Ghost of a Flea Read online

  The final part of James Sallis’ sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin

  In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone again…or almost. He and Deborah are drifting apart. His son David has disappeared again, leaving behind a note that sounds final. Heading homeward from his retirement party, his friend, Don Walsh has been shot while interrupting a robbery. Worst of all, Lew himself is directionless, no longer teaching, with little to fill his days. He hasn’t written anything in years. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters sent to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost.

  Through five previous novels, James Sallis has enthralled and challenged readers as he has told the story of Lew Griffin, private detective, teacher, writer, port, and a black man moving through a white man’s world. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn’t speak, doesn’t think about what happened, somehow things will be alright again. He thinks about his own life, about the other’s, about how the two of them came to be here…

  About the Author

  James Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the L.A. Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. In 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon. In addition to Drive, the six Lew Griffin books are now in development as feature films. Jim teaches novel writing at Phoenix College and plays regularly with his string band, Three-Legged Dog. He stays busy.

  SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

  Novels Published by No Exit Press

  The Long-Legged Fly – Lew Griffin Book One, 1992

  Moth – Lew Griffin Book Two, 1993

  Black Hornet – Lew Griffin Book Three, 1994

  Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1997

  Eye of the Cricket – Lew Griffin Book Four, 1997

  Bluebottle – Lew Griffin Book Five, 1998

  Ghost of a Flea – Lew Griffin Book Six, 2001

  Cypress Grove – Turner Trilogy Book One, 2003

  Drive, 2005

  Cripple Creek – Turner Trilogy Book Two, 2006

  Salt River – Turner Trilogy Book Three, 2007

  The Killer Is Dying, 2011

  Driven, 2012

  Other Novels

  Renderings

  What You Have Left: The Turner Trilogy

  Stories

  A Few Last Words

  Limits of the Sensible World

  Time’s Hammers: Collected Stories

  A City Equal to my Desire

  Poems

  Sorrow’s Kitchen

  My Tongue In Other Cheeks: Selected Translations

  As Editor

  Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany

  Jazz Guitars

  The Guitar In Jazz

  Other

  The Guitar Players

  Difficult Lives

  Saint Glinglin by Raymond Queneau (translator)

  Chester Himes: A Life

  A James Sallis Reader

  Praise for James Sallis

  ‘Sallis is an unsung genius of crime writing’

  – Independent on Sunday

  ‘James Sallis is a superb writer’

  – Times

  ‘James Sallis-he’s right up there, one of the best of the best… Sallis, also a poet, is capable of smart phrasing and moments of elegiac energy’

  – Ian Rankin, Guardian

  ‘[A] master of American noir…Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared down prose is distinctive and powerful’

  – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Sallis’s spare, concrete prose achieves the level of poetry’

  – Telegraph

  ‘Sallis is a wonderful writer, dark, lyrical and compelling’

  – Spectator

  ‘Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work’

  – London Review of Books

  ‘Unlike those pretenders who play in dark alleys and think they’re tough, James Sallis writes from an authentic noir sensibility, a state of mind that hovers between amoral indifference and profound existential despair’

  – New York Times

  ‘Carefully crafted, restrained and eloquent’

  – Times Literary Supplement

  ‘James Sallis is without doubt the most underrated novelist currently working in America’

  – Catholic Herald

  ‘Sallis writes crime novels that read like literature’

  – Los Angeles Times

  ‘Allusive and stylish, this stark metaphysical landscape will leave a resounding impression’

  – Maxim Jakubowski, Guardian

  ‘The brooding atmosphere and depth of characterisation mark this as superior mystery fare’

  – Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

  ‘I’m brought back, yet again, to my conviction that the best American writers are hiding out like CIA sleepers, long forgotten fugitives from a discontinued campaign’

  – Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books

  ‘Classic American crime of the highest order’

  – Time Out

  GHOST OF A FLEA

  Lew Griffin Book Five

  JAMES SALLIS

  www.noexit.co.uk

  To Jane Rector-Donaldson

  Rich and Abi Martin

  Emily and Joe Ferri

  Contents

  About the Author

  SELECTED WORKS BY JAMES SALLIS

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Copyright

  My beautiful ship O my memory

  Have we sailed far enough

  In waters bad to drink

  Have we sailed far enough

  From the beautiful dawn to the sad evening!

  —APOLLINAIRE

  Chapter One

  AFTER A WHILE I got up and walked to the window. I felt that if I didn’t say anything, if I didn’t think about what had happened, didn’t acknowledge it, somehow it might all be all right again. I listened to the sound of my feet on the floor, the sounds of cars and delivery vans outside, my own breath. Whatever feelings I had, had been squeezed from me. I was empty as a shoe. Empty as the body on the bed behind me.

  A limb bowed and pecked at the window, bowed and pecked again. Winds were coming in across Lake Ponchartrain with pullcarts of rain in their
wake. I heard music from far off but couldn’t tell what it was, not even what kind. Maybe only wind caught in the building’s hard throats and hollows, or the city’s random noise congealing.

  I seem never to learn that standing still doesn’t work. There you are with a smile on your face, they won’t notice me, and all the while all the things you fear keep moving towards you, their smiles a violent travesty of your own. “In your books you never write about anything that’s not past, done with, gone,” LaVerne had said years ago. She knew that was a way to stand still, too. And she’d been right—about that as about so much else.

  Sooner or later I’d have to move. Go back out there, into the world, a world much smaller now, where it was about to rain. And where one of the coldest winters in New Orleans history like a bit player waited impatiently in the wings, strutting and thrumming, for its cue to go on.

  I’d spent my life in rooms much like this. You move, like a hermit crab, into their shell. Then in time, as old clothes and mattresses do, they begin taking on your form. Their safe, familiar walls are a second skin. You and the room become of a size and kind, indistinguishable. The room, its surfaces, its volumes, diminish when you leave; and you in turn, away from the room too long, find yourself growing restless, edgy, at loose ends.

  I peered out the window, a dim image of the room behind me superimposed there like a fading photograph or one taken too soon from the developing tray, suspended half-formed, neither wholly out of the world nor quite a part of it. The window had become a universal mirror. In it everything was reversed, turned about, transformed: light bled away to darkness, walls and corners bent to obscure, indecipherable shapes, the whole of the room lumpen, autumnal.

  And out there in the window-world where a moth beat against glass, a man I knew both too well and not at all stood watching. A man dark and ill-defined, with the mark of lateness, of the autumnal, upon him too.

  I remembered Henry James’s remark upon meeting George Gissing that he appeared to be a man “quite particularly marked out for what is called in his and my profession an unhappy ending.” Gissing had deployed his creativity as the single dynamic force in a life otherwise marked by doubts and indecision, discord, disappointment, disillusion. All of which had a familiar ring to it.

  I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose, I had written, years ago. I can’t imagine what it should be.

  Now I knew.

  All the people we’ve met, all those memories and voices, real or imagined, the hoarse whisper of our communal sadness, the beat of regret and sorrow in our blood, the haphazard apprehensions that have made us what we are—they’re out there now in the darkness, all of them, at these silent barricades. All the people (as LaVerne used to say) we’ve watched disappear out the back windows of trains. LaVerne, parents, Hosie Straughter, Vicky, Baby Boy McTell. Myself. This odd man Lew Griffin who understood so much about others and so little, finally, about himself.

  Another moth joins the first. Together, apart, they beat soundlessly at the window’s periphery. This latecomer, a sphinx moth, has the body of a bulldog, colors like those of an oil slick in moonlight. Also called a hawkmoth. I watch the two familial insects, who could scarcely be more dissimilar, bump and bounce away from the window, skitter the length of its glass in long slides. Perhaps I should value my life more, that something else so badly wants in.

  Because the volume has been increased, or because other sounds have fallen away, I can make out the music now. Charlie Patton’s slurred voice and guitar, like hands that have gone into water and come out with something shapeless, something that nonetheless coheres for just a moment before it begins spilling away. Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home.

  A long way indeed.

  Here in this still room, then, in this moment before the world returns in a rush and bears me back into it, I will tell you what I know: It is not yet midnight. It is not yet raining.

  Chapter Two

  ALOUETTE NAMED THE CHILD for her mother. She was born on Epiphany, January 6, and I first saw her two hours later at Touro Infirmary, her father standing alongside grinning. Larson was a good, uncomplicated, immensely kind man.

  “’ew,” he said when I stepped into the room, his L an unvoiced breath. I’d never been able to decide if he had an impediment or if that L with the tongue’s trip from the top of the mouth down was just too much effort for him. I was ’ew, his wife was ’ette. Not that he said much any other time, either. Scientists claim that in our lifetime we spend a total of twelve years talking. If there’s any kind of sliding scale, Larson would live to an advanced age.

  We shook hands. His was rough and scarred, bleached in patches to a whitish, puttylike gray, elsewhere stained darker, by the cleansers and chemicals he used in his work. Larson restored old buildings. One of the few times I’d heard full sentences from him was a year or so past when we’d sat out on the porch after dinner sharing a beer and he began talking about a house he was working on. You wouldn’t believe what-all these old places have wrong with them, he said. Everything on God’s earth looks to be out to destroy them. Termites like you’ve never seen. Mold and rot everywhere. Ground settles, trying to crack them open, and when that doesn’t work it moves off somewhere else and settles again. People rip out their insides. Wonder any of them manage to go on standing. But they do.

  I stood there by Alouette and the baby, grinning myself, remembering once years ago walking up Magazine watching people as they made their way out of the business district by car, bus, foot and streetcar. I’d been thinking then about the homes, families, meals and easy chairs they were headed back to, thinking how that world flowing past was one I’d never know. Alouette’s mother told me that the two of us were just alike, that we’d never find anyone permanent, anyone who’d go the long haul, who cared that much.

  All that was a long time ago.

  Early morning light spilled through the window onto us. Alouette was asleep. It was as though time were suspended, as though the very morning held its breath. Day became a squirrel gliding between trees in a long, silent jump.

  “They’re both okay, the nurses said.”

  Larson nodded.

  “Tell her I was here? I’ll call or come back by later.”

  Another nod.

  “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Y’bet.”

  But when I stepped out, Larson followed. We stood by a hall window. Below in the street a Toyota had tried to make it past a turning eighteen-wheeler carrying plumbing fixtures and had wound up lodged underneath. We watched firemen’s efforts to extricate the Toyota’s driver. A team from the hospital hovered about a gurney at crowd’s edge, hugging themselves against the cold, waiting. Lights from police and emergency vehicles lashed the street.

  “She tell you about the notes?” Larson asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Think she meant to. Hope she did. Else I’m ’bout to step in it here. Pull you along.”

  When his eyes cut towards mine, I said: “At work, you mean.” Alouette was a community activist. Rattling cages, shaking jars that had sat too long unmolested on shelves and getting in people’s faces was what she did, what she was good at. People got upset. They were supposed to. Sometimes abrasiveness hauled in results on its back. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes results not intended hopped aboard and made the trip.

  Larson allowed as how it had been, yes, at work.

  “Threats.”

  He nodded.

  “Anything specific?”

  “Not really. Impression I got, she was supposed to know already.”

  “Did she?”

  Larson shrugged. “Have to ask ’ette.”

  “You have any idea what the threats were about? Who they might have been from?”

  “No.”

  We stood together looking down at the revolving lights, circle of medical deacons about the car.

  “Case she was working on, maybe.” Alouette being still, between bouts of raising ideological hell,
a caseworker.

  “Could be.” He shrugged. “You know how ’ette is. Save the world. Dozen or more balls in the air. No way she’s gonna keep them all up there. Sooner or later they start comin’ down on folks’s heads.”

  “But she took the threats seriously?”

  “She told me about them. So I have to figure she must of.”

  Down in the street they dragged the driver from the Toyota. We watched as head and trunk came free, a young woman wearing a blue blazer, light blue shirt, red tie. Her legs hung oddly, like a doll’s. As did her head.

  “I’ll need to see her files. What she was working on, correspondence, any notebooks or the like.”

  “Most a that’s up to the Center. Have to ask them there. Not my world.” Larson spread fingers wide on the sill. I thought of the wingspan of large birds: eagles, hawks. Just before those splayed, discolored fingers fell lightly onto my arm.

  * * *

  I was sitting in Joe’s, heading for a record. I’d come in early yesterday afternoon for a coffee and never left. A regular named Jimmy and I had been talking and got to wondering how long anyone ever sat in a bar without drinking. Now, though I didn’t know whether momentum or inertia would be the appropriate term, I was too far invested in the thing to get up and go. Here I was. Too much coffee had my nerve ends flapping like tatters of flags left behind once all the Pattons, Westmorelands and Schwarzkopfs have had their way, dark things were beginning to move in the corners whenever I looked away, and I’d had enough weird conversations to last well into the next century. But here I was.