Rook & Tooth and Claw (17 page)

Jim nodded.

Ricky said, “When that old woman swallowed herself … Jesus, you must have
barfed
.”

“I can’t believe a word of it,” said Rita. “This is just a test, isn’t it? Just play-acting, to make us think about impossible things.”

“Oh, yes?” said Jim. “And why would I want to do that?”

“To educate us, right? To stretch our imagination.”

“Well, I wish it was,” Jim told her. “Sharon, what do you think?”

Sharon was very subdued. “I’ve read about this thing of people being forced to eat themselves, yes. It’s supposed to be a punishment for sticking your nose in where it’s not wanted. Like treading on magic ground, or walking through a cemetery, or watching a
banda
without being invited.”

“A
banda
… that’s kind of a dance ritual to honour Baron Samedi,” Tee Jay explained. “Most of the time it’s pretty sexy. You know, people dancing with no clothes on.”

“This eating thing, though,” said Sharon. “I never knew it could really happen.”

“Lots of things you don’t know about,” Tee Jay told her. “You keep talking about our roots and stuff… you don’t even know the half of it.”

Sharon was about to protest but Jim interrupted her. “That’s why we need your help, Tee Jay. You know more about this than any of us. And even when you can’t actively help, at least you can try not to obstruct us. It’s the least you can do, considering what happened to Elvin.”

Tee Jay flapped up his hands from his desk as if to indicate, “OK, everything’s going to be cool.”

Jim said, “What I propose to do is this: Tonight, if and when his Uncle Umber goes out in his Smoke form, Tee Jay can call me at home and tell me that he’s gone. That’s all I’m going to ask you to do, Tee Jay – nothing else – but it has to be you, because you’re the only other person who can see him. As soon as I get Tee Jay’s call, I’m going to try to leave my body, using the technique that Mrs Vaizey taught me. If I go immediately, there’s a good chance that I can get to Uncle Umber’s apartment and get hold of the
loa
stick before he returns from wherever he’s been.”

“What if he catches you?”

“Then I won’t need to worry about dinner tonight, will I?”

Chapter Eleven

He parked a block away from Sly’s and walked the rest of the way. The bullet-shaped doorman was even more hostile than he had been before. “You got your nerve, Charlie. If I was you, I’d be in Nome, Alaska, by now.”

“What is this place?” Jim asked him. “The Nome, Alaska, tourist board?”

“Chill won’t see you. Chill’s not seeing nobody.”

“Tell Chill I have something for him. A little gift from Umber Jones.” Jim’s heart was beating more violently than usual, but all the same there was something indescribably exciting about talking to hard men like these and knowing that he had the upper hand. For the first time in his life he understood why some men turned to crime. It was pure adrenaline. He loved the terse, euphemistic conversations that barely kept a lid on ruthless acts of violence – beatings, knee-cappings, killings. He loved the constant threat of saying the wrong thing; of showing disrespect, or weakness; or pushing his luck just a little too far.

It was almost as exciting as teaching, he thought, wryly.

The doorman talked in the phone and then he said, “Okay … you know where to go.”

Jim went down the darkened staircase and the bouncer
frisked him and nodded him inside. The same pianist was playing selections from the Broadway musicals. The singer was gone. Jim crossed the floor through the red lights and the cigarette smoke and there was Chill sitting in his corner booth with a white turbanlike bandage on his head and both hands wrapped up like finger-puppets. He was flanked by three stone-faced minders in reflective sunglasses, one of whom kept looking at his watch as if he had an urgent appointment with the hairdresser who kept his pompadour from collapsing.

Chill said, “Sit down,” and Jim sat.

There was a very long pause. Chill said, “Cigarette,” and one of his minders tucked a cigarette between his lips and lit it. Chill blew out smoke then leaned back in his seat and said, at last, “This Umber Jones … I need to know some more.”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can tell you. I just bring the messages.”

“What I’m saying is … would he be interested in a little gentlemanly negotiation?”

“No.”

Chill made a squeezed-up face as if he were constipated. “You see, the trouble here – the trouble we’re facing here is – there’s no way ninety per cent.”

Jim said, “That’s up to you. I think it’s only fair to warn you, though, that if you don’t agree to Umber Jones’s terms, the consequences could be pretty apocalyptic. For you, anyway.”

“Say what? Will you talk English?”

“What I’m saying, Mr Chill sir, is that you and your people had better do what Umber Jones wants you to do, otherwise you’ll be in for a major-league ass-kicking.”

“
Hey
!” objected one of Chill’s minders, but Chill waved his finger-puppet fingers at him to keep quiet.
He leaned forward across the table and said, “So who, may I ask, is going to be giving me this major-league ass-kicking?”

Jim didn’t blink. “The same people who set fire to your hair, I should imagine.”

“You know who they are?” said Chill, fiercely. “Don’t you think you better tell me?”

There was a moment of spring-tightening tension. Chill stared at Jim with his eyes wide and Jim stared back at him, calm and unblinking.

After a while, Jim took out the chicken-bone fetish and held it up. At first Chill didn’t want to look at it but then he had to. His eyes flickered once, twice, and then he took his eyes away from Jim’s and focused on the fetish with the kind of expression you would normally see on a man who has been told by his doctor that the lump on his neck is not just an ordinary lump but malignant lymphoma; and that he has less than six weeks to live.

His minders backed away – clumsy, but with obvious cowardice. They knew what the fetish was, too; and they didn’t want to be too closely associated with a man who was marked for sudden death. One of them crossed himself. Another one spat and made a sign in the air. The third one shielded his eyes with his hand, so that he wouldn’t even have to
look
at the fetish.

“Maybe there’s some room for manoeuvre,” said Chill, without much hope in his voice.

“No,” said Jim.

“Hey, come on. I should meet this Umber Jones … maybe we can talk this whole thing out between us, man to man.”

“No.”

Chill flared up. “I’m trying to be reasonable here, you understand? I’m trying to make some concessions! But
you have to be fair! This is my turf! I been operating here for fifteen years, man. Everybody knows the Chill. How is this Umber Jones character going to take over from me? He don’t know jack.”

“He doesn’t have to. You’re going to do all the work; and he’s going to take his percentage. It’s either that or more of what happened yesterday evening.”

Chill banged his fist on the table and immediately regretted it: his fingers were still sore. “You can’t prove to me that Umber Jones did that! There wasn’t nobody there!”

Jim held up the voodoo fetish and shook it like a tiny maracas. “Oh, yes,” he said. “There was somebody there. Just because you couldn’t see them, that didn’t mean that they weren’t there. You’ve heard of The Smoke?”

Chill’s face drained of blood, and his cheeks were almost as white as his hair. “The Smoke? Is this what you’re talking about? The Smoke? That ain’t possible, man. That’s just a superstition.”

“Oh, I see. Your minders were stabbed by a superstition, were they? Unusual way to die.” He held out the fetish.

Chill couldn’t take his eyes off it. It was clear that he was deeply frightened. “Take that away. I don’t even want to
look
at that, man.”

“It’s a gift. Umber Jones is going to be seriously upset if you don’t take it.”

“
Take it away, you hear me
!” Chill screamed at him. “Tell him he can have what he wants! Ninety per cent, one hundred and ten per cent, whatever!”

Jim leaned forward, one hand cupped over his ear. “Did I hear that right?”

“Tell him he can have what he wants! Anything!”

Jim said nothing for a second or two, but then he
nodded, and said, “Okay. I’ll tell him.” He stood up and walked out of Sly’s. When he passed by, everybody gave him plenty of space, staff and customers both, and even the pianist stopped playing.

He detested Umber Jones for all of his cruelty and his greed and his mumbo-jumbo, but at that moment he felt a huge surge of power. He understood why Tee Jay had felt so attracted by voodoo. It was like sex. It was like beating a man to the ground. It was liberation. It was winning. It was like having the gods on your side.

He was sitting at his kitchen table eating Chef Boy-ar-Dee Ravioli with heaps of freshly-grated parmesan cheese when the telephone rang. He lifted it off the wall and said, “Yes, what is it?”

“Mr Rook? This is Tee Jay. Uncle Umber just left the house.”

“You’re sure?”

“He locked himself into his room about twenty minutes ago. I kept a watch on the street and I saw his smoke-spirit heading west.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure. I saw him with my own eyes. Like he was floating across the street.”

Jim looked at the kitchen clock. It was 22:47. The feline formerly known as Tibbles was sitting at his feet, enthusiastically licking her lips. “Listen,” he said, “you’ll hate ravioli. Remember what happened yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?” Tee Jay asked him.

“Forget it. I was talking to a friend of mine.”

“Come on,” said Tee Jay, “I don’t know how long he’s going to be away.”

“All right,” Jim told him. “But don’t go counting on
anything. I never did this before, and I might not be able to do it now.”

“You’ll do it, Mr Rook, I’m sure of it,” said Tee Jay.

Jim had already marked out a circle of ash beside the couch, with his own improvised signs for the sun and the moon and the wind. He lay down and propped a cushion under his head. He felt ridiculous, to say the least. But it had worked for Mrs Vaizey. There was no reason why it shouldn’t work for him. Countless people left their physical bodies at night and wandered around the universe as smoke, or spirits, or summer draughts. There was no reason why he couldn’t, too.

The feline formerly known as Tibbles watched him with narrow-eyed interest as he started to recite the words that Mrs Vaizey had taught him, as well as a few elaborations of his own. “Set my spirit free … let my spirit go … let my body sleep without it … let me travel where I will. Keep my body safe from evil … keep my body safe from darkness … let my spirit go …
let my spirit go
…”

He felt strangely light-headed, as if he had spent all evening in a bar, drinking one shot of whiskey after another. He looked up at the ceiling, at its waves of combed 1950s plaster, and thought,
Let my spirit go
… The plaster began to undulate, wave upon wave, and all the time he kept repeating to himself
let my spirit go
… The plaster was the sea, and the couch in which he was lying was his boat; and in his boat he rowed on waving waters, out of his present consciousness, out of his cagelike bones and his heavy, restrictive flesh; shedding the weight of his physical body; and literally rising, into the air.

He turned, as if he were swimming, and saw himself
lying on the couch, his eyes closed, his arms crossed over his chest. He approached himself and stared at himself in fear and fascination. His face looked oddly lopsided, not quite himself. Then he realised that he had never seen himself like this before, except in photographs. Most of the time he looked at himself in mirrors, in which his image was the other way around.

His cat seemed to be aware that something strange was happening, because her fur stood up, and she took three or four tentative steps away from him. She didn’t look at him directly, though, which meant that cats couldn’t see spirits any more than humans could.

The kitchen clock read 23:00 precisely, and he knew that he had to go. The last thing he wanted was for Umber Jones to come back and find him in his apartment.

He swam across the living-room and slid through the quarterlight, which was less than three inches open. The sensation of having no physical substance was exhilarating. Mrs Vaizey had been right: it was like suddenly shedding a heavy topcoat and finding yourself naked. He glided along the balcony, past Myrlin’s apartment, and through the window he could see Myrlin peering intently at a small mirror and clipping the hairs out of his nostrils.

He carried on, down the steps and out of the apartment block, on to the street. He found that he could glide much faster than he could walk. In fact he only had to
think
that he wanted to reach the next intersection and he was almost there, like a camera-trick. He flowed through the streets of Venice, crossing streets and sliding along sidewalks. Sometimes he passed within inches of people out walking, but nobody saw him.

He knew that he could cross the street right in front of speeding vehicles without any risk of injury. The
vehicles would simply pass through him, the same way that they had passed through Umber Jones’s smoke. All the same, he didn’t feel confident enough to chance it, and he waited at DON’T WALK signs, invisibly, like everybody else. On the corner of Mildred he was standing behind a man in a beret who was walking his poodle. The poodle could obviously sense that he was there, because it kept whining and pawing the sidewalk and anxiously looking all around it. “What’s wrong, Sukie?” the man wanted to know. “You’re acting like you seen a ghost.”

At last Jim arrived outside Umber Jones’s apartment. He rose as lightly as a tissue-paper kite until he reached the second-storey windows. In one window he could see Tee Jay, sitting on the couch watching television with the sound turned off. Every now and then Tee Jay checked his watch, and glanced toward the window. Jim’s first reaction was to duck, but while Tee Jay’s initiation into voodoo had made it possible for him to see The Smoke, he couldn’t see Jim’s spirit at all.

Jim floated along to Umber Jones’s window. The drapes were partly drawn, and the room was lit with only two floating night-lights fashioned out of black wax. As he came closer, however, Jim could see Umber Jones’s body lying on his bed. His face was dusted gray with ash and he was dressed in a dusty black frock-coat, complete with grey spats and black funeral shoes. His top-hat lay on the pillow beside him. In his left hand he held a chicken-bone fetish, much more elaborate than the one which he had sent to Chill, with beads and feathers and knots of fur. In his right hand he held a long cane of pale polished wood, topped with a silver skull.

The
loa
stick. As much a symbol of Umber Jones’s dark authority as a bishop’s crook or a king’s sceptre.
Jim had been reading about
loa
sticks in Sharon’s books – how they were passed from one voodoo practitioner to another, but never owned by any of them. They belonged to Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemeteries, and technically speaking they had to be returned on demand.

The window to Umber Jones’s window was slightly ajar, and Jim poured through it like warm water. The air-conditioner in the bedroom had been switched off, and it was almost unbearably stuffy and hot, and the smell of incense was so strong that Jim felt as if he were suffocating. Strange, he thought, that he had no visible substance, yet he was still aware of the need to breathe. Even spirits have senses, he supposed.

He approached the bed and stood looking down at Umber Jones. Unnervingly, Umber Jones’s eyes were wide open, with pupils as red as garnets. But his spirit was absent, somewhere in the night, and his eyes were sightless and unblinking.

Jim cautiously reached across his comatose body and took hold of the
loa
stick. He could feel it, but his hand passed right through it. He tried again, but again his fingers couldn’t grasp it. It was exactly like trying to pick up an unwilling eel.

Then he remembered what Mrs Vaizey had told him: a spirit works by
will,
not by physical strength. A spirit’s strength is in the purity of its essence, its ability to concentrate on what it wants, unhindered by flesh and blood.