The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  The imbecile elder made so much sense that I doubted my own. My true profession was not working a shovel at Worthington Steel. My profession, as I’d learned on the banks of the Meuse, was and had always been killer. This did not, realized I, need always be a shameful fate. I could use my ability for good. I could do better than help the insulting Detective Roseborough catch the Bird Hunter. I could catch him myself, kill him myself, get my name and face on the front page of Kip McKenzie’s paper, where even Bartholomew Finch, as confused as he was, would see it and know, somewhere in his heart, that I had, at long last, done him and Abigail Finch proud.

  What was this mysterious heat warming my limbs of cold clay? Rabies, thought I, passed down through the cosmos, mother to son, all the better with which to poison my bite. I stood and arranged my fedora. We were done, the crazy old feller and I, this time for good, though he had, here at the end, pointed me in the right direction. For that I at least owed him breakfast. I removed my wallet and tossed to the counter my last dollar bill. He stroked it with a palsied finger bolted to an arthritic knuckle.

  “To be young again,” sighed he.

  “No, sir,” said I. “To be old. Now that would be something.”

  XI.

  WITH NEITHER MONEY FOR A tailor nor a motherly sort from whom to pull a favor, I swiped a stapler from a sheet-music store and used it to fasten an old sock to the inside of my jacket. Into this sock I slid the sharpest knife in our apartment. On came my fedora and best suit; out came my Excelsior upon a chain so that I might twirl it to nonchalant effect; and northward I bused until I arrived at the city’s scorched centrum, that furnace of saxophone and sex known as Harlem. If the Bird Hunter was anywhere to be found, it was here.

  I was ill-prepared for the pungent squall of sensuality that clobbered me the second my shoes hit pavement: cotton danked by perspiration, perfume brined by sweat-slicked friction. Insatiate revelers pushed me down the sidewalk, where a lamppost provided bracket against the onset of a million watts: “DANCING” in twenty-foot letters; “LOUNGE” in epileptic strobes that promised anything but; “BALLROOM” bathed in a pink light hinting that the room was, indeed, for balling. “RADIUM,” “WONDER,” and “PARADISE”—words so hot that moths made love to them and died happy at my feet.

  Van Dyke beard, repeated I, oversized sunglasses, sings a little song. It sounded easy enough, but each foot of pavement boasted examples of facial-hair foolery, tinted spectacles, and songs on every other lip. What seventeen-year-old had the stamina to remain loyal to his task while Charlie Johnson, Fats Waller, and Jelly Roll Morton flogged their bands so hard that the wails of tortured pleasure bled through solid brick?

  I ricocheted from brass-buttoned valet to stage-door Johnny and back again, each of whom had something to peddle: hot peanuts, a swig of coffin varnish, or, heck, how about some “reefer”—two fags for a quarter. I shook my head and bulleted for the swingingest club that might feasibly accept my grade of evening wear and gave them my standard sob story.

  The market collapse might have turned Church’s nouveau riche into the nouveau poor, but my, were they ever intent on going out with a bang! The way they hot-footed looked like it hurt. I skirted the upheaval and zeroed in on a table of tomatoes (to use the parlance) recuperating from the hedonistic ordeal. Was the killer watching? I hoped that he was. I patted my stashed knife and told myself that my approach on these girls was no different from a trench rush—some of them might die but those corpses would duckboard the mud for future survival.

  As Church had predicted, Harlem girls were thoroughbreds. They sported velvet jackets with leg-o’-mutton sleeves as tenderly folded as bulldog skin; sleeveless tunics as tall and straight as the Chrysler Building; muslin skirts gussied with pearls. But no sooner had they pulled faces over how adorable I was (not the reaction I wanted!) than they were scurrying back to the floor for another round.

  That would not do! I plunged after, pulling apart every couple to see whether I recognized an old enemy. This upset both genders, with the females telling me to blow, buster, while the male contingent began clearing floor space for my beating. But the girls swept them away in a silken swirl, leaving me to panic. Curses! Now I’d exposed all of them to danger, too many to possibly protect. I cut my losses and, as the flappers liked to say, ankled it out of there.

  In transit I spotted Lou and the Babe exiting the club I’d just vacated. These bunglers were after me again and this time they’d find me knife-handed! I ducked and dashed and surfaced in a lesser joint nonetheless knocked on its ass by a brass brand loud enough to rattle the liquor. There I found a woman slingshotting her knickers into a man’s lap before scaling a table and doing the Lindy Hop as if demonically possessed.

  I’d paddled from the Styx only to sink into Tartarus; here came Lou and the Babe, tunneling through the mob. Again I swapped locations, this time landing in a humid underground bunker that I realized, too late, was colonized entirely by Negroes. I let go with a weary chuckle; if there were anywhere in Harlem I couldn’t hide, this was it! Yet I could not bring myself to leave, so reminded was I of John Quincy’s affectionate alky-cooker atmosphere. Enduring alarmed looks, I plodded into the bar morose as hell, commandeered a chair, and waited for the unrelenting twins to accost me.

  What I got instead was the earsplitting bawl of a bullhorn.

  “ATTENTION. ATTENTION. WE ARE CITY AND FEDERAL AGENTS AND THIS ESTABLISHMENT IS BEING RAIDED. PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.”

  In other words, giddy-up, and start the stampede! Every Manhattan gin joint, regardless of its backing by Luciano or the NYPD, had a secondary exit for raids, and toward it scrambled the smashed and the scared. A giant black man and I, abrupt allies, clutched each other against the rout. When I did manage to grapple my way up a barstool, I spied Lou and the Babe pointing the way for a coterie of badged invaders led by guess who? Fergus Roseborough, bigger and frecklier and redder-haired than I remembered and boasting the chic new accents of a black eye and a broken thumb.

  The detective was using me as bait whether I liked it or not, and now half the black population of Harlem was paying the price. Overhead lights flooded on and the remaining habitués scattered like Chinatown roaches. I took off too, only to find a backdoor bottleneck as thick as any at Belleau Wood. Roseborough already owned that exit, in hopes of sifting from the silt a killer.

  I changed direction to follow a skedaddling bar-back. He stormed the ladies room, cutting through a receiving line of women holding their handbags like nightsticks. The bar-back ignored the threat and cranked a coat hook until a section of brick wall swung inward. A tunnel was revealed—a third exit!—and the bar-back took it. I followed, leading a wagon train of women, until one by one we emerged cobwebbed and crudded from an alleyway manhole.

  The raids had an immediate effect upon neighboring establishments. Thickset porters linked arms along 131st Street to ensure that hysteria did not taint their Caucasian congregations and that no rabblerouser like me got inside. The streets, thankfully, were a shaken hive of deserters and I fit right in, striding southward as if late for a business meeting set for the curious hour of midnight.

  At this rate, luring the Bird Hunter would be a chore indeed. I’d not quite escaped the jazz-time jamboree when a fellow barely my senior caught up to me and popped his red-feathered homburg in salutation without losing pace. He was a stub of a man, measuring to my chin, tow-headed and bright-eyed and spruced in the most youthful of fashions, which is to say he looked like an escapee from Princeton: tan-and-green checkerboard jacket, baggy breeches, and knee-length boots better suited for cropping horses than copping ladies.

  “Hot socks, Jim Thorpe! You’ve sure got anties in your panties! Where’s the fire?”

  “Pardon, good sir,” said I, “but I do not seek conversation.”

  “Oh, I’m hipped to that. I’d feel the same, chased off by Roseborough and his goons.”

  I gla
red in apprehension but kept moving.

  “What do you know of it?”

  “What do I . . . ? Oh, applesauce! I forgot the glad hand.” He stuck out his palm. “They call me Kip, Kip McKenzie.”

  I tripped over my feet and pitched toward the cement, only to right myself and find that the fast-talking midget was real. Certainly the brawny, ironclad newspapering on which I’d come to depend originated with a sunburned, sleeve-rolled Hemingway. Not this jittery little chipmunk!

  “You are Kip McKenzie?”

  He snapped his fingers.

  “Now you’re on the trolley! It’s swell you’ve heard of me, we can skip the beauty parlor chit-chat.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, Jim Thorpe, nosing out leads. Roseborough, the big ape, he means well, but he’s got all the nuance of a battleship in a mud puddle. He’s all over you, that’s for sure, which means I need to be all over you, too. We copacetic?”

  I had no time to reconcile my admiration for this pipsqueak’s writing with the immediate problem of my getaway.

  “Copacetic we are assuredly not. Yield the sidewalk!”

  The gazetteer must have been one hell of a dancer. Courtesy of some fabulous footwork, he hurdled the curb and walked in reverse so that he could look me in the mug as I charged onward. Quite piqued now, I flashed him the knife inside my jacket.

  “Wowza, Jim Thorpe,” said he. “If a steak falls out of the sky, you’ll be ready to eat it. Come on, fella, don’t have a kitten. Everything’s jake, baby, I’m on the level.”

  “I’ll level you.”

  He yanked his tie to the side so that his collar followed. Beneath his clavicle was a round pink scar.

  “Caught a congressman in an affair, real tawdry one, too. Took a bullet for my trouble.” Next he pushed back his sleeve to display a white line drawn wrist to elbow. “Exposed some no-bid government contracts. Hardly the Teapot Dome scandal, but I got a scratch for it anyway, plus sixteen swell stitches. So between me and you and the fence post, nothing you’re liable to say is going to send me high-tailing. Cripes, listen to me beat my gums! Let’s talk about you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Dirt, details, chin music—whatever you got.”

  “I refuse to disentangle your gibberish. Tell me what you know.”

  “Van Dyke, big sunglasses, sings a song. Am I aces so far?”

  “Where did you hear all that?”

  His grin was so pleased!

  “Aw, a good reporter can’t kiss and tell. What I don’t know, see, is why the Bird Hunter is circling you buzzard-like. If I knew, I could solve this thing lickety-split, make Roseborough and his boobs the laughingstock of the town. Would that be the berries or would that be the berries?”

  A hailstorm of running, shoving, and general umbrage rose one block to our rear. McKenzie’s playful eyes flicked over my shoulder.

  “Speak of the devil and here come his gargoyles.” He tsked his disappointment and whipped from his jacket, with substantial panache, a business card. “Here, let me prove myself. You take this card, chew it over, give me a ring-a-ding-ding, and I’ll head off Laurel and Hardy here. Deal?”

  I hated to abet any scheme this sprightly insect hatched, but I relished even less what might happen if Lou and the Babe found that knife in my coat. So I snatched the card and his homburg, too, planting on his white-blond crown my cherished Knapp-Felt fedora. McKenzie’s confusion lasted only a second. He grinned and waggled a finger at me.

  “The old bait-and-switch! You’re a tricky one, Jim Thorpe. Let’s gab real soon. Don’t take any wooden nickels!”

  Kip McKenzie put the breaks on his backward foxtrot, spun upon his ridiculous horse-riding heel, and began to saunter down a cross street, whistling, the fedora banked so that he might be mistaken for me. I wanted to pluck the silly red feather before putting on McKenzie’s homburg, but then was not the moment for snobbish adjustments. I crumpled his business card and tossed it to the street. I needed to hoof it, and fast. Everyone in the city, or so it seemed, wanted a piece of me.

  XII.

  THE NIGHTS! THE RAIDS! THE FIGHTS! Ever through Harlem I crashed. The Bird Hunter terrorized with equal gall, claiming several flappers whose rotten luck had placed them in my path. The bloodbath would have commanded national headlines were our country not tobogganing toward the Great Depression. Kip McKenzie, at least, clung to the story like a tick, and to earn his keep made the news bright, syrupy, and stinking of blood.

  Wadded, his pages made acceptable pillows; many a night I spent among the winos of good old Battery Park, so uncomfortable had life with Church become. When not galumphing about Manhattan begging for work that no longer existed, he was frowning at my odd-hour returns from reconnaissance. He was no fool; I was hiding a secret and he knew it. But I would not involve in my dangerous scheme a man who had already survived too much danger.

  Hence he and I were riven, left to tiptoe around each other’s unarticulated failures. Day by day, I was losing the trust of my only friend.

  It rather tore me apart.

  Weeks after we’d swapped headgear, McKenzie extended to me an enigmatical entrée at the end of his column:

  POSTSCRIPTUM TO “JIM THORPE”: CONTACT ME VIS-À-VIS BIRD HUNTER, VIZ. DESCRIPTION, LOCALE, RELATION TO SELF, ETC. K. McK. C/O NYHT.

  Indeed it did stimulate me to be mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune, an institution even finer than my prized Atlanta Constitution. Still, I resisted the flattery. The killer operated just beyond my reach, evident as smoke and equally as hard to catch.

  McKenzie, though, proved tireless. His obscure postscript captured the city’s imagination and letters flooded in demanding more details about this “Jim Thorpe.” It was a publicity coup d’état and McKenzie a clever revolutionary. He lectured his followers on the reporter’s code, how he shan’t ever divulge a source. Nice speech, but it did not stop him from stirring the pot and thickening it with fresh ingredients.

  POSTSCRIPTUM TO “JIM THORPE”: IMPERATIVE WE MEET. LIVES HANG IN BALANCE. REACH ME C/O NYHT.

  POSTSCRIPTUM TO “JIM THORPE”: LYRICS OF SONG (YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN) COULD EXPLAIN ALL. LEADS PENDING. FIND ME C/O NYHT.

  POSTSCRIPTUM TO “JIM THORPE”: “BIRD HUNTER” ANAGRAMS—”BURRED HINT,” “INBRED THRU,” “RIB END HURT,” “BURNT HIDER.” FAMILIAR? CONTACT VIA C/O NYHT.

  This last cryptogrammic clue didn’t even make sense, as it had been McKenzie himself who’d invented the alias—not that his rabid readers would pause to remember. At last, on March 15, 1931, McKenzie deviated from the cock-and-bull, though I am sure he did not realize it. I read that day’s paper late—perilously late as it turned out—plucking the issue from a trash can after midnight in Battery Park, where I had set up camp away from Church for what was going on three days.

  POSTSCRIPTUM TO “JIM THORPE”: ANONYMOUS TIP—BIRD HUNTER REQUESTS TO MEET “JIM THORPE” THIS DAWN AT “THE DREAM”—SENSE TO YOU? LET’S DISCUSS. C/O NYHT.

  Slide yourself into my cold corpse, Reader, see if you feel my nausea. The Bird Hunter had more than followed me about New York. He’d been my very shadow, eavesdropping while Church spun fantasies out of aspirational thread. The Dream, the secret he and I shared, had now been parceled to thousands via inky-palmed newsies, though only I had the ability to decipher it.

  Dawn threatened. No cab fare.

  See how fast I run?

  The Cotton Club looked shabbier by daybreak. I’d prayed before its radiant altar many a Harlem night until colored doormen brushed me back to hold limousine doors for fur-coated Shebas and their bow-tied sheiks. But at 5:45 a.m. the iconic letters were unlit and watched the sky like stone relics of some once-important edifice. I crept close, weak with dread.

  Parties here raged all night, but between the last ejected debauchee and the arrival of the morn
ing custodians existed this dead zone. I ducked beneath the marquee and peered through the glass. I could see nothing but an obelisk of a red-carpeted stairway. If the Bird Hunter was wily enough to hide inside the club before it closed, he would not be so dim as to invite me through the front door. I slinked into the alley, where I surmounted a locked gate.

  From there I climbed a back staircase to the musicians’ entrance and found a door thrown wide to backstage darkness—a menacing sight. Yet I entered and from the murk discerned sleeping stage lights, dangling curtain tassels, a centipedal stack of top hats. A windowless tunnel took me deeper, a vein leading to the club’s heart.

  Now I knew how those English chaps had felt eight years back when breaching Tutankhamun’s tomb. Here I was in the Cotton Club at last, a deserted but breathtaking salon of frescoes lording over the country-home facade of the bandstand, from which the stage extended like a tongue. The majesty, however, was sullied by the smolder of early morning, the funk of stagnating alcohol, and the leavings of the aristocracy—widowed earrings, flyaway headdress feathers, each bit of detritus easy to imagine being ripped off by a murderer’s hand.

  The club mourned along with me: a lost, lonely jazz note scuttled along the wainscot, searching for an exit. No—this note hadn’t been birthed by Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway. In a room that demanded a whirling tempest, it was too soft a whistle. It took me a moment to realize that there should not have been any music playing at all.