I picked Zole up, tears streaming down my face.
“Zole. I’m sorry. I thought he’d just do me —”
“Let me down, silly fucker,” Zole said, wriggling. “Where’s ma gun? I gotta finish the motha fucka —”
He escaped, searched for something on the ground. Sherman was howling, shivering worse than me. Magda was shouting, holding my arm, pulling, trying to get me to run past the kneeling man who had stilled, slumped ominously against the wall.
“Hang on,” Zole was calling. “I gotta find ma gun an’ finish him—”
Sherman howled and Magda screamed for Christ’s sake to come on, the others’d be back. Zole was stumbling after, Sherman’s lead round his legs, the mongrel howling and whining. And bleeding, I saw as we stumbled up the alley towards the street lights, from a scratch near its nose, presumably a splinter… And Zole was fiddling with a gun as he followed, grumbling at the thing. He shook it like a rattle, listened hard to its sound as he tried to work the trigger.
I snatched it off him and flung the thing into the alley. We ran towards the boat, the pretty girls waiting for the last trippers to climb aboard. We joined them. Thank God for New Orleans music. It deafens you to everything else. I paid, and though the girls looked at us a bit oddly, Magda was talking breathlessly to them and I was paying money over, and all was peace and light and safety as the boat pulled away from the mooring and we glided away up the lovely broad flowing Mississippi.
WATCHING the paddles turn water on a steamer is hypnotic, even a new and utterly phony side-paddler. The trippers seemed to be some sort of convention, fez hats with tassels and secret songs bawled into the universe. Beer flowed. Some other passengers were like us, normal and very, very glad to be there.
Normal? For that read abnormal.
I stood watching the shore line. I had only a few dollars now. Rescued by a homicidal child, supported by a prostitute. And now leant on by a dog that was still trembling with fright. The cut on its face was about a tenth of an inch, the worm.
Tye had gone. Prunella had gone. All right, Magda lied—she’d told me she wouldn’t try to contact Tye. But she’d come to warn me.
Zole came, threw Sherman some unspeakable protein, and passed me a glass. I tasted gingerly. Wine.
“Hey, ma man. Whyn’t you ball Magda? See, ifn you stick each other, we’s team animals, right?”
I turned to inspect him, leaning over the glittering dark river. He was hardly out of nappies, and listen to his language.
“Where’d you get the automatic, Zole?”
“Bought it. Cheaper’n N’York.”
“There could have been another accident. What if the safety catch hadn’t been on?”
He snorted scorn. “Ain’t no safeties on revolvers, Lovejoy. On automatics, sure. This wasn’t no ’matic magna.”
I scrutinized him. “You ever shoot anybody before, Zole?”
“Nope. ’Cept a numbers drek near East 43rd one time.” He showed a scar on his shoulder, pulling his shirt down for me to see. “Got cut bad bad, man. Dee bee recoil, y’know?”
He reached down and embraced Sherman, now wolfing the meat. Drinkers whooped by, yelling something about going fishing.
“Lovejoy? Tye comin’ after us?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. Leaving me to face Hirschman’s hoodlums was one thing. But would Tye hunt me down? Zole saw clearer than I.
“Dunno, Zole.”
“Then what’s the plan, ma man?”
“Yes, Lovejoy. What’s the plan?”
Magda. Another tour boat creamed out of the darkness with lights and music, paddle wheels splashing. People waved and shouted, and our lot waved and hollered. Zole took a bead on the bridge and went, “Pow-pow-pow!” I almost clipped his ear as correction but thought better of it.
“I’ll tell you the story, love. See if you know.”
Zole went and brought drinks for us both while I told my tale, every detail, including the phony scripts, how I’d tried to bring in a number of fake pages to prove to Gina I’d combed the kingdom for the Sherlock grailer. I explained that would expose Moira Hawkins as a fraud, so allowing Gina the chance to eliminate Moira from the gamesters. I spoke with grievance. I’d done well by Gina. And now Tye makes a mistake like this, almost gets me killed.
“Why, Lovejoy?” Magda asked when I’d done.
“He dumb, Magda,” Zole said.
“Well, see, Magda, it’s like this…” Like what? Nothing came to help. “It’s complicated, see? It’s raising millions from antiques and art —”
“So?” She lit a rare cigarette and smiled wrily when I moved to windward. “So why her people let you get killed when you raisin’ so good?”
“Wastin’ yo’ time, Magda. He but dumb.”
“Shut your face. Magda, I think she said something about…”
Magda shook her head slowly. “I’ll say for her. She’s the hots for Denzie Brandau, right? Along comes Moira Hawkins with the big dig, the dream scheme. Dumb Denzie falls for Moira’s play — that president crap—leaving Gina washing the coffee things. See? So she minds to wreck Moira Hawkins’s gran’ plan.”
“But…” But that wouldn’t explain Tye’s failure to come and protect me from Damski Hirschman’s goons, would it?
“Gina Aquilina gets your pages, like you sent. She has them tested. Sure, they’re dud. She’s all the evidence she needs to confront Denzie Brandau and Moira Hawkins. So out goes Moira. And guess who that leaves to pick up Denzie’s daisies?”
“So Gina withdraws Tye Dee… ?”
And the peanut eaters, and the plane from New Orleans. And the bank credits I was using. And Prunella. And the rest of my little circus. A dead man wouldn’t need helpers. Yet I’d been successful. If Gina was sure that she and Nicko would win the California Game, she’d be sure of snaffling Denzie Brandau as well once he ditched the shadowy Moira. Plus his big run at the presidency, with Gina his First Lady, perhaps after Sophie had bought some tragic but convenient accident?
“Lovejoy,” Zole said. “How you get to grow old, ma man? I don’t believe him, Magda.”
I counted out my few dollars, watched by them both. “That’s it. I’ll understand if you cut and run.”
“See how dumb he really is?”
“Stop talking, Zole,” Magda said evenly. And the lad subsided. I didn’t believe it. Never listens to a word I say, but heeds her matter-of-fact shush. “I haven’t got much more, Lovejoy.”
Zole rebounded. “Me too.”
Dog? Gun? Magda’s expenses made more sense than any of mine.
“You got your list of places, Lovejoy. Maybe we try shaking them down?”
“No, Magda. I wrote them to Gina, places, dates, names, everything. If she’s the one who marked me down…”
“You aren’t thinking of California, Lovejoy?”
“We know where the Game is, love. We know when, who’ll be there. Fancy running for the rest of our lives?”
Running’s dumb, man, from Zole.
“Zole’s right, love.”
“Hey, Lovejoy! You’m learnin’!”
We went to join the party, Magda sitting close to me as we spent our last on drinks and food. The old saying is, your last bite lasts longest. It transpired that we were heading upriver on an all-night paddler party, destination Baton Rouge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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THE night was idyllic. What better way to spend a balmy warm night, than sit on the deck of a pleasure steamer on this great river of midnight velvet, watching lights go dreamily by?
At least, it would have been, if I wasn’t the quarry of hunters. If the little lad asleep on one of the boat’s benches with his dog hadn’t shot and possibly killed a man. If the prostitute who was his… what? Pal? Mother? I’d not asked… if she wasn’t probably sick of the sight of me. I mean, before I’d hove into view her life was plain and ordinary, right? Well, not quite those, but certainly ordered. She’d hook a client, charge him the going rate, repeat the process, while Zole stole. Together, a living.