by Toby Ball
Also by Toby Ball
Invisible Streets
The Vaults
Copyright
First published in paperback in the United States in 2014 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.,
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 2011 by Toby Ball
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0986-7
Contents
Also by Toby Ball
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Epilogue
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
About the Author
About Scorch City
For Mom and Dad
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Faith and Jonathan Ball and Glenda Kaufman Kantor, who all read early versions of this book and provided valuable insight and encouragement.
Thank you to my agent and friend Rob McQuilkin, and to his colleagues at Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin. Once again, Michael Homler was the steady hand steering this book from manuscript to what you have in your hands. Many thanks to him and to Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Loren Jaggers, and Emily Fry at St. Martin’s.
There are a number of other people who deserve mention for their support, enthusiasm, and friendship: Susanna, Peter, Jackson, and Julia Kahn; Terrence, Lisa, Owen, and Sophie Sweeney; Martin Sweeney and Heidi Kim; Julian, Kate, and Meghan Gross and Jill McInerney; Paul, Riley, Adelaide, and Leo Nyhan and Samantha Neukom; Nick and Maria Aretakis; Carter, Julien, and Charlotte Strickland and Nicole Gueron; Michele Filgate, Liberty Hardy, and everyone at RiverRun Bookstore; and my friends at the Durham Public Library.
And, mostly, thank you to Deborah, Jacob, and Sadie.
1.
Moses Winston had learned from years of being a stranger everywhere he went—such was the life of an itinerant musician—how to recognize trouble and how to avoid it without backing down. It never did him any good scrapping in a place where he wasn’t known. So, as he walked through the smoky shantytown alleys, breathing fumes from the tar roofs baking in the sun, he kept his head up and his eyes on nothing in particular, save the occasional passing woman who, even today, earned his glance. This day, of all days, was one to stay out of trouble.
He moved quickly through the maze of shacks, the route playing with him, disorienting him. The way out never seemed quite the same. The configuration of the alleys seemed to be constantly changing, like dunes shifting in the wind.
Children appeared out of the smoke like apparitions. Winston moved to the side to make way, stepping into the threshold of a shanty. A baby was crying inside.
He walked toward where he thought the way out was. His skin prickled in the heat, his eyes burned red from the smoke. On his back he carried a guitar case with a rope rigged as a strap. He’d left Billy Lambert’s shack minutes before, after several hours spent rooted to his bedroll, paralyzed into inaction, watching Lambert’s bruised body across the room, chest expanding and contracting with each sleeping breath.
Inside the little shack he’d felt isolated, even protected, as if history didn’t exist there. But he had a gig tonight and had reluctantly left, trading static anxiety for the uncertainty of the shantytown alleys.
Winston turned a corner and found himself at the far end of an alley from a group of four older men who were sharing a pipe and watching his approach. Winston knew of these men and his pulse quickened. Trouble. He kept his head up and eyes focused beyond the men, down the shantytown alley. These were big, hard men with indifferent expressions but malevolent eyes. Winston didn’t worry about much, but men like these concerned him more than the teenage kids who roamed the shanties like jackals, looking for isolated prey. The kids had material wants. Who knew what the hell these men wanted? Maybe nothing.
Their gazes as he passed them had a physical quality, repelling Winston into a new alley, this one a confusion of chickens pecking wildly in the dirt and a tethered goat lying either asleep or dead.
Eventually he found his way out, emerging from the shantytown into a field defined on one side by the river and on the opposite by crumbling low-rise buildings. The fresh air hit him like waking from a dream; but
with this wakefulness, fear.
Winston was playing that night at a broken-down joint called the Checkerboard, located in the midst of several seedy blocks of bars and clubs—the streets haunted by hustlers, whores, and working-class drunks—where the edges of Capitol Heights drained into the Negro East Side. The Checkerboard was run by a fat white cat by the name of Cephus, who kept the drinks weak and ran a half dozen whores who looked better than the usual fare on the street.
Winston arrived early. The bartender unlocked the front door to let him in, locked up again. Winston grabbed a shot of rail whiskey and a bottle of beer from the bar and sat on the tiny wooden stage, playing with the amplifier, tuning his guitar. It was just Winston on the stage and the bartender stocking his bar for the evening when Cephus rolled in from the back wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt that could have doubled as a pup tent. The collar and underarms were dark with perspiration, and the top buttons were undone to reveal a mass of damp, white, hairless flesh.
Winston watched Cephus amble over and register the empty shot glass and half-empty beer sitting on the stage. Winston didn’t normally drink before playing. Cephus knew that.
“You don’t look so good, Moses,” Cephus said in his high, wheezy voice.
Winston kept to his tuning. “No?”
“No, you don’t. And the drinking … Something wrong, boy?”
Winston looked up, not liking this fat-ass cracker calling him “boy.” But something in Cephus’s face, some kind of ignorant sincerity, made Winston think that Cephus probably called his white musicians “boy,” too. Probably. And now that Winston had a good look, Cephus didn’t seem to be doing so well himself, his face an alarming shade of red under a sheen of sweat. The early-evening heat was taking its toll.
“Nothing wrong,” Winston said, forcing himself to hold the fat man’s eyes for a couple of beats before turning back to his guitar. Nothing wrong.
Cephus shrugged. “I must be mistaken.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “You need something from the bar, Moses? Another whiskey, or a beer, or something?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Suit yourself.” Cephus gave a concerned scowl, seemed to contemplate saying something further. Instead, he made a kind of clucking sound, checked his pocket watch, and headed to the front door. Winston watched him go, heart pounding.
2.
Frank Frings’s apartment smelled of marijuana smoke, the half-smoked reefer stubbed out in an ashtray on the coffee table. Frings leafed through the early edition of the Gazette, taking his time with a bottle of beer. He didn’t have a column in the day’s paper, so he skimmed through the headlines, perused the obits, read up on the horses. He checked his watch—ten past one. Renate wasn’t home.
Frings finished with the paper, picked up his beer, and walked to the window, looking down onto the street. A couple of cabs crept along, looking for fares. A group of young men, their ties loose around their necks, made drunken, boisterous conversation as they jostled down the block. Two derelicts huddled in a doorway, sharing a smoke. Frings finished his beer, took it and the newspaper into the kitchen, and left them on the counter next to the sink.
She would have been off the stage by eleven forty-five and home by twelve thirty. That’s the way it always was, except when she didn’t come home. Frings sighed, drank a glass of water. He didn’t wonder whom she was with tonight. He was annoyed that he’d stayed up waiting for her and would be tired the next day. He was annoyed that he would be alone in his bed tonight. But he didn’t think about her in another man’s bed. It didn’t matter to him.
He undressed, set his alarm clock. The phone rang.
His shirt pasted to his back with sweat from the cab ride, Frings walked into the Palace, shook hands with the bouncer, and glanced around at the crowd—maybe a couple hundred people—which seemed to be suspended in the thick air. Years ago, a few whites had been regulars at the Palace, but tonight there wasn’t another white person in the joint. Frings felt eyes on him and then, because he was a regular, the attention returning to the stage. He watched as the owner came his way, weaving gracefully between tables, nodding, smiling, giving the occasional brief handshake. Floyd Christian was about Frings’s age, but could have passed for ten years younger if not for the beginnings of gray in his hair. His body was still lean, the coal black skin of his face unlined. He might have been the only person in the place not sweating.
“How are things at the Gazette, Frank?” Christian asked by way of greeting, gripping Frings’s hand, flashing a grim smile.
“Good. Fine. You know what time it is?” It was a rhetorical question; they both knew it was two in the morning. Christian had rung him, pulling him out of bed, the urgency in Christian’s voice getting Frings here in yesterday’s clothes, no time to pull out new ones. He was rumpled, his face greasy from the pillow. Christian didn’t make calls like that, dragging the best-known newspaperman in the City over to his club during the wee hours. Frings wondered what the hell was going on.
Christian said, “Sorry to pull you away from the lovely Renate.”
“You didn’t pull me away from her.”
Christian raised his eyebrows, concerned.
“It’s nothing,” Frings said. “She’s young.”
Christian frowned and clapped Frings on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go back to my office.” Frings followed him along the back row of tables. Frings, at just under six feet, was shorter than Christian and a little thicker around the waist, too. But despite an unmemorable face, Frings had a smile that drew people in, and the presence that sometimes comes to those who are comfortable with their celebrity.
Christian turned his head and yelled over his shoulder, “What do you think of them?”
Onstage a band was playing languid jazz, the musicians dressed in maroon tuxedos. The crowd murmured dozens of low conversations and smoked and drank. Frings wobbled his hand. So-so. It wasn’t his kind of thing.
Christian knocked twice on his office door, which opened from within. Christian went in first. Frings followed.
He eyed three Negroes sitting at Christian’s meeting table; two men, one woman. His mouth went dry. He’d met one of the men before and could guess who the other two were. Something was really wrong. Christian wouldn’t have brought Frings together with these people at this time of the night and in secret unless it was big. He didn’t like it. Christian could have filled him in, warned him about what he was walking into.
The man in the middle stood up—tall, very thin, black-framed glasses, close-cut hair.
Christian said, “I think you know Mel Washington.”
Frings had met Washington before, smart, elegant, rumored homosexual. Frings’s editor’s, Panos’s, take on Washington: Black, queer, and Red? God doesn’t hate nobody that much.
Mel Washington extended a slender hand with long, pianist’s fingers. They shook. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Frings.”
“Frank.” Frings saw the tension in Washington’s jaw.
“Okay. Do you know Warren Eddings and Betty Askins?”
“Only by reputation.”
The other two nodded in silent greeting. Washington, Eddings, and Askins: the City’s three leading Negro communists. Frings looked at Christian. Christian nodded, acknowledging the difficult situation he’d put Frings in—better to have done this during the day, in public. Right now things looked suspicious.
Frings and Washington sat. Christian stood by the door, overseeing, removing himself from the conversation. The room was furnished in black leather; a one-way mirror looked out on the club floor. Barbershop fans pushed the stifling air around the room to no effect. Eddings and Christian smoked Luckies. It was hard to breathe.
“Frank,” Washington began, elbows on the table, fingers steepled, “we asked Floyd to bring you here to meet with us because we have a very difficult situation. A very difficult situation. We’re hoping you’ll be … discreet. We’re coming to you because we know you are sympathetic to our cause.
Can we trust you to be discreet?”
Frings looked at Washington, then turned in his seat to give Christian a questioning glance.
“Frank, I wouldn’t bring you …”
Frings nodded, trusting Christian. He turned back to Washington. “Okay. We can talk.”
“Two men over at the Community were fishing tonight on the riverbank. They found a dead woman in the rocks. A dead white woman.”
“On Community land?”
“More or less.”
Betty Askins nodded along with Washington. Warren Eddings scowled at his hands folded in his lap.
“Yeah, that’s not good.” A dead white woman by the all-Negro Uhuru Community was trouble.
Washington continued, “We don’t know what happened yet, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Frings shook his head. It didn’t. Frings knew how perception worked in the City. Anticommunists and the blue press would make lurid speculations, and these would be digested by many people as unquestioned truth. The Uhuru Community, he thought, would burn.
Betty spoke. She was younger than the two men and attractive in a finishing-school sort of way; her hair in a chaste bob. “We have people trying to find out if it was someone in the Community that did this. We can’t rule it out, but …”
“What would a white girl be doing there?” Frings said.
“Exactly,” agreed Washington.
“Working girl?”
Betty Askins looked down at the table, embarrassed.
Washington said, “Could be. But our understanding”—he looked uncomfortably at Betty—“is that … this type of commerce is generally kept within the Community.”
Frings nodded.
Warren Eddings wore a skullcap. He had high cheekbones and a narrow patch of beard that hung a couple of inches below his chin. His voice was low and controlled. “This is a setup, white folks putting this on the Community.”
Washington looked pained. “Frank, I realize this might put you in an awkward position.”
Frings’s pulse hammered in his ears. “Jesus, Mel, I don’t know why you say that.” Why was he here?
Eddings and Betty looked to Washington. “We need this to be kept quiet.”
They’d said that. “That’s going to be difficult.”
Washington said, “I’m afraid I’m not getting to the point. We need this situation taken care of. We can’t let this crime be associated with the Uhuru Community. The Community’s the most successful Negro endeavor in this City’s history. Its existence is at stake. You know that white folks won’t tolerate the Community if this news gets out. They won’t. And I’m worried that, like Warren said, this is a setup, specifically to put the Community at risk.”
