Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

There was a fleck of parsley in the man’s teeth and I stared at it, feeling sort of sick. ‘We don’t start wars,’ he muttered, ‘but by the Führer’s grace, we finish them.’

My mouth had gone dry. I reached up and flagged the next stop. We stood, gripping the brass railing for support. The trolley shook, shuddered to a halt.

‘Heil Hitler,’ the jack said.

‘Heil Hitler,’ said Paul, smiling.

Then we got off and walked the rest of the way to the Hound. Paul was shaking. I thought it must be nerves, but then I glanced at his face. He was furious.

I didn’t say nothing. Ernst had secured us brown Aryan identity cards months ago, but we still wasn’t comfortable. ‘Just don’t do anything foolish,’ he done told us. ‘Don’t draw any attention to yourselves. They’re good forgeries, but they’re not perfect.’

So we passed, sure. But there was passing, and there was passing. Sometimes it seemed we’d passed right out of our own skins.

Ernst’s club, the Hound, been shut down for its degenerate sympathies a long time ago. And by ‘degenerate sympathies’, I mean us. It wasn’t no dive, not exactly, not yet. Still got running water backstage, tiled floors, grand lighting. Jacks walked up red velvet stairs into a gallery of brass and mirrors. Or used to, when the carpet was still down, before Ernst sold it to keep us in fuel. We didn’t care that rats lived in the walls, that the water come out brown some days. For us, for Ernst’s Hot-Time Swingers, its stage was our home.

Me and Paul gone in to find the kid already up on the boards, trilling out his scales. Always felt spooky, playing a stripped-down session without Chip. Sure you can be brilliant without the skins, but still, never felt right. It was like waking to find someone had cut you open and yanked out you damn appendix while you was sleeping. Something was missing .

Half a hour later we was still up onstage, the kid and me staring over the piano’s back at Paul. All three of us in our shirtsleeves, smoking and drinking the czech. The kid kept stopping, gesturing softly at me, counting me in. I finally just stopped, folding my arms over my axe with a sour look.

‘Hell, brother, quit that.’ I wiped a handkerchief along my neck. It was hot . ‘What is you damn problem?’

Hiero looked at Paul, like he half-frightened.

‘Well, say it,’ I said. ‘What the trouble?’

The kid shrugged.

‘Hiero,’ said Paul. ‘What’s the problem? Sid’s five minutes away from just packing up.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I just tryin to get this line to go underneath him.’

Paul smiled tiredly. ‘Sid, this kid’s going to be your death .’

He punched a few low ivories for emphasis.

The kid just stood there, waiting. He snuck a quick look at me.

‘Alright, alright,’ I said. ‘We goin back to the bridge. You happy?’

The kid looked sheepish.

‘You boys go on back,’ Paul said, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

Son of a bitch. We gone back into it alone, me and Hiero. And this time I felt it, I felt the kid sort of getting between my strings and pushing back against them as I walked across. He fixed his eyes hard on me. Then he pursed his lips and blasted back into his end of the song, and we played through the bridge. Paul started tickling his way back in.

But it was a damn strange feeling, the kid making me start again. I didn’t like it.

We played on through into the change. Then suddenly the kid lowered his horn again, looking nervous-like out at the darkness.

‘What the trouble now ?’ I barked. But then I fell silent.

Someone was clapping out there, the applause slow and loud.

‘Ernst?’ Paul called out. He pushed back his stool, leaned an elbow on the corner of his upright, shielding his eyes. ‘That you?’

Ernst come out of the shadows, his cigarette burning so low it like to scorch his fingers. His sleepy eyes look hooded and soft. ‘Gents, break for a minute. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

A figure come out from behind him and begun snaking between the tables. Man, it was her . That jane with the tiny teeth. She was wearing a tall headwrap, a sleek blue dress that poured off her like water. Hell. Tottering on heels high as dinner forks, she look tall and stiff as a birch. Something happened to my breath then, it sort of snagged in my chest. Not that she was beautiful. Her skin was a odd tawny colour, like oats. And she was rope-thin, with one a them stark bodies, like she built of planks nailed together. I could see the bones in her wrists sticking out when she lift up one hand to adjust that thick headwrap.

‘You boys don’t sound so bad,’ she said in English. ‘For a trio of Germans .’

‘Sid’s from the States,’ Ernst murmured.

‘Mmm. Of course he is.’

Man oh man. That voice . It was low-pitched, cozy, full of the dark tones of my old life in Baltimore. I found myself giving her a harder look. That small, high chest. Those plum lips that turned playfully up at the edges. Even her boyish hips. She smiled, and her crooked teeth seemed suddenly sensual.

Ernst put a elegant hand on her elbow, like to guide her forward. ‘Gents, this is Delilah Brown. She’s up from Paris. You’ll have to excuse her, she doesn’t speak German, but she has a few things she’d like to discuss with us.’

Paul run a finger along his thin moustache, watching me. ‘I bet Sid here could discuss a few things with her.’

‘In what language?’ Hiero smiled slyly.

‘In the language of love .’

‘You both asses. Both of you.’ I cleared my throat, stepped down from the stage. ‘Miss Brown?’ I said. ‘Sid Griffiths. This is Paul Butterstein. And—’

‘Hieronymus Falk,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know.’ She was staring at the kid with this wolfish look. Her eyes was amazing — a weird pale green, translucent almost.

‘She likes you , buck,’ said Paul, smiling at the kid.

Hiero dropped his gaze.

She give Ernst a quick glance. ‘Where are the others? The Hot-Time Swingers had six, didn’t it? This isn’t all of you?’

I sort of flushed, hearing that. Like we was the stuff .

‘Where’re Chip and Fritz?’ said Ernst.

Paul shrugged. ‘Fritz said he had a meeting. Chip, hell. He’s probably sleeping it off somewhere. What’s she want, Ernst? Who is she?’

‘They said they’d meet us later,’ said the kid, his voice shaking a little. ‘At the baths.’

‘First, sit,’ said Ernst. And then in English, ‘Please sit, sit.’ He pulled out a chair, and the jane sat at one of the blue-clothed tables under the stage. ‘What can we offer you? I’m afraid all we have is the czech.’

She glanced across at Paul, who was rummaging at the bar. ‘The czech?’

Paul was already returning with a cloudy bottle gripped in one fist, five shot glasses pinched in the fingers of his other hand. He held the czech up to the light, shook it. Then he poured out a finger for each of us, set our thimbles down with a soft click. He poured one for her, too.

She held the liquid up to the dim light, her brow wrinkling. ‘You’re kidding. You drink this stuff?’

Ernst smiled. ‘Chip sometimes inhales it. But generally, yes.’

I smiled, took a sour swipe of it. Felt like gasoline scraping out my throat.

The kid turned his thimble in his long fingers.

‘It ain’t really Czechoslovakian,’ I said, coughing. ‘We used to call it the Cheque . Like, you drink it up now, you pay for it later.’

‘When the cheque comes, you pay,’ Ernst smiled. He put his shot back with a elegant shiver. ‘Go on.’ He gestured at her thimble.