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A Novel
by Francis Spufford
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Barrow squinted, and the scene resolved itself. The bundle at the head end was the dead man's clothes, shirt and jacket and coat pulled inside out over his face. The peculiar fans were his ribs, cracked open and somehow pulled wide. Since he was the one holding the light, Barrow stepped closer and shone the beam in, on a cavity full of red ruin and streaked bone, with the tangle of liver and guts visible at one extremity, and a frosting of granular pink, from the snow. The best you could say for the view was that it was tidier than the effect of a shell burst. But there was less in the hole than there should have been: this was obvious. It was a cavity reamed out, a space from which something had been torn.
'Any more, uh, pieces, rounda side you're on?' Barrow said.
'Pass the light,' said Drummond, and paced a circuit, lighting up each black blob in the slush till one of them proved more solid, a slick red-brown lump protruding ragged tubes. 'Well. Seems like this gentleman done mislaid his equipment for Valentine's Day.'
'Cold, Phin.'
'I'm on a roof, in the snow, lookin' at an e-visserated corpse. At 4 a.m., dammit. When I could be—'
'Not this again.'
'—when I could be in Cal-i-forn-i-ay. In the soft and velvet night. Maybe out under those big ol' stars. In a hammock.'
'Just shut up.'
'In my grove of orange trees ...'
'You ain't got a grove of orange trees.'
'No, but I will.'
'Yeah, yeah.'
'Man's gotta have a dream, Joe. Where's yours?'
'Back in my bed. I left it there when I got up, do this job. This job you got me signed up for, case you don't remember. So quit belly-aching.'
'Who's belly-aching? I'm trying to inject a little ro-mance, here, is all, brother. But okay, okay.'
Drummond found his flask and poured a small dash of corn liquor over the cleanest-looking bit of skin at the side of the shattered chest. The blood streaked away, leaving a bare spot of flesh – scrawny, middle-aged, most definitely in its chicken-neck paleness takata – to which he applied a forefinger, making a little vaudeville business of drawing up his sleeve first.
'Well?'
'Not quite stone cold, but getting on.'
'Few hours, then.'
'Yeah. Midnight, one o'clock maybe. Though it's a cold night.'
'Lucky for us,' said Barrow.
'Whaddaya mean?'
'I mean think how this'd smell in August.'
'True. True. And that is why the good Lord created see-gars, to block the noses of the police. But I cain't light up in this, dammit,' said Drummond, waving a hand in the flying flakes.
Normally, it was true, he would have had a stogey wedged in his wide mouth by now, talking nineteen to the dozen around it and sending up blue smoke in puffs and swathes like a curtain between him and whatever his hands were doing. Smoke and nonsense as the two of them rolled over the body of a drunk in an alley hit a little too hard when someone stole his wallet. Smoke and nonsense as they heaved the deadweight from a bathtub, in an apartment buzzing with flies where a wife-beating had tipped into homicide. Smoke and nonsense when they fished up a citizen from the brown water after a fight on a riverboat. Or, increasingly, when they went out with the meat-wagon to a waste lot, to retrieve the bullet-chewed remains of a moonshiner, curious about causes and culprits or absolutely not, depending on what arrangement Drummond had made just then with the opposing sides in the liquor war. Barrow left that stuff to him. He took the money and preferred not to know. Traditionally, it was Benny Shokcha's takouma mob that had the department in its pocket, but the takata were getting themselves organised at scale, with shipments coming in now from the Illinois state line, and by freight car all the way from Canada. All standard business for the Murder Squad; and all of it Drummond would face with a smokescreen of smoke and a smokescreen of words, the set of his features as he gripped the butt making him look comically startled. He had a funny-pages face anyway, lips and eyes and nose drawn on a little too big and simple for his skinny white-trash head, and a cowlick of straw-coloured hair flopping on his forehead. But no cigar now, and whatever this rooftop gutting turned out to be, it was not a standard death.
Excerpted from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2024 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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