Barrabas decided it was a rhetorical question used as a greeting, and only shrugged.
Jo Ann said, “We’re looking for Dahlia.”
“Right here.” She appeared at the door to the dining room—a tall, gracefully long-necked black woman in an African robe batiked in red clay, copper, and silver; she wore silver contact lenses, white-blue lipstick, earrings that were dangly gold replicas of ancient tribal fetishes; cornrowed hair, each row glazed a different metallic color: copper, silver, gold, platinum, bronze, stainless steel…
“’Ello, love,” she said, crossing to Jo Ann. Her anklets clinking; her bare feet slapping on the polished hardwood floor. She hugged Jo Ann, slowly and deeply. A little embarrassed, Barrabas looked around.
They were in a high-ceilinged sitting room, in the old Edwardian terrace house, beside a dusty marble fireplace. The room was busy with the sheer excess of its decor. The mantel was crowded with a collection of jade figurines. The late-nineteenth-century plaster moldings near the ceiling were ornate. On the walls, between the cheerfully painted woodwork, covering most of the faded, intricately patterned wallpaper, was a crowd of artwork; aboriginal art, with its assertive angularity, was mixed indiscriminately with the evocative blur of Impressionist paintings and the restless collaging of video paintings. African and Australian nature gods scowling out from between Seurat and Thaddeus Wong.
My God, where has she brought me to? Barrabas thought.
Dahlia came out of the giggling clinch and snaked out a long arm to Barrabas.
In a rather rummy voice, Barrabas thought, Jo Ann said: “Oh, Dahlia, this is Patrick Barrabas.”
“’Lo.” He took her hand. It was warm and moist.
“I guess you’ve already met Jerome and Bettina.”
“Sort of,” he said. “And we saw them perform the other night.” Dutifully, he added, “Exxy show.”
Jerome grinned. “Thanks.”
Dahlia led Jo Ann to the Louis XIV sofa. Barrabas sat across from them in an antique chair of cracked brown leather. He tried not to stare at Jerome and Bettina.
Bloke looked like a bloody ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on the great puddle of the black woman’s lap, Barrabas thought.
Dahlia reached languidly to a remote on a mahogany end table. “Let’s have some music,” she said. Her accent was middle-class London, Barrabas thought, for all her African affectation. A wealthy family, like as not, judging from the expensive jumble of the furnishings. From a family of black immigrants, he told himself, come over a generation ago, taking opportunities that should have gone to white British natives.
Barrabas tried to work up some inner spark of outrage about it. But the flint found nothing to strike on.
The music swelled to thud and skirl on the high ceiling; Barrabas had expected recordings of “authentic aboriginal” music, or some such, but instead the music was an amalgamation of house music and dance electronica. Perhaps it was the contemporary equivalent of aboriginal music.
“I was hoping Smoke was still here,” Jo Ann was saying. “I need to talk to him, if you think it’d be okay. I’ve got a problem. Some people—”
“Might be better to tell as few people as possible,” Barrabas broke in. Smiling apologetically. “To protect them as well.”
Jo Ann hesitated. “I guess so. To protect them.”
“Oh, I do love the dramatic sound of all this,” Dahlia said, yawning. “Not going to tell even poor Dahlia?”
“Um—eventually,” Jo Ann said.
“They don’t know if they can trust us,” Jerome remarked, whispering it sotto voce to Bettina.
“Hell, I don’ know if dey can either,” Bettina said. “I don’ know who dey are. I don’ care about dis shit neither. Dying for some motherfucking dinner.”
Jerome started to get up. “I’ll get Smoke, maybe we can all cruise for something.”
Bettina grabbed him, held him back. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Did I say you get up?” Looking at Jerome with narrowed eyes.
Not serious, Barrabas realized. Some kind of game.
“Fuck you,” Jerome said, trying not to laugh, wriggling free of her. “I go where I please, bitch.”
“Who you calling bitch—? Come here, I beat yo’ skinny pink ass!”
But he was gone, laughing at her as he went through the door.
“Little white punk!” she called after him. “I make you sorry!” But shaking with silent laughter, big belly and the obese undersides of her arms quivering.
Weird, Barrabas thought.
“If you want Smoke’s help,” Dahlia said, thoughtfully clicking her long, gold-painted nails against the carved wood of the armrest, “then it’s maybe some… political problem?”
“Yeah,” Jo Ann said.
“You need Smoke’s people too?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, no reason not to talk in front of Jerome and Bettina. It’ll come out, I reckon—they’re part of it.”
“Uh—” Jo Ann looking at Barrabas. Thinking, he supposed, of warning Dahlia not to say too much in front of him. She wasn’t sure of his loyalty.
And he wasn’t sure himself. But he said. “It’s okay, Jo Ann. I’m committed.”
She pursed her lips—but shrugged resignedly.
Barrabas noticed Bettina watching them; following the implicit message as well as the explicit one, in the exchange between Jo Ann and Barrabas.
He had an uncomfortable feeling Bettina knew exactly what was going on. Looking at her, just a quick glance into Bettina’s eyes, he glimpsed the analytical whir of her mind; was shaken up by the hard glitter of intelligence he saw there.
Jerome returned with a stooped, lanky, hawk-nosed man in a rumpled, ill-fitting real-cloth suit of gray pinstripe. He was in his stocking feet. “This woman wanted to talk to you,” Jerome said.
“Jack Smoke,” the tall man said, crossing to them, shaking Jo Ann’s hand.
The restaurant was crowded and close and smelled strongly of beer and beef. Yellowed prints of nineteenth-century opera posters on the wall almost vanished into the dim, dark-wood ambience. The low rafters were smoke-blackened from a time when smoking was allowed in restaurants. Barrabas, Jo Ann, Dahlia, Jack Smoke, and Jerome banged elbows in a hard wooden booth. Bettina sat grouchily on a chair at the end of the table. Jo Ann told her story, keeping her voice down for much of it so they had to strain to hear her. Finishing just as the food arrived.
“Only ting dey know how to cook in dis fuckin’ country is roast beef,” Bettina said, digging into hers with no further preliminaries.
Barrabas would have liked to have resented the remark, only it was uncomfortably correct.
“There’s curries,” Dahlia said. “And cous-cous.”
Not British, Barrabas thought. Except by default.
“I’ve been taking cooking courses,” Dahlia said. (Barrabas thinking: I was right about her, she’s a course taker.) “North African cuisines. And it’s had an effect on my paintings.” (Barrabas nodding to himself.) She went on, “The spicier the food I cook, the more color I tend to use—it’s a reflection of those energies, you know.” And she went on, filling up the time talking about “her art” and “her music,” as Smoke ruminated on Jo Ann’s dilemma.
Finally, when they were drinking bitters and eating pudding, Smoke said, “Jerome. Bettina.”
They looked at him expectantly.
He went on slowly, staring into his half-eaten pudding. Talking low, though the place was crammed with noise, “Can you check the Plateau, see if anyone we can trust has access to an extractor in London?”
Jerome-X and Bettina nodded, like a person with two heads.
And as one, their eyes glazed.