Sallis Ghost of a Flea

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84243-718-6
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 6, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Lew Griffin

In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone again...or almost. He and Deborah are drifting apart. His son David has disappeared again, leaving behind a note that sounds final. Heading homeward from his retirement party, his friend, Don Walsh has been shot while interrupting a robbery. Worst of all, Lew himself is directionless, no longer teaching, with little to fill his days. He hasn't written anything in years. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters sent to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be alright again. He thinks about his own life, about the other's, about how the two of them came to be here... In a series as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis has held a mirror up to society and culture, while at the same time setting Lew Griffin the task of discovering who he is. As the detective stands in that dark room, the answers begin to come clear and the highly acclaimed series builds to a brilliantly constructed climax that will resonate in readers' minds long after the story is finished.

James Sallis has published sixteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. He has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sallis, James

Leseproben

Chapter Two
ALOUETTE NAMED THE CHILD for her mother. She was born on Epiphany, January 6, and I first saw her two hours later at Touro Infirmary, her father standing alongside grinning. Larson was a good, uncomplicated, immensely kind man. “’ew,” he said when I stepped into the room, his L an unvoiced breath. I’d never been able to decide if he had an impediment or if that L with the tongue’s trip from the top of the mouth down was just too much effort for him. I was ’ew, his wife was ’ette. Not that he said much any other time, either. Scientists claim that in our lifetime we spend a total of twelve years talking. If there’s any kind of sliding scale, Larson would live to an advanced age. We shook hands. His was rough and scarred, bleached in patches to a whitish, puttylike gray, elsewhere stained darker, by the cleansers and chemicals he used in his work. Larson restored old buildings. One of the few times I’d heard full sentences from him was a year or so past when we’d sat out on the porch after dinner sharing a beer and he began talking about a house he was working on. You wouldn’t believe what-all these old places have wrong with them, he said. Everything on God’s earth looks to be out to destroy them. Termites like you’ve never seen. Mold and rot everywhere. Ground settles, trying to crack them open, and when that doesn’t work it moves off somewhere else and settles again. People rip out their insides. Wonder any of them manage to go on standing. But they do. I stood there by Alouette and the baby, grinning myself, remembering once years ago walking up Magazine watching people as they made their way out of the business district by car, bus, foot and streetcar. I’d been thinking then about the homes, families, meals and easy chairs they were headed back to, thinking how that world flowing past was one I’d never know. Alouette’s mother told me that the two of us were just alike, that we’d never find anyone permanent, anyone who’d go the long haul, who cared that much. All that was a long time ago. Early morning light spilled through the window onto us. Alouette was asleep. It was as though time were suspended, as though the very morning held its breath. Day became a squirrel gliding between trees in a long, silent jump. “They’re both okay, the nurses said.” Larson nodded. “Tell her I was here? I’ll call or come back by later.” Another nod. “Let me know if you need anything.” “Y’bet.” But when I stepped out, Larson followed. We stood by a hall window. Below in the street a Toyota had tried to make it past a turning eighteen-wheeler carrying plumbing fixtures and had wound up lodged underneath. We watched firemen’s efforts to extricate the Toyota’s driver. A team from the hospital hovered about a gurney at crowd’s edge, hugging themselves against the cold, waiting. Lights from police and emergency vehicles lashed the street. “She tell you about the notes?” Larson asked. I shook my head. “Think she meant to. Hope she did. Else I’m ’bout to step in it here. Pull you along.” When his eyes cut towards mine, I said: “At work, you mean.” Alouette was a community activist. Rattling cages, shaking jars that had sat too long unmolested on shelves and getting in people’s faces was what she did, what she was good at. People got upset. They were supposed to. Sometimes abrasiveness hauled in results on its back. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes results not intended hopped aboard and made the trip. Larson allowed as how it had been, yes, at work. “Threats.” He nodded. “Anything specific?” “Not really. Impression I got, she was supposed to know already.” “Did she?” Larson shrugged. “Have to ask ’ette.” “You have any idea what the threats were about? Who they might have been from?” “No.” We stood together looking down at the revolving lights, circle of medical deacons about the car. “Case she was working on, maybe.” Alouette being still, between bouts of raising ideological hell, a caseworker. “Could be.” He shrugged. “You know how ’ette is. Save the world. Dozen or more balls in the air. No way she’s gonna keep them all up there. Sooner or later they start comin’ down on folks’s heads.” “But she took the threats seriously?” “She told me about them. So I have to figure she must of.” Down in the street they dragged the driver from the Toyota. We watched as head and trunk came free, a young woman wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt, red tie. Her legs hung oddly, like a doll’s. As did her head. “I’ll need to see her files. What she was working on, correspondence, any notebooks or the like.” “Most a that’s up to the Center. Have to ask them there. Not my world.” Larson spread fingers wide on the sill. I thought of the wingspan of large birds: eagles, hawks. Just before those splayed, discolored fingers fell lightly onto my arm. * * * I was sitting in Joe’s, heading for a record. I’d come in early yesterday afternoon for a coffee and never left. A regular named Jimmy and I had been talking and got to wondering how long anyone ever sat in a bar without drinking. Now, though I didn’t know whether momentum or inertia would be the appropriate term, I was too far invested in the thing to get up and go. Here I was. Too much coffee had my nerve ends flapping like tatters of flags left behind once all the Pattons, Westmorelands and Schwarzkopfs have had their way, dark things were beginning to move in the corners whenever I looked away, and I’d had enough weird conversations to last well into the next century. But here I was. Not the original Joe’s, of course. That sad, used-up old place had passed during the Seventies. Briefly there’d been an uptown, unreasonable facsimile, someone’s halfhearted attempt at resuscitation, body pronounced DOA. But locals had kept the memory alive, till finally a new crop of moneyed folk thought to kick the tired horse to its feet one more time. Joe’s had come back as, essentially, a theme park, nostalgia island. “Have to say I’m surprised you suggested meeting here.” Don stared at the cheeseburger they’d set down before him. Then his eyes crossed to the beer glass. A stanchion he could trust. “Authenticity be damned, huh? Glitz! Glamour! New Orleans’ answer to the new Times Square.” “Tradition.” “Tradition. Right. Ain’t what it used to be,” he said. “What is?” “Not burgers, obviously.” He lifted the bun to look underneath. “You have any idea what these things might be that’re growing on here?” With one finger he winnowed out a mushroom. It looked like those I’d once found sprouting from my welcome mat following a hard hour’s rain and a day or so of sun. “Cremini mushrooms.” He’d made a nice pile of them by then. “First cousin to athlete’s foot and people pay good money—” “Damn good money.” “—to eat them.” I shrugged. “White folk, Massuh Don. What can I say?” His head wagged sideways two or three times, incredulous. Then he started stoking in demushroomed burger. Swallows of beer followed each bite. “So,” I said. “How you filling your days now?” “It’s only been three.” “You don’t work it from the first, they get longer.” “Thought I might take to reading some of those books you’re always going on about.” “Good thought.” “Or then again, maybe I’ll just get in the habit of hanging around making a full-time pain in the ass of myself, like you.” “Someone came to me and asked, like for a recommendation, I’d have to tell them you’re not half bad at it. Being a pain in the ass, I mean. Definitely some nachural talent there. Even if being a cop’s what you’re good at.” “Fact is, that’s all I was ever good at. Never much going for me with the family thing, for instance.” “Not what I meant.” “I know.” Thirty, forty years Don held the reins on New Orleans’ criminal element, and he’d done as good a job at it as anyone would ever do. Five years ago his son killed himself. There’d been a bad patch then. For a while Don had moved in with me, going through motions, he said, hoping if he just kept on, somehow, someday, it’d all start making sense again. Then three years ago, walking into a print shop to have copies made of insurance forms, he’d met Jeanette. He finished the burger and last swallow of beer. “We’ve done our turn on the floor, Lew, you and me.” “More ways than one.” “For sure.” Don laughed. “You especially.” “But you probably meant dancing—as a metaphor.” “Of course I did. Absolutely. A metaphor.” He pushed away his plate and signaled for another beer. “And now all your dances are gonna be with Jeanette.” He looked away and back. “Don’t I hope.” By ten that night, a few hours after Don walked aslant and slightly weaving out the door, I decided to head home myself. That wasn’t good enough for a record, the hell with it. Made it erect out the front door, surprising enough in light of all those hours of sitting and all the years stacked up behind me, and watched the storm go from dog paddle to channel swimmer as I walked home. Gentlemanly palms along St. Charles bowed deeply. In yards off Prytania, banana trees were bent almost horizontal, their fan-blade leaves spread in layers close to the...