Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

I followed him down.

The sawdust was thick, the air sour with it. I felt a cough coming, held it in. We was in a cramped space that stretched behind the prop storage, under the stage. There was all these cold, jointed pipes in the darkness, and I shifted real slow among them, feeling my way with my scabbed-over knuckles. I reached back, shut the panel behind us. It gone utterly black.

I felt a hot hand on my shoulder, heard Chip suck in his breath. My eyes was adjusting and I seen, just faint like, tiny cracks of light coming in through the nail holes under the stage. And then a terrifying sight rose from the shadows. Twin shining eyes, like brass coins, glinting in the dark. They was gone almost as quick as they appeared.

‘Dame Delilah,’ said Chip. ‘I told you, brother. Damn cat lives in here.’

‘Shut up,’ Paul whispered. ‘Fuck.’

Our breath filled the space. After a moment I heard a slow, heavy tread passing the boards over our heads, the soft scrape of a heel. Whoever it was stopped, like they looking out over the dance floor.

I lift up my eyes, real slow, in the blackness.

Then the jack start speaking, just real soft, real calm. It was a muffled, slightly nasal voice. I ain’t able to make out the words.

After a few minutes there was a sharp crash, then another.

‘That’s enough. I mean it,’ Ernst shouted angrily.

There was another crash, the clatter of Chip’s snare overturning.

The footsteps crossed back above our heads, come back again. Stopped again. The jack continued on in that same calm nasal voice. And then I thought, God, did we leave anything in the green room. Anything suggesting we slept there last night, that four men slept there. Hell. There got to be something .

I felt Chip’s big hand gripping my arm.

The doors in the corridor behind us was banging open. The sound coming closer. The green room. The prop closet. The old dressing room. Door after door, bang, crack, bang. We heard boots kicking their way through the clutter in the closest room. There was a pause. The water closet banged open.

Ain’t none of us even breathed.

I heard someone come in. They seem to be looking a long damn time in there.

The jack above us was still going on in his nasal voice. Something bout permits, hours of occupancy. I ain’t heard it clear.

Whoever was in the water closet was breathing real soft. Something clicked, rolled in the sink. I heard something tap at the far wall. Then it sound like the jack stood up on the toilet seat, was tapping the ceiling, lifting the panels one by one. Son of a bitch .

That panel under the sink was awful damn obvious. If he come in here , I thought. If he come in .

He called out in a startlingly clear voice, like he standing just at my elbow: ‘My wife wanted me to ask you where you got those apples.’

There was a muffled comment from the corridor.

‘Six o’clock,’ the Boot replied. ‘No, sorry. Five o’clock. But not tomorrow.’

There was some long damn answer from the corridor. I crouched in that darkness holding my breath, praying. Just praying.

And then the jack gone out, shutting the door behind him. I heard a clattering in the next room.

I was crying soundlessly. I dragged my damn face against my sleeve, feeling ashamed. I ain’t never thought fear had a taste. It does. In that small darkness it was a thing filling my nostrils, thick as sand in my throat, and I near choked on it.

I ain’t known how long we was in there. My legs was throbbing and then they just gone totally dead. And still we was crouched silent in that cellar. After a while Delilah called through for us to stay put, the Boots was gone but they might be back. And then some more time passed. Chip shifted on his haunches. The kid let out a strange strangled sound, muttering a embarrassed apology. My mind started to drift.

At last there was a rustling in the wall, and the panel was pried back. Ernst peeked in.

‘Alright. Come out,’ he said brusquely.

Hell. We stumbled out filthy and shaking. Ain’t no one talked at all. I had sawdust in my collar, plastered to the sweat, and I started scratching hard at it. Ernst led us back out, up the steps, across the cluttered stage and up into his office. The tables on the dance floor been overturned, the drumkit scattered.

Delilah sat on the leather couch under Ernst’s long windows, her thin hands folded in the lap of her white skirt. Her eyes was dark.

The carpet was covered in papers from upended drawers.

‘Sit down,’ Ernst said to us. He crossed behind his heavy desk, smoothed his tie along his shirtfront. ‘We’re in trouble, gents.’

Ain’t none of us sat. Our damn knees was still cramping.

‘How bad is it?’ Paul said after a moment. ‘They know who we are?’

‘They think they know who you are,’ said Ernst.

‘Hell,’ Chip swore. ‘Goddamnit. Where the hell’s Fritz? What he doin?’

Ernst shrugged. The walls of his office was painted a deep maroon and the black furniture give it a gloomy feel. He picked up a silver pen, began tapping it on the desk. ‘I put in a call last night. To Hamburg.’

We all lift up our eyes, staring at old Ernst. You like to hear the rats tunnelling in the walls, it grown so hushed.

At last Chip spoke up. ‘You pa? For real?’

‘How can he help?’ Paul said angrily. ‘ Why would he help?’

‘We in trouble , buck.’

‘We’ve been in trouble for months.’

‘I don’t know that he will,’ Ernst cut in. ‘He might not.’

My eyes drifted over to Delilah, to her long legs crossed high. In her white skirt and white headwrap she look ghostly, a phantom of other times.

The kid turned, gone out onto the stairs, come back in, like he just stretching his legs, like he ain’t got nowhere to go. He set one soft hand against the doorframe. He looked anguished. ‘And what he say?’ he said.

Ernst gestured vaguely with his pen.

‘What do that mean?’ I mocked Ernst’s gesture with my battered hand.

He looked at me with his heavy-lidded eyes. ‘It means I’m still waiting. It means he’ll call me back. He might telephone back this afternoon.’

Chip scowled. ‘Or he could buzz you in a week. Or in a month. What we goin do, just sit round here waitin for the damn Boots to come back?’

‘Even if he could help,’ said Paul, ‘can we even trust him?’

Ernst run a hand white as limestone over his slicked black hair. ‘I believe so. Yes.’

‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘And then the question becomes, Will he.’

Cause old von Haselberg was disgusted by us. One of the Fatherland’s coldest industrialists, he trafficked in iron, steel, coal, in arms too. A kind of Saarland empire. Nothing so soft or pansy as jazz. His business was hard, he was hard, his world was hard. He done rode out the inflation years by buying hordes of machines on borrowed change that’d lost its shine by payback time. He wrestled the unions, stomped down luxuries like the eight-hour workday. Ernst told us during Weimar his father been beaten twice in the streets, for making blood-soaked money off the poor. Old von Hasselberg ain’t minded it at all.

And this was the jack who written us off as degenerates. This was the jack we needed now. We who was the ruin of his good son. Ever since the day when a adolescent Ernst heard Ma Rainey and Rabbit Brown at his friend Paul’s house and become a jazz-lover to the end.

Ernst’s eyes still lit up whenever he told it. How he listened with one ear pressed right up to the speaker, like that old black-hearted jazz was talking just to him.

‘So we definitely goin,’ I said.