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  At last, however, Jim began to pull himself together. The first thing he did was go to the door and put on the chain. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself another drink. His hands were shaking so much that the neck of the whiskey-bottle clattered against the glass. He drank, swallowed, and half-choked himself.

  Eventually he went back into the living-room. He sniffed. Elvin had left behind him a curious and distinctive smell, spicy and dry, like Uncle Umber’s, but mingled with the underlying sweetness of decaying flesh. The small piece of cloth that Elvin had tried to give him was still lying on the table. He picked it up, and turned it over. It was coarse and very black, as if it had been cut from a priest’s cassock. There were some signs and words written on it in dull red, scarcely visible in artificial light. He didn’t know what effect this would have on the man who called himself Chill, but it didn’t look very threatening to him.

  Now he had to decide if he was going to talk to Chill or not. He had never been a coward, but the prospect of going to meet a drug dealer on his own turf and demanding ninety per cent of his income seemed to be tempting fate, to say the least. On the other hand, what if he didn’t? He was quite sure that Umber Jones wouldn’t hesitate to wipe his class out, one after another.

  He checked his watch. A few minutes after midnight. He took his blue linen coat off the peg by the door and shrugged it on. He had never been so reluctant to do anything in his life, but he simply didn’t have any choice. He took a quick look around the apartment and then he switched off the lights and opened the door. A tall black figure was standing outside, its head silhouetted by the glass globe light on the balcony. Moths fluttered and whacked around it, so that it looked like the lord of the flies.

  Jim couldn’t say anything else but “Ah!” He stumbled back into the apartment and stood staring at the figure with his mouth open.

  The figure stepped forward. It was holding something in its arms, a book or a box. “Brought your pizza, man,” it said, worriedly.

  Jim switched on the light, and there was a lanky youth with a wispy little beard and an earring and a red-and-black Pizza Hut T-shirt, holding out his supper. “Twenty dollars, man,” he asked, holding on tight to the box. Then – as Jim opened his billfold and counted out the money, “You look like you just seen a ghost.”

  Jim handed him the money, all crumpled up, and a $5 tip. “Yes,” he said. “Got it in one.”

  It took him over 20 minutes to find Sly’s. It was a basement bar, reached from the street by a single dark doorway with the name Sly flickering in purple neon over the canopy. He managed to park around the corner and then he walked back to Sly’s along a sidewalk still crowded with aimlessly-milling young people and watchful, hard-looking men. There were plenty of hookers around, too, in hotpants and short skirts and storebought hair of every conceivable colour.

  Sly’s doorway was guarded by a short, broad black man who looked like Mike Tyson after having an eight-ton block of concrete dropped on his head. “Sorry guy. Bar’s closed,” he said, as Jim approached, holding up the flat of his hand.

  “I’ve got a message,” Jim told him.

  “Oh, yes? So where’s your Western Union uniform?”

  “Is Chill still here? Charles Gillespie? He’s the one I’ve got the message for.”

  The doorman eyed him with piggy, glittering-eyed suspicion. “Don’t nobody call him Charles Gillespie, excepting his mother. So you better not, white man, otherwise you know what they say about shooting the messenger, bad news or good.”

  “I have a message for Chill,” Jim repeated, in the same tone that he used for his English comprehension class, very slow and very clear. “If Chill is here, I would very much like to speak to him.”

  “Okay, what’s your name?” the doorman asked him.

  “That doesn’t matter. The message is all that matters. Don’t tell me you don’t know Marshall McLuhan?”

  “Marshall McLuhan? He ain’t never been in here,” the doorman replied, suspiciously.

  He picked a phone off the wall and spoke into it with his hand covering his mouth so that Jim couldn’t hear what he was saying. After a few nods and grunts he hung up and said, “Okay, then, you can go on up. C’mere.” He gave Jim a quick frisking and then he opened the door. “A word to the wise,” he said, as Jim went down the first two steps. “Chill isn’t feeling too happy tonight. He just had a root canal job. So, you know, don’t like provoke him.”

  Jim didn’t reply, but descended the narrow, black-carpeted staircase with growing trepidation. The walls on either side were covered in dark mirrors and he could see himself going down and down like a man on his way to hell. Another huge minder was waiting at the bottom, with sunglasses and an electric-blue suit. He let Jim pass through a swing door into the bar itself, which was ferociously air-conditioned and lit up in red and blue. A white man with an acne-scarred face was sitting at a black piano playing I Will Always Love You as if he were making it up as he was going along, and a large black girl in a small white dress was standing on a podium the size of a hatbox shrieking out the words.

  In the darkest comer of the bar, in a semi-circular booth, sat a big black man with bleached hair, surrounded by five other black men with a variety of pompadours and crops and pigtails. They all wore black leather and heavy gold rings. The black man with the bleached hair was strikingly handsome, in a rough, unfinished way, as if he were a sculpture that had hurriedly been chiselled out of ebony, and then abandoned.

  Jim went up to his table, drew out a chair and sat down. The six men looked at him like six cobras, ready to strike him dead. “Which one of you is Chill?” Jim asked, quite aware how close he was to committing the ultimate insult of disrespect.

  “I’m Chill,” said the man with the bleached hair, in a surprisingly high, carefully-enunciated voice. “You got a message for me, messenger boy?”

  Jim’s heart was beating so hard and so slow that he thought he was about to have a heart-attack on the spot. “I’ve got a message from Umber Jones,” he said, unsteadily.

  “Who the hell is Umber Jones? I don’t know no Umber Jones.”

  “Well … this is just a message,” said Jim. “Umber Jones says he knows that you recently took delivery of two kilos of Colombian cocaine.”

  Chill leaned forward in a menacing way, lacing his fingers together and looking Jim straight in the eye. “I told you, man. I don’t know no Umber Jones. So how come this Umber Jones know so much about me?”

  “He has – what can I call them? Very special abilities.”

  “Like what? To tap my phones? To pay off my runners? What? This Umber Jones wouldn’t be the man, by any chance, would he? This wouldn’t be no bust? Because if it is, messenger boy, you don’t get out of here with two legs.”

  “Please, listen to me,” said Jim. “Umber Jones says that times have changed. He says that he’s taking over now and that he wants ninety per cent of everything you make out of this shipment. He says that he’s willing to let you carry on, provided that you work for him, and provided that you don’t give him any trouble.”

  Chill was staring at Jim in almost comical disbelief. One of his aides stood up, his earrings swinging, and reached inside his leather coat; but Chill snapped, “Siddown, Newton!” and the man reluctantly sat down again.

  Jim continued, “Umber Jones will let you know later where you can pay him the money. He also said that if you lay one finger on me; or if you don’t agree to do what he says; there’s going to be trouble.”

  Chill slowly shook his head. “Never in the whole of my life, man, have I come across anybody with the nerve of you. Or this Umber Jones dude, if he really exists. I mean, let me get this right: he wants me to pay him ninety per cent of everything I make? He gets ninety per cent and I get ten percent, is that it?”

  Jim nodded dumbly. The singer was approaching the climax of I Will Always Love You and her voice had risen to an hysterical screech.

  “And if I don’t give him the money, there’s g
oing to be … trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, there is going to be trouble.”

  “You mean yes sir, Mr Chill sir, there is going to be trouble, sir. So what kind of trouble are we talking about here?”

  Jim reached into his pocket and took out the small piece of black cloth. Now his heart was beating so slowly that it had almost stopped and he felt as if he could easily turn into a zombie himself. He laid the piece of cloth on the table and Chill pushed aside a heaped ashtray full of pistachio shells so that he could look at it. He picked it up. He turned it this way and that. He leaned back under a spotlight so that he could see what was written on it.

  He looked at Jim with a wary expression on his face. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  “Umber Jones gave it to me, to give to you. I don’t even know what it is.”

  “You don’t know what it is? You bring me a voodoo curse and you don’t know what it is?”

  “Listen – I’m only the messenger here. I’m not a Catholic and I’m not black. I’m a college teacher. All I know about voodoo is what I’ve read in books and magazines.”

  Chill banged the table with his fist so that pistachio shells went dancing in all directions. “You brought me a voodoo curse!” he roared. He held the piece of cloth up in front of Jim’s face and his eyes were bulging with rage. “You know what this is? This has been cut from the cloth of a murdered Roman Catholic priest and the warning has been written in his own blood! You know what this says? Here, look – jama ebya ozias – and here, the mark of Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemeteries! You dare to bring me this? You dare to bring me this?”

  “I was – I was asked to, that’s all. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I owe Umber Jones a kind of a favour, that’s all. Don’t ask me about voodoo. Don’t ask me about narcotics. I’m just trying to stay alive and I’m just trying to protect some people who are very precious to me, okay?”

  Chill looked down at him for a very long time. It seemed like hours. Then he reached into his coat and took out a pack of cigarettes. He tucked one into his mouth and instantly four lighters clicked into action. He ignored them all and lit his cigarette himself. “Who is he, this Umber Jones? He tired of living or something?”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate him if I were you.”

  Chill rolled the piece of cassock between finger and thumb. “He knows his voodoo, I’ll give him that. Sometimes somebody might take a splinter from the altar; or the communion host; and they’ll dip it in chicken’s blood, and that’s enough of a warning. But this – this is like a death threat. Ain’t nobody gives no death threat to Chill, believe me.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Jim. “He told me to bring it to you and I brought it.”

  Chill grinned, and smoke leaked out from between his teeth. “I don’t know what somebody like you is doing mixed up in a business like this. But if I were you, I’d forget about this Umber Jones, whoever he is, and put as much distance between you and LA as you possibly can. Like I hear that Nome, Alaska, is pretty nice at this time of year.”

  “So what do you want me to tell him?”

  “Tell him I’ll see him in hell.”

  He said it as coolly as he could; as befitted a man with a name like Chill; but Jim detected an inflection in his voice that betrayed a deep underlying uncertainty. He had heard the same slightly-strangulated talk from countless college bullies. Chill had been seriously disturbed by Uncle Umber’s patch of cloth. It was like Billy Bones in Treasure Island, being tipped with the black spot.

  Jim waited for a moment, but Chill crushed out his cigarette and his minders began to shrug their shoulders and look threatening and the audience was obviously over. Jim got up and left the bar, just as the singer was launching into You’re Simply The Best, wildly off-key. Quite honestly, thought Jim, if Chill was going to shoot anybody, he ought to shoot her.

  Chapter Nine

  To Jim’s surprise, Tee Jay was back in class the next morning, wearing a Snoop Doggy Dogg sweatshirt and a strange, evasive look on his face. Jim came into the room with a bulging folder under his arm, dropped it on to his desk and stood for a while, taking in everybody’s faces – Sue-Robin Caufield, flirting and chatting; David Littwin, frowning at his desk as if he couldn’t understand why it was there; Muffy Brown, her head thrown back in laughter; Ray Vito, his eyes half-closed in a smooth Latin flirt with Amanda Zaparelli – he had taken a sudden interest in her now that her teeth were fixed.

  Jim rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. He had been plagued by nightmares all night and he hadn’t shaved very well this morning. His hair had refused to do what he wanted it to do and there had been no clean shirts in his drawer. He had discovered a blue checkered shirt that he usually used for working on the car. Two buttons were missing but at least it was pressed.

  “Okay, class … this morning I’m pleased to welcome Tee Jay back to college and I’m sure that the rest of you are, too. What happened to Elvin was a terrible tragedy but in a way it makes it a little easier to bear knowing that the perpetrator wasn’t one of us.”

  As he said “one of us” he turned and fixed his eyes on Tee Jay. He and Tee Jay were the only ones who knew that Tee Jay had been involved – and that even if he hadn’t killed Elvin himself, he had stood by while Umber Jones had stabbed his best friend more than a hundred times. But Jim still wanted him to feel that he was part of the class – that he had a family to turn to. It was the only possible way of setting him free from his uncle’s influence.

  “Today we’re going to read Why He Stroked the Cats by Merrill Moore. Page 128 in your Modern American Verse. I want you to read it silently to yourselves first of all, to see what you make of it. It’s a difficult poem, strange. But I’d like to hear what each of you think it means.”

  ‘He stroked the cats on account of a specific cause,

  Namely, when he entered the house he felt

  That the floor might split and the four walls suddenly melt

  In strict accord with certain magic laws

  That, it seemed, the carving over the front door meant,

  Laws violated when men like himself stepped in,

  But he had nothing to lose and nothing to win,

  So in he always stepped—’

  He was still reading the poem to himself when he saw what looked like black smoke pouring over the windowsill. It rose, and softly whirled, and eddied around, and gradually the shape of Umber Jones materialised, shadowy and distorted at first, but then quite clearly.

  Jim tried not to look at him, but it was impossible, because Umber Jones came right up to his desk and stood in front of him. His face looked as if it had been powdered with ash and his eyes were glittering red. He looked like a zombie himself, but he spoke with his usual thick, threatening aplomb. “You did what I asked, and talked to the man called Chill?”

  Jim nodded. He could see that Sharon had looked up from her poem and was frowning at him, as if she suspected that something strange was happening. He didn’t want Umber Jones to think that any of his class were aware of his presence. But then he glanced at Tee Jay and it was quite obvious that Tee Jay could see his uncle as clearly as he could. He was giving Jim a small, mocking smile, as if daring him to speak.

  “Okay, Mr Rook … and what did Chill have to say for himself?”

  Jim said nothing. Umber Jones stepped closer to his desk and held up his right hand. “I didn’t quite hear that, Mr Rook. Maybe you better speak a little louder.”

  Jim continued to stare at him and say nothing.

  Umber Jones stared back at him for a while, and then he started to rotate his right hand, around and around, and take it off, exposing the blade that was concealed inside it. “You see this knife, Mr Rook? This knife has the power of Ghede, who is Baron Samedi’s closest assistant. When Baron Samedi wants bodies, it is Ghede who provides them. Now, you wouldn’t want to be one of those bodies, would you?” He held the knife right
in front of Jim’s face until the point almost touched his chin. “How about you telling me what Chill said to you last night?”

  “He said he’d see you in hell.”

  “Well of course he did,” said Umber Jones. “You didn’t seriously think that he was going to give up ninety per cent of his income, did you, just because some college teacher told him to?”

  “No, quite frankly, I didn’t.” Two or three more members of the class looked up.

  “But you gave him the message, didn’t you? And you warned him what would happen if he didn’t do what he was told?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So next time, when you go to see him, he’ll be more amenable, won’t he?”

  “What do you mean? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to persuade him, Mr Rook, in the time-honoured fashion.”

  “If anybody else gets hurt—” Jim began. But at that moment John Ng stood up, with an expression of panic on his face.

  “Mr Rook!” he said, and held up his necklet. “Mr Rook, he’s here now, isn’t he? That’s who you’re talking to! Look at my stone! Look at it! It’s turned completely black!”

  Sharon stood up, too. “I can feel him, Mr Rook! You can’t pretend he’s not here!”

  The other members of the class turned this way and that in confusion. “Who’s here?… What are they talking about?”

  “It’s the man in black!” John shouted. “It’s the man who killed Elvin! Nobody can see him, only Mr Rook, but he’s here! He’s here right now, in the classroom!”

  Tee Jay twisted around in his seat. “Shut up, you Viet Namese loony! What the hell you say, man in black?”

  Sharon said, “He is here! I know he’s here!”

  “You shut up too, bitch,” Tee Jay snapped at her. “What are you crazy or something?”

  “Tee Jay!” said Jim. And it was then that he felt a cold flick across his face, and the poetry book in front of him was abruptly spattered with a fine spray of blood.