Rook & Tooth and Claw (12 page)

Restless, he went back to the kitchen to find himself a beer. On the floor, in the corner, was the bag containing Mrs Vaizey’s death dust. He hesitated for a moment, then he took a blue china mug out of the cupboard, set it down in the middle of the floor and poured the dust directly into it. Then he covered the mug with clingfilm. Pretty damned funny way to end up, he thought. One minute you’re sunbathing and drinking whiskey, the next you’re a little heap of powder in somebody’s coffee mug.

“‘A heap of dust alone remains of thee,’” he quoted. “ ‘’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!’” He smiled, and then he said to himself, “
Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.
How true.”

He drank beer and channel-surfed; and he was still flicking from one programme to another when the doorbell rang. Great – pizza at last. He went across to the side-table and picked up his billfold. The doorbell rang again and he called out, “Okay – okay! I’m coming, don’t worry about it!” He licked his thumb and counted out twenty dollars as he approached the door. He was still counting as he opened up the door and there he was.

Elvin.

He was standing right outside the door, wearing a smart dark suit, as if he had dressed up to pay his college teacher a last respectful visit. But his face was distorted with twenty or thirty stab-wounds, his ears were gone, and his eyes were as blind as pebbles. His wounds had mostly healed, but his starched white shirt-collar was
stained with a few cranberry-coloured spots of blood and his eyes were still weeping.

Jim held on to the door and didn’t know what to say. He was so frightened that he felt as if his skin had shrunk, and all of his insides had suddenly dropped out, leaving nothing in his stomach but a chilly vacuum of fear.

“Hello, Mr Rook,” said Elvin. His voice sounded terrible, all foggy and bruised, as if his tongue were too big for his mouth. He stepped forward with an awkward, unbalanced shuffle, his feet dragging on the floor, and as he did so his wounds gaped open, so that Jim could actually see his bright white cheekbones.

“You’re dead, Elvin,” said Jim, retreating across the living-room. He stumbled against a chair but managed to right himself. “Umber Jones killed you. You’re dead. You have the right to some peace, don’t you?”

Elvin gave a tilted smile, and swivelled his head around as much as his wounds would allow. “I’m not going to hurt you, Mr Rook. I brought you a message, that’s all.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Elvin. I want you to go.”

Elvin stayed where he was. It was his blinded eyes that disturbed Jim the most, slit in half from top to bottom, so that his irises were split like cut-up mushrooms.

“I want you to go, Elvin,” Jim repeated. “I don’t want to have anything more to do with Umber Jones, and you can tell him that from me.”

“You have to hear his message,” Elvin insisted.

“I told him back at police headquarters, it’s over.”

“He says you’re his friend, Mr Rook. He says you’re the only friend he’s got. But he said something else, too. He said that every time you say ‘no’ to him, one of your class is going to die, the same way that I died.”

Jim said nothing, but licked his lips. His mouth
was so dry he felt as if he hadn’t drunk anything in a year.

Elvin said, “There’s a bar on Vernon called Sly’s. There’s a guy who hangs out in this bar called Chill. His real name’s Charles Gillespie but he doesn’t like nobody to call him that. All you got to do is to go see Chill and tell him that you work for Umber Jones and that Umber Jones knows that he’s just taken delivery of two kilos of best Colombian nose candy. Then tell him that from now on
he’s
going to be working for Umber Jones, too, and that he’d better make sure that he pays over ninety per cent of his profits. Tell him you’ll let him know later how and where and when he can make his payment. And if he shows any sign that he doesn’t want to co-operate, tell him that Umber Jones is going to be watching him, night and day, and give him this.”

Elvin put one mutilated hand into his coat pocket and took out a small fragment of black cloth. He held it out but Jim wouldn’t take it.

He laid it carefully on the table instead. “Tell Chill that times have changed. Tell him that he’d better change with them, if he values his life.” With that, Elvin turned around and shuffled toward the door, groping and feeling his way between the chairs.

He opened the door but then he hesitated for a moment. “You’d better go tonight, Mr Rook,” he suggested. “Umber Jones is a very impatient man.” He walked through the door and closed it very, very quietly behind him, which Jim found much more frightening than if he had slammed it.

For a long time he couldn’t move, but held on to the back of the couch, his head bent forward, taking deep, steadying breaths. He had read articles about the so-called ‘walking dead’, but he had always accepted the historical
explanation rather than the magical myth. Zombies were the victims of unscrupulous sugar-plantation owners during Haiti’s great labour shortage in 1918. The owners were said to have hired voodoo sorcerers to administer soporific drugs to any likely-looking worker – probably a cocktail of tetrodotoxin, from the puffer fish; datura, a powerful hallucinogenic; and an extract from the toad
Bufo marinus,
which gives extraordinary strength. These drugs lowered the pulse-rate and gave the appearance of death – so much so that the zombie-to-be could be buried, and could remain in the cemetery in a trance-like stupor for days.

The sorcerer would then exhume them, revive them and take them to the sugar plantations to work – but not before taking the precaution of cutting out their tongues, so that they would never be able to protest or to explain what had happened to them.

But Elvin – Elvin was different. Elvin had been repeatedly stabbed all over. His heart and his lungs and his liver had been pierced. His body had undergone a full post-mortem, which would have killed him even if he hadn’t already been dead. Yet he had walked into Jim’s apartment tonight and spoken.

At last, however, Jim began to pull himself together. The first thing he did was go to the door and put on the chain. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself another drink. His hands were shaking so much that the neck of the whiskey-bottle clattered against the glass. He drank, swallowed, and half-choked himself.

Eventually he went back into the living-room. He sniffed. Elvin had left behind him a curious and distinctive smell, spicy and dry, like Uncle Umber’s, but mingled with the underlying sweetness of decaying flesh. The small piece of cloth that Elvin had tried to give him
was still lying on the table. He picked it up, and turned it over. It was coarse and very black, as if it had been cut from a priest’s cassock. There were some signs and words written on it in dull red, scarcely visible in artificial light. He didn’t know what effect this would have on the man who called himself Chill, but it didn’t look very threatening to him.

Now he had to decide if he was going to talk to Chill or not. He had never been a coward, but the prospect of going to meet a drug dealer on his own turf and demanding ninety per cent of his income seemed to be tempting fate, to say the least. On the other hand, what if he didn’t? He was quite sure that Umber Jones wouldn’t hesitate to wipe his class out, one after another.

He checked his watch. A few minutes after midnight. He took his blue linen coat off the peg by the door and shrugged it on. He had never been so reluctant to do anything in his life, but he simply didn’t have any choice. He took a quick look around the apartment and then he switched off the lights and opened the door. A tall black figure was standing outside, its head silhouetted by the glass globe light on the balcony. Moths fluttered and whacked around it, so that it looked like the lord of the flies.

Jim couldn’t say anything else but “
Ah
!” He stumbled back into the apartment and stood staring at the figure with his mouth open.

The figure stepped forward. It was holding something in its arms, a book or a box. “Brought your pizza, man,” it said, worriedly.

Jim switched on the light, and there was a lanky youth with a wispy little beard and an earring and a red-and-black Pizza Hut T-shirt, holding out his supper. “Twenty dollars, man,” he asked, holding on tight to the
box. Then – as Jim opened his billfold and counted out the money, “You look like you just seen a ghost.”

Jim handed him the money, all crumpled up, and a $5 tip. “Yes,” he said. “Got it in one.”

It took him over 20 minutes to find Sly’s. It was a basement bar, reached from the street by a single dark doorway with the name
Sly
flickering in purple neon over the canopy. He managed to park around the corner and then he walked back to Sly’s along a sidewalk still crowded with aimlessly-milling young people and watchful, hard-looking men. There were plenty of hookers around, too, in hotpants and short skirts and storebought hair of every conceivable colour.

Sly’s doorway was guarded by a short, broad black man who looked like Mike Tyson after having an eight-ton block of concrete dropped on his head. “Sorry guy. Bar’s closed,” he said, as Jim approached, holding up the flat of his hand.

“I’ve got a message,” Jim told him.

“Oh, yes? So where’s your Western Union uniform?”

“Is Chill still here? Charles Gillespie? He’s the one I’ve got the message for.”

The doorman eyed him with piggy, glittering-eyed suspicion. “Don’t nobody call him Charles Gillespie, excepting his mother. So you better not, white man, otherwise you know what they say about shooting the messenger, bad news or good.”

“I have a message for Chill,” Jim repeated, in the same tone that he used for his English comprehension class, very slow and very clear. “If Chill is here, I would very much like to speak to him.”

“Okay, what’s your name?” the doorman asked him.

“That doesn’t matter. The message is all that matters. Don’t tell me you don’t know Marshall McLuhan?”

“Marshall McLuhan? He ain’t never been in here,” the doorman replied, suspiciously.

He picked a phone off the wall and spoke into it with his hand covering his mouth so that Jim couldn’t hear what he was saying. After a few nods and grunts he hung up and said, “Okay, then, you can go on up. C’mere.” He gave Jim a quick frisking and then he opened the door. “A word to the wise,” he said, as Jim went down the first two steps. “Chill isn’t feeling too happy tonight. He just had a root canal job. So, you know, don’t like provoke him.”

Jim didn’t reply, but descended the narrow, black-carpeted staircase with growing trepidation. The walls on either side were covered in dark mirrors and he could see himself going down and down like a man on his way to hell. Another huge minder was waiting at the bottom, with sunglasses and an electric-blue suit. He let Jim pass through a swing door into the bar itself, which was ferociously air-conditioned and lit up in red and blue. A white man with an acne-scarred face was sitting at a black piano playing
I Will Always Love You
as if he were making it up as he was going along, and a large black girl in a small white dress was standing on a podium the size of a hatbox shrieking out the words.

In the darkest comer of the bar, in a semi-circular booth, sat a big black man with bleached hair, surrounded by five other black men with a variety of pompadours and crops and pigtails. They all wore black leather and heavy gold rings. The black man with the bleached hair was strikingly handsome, in a rough, unfinished way, as if he were a sculpture that had hurriedly been chiselled out of ebony, and then abandoned.

Jim went up to his table, drew out a chair and sat down. The six men looked at him like six cobras, ready to strike him dead. “Which one of you is Chill?” Jim asked, quite aware how close he was to committing the ultimate insult of disrespect.

“I’m Chill,” said the man with the bleached hair, in a surprisingly high, carefully-enunciated voice. “You got a message for me, messenger boy?”

Jim’s heart was beating so hard and so slow that he thought he was about to have a heart-attack on the spot. “I’ve got a message from Umber Jones,” he said, unsteadily.

“Who the hell is Umber Jones? I don’t know no Umber Jones.”

“Well … this is just a message,” said Jim. “Umber Jones says he knows that you recently took delivery of two kilos of Colombian cocaine.”

Chill leaned forward in a menacing way, lacing his fingers together and looking Jim straight in the eye. “I told you, man. I don’t know no Umber Jones. So how come this Umber Jones know so much about me?”

“He has – what can I call them? Very special abilities.”

“Like what? To tap my phones? To pay off my runners? What? This Umber Jones wouldn’t be the man, by any chance, would he? This wouldn’t be no bust? Because if it is, messenger boy, you don’t get out of here with two legs.”

“Please, listen to me,” said Jim. “Umber Jones says that times have changed. He says that he’s taking over now and that he wants ninety per cent of everything you make out of this shipment. He says that he’s willing to let you carry on, provided that you work for him, and provided that you don’t give him any trouble.”

Chill was staring at Jim in almost comical disbelief. One of his aides stood up, his earrings swinging, and reached inside his leather coat; but Chill snapped, “Siddown, Newton!” and the man reluctantly sat down again.

Jim continued, “Umber Jones will let you know later where you can pay him the money. He also said that if you lay one finger on me; or if you don’t agree to do what he says; there’s going to be trouble.”

Chill slowly shook his head. “Never in the whole of my life, man, have I come across anybody with the nerve of you. Or this Umber Jones dude, if he really exists. I mean, let me get this right: he wants me to pay him ninety per cent of everything I make? He gets ninety per cent and I get ten percent, is that it?”

Jim nodded dumbly. The singer was approaching the climax of
I Will Always Love You
and her voice had risen to an hysterical screech.

“And if I
don’t
give him the money, there’s going to be …
trouble
?”