Cahokia Jazz

by Francis Spufford

Genres: Literary Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Noir; Alternative History sci-fi

Synopsis

A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently — from the bestselling author of Golden Hill.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.
It's 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient city of Cahokia lives on – a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week that will spill the city's secrets, and bring it, against a soundtrack of wailing clarinets and gunfire, either to destruction or rebirth.
The multiple-award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly created, richly pleasure-giving, epically scaled tale set in the golden age of wicked entertainments.

Release date: February 6, 2024

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 464

Sample

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 cleaner who’d found the door unlocked originally. She’d gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creekside to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you’d call avid. The cleaner, 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 there 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 cleaner. “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 gray 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 leaped out into scarlet.

“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 that had bled out in gouts down the glass; oozed in the other ways death inflicted, judging by the smell reaching his 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.”

“I’m on a roof, in the snow, lookin’ at an e-visserated corpse. At four 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 bellyaching.”

“Who’s bellyaching? 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.

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 organized 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-colored 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.”

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 discolored 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, it was lurid and terrible; alive, it must have been mild, petulant, inoffensive, a face 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 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?”

“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. 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 southwest 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.”

“Phin, though? I think you musta wiped your hands in your hair? You’ve got 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. He 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 theater—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 suit, 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 Fifth 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 stand-ins. 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 deadweight, already stunned or bound before being brought out to the skylight? He couldn’t have been literally dead already, because he’d done his bleeding here. Or was he awake, and to some degree cooperative, 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 fourth 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 black 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 on 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.

“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 forty, 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.

“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.

The lobby of the Land Trust was still in a state of nighttime 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 skeptically. “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 cleaner.

“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.

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

“Sorry,” said the cleaner, 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 gray 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 bustling 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 cleaner buttoning her coat and hurrying 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?”

“Sure, Phin.”

“Okay, then.”

“So, you think, don’t bother with the whole witness thing, across the street.”

“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 takoumado.”

“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 Third, 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 the 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 got all his good humor 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 five a.m. In a snowstorm. 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, and 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 his 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. ...