Half-Blood Blues (18 page)

‘Delilah Brown,’ said Ernst. ‘Armstrong’s singer up from Paris. She was with Paul when he disappeared. It doesn’t make sense.’

Fritz leaned back against the edge of the bar. ‘I didn’t hear anything about a jane. She’s American?’

‘Canadian. Both.’

‘You’re sure she was with him?’

But Ernst was studying him with his very dark eyes, like he brooding on something. At last he said, ‘What did you hear, Fritz? How did you know to come back here?’

Fritz shook his head. ‘Only that Paul was arrested.’

‘Jesus,’ Chip muttered.

Fritz glanced at our faces. ‘You didn’t know?’

‘No.’ Ernst sat back, crossed his legs. But there was a hardness in his gestures, like he trying real hard not to feel what he was feeling.

‘What you mean, arrested?’ the kid said nervously.

‘He was deported to Sachsenhausen. This morning. I don’t know what the charges were. I expect the usual.’

‘The usual,’ said the kid, and there was a bitterness there I ain’t heard before.

‘Holy hell,’ Chip whispered. He begun running his hand down his face, staring at the scuffed floor.

The cat stood in the footlights, stretched, lay back down. Started licking the tops of its paws.

I felt something just give out in my chest, like my lungs was collapsing. I was breathing real fast, real shallow.
Sachsenhausen
. Hell. Not one of us had to ask where that was. A jack could live in a windowless pit and still know the word Sachsenhausen.

A tap was dripping somewhere back in the green room. The floor shuddered slightly, like a big truck passing in the street outside. I could hear the kid breathing.

‘What bout his papers?’ said Hiero. ‘He got his papers with him, right?’

Fritz shook his head. ‘I didn’t ask about his
papers
.’

‘
Who
didn’t you ask?’ said Ernst. ‘Where did you hear all this, Fritz?’

Sachsenhausen, I thought. Hell.

Fritz ain’t said nothing for a long moment. His huge red face looked flushed, but it always look like that. He fold back the doors of his suit, put his huge hands in his trouser pockets. At last he sort of sighed. ‘Albert Basel. I’ve been hiding in an old flat he owns. Hoping this would blow over.’

‘Albie Basel!’ Chip shouted. ‘
Albie Basel?
’

‘What you doin over there?’ I snapped. ‘He
killed
us last year.’

‘It made more sense than staying here with you,’ he said grimly. ‘Than all of us being in one place. I should have said something. I’m sorry.’

‘Aw, he
sorry
,’ hissed Chip.

Fritz stood real damn still, like he made of wax. ‘Shut up, Chip. I mean it now.’

‘Sure you do. If you ain’t gone out in the damn daylight maybe the Boots be less suspicious. They come here huntin for us the morning you left. You known that?’

‘If you hadn’t killed that poor boy, we wouldn’t be in any trouble at all.’

‘Poor boy?’ I said. ‘The one with the bottle to the kid’s neck?’

Fritz scowled. ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Enough,’ said Ernst.

The club’s coarse light sat on our faces in a way made them look like masks, shone this soft transparency over the flesh. Ain’t none of us look like ourselves.

Delilah’s gone
, I kept thinking. And then:
Sachsenhausen
. And then:
Delilah
.

Ernst stood decisively. He run a hand over his sleeves, like out of habit. ‘I’ll get the Horch out of the garage. I’ll bring it around out back. We need to go. Now. We don’t even know what Paul or Delilah will have told them. But I’m sure it’ll be enough. Take what you need from here.’

Sachsenhausen.

‘Where we goin?’ Hiero asked slowly, like from underwater.

Delilah was gone.

‘Hamburg. And then, hopefully, Paris.’ Ernst look like he going to say something more but then he broke off, as if there too much to say.

Sachsenhausen.

‘I won’t be going,’ said Fritz. There was a strain in his voice. All a sudden I was seeing again just how huge he was, how much his own man. He crossed to the stage, gathered up his coat and his alto sax.

‘You can’t stay here, Fritz. It’s madness.’

Fritz let a long silence trail Ernst’s words. He frowned. ‘Franz Thon has invited me to join the Golden Seven,’ he said calmly. ‘I wanted to tell you before I heard about Paul. And then, well.’ He sort of shrugged.

I got a strange taste in my mouth, a texture like cobwebs. Fritz in the
Golden Seven
? Hell.
Imagine
it. I ain’t never heard nothing so unreal in my damn life. And all a sudden it all seemed so dreamlike, so ridiculous.

Ernst was staring at the filthy floor. ‘And you’ve accepted Thon’s invitation.’

We sat there in silence, all of us staring at Fritz.

After a moment he shrugged again. Then he turned to go. He was holding his chin stiff as he made his way through the tables and up toward the front of the club. I imagined I could hear his fat thighs rubbing together in that suit. He stopped halfway up. ‘You should come too, Ernst, while they’ll still have you. They’re not bad players. But they’d be so much better with you there. Think about it. Food, good money – you’d be taken care of.’ He glanced us over, a kind of sadness in his eyes.

Ernst bent down, lit a cigarette very carefully. I seen him shake out the match but his hands, hell, they was trembling.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashamed of someone in my life,’ he said. ‘Never.’ He exhaled a long slow stream of pale smoke. ‘Good luck to you, friend.’

‘You callin him
friend
?’ Chip shouted. ‘
Him?
That fat
fuck
?’

Hiero was staring at Fritz with a unreadable expression in his eyes.

Fritz nodded, twice. He made to say something, then seemed to decide against it.

Chip stood, leaning across the table. ‘You sack of
shit
,’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here before I shove that axe so far down you throat it come out the other end.
Go
.’

‘Damn it Chip,’ Ernst raised his voice. ‘Sit
down
.’

But Fritz was already out, past the coat check, into the lobby.

Chip’s panting filled the club. We heard the bolt on the front door punch back, then the glass clatter as the door opened and shut. Then nothing but silence. That dripping water from the faucet backstage, a distant rattling from outside, like the street itself was trembling, the great pavement shaking.

3

I was curled up against the back window of the Horch, my suit jacket folded under my head. Mile after mile rolled by, barren in the dark. I remember the sun coming up red in the east. Delilah, the smell of her skin, her cool fingers tracing a line down my ribs. And old Paul blind-drunk at the piano, his amber laugh. I felt heavy, blank, like a light gone out in me. The Horch banged and jounced over the back roads, climbed back up onto the highway. And then I ain’t felt nothing. Not a twinge of grief, disgust or anger. Nothing.

I remember the kid swearing. We was long out of Berlin when he start to cussing and banging his hand against the back of Ernst’s seat, shouting that he left his horn in the Hound. I opened my eyes. My own axe loomed between us, its head pressing hard up against the canvas roof. The kid put a hand on my shoulder, murmured a apology. I just closed my old eyes.

I remember a early sky blond as ash, a warm wind smelling of coal and birch leaves. The mute road rolling out before us. Chip cracked his window open, and smelling all that dust I thought I was going to cry. I just shut my eyes tight, buried my face in my jacket. Thinking, there got to be something we could of done. Cutting out for Hamburg ain’t no kind of loyal.

Somewhere through that fog I heard Chip and Ernst in the front seat, arguing. The miles poured past, never-ending. I remember seeing Chip unwind the stained bandage from his head, peel the gauze off his scabbed-over scalp and ball up the bandages, tossing them out the window. We was nearing Hamburg. And then we was pulling over, lurching to a stop. I lift up a feverish face and seen Ernst out on the gravel shoulder talking to two armed Boots.

‘It okay, it okay,’ Hiero whispered to me. He squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t you worry Sid, we goin be fine. Ernst got it under control.’

One of the Boots crouched down, staring in at us with a flushed face. Ernst barked at him to step away from the Horch, like he might sully it. There was more talk, and then suddenly they was pulling away in a storm of gravel. Ernst thrown hisself back into his seat, his delicate hands on the wheel. He had a quiet, angry-looking smile on his face, and saying nothing, started the auto back up.

I slept again.

I woke feeling drained. Thoughts of Delilah and Paul rose up in my mind, and I tried to force them back down. Shadows passed by in the windows.

‘Sid,’ the kid said quiet-like. ‘How you doin?’

I shifted, glanced over at him. The road’s holes rattling the wheelwells, making my feet stammer against the floor. The kid’s knees was folded up over my old axe.

‘Hiero,’ I said, then begun coughing.

‘You thirsty, buck?’ said the kid. He pulled a canteen of water from under his seat. ‘Go on.’

It was late afternoon. Outside, a soft green light lined the boulevard, filtered through the trees. We started passing tall, pillared gates, the arched and gabled roofs of vast mansions rising up over their brick walls. Ladies strolled the streets, maids in strict uniform walking hordes of dogs on leather leashes.

Ernst look uneasy, driving real slow. We ain’t none of us talked.

Except Chip, of course.

‘Shit, Haselberg,’ he grinned. ‘You grown up here? With butlers and gardeners and nannies wipin you ass?’

‘We don’t choose where we’re from,’ said Ernst.

Chip chuckled. ‘I guess you got to keep you hands clean for you clarinet.’

I could smell the sea through the open window. Ernst pulled onto a leafy road, winding between pale lindens. I seen some wide green lawn just beyond the trunks. And then it struck me: this wasn’t no road at all, but a damn
driveway
. Hell.

Ernst pulled to a stop on pink gravel. ‘We’re here.’ With a vaguely sour look on his mug, he climbed out of the Horch, left his door standing wide.

Well, knock me over with a feather. It was a huge white stone mansion, with pillars and twin staircases leading up to the front verandah. A stone balustrade looked out over the yard. On either side of the huge façade, long, windowed wings stretched on for what seem like forever. On the lawn beyond I seen figures working, two gents crouched in the flowerbeds, a jane carrying some sort of bucket over their way. Looked like a damn
institution
.

‘You grown up here, buck?’ Chip muttered. ‘Hell. You father ain’t happen to wear a little white coat most days, do he?’

Ernst put a hand on the warm hood of the Horch, studied us where we stood on the running board staring in awe at the property. ‘My family – well, they aren’t me. Please remember that.’

Hiero nodded. ‘We know you, Ernst. It alright.’

‘And no,’ he said to Chip. ‘I didn’t grow up here. Mutti bought this place two years ago.’

‘You got to have one damn big extended family,’ Chip said with a smile. ‘Hell, buck. Boots ain’t never find us here. Even if they lived in the damn place
with
us.’

A tall man had come out to the balustrade and stood watching us, his long shadow bent and stretching out towards us. Something in the way his grey fingers grasped the stone made me real uneasy. Ernst shaded his eyes, studied him.

‘That you father?’ said Hiero.

Ernst shook his head. ‘It’s Rummel.’

The man come down one side of the steps, moving with a stiff grace. As he approached I seen just how damn long and thin he was. He got to be six and a half feet, but thin as celery, his lean, bony face expressionless, his hooded eyes pale. He give a quick, stiff bow, the corded muscles knotting in his neck.

‘Mr Ernst,’ he said. ‘How pleasant to see you.’

‘Rummel,’ said Ernst, smiling. ‘This is Sid Griffiths. Chip Jones. That over there is Hieronymus Falk. They’ll be staying here tonight. Would you find them a room, please. In the west wing, I’d think.’

Rummel nodded. ‘Shall I inform your mother that you’re here?’

Ernst give him a look. ‘Where’s Father?’

‘Your father, sir?’

But Ernst shook his head. He was already starting toward the house. ‘Leave your instruments, gents,’ he called back to us. ‘Rummel will take care of that. Are you hungry?’

Holy hell. The entrance hall we come into just gone up and up, near twenty-five feet to the moulded ceiling. The floor was pearled marble, the walls lined with leaded glass windows doused in light. In the centre of the foyer stood a single dark table, holding a glass bowl of lilies floating in water, the buds rocking softly. There was corridors off to the left, the right, and straight ahead. Past tied-off green velvet curtains you could see a indoor winter garden. Curving up round either side of the entrance hall, wide steps led to the upper floors.

Hiero was staring at Ernst with a strange look on his face.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ernst, ‘it’s big, I know. They don’t even live in most of it. It’s like a tomb. Come on. I hate coming in through this entrance.’

Chip give a low whistle. ‘Hell, buck. It amazing.’

‘Yes, that’s the point,’ Ernst said crisply.

He led us toward the right corridor and stopped at a small rounded alcove, glancing down at the curve in the hall. There was a tall window set in the facing wall, and we could see the white Horch parked far below, covered in dust. ‘I don’t know if they’ll be in the back garden, or in the sun room.’

There was a low mahogany bench set against the wall, and the kid sat down with a frown. Lifting his head, he listened.

Something was coming down the hall. Sound like the shifts of a dress rubbing together, the soft click of heels. And a mechanical squeaking, like a drinks tray. I got to wondering if we was intruding on some sort of afternoon tea.