yawned in the passenger seat.53

‘Honestly, why’d you do that?’ he said, when Barrow climbed in to join him. ‘It’s not goin’ to do her any good, and you don’t owe nothin’ to her. She’s just trash floating on the water, you know; next wave comes, and it’s gone. You should think of yourself. Free your mind.’

‘Is that right,’ said Barrow, and pulled across the street to join the flow of traffic heading back east. The moving air on their faces was cold and damp; it felt as if it might rain soon. After a couple of blocks they went past a glass-and-chrome frontage signed HAMELIN’S, looking very innocent and everyday.

‘Know what I noticed in there?’ Drummond said.

‘What?’

‘They’re stony-broke, right? Down to livin’ on beans and borrowing from a loanshark to make the rent. Looks like they ain’t had new clothes in years. But they still managed to pay for ol’ Fred to get the whole outfit for the KKK, robes and sash and all, and that stuff you cain’t get second-hand, and it ain’t cheap either, I happen to know. A few dollars for this part, a few dollars for that: it mounts up.’ He whistled. ‘You’ve got to admire that, in a way.’

Barrow knew Drummond well enough to be sure he didn’t mean that he admired the Hoppers’ costly devotion.

‘I mean, think about that. Poor people; white trash, really, though I know they don’t call ’em that back in Oh-Hi-Oh. Take ’em right, and you can just pump the cash out of them. Now, the Klan’s big in the city right now; it’s grown and it’s grown. Other places, they get choosy about whether your name ends in -oosky or -elli. Here, it’s good enough if you’re takata, any kind. I reckon the ol’ Invisible Empire must have twenty thousand members here now, maybe more. Maybe thirty thousand. Thirty thousand nice white robes hangin’ in closets. Flimsy white cotton at the biggest mark-up the market’ll bear. Not to mention dues, and tributes, and tie-pins, and rule-books, and newspapers, and any other kind of Krap you can 54spell with a “K”. Someone,’ said Drummond, surveying the passing bakeries and warehouses with a sleepy complacency, ‘someone has found out the way to squeeze this place for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Got to admire that. I take off my hat to ’em.’ He did, literally, raising the snapbrim off his yellow flop of hair and pressing it back down again to cover his tired eyes. ‘Show me a believer, in pretty much anything, and I’ll show you somebody someplace else who’s making bank. It’s a law of the universe, is what it is. No different for the takouma, mind, with their holy cardinal to keep ’em in line, who just so happens to be brother to the Man. It’s all a racket, Joe, everywhere you look, and the only way not to be a sucker is, believe none of it. Free your mind. Free – your – mind.’

‘Huh,’ said Barrow. He had been more impressed when he heard this philosophy first, from a Drummond with a bandaged head holding a cigarette steady for him to puff on, in the field hospital behind the trench lines at Jouy. It had seemed like wisdom then, and it had seemed like Drummond proved it by his indifference to the colour of Barrow’s face. The 131st was an Illinois regiment, and the social rules it followed were not as harsh as those of the segregated South or the lily-white East, but still a lonely business for someone not-white, caught up at random by the draft in Chicago. The cynic from mixed-up, muddled-up brown Arkansas was the first American he ever ran across in France to meet him and see, principally, a tall guy named Joe. But since then he’d heard the routine over and over – a take on everything that was as predictable as clockwork.

‘Phin?’ he said, after a minute. ‘I think you better tell me what’s going on. What is the angle here?’

There was no reply. He spoke louder, and when there was still no reply, took a hand off the wheel and twitched the hat off Drummond’s head. He was asleep underneath it. Lids down over the funny-pages eyes, like bulging window blinds. Narrow cheeks slack 55and stubbled. Big mouth ajar. No doubt he needed it. Barrow didn’t know where Drummond had been when the dispatcher found him in the small hours to call him to the Land Trust, but he might well not have been to bed at all. There was a night-life there that Barrow knew nothing about, any more than Drummond knew what Barrow did off duty, down in Darktown. Let him snatch some rest.

They could in theory have reached the south-west of the city, where Yanasa’s lead on the Warriors was located, by continuing to the levee and following the waterfront down. But that way lay an intricacy of docks to thread, and tracks crossing every hundred yards, and therefore endless chances to get locked up behind, or between, the slow-moving freights bringing in cattle to the packers, lime to the cement works, lead and aluminum to the smelters, coal to power it all. Quicker and surer to go east again, then south.

Barrow sighed and drove on, thinking about Hopper telling his wife yesterday evening that he was going to ‘settle accounts’. Whatever it was he thought he was doing, Hopper was definitely expecting something. That didn’t sound like a man who had run into a party of slaughterous takouma extremists by accident. (And who runs into anybody on a locked rooftop in the middle of the night by accident, anyway?) Barrow supposed he would just have to wait and see what fell out when they shook things up with the Warriors. He had the brass knuckles in his pocket. He hoped they would protect his hands. Muscle work was a stupid thing for a pianist to get involved in. But to stop it, he’d have to decide that he actually was a pianist, not just muscle who played a little sometimes. On the wheel, he tapped out a little of the piano part of ‘Kansas City Stomp’ – or his version of it, anyway; it was years since he heard Morton play it in Chicago, and like all the good tunes it had been tinkered with since by every performer at every performance. The skyscrapers of the business district, with the Panton Leslie tower ruling over them, were still way ahead, 56but the buildings were rising and the traffic was thickening and the streets were getting noisier; and intermittently, for a bar or three, he had that illusion that the city’s movement had gotten into time with the song, wheels and passers-by in derby hats and busy crossings and men astride girders up in the air all momentarily joined in one dance, to the pulsing rhythm of his own left hand. The invisible orchestra of his head provided clarinet, cornet, drums. But the bumps of the roadway fed such a lot of judder back into his hands that he had to keep gripping the wheel tight and interrupting himself, and over streetcar tracks the narrow tyres of the Model T positively jiggered and bounced. Barrow could drive well enough, but he didn’t enjoy it. He switched to humming, and stole a glance at Drummond – only a glance, because he had a truck behind him and a trolley pulling by on his left – expecting that the noise and the rattling would be waking him. No; Drummond was deep down and far off, being shaken slackly in the seat.

In fact, he seemed so thoroughly gone that, a little time later, amid the general rattle and roar Barrow almost missed the sound Drummond started to make. It was one Barrow had not heard for more than a year: a choked bark deep in his throat, like a cough that couldn’t get free. He glanced across again. This time Drummond’s eyes were twitching under the closed lids, back and forth in jerks. He was dreaming, and Barrow was afraid he knew what he was dreaming of.

‘Phin,’ he said. ‘Wake up, now. Wake up, man.’

Drummond only made the choking sound again. And then again.

‘Phin!’

Nothing; a man locked deep in his dream, his very fearful dream; and now he had begun to jerk his head forward, in short violent nods, as if that way he could shake out the obstruction he was dreaming. It didn’t work; it never had. His windpipe was filled with a phantom of Flanders earth, and it could not be coughed free.57

Barrow was still boxed in, baker’s truck behind now and a continuous file of automobiles to his left, but he dared to detach a hand from the wheel and shook Drummond’s shoulder hard for a moment, hoping that touch could recall him. It didn’t. It seemed only to set the demons looser. Drummond bent his whole torso forward from the waist and then slammed it back against the seat, flailing like a gaffed fish. His hands rose and clawed at the air, and his face began to turn purple. All the while the desperate sound of imaginary suffocation came from his throat. Horns sounded from behind Barrow; he was going too slow for the traffic. He was afraid that Drummond would pitch himself off the seat altogether, and fall out into the roadway to his right and be mangled by the rolling wheels behind. He needed to pull over and stop.

But as if the nightmare had leaked out of Drummond’s mind into the real fabric of 2nd Street, and infected it with malignant impossibility, right now he could see absolutely nowhere to pull over. The sidewalk was blocked completely with parked cars. The next intersection allowed no turn to the right. On the block after, everything seemed to be parked so tight it might all have been wedged in with a lever, and then there was another intersection across which the bread truck behind drove him, roaring and honking. He gripped Drummond by the scruff with his free hand and held him in place as best he could as he thrashed about, while his right fought the jitters of the wheel and his feet moved confusedly on the three pedals on the floor. Finally, a space opened up, perhaps too small a one but he didn’t care, and he flung the Model T into it at a slew while stamping on the brake. They hit the back fender of the car parked in front with a heavy metallic clang, and the kerb with the front wheel.

The Model T rocked and Barrow seized Drummond with both hands and pulled him into a heavy embrace, pounding on his back like someone trying to burp a baby. Except that Drummond was 58more like an armful of live wires, to hold; he was still thrashing about, to the point that things were shaking out of his pockets and collecting on the floor round his kicking feet, coins and lighter and pack of half-crushed stogies and something small that rolled away under the seat with a glassy clink. ‘Hey!’ Barrow said in his ear. ‘Hey. Hey. Come back, Phin. Come back. Wake up. You can breathe. It’s not happening. That was then. That’s over. You’re okay. You’re okay. Wake up, now. Back you come’ – these words accompanied by a grip on him that Barrow hoped might work as a lifeline, a point of contact that could be followed home into daylight from the collapsed trench at Chateau-Thierry where his mind was telling him he lay suffocating.

They were parked outside a grocery store just receiving a delivery of ice. The icemen toting the block across the sidewalk had turned to stare, and so had the customers at the doorway, and a very old man in a frayed straw hat sitting on a bench outside, watching the world through faded pale-blue eyes.

‘Does he have the flooenza?’ said the old man. ‘I had the flooenza. That’s a nasty one.’

‘No!’ said Barrow. ‘Wake up, Phin. There we go. That’s right. Open your eyes. You’re all right. You’re safe and sound. You’re right here. Okay, now.’

Drummond’s eyes flew open, and darted left-right-left-right before fixing on Barrow’s face. ‘Joe,’ he croaked, and drew a gulp of a breath. Barrow let go of him and he began to cough fully, rackingly.

‘Whatsamatter with him?’ said the guy at the rear of the ice, shifting his gloved grip.

‘Not a thing,’ said Barrow, but as he spoke Drummond leaned out over the side of the Model T and vomited copiously right in front of the audience.

‘Ewww!’ went the customers, and averted their faces, except for a grey-haired woman wearing a Women’s Christian Temperance 59Union pin who said, triumphantly, ‘I believe this man is drunk.’

Drummond sat back, pale and shaking. The storekeeper came to the door to see what the fuss was about, bare arms seamed with black gorilla hair, and folded them in disgusted sarcasm.

‘Won’t that do wonders for my trade,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much. – Ike, get the sawdust!’

Meanwhile, a beat cop was setting off towards them from the corner, swinging his nightstick. Cop, icemen, storekeep, old man, customers: every single one of them was takata. They drew in, or at least it felt as if they did.

Barrow stood up behind the wheel, and pulled open his coat to show his gun and his badge. People stepped back as they tended to at the sudden demonstration of his height, even without the extra platform of the Ford lifting his head eight feet from the ground.

‘Nothing to see,’ he said. ‘Nothing to see. – Murder Squad, Officer; no problem here.’

Grumbling, the onlookers departed. In a minute there was no-one left to see but Ike and his bucket, and the old man smiling on the bench, as Barrow squatted to squeeze the crank into the awkward cranny under the tangled fenders and restarted the car, reversed free with a squeal of metal, and pulled away onto 2nd again.

Drummond was patting the passenger door and seat as if verifying their solidity.

‘You okay, there?’ said Barrow.

‘Buried,’ said Drummond, in a hoarse whisper.

‘I know.’

‘Haven’t had that one for a while.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thanks, pal,’ he said.

Barrow shrugged.60

‘You’d do the same for me,’ he said. ‘You have done the same for me.’

Drummond wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, then spat into it to clear his mouth. He lit a cigarette, took one drag, and gazed at the orange glow of the burning end with his shoulders hunched.

‘I wish it would go,’ he said. ‘I can still taste … mud.’

‘It’ll go,’ said Barrow. ‘Just give it a minute. Pick up your shit off the floor there. You’ll be right as rain. Tell me about something; that’ll help. And when we get there, you’ll be back on the case, you’ll be too busy to remember it.’

‘Yeah,’ said Drummond, but he didn’t start talking, just sat there hunched in a silence unlike him. They were coming up on Division, where purely takata Cahokia gave way to the shared ground of the business district, when he spoke again.

‘Joe?’ he said. ‘That ol’ sow at the store was wrong, but I’m thinkin’ I’d like to make her right. Right now, drunk sounds good. Very good. Could you let me out, and gimme a rain check? I know a speak’ll serve me, not far from here.’

‘You want me to do the Warriors alone?’

‘No! I better be there for that. I meant … you just go along and tidy up the rest, best you can, and we’ll pick up the case together tomorrow; go and kick ourselves down some doors then, all right?’

‘Are you sure?’ said Barrow. ‘We kinda promised the miko speed, remember?’

‘We’ll go first thing tomorrow,’ said Drummond. ‘Early as you like. But now I really need a drink.’

‘Well … do you want company?’

‘No,’ said Drummond.

‘Sure,’ said Barrow. He found a space just before the corner of Division to set down. Drummond turned up his coat collar, pulled down his hat, and sucked in smoke underneath it. Then he walked away, slightly unsteady and meaning to get unsteadier, into the 61midday crowd, and was lost, one brown hat among a thousand. Barrow watched him go. Damn, he thought, I still haven’t shown him the card the Man gave me.

5

‘Tidying up’ turned out to mean going back for a statement at the Land Trust from Hopper’s supervisor. Barrow ate a baloney sandwich and drank a slug of black coffee greatly inferior to the Man’s, at a counter near the precinct on Algonkian and 5th, over the road from the Algonkian Hotel itself but ten times more modest, and ten times better suited to a cop’s income. He watched the limousines come and go under the decorated concrete of the portecochère. The limos were inferior to the Man’s too, but this time only slightly. You could see the hotel was a kind of takata fantasy of takouma life, with a Mound-like roof in shallow green tiles, and uprights modelled like abstract totems. But the real takouma of the Algonkian Tribal Endowment who had commissioned it were apparently happy with the effect: and the architect Wright was so pleased with how it had come out, they said, that he was building it again, only bigger, over in Japan. Barrow played himself a little more of ‘Kansas City Stomp’ on the edge of the counter, followed by the tricky piano line for James P. Johnson’s ‘Keep off the Grass’. Then he strolled past the Algonkian to the stub of Biloxi Avenue that led down onto the end of Creekside Drive, and walked himself back to the Three Sisters. It was definitely going to rain. The brackish city air was much warmer than it had been in the sleet at dawn, but the clouds overhead were darkening and ripening. The ruffles had distended into blue-black sacs, just waiting to split and spill. A passenger train went overhead as he crossed Union under the elevated, and he looked up reflexively; but this time, of course, it was 62not the Usunhiyi, either coming or going in sleek luxury from the land of dead. Just the dusty blue cars of the Cahokia Northern service to Chicago. He had ridden them himself.

*

‘What kind of a worker was Fred Hopper?’ he asked dutifully. He was sitting in the manager’s glass-walled enclosure at the end of a long room full of clerks on the seventh floor of the Land Trust.

‘I would say: a nervous one,’ said Mrs Hankeha, a heavy and large-bosomed takouma in her forties, whose movements were nevertheless sudden, almost irritable. She was swiping from time to time with a finger at the back of a new bob, either unsure whether she liked the feeling of her nape being bare, or maybe sure that she didn’t. She had a rosary dangling from the toggle of her desk lamp, and a tinted photograph of the Man in a frame on her wall. His earrings had been coloured as bright as a lipstick.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, of course I didn’t know him very well,’ she said. ‘As you can see, there are a lot of people in the department. And he hadn’t been here long. But he stood out a little bit, because we don’t have very many takata working here, and he was – well, I would say he was nervous of us, poor little man. I don’t think he’d ever worked with takouma before. – And I don’t think he’d ever had a woman for a boss either. Whenever I asked him to do something, he was surprised all over again. Is that a takata thing, do you think?’

‘Probably,’ said Barrow.

‘He was certainly very surprised when the Four Winds gave him his welcome. I suppose nobody had told him it was going to happen, and he didn’t know what to expect. He stood there practically trembling, can you imagine?’

Barrow could imagine. He had known what was coming, more or less, when he started at the department, but it was still quite sufficiently startling when, without warning, the Four Winds Society of 63the detective pen surrounded him. The approach, perfectly silent; and then the circle dance around him, silent too. A step around, and then a step in, four times repeated, until all of the Winds had stepped up to him on every side. Till he had been blessed on every side, he supposed. The masks they wore were two feet, maybe three feet long, and compellingly strange, with the eyes of the human wearing them lost and tiny inside the painted wooden pupils of joyful East, howling West, youthful South and haggard North. It had made less difference than you would think that he could see Miss Chokfi’s short legs under the face of West, Captain Nakbateroli’s straining belt beneath South. They were transformed, detached from their daily selves to do this solemn and unearthly thing, never to be referred to when the masks were hidden away. They stepped in, and Barrow found himself briefly enclosed, in a momentary casket of cedarwood, a chimney of painted strangeness. Yes, he could see how there could be terror in that for Fred Hopper, fresh from Ohio and filled with who-knows-what stories about savages, scalps, war-dances.

‘Well, perhaps he was right to be afraid,’ said Barrow. ‘Something very bad did happen to him, right upstairs.’

Mrs Hankeha winced. ‘I saw the blood,’ she said. ‘They were cleaning the skylight when I arrived. What a horrible thing. I shall light a candle for him on Sunday. But no-one here wished him any harm, you know. We felt sorry for him, with his worn-out clothes. You could tell he’d had a hard life. In the lunchroom he ate as if he was really hungry, if you know what I mean. Like a mouse who’d grabbed a bit of corn, and thought someone might take it away again.’

‘Does anyone in your department have any connection to the Warriors, that you know of?’

‘No!’ she said, staring. ‘We’re all sensible people here; respectable people.’64

‘Can you think of any other reason why someone here would be angry with him, or hold a grudge against him?’

‘I cannot,’ she said firmly. It was plain she thought that the honour of the seventh floor was at stake. ‘He may not have had any close friends – although, you know, I would have said he was starting to calm down and even smile a little, poor mouse – but here, we are civil, Detective; professional. There is no place for anger in a well-run office. Had there been any raised voices, I would have known.’

‘Yes,’ said Barrow. ‘Tell me, were you aware that this job had been suggested to him by the Klan?’

‘What?’ she said, blankly. ‘No. Are you sure? I must say, that doesn’t sound very likely. The Klan doesn’t approve of the Land Trust at all, Detective. They tell outrageous lies about us, in fact.’

‘Like what?’ said Barrow.

She blushed and lowered her voice. ‘Well, that after hours the building is full of priests and nuns having orgies. What a thing to say!’

‘Do you think they really believe that? Do you think that Mr Hopper thought he was coming to work in a … den of vice?’

‘I don’t know. Surely not.’

Barrow rubbed his eyes.

‘You can’t see any advantage to the Klan in … having a man on the inside? Something to do with the work Mr Hopper was doing, perhaps?’

‘What, you mean they might have put him here as some kind of agent? To undermine us? That sounds fanciful to me,’ said Mrs Hankeha, making it clear that ‘fanciful’, as far as she was concerned, stood at the opposite pole of the universe to ‘respectable’, and probably to ‘civil’ and ‘professional’ as well. She looked at him. ‘Do you understand what we do here, Detective?’

‘Not really,’ Barrow admitted.65

‘Surely you remember a little of it from civics class?’

‘I didn’t go to school here.’

‘Oh. You’re not … Well,’ she said, her voice patient but the tips of her fingers tapping together rapidly. ‘All the land in Cahokia – the whole state, I mean, not just the city – is owned by the tamaha.’

‘Sorry – the what?’

‘The people! All of the takouma together. Well, literally the word means “town”, but the tamaha is the human beings not the buildings. If you see what I mean. It’s clearer in Anopa. Anyway, we don’t have private ownership here. Instead, people who need to use the land take out leases, for a certain number of years; ninety-nine years for example, usually, for a city plot, although it can vary. Some very valuable ones only go out for ten years at a time. And the lease will say, you can do such-and-such things with this land, and you are entitled to such-and-such a share of water and, nowadays anyway, to such-and-such a share of electricity. Land, Water and Power, you see; that’s why we’re next door to each other. Now, sometimes the leases change hands because the term of the lease is over. Then the land is handed back to the tamaha, and a new lease is issued. They do that down on the fifth and sixth floors – the Registry is below that – but up here on the seventh and eighth floors, we handle what happens when people want to transfer their leases in the middle. Which you can do, you see; if you need some extra room for your farm, or your factory, you can pay your neighbour to pass over to you their lease on a plot which still has, say, thirty-one years to run. Then both parties come to us and pay the transfer fee, we check whether there needs to be any variance in the conditions, and we issue a new lease for the remaining term, which gets filed downstairs. Do you see?’

‘Yes,’ said Barrow. ‘So you’ve got the whole state in here on paper?’

‘We do,’ said Mrs Hankeha. ‘Now come with me, and let’s see what Mr Hopper was working on.’66

She sailed out of her glass office, and was swiftly surrounded by clerks fetching her a pile of ledgers.

‘There,’ she said. ‘February to March, 1922. He processed transfers for … a dairy co-op in Augustine Parish, a forest square near Camaqua, and quite a few house lots. Oh, and he helped Union Cartridge move its eastern boundary out by … twenty yards at its Abbeyville plant, so they could lay a new connection to the drainage system. None of that sounds very underhand, does it, or like a motive for murder?’

‘No,’ said Barrow. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hankeha.’

He tipped his hat and took his leave, but he left her frowning, and felt sure that she was going to get Hopper’s transfers re-checked as soon as he was gone.

*

When he got back down to the lobby the sky had darkened so much that there was a premature evening dimness. Thunder rolled, and the rain began to fall, first in heavy single drops splotching the grey stone of the embankments dark, then almost at once in visible rods, continuously slanting down to kick up a fine white rebounding spray along the ground. The sidewalks and the roadway hissed; the water of the Creek gave back a deeper note from the bombardment, like an engine running. Parked cars rattled. Barrow stood under the shelter of the overhanging roof above the revolving doors, and watched. Black-purple sky, green-dark water, slate-dark walls, blue-dark air. Over on the far embankment, number 40 looked back at him. It is the House of the Moon, of course. The upstairs light under the long, level roof was out, but there was a yellow glow downstairs between the screening cypress trees.

‘Dammit,’ he said, and when the cloudburst seemed to have slackened a bit, he made a dash up the road to the next bridge, holding his rapidly soaked hat on his head and drenching his feet in the gurgling streams of water pouring over the granite. On a day 67like this, he could see the point of Drummond’s Californian fantasy. Who wouldn’t prefer warm sun and orange trees?

The Moon’s house lay behind a high, unwelcoming wall. He rang the electric bell at the gate, expecting a long wait watching the wet run off his hatbrim in silver lines, and then an argument to follow, still in the rain. Instead, the gate clicked open immediately, and across the dark and sodden garden the front door was open too. He could see the back of the woman in maid’s uniform who’d opened it, just turning away.

Barrow stepped hastily in, realising that the maid must have been expecting someone else at about the same moment she realised the man behind her was not that person.

‘Hatak nanta? Nanta bana?’ she cried, and then a string of other high-speed Anopa.

‘Police,’ he said. ‘Sorry, iksho Anopa. I don’t speak it.’

‘What want?’ she said – a very takouma-looking takouma in middle age, hair scraped back in a fierce bun; and, judging by her accent speaking English, one of the population of primary or even exclusive Anopa speakers, from deep in the countryside. ‘Out! Out!’ she added hopefully, trying to shoo him back into the rain. He was dripping on the mat at the end of a long, high, severely square, severely white hall, with a branching staircase at the far end. There were geometric rugs on the floor in yellow and brown, ancient pots on square white plinths and, disconcertingly, a Thompson gun propped against the wall by the door, next to the umbrella stand.

‘I’d like to speak to – the lady of the house,’ said Barrow.

‘You speak Moon?’ said the maid incredulously. ‘No, tastanagi. She sleeping. Out!’

‘Cahokia PD Murder Squad,’ Barrow said, producing his badge. ‘On official business. Investigating a death over the road. Possibly witnessed from this house.’

‘So?’ she said, waving the badge away as if law and police were 68smoke to be dispersed in the air. Perhaps she wasn’t a maid; perhaps she was more like a housekeeper. She certainly seemed to think she out-ranked a mere detective. ‘Official not here. Nothing business here. You go now.’

Barrow hesitated. Then, replacing his badge he pulled out his wallet instead, and found the Man’s card.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘How about, I want to speak to the Moon because the Sun told me to?’

The woman’s eyebrows shot up. She took the card and stared at it.

‘Hmph,’ she said. ‘You wait. There!’ – indicating the zone where he was permitted to stand and drip. She closed the door, with a glance up the path to the gate, and took the card away with her up the stairs, walking on square heels that clock-clocked on the bare wood.

Barrow waited. The rain noise had receded to a murmur in the distance. He looked at the tommy gun, at the pots, at the art on the walls, all of it abstracts in subdued colours except for a large canvas of three flattened takouma figures dancing.

Nothing happened. More nothing happened. After a while, when it seemed that most of the damp in his shoes and his pants must have transferred itself to the mat, he moved defiantly off it, and padded around the room looking closer. It reminded him of Paris. Through a square arch to the left there was a dayroom, just as deliberately bare, with a black grand piano in it, lid up. Barrow considered it. Rain music not dance music for this room, he thought. He flipped out the tails of his overcoat, sat down; stirred up a little slow melody with his fingers while the black branches stirred at the window, and silver streaks descended the glass.

‘A musical detective,’ observed a voice from the direction of the stairs. Not a musical voice; young, but with a croak in it as if its owner had strep throat, or were part-nightbird.69

Barrow stopped playing and went back into the hall to look. A takouma woman in her late twenties had descended the stairs as far as the central crossing and was standing there wrapped in a black-and-silver Japanese robe, the Man’s card held out between finger and thumb. The maid bustled down the lower flight and pushed past Barrow with a disgusted expression. The Moon, however, stayed put. She made a tiny beckoning gesture with the card: approach. Barrow resisted the urge to bow, and did so, stopping two steps below her so their faces were on a level. They inspected each other.

At first sight, Barrow thought she was very ugly. She was wearing her black hair in a severe and drastic crop which even Barrow could tell had been about ten times more expensive than Mrs Hankeha’s uncertain attempt to keep up with the fashion. It put the sharpness of her skull on radical display; made her eyes – sunken, sore, red-rimmed – huge in proportion to her face; made it radically clear that here was a face made of angled bones, temporarily stretched-over with skin. The same thing you might see if you found a bleached hare’s skull in the dry grass beside a road in summer. Form without softening, without the compromises of flesh. In this case, with the minimal softening of flesh. Her cheekbones stood out like points. Looking at her, the starkness of her house made sense. He wondered how much she ate.

‘Mr—?’ she said.

‘Barrow.’

‘Not a takouma name.’

‘No.’

‘Mr Barrow, I’m an insomniac. You woke me up. I wouldn’t have come down unless I was curious.’

‘There was a murder on the roof of the Land Trust last night.’

‘Was there?’ Said with absolute calm.

‘A light was on over here, and I wondered whether, if you were awake, Miss Hashi, you had seen anything?’70

‘“Miss Hashi,”’ she said, as if holding out the phrase the way she was holding the card. ‘Strange to hear that from a takouma face. That is generally what white people call me.’

‘What do takouma say?’

‘In a formal setting the correct address is, ino hashi-ninak. What,’ she went on when he looked blank, ‘no Anopa at all?’

‘Practically none,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Sorry.’

‘It means, “my moon”,’ she said.

‘But this isn’t a formal setting,’ said Barrow. ‘You’re halfway up a staircase wearing a bathrobe, and in any case, miss – forgive me, you’re not my moon.’

A hiss of outrage came from the maid behind him, but Couma Hashi leaned forward as if he had become more interesting.

‘I see. – No, I didn’t see anything during the night. How could I? It’s a ridiculous idea. The angle is wrong. I don’t see anything in the window at night but the reflection of my own predicament. – But that’s not the question, Mr Barrow. That’s not what I’m curious about. The question is, why does my uncle think I should talk to you?’

She held out the card, but Barrow discovered as he reached to take it that she was keeping a pincer-grip on her corner of it, and that he was not going to be able to make her relinquish it except by yanking. They each held an end, suspended.

‘Ask him,’ said Barrow.

‘We’re not especially close,’ she said. ‘He is so very Catholic.’

‘I thought you were the traditional one and it was your brother was the rebel?’

‘Well, there’s traditional and traditional; and dear Frankie isn’t a rebel, he’s an idiot. But let’s not linger on your clumsy and impertinent speculations about my family, Mr Barrow. I’m asking you. What is it about you that makes my uncle think you should receive “all help”, when (forgive me) you are not one of our people, despite 71appearances? When you are clearly a language-less, culture-less, root-less hired hand? A mercenary, here today and gone tomorrow. A lost soul. Though I enjoyed the Satie.’

‘Your uncle was politer about it but that’s what he said too, more or less. He called me Thrown-Away Boy.’

‘Did he?’ she said, eyebrows raised in thin, thin arcs. There was a buzz from the bottom of the stairs, and the clunk of the door opening.

Barrow turned his head. In out of the rain came a stocky, scarred takouma in a drenched suit, not built to the same scale as the Man’s Oscar, but still clearly from the same warrior stable. He ducked his head to the princess on the stairs, and pulled out damp evening newspapers from under his suit coat, which he handed to the housekeeper, receiving in return the Thompson gun. He worked the slide to chamber the first round, and held it casually across his body with both hands: not pointing it at Barrow, but not not-pointing it at him, either. The housekeeper peeled apart Tamaha from the Chronicle from the Post. Then she held up the Post’s front page, with Anderson’s work screaming on it in giant type: AZTEC SLAYING!

‘Ah,’ said Couma Hashi, and released the card. ‘Yes, you do need my help, Mr Barrow. But not now. The last wisp of unconsciousness is still trailing through my mind, and perhaps I can catch it if I’m quick. I’m going back to bed. Come to the Foundation tomorrow at five. Over my shop, on Division and 3rd? I’ll talk to you after the lecture. Now, out you go. Goodbye.’

The muzzle of the tommy gun rose and gestured him away. Barrow took the hint, and departed promptly from the House of the Moon, followed back into the darkness and the wet by two scowls, and a long considering gaze from the stairs.

*

The dimness of the storm had merged now into the true dusk of a mid-March day, and the rain had settled from a downpour into 72a drizzle, blown about by a warm, rising wind. Snow before dawn, cloudburst in the afternoon, wind at night: the city was having one of its spring days that hesitated between the seasons, lurching this way and that, nothing constant but change. Barrow took off his hat as he walked back along Creekside, rather than have to hold it on against the gusts, and let the rain wash him. Under the lamp-posts it moved in ghostly curtains.

He was suddenly very tired. He could go back to the precinct and type up his notes – but if he did that, he would likely have to explain the absence of Drummond, and reassure Nakbateroli about the progress of the case. Better to do that when the Warriors lead had produced some definite results. Anyway – he looked at his watch – he had been working now for fourteen hours straight, counting from the moment he was woken by the call to the rooftop. Enough; home.

If he walked over to Union again, he could be carried all the way south to Darktown by streetcar along the straight, well-lighted avenues of the new city. But this had not been a well-lighted sort of day. It had been filled with half-understood signs and symbols all day long, starting with Fred Hopper’s upside-down face streaked with black blood. Compared to all that, walking in solitude felt good; almost like peace.

With a kind of defiance he turned off into the first alleyway he came to. Immediately he was past the skin of office buildings that fronted Creekside, he was in the dense unmappable windings of the Quarters, the four districts that surrounded Old Cahokia’s central Plaza like the cloven pieces of an apple. There was a pavement of crooked stones under his feet, and walls on each side closer in than the stretch of his arms, made of the bricks the Jesuits had taught the first Cahokians to bake from the Mississippi clay. Small doorways led into small privacies. The smell of meat and roasting corn came from screened windows, but there was not much light, 73except where a shrine at a junction had a string of coloured electric bulbs twined over it. The people who lived here did not need lamps or signposts to tell them where they were. Barrow navigated by the occasional sight of the cathedral’s tower and the Mound appearing to his left. He was not technically alone, for the workday at the factories and canneries was ending, but the shadows who pressed past him on their way to join the buzz of voices speaking Anopa behind the closed doors let him alone. The dark hid any surprised glances at his height and his clothes, and no-one spoke to him the whole transit through – except when he rounded a corner and found a young takouma priest in cassock and surplice laughing as he struggled with an umbrella blown inside out, and surrounded by a whole choir of little takouma boys giggling.

‘Achikma, babishili,’ the priest said, his teeth showing, and one of the children rattled a tin. Then when he got no reply, ‘For the Lady Day feast on Saturday? Pax vobiscum, brother.’

Barrow put in a dime, and passed on. Beyond, in the park, the rain dried up altogether, leaving a breeze with a hard bounce to it, thinking about becoming a gale. It threshed and stirred the trees above his head. He walked from one light-pool round a streetlamp to another, smoking with cupped hands guarding the cigarette. Shadows chased him wildly.

But then, south of State, the city came to life again, and familiar life too as taklousa faces multiplied in the streets. Calling these blocks ‘Darktown’ was a kind of joke – a taklousa joke, to name this bright spot for taklousa life the same as the dismal districts in Atlanta and Birmingham where their kin were confined. There were bright lights, chatter on the sidewalks, plate glass behind which waiters came and went, cars disgorging parties in evening clothes, threads of music weaving through the bouncing air. He stopped off to buy more smokes at a booth where they knew his name, ate a plate of ham and eggs at the Royal Grill. The beat cop 74on the corner of Loyola nodded to him. Two of Ma Colson’s working gals waved and called ‘Hey, Joe!’ across the road to him. All the profane mercies of the city seemed back in business.

He had a key to the side entrance of Lydia Lee’s, so he didn’t have to pass through the business’s deliberately dull storefront. (An ice-supply outfit, it claimed to be, but the ice was always regrettably out of stock if anyone was dumb enough to ask for it.) He could step straight into the world behind. The dance floor, the stage, the bar where raw corn liquor was cunningly transubstantiated into cocktails, the private booths for private business. He meant to take his weary bones straight upstairs to his room on the floor above Lydia’s own satin boudoir, but she called him in as he went by the stage door.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Look who’s just off the train!’

Barrow poked his head round, and there, already tuxed-up for the evening, was Dolphus Henderson and a band he knew about half of.

‘Holy shit,’ he said.

‘Indian Joe!’ cried out Henderson. ‘How you doin’, man?’ He reached out a manicured hand from a sleeve with pearl cuffs and seized Barrow’s, not just to shake it but to draw him into view round the door jamb. ‘Y’all? Y’all, this is Indian Joe, pianoman from Chicago I tole you about. Tried to get him along on the tour; wouldn’t do it, some reason.’

‘How’d it go?’ said Barrow.

‘Oh, tollable, tollable. Kind of, in Joe Oliver’s footsteps some of the time. But I think we showed ’em a thing or two of our own, opened their eyes a little. And we kept it tight.’

Barrow was sure they had. Dolphus, five-two in his polished pumps with a pencil moustache and a parting lacquered into place, was a martinet, prone to issuing fines for violations of tempo. Also a compulsive gambler with the band’s wages. Also a clarinettist of honeyed genius.75

‘Here, let’s see,’ said Henderson. ‘Willie on drums, you know; Dutch still earnin’ his living onna bass. This here singin’ for us is Alma Barbarin—’

‘On-shon-tay,’ she said, a light light Louisiana taklousa with a kissing curl and a dress made of silver scales and make-up aimed more for the pleasure of an audience twenty feet away than someone up close taking her hand.

‘—and my new cornet here is my man Stukeley, who is pretty good, though he ain’t seen nothing, and he ain’t been nowhere, and he don’t know nothing, pretty much. First time outside Harlem.’

Stukeley, young, reserved, sketched a salute.

‘Where’ve you been, then?’

‘Hell, all over. New York, Chicago, Columbus, Boston, ’dianapolis. Atlanta.’ He gave a theatrical shudder. ‘Out west too. Kansas City. LA. Seraphino. Little bit in the Dinetah. Up over the line to BO, play for the doughboys shipping north. Man, lot goin’ on up there; gettin’ pretty serious. Nearly home now, though, and oh are we ready for it. Nine months walkin’ on eggshells, mindin’ our mouths: you know what I mean.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Always feel, when we hit Cahoke-yuh, I can start to breathe out. First place Stukeley’s been without a colour line.’

‘Seems pretty fine,’ said Stukeley, politely.

‘Oh you wait, boy. You think this is fine, jus’ wait till you see Vicksburg and Jackson. Then you be really home.’

‘They tell me I’m gonna see black cops, black mayor, black senators, black I-don’t-know-what. I say, I’ma believe all that when I see it.’

He was playing it cool but Barrow could see in his eye the light caused by even the rumour of such things, the same hope in the Mississippi Renaissance that had sent so many taklousa migrating south from the cold cities of the north and the midwest, most of all 76from the sharecropping prison of the Jim Crow states.

‘Well, you can start believin’ it now,’ said Dolphus. ‘Joe’s a cop.’

‘Day job,’ said Barrow.

‘It don’t mean quite the same thing here it does other places,’ said Dutch the bassist kindly to Stukeley, who was looking startled.

‘Now that cain’t hurt, Miz Lee,’ said the singer, ‘havin’ a friendly cop for a parlour boarder, when y’all are runnin’ a speak?’

‘Joe’s a darling, he can stay just as long as he likes,’ said Lydia Lee blandly.

‘So!’ said Dolphus. ‘Are you gonna sit in with us tonight? Can we tempt you, man? I tell you, nine months of carefulness, I’m about ready to cut loose a little. Time to get care-less.’

Barrow looked at the stage with longing. Through that door lay most of the chosen part of his life. But he could feel exhaustion pulling him down like weights, and between him and joy stood the image tonight of Fred Hopper’s cold skin and blood-choked mouth. It was hard to believe his fingers could fly.

‘Oh, I’d love to,’ said Barrow. ‘I’d severely love to. Trouble is, I’m beat. Are you all … just here for the one night?’

‘No, all week,’ said Dolphus. ‘In the city, I mean. Here some nights; on the boats; around. Don’t sweat it. We’ll catch you, man. It’s good to see you.’

‘Good to see you too,’ said Barrow. But Dolphus, who was always quick with everything, was already closing the door. Lydia patted his cheek and bustled off to see about something. He climbed the stairs alone, pursued by the faint beginning of the band’s runthrough of Handy’s great blues of the city, Dolphus’s inevitable opener here. I hate to see, that evening sun go down.

*

Thrown-Away Boy yawned, and went to bed.77

78

TUESDAY

79

80

Did ever a single Spectacle so perfectly combine Civility with Barbarity? I think I had mentioned in my Last, that the Prince of the Indian Kingdom, that Terra Ignota lying to the North of the French Possessions in Louisiana, was expected imminently among Us here in Rome, and last Night I and Charles had the Pleasure of encountering this Gentleman, on his Way to make his Homage at the papal Throne. And Gentleman I do call Him, for so long as We paid the greater Attention to the Witness of our Ears, We were assuredly in the Company of a Being perfectly well-bred, speaking (thanks to the Society of Jesus) a French that would not have disgraced Versailles for its Purity, and exhibiting a Charm vitiated only by the conventional Disdain for Us as Protestants. (It appears that Freebooters from the English Plantations in the Carolinas have been attempting to carry off some of his People into Servitude, which I suppose must sharpen a Dislike.) But attend to our Eyes! and what a Difference declared Itself. For He had added to his Court Dress, Items from the Grande Tenue of an undoubted Savage – Ear-Rings, in some red Stone, from which howl’d hideous Faces, and Beads strung in his Hair – while Tattoos in Indigo darkened his already forbidding Visage. I did not envy our American Colonists the Company of this Gentleman as a Neighbour …

Letter of George Lyttelton to his father Sir Thomas Lyttelton, February 1730

811

Eight in the morning, and Barrow and Drummond were standing with guns drawn on opposite sides of the doorway to which Detective Yanasa’s address had sent them – the door of a near-derelict rowhouse in the tract of poor housing that had grown like an afterthought, or a fungus, between the freight yards and factories in the city’s extreme south-west. Though the day was blue and still, without the seasonal quick-changes of yesterday, this ragged street was in the semi-permanent shadow of the great Mississippi Bridge, rising up on striding steel legs with its two decks for rail and road traffic. Up there, the whole commerce of the centre of the continent was going by, paying tolls to the Cahokia Pacific and consequently to the Man. The tracks in the yards led up to the Bridge. The factories belched smoke as they fed the Bridge, and were fed by it. The air reeked to serve the Bridge. The sunlight flamed on the metal heights of the Bridge. But down here under it there was an overlooked chill, a dismal little pocket of stillness. Whoever could afford it lived away from the smoke and the smell of the work done here. These streets of slimy cobbles were for the desperate, the wrecked, those who had lost their grip and fallen. They were what all the careful darning had been meant to save Fred Hopper from: instead of which he had fallen further still. But they might also, thought Barrow, be somewhere you’d put yourself if you wanted to be overlooked, if you thought it meant you wouldn’t be checked or interfered with.

The paint of the door was peeling. It didn’t look like the way in to the headquarters of anything formidable. But this was definitely the right place. BASHLI had been painted in a blackening red across the space above the first-floor windows, and from the upstairs casement hung a faded rag in red and green which Barrow 82could just about identify as the old flag of Cahokia, the flag of Cahokia the nation.

Drummond looked across and nodded. Barrow reached a fist and banged hard, backhand, on the door. Across the street, where the paddy wagon was parked, the hands of the four uniforms tensed on their shotguns. Nakbateroli had sent them to handle what he hoped would be a satisfactorily large and belligerent haul of suspects. The morning headlines had given the miko a nasty jolt: not just the Post’s WHO NEXT FOR SKYLINE SACRIFICE? and the Chronicle’s NO PROGRESS ON LAND TRUST HORROR, but lip-licking or head-shaking coverage from much further afield, the wire services having picked the story up overnight. Even Tamaha had run with ANOLI, ISISHI! (‘Speak, blood!’). Journalists were converging from all points of the compass, and Nakbateroli wanted a parade of perpetrators to show them.

No answer to the knock. Barrow hammered again. Nothing, except maybe a faint scuttering sound. He stepped out, turned, and kicked the door in while Drummond crouched to keep a clean shot into the hall. But there was no-one there; or, no-one there until the old takouma man who had been mashed against the wall as the door slammed open fell out from behind it onto the bare boards of the floor, and lay there dazed, clutching his bleeding nose. Barrow stepped in and hoisted him with his left hand, light as a bag of bones, keeping his gun up. The house smelled bad, and the person he was gripping smelled bad in the same way, only more concentratedly: a gross reek of meat gone rotten. He was wearing some sort of robe, thick with grease. Drummond made disgusted noises and pressed by, disappearing into the downstairs room. He emerged towing a small, equally elderly takata woman with her hair in a grey plait, twittering slightly. She looked peculiar, but unlike the stinking old man, strangely respectable. A necklace of crystal chunks; good clothes.83

‘Police,’ said Drummond. ‘Where is everyone?’ To the air in general; but the lady answered.

‘I’m only here to bring him his breakfast,’ she quavered. ‘From the Theosophical Society? I’m afraid I don’t know where anyone is. Oh good heavens, don’t hurt him.’

‘What?’ said Drummond. ‘What?’

‘Lady, who are you?’ said Barrow. ‘And who’s this?

The uniforms were filing in as well, their guns lowered.

‘Sybil Auchinleck,’ she said. ‘Er, how do you do? This gentleman – I’m afraid I only know him as, well, The Great Crocodile.’

‘Crocodile,’ repeated Drummond, with flat incredulity.

‘Chunchouba,’ said the reeking man, showing snaggle teeth.

‘It is a spiritual title,’ she explained. ‘He is a shaman.’

‘He’s a fucking mess, is what he is,’ said Drummond. ‘And I’m not hearing an answer to my question. Where are the rest of ’em? The young ones? I was told there were a whole pack of young guys running around down here.’

‘Kaneya,’ said the Crocodile, with contempt.

‘Say what?’ said Drummond. It wasn’t one of his words.

‘I’m afraid he only speaks Anopa.’

‘Nobody only speaks fuckin’ Anopa. Joe, give him a tap.’

‘No, you must not,’ said the sergeant in charge of the takouma uniforms. ‘He is too old. There would be no honour in it. I can translate.’

‘Fine,’ said Drummond heavily. ‘Absolutely fuckin’ fine. I see I’m bein’ backed up here by the Boy Scouts of fuckin’ America. Right, ask him—’

‘It is a point of principle, you see,’ explained Sybil Auchinleck. ‘He will not dirty his mouth with the invader’s language. And you, young man,’ she went on with a sort of quivering courage, ‘you should not swear like that in mixed company. It is – well, it is rather disgusting.’84

‘Oh is it,’ said Drummond, and kicked the wall next to her, hard, leaving a gash in the crumbling plaster. She jumped. ‘You got any problem with the par-fum oozin’ outta your spiritual friend here, or is it just my language that offends? God, what is that. One of you, go and search the place, maybe open a window or somethin’.’

A uniform headed upstairs.

‘Right. Let’s try again. With translation. Mr Croc – no, fuck it, let’s start off with your actual name.’

A burst of Anopa from the bundle of bones. Quite a long one; someone launching into an explanation on a favourite topic.

‘He says, none of our names are real. He says, our so-called takouma surnames are all the names of wild animals or wild things that grow, and we should be wild too. He says, we have been forced to pretend that we are like white people. To go against our natures. He says—’

‘Yeah, yeah. Enough with the lecture. Gimme your legal name, right now, or my very tall friend is gonna get angry, whatever the Theo-mum-jummery Society thinks about it.’

Barrow gave the shaman a shake, and lifted him so his feet left the floor. The grease-smeared face looked back at him with what seemed to be contempt.

‘He says, you cannot frighten him, because he is a servant of Hu-, Huitz-, I don’t know this word?’

‘Huitzilopochtli,’ said the shaman, showing his teeth again.

‘Of … that. But,’ the uniform went on, as more Anopa flowed, ‘he says that before he was brought into the true knowledge of things, and was forced to hide behind the deceiving mask of a Christian saint, he was known as … Laurence Chunchouba.’

‘Larry!’ said Drummond. ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance! But we are a little bit pushed for time. So, real simply now please – Where. Are. The. Warriors.’

More Anopa, a continuing flow.85

‘He says they are gone. He says they have given up the true cause and gone whoring after the false solutions of politics, which are as bad as the false God of the Christians, because—’

‘No, my friend,’ said Drummond, looking savage. ‘Gone where?’

A shrug, and no words at all.

‘Try asking when,’ said Barrow.

‘He says, two months, maybe three months? He says, he tried to teach the young men, but they were shallow. They had no patience. They turned away from the true path. They deserted him, even the—’

‘Even the what?’ prompted Barrow.

‘No, he stopped talking then,’ said the translator.

‘Looks like it’s a while since Yanasa ran across the Warriors, and his info is out of date,’ said Barrow to Drummond.

Back down the stairs clumped the uniform, looking both nauseous and shocked. ‘Detectives?’ he said. ‘I think you better see this.’

‘Larry, Larry,’ said Drummond. ‘What treat have you got lined up for us, eh? Okay. Better bring him along, Joe.’

As they trooped up the staircase, the voice of Sybil Auchinleck floated anxiously after them. ‘Do not be alarmed! Remember that, seen with the eye of purity, it is all in the service of the Life Force!’

With each step, the smell increased, until at the top it reached gagging-strength, and the reason for it was also made clear. The upper part of the house had been stripped of its ceiling, so that it made one large space, open from floorboards to the rafters of the roof. But rather than seeming airy, it was chokingly close, for against the end wall, where a large figure had been painted in blue and black who seemed to have too many legs, a homemade altar was erected, by the looks of it from a packing case with a zinc counter-top nailed onto it; and on this surface, blood had been poured out, not once but many, many times, in stream upon stream upon stream, overflowing the altar and running down onto 86the floor in coagulated brown rivers. It looked like an explosion in a blood-pudding factory. The newer flows were wriggling with maggots, and the air was full of buzzing flies, banging against the dusty windows, dying in crunching masses on the floor. On each side of the altar a smoky flame burned in an old oyster-can filled with fat.

‘This is a temple for the worship of idols,’ explained the uniform who had been up there first, unnecessarily.

Barrow was concentrating on breathing through his mouth, as a precaution against throwing up, yet the rancid stink of the place pressed in. He could see the same struggle on the faces of the uniforms – on all the faces except those of the shaman, who was proud, and of Drummond, who was exhibiting a kind of glee.

‘Pisa! Attelouwa Huitzilopochtli!’ declared the Crocodile.

‘He says, behold the—’

‘Yeah, yeah, I got that. Well, my my my, Larry. What a place you have here. I guess ol’ Higgly-Piggly don’t hold with cleanin’, much. Now tell me: just what have you been killing, on this altar of yours?’

Anopa.

‘He says, rats and pigeons.’

‘Mmm, yeah: problem there being, Larry, that even a really big rat would have, what, maybe a cupful in him? Whereas, lookin’ at the mess here, we’re talkin’ gallons. Aren’t we.’

Anopa.

‘He says, before the boys deserted him, they used to bring him blood from their work.’

‘Which is where?’ put in Barrow.

‘He says, the meat-packers.’

‘So, you’re sayin’, all this is cow and pig? I’m surprised you’d settle for that, Larry, a mighty mover like you. Matter of interest, have you ever sacrificed a human being?’

Anopa.

‘He says, he has not had that privilege.’87

‘You might want to work on that answer, old man, you ever have to give it in court,’ said Barrow.

‘You’d like to, though, wouldn’t you, Larry? You got the itch, haven’t you? Let out all that lovely Life Force?’

‘Phin,’ said Barrow.

‘Where were you on Sunday night, Larry?’

‘Phin,’ said Barrow.

Anopa.

‘He says, he was here, on his own.’

‘No alibi, then.’

‘Phin!’ said Barrow. ‘Come on, look at him. This can’t be the guy. He’s disgusting, but he’s much too old. He’s not nearly strong enough, for one thing. Even Fred Hopper could fight him off.’

‘Maybe he … talked him into it?’

‘Yeah? You were a takata clerk, head filled with Klan nonsense, scared of shadows even when it came to your nice, well-meaning Mass-going takouma workmates – would you do anything this stinky scarecrow suggested?’

‘Shit,’ said Drummond. ‘It just looks real neat, you know. This mess; that mess on the roof?’

‘Yeah; but if you look here, all the really big … puddles are old-looking – all dried up. And the new stuff, up on top there with the worms, that’s pretty small. It probably is rats and pigeons. C’mon, Phin. This is a crazy old coot killing rats with a penknife. It’s nasty, but it’s kind of pathetic, really. What puzzles me, though: this doesn’t exactly square with, what was it Yanasa said in the captain’s office, drumming and soup kitchens? Not a lot of social work going on here. Say, Crocodile-man, didn’t y’all use to be more of a social-work-type outfit?’

‘He says … there used to be foolishness of that kind, but then came the true revelation, and he was able to turn the Warriors to a better purpose.’88

‘Right, and then they all gave up and left, and now you’re a filthy old wretch on his own, living on takata charity. Phin? No.’

Drummond sighed. ‘Hell, I suppose you’re right. He won’t do, will he.’

‘I don’t think so. We take him in, though – let him stink up the cells a little, see if he’s got anything else for us. And on the way, we see if we can’t track down the younger ones at the slaughterhouse. Which meat-packer?’

‘He says, the Helm plant, when he last heard of them.’

‘Okay,’ said Barrow. ‘Tastanagi, put Mr Chunchouba in the paddy wagon. Play your cards right, Laurence, you might even get a shower.’

The shaman shuddered.

*

The consequence of having called at the Temple of Huitzilopochtli first was that the smell coming off the vast Helm stockyard and abattoir, which Barrow imagined most visitors found overwhelming, seemed almost fresh in comparison. New blood, new dung, new guts, and everything in rapid motion. In the Ford, with the paddy wagon following along behind, they threaded their way under the Bridge and into a geography all marked out for the industrial infliction of death. Constant trains delivered living steers and pigs from east and from west, constant river-boats unloaded living pigs and steers from south and north. Other trains, constantly backing, shunting, filling, loaded up the finished carcasses in refrigerator cars and took them away. The transformation of living flesh into chilled meat happened in the vast black building up ahead, with its three square-topped chimneys spewing black smoke day and night, and the word HELM on it in letters three storeys high. But all around was the flow pumping into it and the flow pumping out. They drove between pens of cattle crowded together and all continually walking along forward, putting up a huge collective mumbling and lowing sound 89as they bumped along, like a leathery bee-swarm. Drummond and Barrow had to raise their voices to hear each other speak.

‘I know we could’ve found out all that last night,’ Drummond said; not an apology, but about as close as he ever got.

‘No problem. You all right now?’

‘Headache.’

‘Not surprised. How much’d you have?’

‘Enough,’ said Drummond, with a watery smile.

When they reached the plant itself, it became clear that they had approached it more or less from the back, through the working innards of the operation. There was a front as well, located on the end of one of the westerly avenues coming out from downtown, with a main door, and offices, and a streetcar stand for the workforce, and even a driveway with a bed of discouraged flowers, looking about as lively as you would expect from foliage nourished on the tallow-rich combustion products of unwanted hooves and tails. The smoke from the three chimneys churned away upwards, in Stygian ribbons, but grit and fumes sank down to ground level. And beyond, to west and north, were the walls and silos and smokestacks of a hundred other factories.

There was another black, anonymous Model T parked by the gates, with two blue-suited takata men sitting in it, reading the paper and looking bored, but plenty of space to fit their own vehicles.

‘Where’d they work, these fellows you’re looking for?’ asked the takata under-manager who intercepted them when they went in mob-handed, leaving the shaman handcuffed in the wagon and a single uniform watching over him.

‘Don’t know,’ said Drummond.

‘Well, how many of them are there, then?’

‘Don’t know that either.’

‘They’d be somewhere they’d be able to get their hands on a lot of blood,’ put in Barrow.90

‘This is a slaughterhouse, Officer,’ said the manager. ‘That’s everyone, more or less. You’re not giving me much to go on, I must say: we got just shy of eight thousand on the payroll here, any one time.’

‘Go back and see if you can get a name out of the prisoner,’ Barrow said to the sergeant who’d done the translating.

‘Yeah,’ said Drummond, ‘and represent to him as how these are the people who done betrayed the great god Higgly-Piggly, and shit like that, okay?’

‘What’s that?’ said the manager.

‘You don’t wanna know.’

‘Well now, see here,’ said the manager. ‘We wanna do our best for law enforcement, of course we do. Here at Helm we are very law-abiding. Your colleagues outside there, they’ll tell you we’re being real co-operative.’

‘Say what?’ said Drummond.

‘But you gentlemen have got to understand, that if we do find who you’re looking for, you can go in and have a look for ’em, that’s fine: but we’re not going to be able to stop the line for you, nohow, not without a court order. That’s policy. This place is set up to run continuous, you see; we stop it, we’re running straight into loss, and I can’t authorise that, less you show me a warrant.’

‘Now wait just a moment—’ Drummond began.

‘Louis Bessa,’ reported the sergeant, trotting back in.

‘Can you maybe look him up, find a department for him in your card index, something like that?’ suggested Barrow. ‘Find one, maybe you’ll find all of them. I got the impression they were working together, like all on the one job.’

‘I don’t have to look him up,’ the manager said, staring. ‘That’s the same man the gentlemen outside have been asking about. He’s on the killing floor. Him and a gang of eight.’

‘Now you’re talkin’,’ said Drummond. ‘Lead us to him, why don’tcher.’91

‘But the ones outside, they told me he’s under surveillance – that it was a watching brief only, and he was not to be disturbed.’

‘Sorry,’ said Barrow. ‘Go back just a little bit. Who’s outside?’

‘Why, the agents from the Bureau of Investigation.’

‘Those are G-men, parked out front?’

‘Why, yes. You didn’t know? If you’re after the same fellow, I really think you better talk to them, before you do anything hasty? They were real clear, about what they did and didn’t want.’

‘Oh no,’ said Drummond. ‘Oh no no no no no. We get the federales tangled up in this, we’ll never get this movin’, and we’re on the clock here. Whatever it is they’re up to, we got a murder investigation goin’, and the eyes of the city are upon us – that kind of deal. So you just show us the way, and we’ll slip in and fetch our culprits, and we’ll deal with the dismay of the B of I of the D of J when we get to it. When we gotta spare moment. Which we don’t now. Okay?’

‘You sure, Phin?’

‘Yep.’

‘Now, fellers—’ began the manager uneasily.

‘Detectives,’ corrected Drummond.

‘—Detectives, all right; now, I really think I’m going to need to talk to them, even if you don’t, just in, you know, the interests of the company?’

‘Don’t you dare,’ said Drummond. ‘Not till we’re done; not till we’re outta here. We are the Murder Squad of the city of Cahokia, and it would be in the interests of the company, shithead, for you not to fuck with us, okay? We can cause you all kinds of grief, we want to. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ said the manager miserably. ‘Stevens, take ’em along the gantry to the floor, and don’t let ’em try to stop the line.’

The clerk in question, with no relish at all on his face, led them off down a corridor that turned into a box-sided metal walkway suspended over a variety of busy scenes from hell.92

‘He’s gonna go out there, you know, soon as we’re out of sight,’ pointed out Barrow.

‘’Course he is,’ agreed Drummond. ‘So we better be quick. Come on, Stevens. Chop-chop. Shift those legs.’

They passed above rooms where carcasses, strung up by a leg on a clanking track, were being split in half. Where they were being dipped in boiling water. Where they were being sprayed with hoses. Where they were being stripped into different wheeled tubs of their livers, stomachs, yards of stinking intestines, the hollowed-out cavities left afterwards helplessly reminding Barrow of Fred Hopper’s ravaged chest. Where they were being skinned, with long sure knife-strokes. Where they were being de-headed and de-hoofed with saws. The track clanked regularly, moving the dangling bodies onward with a jerk and a swing that each group of butchers in their bloodstained white coats had to seize and still, before they did their part in the dismantling of the animal, in movements just as fast and regular. But, Barrow saw as they hurried by above, this was the process in reverse. The walkway was following it backwards, towards the point of death; towards the point at which the sound of the cattle lowing rose to a panicky crescendo and then stopped.

And here it was. Suddenly the gantry carried them out over a huge saucer-shaped space with a glass roof through which you could see the banners of greasy smoke ascending into the blue. Through one wall, the cows came in, pushed by the crush behind into narrow runs that all ended in a gated pen one cow wide, one cow long. At the tail end, the metal gate slid shut behind them. At the head end, a man with a sledgehammer swung it in a skull-crushing arc. Then the side swung up, and the dead beast fell sideways onto an angled metal bed, where another slaughterer stretched its neck and cut its throat with a deep, deft stroke. Blood poured in smoking streams into a system of runnels on the floor. Then a third man heaved up the limp thing’s heavy leg high 93enough to hook it to a cuff on the moving track, and up the body rose, to start its journey towards steak, handbag leather, bone buttons, glue and soap. The killing went on continuously, on a front ten cows wide. The track snaked ingeniously in and out to keep the moving cuffs in reach of all the teams.

‘Now we’re talkin’,’ said Drummond, leaning over the rail and grinning. Barrow could see what he meant: here, obviously, was all the skill and the strength required for the butchering of Hopper. Though that still left the question of why the little man would have co-operated in his own murder, as would still have been necessary for it to happen on the Land Trust roof.

‘How do we get down there?’ Drummond demanded.

‘You don’t,’ said Stevens the clerk, with nervous resolve. ‘You ain’t been through the disinfectant bath, and besides, y’all go down there, you’re gonna mess with the line, and you ain’t allowed. No, I call down, and if’n the ones you want are there, you can have one of ’em up here to talk to, and then if you want the rest, you need to wait whiles we get replacements onto the floor. That’s regulation.’

‘Is it now?’ said Drummond. ‘How’d you like to take a short flight down there right now, start the conversation?’

‘Steady, Phin,’ said Barrow, and to Stevens, ‘What if they run? How’d we catch them up then?’

‘They can’t run,’ said the clerk. ‘Lookee there. All the doors to the floors are closed, till shift-end. Only way out’s along the track.’

‘Or through the cows,’ said Drummond, but more for the sake of arguing than anything.

‘Okay, then,’ said Barrow. ‘You get us this Louis Bessa up here, and we’ll go from there.’

Stevens leaned over the rail himself, taking care to be out of reach of Drummond, and shouted through his cupped hands, ‘Bessa! Bessa! Calling for Louis Bessa! Po-leece here for Louis Bessa!’

The head of one of the sledgehammer-wielders turned. Then a 94moment later, helpfully, so did seven others, all takouma: the rest of his slaughter crew, the one beside him, and two-thirds of the one beyond that. The whole refugee membership of the Warriors, presumably. Bessa shaded his eyes and looked up at the catwalk. Then he nodded to himself, handed over the hammer, and with springing, unexhausted steps made his way over to a concertinaed fire-escape arrangement hanging from the gantry, which he pulled down with a chain and then bounced swiftly up on.

‘Yes?’ he said – a stocky, thick-armed young man with eyes as bright as black berries, smiling in butcher’s whites smeared with blood and brains. He seemed neither surprised nor afraid. ‘This is about the murder in the newspaper, right?’

‘Now why would you think that, Mr Bessa?’ said Barrow.

‘Guilty conscience?’ said Drummond.

‘No, simple logic,’ said Bessa. ‘All that Aztec sacrifice yalki? You’d have to follow that up, the way it could set things off in the city between takouma and takata, and where would that lead you, except to the Warriors? The Warriors as used to be. And then I should think old Chunchouba sent you over here. I’ve been expecting you.’

‘Yeah, very logical,’ said Drummond. ‘Only, we just came from a roomful of crazy; crazy you used to go along with. And now I’m seeing someone who’s sprayed up with nearly as much blood as Larry-the-Crocodile, only he’s young, and strong, and calm enough to hide the crazy when he wants to. Wanna tell me why I shouldn’t like you for this, Bessa? I see the way you take those steers apart. Wouldn’t make you raise a sweat to do it to a little guy with no muscles.’

‘Waka-abi iksho atak-abi,’ said Bessa, looking at Barrow: and then, when he looked blank, ‘A cow killer isn’t a man killer. You don’t speak your own language, brother? That’s a shame. Anyway, Chunchouba wasn’t always crazy. It came on him gradually.’95

‘You brought him blood to throw around.’

‘Hey, it’s a useful symbol for what we takouma have lost. For the life that’s been drained out of us, right. Throwing blood on the Victories in the Plaza – that was teaching a lesson, a lesson anyone could read. I’m not saying I did that personally, you understand.’

‘And what about the blood you gave him to pour all over the floor for ol’ Hwitzly-thingumbob? What kind of lesson was that?’

For the first time Bessa looked uncomfortable. ‘That,’ he said. ‘Even that … started off different. We thought that would be just a symbol again. Or, like, a piece of poetry? He had a headful of poetry. He could tell you it for hours. When we realised he meant it, it was sad. None of us liked it. Well, none of us but Sammy, and Sammy is crazy.’

‘Ah-huh,’ said Drummond. ‘Which one’s Sammy, then? Point him out.’

‘Oh, he doesn’t work here,’ said Bessa, laughing. ‘You wouldn’t want to give Sammy a job with sharp tools. Haven’t seen him since we broke up the Warriors.’

Barrow noticed the phrasing. ‘We broke up’, maybe even ‘I broke up’. If this cheerful young man wasn’t the leader of his little group, he was something pretty near to it.

‘So why did you go?’ he asked.

‘Well, look around you,’ said Bessa. ‘Look at all of us. Cogs in a machine! Old Chunchouba was right about one thing. This is not our proper life. We are not supposed to live like this. But the solution lies in the future, not the past. We see now that there will be no liberation for the takouma without the general liberation of the labouring classes.’

‘Bolshevik non-sense,’ muttered Stevens.

‘No,’ said Bessa, ‘good politics.’ He even had one bloody finger raised, like a teacher.

‘You don’t seem at all worried,’ observed Barrow.96

‘I figure he’ll git a grasp on the seriousness of the situation real fast when the cuffs go on,’ said Drummond.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Bessa. ‘Go on, ask me your question. The murder happened on Sunday night, right? Ask me what I was doing on Sunday night.’

‘Okay,’ said Barrow with a sinking heart. ‘What?’

‘I was on the night shift here. We all were. Nine at night till five in the morning. With the doors to the floor closed.’

‘And there’ll be witnesses, of course,’ said Barrow, sighing.

‘How many total on the night shift?’ Bessa asked the clerk. ‘Round about a thousand? There you go, Detective.’

‘Shit!’ cried Drummond, rubbing his temples with his fingers. ‘Why cain’t this thing be simple? Shit!’

‘Yalki,’ agreed Bessa. ‘Sorry to disappoint. Well, if that’s all, I better get back down. It puts the rhythm out if there’s a man missing.’

‘One thing,’ said Barrow, before Bessa could go.

‘Yes?’

‘This … Sammy? Who’s he? Would you tell me his name, where he works?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bessa, righteously. ‘There’s a basic issue of class solidarity here. I don’t like Sammy, but why should I get him in trouble? It seems to me like this murder of yours is an obvious attempt to whip up takata against takouma. Why should that have anything to do with crazy Sammy?’

The boy’s confidence was both impressive and maddening. Barrow could feel Drummond at his back, still infuriated, and no doubt about to urge the usual remedy for witnesses who thought that they should be the ones drawing lines and deciding terms. Instead, he opened his wallet, and took out the Man’s card.

‘How about this for a reason?’

Bessa took it curiously and, staring, turned it over to read the 97back, leaving a red thumbprint on the fine engraving. Barrow watched his face fill with a reluctant wonder.

‘I don’t approve of him,’ he said slowly, in a voice Barrow could scarcely hear. ‘He and his family – they put us here. This is their fault. But … if it’s for him … all right, tastanagi. Sammy Noukouwa, and he worked at Union Cartridge, last I heard.’

He handed back the dirtied card, with a strange tension in the angle of his head, which Barrow, after a moment, recognised from his own struggle not to bow to the Moon.

Symbols and their power, he thought.

2

Drummond went on seething all the way back along the catwalk. The scenes from the inferno rolled by underneath again, this time running forwards from cow to steak, and he kept up an agitated jabber while the uniforms trailed behind.

‘You sure they were workin’, Sunday night?’ he said to Stevens the clerk.

‘I believe so, yes,’ said Stevens.

‘No, no, you don’t get me,’ said Drummond. ‘Looks to me like Bessa there’s a bad boy; must be, or you wouldn’t have the federales camped out front, keepin’ their eye on him. A loudmouth. A real agitator type. Must be a nuisance for y’all. So what I’m saying is, are you sure they were here Sunday night? Couldn’t there maybe be some mistake about that?’

‘You’d have to talk to my manager about that kinda thing,’ said Stevens uncomfortably.

‘Phin, come on,’ said Barrow. ‘No.’

‘I still like them for this! I mean, who-all else fits the bill like they do?’98

‘You heard him back there. That was a sane man talking. Fanatical maybe, but sane.’

‘Who said the one who did this was in-sane?’ cried Drummond, for all the world as if he was defending the killer’s honour. ‘He coulda had all sorts of reasons.’

‘Bessa has an alibi, Phin. He’s got a cast-iron alibi.’

‘I don’t think so, not necessarily. I believe that can be fixed, with a lil’ bit of gumption and a touch of tenacity. You just watch me.’

‘Phin, the case would be thrown out the moment it got to court.’

‘You’re not seein’ the big picture here, Joe. It’s getting ’em to court, is the charm.’

‘What?’ said Barrow, and almost stopped walking. ‘What do you mean? Are you saying we don’t care if we get the right people for this?’

‘What’s come over you?’ said Drummond.

‘What’s come over me?’

‘Yeah, that’s what I said. Since when are you unhappy ’bout leaving the thinkin’ to me? You never were before. Always quite contented to keep your head up there in the clouds, reflectin’ on your music or whatever – and that’s fine. We work well together that way. No change required. Talkin’ of which – what was that you showed to Bessa back there, made him un-clam like that?’

Barrow produced the Man’s card, with a reluctance he couldn’t quite account for, and showed it to Drummond without letting go of it.

‘Huh,’ said Drummond. ‘Okay. Could come in handy. Better give that to me for safe-keeping.’

‘No,’ said Barrow, ‘he said—’

‘No?’ said Drummond, incredulously. ‘No?’ He was making a performance of it. ‘Big man, you and me, we’re going to sort this out, just as soon as I’ve sorted things out here.’99

‘But we have a lead, Phin, a solid lead. Sammy Noukouwa at Union Cartridge. Come on, he checks all the boxes. Actually into all the blood-sacrifice shit. Crazy even by the Warriors’ standards. Young enough to do it. Let’s go get him, and then we’ll see.’

‘All mornin’ we’ve been traipsin’ from one “solid lead” to another, and what do you know, they keep turnin’ to smoke just as we get to ’em. Bessa’s a bird in the hand. You let me work this.’

They had reached the main door, and there were the two blue-suited G-men, silhouetted against the daylight with the manager; faces in shade, but with stances illustrating anger loud and clear. Drummond went forward at a strut.

‘Gentlemen, good mornin’,’ he said. ‘Seems like we may have had a little bit of a misunderstanding—’

‘I want your names and badges,’ said the Bureau man on the left, drawing them out of the building with furious hand movements. In the light it became clear that he had brown hair while the other was fair, but they did otherwise appear to have been popped out of a mould for the production of clean-cut, tight-lipped takata, an impression aided by their identical clothes, shoes and tie-pins.

‘Yessir,’ said Drummond. ‘Detectives Drummond and Barrow, Cahokia PD, Murder Squad. In hot pursuit of a suspect in the killing you’ll be readin’ about on the front pages o’ your newspapers, so I hope you’ll excuse us if we’ve maybe trampled on the niceties slightly?’

‘Local law, in other words. As represented by a village idiot and, what, Big Chief Tomahawk.’

‘Hey now—’

‘You were explicitly warned of our interest here, and you blundered in anyway. This is going to be reported. You are in deep trouble.’

‘Fellers, I’m tremblin’. But now—’100

‘You would be trembling, if you understood the gravity of the situation. You may have compromised a federal investigation. What did you say to Bessa in there?’

‘We checked his whereabouts on Sunday night,’ said Barrow. ‘He was here, working. That clears him for our—’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute—’ began Drummond.

‘Shut up, the pair of you!’ snapped the other agent. ‘You, Big Chief, shut your mouth altogether and let your boss do the talking. You, hayseed, you speak when Agent Gilbreth asks you to, and not otherwise, understood?’

‘Hayseed, is it?’ said Drummond.

‘Boss, is it?’ said Barrow.

‘Detectives, should we return to the precinct?’ asked the sergeant who had translated.

‘Don’t you move,’ said Gilbreth.

‘Yes,’ said Barrow. ‘You head on through, boys. Take the wagon back, book the prisoner in, tell the cap we’ll be along soon. Looks like we don’t need you for now.’

‘Stay right where you are,’ said Gilbreth. ‘And I’ll have your name too.’

‘It is Hanunu,’ said the sergeant. ‘H–a–n–u–n–u. But I’m sorry, sir. He speaks for the tamaha. You don’t.’

They passed on, faces placid.

‘What the—?’ said the agent.

‘Fuck?’ suggested Drummond.

‘What the dickens do you think you’re playing at?’

‘Well,’ said Drummond, his voice as insufferably country as he could make it, ‘you two are in Cahoke-yuh now, so the ballgame is traditional. Y’all ever seen that? You should. Friday night down at the Plaza, eight red men and a rubber ball heavier’n a cantaloupe. But me, I prefer mumblety-peg. Only I don’t happen to have my knife with me.’101

‘This city,’ said Gilbreth, or rather hissed it, exasperated, as if the consonants would boil to steam upon touching any surface. ‘This … mongrel city! Contrary to certain local illusions, this place is just as subject to federal law as anywhere else. And we are here in it on a matter which touches the safety and security of the entire United States. So, you pair of morons, whatever penny-ante case you may think you’re pursuing, ours takes precedence, is that clear?’

‘Louis Bessa is a threat to the entire United States?’ said Barrow.

‘Louis Bessa,’ said the second agent as if talking to a child, ‘is a member of the Workers Party of America. The Workers Party is organising opposition to the war up in the New Siberian Territory. If the war in the NST is lost, and the White government in Kodiak falls, Moscow will rule all the way to the Yukon. The Soviet will have established itself on our continent. The Red Army will be camped up there, ready to roll down on top of us.’

‘He’s going to make all that happen from a job in a meat-packing plant?’

‘We are looking at all the subversive networks who are willing to help the Red cause. All of the anarchists, all of the degenerates, all of the race radicals, all of the foreign infiltrators. Here in Cahokia we have reports of an underground organisation named the Red Council. Therefore we have the likes of Bessa under close surveillance. Our authority to do this comes direct from President Harding.’

‘Ol’ Gamaliel?’ said Drummond. ‘Was he drunk at the time? No; no, seriously now; I have a question.’

‘Yes?’ said Agent Gilbreth.

‘Phin,’ said Barrow.

‘My question is this: are those pretty suits of yours sewn on, Agent Dog-Breath, or do they come off at night?’

‘My God,’ said Gilbreth after a momentary pause. ‘They’re clowns. I am addressing clowns.’102

‘We didn’t mention you in there,’ offered Barrow. ‘We didn’t refer to your presence in any way.’

‘I suppose that’s some kind of small mercy,’ Gilbreth said. ‘But in my experience suspects have a way of getting anxious when they’re visited by the cops. Even if it’s the Keystone Kops. I repeat: you two may have compromised an investigation of national importance. Now I have told you that you are in trouble – and you are, there’ll be a report going to your precinct captain – and that apparently had no effect. I have appealed to your patriotism, and all I got in return was profanity. So let me lay this out for you really simply, in language you’ll understand. You two are vets, aren’t you? You’re the right age.’

‘Yes?’ said Barrow.

‘Which makes you reservists now. Get in our way once more – go into any building we’ve got staked out – interfere in any way at all – do anything that causes me even to hear of you again – and I will personally make sure that the War Department reactivates you both, with immediate effect. Cross me, and you’re going back to war. It will take one telephone call. You’ll be on a train to the NST in a week.’

‘They say it’s turning into a real meat-grinder up there,’ said the second agent.

‘So is that clear?’ said Gilbreth.

‘Clear,’ said Barrow.

‘And is that clear to you, hayseed?’

‘What is clear to me,’ said Drummond, with a peculiar gulping sound, as if he were having trouble swallowing, ‘what’s c-clear to me is, mongrel city though this may be, you are a real pure-bred sonofabitch.’

Gilbreth smiled thinly. ‘Take him away,’ he said to Barrow. ‘Before he embarrasses himself.’

‘Phin, time to go,’ said Barrow, and led Drummond to the car. 103As soon as he’d gotten him into the passenger seat, he cranked up the engine and drove; drove away from the Helm plant as fast he dared, into the district of docks and factories to the north, where the chimneys put up their sky-masking smoke, where the fifty-foot figure of the brave in jerkin and feathers presided over the Red Giant cannery, where the freight trains slid across the roadway like screens you could hide behind.

*

As he drove he stared ahead with his jaw set. He didn’t trust himself to look at Drummond yet.

‘Joe?’ said Drummond eventually.

‘What.’

‘I cain’t go back in the army.’

‘I know. I’m not eager myself.’

‘I just cain’t, Joe.’

‘You won’t have to,’ he said. ‘He was only threatening.’ He meant this to come out warmly, surely, but it only sounded weary. And hot on the heels of tired reassurance came unaccustomed anger, and after a second he burst out, ‘Why’d you have to talk to him like that? Why’d you have to bait him?’

‘You sound like my mama,’ said Drummond. ‘Phineas, she’d say, if you cain’t say nothin’ nice, don’t you say anythin’. But I never minded her, either.’

There was a ghost of humour in the voice but all thinned out, washed out. Barrow did glance across then. Drummond looked awful, stark white and clammy, with shadowed eyes.

‘No,’ he said determinedly. ‘No, it’s more than that. You always did like being provoking, but this is different. Now it’s like you don’t even care what you say. It’s like it doesn’t matter to you what happens. That’s crazy, Phin. You were crazy, back there. What is going on?’

‘Big man—’104

‘Don’t call me that, I’m sick of that. It makes me sound like I’m nothing but muscle.’

‘Okay.’

‘Well?’

‘What is going on is … I have an opportunity. I’ve been told that … if this case goes a certain way, then I could be … set, for life I mean. I’d be made. Just like that.’ He clicked his fingers, a quiet little snap.

‘Told by who?’

‘I cain’t tell you that.’

‘Right. And this thing they want you to do?’

‘I cain’t tell you. Trust me, I just cain’t and it’s better you don’t know. But if we handle this right, please the right people, then that’s the ticket out of here for both of us, right there. California, here we come. Swimming pools and orange trees and money to burn. For real, I swear.’

‘Phin,’ said Barrow, ‘that’s … your dream, not mine.’

‘I’m not gonna leave you behind, big m— … Joe.’

‘Does it mean trying to frame up Bessa and his boys, when we know it wasn’t them?’

‘We cain’t now, anyway.’

‘That’s not the point. It doesn’t sit right with me.’

‘Well, it doesn’t have to be them. My thing I’ve got going, it ain’t really about who we catch.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘I know, but it’s better that way. Protects you, for one thing. You’ve just got to trust me, all right?’

‘Well, I don’t know about that, Phin. You told me yesterday, for every believer there’s someone out there making bank off them. Don’t that make me the sucker here?’

‘Oh, you don’t want to be takin’ my bullshit too seriously …’

‘Seems to me like you’re asking for a lot of trust, but you’re 105hardly giving none.’ Barrow thought for a minute. ‘I tell you what, I will do you a deal. I won’t ask about this, ah, side-bet of yours, and in return you back me up following this investigation where it goes. I mean, really back me up; properly. No bullshit. No crazy talk. No pulling people’s noses just because you can. If I say we need to do something, we just do it. Okay?’

Drummond gave an ironic whistle. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Okay. Long as we can still be pretty quick about it. Deal.’

‘Right. So now we go to Union Cartridge.’

‘Shee-it. All right then, Detective. Lead on. My fuckin’ my, the worm hath certainly turned around here.’

‘Fuck you, Phin.’

‘Fuck you too, Joseph.’

*

(In fact, though, Barrow had never had a first name longer than just Joe. It was not a shortening. The Barrow Boys’ Home, surrounded by yellow wheat fields as isolating as any set of prison walls, with its clapboard towers like grain elevators for the storage of children, did not believe in wasting syllables on its inmates. Joe Barrow slept in a dormitory with an Ike, an Abe, a Jim, a Jack and a Ted Barrow. All of them human mixtures that even the Brown Middle hesitated about accommodating. All of them dressed in clothes smelling of disinfectant soap. They gave him piano lessons, though.)

*

They wound through the ordered chaos of the industrial zone to the gates of Union Cartridge. No organic smell here: fumes of molten lead and a chemical reek of cordite billowing from the smoke-stacks instead.

‘No no, don’t stop, keep going,’ cried out Drummond suddenly, and the reason declared itself instantly. Yet another black Model T parked among the trucks and the horse-drays out front, with two 106more manicured young men in suits waiting in it. Barrow changed back up into second gear and they went sedately on by the plant, round the corner into a side street with a couple of diners and a drugstore in it, clearly there to cater for the plant’s lunchtime, though you’d think that the hot-metal atmosphere would turn the fried eggs green at the very least.

‘Now what?’ said Drummond shakily. ‘Over to you, Sherlock Holmes. You’re the one who wants to get us in there, but I don’t think we want to catch the eye of those boys.’

Barrow put the Ford half-up onto the sidewalk and considered, the engine idling. A back gate? A side way in? Round to the tracks where the lead ore came in from the mines at Nakicoula? No; they didn’t know what the Bureau was watching here, exactly, or who they might have inside, and he felt no confidence that they could get in and out unnoticed, even with Drummond in this subdued state. Think, big man, and prove you’re not just muscle. Think, the fluent-fingered pianist. Think, Detective. What did they want in there? To arrest Sammy Noukouwa, ideally. But first, to size him up as a suspect. Which meant? To see what he was like. To see if he had a watertight alibi for Sunday night. To see first of all for that matter if he actually did work at Union Cartridge since, Barrow recalled, Bessa had been a little uncertain on this basic point. So. Take it thataway around, first things first, and what they needed to get out of the building beside them, before the issue of taking a live and handcuffed body out of it even arose, was knowledge; information. And of course there were ways, obvious ways, you could get information from a place without physically entering it. Barrow pulled the parking brake, killed the engine, jingled up some loose change from his pocket, and set off for the wooden Bell Telephone booth outside the further diner.

‘Wait up,’ said Drummond, arriving hastily as he was sliding the concertina door open. ‘Whatya doin’?’107

‘Calling Personnel in there to check if they really got Sammy Noukouwa on the books, whether he’s in today.’

‘Okay, that’s a plan, but as it happens I … know someone works at Union Cartridge. You wanna let me try?’

‘You couldn’t have mentioned this before?’

Drummond shrugged, and held out his hand for the nickel.

‘I don’t know …’ said Barrow.

‘How’s this gonna work if we don’t trust each other at all?’ said Drummond. Barrow gave him the nickel, and Drummond stepped in and pulled the door of the booth shut behind him. Barrow could see him through the glass panel, crouched over with the earpiece held up under his hat and the mouthpiece on its wire touched to the stubbly dimple on his chin. But not hear him, given the mechanical roar coming from the plant. Drummond got through to somebody, gesticulated, moved aside the mouthpiece to slot a cigarette into his mouth, contorted in the booth to strike a match on his shoe, and seemed to settle in for a conversation.

Barrow stepped round the side of the booth and leaned against it to light up himself. It was a little past noon. The spring sun was straight overhead, bright but weak, visible like a wafer through the haze. The metal taste in the air also combined strangely with the tobacco, and left a coating on Barrow’s tongue like tarnish. He spat and abandoned the smoke. Drummond opened the door, but only to hold out his hand for another coin. ‘Phin—’ he said, but Drummond just flapped his hand at him, pulled the door shut, and went on talking.

Barrow thought of the almost-empty paddy wagon arriving at the precinct, and wondered what the miko’s reaction had been to its solitary, stinking passenger. He thought of Dolphus Henderson, and wondered where the band was playing tonight. He thought of Dolphus’s clarinet drawing out the long notes on ‘Riverside Blues’. When after this Drummond was still talking, he went into the drugstore and bought the next edition of the Post. PAGAN SEWER, 108it now said on the front page. Anderson, it seemed, had found her way to Bishop Halloran, the prelate from Chicago who had come down to cover Cahokia while the cardinal was in Rome for the papal election; and Bishop Halloran wanted the world to know that he had not liked it at all when, celebrating his first Mass in the cathedral, he had found himself silently surrounded by priests and nuns in the masks of the Four Winds Society.

Finally Drummond emerged.

‘Fixed that, I think. They’re lookin’ him up. They find him, they’ll bring his time card on out to us, so’s we can see what his comings ’n goings have been. – Not out the front gate, don’t worry; there’s some kinda little exit up along here, somewhere. Might have to wait a coupla more minutes. That all right for you?’

‘That’s good. That’s real good. But, would you mind telling me who …?’

‘Hey, I’m keepin’ my side of the deal we just made. Now you gotta go on and keep yours.’

‘… Okay,’ said Barrow.

But when two figures came picking their way through the back lot beyond the diner, in clothes made for office floors and not rubble and weeds, it was plain from Drummond’s silent surprise that the one in the lead must be the party that he had been trying to be discreet about. He was a plump, baby-faced takata in a Homburg hat and a bow-tie. The fine chalk stripes of his suit were so far apart that they would have looked almost jazzy, had it not been cut with a loose, expensive neglectfulness. He was only about forty, but both a toddler and an ancient would have been equally at home in his outfit. Behind him came a secretary carrying a couple of items in cardboard. She was labouring with difficulty to extract the points of her heels from the broken ground.

‘Helloo! Helloo!’ called Bow-Tied Babyface. ‘Detective Drummond! And this must be your redoubtable partner! Redoubtable and’ – 109he paused happily to choose a word – ‘lofty.’

‘Won’t you introduce me?’ said Barrow.

‘Sure,’ said Drummond helplessly. ‘This is Arthur Vanderberg.’

‘The owner of Union Cartridge?’

‘Among the major stock-holders, let’s say,’ smiled Vanderberg. But he was the owner of the plant, Barrow knew, in every effective sense, and of much more besides. The Vanderberg dynasty were in steel, railroads and textiles as well as munitions. Their money was so old that it underlay the United States like geology. Before there had been a United States, in fact, there had been Vanderbergs and they had already been rich.

‘I thought you lived in New York City, sir,’ said Barrow.

‘I like to keep an eye on our operations, particularly when they are in unusual places. I like to see things for myself. Last month, Manila. This month, Cahokia. Now – you were looking for one of our line workers, I believe. And Shirley here has found him. Shirley?’

‘Yes, Mr Vanderberg. Here is his employee card: NOUKOUWA S., employed since January of last year as a junior die-stamper. And here is his time card.’

‘Is he in the plant today?’ asked Barrow.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘According to his time card, he missed his shifts both yesterday and today.’

‘He wasn’t working over Sunday night, was he?’

Shirley looked at Vanderberg, who nodded.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was last in last Friday. Since he was already on second warning, he will probably now be fired.’

‘Is this good news?’ asked Vanderberg. ‘You seem pleased, Detectives.’

‘It may be, sir,’ said Barrow. ‘Is there a home address for him on that card?’

‘There is,’ said Shirley, ‘but I … don’t understand it.’

‘It’ll be in the Quarters,’ said Barrow. ‘May I see?’110

Vanderberg nodded again. Shirley passed over the employee card. Under ‘Address’ a different hand, perhaps Sammy Noukouwa’s own, had written in clumsy pencil:

Hashi-Ninak

Shakba alpisa

Ontoklo hina

Shakba alfabi

Tochina hina

Okisa okchako

Barrow read it out loud.

‘What on earth does that mean?’ asked Vanderberg. ‘Is it a poem?’

‘It’s a set of directions, sir,’ said Barrow. ‘The alleys in the Quarters don’t have names or numbers. Did you get that, Phin?’

‘I believe so,’ said Drummond. ‘I mean, do make a note of that in Anopa, Joe; we best check it at the precinct. But I think that was … Moon Street side; on the right; seventh turning; left-hand side; third turning; blue door?’

‘Remarkable,’ said Vanderberg. ‘And I suppose that works, so long as everyone agrees on the fixed points from which you begin. No odder, really, than the ancient Inca communicating with string.’

‘Okay then,’ said Barrow, closing his notebook. ‘What did I tell you? We have a viable suspect, missing from work since the murder, with no alibi that we know of. And an address for him. Bingo.’

‘Bingo!’ agreed Drummond, grinning.

‘Golly, it’s like one of those crime serials on the radio,’ said Vanderberg.

‘Thank you very much, sir, you’ve been a great help,’ Barrow told him.

‘A pleasure! A fascinating pleasure! Tell me,’ he went on, nodding at the Ford, ‘are you heading back uptown now?’

‘Why – yes,’ said Barrow.111

‘Could I cadge a lift?’

‘Mr Vanderberg, I can have your own car brought straight around for you, if you just give me a moment,’ protested the secretary.

‘No, no, I shall ride with the detectives,’ said Vanderberg, making it sound like a thrilling caption in the movies. Riding with the Detectives! ‘If, that is, you fellows don’t mind.’

‘You’d probably be more comfortable in your own vehicle, sir,’ said Drummond, frowning.

‘Who cares for comfort, when the game’s afoot!’

‘Uh … okay.’

‘Excellent! I’ll be at the Union Club till three,’ Vanderberg told Shirley, clambering up like a teddy bear into the back of the Model T, and posing there with his hand clapped dramatically to the top of his Homburg, as if a hurricane might imminently snatch it off. Barrow supposed he was not used to riding in a car with open sides. ‘Any telegrams, to me there, please.’

‘Jus’ let me do the talkin’, here,’ muttered Drummond to Barrow as they got in. ‘You drive. Sweet fuckin’ Jesus, the foibles o’ the rich and famous.’

The electric starter obliged this time. The engine of the Model T puttered to life, and under the anxious eyes of the secretary they pulled out of the side street and headed east, back into the city. The watchers in the Bureau car showed no sign of paying attention to them at all, in the single glance Barrow dared to flash in their direction. Just two distant heads in neat boater hats with identical ribbons, facing the other way.

Vanderberg, however, intercepted his glance with disconcerting swiftness.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘our friends from the Bureau. Are you boys liaising with them?’

‘Not … really,’ said Drummond. ‘Fact, we’d appreciate it, sir, if you’d see your way to not mentioning our visit to them. They don’t 112fancy it overmuch, you see, if city po-lice butt in on their operations.’

‘Hmm? Territorial, are they? Well, no reason to, when you’re making separate enquiries. You with your murder, them sniffing for Bolsheviks. They are separate investigations, I suppose?’

‘Yes sir, they are.’

‘No chance, given the political situation in the city, tension rising and so on, that one thing might flow into the other?’

‘That’s above our pay-grade, sir, I’m afraid. We’re just street cops. I’m a proud ignoramus, and Joe here is pos-i-tively unfriendly to politics. He doesn’t like ’em at all.’

‘Very sensible of him,’ said Vanderberg. ‘Less wear and tear on the psyche altogether, I imagine, if one could dispense with all that flapdoodle. I wish I could do the same. Instead it’s senators for breakfast and congressional committees for lunch. Penalty of being in the bullet business when there’s a war heating up.’

Presumably he meant the ruckus in the NST that Agent Gilbreth had just threatened them with. Neither of them wanted to talk about that. There was a pause. They reached Division, and the city discarded its industrial character, regained its commercial one. Barrow turned left, into the flow of streetcars, and wondered if he was imagining something slightly off in the hum of the streets. Something untranquil; a glitch. Here and there takata men gathered in small groups, talking. He looked across at Drummond: tension rising there all right, definite eagerness for Vanderberg’s ride to be done with. He searched for a neutral subject.

‘Is it true about the Incas and the string, sir?’ he asked.

‘It is,’ said Vanderberg, leaning forward with instant enthusiasm. He seemed to have decided that his hat would stay on by itself. ‘A gadget called a quipu, where the spacing of the knots worked like a code. But now of course, the poor old Incas are dead and gone, and no-one knows their code any more. Their string is silent. Their string is just string! Very sad.’113

‘You’re interested in that kind of thing, sir?’ Barrow asked politely.

‘Oh, very much so; always been an archeology buff. Ancient Americas, especially – why get worked up about Greece and Rome, I say, when we’ve got our own splendours on our own continent? That’s why I’m always glad when business brings me here. It’s like a living museum. A diorama you can actually step inside! Look around us on the street, and among the everyday American faces, there are the visages of the mound-builders, the mighty Mississippians themselves, a few centuries away from their loincloths and feathers and yet essentially unaltered by the modern world. There, for example – that woman waiting at the stop sign with her child. Take away her new hat and gloves, put her infant into a birch-bark papoose, and there stands the ancestral squaw. One hopes that when the, ah, obstacles of the present arrangements have been cleared away, the place will still preserve its character. As much as possible, anyhow.’

‘Like I said,’ put in Drummond, ‘Joe is not interested in politics. He’s more the artistic type. Plays the pi-ano. Jazz.’

‘Really?’ said Vanderberg. ‘What a man of talents. Have you played with anyone I’d have heard of, Detective?’

‘Dolphus Henderson?’ offered Barrow. ‘Frank Trumbauer? Fate Marable? Jelly Roll Morton a time or two, up in Chicago. But that was a while ago.’

‘Oh, I’ve certainly heard of that last one. “Jelly Roll Morton”: marvellous. But such a sticky name for a pianist, don’t you think? Jelly on the ivories, getting in between the keys …’

Can this man be for real? thought Barrow. Can he genuinely not guess what ‘jelly roll’ means? The rear-view mirror showed Vanderberg’s little eyes twinkling with expectation. Yeah, no. He’s waiting to see if I’m embarrassed. This is a clever man playing the fool to entertain himself. Probably because he doesn’t give a damn for anyone else’s opinion.114

‘Interesting, though,’ Vanderberg continued when it was clear that Barrow wasn’t going to oblige, ‘that you should be playing jazz. Negro music. Virtually the type and definition of negro music. When you yourself are – what do they call it here? – a takouma. Do you find it comes naturally?’

‘You think I’ve drifted off my spot in the diorama?’

‘I do find people are happiest when they know where they belong.’

‘Mm-hmm? I think it was the Union Club you wanted, sir. Here we are.’

They had reached the block of Division between 1st Street and Martyr, a place of brownstone gravitas and solidity. The Union Club had a brass plate beside its door, and wide marble steps leading up to doors guarded by a doorman in blue and gold. Vanderberg scrambled down. He turned and winked at them, cried ‘Good work, boys!’, and then took the steps at his teddy-bear roll. They watched the door open and admit him into a sanctum of oak panelling, thick rugs and low lights, where the captains of industry could go to enjoy the rewards of industry purged of all its sweat and smoke. And blood, said Barrow to himself, thinking of the sidling, grunting, falling cattle.

‘I don’t think I like your friend,’ he said.

‘He’s not my friend,’ said Drummond automatically, but he was looking better than he’d done all morning, as if the world had just been turned rightside up.

‘What was that all about, then?’

‘Man likes to see with his own eyes what he’s gettin’ for his money, is my theory.’

‘And what is he getting, Phin?’

‘Nothin’ you need to pay for, that’s for sure. Come on, let’s go pursue your suspect.’115

3

‘And where in hell have you been?’ demanded Lieutenant Doyle. ‘We’re up to our necks in reporters and the mayor’s in there shouting at the miko. We promised him a parade of hooligans, and all you send back is one old devil who smells like a bad sausage in a latrine.’

They could indeed see, inside the glass box of the captain’s office, the figure of the Honourable Paul Lakna standing over Nakbateroli where he flinched behind his desk. Stray reverberations of the mayor’s anger made it out through the glass.

‘Turned out the Warriors broke up as an organisation two-three months back,’ said Barrow, ‘and most of the young ones – the ones who’re strong enough to’ve killed Hopper – had an airtight alibi from the Helm plant, where they were all on shift together on Sunday night.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I got all that from Sergeant Hanunu when he came in with the stinker. But? And? Tell me there’s more, tell me you’ve got something else.’

‘There is,’ said Drummond. ‘We have.’

‘One of the young ’uns, Sammy Noukouwa, who was into the blood stuff Chunchouba was doing, who the others say is flaky—’

‘Nuts—’ said Drummond.

‘—doesn’t work with them at the meat-packers. He’s over at Union Cartridge, on the line there; and when we go over, there he isn’t, ’cause he missed work today and yesterday. Seems like he’s a definite possible.’

‘Got an address?’

‘Yes, in the Quarters.’ Barrow flipped to the notebook page where he’d copied down the Anopa directions and passed it over.

‘Moon side, seventh right, third left, blue door,’ Doyle read off. ‘All right; that is a thing worth the name of something. Maybe. It’ll 116take a little delicacy. Mostly takouma faces, is the ticket for the Quarters; and we’ll need a fair few to get your man Noukouwa here genuinely surrounded, if he’s gone to ground at home. Not to mention people may turn a blind eye if they see him running. The Quarters don’t take kindly to a heavy hand from outside. I’ll see if Hanunu’s still in the building and put some bodies together. You go and relieve the captain of a portion of his misery. And for the love of God, don’t let him make any more statements to the press.’

Doyle had stood up. As he said this last part, he gave a grim pat to the copy of the Post on his own desk, the one in which Bishop Halloran complained about pagans in the cathedral. When he saw where Barrow’s eyes had gone, he picked up the paper as if he were ashamed of it, and tossed it into his wastebasket.

‘Tripe,’ he said. ‘Tripe written by a trollop. Come on, lads. Time’s a-wasting. None of us can take it easy.’

Barrow went and knocked on the miko’s door, Drummond close behind. Nakbateroli’s face turned towards him with desperate gratitude, like a flower towards the sun.

‘Come in!’ he called, and beckoned for good measure.

But the mayor went on talking.

‘I’ve got fist-fights breaking out in the Fifth! I’ve got bricks and bottles coming through the windows of ward offices! I’ve got the takata section of the streetcar union threatening a walk-out! I’ve got Corfield up on his hind legs in the state senate, smirking and calling for “responsible hands at the helm”! By which he means white ones! Because nothing takouma can be trusted all of a sudden! I’ve got the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune talking about us like we’re all dressed in dirty blankets, sitting round a campfire with lice in our hair! And what do I have, who do I have, to sort this out, to calm the streets, to show the world we’re not idiots? I’ve got you, Nakbateroli; Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’ve got you, mumbling and sweating.’117

It was true that the miko was sweating, his unhappy face sheened and glazed, but then so was the mayor. Big drops, slow as glycerine, were descending the smooth wide forehead of the Honourable Paul Lakna, pale for a takouma, who had been elected two years before as a good-government candidate. Radical Party of course, with its guaranteed takouma and taklousa vote, but Lakna had sold himself as the man to modernise the city, to normalise it, and had put a lot of effort into trying to build himself a personal constituency among the more accessible parts of takata Cahokia. To the progress-minded white business class, he talked the Teddy Roosevelt talk and even walked the Teddy Roosevelt walk, cleaning up the city finances and opening public libraries, declaring himself personally an abstainer despite the city’s generally wet views on Prohibition. To the city’s Polish and Irish factory workers, he presented himself as a big-city Catholic boss not much different from Al Smith of New York or Curley of Boston: many careful photos of Mayor Lakna enjoying church picnics amidst white crowds, in processions next to white priests. This pulled him, on the national stage, towards the Democrats, despite the Radicals’ origin as an offshoot of the Republicans and the party continuing to caucus with them in Congress. The kind of press he liked featured headlines such as THE GREAT REALIGNMENT, with pictures of himself looking thoughtfully out of high windows. He was the city’s first mayor to have no blood relationship to the Hashi family. He was rarely if ever heard to speak in Anopa.

‘Mr Mayor—’ Nakbateroli tried.

‘You don’t seem to understand we’re on the clock here,’ Lakna continued. ‘You don’t seem to understand that you are. Well, let me tell you, your hours as police chief are ticking away. Because until you find me some crazy takouma fools to be guilty of this – specific takouma with names and faces and, I hope to God, mad expressions that photograph well – we are all going to be guilty 118in the eyes of the world. We’re all rooftop-murdering savages till proved otherwise. It won’t be something some individual maniac or maniacs did. It’ll be something the takouma did. All of us. Me; you, Nakbateroli. And believe me, I will make damned sure that the finger points at you before it points at me. I will sacrifice you in the blink of an eye. Do I make myself clear? Do I—’

‘Miko?’ said Barrow, who had waited for an opening and now understood that there wasn’t going to be one. ‘Miko, we have a lead.’

‘You see?’ cried Nakbateroli. ‘I told you I had my best men on it!’

‘You told me this morning that it was all wrapped up already,’ said the mayor. ‘But – go on, Detective. Who?’

In fact, thought Barrow, the expressions of hope on the two men’s faces were rather similar. He repeated what he had told Doyle. ‘And we’re going in to try to get him now, sir.’

‘Name?’ said the mayor.

‘Sammy Noukouwa. N–o–u—’

‘Yes, yes, I know how to spell it.’

‘We could call a press conference,’ began Nakbateroli eagerly.

‘No, you moron,’ said the mayor, looking at him with contempt. ‘There’s been quite enough of promising before we can deliver. If you get this Noukouwa, if he checks out as a suspect, then I will make the announcement. I’m due on the radio at four, God help me, to calm the city down. Can you give me something definite by then?’

‘Of course!’ said Nakbateroli.

Lakna ignored him and looked at Barrow.

‘We’ll do our best, sir,’ he said.

‘That would make a nice change,’ said Lakna. He wiped his forehead with a polka-dot handkerchief. ‘Very well. Last chances all round, gentlemen. Try not to fuck this up any further, please.’

*

The lower floor of the precinct house had largely emptied out to reinforce the foot patrols trying to suppress the fights breaking out 119west of Division. It was a thinner company Sergeant Hanunu could scrape together to invade the Quarters than Doyle had asked for. But they still had enough men for two or three to converge on the blue door by each of the capillaries by which it was possible to approach it. Enough, they hoped, to block Noukouwa’s possible exits, or at least the ones Hanunu knew about. Barrow and Drummond walked in with a single tastanagi to guide them along the actual twists and turns off Moon Street which the personnel card had stipulated. By day the alleys were jumbled terracotta, with a sky still chill blue above. The world was half clay, half clarity. On the stone lintels of the low doorways were scratched crosses, set in squares or circles breaking out to faces at the four compass points, with here and there a saint’s name carved in, abandoned fruit of some early attempt by the Jesuits to organise their new flock. Barrow’s stomach rumbled: no time to snatch lunch.

Seventh right, counting eastward up the axis of Moon Street from the Grant Square Arch. Third left, an opening slightly wider than human shoulders and no different to look at to any of the other chinks that pierced the maze. Then a winding thread of a path they followed, ignoring all alleyway openings to left and right, round so many corners that Barrow lost pretty much all orientation to the world, except that they were in Cahokia – deep in Cahokia – and under the sky. They hardly passed anyone, but eyes were on them all the way. A lounger with a toothpick by a shrine, a woman hanging laundry on a flat rooftop, a child too young for school gazing gravely from a stoop. Yellow doors, brown doors, red doors; not a blue one, for so long that he was beginning to believe they had mistaken the way, until they found a door faded to battered turquoise tucked in an alcove, and at the same time the dark blue of Hanunu’s uniforms trickled into view up ahead, from both sides of a T-shaped junction.

‘I’ve got two more boys in the hini behind, in case he breaks out that way over the roof,’ the sergeant reported in a low voice. ‘But 120we’d have to be lucky, Detectives. I apologise: it’s not a complete ring.’

‘Hey, you done your best with what you got,’ said Drummond, who was still in a state of sunny good humour. ‘Over to us.’

He drew his gun, and Barrow seeing this reached for his own, thinking: how many more doorways today? But Hanunu, face full of alarm, made silent forbidding movements with his hands.

‘Not here!’ he whispered urgently. ‘Here you have … some hundreds of people around you that you must not make angry. Here, everything must start polite, even if there must be fighting afterwards. Like this,’ he said.

He cleared his throat and raised his voice. ‘Ayokpachi, choka!’ he called, and slapped the flat of his hand formally twice on the turquoise door. ‘Wakamme. Tastanagi tamaha. Wakamme.’ He slapped again.

At the corners of Barrow’s eyes, small movements told him that the neighbourhood was taking notice, and from inside there was a sound of hesitant footsteps.

‘Ayokpachi?’ said a woman’s voice, reedy and middle-aged. ‘What do you want?’

‘Police, sister,’ said Hanunu. ‘Please open the door.’

‘Why?’

‘We are looking for Samuel Noukouwa. We have questions for him, on a serious matter.’

‘He is not here.’

‘Nevertheless, we must come in.’

‘Sammy wouldn’t like it. He told me not to let anyone in while he was gone.’

‘You are his mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you not therefore the ruler of the house? Does the child obey the parent, or the parent the child?’121

An uncertain, bleating sound from behind the door, perhaps a laugh.

‘Ah, come on,’ said Drummond.

‘She is frightened of him,’ Hanunu observed.

‘Do you think he is in there?’ Barrow asked.

Hanunu crinkled his eyes. ‘I cannot tell,’ he said. ‘I think we must now make her a little bit more frightened of us.’ He slapped the door again, much harder, and cried, in a kind of controlled roar, ‘Wakamme, holchifo tamaha! Open up, in the name of the city, in the name of the Sun, in the name of God!’

There was a muffled whimper, and the door cracked open to show a timid, foolish, nervous face. Hanunu was gentle but firm. He put his foot in the door and eased it open, revealing a narrow, cluttered, unlit passage, with a further door at the end, and standing in it, a slight woman in scrawny middle age wringing her hands together. Equally gently, equally firmly, he propelled her backwards with a hand on her shoulder, so the detectives could press in behind him.

‘Where is he?’ said Hanunu. ‘Is he here?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘He is gone, like I told you.’

‘Gone since when?’ said Barrow.

‘Gone where?’ said Drummond.

But it was Hanunu’s face she kept her eyes fixed on anxiously. The sergeant reached open the second door, and daylight came in from a cramped inner courtyard, where a charcoal grill for cooking, and a pump for water, and a barrel for washing, were vying for space with an assortment of wooden and metal junk, and dead plants in jars. Two further doors opened off it, one padlocked, and there was a ladder up to the roof. They pushed on through together into the yard, filling it, and with a jerk of the head Hanunu sent one of his tastanagi up the ladder. The sergeant was surveying the mess in the yard in frowning glances, but he kept his hand respectfully 122on the shoulder of Mrs Noukouwa, and gathered her flustered gaze back to his own.

‘Just a moment, sister,’ he said. ‘Be calm.’

Barrow opened the openable door, and though the space inside was shadowy, it was clear no-one was in it. The constable on the roof leaned back over the parapet and shook his head.

‘Okay,’ said Drummond, ‘he ain’t here. Now, like I said, Sergeant – over to us. Lady, where is he?’

‘Sammy is a good boy,’ she said.

‘Oh, ain’t they always,’ Drummond said, with a bark of laughter. ‘But lady, over here, please. You’re talkin’ to me now.’ He gave a two-tone whistle, like a man summoning a dog, and tried to draw her gaze across with a slow-moving forefinger. But her eyes did not follow it.

‘Sammy said I shouldn’t talk to anyone,’ she said, still to Hanunu. It was as if, having registered the fact of their intrusion, she could only manage to deal with one intruder – the first one, the one who had spoken to her in Anopa, the one to whom she had opened the door.

Hanunu cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Sister, you must tell these gentlemen where your Samuel has gone.’

‘Sammy said not to talk to anyone?’ she repeated, this time with a slight question mark audible.

‘Lady,’ said Drummond, irritated, ‘we ain’t here for the pleasure of your conver-satzy-onay. There’s been a murder, you mighta heard. And it seems like your boy was in on it. So you need to open up your trap and just answer the damn question.’

Instead she clapped both hands over her mouth, looking very like a rodent, and made noises of inarticulate distress behind them.

‘Phin?’ said Barrow. ‘Let Hanunu have a try. Looks like he’s got the best shot here.’

Drummond rolled his eyes and waved a permissive hand.

‘Sergeant?’ said Barrow.

Hanunu nodded.123

‘What is your name?’ he asked. ‘I am sure Sammy would not mind if you just told me your name.’

She whispered something into her hands.

‘I am sorry, I cannot hear.’

‘Annie,’ she said in a tiny voice.

‘That is a very good name,’ said Hanunu. ‘The name of the mother of Our Lady.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I have a picture of her.’

‘Do you? That is good. Will you show it to me?’

‘Sheesh,’ said Drummond. ‘Now we’re on to art appreciation.’

Mrs Noukouwa pointed a finger: not however into the open door of the room, but at the stack of junk piled in the yard.

‘Sammy made me take it down,’ she said.

‘Did he,’ said Hanunu grimly. ‘Well, I am sure he had a reason. And I am sure he has a reason why you should not talk to anyone. Let me see if I can guess. Is it because he has a secret?’

‘Yes!’ she said, with almost a squeak of relief. ‘Sammy does important work. Sammy does secret work.’

‘Is he doing it now?’

‘Maybe?’ she said.

‘He is not at the factory today,’ said Barrow, trying to copy the patient evenness of Hanunu’s tone. She twitched, as if a fly had passed by, but it was Hanunu she answered.

‘That is only his job,’ she said. ‘He does his secret work in the night.’

Hanunu and the detectives looked at each other.

‘Do you know what it is, this secret work?’ Hanunu asked.

‘No!’ she said. ‘I must not ask! Sammy gets angry!’

Sergeant Hanunu pressed the hand he wasn’t touching her with to his forehead.

‘And what does he do when he gets angry?’ he asked.

‘He gets angry,’ she repeated helplessly.124

‘And he is frightening when he gets angry. – No, don’t worry; you did not tell me that. I saw it by myself, sister, in your eyes. Has it been just you and him for a long time?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘Do you have no brothers who can speak up for you? Who can say to him: sister’s son, this is your mother you have raised your hand to? Sister’s son, you have disgraced your manhood?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘If I were your brother, I would beat him. I would beat him until he showed you respect.’

‘You would?’

‘Yes. I would do it for the sake of my mother. And my wife. And my sisters. And my daughters.’ Hanunu considered. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘if I were your brother, I would ask you to serve tea now for me and my two friends. Would you do that, Annie?’

‘We never have visitors,’ she said.

‘Now you do.’

‘Now I do,’ she agreed wonderingly. Then abruptly: ‘Where are my manners? Please come in! Sit down! I will make … tea.’

She scurried out from under Hanunu’s hand, and showed them through the door that wasn’t locked, lighting a kerosene lamp to illuminate an adobe-walled low-beamed room that struck Barrow as surprisingly tidy compared to the junkyard outside. Then she rushed back outside to fill a tin kettle and put it on the griddle, with the uncertain excitement of someone following a script nearly, but not quite, forgotten. The uniforms drew respectfully back from her as far as the tight space allowed. Hanunu and the detectives sat down side by side on the low bed that occupied one wall of the room.

‘Sergeant?’ said Barrow, tapping his watch.

‘I know, Detective,’ said Hanunu. ‘But this lady is not clever, and she has been bullied for a very long time, I think.’

‘And now you got her eatin’ outta your hand,’ observed 125Drummond. ‘You’re good at this, Hanunu; you should be the one with the shield.’

Hanunu grimaced.

‘This is horrible,’ he said, rubbing his hands on his sleeves, and Barrow saw that he was genuinely shocked, shocked almost to the point of being unable to continue the manipulation.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Drummond, puzzled. ‘What’s the big deal here? A rat-fink of a kid pushes around his dumb-cluck mama. Nothin’ new.’

‘But these are traditional takouma!’ said Hanunu. ‘This is his mother! I would be ashamed even to raise my voice to my mother, let alone my hand. I would not dare to treat her the way this little … sinti … has treated his. The woman is the queen of the hearth, the ruler of the roof and the fire. In the house, she decides. That is our way. In the old time, you know, before the holy men came, it was always the women who chose between the war and peace. The men fought, but the mothers and wives and sisters decided.’

‘Yeah?’ said Drummond. ‘Your wife the one who wears the pants round at your house, is she?’

Hanunu looked at him with dignity. ‘Am I a child to object to fair shares? She has the house, I have the world. But here! Look at this place! Look how he has pushed her into a corner!’

Examining the tidy room more carefully, Barrow saw that Hanunu was right. It was tidy because, apart from the bed where Mrs Noukouwa clearly slept, everything had been purged from it except the things that mattered to Sammy. A battery-powered radiogram on a shelf. A table dominated by a big zinc ashtray. There were discoloured patches on the wall where things had been taken down. The only remaining decorations were a kind of spiked cudgel wired to nails, and a studio photograph of a grinning rat-like young man with an unconvincing moustache, striking a pose in a hat with a loud, zigzag pattern on the band.126

‘Do you see?’ said Hanunu, pointing back out into the yard. ‘Her spinning wheel. Her holy pictures. Even her Four Winds, pushed out as if they were trash. I do not like this boy.’

‘What is that thing?’ asked Barrow, pointing to the cudgel.

‘A war club,’ said Hanunu. ‘Not a real one.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Drummond, ‘this kid doesn’t strike me as Mr Reality in any way, so far. A feeb living a fantasy.’

‘But mean enough to be our guy,’ said Barrow.

‘Not saying he ain’t. I’m curious what he keeps in that locked room, ain’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Barrow. Then quickly to Hanunu, since Mrs Noukouwa was coming back: ‘Have you decided what question to ask?’

‘I … think so,’ said the sergeant.

She brought the tea on a tin tray. It was black and bitter, in dusty cups. Drummond didn’t touch his, Barrow took a polite sip, but Hanunu drank his down in three scalding mouthfuls while she hovered in the doorway. He smacked his lips appreciatively, and she gave a tremulous smile.

‘The packet was old,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it was very nasty.’

‘No, no,’ said Hanunu. ‘Tell me, sister—’

‘I have a question for you, brother?’

‘Of course,’ said Hanunu. ‘Ask. Anything you like.’

‘Will Sammy come back?’

‘Now, that kinda depends on where he’s gone,’ said Drummond. Barrow elbowed him.

‘I mean, will he come back if you catch him?’ There was a flickering something in her face, some combination of hope and shame. Maybe not so stupid, maybe just very sat-upon, thought Barrow.

‘If he has done what we think he has done – no,’ said Hanunu.

‘But you cannot promise?’

‘No,’ agreed Hanunu. ‘We do not know enough to make a 127promise. But sister, answer me this: do you want him to come back?’

She clapped her hands over her mouth again. But then she lowered her fingertips just enough to free her lips, and whispered, ‘No.’

‘Then help us to find him. That is the first step. I suppose,’ Hanunu went on, seizing the opening, ‘that you have not seen him for several days now?’

‘Yes I have,’ she said; and then had to repeat it, she had spoken so softly. ‘Yes I have. He came here this morning. To collect his suitcase.’

‘Did he. Thank you. But before that, not for a little while?’

‘Not since Sunday. I think it was Sunday? I could hear the Mass bells. But I didn’t go because …’

‘Because Sammy doesn’t like it,’ agreed Hanunu placidly. ‘So he went out on Sunday. Do you remember when?’

‘It was dark,’ she said.

‘And then did he come back before this morning?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was peaceful.’

‘And when he came home today, was he … dirty?’

‘No,’ she said, puzzled. ‘Sammy is always smart. He doesn’t let me look after his clothes, you know. He does all that himself, in his room.’

‘Was he carrying any clothes?’

‘He had a bag?’ she offered. ‘He went and changed in his room, and then he came out with the suitcase.’

‘And was he … upset, at all? Did he seem scared, maybe?’

‘No, he was excited. He said …’

‘What did he say? Tell me, sister.’

‘He said … “I’m playing in the big leagues now, Ma.” Then he snapped his fingers next to my ear, and laughed when it made me jump, and went to catch the train.’128

‘The train?’ said Barrow quickly, unable to help himself. ‘What train? Where to?’

‘Did he say where he was going?’ asked Hanunu, trying to return to the tone of unhurried patience he had maintained till now. But this time, Annie Noukouwa’s attention had moved away from him.

‘The train,’ she said to Barrow, as if he was being slow. ‘The train. The train that goes by. To the evening land.’

‘Shit, shit, shit, shit,’ said Barrow, surging to his feet and narrowly avoiding a collision between his head and the beams. ‘He’s on the Usunhiyi. Hanunu, nice going, but we’ve got to get into that room now.’

‘Hey, steady the cavalry, there,’ said Drummond. ‘Where’s the hurry? You know where he is, now. Boy’s safely in a box, headed west.’

‘Yeah – till he gets off! Mrs Noukouwa, did he say anything about where he was going?’

She shook her head.

Barrow pushed past her as gently as possible, back into the tight little yard.

‘Anything to use as a pry bar,’ he demanded. The uniforms rummaged, and one of the tastanagi dug out a blackened poker from beside the griddle. Barrow levered the tip in under the hasp of the padlock on the locked door. The lock was big and shiny, but the screws holding it to the wood were shallow, and with one good heave and a protesting crunch the whole thing popped off. He yanked the door open: darkness.

‘Someone pass me the—’

‘Here you go, Sherlock,’ said Drummond, who’d sauntered up behind, handing him the lantern. ‘Knock yourself out.’

Sammy Noukouwa’s room was, it turned out, a shrine. Mainly to himself. He had three suits up on hooks, complete with ties and hats all at the cheap end of snazzy: outfits for the low-budget dandy, all ready to go. He had an array of pomades and creams. He had a set of 129other pictures of himself, all seemingly taken at the same session as the first portrait, but working their way with relish through the studio’s array of props. Sammy leaning on a pillar, musing. Sammy in a ten-gallon hat and string tie, pointing two fingers at the camera and winking. Sammy blowing imaginary smoke from a six gun. Sammy, astonishingly, flexing in nothing but a wrestler’s leopard-skin trunks. But over in the far corner, the focus of his idolatry shifted. He had pinned to the wall a kind of horseshoe arch of knives – big-bladed ones, picked by the look of them for their shine – and within them there was what Barrow took at first for just a small version of Chunchouba’s mural of Huitzilopochtli, accompanied by a disturbing thread of the same smell, which Barrow tracked as he stepped closer to a very small puddle of gore and rot surrounding the body of a mouse offered up in front of the image on a board. The way the little grey corpse had been stretched and pinned spoke of a patient pleasure in tormenting it. Barrow averted his gaze, but then looked back: the thing pictured on the wall was blue-black, with too many legs, yes, but this was a homemade icon of some slightly different figure, a skull-headed being that was at the same time blatantly and gynaecologically female.

‘Hmm, yeah, I’d keep my mama outta my bedroom if’n I had that for a pin-up, too,’ said Drummond, who had come up to peer over his shoulder. ‘Boy certainly likes knives, don’t he?’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Barrow. ‘But what I don’t see so far is a bundle of bloody clothes. You’d think he’d have been all over blood when he came down from the Trust roof.’

‘He seems to like writin’ with the stuff,’ observed Drummond, pointing to the wall under the picture, where a legend had been added in ochre-brown capitals for which the mouse had presumably donated the ink.

‘HOUMA ANOPOLI,’ read out Barrow. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘Don’t know, izzactly,’ said Drummond. ‘Houma is “red” – you 130know, red like the people. Takouma is hattak houma, “red man”. But anopoli, I don’t know that one. Something to do with Anopa, I guess.’

‘The language?’

‘Or just, like, any kinda talking?’

‘“Red talking”? “Red speech”? Maybe, something like, “the blood is talking”?’

Drummond shrugged.

Barrow went back to the door and called Hanunu. ‘Can I get your eyes on something in here, Sergeant?’

‘Of course, Detective,’ said Hanunu, releasing the hand of Mrs Noukouwa, which he had been clasping between both of his. ‘What do we have here? Ah, more ugliness.’

‘And more of the same kind of ugliness. But what do these words mean?’

‘Hmm,’ said Hanunu, and hesitated.

‘Houma like in blood, do you think?’

‘No, it is just the colour. Though of course it is the famous colour of blood, and of … war, for example.’

‘And anopoli?’

‘That means, “talking, speaking, discussing”. If you and I are talking together, for example, we are having an anopoli. That is one way of using it.’

‘So you’re saying, the whole thing together is like, “Red Conversation”?’

‘That would be a fair translation,’ said Hanunu carefully.

‘Then I really don’t get why Sammy Noukouwa would write it on his wall in mouse blood, inside a necklace of knives?’

‘It is certainly puzzling,’ agreed Hanunu. He was frowning. ‘I wonder if I have made a mistake.’

‘What about?’

But before Hanunu could answer there was a shout from outside.131

‘Sergeant! Sergeant!’

Barrow snatched up the nearest picture of Sammy and followed back out into the yard. The uniforms were all looking up at the roof, and the man Hanunu had sent up there was beckoning frantically. Something had changed in the sound of the world too, as if a beehive had been disturbed and was putting out a new, angrier note. Hanunu ascended, took a quick look around at something, and said to Barrow down in the courtyard, ‘We must leave, Detectives! Right now, please.’

‘What is it?’ said Barrow.

‘We are surrounded.’

‘What?’ Barrow said, and climbed up to see for himself. The angry hum increased, but it took a moment for him to understand what he was seeing from the flat roof with the washing poles. At first, all he could see was that the lines of cinnamon shadow marking the paths of the alleys through the jumbled terracotta of the Quarters had all been filled in nearby, somehow, with lines of bright mixed colour, as if multi-coloured paint were flowing through them. Then his eye successfully interpreted the scene, and he saw that the colour was many, many people in Four Winds masks pressing in along the alleys from every side towards the Noukouwa house. The Police Department’s little dragnet had been engulfed in a much bigger one.

‘Seems like they really don’t want the police in here,’ said Barrow.

‘Yes,’ said Hanunu. ‘Probably it is that. But definitely it is time to go, Detective.’

They scurried to depart. Mrs Noukouwa crumpled in on herself, and stared at the ground, at this demonstration of the weakness of her new protectors.

‘I will go first,’ said Hanunu in the passage to the outside door. He lifted a finger: ‘No guns, Detectives, whatever happens.’

He opened the turquoise door inwards, and the alley appeared from where Barrow was standing behind him to be completely 132empty, and still too, as if the encirclers had melted away, or perhaps only been a peculiar intrusion from some dream of pursuit. If it was a dream, though, it was continuing. One more step out behind the sergeant, and he found that the turn to the right was blocked from side to side by a wooden wall of masks, whose wearers were standing in absolute silence, with behind them other masks, and others, crammed in solid all the way to where the alley doglegged in that direction. The hum had stopped with eerie unanimity, as if a switch had been thrown. As at the welcoming-in ceremony, it was strangely easy to ignore the human waists and legs below the wooden faces. It was not the individuals in moccasins and work boots, overalls or housecoats, who wanted them gone from the Quarters: it was laughing East and wailing West, innocent South and ancient North, with their fixed, huge expressions, their painted eyes as big as saucers. Back they stretched, West-North-East-South-North-North-East-West, all slightly different, all repetitions of the same four themes mixed together. An uprising by all the points of the compass. The North in the front row had teeth in brilliant yellow and age-lines in alternating red and grey.

Behind Hanunu, Barrow and the others filed out and to the left, that being the route left open to them. Mrs Noukouwa at the rear dared to poke her head out to see and the three Winds in the front row turned their wooden heads to face her, in one jerky simultaneous movement. She fled back inside and shut the door.

Then the Winds stepped forward together, and at a steady pace drove all the police ahead of them up the alley: a piston of colour pushing out a small blockage of blue and grey. They did not have to touch them. The uniforms wanted to keep well out of reach of the advancing faces, and Barrow felt the same compunction. He couldn’t have said what he feared in the painted stares, but he feared it, whatever it was. Only Drummond dragged his feet, whistled under his breath, turned a cigarette over and over in his fingers, fussed with his 133lighter, threatened to stop while he brought flame to tobacco.

‘Cain’t a fellow get a smoke in this town?’ he said.

‘Shut up, Phin,’ said Barrow. ‘Just shut up and walk.’

At each corner there was another wall of masks, or a couple of walls if need be, blocking all directions but one. They were being herded, and they went where they were sent, grateful each time that there was still a route open, and not a silent closing in from every side at once. What would have happened then, Barrow did not know, and he did not want to find out. Instead they were only being driven out. Out of the Quarters by the quickest route, it turned out; not back to Moon Street but, it became clear when the last cramped alley led suddenly through an arch into open space, onto the vast paved plain of the Plaza. As they passed the threshold they broke into a trot and scattered, the free space seeming like both escape and exposure at once – but the Winds did not follow. When Barrow looked back at the archway, it boiled with colour for a moment and then the masks retreated out of sight. It was as if something bright and strange and fierce had risen at need in the body of the city, and then sunk back into it again. But having seen it, you could not forget that it was there. And the alley’s mouth that had spat them out was altered by the knowledge. A prohibition remained.

4

‘Seriously?’ said Drummond. ‘That’s what we’re going with, as the mug-shot of your fleeing suspect?’

Barrow looked down at the photo of Sammy in his hand and found that the one he’d grabbed off the wall was the picture with the leopard-skin trunks.

‘It was nearest,’ he said heavily. They were still standing uncertainly on the Plaza, only a little way offshore from its coast of 134buildings. Out in the middle of the open expanse at the centre of the city – when you were over by the two obelisks everyone called ‘the Victories’, for example – the structures at the edges sank down into a mere rind of architecture. Even the yellow Mound became only a bump on the margin of things, and you seemed to be surrounded by a whole paved planet, curving away to the horizon. But here the old Spanish arcades bordering the giant square still had some credible loom to them.

‘I just foresee a little difficulty there,’ said Drummond, who had gotten his cigarette alight and was drawing on it cheerfully. He seemed to be the only member of the party left unshaken, as if the march of the masks had not struck him as much more than a bunch of people in fancy dress. For him, apparently, it hadn’t been like a dream breaking out into daylight and leaving you wondering how securely you were awake, how logical and secure the waking world even was. Perhaps Drummond’s nightmares were too particular. Perhaps all his dread was monopolised by the dream of the mouthful of earth. He was grinning now, anyway, while the uniforms were slack with shock, and Hanunu’s eyes were focused off on some completely internal thought he was having.

‘Awkward, I mean,’ Drummond went on, ‘to be sayin’ to people, “Excuse me, kind sir, have you seen a scrawny Tarzan go by?” He paused, took a suck of smoke, drew a little vaudeville curve in the air with the ember. Laugh-line. Ba-boom. ‘No? No-one in the joking mood at all? Okay, then. On to Union Station, I presume. Quickest way from here’s probably to pick up the Number 6, don’t you think?’

Barrow looked at his watch. Quarter of three.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You go on, Phin, hold the car if it comes. I’ll catch up in a second.’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Drummond, and set off towards the distant streetcar loop between the Victories. His hat was on the back of his head and his step was jaunty.135

‘I had better be quick,’ Barrow said to Hanunu, ‘if the mayor’s going to have something to say on the radio. You head back to the precinct. I’m sorry, but you get to break the news again that we don’t have a perp to show off.’

‘No problem, Detective,’ said Hanunu, pulling his attention back from wherever it had been.

Barrow hesitated.

‘You grew up in the Quarters, right?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Hanunu, ‘but that was thirty years ago. I am up on the Northside now – Catawba and 14th.’

‘All the same, you’ve got the feel for it better than me. All of you guys do. And that was strange just now, right? The way the Four Winds came. Really organised, really quick. That wasn’t just the Quarters not liking it when cops come in. Was it?’

The uniforms looked at each other, and looked to Hanunu to answer.

‘I thought maybe not?’ said Hanunu.

‘In which case,’ Barrow pushed on, ‘that means someone was keeping an eye on the Noukouwas’ place specifically. Someone who knew it might need protecting. Someone who could call out the Winds. Someone who could …’ He reached around in his mind, and found the phrase that Hanunu had used that morning. ‘Someone who could speak for the tamaha?’

‘I think so,’ said Hanunu. ‘Yes.’

‘But why would the tamaha want to protect an obnoxious little prick like Sammy Noukouwa? Treats his mama like dirt, breaks all the traditional takouma rules. Even if the neighbours don’t know that he’s running a private shrine to Huitzilopochtli’s ugly sister, they’d know what he’s putting Mrs N. through, wouldn’t they. So why would the neighbourhood turn out for him?’

‘I do not know,’ said Hanunu.

‘And who would have the power to make that happen?’136

‘I do not know,’ Hanunu repeated. ‘But,’ he began, and then stopped.

‘Go on,’ said Barrow. ‘What?’

‘I thought maybe it meant we were wrong to be looking at the Warriors for the murder? That the Winds were sent to say to us, look somewhere else. – Detective, the Number 6 is coming.’

Barrow turned and sure enough, over at the mouth of Christ-the-King on the distant south side of the Plaza, the tiny silver caterpillar shape of a trolley was nosing out between the mass of the Ballcourt and the columned side of the Legion Barracks. From this distance, the blue splotches of light made by the sparks on the catenary winked as large as the vehicle itself. Drummond was almost at the Victories, waving his hands over his head.

‘Okay,’ said Barrow, ‘thanks. – And is that why you said in there that you’d made a mistake?’

‘Mmm,’ agreed Hanunu.

Barrow turned and ran, his coat flapping, and it was only once he was far out himself on the Plaza, his shoes slapping on the endless grey slabs, that he remembered that Hanunu had said ‘I wonder if I have made a mistake’ before they knew the house was surrounded.

‘Hey,’ said Drummond, waiting at the stop while the rubberised concertina doors of the Number 6 folded back, and the metal steps hissed down. He was looking up at the nearest Victory – the monument to strictly and entirely Cahokian victories, with battles carved on the obelisk going back to the Chickasaw War of 1705, not the tactful newer one to the victory of the Union. There were dried splashes of something dark on it, up at the point where the square column with the writing turned into a round stone spire.

‘Bessa said, we threw blood on the Victories – but don’t you just bet that’s our Sammy at work too? I mean, personally?’ said Drummond. ‘Convenient for where he lives. Nip out at dawn when there’s no-one around, and throw some of his favourite jug wine around?’137

‘Maybe,’ said Barrow.

The passengers got down and, scattering in all directions onto the Plaza, instantly grew small: sand-grain-sized beings upon the stone plain. Barrow and Drummond stepped up, and the Number 6 moved off with an electric crackle. From where Barrow stood, hanging on to a leather strap, with his head up in the arch of the roof, the view was all of the ground going by. The track ahead carved a rushing silver curve across the grey, and the paving poured past on both sides like twin wakes. Perhaps there would be a chance to pick up something to eat at the train station.

*

There was some kind of argument or dispute going on in the tiled underpass that served as the streetcar stop under Grant Square. Their car inched in behind a line of two or three others. The tracks were blocked, and raised voices echoed from the white roof of the tunnel. Passengers unable to get further had spilled out onto the walkway and were adding to the noise.

‘Po-lice, coming through. Po-lice,’ called Drummond, but it was Barrow’s height that parted the blockage. The crush lessened on the stairs leading upward, and by the time they’d climbed all the way up to emerge onto the marble floor of the main concourse, things seemed normal again. Normally busy, normally hectic, that is. Any rumble from below which the stairwells were emitting was blended into the general clamour of locomotive noise, train cars shunting, tracks being called, baggage carts clacking along, porters shouting, and a thousand travellers simultaneously greeting and adieu-ing.

Cahokia’s Union Station was the hub and headquarters of the entire Cahokian Pacific network, and twenty years earlier the Man had paid the Beaux Arts architects of Penn Station in Manhattan enough money to build him something competitively fabulous. Thanks to the elevated construction site, with the whole thing 138perched on the brick embankment running slantwise across Grant Square, it had to be lighter than Penn, with more glass and steel in the walls and comparatively slender stone piers supporting the vast glass dome overhead. But what it lacked in mass, it made up in light and colour. The dome was a stained-glass sun, and the real sun outside threw dramatic lines of brightness and shade angling down onto the floor through the soaring windows; and across the floor, thanks to the colours in the glass, floating blobs of red and blue shifted constantly on pale stone, dark mahogany benches, the suitcases and hats of travellers, so that to get to the booking windows you waded through an imaginary meadow. There were statues in alcoves: St Baltasar, General Founi the conqueror of Vicksburg, Prince Cuauhtemoc the Fifth and Last shaking hands with Ulysses S. Grant. But the one with the feet shiny from touching, and the perpetual offering of flowers at its feet, was the takouma-faced Maria Tamaha, the Virgin of Cahokia. She had the infant Christ in her arms, and a sickle moon on her head.

On the wall above the row of doors leading to the tracks, a mosaic as wide and high as a whole average apartment building showed the CP system. Northern branch stretching up to Chicago, southern branch following the river down to Quizquiz, Vicksburg, New Orleans. Chequerboard mosaic for the shared tracks running back east to DC. Proudest, in thick red, the western line that reached across canyon and desert to span the continent. There was a gold square to indicate the spot on the boundary between Deseret and the Dinetah where Prince Cuauhtemoc, in his first role as Citizen Hashi, had driven the golden spike.

Barrow flashed his badge and jumped the line at the nearest ticket window. He held the photograph up to the glass.

‘Looking for this fellow,’ he said. ‘Got on the Usunhiyi this morning, we reckon.’

‘I think I’d have remembered the underwear,’ deadpanned the 139booking clerk, a handsome takouma in her twenties. Barrow heard Drummond snicker behind him.

‘Everyone’s a comedian,’ he said wearily. ‘Lady, this is a suspect in the rooftop murder. Gimme somebody serious to talk to; gimme your supervisor, please.’

‘I am the supervisor,’ she said, ‘and I wouldn’t have joked about murder if I’d known it was murder I was joking about. Try saying “murder” first next time, tastanagi.’

‘Sorry,’ said Barrow.

‘You’d better come on back here, and we’ll look at ticket stubs. If your guy bought his ticket in the hour before the Usunhiyi left, the person who sold it to him will still be here. Otherwise, it was the night shift.’

They were let in through a locked door at the end of the row of windows, and the supervisor gathered a ring of clerks around them to study the photo.

‘What would he have been wearing?’ she asked, with a quelling glance.

Barrow covered Sammy’s body with his hand, so only the grinning, rat-like face showed. ‘Cheap suit, probably a hat with some kind of loud band round it,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ said a middle-aged male clerk with a fastidious air. ‘I remember him. Positively garish. Orange stripes round the hat, and a tie to match. I noticed him because the outfit was not refined, or first-class in any way, and yet he bought a Pullman ticket. Which is not the usual combination. He was very pleased with himself. What do you want him for, crimes against fashion?’

‘Or possibly somethin’ even more serious,’ said Drummond.

‘This was when?’ said Barrow.

‘About seven thirty this morning? Not long after I came on, and about half an hour before the Usunhiyi left.’

‘And where was he going?’140

‘I’ll check the drawer, because we don’t sell so very many first-class fares to walk-up passengers, but I’m pretty sure it was all the way. Wait one tiny moment.’

He came back with a book of green-and-white tickets and counterfoils like oversized bank checks.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right. I only sold two Pullman fares for this morning’s train, and this one is definitely him: Car 15, Berth 91, which is a private single compartment, Cahokia Central to sunsoaked Los Angeles. Thirty-seven dollars.’

‘He’s livin’ it up,’ observed Drummond, with a whistle. ‘What’ll he have earned at Union Cartridge, seventy, seventy-five cents an hour? Either he’s blowing his savings, or someone’s bankrolling the critter.’

‘“I’m in the big leagues now, Ma,”’ Barrow quoted. ‘All right, then. He’s on board. So. Where is the Usunhiyi now, where does it stop next?’

‘There,’ said the supervisor, pointing to an indicator board twenty feet long on the back wall, where a row of little electric bulbs stretched from DC at one end to LOS ANGELES at the other, with CAHOKIA dead centre. One bulb was lit, just to the left of KANSAS CITY. ‘That moves along automatically with the train. It left KC about half an hour ago; next stop’s Dinetah at three tomorrow morning.’

‘What, nothing in between? Nothing at all?’

‘That’s kind of the point of it, tastanagi, as a super-fast service? The only stops are KC, Dinetah, South Deseret Junction, Ransom City, Robinson and LA.’

‘Can you get it stopped sooner?’

She smiled sympathetically.

‘Just as soon as you bring us a court order,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t the first time this has come up. Fugitives like a fast train. Company policy is co-operation with law enforcement at station 141stops, but nothing that interferes with the timetable, or we’d be halting expresses all the time. My guess is, by the time you’ve found a judge and gotten past the company lawyers, it’ll be 3 a.m. anyway. You might as well wait for Dinetah.’

‘There’s a lot of people eager to get this guy caught,’ said Barrow, frustrated.

‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘but think about it: if he’s dangerous, do you really want the train halted at a red signal in the middle of the desert, and the West Podunk Police Department coming on up in a horse buggy to try to arrest him? Better to wait, honestly; and what I can do, is get a message into the mail pick-up when it goes through the junction at La Junta, telling the train crew what’s going on, and to expect police at Dinetah?’

‘When’s that?’ said Barrow.

‘’Nother couple of hours.’

‘Then it’ll have to do, I suppose. – And he really can’t get off anywhere in between? Nowhere he could jump the train?’

‘Not unless he fancies jumping out onto a mountainside at sixty miles an hour. We say non-stop, we mean non-stop.’

‘Okay, then. Yakokai,’ he said. The word for ‘thank you’ he did have in his small Anopa vocabulary, along with ‘please’, ‘good morning’, the other basics.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Come on back and see us again, Detective,’ said the fastidious clerk. ‘We’ll punch your ticket anytime.’

‘Down, Herbert,’ said the supervisor. But as she let them out, she said, ‘Give me a call if you’re free one evening. I like a big man with manners.’

*

‘Well, I suppose that’s progress of a sort,’ said Doyle. ‘It won’t please the mayor, though, and it won’t get the miko’s feet out of the fire.’ He looked at Drummond over the top of his half-moon 142spectacles. ‘Go on and tell young Miss Chokfi to set up a long-distance with our Navajo friends. She needs to get me through to a Captain Tlizilani. That’s T–L–I–Z–I–L–A–N–I.’

‘You’re going to do it yourself, Lieutenant?’ said Drummond.

‘Miko’s in no state. Go on, scoot. You, though,’ he said, pointing a thick finger at Barrow, ‘you stay put.’

He waited while Drummond sauntered away. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m not best pleased with how this case is going. Frankly, I’d take the two of you off it if it were up to me. So far, all we’ve got is a wild chase from one suspect to another with nothing done, as far as I can see, on how the damn murder even happened. Now, maybe this foolish young feller on the train will turn out to be our man, and maybe he won’t; we don’t know, and yet somehow all our eggs are loaded in the one basket, travelling thataway to California at high speed. It strikes me there’s been a neglect of basic policework. For example, here’s the ME’s report on Hopper’s body. Sitting on my desk. Waiting for one of you two eejits to ask for it. And have you? No.’ He flipped the pair of typed pages over to Barrow. ‘Read it, and then for God’s sake, since there’s only that one word on the poor soul’s head and no actual manner of proof of a connection, forget about the Tastanagi Talhofichi for a moment—’

‘The what?’

‘The Warriors! Tastanagi Talhofichi, “warriors of liberation”?’

‘Tastanagi means “warrior”? I thought it was like “officer”, or “constable”.’

‘No, lad,’ said Doyle, rolling his eyes. ‘We police – you, me, Hanunu, your tricky friend Phineas there – are Tastanagi Tamaha. “Warriors of the city”. Didn’t you get that?’

‘No,’ said Barrow.

‘A few language lessons wouldn’t go amiss, maybe, if you’re planning to stay in this line o’ work. – But never mind that now. What I’m saying is, what I’m telling you now is, there’s to be no 143idling just because you think your feller on the train may be the one. Use the time, dammit, and better late than never, to work the end of the case where there’s an actual body on hand, and some actual evidence to start from. What have you got along those lines, Detective? Tell me.’

Barrow glanced towards the telephonist’s alcove but there was no sign of Drummond coming back.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘There’s the indication that Hopper co-operated with getting up on the roof, like he thought he was meeting someone he could trust. There’s the Klan having put him into the job at the Land Trust. There’s him being in hock to Weiss, back in Germantown. The bootlegger?’

‘You’ve got the vic connected to the Klan and the Mob? Then follow up, for God’s sake. Get back out there and follow up! Find out if there isn’t one of the good old plain reasons in play here that people usually kill each other, instead of all this politics, and old loons who think they’re alligators.’

‘I’ve … got to be at a lecture at five,’ said Barrow.

‘What’s that?’

‘I have an … appointment with Couma Hashi at five. To talk about the case. It … came up.’

He took out the Man’s card, the worse for wear now, and put it in front of Doyle. Doyle stared.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘The Man of the Sun himself is putting his finger in the case, is he. And you’re it. You’re his finger. I see.’

‘He hasn’t told me what to do,’ said Barrow.

‘Has he not? Perhaps he thinks it’s obvious.’

Miss Chokfi was coming into the room, head down and cheeks aflame, Drummond moseying behind.

‘Your call is ready, sir,’ she said, and fled towards the water-cooler.

‘All right,’ said Doyle, levering himself up. To Barrow he said rapidly, under his breath, ‘Far be it from me to meddle in the wishes 144of royalty – but try and fit in a touch of detective work on the side, hey?’ And to Drummond, as he pushed past towards the telephone: ‘She’s a good girl. Leave her alone, can’t you?’

‘Why, that lil’ rabbit’s eating out of my hand,’ protested Drummond. To Barrow, though, because Doyle had already pushed by. ‘Just some harmless teasin’. Brotherly, you might say.’

‘She doesn’t like it,’ said Barrow. ‘What’s more, man, you do it because she doesn’t like it. Don’t know I’d call that harmless.’

‘Oh, everyone’s a saint but me,’ said Drummond, reclining in his desk chair with his hands behind his head. ‘What’s that?’

‘Medical examiner’s report.’

‘No need to bother with that, right?’

‘I think there is.’

‘But you got your man in a can, don’t you, waiting for those Dinetah boys to come along with their can-opener. Why complicate things?’

Barrow ignored him, and flipped through the details of Dr Fussner’s autopsy. Some signs of rope burns at wrists and ankles but not severe or deep ones, suggesting a brief rather than prolonged struggle against the bonds that had attached the victim to the skylight, and death coming as a surprise rather than an apprehended menace. Cause of death: exsanguination, due to severing of carotid artery in the throat. All other injuries and mutilations inflicted post-mortem. Considerable force required to open the chest cavity, but the ribs were cracked along a single line, as the result, to all appearances, of a determined effort, not a frenzy. Organs removed roughly and hastily: no sign of surgical knowledge on the part of the assailant. Fragments of a black substance found within the chest identified by microscope analysis as being, indeed, flakes of black volcanic glass, or obsidian. But close microscopic re-examination of both the throat wound and the cut through the chest wall in the light of this discovery showed no detectable 145presence of these glass fragments at all in either, where the force necessary for the attack would have been expected to produce flaking from the blade, if the weapon were indeed made from obsidian. Instead, pattern of cut muscle fibres consistent with use of a straightforward steel knife, at least six inches long, probably of ‘Bowie’ type. Strong probability, therefore, that the black glass fragments were a deliberate addition to the body by the attacker.

‘So?’ said Drummond. ‘Anything I want to know about in there?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Told you so. Well now, lookee: it’s four o’clock. Nothin’ else is goin’ to happen till that train reaches that station. Time to knock off and seek out the hair of the dog, don’t you think?’

‘Nope,’ said Barrow. ‘It’s four o’clock, and I’m due at five at the something-or-other Foundation on Division and 3rd, where the princess of the moon is gonna set me straight. So there’s just time for you and me to grab a car and go back to Germantown to talk to Mr Weiss at Hamelin’s drugstore.’

‘Seriously?’ said Drummond, sitting up suddenly.

‘Yeah.’

‘Then no, Joe. Absolutely not. Not a good idea.’

Barrow studied him curiously. The good mood seemed to be evaporating as quickly as it had come, earlier.

‘Why not?’

‘Because …’ Drummond glanced around the room, then slid over to speak without being overheard. ‘Because – you know you don’t ask questions about where the, shall we say, supplements to your pay check’ve been coming from? And you know I’ve been gently, uh, negotiating our way to seein’ a little more from the takata boys, ’cause they’re the ones whose liquor business is buildin’ up to operate at scale? Well … Weiss is kinda my contact there. And I don’t want to kick over that particular house of cards, okay? Things are at a … delicate stage.’146

‘I see your point. But I think we got to do it anyway. This is a murder, Phin.’

‘Oh, Joe, they’re all murders. All of the deadbeats, and the ladies with their heads stove in, and the country boys who come in with a truck full of ’shine to sell without checkin’ whose turf they’re on – all of ’em doing the human thing, of turning to meat that turns to mould that keeps the grass growing.’

‘This one’s different. This one’s set the city on its ear.’

‘It has that,’ agreed Drummond with a gleam of a smile.

‘So I think I’ve got to go down there.’

‘Shit,’ said Drummond.

‘I’ll go on my own if you like – no need to mention you’re my partner.’

‘Shit, shit, shit. Shee-it. You crazy conscientious bastard. I am not letting you go into Germantown alone to talk to gangsters, not with what’s kickin’ off over there today, by all accounts. You’re really goin’ to insist on this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Shit.’

5

‘That’s them,’ said Drummond. They were parked on the corner behind Hamelin’s, looking through the plate glass at a row of four male backs perched on chrome stools at the drugstore counter.

All the way west along 2nd Street they had been passing turbulent little groups of takata men. At first, often pushing and shoving in small scrimmages with takouma in Police Department blue, broken storefront windows nearby. After that, as if passing beyond a boundary line into a zone the Department could not hope to police just now, less ruckus but many intersections featuring 147pickets in Klan robes, selling a special edition of Fiery Cross and holding placards – printed placards, not homemade ones – that said AMERICAN LAW FOR AMERICANS and WHITE HOMES IN DANGER. Barrow even saw one Klansman on a horse equally draped in white, doing the hooded cavalry thing popularised by Birth of a Nation, a movie the Klan were constantly showing at union halls and church socials. A kid was feeding the horse an apple. Businesses were open over here, with no broken windows, but there was a kind of semi-holiday mood in the air, an excitement waiting for its outlet. Heads turned to stare at him in the passenger seat of the Model T, then grudgingly swung away again at the sight of Drummond at the wheel, grinning and waving. ‘Suckers,’ he was muttering as he grinned. ‘Suckers and assholes, suckers and assholes.’

But the guys in Hamelin’s seemed immune to the stir outside. They were taking their ease with cigarettes or toothpicks, heads tilted toward each other as they chatted through their business, thick shoulders bunching and rolling the suit jackets.

‘That’s Weiss on the end,’ said Drummond – not much in particular to see between hat and jacket but yellow-blond hair and a wide neck scraped red by the barber. ‘Right, if we’re doing this, let’s get ’er done. The things I undertake in the sacred name of friendship are just an astonishment to me.’

And before there was any chance for discussion about what they were going to do and say in there, he hooked out a billy club from under his seat, and was on his way with it through the corner door of the drugstore. Barrow, having no choice, jumped out and followed, and was just in time to see Drummond, striding across to the counter and smiling wildly, swing the club at the head of the first wise guy as if trying to whack a coconut off a stand. He always did move horribly quick in a brawl – a spider scuttling from harm to harm. There was a crack now like glass breaking, and the victim 148flew forward onto the shiny marble counter and slumped there in a mess of spilled coffee. But torpedoes number two and three were up off their stools instantly, one reaching for Drummond’s throat, the other wheeling round on Barrow, blade already magically in hand.

Barrow abandoned his belated groping in his pocket for the knuckles and swayed back. The knife went past his nose in a silver arc. He leaned back in and went fast for the knife arm with both hands, throwing his weight to tip the mook back off-balance towards the counter.

He was stronger than most people, but this guy – gorilla brows, a fur of black hairs on pale hands – was wide and low-slung. He was planted on the red vinyl floor like a wrestler, and Barrow couldn’t quite get the leverage to push his thick arm across and slam the elbow on the hard counter edge. One good downward blow against the direction of the joint would crunch bones.

But it was like trying to uproot a fireplug, moving the guy across. He got him part of the way there and stuck, face a foot from the other guy’s, hard impersonal concentration on the gorilla face which probably matched his own, scrabbling and stumbling, locked arms straining. Barrow got him an inch or two further down onto the counter; the guy flexed, heaved, pushed the inch back up again. And managed to switch grip on the blade so it became a spike pointing sidewise at Barrow’s face.

Seconds had passed but the fight already felt as if had been going on for a long time. Something was going on with Drummond, but Barrow was closed into the small world of this one combat, this one pair of heaving bodies.

He reached with a leg to swipe at the gorilla’s footing. The gorilla, thinking in parallel, used his free arm to try to land a kidney punch on Barrow. It didn’t connect with much force through the swinging fabric of Barrow’s coat but it jolted him, and as the gorilla 149fell back he lurched forward, and the tip of the knife jabbed into him somewhere above his right eye. Cold slicing of the steel going through skin; hot gushing, immediate, as blood poured down into his vision on that side. The gorilla gave a grunt of satisfaction, but Barrow had him fully off-balance now, and he jerked the knife arm wide and away at last, and shoved the heel of his left hand under the black-stubbled chin, ready for the slam—

But then there was a gunshot. They froze without letting go of each other, and both Barrow and his wrestling partner looked around and took in the state of things elsewhere in the drugstore. Drummond was bright red in the face from being choked, but he had his .38 against the head of the man trying to do the choking. Weiss, in turn, had a big automatic out and had it levelled at Drummond’s head. There was a smoking hole in the white ceiling. A door still swinging behind the counter suggested that the soda-jerk had sensibly high-tailed it.

‘What the fuck, Detective?’ said Weiss, which was very much Barrow’s feeling too. ‘What. The. Fuck?’ A solid, placid Bavarian farmer’s face, the kind of face from which you’d expect to be buying cheese or a churn of milk, and a calm, placid voice, marked by the traces of an accent which said he’d come over just that little bit too old to have his larynx entirely remodelled by America. Only his eyes told you why Mrs Hopper could have thought he was the devil. They were a blue so pale they looked frosted over, on their way to the blind white of glaucoma, and the bleached holes in his pink skin declared that, out of the face of the farmer, something icy and utterly indifferent was looking.

‘Have you gone mad?’ Weiss continued. ‘Are you experiencing some sort of breakdown? In comes a lunatic with a bat and up we jump thinking the enemy is at the gates; but no, it’s you and your pet redskin. I was under the impression we had an understanding. Am I mistaken, Detective? Do we not have an understanding?’150

‘We have an understanding about the liquor business,’ said Drummond thickly. ‘We don’t have an understanding about murder.’

‘Ah,’ said Weiss, looking from Drummond to Barrow and back again.

‘I just thought I’d underline that, to get the conversation off on the right footing.’

‘And you couldn’t think of another way of saying so? – Tommy, Gunther, let go of them.’

Drummond’s opponent let go of his neck. Barrow and the gorilla detached carefully from one another, the gorilla no doubt feeling in his racing heartbeat as Barrow did in his the unnaturalness of halting before one had finishing crushing the other. He reached for a handful of paper napkins and held them to his head, blinking away blood. Drummond and Weiss lowered their guns but did not put them away. The henchman hit with the bat still sprawled in his brown puddle.

‘Of course we know nothing about any murder,’ said Weiss blandly. A remarkable statement considering that Weiss’s organisation, and probably the men in this room, had provided the majority of the corpses the Murder Squad had spent the last year dealing with. But Weiss seemed to have decided, despite the smell of cordite in the air and the trail of scarlet drips Barrow was leaving, to stonewall as he would have done in a courtroom.

‘My colleague has a few questions he feels he’s gotta ask you all the same,’ said Drummond.

‘A very few, I hope,’ said Weiss. ‘Well?’

‘Fred Hopper,’ said Barrow. ‘Killed on Sunday night on the Land Trust roof.’

‘A tragic case,’ said Weiss. ‘Nothing to do with us. Done away with, poor fellow, by one of you roten heiden, according to what I read in the newspaper.’

‘Roter neger,’ said the gorilla who had cut Barrow.151

‘Now, now,’ said Weiss.

‘You lent him money,’ said Barrow. ‘How much?’

‘Before the vig? Fifty dollars.’ Weiss shrugged. ‘I’m in a lot of different businesses.’

‘His wife said you were threatening him – threatening the whole family. She met us at the door with a gun.’

‘How unpleasant for you. Where is she, by the way?’

‘Gone,’ said Barrow. ‘Far out of reach. Why do you ask?’

‘A payment is due. Is that all?’

‘No,’ said Barrow. The napkins had soaked through. A hot salt trickle was running down beside the corner of his mouth. ‘Where were you on Sunday night?’

‘Ah,’ said Weiss. ‘Happily, I can tell you exactly. I was at a fund-raising concert for the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche on 3rd Street and Beaumont, playing pinochle and other harmless games of chance until 11 p.m., when my dear wife Clara and I had the pleasure of entertaining the minister and his wife to a late supper at our house. They stayed until nearly one in the morning, discussing the church extension. Then I and Clara went peacefully to bed. Together.’

The gorilla snickered.

‘That’s a very detailed alibi,’ said Barrow.

‘Isn’t it. And now I think that’s all—’

‘One more question—’

‘He is persistent, isn’t he, your … colleague,’ said Weiss to Drummond. ‘And not very well-informed about his own best interest. You should explain things to him, before somebody loses their temper. Point out to him that very soon there will only be jobs for good and polite boys with his particular complexion. Those angry citizens outside’ – nodding to the Klan picket on the opposite corner – ‘may be, how do we say, blinkered when it comes to alcohol, but they are very sound on the racial question.’152

‘The “racial question”?’ said Drummond. ‘My, that’s some high-soundin’ talk to be comin’ from a purveyor of bathtub gin, you ask me. Ten-dollar words for two cents’-worth o’ shit, if you asked me.’

‘Nobody did,’ said Weiss.

‘One more question,’ pressed Barrow. ‘What is your connection with the Land Trust?’

‘None!’ snapped Weiss. ‘I have no connection with it. Why would I? A ridiculous institution, that exists to obstruct me, and every other businessman. A warehouse in Columbus or Detroit, no problem; a ranch in Texas or California, sign on the line. In this city, thanks to your Land Trust, I can’t even own my own house. Now, we are done. You are leaving.’

‘Sure,’ said Barrow, ‘only, it’s interesting. Here you are, a man with, like you say, warehouses in Columbus and Detroit, ranches and what-have-you all over; and it ain’t really bathtub gin you run, is it. What I hear, if I’ve understood correctly, you’re the fellow for the real stuff. You’re the one keeps the genuine scotch flowing. You’re no small-timer. You think big. So, why would you be loan-sharking fifty lousy bucks to a deadbeat clerk, and taking the time to terrify his beat-down wife? Unless, that is, you were keeping him motivated – keeping him gingered up to do some other thing …’

‘Get him out of here,’ said Weiss to Drummond. ‘And don’t ever bring him back, and don’t come yourself till I ask you to. I give you this one chance to remember which way around this works.’

*

‘Happy now?’ said Drummond, as they walked to the Model T.

‘Shut up, man,’ said Barrow. He looked at Drummond doing his loose-limbed, self-contented strut, and he had one of those moments when the familiarity strips off things. He thought, why am I hanging around with this weasel of a human being?153

‘I mean, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be happy? You’ve checked the box for virtuous ol’ Doyle. Weiss has an alibi. End of story.’

‘Phin, I’ve had a bellyful of crazy today. Just shut up.’

‘Well now, that’s—’

Barrow punched Drummond’s near shoulder. Not quite full force, but not a friendly sock on the arm either. Drummond sprawled back against the hood of the Ford, and as he came up, his blue eyes wide, his hand jerked towards his holstered .38. He checked himself, but Barrow saw it.

‘Ah-huh,’ he said. ‘What are you gonna do, Phin, shoot me?’

‘I wouldn’t even haveta. I could just leave you here and let the Klan eat you up.’

Weiss’s boys were spectating through the plate glass, and the onlookers on the corner were indeed stirring. They’d seen a takata coming to blows with a takouma.

‘See,’ said Drummond, ‘from my point of view, I just found a way to get you what you said you wanted, even though it was a load of damn non-sense, and nothin’ to gain from it but trouble.’

‘See, from mine, you just got me cut up and covered in blood. I coulda lost an eye!’

‘Keep your voice down, man.’

‘Oh, now you’re cautious. Okay, get in the damn car and drive.’ Barrow looked down at his watch, and spilled another thick drool of red straight onto the glass. He wiped it off. Five minutes to five. ‘Drive me to Division and 3rd, and this Foundation place.’

‘You’re not still plannin’ on going to that damn lecture thing, are you?’ said Drummond, starting the engine.

‘Why not?’

‘Well – your clothes are kind of a mess, and I’m thinking, you should maybe get a doc to look at your head?’

Barrow prodded his brow, and found a pulpy gash there, through to the bone, still running hot and liquid, though the previous flow 154was crusting on his cheek. A lot had soaked into his shirt. The pain was coming in as his body calmed. Pulses of nausea too.

‘Just drive.’

*

Partway through a roundabout route back, doubling to the north on back streets to reach Division without passing the trouble spots, Drummond tried again.

‘Look, I take it for granted that you can handle yourself,’ he said.

‘You take a lot for granted.’

*

And at the kerb outside the immense glass vitrine of Couma Hashi’s store, back in the shaded depths of the business district, where violet was creeping into the slot of sky overhead and money still mostly cushioned out the stutter of trouble breaking the rhythm of the city – Drummond said, ‘What’ll this take, an hour, two hours? I’ll come back and get you, and we can go find a doc then, maybe a drink to take the edge off.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Barrow.

6

COUMA it said on a pure white awning over a stark and mostly empty window, where one dress, one hat and one coat were arranged like treasure. There was a bell to get in through the bronze-sheathed glass door, with two plates below it, the bigger reading COUMA again and the smaller one THE ALTEPETL FOUNDATION. Barrow buzzed, and had time to take in, in the door, the reflection of a man grotesquely out of keeping with what was waiting on the far side, a domain of luxury too elegant to require decoration, and wealth too extreme to require price tags. Superimposed on a carpet in oatmeal silk, and white wooden cabinets like the ones in the 155Moon’s own home, a dishevelled hulk was standing in the twilight, with a mashed brow and an eye sealed shut with crusted blood, and ruined clothes.

When a takouma shopgirl of ridiculous beauty came to let him in, he reached with a sticky hand for his wallet and the Man’s card: but he underestimated the training of those who deal with the very rich. She was appalled, and she did take half a step back, but she smiled at him evenly.

‘Detective Barrow?’ she said. ‘Madame is expecting you. If you’d like to follow Angélique here, they are having drinks upstairs before the lecture.’

An equally exquisite girl, only this time taklousa, led him up two flights of stairs, he feeling with each step filthier and more out of place. At the top, an open door led into a long, bare wood-floored room where chairs were set out in rows facing a lectern, and a small crowd was milling about in conversation with wine glasses in their hands.

‘Now if you will just wait right there,’ said Angélique, in a voice in which Paris and New Orleans blended prettily, ‘I will fetch Madame.’ And she patted, not his verminous skin, but the air two inches above his hand.

But the Moon, who had been talking in a group among which Barrow recognised only the cat-eyed Mickey Casqui, had already noticed him, and came out to them, frowning. He almost didn’t know her. The hollow eyes were rimmed with kohl and now looked huge and lustrous, the skull-mask of a face had been smoothed into something slenderly perfect. The expensively minimal crop had been teased at brow and cheek into sleek tendrils that, yes, wrote lunar curves onto her skin in reverse. Her dress was plain and fabulous black. She had a necklace of rock-crystal chunks alternating with spheres of slate, and up each arm, all the way to the elbow, she was armoured in bracelets, organised 156ivory-jet-glass, ivory-jet-glass. White-black-clear.

‘Mr Barrow,’ she said. ‘Are you intact?’

‘Miss Hashi,’ he said. ‘More or less.’

‘I can see you’ve been having an interesting afternoon.’

‘I’m sorry about … this,’ he said, indicating his face. ‘Not really in a fit state for company.’

‘You could certainly do with a little cleaning up. Come into the atelier, there’s a first-aid box. And that shirt is done for. The shops should still be open – Angélique, just go out for me, would you, and buy a man’s shirt. What size?’

‘Eighteen collar,’ said Barrow, ‘but—’

‘This way.’

Heads turned curiously. Just inside the lecture hall, a further door opened into a workshop as practical as the showroom downstairs was not. Long benches with sewing machines, racks of fabric, dummies draped with half-finished garments. Steel industrial lights on cables that, when she flicked them on, sent down cones of unremitting brightness good for exact close-up work. A man followed them in, and stationed himself by the door: the bodyguard Barrow had seen at the house, he thought when he peered at him, only without his tommy gun.

‘Right, get rid of the shirt, and you had better just put your head under the faucet in the sink and rinse the worst off, so we can see what the damage is.’

He undid the buttons of the spoiled shirt, trying not to remember the similarity to the slicked and clagged heaviness of the fabric Fred Hopper had bled into, nor the puddle of corruption in the house by the Bridge, nor the salty red walls of the slaughterhouse, and failed at all three. Blood, blood, and more blood. The undershirt, nearly as sodden, was hard to manoeuvre over his head without touching the wound, and in the end he just pulled hard and got the friction over with in one burst of pain. On the same 157principle, he leaned straight into the flow of cold water and let it do its worst. Clots and rusty scales came off onto the white enamel along with the lacings of fresh scarlet, and he felt the icy tongue of the water flickering through the raw inner flesh of the gash.

He surfaced and Couma Hashi handed him a towel. She had fetched a case with a red cross on it, and put on a high-necked apron. She removed her bracelets in two orderly stacks, one for each arm.

‘Sit down on a stool, or I won’t be able to reach.’

‘You’ll mess up your outfit.’

‘No, I won’t. Sit down, Mr Barrow – there, under the light.’

He sat, with the towel, already quite bloody, wrapped around his waist. She considered him half-naked: not as if he were something she wanted to touch, but with a more distant appreciation, as if he were something delightful far off. Or perhaps it was nostalgia in her gaze, as if he were something that she had lost, and still missed sometimes.

‘Hmm,’ she said, and sorting through the case picked out gauze, swabs, cotton balls, iodine, a little kidney-shaped dish. She washed her hands thoroughly. She poured iodine into the dish. Then she used her left hand – long fingers spread as if spanning a melon – to hold his head still, and with the other dipped a swab in iodine.

‘This will hurt,’ she said. ‘But then, in my opinion, almost everything real does.’

She started to clean out the wound, making neat, sure, completely unflinching strokes to paint the iodine deep into the slash: and it did, indeed, hurt, both from the chemical burn of the antiseptic and the mere touch on the skinned meat of his forehead. His eyes ran. The intent face of Couma Hashi wavered and blurred.

‘That’s a very gloomy philosophy,’ he said, for something to say.

‘True, though, don’t you find? Love hurts. Loss hurts. Failure hurts. Success hurts. Responsibility hurts.’158

‘… Music doesn’t hurt.’

‘Doesn’t it? When you take it seriously?’

Barrow thought about it. Effort, yes; heartbreak, sometimes; frustration, often; the dive back to the ground again, inevitably, after any spell in which you managed to fly. And the woe the blues was made on. But then that was changed by being uttered.

‘No. Not always.’

‘Mm? Lucky man. Now – I’m afraid you’re going to need stitches in this. The cut goes right through your eyebrow and it’s pulling apart.’

‘I better go, then.’

‘Maybe not, Mr Barrow. Look around. This is a couture house. Sewing is something we specialise in. I could do it for you right now, if you would trust me. Of course, it will—’

‘—hurt. Yes. All right, then.’

She nodded, and went to fetch a length of black silk thread and a fine needle. The bodyguard struck her a match to sterilise it. He was looking at Barrow with an expression that he couldn’t read. Through the wall came the continuing hubbub of the party. A little pyramid of used swabs and cotton balls stood in the dish, yellow and red. She came back. Her hands swam towards him with the bright sharp spark of the needle glinting in them.

‘Don’t look at my hands,’ she said. ‘Look at my face. Or better yet close your eyes.’

‘I’d rather look at your face.’

‘Would you.’ She threaded the needle. Her eyes were huge, and intent. He had still not seen her smile. She put her left hand back on his head to brace it, fingers still a cool arch, but with a different grip to press the sides of the split flesh together.

‘Tell me a story,’ he said.

‘What story?’ she asked, unsurprised.

‘The story of Thrown-Away Boy?’159

‘Very well. Listen to this, then, Joe Barrow. Once, in the very-long-ago, not long after the world was made …’ And she drove the point of the needle deep into good tissue to the side of the gash, pushed it through the raw pulp where the knife had gone in, and into the flesh on the other side, tender as an oyster, and pulled the thread after it, cutting and dragging, as huge-seeming as a hawser in a trench.

All the way through the story that followed, Barrow felt himself to be in two places. One was the indoor place of bright light and fine, fine pains, where his skin was being drawn together like especially soft and tearable leather; and the other, which was not an escape from it, and even seemed to borrow the inescapable piercing of being sewn, was some outdoor space, some mist-shrouded riverbank very-long-ago.

Once, not long after the world was made, the hunter Kanati lived with his wife Selu on Looking-Glass Mountain. She gave birth to a baby boy, and they named him Lodge Boy, because they always took great care of him, and watched over him as he played near the cabin. The afterbirth, they threw away into the river, as was traditional. But as Lodge Boy grew older, his parents sometimes thought they heard two voices when he was playing on the riverbank. And spying through the leaves, Kanati saw another child beside Lodge Boy, bright-eyed and dirty, wearing clothes made of feathers. ‘Who is that, that you play with?’ Kanati and Selu asked Lodge Boy when they were eating that night. ‘He says he is my older brother,’ Lodge Boy replied, ‘but you threw him away into the river.’ So Kanati laid a trap the next day and jumped out and seized the strange child. He was hard to hold, for he had magical powers, and could turn himself into many things, but Kanati gripped him tight, and in the end took him home to the cabin to raise as their own. They called him Thrown-Away Boy, and in every adventure that Lodge and Thrown-Away had together, it was always Thrown-Away who encouraged his brother into mischief and 160disobedience. ‘You must not enter this cave,’ said Kanati, ‘for it is there that I keep all the animals.’ ‘Father says, we must go into the cave at once, and let all the animals out,’ Thrown-Away told Lodge. And they did, and that is why, from that day to this, animals are hard to catch, and human beings must work hard all day to have something to put in the pot.

‘There,’ said the Moon. ‘Done.’ She repainted the stitching with a last lick of iodine, and he could feel from the rub of swab on thread that there was now a tight little row of stitches binding his eyebrow. ‘Shall I tape on some bandage? It would be for other people’s benefit, really.’

‘How rough do I look?’

‘A little villainous, but only to an interesting degree. Fit for company, if that’s what you’re asking. No bandage? Up you get, then. Here comes the shirt.’

Barrow stood up but his head swam and he had to drop back down again on the stool abruptly.

‘Oh,’ said Couma. ‘Head between your knees.’

He obeyed, and he felt her cool hand on the back of his neck keeping him in place. A blur in his vision like an electric soup of jigsaw pieces gradually receded.

‘Come to think of it, I kinda haven’t got around to eating anything today,’ he said to the floor.

‘That would do it. And you’ve bled quite a lot. We’ll have to fill you up with steak later. Better now?’

‘Yeah.’ The hand, disappointingly, went away. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Thrown-Away Boy is the bad guy, right? The bad one of the two-some.’

‘Uh-uh. Bad versus good is for takata stories, not ours. They aren’t Cain and Abel. Thrown-Away is more like … wild to Lodge Boy’s tame, and both of those qualities usually turn out to be useful in the stories about them.’161

‘There’s more?’

‘Heavens, yes. Avenging their mother when a kolowa eats her; stealing the lightning eggs; fighting the Giants; travelling west to the land of the dead – on and on.’

She turned away and washed her hands again, and armoured up her arms again in clinking bracelets, while he dressed in the new shirt Angélique had been out to buy. It was soft and grey and, he suspected, more expensive than anything else he had ever worn. There was a new necktie to go with it, soft and purple. He felt a little as if he were being dressed up like a doll but the tough guy in the workroom mirror with the iodine-yellow stitched brow and the incipient black eye undeniably looked good.

‘Ready?’ said the Moon, looking at him approvingly. ‘You know,’ she added, ‘if my uncle compared you to Thrown-Away Boy, he was teasing but he wasn’t insulting you. Thrown-Away is a hero, Detective.’

The bodyguard’s expression was perfectly intelligible to Barrow, now. It was naked envy.

*

It had grown dark outside; the tall windows in the lecture hall were no longer showing violet sky but plain reflecting black. The circle of people in which the Moon had been chatting re-opened to admit them both, and Barrow found himself holding a canapé in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other, poured from a plain bottle marked FOR SACRAMENTAL USE ONLY. Mickey Casqui saw him looking at it and said, ‘I assume you’re off duty, Detective?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Barrow.

‘It probably comes from the cathedral’s stock,’ Casqui said. ‘One of the little work-arounds available in a Catholic city. No-one checks exactly how much the churches order in to use at Mass, so whole box-cars of the stuff come clinking eastward to us.’162

‘Ah, it is Californian,’ said a takata in his forties, grey tweed-dressed and bearded. ‘I thought it had a familiar taste.’

‘This is Professor Kroeber of Berkeley, who’s lecturing tonight,’ said Couma. ‘And this, Professor, is Detective Barrow of the Cahokia Police Department, whom I’ve invited along because the case he’s working on involves the nature of the city, even if he hasn’t necessarily discovered that yet.’

‘Intriguing!’ said the professor politely, taking in Barrow’s battered-and-repaired state, but apparently with simple interest rather than judgement or repulsion. ‘Ayokpachi, Detective. Would you prefer English or Anopa?’

‘Definitely English, sir.’

‘And I see you’ve met Michael,’ the Moon continued.

‘In fact, no,’ said Casqui. ‘He’s met Mickey the newshound, not Michael the poet. I’m off duty too, Detective. I won’t ask you about the case if you don’t ask me about the press coverage. I’m here as the editor of Apisa. – A magazine,’ he explained, when Barrow looked baffled, ‘which this generous lady supports through the Foundation.’

‘Michael is the father of modern verse in Anopa,’ said Couma.

‘Shouldn’t that be uncle?’ said Kroeber, which Barrow suspected was a scholarly joke, judging by the polite smiles.

‘No, no,’ said Casqui cheerfully. ‘I’m not responsible enough to be an uncle. The most I can do is to impregnate the language and run away.’

Laughter, less polite.

‘I’m sure the language wasn’t looking for anything more than a good time from you, anyway,’ said a short woman in her thirties, wearing a button that said HANDS OFF THE NST. ‘She’s talking you over with her sisters now, comparing you to other poets she’s known. Probably to your disadvantage.’

‘Ouch!’ cried Casqui, clutching himself comically. ‘I suppose you think she prefers your Sapphic embraces?’163

‘Infinitely,’ said the woman, grinning.

‘It’s conversations like this,’ said the professor, stuffing his pipe with tobacco, ‘that make me wonder whether the classification of Cahokia as patriarchal, or at least at the patriarchal end of the spectrum of societies, actually means anything at all? I mean, even given the inappropriateness of the term, for a culture of uncle/nephew inheritance in the male line.’

Kroeber, Barrow saw, was not quite off duty; or perhaps was just too curious, perhaps about everything, to pass up the chance of asking questions in a room full of Anopa intellectuals. For that, looking around, was what this was: Northside takouma doctors and lawyers and teachers, as well as the poets, plus a sprinkling of priests and nuns from the university. Probably the first violin from the Cahokia Symphony was somewhere in the crowd too, and the actors from the National Theatre.

‘I think,’ said Couma Hashi, and everyone in the circle turned slightly towards her, ‘that it makes sense to see us as a culture which has elements of both patriarchy and matriarchy together. The holy fathers gave us a push towards the relations between the sexes they were used to from Spain, but it didn’t entirely take.’

‘That’s what Morgan said,’ nodded the professor.

‘Morgan?’ said Barrow. If the Moon had brought him here for a free tutorial, he might as well understand it.

‘Uncle of American anthropology,’ said Kroeber, twinkling amid a cloud of smoke. ‘Came here in 1859 when the railroad opened. Wrote the first monograph.’

‘Popular with Marx and Engels,’ put in Mickey – no, Michael – Casqui. ‘Said we were all communists.’

‘We are!’ said the short woman. ‘The question is only whether our collective embodiment should continue to take the form of a solar monarchy.’

‘Please!’ said Couma. ‘A solar and lunar monarchy.’164

Again, they all laughed, but Barrow noticed that though they were willing to mock each other, there was a limit to how far they would go with the Moon. The conversation wandered on towards a takata fellow from the city called Tom whom the Foundation was helping out while he wrote something earth-shaking and worked in a bank in London. Casqui had had a letter from him, asking advice about some Anopa phrases he wanted to put in his great work. But soon Couma tapped her glass with a spoon for silence, and led Kroeber to the lectern while everyone took their seats.

‘Ayokpachi, takouma, takoumaya,’ she said, and there was a murmur in return. ‘Although our guest this evening is one of the few white men to speak truly fluent Anopa, we will proceed in English in his honour. Professor Alfred Kroeber is an anthropologist at the University of California, the curator of the ethnological collections in the museum there, and the author of The Handbook of the Indians of California, which we hope the Smithsonian will eventually get around to publishing. – Professor, if they don’t, the Foundation will be glad to take it on. But most of you are probably aware of him as the expert witness who tipped the balance in Yurok v. State of California. He is a constant friend to the native civilisations of this continent – and he has always described them like that: as civilisations. Truly, we may call him tak’ nakni okla, a man of the people.’

There must have been a particular compliment buried in that last part, because Kroeber grimaced amid the applause, as you do when you have been unexpectedly moved in public and do not wish to show it. He fiddled with his pipe to calm himself and shuffled his papers.

‘I am not sorry,’ he began, ‘to have spent twenty years among the native peoples of California before coming to Cahokia. In those tribes is still discernible the pattern – the very recent pattern – of their lives before contact with the white man. Whereas there is little in Cahokia that has not been moulded and blended by the 165long contact, first with Catholic Europe, then with the myriad of displaced peoples forced west by the expansion of the United States and forming so much, in the end, of the human material for this Mississippian fusion. Yet against all this must be placed the inestimable advantage that Cahokia thrives; that Cahokia is not a dying, but a living culture. A living culture lives. Of necessity therefore it changes, grows and adapts as its habitat encourages or even requires those changes. In such circumstances, syncretism is not a defect, is not an impurity. It is an inarguable sign of evolutionary success. Cahokia is not what it was in 1650, in 1750, in 1850? Neither is English-speaking America …’

Barrow’s attention strayed. He was not sure what it was that Couma Hashi had brought him here to notice, and without the stimulus of conversation to keep him distracted, he felt all the more how his head ached, and throbbed, and stung. He had put himself discreetly in the back row. From here, all he could see of the Moon up at the front were the precisely brilliantined layers in which her cropped hair sleeked onto her bare neck. The intellectuals chuckled, took notes, murmured, nodded, shook their heads, smoked. Barrow shook out a cigarette and lit up himself. Every time he inhaled, the stitches seemed to tighten. He thought about how crazily dissimilar the rooms he’d found himself in today had been. Chunchouba’s slum temple, the slaughterhouse’s assembly line of death, Sammy Noukouwa’s shrine to himself, the echoing stained glass of the Union Station, the counter at Hamelin’s with its sugar shakers and pink paper drinking straws, and now this abode of high-thinking just upstairs from luxury. He was gazing out of the window at the Panton Leslie spire outlined in the night sky over the rooftops in electric bulbs, and the back of an illuminated sign reading AZTEC SYRUP in reverse, when his ear was snagged by hearing the same word he was reading. Aztec, Aztec.

‘But first,’ the professor was saying, ‘we must rid ourselves of 166the illusion of Aztec influence on Cahokia. Romantics point to the famous sprinkling of Aztecan customs and usages here: romantics, and partisans of the idea that where there stands an earth pyramid there must have been direct cultural diffusion from the stone pyramids of Meso-America. For example, the invariable naming of the city’s princes after the last emperor of Tenochtitlan. Or the ballgame court off the Plaza and the game played within it, when a Mississippian settlement at this latitude should be playing chunkey. But these are a mere scattering upon an otherwise quite different set of cultural strata. When we look at Anopa with the philologist’s eye, for example, we see proof of its origin as an interlingual jargon for the riverlands in the mixed sources for its vocabulary. Muskogean, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, yes; a certain contribution from the Siouan and Algonkian groups, yes; but no words from Nahuatl at all. Not a single linguistic contribution from central Mexico, despite the supposed founding of the city by the Plague Prince, fleeing from the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan and inoculating the Mississippi valley with smallpox as he came. Whence, then, this story? Whence the ballgame, and the five rulers named Cuauhtemoc? Well – there is one historically attested mechanism by which Mexico influenced Cahokia. It is the Society of Jesus itself. The Jesuit fathers themselves, arriving here eighty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, brought with them the memory of the Aztecs. And fixed it here, in purged and Catholicised form, as a kind of image of what civilisational greatness in the New World might be …’

*

‘You’re not Aztecs!’

‘No, we’re not,’ said the Moon, who was trying to say goodbye to the audience at the door downstairs. ‘Good night, good night. – We aren’t, and for that matter neither are you, Mr Barrow. We never held human sacrifices on the Mound. We never murdered people on top of pyramids. We did other unpleasant things, but not that.’167

Distant sirens could be heard in the streets.

‘Sounds as if the trouble hasn’t died down yet,’ said Kroeber, accepting his overcoat from Angélique.

‘No,’ said Couma. ‘Be careful on your way home, everybody!’

The intellectuals dwindled off into the darkness of the business district, looking vulnerable and insignificant; the beautiful staff of the shop too, probably bound for quite different evenings. Only Couma, Kroeber, Casqui, Barrow and the bodyguard were left, and the short woman poet, who turned out to be called Peggy Iti. Barrow scanned the sidewalk opposite, half convinced he would find Drummond loitering there under a streetlamp, impervious to being banished. But the words of banishment seemed to have taken, and there was no gangly form waiting there in a cloud of lamplit smoke.

The bodyguard held out a coat for Couma and she backed into it, a huge greatcoat of padded black silk with a white fur collar in which her head sat like a pearl.

‘The professor is at the Algonkian,’ she said, ‘and the Foundation owes him dinner. I suggest we all go over there and eat?’

She pitched it like a question but she set off without waiting for an answer, and they all obediently followed around the block, past shuttered banks and jewellers, hat shops and insurance companies. There was no visible threat in these prosperous streets, and yet the far-off sirens crept into their ears like news of a siege, and they walked closer together through the dark than they might have done otherwise. The bodyguard took position at the back, glancing right-left-right at every junction and alley mouth. Barrow fell into step beside Couma.

‘So, no, we’re not Aztecs,’ she said as if there had been no pause. ‘Which means that whoever went to the trouble of manufacturing a supposedly Aztec-style tableau on the Land Trust roof with the body of that poor little clerk, is not a takouma reverting to our dark old ways, because our dark old ways were not like that at all. They are a takata trying to stir up fear among takata, I would say. Probably a 168takata trying to create just the atmosphere of crisis we are now in.’

‘Unless,’ said Barrow, ‘it was a takouma who believed in the Aztec stuff. Someone who likes the legend, doesn’t know it ain’t true. Or doesn’t care.’

‘Are there any?’ she said.

‘I met two today. Well – met one, tried to meet the other; he’d skipped town. But, yeah. Today I have laid eyes on two whole separate homemade-type shrines to, I guess, Aztec gods? With sacrifices, and all. Big guy called Hwitzy-something—’

‘Huitzilopochtli,’ put in Professor Kroeber from behind.

‘Yeah; and another one for a kind of scary girl-god. Real bony.’

‘Skeleton with prominent genitalia?’

‘Uh, that’s her. Yeah.’

‘Tzitzimitl.’

‘Okay. Though the writing underneath said something else. The guy who skipped town was into her. He’d painted her on his bedroom wall.’

‘His bedroom wall?’ said Couma, with distaste.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Where was this?’

Barrow looked over his shoulder at Casqui. ‘Are you sure you’re not working?’

‘I’m not, no.’ Said with the faintest emphasis on the ‘I’.

‘Well, in the Quarters. It was creepy, all right. But then he’s a creepy guy. And at the moment we’re liking him for the Land Trust job. At least, we need to speak to him.’

‘Tell me,’ put in Casqui. ‘Your suspect – did he seem like a reader?’

Barrow considered the various aids to vanity in the Noukouwa house. Weapons, photos, clothes. Not a book in sight.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Well, whoever did the Land Trust killing got the set-up out of a book. Or they’d talked to someone who did. Conquest of New 169Spain. Contains the inside dope on Aztec sacrifices.’

‘Is that what you were quoting up on the roof yesterday?’

‘Good memory, Detective. – Yes, that’s right. Reeking altars up on high, gutters full of gore and priests with blood in their hair; the whole caboodle, as observed by conquistadors who were horrified, disgusted, very pleased indeed, to find that the people they were looting and pillaging from were a bunch of monsters.’

The professor laughed quietly. ‘Cynically put, but accurate,’ he said.

Peggy Iti was laughing too. ‘The inside dope. The inside dope! Read all about it! Fall of the New World, exclusive on the sports pages!’

‘Are you mocking my day job, lady?’ said Casqui. They seemed to be in a state of permanent, comfortable rivalry, the two poets.

But Couma Hashi was not amused. The subject seemed to repel her; but not, thought Barrow, puzzled, because she was squeamish. His sore head proved that. Her steady hand with the needle proved that.

‘I really think you should be looking at takata for this,’ she said shortly.

They had crossed the Creek, and arrived at the brilliantly lit frontage of the Algonkian Hotel. Out between the concrete and greenstone pylons, out under the green-tiled canopy of the portecochère where the limos drew up and the doormen handed out the debutantes in their silk and heels onto the welcoming emerald carpet – out from the hotel into the night air, jazz was drifting. And particular, instantly familiar jazz at that.

7

‘Hey, Joe,’ said one of the bellhops Barrow knew, a takata follower of the music. ‘You been in the wars.’170

‘Hey, Mac. Nothin’ too grave. Is that—?’

‘Yep. Dolphus and company, in the Catawba Room. Ma’am!’ he added, recognising the Moon with a start, and effacing himself.

‘People you know?’ said Couma.

‘Yeah. People I’ve worked with.’

‘Then why don’t we eat in there?’

The architect Wright had laid out the interior spaces of the Algonkian so that it formed a kind of never-concluding cave, a geometric box unfolding further and further, the square pillars and square hanging balconies all pierced and gapped to reveal more doors, stairs, openings beyond, lit not from overhead but by a hundred separate glows from a hundred separate grilled lanterns, each illuminating a differently rich surface. Concrete cast into intricate hollow blocks, bricks with the courses of mortar between picked out in gold, copper and green intaglio set into slabs of polished wood. As they crossed the foyer, the staff discreetly cleared a path for them, takouma and taklousa and takata all standing reverently aside. Only the takata out-of-towners stared, wondering why this one woman with the fur collar should cause such a ripple of respect, should drag such a wake of attention behind her. In the Catawba Room – long bar glittering along the wall, stage at the end, concrete beams high overhead in the architect’s idea of a primeval longhouse – the maître d’ had already hustled two good tables together for them to one side of the dance floor, near the band. Hands were ready to take Couma’s coat, to hold her chair, to offer menus, to lower a subservient flame to the tip of the cigarette in her jet-black holder. There was no need to ask for anything; it was always there already, waiting.

It took the band a little while to notice them. They were well into the middle of their set, and deep in the music too. There was a sheen of moisture on Dolphus Henderson’s forehead as his clarinet soared, though it didn’t affect the slick exactitude of his coiffure, and Stukeley was working his cornet so hard he was frankly sweating. 171Alma Barbarin’s voice had warmed into full, loose power as she belted out ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, swaying at the microphone in her silver fish-scales. One of the songs Dolphus would’ve picked for their Cahokia dates in compliment to the city, Barrow guessed, though it had begun as downstairs music for a Cahokia whorehouse. No-one cared; its low-life grime had been washed off it, it had been dressed up to the nines and sent forth into the world again as sophisticated wickedness, and the crowd was doing sophisticated wickedness too, whatever might be happening in the city outside. They danced or they ate or they sat, takouma and taklousa and takata, in their gowns or their tuxedos, drinking from shot glasses something bourbon-coloured that came in white teapots. My baby, when you hear them bells go ding-a-ling, finished Alma,

All join around and sweetly you must sing!

The birds dance too and the poets all join in!

There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!

Applause; and then Dolphus spotted Couma’s party. He put his head together with Stukeley and Alma for a minute, muttered something over his shoulder to Willie and Dutch on drums and bass, and then with comical courtesy, cornet and clarinet and voice all standing in a meek row on the edge of the stage, like good children singing for pennies at Christmas, they sang, straight down at the city’s princess –

Place, park; scene, dark

Silvery moon is shining through the trees.

Cast, two; me, you

Sound of kisses floating through the trees.

By the light of the silvery moon

I want to spoon, to my honey I’ll croon

Love’s tune!

172A spot found out Couma. More applause, and laughter, dissolving the song away. Couma nodded an acknowledgement, head tilted and lips ironic. Then she made a shoo-ing motion with her fingertips, and the spotlight obediently departed. Dolphus caught Barrow’s eye, and pointed questioningly over his shoulder to the unused piano at the back of the stage. He started to stand, but Couma held him down with a finger.

‘Not till you’ve eaten your steak,’ she said: and over her shoulder, to the hovering waiter, ‘Porterhouse for the detective here, planked, with all the trimmings you can think of. Medium rare.’

‘No, well done,’ said Barrow. ‘I’ve had enough for today of things that bleed.’ He held up two hands to Dolphus with fingers spread: ten minutes. Dolphus smiled and retreated, and the band went into an easy-tempo’d ‘Milenberg Joys’ to give the singer a break.

The professor, presumably in the interests of research, picked a dish of blue and red corn with shellfish which the waiter swore was authentically Algonkian. Barrow got the impression that he did not usually spend much time in night-clubs or speakeasies, and was enjoying himself.

‘Joking apart,’ he said, handing back his menu and stuffing his pipe anew, ‘I am curious about how much your Catholicism has displaced your older traditions – matrilocal marriage, matrilineal inheritance, and so on?’

Peggy Iti shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘I exist in a state of freedom from marriage that Catholicism made possible here.’

‘Peggy is a nun,’ Couma translated, seeing Barrow looking puzzled. ‘Loreto Sisters. Teaches at the university.’

Kroeber looked at Casqui. ‘Well,’ Mickey said, ‘I suppose most marriages here do involve the young man moving in with the wife’s family; and uncles are important. But fatherhood is too, these days – joking apart. The only family in which inheritance runs strictly uncle-to-nephew is the House of Hashi. That’s why it matters 173so much that Francis Xavier Hashi has run off to Hollywood and turned himself into Frankie Blackhawk.’

‘Your brother,’ said the professor, pointing his pipe stem at Couma.

‘Yes,’ she said tightly. ‘My amiable brother Frank, who always raises the spirits of the room. He makes the men laugh and the women blush.’

‘I suppose those are not the qualities of a prince.’

‘No. Not even an uncrowned one.’

‘I don’t want to tread on anyone’s toes here,’ said Barrow cautiously, ‘but I don’t get why him being an actor is such a big deal.’

‘It isn’t just the acting,’ said Mickey Casqui, ‘though if you’re supposed to play one role, to wear one face, it doesn’t help with your credibility that you make a living pretending to be one person today and another tomorrow. No, it’s more what he’s acted. Have you seen Birth of a Nation, Detective?’

‘The movie the Klan keep showing?’

‘Yes, that one. No? Well, it’s very good, technically speaking. I admire it a lot – technically. It’s got a whole big sequence in the middle, set down in Mississippi during Reconstruction, where a mob of sweet, innocent, defenceless takata get together to protest against the brutish taklousa who are sitting in the legislature. A lot of throwing hambones, spitting on the floor, scratching their asses, leering at white women, that kinda thing. But just when it looks as if the whites are going to purge Mississippi of this awful stain, in comes that terrible takouma villain General Founi, galloping at the head of the Cahokian Legion. Redskin brutes! Even worse than black brutes! They open fire on the crowd! It’s a massacre! The sweet, innocent lynch mob fall down in droves! Wonderfully choreographed close-ups! And we cut away to the horrified face of the takata hero, aghast, eyes huge and round, his hand on the shoulder of the beautiful heroine, also aghast, eyes if anything huger and 174even rounder – and the caption says, in lettering that practically trembles, MISSISSIPPI IS LOST TO CIVILISATION – BUT VIRGINIA SHALL NOT BE!’

‘Yes?’ said Barrow.

‘And who do you think played General Founi, scowling and wearing more mascara even than his own sister? Forgive me, ino hashi-ninak.’

‘Forgiven,’ said Couma.

‘Who but our own dear Frankie? Giving that extra little thrill to the takata audiences in their white hoods, by being the real General Founi’s real grandson? It was his big break. That’s how he progressed from being Third Injun in Westerns to being a Hollywood player in a silk shirt with a house in Beverly Hills. And that’s why no-one is quite sure about him inheriting from his uncle, and becoming the Man of the Sun.’

‘Yes,’ said Couma.

The food came. Barrow’s steak was, by a large margin, the best he had ever tasted. He dug in. The band moved on to ‘Pleasure Mad’, and the floor filled with couples fox-trotting. Stukeley milked his mute like he was an extra part of the rhythm section, deft and precise. The boy was really good.

‘Do you have children, Professor?’ asked Peggy Iti – Sister Peggy, it turned out.

‘No,’ said Kroeber. ‘I was married, but she died.’

‘The whole story in six words,’ said Couma bitterly.

‘Your six words too?’ enquired the professor gently.

‘With the substitution of “he” for “she”, yes.’

To fill the silence as much as anything, Barrow dabbed his mouth, and said, ‘Hey. Since I got all you experts and poets here, can I ask a question about Anopa?’

‘Are you thinking of learning it?’ asked Casqui.

‘My lieutenant says I should, if I stay a cop.’175

‘You should know it anyway, whatever you do,’ said Couma earnestly. ‘It’s your birthright.’

‘Yeah?’ said Barrow. ‘Who knows what-all exactly went into this’ – waving at his face. ‘Could be from a long way west.’

‘You don’t know?’ said Peggy Iti.

‘No. Some kind of a takouma–taklousa mix-up, but that’s all I got. They didn’t leave no note in the basket on the Boys’ Home steps.’

They studied him, since he had invited it.

‘Could be Osage or Cree,’ said the professor.

‘Could be some Sioux in there, down from Dakota,’ said Peggy Iti.

‘Could be Western Cherokee or Navajo,’ said Casqui. ‘Lot of travelling men from both of those.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Couma. ‘Anopa is still the crossing-point between the peoples. It’s still the natural lingua franca for our kind. It can be yours as much as anyone else’s, Detective.’ She had the light of belief in her eyes.

‘So, what’s the question?’ Casqui asked.

‘Well,’ said Barrow, pulling out his notebook. ‘I was wondering about this phrase: houma anopoli. Sergeant I was with said it meant, like, “red conversation”, but he didn’t seem real sure.’

Actually, Hanunu had sounded like he was holding something back, but Barrow didn’t want to bring that up. He looked up from the notebook page and found the whole table staring at him, the professor just interested, Casqui startled, the nun defensive and almost hostile, Couma intent and assessing. Finding something in his face, or maybe failing to find it, she dropped her gaze and busied herself fitting a new cigarette into her holder, instantly lit by a hand over her shoulder. She had hardly touched her grilled fish.

‘That’s a very … historical term,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised you came across it. May I ask where you saw it?’

‘Back on my suspect’s bedroom wall, under the drawing of Skeleton Lady.’176

As far as he could tell through the veiling smoke, the look of distaste returned, deeper, mixed with something like anger.

‘Professor?’ she said, with a bestowing wave of her cigarette. ‘I’m sure your Anopa is up to this.’

‘Yes, certainly,’ said Kroeber. ‘Anopoli in that context doesn’t mean talking or conversation so much as the group in which the talking is done. It’s people meeting for discussion – formal discussion. “Council” would be closest. Houma Anopoli: “Red Council”. And it is a phrase from the past. Historically, you see, in the cultures of the Eastern Woodlands, it was the name for a kind of shadow government which took over the ruling of a tribe in time of war. White Council for peace, Red Council for war.’

‘Now that’s strange,’ said Barrow. ‘I met a Bureau agent earlier who told me it was some kind of secret communist conspiracy that he was trying to track down in the city.’

‘Is that so?’ said Couma. ‘Sounds like a misunderstanding. It’s not red as in politics, Detective. Sorry, but we’re back with red as in blood.’

‘I guess my guy might be using it because he thinks he’s going on the warpath?’ said Barrow, trying to think it out. ‘But—’

‘You friends are calling you,’ pointed out Couma.

It was true. The band had finished ‘Pleasure Mad’, and ‘Just Gone’ too, Dutch picking away rock-steady on his bass fiddle and Dolphus and Stukeley weaving clarinet and cornet together into danceable filigree, high, higher, highest, getting into one of those shared trances where competition and co-operation worked so close they couldn’t be distinguished. Now they were grinning, and beckoning him on up. Barrow sawed off the last delicious mouthful from the bone of his steak, wiped his hands, and rose, chewing fast. The spot found him. Dolphus nudged Alma Barbarin aside at the microphone.

‘You can swaller that, Joe,’ he said. ‘You got time. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s now my unexpected pleasure, to announce we bein’ 177joined by one o’ the finest keyboard-men inna forty-five states. He been moonlightin’ down here-bouts as a po-liceman, some crazy reason, but tonight we gonna re-call him to his true talent. Come on up here! Ladies, gentlemen, on the piano, “Indian Joe” Barrow!’

A sleek black German number, the Algonkian’s piano turned out to be as good as their steak. Barrow did a few bars of James P. Johnson’s ‘Harlem Strut’ to get his fingers loose, and the superfast, tinkling stride of it came through sweet and precise. There was a little ripple of applause from the dark beyond the footlight. He hadn’t meant to be showing out, or to be putting a quick little signature on the air to justify Dolphus’s big words: but he found he didn’t mind at all, if he proved a little what he was made of, tonight. He shook his wrists and nodded to Dolphus, waiting to be told the tune.

‘You pick,’ said Dolphus. A major compliment, control of the set list being such a foundation stone of his artistic tyranny.

‘Well … “Kansas City Stomp”?’

‘“KC Stomp” it is.’

In the solo form in which Barrow had been working it through these last few days, more often on table tops and counter edges than on an actual instrument, Morton’s tune got all its play from a stretched bottom hand and a stretched top hand on the keys, giving you effectively four lines as pinkies and thumbs worked fast and way apart. In the band version the tune dismantled into four parts for four separate musicians. The opening was a line-up of separate calls. Dee-doo, dee-doo. Dolphus wailed, Stukeley honked, he jangled and Dutch doomba-doomba’d. Then all in together for the brass annunciatory blare of the tune, Willie doing the flatfooted beat of the stomp underneath, Dolphus and Stukeley jousting, he and Dutch mainly rhythm at this point. But the way the Stomp worked for a band was, chorus and then solo, chorus and then solo, for each of the players in turn, as many times as you liked. Through 178the chorus and Dolphus nodded him in first, the whole thing back in his two hands, taking the tune bold but plain this first time around, with nothing but the stomp beat underneath from Willie, till Dolphus came back in over the top with a noodling moan and they all restated the tune together. Then Dolphus himself – of course – making the clarinet sob and sing and almost squeak; then Stukeley, neck inflated like a bullfrog, squeezing out sweet and golden statements from the cornet; then Dutch, thunderous, plucking and slapping. And around again, by common consent a little faster this time. The floor was filling, a couple of taklousa girls at the front doing the crazy strides and arm-waves of the Juba dance and couples beyond them copying, imitating, doing their best to keep up. This time around, they all gave it more, they all pushed the tune a little harder, and it began to melt at the edges into individual invention. Barrow ran his bottom hand at a different tempo, started to throw in grace notes, trills, trips to the wild far corners of the keyboard; Dolphus climbed up into the kingdom of the birds; Stukeley coaxed out ever quicker, more outrageous brazen logic; Dutch’s hands blurred. The next time around, faster still, Alma produced a ukulele and came in for a turn in a soprano skitter of notes. The boundaries between solos started melting too, and they all started to embroider on each other – but they were losing the dancers, it was whirling too fast now for legs and even the Juba girls were dissolving into protesting laughter and applause. One more chorus and they stopped. A happy roar from the room. Dolphus was grinning. Stukeley gave Barrow an estimating nod.

Then, back on Dolphus’s set list, they shifted down-tempo, and Alma sang ‘Delta Water’, a home-going song for the contingent of the band looking forward to Vicksburg and Jackson, but enough of an anthem for the riverlands in general for the room to share the mood too.179

Delta water, Delta tide

Starts a yearning deep inside

To be headed south once more

– Alma’s contralto coming thick and rich as the silty water, the clarinet and the cornet bending down through it like light beams in the water, nothing for the piano to do but slow harmonies, with just that little bit of drag on them to add to the richness. Then ‘Alligator Hop’ to get back to danceability. Then, ‘Do y’all want a break?’ said Barrow, by now feeling total confidence in his fingers, and while the others smoked and sipped he gave the room as a solo Johnson’s notorious ‘Eccentricity’, a syncopated waltz of such tricksy clockwork intricacy that if you did it right, it sounded as if you had a third hand on the job at least. More applause. Then all back together for Handy’s ‘Quizquiz Blues’, for more riverland complimenting.

‘Got anythin’ new?’ asked Dolphus. Barrow considered. There was a thing he’d been turning over in his head, and at long intervals out loud, which he thought was going to be called ‘Red, Black and Blue’. But it wasn’t there yet, and he hadn’t begun to arrange it as more than a solo piece. On the other hand—

‘More like something old,’ he said. ‘Real old.’

It was a ballad he’d heard Drummond whistling. He’d thought how, like so many of white folks’ sad songs, it only needed a nudge, a twitch to the rhythm and the right chords, to be entirely recognisable as a blues, the human heart and its sorrow doing its damnedest to extract the same dues in song, no matter how people tried to keep themselves split up. He wasn’t feeling split up this evening. In fact he was feeling the least split he had been for a long time.

Singing as he played it through for them, not well but well enough to show how it should go, he laid out his arrangement. They all listened acutely. Then without a pause, as he’d hoped, when he 180swung into it the second time around, Alma took the voice from him, Willie began a slow underbeat, Dutch took up the bass pulse of the thing, and Dolphus lifted his clarinet and gave a slow flying lilt to sorrow. And that was good. But what was even better was the next time around, when Stukeley lifted up his cornet and took it over, the boy seeing the simplicity in the tune and making it ache almost unbearably. Like it was the natural cousin to the old, old pain of ‘St James Infirmary’. True love don’t weep, sang Alma,

True love don’t mourn for me.

I’m going away

To Marble Town.

With that little hitch upward on ‘go-ing’ that had first caught his ear, as if the voice had broken there. And Barrow thought, how had he persuaded himself that he wasn’t allowed this? How had he fooled himself into thinking he should be living without it?

‘Aaand … he’s back,’ said Dolphus into the mike, at the end. ‘By our own Indian Joe, that was – what was that, man?’

‘“Marble Town”.’

‘But now let’s change the mood again and – hey, where you goin’?’

‘To ask a lady to dance,’ said Barrow firmly, making his way off the stage. ‘Somethin’ slow, please, Alma, boys?’

Out beyond the stage lights, the rest of the dim geometry of the Catawba Room came back more into view: parties at the tables applauding, the Moon and her courtiers and the professor applauding. Over at the bar, to Barrow’s surprise, seated with a white teapot of her own, Anderson the redhead journalist from the Post, also applauding. But it was the Moon he was shooting for. He stood over the table and she was for the first time actually smiling, teeth showing hesitantly. An uncertain expression for such a decided face.

‘Hidden depths, Detective!’ said Mickey Casqui.181

‘Thanks, man,’ said Barrow. But to Couma Hashi, ‘Would you care to dance?’

Casqui’s eyes flew wide, and his eyebrows flew up, as at some display of really extraordinary naivety. Peggy Iti gave Barrow a look with a kind of intelligent pity in it, the professor one full of anthropological curiosity. But Couma, looking just as startled – flustered, even – rose to her feet and said, ‘Why not?’

He steered her out onto the floor, holding her as lightly as he could. There was not much to her, but what there was was tight-coiled and taut. She put her hands on his shoulders and he felt the contact as strongly as he had when she was running a needle through his flesh. The band’s idea of a slow number, alas – mischief in Dolphus’s face – was Alma singing ‘My Man Rocks Me’, which was more like the score for a deep grind up against an outhouse door than for the kind of delicate approach Barrow had in mind.

My man rocks me, with one steady roll

There’s no slipping, when he once takes hold …

But still the sway of the thing put them into some private and separate little sphere together, with the music as its walls. Couma’s hips and spine knew how they wanted to move, despite the lingering shock on her face.

‘Is it really that surprising that a guy asks you to dance?’

‘Yes!’ she said. ‘If you haven’t noticed, I am the living counterpart of Maria Tamaha. Our Lady of Cahokia?’

‘But you’ve—’

‘—been married. Yes. It’s not an exact association. And she is the image of all human virtue, and I am not. Oh heavens, I am not. But that is the mask I have to wear. I envy you.’

‘You envy me? Why? You’re a princess. I’m a bum who can’t even get it together to decide if he’s a cop or a pianist.’

‘But that’s why I envy you. You can still choose.’182

‘You make it sound like you’re a hundred years old,’ said Barrow. Stray silvery dapples of light were travelling across her black eyes, her moon-curls of hair, as they turned. ‘How old are you, anyway?’

‘Twenty-six?’

‘Oh my. That is old.’

‘Don’t laugh at me, Mr Barrow.’

‘I doubt if anyone dares to. – But really, why can’t you choose? Why can’t you take the mask off?’

‘You must be the only man in this town who needs it explaining to him. I’m not a private person. I used to be; or nearly, anyway. I was married to a brave, charming, good-looking man with the gift for happiness. You know what I mean. One of those people who wakes up every morning expecting good things. He flew airplanes. I had no duties, except to be happy, and cut dresses, and have babies, in time. Ideally, a boy and a girl, one for the palace and one for the Moon’s house, in time. But my time ran out. My Charles died of the flu in the transit camp on the way home from France, and my brother decided he didn’t care what the tamaha needed. And now, because I do care, I am not a private person any more, and I cannot want things for myself any more, and I cannot be asked to dance any more, except by detectives too ignorant to know what they’re asking.’

‘But—’

‘Shut up, Mr Barrow, and let me enjoy this.’

‘Joe.’

She sighed.

‘Shut up, Joe, and let me enjoy this.’

She closed her eyes and leaned against his chest, and let him carry her round like that, slow-swaying, his arms closed around her in as strong and careful a protection as he could manage. The other couples on the floor left a space around them; and Alma and Dolphus, seeing that things were not at the joking point, kindly 183dropped the lyrics and gave them another couple of verses and choruses that were purified by being purely instrumental.

When the music stopped, she looked up at him like someone surfacing from deep water. Deep moonlit water. If that had been the look that greeted her Charles across the pillow, Barrow was not surprised the man had woken happy every day.

She put out a finger and stroked his mended eyebrow, not with the clinical decisiveness of earlier, but with some far gentler emotion.

‘Don’t let us hurt you, big man,’ she whispered, and from her he didn’t mind it at all. ‘Thank you. And now,’ suddenly brisk, ‘I must be going.’

*

And she detached herself and was off. She must have made some hand-signal, for the poets and the bodyguard were up and waiting for her when she reached the table, and immediately they surrounded her like a phalanx and out they walked, going going gone, leaving only the professor and his pipe, and Couma’s hardly touched fish.

Kroeber too rose to his feet; hesitated, smiled. ‘There is advice I could give you,’ he said, ‘but in every culture I know, the offering of unsolicited advice is an extraordinarily hostile act. So I will only say: good night, Detective, and good luck.’

‘Good night, sir,’ said Barrow, his head spinning.

Then the professor was gone as well. Barrow sat down heavily, and lit a cigarette. The band played on, but when Dolphus tried to catch his eye, he just held up a refusing palm. It was as if the weight of the day had all fallen on him at once. In a minute, he supposed, he had better get up and go home to bed, but the dark of the Catawba Room seemed like a burrow in which, just now, he could hide away. At least while the cigarette lasted. He put his head in his hands, winced, re-arranged himself.184

‘Hey, Detective,’ said a teasing, educated voice from the bar.

Anderson was beckoning him.

‘What?’

‘Come over here.’

Reluctantly, he did.

‘Your friend’s been telling me stories,’ she said.

‘Really? Phin Drummond? I got the impression yesterday you couldn’t stand each other.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s a little vile, but very forthcoming. So I wondered if you had anything for me, too. Have you got something for me, Detective?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Barrow, remembering what the Post’s headlines had been like, the last couple of days.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said the teasing voice. ‘Did the princess not want to kiss the knight? The more fool her, I say.’

She wasn’t slurring her words, but her speech had been loosened up, all right, by the contents of the teapot. She blew out smoke from the side of her scarlet mouth, and kept her hazel eyes on him.

Barrow stepped closer. Yes, there were fumes of whisky mixing with her perfume. Her skin was flushed and warm, her copper hair was loose. The scarlet-nailed forefinger of the hand that wasn’t holding her smoke was pressing the milky skin of her neck, just under her ear. Pressing, palping, stroking. She was, straightforwardly speaking, at least as pretty as Couma Hashi, and much more straightforwardly desirable, with none of the suffering saint in her. On the contrary, she was looking at him, breathing hotly at him, with the mixture of excitement and nerves he had come across occasionally before in takata women daring themselves in relation to him. He had a feeling that there were simple words he could say, simple things he could do, that would lead from here to an outhouse door he could press her up against, or more likely, the sheets of a bed upstairs in the Algonkian where he could strip the tweeds 185and the silks off her, and bare her down to the smells of smoke and whisky, and plough her while she enjoyed her transgression. But the trouble was that he was still feeling the un-simple touch of the Moon’s finger and he wanted nothing, nothing at all, to erase it.

‘Good night,’ said Barrow.

186

WEDNESDAY

187

188

Mr HARRISON (Pennsylvania) had risen to speak, when there was a clamour outside the chamber, and it was announced that a man had appeared, purporting to be the emissary of the Indian Kingdom upon the Mississippi. Admitted, he proved to be of middle years, soberly attired, and speaking (to the surprise of many) perfect English. Mr ADAMS (Massachusetts) asked, had he come in hopes of admitting the Kingdom to the company of the United Colonies? He declared, he had not, for the Prince his master valued too highly the independence of his realm. But he understood, that it was one of the purposes of the present Congress, to settle on a cordial footing the relations of the Colonies with other powers. Mr OVENDEN (Georgia) said, that by ‘Powers’ had been intended the civilised states of the world, and not a parcel of papist savages. Mr TURNER (Rhode Island) cried, we might send them some glass beads for their rosaries! Mr WASHINGTON (Virginia) asked the Emissary, would the Kingdom continue to sell guns to the Iroquois and the Cherokee, which might be used against the Colonies in any dispute with the Crown? The Emissary declared, that the Kingdom (which he referred to by the name of “Tamaha”) would trade as it saw fit with any of the peoples beyond the Proclamation Line, self-defence being a right of all nations under natural law. And he asked the Congress to consider the points following. 1. That the population of the Kingdom was as numerous as that of the Colonies. 2. That they relished interference as little as the Colonists did, and would not be bound by any treaty to which they were not a party. 3. That if any were tempted to declare, of the Kingdom’s soil, Res nullius naturaliter fit primi occupantis, the inhabitants were themselves the first occupants, and in full possession. Mr OVENDEN said, what heathen babble is this? Mr ADAMS replied, he is quoting the Laws of Justinian.

Journal of the Second Continental Congress, 14th May, 1775

1891

Barrow’s head woke him before it was light. He must have rolled over on the stitches. The radium-painted hands of his wristwatch, glowing green in the dark like symptoms of a headache themselves, said it was five o’clock. When he got out of bed and went to the window of his room up on the top floor of Lydia Lee’s to smoke a cigarette, he saw that a river fog had come in overnight. All along Loyola, the streetlamps were dim points in a swathing grey. Darktown had been engulfed, probably the whole city.

His forehead felt not-too-bad now nothing was touching it, but the rest of him ached. He stretched his shoulders and got a series of clicks and pops. The last time he had made it to the weights and the skipping ropes at the Athletic Club had been days back, and it felt as if he were still carrying around all that had happened since. The fears, the frustrations, the puzzlements, the disgusts, the confused changes in his knowledge of Drummond – even the pleasures and the hopes, and the joys of the music – all tangled and impacted together, laid stiffly down in the muscles. Layers of the stuff. Crud under the skin. If he could get himself into hard motion perhaps he could sweat it out, get it gone. He ought to get to the precinct soon to find out what was happening, but Sammy Noukouwa should be safely under arrest by now, might already be on his way back in cuffs on an eastbound train. And Solly Stein liked to open up the Athletic early, for clients on their way to work. True, not quite this early – but he could set out now, grab some eggs at the Royal before their night service ended, then walk on over to the Northside to train a little and still be at the precinct before seven. Yes. He found the tooth-powder in the dark, brushed and spat, then left by the fire escape.

Out in the thick grey a half hour later with a belly full of scrambled eggs, he could tell with every step that the fog was the river’s 190creature. It had the river’s smell, the organic smell of growth and rot together, still chilled by winter but waking up. The human contribution was there too. A Cahokia fog always had smoke in it, and gas fumes, and cooking grease: but they were subdued, pushed back to a minor place in the chord. From out of the cold brown levels of the water as it slid south, creasing and tilting, dimpling against the great caissons of the Bridge, a billion billion droplets had risen, breathed by the river into the air. Each one a messenger of the ceaselessly moving silt below, in which was digesting everything that ever fell into it on its path down the continent, from dead trees to dead people. And now the exhalation of all this filled the streets with dense, soft vapour that behaved like a live thing itself, stirring slightly at the passage of bodies through it, hugging walls, licking at doors and windows with damp particulate tongues.

Barrow could hardly see the buildings next to him as he walked up Division, let alone the ones on the far side of the street. The world was a few square feet of paving slabs beyond which everything dissolved. Round every streetlamp, a halo of light fog floated within dark fog, grainy, restless; as if, if you could look at it through a microscope, you’d see corpuscles thronging. All sounds were muffled. A single streetcar went by, its hum hushed, fuzzed spokes of yellow light from the windows turning as it passed, like something seen underwater.

Instead of in the heart of a city, he might as well have been strolling alone on a riverbank. A riverbank not long after the world was made. And yet, all around him in the swaddling murk, there it all still was. Somewhere in the grey, there they all still were, sleeping or waking. Anderson, mumbling in the first grip of a hangover, her red hair spread across a pillow he could have been sharing. Couma Hashi, almost certainly not asleep, standing raw-eyed by her upstairs window, staring at ‘the reflection of her predicament’, whatever she meant by that; whatever it was that made dancing 191with him seem like an interlude in a nightmare. Barrow’s heart lurched. It gave him a little, literal jolt, as real as indigestion.

Solly was just pulling back the grille across the steps of the Athletic when he arrived, inevitable half-smoked dead stogie in the corner of his mouth. Barrow wasn’t sure he ever lit them – just clamped them there for the burnt tobacco-juice taste, spitting from time to time.

‘Ain’t you the early bird, Detective?’ he said. Then, when they were both under the lights, inside, ‘Oy. Someone’s been doing a number on your head. Better show me.’

He climbed up on a bench in the locker room, being only jockey-sized, and probed the stitch job carefully with fingers practised from a thousand ring-corner consultations.

‘That’s clean,’ he said. ‘That’ll mend. No sparring till it does, mind. Tell you what: you go round the weights, I’ll fire up the shvitz. You look like you could use a steam.’

Barrow skipped, lifted and punched, watched over by the framed photos of Jack Dempsey, Benny Leonard and the city’s own Kid Houliso, victor over Pete Herman last year for the bantamweight title with a sixth-round knockout. It was simple, punching the bag. It was gloriously simple, lining up the whole force of his chest and shoulder and arm behind the glove, and driving it into hard leather. He made that straight line of force over and over, as if he had uncertainty itself strung there between floor and ceiling, waiting to be pounded; and he did go into the steam with streaming skin and a lighter heart. But, sitting on the wood slats dripping, he found himself still hopelessly not-simple afterwards. Still puzzled. Still torn between loyalties. Still host to a new flutter of feeling in his chest. It was as if he’d been asleep these last two years – or maybe longer, asleep ever since France – and now was waking up and kind of regretting it.

Solly was waiting when he came out. There were still no other clients, which was unusual.192

‘Wanted to ask,’ he said, working the stub out the way with a wriggle of the lips. ‘This meshuggah mood inna city’ – he screwed a finger to his temple in the crazy sign – ‘do your guys see it calming down, any time soon? Or would this be maybe a good time, go pay a little visit to my brother in Chicago? What’s the inside track, here?’

Barrow thought about the rhythm of the streets hitching and breaking, about the signals from all over that a storm was rising. About how many people in takata Cahokia at least seemed to want the storm, positively desire it, with the case of Fred Hopper only the pretext.

‘I … don’t know,’ he said.

Solly looked at him with a bird’s sharp little eyes.

‘Guess I’ll take that as a yes to the quick vacation,’ he said.

‘I mean, we got someone in custody for the killing—’

‘You do? Not what I heard onna radio just now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, the mayor’s all over WNCK, wringing his hands and rending his garments, sayin’, “I can only apologise that the fugitive has somehow slipped through our fingers, but rest assured that no effort will be spared”, ex cetra, ex cetra.’

‘Shit,’ said Barrow, and was out the door.

*

Dawn had come while he was exercising, which meant the fog had turned white. Two blocks down from the Athletic and three blocks over, he turned onto 5th – definitely less traffic than usual, much less – and found that the station house was now protected by armoured cars drawn up across the roadway on each side, stopping the traffic altogether, and a huddle of weary patrolmen in waterproofs, holding carbines. Inside, the building was packed for the uniforms’ shift-change, but with people moving at the after-action plod Barrow remembered from the trenches, moving each foot as 193if it were ten times heavier than normal. And a lot of them, judging by the badges, belonged not to the central district but to the Northside and eastern precincts, drafted in from the city’s other mainly takata areas.

Upstairs the detective pen was almost deserted, but not peaceful. Drummond, Yanasa, Tali, Everard and Bunce were not in yet, but for some reason Doyle and Miss Chokfi were in the captain’s office listening to the big new teak radio in the corner. Doyle saw Barrow bound in, and beckoned grimly.

‘They didn’t get him?’ said Barrow, panting.

‘They did not,’ said Doyle. ‘Good grief, man, the state of your face! No – Captain Tlizilani reported at four this morning that the Dinetah police had searched the train from top to bottom, and our man Sammy – or rather your man, Detective, for it’s you and your partner got us to this point – wasn’t on it. Not a sign. Neither hide nor hair of him. Vanished. Dissolved into the mists. If, for that matter, he ever got on in the first place.’

‘They were positive at the station that he had.’

‘That he’d bought the ticket anyway, which is not quite the same thing, the dear knows. Not that it matters much, at this point. I was never convinced we were on the right trail, with him. And now we’re in a world of shite.’

He indicated the radio, from which was coming a takata male voice from somewhere in the boondocks. Ungentle, unbeautiful, vowels like the rusty teeth of a saw, but up on its high horse and showing every sign of having a good time there.

‘The Radical Party,’ it was saying, ‘this Radical Party we hear so much about? Which gave us that very civilised man, Mayor Lakna? Which has held an American city in its grip for so long? What is it? I’ll tell you, sir. It is a monarchic swindle, sir. That is what it is. It is the spittle-licking gathering of the courtiers, in all but name, of a king, in all but name. A king! And not a king living on the far side 194of the ocean, like the King George our ancestors drove out, but a king right here among us. In his palace. In his palace, good people, collecting the servile oblations, the shameless prostrations, of his redskinned subjects. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel inclined to bow the head. I don’t feel inclined to bow the knee, to any potentate or panjandrum, any penny-ante plenipotentiary of the pope of Rome! I say—’

‘Who the hell is that?’ said Barrow.

‘That, Detective, is State Senator Corfield, the Klan’s own representative, telling us that the boys in the white sheets are going to march on the Plaza tomorrow to protest Fred Hopper’s death. He also wants the Illinois National Guard to come across the state line and restore order. Not the Cahokia Guard, mind you: not trustworthy, he says, any more than the mayor is, or the city police. Meanwhile the concerned citizens he speaks for have spent the night taking potshots at blue uniforms and setting fire to certain businesses and keeping off the firetrucks when they try to put ’em out again. The fog may help a little, just because it’s hard to draw a bead on someone if there’s a cloud in the way. Then again it means we can’t see what we’re doing either. And that’s not all, Detective. A world of shite I said, and a world of it I meant, for me and for thee both. Take a look at this, why don’t you?’

He tossed a new copy of the Post across to Barrow. REDSKIN CAP CAUGHT RED-HANDED was the headline, and below it on the front page, a story about Nakbateroli taking kickbacks from the takouma rum runners. Just the takouma mob; Weiss’s ascendant crew of white gangsters were not mentioned. And there was a cartoon, showing a caricature Indian warrior dressed in nothing but feathers and a loincloth, little bubbles and fizzes around his head to indicate drunkenness, holding out a hand behind his back for coins to be poured into it by a shadowy figure skulking in darkness.

‘Where is the captain?’ asked Barrow.195

‘Gone,’ said Doyle. ‘Fired by the mayor an hour ago, when this came off the presses.’

‘Then who’s the miko now?’

‘I am,’ said Doyle. ‘For my sins. And my first question to you is, what do you know about this story? It’s from an inside tip, obviously. And you seemed to be getting on quite well with dear Miss Anderson, yesterday.’

‘She didn’t get it from me.’

‘No? You didn’t speak to her yesterday evening? You weren’t chatting to her, for example, at the bar of the Algonkian?’

Miss Chokfi looked at the floor. It occurred to Barrow that dancing with the most famous woman in the city might have caused some interested attention to him that didn’t stop when the dance did.

‘That was … on a different subject,’ said Barrow.

‘Was it.’

‘Yes.’

‘I can tell you,’ said Doyle, folding up the half-moon glasses and laying them down, ‘on my watch I will not have my detectives using the press to settle scores or play at politics. That style of shit ends right now.’ He sighed. ‘All right. You don’t strike me as one of nature’s conspirators. But if it wasn’t you, I’ll lay money it was that partner of yours. He’d do it from devilry if nothing else. Do you have anything to tell me about Phineas Drummond, Detective?’

Barrow shook his head dumbly.

‘Think, now. Consider your loyalties, and whether you’re putting them in the right place. I know you’ve been close, what with the war and all. But the game just turned serious. Now’s the time to stop following him around like a lost puppy.’

Barrow stared at him. Doyle stared back up at him from Nakbateroli’s chair, apparently quite unbothered by the difference of height and size. Barrow hesitated. Whatever the deal was that Drummond had made with Arthur Vanderberg was looking worse 196and worse as the city caught fire. In the end it was his own newfound resistance to being managed by insult that kept his mouth shut. If he wasn’t going to be told he had to be on Drummond’s side, because anything else was for suckers, then he wasn’t going to be told he had to take sides against him for the same reason.

‘No?’ said Doyle. ‘Nothing to say? That’s a pity. I look forward to the moment when you decide to show the world that you’re not as dim-witted as you give yourself out to be, Detective.’

More of the same, thought Barrow.

‘Well, let me tell you. Things are going to be considerably different around here. I don’t know how much difference it can make catching Hopper’s real killer, now that it’s got to street-fighting, but we’re going to give it a go. Everyone’s on the case, as of now, except for dear little Phineas, because I’m going to suspend him the moment he walks through the door. I’d take you off it too if it weren’t that you’re the palace’s man. But Buncie and Everard and Tali and Yanasa are going to go out there and knock on doors and bother passers-by in all the parts of the city we can still get at, and sort us out a chronology for poor Fred’s last hours. When he actually arrived at the Land Trust, who saw him on the way: that stuff. The stuff that actually solves crimes. You on the other hand are going to sit down and type up your notes for every single interview you’ve done since Monday morning. There’s been a lamentable lack of record-keeping. When you’re done, we’ll see if there’s anything else you can be trusted with. Go! The typewriter calls.’

Barrow left Doyle there, listening to the rant still crackling out of the radiogram. A short time later Miss Chokfi came out as well, equipped with a long list of numbers to call, and disappeared into her telephonist’s cubby. For a while the bull-pen was quiet except for the peck-peck of the keys as he transcribed his notes. To begin with, tension vibrating in his fingers, he made endless errors he had to strike out with rows of x’s. Then after a time there was 197something soothing about rolling the endless sandwiches of report forms and carbon paper into the machine. The whole progress of the case so far passed in front of him, one blurred character at a time. There was a lot of it. The patrolman, Mrs Jackson the janitor, Mickey Casqui, the Man, Mrs Hopper, Mrs Hankeha, the Moon, Chunchouba the crocodile … He had not been doing nothing, whatever Doyle said. He typed on. Miss Chokfi appeared at his elbow from time to time and carried off the finished statements to Doyle. The other detectives came in. By nine o’clock only Drummond was missing. The pen buzzed and quietened again as Doyle dispatched his investigators in different directions.

On and on, and the further on he got, the more he was having to leave things out if he was going to go on covering for Drummond even minimally. He put in Louis Bessa’s alibi and the meat-plant management’s confirmation of it, but left out Drummond’s attempt to override it. He put in the Bureau agents’ interest in Bessa as a possible subversive, but left out Drummond provoking them and Gilbreth issuing threats in return. He put in Vanderberg’s helpfulness in finding Sammy Noukouwa’s time sheet and address, but left out the evidence of Drummond and Vanderberg already knowing each other, and having an arrangement of some kind. His headache came back. Sammy Noukouwa’s mother, the Four Winds, the railroad clerks – those were easier, but then there was the visit to Hamelin’s. He put in Weiss’s alibi at the Lutheran church and the stuff about the loan to Hopper, but left out everything to do with Drummond’s crazy attack and Weiss’s fury at being attacked by someone he obviously thought was in his pocket. The more he altered the event, the less sense it made – not that it had made much in the first place. Finally, with relief, he reached the professor’s lecture and the conversations with the Moon and the poets. There were loose ends everywhere, he was now thinking; even in the interviews he wasn’t censoring, far more questions than answers.198

He typed the last words, and Drummond still hadn’t shown his face. Doyle was busy – it already seemed natural to look into the miko’s office and find him there, conferring with two of the uniform lieutenants from downstairs. Barrow wound in a blank sheet of paper, and began pecking out a list of questions. He remembered Drummond’s cracks about Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s about dimwits and lost puppies. There was a defiance in it.

WHY DID HOPPER CO-OPERATE IN HIS OWN DEATH?

WHY DID THE KLAN WANT TO PUT A MAN IN THE LAND TRUST?

WHY WAS WEISS BOTHERING TO PRESSURE HOPPER FOR $50?

WHY AN AZTEC SACRIFICE?

He crossed out that last question because he realised he knew the answer: to make a connection between the killing and the legend of the city’s founding. Whoever had killed Fred Hopper hadn’t done it for any of the usual reasons people murdered other people. Not in anger, not from jealousy, not for money, not to remove a witness. All of those kinds of homicides happened either on the spur of the moment, with nothing like the theatrics of Hopper’s death, or in some place as discreet as possible, to draw no attention. This was the opposite both ways around, a well-prepared death that was also attention-seeking. It had been done to make a point. The important question was what point. It could be a crazy point, being made by a takouma ignorant enough to believe the legend and to think that the Aztec gods would like to have a white man’s heart offered up on top of a skyscraper. That was what Bashli written in blood had suggested, and why they had chased Sammy Noukouwa as a suspect. But it could be a sane point, being made by a hostile and book-reading takata, as Couma and Mickey Casqui had urged him to believe. In which case, what the murderer wanted was for the 199audience of the death to believe that the city was a place founded by dangerous savages, and still ruled by dangerous savagery. If that were so the murderer must’ve welcomed the chaos the killing had brought about. Wanted it. Aimed to bring it about. He typed:

WHAT POINT WAS THE KILLER MAKING?

IGNORANT TAKOUMA OR HOSTILE TAKATA?

WHO BENEFITS FROM CHAOS?

Barrow paused, and lit a cigarette. There was the evidence of the medical examiner’s report, with its definite finding that the flakes of black obsidian in Hopper’s chest hadn’t come from the implement that cut, but had been planted there. Did that help to decide the takouma/takata question? Not conclusively. It seemed most likely, yes, to be a sign of deliberate fakery, therefore part of a smear against the city, therefore on the side of the takata theory. But he could imagine, too, that strewing in the glass after the killing might have seemed like a worthwhile second-best option for a takouma nutjob who’d have preferred to carve up Fred Hopper if he could with some glittering shard from a volcano. You know, to do it right. Barrow typed:

WHERE DID THE GLASS FLAKES COME FROM? IS IT

HARD TO FIND OBSIDIAN?

Then he went on to the next set of puzzles, the ones to do with their disappearing prime suspect. Or previous prime suspect.

IS SAMMY NOUKOUWA REALLY CONNECTED TO THE MURDER?

IF HE ISN’T, WHY THE TIMING? WHY DID HE SUDDENLY LEAVE TOWN NOW?

WHERE DID HE GET THE MONEY FOR THE PULLMAN TICKET?

DID HE GET ON THE TRAIN OR NOT?200

IF HE WAS ON THE TRAIN, WHY DIDN’T THE NAVAJO POLICE FIND HIM?

WHERE IS HE NOW?

WHAT IS HIS LINK TO THE RED COUNCIL?

WHAT IS THE RED COUNCIL?

The Bureau agent had thought it was an organisation of Bolshevik saboteurs, getting ready to support the Soviet effort to overthrow the White Russian statelet up in the NST. The professor said that on the contrary it was a traditional takouma thing, the government that took over a tribe in time of war. Couma had called it ‘historical’ as if it were far away in time. But Sammy was writing its name on his wall in the present day, underneath his bony goddess.

Finally, since he might as well put down absolutely everything that was puzzling him, he added in a rush –

WHAT DOES THE MAN OF THE SUN WANT FROM ME?

WHO CALLED IN THE FOUR WINDS YESTERDAY?

WHAT IS VANDERBERG PAYING PHIN TO DO?

WHY DID PHIN BEHAVE THAT WAY WITH WEISS?

‘Hey,’ said Drummond.

Barrow folded over the page. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been? It’s … ten o’clock!’

‘Looks like you got your head fixed up?’

‘Yeah. Helpful lady with a sewing needle. Listen, Doyle’s the new miko, and he wants to see you right away. He didn’t like the story you fed Anderson about Nakbateroli.’

‘Didn’t he? I call that ungrateful; he did all right out of it.’

‘He’s gonna suspend you.’

‘Oh well. No big deal. I got business more or less taken care of here by now anyway. – No darlin’, don’t give me those, I ain’t gonna be here long enough to open ’em.’201

Miss Chokfi had tried to hand him some mail. He slung it onto his desk unexamined, and slapped her ass as she turned away, not gently. She shot him a look of pure hatred over her shoulder.

Drummond laughed and went off to the captain’s office. He did seem entirely unworried. There were purple shadows under his eyes, but he had his hat pushed to the back of his head and he walked with a spring in his step. He opened the glass door with the air of someone making an entrance; and though Barrow couldn’t hear what happened after that, he could see that Drummond kept up his lounger’s stance and his winking, grinning, aw-shucks-ing expression all the time that Doyle was tearing a strip off him. He tossed his badge onto the desk and came out whistling ‘Marble Town’.

As he passed Barrow’s desk the tune transmogrified into a two-note sheepdog call.

‘Come on, Joseph,’ he said. ‘Time to quit this sorry spot.’

‘What?’ said Barrow. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Oh now, come on,’ said Drummond. ‘I hurt your feelin’s last night, I know, and I’m real sorry ’bout that, but let’s do all the recriminatin’ and the apologisin’ outside.’

‘I’m working here, Phin. I haven’t been suspended. Sammy Noukouwa somehow slipped off the train last night or never got on, and we’re missing a perpetrator. I’ll meet you this evening, if you like.’

Drummond clucked his tongue sorrowfully. ‘Sammy Noukouwa, Sammy Noukouwa. Look at your face, all serious. Dear Lord, didn’t you understand all this time that this po-lice thing was just a temporary gig till something better came along? And now it has? I’ll lay it all out for you outside, if you’ll just kindly get up on your hind legs and walk.’

‘Maybe I’ll stay a cop and maybe I won’t,’ said Barrow. ‘But if I don’t, it’ll be because I got something of my own I want to do. Not because of some crazy scheme you cooked up for you.’202

‘But I got things all set up sweet ’n nice for two. I’m trying to cut you in on some good luck here, is what I’m meaning to communicate. What I’m trying to get through your imposing and battered head.’

‘I can make my own luck.’

‘Oh, get up, man! I cain’t do this in public.’

Drummond jerked his head and blew his two-note come-along again.

‘Don’t whistle at me.’

‘What’s got into you, Joe?’ said Drummond, sounding genuinely baffled.

‘Don’t whistle at me, I’m not your dog.’

‘I was under the impression you were my friend.’

Barrow looked at him, and the funny-pages blue eyes seemed for that moment to belong to a lost boy, not so much somebody cynical about ordinary expectations as drifting among them, at sea.

‘Like I said, I’ll meet you for a drink later, if you like. You can talk to me then, Phin.’

‘Hell with that. You come and find me when you come to your senses, how about. Right then. Right then!’

He stalked off. ‘So long, sweet cheeks,’ he said to Miss Chokfi as he passed her, his fingers reaching to goose her once more. Barrow shut his eyes.

Then opened them again abruptly when Drummond made a screeching sound unlike anything that usually came out of his mouth. Doyle emerged from his new office door at speed. Everard and Bunce, just coming back up the stairs into the squadroom, stopped dead. Everyone stared. Drummond was shaking his right hand in the air, a branching stream of fresh red coming from a dark mark in the back of it. Miss Chokfi, bright spots back in her cheeks but this time not from shame, was holding the office stapler the way a duellist might hold a pistol. It became clear that she had 203armed herself with it in case Drummond grabbed at her again – and whirled around when he did, and fired a metal staple half an inch deep through the skin of the offending hand. Blood started to run down Drummond’s sleeve.

‘You little bitch,’ he said. ‘You nasty little bitch. I’m gonna—’

‘—do nothing at all,’ said Doyle. ‘Anyone here think that was anything other than a piece of justice?’

‘The trick is to pick the ones who want you to touch ’em,’ advised Everard.

‘You should maybe get a doc to look at that,’ said Barrow, unable to help himself.

‘On your way, boyo,’ said Doyle.

Drummond departed, swearing.

2

‘Not going with him?’ said Doyle to Barrow.

‘Nope.’

‘All right, then. Come on downstairs with me. – You getting anywhere with the Klan?’ he asked Bunce and Everard.

‘Not really, miko,’ said Bunce. ‘No-one wants to talk today.’

‘Well, keep at it. Maybe get Chokfi to try ringing all the ministers of all the churches up at that end of 2nd. Chances are one of them’s the Kludd.’

‘The what?’ said Barrow.

‘Klan chaplain. Sometimes with them the white sheet ain’t eaten up the religion entirely. Okay?’

‘Yes, boss,’ said Everard. ‘Say, big feller, is it true that you been making eyes at my Anderson?’

‘A gentleman never tells,’ said Barrow.

‘You just remember that she’s reserved for me, okay?’204

‘In your dreams,’ said Bunce.

‘Exactly. She’s reserved for me, in my dreams. Tread softly, Detective Barrow, for you tread on my dreams.’

‘Ninnies and eejits, the pack of you,’ said Doyle. ‘Move along before your feet grow to the spot.’

‘Where are we going?’ Barrow asked.

‘Been reading your statements,’ said Doyle, leading the way down the stairs, past the weary busyness of the first floor, on into the basement, where the lock-up was. ‘You got a decent eye. You’d be good at this if you let yourself tell the whole story. Strikes me you got a couple of natural follow-up questions for your friend the crocodile. You’ll need me for the lingo.’

Chunchouba was in the last cell on the right. All the others were crowded with young and middle-aged takata men brought in during the night’s disturbances. They were bruised, many of them, and subdued to some extent by the realisation of being locked up, but they were still flickering with the bravado of riot.

‘Hey!’ they cried when they saw Doyle’s white face. ‘Hey! You ain’t no Injun! Which side are you on, anyway?’

‘I’m on the side of law, and peace in the streets,’ growled Doyle. ‘I’m on the side of the tamaha, and the holy lady in heaven who protects it. I’m on the side of my grand-daddy, who was treated with honour here when hoors like you were trying to starve him in Ireland, and to pick his pocket in New York City. Get your fingers off them bars.’

And he rattled his way up to the end with a nightstick. Chunchouba was huddled in the corner of his cell. He had been scrubbed at some point since yesterday, and dressed in grey prison overalls, and the effect was to shrink him. Without his stiffening of grease and his halo of stink he was a mouse, not a rat. His white hair had become a wispy curtain behind which he was trying to hide from the raucous takata shouting next to him.205

‘Laurence Chunchouba,’ said Doyle. ‘Get over here, settle a few things to my satisfaction, and we’ll have you on your way home. You’re a sight of pathos not of terror, and we need the space.’

The Crocodile shuffled across. The legs of the overalls were too long, and he had to pluck them up at each knee.

‘Ashoboli?’ asked Doyle.

‘Ma,’ said the Crocodile: neither a yes nor a no, just the city’s universal unh-huh, an acknowledgement that something was happening. But he accepted the cigarette passed through the bars. Doyle lit it for him.

‘Now—’ Doyle began.

‘Anopa ayomiksho,’ said the Crocodile, still sulky.

‘Yes, yes. Your wish is my command. We shall speak in the language of your choice. Though I notice you didn’t have any difficulty following my English a minute ago. – Well, go on,’ he said to Barrow.

Barrow found that he did indeed have follow-up questions on the tip of his tongue.

‘Ask him where he found out about the Aztec gods. How to draw them, how to do a sacrifice; that kind of thing.’

‘Coming up.’

Doyle asked the question in Anopa, with only the word ‘Aztec’ recognisable in it to Barrow. Chunchouba struck an orator’s pose and said something grand. Doyle said something scornful.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said it came from the ancient and secret knowledge of his people. I said that was bollix.’

‘Is he … embarrassed?’

Chunchouba was gazing at his feet.

‘I think he is, at that. Listen, you disgraceful old heathen: spit it out, whatever it is, and you can go home and start rolling in the gutter again.’206

Doyle started repeating himself in Anopa but Chunchouba didn’t wait. Keeping his eyes on the floor, he muttered out a sentence, two sentences, three sentences. Doyle laughed.

‘What?’

‘He says, that the lady from the Theosophical Society brought a “big book” over, I’m guessing he means an encyclopedia, and showed him the pictures, and read aloud about the Aztecs. He doesn’t read himself. So, there’s your answer. “A is for Aztec.”’

‘Which means he definitely didn’t know about’ – notebook flip – ‘The Conquest of New Spain.’

‘I wouldn’t have said.’

‘And so far as he knows, Sammy Noukouwa got all his information about the Aztecs from him? Including the know-how to paint the skeleton goddess in his bedroom?’

Anopa.

‘Yes, he says the harpy with no drawers on came out of the “big book” too. Anything else?’

‘Can you ask him if he knows why Sammy would write Houma Anopoli on the wall, underneath the picture?’

‘I will if you like, but I can answer that one myself: because Sammy is obviously a daydreamer who spent his time in parochial school staring at the ceiling and wishing he lived in more glorious times, even though a little squirt like him would have lasted about ten seconds on a battlefield.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that the Red Council hasn’t existed since the war ended in 1865.’

‘Houma Anopoli falama?’ said Chunchouba with a gleam of interest.

‘No, it has not come back, you mad old coot. Why would it?’

Why would it? Thinking of the armoured cars outside and Doyle’s description of what the night had been like in Germantown, Barrow 207didn’t find it hard to believe in some group of takouma deciding that this, right now, was a time of war as far as the tamaha was concerned.

But Doyle was unlocking the Crocodile’s cell. ‘All right, that will do. Home with you; and mind how you go. It’s not very friendly out there. Have you got streetcar fare?’

‘Ma,’ said Chunchouba. Doyle sighed, and passed him a nickel. He pocketed it, and emerged with dignity restored. They followed him along the cell corridor. His bare feet slapped on the floor, he was holding up his waistband with one hand, but his head was high, and he blew smoke imperiously to left and right at the imprisoned takata from the stub of the cigarette.

‘You see?’ said Doyle. ‘That’s how you do it. Systematically. Now, what I’m minded to have you do next, now that we’ve gotten Sammy out of the way, is to chase up the black glass. Get over to the museum and talk to the geological folk there; find out how rare this stuff is, and if there’s any percentage in trying to track it down.’

‘I’m allowed to leave the building now?’

‘In a probationary way. Each time you do something without screwing up, you win a try at the next thing. That’s the deal. You want me to trust you, show me I can. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ said Barrow. ‘But Lieutenant – miko – are we really sure Sammy Noukouwa’s out of the picture?’

‘How are we not sure?’ said Doyle irritably, stopping on the stairs back up to the detectives’ floor. ‘He’s a pipsqueak and a fantasist. He’s got no connection to Hopper that we know of, no way of getting into the Land Trust in the middle of the night, no record of violence against anything but, what was it, mice? He’s not very nice to his mother, but that doesn’t make him a murderer. There’s no evidence here, Detective. He’s a distraction in this case. A will o’ the wisp, leading you into a swamp. And, if you hadn’t worked that out, a scapegoat, being assiduously promoted by those who’d like to keep the fires burning, out there.’208

‘I agree that he almost certainly didn’t kill Hopper—’

‘Big of you,’ said Doyle.

‘—but he’s tied in somehow. I can feel it.’

‘You can feel it?’

‘Look at the timing. He skips work on the night of the murder—’

‘—coincidence—’

‘—and skips town the day we come looking for him.’

‘It’s not a crime to catch a train.’

‘Look at him boasting about “secret work” and “the big leagues”.’

‘Pipsqueak. Fantasist.’

‘Look at the Winds turning out to defend his house—’

‘They don’t like outsiders in uniform in the Quarters. You know that.’

‘Look at him disappearing off the train!’

‘If he was ever on it. If he didn’t just get off at Kansas City. If if if, Detective. Cobwebs and moonshine, that’s all this is, and I don’t mean in the alcoholic sense.’

‘This Navajo captain who was doing the search, Tiz–, Tliz—’

‘Tlizilani.’

‘Yes; do you know him well, miko?’

‘Not very,’ said Doyle, shrugging. ‘Why?’

‘I was wondering how he sounded on the phone when he gave the news.’

‘Oh for the Lord’s sake, Barrow. Are you asking me if I think he was lying? He didn’t speak to me, as it happened; I expect he’d gone to bed when the train came up empty. We just heard it through from their switchboard girl passing the news to Chokfi. But really, man, pull yourself together here. Why do you think they would lie? Why would they?’

Barrow had no answer.

‘Quite. Now, leave all this nonsense alone, get your hat, and go and talk to a man about a rock.’209

Doyle turned and stumped away up the steps.

*

The museum was down at the southern end of Christ-the-King, on the near corner of the junction with State Street. Barrow fetched his hat and pulled his coat off the stand. He was on his way out when it occurred to him that his route would take him across the Plaza, and that he knew of one person to be found by the Plaza – in a palace by the Plaza – whose contacts stretched across the continent and who might well have a view on what would make the Navajo authorities lie to the Cahokian ones. A person who, for whatever reason, had urged him to ask questions.

The Man’s card might no longer be the pristine wafer of pasteboard it had begun as, but Miss Chokfi took it with reverence when he asked her to dial the number on it. Someone answered. Barrow couldn’t hear the words but the thread of sound that trickled out of her headset was male, secretarial, clerical, impatient.

‘No, Father,’ said Miss Chokfi. ‘Yes, Father.’ Then to Barrow, with her hand covering the mouthpiece, ‘They say he’s too busy to talk to you. He’s in meetings all day.’

‘Tell them … that Thrown-Away Boy is asking.’

More inaudible priestly speech, leaking from the earphones. Then a pause, as if the person at the other end had gone away to talk to someone else. Then a threadlike resumption.

‘They say if you go over now, you can ride along with him, and he’ll talk to you that way,’ she reported.

‘Okay,’ said Barrow. ‘Tell ’em thank you, and I should only need a minute.’

‘They’ve already rung off,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

He turned to go, and was promptly whacked across the backside by Miss Chokfi.

‘Ouch?’ he said. ‘What was that for?’210

She was standing up very straight and gallant, though it still left her a foot and a half shorter than him, with the office stapler ready by her hand.

‘That was for not stopping him,’ she said. ‘Was there anything else you needed?’

‘Not a thing,’ said Barrow, and tipped his hat to her.

*

Somewhere above the fog, the sun was high in the sky now, and it made the whiteness that filled the streets glow brightly, like a veil or a garment made of fine lace. But it still blocked the sight of anything more than a few feet away, it still smelled of river, and it was still penetratingly cold. Barrow tucked his hands in his pockets as he walked – every one of the department’s Fords was out, carrying the uniforms from trouble spot to trouble spot in the western wards. He wished he had gloves.

The white veil suited the stage-set quality of the Algonkian. The green-tile eaves looming and fading over his head as he walked south along the side of it put last night’s music in his head. He hummed in time with his footsteps on the wet sidewalk. The city was subdued and unhappy, though, in its box of fog. South of 3rd, most of the businesses were shuttered. Blumfeld’s on Grant Square was open, all its lights on to try to push back at the day, but there seemed to be hardly any shoppers moving among the cosmetics counters when he peered through the glass. Just the shopgirls, nervously stationed among the displays, and glancing about. The golden mouth of the great entry to the Panton Leslie tower had metal grilles pulled almost all the way across. It looked as if the building were a whale far out from land, jaws wide, filter-feeding its way through the swells of the fog ocean. A solitary traffic cop out in the square had hardly any traffic to direct. His batons glowed radium-green in the white, like giant versions of Barrow’s watch hands. Only in the tunnels under the Union Station was there 211anything like a crowd, and that was citizens with suitcases – takata citizens with suitcases – hauling them out of a pulsating knot of taxis, and pushing away upstairs towards the trains. Acting on Sol Stein’s impulse to get out while the getting was good, presumably.

Beyond, on the takouma side of Grant, the old Arch with the angels roosting on it like pigeons grew from the mist a particle at a time: grainy, indistinct, a grey bulk only partially visible even when he was walking beneath it. Drips echoed under the Arch from the water condensing on all the pitted stone faces and feathers, then faded as he stepped on into the long white hush of Moon Street. This was where he and Drummond and Sergeant Hanunu’s boys had made their incursion into the alleyways yesterday in search of Sammy Noukouwa – and been driven back out by the silent mob with the wooden faces. There might be sentinels in the masks of the Four Winds guarding these entries now, but the fog hid them if so. Nothing was visible at the turnings he passed but a whiteness thick as milk. And nothing interrupted the hush all the way along the axis of Moon except one Number 6 streetcar going by, clanging. And except, after the clanging had stopped, a faint singing that began to creep into his ear up at the very end, where the low ranges of the Quarters beside him rose up vaguely into tall arcades, like a brick wave cresting, and the street opened out before him into the unbroken white sea of the Plaza.

It seemed to be coming from more or less the direction he needed to go. He struck out on a diagonal to his left, towards the north-east corner where the palace stood, last in the row of grand things that filled the north end of the Plaza. Cathedral, the Mound behind its railings, palace. He meant to go to the corner, anyway; but with the fog all around, depthless and luminous, and nothing under his feet but endless cobbles, he must have strayed. Perhaps the singing pulled him, there being no other marker to follow. At any rate, he reached the north side well before the palace. It was 212the tall iron of the fence that distilled itself out of the fog, with a few feet of green turf sloping up beyond it. The singing grew louder. It was to a tune he was sure he knew, though he couldn’t remember where from – a hymn on the harmonium, back at the Boys’ Home on a Sunday morning? German prisoners huddled by an icy roadside in the winter the war ended, and comforting themselves with song? But it had certainly had different words when he heard it before, because these were words in what he guessed was Latin again, being sung with a sweet inexpressiveness that was like nothing he knew. It sounded as if it came from some other world where the tangles of feeling and wanting were set aside.

O quanto maius donum

Cum filius ipse solis

Sponte suo sanguine

Dedit terrae filios!

Then, dim against the white at first, with a pinpoint of light floating at its head, he found the source of the music in a small procession, apparently winding its way back towards the cathedral. Figures in robes were carrying on their shoulders a pair of white litters. The robes were church vestments, not Klan sheets, and it was the litter-bearers who were singing. In the milk that thickened the air, they seemed to be gliding. As it passed, each part of the procession faded up from nothing, and back into nothing again as the mist absorbed it.

Gliding along at the front, an acolyte was carrying the light he had seen, a single flame fed by a dark yellow oil or wax, burning in a huge glass tube with a pierced tin cap on it to keep off any breeze, like a sort of holy hurricane lantern. The first litter followed, and it carried a disc of gold upright on a stand; a disc a foot wide, with rays and beams around the edge. It was not solid, though. There was a little glass window in the middle of all the gold. Through it, 213something small and round and white was showing; something thin and perishable-looking, enthroned in all that hard metal. The second litter had a statue of Maria Tamaha upright in it, all black, draped with white shells and flowers. And behind that, an immensely tall person brought up the rear, holding a black stave with a golden tip. All the other faces had been bare, and nodded or smiled to Barrow so far as they could without stopping singing, but this one was masked. This one was wearing a wooden face that did not belong to any of the Four Winds – a mask Barrow had never seen before, yellow as beeswax, patterned all over with black crosses, shaped like a welder’s helmet. In the slot for the eyes, dark pupils slid left to regard Barrow; faced forward again, impassive.

The procession went by and the fog consumed it. Barrow stood still while the song too dwindled. The city had shown him its secret self again. At any rate, that was how it felt, as if for whatever reason he was being selected as the favoured audience before whom secrets were revealed. The song shrank away to nothing. Perhaps they had gone in through the doors of the cathedral. He shook himself, slapped his cold hands together, set off once more along the iron fence, trying to summon everyday normality. At the far side of the Mound walls rose, made from the same thin old red brick as the Quarters, but far higher. Grander too. Up there in the fog were glimpses of stone arches and high windows split by leadwork into little diamonds. The front entrance to the palace was a gateway that set arch inside arch inside arch of yellow stone, with flattened mock-pillars a few inches thick carved out of the stone, and words carved over the door itself. It looked like the title page of some very old-fashioned book, only imprinted on brick and stone not paper. CANTABO something, the words said. The fog got in the way. In Latin? Yeah, of course it was; what else. Barrow rang the black doorbell, and made an effort to be the cop again, rather than the man who had been wandering momentarily in other worlds.214

Fortunately, the person who answered the door was a bustling, irritable young takouma priest, full of this-worldly annoyance.

‘Detective?’ he said. ‘We are having a very busy day, as I’m sure you can imagine. He really has no time to talk to the police, just now.’

‘I only need a minute,’ said Barrow. ‘Then I’ll be on my way. I got things to do too.’

The priest looked at him as if even the comparison of his timetable with the Man’s was an impertinence.

‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘His Highness is on the telephone with President Harding. Then we have calls lined up with the State Department, the office of the Prophet in Salt Lake, and His Highness’s lawyers in New York. You’ll have your minute when he can spare it.’

‘I can go do my other thing and come back when it’s quieter?’

‘It won’t get quieter, Detective. The day is full. No, no, what you will do, since he has been good enough to say he will talk to you, is to come in and wait where I put you, so that when he is free to give you his time, he can do it with the minimum inconvenience. Understood?’

‘Understood,’ said Barrow. ‘Yakokai, Father—?’

‘Pali. Jerome Pali. But it is not me you should be thanking. Follow me!’

And he led Barrow across a white-walled hall where a couple of relatives of Couma’s bodyguard were stationed, though without visible machine guns, and up a staircase of old dark wood onto an upper corridor where the diamond-paned windows Barrow had glimpsed from below looked out onto nothing but depthless white.

‘Where, where, where, where, where?’ said Father Jerome to himself. ‘Ah, yes.’

He unlatched a door in a stone archway and urged Barrow through it with quick propelling motions of his soft hands, like somebody hustling a hen.215

‘Now stay put,’ he said severely. ‘He will find you. And don’t smoke! It’s bad for the pictures.’

Barrow was in a long, long room running at right angles to the corridor he’d just come off. A ribbon of Persian carpet extended the whole way to the end, where there was another, mightier door. The floor under it was ancient timber polished till it shone like black glass, the walls were wood panelling aged to the colour of old leather, and there were indeed pictures hung all the way along the gallery. It was warmer than the Plaza outside, but not much. The settled chill of antiquity was on it. Perhaps the inhabitants kept warm in winter by, like Father Jerome, always moving at a scurry. Barrow wished for the cigarette he’d been forbidden to have, and paced along with his hands in his pockets.

The pictures, he saw, got newer as they went along. In fact they formed a kind of history, starting with a faded tapestry that showed a man on a raft in peculiar regalia, surrounded by heaps of ailing, almost-naked takouma. The Plague Prince, presumably, making his way upriver after the fall of Tenochtitlan to found the city. (And why the House of Hashi would have the Aztec legend on their wall, Barrow did not know, if they didn’t want people to believe it, and didn’t believe it themselves.) Then came a long run of portraits. To begin with, they were awkward. Stiff and blocky and not quite right in their proportions, early products presumably of the workshops where the Jesuits were teaching their takouma converts to master working in oils. Yet even in these first clumsy paintings of tattooed princes with crucifixes of polished shell around their necks, the face was recognisably the one that he had last seen in the back of a Duesenberg. The same long nose, the same sharp sardonic eyes. The Hashis had clearly bred true for centuries. There it was again, the face, a little later on, in a much more accomplished picture, its owner wearing brocade and leaning on a pillar, yet still giving the same assessing glance. And again in the outfit of 216a sporting gentleman, pointing to a deer fleeing with all four of its legs in the air. And again in a black silk hat and white neckcloth, the whole outfit turned nineteenth-century monochrome except for the red plugs of the earrings.

But after that the paintings got bigger, more dramatic – pictures of events, not of the one individual, though he was always there somewhere if you looked. There was the Cuauhtemoc of the time on horseback, welcoming the weary Cherokee refugees of the Trail of Tears, as they came through the trees in the twilight with their packs and their handcarts. There he was surrounded by riflemen under the green banner of the Legion and the harp banner of St Patrick’s Brigade, defeating the American invaders in the War of 1846. There he was again, though it took some searching to find him, in a huge oil painting called, according to the label on the base of the gold frame, THE PEOPLES SELECT THE ROUTE OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD. The artist had really gone to town on this one. Around an exaggeratedly long table covered in maps, little groups were arguing, all dolled up to the maximum in spectacular and different tribal costumes. Navajos in ropes of turquoise, Comanches in buckskins and feathers, Plains representatives in at least three different styles of buffalo robes, Brigham Young in a prophetic gown embroidered with lightning flashes, some Kansas takata pioneers wearing stiff collars and cravats. The front of a locomotive was butting into the conversation from the right, while out of a window at the left, a landscape compressing all America could be seen, arranged in blue romantic distance. Forest and plain and mountains and desert and, far off, a twinkle of the Pacific. The Man was at the end of the table, showing a model of the Cahokia Bridge to a bearded takata in the sleek suit of a banker.

Something struck Barrow, and he went back to the beginning of the gallery to check. It was true. All the portraits were of princes, of 217course, not princesses, but nowhere on the tapestry raft, nowhere in the background of any of the grand history paintings, were there any women at all. Even the footsore refugees were, improbably, all male. He was leaning close to the railroad painting again, examining the faces in the shadows – still male, male and male again – when the present owner of the Hashi nose spoke, unexpectedly close behind him.

‘My uncle told me it wasn’t like that at all,’ said the Man, who must have come silently through a door in the panelling, and padded up the carpet. He was wearing a lounge suit in Prince of Wales check with a maroon tie and handkerchief. He smelled of lilac cologne. ‘The Comanches had just martyred poor Brother Thomas and Sister Agnes, and had to be brought into the discussion at the point of a Maxim gun, and J. P. Morgan there’ – he pointed to the banker – ‘refused to be in the same room at all.’

‘Sir!’ said Barrow. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’ Then, although there were many more urgent things to talk about, he found himself saying, because the Man was still gazing thoughtfully at the canvas, ‘Where are all the women? I can’t find a single one.’

The Man chuckled. ‘Do you know, Father Jerome has been with me three years, fussing over these pictures daily, and he hasn’t noticed that? Perhaps he takes it for granted. The answer is: elsewhere. This is the men’s place, Detective. It is a Hispano-Baroque mansion of the early seventeenth century, and it is also the men’s longhouse of the tamaha, where the men’s business is done.’

‘Didn’t your wife live here with you, when she was alive?’

‘Well yes, of course. Symbolism only takes you so far. Though she did always prefer our summer place, up at the Springs. Now: you have more to ask me, but Father Jerome is correct when he says the day is full, so you’ll have to tag along if you want to talk. And, just to be clear, there will be a price for each question.’

‘A price?’218

‘I get to ask you one back, and this time you answer fully, freely, and without suppressions. Acceptable? Then follow me.’

‘I really only need to bother you briefly, sir, about one thing,’ said Barrow, being led smoothly and swiftly up the gallery.

‘Oh? Well, we’ll get to that, just as soon as you’ve paid off your debt of questions to me, Detective. You’re two down at this point, you know. I’m not sure I would have spent my questions on art history and the Hashi family’s living arrangements, but you know your business best, I’m sure.’

The grander door at the end of the gallery led to another, grander staircase, which led in turn down to another hallway, tiled in black and white squares and lit by old-fashioned gas jets. The same antique chill prevailed. By now Barrow had lost all sense of how the warren of the house aligned to the outer world. Oscar the chauffeur was waiting, big as a pillar in overcoat and leather gloves.

‘Oh good, you’re back,’ said the Man. ‘To the Union Club please, tastanagi.’

There was a heavy door inset with patterned glass that might have been a way out, but rather than taking it, they filed through another discreet opening in the dark panelling, to a tightly spiralling service stair. Like a drill bit coring out a hole through some complex layered material, it took them rapidly down through old stone and newer brick into the oil-stained concrete of what turned out to be an underground garage. Oscar fitted the spiral stair but only just. Barrow, at the back, looking down past the Man onto his immense shoulders and the foot-long side-part gleaming in his black hair, put him together with the being in the fog carrying the golden staff.

‘Was that you in the mask outside?’ he asked, when they were down.

‘You should know better than to ask that, by now,’ rumbled Oscar. Black pupils, sidelong.219

‘Also, that makes three questions you owe us,’ put in the Man, as if he were some tricksy creature met in a folk tale rather than a politician in the middle of a crisis.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Barrow firmly. ‘I didn’t get an answer to that last one.’

The Man clicked his tongue. ‘True enough,’ he said. Oscar held open the rear door of the Duesenberg, and he slipped neatly to the far corner of the back seat. ‘Come along,’ he said, beckoning. ‘No time to waste.’

Oscar cranked up the garage door, and took the big limousine carefully out up a steep ramp onto what seemed to be the south shore of Creekside Drive, so far as Barrow could tell from the snatches of stone balustrade that appeared in the white murk. The sun had moved or something, and the fog no longer glowed like a garment illuminated from within. It was dimmer now, though just as thick. Barrow could see the little coloured lights from the dials on the dash brightening Oscar’s hands on the wheel. The Duesenberg’s headlamps pushed two spears of yellow forward through the vapour, but visibility was still only a few feet. They crept along.

‘Detective?’ said the Man. Barrow turned, and found the prince of the city studying him with the teasing, the merriment, the games-playing removed. The little red monsters in his ears seemed to study him too. Barrow took in, this time, the wilder visage on one side, the tamer one on the other, and wondered if they might be Thrown-Away and Lodge Boy, but he did, he finally did, know better than to ask.

‘Yes, sir,’ Barrow said. He braced himself for complicated invitations to betrayal.

‘First question. Most important question. What do you think is happening in this city?’220

3

‘What?’ said Barrow. ‘You want my opinion on, on, the politics? Why?’ The Man had to know better what was going on than any street cop, or musician for that matter.

‘I won’t count those as questions. No, I want to check on your understanding of the situation, Detective.’

Barrow bridled automatically at the idea that the Man had a right to set him tests, but it was a reflex Drummond had taught him, and it seemed to be fading. His understanding of the situation was a fog-bound metropolis in itself, and among the things moving in those clouded internal streets, there was a procession following a pinprick of light, and a woman’s voice telling a story from not long after the creation of the world. A story he might possibly have a place in. It felt as if something was beginning to be opened up to him, and he wanted more.

‘Well,’ he said cautiously, ‘I think someone is … trying to take the city away from the takouma. By, you know, whipping up a crisis over the Land Trust murder.’

‘Well, thank heavens for that,’ said the Man. ‘If you hadn’t got that far, this would be a very difficult conversation. – Yes, Detective. Yes, absolutely. What is being attempted here is a repetition of the strategy that worked in Texas and in California, last century, and in Hawaii only twenty or so years ago. Make trouble; demand outside intervention to restore order; when you get it, make sure that the order that is restored conveniently wipes away native power and native property rights. All in line with the great unspoken principle of American history, Detective. Which is, if it’s worth having, the red man shall not be allowed to keep it.’

The Man’s voice was still educated, grammatical, elaborate. He was speaking in a limousine. He did not seem like a red man who 221was in immediate danger of losing the very large amount that he possessed. But he said this last sentence with such harshness that for a moment it made the limousine, the city, the whole takouma inheritance here, seem uncertain. Mere wisps, thinner than fog. As if one strong wind could blow it all away in favour of another vista, in which a remnant of the takouma, poor and desperate, camped out in the last worst scraps of the continent.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow, not quite sure why he wanted to argue, except perhaps to push this picture away, ‘but Texas, California, those places – they were outside the US at the time, right? That’s why they could do that.’

Even with the snail’s pace driving, and a couple of sharp halts when a pedestrian materialised in the yellow of the headlamps, they had reached the turn onto Union. The fog descended a stage further into dingy grey. They were under the shadow of the elevated tracks. The lights of the occasional vehicle coming the other way swelled slowly, lemon-coloured blotches.

‘Indeed. It’s a little more complicated to play the trick here. We are already a State of the Union, and we managed to come in on our own terms. So an invasion won’t quite work. Here what they need to do is to overthrow the State Constitution and in particular the clauses of it that write in the collective ownership of the Three Sisters, Land and Water and Power. They need an emergency big enough to get the federal authorities to suspend local law.’

‘Yeah, but there’d still be a takouma majority living here.’

‘About 60 per cent, yes.’

‘So Mayor Lakna would go on winning elections. Sunshine Gus would still be our senator in Washington.’

The Man shuddered delicately at his son’s nickname. Oscar turned them off Union and onto 3rd, back into the domain of banks. Judging by the greater number of lighted windows and the slight uptick of foot traffic through the murk, more of these 222were open than the stores to the south.

‘I expect so. For a while, anyway. But if the rules of the game were changed, if we had lost the land under our feet, that might not matter terribly. The takata would own the streets, and the Klan would rule them, effectively, whatever was said in the Statehouse. The police would be their tool. Mayor Lakna would be comfortably confined to kissing babies, and not insulted for his skin colour more than he could learn to tolerate. Say, once or twice a day. I also don’t believe that Cahokia would stay 60 per cent takouma for long if the earth and the air and the river were for sale to the highest bidder. Once that was gone, the rest would melt away.’

He tapped the window glass proprietorially as if, rather than he being in a small glass-and-steel box moving through a big world, the proportions were reversed, and he had the state of Cahokia, earth and air and river, held in a glass globe. ‘All that,’ he said.

Parking spots were easy to find today. Oscar put the Duesenberg into one right in front of a set of red-carpeted steps that Barrow recognised, even through the fog, as the way in to the Union Club. He turned off the engine.

‘So,’ said the Man, with a smile, ‘I am spending this week trying to persuade people of influence – here, in DC, everywhere – that this is not a good idea. I talk to those negotiating with Deseret, and point out that the United States breaking its word to Cahokia isn’t a good advertisement to the Mormons for joining the club. I talk to those concerned about the Bolsheviks in the NST, and point out that unrest on the Mississippi plays into their hands. I talk to the president: and there, any point I want to make, any card I try to play, is trumped by the fact that the man is an idiot. I pull on the strings of self-interest, honour, intelligence, caution – but I can’t pull hard. You see, as my very expensive lawyers in New York point out to me, the legal excuse for destroying the tamaha is likely to be the clause in the federal constitution which guarantees every state, quote, “a republican form of 223government”. Sound too royal, show too much power, and I defeat myself. There’s a limit on what I can do, Detective.’

The Man sat back, apparently in no hurry after all to get to whatever his business was in the Union Club. He gazed at Barrow with what seemed alarmingly like expectation. There had been a touch of emphasis on ‘I’. A limit on what I can do, Detective … The old reflex kicked again. It would be good if, the instant he started to get free from Drummond, everybody didn’t try to sign him up to some other programme of their own.

‘If you can’t fix it, sir, then I sure as hell can’t,’ he said.

‘Can’t you?’

‘Is that a question?’

A glimmer of humour in the Man’s eye. ‘No, Detective, just an expression of disbelief. If the Land Trust murder sparked our crisis off, it would help at least to solve it, don’t you think? – Also not a question. My second question to you is not rhetorical. It is very straightforward. Detective: who killed Fred Hopper?’

‘I don’t know!’ said Barrow. Then, more slowly, ‘I don’t know whose hands were holding the knife, anyway. It doesn’t seem like it could have been anyone in the Warriors. Setting up that scene on the roof – getting poor old Fred to be there – that needed a whole lot of co-ordination to make that happen, with Fred himself, with the Klan to put him in the job, with a takata gang to keep the pressure on. The Warriors couldn’t have rigged all that even if they wanted to. The only wrinkle there is that one of them, an obnoxious kid we thought we had tracked down to the Usunhiyi yesterday, does seem to be tied in somehow. But now I’m wondering whether that’s just some different thing going off at the same time, linked but … I dunno.’

‘Go on,’ said the Man.

‘But even if I don’t know who actually did it, I kind of know who’s responsible. Who commissioned it. It’s got to be the same 224people who’re trying to do the takeover. They’ve got to be the ones who wanted the … the theatre of it. Who set the killer up with the Aztec-type details they knew would push people’s buttons. The pyramid, the heart taken out, the black glass.’

At the mention of the obsidian, Barrow felt a slight pang for Doyle’s expectations, and the museum he wasn’t on his way towards. But only a slight one.

‘It couldn’t be coincidence being exploited,’ said the Man.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Barrow. ‘The speed things have moved since Sunday – no, someone was ready, someone was prepped for this, someone knew this was coming.’

‘Indeed. I could add to that, the choice of a time for the murder when the tamaha is without some of the traditional elements of its strength. When my brother the cardinal is away in Rome for the papal election, for example.’

‘Of course I don’t know who these people are, who we’re talking about,’ said Barrow. ‘I don’t know their names, anything useful like that.’

The Man grinned.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Would you like to meet them?’

*

It turned out, once the three of them reached the top end of the carpet, that instead of the blue-and-gold doorman there was a guard outside the Union Club today, a takata bravo in a derby hat and a muffler. His nose was broken, his demeanour was mournful. By all ordinary standards he would have been quite large and imposing; just not by Barrow’s, and Oscar’s. Nevertheless he blocked their way as they approached, and showed a Pinkerton’s card.

‘None o’ youse to come in,’ he said. ‘Orders.’

‘You’re from out of town,’ said the Man genially. ‘You probably don’t know that my uncle founded this club, and that I was written onto the books as a member at the age of seven.’225

‘No offence, but you coulda been a member since the age of the dinosaurs, and you still wouldn’t be comin’ in today.’

‘Oscar, move this gentleman,’ said the Man.

Oscar cracked his knuckles. His black gloves were the size of baseball mitts. The Pinkerton’s man only regarded him with a melancholy professional interest, and resettled his jacket minutely, to show the holster bulge. Oscar nodded in a similarly minimal spirit. Then he made his way unhurriedly back to the Duesenberg, and through the fog they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, and something metallic being cocked. He came back with a tommy gun twin to the one Barrow had seen at the House of the Moon. The Hashi family must have been buying in bulk.

The guard moved.

The Man led the way into the sanctum of money. It was much warmer and more comfortable inside than the palace had been. The rugs yielded underfoot, the air was perfumed with the smells of lunch and of cigars, ruby glints of light caressed old wood. Voices were coming from a room at the far end of the hall: the kind that did not expect to be interrupted. The Man walked his fingers across a table where newspapers and members’ mail were laid out. Barrow got the impression that, whatever he said, it had been a long time since he’d visited.

‘Detective,’ he said in an undertone, ‘would you mind keeping quiet while we’re in here? The message I’m delivering needs to come through clearly, with no distractions.’

‘Okay,’ said Barrow.

They could see the thick shadow of the Pinkerton’s agent where he was pressing against the outside of the engraved glass of the door, hands cupped as he tried to see what they were doing.

‘Why don’t you make sure that no-one else comes in?’ called Oscar, his voice pitched to penetrate. The shadow retreated.

‘He’ll fetch reinforcements,’ Oscar predicted.226

‘This won’t take long,’ said the Man.

The door at the end of the corridor was ajar. The Man lifted his chin, gave a little limbering twist to his shoulders – like, Barrow thought, an actor just about to go onstage – and pushed inside. The voices paused, startled, then when Oscar followed made a brief protesting noise expressing the different kind of surprise felt when a man of six foot seven enters a room holding a machine gun. The repertoire was exhausted when Barrow entered. The room’s circle of men in armchairs had no surprise left for him. With one exception: Arthur Vanderberg, sitting teddy-bear-like in the chair nearest the fire, gave him a startled, momentary glance before composing his face back into lazy contempt.

‘Brandy and soda, please,’ said the Man to a taklousa steward just coming out with a tray. He bobbed his head and left fast.

‘And so,’ said Vanderberg, sounding as ever as if he were reading aloud something he found ridiculous, ‘savage Force breaks in among the ceremonies of Civility.’

‘Oh, the gun?’ said the Man. ‘You are quite wrong. This is Civility making its last plea for Force to be avoided.’

He worked his way around the ring of faces, greeting them one by one; and doing so by name, which Barrow thought was probably for his benefit.

‘Bishop Halloran,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to see any son of Mother Church involved in something like this. I’m sure it wasn’t what my brother the cardinal had in mind when he asked you to keep the diocese warm. – Mr Gerhardt, I know that times are thin in the brewery business just now, but I can’t believe this will help. – Mr Panton. Oh, Mr Panton. Tut, tut. Five generations of successful collaboration with the tamaha, very profitable collaboration, building all the way up from a tin-roofed trading post to that glorious tower, and now you decide to jump ship? – Mr Dredgehorn, you I am not surprised to find in this company. The headlines of the Post have 227been advertising your opinion for years. Editors come, editors go, but it is always your horn that is heard. And the music remains stubbornly the same. – Mr Vanderberg! What has our city done to deserve your presence, when there must be so many quarters of your empire that need your attention? I understand your last bond issue was very hard to get away, even at the most—’

‘What is this plea you want to make, Hashi?’ Vanderberg said, sharply.

‘For the Klan not to march tomorrow, gentlemen. For the guns to stay in their racks. For us all to step back from the brink. Inter arma enim silent leges. Listen to Cicero if you won’t listen to me. Once the weapons are out, the laws fall silent.’

‘How puzzling!’ said Arthur Vanderberg. ‘I don’t know about you other fellows, but why would you think I had any influence over an enthusiastic rabble like the Klan?’

‘Why indeed,’ said the Man. ‘Anyone else?’

He surveyed the chairs again, and the well-fed takata faces in them. The bishop looked uncomfortable, but no-one spoke.

The steward came back with a glass tumbler on the tray, contents amber and fizzing. The Man took a single swig and put it back. ‘Ah, you really can trust Mr Weiss to deliver the real thing. – Well, I tried. If it comes to open conflict, matters will be out of my hands. Do remember, gentlemen, that the tamaha has its mechanisms of defence. Good day.’

He led them back out. The goon on the step had indeed been joined by another of his kind, but when Oscar raised the barrel of the Thompson gun questioningly, they in turn lifted their hands in the foggy air, and stepped back to let them pass.

‘Oscar, the Bridge,’ the Man said, when they were back in the Duesenberg and pulling away from the kerb.

‘Hey, no, I need to be getting back over to the museum,’ said Barrow.228

‘You haven’t even asked your first question yet,’ the Man pointed out. As he reclined in his leather-lined corner again, his face was serene, his eyes comfortably lidded, but his breath was coming audibly fast, and for the first time it struck Barrow that, poised though the Man was, nimble though he was, he was also old. He might not be as sure as he seemed that he had the strength required for this crisis.

‘What did you mean when you said that it would be out of your hands?’ Barrow asked.

The Man closed his eyes the rest of the way.

‘Is that really what you most want to ask?’ he said. ‘Is that what you had in mind when you contacted me?’

‘No.’

‘Well then. First things first. An orderly mind is a precious possession, as my tutors always taught me.’

‘All right. It was about the Navajo police. We were pretty sure that our suspect from yesterday got on the Usunhiyi—’

‘The “obnoxious kid” you mentioned.’

‘Yes; him – got on the Usunhiyi with a Pullman ticket to California he couldn’t really afford. But when they searched the train for him in the Dinetah last night, there was no sign. Or so they said.’

‘And you were thinking, why would they lie? If they were lying.’

‘No, sir. It’s obvious why they’d lie – because someone asked them to, and it was more important to them to oblige that someone than to co-operate on the level, department to department, with the Cahokia PD. What I want to know is, who they would lie for.’

‘I see,’ said the Man.

‘Would they lie if, for example, you asked them to, sir?’

‘I think that very probably they would, Detective. I think that if I rang up the chairman of the Tribal Council in Tseghahudzani and said, Edgar, truth is a great thing, but this time the greater good would be served by your police telling a strategic fib to our police – they would do it.’229

‘Did you?’

The Man opened his eyes.

‘No, Detective. I didn’t. Neither I nor anyone else in the palace called the Dinetah last night.’

‘Then who else would they lie for?’

‘Isn’t it my turn again now? Surely you’ve had your question, Detective.’

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ said Barrow, suddenly infuriated. ‘Why do we have to treat this as a game?’

Oscar turned his head, eyes wide with some combination of reproach and menace.

‘It’s all right,’ said the Man. ‘It’s all right. – I like games, Detective; I’m good at them. For God’s sake, and for my people’s sake, I have been playing the game my uncle chose for us, my entire adult life. Us against the takata world, by the takata world’s rules. It’s a draw so far. And in the interests of that great game, I will go on playing this silly, small game of questions with you, Detective, just so long as I don’t know where your loyalties lie. Or perhaps I should say, just as long as you don’t—’

‘Woah!’ shouted Oscar, and stood on the brakes. They had been moving westward from Division up one of the industrial avenues leading into the capillaries that served the Bridge, having first travelled south to avoid the insurrection in the takata districts. But not far enough south, apparently. Looming up out of the fog was the red smeech of a building on fire, and across the road stretched a makeshift barricade fashioned of oil drums and plugs of concrete rolled into place. Coming from behind it to check out the limo they’d halted were a line of shadowy white men toting staves.

‘Hold on to something,’ said Oscar, and reversed with his foot flat on the floor on the gas. The straight-eight engine howled. There was no more visibility behind them than in front, but Oscar clearly regarded anyone stepping in the way now as acceptable roadkill. 230They hurtled backwards at fifty miles an hour. Then he stamped simultaneously on clutch and brakes and whirled the wheel. The long Duesenberg spun in its own length on smoking tyres, and slid to a stop facing more or less back the way they’d come. He kicked the engine to a roar again, engaged top gear, declutched, and they were speeding off forwards. The stink of burning rubber filled the cabin.

‘Chokma, miko?’ Oscar called.

‘Chokmataha, tastanagi,’ said the Man. ‘Perfectly placid, thank you.’

Oscar laughed.

‘How ’bout you, Detective?’

‘Ma,’ said Barrow.

Oscar laughed some more.

‘Maybe a different route, though?’ said the Man.

‘Yeah, I think so!’

They tried again three blocks further south. ‘Yalki!’ he said, when another burn-coloured point of light swam up in soupy air to the west. But then, ‘No … wait …’ They crept forward and it became clear that this time the fire was in a brazier, and those standing around it were a mixed crowd of takouma, taklousa and takata wearing armbands and holding union signs. CLC, said the signs: Cahokia Labor Council. The crowd pressed towards the car, but not threateningly, and when Oscar wound down his window, a spokesman bent down and said, ‘Don’t go any further north. We got this area safe, but it’s rough up there.’

‘Thank you, brother,’ said Oscar. ‘It’s okay, we’re headed for the Bridge.’

‘You heard any news?’ the picket asked. Or rather, began to ask; but others had seen who was in the back. Hats came off. Faces leaned in out of the fog. The Man scrabbled at the winder on his window but was evidently not used to operating it himself. Barrow reached across and did it for him. There must have been twenty or 231thirty men out there. Barrow thought he could see Louis Bessa and his boys from the Helm plant towards the back.

‘The news,’ said the Man, pitching his voice to carry, ‘is that the tamaha stands on the strength of its people. The news is that we are not defenceless. The news is that the tamaha endures.’

‘Should we come to the Plaza tomorrow, miko?’ asked a voice.

‘Only if the call comes that you are needed. Listen for the call, and do not come without it. You know that in these times it will not come from me.’

This seemed to satisfy the questioner. There was nodding.

‘The Sun and the Moon!’ someone cried, and the crowd in the roadway repeated it sombrely. ‘The Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon.’

‘Keep safe, children,’ said the Man, and Oscar drove carefully on. The Man inclined his head to left and right until they were past. Barrow wound the window back up for him.

‘Jesumaria,’ said the Man. ‘What a lot of people need this to turn out right. If only we could deal with this as easily as we saw off Leander Sprugg.’

‘Who?’ said Barrow.

‘Oh, a problem of my uncle’s uncle’s time. A filibuster from New Orleans who was under the impression that if he rode up here with two hundred ne’er-do-wells on horseback, the city would tumble into his lap. They hanged him and his officers on the Plaza. My uncle said his gravestone should have read, DIED OF SURPRISE. Simpler days.’

‘You sound like you wish you were back in ’em.’

‘No, not really. I said simpler, not better. The tamaha needed to outgrow princes. Anyway, my uncle committed us. And he was probably right. Monarchies have never thrived for long in the New World since Columbus came.’

‘There haven’t been any, have there?’232

‘Ah, American education. A few: a couple of emperors in Brazil, two in Mexico, a king and an emperor in Haiti. And of course in theory, boring George is king of Canada.’

‘You … know the king of England,’ said Barrow, flatly.

The Man patted his knee.

‘Only to play polo with, when we were younger. We imaginary monarchs are sometimes allowed to consort with the real kind, Detective.’

Now they were in the complex of roads and rail lines leading up to the Bridge, and as they rose up the incline towards the first great arch of girders, they came to a police perimeter, a line of officers in capes holding hissing flares that stained the fog with smoke. They were there to govern the line of motor traffic that was trying to leave the city on the road deck of the Bridge, and to stop it clogging the crossings for the traffic moving on the rail level. The interurban cars were still running; Barrow could see the officers holding back trucks and automobiles so that one crowded with people could rumble through on its steel bogeys, pantograph overhead flittering and crackling in the wet. The cops were also there, it occurred to him, just to hold the Bridge. The Bridge was strategic.

Oscar honked the horn, but it was lost in the din. He opened his door, letting in a powerful wave of the river’s smell, dank and strong, and went over on foot to get the cops’ attention. Through the windshield Barrow could see him gesturing, blurred by the mist. The Duesenberg throbbed.

‘Perhaps this is where I better get out, sir,’ said Barrow. ‘I don’t wanna get too far away from everything else I need to do.’

‘You owe me a question,’ said the Man firmly. ‘We’ll have to stop for a little while over on the far side, and look, you can catch a trolley back again then.’

‘Oh, come on now,’ protested Barrow.233

‘A deal’s a deal, Detective.’

‘You mean a game’s a game.’

‘Quite so.’

Oscar trotted back and climbed behind the wheel. Barrow found himself unable to leave without being dismissed.

‘Where are you going anyway?’ he asked, as the cops levered open a space for them in the departing column of vehicles. The Duesenberg’s wheels bumped over tracks, and then they were on the long upward slope of the road deck, brake lights ahead climbing two by two into thick oblivion, asphalted steelwork thrumming, the huge riveted curves of the bridge supports flicking by in steady four-four time. Up in the middle of the Bridge, high over the Mississippi water from which all the fog had brewed, there was a slight breeze, and the fabric of the fog could be seen to be in motion, pouring slowly through the Bridge in sluggish streamers, left to right.

‘To the festival of the Green Corn Planting in the parish of St Lawrence,’ said the Man.

‘What? Today? With all … this … going on?’

‘Detective, Detective,’ said the Man. ‘Keep a sense of proportion, please. They need me. Whatever else is happening, the corn must be planted. The Sun must shine on it. Spring must come. You do want spring to come, don’t you?’

Barrow stared at him, almost sure, but not absolutely sure, that he was being teased.

‘You don’t seriously believe that spring won’t come without your help! – Do you?’

‘I don’t know whether it would or not,’ said the Man gravely. ‘I’ve never missed a Green Corn Planting, so I’ve never had occasion to find out. I don’t think I’d care to take the risk.’

He held Barrow’s gaze for a moment longer. Then he snickered, and sounds of amusement could be heard coming from the driver’s seat too.234

‘Oh, Detective, your face! Mr Barrow, I had an American education too. At Harvard, in fact. I know that spring is caused by the regular tilting of the Earth’s axis as it orbits our star. I really do. But I also know that spring is caused by God’s grace, in the form of the sun’s rays, touching this dark earth with new life: a sacred birth, a sacred return, which deserves all the singing, all the dancing, all the ceremony we can give to it. The world turns, but it is not a clockwork mechanism, Detective. It is a circular dance, from birth to death to resurrection, through arches of flowers, and arches of bread, and arches of skulls. We dance the turning world, and it dances us.’

Saying this, the Man did not look like a teasing aristocrat. He looked like the ancient priest of something Barrow did not understand. They had reached the western end of the Bridge. More cops, more flares. Oscar extracted them from the line of traffic flowing out west along the main highway, and off to the right, over freight yards twinning those on the city side of the river, and down into the streets of New Cahokia. The always-strange streets of New Cahokia, with or without the fog and the strangeness of this day of crisis, built as they were from the remnants of the Exposition twenty years before, half transformed for everyday commerce. Among the warehouses and loading docks, glimpses materialised in the murk of the plaster spires of the Hall of the Peoples, the round dome of the Sacramentarium. The sloping white skirts – just the skirts, the rest was gone – of the giant Maria Tamaha, once as tall as the Statue of Liberty, with a café in her crown.

‘I don’t believe any of that,’ said Barrow.

‘You sound sad, Thrown-Away Boy,’ said the Man.

‘Yeah, well.’

‘May I ask then what you believe in?’

‘Is that your question?’

The Man sighed.235

‘I wish it were,’ he said. ‘It should be. On any other day, it would be. What could be more right, what could be more fitting for the shape of a tale, than for the third and last question – after the one about the city, after the one about the murder – to be the one that elicited your own nature?’

‘You’re assuming I’d answer it.’

‘Oh, you’d answer it, my friend. I know you well enough to be sure of that, by now. Beneath your tough-guy crust, you turn like a sunflower towards any source of warmth. – But no, I suppose not. I suppose I had better be practical. Hang on a moment, though.’

The Man peered through his window. They had come out of the zone of surreal leftovers now, and into the countryside. They were bowling along a straight one-lane highway, shared with the interurban tracks, on top of a causeway through fields. Here the fog had lifted slightly, and drifted gauzily a few feet above pocket-sized plots to the left and right. The dark soil was laid bare, ready indeed for the planting. Here and there takouma women – all women – were out with hoes. The causeway drew a green line through the white mist across the black earth.

The Man tapped on the glass of the driver’s compartment. ‘Anywhere along here,’ he said to Oscar.

‘Just as soon as I find a passing-place, miko.’

The automobile bowled on.

The Man leaned back. ‘So,’ he said, ‘my practical question to you, Detective, is: why did Arthur Vanderberg of Union Cartridge recognise you, back there?’

Barrow had not known that the Man had noticed that momentary look. He felt a scrabbling alarm, a sense of the part he was trying to play today being suddenly dragged back by, clutched and tripped up by, the person he had allowed himself to be yesterday. Every day until yesterday. The serious policeman trying to guard the tamaha, versus the friend of Phin Drummond who consented 236to any amount of bullshit. Because … Why had he done that? Why had he been that person? One step out of the old role and it was already getting hard to understand. Because, he supposed, he had not wanted to choose, about a whole lot of things. Because he was a follower, and there had been someone to follow. And he had followed, like a young duck mistaking the farmer’s boot for his mama and going quacking off after it in loyal pursuit, through the mud and the puddles.

‘Detective? Is that a difficult question? Why is that a difficult question?’

‘I … gave him a lift to the Union Club yesterday.’

‘You gave him a lift? Vanderberg the plutocrat thumbed a ride in your police car?’

‘No … no. We were over at Union Cartridge, looking for that boy I mentioned, the one who vanished from the train. He works there. My partner said he knew someone in the company, called in; Vanderberg came out himself with the ticket on him. Then he asked, could he ride with us. His secretary was surprised.’

‘I’m sure she was. Weren’t you?’

‘Yeah. I was. He was doing this big-kid act, how-cool-to-ride-in-a-cop-car kinda thing, but it wasn’t real convincing.’

‘Contemptuously unconvincing, I’m sure. That’s our Mr Vanderberg, all right. But how did your partner happen to be able to call him up – him, the owner of the whole company?’

‘They got some kinda … arrangement.’

‘About what?’

‘About … the case, maybe.’

‘About the Land Trust murder?’

‘… Yeah.’

Saying these things out loud, putting them outside the special cabinet in his mind for the inexplicabilities of Phin, made Barrow hear them clearly himself. Hear them with dread.237

‘Detective,’ said the Man carefully. ‘You’re telling me that the man who ultimately commissioned the death of Fred Hopper is paying off the cops who are investigating it? Is paying off your partner. Is paying off … you? I warn you, Mr Barrow, this is not a confessional and there are consequences to what you say here.’

California. Orange trees. I’m tryin’ to cut you in on some good luck.

‘No! Not me. I didn’t know anythin’ about it.’ I didn’t want to know anything about it, supplied a voice in Barrow’s head.

‘You don’t know what he was doing for the money?’

‘I thought he was putting some kind of spin on things, so it came out lookin’ the way Vanderberg wanted? He didn’t seem to care exactly who we arrested.’ So long as it was a takouma.

‘There could be more than one reason for that.’

‘Phin can’t do much at all now. He’s off the case,’ Barrow offered. ‘Lieutenant Doyle – Captain Doyle – suspended him. I don’t think he’s coming back.’

Oscar had spotted a place where a grass track on another causeway came in from the left, and the highway broadened enough to pull over. He slowed. The Man didn’t take his eyes off Barrow’s.

‘And you just let him walk away, this friend of yours? With no questions asked?’

‘I think I need … to talk to him.’

‘Oh, I think you do. Urgently. Or someone does. Maybe someone less compromised. I am rethinking your participation, Detective. Maybe this is where you bow out of the case too.’

Oscar had parked and was looking back at the pair of them. The Man made no move, gave no signal that drew the driver explicitly in, but Barrow understood that he was before a tribunal of two. And was under judgement. It occurred to him that no-one knew where he was. He was way out in the sticks alone with them and a machine gun, in the fog, with deep water to swallow all secrets no doubt nearby. There were ways to make him bow out that would 238be very final. That did not square with what he had seen of the Man, or guessed of his principles. But what did he know, on the basis of two conversations. Less drastically, he could see a set-up in which the Man sent Oscar looking for Drummond. How did he feel about Phin falling into those huge hands? Some protectiveness seemed to linger, there.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I should do it. I shoulda done it before. Anyhow, you need this thing solved by the PD, if it’s gonna convince the takata. If it’s gonna calm things down.’

The Man thought. Barrow waited.

‘I do believe in redemption,’ the Man said eventually. ‘More joy in heaven over one sinner that doeth penance, and so on. But if your kingdom is of this world, you have to back up hope with a calculation of the probabilities … Very well. Very well, then. You go and find him. You have twenty-four hours.’

‘Because then you’ll put somebody else on it?’

‘No, because by then, if it’s all gone wrong tomorrow, it won’t matter any more. Welcome to the horrible burden of trust, Detective. Now please get out of the car.’

‘You’re leaving me here?’

‘I’m asking you to give me some privacy while I change my clothes, Detective,’ the Man said, mild again.

Barrow opened his door and climbed out of the Duesenberg. The fog here was cleaner. It smelled just as much of river, but less of coal smoke and more of damp earth. He crossed the metals of the interurban and went and stood on the other side of the road by a telegraph pole, and lit a shaky cigarette. It was quiet in the green and white and black world. There was no other traffic in either direction. A bird sang in the mists. A hooter sounded off on the river. He could hear the murmur of the two or three women in the nearest field as they peered at the car, and stopped the rhythmic slice and slap of their hoes. The magical strangeness of the earlier 239part of the ride, and the courtly courtesy, and the game of questions, seemed far away already, replaced by guilt. His sewn eyebrow was stinging again.

At the limo, the Man had drawn curtains across the back windows, and Oscar had fetched him a collection of boxes and bags from the trunk. Then the chauffeur came across the road to join Barrow.

‘Spare smoke?’ he said.

Barrow offered the pack, and then his lighter.

‘Thrown-Away,’ Oscar said in acknowledgement, bending to the flame.

‘Lodge Boy,’ said Barrow.

‘You worked it out, huh.’

They stood side by side smoking in silence, the white cylinder in Oscar’s mouth looking not much bigger than a toothpick.

‘Not sure you were going to go on calling me that,’ Barrow said, after a while.

‘He decides to trust you, that’s good enough.’

Another pause. The curtains in the back of the Duesenberg rippled. The women in the field were coming over.

‘Hear you’re a pretty fair pianist,’ said Oscar.

‘A-huh.’

‘Hear you dance pretty good, too.’

Barrow said nothing.

Oscar indicated the car with the burning end of his smoke. ‘Just remember,’ he said, ‘they’re not like us. They’re flames. They burn. If you get too close they burn you.’

Barrow dropped his stub on the ground and stepped on it. ‘I gotta find a trolley back into town,’ he said.

‘I heard that,’ said Oscar calmly. ‘Maybe ask these ladies here where the stop is.’

The farmers had reached the top of the grassy bank. They were two capable-looking takouma in their forties or fifties and one 240much older and smaller, by the looks of things their mother, back bent over by decades of stooping to the corn.

‘Ishla,’ said Oscar.

‘Ishla,’ echoed Barrow.

They chorused a greeting back, but their attention was all on the car, from which the Man was climbing out, transformed. The outfit for a Bostonian gentleman had vanished. He was now dressed in an embroidered buckskin tunic, knee-length, with saffron-yellow leggings under it and moccasins on his feet. There were yellow gloves on his hands, which he was spreading in welcome. He had braided his hair with a yellow tie. He still had a cross round his neck, but it was now at the centre of a gold sun disc. Most startlingly, he had painted his eyelids gold. There was a double flash whenever he blinked.

The old lady said something in Anopa which Barrow, though he didn’t understand any of the words, had no difficulty in translating as ‘I told you it was him’, and all three surged forward. ‘Miko!’ they said, bobbing their heads, and Barrow saw that they took care not to touch the Man, but it was a respectful familiarity they showed towards him – as if an oracle passing by, or a messenger from heaven, was a stroke of luck but nothing too far out of the ordinary. A rapid conversation in Anopa ensued. The Man bent his head down gravely, bestowing golden blinks.

‘What are they talking about?’ Barrow asked Oscar.

‘The weather. If it will be a good season for the corn. The Man says he thinks it will be a dry summer. The old one says, that’s not what they say on the radio. The Man says, he doesn’t think the sun will obey the forecasters. This makes them smile. Now the one on the left is complaining about how much their crop insurance is costing—’

‘Yeah, okay.’

‘It matters to them,’ said Oscar.241

The conversation petered out in declarations of mutual esteem. The Man turned back to the Duesenberg.

‘Do you want me to translate for you?’ Oscar asked.

‘No, I’m good,’ said Barrow, put on his mettle. He was almost sure that the term for a trolley was ikcoli. Adding ‘please’ should do the job.

‘Bana, ikcoli?’ he said to the old lady, as the leader of the group.

She stared at him. Then she grinned, showing her gums, and went into a saw-toothed cackle. She slapped Barrow on the back – the lower back, she couldn’t reach very high – and said something in Anopa that caused her daughters to start laughing too. Rocking, whooping, thigh-slapping, funniest-thing-in-years laughter. It was infectious. Oscar roared. The Man covered his mouth and shook.

‘What did she say?’ demanded Barrow. ‘What? What?’

‘She said,’ Oscar managed to get out, ‘that you’re a good-looking boy but she thinks you’re a little bit young for her.’

‘Oh God,’ said Barrow. ‘What did I say?’

‘“Trolley” is chanali. You asked her for something else. Something all women have. Something not very polite.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Don’t worry about it. You did say please!’

Everyone laughed some more.

‘Please apologise to her,’ said Barrow.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay. She says … it’s nice to know she can still catch the fish. That means—’

‘I got it. Really.’

‘Also, you can get the interurban in the next village, about a mile along. C’mon, we’ll drop you off there.’

The farmers trooped off down the bank. As they picked up their hoes, one of the daughters must have repeated ‘Bana, ikcoli’ because they all went off into whoops again. Barrow had clearly provided them with entertainment that would last months, if not years.242

Oscar turned the key and started the engine. Without discussion, Barrow joined him in the front, shifting the tommy gun carefully aside. There was something about the Man dressed like this that made it clear he was no longer a being you could share a car seat with.

‘Hey, it’s a pity you can’t come along to the Planting,’ said Oscar, when they were rolling again. ‘There’s a party afterwards. It gets pretty lively. You might’ve found somebody younger who wanted to share her trolley-stop. Maybe only seventy years old. Maybe sixty!’

‘You ever gonna let me forget that?’ said Barrow.

‘I don’t think so, Thrown-Away.’

4

They left him in the village of St Louis, which was a church, a gas station and a general store, clustered under dripping oak trees. There was a sign put up by the state historical society saying the place had been founded by a French settler in 16-something. It didn’t seem to have grown much since.

The stop for the interurban was outside the store. Barrow went in and bought an apple and a piece of pie and handed over a dime for the use of the telephone. He didn’t want to go into the department and have the conversation with Doyle about Drummond until he’d spoken to the man himself – he certainly owed him that much – but Chokfi ought to be able to tell him what he needed to know to find him. He didn’t relish speaking to her about Drummond either, but at least that was a case of simple hatred.

‘Hello, Detective Squad,’ she said.

‘It’s Barrow,’ he said.

‘Oh, the miko’s been wondering where you are.’243

‘I got sidetracked.’

‘He says he wants your report from the museum, and he wants it like a couple of hours ago.’

‘I haven’t got there yet. Tell him it was worth it, though, wouldya? I learned some other stuff, important stuff, which I will come in and tell him, soon as I can. Or type it up on a pink form, he prefers. But listen, first I got to speak to Drummond.’

‘Him,’ she said. ‘Why’d you wanna speak to him?’

‘I just got to, okay? Can you be a doll and find me his home address?’

‘Mr Barrow,’ she said. ‘Am I a doll? Am I a rabbit?’

‘You are not,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I mis-spoke. You are a woman of dignity. Since this morning, you terrify me slightly.’

‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Okay, hold the line and I’ll go and get it. – It’s funny you don’t know it, though, you being his friend and all. Haven’t you ever been over to his place?’

‘I never have. I don’t know why, but I never have.’ And come to think of it, that is funny, Barrow thought.

There was a pause. Barrow could hear the tock-tock sound of her heels retreating, and then distant squadroom voices. In his other ear, however, the one not pressed to the black Bakelite earpiece, he could hear a distant clanging of a trolley bell. He glanced out the window. Still nothing, but it could only be a minute or two.

She came back.

‘The captain says he wants you back here right now,’ she said.

‘Have you got it?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I’ve been riding with the Man of the Sun,’ said Barrow, remembering the Man’s portrait on the wall of her cubby. She would be looking at it now, he was sure, red earrings and all. ‘He gave me something to do. This is part of it.’

‘Yes, but—’244

‘You’re in the Four Winds, aren’t you?’

‘I can’t talk about that.’

‘I know – but this is like that. I got to do it.’

‘… Okay,’ she said. ‘308 Dearborn, it says on his card. No phone number. But hurry back. The miko’s starting to rage.’

‘Okay, quick as I can. Yakokai.’

‘Kaniya, babishili.’ She rang off.

The trolley slid into sight.

‘Hey,’ called Barrow to the shopkeep as he dashed for the door. ‘Kaniya’s “goodbye”, right? What’s babishili?’

‘“Brother”!’

*

The single green car of the interurban had its single round headlamp on. It was only around three in the afternoon but when Barrow swung himself aboard up the metal steps, the long space of varnished wood, with its rows of upholstered benches and its tulip light bulbs between the windows, felt from inside like a box of brightness suspended in hazy evening. Hardly anybody was in there, however. The trolley he’d seen grinding onto the Bridge had been packed to the gunwales with people. There were just a couple in coats and hats up at the front riding this one, and the conductor, a stout taklousa in his forties, making his way down the aisle towards the door at the rear as the trolley hummed and moved off.

‘You sure about that, man?’ he said, when Barrow asked for a ticket to the city. ‘No-one’s going in, today. We been hauling them out, many as we can fit, all day long.’

‘I got to,’ said Barrow, showing his badge. ‘I’m Cahokia PD.’

The conductor shrugged.

‘Well, good luck,’ he said.

‘What’s running in the tamaha, do you know?’

‘Pretty much all the routes in Ofayville are down, what I hear. 245White folks’ strike’s taken out the white folks’ trolleys. Where you wanna git?’

Dearborn was up in the far north-west of the city, in the ambiguous zone where the less-prosperous edge of the prosperous takouma Northside tailed off into tract housing at the least-prosperous top end of Germantown. Far as Barrow remembered, he and Drummond had been up that way once, to fish a corpse out of a canal. Drummond certainly hadn’t mentioned he lived nearby. There was no reason he shouldn’t live there, but somehow it was a surprise; it wasn’t the place, or the kind of place, Barrow would have pictured for him. Some sixth-floor apartment with empty gin bottles on the floor of the kitchenette, was more like it.

‘North-west?’ he said to the conductor.

‘Best bet’s staying right on this here through the centre, then.’

‘You’re heading on through?’

‘Oh yeah, all the way to Springfield. We go outta town up the Northside. Line goes up Lenape Avenue. Ain’t no official stop but I can drop you round 27th, 28th, like that? You’ll git a long walk west, but I don’t think you’ll do better. Mind you, you’ll have to get yourself off the trolley when I call it, and I’ll tell ya, it’s gonna be rammed, it’s going be bustin’ full from the Plaza on. All the way to the Illinois state line. Mostly,’ added the conductor reflectively, ‘with white folks. And a ton of their luggage. ’Cause they’re the ones got places to run away to. Eye-ronical, ain’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow.

An electric gondola clacking and swaying along the metals, the interurban took the causeway over the misty fields at a lick. Soon they were back among the strange miscellany of New Cahokia, fog thickening again as they approached the river. Then the interurban, having picked up only one other person, was rumbling onto the Bridge. This time it was the lower, rail deck. Halfway across a red signal stopped them. They waited, between a floor of girders 246and a ceiling of girders, with nothing to see out the sides of the Bridge but coiling grey a hundred feet down to the unseen water. The rumbling and the vibration increased, though it wasn’t the stationary trolley making it, and from behind them on the track to their right an immense locomotive passed, sixty feet of black steel gouting steam, and gliding after it, grey-and-gold car after grey-and-gold car, the eastbound Usunhiyi. It was moving slow. Slow enough that, looking up from the trolley’s windows to the higher panes of the Pullmans, Barrow could see that there were takata passengers of the express standing in the corridor of their train, peering intently down at him in turn. They were dressed in tennis dresses, plus-fours, silk pyjamas even. They had read headlines saying CAHOKIA IN TURMOIL before they set off, he guessed, and now they were passing through they were trying to catch a glimpse of the turmoil and being thwarted by the fog.

The last car passed, the light turned green. The interurban moved forward. They passed the cordon of cops holding the Bridge – tired but still in possession – and almost immediately started to find lines waiting at all the city trolley stands. The interurban, as a long-haul service, only stopped at a fraction of them, and the conductor stationed himself across the door as they pushed on by, bells dinging in warning, agitated little crowds gathered in the darker fog-shadows of high buildings or under fizzing and spitting electric signs, who began to try to surge forward when they saw the green car coming. The city seemed to have begun panicking. At least, as the conductor had pointed out, the white part of it had, those being on the whole the citizens who had choices about where else they could be.

They turned onto State Street, and here there was a designated stop. The Statehouse loomed charcoal against slate. Barrow resisted the urge to get off himself, and go home to Lydia Lee’s three blocks away and hide; and after a moment it was too late for the impulse, because through the door poured a stream of Illinois-bound takata 247functionaries and office-workers, anxious women clutching the hands of small children, an old man with a stick, a takata saxophonist and his wife Barrow recognised but didn’t know, more – until, with the car half full, the conductor shoved himself into the door and rang the bell fiercely. He clearly wanted to keep some space for the Plaza.

And indeed, once they had trundled up Christ-the-King, the yellow lights of the museum nagging at Barrow as they passed, they found something like a mob waiting at the trolley loop out in the planetary void of the Plaza. It looked as if the city had fallen already; as if these were refugees, desperately displaced into the middle of nowhere with their suitcases. The nowhere of the Plaza under fog, at any rate, with the globes of the lamp standards around the Victories shining grey like river pearls, and the edges of the great stone plain entirely out of sight. Barrow had a brief flash of the morning’s impression that the city really had vanished. These people fleeing because behind them all the buildings had dissolved. Nothing left here under the river’s dank breath but empty fields. And perhaps the lone yellow slopes of the Mound. But then the mob pressed close. As they saw the trolley approaching, the crowd contracted in towards the tracks, hardly allowing room for it to move the last few yards. They gathered up against it in a grey hubbub that became a jabber, a yammer, a roar of panicky sound as the conductor opened the door.

‘Shee-it,’ Barrow heard him say under his breath. Then, raising his voice, ‘Folks! Listen up! I got room for fi’ty more people! I’m gonna count them in, then I’m gonna close this door and that’s the way it’s gonna be. They be another car along in a few minutes, okay. Y’all gonna catch a ride, don’t worry.’

And in they came, a rush of wild faces that had caught fear off each other. All takata, or almost all: whites from the west of the city too poor to own an automobile to leave in, or to buy a more costly ticket out at Union Station, yet respectable enough, or 248timorous enough, or with enough to lose, to flee the Klan’s uprising tomorrow and whatever would follow from it. Barrow could imagine the Hoppers in this crowd, in their threadbare coats, if Fred hadn’t died on the rooftop and his wife and son hadn’t already fled. Except maybe Fred would have been proudly getting out his robes for tomorrow, and preparing to kick redskin butt in an army big enough to compensate for his individual pitifulness. Except if Fred hadn’t been killed there’d be no march, no uprising … Anyway. A woman stumbled as she was propelled up the aisle past Barrow. He put out an arm to stop her falling and her husband – pencil moustache, receding chin – barked and swiped at him, seeing nothing but a frightening brown man.

After that, Barrow squeezed up on the bench and made himself as small as possible, which was not very small. Bodies bundled up against him. He turned to the window. Pressed his head against the glass, finding the cool welcome against the stitches. Concentrated on what he could see outside instead. It was a ruck, in the darkening fog. A struggle, a slow-motion stampede with kids held high, hats falling off, here and there a head dropping out of sight as someone lost their footing. The strugglers were too busy to notice him gazing at them from inches away.

There was a flash from somewhere further back. Barrow looked over the heads, and saw it had come from a photographer’s flash powder not a gun muzzle. There was a snapper at the back of the crowd with a camera on a tripod, getting a view of the scene round the trolley. Next to him with a notebook out, looking shaken but still cool and foxy was, yes, Anderson of the Post. He looked at her. She, somehow tapped to attention by his glance, even through the mob, found him with her gaze too.

‘Forty-eight!’ shouted the conductor. ‘Forty-nine! Fi’ty! That’s all! Full up now! No sir, no ma’am! Y’all get back or you gonna get hurt!’249

There were sounds of tussling from the doorway. The conductor hit the bell twice and the motorman started to inch the trolley forward, but there were still people on the tracks ahead, people scrabbling at the sides of the interurban. It had no running-boards you could cling to for an outside ride like the city trolleys, but people tried to grab on. The trolley rocked slightly. Those who had succeeded in getting aboard, wedged in every seat and crammed standing all up the aisle, stirred in unease.

Then there was a bang from the door of the trolley. This time it was a shot. The conductor had produced a pistol and fired it in the air. The crowd cried out and drew back, drew back enough for the trolley to speed up to walking pace. The clingers-on gave up and let go. The conductor forced the door shut.

Barrow looked back to the window, and found that Anderson was walking along beside the trolley. She tapped the glass. Her face was only a couple of feet away but her expression was hard to read: amusement, sure, but that seemed to come as standard with her, and it had been joined by chagrin, determination, and maybe even a kind of embarrassment.

She was mouthing something at him. Could have been ‘Call me.’ Could have been ‘Sorry.’ He couldn’t hear a thing through the thick glass, with all the noise on board. The sight of her wide red mouth trying to enunciate whatever-it-was big enough for him to get it, sent a tightening, almost a twinge of pain, running down his nerves to his groin. It was completely unwilled, a feral thought: just the body registering chances not taken, lips not pressed to freckled skin, red fur not laid bare. He didn’t even like her.

‘What?’ he mouthed back.

She shook her head in exasperation. She wrote something in her notebook and pressed it to the glass. URGENT, CALL ME, it said. CEN-4473. The trolley was picking up speed and she was having to trot to keep the page in place. He nodded. She arched 250her eyebrows and pulled her hand away, dropped back, was immediately gone.

‘You like the white women, do you?’ said a voice beside him, filled with poisonous intent.

Barrow found that he had acquired a crushed-close circle of onlookers, all smelling of tight-wound fear, all willing to turn their fear to anger. The speaker was the stumbling woman’s husband, Pencil Moustache. Barrow reached inside his coat, an exercise that took some heaving and flexing in itself, and produced his shield.

‘Cahokia PD,’ he said, and the six or seven faces that were fixed on him reluctantly looked away and abandoned him as prey. At least, he thought, while they were still in the strange city that made big takouma and taklousa into policemen. He felt ancient reflexes stirring to life, all the apparatus of self-preservation he had needed in Nebraska, in the Montana mining-camps, in Chicago, in the war. It had been two years since he had had to think this way, he realised. He was glad he wasn’t going to Illinois. He was glad he was getting off this trolley.

Not that that was going to be easy. The aisle was solid with flesh and luggage. They rattled off the Plaza and through the opening of the arcades into Sun Street, built to align with the dawn coming from the east but showing nothing now but a vanishing point in foggy darkness. Catenaries flicking by overhead, on either side the blank faces of the two eastern Quarters. People were waiting, worrying, dreading, preparing in there while this tight can of fear flew by. They crossed Huron, and the very ancient city gave way to the Beaux Arts apartment blocks of Morningside. Four more blocks east to Lenape, and then the long haul north, but the motorman was pressing the electrics hard, running at near top speed, and with a more-than-full load already aboard, taking no chances of trouble at the trolley stops. They hurtled through them all without braking, in a clatter of warning bells. For the turn onto Lenape, they did 251slow a little, but still squealed round in a flurry of sparks. Then the electric hum pushed back to a high A-flat and stayed there. A rumble over the Creek bridge, the nearer louder blackness of the tunnel under the bluff, and out, full speed, onto the grass median up wide North Lenape in the fog and the dark, pairs of the sunflower lampposts with their nodding yellow glass heads appearing and parting before them like an endless series of opening screens.

Barrow made his move. Keeping his badge in one hand as some kind of warrant, he levered himself up from his seat and climbed up onto the bench-back. There was just room to crouch up there, gripping on with the badgeless hand. Then he set to work clambering along from seatback to seatback towards the door, having to force his foot between people at each step, and setting off a chain of complaint, protest, fury more or less suppressed again by the sight of the badge.

‘Say, what’s the—

—get your—

—giddown, you—

—no, Claude, he’s a—

—foot outta my—

—fool thing to—

—why doncha just—

—woah there, feller—

—my damn ear—

—some kinda zoo—

—mean by it—

—lot of nerve to—

—keep your big—

—wife’s not for—

—you big—

—oh now—

—crazy!’

252It was hot work in a winter coat, in a car part-packed with eighty bodies, and filled the rest of the way with the fevered exhalations of those eighty. The windows were steaming up, and by the time Barrow forced his way off the last seat, and down by weight and insistence alone onto a reluctantly ceded square foot of floor next to the conductor, he was prickling with sweat himself.

‘Wondered how you’d do that,’ said the conductor. ‘Don’t worry, you’re in good time. We just blew by the 20th Street stop, you got another minute or two. Breathe, man.’

‘Okay,’ said Barrow. ‘Thanks.’ He dropped his voice. The babble all around made a kind of privacy possible. ‘What about you, you gonna be okay when you get to Springfield? I mean … about the gun, and all.’

‘Company’ll back me up. I hope.’

‘And you’d think these folks here’d be glad you got ’em away.’

‘You’d think,’ said the conductor, deadpan. They both knew that white people tended to become antsy when the darker-skinned fired off weapons around them, even if it was for their benefit. ‘Anyway, I be back tomorrow. Just hopin’ there’s somethin’ to come back to, you know what I mean. I’m a little old to up sticks for Mississippi and start all over again, ’less I have to. I gotta house, man. – Okay, this oughta do you.’

He rang the bell in the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm. Ting tingety-ting-ting, ting ting! The trolley slowed, the note of the hum dropping rapidly down the scale.

Barrow thought of the Man telling the union boys that the tamaha would endure. Raising, without hesitation, the Harvard-trained voice. Whose accent, he had noticed, disappeared the instant the Man switched into Anopa. He couldn’t talk like that. ‘We’re … working on it,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said the conductor, deadpan again, neither accepting nor dismissing hope. The interurban rocked to a halt. He pulled the 253door half open and Barrow squeezed out into the cool beyond. The conductor looked down at him.

‘Like I said, luck to you.’ Then he rang the bell and was drawn away into the night with his cargo, even the red light on the trolley’s stern gone in seconds.

Barrow stood still for a moment. He felt a sudden peace. The foggy air travelled delicately over him. It might seem clammy soon, but for now the damp of it was like a welcome spritz on his brow. A gentle benediction by the oncoming night. He was standing on grass at an intersection, in a foggy dusk from which the very last of day had almost drained. The lights were on in all the windows, diffuse patches of radiance seeming to float as free of the buildings as if they were paper lanterns sent aloft. On one hazy corner, a mother in a cloche hat was shepherding two small children out of the doorway of a shop, and over to a parked car. They were eating something out of a paper cone. All takouma. On another corner, squeaks through the fog announced an elderly priest with a shock of bright white hair, also takouma, pulling back the bolts to open the doors of his church for evening Mass. Life continued, small and precious.

Barrow was too much of a heavyweight to be any good as a sprinter. But all the hours on the skipping rope had given him some endurance as a runner. He took off his coat and slung it over his arm, then put his head down and began the long lope westwards.

5

If the centre of the city was traditional takouma – and its sacred heart – then the Northside was modernised takouma, takouma that had prospered in the new world that had grown up since Cahokia joined the Union. In the blocks immediately north of 254the Creek lived the actual aristocracy of takouma life, the Moon in her Creekside house being the ultimate example, and also the takouma kings of business and the takouma nobility of the mind. There lived the people who wore the clothes Couma sold in her shop. But Barrow, running along 27th Street, was much further north than that, in a different and more modest zone of takouma accomplishment. He was well up beyond the blocks where the architect Wright had found so many takers for his rectilinear villas that whole cross-streets were parades of near-horizontal tile and chunky facade. He was up on the far side of Blessed Thomas Neta High School, through whose labs and sports fields and auditoria passed the luckiest takouma teenagers in the city, taught with demanding brilliance by the Sisters of Loreto and the Jesuits, who had shifted their headquarters northwards to be on hand. (The Jesuit cardinal of Cahokia, when he wasn’t in Rome, still slept in Sebastian Villanova’s original cell in the cloister beside the cathedral. But then, he was a Hashi, and the city’s heart needed him.)

Up here, where Barrow was, takouma lives were respectable-modern rather than magnificent-modern. 27th Street’s neat dwellings belonged to accountants rather than financiers, technicians rather than scientists, stenographers rather than judges. To police sergeants, too; somewhere in these parts must be the house where Hanunu’s wife and daughters lovingly mocked him, to remind him that patriarchy stopped on the doorstep and inside the matriarchs took over. Barrow was running beside white fences, hedges of rose bushes, tiny shrines, neighbourhood playgrounds. When summer came, fathers in shirt sleeves would show their kids the basic holds in the little wrestling pits, demonstrate the hip action required to keep the heavy rubber bouncing in the little ballcourts. Now, on a wet evening before spring had begun, the playgrounds were empty, strewn with dead leaves. Family life was all indoors, visible to Barrow in the floating patches of window 255light as blurred glimpses of supper going onto tables, an elderly couple bent over a radio, a woman with a baby in arms arguing with a man pulling on his coat. In his head he heard the Man saying again, What a lot of people need this to turn out right.

He loped on, still breathing easy but starting to feel the distance in his calves. So much sidewalk to pound. Over avenue after avenue threaded with wet-gleaming trolley tracks, not deserted, but far lonelier than they should be on a weekday evening, red tail-lights reflecting in puddles. Irrakwa, Huron, Guale, Fox, Eufala, the tribe names ticking by backwards through the alphabet. Under tree after tree, fog-shrouded. But as the night chill came on it did seem as if the fog was lifting at last. Or rather condensing out of the damp air, in a sheen on the asphalt, the paving slabs, the tree trunks. He was seeing topmost branches coming clear in the streetlamps, with their swellings of spring buds. He was seeing the momentary indoor scenes with greater clarity. Catawba, Biloxi, Algonkian. He looked left as he took the empty junction with long strides. Somewhere far out of sight down there, beyond the vanishing point to which the trees and the overhead wires converged, the doors of the Algonkian Hotel would be open. Perhaps Dolphus and the band were setting up there now, if the music hadn’t been cancelled tonight. He crossed Division. Then the avenue names began to tick back up again from A, this time through American-normal tree names. Aspen. Beech. Cedar. The houses were getting less takouma-aspirational, more mixed. Also more shabby. Up ahead, there was human movement of some kind, a blockage of some kind. Behind it, a reddish light not native to the suburban night.

And with a start he realised that he had let himself slip into the easy trance of the gym, the mind-away state where you become the rhythm of the exercise. He’d told himself when he squeezed his way out of the interurban that he would have plenty of time to think as he ran. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t been thinking. He had not 256even begun working out what he was going to say to Phin, when he found him: how he was going to act on his new loyalty and find out what the hell Phin had been doing, while somehow appealing enough to the old loyalty between them to get Phin to talk in the first place. He’d shied away from the prospect and gone mind-away instead. Why? Because it was Phin. Because it was a settled thing between them, these two years on the job together – maybe for longer than that, maybe for all the time since he had come back from the war – that it was Phin, not him, who’d turn the mental cogwheels and grind through the hard stuff. Come to think of it, the more he’d been around Phin, the more he’d found himself in situations where he wanted that to be the case, even needed that to be the case. Where, thanks to a decision Phin had already taken, it was a relief – or a necessity – to go away, and let his arms administer the beating, to hold the guy’s head under the surface of the water in the bathtub until the bubbles came up and he was terrified enough to talk. To be simple Joe, big-man Joe, muscles Joe. With his mind altogether elsewhere, tinkering with a tune.

He didn’t stumble, but he missed a beat in his stride, and came suddenly to a halt. There was a buzz of voices up ahead, but for the minute he was still alone. Under a streetlamp, he held up his hands and looked at them; turned them over curiously, as if he’d never seen them before. No, as if he’d seen them ten thousand thousand times, but never taken in at once the different things he’d asked them to be. If he put together the tunes and the force – if he let it be all him, under his own direction, so far as anyone could choose such a thing – what would he be? Who would he be?

*

The blockage across the street, he found as he got closer to it, and into a busy swirl of householders coming and going in the dark with their arms full, was a barricade, being built that very minute. It consisted mainly of two cars and a milk delivery wagon, but it 257was being rapidly supplemented with packing cases and old furniture. The builders were mostly takouma but not entirely, mostly men but not entirely. Nobody was armed that Barrow could see, except for one fellow with a small-bore hunting rifle slung over his back, but people had come out with bats, lengths of two-by-four, pool cues, golf clubs, and in one case a bow of the kind used for back-yard target shooting. Because he had come up from the east – and because he was takouma-looking himself, of course – nobody was startled to see him. They took him for another volunteer trickling in to help.

‘Here,’ said a panting man in undershirt and suspenders, ‘wouldya grab the other end of this?’

Barrow bent and took hold of the splintery cornices of a half-bust closet lying on its side. Together they manoeuvred it onto the barricade, in between a tower of wooden boxes and the cylinder of a cast-iron lawn roller.

Then he helped shift a few more items. The men at the barricade were swapping rumours. All the gold in the Bank of Cahokia had vanished from the vaults. An enormous herd of snow-white horses had been seen in the south of the city. The Man had fled to Florida.

‘I know that last one ain’t true,’ said Barrow. ‘I saw him, like, a coupla hours ago. He was going to the Green Corn Planting in St Lawrence Parish. He’s probably on his way back by now.’

‘Yeah?’ said the man in the undershirt sceptically. ‘Good to know.’

Barrow looked at the flimsy mountain range of objects. ‘I don’t think that’s gonna hold off anyone very determined,’ he said.

‘No kidding,’ said Suspenders. ‘But at least it sends a message to them over there, hey? That it ain’t just all theirs for the asking.’ There was no-one in view on the other side of the intersection, but his meaning was clear. Them, who in the darkness beyond Dogwood Avenue, were responsible for the smeech of red in the 258night from the building burning over to the south-west. Them, who might come this way in white robes. ‘’Sides,’ said the man, ‘it’s gotta be done. Word’s gone out, hasn’t it.’

‘Really?’ said Barrow. ‘Who from?’ He was remembering the Man saying, You know that in these times the call will not come from me.

Suspenders gave him a funny look, and jerked his chin at a woman standing in the deep shadow under a tree at the corner, surveying operations. There were mules on her feet. She was wearing a housecoat. Above the pink satin was the mask of South.

Barrow went over, drawing out his badge.

‘Sister?’ he said. ‘Police.’

The mask looked at him. In the dark all he could see of the human eyes within the painted ones was a pair of faint gleams.

‘Can you tell me who put out the instructions for this?’ It couldn’t just be here, he thought; that would make no sense. East, West and North of her Four Winds Society must be out getting the three adjacent junctions with Dogwood blocked, and he’d bet that all the way up and down the avenue, along the line where the city went majority-takata, other Societies were at work, doing their best to stop the mouseholes of the takouma city with whatever was at hand.

Silence from the mask. You should know better by now. The hell with this, thought Barrow. He leaned closer and dropped his voice.

‘Houma Anopoli,’ he murmured, experimentally.

The mask dipped fractionally, rose again fractionally. A nod. Maybe a nod. Well, it was something.

‘Suppose I’m not getting any more than that,’ he said. He touched his hat. ‘Well, good luck,’ he said. ‘What it’s worth, just so I don’t take anyone by surprise, I’m heading over to the far side now. I got business over there.’

‘Tamaha business?’ she said; and the voice of an ordinary middle-aged takouma woman hummed and hollowed inside the wood, becoming strange.259

He grinned, and gave her a silent nod of his own.

She extended an arm. Go ahead. He walked to the barricade, and her mules clacked after him on the wet concrete sidewalk. Her toenails were painted coral, and it did not make her progress less stately. A gap was opened for him between a packing case and the fender of one of the cars. He stepped through. In the middle of the intersection, he looked back. There was the South mask, watching him go. There were the accountants, standing watch with their planks and their .22 and their bow and arrow. He waved, and ran on.

*

Over there – just having said it out loud solidified the sense that these streets were a different territory – the smell of burning strengthened on the night air. But the houses were much the same to begin with, curtains closed tight, each individual box anxiously sealed, and it wasn’t until Barrow saw the first of the cruising pick-ups go by that the night began to feel truly feral. He stepped into the pitch black behind a tree when he saw the headlights, and it was a good thing he did, because the driver proved to be wearing a white cloth over his head with torn eye holes, and so were the three men he had standing in the back, lurching about as they passed a jar of ’shine from hand to hand, and bickering over a long gun of some kind. It wasn’t official Klan regalia they had on, just an improvised minimum required to go out and misbehave anonymously. They were drunk boys looking for a fight. Barrow stayed very still in his shadow, with his gaze fixed on the ground at his feet. (A lesson from the night-time trenches, about the surprising amount of reflection off an eyeball.) The pick-up crept by. At the end of the block the one in the back who was holding the gun at that moment drew a bead on a trash can, and shot a hole in it with a metallic clang that made the riders whoop. A dog began barking; the owner of the house chinked a door open, and hastily shut it again when 260he saw what was going on. The pick-up disappeared slowly round the corner.

After that, he saw two or three more of them, and learned to expect one every little while. A patrol equivalent to what the Four Winds were doing to the east, he supposed, only more careless and with the young men in charge, let loose to holler, to shoot up stop signs and street lighting. They did not, at least, appear to’ve been encouraged to move aggressively east. That was for the big march tomorrow. This was just about declaring control of their own patch: marking the streets, he thought, like pissing dogs. Another cop reflex Barrow had not known he possessed surfaced at this, and he found himself deeply offended, even as he prudently hid himself. The city was not theirs to treat this way. It was his, and they ought to know it. He could imagine what Doyle would say about them.

As he turned each corner, he scoped out the possibilities for concealment ahead, and then moved from shade to shade as if he were crossing no-man’s-land. – Which, tonight, perhaps he was. It was easy to begin with. Nobody was walking but him, and the whole black lacework of shadow on night-time suburbia was his to flit through. But as he went on west, or north-by-west, the tract houses were giving way to warehouses, more than he remembered, and a straight street between sheer-sided walls, even badly lit by a single lamp-post, offered no more cover to hide in than a zone or two of relative dimness, out in plain sight. Dearborn turned out to be one of a set of independently alphabetised alleys between these high tin buildings, squeezed side-on A to E into what should have been a single square block. It seemed ever less likely as a domicile for Drummond.

He sped up to a trot, listening obsessively for engines. At least it was darker in the alleys; dark enough to hide him, dark enough for it to be difficult to make out numbers on the corrugated gateways, the tin fencing with barbed wire along the top. He got out his 261lighter, and flicked up a flame for each gate. 304 was Somebody’s Tool & Die. 305 was a heating-oil depot. 306 was steel pipes. 307 was storage for discount plumbing supplies – and also the last building in the row. The other side of the alley was blank, gate-less, just the backs of the buildings in the next alley over. He walked back along to be sure, holding up the lighter here and there, in case some cockamamie piece of mis-numbering had taken place, but there was no mistake. 308 Dearborn did not exist. It was a fake address.

‘Phin, you fucker,’ he said out loud.

‘Language!’ said another voice. ‘Now, now, what have we here?’

There were a couple of hooded silhouettes at the mouth of the alley he was walking back towards. They were still thirty, forty feet away. One of them was holding a shotgun-shaped blob of shadow. There was nowhere to exit the alley except at the ends. It was a straight shot down it. And of course, they had seen his face, his face halfway between takouma and taklousa, in the helpful glow of the lighter flame. He kept moving towards them, lengthening his strides but not breaking his walk. They’d be seeing coat, hat, movement, but no detail now the flame was out.

‘What’s a big red buck like you doing way over here? Little out of place, aren’t you?’

The speaker was the one on the left, the smaller one, the one with the gun. Barrow knew that voice, not individually but generically; it belonged to the one in the group of male friends who was sure they were the clever one, who egged the others on, who liked to talk and to take his time talking. He’d met several examples in the 131st.

‘I’m a cop,’ he said, with as much loud, relaxed confidence as he could muster. ‘Murder Squad. I could ask what you gentlemen are doing. Have you got a licence for that peashooter?’

‘Ethan, he’s a cop,’ said the bigger figure on the right, resolving as Barrow drew closer into an awkward lunk in denim overalls. 262Barrow was listening acutely; there was no sound coming from anyone else behind the two he could see.

‘Shut up, Joe,’ said Mr Clever to his friend. ‘That don’t matter tonight, don’t you see? What matters tonight is, I got a twelve-gauge on him.’

‘Joe!’ cried Barrow delightedly, closing fast. ‘Hey, you’re a Joe too! I’m a Joe! Ain’t it a great name!’

‘You stop right there,’ said the smaller figure – but he said it as if he were anticipating a pleasurable monologue he didn’t plan to shorten, not as if he were anticipating opening fire imminently. Most people wouldn’t or couldn’t, or at any rate didn’t, start shooting without some considerable mental gearing-up, in Barrow’s experience. They had to ready themselves. There was a gulf to cross, between everyday and homicidal, and most people hesitated on the edge of it. The few exceptions he’d met were either stone killers, or nuts in some way. (Or were Phin. He could shoot without warning.) This kid, he was betting – and the stakes were large – wanted to talk first, induce some terror, maybe shoot later.

So Barrow walked right on up into him. He didn’t take out his own piece, he didn’t want an exchange of gunfire in a confined space. He just gave the boy no interval in which to change plans, and hoped he didn’t have his unprepared finger on the shotgun’s actual trigger.

White cloth bag on the boy’s head coming up close. It looked like a flour sack. The twelve-gauge was up but not exactly pointed. Barrow stepped inside the muzzle with his hands down low and wrenched the barrels away from him and left. It did go off, blowing a hole in the corrugated siding on Barrow’s left side, and sending pellets screaming off the tin. He felt a stinging patter from the rebounds and a flash of burning heat in his hands, but he kept his grip, and yanked both weapon and boy closer, close enough to ram his knee into the kid’s groin as hard as he could.263

The would-be shooter let go of the gun and fell on the ground moaning.

‘Ethan!’ cried the other, and threw a clumsy punch at Barrow which bounced off his shoulder.

Barrow drew back his right, and drove his fist forward into the second kid’s hooded face in as clean and pure a line of force as if he were working the bag at Solly’s. It felt good. Joe the Second flew back, bounced off the tin siding on the other side of the alley, tripped over his collapsed friend, and went down too.

Barrow stepped over them and put his head cautiously out of the alley. There was no-one else out there, just a broken-down little Ford truck with a strongly agricultural appearance. It looked like these two were in from the farm to join in the fun, from somewhere over on the Illinois side.

He broke the barrels of the shotgun and ejected the unused shell. Then he took it by the stock, found a brick upright at the mouth of the alley, and swung it against the bricks till it broke apart.

‘That’s my daddy’s,’ said the second boy groggily.

‘Your daddy’s?’ said Barrow. ‘More fool you, for lending it to your stupid friend.’

Now he did take out his service revolver, and cocked it with a loud click he made sure they could hear. He bent down and tugged off the two hoods. Seventeen, eighteen years old at most. He looked to have broken the second one’s nose.

‘Here’s the thing, boys,’ he said. ‘I had a revelation tonight, and it was that I won’t be beating on anybody unless I think they deserve it. Now, you surely deserved that, for trying to stick up a po-lice officer in an alleyway, on account of a trifling difference of skin colour. What do you think, do you deserve any more?’

‘No sir,’ said the second boy.

‘Ethan?’ said Barrow.

‘No … sir,’ said the first, thickly.264

‘Okay, then. This is your lucky evening. I will not stay here and fuck you up. I will leave you with the ability to walk and to consume solid food. Now gimme the keys to the truck.’

‘What?’

‘Keys!’

A key-ring was passed up to him, a little slimy with blood from the broken nose.

‘How’re we gonna get home?’

‘Your problem,’ said Barrow. He holstered his pistol, and left them there.

The truck smelled of cow shit, confirming its origin, and it most definitely needed the crank to turn it over. He was feeling the burns across both palms by the time he got it chugging, and gripping the wheel was painful too: but then he was in motion, rattling east with headlights off as fast as the jalopy would permit. At every junction he had his foot down hard on the gas, and his head ducked down low, but his luck held, and he reached Dogwood without running into any of the Klan patrols. It seemed to take an instant, compared to the stealthy outward leg of his journey – his pointless journey.

There he turned south, and motored a way down the avenue, thin tyres of the truck juddering against the trolley tracks. Still not a thing was moving, in the way of traffic. He would have liked to drive all the way back to the precinct, instead of facing another long trek on foot, but if he kept on down Dogwood it would lead him into the heart of Germantown, where he had no desire to be – and, as he had suspected, all the exits east of Dogwood were closed with improvised barriers, behind which suspicious takouma heads turned to watch him go by. He kept going till he found the junction where the mask of South topped a pink housecoat, parked, and came over with his hands up.

‘Spoils of war,’ he said, and flipped the truck keys to the nearest pair of hands. ‘Call it my contribution to the barricade.’265

Then he vaulted over, tipped his hat, and headed on east and south, back into the city.

6

‘But he told me this morning to come and find him,’ Barrow had time to think, repeatedly, while he covered the thirty-odd dark blocks’ distance to the precinct. All on foot. All at walking speed. He was too wrung-out to run any more just now. As the spike of energy from the confrontation receded, it left him shaky – and ravenously hungry. A few northbound trolleys passed, less insanely crowded than the interurban had been, but nothing going south to the centre.

Drummond had told Barrow to come and find him. That meant Drummond had thought Barrow could come and find him. Not necessarily that it would be easy – he’d been angry already, that Barrow wouldn’t up and follow him like an obedient puppy, even before Chokfi fired the staple into him – but that it would be possible. A do-able task. Not something that would be thwarted altogether by the lie in the file about the address. (Why Phin had done that, apart from general devilry, was another question, and would have to wait its turn.) No; Barrow was still supposed to be able to work out how to get hold of his evaporating partner. Which in turn meant that he, Barrow, must already know something that would lead him in the right direction. There was a string to follow if he could just put his finger on it. But what? But how? All he could think of was to try every speakeasy, every cellar bar, that he and Phin had ended up drinking in after work – that being where they had gone, in off hours, rather than to his own place at Lydia Lee’s, or to Phin’s. Wherever that was. A good two-thirds of those drinking spots, though, would be over on the Germantown side 266of Division, and therefore not places Barrow could easily get to, or wanted to get to, tonight. Besides, it didn’t seem quite right as a strategy. Come and find me: maybe a command to do a random drag through town for him, but it had sounded more definite than that. Like there was one place to go, if he could just puzzle it out.

He hadn’t though, by the time he came through the cordon round the precinct house and tramped up the steps. It was gone seven o’clock. His head still full of his own perplexities, he was braced for the conversation he was now going to have to have with Doyle before having had the chance to get Phin’s side of things. But Doyle had gone home. Which Barrow realised, wearily, made sense. The guy had to have been in the office continuously since the middle of the previous night, to handle the call to Dinetah, and then to pick up the load Nakbateroli had shed. It had been a long, long day. His own sense of time had gone screwy.

Chokfi was still there, just about: putting on her coat as he passed her cubby, and looking out anxiously after him.

‘Joe—,’ she said. ‘Mr Barrow—’

But the rest of the day shift had all departed. It was the night guys, who Barrow didn’t know very well, sitting at the familiar desks, and Lieutenant Pishu at the miko’s station, a sardonic dandy of a man, with thin sideburns barbered to make him look like a takouma Valentino. Barrow had scarcely spoken to him, but he was up and coming over, the moment he laid eyes on Barrow.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Get outta here. Miko said to say, you had your one chance and you blew it. He doesn’t care about your powerful friends. You ain’t welcome here no more; you don’t work here no more. Git!’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Barrow, making no deviation in his beeline for Phin’s desk. ‘Just a minute.’

He hustled aside the night detective on Phin’s desk chair and flopped down there himself. On the desk top, a drift of uncompleted 267forms, and the mail Phin had tossed there this morning. He pulled out the drawer, hoping for something, anything, more personal. A few thumb-tacks, many empty and flattened cigarette packs, a loose bullet or three. No notebooks, conveniently self-addressed envelopes, library cards. He couldn’t imagine Phin with a library card. At the side of the drawer, under the slew of paper and cellophane, something that clinked: a little brown medicine bottle, empty. The lieutenant was yakking on; he tuned him out like a noisy insect. He held up the bottle under the desk light: a printed label but no handwritten name added, no issuing pharmacy, just ‘EDELEANU-VCS Inc.’ and under that ‘Phenylisopropylamine’. He shrugged and pocketed it. Then closed the drawer and turned without much hope to the mail.

The top envelope contained a printed flyer from a bookie. The one underneath, however, was handwritten in looping, clumsy letters, and directed to ‘Detective Drummand (the Hopper Case)’. It was postmarked Syracuse, which rang a distant bell: the city, Barrow recalled, which he and Drummond had sent Fred Hopper’s widow skedaddling off to, on long-ago Monday. If it was from her, she must have sent it more or less instantly she arrived. He slit the envelope and read:

Dear Detective Drummand your red-man stooge tole me to get in touch if I thougt of anything that would help with Freds case but I did not take to him atall I do not know how you can work with a big brute like that everyday it would make me shiver so I take the liberty of writing to you insted to say that when we was clearing out to ketch the train I found this with Freds clothes I dont know if it will be any help but I send it anyway with all respecful greeting

L Hopper (Mrs)

‘You just hold your horses,’ Barrow said to whatever it was that Pishu was trying to pour in his ear. ‘This’ was a torn-off bottom 268part of a page, something typewritten and formal. It read, in blue typing, ‘—easement of boundary to achieve fix to Abbeyville main drainage therefore as indicated in attached plan—’. But underneath, in fountain pen, someone had added Rooftop of Trust, eleven pm March 19th. Your co-operation greatly valued and appreciated.

‘Well, shit,’ said Barrow, who remembered which of the dossiers Hopper had worked on at the Land Trust involved a boundary issue in Abbeyville. He stood up.

‘Okay, now—’ began Pishu again.

‘I’m gonna need to talk to Doyle,’ Barrow cut across him. ‘And don’t worry, he’s gonna want to talk to me. I got … something.’

Miss Chokfi had added gloves and hat to her coat, but she had lingered by her cubby, shifting from foot to foot. She looked young and small and tired and anxious. Even as a woman of dignity and terror, she looked like somebody running out of impetus.

‘Hey,’ said Barrow, smiling at her. She smiled back, uncertainly. Coaxing the alarm off her face seemed like a good thing to do in itself; also, like a good small thing to hold on to, in the face of the betrayal he was about to commit. ‘Could you call the miko at home for me, please?’

She sat back down. ‘I’ll try,’ she said, taking off hat, putting on headset, ‘but I don’t know if … you know, he was really – ah, hello, Mrs Doyle? This is Amanda Chokfi at the precinct. I’m sorry to disturb you. Could the captain please come to the phone? I know he’s just got in. Oh, he’s actually in bed? Oh dear. Yes, a very long day. All the same—’

She looked at Barrow, who nodded firmly.

‘All the same, could you get him? Detective Barrow says he has something on the Land Trust case.’

Sounds of tiny protest leaking from the headset, then silence. Pishu was hovering. Barrow shooed him away. Then bass rather than treble protests out of the headset.269

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Chokfi. ‘He insisted.’

She peeled off the headset and passed it up. The wire wasn’t quite long enough and Barrow had to bend. The apparatus calipered his head like a too-small hat. But there was Doyle, irate, in his ear.

‘Yeah, what?’ growled the miko.

‘I talked to the Man of the Sun. He’s certain that the Land Trust killing is a takata political move, and that Arthur Vanderberg of Union Cartridge is behind it.’

‘Opinion, not evidence.’

‘Yeah, but he took me to the Union Club—’

‘—I could care less about your cocktail habits—’

‘—and Vanderberg was there, and he didn’t deny it.’

‘He didn’t?’

‘Well, he said the words, but like he knew exactly what the Man was talking about. He wasn’t shocked. He smirked.’

‘He always smirks. Not admissible evidence.’

‘But we do have evidence, documentary evidence, that it was a message from Union Cartridge that got Hopper up on the Trust’s roof to be murdered.’ Barrow described the letter from Mrs Hopper in Syracuse.

Silence at the other end of the line, a thinking silence.

‘Huh,’ said Doyle after a minute. ‘That is something. Not enough, yet; we still got nothing on the actual mechanism of the murder itself. The hands that Vanderberg hired. But, as it happens, it kind of fits with what I got from the museum when I got tired of your heavyweight-primadonna act and sent Bunce over instead. Circumstantial, nothin’ to lean on too hard, but: turns out that actual obsidian, which is what the lab said the black stuff was, was never a thing round here, here being a valley full of mud. In the old time, the sharp stones for cutting round here were all flint, from over in Ohio. Obsidian was strictly California and down Mexico way. Round 270here, you’d only find it in collections of pre-Columbus antiques. The museum’s got one. And it was donated by … Arthur Vanderberg.’

‘He likes Injun things when the Injuns are good and dead. So, he could roust up some crumbs of it and give ’em to the killer,’ said Barrow.

‘He could.’

‘And he’d know the details about the Aztec pyramids and shit, that Mickey Casqui said were in this particular Spanish book.’

‘He would. All circumstantial, nothing we can make an arrest on in time to throw any kind of serious spanner in the works of tomorrow’s mischief. So maybe we’re too late. But we’re getting somewhere. Okay, boyo, you can consider yourself provisionally back on the payroll—’

‘Wait,’ said Barrow. ‘There’s something else. Drummond is on Vanderberg’s payroll.’

‘What?’

‘He’s paying him off. Enough that he can get his California daydream. Enough that he doesn’t care about getting suspended, or getting fired either. Enough that he thinks he can flip the world the finger.’

There was a silence of a different quality.

‘Mother of God,’ said Doyle. ‘You’re telling me … that the prime suspect for the procuring of this murder … has owned the investigation into this murder?’

‘He doesn’t own me,’ said Barrow.

‘Debatable, if he owns Drummond, and you’re Drummond’s good little dog. How long have you known about this?’

‘Since yesterday morning.’

‘Mother of God. And you didn’t say a word. And there was me thinking my problem with you was that you’re the palace’s patsy. So. So. What has Vanderberg had Drummond doing, if you’d care to tell me that?’271

‘Miko, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me, and I can’t fathom it. He was keen on us going after the Warriors, then frustrated when it didn’t work out – frustrated enough he would have framed ’em if he could – but it was also like he didn’t really care? He didn’t really care who we got so long as we got somebody.’

‘Somebody takouma.’

‘I suppose, yeah.’

‘Meaning at the very least the instruction from Vanderberg was to keep the pot on the boil, make sure that short-term the story was still about the red savages. Tell me, did he get in your way? I did receive the impression you were actually giving the detective work a try, on this one.’

‘He tried to … stop me taking it seriously. But he’s like that anyway. And he promised me that he wouldn’t stop me following up the evidence. It was a deal we did, yesterday.’

‘A bit of misdirection, putting a slant on things? Doesn’t sound like the kind of favour you’d pay the big money for.’

‘… No.’

‘No. Well, all these mysteries shall be swiftly resolved. We’ll get the little weasel brought in, in short order, and sweat the truth outta him.’

‘Captain, that could be … difficult. I’ve been trying to find him today, before I talked to you, because – because—’

‘Because he’s your partner and you wanted to get his side of things first. Yeah, yeah. But?’

‘But the address the department has for him doesn’t exist, and I don’t know how else to find him.’

‘It doesn’t exist,’ said Doyle flatly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s no building there. “308 Dearborn” it says on his card, and Dearborn ends at 307.’

‘Let me get this straight. He lied to the department. About where he lives. And you don’t know either? His own partner?’272

‘… No.’

‘Good grief. And Miss Chokfi doesn’t have a number for him?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Nothing helpful in his desk?’

‘No sir. I’ve looked.’

‘Where’d you meet him then, when you were off duty?’

‘We’d go drinking. Mostly in bars I can’t get at tonight, ’cause they’re over the other side of Division.’

‘Hmm. Well, give Pishu a list of the other ones. He might as well try ’em. But a fictitious address? That’s preparation. That’s someone planning to vanish, when the moment is right. Makes you wonder … well. Okay, put Pishu on.’

‘But what should I do, miko?’

‘Unless you got some brilliant idea you’re not sharing with me, doesn’t sound like there’s a lot you can do.’

‘But he needs finding tonight! Before the Klan march tomorrow!’

‘Ideally, yes. But being on the verge of doomsday doesn’t make impossible things suddenly turn possible. It’s a big city out there, it’s full of frightened people, and we don’t have access to a third of it. The odds aren’t good if your man Drummond doesn’t want to be found. So go home, eat, sleep, and get back in for six tomorrow morning. When you and I are going to put our heads together on the subject of: what do we know about Phineas Drummond? There’ll be something to find him by. There’s always something. And your Phineas is not a careful feller.’

‘And what if it’s doomsday?’

‘If it’s doomsday, we’ll still be police. Or I will. What you are … remains to be seen. Listen, Detective. I appreciate that you told me – but, assuming we’re spared, there will be consequences. This is not a confessional, you hear me? I don’t pat your head, give you a penance and send you off absolved.’273

‘You’re the second person to tell me that today. I’m starting to think I should go and find a real confessional.’

‘Perhaps you should at that. But that’s between you and the Almighty. Go home and rack your brains and I’ll see you at 6 a.m. Now put Pishu on.’

Barrow eased the band of metal and Bakelite off his head, and passed it to the hovering lieutenant, who took it, but also fixed a hand on Barrow’s shoulder. A couple of the other night boys were hanging around outside the cubby.

‘I’ll be leaving now,’ said Barrow, looking at the hand.

‘You wait right there,’ commanded Pishu; and it occurred to Barrow that, if Doyle’s inscrutable calculation about the fraction of trust he was still willing to show him had come out different, he might well be spending the night in a cell himself, just to make sure he was present and willing to talk in the morning.

Pishu listened to Doyle for a minute, and then did remove the hand. Barrow anticipated the next request, and scratched out a list of four drinking-holes east of Division on a notebook page, and handed it over. Pishu nodded at him, eyes suspicious. Barrow tipped his hat to Miss Chokfi.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Wait, Mr Barrow,’ she said. ‘– Joe. Would you walk me home? It seems like it’s gone a little crazy out there.’

‘It surely has. Okay. I’ll see you out front.’

He went down the stairs with a feeling of escape, and went and stood outside by the station-house steps. He lit a cigarette, comforted by the rasp of the flint in the lighter, the rasp in his lungs of the first rich draw of smoke. The fog had completely cleared, leaving only a watery brightness to the stars out overhead, as if an uncertain lens was magnifying them. It would be a fine day tomorrow, just when the city could have done with a nice disheartening drench of rain. Miss Chokfi’s neat black heels came clicking and 274clocking down the steps, and turning to meet her Barrow discovered that, over the precinct’s stone doorway, there was – of course! – another Latin inscription. He must have gazed at it a million times without reading it. This one came with translations in Anopa and English. SALUS POPULI, SUPREMA LEX. Chokma Hattak, Aba Hina. The Good of the People is the Highest Law.

Well, that’s dandy, thought Barrow. But what good, and which people?

7

It was surprisingly comfortable walking along with Chokfi. She put her hand on his arm and took one and a half steps for each of his, turning her face in the cloche hat up to look at him when she spoke, like some short-stemmed flower being tugged his way by a persistent breeze. And when she lifted her face, there was a concern on it for Barrow which he couldn’t think he really deserved.

‘I’m sorry you’re in trouble,’ she said.

‘I’m not in as much trouble as Phin is.’

She waved her free hand dismissively. Putting the staple in Drummond seemed to have reduced him effectually from bogeyman to dung-beetle, as far as she was concerned.

‘He deserves it,’ she said. ‘But you’re … between, aren’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You got the department rules on one side, and the thing you’re doing for the Man on the other, haven’t you? And you’re in the middle. The miko’s a good man, but there’s things he doesn’t understand.’

‘Oh now,’ said Barrow, troubled by this high-minded picture, which he had helped to paint in her mind earlier, he supposed, by invoking the mysteries of her role in the Four Winds. It was 275a picture missing all the slow, clumsy, waiting-till-hit-round-the-head realisations of the last few days, and all the weak passivity of the compromises he’d made. He’d let himself be tumbled along, it felt like, taking the easy choice in every situation till he was sitting wrong with absolutely everybody, and every thing. Phineas. The department. The Man. The tamaha. Music. ‘Don’t say that. That’s too kind.’

‘Why shouldn’t people be kind to you?’

‘’Cause it’s a mess I’m in of my own makin’, mostly. Not some … noble dilemma. I’m no hero.’

‘Uh-huh?’ she said neutrally.

‘I’m just trying not to make a bad job worse,’ he said.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, and squeezed his arm.

By now the distant noises of the city in trouble were almost routine. Chokfi turned out to live in the nearest one of the Quarters, the north-west one. There was no-one around on Union Avenue. The individual drips from the elevated tracks were audible. But, to Barrow’s total lack of surprise, one of the Four Winds was stationed just inside the entry to the Quarters she led him in by, and shone a flashlight on their faces before stepping aside and letting them pass. With Chokfi guiding him, the alleyways were neither a mystifying warren nor the place of inscrutable threat they had been when the masks surrounded the Noukouwa house. They were just the way home, the landmarks obvious, the doors the ways into a thousand families’ lives, the little shrines familiar, the passers-by the known faces of her neighbourhood. The smell of a thousand suppers rose around them, and Barrow’s stomach rumbled.

‘Was that you?’ she said, grinning.

‘No, it was artillery in the distance. Yeah, that was me. Lunch was a piece of pie and it was a long time ago.’

‘You can eat with us if you like.’

She chirped a greeting to three or four others homeward-bound 276that they met along the way, and when they ran into the choir of little boys and the young priest again, still shaking a collecting-tin, she steered the conversation firmly into English so Barrow wasn’t excluded.

‘And will you be coming to the grand Mass on Saturday?’ the priest asked her, once Barrow had deposited his dime. It struck him as a funny thing to be making plans for, when the takouma world might be overturned tomorrow.

‘Deo volens, Father,’ she said, smiling.

‘God willing, indeed,’ the priest agreed; and Barrow understood that it was a willed optimism he had all around him, not an oblivious one. Willed hope in the accountants standing-to with their golf clubs; willed hope in the policemen holding the Bridge; willed hope in the pickets on watch by their brazier. Willed hope in the cooking dinners. Willed hope when Chokfi told him comfortably that everything would be all right.

She tucked her arm back in his and was holding on to him when they stopped outside a door no different from the others, except that this door was her door. The woman who opened it was a middle-aged edition of Chokfi. No taller; streaks of white in the dark hair; a more sardonic mouth. Past her came the sounds of children shouting, a man adjudicating, and dance music pouring out (judging by the crackles) from a radio set. Also a positive gust of herby meatiness.

‘Oh!’ said the woman on the step. ‘This must be the one you keep talking about.’

‘Mother!’ said Chokfi.

‘There’s as much of him as you said there was! Well, come on in. Dinner’s going on the table any minute.’

‘I was just walking your daughter home,’ said Barrow. ‘I don’t mean to be any bother.’

‘Nonsense! We got lamb stew and cornbread, and lots of it, which 277is probably a good thing, now I lay eyes on you.’

‘Well, if you’re sure …’ said Barrow. ‘That certainly smells real good.’

‘Of course we’re sure. Come in, you’re very welcome.’

And Barrow was taking off his coat and hat in the tiny hall, looking forward to stepping through into the courtyard beyond, where there was warm yellow light and food and children, and thinking how different this was from the derelict misery at the Noukouwas’ – when the music on the radio was abruptly cut off, and everything changed. A voice in Anopa took over, talking solemnly and urgently. Chokfi’s still-invisible father hushed the children. Then her mother gasped and raised her hands to her mouth.

‘What is it, what is it?’ Barrow asked Chokfi. Her eyes had gone big and shocked.

‘They are saying that … Francis Hashi is dead. That he was killed an hour ago at his house in the Hollywood Hills … by a stranger … with a gun. This is very bad,’ she added unnecessarily.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Barrow, thinking of the Moon’s house overlooking the creek, and the princess in it, already sleepless and assailed by nightmares, who had just learned she had lost a brother. ‘I better go,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I gotta go.’

He snatched up coat and hat. ‘Which is the quickest way out, going north?’

‘Second left, then left again,’ she said automatically, following him out. ‘But, wait. Do you really have to go? You just got here.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I really do.’

‘Why?’ she said. ‘I don’t see what you can …’ She gave it up in exasperation. ‘Bend down,’ she said.

‘What?’

She stamped her foot.

‘Bend down! I can’t reach you.’

Barrow leaned over and she kissed his cheek.278

‘Remember to look after yourself,’ she said. ‘Okay. Good night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, a third and last time. Then he took to his heels, second left, left again, through the narrow crevices of the Quarters. Pursued, a couple of minutes later, by the bells of the cathedral, and then of other churches across the city, beginning to toll for Frankie Blackhawk.

*

He had the notion that when he reached the House of the Moon he would rush in and, finding Couma alone and weeping, comfort her. But when he burst onto the stone embankment on the south side of the Creek, he saw that there were a mass of cars drawn up on the opposite bank outside the house already, headlights blazing. A positive crowd of urgent silhouettes were coming and going on the sidewalk over there, through the front gate and on the path up to the front door. I am not a private person, said Couma’s voice in his head. He drew nearer, on towards the bridge that would take him across, but with his feet slowing; the certainty draining from his steps. In the black-white dazzle round the door, the chessboard tangle of light and shade, he saw business suits moving, the robes of priests and the habits of nuns, uniforms, a long coat and a doctor’s case, the flash of a photograph being taken. Mickey Casqui might well be over there. Anderson too, and he definitely didn’t want to meet her now. (What had she wanted? The question rose and then vanished again.) The closer he got to this scene of public business, the smaller his own standing to involve himself seemed. In any way. Who was he to be where the death of the city’s heir meant who-knew-how-many arrangements to be made, hands to be shaken, people to be seen, prayers to be said, consequences to be discussed? Let me through! She needs me! I’m a man whose piano-playing she praised! I’m her tolerated one-time dance partner! I’m someone she sewed together again. I’m someone whose flesh has not been his own since she touched it.

But in the end it was neither the scurrying activity opposite nor 279these dialogues inside that brought him to a complete halt. It was the sound that came out to him for a brief second as the door of Number 40 opened and closed: the familiar voice, howling. Not grief’s civil tongue but its helpless wail, pouring from a raw throat. A klaxon of desperation. The crowd at the door froze too for an instant when they heard it. Barrow gripped the stone balustrade and looked down at the black water with the cold dapples of the streetlamps swaying on it. He thought: she is drowning, but I am out of my depth. How could I have anything to say to that? I have never had anyone to mourn, and I have no idea what it is even like, over there where she is.

So he only stood there in the dark, keeping watch on the house. After a while the cold of the stone reminded him of the existence of his fingers. Spread out on the granite. Big. More than octaveswide. If he could make music – silent music – on zinc counters, table edges, the wheel of an automobile, he could play a stone wall too, without bothering anyone. There was another French piece he knew, meant for a dead princess not for a live princess mourning, but it seemed close enough to be right. It was full of grief but intricate, composed, shape-making. It was like a eulogy for the shapes that life made and death ended. It would pierce your heart if it took you unawares, but compared to the terrible lack of shape in that cry over the water, it seemed like somewhere you might hope grief would arrive at. Something to offer, therefore. He flexed his hands – his hands, his to use with subtlety or with force as he saw fit – and entered into the delicate, demanding complications that Monsieur Ravel had prepared. Both hands had to produce both tune and accompaniment, rather than there being one for each. All the fingers had to have all his mind patiently behind them. He could hear the precise little steps of the dead princess’s dance resounding as clearly as if he had moving keys under his fingers not cold stone. Baby steps, for this was a baby princess the piece was mourning. Some long-ago 280little soul in stiff embroidery, lost to life behind the hangings of a royal bed. But a foolish movie star, selling his birthright for a little flickering fame, was maybe not so very different. For Frankie Blackhawk, for his sister, he stepped out a lament that nobody else could hear. Afterwards, he’d tramp back to Lydia Lee’s, fix himself a slice of bread and jelly in the kitchen, squeeze his brain some more to guess where Phin might be, and fear for the doomsday due tomorrow. Afterwards, he would use Lydia’s telephone to call the palace. Afterwards he would sleep. Afterwards. Now, the stars glistered and shook in the weeping sky, and he played.281

282

THURSDAY

283

284

From the very first day in the woods, we were subjected to continuous sharpshooter fire, and every dawn saw our force reduced, both by wastage and by desertions among the volunteers of the state militias. We emerged from the treeline with no more than seven thousand effectives. The prospect then lying before us was of an intensively farmed lowland, in which a myriad of small fields, flooded in anticipation of our arrival, were reticulated by earthen dykes. In such a setting, unless we were to wade, advance towards the city in the distance was only possible along the larger dykes, in narrow columns. This General Marsh proceeded to do, despite the tactical misgivings of his staff; misgivings rapidly borne out as the enemy’s cannon discovered our range and rained explosive shells on us. Manoeuvre was not possible until we attained the relatively open space at the edge of the city itself, and here we discovered that the infantry of the Cahokian Legion, far from fighting in the dashing and disorganised style of Indian braves, exhibited a trained accuracy in the use of the musket which our own men could not match. (Conversations during my parole in the city with Lieutenant Founi of the Legion revealed the origin of this skill in a continuing intercourse between the Legion and the army of France.) At this point both General Marsh and Colonel Edwards were killed. Assuming command I began an immediate withdrawal to the forest – which I believe would have extricated us as a viable force, had it not been for the sudden appearance across our path of the city’s Hibernian regiment, who charged us with cries of ‘Erin Go Bragh’. I and the other survivors of the expedition were treated with propriety and civility as prisoners, until our eventual repatriation via steamboat to New Orleans.

In the interval I was enabled to reflect on the strategy necessary for any future attempt upon ‘the Indian Kingdom’. Firstly –

Report by Capt. Robert E. Lee to the Congressional Committee of Enquiry into the Failure of the Cahokia Expedition, Dec. 1848

2851

It was dark in the dream too. He was climbing. He was climbing something vertical that he could not see, except as a blackness even denser than the black behind him. His hands and feet were on the rungs of a ladder. The ladder was flat against the black thing in front of him. His fingers would not go all the way round the rungs, and his bare toes could only stub in a couple of inches on each hold. He had to cling on. He was pressed against the ladder, wriggling up. And he must not fall, because though he could not see the ground, he knew it was a long, long way down. He was afraid, and alone, and very high up. And also he was smaller than he was used to being; weaker. The distance from his feet to his hands was much less. His arms were thinner. He was panting, and it was a quick high sound. He was a boy, not a man.

But he knew this place. It was a real place, not one of the elastic cliffs and abysses of nightmare. The boy he was in the dream had been there before. The new thing was the being there alone. That was the source of the terror: not the height, or not the height in itself, but facing it alone. When before, there had always been another with him. A confident other taking the lead, climbing the ladder above him, whispering confident mockery if he hesitated. This was … this was …

He reached the top. And that was worse, because rather than projecting up at least a few more inches, giving him something to hold on to, the ladder simply stopped, flush. And the top of the tower – or whatever it was – was a smooth level, with nothing to reach and grab for leverage. He had to just bend onto this flat surface, a little more and a little more, as his feet walked up the last rungs, casting his weight forwards and hoping that would keep him there. Until at last he could flop forward altogether, and jerk on into safety on his belly like a frog, on darkness, in darkness. He lay gasping. 286

But when he sat up, and felt the tremor of the night air moving over him, he knew abruptly where he was. And when this was, too. He was on the top of the grain elevator at the farm next door to the Boys’ Home in Barrow. And this was the night of the day that Ted was fostered, and his foster-parents took him away. Knowing this had the power, according to dream-logic, to restore the intelligibility of what was around him. The night was no longer an absolute black. The concrete top of the elevator glimmered pale. The land below was a charcoal circle, dimly pierced by the lights at the front gate of the Home, the steel points of the lamps on the crossed streets of the town beyond. The vault above was a dark, dark blue, too cloud-veiled for stars, with a faint blistering of silver at the point on the horizon where moonrise was due.

Joe Barrow the adult knew that he was dreaming. It did not make this moment less enveloping. Some current of sleep had washed him, some tightening invisible fishing-line of memory had drawn him, back inside the twelve-year-old body, back inside this night. From here – up here, insisted his mind – the frantic concerns of the man who lay asleep far off in Cahokia were as obscure as the shadowed fields sixty feet down. This was real. This had fresh in it, unfaded, undiminished, just what it had had in it before.

He had stood on the steps of the Home, and watched Ted put his cardboard suitcase in the back of the Coopers’ wagon. Mr Willis, the superintendent of the Home, stood behind with his hand on Barrow’s shoulder.

‘Well so long, dog,’ said Ted.

‘So long, hound-dog,’ said Joe automatically.

‘So long, hound-dog with a wet nose,’ said Ted.

‘So long, hound-dog with a wet nose and a stinky—’

‘We should git going,’ said Mr Cooper. He was a leathery man with dried-out hair, and eyes narrow from squinting at prairie sun. His wife was the same. 287

‘Guess so,’ said Ted. He raised a hand, standing there in his clean-pressed overalls. Then he got in the back of the wagon, Mr Cooper clicked his tongue to the horse, and they were gone. Out the gate, along the fences: gone.

‘I did try and see if they’d take the pair of you,’ said Mr Willis quietly. ‘But they’d only room for one, and besides …’

The ‘besides’ didn’t need saying. Ted was the whitest boy in the Home, just one jigger of takouma in a bucket of white. He was pale enough to pass as all-takata if you didn’t know. Far paler than Joe, or Mr Willis himself.

‘They won’t be mean to him,’ said Willis. ‘They’re decent people. They’ll work him hard, and feed him up, and give him a good life. Don’t you worry. You just take things steady.’

Mr Willis was meaning to be kind, and judging by his wifeless rooms on the second floor, he was tolerably acquainted with solitude himself. But he didn’t know much about Ted, if he thought there was even a chance of these farmers getting the upper hand over him. He’d have them wrapped round his little finger by nightfall, Joe was sure. Ted always knew how to work people. He knew where the soft places and the weak places were, how to slip in a word that cut like a blade. He was the source of the ingenious little cruelties that had kept them both kings of Room 3, time out of mind. Joe was only his tall assistant, his muscle when words weren’t enough.

‘There’ll be other friends,’ said the superintendent. ‘And you’ll have plenty of time to work on your music, think of that.’

But it didn’t ease the desolation. And when he climbed into bed that night and growled, ‘Shut up, you little pissants!’ at the younger ones, it didn’t carry conviction. It didn’t hush them down the way it had when Ted said it. They muttered back before they slept. The kingdom was wobbling. He waited till the last of them was asleep, blanket in his fists up under his chin. Then he ghosted silently out of bed, the way Ted had showed him, and re-dressed silently and crept downstairs and 288found the key the way Ted had showed him, and went out in the dark the way he had with Ted, on nights of adventure. Only, without Ted. And he climbed the elevator without Ted, and he endured the terror of the climb without Ted, and he sat in the night-time chill on top of the elevator with his bare feet stinging, and he gazed at the silver blister of moonrise on the horizon, all without Ted.

And the cold moon rose, and showed him a cold world.

*

The feel of being alone in a high place, and weak, stayed with him when he gave up on the night and went stumbling in search of coffee in Lydia Lee’s kitchen. Her apartment kitchen, that is, not the place downstairs that served up the food for the speakeasy. The feeling was in his body, even though he had woken up six-four again, and 220 pounds. It made the day even harder to face. He came down the stairs from his loft room with his hands on the rails, sore where the gun barrel had scorched them. When he groped along the passageway, fuzzy-headed in the dark, not wanting to wake anyone, the parquet boards seemed to teeter beneath him.

But there was a bar of light under the door, and when he opened it, he found Dolphus and Lydia eating eggs at the table.

‘Hey, Joe,’ she said. ‘You want some? ’S more in the pan.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘Okay. I was gonna make coffee?’

‘Not for me,’ she said.

‘Nor me, man,’ said Dolphus. ‘Sleep is beckonin’, soon as I’ve eat this.’

They were both in robes – Lydia’s robes, pastel pink – and it was clear from Dolphus’s mussed and de-brilliantined hair, Lydia’s eroded mascara, that for them this was still the end of the evening, not the start of the morning. Also, that Dolphus had received one of the rare and occasional invitations to her bed that Lydia issued. Barrow had had one himself, about a month after he moved in, and it had been spelled out that he wasn’t to presume there’d ever be another. 289That was the way she liked it, in these years after the death of Mr Lee. Dolphus looked bleary. Lydia’s bed was a strenuous place, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He probably needed his eggs.

Barrow put on the water for coffee. His palms complained as he handled kettle, cup, spoon. Then he loaded himself a plate and sat down. The sky outside was still as solidly dark as if Loyola Street were at the bottom of a lake of black water. It brimmed against the window glass. He’d left the moonlight behind in the dream.

‘You both doin’ okay, then?’ he said.

‘I guess,’ said Dolphus, ‘’cept for this town of yours turning so nasty, of a sudden. I mean, don’t get me wrong,’ he said, with a gallant flourish of his fork. ‘Very recent events have been plumb magnificent. No question. But like I think I done said, I thought this place was next thing to home ground. Didn’t reckon on being here for no Klan takeover.’

‘They ain’t taken over yet,’ said Barrow.

‘They’re fixing to try, that’s bad enough. I tell you, I’d be happier if we’d took the train south Monday, or never come here at all this trip, beggin’ present company’s pardon. Be a whole lot more comfortable in my mind if I was safe home in Meridian.’

‘Yeah?’ said Lydia sharply. ‘And how long you think it’s gonna stay safe, down in dear old Meridian, if everything goes to shit up here?’

‘Don’t see there’s much I can do about that, my dear,’ said Dolphus.

‘You know anything we don’t, Joe?’ she asked. ‘Somethin’ hopeful, maybe?’

‘Not … exactly,’ said Barrow. ‘But the takouma have got something planned, I think.’

‘Well, I hope so.’ She pushed away her plate, and fished in the pocket of her robe for cigarettes. ‘I ever tell you the story of how my grand-daddy came up here?’

‘I don’t believe you did.’290

‘Well, he ran from a plantation down near Baton Rouge. Stole a suit of fine clothes from the master’s house, and swam hisself out to a island in the river channel. Then he flagged down one of the Vann steamers on the Cahokia run. He knew which ones they were, ’cause of the flag. Coupla Cherokee sailors rowed over to take a look at him, dressed to the nines and soaking wet, and he said, this is scandalous, my man; I have been throwed overboard from another ship of your fine fleet, following a trivial disagreement about a card game, and my ticket has done floated away. They said, then you best come aboard – sir. And when he did, they said, that is the most ridiculous line of taklousa horseshit we’ve heard all week, take this shovel, take off those clothes that don’t even fit, and you can git stokin’ the boiler, that should about pay for your fare north. So he did, and they kept him outta sight below-decks till the boat was past Quizquiz. Then when he got here, the tamaha made him do a year on a road gang and two years more in the Legion, and he said he didn’t know sometimes whether he hadn’t just traded one state of bondage for another. But when he was done, they gave him a hundred dollars Cahokian in his hand, and the lease on thirty acres down at the south end of the state, where they liked to settle old Legionaries in case they needed them again. And they said, thank you Mr Lee.’

She looked at the end of her cigarette, and stubbed it out in what was left of her eggs.

‘Now, I’m goin’ to bed. And Dolphus here and I are gonna hide under my silk covers, and hope that when we come back out, the danger’s gonna be past. Or at least that things’ve calmed down enough that we can git back to the music business, and the gin business. But I’ve a notion that you, Joe, ain’t gonna be hiding today. So you take care of yourself.’

She stood up and came round the end of the table. Then she squeezed onto Barrow’s knee with a wriggle of her ass, and put her 291arms round his neck, and kissed him. Not a peck on the cheek, a hot hard injection of tongue. She tasted of eggs, and smoke, and alcohol.

‘Any complaints?’ she said to Dolphus, surfacing.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Damn right,’ she said. She patted Barrow on the cheek and extricated herself. ‘Come on then,’ she said to Dolphus.

‘You know, man,’ said Dolphus yawning as he rose. ‘However this thing works out, when we go, when we git on that train outta here, I’ma make one more serious play for you to come along, man. You been sittin’ on your talent long enough, and you know it. Well, good night.’

‘Kettle’s boiling,’ said Lydia, and took him away.

2

It was still dark when he reached the precinct at ten minutes before six – first dawn twilight just creeping across the dome of the sky overhead, a bleed of pure colour that showed it was indeed going to be a fine day. But Doyle was already there, in conference with Pishu of the night squad and the two lieutenants of the uniforms from downstairs. There was so much smoke in the captain’s office that it looked like a box of leftover fog. Chokfi was already there too working the telephone, a legal pad in front of her with many headings scrawled on it. It seemed like the takouma part of the city, at least, was wide awake. Yesterday had been all waiting, and the paralysis of waiting. Today the waiting was over. Frankie Blackhawk was dead, the peril of the insurrection was on them, the line of dominoes had begun to fall.

Barrow put his head into the cubby. Chokfi looked at him, indulgence and irritation on her face together, but didn’t stop talking in rapid Anopa. She just waved him on, into the squadroom.292

He’d bought all three newspapers from the vendor outside. He dumped them on his desk and scanned the covers while he waited for Doyle to be free. The Post had PANIC ON THE STREETS and a picture of the trolley being mobbed on the Plaza, all rushing shadows and pale takata faces with mouths stretched wide. It was an odd thought that he was somewhere in that scene himself, out of sight in the blurry blaze of the interurban’s windows. Tamaha, on the other hand, had nothing on its front page but a giant, black-bordered studio portrait of the late Frankie Blackhawk, looking noble and dignified in a dark suit. Underneath it said INO MIKO ANITA. Our, chief, something, Barrow worked out. Lost? Departed? Young? He flipped the pages inside, but of course, if there were details from LA of the murder, they were all in Anopa. The Chronicle was having it both ways. Half its front page was the rising storm in the city, captioned MAYOR, GOVERNOR, NOTABLES CALL FOR CALM. The other half was an obit for the dead prince, described as ‘playboy and Hollywood leading man Francis Hashi’. This, Barrow did skim through, but the facts were scanty. The star had answered the door of his mansion himself, since he was expecting guests that night and liked to welcome them in person; two shots had been heard, and when his secretary and housekeeper came running, they found him already dead on the hall floor, with a bullet in his chest and another in his head. The door was swinging open, and whoever had shot him had fled. ‘His mysterious assailant’, the Chronicle said, though Barrow was unsure how they could know there was only one.

Doyle’s office door opened, and he and all three lieutenants came out. They shook hands with each other, more like men setting off for war than cops at the start of a day. The others filed out. Doyle saw Barrow. He sighed, slapped his knees, and came on over.

‘Right, let’s be having you then,’ he said. He hooked over the nearest desk chair and sat in it.293

‘Miko,’ said Barrow, nodding at the departing backs in the stairwell, ‘is there a plan for today?’

‘Something like one, anyway,’ said Doyle. ‘They’re not telling us the whole of it. Word’s come down that we’re to open the Klan one route to the Plaza, along 1st and then Moon, but only the one. All side streets to be sealed.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then we await developments, and, quote, “stand ready to assist”. And no, I have my guesses, but I don’t know what that means either.’

‘I’m guessing this isn’t coming outta the mayor’s office.’

‘Well, I got a call from Mr Lakna urging me to go along with it … Now. Back to what we can control. Pishu’s lads checked out the bars you told them about, and drew a blank at all of ’em, as expected. So, we’ll be proceeding on the basis of pure reason instead. Tell me everything you know about Mr Phineas Drummond.’

‘Like what?’ said Barrow. He was willing, he supposed, to do this excavation. He’d decided that yesterday. But that didn’t mean he was going to enjoy it. And the memory of moonrise on top of a grain elevator was still floating behind his eyes. It made no sense, but part of him was angry Drummond was gone, and he was having to do this shit on his own.

Doyle’s face was sore with tiredness but his eyes were bright. ‘Everything. Where you met, for a start, and formed your odd couple.’

‘Do we really have to go that far back?’

‘Seems to me like you’re drawing a blank in the present. So, yes. Go back to the beginning.’

‘It was in the hospital, in France.’

‘You were in the same unit?’

‘No, no. I was in the 131st, he was in the 153rd. That’s an Arkansas regiment. We wouldn’ta met, it hadn’t been we were in 294the next beds to each other, in the field hospital. I’d been shot, he’d been caught in a shell burst.’

And buried, Barrow didn’t say. It wasn’t like you decided to talk and that opened all the privacies at once. There was container below container, and they had different locks.

‘You get a sense of what kinda soldier he’d been?’

‘He was a sharpshooter. Grown up hunting squirrels, and he said it was no different drawing a bead on a man’s head.’ Easier, to be honest with you, Drummond’s voice said in his head from the next bed under the canvas ceiling. Those Boche boys don’t move as quick. More like shootin’ cans off of a fence. The voice quick, reminiscent, un-guilty. Barrow’d liked that, along with the apparent colour-blindness of the man. It made a change.

‘I meant, whether he did well. But that sounds like our Phineas. Not over-troubled by scruples. Did he say where all these squirrels had perished, exactly?’

‘Somewhere in the Ozarks, that’s all.’

‘He didn’t mention a town?’

‘Going to Little Rock to join up, is all I can remember. He talked a lot, but it was like, opinions, ideas, plans. He was … real vague about himself, thinking about it now.’

‘Vague as in, maybe with something criminal behind him? Something that might’ve left some kind of record?’

‘I don’t think so. He’d say, “I ain’t never bin caught and I don’t aim to be. Self-respect keeps ya slippery.”’

‘Like he had done something, and he’d gotten away with it?’

‘More like it was a kind of slogan he’d made up for himself. He was big on not getting trapped. He’d say, politics, religion, marriage – all of them were traps, and he didn’t plan to get caught in ’em.’

‘Hmm. Any family that he talks about?’

‘His mama’s dead, that I do know, ’cause he mentioned her funeral once.’295

‘No-one else? They’re supposed to be real clannish down there, that I heard.’

‘Oh no, he despises that stuff. Says anyone believes that fiery cross stuff, is a sucker.’

‘What? No. No, I meant “clannish” with a C. All those cousins those folks are meant to have, in the mountains.’

‘Oh.’

‘He talk about anyone like that?’

‘Well … he’d tell stories sometimes, about his uncle. But they were all, you know, tall tales. How his Uncle Arvin kept a cricket that talked. How Uncle Arvin ate a toadstool ’n went to sleep for a year. How he met a giant. Like that.’

‘I don’t believe Uncle Arvin is going to be numbered among the real citizens of the great state of Arkansas. He didn’t get letters from home?’

‘If he does I’ve never seen any.’

‘Right. Solitary so-and-so, isn’t he, for a talkative fellow … Back to the army, then. So there are you two in adjacent cots. And you find you get along. Which is a surprise on the face of things, isn’t it, him being the talker that he is, talking the way a jackrabbit runs, and you being mostly silent. And maybe, forgive me, giving the impression of being not the sharpest tool in the box, till you get to know you. So how did it work, then, you being friends? Does it work.’

They were bouncing backwards and forwards between past tense and present tense all the way, Barrow noticed. As if Drummond was gone and also not, as if the friendship was over and also not.

Mutual need, was the immediate answer to Doyle’s question. When the morphine ran low in the canvas hospital behind Chateau-Thierry and pain had spread through Barrow from the crater in his shoulder till his body felt all hollow, a vessel with nothing in it but pain, a bottle full of lightning, and thought had been impossible let 296alone speech, the voice from the next bed had gone lollygagging on, unceasing, and he had held to it like a rope. Then when in the deep night Phin had begun to choke for the first time on earth that could not be spat out, because it was only the memory of earth, he had reached an arm across the gap between the cots and been able to bring him back with touch to the dark low tent. With touch, and with singing not much louder than a murmur, all he’d been capable of. ‘St James Infirmary’, if he remembered correctly. I went down to St James Infirmary, saw my baby there. Laid out on a long white table, so cold so still so bare. And the gasping had ended; and Phin had lain there with his eyes wide and wet, and said, ‘My, ain’t you a regular fountain of cheerfulness …’

‘I guess we looked out for each other,’ Barrow said to Doyle. ‘And I guess he was the first takata I’d met, looked at me like I was a human being.’

Which sounded great, and was true as far as it went. But right now Barrow was wondering how much he’d been primed by old times at the Boys’ Home to find an ancient comfort in having someone clever and mean tell him what to do. And how much on his side Drummond had understood that this particular human being would follow where he was led, so long as the lost-brother button was being pressed upon. Had they drifted by chance into Barrow handing over his judgement and his conscience for safekeeping? Or had Drummond scoped out the possibility of that early? Phin was quick.

‘And you were army buddies from then on?’

‘They gave us both two weeks’ medical leave in Paris after we got outta hospital, and we bummed around together.’ More red wine, less music on that leave, he remembered. Already less music. ‘He said, we should go into partnership together after the war. I said, like opening up a repair shop or something? He said, hell no, where’s the percentage in that, I mean something serious, where we can use my wits and your muscle.’ Big man. ‘Then it was the Armistice. We got 297mustered home on different troop ships. I suppose he went back to Arkansas. I gave him my old landlady’s address in Chicago—’

‘He didn’t give you his?’

‘… No. And he wrote me there, maybe eight or ten months later, autumn of ’19, to say he’d gotten an in for us here.’

‘He called and you came.’

‘I didn’t have anything better to do.’

‘A-huh. Now, I don’t see any mystery in old Nakbateroli hiring on a pair of ex-soldiers to the Murder Squad. Tough guys, not too squeamish for a dirty job: yeah. And I suppose there’s no mystery either in why your man Phineas would think that po-lice work offers a chance or three in these times to fill your pockets. For you cannot deny that the Eighteenth Amendment and the ragin’ thirst of a Catholic city do work in glorious harmony to throw off the dollars.’

Leaving tactfully unsaid, Barrow noted, whether Doyle’s captaincy would mean any changes in the regular flow of brown envelopes. It had been all crisis so far, on his watch.

‘But what I do ask myself is, did he come in here knowing there was some bigger score in prospect? Was he put in here, ahead of time, for something particular?’

‘You mean, whether he was a plant. Like the Klan putting Fred Hopper into the Land Trust.’

‘Yes.’

‘If he was he kept it awful quiet. I mean, he never talked till now like his California daydream was anything but a daydream. It’s like it only got real this last week or two. He might have been on the lookout for a big score but I don’t think he found one till now. And he never talked like he knew powerful people, either. Not Vanderberg; not anyone.’

‘We got to get to the question of how they got hooked up, ’cause it ain’t obvious. – But hold off on that a second; let’s finish out the routine business. Friends. Who’re his friends off the job?’298

‘I … don’t know that he has any, much. Drinking buddies, I mean, sure: he’ll talk to anyone, he likes to talk. But he does give off a, a—’

‘—powerful smell of contempt for the human race? Yes, I can imagine that would be off-putting. So there’s only you he’s close to?’

‘… Yes.’

The things I do inna sacred name of friendship, said Drummond’s voice in his head. And Barrow felt a pang of guilt, for even if Phineas Drummond’s feeling for Joe Barrow was nine parts in ten utilitarian, or ninety-nine parts in a hundred, that might still be more friendship than the mind behind the cartoon face had managed to conceive for anyone else.

‘Right. Women, then. Has he got a girl? I won’t even bother to enquire for a fiancée. I’ve seen how he behaves around a decent girl. But somebody casual and regular maybe? Someone with a strong stomach and no aversion to contempt?’

‘He … says he prefers to pay. And a different hooker every time, in case they … get ideas.’

‘How tragically disappointed those ladies must be when he doesn’t come back. So, he’s not holed up in some tart’s boudoir, then, you don’t think.’

‘No.’

‘No. He’s not giving us much to work with here, is he.’ Doyle yawned. ‘All right. Back to the question of how he and Arthur Vanderberg got acquainted. Let’s see … is he … I don’t know … an unlikely but passionate supporter of the Republican Party? No? Does he … go to public lectures on ancient American antiquities? No. Does he like to share stock tips? Does he have a broker who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who knows somebody at the Union Club? No?’

‘No.’

Doyle rubbed his face with his wide red hands.299

‘Perhaps we’re coming at this the wrong way around. Who do we know that dear Phineas is connected to?’

Barrow cast his mind back over the last two years. All those situations in which he’d let Drummond do the talking. The accomplices who needed persuading to sing. The plausible boys snatched off street corners who would do to close a case proving troublesome. The business owners willing to pay to have a crime scene relocated off their premises. The rum-runners, of course, whom American thirst provided with so much money to procure police favours, when eyes needed to look the other way, when their subterranean wars burst out into daylight. They were the permanent ones, the web of connections Drummond had known he was operating in, day after day, on into the future. The others were all chance met, case by case, and Barrow didn’t remember ever having the sensation that Drummond knew more than he who to expect when the Murder Squad pushed through a door. No, it was cherchez la booze, all right. But even then, relations with the takouma mob had mostly gone through Nakbateroli: Drummond had been connected with Benny Shokcha and his Southside boys because the department already was, and within the parameters the department set. The person he definitely had individual history with – the one he’d behaved toward lately with unaccountable strangeness, was—

‘Weiss,’ said Barrow.

‘Okay,’ said Doyle, ‘and doesn’t his name come up a lot. But connected how? The … usual?’

Again the delicacy.

‘No, not just that. There was something real strange in the air when Phin and I went to talk to him Tuesday. Phin didn’t want to go – I mean, at all – and when we got there, he was like a maniac. Went in swinging, started a fight there was no reason for. Got me cut up,’ said Barrow, touching the eyebrow, which seemed to be starting to heal, though he could still feel that the little row of silk 300knots was holding it together. ‘It was like – it was like, he was doing this crazy thing because it was all he could think of, to stop something else happening.’

‘Like what?’

‘I been thinking about this. Maybe, like Weiss starting a conversation he didn’t want me to be hearing. I think … he was sending a … rough kinda signal to Weiss to remember that him and us were supposed to be enemies. Weiss said, real pissed, “I thought we had an understanding?” and Phin said something like, “We do about the liquor business, not about murder.”’

‘Ah,’ said Doyle. ‘Hint, hint, you think.’

‘Yeah. And Weiss got the signal. Message received. He didn’t like it though; he let me ask him questions for two minutes before he pushed us out the door, and all the while he behaved like that was ass-backwards, like the police makin’ demands on him was some awful liberty. Like the dirt had upped and started talking.’

‘Because you’re takouma?’

‘I’m – no. Or not only that. He said to Phin, as we were going, “Remember which way round this works.” Weiss was angry at him.’

‘And what do you conclude from that?’ asked Doyle.

‘That whatever Phin and Weiss have going, it was Weiss’s idea.’

‘All right,’ Doyle said. He drew a line in the air. ‘So, Detective Drummond connects to Mr Weiss, and it was Weiss’s idea. Who does Weiss connect to?’

‘Well, the Union Club! He supplies them.’

‘With the good stuff, presumably. The scotch made by men in kilts, not men adding caramel to veterinary products. You’re sure of this?’

‘The Man told me yesterday.’

‘All right, then. So here’s the picture. The delightful Mr Vanderberg wants something doing. He applies to his friendly neighbourhood bootlegger. Then the bootlegger finds a cop.’301

A cop with no prejudices, a voice in Barrow wanted to object. A cop with no principles, a second voice countered.

‘Yes?’ Doyle prompted.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t like this,’ said Doyle. ‘I don’t like this at all. I think you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that your friend Phineas has been a very bad boy indeed.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Barrow. And he wasn’t sure if he was playing dumb, or just fending bad news off while he still could.

‘I mean,’ Doyle said, ‘that we’ve been talking as if Vanderberg hired him to queer the case in some way. That would be bad enough, of course. But in fact we can’t easily point to any definite piece of interference, except that he kept trying to keep takouma suspects in the frame. It didn’t work, but he didn’t seem to care. He was half-hearted at best when you started chasing after Sammy Noukouwa. And then yesterday he waltzes away out of the department as if he’s already done whatever it was Vanderberg wanted him for. Or he would have been waltzing if Chokfi hadn’t fired a tack into him. What I’m thinking is, Fred Hopper’s only been dead for four days, and however recent your man’s deal with Weiss is, it’s got to be older than that. So they signed him up before the murder. And what he’s done for them may be worse than messing with the investigation.’

Barrow looked at the floor.

‘Yes,’ he said.

It was nearly seven. The light of the fine day dawning outside was pushing into the squadroom, blue and inexorable, from the windows of the stairwell. The smoke in the captain’s office had thinned to a steel veil. And as the two of them talked, bent forward head to head on the two desk chairs, the room had filled up with the other detectives, back on shift for judgement day. There was desultory tapping of typewriter keys, sipping from paper coffee 302cups, but Bunce and Everard, Yanasa and Tali were really waiting on the captain.

‘Couple more seconds, gentlemen,’ said Doyle to the room. ‘We’ve achieved some moral clarity here, Mr Barrow, and dismal it is too, but we’ve still no actual lead to follow. Come on, now; there must be something to help us lay hands on him.’

‘The frustrating thing,’ said Barrow, and cleared his throat.

‘Yes?’

‘The frustrating thing is, that Phin told me yesterday morning to come and find him. So he must think I know how. So it must be I do know how. And I been racking my brain, I swear. But I can’t put my finger on it.’

Doyle looked at him.

‘Don’t think, magic solutions,’ he said. ‘Think, habits. Think, little things he does that might’ve left a trail. A suit he ordered from a tailor and got delivered? Favourite lunch spot where they take calls for him? Come on, man. You know him better than me. Anything at all.’

‘Well, there’s – this,’ said Barrow. He fished the empty medicine bottle out of his pocket and passed it over. ‘I found this in his desk last night.’

Doyle put on his half-moon glasses and read, ‘Phee-ny-liso-pro,-pro-, fiddly-tiddly-widdly-something-or-other. What’s this?’

‘I don’t know. But if Phin’s taking it, he must be getting it from a drugstore, and I thought, if it’s unusual—’

‘—then someone might remember, or better yet, have his address on a prescription pad. Good! Or better than nothing, anyway.’

Doyle heaved himself up from the chair and flicked the little empty bottle across the squadroom to Bunce, who blinked and caught it.

‘You two,’ he said, meaning Bunce and Everard, ‘talk to druggists. Find a pharmacy that’s planning to open today – on the Northside, 303maybe – or find someone at home who’ll talk to you. Find out what this is, quick, and whether it’ll give us a line to follow. And you,’ he went on, swivelling to Tali and Yanasa, ‘get back to the Land Trust, grab Mrs – Mrs—’

He snapped his fingers.

‘Hankeha,’ said Barrow.

‘—as soon as she comes in, and find out how the jobs get assigned to the clerks on her floor. How the Union Cartridge file went to Fred Hopper. Get a statement from her. Then talk to her about keys: who has ’em, which ones exactly you’d need to get to the roof of the building at night. Right?’

‘Will they be working today?’ asked Yanasa.

‘All hands on deck, I hear,’ said Doyle. ‘Go! I’ve got a riot to supervise, and a statement on this mess to write for the mayor.’

‘What about me?’ said Barrow.

‘Guess,’ said Doyle.

‘… Type up everything I just told you?’

‘Correct. After yesterday, I’m keeping you under my eye.’

‘But I can’t just … sit here while the city goes to hell.’

‘Consider it a punishment, Detective. Examine your heart, and tell me whether you don’t deserve it.’

3

The clock ticked in the empty room. The typewriter clacked. He  made  error  after  error,  mis-transcribing  PHENYLISOPROPYLAMINE from his notebook so many times that he had to throw that sandwich of carbon paper away, and start again. The captain came and went from Chokfi’s cubby; uniforms serving as messengers ran up the stairs, relayed news to Doyle and ran back down again with instructions. Barrow itched and twitched in his 304seat, his fingers too big for the typewriter keys, his body boiling with unused adrenalin. There were shouts from the street outside now and then, perhaps a slightly louder background hum of noise filtering through the precinct walls, but nothing definite. He thought of the Man, waiting in his palace for twenty thousand Klansmen to assemble outside. He thought of Couma’s howl of grief last night; he thought of her this morning, red-eyed and sleepless. And though he knew with his head that something must be in place for the protection of both of them, something more substantial than a bodyguard each with a tommy gun, in his mind’s eye they were helpless. Pinned in place while the mob flowed towards them. He had done his best to report to the Man last night, on Lydia’s telephone, but this time had not been able to get past Father Jerome. ‘His Highness is dealing with a family tragedy. I will let him know that you called.’

*

At eight o’clock, Doyle turned on the radiogram and cracked open his office door. Taking it as an invitation Barrow came over and listened. It was the WNCK news bulletin, and there was the mayor talking. His voice was still smooth, but now effortfully so. He sounded as if he had just run up a flight of stairs and was trying not to show it.

‘I have been informed by the Police Department,’ Lakna said, ‘that they have ruled out takouma involvement in the Land Trust murder. I’ll repeat that: the police are confident that Frederick Hopper was not killed by any takouma. They are currently in pursuit of a takata suspect. And it is their working theory that this shocking and heinous crime was committed in order to stir up – to stir up deliberately – the kind of tension and strife in which our city finds itself this morning. So I appeal to all those of you whom this murder has made feel unsafe, all those of you who are rightly horrified by this exhibition of wanton bloodshed, to remember 305that those who perpetrated this horror upon us did so with the intent of terrifying you; with the intent of making you doubt your safety in this city we all share. Your best protection from those who would set us at odds with each other is to shake off fear. To lay aside suspicion. To forswear hatred. To recall that we are neighbours, in a metropolis where red and white and black have lived together in trust and confidence for fifty years. Don’t let fear guide your steps this morning, neighbours!’

‘He doesn’t think that will work, does he?’ asked Barrow.

‘Nope,’ said Doyle. ‘He knows it’s all gone too far for that. But it might peel away a fraction from the march and that would be worthwhile in itself.’

The mayor had switched into Anopa.

‘Same thing again?’

Doyle gave him a slightly ironic smile. ‘As it happens – no. All the Anopa speakers will have understood the part in English already. This is an extra statement, just for them. He’s saying … keep off the streets, till you hear the all-clear. He’s saying … no-one is to take individual vengeance for the death of Francis Hashi. The tamaha is under the protection of Our Lady. The situation is … in hand.’

‘That doesn’t sound like him.’

‘No.’

Barrow tried to light a cigarette and discovered that he already had one alight in his mouth.

‘What the hell is happening out there?’ he said.

‘Take a breath, son,’ said Doyle. ‘Everyone’s got people they care about at risk, today.’

‘I don’t know if the next thing I see is gonna be white hoods coming up those stairs.’

‘March hasn’t left Germantown yet,’ said Doyle. ‘They’re still forming up. Not supposed to be on the move till after nine.’306

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure. You want a bulletin, ask Chokfi. She’s done talking; she’s listening now. The exchange has got her plugged into a gigantic party line with every takouma-owned telephone westward up 1st from here to the river. There are eyes on the Klan on every block. They move, we’ll know.’

‘It’d be easier if you gave me something to do.’

‘I have given you something to do.’

‘I mean something active.’

‘Look, you were on probation yesterday. You screwed it up. Today – I don’t even know what you are today. Hanging on by the skin of your teeth—’

‘Does any of that stuff matter, when—’

‘When the world’s ending? Yes, dammit. Because if we’re going to go down, we’ll go down doing it right, and if we’re going to be here tomorrow, the city needs a po-lice that behaves like po-lice. Not like hoodlums acting on impulse. Now siddown.’

Another messenger in uniform was bounding up the stairs. Doyle beckoned him into the glass office and shut the door behind him.

Barrow couldn’t sit down. He paced. He finished the cigarette and immediately sparked up another. The match he used lit a small fire in the wastebasket he flung it into. While he was putting out the burning paper, Everard and Bunce came back.

‘Miko busy?’ said Everard.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow. ‘Did you get anywhere with the medicine?’

‘Kinda,’ said Bunce cautiously, ‘and kinda not. Look, I think we should maybe wait and—’

‘C’mon, now,’ said Barrow. ‘This is my partner we’re talking about, here.’

The other two detectives looked at each other.

‘Well,’ said Everard, ‘okay. The bad news is, whatever this stuff is, it ain’t normally prescribed. It’s not in, like, the standard listing 307for drugs. Which means it ain’t on the market. But, good news, that means it’s rare. Wherever Phin got it, it wasn’t a regular druggist. Maybe a hospital. Maybe direct from the manufacturer. Guy we talked to said, try the chemistry department at the university – see if they can identify it.’

‘Okay,’ said Barrow.

‘Now, hold your horses—’ began Bunce.

But Barrow had whirled out of the pen, and round the corner into Chokfi’s cubby.

As Doyle had said, she was on the phone, but listening not talking. Her head was on one side, her expression was intent, and she was nodding unconsciously to whatever it was that she was hearing. There was a big paper street map laid out on her desk to her left, and she had the forefinger of her left hand, varnished pearly-violet, stationed at an intersection deep in Germantown. When she saw Barrow come in, she smiled wearily at him, and tapped the forefinger on the map. He bent down and looked.

‘1st and Cedar? Is that where the front of the march is at now?’

‘Mm-hmm,’ she said.

‘Say,’ he said, ‘could you come off the line just long enough to set up a call to the chemistry department at the university?’

She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Sorry, Joe – we gotta keep the line for this.’

‘I’d be real quick,’ said Barrow.

She frowned. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Like, one minute flat.’

‘No.’

‘Come on, now.’

The frown, the puzzlement, faded into a stare. Without losing her left hand’s place on the map, she bent and dipped her other arm into her bag, down on the floor at her feet. It came out holding her Four Winds mask. She lifted it. Then it wasn’t Amanda Chokfi 308saying no to him, it was West, with the painted grey hair, the skull eyes, the age-lines beside the anguished wooden mouth.

Barrow lifted his hands and backed out. Doyle was done talking to the messenger; he was out on the floor of the pen, yakking with Everard and Bunce, and they were all looking his way.

‘Shit,’ said Barrow under his breath.

He hesitated. The urge to just bolt down the stairs was strong. Then he turned back into the squadroom.

‘Captain,’ he said, ‘send me to the university. Please.’

Doyle looked at him, then at Everard and Bunce. They shrugged.

‘It was his case, miko,’ said Everard.

‘Would you come back?’ said Doyle.

‘Miko, you said yourself, it’s all hands today. You need everyone.’

‘The thing we don’t seem able to settle is, are you one of my hands? I tell you, you’re a conundrum I could do without.’

‘Do you—?’ began Barrow, and then stopped. He changed the grounds of his appeal. ‘Do you believe I’d take sides against the city? Today?’

‘… No,’ said Doyle eventually. ‘No, I don’t believe that.’ He blew out his breath. ‘Ah, go on. Go. But quickly, for God’s sake. And no vanishing. And no heroics!’

‘Thank you,’ said Barrow. He snatched up his hat, and went.

*

The sky was a bright, bright blue now, as perfect and unbroken as if it were painted on. As if someone had dipped a brush in the colour used for the Madonna’s cloak, and patiently worked it onto every inch of the vault overhead. The trees on the sidewalk beside the Algonkian stirred in a cold breeze, the tips of the bare branches thickening with buds, but the sky seemed quite still, far removed from changes and chances down below. Immaculately safe from whatever it would witness today, whatever would happen under its bright canopy. The streets were deserted. Every business was 309shuttered and bolted. Everything was silent and perversely, thanks to the light, everything was looking its best. Even the marks of winter damage on the buildings – the stains, the fading of paint, the withering of woodwork – were tidied into clarity. It made Barrow’s eyes ache as he hurried along; made him feel, behind his eyes, how badly he had been sleeping. A thousand windows looked down on him. Some, he knew, with watchers behind them tied in to Chokfi’s network of telephones but most just with people waiting out the day.

At Grant Square he found one of the armoured cars that had been guarding the precinct drawn up to block the mouth of the street he was coming out of, and a line of wooden X’s strung with barbed wire, and behind it all a row of nervous cops. It was a planned, methodical version of the barricades he’d seen on the Northside, but the wire still had a faintly unbelievable quality, out of place in a business district and therefore more incongruous than warlike. They had to shift the left-hand end of the barrier to let him through. But out on the square, walking alone over the streetcar tracks where on any normal day he’d have been diced by steel wheels or run down by rubber ones, the strangeness mounted into the sinister. Every window was faced with steel. The golden maw of the Panton Leslie building was shut. Blumfeld’s display of sporting hats and tennis suits for spring was sealed behind armourplate. All the streets off Grant were blocked, in accordance with the orders, except the tunnels leading east under the Union Station and, westward, the wide opening of 1st. Alone on the square, Barrow peered that way. Nothing could be seen except the dim convergence of the office blocks and apartment blocks to the vanishing point: but he could hear the Klan. An audible thrum and buzz of trouble came out of 1st, the sound of a hive far off stirring into agitated life. With, as the breeze eddied, faint snatches of brass. It seemed the Klan were marching out of Germantown to an oompah-oompah band.

He picked up the pace and went east under the railroad, feet 310echoing in tiled emptiness from which all the usual reverberant noise had been removed. Then through the Arch with the carved angels, where the roosting seraphs seemed not just dovelike but positively dopey today. Wake up! Draw your swords! Fly! And onto Moon Street. He still couldn’t work out why, if the plan was to resist the Klan, they were going to be allowed to get this far into the city’s heart. Was the hum from behind getting louder? No; he was imagining things. Again, on all that long axis, he was the only figure moving. But the unnatural solitude was not quite complete. Behind the heavy gates that had been locked across the entries into the Quarters, he caught occasional flashes of colour at the corner of his eye. Mask colour. The situation is in hand. He wished he knew why he was supposed to believe that.

Out into the Plaza. Silence in the pillared arcades to east, west and south. To the north the facade of the palace glowed red and yellow in the sun, and the facade of the cathedral yellow and red; and between palace and cathedral, the mass of the Mound, winter’s dead grass on its slopes shining like pale flax. The intimate space of mystery where he had met the procession was gone, replaced by a vast stage-set with no hiding places. He had wondered if some kind of takouma army, summoned by the Red Council, would be waiting here. But there was no army.

*

It seemed to take an age to cross the plain of cobbles, and to get down to its southern exit onto Christ-the-King, between the corner of the block-long stone barn of the old Legion Barracks on one side and the open-topped brick box of the Ballcourt standing guard on the other. Down at the far end the green dome of the Statehouse lifted in the sun, with the pointy gothic of Francis Xavier University just short of it. It was nearly nine, and when he reached the main gate of FXU he was half sure that he was only going to find it impenetrably closed. He could see why the city would insist on bringing the civil service 311to work in the Three Sisters today – that was like keeping a flag flying – but it might well be a day when the tamaha could do without history, and literature, and theology. And chemistry.

But when he banged on the closed gate, a spyhole opened promptly; when he held up his badge, a small door in the gate opened promptly too. And on the other side he found that there was at least a skeleton staff present. The students might have been told to stay home, but some of the janitors and some of the professors had come in, and were talking in anxious little groups. He asked for the chemistry department, and was directed to a stairwell at the corner of a quadrangle which had probably been built to look like Paris or Zaragoza, but where the hard winter of the Midwest had bleached the lawn entirely brown. Up three flights of stairs smelling of floor polish, then into an austere range of laboratories, all cold blue air and fume cupboards and scarred work benches. There didn’t seem to be anybody about, here.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello?’

‘Yes?’ said a woman’s voice from along the hallway.

He followed it, and found an office with a high metal window overlooking Christ-the-King, where a small solid nun in a black-and-white habit was hastily gathering papers into a briefcase.

‘Sister,’ said Barrow. ‘Cahokia PD. I wonder if you could just – oh.’ The habit had slowed the recognition down, but this was the woman whom Mickey Casqui had been sparring with at the lecture, and then afterwards in the Catawba Room. Sister Peggy Something. Peggy Iti.

‘I thought you were a poet?’ he said.

‘Detective, good morning. I am a poet. I am also a chemistry lecturer. You are a cop, and also a pianist. Aren’t we versatile. Is there something I can help you with? I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.’

‘Me too,’ Barrow said. ‘I’m trying to identify a medicine. The druggist we went to said, try here.’312

‘They probably shouldn’t have. Analysis of a small sample is a tricky business, you can use it up on a couple of initial tests for the wrong thing. Contrary to what they say in the press, you usually can’t get a firm ID for a mysterious powder on the carpet. Bring me an ounce or two of the stuff and then we’ll talk. But on another day, please.’

‘No,’ said Barrow, ‘sorry; we’re not trying to put a name to a powder. We got the name, on an empty pill bottle. We just don’t know what it is.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘And it’s not in the national formulary? Not in the US Pharmacopeia?’

‘I don’t know what those are but, I don’t think so. Drugstores ain’t heard of it, apparently.’

She looked at her wristwatch, glanced at the window. ‘I’m afraid you’re still going to have to wait for another day. I need to be on my way, before …’ She gestured at the window.

‘So do I,’ said Barrow. ‘This is for the Land Trust murder. So there may not be another day, if …’ He repeated her gesture. ‘I got a card somewhere from the Man of the Sun saying help me, if that helps. It’s getting a little dirty and little bloody now, mind you; it’s been quite a week.’

‘I don’t answer to him,’ said Sister Peggy. She snapped the lock of her briefcase closed, snapped it open again. She was as antsy as he had been stuck in the squadroom, he realised. ‘Oh, very well. What’s it called, this stuff? – No promises, mind you.’

Rather than trying to say ‘phenylisopropylamine’ out loud, Barrow just handed her his notebook, folded open to the right page.

‘Hmm,’ she said. Her office had a blackboard. She stepped quickly to it, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote with quick squeaks C9H13N. Then, underneath, a diagram of something hexagonal with a criss-cross tail coming off it. ‘That’s what the name means. And it’s a liquid, so if you had it in pill form, it would probably be 313the crystalline sulphate of this molecule.’

‘But what does it do?’

‘No idea. An organic chemical’s interaction with the human body is something you generally discover by experiment. Did it say anything else on the bottle?’

‘The maker’s name. Which was …’ He flipped notebook pages. ‘… Edeleanu-VCS.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’

‘You recognise that?’

‘Yes, but it’s a German company, not an American one. Well, the “Edeleanu” part, anyway. Lazar Edeleanu is a German chemist – at any rate, a Romanian-Jewish-German chemist. Oil industry, mostly, I thought. I didn’t know he’d done anything medical. Wait a moment – if we put the name and the molecule together …’

She went to a bookcase filled floor to ceiling with green-and-black volumes stamped ACTA CHIMICA, and picked out an index. ‘E, E, E,’ she said. ‘Yes. P, P, P. Yes! But way back. 1887.’

She craned upwards. The volume she wanted was well out of her reach, and she was beginning a flustered search for something to climb on, moving backwards and forwards in jerks like a little monochrome hen, when Barrow stepped up. ‘Tell me where, Sister.’

‘Third from the top. Left a bit. Further. Yes, that one.’

He handed her down the book. She found the page she was looking for.

‘Hmm. Mmm. Mmm,’ she said.

‘What does it do?’

‘It seems to be a central nervous system stimulant. Not one that anyone put into production till now, by the look of it. I wonder what they mean to prescribe it for?’

Despite herself Sister Peggy had become interested, but now she looked at her watch again, blinked, and put the book firmly down.

‘I must absolutely go,’ she said.314

‘Will you tell me more if I walk with you?’

‘It depends which way you’re walking, Detective.’

‘Back up to the Plaza.’

‘All right. Me too. I need to get across and to, well, the Northside, before …’ Again the gesture.

Barrow opened her office door for her, and she was through it in a flash. Even with his paces being about twice as long as hers, he still had to move briskly to keep up as she scurried along the corridor of labs.

‘Central nervous system stimulant,’ he reminded her. ‘What does that mean?’

They started down the stairs.

‘It means that a dose of See-Nine Aitch-Thirteen Enn will make you move faster … talk faster … possibly think faster, though I wouldn’t vouch for the reliability of those thoughts. It would probably, let’s see, suppress appetite?’

‘You wouldn’t get hungry?’

‘You wouldn’t notice yourself getting hungry. Maybe a diet pill … Possibly the person who’s taking these might be overweight.’

‘No,’ said Barrow. They crossed the quadrangle at speed, and Sister Peggy scratched the tip of her nose nervously while the door to let them out of FXU was unlocked for them.

‘Anything else?’

They stepped through, and Sister Peggy made an instant left towards the Plaza, almost trotting. The note of trouble in the air had definitely changed. It was louder and closer; it was no longer a single belligerent hum glinting with accents of brass; it had diversified into a rolling scrabble of anger, holiday high spirits, and sports-crowd roar, with snatches of actual tune from the brass band audible. ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’, Barrow thought. He didn’t like the sound of it at all. His watch said nine thirty. There ought still to be plenty of time to clear the Plaza, but he was having 315to resist seizing Sister Peggy by the elbow and breaking into a run himself, mindful that at this point they were very much heading towards the danger. He settled for a trot like hers.

‘Anything else apart from fast-talking, maybe fast-thinking, and appetite?’

‘It would suppress fatigue as well, I suppose?’

‘You wouldn’t sleep.’

‘Yes. You could think of it as a sort of anti-sleeping pill. In fact, that could be what you’d sell it for, couldn’t it. To night-watchmen, sailors, soldiers, what have you. Policemen! People who wanted to stay awake. Well; needed to, for their work. Hard to imagine a reason why you’d actually want not to sleep.’

‘I can think of one,’ said Barrow.

‘You know the person who’s taking these?’ said Sister Peggy, picking up more than he had intended to give away. ‘I thought you were trying to use them to identify a suspect.’

‘Well. It’s complicated.’

‘Tell them to be careful, in that case. If the drug is still experimental, the dose may not have been accurately established, and if you over-stimulate the nerves, or go on doing it too continuously, I would think you’d get some very unpleasant and perhaps dangerous side-effects.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m guessing, but: cognitive deterioration, erratic decision-making, poor impulse control. Plus general strain on the brain and heart. We’re supposed to sleep, Detective.’

‘You couldn’t just, ah, go on staying awake?’

‘No. There’d be a crash. In the end, the body would insist. It wouldn’t be pretty.’

Barrow thought of Phin’s jittery rapidity, these last few weeks. The way his talk almost tripped over itself sometimes, it came out so fast. The purple shadows under his eyes, which maybe hadn’t 316been hangover. The wildness, even for him, of his choices. Perhaps it was a sick man they were looking for. Or perhaps that was an excuse he wanted to make for him.

They had reached the Plaza. The oncoming noise in the air had gone up by a notch again. The thought of being out on the open expanse, isolated, unprotected, scared the crap out of him. But if they skulked along the arcades around the edges, their route would be a longer, slower L. The shortest path between entry and exit took them across the centre, and Sister Peggy had bustled onward without stopping. Out onto the planet of cobbles they went, and it had never seemed so endless. The windows watched. The sun glinted on the cathedral. The pale grasses of the Mound moved uneasily. The sound of approaching hatred came and went like an incoming sea.

‘So,’ said Barrow, to keep talking as much as for anything else, ‘how would a person get their hands on something like this, that wasn’t, uh, released yet? From a hospital?’

‘No,’ said Sister Peggy, breathing hard and looking straight ahead. ‘I don’t think so. It’s not a medicine for an illness, is it. It’s a behaviour-modifier. It’s designed to rev you up, like an engine. That sounds like something you’d sell to individuals, which I suppose is why an outfit like VCS is involved. They’re all about the wholesale drugstore trade.’

‘I thought you said it came from Germany.’

The two monoliths of the Victories approached by inches, passed, were behind them.

‘Edeleanu is German – Edeleanu GmbH, of Berlin. But VCS is red, white and blue American. I’d say, whoever got hold of this early must have a contact at VCS.’

‘Yeah?’ said Barrow. ‘What’s “VCS” then?’

‘Vanderberg Chemical Supply.’

Of course it was. Whatever else Arthur Vanderberg was offering 317Phin, he had managed to throw in a cure for nightmares. At least, a temporary one. An armistice from nightmares while the phenylisopropylamine held back the tide of sleep.

Barrow had stopped while this sank in. Sister Peggy had stopped too, but for a different reason.

‘Jesu Maria,’ she said, staring. It was the first time she had sounded like his idea of a nun.

He looked up. There was a white mass in motion at the mouth of Moon: filling it, spilling from it. Evidently the Klan had moved much faster than predicted. Impatient for the riot that was to give them the city, they had not processed out of Germantown, they had certainly not strolled or ambled. They had boiled out. They had seethed up the length of 1st Street, kept under pressure by all those blocked side-turnings. They had bubbled across Grant, they had jetted under the sleeping angels, they had pressed up Moon like a gas in a piston. Because here they were now, spreading out of the street’s mouth onto the Plaza in a volatile white flood. Hundreds of them. Hundreds becoming thousands. Somewhere behind, no doubt, the placards and the banners and the emblems were on their way, the loudspeaker truck carrying State Senator Corfield in his crimson and purple as Grand Wizard, the apparatus for the particular demand all this was meant to make on the city. But for now, no demands, no names, no words, just a gleeful freeform hatred, a huge and anonymous malignancy, all those particular takata men beneath the hoods losing themselves deliberately, delightedly in being corpuscles of an organism bigger, and angrier, and more merciless than any of them would have dared to be alone. Or maybe would’ve wanted to be. Putting on the pointed hoods, losing their individual faces, made them over into different beasts from their everyday selves, with a different geometry of the body, honed now simply for threat. If they had been magically reclothed in snakeskin, or gone club-headed like hammerhead 318sharks, they could not have been more viciously transformed. They roared. Tubas bellowed behind them. And on they poured toward Barrow and Sister Peggy.

4

‘No!’ said Sister Peggy. ‘It’s too soon!’ She turned her back on the Klan with a jerk of wimple and tunic, and studied the empty vista behind them as if it was supposed to hold a solution. The sun-painted, blue-skied, movement-less vista. ‘Too early!’ she said. Her voice was wobbly with fear.

Barrow looked at the mob and saw in them his undoing. Not just the chance of his death, but the undoing of his doubts. He might be endlessly uncertain what he was. They weren’t. They would see – they were seeing, as the hoods at the front edge of the white tide turned this way to take in the two figures caught out alone in front of the hungry crowd – just a big brown man to play with. A toy for people angry that till now they’d not been allowed, here, to be the biggest things in the world. And a little brown nun to play with too, when they had all been reading sticky, damp-fingered pamphlets about nuns and orgies, nuns and secret vice. Fun, that’s what the crowd saw. Set on fun, part of the front edge of the crowd began to curl towards them.

He measured the distances with his eye. The front ranks of Klansmen were still a hundred yards away, but they were spreading fast from the north-west corner of the Plaza. It was too far to the mouth of Sun over on the east side to get out that way. It would have to be back the way they’d come.

Sister Peggy seemed paralysed. He grabbed her hand without ceremony, turned and ran. She dragged after him, gasping. But her legs were short and her habit hobbled her.319

‘Keep up, Sister!’

‘I can’t!’

He glanced back. The crowd was putting out a tentacle of specifically interested white-robes, twenty or thirty of them willing to seize the chance of sport and give chase. So far they were only jogging on, baying and making crooning come-hither calls; they could see they had all the width of the square and all the time in the world to catch up. Why hurry a pleasure? But they’d accelerate if their prey seemed to be getting away.

Barrow dropped a half-step behind Sister Peggy, dipped down and scooped her up, with one arm behind her shoulders and the other behind her knees. A lot of her was fabric, but underneath she was solid and not especially light. She made a sound of surprise but not of protest. Then with his double armful of nun he sprinted south.

None of the exercises at Sol’s gym had featured loading abs, dorsals and biceps simultaneously with the weight of a sister of religion while running flat out. It wasn’t a workout he’d recommend. He was instantly awash with sweat, he was heaving breaths, just lifting his knees at every step was a strain, and each foot he put down slammed the cobbles. He couldn’t see his feet to place them and he was continually afraid of slipping or tripping if he ran up against a projecting edge or came down on a loose stone. The shining metals of the streetcar tracks came up and he high-stepped over them. The Victories loomed ahead of him, grew taller. Jolt, jolt, jolt. Gasp, gasp, gasp. Six-eight time. The blood thundered in his ears. The hungry catcalls of the Klan pierced through it. He passed the Victories. That still left half the Plaza to cross, and he wasn’t sure he could keep it up, or whether if he did keep it up it would be enough to stay out of reach, or whether if he reached the far side there was any safety to be had there anyway. But there was no alternative. He pounded on. He couldn’t turn his head to check 320how much lead he had left, but Sister Peggy looking over his shoulder was big-eyed. A nonsensical part of his brain – his inner scat singer – said, I ain’t no rum-runner. I ain’t no gun-runner. I’m some kinda nun-runner. His hat blew off.

‘Hell!’ he grunted.

‘Literally, I believe!’ said Sister Peggy. ‘Literally hell at work. Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni. The banners of the king of hell advance.’

‘Always – the – fuckin’ – Latin!’

She laughed, shakily.

‘They close?’

‘Fifty yards, but they’re trying hard now and you’re staying out of reach, you’re doing it, you’re doing it, don’t stop, there’s a good man.’

His upper body was klaxoning in complaint. He was having to put hard, willed force into keeping each leg swinging at speed. End-of-workout stuff; last bit of overdrive being called on, blare of will to override the weakening muscles, for another second, and another second, and one more second. But the end was not in sight. The hard stone plain swayed before him, endless, made of impossible effort.

‘They weren’t supposed to be here,’ said Sister Peggy, as if the situation might be improved if she could make this sufficiently clear. ‘The whole plan was for ten o’clock.’

‘What?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, wait. Something’s happening.’

‘What!’

‘They’re slowing down. They’re stopping.’

‘Can I?’

‘No! Not yet!’

Jolt, jolt, jolt. Gasp, gasp, gasp.

She twisted round to face forward, and her expression cleared. There was something moving up ahead now in the straight depth 321of Christ-the-King, but he couldn’t focus on it. There was a high whine in his ears.

‘I gotta slow up. I gotta stop. Can I? Is it safe? Lemme know!’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can. You can. It’s all right now. It’s going to be all right. Oh, thank heavens.’

Barrow lumbered to a halt, put her down in a slither of black and white, and bent at the waist and breathed so hard it felt as if his lungs would turn inside out. Five breaths; then he made himself straighten and take in the world.

It was true: behind, the reaching octopus-arm of the Klan had disintegrated back into the main mass of white, and they had all halted together, once again a hundred yards away and more, though now the Plaza was something like a third full of Klan. Thousands of them. But even in their thousands, they seemed to be seeing something that made all those ragged eye holes face front; something to make them want the safety of numbers.

He swung back. The movement in Christ-the-King clarified, declared itself. Far back up the avenue, the great doors of the Legion Barracks, sealed for five peaceful decades, had swung open. And out from under the carved words overhead were trooping a mass of uniformed horsemen, long guns on their saddle bows. More of them, and more; more and more, moving on a quick twinkle of hooves, not on trailing white sheets at foot-speed. They were forming up. They were forming up in lines which, stirrup to stirrup, spanned the whole width of the roadway; rank behind rank behind rank of them, with yet others still issuing out behind till as far as Barrow could see the avenue was filled with a wall of horseflesh, and green tunics, and gun barrels, and stern takouma faces lifted ten feet off the ground. An enormous herd of white horses being driven through the streets at night. That one of the barricade-builders’ rumours had been true. The cavalry had appeared on the horizon. The tamaha’s army was here.322

‘Pita yakokai abá, pita yakokai abá, pita yakokai chito abá,’ chanted Sister Peggy under her breath, and crossed herself. She looked up at Barrow with bright eyes. ‘Now it will all be all right, Detective.’

This seemed to Barrow to be a strange confidence to feel before a battle even began. He could see things getting real ugly real fast; hand-to-hand ugly, in a wide space with no cover for either side. The cavalry’s weapons were out, but he had no doubt that hundreds if not thousands of the Klansmen would be carrying too, under those robes. Pistols, shotguns, meat cleavers, whatever. It would get bloody. She also seemed to him to be ignoring the pressing matter of where the two of them were standing in relation to the imminent battle. ‘It’ might be all right, ultimately, for the tamaha, but they wouldn’t be, if they stayed where they were. They were between the proverbial rock and hard place; they were alone in a no-man’s-land about to be fought over. They were in the path of a cavalry charge.

‘We gotta move,’ he said. But where? The edges of the Plaza were still out of reach; the battle lines would close on the two of them before they could possibly get to the arcades. Where, in any case, he could foresee slaughter rather than security as riders and Klansmen hunted each other round the pillars. If they couldn’t leave the battlefield, they would have to get off the ground of it, they would have to get above it, out of the way of hooves.

Which left precisely one option. The Klan’s front line was ten yards or so behind the Victories. It felt like a mad decision, it felt like a play flat contrary to all instinct, but the horsemen on Christ-the-King were beginning to move. The ranks behind ranks shifted into the up-and-down of the trot, the horses’ legs blurred into motion, a rumble arose on the way to becoming a thunder. He bent before he could lose courage, snatched Sister Peggy up again, and ran towards the Klan.323

This time she did protest: she squeaked, and stretched out an arm in the direction of the riders, and banged on his chest with her fists. He ignored her, his mind wholly filled with the insane truth that he was charging the Ku Klux Klan alone – charging them all, as they stood there motionless and silent in their thousands, looking past him.

I should be shouting something, he thought wildly, I should have a war-cry! But what? What from the cacophony of his different selves? Inside his head as the distance closed they all shouted at once. Cahokia PD! Barrow, Barrow, Barrow boys/Barrow boys beat all the rest! Fightin’ One-Three-One! For the Sun and the Moon! Yoobie-doobie-zeebee-dah! But when he opened his mouth it was a wordless roar that came out, unanimous rage right up from the lungs and the guts and out of jaws spread so wide it felt like his head might split.

Maybe two or three of the nearest Klansmen even gave back a foot or two. Or maybe it was what they were seeing beyond him that did it. In any case, none moved to intercept him. He bounded up the three steps of the plinth surrounding the nearest Victory, the purely Cahokian one with a few dark stains still visible, and virtually threw Sister Peggy up to the top of the man-high block of rectangular marble from which the rest of the monument rose in a tapering spire. She got the idea, clung on, and climbed further. Then he set the toes of his own shoes in the incised letters recording past triumphs of the tamaha, and scrabbled on up. Easier than a grain elevator. Up to the top of the block, arms round the stone obelisk, shimmy up that too a way, until he was on a level with Sister Peggy. Not high enough to be completely out of reach, but high enough to be safe from trampling, from being pulped by iron horseshoes. If it came to the mob reaching for him, he could kick at them, he could empty his service revolver into them, before they brought him down. The best he could do. Cheek against the cold 324grit of the monument, he manoeuvred his piece out of his shoulder holster and into his hand.

But the Klan were still paying no attention whatsoever to the two fugitives up the Victory. From here he suddenly had a panoramic view: he could see the immense spread of the crowd in the white robes, the point-topped identical figures in a crush going back and back and back all the way to the mouth of Moon, tinier and tinier, diminishing into the wriggling maggots of a fisherman’s pail, into rice grains, into dots. Now they weren’t doing their famous synchronised shapes, formed up into marching crosses and squares, so that a plane overhead could film them and later they could admire themselves in the newsreels. Now they were just standing, a mass. A quantity, irresolute. Way away over at Moon a bumpiness in the mass suggested the oompah-band stuck in the jam, Corfield’s speaker-truck marooned. A squawking came from over there, but it was not being distinguished, it was not being heard, it was not being attended to, because all the Klansmen’s attention was on the sound, and the sight, of what was coming at them.

All this he took in in a moment. Then, wriggling to face the other way, Barrow saw what the Klan was seeing: a shockwave of takouma cavalry, broadened to the whole width of the square, and accelerating from trot into canter. Everything was in hard motion over there, hooves striking the paving, legs kicking into horses’ sides, arms up with carbines in them, hundreds of intent faces bobbing and bowing, and it was the onslaught you noticed, but still in the stream of it, the torrent of it, Barrow got the impression of something weirdly antique. Those uniforms – not doughboy khaki, or the familiar fatigues of the National Guard, but a felted emerald-green with brass buttons. As if the tamaha had conjured a museum army to fight for it, or an army of ghosts. The guns looked new though.

The line of the cavalry swept towards the Victories. Sparks flew from horseshoes on the streetcar tracks. A hundred feet of empty 325space to cover – fifty feet – Barrow squirmed round again, expecting to see a forest of blades and gun barrels coming out of the robes, some kind of fighting positions being fallen into, but instead saw the front line of the Klan waver and collapse like water, the whole mass turning and trying to flee, all the thousands of white embodiments of threat and terror breaking into panicked, chaotic flight. At the mouth of Moon the part of the crowd that had not reached the Plaza could be seen catching the infection of fear and turning to run, but there were so many pressing behind them that the gorge of the street choked, blocked, unclogged in a stampede of frantic fighting bodies, choked again, flowed again. An overloaded drain, trying to clear.

The cavalry surged past the Victories, and for a minute Barrow and Sister Peggy were suspended above a sea of horseflesh and leather and hot horse smell and rattling, jingling harness. The riders were intent, furiously concentrated rather than plain furious. And they had Oscar’s face, Yanasa’s face, Louis Bessa’s face, Chokfi’s father’s face, the young priest in the Quarters’ face, Couma’s actor and violinist guests’ faces, the Man’s face – his own face, give or take. He would have taken off his hat and whooped if it hadn’t been lost and wasn’t presently out there on the ground somewhere, getting crushed in the chaos of legs and hooves. He could feel from the tightness of his face that he was grinning helplessly – the same grin, probably, as the irreligious one he was seeing on the face of Sister Peggy, beside him.

But he was puzzled, too. Couldn’t work out why this bloodless victory was happening; why fear had gripped the Klan so suddenly they routed themselves. Why, now, whistles could sound in the ranks of the horsemen, and the line of the charge slow to an orderly halt so that the blocked mouth of Moon had a chance to start gulping again, and swallow the rout. And why, while this pause took place the mob stayed terrified, jerking and twitching when the stilled cavalrymen all together cocked their carbines, yet did 326not open fire. When the crush had slackened enough, the forward sweep went on – over, now, many many discarded white robes, abandoned on the ground and trampled by hooves as their wearers put off menace and anonymity and frantically reclaimed their identities as individual takata citizens, harmless bank clerks and cooks and warehousemen and attorneys. Scrupulous people. Innocents. Good neighbours.

‘I don’t get it!’ he bawled to Sister Peggy, loud enough to reach over the din.

She cocked a bright eye at him, waiting for a question.

‘Why are they running?’

‘Ah.’

She slid a foot closer to him around the obelisk so she could lean over and talk in his ear.

‘I think you said on Tuesday night you hadn’t seen Birth of a Nation? Well, all those gentlemen down there in the bed sheets have done. Every single one. The Klan showed it to them! And our troopers there’ – lift of a small decided chin toward the receding line of horses – ‘are wearing the old uniforms, out of the Legion stores. Exactly the ones that Founi’s boys are wearing in the film when they open fire on the crowd. They’re dressed up like a takata nightmare. They’re dressed for a massacre, as far as the Klan are concerned. The Klan brought the fear along with them! We’re just taking advantage of it. With luck, the Guard will drive them back to Germantown and hardly have to fire a shot.’

‘That’s the National Guard down there?’

‘Oh yes. Our own CK National Guard, called out by due and legal process. – Well, maybe they’ll have to fire a volley in the air now and then. But thank God for the Red Council being in clever hands, in this generation.’

‘Who are the Red Council?’ he said, pretty sure he’d get no answer. But though she looked at him narrowly, her coif was 327coming loose, he’d just saved her life, and it was a moment of victory, there on the Victory.

‘Who makes war, Mr Barrow?’

‘Generals … soldiers?’

‘I mean more fundamentally, in human terms. Men, Mr Barrow. Men make war. Oh, there are always some warrior women, but on the whole it’s men’s business. They’re bigger and stronger – like you, Detective. They’re good at war. They find it exciting.’

Barrow wasn’t sure this was an accurate description of his experiences in France.

‘Which is why, according to takouma wisdom, backed up by the teaching of the Church on the subject of just war, it is not safe to let the men decide whether to fight. That decision belongs to the Red Council, not the White. To the Moon, not the Sun. To the women, Mr Barrow. To the ones who will lose brothers, husbands, sons, fathers, lovers. They have the proper caution.’

‘The Red Council is women?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘It is … the Moon, not the Sun?’

‘Now you’re getting it. Oh,’ she added in a suddenly different tone of voice. ‘Oh. That’s not right.’

‘What?’ said Barrow.

She was looking past him, at the north-west corner of the Plaza, where the troopers had almost finished pushing the mass of the Klan back onto Moon. Round the end of the cavalry line, a little group of white-robes had slipped out and were running determinedly towards the cathedral. In the general stampede, no-one was paying them any attention. As Barrow watched, they produced something long from under their robes, and pushed in through the double doors at the foot of the great facade.

‘No, no, no,’ said Sister Peggy with increasing urgency. ‘They shouldn’t be doing that. They shouldn’t be in there. I don’t know 328why it isn’t locked!’

‘What’s in there?’

‘The heart of the heart, Mr Barrow. The place earth and heaven meet.’

‘I—?’

‘You need to go and stop them. I’m very sorry, Detective, but you need to go now.’

‘Are you sending me to war, Sister?’

She patted his hand. It was the one with the gun in it. ‘I’m saying, my dear, that it’s time for your solo.’

He scrambled down, leaving her to find her own way. Nun-less, he was light-footed; he hardly seemed to weigh anything at all as he skimmed over cobbles strewn with abandoned white, under the bright-blue impervious sky.

5

Between the two square bell-towers of St Baltasar’s Cathedral, the frontage went flat like the flat book-page front of the Man’s palace, only on this page of brick and stone, in between stone pillars twisted like candy canes, there was an immense carved sunburst, rimmed in gold, with the letters IHS taller than a man in the centre of it. Underneath, though, the doors were that double kind that grand buildings in cold places use to keep the inside, inside, and the outside out. Like an airlock. Barrow burst through the narrow vestibule and the wooden inner door, and found himself taken from bright nearly-spring light into a vault of darkness and dimly shining gold where, for a moment, he could hardly see. Something was going on in here, there were scuffles and thuds up ahead, but he couldn’t make out what.

A hand plucked at him. He swung round, squinting, and found 329himself facing a nervous, elderly shrimp of a takouma in some kind of black robe; a church janitor, or custodian of some kind, by the look.

‘I didn’t mean to let them in!’ he twittered. ‘I just opened the door to see if it was over, and they pushed past! They went straight for the flame! Now they’re fighting the First Guardian! You’re only just in time!’

‘Where?’ said Barrow, ignoring the incomprehensible parts of this.

‘There, of course! In the east chapel!’

The main body of the cathedral was a long, dim half-barrel, leading to a high altar with a veritable wall of gold behind it, all encrusted with paintings and more candy-cane twists. Light came down on that from above somehow. But the custodian was pointing up the dark aisle on the right side, into a smaller cave of obscurity where a single flickering point of yellow light was playing off something metal and reflective. In front of it, blocking it and revealing it in violent motion, black silhouettes of figures were struggling, making the noises he’d heard.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Barrow.

‘Of course,’ said the custodian, bobbing his head. ‘But not with that!’ he cried, catching sight of the pistol belatedly. ‘Not in here! I have your things ready for you.’

‘Say what?’

A wooden pole tipped with a metal cap was being held out to him, and a yellow-painted shell of wood with a leather strap across the back: a mask, but not one of the familiar faces of the Four Winds. Instead it was something he had seen before, but only once, at the back of the procession through the fog. The holy welder’s mask. The face-shield of yellow embossed with black crosses. Barrow, feeling somehow a deep lack of surprise, put the gun away. It didn’t seem like he was making a choice, exactly. More, that he was giving in to the story which, these past few days, had been 330beckoning and lobbying and beseeching for him to take his place in it. He stood still, while the old man hopped up on a pew in the blackness and fitted the mask over his head. He did it rapidly but reverently, like a squire putting on armour.

Barrow’s vision shrank to a wide slot. But within it his eyes were adjusting; had adjusted. He took the staff and ran with it into the dark, where the scene had clarified. As he had expected, a yellow-masked giant was defending the chapel entrance against the Klansmen, one two three four five of them. Baseball bats swinging and thrusting, they were trying to get past the defender to where the light in the glass column, which Barrow had seen in the procession, stood in front of the gold sun on the stand which he had also seen being carried and sung to, out in the fog. Yeah, looked at one way that was probably Oscar the chauffeur behind the mask, spinning his staff so fast in two hands that it whirred like a plane’s prop, and the end made a blurred circle of gold. But just now Barrow did not need to know so, did not want to know so. The name belonging to the face behind the mask was not the most important truth, just now. The important truth was the freedom of being what the mask asked you to be. The important truth was Thrown-Away racing to the aid of Lodge Boy. Once, not long after the world was made … The roles were there, waiting to be filled, waiting to be fitted-into as face fitted into mask. The one on the outside, without household or family, lawless, improvising. The one on the inside, faithful servant to rule and custom and home. Both figures of force, co-operating to save the sum of things. Fighting monsters. Of course.

It was only as he came up behind the struggling Klansmen, white robes pulsating in the dark as if they were a single monstrous organism with many limbs, that he gave any thought to what he was going to do when he arrived. He had a long metal-capped stick in his hands, and no idea how to use it.331

For want of any better idea, he stuck the end of it between the legs of the rearmost white-robe, and twisted. The guy lost his footing promptly, and fell forward flailing onto the others. Barrow stepped in for a kick, somewhere vulnerable enough – head, groin – to put that one of the five out of the fight. But the thrashing white sack made it hard to find a target, and he’d put himself in reach of the next guy. Who turned, off-balance, but firmly planted enough for a solid swing, and hit out at Barrow’s head.

He was aiming for the unprotected side of the skull, which he’d have stove in right then if he’d connected. As it was, Barrow had time to turn his head and take the blow on the mask’s curved top.

It landed with a hollow clonk that shook his brains. No sound of splitting or splintering; the mask must’ve been made of some anciently hardened wood. But three inches over and that would have been that. He’d have been KO’d as quick as the mook in Hamelin’s that Phin had battered with the billy club. The first Klansman was already scrambling up from the dark floor with his bat, scrambling to his feet. Barrow stepped back.

And discovered the obvious first advantage of the fighting stick. It was longer than a baseball bat. They were out of range of him; he was still in range of them. He jabbed at them with the metal tip. Too rounded and blunt to be a spear, but still a nasty load to take in your gut or your ribs if delivered with force. Or your face. There was nothing over the Klansmen’s faces but pillow-case fabric. He lifted the tip and tried for a jab into their hoods. They lurched back, parrying clumsily with their bats.

But that pushed them into their three front-facing colleagues who were trying to get by the whirling staff of the First Guardian. Was that a help? No it was not. It was anti-helpful, if anything. The First Guardian was up against a kind of knee-high iron fence across the mouth of the chapel. He couldn’t step back; he had nowhere to retreat to. If Barrow pushed the Klansmen forward, into the 332spinning prop of his staff, it’d mangle whoever interrupted the spin but they’d topple him, from the sheer throw-weight of their bodies. And then they’d be through, to the precious objects in the chapel which for whatever mysterious reason were their goal. He wasn’t helping by pushing them up the narrow aisle towards that goal. Not unless he thought he could pick them all off one by one, and he had no illusions that was likely, with a weapon he was getting his first lesson in, here and now. The aisle had already confined them so they could only come at the chapel’s guardian two, three at a time, and lost their advantage of numbers. If Barrow was going to do any good, he needed to get up the front beside the tamaha’s other warrior, and even the odds up there.

Meanwhile – a matter of a second or so to work this out – the two Klansmen in front of him were making discoveries of their own. With the staff at the full extension of his arms, it had a lot of force behind it, end to end up the line of the thing, but he couldn’t bring much leverage to moving it side to side. The Klansman to his left snagged it in a parry and held it out the way against the wood of the bat. The other grabbed at it, and with his hands immobilising it, the first stepped up and started trying to hit at Barrow’s own hands, unprotected as they gripped the staff. It had no hilt, no guard, nothing for fingers to hide behind. One smash there and goodbye piano.

Barrow retreated with his whole body instead. Wrenched, twisted, pulled the stick back out of the Klansman’s grip. – Then, instead of backing, jumped sideways into one of the dark lines of pews filling the space between this side aisle and the central one up the nave. Scenting victory the two he’d been fighting gave chase. He backed up the narrow slot of the pew, and discovered something else. If you gripped the staff a couple of feet along with one hand and then rotated the butt end with the other in tight circles, you got an amplified and violent and much wider spin at the far end, 333leverage working to your advantage to make a nasty cone of force no pursuer wanted to step into while you kept cranking. Then, moving his feet in a dark which none of the feeble glimmers of light in the cathedral reached into, he tripped over something underfoot at the end of the pew – kneeler, steam pipe, something – and fell out backwards into the centre aisle, losing the stick.

Something was happening up by the chapel, a rapid-fire crack and smack of wood against wood, wood against flesh, but there was no time to look and see. The Klansmen swarmed forward, he scrabbled around for the stick. It was a race. He won it. When the first white-robe came out of the pew, he was up and already swinging the staff in a whistling arc to a cross-body blow that sent the recipient sprawling and groaning, in no hurry to get back up, maybe in no state to.

One down. He’d have done it again, but he’d learned his lesson. He took to his heels, and found his way at last round the front end of the block of pews to the other Guardian’s side.

On the way he passed under a crucifix. Just for a flash, a takouma Christ looked down at him. Eyes ancient, huge, impassive: used to the ways of the world and its blows. Used to there being soldiers at work at the cross’s foot. Used to the logic by which a man was crucified so there should be no unrest in the city.

Somewhere in the quick-fire crack-crack-crack Barrow had just heard, the First Guardian had also accounted for an attacker. There was a heap of white on the floor with a bloodstain spreading from its head. Two down. But in the process of seeing off this one, he had had to let the others inside his guard, losing the shield of the whirling staff. Now he was in a close-quarters ruckus with one of his remaining two attackers, stick to bat, mask close to hood, both levering frantically at each other, and trying to kick the other’s legs out. The Klansman had a squat, wide grip on the ground that Barrow found familiar. Meanwhile, with nothing but his shoulder 334and the weight of his body, the Guardian was also trying to prevent his second remaining opponent from squeezing by him into the chapel: the guy was trying to wedge his way past the Guardian. His bat was already through, held out ahead of him and threshing the air in short swipes. It was short of the glass of the lantern by only a few inches. One more second or two, one more shove or two through the gap beside the occupied Guardian, and the bat would connect with the curving glass, and drive through, tinkling and shattering, and send the light over to fall onto the stone floor in the dark, reduced to shards and puddled wax, extinguished.

Barrow didn’t know why it mattered that the light not go out, but it clearly did. He discarded the Klansman behind him as a priority, dropped the stick, and lunged. He got the Klansman struggling to reach the lantern round the waist. He yanked: yanked him right back out over the iron barrier, a writhing double-armful of solid male body smelling of sweat and cologne and slipping about inside the loose cotton.

With the guy’s weight flying back onto him, Barrow overbalanced too and fell on his back full length on the stone floor with the Klansman on top. It winded him, but he didn’t let go; held on, and tried for a crushing bear hug. He got some kind of grip, applied some kind of pressure and heard pain noises coming from above, but it wasn’t going to get the job done any time soon. Also, his pursuer had come up and was standing over the two of them on the floor waving his bat uncertainly. The Klansman on top of him was serving as a shield for now, but it was only going to take a moment for the man with the bat to work out that he could hit at Barrow’s visible arms.

He rolled, bounced off the wooden wall of the nearest pew to the chapel, and flipped over. Now the huggee was under him. The batsman behind started swinging, but the space was tight and he couldn’t go for Barrow’s head. He was landing short, drubbing strokes on Barrow’s sides and shoulders. It hurt like hell and if it didn’t crack 335a rib it was definitely going to leave him with a parade of bruises: but none of them were the type of hits to put him out of the fight. He smacked the man under him’s head on the floor once, twice, till he went limp. Then pushed off the ground and rose, a belaboured boulder. He turned with his shoulders hunched and his fist already bunched, thinking he’d need to block the bat as best he could with his left – but the eyes in the hood facing him were wild, and their owner was stepping back, dropping the bat, raising his hands in surrender – then turning, and running for the cathedral door.

That left just the wide gorilla the First Guardian was stick-wrestling with.

This one’s eyes were red-veined but steady. He took in the disappearance of his allies, and stepped backward from the stick-to-stick clinch into the narrow side aisle before Barrow could get behind him.

‘Scheisse,’ he said, and it sounded like he was grinning under the hood. He put down his baseball bat carefully, along the shelf of a pew, and backed further. He slipped a hand through a slit in his robe and pulled out just enough of the grip and magazine of an automatic to be unambiguous. Barrow stiffened, but he was warning, not threatening.

‘Later, roter neger,’ he said. Back he went, and they watched him; all the way to the doors. He slipped into the airlock arrangement, and was gone.

‘That was the guy cut me, day before yesterday,’ said Barrow.

‘Yeah?’ said the Guardian, becoming Oscar for sure. But he said nothing else till, between them, they had dragged out three Klan bodies onto the cobbles of the Plaza, two groaning, the one with the head injury still motionless. And as he took off his mask, and handed it over to the bowing custodian, he turned away modestly to do it, as if the moment of transition from masked face to bare face was somehow indecent. Barrow copied him. As they left he 336looked back. In the dark, the little yellow flame in front of the golden disc burned on serenely.

It was only when they were both outside and wearing their private and individual faces, that Oscar spoke again.

‘You fight like a barroom brawler, little brother,’ he said.

‘Well, excuse me,’ said Barrow. ‘You wanted something more elegant, I’d a needed some practice with that thing. I’d a needed some warning.’

‘It wasn’t a complaint.’

Oscar produced a pack of cigarettes, and they lit up, both of them inhaling with the caution of men whose ribs are protesting. The sun glittered on in the implacably blue sky. The Victories were nun-less. A further squad of the Guard trotted by, followed by an ambulance truck with a red cross on the side. Oscar put out an arm and pointed down at the slumped forms they stood beside, full robes among the scattered empty ones. The ambulance driver nodded, and steered their way.

‘Talking of warning,’ said Barrow. ‘It was like the old guy inside was expecting me.’

Oscar shrugged. ‘There are always two guardians of the flame,’ he said.

‘Yeah, but – oh, never mind.’

It was surprisingly easy to let the question drop. You didn’t talk about what you did in the mask after you took it off: that’s what everybody had been letting him know, these last few days, and now that Barrow had worn one himself for the tamaha, he saw why. Felt why. Already the fight in the cathedral seemed distant, separate from him, as if it had happened to someone else. More exactly, as if it had happened to a being that had borrowed his body, a being with whom he’d shared only a temporary overlap of muscles and skin, and who now had handed him back over to himself, with a gift of exhaustion and bruises to keep.337

‘You okay?’ Oscar said.

Stretcher-bearers bustled around them.

‘I think so. Yeah. That was strange, is all.’

‘Your first time,’ Oscar observed. ‘Yes.’ He took one more draw, and stubbed out his butt on the cobbles. ‘Come on back to the palace and we’ll get you taped up.’

‘Do I look like I need it?’

‘You took a few good ones. Yeah, you look a little grey.’

He said something in rapid Anopa, and chuckled.

‘What’s that?’

‘I said: grey, little brother, like your taste in pubic hair.’

6

It turned out that Oscar had a little workroom or chauffeur’s pantry type of arrangement, off the palace’s underground garage. You could tell from it the range of what he did for the Man. It contained tools for the Duesenberg, but also a closet full of outfits both profane and sacred, a small armoury, and supplies for self-doctoring. Under the bare electric bulb Barrow stood with his hands on top of his head and had his ribs impersonally probed.

‘Nothing broke, I don’t think, but you are for sure going to bruise,’ said Oscar. ‘Hold that pose, Thrown-Away.’

He reached for a brown jar of what looked like flower-heads floating in viscous liquid. The top off, it released a powerful, clean reek, nearly but not quite like pine resin.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mountain tobacco. It works.’

‘And what’m I gonna smell like if you put that on me?’

‘You’re going to smell like someone who’s not in pain.’

‘Okay, okay.’338

Barrow was buttoning his shirt back up, already able to move more easily, when a bell rang. Oscar put the jar neatly in its place, wiped his hands on a rag, and uncapped a metal speaking-tube that came halfway down the wall above his work bench.

‘Ishla?’ he said, and a thin stream of answering Anopa came out of the tube. ‘Himaka,’ he agreed, and put the cap back on.

‘Man needs the car,’ he said to Barrow. ‘He’s on his way down. Do up your tie.’

Barrow did, conscious of the report he’d promised and failed to give the Man last night. There were already footsteps on the spiral stair. Oscar took out his blue uniform coat from the closet and shrugged it on. But when the Man appeared, he had at his heels a sandy-haired takata of the Man’s own age, in expensive tweeds, rosy around the gills and slightly uncertain on his feet. Barrow deduced Dutch courage at work; this WASP guest of the Man’s had presumably been fed a tactful cocktail to help him withstand the view from the palace windows, as the Klan and the Legion clashed.

‘Hop in, Jack,’ said the Man, his voice fully Bostonian, opening a back door of the Duesenberg.

‘Right-ho, Corny,’ said the WASP, and bumbled aboard.

‘“Corny”?’ said Barrow.

Oscar clucked reprovingly, but the Man gave Barrow a level look, apparently quite unsurprised to see him. He exchanged a glance with Oscar; Oscar nodded; some information passed between them. The Man said, as if there had been no pause, ‘Corny for Corned Beef. Corned Beef for Corned Beef Hash. Hash for Hashi. We were at Harvard together. Ra, ra, ra. What news do you have for me, Detective?’

‘I tried to call last night, but you were—’

‘Yes. What news?’

‘I’m sorry for your loss, sir.’

‘Thank you. It’s a cruel thing to do to a foolish boy. It makes us 339all more vulnerable this morning. But it seems we are in a season of change.’

‘I hope you are taking extra care of your safety, sir.’

The Man nodded at Oscar, who was fitting a newly filled magazine in the Thompson gun. ‘As you see. Of course, some threats are easier to guard against than others. News, Detective.’

‘Yes, sir. Well: we have multiple connections, now, between Vanderberg and the murder, but nothing that will hold up in a law-court yet. As for the actual killer,’ Barrow said carefully, ‘it seems like it has to be someone linked to the Weiss gang.’

‘What does your partner know? What did he say when you found him?’

‘I … haven’t. We been looking for him all over the city – all over the parts we can reach – and it turns out he lied about his address. He’s hiding out somewhere. But we’ll find him.’

‘“We”?’

‘I. I’ll find him.’

‘Find him soon, Detective, your treacherous partner. Yesterday I gave you until today. The Legion bought you some extra time this morning, but for peace the city needs a culprit for the Land Trust murder that it can see, not just radio announcements.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I had better be off to the Union Club, to see if my lawyer Mr Merryweather here can embarrass away the other supporters of Vanderberg’s coup d’état.’

‘He’s got something on them?’

‘There’s not much goes on upon Wall Street that Pleasaunce, Merryweather and Babbitt can’t dig up. That’s why the tamaha has had them on retainer since my uncle’s uncle’s time.’

‘Yes, sir. Can I ask—’ He stopped. He didn’t know how to allude to what he’d learned today about the source of the Legion’s orders. He had a feeling that relations between Sun and Moon were as 340little to be talked about as what happened when a mask was worn.

‘What?’

‘Your niece. Is she … managing? I mean, is she doing okay?’

The Man’s face closed.

‘She is doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances,’ he said. He turned away into the Duesenberg, and pulled the car door hard shut behind him, less than a slam but more than a click. Oscar pressed the starter button, the steel door of the garage winched up, and Barrow followed the limo on foot up the steep concrete slope into the sunlight of Creekside.

Oscar gave him a finger-salute from his forehead. Then with a creamy roar of power the limousine swung left and was gone. Barrow was left on the stone embankment, looking across the water to the wall and the cypress trees of the Moon’s house on the far side. All the colours had lifted in the bright light. The red roof tiles shone like copper, the cypress glowed deep and mossy. No amount of sun could make Cahokia Creek run clear – too much bottomland silt in the flow – but the blue sky was striking glints from water turned cloudy malachite.

What was that about? he thought. Was it, he didn’t like the help presuming, where family’s concerned? Did I overstep? He doesn’t seem as pleased with her as you’d expect, given the way things’ve gone this morning.

Across the Creek there wasn’t the mad throng of visitors there had been last night, but a couple of black, expensive automobiles were still parked by the garden door, one with the engine running, and as he watched the door opened and closed and a young takouma man hurried out with a folder of papers. The house was clearly active. As it would be. He knew now that, whatever the howl of grief it held, it was working today too as a general’s headquarters. The messengers would be running to and fro. As many of them as Doyle had at his disposal – more. The phones would be 341buzzing. (Miss Chokfi’s tree of telephones would have its topmost branch over there.) The maps would be out. The Moon’s finger, the cool finger that had mended him, would be tracing over paper junctions the progress her soldiers were making. Barrow was not needed there, for anything. The idea was ridiculous. You must be the only man in town who needs this explaining to him.

*

But still he found his heart bumped up from the gutter and began to lift a fraction, as he walked back to the precinct. You couldn’t help it. The city was hurrying back to life. As he crossed Union, he found all the businesses racking open their shutters, pedestrians moving, sidewalks filling. The radio must have announced the all-clear, and pent-up normality was coming surging back. In the sunlight, strangers were nodding to each other, touching hats, making eye contact, far more than usual on a business street. The takouma and taklousa workforce, of course, but not just them, the minority of takata in fact being almost over-emphatic in their good cheer, to prove they were glad as well. Barrow was grinned at several times as he followed the dog-leg of Biloxi round the back of the Algonkian and up onto 5th. After a bit he grinned back. It made him feel good about his sore ribs, about the part he’d played himself this morning, whatever the hell the fight in the cathedral had been about.

And as he came to the front of the hotel, the mood of relief in the streets turned festive, skittish. The doors of the Algonkian had been flung open, and a crowd of guests who’d presumably been imprisoned till now for their own safety had spilled out, chattering, into the porte-cochère and the semi-circular forecourt. Many of them were still dressed up to the nines from the night before, like guests unable to leave a party. A chitter of drumsticks on the cymbal edge, a glissando or three in the high octaves, that’s how you’d play the scene.342

Among the party jabber, a more prosaic line had formed waiting for taxis, and in this Barrow spotted Professor Kroeber standing patiently with his suitcases, genial but not jabbering, smoking his pipe and reading a book. Barrow hesitated, and went over. Kroeber took the pipe out of his mouth and smiled at him.

‘Good day, Detective,’ he said. ‘A better day altogether than we feared.’

‘Yes, sir. You’re leaving?’

‘I’ve got to be in New York. In fact, I was supposed to be there yesterday. But they tell us the station has re-opened, so I have hopes of the afternoon train.’

‘I was wondering if I could ask you a question. I guess, an anthropological question?’

‘By all means. Not that I’ll necessarily know the answer.’

‘Okay. There’s some kind of holy lantern-type deal in the cathedral, up in front of a big round gold plate. Why would a bunch of Klansmen think it was worth their while to fight their way in and try to break it?’

‘Has it been broken?’ asked Kroeber sharply.

‘No.’

‘Good! Well, let me see.’ He mouthed his pipe and looked at his shoes, and Barrow could tell he was selecting a level of explanation suitable for policemen, as opposed to scholars. ‘What you have to bear in mind, Detective, is that the Jesuit father who converted Cahokia was a brilliant user of analogy. He came to a place with a solar religion – a city of sun-worshippers, who treated their chief as a representative of the sun – and he saw a way to fit this together with orthodox Roman Catholic theology.’ He patted his pockets. ‘Do you have a piece of paper?’

Barrow passed his notebook across, and a pencil. Kroeber found a clean page, and wrote on it in neat script:343

God the Father (in heaven)

|

|

|

God the Son (on earth)

‘You see? So far, so orthodox. God is both the creator, and present in creation. Back in the gospels, Christ walks about on earth, divine but a human among humans. And right now, for Catholics, thanks to the doctrine of the Real Presence, he continues to exist on earth in the form of the consecrated wafer at Mass.’

‘The white thing in the middle of the gold disc.’

‘Exactly. Now, what clever Father Villanova saw was that you could put this in parallel with what the tamaha already believed.’ He wrote again with the pencil.

God the Father (in heaven)
|
|
|

God the Son (on earth)

The sun in the sky

|

|

|

?

He handed the notebook back. ‘What belongs there, Detective? What is the equivalent, on earth, to the sun in the sky?’

‘… Fire,’ said Barrow.

‘Yes!’ The professor was unselfconsciously pointing his pipe stem at him approvingly. Good student. ‘More specifically, the sacred flame, faithfully guarded, constantly burning, never extinguished, of all the Mississippian cultures. Father Villanova got Cahokia to fuse together Christ’s presence in the sacrament with their sacred flame. He thought of it, of course, as a kind of conceptual bridge they might cross over to the truth – his truth, that is – after which they could leave the solar stuff behind. But they are stubborn souls, as you have 344seen, and they kept both. God in the wafer and the perpetual flame remain indissolubly linked, inseparable parts of one holiness.’

‘“The place that earth and heaven meet.” Someone said that to me.’

‘Yes. And that’s why, in the cathedral, the golden monstrance with the wafer in it is always, always accompanied by the light of the sun brought down to earth. Tended, fed with wax or oil so it never goes out. The flame in that glass tube has been burning continuously for at least four hundred years. The Natchez had one, down south from here, but the French put it out in 1730. Cahokia’s flame burns on. If it were snuffed now, especially by enemies, it would be a symbolic catastrophe of the worst order. Maybe that doesn’t sound like too big a deal, Detective, but—’

‘Symbols have power. Yeah, I got that.’

‘Sorry, am I starting to lecture? A deformity of the profession, I’m afraid.’

‘No, no. It’s just it seems like half the people I’ve spoken to this week want to tell me that same thing.’

‘That’s what you get for living where the mythic order of things is alive and well. You want less magic, you should move to Indianapolis.’

‘I’ll take the magic.’

‘Me too. For all its inconveniences. I find that California retains a reasonably persistent degree of enchantment. – By the way, Detective, since we’ve run into each other, I met a young woman in there last night who seemed very eager to speak to you.’ He pointed back into the hotel with his pipe.

‘Yeah?’ said Barrow, a card-house of hope erecting itself instantaneously in him.

‘Yes. Red-headed gal, a journalist. She’d seen us at dinner together the other night – wondered if I’d heard from you. Wanted to talk about you, was my impression.’

‘Oh,’ said Barrow.345

‘Wrong young woman?’ said the professor. ‘Ah. I’m sorry.’

There was a wry and open sympathy in Kroeber’s face. Remembering the sadness of the professor’s six-word description of his life, seeing how he stood solitary among the jubilant crowd as he waited for his cab, Barrow felt something come into alignment between them. A recognition.

‘You said you had some advice for me the other night, Professor,’ he said. ‘But you wouldn’t give it me, because, because—’

‘Because unsolicited advice is rude in every culture.’

‘What if I asked for it?’

‘A different kettle of cultural fish altogether. Are you sure?’

The taxi line was moving, but they weren’t at the front of it yet.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow.

‘All right. I was thinking of the other young woman – the one we ate dinner with – and I was noticing how exactly she paid me the compliment I most wanted to receive that evening, just before my lecture. It almost hurt, it was so exactly on target. And I don’t think she put any particular thought or effort into doing it. I suspect that she and her uncle, as part of being royalty without formal power, have a trained, reflexive, perhaps even unconscious knack of giving pleasure to those they meet, and consequently in short order securing their admiration, their loyalty … their love, even. I’m not saying it’s manipulative. I’m saying it’s adaptive. An evolutionary asset. They are organisms evolved to elicit love. When your princess told me I was “a man of the people” – the precise meaning of the name taken by my dead friend Ishi of the Yahi tribe, to whom I owe a debt I can never make up, whom I would be of all things proud to resemble – I certainly loved her. And of course she is very beautiful.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow, feeling the pleasure that comes of talking about the beloved. Secondary, dilute, not as good at all as their real 346presence, but you don’t turn it away. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘And then when I look at you, Detective – forgive me if I’m wrong, forgive the presumptuous nature of this – I see someone who is just in the process of shaking off an old attachment of some kind. Someone who is perhaps used to handling the world through a single strong attachment. Does that sound like you?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Well, someone in that position is therefore wide open, and perhaps more open than they know, to falling into a new attachment. Falling hard and falling fast. There is a referent for this in, in fact, the Christian mythos again. Jesus observes this phenomenon, in his role as wonder-working exorcist. He says, throw out one devil and seven come rushing in, because the house of the soul is nice and empty for them.’

Barrow frowned.

‘Are you saying Couma’s a devil?’

‘No! Absolutely not. I’m saying, just now you may be ready to give something, anything, house-room, for reasons that have got more to do with you than with her. I’m saying—’

A cab drew up for the professor. Barrow opened the door for him, and he climbed into the back seat with his suitcases. Kroeber pulled the door shut behind him, and wound the window down.

‘I’m saying, treat your own emotions on this subject with just a touch of suspicion, Detective. I’m saying, good luck!’

‘Thanks.’

The cab departed and so did Barrow. As he walked the last block to the station house, he thought: is that right? One out, one in? I push out Phin, and Couma Hashi slips straight into the empty chair, as boss of me? The trouble was that, even in this key of doubt, it still pleased him to think about her. He conjured her. Inches away from him. Intent and beautiful and severe. But in the small space between, the face of Anderson intruded. Irritatingly; insistently. 347Demanding to be attended to. Anderson, Anderson, Anderson—

Back in the squadroom, there were as many grins as there had been on the street. Chokfi had Yanasa and Tali and a mob of uniforms squeezed in with her in her cubby, all talking nineteen to the dozen and slapping each other on the back and watching her finger move further and further west to the river. Everard and Bunce were nipping at a flask of something illegal. The radio was blaring: the mayor’s voice again, but no longer breathless, now unctuously triumphant. Doyle was sitting on his desk edge in quick-fire conversation with one of the two lieutenants of the uniforms, both of them laughing. When he caught sight of Barrow across the uproar he waved him in, relieved rather than angry.

‘I thought you’d been caught up in it, boy. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a thing. What a complete thing. Rolled them up like a carpet. But here you are in one piece. No heroics, I hope?’

‘Nope,’ said Barrow. ‘But miko, I’ve got something.’

He had, for the penny had finally dropped about how he was supposed to reach Drummond.

7

‘You’re saying that Miss Anderson of the Post knows how to get hold of your man Phineas?’

‘I don’t know it for sure, but – when he walked out yesterday, it was like he expected me to follow him. Like he’d left a trail. And I do know he’s been feeding her stories; and she’s been trying to talk to me for … two days now. I thought that was, well, something else. Now I’m thinking, he may’ve left a message with her for me.’

‘Ring her up then, do. Worth a try.’

But that proved easier said than done. CEN-4473, the number Anderson had pressed against the window of the streetcar, turned 348out to be a residential line. Fancy, to have a private telephone of your own at home, and not in line with Barrow’s idea of a yellow-press scribe’s wages: but when Chokfi, freed from her emergency duties, dialled it for him, it rang on and on unanswered. Of course, she was at work. She’d have to be, on a day the Post had expected to see the Klan in triumph. So Chokfi rang the Post switchboard, got treated with a sullen lack of co-operation once they knew it was the PD on the line; managed to get directed to the City Desk by repeating the phrase ‘murder investigation’ over and over; there came up against an editor who, in a voice of tight fury, would only say that she was busy on a story, and rang off. Barrow was just reconciling himself to having to go over there, and bull his way into the newsroom, when Chokfi took an incoming call from a pay-booth. It was Anderson, calling from the street outside her office. Her voice cut in mid-sentence; she hadn’t waited for her nickel to rattle through to start talking.

‘—big idiot,’ she said.

‘It’s for you,’ said Chokfi, and passed over the headset.

‘Hello.’

‘I said, what’s the idea calling me at work, you idiot? Have you got any idea what it’s like in there today? The whole evening edition’s having to be remade.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Yeah, yeah. But if you know the Post is the enemy camp, wouldn’t you show just a tiny bit, just a wee bit of discretion in how you approach me? I’ve got a job to do and I’d like to keep it. That’s why I gave you my number at home.’

‘Well, I’ll be real quick. I’ve a notion you may have a number or an address for my friend Phin. Do you?’

‘Your friend Phin who’s been vanished from the face of the earth for lo these twenty-four hours? Phin the asshole? That friend?’

‘Mm-hmm.’

‘Meet me in the bar at the Algonkian at four thirty and I’ll see 349what I can do. That’s the soonest I can get away?’

‘Could you not just tell me now?’

‘I’d rather meet face to face.’

‘I’d rather not make a performance about a simple request.’

‘Not that simple. There’s such a thing as protecting your sources, you know.’

‘Miss Anderson, this is a murder investigation.’

‘Oh. Is it. Well, now you’re making a girl’s head spin. You’ve gotten me all puzzled, Detective. Are you pursuing a murder investigation, or trying to find a friend? Make up your mind.’

‘Are you passing on a message or trying to get a date? Make up your mind.’

‘Woah! I was operating under the impression, Detective, that I might possibly owe you an apology, after breathing fumes over you the other night. And therefore a small favour as well. But it is an impression I am willing to kick up the wazoo and banish if you prefer.’

‘…’

‘That was a pause I was leaving right there,’ she said, ‘into which you could insert an apology of your own.’

‘No shit.’

‘Charm and eloquence in one package, oh my. See you at four thirty. If you’re lucky.’

She rang off.

Chokfi gave Barrow a look.

‘What?’ he said.

*

So he was obliged to sit tight in the squadroom while the afternoon passed, and help with the tying-up of a few of the case’s loose threads. Doyle got him to write up his interview with Sister Peggy about the medicine bottle – ‘again suggestive but not dispositive’, as Doyle said, of the link between Vanderberg and Drummond. 350Barrow couldn’t tell Doyle about the fight in the cathedral, exactly, but he mentioned that he had seen Weiss’s boys from the drugstore playing the role of storm troops for the Klan out on the Plaza, and menacing the building. On the strength of that, Doyle pointed his old search for Fred Hopper’s Klan chaplain experimentally at the Lutheran minister in Germantown who had given Weiss his alibi for the murder. And, bingo, so it proved: Dr Gruber of the Evangelische-Lutherische Kirche on 3rd and Beaumont had indeed been poor Fred’s Kludd.

Doyle went himself to interview him, along with a carload of uniforms. He was back an hour later.

‘Did he talk?’ Barrow asked.

‘Twittering nonsense, for the most part, but yes, he talked. The poor fellow had not had the day he expected, and he was sitting in the kitchen when we arrived looking like he’d been turned upside down and had the change shaken out of his pockets. Also, he seemed to think that a massacre of the takata population was imminent, and that our knock on the door was the start of it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Let’s see,’ said Doyle. He put his half-glasses on his nose, took out a small sheaf of torn-out notebook pages from his pocket, and prodded at them with a silver-topped pencil till he found the right place.

‘Here we are. – I’ll give you the gist. – Interview with Dr Leopold Gruber. He said, it was a terrible thing if a man couldn’t be safe in his own city. He said he had marched this morning as a man of peace, and then had to flee from Cossacks, positive Cossacks, and, quote, it was like living in Red Russia not in the United States at all. He said, there wasn’t the respect for religion there should be. I said, did he know that members of his own Klavern had been seen attacking the cathedral? He said they’d never have done that. He said, if they had done that it was out of mistaken zeal. He said, what proof was there 351the attackers were even real Klansmen? They might have been imposters, he said. They might have been’ – Doyle’s eyebrows were up, and he was reading in an ironic monotone – ‘they might even have been, quote, Roman priests in disguise. Because everyone knows the cathedral is a hotbed of deceit and superstition and popish wiles, such as might drive decent men to extreme measures. Just look at what had happened to poor Fred Hopper – he said. Of course he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions, he said. He was always ready to help the work of the law, he said.’

Barrow was getting the impression that Doyle had enjoyed his foray back into street detective work.

The miko raised a finger. ‘Yes, he said – they had all known that Fred had been called in to do a special task at the Land Trust, but no-one knew what it was, including Fred. It was all arranged much higher up. Word came down from the Great Goblin – that’s Corfield – that some Klansmen would be arriving from out of state as part of the plan to clean up the city. Fred was just the one who came to their Klavern. He said, Fred was a decent family man fallen on hard times, and Mrs Gruber had taken the Hoppers over a pot roast. I said, was Fred excited about this mysterious mission of his? To begin with, he said, and then maybe “withdrawn” would be more the right word. No, he said, he’d never seen any tension between Fred and Mr Weiss, the treasurer of the Klavern. – There’s another K-name for that, but I couldn’t be arsed. – Mr Weiss is an upstanding businessman, he said. Wasn’t Fred frightened of Weiss?, I said. No, he said, he’d never noticed that. I said, wasn’t Fred terrified of Weiss? Wasn’t Fred persecuted by Weiss, wasn’t Fred’s family brutalised by Weiss, wasn’t Fred brought to the city on purpose to be killed with the Klan’s connivance? I said, wasn’t Fred a sacrifice deliberately staked out and slaughtered to serve the purposes of cold and powerful men who didn’t give a damn about the life of one poor threadbare takata bastard? He said, no, no, never, 352that was disgusting, horrible, impossible, the world wasn’t like that, he couldn’t believe the world was like that. – Well, type it up.’

Doyle passed over the pages of notes.

‘I did believe,’ he added, ‘that the good doctor had no idea what was coming. Clever, the set-up of this. No-one involved in bringing Hopper here had to know what it was for, at the Klan end. They each just had to do their part and not ask questions, which all the Klan’s play-secrecy of course encourages. One real secret planted in a forest of shite. And then Weiss had his separate connection to Vanderberg, not through the Klan at all, and he could organise the rest. Weiss is the only one who’d be worth much as a witness if we’re trying to get Vanderberg, and he’d be incriminating himself, so it’s hard to see why he’d ever talk.’

‘Do you think Gruber knows what Weiss is?’

‘I think he doesn’t want to let himself know he knows.’

Meanwhile, Mrs Hankeha on the seventh floor of the Land Trust had confirmed that Fred had indeed specifically asked for the Union Cartridge lease-adjustment to work on, and that a set of keys to the building were missing from her desk. From the radio came other news. State Senator Corfield had attempted to rally his fleeing troops before they dispersed altogether into the river wards, and been trampled by the crowd for his pains: he was in Our Lady of Mercies hospital with a broken leg. The mayor announced that he had received offers to help secure the city from the National Guards of several surrounding states. At present there was no need for outside help but, mindful of public anxiety, he had accepted the offer of assistance from the Mississippi Guard, to be deployed if and only if there were any resumption of disorder. Meaning: behave, takata citizens, or black men with machine guns will appear on your street corners. Iron seemed to have entered Lakna’s soul. Miss Chokfi brought Barrow a sandwich – dropped it on his typewriter from six inches up, in fact, with a thud.353

*

At four twenty he looked for his hat and realised he’d left it somewhere on the Plaza; straightened his tie and then loosened it again in a spirit of mutiny.

Anderson did keep the rendezvous. She had arrived before him, in fact. She was waiting at a little table in the Palm Court of the Algonkian, her hair lit up like a red beacon by a sunbeam falling through a high window down into another of the architect’s geometric abysses. Her face was in shadow, though, with a shroud of smoke in front of it from her cigarette like a second curtain. It was only when he was seated opposite her that he could make out the expression through the blue fumes: tense, uncertain of herself. An anxious fox. She poured him a cup of coffee from a geometric abyss of a coffee pot. He ignored it and lit a cigarette of his own.

‘Well?’ he said.

She sighed, and produced from an inner pocket of her green tweeds a folded slip of paper. She offered it to him, but when he reached for it, she plucked it back out of his reach, and held it up above her shoulder in two fingers of the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette.

‘Talk to me first,’ she said.

‘What about?’

‘About what’s going on, and what you can give me in return for this.’

‘I’m not giving the Post a damn thing.’

‘I’m not talking about the Post. I mean me, singly and individually, Mr Barrow. What you can give me.’

‘A sense of civic pride, ’cause you helped out the po-lice?’

‘With a murder investigation – yes, you said. But this is a telephone number for your own partner, Detective. What on earth has that to do with a murder investigation?’

‘Is that what you want to know, Miss Anderson?’354

‘Call me Harry. – No, it isn’t. I kind of know where you’re going with this, or at least I suspect I do, and none of it is a story I can write for my present employer. The Post has known what it wants for every day of this week. There’s been a plan in place, headlines all prepared step by step, and decorative detail only required from the likes of yours truly.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute – you mean, the Post knew the Hopper murder was coming?’

‘No-o. No, not that. When I came back from the precinct on Monday morning with the hot goods on Hopper, it was genuine new news. Bolt from the blue; surprise all round. But then it was like it triggered something – like they knew what to do as soon as a story like this gave them the opportunity. Right down to the Aztec angle. I was terribly pleased with myself when I worked out the obsidian-knife side of things, I don’t mind telling you. I expected an “Attagirl!” or at least, how can I put this, the fine old unconscious salute of envy, around the newsroom. But no. My editor just waved my beautiful discovery on by, as if a space had already been reserved for it.’

‘How frustrating,’ said Barrow.

‘Oh, it was. Fearfully frustrating. – Of course, the Post’s agenda for the week is all wrecked now, because today did not go according to plan. They can’t ignore it, the way they did the Frankie Blackhawk news. It’s been scramble, scramble, scramble to find a new plan, because believe me, the Post doesn’t think this is over yet. But there’s nowhere in the new plan, any more than in the old one, for me to use what I understand about what’s been going on.’

‘You don’t sound like you like your job, Miss Anderson.’

‘Well, I certainly like my supposed enemies better than my supposed allies; that’s part of the problem.’ She said it ‘supposèd’. There it was again, Barrow thought. Under the wisecracking and the press slang, the patrician drawl, from some pillared country 355club back east, or perhaps some pillared women’s college.

‘You don’t like it, why’d ya do it?’

She had stubbed her cigarette. Now she put out a pointed pink tongue between her fire-truck red lips, and scratched at the close-pored dampness at the tip of it with a nail of her free hand, also fire-truck red. She looked down at the table top while she did this, but then she cast her hazel gaze up at him under her lashes, and caught him looking, and grinned at him.

‘Do you have any idea, Detective, how hard it is for a girl to get work reporting the actual news? To escape the cookery corner and all the human-interest mush? I took what I could find.’

‘On a paper, wants to bring Jim Crow to the state, and to teach the likes of me to know my place. Which is back in Darktown, and not talking to takata women, ’less I wanna find myself strung from a tree limb.’

‘Well – yes. I could say, there’s a technical interest in learning to do anything well. But that wouldn’t really help, would it.’

‘Not hardly, no.’

‘Or I could observe, Detective, that you yourself don’t seem to me to be pursuing police work out of some pure and dedicated sense of vocation. I’ve heard you play, remember. That’s your calling. All this’ – she indicated the room with a twirl of a scarlet nail, and the city beyond – ‘is just day-job. Fill-in. What’s Cahokia to you? You’re passing through.’ Just as much as I am, she didn’t have to add.

‘That’s different,’ he said. He searched for the right high-flown word. ‘It’s not … dishonourable.’

She flushed. The freckles over the bridge of her nose showed up sharply, and for a moment dismay made her face’s arrangement of plucked eyebrows, lipstick-slash of mouth and challenging gaze fall somehow out of alignment, as if the flirtatious elements had suffered a mechanical glitch. Hell, it’s another mask, he thought.

‘Yeah?’ she said. ‘Are you sure about that?’ She fluttered the slip 356of paper she still held poised over her left shoulder. ‘You haven’t been doing anything you’re ashamed of?’

‘Fair point,’ said Barrow, and liked her a little more. His own cigarette was down to an ember. He lit a new one off the end of it, and passed it over to Anderson. ‘So. Harry. What do you want?’

She breathed for a minute, smokily, like a fighter making the most of the space between rounds.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really come to vamp you. Though you’re so solemn, it is a very reliable source of fun—’ She looked up at him through the smoke and licked him again with her eyes, this time exaggeratedly.

‘Yeah, stop that now,’ he said.

‘Lost cause, huh. Don’t worry, I know that. I saw the way you were with her. Heart in your eyes, big man. And listen, I was blotto that night; said what I shouldn’t have. My apologies.’

‘I don’t know you got much to be sorry for.’

‘Are you going to make me spell it out, Detective? I was crass and I was clumsy and I looked at you as if you were an order of beef.’

‘Like that’s different from how men look at women, mosta the time. Like that’s different from how I was looking at you Tuesday, that matter.’

Barrow wasn’t quite sure why he wanted to make her feel better about this, if that was what he was doing. Some combination of being touched she’d wanted to push her apology so far – and a continuing pleasure in naming the rough thing there was between them, as she sat there. Titian-haired. Tweed and lace.

‘And there I was thinking you just didn’t like redheads.’

‘I like redheads fine. But,’ he said, pulling things back, ‘I was a lost cause already, like you saw. And you wouldn’t want to be no substitute, would you? You wouldn’t want to be second best.’

‘I’d – no,’ she said. ‘But since we’re being so frank, would you satisfy my curiosity and tell me what it is about her, that has you so 357tied in knots? Is it the princess thing? (Which, heaven knows, a girl cannot compete with.) Would you be falling for her if she weren’t, of all the storybook things, a princess in trouble? I’ve seen her around, you know, talked to her a little bit at openings and so forth, and she’s earnest, rather humourless, and very conscious of her own dignity. Does that sound like the kind of person you’d go for, under other circumstances?’

‘I can’t tell you why.’

‘Oh. Well, pardon me for—’

‘I mean, I can’t tell you because I don’t know. It just happened. She don’t want me, I’m sure. But I’m hers.’

‘Oh my,’ said Anderson, looking at him with a new expression: a sort of affectionate contempt. ‘You’re a sap. This fact was concealed from me by your being, you know, twenty feet tall and constructed along the lines of the proverbial outbuilding – but you’re a sap, my darling.’

‘Yeah, maybe. But I can’t help it, if I am.’

‘Never mind, sweetie,’ said Anderson, ‘never mind.’ She patted his hand.

‘Business,’ suggested Barrow, withdrawing it.

‘Okay. What I want, apart from all aforementioned impossibilities – is to get to write the damn story. The real story of what’s going on here, this week. I’ve got this truly astonishing saga unrolling under my nose, American history in the making, Pulitzer material: and all they’re letting this girl Friday do with it, is digest it into little nuggets of hate for the hicks.’

‘So frustrating,’ said Barrow, with some irony.

‘Darn it, it is. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime story, don’t you see? The kind that could take me straight out of Hicksville to a proper job on a proper paper: one with slightly higher aims than the regular dispensing of poison. But I’ve got to have something to go to the Tribune or the Times, with. I’ve got to be able to say I have access. I 358want you to get me interviews, real in-depth interviews, with Old Man Hashi and Couma.’

‘This would be the boring, humourless woman you just mentioned?’

‘She’s news, you sap. A national figure. Famous from sea to shining sea, whatever I think of her.’

‘Well, I can’t promise, with either of them.’

‘But you can try. Promise me you’ll try – that you’ll give it your best endeavour.’

‘Sap’s honour,’ Barrow said, holding up three fingers like a Boy Scout. ‘You give me that, and I will do my best, and put your private number into their hands. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

She passed over the slip that all this while she’d had poised in the air, and watched him open it. SDO-9114.

‘You know where this is?’ he asked.

‘It’s the Saint Dominic’s exchange so, somewhere out in Little Italy, I guess,’ she said, referring to the anomalous pocket of pasta-eating way out on the south-eastern edge of Morningside, up on the bluffs where the riverland ended, fruit of some kind of failed experiment in wine-growing forty years before. It was, Barrow couldn’t help noticing, the exact opposite corner of the city to the address he’d hared north-westwards to find.

‘And this is him?’

‘This is what he gave me to give to you.’

‘Okay, then,’ said Barrow pushing back his chair.

‘That side of things,’ said Anderson. ‘– I’m going to want to talk to you too, on the record, when all this is done. Acceptable?’

‘Sure,’ said Barrow. ‘You can interview me. Just not … in depth.’

She blushed again. He patted her on her auburn curls as he passed, and left whistling.359

8

A quick call by Chokfi to the central city exchange, where they kept reverse phone-books for all the numbers within city limits, revealed that SDO-9114 was registered to a mom-and-pop corner grocery called Santorelli’s, which was indeed in Little Italy, on a hill well beyond Zuni and the formal eastern end of the street grid. Barrow wanted to collect a car and go straight over there, but Doyle forbade it. It was getting to the end of the shift, but the miko was determined to settle the Drummond matter before handing over to the night squad.

‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘We got one shot, to scoop up our miscreant here, and we don’t even know if dear Phineas will be at home at this number. A little co-ordination is called for. And your role in the drama will be to play the Judas goat – if you’re willing. You will go up the street with a pocket full of pennies and nickels, and make the call from a public booth, because it will not inspire your man’s confidence if he knows you’re speaking from here. The illusion of privacy, that’s what we’re after. I will stand by with a carful of the boys, and if he answers, we will drive eastward like the wind. Your job is to keep him talking, keep him on the line by any means at all – and then with any luck we’ll catch him with the telephone still in his hand. That is, if you’re willing. Are you willing, Joseph? I’m afraid this is the moment of choice. In or out; police or not police. As simple as that. If you want to stay, if you are indeed tastanagi tamaha, this is redemption. This is how you prove it. I know it’s no easy thing, but you have it in you, I believe. I see the sparks of it in you. Well?’

‘I’m in,’ said Barrow.

A whip-round in the pen produced forty-two cents in very small change. Doyle went to roust out Sergeant Hanunu to drive, and 360two of his squad for back-seat muscle. Chokfi smiled at Barrow – she was smiling at him again, which maybe meant the news of the cathedral fight had percolated through the Four Winds network.

‘I know he’s your friend,’ she said.

‘I think my taste in friends is getting better.’

‘All the same,’ she said. ‘Oh, Mickey Casqui left something for you.’

It was a package. He stuffed it into one coat pocket and poured the jingling stream of coins into the other. Chokfi did up his coat buttons, and gave him two open-palmed claps on the chest with both hands, like someone making the first moves of a game of patty-cake.

‘Thanks, Mom,’ he said, though he knew it was wifely not motherly reassurance she was meaning to give.

*

Out on the street, the sky was fading from Madonna-bright to a blue suitable for business correspondence, and there was pink and gold showing to the west. The nearest phone booth had an egg-shaped takata in a business suit in it, who startled when he suddenly found on the other side of the glass Doyle holding up his shield, a knot of weary takouma cops in feverish high spirits, and one of whatever Barrow was, looming. He rang off, and skedaddled. Barrow slid into his place. His head was up in the cherry-wood vault of the booth, near the light fitting, and he had a sudden flash of riding the narrow elevator at the Land Trust, back at the beginning of this week. Coins in the slots, as many as the paybox would take. At the kerb, Hanunu started the engine of the car, and his passengers piled in. Barrow dialled. Ringing tone at the other end of the line. Someone picked up, and the first pennies cascaded into the machine.

‘Si, Santorelli,’ said a woman’s voice.

‘Uh, I’m looking for Phineas Drummond.’361

‘Are you called Joe?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, that’s me.’

‘He is upstairs. But he is not very well. I think maybe he should be in the hospital. You will tell him this, yes? Maybe he will listen to you.’

Barrow nodded to Doyle through the glass, pointed east: go. Hanunu stepped on the gas: gone.

‘I’ll … do my best.’

‘Okay. I’ll get him. Momento.’

Barrow waited, nothing but electric crackles in his ear, all of a sudden solitary. The yellow lamp in the booth darkened the predusk blue outside towards dusk proper. Passers-by streamed along on both sides of the booth, about their business. The shops that had triumphantly re-opened at noon were closing again, in the ordinary course of things. The city inhaled and exhaled. Night was coming, and the world had not ended.

‘Hey,’ said Drummond’s voice in his ear: thick, slower than usual. ‘That you, big man?’

‘Yeah, it’s me,’ Barrow said, with a strange heavy feeling; a feeling of discord, of anachronism almost, as if he had been consigning his friendship with Drummond to the past, for comfort’s sake, and yet here it was alive and kicking in the present. Requiring not just to be relinquished, passively, open your hands and let it slip away, but dealt with. Positively; actively.

‘You worked it on out, then,’ said Drummond. ‘I was startin’ to think I’d been a mite too … too …’

‘You still there?’

‘… cryptic. A mite too cryptic.’

‘You all right, man? You sound like you’re a million miles away.’

‘I’m just … wakin’ up. I been sleepin’. Couldn’t help myself. I been way, way down deep.’

‘You run out of pills?’362

‘Oh, you … know about them? No, I ain’t run out of those beauties. Just, comes a time when they cain’t hold it all back no … longer. It’s like, you got a dam ’cross a valley, keeps back the night, for a while. But in the end, water just gets too high, and through it comes. All black, Joe. No light, Joe. And there’s … things livin’ in it … things you don’t wanna see.’

‘Usual dream?’ said Barrow, not able to help himself. There was something clogged, nightmare-soaked, not just in what Drummond was saying, but in the slowing down of his drawl.

‘Oh and … new ones. I branched out, man. All the devils are here.’

‘You seeing Fred Hopper, by any chance?’

‘Him? Lord, no. Seen one corpus, you seen ’em all. Don’t you worry ’bout me. I’ll be right as … rain … in a minute. I’ve taken my medicine. That’ll bring me right back up. Bye-bye to sleepytime. I’ll be good for days in a … minute.’

‘You shouldn’t take those things, Phin. I met a scientist lady, says they’ll fuck you up if you swaller too many.’

‘Don’t knock ’em if you ain’t tried ’em. Elixir of youth, boy: or the closest damn thing. Draughts from the fountain. Brings everything up bright and tight and clear. Turns this dirty ol’ world purely to … diamond.’

‘Your landlady there – if that’s what she is – seems to think you should be in a hospital bed.’

‘Non-sense. Nonsense! She’s jus’ makin’ a fuss, like women do. Ain’t you, Mama Santa?’

There was an unconvinced murmur in the background, the reply of someone who’d been troubled and wasn’t going to forget it that easily.

‘Naw – my hand’s a little dinged up, from where that fat-ass bitch at the station stuck me, is all. What I need is just a good dose of sunshine on it. Best disinfectant, they do say, don’t they?’

He was audibly beginning to accelerate. Barrow imagined the 363car speeding east, closing the gap. Where would it have gotten to by now? Down onto State Street, aimed like an arrow up the long straight to the bluffs, where the sun rose in the morning and the dark would be gathering now. Maybe two miles to go, and Hanunu wouldn’t be stopping for red lights. He wanted them to get there now, immediately, at once, so the long slow betrayal could end, and he could be done with the helpless urge to protect this man.

‘Which brings us neatly back to business, compadre. Golden sunshine, in the Golden State. Since you have po-litely favoured me with this call, I’m assumin’ y’all have thought it through and you’re ready to take your share in the windfall I won us?’

‘Shit, Phin. You haven’t heard the news, have you?’

‘Like I think I said, I just woke up.’

More coins rattled down to the paybox.

‘Vanderberg’s scheme’s a bust. The Klan march got broke up by the tamaha.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. By the Cahokia Guard dressed up as the cavalry from Birth of a Nation.’

‘A cavalry charge? You serious? You mean a old-fashioned honestto-goodness tan-tan-tara sabres-held-high jinglin’-spurs style o’ thing?’

‘Well, carbines not sabres, but yeah. I saw it.’

To Barrow’s surprise, Drummond began to laugh.

‘Oh, I wish I had. All them freaks in sheets runnin’ for their lives! All them secret-handshake sonsabitches turnin’ tail in glorious u-nison! Musta bin spectacular.’

‘It was, but—’

‘Like someone kicked an anthill. Poured gasoline in a gopher burrow ’n lit a match. Oh my.’

‘Yeah, but Phin, you were counting on ’em to win, weren’t you? I thought that was the whole plan.’364

‘What? You thought I was on the side of those fools?’

Barrow found himself wondering for an instant if he could possibly have been mistaken, if he had been building some crazy tower of suspicion all on the foundations of a misunderstanding. But the phenylisopropylamine was getting busy in Drummond. Maybe it was turning his world to diamond, but for sure it was pumping back up his tendency to monologue.

‘You know better’n that. You know I don’t care ’bout any of that stuff.’

The way he said stuff made it clear he categorised under it everything the Klan had ever said about race, religion or booze.

‘Then why’d you sign up with Vanderberg to help them win? To give over a place like this to them, Phin?’

‘Oh, they won’t be in charge, whatever the hell happens. Mr V. is using them just like he’s using me: difference bein’, I know it, and I’m usin’ him right back. He sees a city totterin’, ready to fall in his lap with one good push in the right place. I see a man in urgent need o’ my services. Urgent enough he’ll set us both up forever.’

‘Except in California, I’m not a citizen, am I? I’m not a detective, and I’m not a musician. I’m not a mix of takouma and taklousa makes people do a double-take. I’m not even a big man no more. You know what I’d be, in your lovely California.’

‘You know I don’t care about that stuff,’ repeated Drummond impatiently, as if it ought to settle the question entirely.

‘Well, fuck you, Phin, because I do. I gotta. This city here is one o’ the few places I can stand upright. You’ll pardon me if I take it personal when you try to hurt that.’

‘Oh sweet Jesus. I know what I’m hearing now. You gone and caught yourself a cause, haven’t you?’

‘What if I have?’

‘What if you have? Then, you poor sucker, you cain’t call your soul your own. It’s that creeping old snake-oil salesman in the 365palace that got you, isn’t it? Him or that chewed-over piece of gristle his niece. You gonna sell your soul for pussy, boy, at least pick a specimen ain’t dried up in advance to shoe leather.’

‘Shut up!’

‘You know what they are? Feedin’ mouths, that’s what. And what they feed on’s belief. Nature gave them pretty words so you don’t notice when they get their ring o’ teeth hooked on. You think they’re gonna love you? Oh no; you can love them, that’s fine, they don’t mind that, but as for them, they’re strictly thinkin’ on their dinner.’

Barrow wanted to say: that’s your nightmare, not mine. He wanted to say: what do you know about love, when you’re so afraid of being trapped you’re hiding in a rented room, living from pill to pill with horrors at your heels. But he thought of the professor, he couldn’t help thinking of the professor, who had made the same point this afternoon, if less disgustingly.

‘You should think about that,’ said Drummond, taking the silence as the sign of a point scored. The next coins jingled down. The car must be nearly there by now; surely it must be.

‘Yeah?’ said Barrow. ‘You should tell me what the hell you did for Vanderberg.’

‘Don’t you know by now? Surely you do. Does a friend have to spell it out to a friend?’

‘Shit, Phin …’

‘Mind you,’ said Drummond, ‘you ain’t been exactly friendly, this last little while. Why d’you ring me if you’re just – oh.’

‘Phin?’

‘Oh, Joe. Well now, ain’t that something. You nearly made a sucker out o’ me.’

‘Phin, listen—’

‘Goodbye, then.’

‘—wait—’366

‘I don’t think so, no,’ said Drummond cordially. ‘Goodbye, pardner. It’s bin sweet, coulda bin sweeter.’

And he put the phone down.

*

Swearing, Barrow re-dialled the number. Three rings, four, five. No answer. Six, seven, eight.

‘Hallo?’ Mrs Santorelli again.

‘Is he still there?’

‘No, he ran out! Straight outta the door. I go to the back of the shop, let him be a little private you know, suddenly he’s gone. What you say to him?’

‘Ma’am, would you do something? Would you look outta the door, tell me if you see a po-lice car coming up the street to you?’

‘… Okay. Momento.’

Sound of feet going, coming back.

‘No, I don’t see nothing.’

‘Hell, hell, hell …’

‘What’s this about? Is Phee-nee-ass in trouble?’

‘I’m afraid so, ma’am. Look, in just a minute there will be a carload of cops at your door. Could you tell them which way he went?’

‘I didn’t see which way he went. Just the door swinging.’

‘Hell. Then, couldya please ask them to call me?’ He read her the number of the public booth.

‘Okay.’ Click.

*

He stepped out to smoke a cigarette, back to the door to discourage any citizens from thinking the booth was free. The traffic was thinning anyway. Business-blue had darkened to indigo overhead, the west was a hearth of scarlet embers, the lights of the human city asserted themselves, steady blue-white on the lamp standards, blebbing and winking at the junctions. He blew out clouds of smoke and they hung in the still air, slow to dissipate.367

Any moment, he expected the bell of the phone behind him to ring. But it didn’t, and it didn’t, and it didn’t. He finished the smoke and looked at his watch – wondering what was happening, wondering how far Drummond could have gotten by now. A party of takouma girls and boys in Blessed Thomas Neta colours made a play for the phone and he waved them off apologetically.

Still no return call. He felt in his pocket for the crumpled pack of cigarettes, to light up another, and found Mickey Casqui’s packet. For want of anything better he tore it open. Inside the paper wrapping was an old book with a green-and-gilt cover: THE CONQUEST OF NEW SPAIN. The thing that Casqui had said the person who set up the Land Trust killing must have read. It had two or three paper slips inserted, to mark pages. He opened it at one and found, with a pencil mark in the margin, the description of the Aztec temple layout which Casqui had quoted on the roof. The top of the temple formed an open square on which stood something like a platform, and it was here that the great stones stood on which they placed the poor Indians for sacrifice. He flipped to another page marker and found, They strike open the wretched Indian’s chest with stone knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart. The third was a description of the Aztec priests who did these sacrifices. They wore their hair very long, down to their waists, and some even down to their feet; and it was all so clotted and matted with blood that it could not be pulled apart.

So? He was pushing the book back into his coat when something snagged his memory. The bloody hair. The blood in the hair, smeared there – jetted there – when leaning over the poor bastard being carved up. The blood in Drummond’s hair, which had made him jump when Barrow had pointed it out up on the roof, though he was usually the opposite of squeamish. The blood that he, Barrow, had sent him off to wash away in a Land Trust men’s room. A picture formed in his mind with black certainty: little Fred 368Hopper excitedly doing his special duty for the Klan by unlocking the doors and waiting on the Trust rooftop at 11 p.m. Little Fred finding that the contact who came to meet him was a yakking, garrulous country boy of a policeman, reassuringly white, with a face out of the funny pages. Fred passing from excitement to terror – please God, very brief terror – as the friendly cop, no doubt talking all the while, stepped behind him, took him by his thinning hair and passed an edge of cold bright steel through his throat. Then trussed him over the glass skylight to gargle out his lifeblood upside down, over his face, into his mouth and his ears. Then the sawing, and carving, and levering. The sprinkling of the black glass from the envelope provided. The washing of the hands and the changing of the clothes, but the blood in the hair not noticed, before the cop returned to the scene with his naive fool of a partner, to make sure that none of that Sherlock Holmes shit took place.

Oh, Phin. No wonder the nightmares were breeding.

*

And then, of course, the phone rang.

9

Doyle was hopping mad.

‘Shit, shit, shit! Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the fecking saints in fecking glory! He’s gone. And gone by the sound of it with enough of a lead that by now he could be anywhere. Again.’

‘I’m sorry, miko.’

‘What did you say to him? How did you leave things? Do we have anything like another chance of laying our hands on him?’

‘I … don’t think so. This stuff he’s on makes him real suspicious. Once he tumbled to what I was doing, he was straight out the door.’369

‘Feck. And we had him. He was sleeping, I’m told. All we had to do was leave out the damn phone call, and motor over to collect him at our leisure.’

‘I’m sorry, I kept him talking as long as I could.’

‘Not long enough. Not fecking long enough. – But,’ added Doyle with an audible effort, ‘to tell you the truth, you’d have had to keep him on the line for another twenty fecking minutes for this to come off. Because we managed to get into the world’s worst-timed traffic jam on the way over. There’d been some kind of accident at the lights, crossing Zuni, and it was backed up for blocks. Tried to get up along the sidewalks; no luck. Horns hooting. Endless fecking palaver. Feck!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Barrow again.

‘Not entirely your fault, is what I’m saying. But oh my, it would have been a small fecking mercy to have a simple plan carried out successfully. If the powers that be can conjure a whole stage army to defend the city, you’d think that I could manage to drive across the fecking town without mishap.’

Barrow could hear him breathing; could hear him deliberately slow his breathing. ‘Anyway,’ said Doyle. ‘The bird is flown. The bird is very thoroughly flown.’

‘I’ll come over.’

‘There’s not much to see. I ran up the stairs in case he was hiding under the bed. Just an averagely sad bachelor room. Quite a few empties on the floor of the closet. Copy of an inspirational work on the nightstand, price one dime, entitled The American Self-Motivator. No helpful scraps of paper containing forwarding addresses. No crazy writing on the wallpaper.’

There wouldn’t be, Barrow thought. Phin kept all the crazy on the inside of his head. It was his skull that was filled up with the dark, dark water. And the things that lived in it.

‘What does his landlady make of him?’370

‘Hanunu’s talking to her now.’ Doyle spoke a question away from the phone, listened to a voice too far for Barrow to hear, came back. ‘Says, he was quiet and polite, ’cept for the occasional nighttime outburst of the screaming ab-dabs, but she knew he was a vet, and the rest of the time he was a gentleman. Only started going truly off the rails these last two weeks. Looked ill. Stopped sleeping. Lots of coming and going at night.’

‘Including last Sunday night?’

‘Way ahead of you, Detective. She said he came home in the small hours, bumped about downstairs, went out again before dawn. Later on she found he’d burned something in the furnace.’

‘Clothes with blood on ’em, probably.’

‘How’s that?’ said Doyle, but not as if this idea shocked him.

Barrow explained about Mickey Casqui’s book, and the blood in the hair. There was a silence: but again, not a surprised one.

‘Well,’ said Doyle eventually. ‘We’d about arrived there anyway, hadn’t we. We’ll rake through the ashes and bring back any bits we find unburnt to Fussner, see if he can make anything evidential of ’em. The immediate question is, is he gone gone, do you think? All the way gone, out of the city and off to the blue horizon?’

‘Well, he’s not waiting for me to go with him to California, any more.’

‘No.’

‘I guess,’ said Barrow, ‘it depends on whether he’s been paid yet. He didn’t … make that clear.’

‘And it’s difficult to see how we’re going to get Mr Vanderberg to clarify the point for us.’

At the thought of the chase resuming, the case lurching onward, Barrow felt suddenly drained. His ribs still ached, despite Oscar’s magic liquid. He touched his eyebrow and yawned.

‘Oh, are you losing interest there, Detective? Are you no longer 371captivated by the quest for your murderous associate? All right,’ said Doyle. ‘Get some sleep. I don’t need you for anything else tonight. You can read up what we find here in the reports tomorrow morning. You type, we read; we type, you read. That’s how it works. – By the way, you need a new partner. I don’t favour the notion of you wandering round on your own. What if I promote Hanunu?’

‘Sure,’ said Barrow wearily.

‘Good.’

*

He did mean to take himself straight to bed when he reached Lydia Lee’s, he really did, but the place was bustling. The same spirit (and spirits, plural) that had animated the crowd outside the Algonkian were at lively work down in Darktown. With the Klan’s threat of doom gone, the joint jumped like a skillet of popcorn with the lid removed. Dolphus and the band were booked for the house that night anyway, and were settling down as he arrived to play a harder, purer set to an almost purely taklousa audience. There was one white table, but the gents drinking at it were fellow musicians, a saxophonist named Trumbauer and a trumpet-player guest of his in from Chicago, so they hardly even counted as takata. ‘Less schmooze, more blues,’ said Dolphus, and he led them straight into a driving version of ‘I Woke Up Cold in Hand’, followed without a breath by ‘Won’t Don’t.’ Between this and Barrow’s sense that when he lay down, the death of Fred Hopper would be waiting for him on the pillow, sleet and darkness and the trickle of the blood – his own share of the black water – he put up no resistance at all to being ushered to the piano.

They did ‘Riverside Blues’, slow and wailing, its every moan a declaration. They did ‘Coal Cart Blues’, and Stukeley’s cornet cut the air so cleanly it was a defiance of a different kind, Dolphus’s sweet reed wrestling away the tune halfway through and outlining 372it in honey. Alma stepped up, and she was no Ma Rainey, didn’t have the depths of Bessie Smith, but she could grind, and she did, silver fish-tail skirt twitching, unrepentant dirt in her mouth. She gave them ‘My Handy Man’, and the room followed with eyes and ears every place her man’s hands went. She gave them ‘I Got What It Takes’, and the room agreed with her. She did ‘Mine’s As Good As Yours’ in a slow-talking version with Barrow’s piano providing the other half of the conversation, and he got laughs as often as she did. After which it made sense for him to shake his fingers out, and lay down a solo of James P. Johnson’s ‘Worried and Lonesome’, which was as ever pointedly cheerful and gregarious. Then he dared his own ‘Red, Black and Blue’ as he hadn’t on Tuesday night, and though he hadn’t devised any more than the piano part, Stukeley and Dolphus did their own devising then and there, right along with him. The room roared. Lydia grinned at him from behind the bar. Stukeley nodded to Dolphus, and Dolphus nodded back, as if to say, I told you so. It wasn’t an anaesthetic for the week that flowed up his fingers from the black and white ivories. It was an order for it, a place to put its sorrows and horrors and joys.

He was still playing after midnight, very bare and basic by then. Just a grid of the stride chords over which cornet and clarinet could blow what came to them, the audience mostly gone, performance metamorphosed into a private reverie. His fingers moved slow, but he could no more forget the route for them to walk than he could forget his own name. Keep it simple, stupid. E flat major to C minor. The city is saved. C minor to F major. The city is saved! F major to B flat major, B flat major home to E flat major. Everything else could wait.373

374

FRIDAY

375

376

Meeting for the Discernment of Spirits by the Ignatian Method, 9 April 1862. English-language version. (For Anopa and Latin texts, see previous pages.) Ladies present: HCH, TCH, FO, BT, Sr Agatha.

1. Prayer. The guidance of the Holy Spirit was implored, and the intercession of Our Lady, St Catherine, St Lucy, St Teresa and all other protectors of the tamaha in the court of Heaven.

2. The report by General Founi was received into the recent stalemate at the battle at Shiloh between the Union and Confederate takata armies. The attention of the company was directed towards his conclusion: that the difficulties of General Grant on the Union side were attributable to his lack of access to the river system, on account of the tamaha’s blockade. That Gen. Grant must now therefore be considering an invasion of the tamaha, to secure this river access to the western portion of the Confederacy.

3. Prayer.

4. First gathering. HCH observed, that traditionally the best safety of the tamaha lay in the division of the takata powers. This was why the tamaha had aided the passage of the Mormon heretics westward, to establish their separate republic. From this point of view, the splitting of the United States might be seen as a gift of providence. TCH responded, that this had held true while the tamaha’s population had equalled that of the takata powers combined. The takouma ten millions now faced thirty millions of takata. In the long run, survival now probably entailed joining one or other of the takata combinations. FO remarked, perhaps the very short run, if Gen. Grant attacked. BT said, it would be better to choose an affiliation freely, on good terms. But which? At this, the problem for the meeting was considered to have been stated.

5. Prayer.

6. Second gathering. HCH observed, that the Confederate envoy 377Maj. Deleuze had made much of being a co-religionist of the tamaha. TCH responded, only in Louisiana was the CSA at all Catholic. Deleuze might bob in and out of Mass like an apple on a string, but the leadership of the Confederacy were the same Protestant bushwhackers and slave raiders the tamaha had been fending off from the south-east for two hundred years. FO asked, were the Union better? BT replied, that there was at least an acknowledgement of the interests of non-takata in some quarters in the North, and this might be bargained into an acceptable settlement, especially if the tamaha were offering something the Union wanted. HCH stated that this was her brother’s view, and also the preference in the councils of the men. TCH said, that was no guarantee of wisdom.

7. Prayer.

8. Third gathering. HCH asked, what should the tamaha offer the Union? Passage of the Union armies south? TCH responded, that was not cause enough for a permanent gratitude, and would in any case extinguish the independence of the tamaha as soon as Union soldiers were present in quantity. FO asked, what then? TCH answered, we should give them Mississippi, and then an alliance. BT asked, could this be done? HCH said, Gen. Founi had prepared plans for the reduction of Vicksburg. Sr Agatha confirmed, that such an attack would conform to Holy Church’s criteria for a just war.

9. Prayer.

10. The meeting reported DESOLATION, that so many of the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers of the tamaha must inevitably perish in such a war. CONSOLATION, that it appeared to represent the best hope for the greater safety of all takouma present and as yet unborn.

11. Prayer.

12. HCH said, if Founi wins, you know you will end up having to marry him, my daughter. TCH replied, with a remark which though harmless was not fit to be transcribed. 378

13. RESOLUTION: that Gen. Founi be instructed to move upon Vicksburg, and that the Prince should cable Mr Lincoln to open negotiations with the Union.

Decision Book of the Houma Anopoli Tamaha, vol. 18. One copy only. Sealed deposit in the Library of St Francis Xavier University,

Cahokia, until 10 April 1962.

3791

Hanunu came to work in an obviously brand-new suit, with a blue shirt and a canary-yellow tie, and as he climbed cautiously up the stairs to the detective pen, he was tugging with one finger at the unaccustomed tightness of the shirt collar.

‘My wife says I look ridiculous,’ he told Barrow.

‘That means she’s proud of you, right?’

‘Probably,’ he admitted. ‘Where do I sit, Detective?’

‘There, I guess,’ said Barrow, indicating Drummond’s vacated desk. ‘And you stop calling me that. I’m Joe. You are?’

‘Nicholas.’

‘Too long. You good with Nick?’

‘Yes.’

Hanunu seated himself with care. He put out his hands and hovered them a half-inch above the scuffed and scratched wood of the desk top, as if unsure whether he was allowed to take possession. Then he put them deliberately down.

‘Now what?’he said.

‘That depends on the miko,’ said Barrow. ‘Whether he’s keeping us full time on the Land Trust thing, or he wants to shuffle round the caseload again.’

‘You can have the two dead hobos back, and welcome,’ said Bunce from two desks over.

‘What about the cement works thing?’

‘Closed it, while you were off gallivanting.’

‘Yeah,’ said Everard to Hanunu, indicating Barrow with his thumb. ‘You wanna watch out for this guy. No work ethic. And his taste in partners: oof.’

Hanunu smiled uncertainly, but Barrow could see him fitting in just fine here – better than he did himself. The deference would 380rub off, the insider’s eye on the Quarters and the Northside would be useful, he would be honest and diligent and trustworthy. He had lied three days back about not recognising the Anopa name of the Red Council, but that was the inevitable product of a collision between police-loyalty and tamaha-loyalty; a wise partner would know not to push him to that point of collision. But would that partner really, conceivably, be him? All this I’m-Joe-you’re-Nick stuff seemed like a performance, a performance he was putting on distractedly with a little fraction of his attention. He hadn’t digested his discovery of what his good friend Phineas had done to Fred Hopper on the rooftop, or anything like it; it was more like he had pushed it aside in his mind, sealed it off, a cyst full of screaming and darkness and bloody snow. The idea of new beginnings, new partnerships, fresh starts – was hard to believe in. He was going through the motions.

*

And this sense of unreality was intensified by the speech Dolphus had made to him this morning. The bandleader had made a special effort, and prised himself awake in time to waylay Barrow before he went to work.

‘Word in your ear, Joe Barrow,’ he said, with a courtly arm movement toward the open door of Lydia’s kitchen, where two cups of java waited steaming on the table.

‘Yeah?’

‘Now, I told you this was comin’. My pitch for your services. I’ma say this once, and I’ma say it right, or do my best to, anyways.’ He stroked the pencil moustache on his upper lip, left from the nose, right from the nose. A punctilious man. ‘Yesterday, best I understand, you was runnin’ around out there bein’ a hero. Out there servin’ the mighty cause o’ freedom, and so forth. And I don’t dismiss that; no sir, I do not. I do not wish the thumb o’ the Klan to de-scend on me and mine, and I am heartily grateful to anyone 381preventin’ that. But yesterday evenin’, you was playin’ the piano, with us. And one o’ these two things, coulda been lots o’ people doin’ it; one o’ them, it had to be you. And the one only you can do, that’s the music. You gotta gift. You know you gotta gift. You got it in you – maybe – to get up there with Jelly Roll and Johnson. But only if you let it be your life. I don’t pretend to know why you ain’t let yourself try before with a whole heart. Seems to me that if you’re a puzzlement to your friends, you probly a bigger one to yourself. But here comes your chance again. Here it comes right now. Lemme make this real con-crete. Tomorrow morning, we-all are catchin’ the nine thirty-five train to Jackson. We got a end-of-tour club date at the Wilhelmina Theater on Revels Avenue tomorrow night, and we want you up on that stage with us. And when I say we, I mean all of us. Dutch, Willie, Alma, young Stukeley – all of ’em say, shake some sense into that fool and bring him along. Then, day after, we cuttin’ some discs for Gennett Records. We want you on them, too. Fact, we been lookin’ for a original song we can show-out a little with, and we like that new thing of yours last night, for that.’ He moved his forefinger in the air, as if reading off the label of a piece of imaginary shellac floating in the air in front of him. ‘“Red, Black and Blue’. Henderson – Barrow – Stukeley.” Think o’ that. Can you see it?’ Barrow could. He could also see that Dolphus had automatically moved himself up to the top spot in terms of songwriting credits, but this was still generous: about as open-handedly generous as Dolphus’s prickly sense of his own primacy could possibly let him be.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that sounds great. But, see, I got some things going on here that—’

‘No,’ said Dolphus. ‘No no no. Don’t you say nothin’, now. I don’t want no answer now. I want you to think on this, I mean really think on this. There’s a ticket for you in my pocket for the Jackson train tomorrow. It’s yours for the takin’. Do you want it, do 382you finally want it, is the question. I’ma say one more thing, then I said my piece. There’s “freedom”, like the po-litical thing – and then there’s “freedom” like … bein’ free, feelin’ free. That’s what you get in the music, my opinion. You, me and Stukeley last night? Three free men, con-versing. I know you felt that. That’s where I’m callin’ you to come live, Joe Barrow. Not in Mizzippy, ’cept, you know, in-ci-dent-ally. In the music.’

*

What Doyle wanted was for him to draw up the affidavit for a general arrest warrant on Drummond. With that from a judge, they could circulate him on the statewide wanted list, and get him on the federal list too if the local trail went cold. Unspoken, obvious rider: that way, too, they could immediately offer the city a named takata suspect, and though the publicity for the department would be terrible, the murderer being police, Mayor Lakna would be more grateful than angry. Besides, Nakbateroli could always be blamed.

So Doyle plunked on Hanunu the files for a couple of new deaths from the week’s backlog, for him to start work on – and on Barrow’s desk, he laid the promised transcripts of last night’s notes, and Dr Fussner’s report on the contents of Mrs Santorelli’s stove. He looked at the pages dispiritedly. They had the cysted memory of the rooftop in them.

‘I been thinking, miko,’ he said.

‘Dangerous sport. Yes?’

‘Vanderberg’s the key to whether Phin’s sticking around the city, right? I mean, whether he’s paid him or not. But Vanderberg’s got no reason to speak to us. We can’t make him with what we got at the moment, and there’s nothing in it for him. He can only hurt himself by talking.’

‘All depressingly true.’

‘But – I was thinking – this is a guy who’s always sure he’s the cleverest in the room. I mean always. A giant among pygmies. A 383genius in a world of morons. Arrogance like you wouldn’t believe. His favourite thing is laughing at people with a straight face.’

‘So—?’

‘So he’s got no reason to talk to us, but he might do it anyway, if he thinks it’ll win him an entertaining quarter-hour triumphing over bumbling cops.’

‘You mean lure him out by playing it deliberately dumb?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. Well, I suppose it’s worth a try. All right, I shall hide my light under a bushel, and make a call to Union Cartridge in character as a naive flatfoot. – Keep it up, Detective; this thinking business suits you.’

Doyle disappeared in the direction of Chokfi’s cubby. Hanunu was reading his first file with a pained frown. Barrow blew out his breath between his teeth and turned to the reports. Dr Fussner had found buttons and fibres in the ash, and iron oxide which might have come from burned blood, though it might also have come from certain types of red paint, if by any chance Phin had gone out in the dark Sunday to paint a mural. Mrs Santorelli had sworn a statement of his movements that night anyway. Nothing useful in the search of the bedroom: not only no crazy screeds on the wallpaper, but also no notes, no messages, no discarded paper items of any kind. No confessions scribbled in the margin of The American Self-Motivator. Gun-oil stain on the crocheted top cover of the chiffarobe, but that was a natural place for a cop to dump his service revolver. Two empty sardine cans on the floor, which it looked like Phin had eaten in bed. So: the burned bloody clothing, the movements attested by the landlady, his own observations on the Sunday night, Phin’s promotion of the false trail to the Warriors, Phin’s connection to a takata gangster known to be involved in the Klan’s planning around the murder. Better stop at Weiss, given the unprovability of the Weiss–Vanderberg link, so far. He cracked his 384shoulders and started typing. If Sol Stein had re-opened his doors, it would be good to get back to the gym today.

Shortly, Doyle returned shaking his head.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘No dice. A mere police captain to bamboozle is apparently not sufficient temptation. Mr Vanderberg does not want to come out to play.’

‘Rude, was he?’

‘His secretary was.’

‘Sorry, miko.’

‘Ah, don’t be. Given a choice between dignity and success on this one, I’ll take success every time.’

He got all the relevant material for the affidavit onto two sheets. As he was finishing the second carbon-paper sandwich, Chokfi brought up the day’s newspapers from downstairs. He smiled at her. She took the pencil from behind her ear and poked his shoulder with the sharp end.

‘That girl is annoyed with you,’ observed Hanunu, when she’d gone.

‘She kind of made me an offer I’ve left hanging.’

‘You could do worse.’

‘I know. Much worse.’

‘She is brave. Kind. Pretty. An upholder of the tamaha. A little bit short.’

‘Yeah, thank you.’

‘Of course, she could always stand on a box.’

‘Thank you.’

The Post had SAVAGES! and a front-cover close-up photograph of one of the charging troopers that made it look as if he was galloping right at the reader, just on the point of riding you down and reducing you to hamburger. Inside there was a high-flown rant by Dredgehorn, the proprietor. Barrow had been wondering how they’d handle the last-minute swerve Anderson 385had described; they’d opted for more fear, but he couldn’t help thinking they were only playing into the takata anxiety that had made the Red Council’s move clever in the first place. The front page of Tamaha had the mayor looking resolute in the foreground of a scene of busy clear-up, on some street over towards the river. A priest was duly present, also some takata children looking cute and a grateful takata shop-owner whose broken front window was being replaced. Other incomprehensible pages inside seemed to have stories about Frankie Blackhawk’s coffin being loaded onto a special, black-draped train, and something involving an airship.

He turned to the Chronicle (headline: QUELLING OF RIOT AVERTS DISORDER, RAISES QUESTIONS) and received elucidation. Yes, the body of the late Francis Hashi was being transported home on a special service of the Cahokia Pacific. And would arrive Saturday afternoon, after the grand public Mass on the Plaza for the Feast of the Annunciation, in time for an equally grand public funeral scheduled for the Sunday. Yes, a transatlantic airship had docked in New York. Its passengers included Louis Hashi SJ, the cardinal-archbishop of Cahokia, homeward bound from the election of the new pope. Due to arrive in the city today on the Usunhiyi, he would therefore be in time to preside both at the feast day and at the funeral. Barrow flicked onward. Business news he could make nothing of, though some of it he guessed could be the convoluted consequences of Jack Merryweather’s Wall Street activities on behalf of the Man. Red Army mortar bombs landing in Kodiak. Statements of commitment to the accession talks by the Prophet in Salt Lake. A wire-service item from LA about the Frankie Blackhawk investigation. Yadda yadda, detectives baffled. No further clues to identity or motive of the assassin, whom the LA press were now referring to as The Hat Killer. Why? Because though no-one living had seen his face, it turned out that Frankie Blackhawk’s Mexican poolboy, at work sieving out fallen leaves at 386the time of the murder, had just glimpsed the top of the murderer’s hat, bobbing above the garden wall as he fled. It was a cheap fedora, with a garish orange band.

Barrow jerked. Not as if an electric impulse had run through him, more like one of those kicks at the edge of sleep, when your brain discovers a limb is connected after all. Something forgotten, turning out to be joined on.

‘What?’ said Hanunu curiously, noticing the twitch. Drummond would have noticed too, but he’d have make a joke about getting the DTs.

‘Shit,’ Barrow said. That was all, out loud, but his mind whirled. He knew there must be a lot of men with ugly hats in Los Angeles. He knew the assassin could in theory have been any of them. But he felt certain, morally certain, that this particular ugly number belonged to mirror-posing, leopard-skin-trunks-wearing, cheaply fantasising Sammy Noukouwa. Sammy Noukouwa, who had ridden his Pullman ticket all the way to California. Sammy Noukouwa, who had waltzed up to the door in the Hollywood Hills, probably smirking as he did so, and put a bullet in Frankie B.’s head. Given the timing, Barrow’d been assuming that the killing was, one way or another, more enemy action by Vanderberg – that it had been on behalf of the coup attempt two thousand miles away that the finger had pressed that doorbell. But, but, but … Anderson had said, or at least strongly implied, that Frankie’s death had come as a surprise to the Post, who had known otherwise what script to follow for the whole week, once the body on the roof was discovered. And Lord knows murders didn’t have to have rational motives. Beyond the intelligible reasons for taking life – money, politics, jealousy, vengeance – there was always the rich and rancid hinterland of crazy to take into account. If this was that – if Sammy was following out some bugfuck agenda to do with the House of Hashi having, what was it Louis Bessa had said, betrayed the true life of the takouma? 387Something like that, turning takouma into factory workers when they should have been hunting buffalo in loincloths – if this was that, then who said Sammy’s crazy campaign was over? One heir of the House of Hashi down, one to go. And his bedroom wall … The Aztec skeleton lady, visible bones and visible snatch, in whose honour he tortured mice. Painted next to her, the Anopa words for RED COUNCIL. Put them together, and it pointed to a sick little obsession with Couma.

Barrow started making calculations. The murder in LA was Wednesday afternoon. The Usunhiyi would have arrived Wednesday late morning. Time enough for Sammy to get over there and do the deed, if he went straight from the train station to Hollywood. And if he came straight back again, he could have gotten himself aboard the Wednesday evening eastbound service, LA to Washington. Which would have gotten him home to Cahokia last night. Which meant that Sammy Noukouwa was potentially out and about on the streets of the city … now.

‘I gotta go,’ said Barrow surging to his feet.

‘Where?’ said Hanunu, but Barrow ignored him. He ran the affidavit pages into Doyle’s office, slapped them down, and ran out in the direction of the stairhead.

‘And here we go again,’ said Doyle’s voice behind him. ‘Take Hanunu with you!’ And then more faintly and far off, when he didn’t stop, ‘Follow him, man!’

2

Hanunu didn’t catch up until Barrow was dodging through the traffic in front of the Algonkian. He was breathing hard, but he paced Barrow as he bolted round the dogleg of Biloxi and out under the Union Avenue El. More horns sounded, more brakes screeched. 388Then at a flat sprint onto the north side embankment of the Creek, under no roof but a grey sky. A high even layer of cloud stretched like a scarf from horizon to horizon.

‘Would you – mind – telling me – where’ – Hanunu was panting out as they reached Number 40, but Barrow made the answer obvious. There was, as usual, a car at the garden door, some dignified coming and going. Barrow barrelled through, oblivious now, shoving some dignitary off the path across the narrow slot of a garden, shouldering open the front door of the Moon’s house, bursting into the quiet hall full of art.

And there was Couma, alive and well and irritated, looking up from a document one of the perfect girls from the shop was holding out to her to sign.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

‘Checking you’re okay,’ said Barrow, bending with his hands on his knees and gasping. Behind him, holding his hat against his chest, trying to look as small as possible, Hanunu sidled into the room as well.

‘What do you mean?’ said Couma. There was a glacial lack of invitation in her voice, and though he was feeding his eyes on the mere sight of her face, her expression was also pure, remote princess. My well-being is not your business, it said.

‘We got word—’ began Barrow, and stalled. ‘Well; there’s a, uh, indication that – It may possibly be that—’

‘Spit it out,’ she said.

‘That the man killed your brother in LA is the takouma suspect we lost track of earlier on, for the Land Trust murder.’

Now her face did change. It flickered momentarily with some strong emotion gone again too fast to be read. Dread? Revulsion? Shock? Then it went quite blank.

‘The murder it turns out your own partner committed,’ she said, levelly.389

‘… Yeah. But this guy, Sammy Noukouwa, he could be back here by now, in town. And he’s got a screw loose. If he’s done for your brother, he could be coming for you next.’

‘So you came running, Detective. You came running to protect me. To protect me.’ Her lips twisted and now he could identify the emotion: bitter amusement. She made a go-back gesture with her left hand to the bodyguard, who had of course come forward off the wall beside the door during this exchange, on the alert, Thompson gun in hand. Then she changed her mind. Wait, said her hand.

‘Who else have you shared this idea with?’ she said.

‘I only just put it together,’ said Barrow.

Couma looked at Hanunu.

‘Hashi-ninak,’ he said, swallowing. ‘This is true. One moment Detective Barrow was reading the newspaper at the precinct house, the next he had taken to his heels and was coming here. None of us knew why. The miko directed me to follow him. Please excuse this invasion of your home.’

‘Iksho tibi, tastanagi,’ she said, with an automatic smile of reassurance at Hanunu, quite different from anything she had shown Barrow. ‘So,’ she began, turning back – but just then there was a metallic crash from the roadway outside, a scream, two loud slamming sounds in quick succession.

The bodyguard glanced at Couma, abandoned his watch on the conversation and went out to investigate. He pulled the door closed behind him as he hurried along the path, blocking the view. They heard his feet on the bricks, raised voices, the noise again: blam-blam-blam.

‘Get—’ Barrow started to cry out, but before he could get to ‘—down’, there was a monstrous stuttering and the right-hand window blew in, reduced to a cloud of flinders and glass dust. Bullets thudded against the back of the hall. Picture frames shattered, 390one of the vases on the white plinths exploded. A moment later, it happened on the other side. The left window went. Glass in the air, glass on the floor, a rain of horizontal lead.

Barrow was on the floor with his back to the wall on one side of the door, Hanunu was on the other, pistol drawn. The pretty girl was in a heap in the far back corner of the hall, bleeding. Couma, insanely, was still standing bolt upright at the bottom of her stairs, in the protective shadow of the front door and therefore out of the direct reach of the bullet-shower, but potential prey to any piece of flying glass, any ricochet.

‘Get down!’ shouted Barrow, over the white noise of breakage. Then when she still didn’t move he pushed off from the wall, got her feet scissored between his legs in a kind of sliding tackle and brought her down, hand on the scruff of her neck to keep her low.

‘The bullets don’t care how brave you are,’ he bawled in her ear.

‘They shot my Matisse!’ she said.

‘So buy another one.’

The fusillade ended. There was a pause – a pause about long enough to change a magazine – and then it started up again, this time raking the windows but concentrating on the front door. They could hear the bullets thudding against the wood on the outside. Barrow winced but, ‘It’s armoured,’ Couma said from her place in the huddle on the floor.

Barrow stood up carefully, pressed close against the wood. It felt wrong to put himself only two or three inches from the impacts but they needed a view of the situation. The door had a security lens in it, and he put his eye up to the little fish-eye tunnel to the outside world, fighting the superstitious certainty that doing so invited a spinning slug to drill precisely and exactly along the glass into his eye. It didn’t. There, in a blobby bowl of light, the whole daylight world reduced to tactical essentials, he saw the end of the garden path, and the garden door closed with the bodyguard 391slumped against the inside of it, very dead, but keeping it closed with the weight of his body. The door shook and heaved against his back: they were trying to get it open but for now his corpse was doing its last service for Couma. The Thompson gun, unfired, lay loose by his hand. And up above, projecting over the high brick garden wall, explaining the angle of the fire able to rake most of the hallway, the top half of a figure in a suit and hat was visible, blasting away with a tommy gun of his own. Not Sammy, a white guy. He must be standing on a car roof. The gun had a drum magazine rather than the stick type on the Thompson by the downed bodyguard. Higher capacity.

Barrow sank down to the floor and took stock. His mind was calm and clear. He had never wanted to be back where machine-gun fire ruled his life, but now he was, the set-up was simple, direct, without ambiguity. The hall was divided into zones. Most of it belonged to death; in the bullet shadow of the door and the uprights on either side of it there was, for now, life. He had his police .38, Hanunu had his. Twelve shots between them. Also he had a princess, and over in the far corner the beauty from the shop, not dead yet, for she was crawling on her belly towards a far door, leaving a blood trail. It was obvious what needed to be done. It might not work: if he stepped into the rain of lead, he would be gone, and the whole deal became someone else’s problem. But nevertheless the thing was simple.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re gonna open the door—’

‘No!’ said Couma.

‘Yes,’ said Barrow. ‘We need more firepower, and till they get in the garden, the one guy who’s shooting down into the room’s the only one who’s got a bead on us. So, we wait till he needs to change his magazine, then you, Nick, put down some suppressing fire on him, stop him popping his head up for a minute, I go up the path and collect the Thompson. Clear?’392

‘We should help the lady over there,’ said Hanunu, meaning the crawling girl in the corner.

‘We should,’ said Barrow impatiently, ‘of course we should. But there is death between us and her, so we can’t.’

‘What if the man with the gun has stopped shooting part-way through a magazine?’ Couma asked.

‘Then I am suddenly full of holes. And you must shut the door and manage as best you can. But I think he is enjoying himself, breaking things. Listen to him.’

The tommy gun outside had been switched from full-auto to single shot, and the shooter was now aiming individual potshots at objects he could see in the room, methodically shattering the remaining vases on plinths. The three of them re-arranged themselves, Couma where Barrow had been, Hanunu ready to rise up into the broken window’s corner, Barrow by the door crack, ready to slip through with his .38 in his hand.

Shot. Shot. A brief pause during which Barrow’s hand floated up to the lock, but which turned out to be full-auto being selected again. A final squirt of lead, directed with no possible point except cruelty into the crawling girl in the corner, who had nearly reached safety. The shots kicked up red divots in her back. She spasmed and lay still. Yeah, happy malice at work.

‘Now!’ said Barrow and threw open the door. He went down the short path at a galloping crouch, almost dazzled at the extra light and the fearsome openness of the space, focused on the garden door ahead where a couple of struggling torpedoes in suits had almost shoved the bodyguard’s body aside, but registering in flashes the presence of another body beside the path, probably the dignitary he’d elbowed aside, and above the wall top the black outline of the gunman on the car roof, ducking out of sight as Hanunu’s revolver behind him began to put slow, precise shots into the space he’d occupied. One, two: conserving ammunition.393

Barrow fired through the opening garden door – didn’t know if he’d hit anyone, but the shot whanged off the black metal side of the auto there, and there was a yelp, and a moment of retreat by the pushing bodies. He reached the dropped Thompson, snagged it, turned. Three, four, said Hanunu’s gun. Stumbled. Five. Rose back to his running crouch and fled for the house door – six – all the while expecting to hear the hammering of the reloaded Thompson behind him, and the rending passage of the bullets through him, and then whatever every other corpse he had ever seen had experienced.

And it came, as he dived through the doorway. The gunman on the car could count to six just as well as him. But it wasn’t his own back the lead tore into. The burst had gone through the window corner where Hanunu had been too slow – too precise, too methodical – to duck back down, and with the door slammed behind him, Barrow found Hanunu gurgling on the floor, his throat a scarlet ruin, his eyes already glassy. He was trying to say something, but blood was coming out of his mouth, pulsing out of his neck to spoil his brand-new shirt and his canary-yellow tie. Barrow couldn’t make the words out, but Couma knew what they were: Ino hashi-ninak.

‘Ino tastanagi,’ she said, crouching and taking his hand.

But there were feet on the garden path, and Barrow needed two guns working to control the two windows.

‘No time,’ he said. ‘Take this.’ He shoved his own .38 at her, with its five remaining shots. ‘You gotta get back against the wall and watch your window.’ As he spoke he was working the slide to cock the bodyguard’s Thompson: single shot, because on full-auto a single stick magazine would last about four seconds. ‘Don’t shoot ’less you can see a body plain.’

She nodded. Letting go of the dying Hanunu, she shuffled her back up against the plaster on the other side of the door from him, 394and lifted the .38 in both hands to point it over her shoulder and behind her, so that like him she had an angle on anyone who came up close to the hole where the window had been. She seemed to know what she was doing with the pistol. He supposed the House of Hashi taught its princesses the basics. There was debris in her hair and blood on her hands and the shuffling had rucked up her skirt to show almost all of her slender thighs in their ruined silk stockings. His brain said: no time for that. His eyes, heart, groin said, there is no other time. I am alive now, now, now, until I am dead, and I will glory in this till the black shutter comes down and prevents me.

She saw him looking, and threw one startled glance at him before something dark moved in the corner of her other eye. She spun her head back and fired the .38: commendably fast reaction time.

Someone outside cried ‘Scheisse!’ and fell to the ground. Then struggled up again by the sound of it: more German swearing followed, an umlaut-rich stream. Hit but only winged, Barrow judged. He doubted that she’d have had the line required to hit the centre of mass. No visible movement at his window, but he squeezed a single shot out there at the sharpest angle up the garden he could manage, to send the deterrent message that both were guarded. Those were definitely Weiss’s merry men out there again; more of his soda-fountain soldiers. How many? Impossible to say for sure but one carful, he guessed; they’d heard one engine. So three, four. Conceivably five, but he hoped not. One up high with the Thompson, two or three available at ground level, one with Couma’s hole in him.

Silence outside for a moment. Feet on the path. They were in a kind of temporary stalemate, he saw. The zones of death drawn inside the house were now matched by a more shallowly angled pair of danger zones he and Couma were projecting outside. Unless the besiegers threw something explosive through the windows, 395and he hoped hoped hoped they hadn’t equipped themselves for warfare to that extent – the windows were now briefly blocked. Blocked till something else tipped the stalemate. Such as—. The feet came back, and with a cleaving thunk the blade of an axe sank into the door. Such as that. Shit.

‘Now what?’ said Couma across the shaking width of the door.

Reinforcements, that was what they needed. Time ought to be on their side here, given that this was an assault close in to the sacred heart of a takouma city, on a day when the main takata challenge to that city had been routed and sent reeling. A man was standing on a car roof on Creekside Drive – Creekside Drive – firing a machine gun into the House of the Moon. People would come running, in a little while; help would come. But it might not come before the axe broke through the steel-reinforced door, and Couma and he were dead on the doormat. He couldn’t hear sirens out there … Of course, the patrollers of the Cahokia PD were heavily deployed out west today, clearing up in the river wards. What they needed was a flank attack right now. From very near by. From—

‘Telephone,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

She pointed. The apparatus had been in the left-hand gallery space beside the stairs, among the pots. It lay on the floor mangled, among the other broken things.

‘Fuck. You got another one anywhere?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Well, we ain’t neither of us climbing up there.’

‘My housekeeper’s up there.’

‘She is? Shit, can you call her – call her so she knows not to try comin’ down?’

The door shook again, and the tip of a blade showed through the wood. Couma shouted up the stairs in Anopa. And again. And again. At last, a thin answer.

‘What do you want her to do?’396

‘Call the palace, get your uncle’s man Oscar, tell him to get his ass out of the garage over there and to lay some fire down in our direction.’

More Anopa. Agreement from upstairs. The door was visibly splintering.

They hadn’t heard from the Thompson outside for a while, Barrow realised. The shooter on the roof was biding his time till the door was wrecked enough. They had better get his attention back, keep him distracted. Barrow looked around for something to poke up into the window opening, saw Hanunu’s hat, dust-whitened and crushed, lying among the broken glass but in reach of a hooking foot. He put one out – and yanked it instantly back as a burst from Mr Target Practice tore into the floor just beyond. The hat was over the invisible line into death’s territory, apparently.

Couma pointed at the umbrella stand next to him. Yeah. He picked an umbrella out and went fishing with it, wooden handle first. Slugs battered floor, handle, hat but he got hold of it, pulled the wrecked bundle of felt to him. The axe blade was developing a gash in the door extending sideways to the lock. It wouldn’t hold much longer. Now, if ever. He put what was left of the hat on the pointed end of what was left of the umbrella, and passed it to Couma.

‘Count three, then push this out your side so they gotta see it.’

She looked at him incredulously.

‘He’ll have been to the movies!’ she hissed.

‘I’m counting on it,’ he said. He stood up carefully, pressed against the safe upright between door and window. Then stepped across to her side, so he was standing over her where she crouched. Of course, if the shooter on the car was either too clever or too stupid, this was going to get him killed toot sweet.

One. Two. Three. She pushed the hat into view and hallelujah, one derisive round spanged through the opening, not even aimed. Yes, he was a gangster who went to the movies. Without a pause 397Barrow swung out into Couma’s window frame, the same window as the derided hat, his Thompson at hip height. As he’d hoped, the gunner outside opened up in a frenzy through the window on the other side, misled by movie logic. Just so long as there wasn’t a second gun trained over here. No: as well as the axe-man, there was another fellow behind him on the path holding an automatic but using that hand to nurse a wounded arm. Barrow put two caps into his chest then dropped, no time to do anything about the axe. The gunner outside found the real prey and directed his chattering lead back again to this side without taking his finger off the trigger, but late; Barrow fell over Couma and made it to the floor with nothing worse than blood dripping from his hair where something had creased across his skull. It burned but only distantly; he could barely feel it. Couma made an anxious sound but he rolled round and grinned at her. She did not grin back. Her face looked not just concentrated but stricken with concentration, all her mind directed one way with nothing to spare. They waited for the next blow of the axe but it didn’t come. Could the trigger-happy idiot outside have traversed his line of fire across his own man?

Then came the sound Barrow had been hoping for: the rat-a-tat of yet another Thompson further off, shooting bursts. Breaking glass and metal impact noises as Oscar, on the far side of the Creek, fired across the water into the car that had been used as the shooting platform. If that hadn’t got the gunner, it would certainly have sent him into cover, either in the slot between car and outer garden wall, or right into the garden itself. One way to find out.

‘I’m going out now,’ he said to Couma. ‘Keep covering the door and the windows, best you can. Don’t let anyone in, ’less you know their voice.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He took a breath, rose up on his haunches, and went out over the broken glass at the sill of the window in the nearest thing he 398could contrive to a low, fast roll. He came up gun in hand and found one dead gangster on the path, the other living but fallen beside the axe, nursing a stomach wound. Bullet in that one’s head. Quick to the inside surface of the garden wall. Thompson to full-auto because, fuck it: then, crouching, round the pillar of the garden gate he came, to see that the roof-gunner was indeed hiding behind the black curve of the car he’d come in, while Oscar filled the air overhead with shots zinging like bees.

The shooter turned his head but slow, slow. Barrow saw he was the grinning gorilla from Hamelin’s. With direct and simple satisfaction Barrow gave him all three remaining seconds of the magazine, and blew his head into flying pieces of bone and mush. Trench broom, yeah. Sweeps everything away. Thank you, Colonel John T. Thompson, and the Auto-Ordnance Corporation.

Barrow leaned back against the brickwork.

‘Okay,’ he shouted. ‘Clear! Clear!’

The gunfire from the other side of the creek ceased. And in Barrow’s ears there was a ringing silence.

*

Barrow walked slowly back up the garden path, the empty Thompson dangling heavy in his hand. Spent brass cartridge cases jingled and rolled underfoot. The garden was full of bodies. The door of the house was smashed almost to pieces on this side. He knocked on one of the remaining pieces of unbroken wood. No answer. Then he remembered what he’d told her.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

He heard the lock being worked, and the door wobbled free. But when he pushed it open, she stepped back from it and him. One step, two steps, up onto the foot of the stairs. She had his .38 in both hands, pointing at his head, and her eyes were so wide open he could see a complete ring of white, bright and stark around each dark iris. Equally dark was the hole in the gun barrel. She looked 399borderline insane and, to Barrow, completely beautiful. Fear took different people different ways, he knew; she must be one of the ones it took a paralysing grip upon once the crisis was past.

‘It’s okay,’ he said as gently as he could. ‘It’s over. You’re safe now. Princess, you’re safe.’

The barrel didn’t waver, but he reached out a slow palm and enclosed it; then gently tugged the piece away from her. She let go all at once with both hands, as if she had discovered she was holding a spider. She backed up another step of the stairs and covered her face.

‘Princess. It’s okay. Princess. Princess?’

All he could hear was her breathing. If she had been any other woman, he would have put his arms around her. But that was not permitted; who was he to do that. Pushed by an impulse stronger than he could resist to offer her something, anything, some piece of adoration the tamaha allowed, he threw away everything Kroeber had said to him, everything he had said to himself. He stooped and laid the guns on the polished mahogany of the stairs like trophies. The hall was full of bodies too, he saw from the corners of his eyes. But that was not where he was looking. He dropped to his knees in front of her.

‘Ino hashi-ninak,’ he said.

‘What?’ she said slowly. ‘No.’

‘Didn’t I say it right?’

‘You shouldn’t be saying it at all. You’re free of all this mess.’

‘I want to say it.’

‘It’s a feudal oath, you great fool. You have no idea what you’d be binding yourself to.’

‘I want to say it.’

‘You want to have me as your lord because you can’t have me as your lover. No.’

‘Ino hashi-ninak.’400

‘Stop it. Run away from us, Mr Barrow, while you still can. You want a reward for – all this?’ She made a hand movement taking in the wreckage all about them. ‘I’ll tell you what. The Foundation will give you a grant. Go and play your piano in Paris.’

‘Ino—’

‘Stop it! If you go on saying it, I will have to accept, don’t you understand that? We take everything we are offered. We have to. It is our only power.’

‘Ino hashi-ninak,’ said Barrow doggedly.

‘Damn you,’ she said. She looked around the ruined room as if for guidance. There were sirens in the distance now, at last, and behind her Barrow could see the housekeeper cautiously showing herself at the bend in the stairs, but whatever sign Couma was searching for, she clearly did not find. She sighed. ‘Very well. Why not. Everything else is broken.’

She reached out her hands and put them on his head, fingers and thumbs extended to make almost the whole of a ring. It was like being crowned. Yours, yes, yours! agreed his body. He wanted to butt his head up against the fingers. But he could feel the tension in her hands, the anger; she was digging her fingernails into his torn scalp, making ten little half-moons of hurt.

‘Ino,’ she said heavily, and stalled. ‘Ino. Ino tast–. No!’ She wrenched her hands away. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I will not! I will please myself in this if in nothing else. Get up, Mr Barrow. Hashi-ninak iksho tastanagi, houma anopoli iksho yoka. The Night Sun refuses you. The Red Council declines your service. You are not my warrior.’

She would not meet his eyes. She turned her back and walked up the stairs to speak with the housekeeper, leaving him blinking there, drained dry of feeling. There was nothing to do but collect his rejected body and start the laborious process of taking it away on his rejected feet. The front door seemed a continent’s march distant. 401

He reached it as the first arrival came up the path. The sirens were loud, the sirens were almost here, but this was not one of the wave of rescuers converging on the house. This was a scrawny takouma boy picking his way between the bodies curiously, with affected little shuffles, almost dance steps. He had his hat off out of respect for the house, held against his chest. The hat had a garish orange band. There was no gun in his hand. He carried himself like an expected guest.

‘Looks like someone’s been having a pa-a-ar-ty!’ said Sammy Noukouwa.

3

‘Put him somewhere out of sight, quickly, before the world descends on us,’ said Couma to the housekeeper.

Barrow said nothing. He just stared, as the boy was led away. A horrible understanding was settling into place. It came in fragments, drifting down in his mind like a ruinous snowfall. And slowly. He seemed to be thinking very slowly now. But slow, slower, slowest here still came the pieces of the puzzle he had not wanted to solve, the truth he had not wanted to see. Who controlled the Red Council, and could send the Four Winds to drive away the police from the Noukouwa house? Who, if it was not the Man, would have the pull to get the Navajo cops to lie about whether they’d found Sammy on the train? Who said she was not a private person, and meant by it that what she felt would always take second place to what she judged the city needed, no matter how dark or absolute a need that might be? Who believed that her irresponsible brother must not be allowed to inherit the invisible monarchy? Who had the cold determination to see a secret opportunity in Vanderberg’s assault on the city? Who knew that a forest was the place to hide 402a tree, a battlefield to hide a murder? Who wailed when the news came of Frankie Blackhawk’s death not from simple loss, but from the awful compound of loss with horror over what she herself had done? One person. Always the one person.

Some of this must have shown on his face as he stared.

‘I told you,’ said Couma bleakly. ‘I take everything that is offered.’

And then the world did descend. A press of too-late rescuers, concerned parties, anxious officials, nearby takouma citizens who simply needed to see that the Moon still lived. Police, medics, clergy, the newshounds, filled the garden and the hallway, jostled on the sidewalk outside, gazing at the bodies of the dead, gazing at the gouged and tattered interior, gazing at him and Couma. And she was ready for them. With dust on her skin and glass in her hair and her dress torn and Hanunu’s blood drying on her hands, she was poised, brave, graceful, reassuring.

He, on the other hand, just stood there. After knowing exactly what to do the whole time the attack was going on, he now seemed to have no will left at all. He felt very cold, but even wrapping his arms round himself seemed to require a bigger decision than he could manage. He let the push and pull of the crowd bump him slowly, randomly away from her, as passive as a log in a current.

‘Have you asked her yet?’ said Anderson, somehow appearing in front of him.

‘I been busy,’ said Barrow. He was working on raising a cigarette to his mouth.

Mickey Casqui asked him other questions. The voice was a long way off, and he didn’t answer. Flashguns went off. People patted him on the back. One of the hands landed instead on his shoulder. A big, big hand. He looked round slowly. It was Oscar.

‘She says you need looking after,’ he said. ‘She thinks you are in shock. I think she is right. Come with me, Thrown-Away Boy.’

Don’t call me that, he would have liked to say, but it was too 403much work to get the words out. Instead he let himself be shepherded out of the garden, Oscar’s arm on his shoulder, Oscar’s other arm clearing a way through the people.

At the road, Oscar matter-of-factly took him by the hand and led him, as if he were about five years old and could not be trusted with the traffic. He dropped his cigarette and protested, but Oscar would not stop. It did not matter very much. Grey sky overhead, the green Creek under the grey bridge, the concrete slope down to the palace garage, the metal shutter of the door going up: the world filled his eyes, and it was all he could do to keep them open. Too much. Too close.

The Man met them as Oscar pulled him, two-handed, out of the top of the auger-drilled spiral stair and into the chequerboard hall.

‘The hero of the hour!’ he said. And then, looking at him again, ‘Brandy?’

‘He needs to shut his eyes more than anything, miko,’ said Oscar.

‘Let’s get him on one of the sofas,’ said the Man, and Barrow found himself being held up by the prince on one side and the chauffeur on the other as his legs sagged.

They supported him through an arched doorway into a room with a huge stone fireplace and tapestries on the walls, and lowered him onto a long pink davenport facing its twin across a Persian carpet. Father Jerome twittered in the background.

‘Perhaps the kitchen, Your Highness?’ he suggested.

‘This man just saved my niece’s life,’ said the Man. ‘And consequently the entire future of the tamaha. If I had a throne, he would be welcome to go to sleep on it. I believe a couch is the least we can do.’

Oscar inserted a pink cushion under Barrow’s head, and he just had time to feel the coarse weave of raw silk against his cheek before the world shrank to a flat black disc, flipped, and vanished altogether.404

*

When he awoke, he did not know where he was for a minute. His head hurt, and he was under a blanket. He did not want to open his eyes, since the light seemed likely to hurt more. Also, he was in no hurry to face the world as it had just revealed itself to be. The world in which the tamaha proved to be as snakebite-venomous as its enemies. In which the invitation to belong was all hollow, a smiling manipulation into bleeding for something that turned out, after all, to be alien and incomprehensible. The world in which Couma as well as Drummond was a murderer. Such taste his heart had; such unfailingly lousy instincts.

Even with his eyes closed, he could tell that the light had moved. The brightness filtering through the orange-and-pearl curtain of his eyelids was coming from a different quarter, and time had passed. There were voices in the room, talking quietly. The air around him smelled of furniture polish and the Man’s good coffee rather than blood and cordite. Peace, here; peace and wealth. But the world was what it was. He lay there in his cocoon of blanket and headache and listened without moving. One voice belonged to the Man; the other was similar, just as brahminically vowelled and educated but a little higher in register, and hoarsened by tobacco smoke.

‘… And will this new Holy Father be good for us, do you think?’ the Man was saying.

‘I believe so, yes,’ said the second voice. ‘He has the reluctance that makes hands safe for power. It was a long, long conclave, and he went into it with no idea – or so I judged – of what was going to happen. He did not scheme or lobby, and when at last he was asked if he would accept the nomination, he gave us two of the longest minutes of silence I have ever heard, before he said yes.’

‘That may make him good for the Church in general, brother, and of course I rejoice at it. But I was wondering if he would be good for us, here, specifically.’405

‘That too I hope. Before he was a cardinal, before he was an archbishop, before he was a diplomat, our new Pope Pius was a philosophy teacher who didn’t suffer fools gladly. And one of the things he considers foolishness is judgement based upon skin colour.’

‘Good,’ said the Man.

Another voice from over by the door: Father Jerome.

‘Your Highness, Your Eminence? Bishop Halloran is here.’

‘I’ll leave you alone to do this, then, Louis.’ The Man’s voice was up and on the move. ‘It’s good to see you. I’m profoundly glad you’re home.’

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get back sooner. It was the merest coincidence that I was in Rome when Papa Benedict died, and then I was the only cardinal from the Americas present, with the whole of the Western hemisphere to speak for. Cahokia had to wait. I know you’ve been having a time of it.’

‘A purgatorial time. Touch and go, day by day, whether we survived. And some wild moves from our own side which I did not anticipate.’

‘So I judged. Don’t be too hard on her, brother.’

‘Little Miss Caiaphas?’

‘Brother …’

‘I know, I know. It will be she who carries it. She will need you, later.’

‘I will wait for her to call upon me. And pray for her. Ayokpachi, hattak hashi.’

‘Ayokpachi hattak kostini chito.’

The Man’s feet departed.

‘Bishop Halloran!’ said Father Jerome by the door again, but this time actually announcing the bishop’s entry. Another, much heavier tread crossed the carpet. Barrow opened one of his eyes to a slit, and got a back view of the man he had last seen in an easy chair in the Union Club, dressed in purple with a square purple cap on his 406head. With visible awkwardness he knelt to kiss the outstretched ring of the cardinal, who was an altogether less impressive sight. A smaller, slighter edition of the Man, with cropped hair going grey, he was wearing a plain black cassock, stained by travel and ashy around the sleeves, presumably from all the cigarettes he’d held in his spectacularly nicotine-yellowed fingers. He was standing with his shoulders at a slant, grimacing. A gimpy little guy, in fact: but with the family’s bright, clever eyes.

The bishop levered himself up, and looked around for a chair. The cardinal did not offer him one.

‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘I must thank you for the care of my flock. But you appear to have interpreted your charge as a licence to interfere in delicate matters for which you had neither authority nor competence. The congregations of the diocese of Cahokia are 80 per cent takouma. I fail to see how the well-being of these faithful sons and daughters could be served by handing the streets of the city to a notoriously anti-Catholic organisation such as the Klan, or the government of the city to white men – few of them Catholics – who wish to take away from the takouma people the peaceful possession of their own land. Go back to Chicago, Bishop. You’re done here.’

The back of Halloran’s neck had turned a dark red.

‘I protest!’ he said. ‘What you omit here … Your Eminence … is the disgraceful, I say disgraceful, state of affairs I found here. The dark superstitions polluting the teaching of the Church! The, the, encrustation of pagan practices upon even the sacred order of the Mass! How could I not welcome a chance for the cleansing of the place!’

‘You didn’t like the masks, did you?’ said the cardinal, smiling slightly.

‘I did not! Any more than I would any other native gew-gaw or fetish!’

‘I suppose it won’t help if I simply remind you that under the masks of the Four Winds are the faces of good Catholic men and 407women? No? Then,’ the cardinal went on sharply, ‘I advise you to treat this as an occasion for faith. Let us say you don’t know what lies beneath the wood. Let’s say it’s a mystery. So let it be a mystery you approach in hope. Say to yourself that under each and every mask, it is the face of Christ that is hidden. For so it is, after all. His face, we know, is visible in every believer. Seek it, Bishop. Seek it particularly where the skin of that face is of a different colour from yours. But first you have a train to catch.’

The cardinal pulled out a cheap tin watch on a chain from his cassock pocket. ‘Yes – you should make the three twenty to Chicago if you leave now. Goodbye.’

‘I—’

‘Goodbye.’

The bishop fumed out. The cardinal watched him go. Then he turned to Barrow, who had been thinking what bullshit this was. How he had been suckered in himself by believing there was something for him behind the masks of the city. Some mystery calling. When there was only, as usual, the big dogs biting on the littler dogs. But he’d thought the narrow chink of raised eyelid through which he’d been watching it all was indetectable.

‘Ah, the sleeper wakes,’ said the cardinal. He limped across the room. ‘May I?’ he said, and sat on the end of the davenport without waiting for an answer. Barrow pulled his legs out of the way and sat up, yawning and stirring at his hair with a hand. The cardinal drew a blue-and-white package of cigarettes from the other pocket of his cassock, and lit one. It stank like nothing Barrow had smelled since France.

‘Want one?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Barrow. ‘My head’s killing me.’

‘Ah,’ said the cardinal. ‘Pali?’ he called. ‘Be a good fellow and fetch a glass of seltzer and a couple of aspirin for our friend here, would you? And otherwise,’ he asked Barrow, ‘how are you?’408

Barrow looked down at himself and discovered that, between the broken glass and the rolling around, one of the sleeves of his jacket was ripped to tatters and the whole thing was caked in dust.

‘Not too good,’ he said thickly. ‘Seems I was taken in by a bunch of crap.’ Bunch of nonsense, his politer self supplied. Fuck that, the rest of him replied.

‘In what way?’ asked the cardinal with calm interest.

But Barrow’s thoughts had gone elsewhere.

‘You Catholics,’ he said. ‘I suppose, you just confess something and it’s gone, right? Real convenient.’

‘That is a misconception,’ said the cardinal. ‘Forgiven is not the same as forgotten. We carry the scars of our sins. And then there are the evils that do not amount to sins, because they were committed without malice – without the intention that makes a sin, a sin. Sometimes even for what somebody believes is the greater good. Those cannot be forgiven. They must be borne as a burden by the unfortunate soul in question, through all the years before they can lay them at last at the Lord’s feet.’

‘Sounds like elaborate horseshit to me.’

‘You’re not a Catholic yourself?’

‘I’m not anything.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Well; I’m sorry to hear that you think that. I find it hard to believe that it is actually the case. If I understand correctly, you have just fought with exemplary bravery in a cause which is not your own, to protect someone who would otherwise have died. That sounds like the action of someone who is a something, Mr Barrow. I suspect you of being a man of virtue.’

‘It was a mistake,’ said Barrow.

The Man came back into the room.

‘Ah, he’s up,’ he said. ‘How is he?’

‘In a state of moral injury,’ said the cardinal.409

‘Yeah, and my suit’s ruined,’ Barrow said. He stood up. ‘I should get back to the precinct. They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

‘They know where you are, Detective,’ said the Man. ‘I don’t think you quite understand what you’ve done. The tamaha owes you a debt we cannot easily repay. The Police Department will be proud to have you back whenever you are ready to return. And a new suit is the merest beginning of what the tamaha will want to give you.’

‘Ah, fairy-tale stuff, right?’ said Barrow. ‘Do I get to take half your kingdom and marry your niece?’

‘I see what you mean,’ said the Man to the cardinal. ‘Listen,’ he said to Barrow, ‘I have to go now. I have an appointment with Vanderberg at the Union Club. But whatever she has done to bruise you, I will do my best, I swear, to make up to you.’

‘Take me along, then,’ said Barrow.

‘What?’

‘Take me along to your meeting with Vanderberg. You say you owe me. Well, forget the suit; that’s what I want. He won’t talk to the cops, and we can’t make him. But it seems like he’ll talk to you. I wanna be in the room.’

The cardinal stubbed out his reeking French cigarette. ‘Doing what in the room?’ he enquired.

‘Listening,’ said Barrow. ‘There’s something that we – I – need to know. I should be able to work it out by listening to him, if I can work it out at all.’

‘Is this to do with your former partner?’ said the Man.

‘Yes.’

‘You did just say you’d do anything for him,’ said the cardinal.

‘So I did,’ said the Man. ‘That was careless.’

Father Jerome brought in a tray with a glass and two pills on it as they were leaving. Barrow gulped them down. The priest looked with disfavour at his shredded outfit.410

‘Perhaps the detective would like to change his clothes first?’ he said.

‘No time,’ said the Man. ‘Besides, as a look it has a certain … rhetorical effectiveness. I don’t see why the Union Club shouldn’t get a little sample of the mess they’ve made beyond their portals.’

4

Barrow rode in the back of the Duesenberg with the Man on the way to the Union Club. There was still a buzz like a disturbed beehive around the House of the Moon, but he looked away from it, and looked away too from Oscar’s concerned gaze in the rear-view mirror. He had things he wanted to say.

‘You knew, didn’t you?’ he said to the Man. ‘You knew yesterday morning that it wasn’t exactly Vanderberg had taken out Frankie. That was why you were pissed at her; why you snarled when I asked how she was doing. “As well as can be expected.” Yeah.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said the Man.

‘Yeah, you do.’

‘No, I don’t. And you need to accept that I am going to go on not knowing what you mean, under all conceivable circumstances. Think about it, Mr Barrow. If for the sake of argument there was something in what you said, if an evil had – hypothetically – been committed so that good might come of it, then to destroy that good by declaring the evil in public would be to remove the one speck of light in the situation. Leaving only the evil.’

‘Smoke and fuckin’ mirrors,’ said Barrow. ‘None of you people talk straight.’

‘Babishili!’ said Oscar.

‘Brother?’ said Barrow. ‘You’re gonna call me brother? That 411don’t make me feel too good, considering the way you treat brothers round here.’

Oscar began to say something else, but the Man put up a reproving hand.

‘No, Mr Barrow is entitled to his anger. But you might remember,’ he said, turning his dark eyes and his old-wood face on Barrow, ‘that for me this loss is personal. It is not the death of a stranger we are talking about, not to me. Francis was a charming, foolish boy who grew into a charming, foolish man. He did no harm in the world except by being born into a role he could not fulfil. Tomorrow I will be looking upon his dead face. The day after, we will be burying him. We all loved him.’

‘All of you?’

‘Yes! Couma adored him as a little girl, you know. Hero-worshipped him, followed him around, swelled with pride when he paid her attention.’

‘And then she set a nasty little psycho on his trail.’

‘It is not for me to pass judgement on the actions of the Red Council.’

‘What,’ said Barrow, ‘no matter what? They could do anything and you’d be okay with it? What if they ordered your death?’

‘Obviously, I would not welcome that,’ said the Man drily. ‘But I would trust that they knew what was necessary.’

They had arrived by the red-carpeted steps on Division Street. The Man looked up through the window of the Duesenberg at the five pillared and assertive storeys of the Union Club. Above, the grey gauze covering the sky was thinning but the afternoon light still filtered down as if the street were at the bottom of a fish tank.

‘I sometimes wish,’ he said, ‘that they’d order the extinguishing of the entire membership of this club. But thankfully, that is not my call to make.’

‘I don’t get you,’ Barrow said. ‘How can you just … go along?’412

‘Isn’t that what you were doing with your late partner Mr Drummond? – Wait, though,’ said the Man, steepling his fingers, and Barrow got the impression he was actually thinking things through, ‘that’s a false analogy, isn’t it. I doubt you believed that whatever he did was genuinely for the best. Whereas I do believe that I am supporting the greater good, by my trust. Try this, Detective, if you doubt that you are a part of something larger than yourself – something you don’t see the whole of, but are keeping faith with nonetheless. Haven’t you noticed that you keep being just in time? You were just in time in the cathedral to save the sacred flame. You were just in time this morning to save my niece. I submit to you, Joe Barrow, that the reason you keep being in time is that you are in time, this week, in the musical sense. The city is playing a song, and you have a part in it.’

He tapped the glass of his window. Oscar got out, came round and opened the Man’s door for him.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘we reach the final Hashi–Vanderberg recitative, which we hope comes somewhere near the end of the whole piece.’

He led the way up the steps, a thin exquisite figure in fur, with two attendant monoliths stumping up behind. One of the monoliths was rebellious, but it was doubtful any onlooker could have told that. They’d just have been puzzling over the shredded jacket.

*

This time, there was no-one in the members’ sitting room except Arthur Vanderberg. The flames of the coal fire murmured lazily, the stained glass of the lamps sent down sleepy smears of colour to merge with the colours of the rugs, the stock ticker in the corner tapped unhurriedly under its glass dome, but Vanderberg was alert and upright in his armchair: a man anticipating something invigorating. It seemed that, in a world of fools and pygmies, the Man did qualify as a sufficient source of entertainment to draw Vanderberg 413out. His plump hands were clasped on his knee. Today’s bow-tie was polka-dot.

‘Hashi!’ he said. ‘There you are. What can I do for you, my dear fellow?’

The Man chose an armchair for himself.

‘You’ll have heard that this morning there was an attack on my niece. Thwarted, thanks to this brave policeman here, but with shocking loss of life.’

‘Yes, I heard that! Thrilling stuff, I must say. This is why I enjoy my visits to Cahokia so. So much seems to happen here, doesn’t it. – Hello again,’ Vanderberg added to Barrow. ‘I see you embraced your heritage in the end.’

There was a contented little smile on his face.

‘Just to recap,’ said the Man. ‘The attempt to overthrow the government of the tamaha by creating disorder on the streets, has failed. The attempt to assassinate the Woman of the Moon, in her own house, has failed.’

‘Ye-e-es,’ said Vanderberg. ‘But why are you telling this to me?’

‘Because I would like you to stop taking potshots at my family.’

‘What a thing to say!’ cried Vanderberg happily. ‘An outrageous accusation, for which I know you have no proof. I mean, I could say, that anyone minded to knock off stray inhabitants of your wigwam could only be inspired by the way your family tree seems to prune itself, lately. Bit of a signal to the world, isn’t it? We kill our own; why not join in? But really, why would I say anything like that. There is no need, since there is no proof.’

‘I don’t need proof. I only need enough certainty to act.’

Vanderberg waited, but the Man had had enough of feeding him lines to riff on. The flames mumbled, the ticker ticked.

‘In what way?’ said Vanderberg, eventually.

‘Oscar,’ said the Man, ‘go and tear off the last couple of feet of the tape, will you, and hand it to Mr Vanderberg?’414

Oscar ripped the narrow paper ribbon where it was inching out of the glass dome, and fished up a further loop or two of it from the basket into which it was endlessly spooling. He dropped it into Vanderberg’s lap.

‘What I am looking for?’ Vanderberg said.

‘Your own ticker symbol, obviously,’ said the Man. ‘I believe Vanderberg Industries opened at fifteen dollars, this morning. What’s VBG down to now? Three and a quarter? Three, even?’

‘Two and a half,’ said Vanderberg. The laughter was gone from his voice. ‘What have you done?’

‘You forget that, from my wigwam, I am the majority shareholder in Cahokia Pacific. We have the firepower to pulverise you. Your company was wobbling anyway – too many private projects, too many eccentric little initiatives. By close of trading today, your stock will be down below two, and you will be in breach of your banking covenants. You will be refused refinancing. You will lose insurance cover. Your loans will all be called. And the New York City district attorney’s office will subpoena your staff for a fraud investigation. Tomorrow morning, I will be snapping up the mangled remnants of your empire at a bargain price. You will retire to your penthouse and collect antiquities, if you can still afford them. I believe the technical term for what it is happening to you is “a bear raid”. But,’ said the Man, showing his gold tooth, ‘I prefer to think of it as a scalping.’

Vanderberg had risen to his feet during this speech, and his face had gone a blotchy mixture of livid white and glaring red. His mouth was open, showing his teeth too, and he had a finger up, shaking slightly. But he pulled his jaws closed, and instead of swearing or raging, he forced the clenching muscles of his face into a kind of smile.

‘Is that … it?’ he said.

‘Isn’t that enough?’ said the Man.415

‘No!’ said Vanderberg. ‘I threaten your family, and all you do is take financial revenge? Have you been wearing borrowed feathers so long you’ve forgotten what you are? Has the worship of the pale Nazarene turned you into a complete milksop?’

‘The what of the what?’ said Barrow.

‘He’s been reading Nietzsche,’ said the Man, on whose dark cheeks darker spots had also appeared.

‘Aren’t I right?’ said Vanderberg. ‘For God’s sake, man. You’re a Red Indian! You’re supposed to be fierce.’

The Man flowed upwards out of his club chair. It was like watching a waterfall running in reverse, or the flames of a great fire roaring up. On his face appeared the expression Barrow had seen there once before, in the limousine, the look of something nakedly ancient and powerful. The Man did not need a mask to be unearthly. But Barrow had never heard him raise his voice before, and now he did. Snarl, chant, roar: all three combined.

‘I am not an “Indian”,’ he said. ‘That is a name for a navigation error. Do you want to know what I am, Vanderberg? I am the sun at noonday. I am Hashi of the House of Hashi. I am the prince of this city. And you – you are a shadow in our alleys. You are spittle on our sidewalks. You are a disease on our corn. Begone, little man. Begone before the Red Council finds you. Go far, far away. If you show your face here again it will be the death of you.’

He was standing over Vanderberg now, speaking down into the blotchy face, looming above him like some leathery doom.

Vanderberg had backed against his chair. But when the Man finished, he hammered his hands together in manic applause, and laughed wildly.

‘Splendid! Splendid!’ he said. ‘That’s more like it! The prince of the city, oh yes – that’s the savage speaking, all right! But this is the twentieth century, you poor primitive. You lose, even if you win. I win, even if I lose. I have behind me the great power of capital itself. 416Accumulation, investment, return and reward, the whole logic of the modern world. If I die, do you think that stops? Is the power behind me broken? No, it rolls on regardless. Whereas one little pellet of lead in your head, to scramble your brains and fit your skull to be boiled clean and displayed in a museum where it belongs – would eliminate your little anachronism of a monarchy in an instant. No king, no kingdom, Hashi! You’re the vulnerable one.’

Vanderberg was in a state of twitchy hatred, bouncing on the balls of his feet, elements of his superior smile madly coming and going but not cohering. The Man looked at him with distaste. He was breathing hard, but he had his smooth and modern face again.

‘I’ll see you in bankruptcy court,’ he said.

*

Outside, the aquarium light had begun to dim. A breeze had sprung up from the west, and the even roof of cloud was breaking up and blowing away. In its place came gusts and black streamers of the coal smoke from the chimneys of the industrial zone, where the factories were all clearly back at work.

The Man climbed into his usual place in the Duesenberg, more thoughtful than triumphant. Barrow followed him, though Oscar was gesturing towards the front seat. The car accelerated smoothly away, through streets where the vitrines of the stores were beginning to cast rectangles of electric brightness before them.

‘Did you get what you needed?’ said the Man.

‘Did you?’ said Barrow.

‘He’s not wrong, that’s the trouble,’ said the Man. ‘We have to win every time. They only have to win once.’

He leaned his august head against the glass of the door, watching through the doubled layer as the rich surfaces of his city went by. Crowds hurried once more as the WALK signs lit up on the crossings of Grant Square. The golden maw of the Panton Leslie building was again open wide. The lights in the windows of Blumfeld’s picked 417out SPRING FASHIONS, SPRING FASHIONS. A train slid into the Union Station overhead, and they swept into the glazed and thrumming tunnel beneath it.

‘But that’s the game we play,’ said the Man. ‘And they didn’t win today.’

On the other side of the tracks, the crossings were crowded with the takouma of the Quarters, just as they had been when Barrow first rode with the Man, at the beginning of the week. Again the workers with lunchpails and the schoolchildren with satchels, homeward bound now, spotted the Duesenberg. Again, they nodded to the figure in the back. Again the Man held up his hand to them in salute.

‘Look at that, Mr Barrow,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Barrow. ‘I live here.’

‘But look, all the same. It’s nightfall. The city has made it through another day. The sky is full of smoke but the earth endures. My people may not like factory work but they still possess the land, and their children are clothed and educated. Down in Mississippi, the children and grand-children of slaves are building something extraordinary. Isn’t all that worth a little dirt, a little compromise?’

‘Maybe,’ said Barrow. He didn’t want to listen to any more speeches.

‘And tomorrow is the Annunciation. Tomorrow the angel tells the virgin that hope will be born in her for all the sinners in creation.’

‘Whatever. Would you drop me off?’

‘We can drive you to the precinct—’

‘Here’s great.’

Oscar pulled over halfway up Moon Street. One way the darkening east cast a pall over the Plaza, a stillness growing deeper as the night came on. The other way, the mix of smoke and flying cloud in the still-bright west stirred busy swathes of grey and black and blue over a skyline beginning to glint with lights. Barrow knew 418which way he wanted to be going. He climbed out of the limousine, and clunked the door shut behind him. The Man wound his window down.

‘Don’t forget we’re in your debt,’ he said, and Barrow thought there was a kind of anxiety in his voice, like a magician whose audience is walking out before the trick is over. ‘I’ll send over a card for my tailor tomorrow morning.’

‘Thanks, but I won’t be here,’ said Barrow. ‘I’m on the train for Jackson tomorrow. So long!’

He stepped back. The window went up. There was a hesitation inside the car, long enough for an exchange of speech between the front and back seats maybe, but then the Duesenberg pulled away and was receding, receding, a lozenge of shadow fading into the shadows of the distance.

Barrow turned and walked, his torn sleeve flapping, cold outdoor air licking his skin. When was that decision taken? He didn’t exactly know. Perhaps when Couma refused to take him even as a vassal. Perhaps when he saw Sammy Noukouwa picking his way through the cartridge casings. Perhaps just now in the Union Club, when he watched the two powers there facing off against each other. And saw, of course he did, that the victory of the Man was infinitely preferable to the victory of Vanderberg; that the Man’s victory was an unequal one, against the odds of history, obtained with guile and carefully hoarded luck, and therefore a precious thing. But he’d seen something else, too, and couldn’t un-see it – that there was a kind of dreadful symmetry in what these powers would do, would wink at, would permit, for the sake of victory. Fred Hopper butchered on the roof, Frankie Blackhawk snuffed out on his doormat – both times, the blood of a fool, of an innocent, coldly shed as the means to the end. Maybe up where the Man was, murder looked like a little thing, a small compromise, but he didn’t have that view. He was seeing it close. He had killed three 419people himself this morning, up close, and he was glad to be alive, glad to be the one walking in the cold lick of the evening air. But it was not nothing, what he had done. He would be flashing on it at night over and over, mashed face and flying bone, he knew.

He was passing under the Arch. The angels up there were in deep black shadow, just an outline of the massed roost of them, a frozen strangeness. He tilted his head back.

‘Any message?’ Silence. Nothing. ‘Yeah, didn’t think so.’

5

What he was not expecting, when he reached the station house, was that the couple of uniforms on the steps would spot him in the distance as he came up in his tatters, and shout word of his arrival back into the building. By the time he got to the front steps there was a crowd in cop blue waiting for him. They stamped their feet and clapped their hands and slapped him on the back as he came through the narrow lane they made for him to the stairs. ‘Iksho itala!’ they said, and in murmurs, ‘Thrown-Away Boy. Thrown-Away Boy. Thrown-Away Boy.’ They followed him up the stairs applauding, and into the detective pen, where Yanasa and Tali, Everard and Bunce, Chokfi and Lieutenant Pishu, had risen to their feet as well. All the way to the door of Doyle’s glass office they cheered him, while he grimaced and shook his head and tried to avert his face. It seemed to be a satisfying part of the character of whatever hero he was in their minds that he shied away modestly and uncomfortably from praise; it just made their praise louder and happier. Only Chokfi dropped her hands and looked troubled. Doyle threw open his door, beaming and holding up the front page of Tamaha, from which his own mug looked back: a stunned-looking Barrow, caught by the flashgun with his big square head scratched and dusty and 420bloody, and a smoke wedged in the corner of his mouth. Over the top it said in huge letters IKSHO ITALA!

‘What does that even mean?’ said Barrow.

‘It means, never lie down! Never give up! Never give in!’

‘Iksho itala!’ agreed the many voices of the room. And then, again, in a solid chant, ‘Thrown-Away Boy! Thrown-Away Boy! Thrown-Away Boy!’

‘It seems I’m the commanding officer of a mythological figure,’ said Doyle. ‘It’ll have its challenges, but we’ll make it work.’

‘I quit,’ said Barrow.

Doyle’s face changed.

‘Let’s give the lad some space,’ he told the crowd, drawing Barrow into his office. ‘He’s had quite a day.’

The crowd laughed and let Doyle close the glass door. They gave one more cheer, breaking into applause like a wave thrashing to foam on a rocky shore, and then began to disperse down the stairs, still pointing at him and smiling, still full of happiness.

Doyle steered him to a chair. On the desk lay the other evening edition: the Chronicle, still engaged in its forlorn quest to pretend Cahokia was like other cities. LOCAL BUSINESSWOMAN SURVIVES SHOOTING OUTRAGE, was the headline.

‘Now, why would you want to do something like that?’ Doyle asked. ‘Do you not see how proud we all are of you?’

‘They don’t know what they’re cheering for,’ said Barrow.

‘Yes, they do. They’ve spent the week fighting fires themselves, all of them, and when they might have lost it all at the last minute, you held the world up for them.’

‘I got Hanunu killed.’

‘Hanunu died in the line of duty, and you made sure he didn’t die in vain. Look: they said, at the palace, that you were in shock. Are you sure this isn’t the shock speaking?’

‘No, it’s not that. I’m seeing real clear.’421

‘Then what? What is it?’

Barrow knew he couldn’t explain. The bind the Man had described to him applied here in spades. All he could achieve, if he told this decent man what Couma had done, would be to ensure that the death of Frankie Blackhawk had only bad consequences.

‘I’m not cut out for this,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a poor kind of policeman here, and you know it, miko.’

‘You’ve the makings of a fine one. That’s what I know. It’s been an evil week, but you’ve gone from disgrace to redemption, far as I’m concerned.’

‘Then,’ said Barrow grimly, ‘I don’t want to be cut out for this. I don’t belong here. I’ve had an offer and I’m gonna go and play piano.’

‘Would you at least take a few days to think it over?’

‘No. I’m sorry, miko. I’m on the express for the Delta tomorrow at nine thirty. I’m just going to relay a coupla things to you – from the case – and then I’m gonna give you my badge and my gun, and I’m through. Oh, and I need to pay my respects to Hanunu. Where’d they take the body?’

‘He’s here. Fussner’s got him in the mortuary – cleaned him up, put on his dress blues. Funeral parlour’ll come by for him but we take care of our own.’

‘Then I’ll go down in just a minute. Okay, two things, then. First, that was definitely Weiss’s boys at the Moon’s house this a.m., and between that and the fight at the cathedral—’

‘What fight at the cathedral?’

‘Doesn’t matter – anyhow, he’s got to have most of his little army out of action just now, one way or another. So Benny Shokcha and the Southside Boys’ll try to move on him, and it strikes me, he might be up to turning state’s evidence on Vanderberg if you could offer him some protection. I mean, I’m just offering this as a thought, miko; I don’t know where you aim to stand on the whole … booze business.’422

‘It’s a good thought,’ said Doyle. ‘This is something you could take care of, you stayed.’

‘Miko…’

‘Okay, okay. Second thing?’

‘Second thing is, I saw Vanderberg.’

‘You did?’

‘Mm-hmm. Man of the Sun was meeting with him, and I got him to take me along – said he owed me.’

‘Which he does, for sure.’

‘Yeah, I guess. Anyway … Vanderberg lost his cool. Ranted, raved, went all the way to threatening. Nothing specific, nothing actionable, and I don’t know what-all he can actually do, since the Man is stomping all over him and Union Cartridge. But, well – I didn’t get any kinda clue on whether he’d paid Phineas, but I wondered if maybe he wasn’t done with him yet? Might be worth going on searching the city. Did you get the warrant?’

‘We did.’

‘Then I’ll leave that with you. And glad to.’

‘All right.’

Barrow stood up. He took his badge off his belt and laid it on the desk. He took the .38 from his shoulder holster and laid that down too, with its four remaining rounds. Last fired by Couma. All the more reason to leave it behind. Then he added the holster too, because why would you walk round with an empty one? He was going to be an unarmed pianist. Finally his keys.

‘Change your mind and there’ll be a place for you,’ said Doyle.

‘I don’t think I will.’

Doyle held out his hand. Barrow shook it.

‘Good luck,’ said Doyle.

‘Thanks,’ said Barrow.

*

Hanunu was lying on Fussner’s slab with his eyes closed, his face 423washed, his hair neatly combed, and a dark blue scarf round his neck above the blue-and-gold collar of his dress uniform, to hide the shredded flesh. A takouma woman of thirty or so was in there, crying silently in two continuous streams. A little girl was holding her hand. The whole Hanunu family, together except that one of them had trodden on one of the concealed trapdoors that let you suddenly out of this world, and would never be present again.

‘He was a good man,’ said Barrow.

‘I know that,’ said Mrs Hanunu.

‘I’m—’

‘I know who you are.’

She did not seem inclined to applaud Thrown-Away Boy, and Barrow didn’t blame her.

‘Was he brave?’ said the little girl.

‘He was very brave,’ said Barrow.

‘He’s going to be in the parade on Sunday, just behind the young miko.’

‘That’s good.’

It was, though it had its sick side, the coffins of everyone who had died for Couma lately riding along together. He’d be in the parade too, he guessed, if the morning had turned out differently.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Barrow said. He’d have touched his hat, but it was two days gone, trampled in a cavalry charge.

*

He took a last look around the squadroom. Doyle nodded to him through the glass but thankfully it seemed that he hadn’t made any kind of announcement. The other detectives just assumed Barrow was heading home for the day.

‘See you later,’ said Bunce.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow.

He looked in at Chokfi’s cubby as he passed, but there was no-one there. The reason for that being, he discovered, that she 424was waiting for him – lying in wait for him – outside on the street.

‘You’re leaving?’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I am.’

‘But why? Why, Joe? Everything’s finally going right for you.’

He couldn’t explain, any more than he could to Doyle. Less, in fact. Chokfi was Four Winds; she was part of the cadre that held the tamaha together. Who needed to believe that she upheld an order in keeping with her own brave, good-natured, warm-hearted self.

‘I … got an offer to leave with the band I been playing with, evenings. It’s a chance to find out what I got it in me to be.’

‘You got it in you to be something good right here. You did something really important today. The paper says you’re a hero. I knew that about you before they printed it.’

‘Oh, Chokfi,’ he said. He put out a finger to stroke her cheek. She slapped it away.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Take me seriously!’

‘I do,’ said Barrow, ‘and you deserve someone better than me.’

‘And you’re going to decide that for me? I know what I deserve, thank you.’

‘Well, I know me. I know things about me you don’t know.’

‘Like what?’

How could he possibly put this?

‘Like, somebody broke my heart, okay?’

He expected her to say Oh or maybe Who? but he underestimated both her powers of deduction and the speed of the tamaha’s gossip, since he took the dance floor with Couma. She didn’t say either of those things. Nor did she draw back like Anderson, at the thought of being second best.

‘Baby,’ she said with kindly pity, ‘you mean the Moon said no to you. She said no like she was always going to do. That isn’t real. That’s just … dazzle in your eyes. There’s real things you can have that would make you happy.’425

‘I’m sorry,’ he said helplessly. ‘I’m going. Ticket’s bought. I can’t do this any more.’

‘Joe Barrow,’ she said, ‘do you owe me something?’

He sighed. ‘I guess I do.’

‘I guess you do too. So come to the ballgame with me tonight. Have you ever been?’

‘No.’ It had always seemed too hermetically, exclusively takouma.

‘Then you should. Specially if you think you’re leaving. You should see it once. There’s nothing like it.’

It didn’t seem like the moment to raise Professor Kroeber’s idea that the ballgame was a fake tradition. It seemed like the moment to say no: to move on, to say goodbye, to be rid of the good woman like he was ridding himself of the decent man whose hand he’d shaken.

‘Okay,’ he said.

6

The game began at eight. There was time for him to shower at Lydia Lee’s, the cuts stinging, dust and grit and glass powder swirling round his feet. Time to say yes to a delighted Dolphus and to be handed the ticket. Time to pack his case: not much to put in it, not much to show for two years of Cahokia. Time to throw out, as trash, the remnants of his black work pinstripe, and to put on, from the hanger in the closet, the windowpane outfit in blue he’d hardly had time to wear, a suit for night, a suit with some jive. He saw himself in the mirror before he went out, and thought he seemed less takouma, more taklousa. Maybe that was right. It was a taklousa life he was choosing. His ribs had stopped aching, the cut in his brow seemed to be healing, and for the first time in a week he wasn’t tired.

The breeze high up must have blown the sky all the way to clear, 426because as he walked north across Moctezuma Park, the moon was out, and pretty near full, a disc of bone-white rising over the trees ahead of him and laying down a trail of trembling silver on the black water of the lake. The branches of the trees were still bare, swaying black against the luminous glow of city lights, the deep near-black blue of the sky, but there was a smell of new growth in the air, a damp fresh smell rising up from the ground. Worms and roots, green grass and the spikes that would be flowers. Alive, alive. He stopped to light a smoke, and made a little ball of hot yellow light between his hands from the match, the only hot colour in all the blue-black-silver world. The first exhale from the first drag, he blew upwards. A sort of smoke libation, dedicated to the bone disc silvering the treetops.

‘Very pretty, ma’am,’ he said. ‘But you’re not my moon. I got that.’

In the far corner of the park, where it narrowed between the nearest of the Quarters and Christ-the-King to just touch the bottom left angle of the Plaza, there was a hubbub growing louder and louder and he was no longer walking alone. People were streaming along in the same direction in the dark in ones, pairs, families, clans. Up ahead the high blocky rectangle of the Ballcourt was sending up a beam of differently white electric light into the night. It was ancient, one of the three oldest buildings of the centre city along with the palace and the cathedral, but lately the open-topped box of brick and stone had been heightened by a pair of steel lighting-towers for the night games.

The entry was round the front on the Plaza itself, an archway the height of an ordinary house decorated all the way round with carvings of takouma figures wearing not much, and spinning, flipping, leaping in pursuit of balls as big as their heads. Men up the left side, women up the right side, a plaque at the top saying something or other, inevitably, in Latin. Something something LUDERE something. 427

Chokfi was waiting in the crowd on the steps, among the lines for the vendors selling roasted corn and hot dogs, the cigarette booth, the Coca-Cola concession. She had a sleek little hat on that Barrow had never seen, and she was wearing a drop-waisted violet number that showed off her curves more than she let herself do in her work-wear. But she was not alone. He had imagined that this would be, awkwardly, a date. But she had brought along her whole family: her grinning stocky father who wrung Barrow’s hand fervently, her ironical mother winking up at him, and three of her little brothers and sisters, all with feathery crowns on their heads made of pampas grass dyed green.

They gathered him up, they put a root beer in his left hand and a cone of popcorn in his right, and they led him through the arch and up the steps. And up, and up, for the steps branched into many narrow capillary flights of stairs, and they followed one of these confidently up, flight after flight, turn after turn, in a near-blackness that must have been the space between the outer and inner skins of the building. There were people on their heels behind them, and people ahead of them, and the narrow black space resounded with chatter, but up ahead there was a roar, and when they reached the top, and stepped out through an opening with an electric glare beyond it, he saw why. They were up under the eaves of the Ballcourt, near the legs of one of the lighting towers, looking down into a deep brilliantly lit slot up whose sides, on the slenderest of balconies, two or three thousands of cheering takouma were stacked. The drop was so nearly vertical that Barrow had an instant of vertigo: it was like looking down a cliff-face in which every crevice was crammed with perching people. No-one else seemed worried by the low railing, little more than knee height on Barrow. The family squeezed cheerfully along into place, the kids adding to the roar by blowing whistles, till they were arranged in a line that ran parents–children–Barrow–Chokfi.428

Maybe there was some intent in that to give the two of them a little bit of couple’s privacy, but the child Barrow had on his immediate left was the littlest boy, aged about six, and this kid had been so struck by the astonishing truth that Barrow – a grown-up! really tall! – had literally never been to the game before, that he had taken upon himself to narrate and explain, almost continuously, what was happening in front of them. Barrow had to keep bending over that way to be able to hear.

He was told that the green grass hats meant that the Chokfis came from the north-west Quarter. The blue hats were for northeast, white for south-east, yellow for south-west. Green was best of course, and the best and most famous Green player was Peter Otak, and Peter Otak’s little brother went to the same school as he did. But Blue was winning a lot at the moment, because they had a player who was so tall it was almost unfair—

‘Is his name Oscar?’ asked Barrow.

Yes, Oscar Pahkali, which was a funny name, because it meant ‘flower’ and this one would have to be a flower as tall as a tree, and how did Barrow know?

‘I’ve seen him playing other games.’

Momentary puzzlement, and then the flow resumed. Tonight, Green would be playing Yellow, and then Blue would play White, and then Blue would play Yellow, and then Green would play White, and of course there were four games because there were four teams, and also there were four players on every team, you see. And here came the band, with their flutes and their horns and their drums, and they came from the high school, which was the school that his sister Amanda had gone to, and—

‘Clement, sweetie,’ said Chokfi, leaning across Barrow, ‘I think he’s got it now. Shush.’

‘I was going to ask if I could sit on his shoulders,’ confided Clement to Chokfi.429

‘I don’t think that would be very safe,’ said Barrow.

‘No, honey,’ said Chokfi.

They really were a small family. Barrow looked down at them surrounding him, looked down at the top of Chokfi’s hat, a neat little bell of purple with a silk flower on the side.

‘Do you want to sit on my shoulders?’ he asked.

She gave him a look, and beckoned him down with a finger. He bent, but not low enough. She took him by the lobe and tugged, so she could speak right into his ear.

‘No thank you,’ she said politely. ‘But I’ll climb all over you every night, if you stay.’

The words ran through him as effectively as if she had put her fingers in his pants. There, said her look. Don’t forget what we’re discussing tonight. And don’t tease me unless you want to be teased back, triple.

He blushed. The horns sounded. The game began.

Out from a doorway he couldn’t see, down at the base of the slot, trotted Green and Yellow’s two teams of four. Rangy, muscly guys in loincloths and moccasins, with kneepads and a leather hipshield on one side, and on their heads majestically enlarged versions of the children’s headgear. Crowns crossed with helmets, with nodding bunches of green or yellow feathers rising from them. They must have been strapped on tight, for none of them fell off in the leaping, skidding, tumbling play that followed.

‘Toli!’ cried an amplified voice, and in flew the ball, a huge heavy solid thing bigger than a basketball, which hit the ground with a meaty whap every time it bounced.

The game, Barrow saw, was like a cross between volleyball and some kind of antique tennis where rebounds off the walls were vital to a good attack. Only, played exclusively with the hips. Every successful interception required either a jump, to get a hip up to the ball, or a balletic drop on one arm, to get a hip down to ground 430level. Those impacts must have hurt like hell, even with the leather guards. You could see bruises visibly blooming on players’ skins as the game went on. You were allowed a bounce between passes, but only one, and you scored by getting the ball to the opposition’s back wall, which was much easier to do if you could work the ball up high enough to run along a kind of gutter that crossed each side wall above head height. Then it would roll almost all the way to the enemy goal, before a deliberate kink threw it back out into play in the end-zone – where a good team would already have mustered a striker, to give it its last whap from a hip to the back wall.

At those moments, the roar rose to a kind of fury.

‘Green! Green! Green! Green!’ bellowed their corner of the Ballcourt, and Barrow shouted it too. Clement would never have forgiven him otherwise. First to four points (of course) was the winner, which made for brutally quick and exciting play, but not for short matches, to his surprise. When the players were good, they could keep intercepting and intercepting, blocking and blocking, using the predictability of the confined space to close angles and neutralise attacks. Only when someone made a mistake under pressure, or there was a shot of unusual brilliance, did attack beat defence. It took nearly half an hour for Green to defeat Yellow 4–2, by which time all of the players were battered and dripping with sweat.

To Barrow’s surprise the music never stopped. It was drowned sometimes by the crowd, but then it would re-emerge, drums in a loose thunder, flutes and whistles lilting endless variations on one tune. Not a bad tune. A tune you could borrow, and move over to piano. ‘Ballcourt Blues’. If he could just get his fingers free … He managed to crouch without toppling to his death and put down the root beer and the popcorn by his feet. The rail was too low to be a keyboard but he could work out fingering on the air if he had to.

Out came Blue and White. Blue, as well as having Oscar on its team, grave and enormous, unexpectedly featured a takata player 431too, milk-white and sunburn-red in his loincloth. He looked like he worked construction, and when he gave a little wave to the crowd, he got a warm cheer of his own. The message being, Barrow supposed: come to our city on our terms, learn to play our sport, and we’ll make you welcome.

‘Toli!’ cried the voice, and the game was on again. Oscar was a star, as expected. His hips were just further off the ground than other people’s, and it was easier for him to get the high deflections that sent the heavy ball spinning along the gutter. But he wasn’t that fast, and what made Blue unbeatable was the combination of Oscar with a whip-thin team-mate, not the white guy, who seemed to be always ready in White’s end-zone when the ball dropped from the gutter. Between them they found more scoring opportunities in the closed geometry, quicker, than in the previous game. Clement was cheering for White, but it didn’t do any good. Barrow was thinking about how you could get the looping, elastic bounce of the game, and also its thudding weight, into a chord sequence. Chokfi was … looking at him, with a small smile on her face. At his absorption, at the way the mood of the game had indeed reached him.

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ she called up at him.

‘It’s great!’ he bawled back.

‘Well then,’ she said.

And he saw what she was doing. Why she had chosen this roaring, public, family occasion to make the case for her claim on him. She wasn’t arguing. She was certainly not pleading. She would jab him with desire if he was stupid enough to treat this last opportunity of hers as a matter for teasing, but really she had brought him to the game to show him a picture. A picture of a possible future.

In which, ten years from now, twenty years, there they’d be at the ballgame of a Friday night, she and him, with their own children between them, peas from the pod, wearing grass crowns for Green, the row of small faces all takouma-plus, the way every citizen of 432the tamaha would be in the end. They wouldn’t live in the Quarters, though. They’d have a big house on the Northside, because Barrow would be the miko-but-one after Doyle, a big respected man, the Chief of Police who had once done something famously heroic. And she would be part of the secret nervous system of the city, nudging it the way it ought to go, and he would never know where she hid her mask. And they would go to Mass together every Sunday morning. And when the children were tucked up in bed, or sent off to the park with their grand-parents, she would jump his bones with steady enthusiasm. A good girl who planned to enjoy her respectable life, her man, her home. And there’d be a piano in the house, and he’d play it quietly in the evenings after work, sipping whisky. Also for his daughters’ dance classes. Also at the Police Department Christmas party.

And that would be okay. That would be very good, in fact. It wasn’t a romantic prospect, but it was a practical one, a warm one, a kindly one. She wasn’t wrong. They could be good together, she and him. Their house could be a shore he arrived at, after a voyage on rough seas. He smiled tentatively at her, the possible Mrs Amanda Barrow. She slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, and squeezed.

But then the Blue/White match ended, 4–1, and once the exhausted players had walked off the court, there was a break in the pattern. The music stopped. People craned over the balconies. Something off the programme was happening. A technician ran out carrying an electric microphone on a stand, black cable trailing behind. Turned it on. It wailed, hooted, settled to an expectant crackle. One drum began a slow beat.

Then out from below processed three figures. First the cardinal, looking so different in jewelled robe and mitre that Barrow only knew him by the limp. Then the Man, dressed as he had been in buckskin and saffron yellow on the day they drove out to the 433country, his eyes painted gold. Then Couma, in a black-and-white version of the same outfit, eyes silver. The drumbeat stopped. A wholly different silence filled the Ballcourt.

‘Pax vobiscum,’ said the cardinal into the mike.

‘Et cum spiritu tuo,’ replied the thousands in the Ballcourt, in practised unison. Chokfi said it, little Clement said it, the whole of their row said it. But not Barrow, who didn’t know the words.

‘Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,’ said the cardinal, and two or three thousand takouma crossed themselves. ‘Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.’

‘Amen,’ said the Ballcourt.

‘Gentes urbi,’ said the cardinal. ‘Sons and daughters of the tamaha. Takouma! We are sorry to interrupt your entertainment, for the heart needs joy, after a week like the one you have all just lived through. But we come to you to declare a new thing: a new thing which we hope will bring you both joy and reassurance.’

He stepped back, and the Man came forward to the mike.

‘Hattak Hashi,’ said the Ballcourt, naming him.

‘Hattak Tamaha,’ he said, naming them, and he had no accent when speaking Anopa, or none that Barrow could tell, but the brahminic drawl came back when he switched to English. ‘People of the city, things change. Sometimes they must change to remain the same.’ He extended a hand towards Couma, slow and graceful. She bent her knees like a ballet dancer and bowed. And turned, and bowed, and turned and bowed, till she had bowed four times, once to each of the compass points.

‘This is the Moon,’ said the Man. Then, with great intentness, and close to the microphone, as if issuing a correction to the order of the universe, ‘This was the Moon.’

There was a stir in the Ballcourt, a hush re-arranging itself.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘she is the Moon who will become the Sun.’

Absolute silence.434

He took a little pot of something from his tunic. Couma knelt in front of him. From the hidden doorway down below, a hastily assembled Four Winds filed out, ball-players still sweating and near-naked, and stationed themselves around her at North, South, East and West. The Man dipped a finger in the pot and began to paint her closed eyelids gold instead of silver.

It was a coronation. The Man was making her his heir. After him, there would for the first time be a Woman of the Sun. She was far away from Barrow, a tiny stick of a figure, but even from up here he could see the doll-like rigidity with which she held herself, down on the stone of the Ballcourt floor. She looked less like the victor of a dynastic struggle, the winner of a throne, than like someone being turned into a statue. Another sacrifice.

Barrow thought of that, as the golden eyes of office were carefully painted on her. But he also thought of how, in the future he had just been imagining, Couma would be omnipresent. Her face on every office wall. Her voice on the radio. The House of the Moon, and then presumably the palace, only ever a few hundred yards away. Her actual self, aging into slender middle-aged distinction, at committees and council meetings and concerts and ballgames and public ceremonies where a police captain would inevitably meet the city’s monarch over and over again. Always there. Always out of reach.

The Man finished Couma’s eyes. She opened them, with a golden blink, and he raised her up.

‘Behold,’ he said, ‘the mother of ten thousand hearths!’

‘Ishki chokpe chokpe ashoboli,’ agreed the crowd.

‘Tomorrow, she will join me on the Mound. Will you witness it?’

‘We will witness it!’ the Ballcourt roared.

The Four Winds did their circle dance around Couma, the cardinal stepped to the mike for a blessing, Couma and the Man took hands and bowed together to the compass points.435

But Barrow was imagining a day, twenty years on, when the Woman of the Sun, face frozen with dignity, dressed in impervious good taste, would give a medal to the Chief of Police. ‘Well done, Captain,’ she would say, and the pin of the medal would not really go through his dress blues and into his heart. It would only feel as if it did.

His face must have changed, because Chokfi took away her hand.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

‘Oh, Joe.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ said Chokfi. ‘Go on, then.’

He pushed past her as gently as he could, and fled down the black stairs.

*

On the way back across the park, he kept his eyes on the ground, and resisted the urge to bang his head on trees. There was a kind of relief in being back in the unrespectable night-glow of Darktown, where the pleasures on offer were easy and shallow. Here today, gone tomorrow except for the hangover.

But it only lasted until he saw, drawn up at the kerb and blocking the traffic, the familiar shape of a Duesenberg.

7

He approached it with something like wrath. Some puzzlement, too. He’d surely left both Oscar and the Man back at the Ballcourt. Why couldn’t they leave him alone? Beyond lay the door of the ice-supply business, strangely popular at night, that fronted for Lydia Lee’s. Through it a drink was waiting, and a sweet haze for a pained mind.

In this state, he’d gotten right up to the limo, angry words on the tip of his tongue, before he took in that it was not quite the one he 436was expecting. The Man’s Duesenberg was black and maroon. This one, though identical in every other respect, was black and silver, with white leatherwork inside. And in the driver’s seat, with the window down and her eyes scanning the sidewalk, was Couma’s housekeeper – the one from the deep country who hardly spoke anything but Anopa, the one who had called Oscar from the upstairs phone during the siege of the house. She spotted him and climbed out to intercept him, an anomaly among the taklousa swells flowing to Lydia Lee’s in their evening suits and furs, shined shoes and high heels, hair oil and pearls.

‘You!’ she said. ‘You get in car now!’

‘What?’ said Barrow. ‘Abso-fucking-lutely not. Go back to her ladyship and tell her that playtime is over.’

‘You tell her. Get in.’

‘No. No. Jesus, don’t you people ever take no for an answer? I am done with the House of Hashi. Finished, understand? I have done everything for them that I am ever going to do, okay?’

He was attracting some curious glances himself.

‘She says, come.’

‘Does she. Well, I say—’

‘She want you.’

‘Yeah, what for? She got some errand to run? Some lie to tell? Someone else need shooting?’

‘Stupid man!’ said the housekeeper in exasperation. She dropped her voice. ‘No. You listen. She want you.’ She held up two index fingers and wrapped them round each other. ‘Woman – man. She want you.’

‘Oh,’ said Barrow. ‘Oh.’

The housekeeper clicked her tongue. ‘Yes! You a lucky fool. Get in.’

He got in.

*

437It was no sleigh ride. The housekeeper drove very badly, crashing the gears and stalling twice at junctions. He guessed that the bodyguard who’d died in the garden had doubled as Couma’s chauffeur, like Oscar did for the Man. But even though the silver fittings were jingling, and the bumps on cobbles taken too fast rattled his spine and his teeth, the moon was high by now and the moonlight poured in across the back seat, clear white into inky black shadow, making harlequin patterns that shook and changed. He laid his hand on the white leather next to him and watched the shapes move on his palm, not a thought in his head.

They came in around the back of the House of the Moon, to a part of it he had never seen. The Duesenberg went into a carhouse behind a high wall, and then the housekeeper led him across a moonlit garden, up a crunching gravel path between glasshouses and ferns. The trees stood like chess-pieces on a black-and-white board. The artful slab of the house rose at the end of the garden, long and wide, scarcely a light to be seen in the windows, with the towers of Land and Power and Water twinkling above the roofline, and beyond them in turn the summit of the Mound, black and massive. Somewhere there was the sound of trickling water, and again he could smell new growth, the ground awakening, the unseen soil breathing life.

She ushered him in through a back door. A kitchen, storerooms, a passageway which led to the familiar rear of the hall. To the door towards which Angelica, or whatever her name was from the shop, had been trying to crawl, while the German gorilla outside used her for target practice. But the bodies were gone, the broken glass and shattered china and wood splinters had been swept up, the floor had been scrubbed and polished. The zones meaning life and death, once absolute, had faded away. The Matisse was probably already on its way to expert picture-restorers in Manhattan. The broken front windows and the battered front door had been neatly 438boarded over, which left the space almost pitch-black, except for a dim creep of moonlight from the music room beyond, where a legged gleam was the piano standing unruined. The light fittings must have not been replaced yet. At any rate, the housekeeper reached for no switches – hadn’t, since they entered the house. Perhaps darkness was what Couma wanted.

‘Up,’ said the housekeeper, nodding at the stairs, and stayed at the bottom to watch him climb. Up he went to the grand fork of the stairs, and up and around again, his feet sounding cautiously on the hardwood, into the domain of the house he had never seen. And was not really seeing now, in the darkness. It came to him as smells, as surfaces, merged into an impression of wealth which, unlike the plush of the Union Club, ran to the bare, the austere, the geometric. There was a cedarwood richness in the black air, a heavy exact squaring to the doorway he passed through at the top of the stairs, a tight-woven scratchiness of Japanese matting underfoot on the dark landing on the other side. He was trying to keep a protective hold of his anger, but anger struggled with a kind of enchantment. A kind of fear, too.

One long corridor ran the whole length of the house, upstairs, but it was obvious which way he was supposed to go. All was dark but at the far end, on the right-hand side, one door stood open a crack, letting out a frayed ray of yellow light. Otherwise the house seemed empty. Had been emptied, maybe. No staff. No witnesses.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘In here,’ said Couma’s voice.

If she wanted to get rid of him, she would surely not do it herself. And it would surely happen in some outhouse, not up here among the good furnishings. He walked along the corridor, feeling the life in his body – pulse, breath, strength, weakness – with every step. And pushed open the door.439

It was her bedroom. There was the long rectangle of black glass, the window as big as a store vitrine through which she hadn’t witnessed the murder on the Land Trust roof, now with grey silk drapes drawn across it. There was a Japanese lantern, box-shaped, from which the yellow light came. There was a wall of books. There was the big bed in which she failed to fall asleep at night, and a paler square on the wall above it, where a picture or a photograph had been taken down. She had been at her dressing table, using cotton balls and cold cream to get the new gold and the old silver off her eyelids, but now she was standing against the wall just inside the door, barefoot in an embroidered robe. With her back against the wall, and her hands pressed against it, down at her sides. He came in. She put out a foot and pushed the door shut with it. Click.

‘What is this, the warrior’s reward?’ said Barrow. She had nothing on under the robe, but for the first time since he had met her there was uncertainty in her expression. Couma being Couma, it came out as defiance. She raised her chin.

‘No,’ she said. ‘This is me trying to take my last chance to act like a woman who can want something on her own account. Before the city swallows me altogether. Before there’s nothing left of me but the Moon.’

‘And then the Sun, right.’

‘You know about that?’

‘I was in the Ballcourt. I was finding out I couldn’t bear to see you, even in the distance.’

Something about the strangeness of the night made it impossible not to speak straight out. No point doing anything else, he thought. Empty his heart, hide his heart: he’d be gone either way.

She winced. ‘But you still came,’ she said.

‘I mean, I couldn’t bear to see you in the distance if I weren’t gonna see you up close.’

‘You’re seeing me now.’440

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know how or why. I don’t know you, princess. I been realising that since this morning.’

He had backed across the corner of the room to the safety of a wall of his own.

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you didn’t understand me this morning. I think maybe you didn’t. Why I refused when you tried to—’

‘No, no, I got it,’ said Barrow. ‘You were trying to keep me clean. Putting me out of reach of this mess you got here. I see that. Real kind of you, no doubt. I’ll be on the train tomorrow. Going far, far off, don’t worry.’

‘I know that. My uncle told me. That’s why I can … do this. Maybe. But—’

‘But that don’t make it better, princess. I found out … See, I kind of fell for you, and fell for the city at the same time. I thought I’d found … a good place. I thought I was being … invited in. But it’s not what I thought. The place isn’t it. You’re not.’

‘Nowhere’s pure,’ she said.

‘Pure? Pure? You killed your brother! You got all these people thinkin’ you’re Miss Tragedy, brave and sad, when you did the deed yourself. It’s like …’

He looked around the room in the lamplight.

‘It’s like I opened up something beautiful. One of these pretty things you got here. That box, there – and inside, instead of jewels, there was a snake. Or a scorpion or something.’

‘You think I’m a scorpion?’

‘Hell, I don’t know what you are. This morning,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘You had my gun held on me. I was looking up the barrel. I thought then it was just fright. But you were thinking about shooting me. Weren’t you.’

‘Yes,’ she said levelly. ‘It would have been the tidy thing to do. Since you know what you’re not supposed to know.’441

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t. – No, that’s not true. I could’ve. I’ve done worse. I found I wouldn’t. I found I’d given the tamaha my conscience, and my sleep at night, and my peace of mind, for the rest of my life probably, but I wouldn’t give it you. Not on top of all those things. Not when you’d just saved my life. Not when … you are the only man in years to look at me and see me. This,’ she said, waving her hand from feet to face. ‘Not the Moon.’

He thought of the stiff, distant figure offering herself to the crowd.

‘Yeah, I see you,’ he said. ‘I can’t look away.’

‘I see you too. You … surprise me. I haven’t felt anything since Charles died, and you … surprise me.’

‘So now you called me over, what, to see if I can surprise you some more?’

‘If you’re going to hate me,’ she said, ‘this can’t work. Or if you’re going to make me pay for being the one who asks.’

Barrow rubbed his face.

‘I don’t hate you,’ said Barrow. ‘If you’d told me yesterday you wanted me, wanted me for anything at all, I’d’ve been, oh, purely happy. But princess – you killed your brother. You killed your brother. Didn’t you?’

‘Do I have to recite all my crimes to you?’

‘I need to hear you not deny it.’

‘Then yes,’ said Couma. ‘I killed my brother. Worse than that. I had him killed. By a pathetic little defective who thought it was exciting.’

‘I can’t get past that. How am I supposed to get past that?’

‘You aren’t,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s a horrible thing.’

‘Then how could you do it? That’s what I don’t get. If I had a brother, he’d be precious to me.’

Saying this, Barrow thought of the parade of near-brothers, 442semi-brothers, artificial brothers there had been in his life. Ted. Drummond. Oscar, lately. And how helplessly his heart had lurched toward anyone who seemed to be volunteering to be family.

‘And mine was precious to me. But,’ she said wearily, ‘there are more important things. He’d have been a disaster for the city. For millions of takouma. The incompetent heir is the fatal weakness of hereditary power. I could do something about that. And because I could, I had to.’

‘I can’t imagine thinking like that.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘It’s like you’re on some other planet.’

‘Yes. A cold moon. Far away. And now I’m going to be here for the rest of my life, and I don’t deserve anything else. But it gets awfully lonely.’

‘Princess,’ said Barrow. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘A little bit of tenderness I don’t deserve.’

‘You don’t have to deserve it,’ he said. ‘Not from me.’

‘I’m making you an invitation,’ she said. ‘A new invitation. Not to the city. Just to this room. Just … to my bed.’

‘Oh God,’ said Barrow.

‘If you will dare it, I will dare it.’

‘D’you have to dare yourself? Is it difficult?’

‘No. Yes. It’s very strange you not being Charles.’

‘There hasn’t been anyone else since?’

‘Or before.’

They looked at each other. She lifted one narrow foot off the floor and pressed its sole against the wall behind her, along with her hands. With a stir of silk, her slender knee lifted into sight through the fold of her robe. It was a nervous gesture, not a consciously seductive one, but it made his mouth go dry.

‘Are you … saying yes to me, Detective?’ Chin high. Proud-shy. Refuge taken in the regal tone.443

‘You know I am,’ he said and touched his eyebrow. ‘You sewed me up. You fixed me. But I ain’t been whole since.’

A faint, faint smile on her face. Abashed, yes; vulnerable, yes; with her face opened and made naked to him by confession, yes; but still, still, with a grain of satisfied will in there. Still Couma.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘But there’s something else first. I need to be honest with you.’

‘Starting now, you mean?’

‘I mean, in this room. For this thing which is … just us.’

‘What, then?’

‘I never do anything for only one reason. And this is a good night for getting pregnant. It’s the right phase of the moon. Ha ha. How do you … feel … about that?’

‘You want a baby?’

‘Yes. If it’s possible.’

‘From me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I guess this would be my only contribution.’

‘That’s right. You’d be gone. Away somewhere, being safe and happy. I want to be able to think of you being safe and happy.’

Barrow thought about the Boys’ Home. When he had ever imagined fatherhood, he had thought of it, off in the future somewhere if it happened, as a chance for a total and entire reversal of what had happened to him. Something he would do, if he did it, by being present. Being there at nightfall and daybreak. Solid and in the room. He did not want to inflict on another small being the knowledge that no-one cared enough to stay. But this child might still be cared for. There’d be a palace not a dormitory.

‘You’d … keep the child by you? If there is one?’

‘Yes. Yes! I swear, no more throwing away.’

‘Wouldn’t you be in trouble, being what you are, if you suddenly have a kid and no husband?’444

‘It would be easier if there was no visible man. I’ve thought it through. Around here, we are … friendly to miracles.’

Barrow breathed in, breathed out.

‘… Okay then.’

‘That’s it? Just like that?’

‘What else am I gonna say, princess? Thank you?’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be grateful.’

‘Oh,’ said Barrow, for once letting some force into his voice. ‘I’m not grateful. I’m eager.’

She flushed and looked at the floor.

‘So. How am I different from Charles?’ Barrow asked, with a sort of burning patience.

She looked back up.

‘He was my height. And wiry.’

‘That’s flyboys for you.’

Their eyes had locked.

‘You’re huge,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I like that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you—’ she began, but didn’t wait even to finish her own sentence. They met halfway, the first step on both sides hesitant, the second a headlong rush; collided halfway, with frantic hunger on both sides, and they were joined – joined all the way together, fumbling his clothes off – there in the middle of her bedroom floor, him lifting her to fit her onto him, her legs tight as a knot round his waist, and her mouth feeding on his continuously as if anything else, one single further moment without lips on lips, would be unbearable famine.

*

She was not all bones. She was all sinews.

*

445Later, on the bed. Barrow trying to smooth the last metallic flecks off her eyelids, with the cotton and the cream. Her eyes shut, and the delicate skin of the lids filling his gaze, and the minuscule veins in them, and the bumps of her eyeballs fluttering underneath, tiny movements to and fro, all that fierce intelligent attention turned away from seeing, from planning, from judging, to things that were close, close, close. And her distracting him from what he was doing by nuzzling against his wrist, and then opening her wet mouth wide and sucking on his hand, until the cream and the cotton balls went everywhere.

*

Later again. Couma crying helplessly, crying in gulps as if it hurt, Barrow’s arms around her as if making her a shelter from the world – except that what she needed sheltering from was inside her own skin, and always would be. I killed my brother. I killed my brother. Yes. Yes. Yes, sweetheart, you did.

Couma dry-eyed on his shoulder, bleak. This is a good place, you know. Better than most. And I will pay the price to keep it good. I can give them fifty years. I can carry it for them until … 1970. Maybe in that time the tamaha can come up with something better than monarchy. And if not, the child to keep the House of Hashi in business? I told you I never had only one reason.

Sammy Noukouwa’s horrible to his mama, you know. What will happen to him? A convenient accident? You don’t need to know. Please don’t talk about that. Sorry, princess.

*

Later still. The tide of desire coming creeping in once more, in sorrow’s aftermath. Stealthy and slow this time. Fingers of silver stealing over the land. Couma’s head on his chest, her fingers elsewhere, exploring. Taking thorough possession.

‘Mine. Mine. Mine?’

‘Yes, princess.’446

‘And this. Is this mine?’

‘You know it is. All of it.’

‘Is it, though?’ she said. ‘You’re so … agreeable. You say yes, yes, yes to me all the time.’

‘Well, I want to.’

‘But—’ Her fingers withdrew. ‘Let me ask you a question? A serious one?

‘Yeah?’

‘Why are you never aggressive? With women, I mean. Not that I think you should be … one of those men who goes through the world expecting to take. Not that at all. But as far as I can see, you never put yourself forward.’

‘I asked you to dance.’

‘You know what I mean. Why?’

‘I’m … too big. It’s not safe.’

Not safe anywhere, till he came to Cahokia.

‘So you’re always cautious? Always careful? Always holding back? In case you’re too much?’

‘I guess.’

‘As if no-one could ever want all of you. That seems sad.’

‘It’s all right. I’m used to it.’

‘But what if I do want all of you? Your strength too? What if I think it’s not too much?’

‘Yeah?’

Dark eyes looking into his. Her fingers back again.

‘Yes. Don’t be my pussycat. Be my thunderstorm.’

‘I thought we’d done that already.’

‘You let me make the running, both times. Come and get me, now. I’m yours, too.’

‘You sure?’

‘I promise you won’t break me,’ she said. ‘So – give – me—’

He did.447

‘Are you whole now?’ she gasped, when her mouth was free again. ‘Are you?’

He grunted agreement. He roared agreement. And the Moon rose over him, and showed him wonders.

*

Later yet. Couma’s head on his shoulder. Barrow slack with happiness.

‘You’re going to go and make music?’

‘That’s the plan. Concert in Jackson tomorrow, studio the day after.’

‘Will you send me the record?’

‘If you want me to.’

‘I wish I could hear you play again.’

‘Well, I don’t think I have it in me to go all the way downstairs to your piano and play you the blues naked.’

‘I like that idea.’

‘Nope.’

‘But I command you to. I’m a princess.’

‘Tough.’

She laughed into his shoulder.

‘We’re sure to be back here one day. You can hear me then.’

‘I don’t think that’s—’

‘—a good idea. No. Well, I’ll just have to imagine you at the back of the crowd, wherever I go. At a table of your own. Wearing black. Out of the bright lights. Real discreet.’

‘And whenever I’m at an exceptionally boring meeting, or speaking to a crowd, or attending an opening, I’ll pretend that you’re there, just out of sight, hat pulled down, nursing a cigarette behind a pillar. The only man there who knows I’m a woman and not a statue.’

‘Who knows what you look like when all the chic clothes are removed.’448

‘A bag of bones.’

‘Beautiful. But you should eat more, you want those fifty years.’

He played his way down her spine in thirds. She yawned.

‘Could you sleep?’ he said.

‘I could,’ she said, and yawned again. ‘I believe I really could. But I don’t want to, because then the night will be over. Ino—’

‘Tastanagi?’

‘No, you are not my warrior. You are my secret. You are my man.’

‘For tonight.’

‘For tonight. I need to make the most of you. So I am going to make love to you ten more times.’

‘Is that right? I got to break it to you, there are certain, uh, limits to the male anatomy.’

‘Ten times at least. Maybe a hundred more times.’

‘Ah-huh?’

‘In just a minute. When I open my eyes.’

‘Okay. No hurry.’

‘Ino mokla,’ she said, hardly moving her lips.

‘What’s mokla?’

‘… “friend”.’

‘Ino mokla,’ repeated Barrow, but her breaths were slowing, had slowed, into the steady rhythm of unconsciousness. The Moon had set. Her dark lashes lay still on her cheeks. With a foot and a hand on the side of him she wasn’t lying on, he got hold of one of the covers, and drew it up by patient inches to wrap them both. And then, until he slept himself, he looked at her.449

449

SATURDAY

452

My joy was unbounded when, after two years alone, I saw the ship approaching upon the river, and understood that the Compania had shared in my judgement of the opportunity here, and had dispatched all that was needful to make our mission thrive. Deo gratias, I cried inwardly, and still cry. So delighted was I, and so busy upon the river shore with the unloading of all that I had asked for – tools, instruments of music, a printing press, brothers able to impart the skills of using and copying all these things – that I did not pay sufficient attention to the arrival of what neither I nor the Prince of the city had requested: a gentleman with a warrant from His Catholic Majesty’s Viceroy to be governor, and ten musketeers to enforce the warrant. These marched away, alone, towards the city. When I followed an hour later, I discovered the musketeers disarmed and bound, and the supposed governor dead. His body was soaking wet. I was told he had unfortunately drowned in one of the fishponds. I set off in search of the Prince, to expatiate with him upon the black sinfulness of murder. But I was accosted on the way by his sister, a woman with whom I have had little to do, for she is young, and forward in manner. Father (said she), is it not true that the men of your Order serve in many parts of the world as confessors to the powerful? I agreed, a little impatiently, that this was so. And in that capacity (she continued) do they not hear sometimes of actions done for the peace of the state, without personal malice, without any element of animal passion, which in other situations, and in regard to other men or women, would be accounted great sins, and great crimes moreover? I agreed that this was so. And are those princes then told that in these cases they have not sinned? I was obliged to agree that it was so. You wish me, I said, to bear this in mind when approaching your brother. I was not speaking of him, she answered.

Sebastian Villanova SJ to the Father Provincial of the Mexican Province, 1608 (Jesuit Relations vol. XXVII, North American Missions III: Cahokia)

4531

Light steps along the sidewalk away from Couma’s house. The drained and happy body, with its tender spots where she’d bitten him. He knew how Drummond would describe this state but he didn’t want any words that were less bright, less clarified, than these steps along the paving stones of a city just waking up. Some wordless music, please. There was a case for something rich and slow and sonorous, to match the purple shadows under the Union Avenue elevated, where the rust spots on the girders glowed like gold coins. His inner Dolphus raised a clarinet. But no, not right. Today he needed the tinkle of pure form. He needed Joplin’s walk into joy. Meditative but not slow; the sound of the world in deft order, flowing as if the left hand and right hand only had to shake the beauty out. His head struck up the ‘Rose Leaf Rag’.

He expected that a time would come when he would miss this terribly. Miss his single moment with Couma; miss what had just ended. Someday, when the night of wonders was far away in memory, he would probably long to be able to go back to it. But he couldn’t miss it now, when he was carrying the happiness of it in his whole body. When it ran through, it filled him, vein by vein, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, from the soles of his feet to the graze on his scalp. Now, what he felt was free. She had freed him by giving him this gift. It could not be repeated, but it could not be relinquished either. He was one self, in one skin, but he could do anything, it felt like, go anywhere. From this morning forward many possible lives branched out, and all of them his own.

She had been gone when he awoke, which he’d thought might be the case, and when there was a tap on the bedroom door and he went to answer it wrapped in a sheet, it had been the housekeeper standing there, holding out a cup of strong coffee steaming 454on a tray, and pointing the way to the bathroom. ‘She gone to confession,’ said the housekeeper. She was grinning at him as if he had done well in giving Couma a lot to confess. It was a country grin, like the ones on the cackling old lady out in the fields and her daughters, but this time not mocking; approving. ‘You want drive?’ she said, when he emerged a little later dressed and steamed and cleaned. The juices and stains of last night washed off the outside of him, but the fact of it filling him up, up, up. ‘Nah, I’m good,’ he’d said, wanting to feel the morning direct, to step out into it with nothing between him and the soft, kind, elastic air.

And he had. And he did. He strolled through the waking city as if he were its lover and not just Couma’s. He was leaving it like he was leaving her, but it didn’t make any difference to the way he looked at it right now. The birds were singing in the iron-ringed trees on the sidewalks – trees swelling with the buds that would be leaves. The smell of gasoline in the air was spicy and full of promise. A passing streetcar crackled blue. The light put a dusty bloom on the stones like the skin of a plum. Everything he saw, he packed away in the suitcase of his heart. He was Thrown-Away Boy, and that was how he possessed things. He had played his part in the city’s story. He had worn its mask. He had fought its battles. (He had carried its nuns.) He had found his way to brotherhood with Lodge Boy. He had opened the box at the city’s heart, and found it contained a secret, and a dark one, a grim sacrifice, but not a snake or a scorpion, not anything beyond the reach of the hope that every morning upholds hearts and cities. And now he was free to go. The city was done with him. Lodge Boy must stay, but Thrown-Away Boy was a wanderer.

The delicate walk of the ‘Rose Leaf’ played on, seeking and finding, seeking and finding. He had plenty of time. It was eight o’clock on a Saturday morning on the threshold of spring. The westbound Usunhiyi had not yet gone by – it ran an hour later at the weekend 455– but there was already activity on the streets. A hum of breakfast smells and chatter came from the Quarters to his left, and parties of takouma in holiday clothes and a holiday mood were ambling along in the same direction as him, down from the Northside for the grand festival Mass on the Plaza that had been in preparation all week. Some were walking along in families and extended families, children held by the hand; some made organised little columns, with a parish banner at their head for them to follow. The embroidered silks rippled and shivered in the morning air. It was going to be a blue and white day, with bright sky and puffball clouds rolling across from the east, but between the buildings there was still shade.

It seemed only right, it seemed only natural, that as he reached Grant Square and the fingers on his mind’s piano reached the end of ‘Rose Leaf’ and moved up-tempo into the ‘Maple Leaf’ – more Joplin, faster Joplin, bouncing higher – the tempo of the street should up-shift too. A streetcar hissed to a halt and out boiled a little army of kids from Blessed Thomas Neta, the boys in the letter jackets jostling and joshing in time, the white socks of the girls twinkling across the asphalt in time, in time. Beyond the glazed tunnel, in the takouma half of the square, the separate streams of people were flowing together into tributaries, coming in from north and south and west, and then as they passed under the Arch into one river, heading for the Plaza. He seemed to be the only person not going that way. A group passing by recognised him, probably from his picture in the paper, and pointed, and waved, and lifted their hats, and called out an invitation. But he smiled and shook his head, having no hat to raise, and went on his way alone, and content to be so, with just one farewell glance up at the angels overhead. The stone faces had a complacent look this morning. Smug doves. As if to say: not so miserable now, huh?

It was quiet in the park. Dew on the grass. Quiet in his mind, too, after the last galloping chord. A pair of taklousa geezers in old 456Legion greatcoats were setting up a chessboard between them on a bench. The damp vegetable smell of last night was present again and stronger, pooling in the sappy shade under trees which wouldn’t be bare much longer, gathering force as the great engine of the year turned. And now he was in it too. No irony, no watching from outside as everything else began to grow. He, with the happy ache in his eyes as the sunlight brightened and the loose muscles of a body well used, had done his share for the spring. Seeds planted. Maybe. He lit a smoke to taste the tobacco, took two drags, felt almost dizzy at the richness, flipped it away between finger and thumb. Did a slow spin on one heel. One of the chess-players shook his head. Oh, the folly of the young. Suddenly Barrow was hungry. Rumbling-hollow-in-the-pit-of-the-belly hungry. He looked at his watch. Eight twenty. He could get some breakfast before the train.

2

‘Well look at you,’ said Lydia Lee, sitting over coffee at her kitchen table. She studied his face through the steam. ‘Guess I don’t have to ask who got lucky last night.’

‘I got a stupid smile on?’

‘You look happy, Joe. It’s sweet.’

‘Dolphus about?’

‘Oh, they-all are gone. On the steamboat last night, for their last show, and they took all their trunks and shit over there with ’em so they don’t haveta move ’em twice. They said they’d see you at the station.’

‘You mind if I throw some bacon in the pan before I grab my case and go?’

‘Be my guest.’457

She watched him fry four slices and a couple of eggs sunnyside up. Then set down, elbows out, to wolf it up, cleaning off the yolk in yellow swathes with a hunk of bread.

‘Should I ask who the lady is?’

‘Nope.’

‘Seems to have given you an appetite, anyways.’

‘Yep.’

‘Gentleman never tells, huh. Fair enough. Oh – before I forget, there was a letter for you came yesterday.’

She reached an arm out and plucked a thin blue envelope off the top of the breadbox.

‘For me? Who’d write to me?’

‘Open it and find out, darlin’.’

It contained a single sheet of writing paper, folded over. On it was written:

Well Joe old partner, looks like it’s me all on my lonesome taking that ride to the Golden State. I hope you think of me sometimes under those orange trees, leading the easy life. I hope you do. I guess I’m mean enough to wish that it’s raining on you when you do, and then you feel a little sorry you didn’t come along. I did try to cut you in. But that’s it for meanness, from me, because what I want to tell you other ways is, no hard feelings. I’m not holding none for you, I mean. I don’t regret the decisions I’ve took, but I truly am regretful that I’m leaving you behind tomorrow when that train whistle blows. You been the best friend I ever had, best partner too, till you gave in to that old conventional wisdom. You wouldn’t open your mind to the big possibilities for us, but you looked out for me. I think maybe you were right about the pep pills too. I better cut them out when I’ve reached my hammock in the sunshine. Well so long with all good and friendly wishes from, giving you the whole mouthful

Phineas Ephraim Kane Drummond

458‘Shit,’ said Barrow.

‘Your happy face just disappeared,’ said Lydia. ‘Bad news?’

‘Shit. I don’t know. I got to check something at the station; I’m going anyway, so I better – where’d I put my case?’

‘In the hallway.’

—‘Okay. Lydia, Lydia, you been a doll – kindness itself – refuge from the storm, but I gotta—’

‘Go!’

I won’t run, he said to himself. I been running all week. But he went down the stairs so fast it barely qualified as a walk, through the dark and empty speak, through the storefront where Lydia’s man Deakins was pretending to sell ice, and out onto Loyola. As chance would have it, out in front of a taxi, into which he threw himself and the case. It was eight forty-five. The Usunhiyi would be in, by now, but not gone out again. The station stop at Cahokia Central was round about twenty-five minutes. Time enough to take a quick look on board for a fleeing ex-dick with a murder warrant out on him. If the traffic permitted. Oh Phin, Phin. Damn you. Just when he was getting out clean and easy.

The cabbie went round the westward way, over to Division and up. Avoiding the crowds making for the Plaza, Barrow supposed was the idea. But even over the line between the takouma and takata cities, some processional thickening was going on in the roadway, as the last pulse of Mass-goers hurried east for the 9 a.m. beginning of the service. Taklousa Catholics up from Darktown with their parish banners, tentative takata following their priest in from somewhere way out in the burbs, the final rush to the Plaza from the pious Northside blocking things up ahead.

By Grant Square, it got so thick Barrow paid off the cab and pushed forward on foot. Everyone was hurrying, the streetcars stationary islands in the flow, unable to move for people, and yet since he was trying to go even faster than the speed of the crowd, he was 459constantly excusing himself as he squeezed through, by, ahead. A couple more times he caused double-takes and startled smiles as people realised the big fellow forging past in the windowpane suit was yesterday’s hero from the front pages. He felt he was dragging a furrow of fluster and recognition behind him. The tunnel under Union Station was a river of faces, cheerful babble ringing from every tile.

It was a relief to reach the stairs and to step sideways and away from it all. Up the four turns to the booking hall, it became only a lazy Saturday morning again, the hubbub falling behind the pleating stonework, halving and halving again. Peace, comparative peace on the great floor where the stained-glass dome above projected the trailing garden of colours. Barrow’s watch said eight fifty-eight. He looked up at the mechanical indicator board under the mosaic where the track numbers were listed – so nearly just a traveller among other travellers doing the same, and, he swore, about to be, in just a few more minutes, nothing but a traveller. He found both the Usunhiyi on Track 1 and the Jackson train listed for Track 6.

A shallow ramp led downward to the trains, for the Union Station’s high central crown of steel and stone actually sat one level above the rails themselves, with a long arcade of girdered glass extending out on both sides, far enough to cover even the longest expresses. At the gate he showed his ticket for Jackson, and hesitated. Track 6 was a right turn, Track 1 was left. Did he have to do this? Did he have to do any more of this? He sighed and turned left. He had about ten minutes to look over the Usunhiyi, before it pulled out. If Drummond was there he would … what? He would extract him, hand the mad bastard to the station authorities and still be in time for the Jackson train. Yes.

Suitcase in hand he jogged down the slope to where the grey-and-gold cars waited, airbrakes leaking a gentle hiss, a perfume of hot tar and coal smoke drifting from the distant leviathan of the 460locomotive. He had only ever seen the train in motion, and in the distance. Up close and at rest, it was vast. Car after car after car lettered TRANS-CONTINENT, stretching both ways from the lamplit section under the booking hall, out to the very ends of the glass roof. Elegance to the vanishing point. Unsearchably much of it, he realised, in ten minutes, and instantly the thought was in his head: if you can’t search it all, why search any?

He swung himself stubbornly up the nearest steps at the nearest car-end and began anyway. Instantly, he was in the long, narrow, luxurious domain of the Pullman Company, wealth’s travelling township, as rich as the carpeted precincts of the Union Club but lighter and more modern. Rosewood foyers led to receding arches, square and grey and fitted with golden lamps, between which what would be curtained berths by night folded down by day into paired armchairs. Equally instantly, an attendant had appeared at his elbow, middle-aged, taklousa, deferential but insistent.

‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. ‘You riding with us today?’

No shade of audible incredulity in the voice, but a challenge all the same. Barrow’d thought he looked pretty smooth in the blue windowpane suit. Perhaps it was the sewn-up eyebrow and the collection of scratches that were the problem. If he was too rough for the Usunhiyi, could Phin really be passing himself off here, with his hand infected, wearing whatever he had on after two nights on the lam?

‘Cahokia PD,’ said Barrow, though he wasn’t any more and had no badge to show. ‘Just running a quick check for a fugitive. I’ll be gone before you pull out.’

‘Yessir, but—’ the attendant began, with a puzzled glance at the case the proclaimed policeman was holding. Barrow had no time. He strode off up the car, peering at faces. The bedding had been put away, but the California-bound passengers were still in the throes of adjusting to the morning. Night-dresses and pyjamas were being 461folded into luggage, people were strolling back from the shower-room at the car-end with toothbrushes and facecloths in hand, coffee was being drunk, fresh newspapers just brought aboard were being shaken open with a decisive air. The travellers were mother-and-daughter pairs from Westchester County, lawyers from DC with neat little moustaches, ball-bearing manufacturers from Cincinnati who’d boarded in the middle of the night. All of them were white, but that was about all they had in common with Drummond. They were from the white East, and though they were riding a train owned by takouma capital, it startled them to have a large brown man push by, staring at them from close to with no lubricating deference.

No Drummond. It was the same in the next car, with the difference that here the attendant was takouma, probably on the higher shift-rate to compensate him for a journey to the land of the dead, and instead of challenging Barrow, recognised him and wanted to follow him up the car expressing admiration. ‘Yeah, yeah, thanks,’ said Barrow and kept moving. By now he was out from under the darkness of the station’s centre, and the view out of the long windows was of the bright blue and white sky, and of the city’s roofs and towers, as seen through the glass skin arched above the tracks. The girders of the glass roof laid down regular stripes of shadow. A few takouma travellers in this car, just boarded and still stowing cases, on their way to the Dinetah or the Coast. But all very respectable. A parade of yawning faces, curious faces, offended faces, indifferent faces – but none of them belonging to a cartoon-faced murderer in two days of stubble, with a bandaged hand. Perhaps if he’d climbed on the train at the other end he’d have found some kind of steerage section, where you could look like a bum inconspicuously. But it didn’t seem likely. The Usunhiyi was all-Pullman, a top-of-the-line service.

How had Sammy Noukouwa ridden the Usunhiyi to LA without being the focus of continual stares and glares, he was starting 462to wonder, when he got to the answer in the next car but one. Not less luxury, but more. That next rosewood foyer gave on to, not the familiar vista of grey arches, but a car of private cabins, a gold-trimmed grey corridor up one side of the train with the gold-handled doors of staterooms along it at intervals. Noises of departure were starting to build, out on the trackside.

‘All aboard!’ a conductor was carolling. ‘Trans-Continent Express for Kansas City! Dinetah! South Deseret! Ransom City! Robinson! Los Angeles! All aboard now, please!’

Desperately, Barrow started trying doors. Any of them could have Drummond concealed behind their inlay and veneer. But most were locked, and there was no time to hammer on them, to finesse his lack of badge and demand entry.

‘Sir,’ said the latest attendant. ‘Sir! You really can’t do that!’

One door that opened, opened on an old lady sitting bolt upright, being read to by a wispy secretary-type. Another, on complete darkness reeking of brandy. Another on a takata in his fifties, grave and sombre of face, completely and immaculately dressed except for a lack of pants, injecting himself in the thigh with a glass syringe. And that was the whole car, or all he could view of it.

‘Sir! Sir!’

‘All aboard!’

Whistles blew from the trackside. The train gave a preliminary jolt.

He barrelled through the concertina-folds of rubber connecting into the next rosewood foyer, and found the way blocked by what looked like a whole takata family standing in the corridor outside their stateroom door. Two teenage girls in sailor dresses, a young man in tweeds, an older woman of harried beauty; all of them pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions, judging by the glimpse of monogrammed but battered luggage, gun cases and butterfly nets visible behind them. White Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it. They were gesticulating anxiously 463at one of their number who was still outside on the platform, book in hand, demonstratively finishing a cigarette.

‘Vovka, montes-toi! Montes!’ one of the girls was calling.

The Vovka in question, a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis-shoes, performed his last exhale through pursed, precise lips, and turned back to the train steps with a big-brotherly smile. At the same moment, the Usunhiyi jolted again, and this time began a slow forward glide.

Damn. Well, he had done what he could. Barrow backed in a hurry to the door himself, to find the step blocked by the Russian boy swinging himself insouciantly up.

‘Sorry, gotta get off,’ he said.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said the Russian, speaking a cut-glass British English, and squootched over. Outside on the platform, the bars of shadow cast by the girders overhead were in slow motion, wheeling slightly like spokes from the curvature of the roof.

Barrow knew he should hop down immediately but he lingered to say, ‘Hey, you been out there the whole station stop?’

‘Yes?’

‘You maybe see anyone getting on, looking kinda rough, with a bandaged hand?’

‘Heavens!’ said Vovka. ‘What a tale of blood and thunder it seems we have strayed into the margins of. – But no, I’m sorry, no bandaged man.’

Outside, the vista of the city through the wall of glass was inching into ominous parallax, the near buildings shifting against the further ones, the whole toy theatre of Cahokia beginning to slide into motion, as if the whole thing were flats mounted on castors and, if he waited a single second longer, it might all disassemble itself and fly apart. The bars of shadow were passing flick – flick – flick.

‘You’ll be fine,’ said the Russian, seeing him estimate the jump. ‘Just be running as you land. Give me your case; I’ll throw it to you.’ 464

Barrow jumped with his legs galloping, lurched on landing but didn’t trip, ran on alongside the accelerating train, through flickering shadow and bright sun quickly alternating. As quickly alternating as if a thumb were being run over the pages of one of those little trick books for kids where mere motion unites the intermittent bird with the intermittent cage.

The Russian tossed the case, with some spin on it for stability. A flittering local whirl of light on the leather side, within the black-bright whirling of the world. Wham: caught. Barrow stopped running. The Russian, laughing, suddenly receding, raised a hand before he pulled shut the sleeping-car door. He shouted something, a salute or maybe just an appreciation of the scene. The chessboard alternations of the light, the steel and the steam of the twentieth century, the running man with the history of the continent in his face. Drumbeat America! he cried. Dreamboat America. Dream-bright America. Something like that.

The rest of the cars of the Usunhiyi flew past Barrow, poured past him, ribbon-smooth with pounding wheels, and were gone. The glass roof rang and roared with it, and then the noise of its passage subsided into the ordinary station murmur of voices and clanks and hissing steam. And across the gap where the Usunhiyi had been, Barrow could see now all the way over to Track 6 where, it being nine fifteen, Dolphus and the band were standing with a mound of trunks and instrument cases, good and early for the Jackson train. The hem of Alma’s silver fish-scale performing dress winked under her fur coat.

His future, waiting for him. He set off to join it, back to the ramp and up and over and down. Well, he thought, as he moseyed over with a deliberate lack of rush, he had tried. If Drummond had been aboard, he hadn’t found him. Probably, he hadn’t been anyway. Really, why would he be? Except for the speed, a top-of-the-line luxury train was not a sensible way for a fugitive to leave 465town. Fixed in place aboard the cars till he arrived, travelling on one known route, leaving from one known location. Much better to spend some of Vanderberg’s money on a second-hand auto and to sneak away on the back roads. But then, why had he talked in the letter about ‘taking that ride’, and mentioned train whistles?

Barrow, on his way down to Track 6, stopped walking. Why had Drummond written to him, and near as dammit, informed him he would be exiting on a particular train, at a particular place and time? This was someone who had been betrayed two days ago by the person he was writing to, and knew it. Someone who had chemical assistance in staying in a state of twitchy suspicion. Why would that person provide a convenient and specific and almost-explicit tip-off to their betrayer as to their next move? Drummond wouldn’t know that Barrow was headed to the station anyway, was leaving town himself. He wouldn’t know Barrow had turned in his badge. He’d think he was writing to a cop. Maybe it was the milk of human kindness at work, or some drug-scrambled version thereof, urging Drummond to put his forgiveness in writing. But that didn’t sound like Phin, even Phin with a headful of pills. Maybe—

An alternative unfolded in Barrow’s mind. The other reason you’d tell someone who wanted to catch you that you were going to be somewhere at a certain time, was to make sure that they were there at that time. There, and not elsewhere. Phin wanted him to be at the station so he wouldn’t be … where? Doing what? Paying attention to what? Paying attention to the one big thing happening in the city this morning. And to this first dire thought, others added themselves, stars in a dire constellation. The possibility that Drummond hadn’t finished doing what Vanderberg had paid for. Vanderberg mentioning the little pellet of lead that would put the Man’s skull in a museum. What Phin had been in the war.

He walked the rest of the way down. Dolphus, natty in a Homburg and a dark coat, had seen him coming and was smiling. Welcome on 466all their faces, in fact. Dutch and Alma and Stukeley and Willie, glad to see him, glad to begin the seven or eight hours with him of card-playing and signifying and mutual insult and shooting the musical breeze together on the way to Mississippi. He’d been a visitor, a guest sitting in. Now he’d be more. He’d be coming onto the inside. There was his future, in front of him, paces away. All he had to do to claim it – was nothing. I want to be able to think of you being safe and happy. Well, there it was. The chance of just that. The promise of the morning fulfilled, in a life leading who-knew-where in the years to come when he was living in the music.

The trouble was it went both ways. To leave, he needed to know that Couma was all right too. Maybe not happy, though he hoped there’d be some joy in there for her from time to time, among the guilt and the duty and the endurance. But safe was non-negotiable. He couldn’t turn away unless he knew he left her breathing, walking, talking, living, safe from harm among her poets and her counsellors. She had to be there. At the heart of the heart. At the core of the world. At the centre of the compass, with north and south and east and west taking their directions from her.

‘You made it!’ said Dolphus.

‘Mister Hero,’ said Alma, dimpling. ‘Saw you in the newspaper.’

‘Looked like you been through my mama’s mangle’ – Dutch.

‘Still,’ said Willie, ‘you on the front page. Oh, we gonna have to be po-lite to you now.’

Stukeley just smiled.

‘Yeah,’ said Barrow. ‘But … before I come along it turns out I got to go see about something.’

‘What?’ said Dolphus. ‘No. Everything you got to see about’s right here.’

‘I mean I’m coming,’ Barrow said. ‘I really am. Look – take my case, put it in with the rest, okay. Worse comes to the worst, I’ll just be on the next train.’467

‘Don’t do this, man,’ said Dolphus.

‘I’ll come find you. Wilhelmina Theater on Revels Avenue, right? No big deal.’

3

One more hasty transit through streets eerily empty again, and twenty minutes later he was climbing the stairs of the damn Land Trust building. The power to the elevator was off and he didn’t have the neat little standard key required to set it going any more, so it was up and round, up and round, on the smooth brown stairs that surrounded the bronze bars of the elevator shaft. Inside, the Latin from the loudspeakers on the Plaza was hushed. He’d been hearing it all the way, bouncing off the buildings, filtering through wires and fire escapes, right the way down from the Aztec Syrup sign to the purple shadows. Audi filia, et vide, et inclina aurem tuam: quia concupivit rex speciem tuam … Recognisably the hoarse voice of the cardinal, amplified to city-size. He didn’t understand a word, but so long as the voice kept calmly singing, the thing he feared was going to happen could not have happened yet. Up and round. Up and round. The Trust smelled of fresh floor soap. A long ray of sun descended from the clean glass of the skylight up on the tenth floor, where Fred Hopper’s blood had all been scrubbed away. In the sunbeam, dust motes dawdled, having the lazy Saturday morning he’d thought he was having himself. Up and round. Up and round.

For a moment, when he came out onto the roof and into the bright light and the full sound of the Mass again, he thought he’d gotten it wrong.

There, from the top of the tower, level with the summit of the Mound a hundred feet away, he could see the whole vista of the Plaza beyond. It was filled from edge to edge, the human sea into 468which all the rivers of Mass-goers had poured, from the Quarters and beyond. There they all were in their thousands and thousands, standing with their banners, faces as small as rice grains. There were all the silk flags of the city’s parishes, there was the old harp standard of St Patrick’s Brigade with the patrikiotaks’ Hibernian Order standing under it in plaids green as emerald, there were the Jesuits and the Loreto Sisters, there were the massed ward captains of the Radical Party in their round straw hats with Mayor Lakna at the front of them, there were the officers of the Legion carrying both the new flag of Cahokia the state and the former flag of Cahokia the nation. There even, off to one side, was the red hammer emblem of the Workers’ Party, with Bessa’s boys holding the poles of a not very religious banner reading HANDS OFF THE NST. And everywhere, seeded through the crowd, the little foursomes of the Four Winds Societies were standing close, four coloured specks in a row again and again, but beneath the masks bodies in farmers’ denim, waitresses’ black and white, business suits, clergy robes, cannery overalls, tea gowns, the uniforms of mail carriers and streetcar conductors and sleeping-car attendants. And all of these people, takouma and taklousa and takata, with naked rice-grain faces or faces of painted wood, were looking towards the place on the Plaza side of the Mound from which the cardinal’s voice was coming. It was the part of the scene – the only part of the scene – out of sight from the tower-top, with all the mighty mass of earth and turf in between. The Plaza gates to the Mound had been thrown open for the feast day, and halfway up it on the far side, a procession from the cathedral must have ascended, with deacons and altar boys and incense and a singing choir, to an open-air altar prepared there. And somewhere there at the focus of things, Barrow had no doubt that the Man and Couma would be waiting. She will join me on the Mound, the Man had said last night. On the top of the Mound, he had meant, on the highest point where nobody was 469allowed to stand except the Man of the Sun, and now the soon-to-be Woman of the Sun. Yes, they must be very close, near the hidden altar, waiting to receive on the city’s behalf the church’s gift of holiness, its remedy for blood and cruelty; waiting then to do the other holy thing the city required, and to climb the rest of the way to the summit, where the dry yellow grass was beginning to colour with new green. Such an easy target, Barrow had suddenly seen, for a gunman up here. No house or palace to batter a path into, no guards. Just two unprotected bodies against the sky, two bullets to aim, to extinguish the powers of the tamaha in favour of Vanderberg’s world.

Now he was here, bursting out of the doorway onto the tarpaper roof, his gaze flying everywhere to take in the scene, and there was no gunman on the roof of the Land Trust building. No sniper’s nest. No blanket to lie on. No Winchester-made P14 with a couple of .303 cartridges ready loaded.

But that, he discovered one second later, was because all of these things were on the next roof along. Phin was set up on top of the next of the Three Sisters – the Water Trust, not the Land Trust. He rolled over on the blanket – something pained in the motion – when he saw the figure in his peripheral vision, and swung the rifle barrel Barrow’s way. Then lowered it when he saw who it was.

‘Shee-it,’ he cried. ‘You worked this out, and all. Well, nearly.’

He got up, and limped over to the near edge of his roof, rifle in hand.

The choir out of sight on the other side of the Mound sang Sanctus, sanctus, and the whole crowd on the Plaza joined in. Sanctus dominus deus sabaoth. A huge rumble of organised sound. They all knew the tune – had sung it every Sunday, Barrow supposed. All the tiny mouths of the rice-grain faces opening and shutting together. O’s and eclipses by turns everywhere, even under the Workers’ Party hammer.470

Drummond looked as bad as Barrow had imagined, and then some. Stubble, yes, and slept-in clothes, but also a dead-white face gleaming with sweat, and shadows under his eyes dark enough that the skull seemed to be pushing out beneath the funny-pages skin. The fingers of the bandaged hand, the one not holding the gun, were a dull purple, webbed with red. He smelled bad, even across the gap between the buildings. He twitched. Yet a ghost of a goofy smile was on his face, and it wasn’t just Phin’s derisive old sarcasm, directed at the fuck-ups and inconveniences of life. He was also just glad to see him.

‘You shouldn’ta sent me the letter, you didn’t want me to know,’ said Barrow. ‘You always did underestimate me. More like a pet than a partner, that’s how you treated me.’

‘Hey!’ said Drummond. ‘No fair. You showed me you don’t want no part in this, so I done my best to keep you out, that’s all.’

‘Well, I’m in it. And I can’t let you do this.’

‘Let me?’ said Drummond. ‘Let me? I don’t rightly see how you’re gonna stop me. You’re there and I’m here. You detectorised yourself the wrong rooftop, Sherlock. You gonna shoot me? I don’t think so. I know you.’

Maybe not as well as all that, Barrow thought. But no, he definitely wasn’t going to shoot Phin, on account of being completely unarmed.

‘So though it’s a treat to lay my baby blues upon you, big man, and I mean that, I reckon you should go back down them stairs again now, ’fore you see something that’s liable to upset you.’

‘Not gonna happen,’ said Barrow. ‘Phin, think about this—’

‘Hell, I could always shoot you, you know.’

‘No, you couldn’t. It’s pretty loud over there, but they’d hear a rifle shot for sure.’

‘True,’ said Drummond, with the grin again. ‘Well, you can spectate if you insist. You ain’t gonna like it, that’s all.’471

He sketched a salute and turned away to his blanket and his firing position.

‘Phin!’

‘Duty calls,’ said Drummond, without looking back.

The Plaza had stopped singing, and there was a kind of huge, intent hush over there now. Barrow had no idea what that meant in terms of the progress of the Mass, and therefore how imminent the appearance of Couma and the Man could be. It didn’t seem like a wise plan to take the time to run down the Land Trust’s ten flights of stairs, bull in through the doors of Water, and run up the ten flights there. But the alternative—

He looked over the edge. The alley separating Land and Water was a good dozen feet wide, and it went down abyssally deep, ten storeys into the morning shadow, a narrow canyon with trash cans dim at the bottom. Looking into it made his stomach lurch. He cast around on the Land Trust rooftop for something, anything with bridge-building properties, and there was a piece of board, lying on the tarpaper by the skylight, with a bucket and rags on top. It was much too short, of course it was. He snatched it up all the same, and laid it as a ramp up to the balustrade round the roof-edge.

Now Phin was looking back to see what he was doing.

‘You’re kidding,’ he said.

Barrow wished he was. My train, he thought. My futures. My freedom. The Wilhelmina Theater on Revels Avenue. ‘Red, Black and Blue’ on the Gennett label. Then he thought of Couma, near on the other side of the Mound and at this moment breathing, thinking, feeling, perhaps praying. Air in her lungs. Blood in her veins. Fifty years ahead of her, if she remembered to eat. A spark of a new person taking hold inside her too, perhaps. Life. Life first, music later. A silvery bell rang, amplified through the speakers, and he pelted across the width of the Land Trust roof, up the short incline of the board, got the pacing and placing of his feet right to 472push off at full speed with full force from the brick edge of the balustrade. And leapt.

For an instant he was running in mid-air. Dream-bright America had dropped out beneath, held him no more with its chasms and sharp edges, its dreams and its hopes and its injuries. Over him was the blue and white rushing sky. Then he slammed into the balustrade round the edge of Water’s roof, chest high, and was just able to get his arms over the top to hold him before he fell. This time he’d broken some ribs for sure; he’d felt things crack as he hit. He dangled. It hurt like crazy, but the terror of the drop beneath him, the mad abandon of the leap, pumped him with adrenalin. Enough, since there was no choice now, to override the pain and lift, and heave, and swing a leg up, and force muscle to do what bones didn’t want to. Phin was standing over him, neither helping nor trying to pry him off the building: just staring, and shaking his head with a kind of awe. The silvery bell rang again, and Barrow tumbled over onto the Water Trust roof at Drummond’s feet. Oremus, said the cardinal’s voice, enormous, and led the crowd into a Pater noster roughened by French cigarettes. Sed libera nos a malo, agreed the crowd.

‘And you make out like I’m the crazy one,’ said Phin. ‘That was plain plumb lunacy, big man. What’ve they done to you? What’ve they done, that you’ll pull a stunt like that just to fuck things up for me?’

‘You’re the one fucked up my big exit, you cracker nutball,’ said Barrow, levering himself painfully to his feet. ‘I’d be gone, if it wasn’t for you.’

‘What?’ said Drummond, backing. ‘Whaddaya mean?’

Agnus dei, sang the crowd, qui tollis peccata mundi.

‘I quit the department. I had a ticket for the Jackson train this morning. I had a whole other life lined up.’

‘You’re not a cop any more? Then what are you even doin’ here? They are using you, big man. I cain’t tell if you been converted or 473seduced, but the Injuns on the other side of that hill – they are using you.’

Of course they were. Couma and the Man used anyone and everyone who was willing. He had been used himself, last night. He was perfectly clear about that. But that was only half the truth. You could do something for two reasons and have both of them be true. His body was no longer brim-full of happiness, but it still held that knowledge.

‘I am trying to stop you doing something that’s … that’s …’ Barrow couldn’t find the words. How can you explain evil if somebody doesn’t already get it? ‘That’s … like your nightmares, Phin. Don’t you see it? What you did to that poor little bastard on the glass roof over there – what you’re aiming to do now – it’s all just as bad as you having earth in your mouth, and your eyes, and your nose, and not being able to cough it out. Only you’re doing it to them. You’re the earth, Phin. You don’t wanna be the earth, do you?’

‘Oh,’ said Drummond. ‘Oh. I get you. But that’s okay. You don’t need to worry about this. This don’t matter.’ He winked confidingly. ‘Cause this is a dream, too. We ain’t awake, Joe. Fact, I’m not sure we’re even alive; I’m still thinkin’ on that one. But we definitely ain’t awake. All this is dreams, ugly and pretty, nice and nasty. I can do what I like and it don’t matter.’

‘No, Phin,’ said Barrow. ‘That’s wrong. We are awake and this does matter. All this is real, and you’re about to be a real asshole. You got to give me the gun now.’

‘No!’ said Drummond. ‘It’s such an easy shot. Such a perfect shot.’

‘In a nightmare.’

‘You won’t grudge a fellow a little fun, will you?’

Ecce agnus dei, said the cardinal’s voice, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi. Domine, non sum dignus, the crowd replied, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. 474

‘Tell you what,’ said Barrow. ‘You give me the gun, you can go. I’m not a cop. You can just walk away down the stairs and I won’t follow you. How about that.’

Drummond had backed as far as his firing position.

‘Phin?’

His eyes were darting about.

‘Phin? What do you say? If you don’t give it to me, I’m gonna have to take it from you.’

‘Shit, don’t make me do this,’ said Drummond.

‘I’m not making you do anything,’ said Barrow, ‘but you got to give me the gun now.’

‘Hell, I don’t wanna,’ said Drummond. He dropped the rifle on the blanket and whipped out a knife from his coat with his good hand. A big one, a six-inch steel spike, probably what he’d used on Fred Hopper.

The rule was, you stepped up to a gun and stepped back from a knife. But he couldn’t afford to play a waiting game here. Barrow rushed him, going for the knife hand with both of his own. But Drummond always had been spider-quick in a brawl. As Barrow closed with him, he stuck him in the stomach with the blade. Deep in. Barrow felt the cold sharpness sink way into his guts, piercing and slicing. No time left for subtlety. He bear-hugged Drummond, pinioning his arms to his sides, and shook the blade from his hand that way. He gave the bandaged hand a crushing squeeze: Drummond howled, and something nasty dripped from the purple fingers. Then he picked him up, pinioned, while he had the strength, and walked him to the edge of the roof.

‘No! No! I don’t like this dream, Joe!’ cried Drummond, seeing what he was doing. ‘Don’t you feel nothing for me, big man?’

‘You know I do,’ said Barrow. ‘Phineas Ephraim Kane Drummond. But I can’t let you do this.’

Something like the old cynicism returned to Drummond’s face.475

‘I guess belonging’s a hell of a drug,’ he said.

‘It’s not about belonging,’ said Barrow. ‘It’s about love.’

He kissed Drummond on his sweat-sour forehead and threw him off the building.

*

Then he had to sit down. Well, to fall down. He sat propped against the brickwork, looking at the Mound. He watched the grasses stir, and watched the Man and Couma mount into view. The Man was wearing his astrakhan coat and his medal, just as Barrow had first seen him, with the addition of a thin circle of gold on his head. Couma was all in black, with a black-and-white shawl over her head artfully folded so that it made a white crescent on her forehead. She looked very beautiful. The choir and the crowd were all singing something or other, but he had ‘St James Infirmary’ in his head, and he listened to that. Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be. She can search this whole wide world over. She’ll never find another man like me. Stukeley on cornet. He would call for help in just a minute. His hands were wet where they held his stomach. Hoochy-coochy. Housha isishi. That’s a lot of blood. The Man was standing on the topmost point of the Mound, Couma beside him. The grass was turning green around his shoes. Through an arch of flowers, an arch of bread, an arch of bones, comes the spring. The horizon swayed dizzily, the city reeled around on every side, its towers and spires like a frieze of the zodiac, like the band of pictures turning on the side of a spinning top: and at the centre of it, with a gesture as casual as if he had just happened to lift his arms to stretch, the Man raised his long hands and took between his fingers, blazing and bright, the sun.

476

477

The House of Hashi

in the later 19th–early 20th centuries

478

Notes and Acknowledgements

It’s a point of honour for stories set in alternative histories that the branching point where the history departed from our own should be identified in the book itself. But I couldn’t do it here – not without giving Detective Barrow a long, plot-stopping conversation with Sister Peggy about immunology. So, for the record: what makes this altered America in this 1922 different is that, in this timeline, it was the variola minor or alastrim form of smallpox that came out of West Africa first, and was carried across the Atlantic in the ‘Columbian exchange’. Alastrim has a death rate of 1 per cent rather than 30 per cent and confers immunity after infection. As a result, the indigenous populations of North America sickened, when the Old World germs spread north from Mexico, but then recovered. They didn’t die back to create the depopulated, post-apocalyptic landscape discovered by later European settlers in our timeline. Instead, the culture persisted that De Soto observed on the banks of the Mississippi in the 1530s: the large towns, the dense populations of maize farmers. And the cycle of state formation that in our timeline had already seen the Cahokia site fill and empty once, from the 1100s to the 1300s, continued for another iteration. The city was peopled again, thriving again, by the time Father Villanova got there in 1603. The rest of the history is in the book. You may notice that thanks to the braking and blocking effect of the tamaha’s presence on the westward expansion of the United States, the further west you get in the world of the book, the more altered the political geography becomes. The Navajo Nation’s Dinetah is a state of the Union, the Mormons’ beehive republic of Deseret isn’t in the Union at all (yet), American Oregon has a Canadian province to the north of it called British Oregon, and 479the United States didn’t buy the Novaya Sibirskaya Territorii from the Tsar and turn it into Alaska.

The language of the city, Anopa, is a slightly altered version of the real Mobilian Trade Jargon. In our history, this was a lingua franca used up and down the Mississippi and across the wider south-east of the continent to allow speakers of the Muskogean family of languages, like Chickasaw and Choctaw and Creek, to talk to their neighbouring peoples, and then later to French and Spanish and English speakers. The last people to be familiar with it were elderly Native Americans in Louisiana in the 1980s. In the timeline of Cahokia Jazz however it evolved and expanded as pidgins do, to become something like a Swahili for the whole indigenous population of the continent’s centre. A synthetic, fully formed language, suitable for cultural nationalism and for Michael Casqui and Sister Peggy Iti to write modernist poetry in. You can find a meticulously reconstructed lexicon of the real MTJ in Emanuel J. Drechsel, ‘An Integrated Vocabulary of Mobilian Jargon, a Native American Pidgin of the Mississippi Valley’, Anthropological Linguistics, Summer 1996, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 248–354.

In our history, and I’m sure in the timeline of this story as well, Professor Alfred Kroeber did not remain a lonely widower. In 1926 he married Theodora Kracaw Brown, also widowed young, who had enrolled in his graduate anthropology seminar at Berkeley. He adopted her two sons, and with her had two more children, equally loved. His daughter Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, born in 1929, became a great American writer and creator of worlds. This book is dedicated to her memory. She wouldn’t necessarily approve of the foundation on which this particular ambiguous utopia stands. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ suggests not. But I remember Estraven explaining to Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness why the keystones of Erhenrang are always set in a red cement: ‘Without the blood bond the arch would fall, you see.’480

In our timeline, the record of the Society of Jesus in North America is chequered. The Jesuits of Maryland owned five slave plantations. The Jesuit missions of California were surrounded by far, far too many indigenous graves, the result of concentrating populations with little resistance to European diseases. Things went better, partly, in New France. But the state Fr Villanova helps build on the Mississippi is based on the genuinely impressive Jesuit missions of the Rio de la Plata in present-day Paraguay, where for a hundred years they maintained an armed, semi-autonomous polity for and with the Guaraní, fending off slavers, nurturing a literate, indigenous Catholic culture. In the case of the Cahokia reducción, Jesuit ideas of the ideal society have been modified by the local insistence on matriarchy alongside patriarchy, and the tamaha being safely out of reach of Spanish imperial power. I mean the city, though, to be a tribute to all that was good in the Jesuit embrace of indigenous peoples. No-one is pure, not one; all have fallen short of the glory. Yet faith, hope and charity persist. Iksho itala!

In our world too, the German chemist Lazar Edeleanu discovered C_9H_13N in 1887 and named it phenylisopropylamine. But his company did not make commercial use of it, and it was not launched into the American market until 1934, when Smith, Kline & French produced an inhaler of it under the brand name of Benzedrine. The chemical itself is now known as amphetamine, or in its C_10H_15N form as crystal meth. I think we can assume that Drummond was taking it in heroic doses.

Since I’m not a scholar of Jesuit history, disease history or indigenous languages, I am grateful for the writing and kind advice of those who are these things. In particular, for patient email counsel, I’d like to thank Professor Anne Ramenofsky, Professor Emanuel Drechsel, and Fr Thomas Flowers SJ. None of them are even slightly responsible for what I’ve done with their real-world knowledge and expertise.481

The anthropological puzzle would have been much less convincing if Dr Fenella Cannell, a real anthropologist, hadn’t pointed me to Handsome Lake, and to syncretism among the Seneca.

The book was read as I wrote it by five friends who received Barrow’s week in one-day instalments. Their intelligent pleasure, reactions and corrections have been – well, I think ‘essential’ isn’t too strong a word. Thanks to Alan Jacobs, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Knox, Stan Robinson and Bernice Martin, makers all, I wrote this mad thing in glorious company. I had extra help early on from China Miéville, who made an unspeakably useful suggestion, and after it was mostly done from Joe Hill: very kind purveyors of the weird and the terrifying, both of them. Alex Bowler edited it tactfully at Faber; Colin Harrison of Scribner looked at me sardonically, mentioned termites, and decided to trust me, for which I am very grateful. Gratitude is only the start of what I owe to my formidable agent Clare Alexander. Throughout, my days’ work, and my days’ everything else, leaned upon the wisdom and judgement and generous heart of Jessica Martin.

So much for our world, where a city named St Louis stands on the left-hand bank of the Mississippi. If however you happen to be reading this book in the version of 2023 in which there is a city called Cahokia on the right-hand one instead – I urge you to check out the three bebop masterpieces by Couma Hashi’s very tall son Theo. Bright Midnight (1955), Hashi’s Hash (1958), Heliotropic (1959), all available on Blue Note. YouTube has his classic eight-minute performance of ‘Red, Black and Blue’ at the Meridian Jazz Festival in 1970.

482

Photo Credits

Monday    Missouri Historical Society, St Louis.

Tuesday    Redferns / Getty Images

Wednesday    Bibliothèque nationale de France

Thursday    Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center

Friday    Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Saturday    Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis

483

Also by Francis Spufford

Golden Hill

A Sunday Times Top 100 Novel of the Twenty-First Century

Winner of the Costa First Novel Award

Winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize

Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize

New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746.

One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition – he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted?

This is New York in its infancy, a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love, and find a world of trouble …

‘Best book of the century.’ Richard Osman

‘Just wonderful.’ Jan Morris

‘Dazzlingly written.’ Sunday Times

‘Every bit as superb as everyone says.’ Sarah Perry

484

Also by Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual

Winner of the RSL Encore Award

Longlisted for the Booker Prize

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young children are atomised in an instant.

Here are the futures they might have known, had they experi enced the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century – futures that illuminate the miraculous in the everyday and the preciousness of life itself.

‘One of the finest prose stylists of his generation. If his stories grip, his sentences practically glow.’ The Times

‘A miracle, not only of art but of encompassing empathy.’ Wall Street Journal

‘The novel’s overarching feat is to resurrect with marvellous vitality not just its central five figures, but six transformative decades of London life.’ Sunday Times

‘A powerful celebration of the wonders of ordinary life.’ Irish Times

About the Author

Francis Spufford is the author of five highly praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both. His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. His second novel, Light Perpetual, was awarded the 2022 Encore Award and longlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and lives near Cambridge.

By the Same Author

i may be some time

the child that books built

backroom boys

red plenty

unapologetic

golden hill

true stories & other essays

light perpetual

Copyright

First published in 2023

by Faber & Faber Limited

Bloomsbury House

74–77 Great Russell Street

London WC1B 3DA

This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2023

All rights reserved

© Francis Spufford, 2023

Map illustrations © Martin Lubikowski, 2023

Photo credits: see link in table of contents

ST. JAMES INFIRMARY. Traditional

Arranged by IRVING MILLS. © 1929 (Renewed) EMI MILLS MUSIC, INC.

Exclusive Print Rights Administered by ALFRED MUSIC

All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

St. Louis Blues from BIRTH OF THE BLUES

Words and Music by W. C. Handy

Copyright © 1914 Pace & Handy Music Co. Inc. Copyright Renewed

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The right of Francis Spufford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organisations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

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ISBN 978–0–571–33689–0

Light Perpetual

Spufford, Francis

9780571336500

368 pages

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** Includes the first chapter from the hugely anticipated new novel from Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. **
'Dazzling.' The Times
'Exceptional.' Guardian
'Brilliant.' Observer
'Extraordinary.' Financial Times
'A miracle.' Wall Street Journal
*Winner of the RSL Encore Award*
*Longlisted for the Booker Prize*

November 1944. A German rocket strikes London, and five young lives are atomised in an instant.
November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered, and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century.

Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.

From the best-selling, prize-winning author of Golden Hill, Light Perpetual is a story of the everyday, the miraculous and the everlasting. Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, it is a sweeping and intimate celebration of the gift of life.

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Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks

Imamura, Natsuko

9780571384143

208 pages

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Asa tries to give her classmate a biscuit.

Nami evades her classmates' playground game of acorn-throwing.

Happy decides she's not interested in doing anything other than lying down on her sofa.

Each of these three stories begins in a reasonable place-but by the end you'll find yourself in another world altogether.

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The Mark

Ísberg, Fríða

9780571376773

256 pages

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'Absolutely stunning.' Hernan Diaz
'Brilliant.' Mariana Enriquez
'A masterpiece.' Kaveh Akbar

The Icelandic Psychological Association has prepared a test. They call it a sensitivity assessment: a way of measuring a person's empathy and identifying the potential for anti-social behaviour.

In a few days' time, Iceland will vote on whether to make the test compulsory for every citizen. The nation is bitterly divided. Some believe the test makes society safer; others decry it as a violation.

As the referendum draws closer, four people - Vetur, Eyja, Tristan and Ólafur - find themselves caught in the teeth of the debate. Each of them will have to reckon with uncomfortable questions: Where do the rights of society end and the rights of the individual begin? When does utopia become dystopia?
No matter which side wins, they will all have to find a way to live with the result.

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Demon Copperhead

Kingsolver, Barbara

9780571376490

608 pages

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A masterful recasting of David Copperfield, narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise, unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures and moral collapse-and his efforts to conquer them. - the Pulitzer

TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION

THE MULTI-MILLION COPY SELLING AUTHOR

BOOK AT BEDTIME ON BBC RADIO 4

AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK

'Extraordinary.' OPRAH

'She means to save us by telling us stories. . . She comes closer than anyone else I know.' ANN PATCHETT

'Electrifying. . . Every sentence here sizzles.' Daily Mail

'It's EPIC. Righteously angry, DEEPLY moving and exquisitely written.' MARIAN KEYES

'A powerful tale.' Good Housekeeping

'A fantastic read.' EMILY MAITLIS

'A masterclass.' RICHARD POWERS

Demon Copperhead is a once-in-a-generation novel that breaks and mends your heart in the way only the best fiction can.

Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he's willing to travel to try and get there.

Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.

'Legit about to get an 'I'd rather be reading Demon Copperhead' sticker for my Nissan Murano.' ROB DELANEY

What readers are saying:

***** 'An amazing, beautifully written story I cannot wait to recommend to everyone I know.'

***** 'Powerful and brilliant. To immerse yourself in a Kingsolver novel is to put yourself in the hands of a master.'

***** 'A must read and heart-opening book.'

***** 'Raw, angry, starkly beautiful. . . Genuinely one of the best books I've ever read.'

***** 'Amazingly complex. . . [Kingsolver] is, by far, one of the greatest living authors'

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The Secret Public

Savage, Jon

9780571358403

304 pages

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A monumental history of the LGBTQ influence on popular culture, from the award-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author.

An electrifying look at key moments in music and entertainment history between 1955 and 1979, which helped move gay culture from the margins to the mainstream and changed the face of pop forever - from the ambiguous sexuality of stars such as Little Richard in the 1950s through to David Bowie, glam rock and Sylvester's 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)'.

The Secret Public is a searching examination of the fortitude and resilience of the gay community through the lens of popular music and culture; it reflects on the freedom found in divergence from the norm and reminds us of the need to be vigilant against those seeking to roll back the rights of marginalised groups.

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