‘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 be 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 part 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 much 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.

  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.

  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.’

  ‘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—’

  ‘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. White 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 and 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 functionaries 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.

 

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