Cahokia jazz, p.34
Cahokia Jazz, page 34
*
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.
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:
God the Father (in heaven)
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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)
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God the Son (on earth) The sun in the sky
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?
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 seen, 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.
‘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 presence, 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. Demanding 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 out 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 what 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. Barrow 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 the 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.’
