The Rat Race by Jay Franklin (book club books txt) 📕

you tell me the name and address of one reasonably respectable medium and I'll take care of the rest. And don't pretend that the Bureau has no record of mediums in New York City."

"Mr. Tompkins," he said—and I could fairly hear the hum of the recording machine on the telephone—"The Bureau does not endorse any so-called spiritualist mediums. Naturally, under the leadership of our present Director, the New York office has made a close check on all self-styled spiritualistic mediums in this city. One of these who has established her bona fides for purposes of identification only is Madam Claire la Lune, 1187 Lenox Avenue."

"Eleven eighty-seven Lenox," I repeated after him. "That's in Harlem. Madam Claire la Lune sounds like the dark of the moon to me. Say, Andy, hasn't she a friend named Pierrot?"

There was a pause at the other end of the wire. "No, sir, Mr. Tompkins," came the F.B.I. official voice.

"Okay," I told him. "I suppose you'll have to check on her as on everybody else but I wanted you to start calling the shots so as to save trouble for all of us. I'm going to consult Madam Lune, so you can tell your agents to rendezvous at 1187 Lenox Avenue. I'll be there in about twenty minutes."

Eleven eighty-seven Lenox did not seem prepossessing from the spiritual angle. Madam la Lune's apartment was on the third floor, walk-up, and smelled of cabbage, diapers and African sweat. Madam la Lune herself was a light mulatto with a superb figure and a face so deeply scarred by smallpox that it looked like a map of Southern lynchings since 1921.

She seemed reluctant to deal with me on a professional basis, even after I had offered her a twenty-dollar bill, until I told her that the F.B.I. had recommended her and that I needed her help.

"Oh," she said. "Tha's differ'nt. Jest you wait till I turn down my stove."

She ushered me into a close and smelly little room, with black velvet curtains and a couch covered with black sateen. Madam la Lune lay down on the couch and directed me to turn off the electric light from the switch by the door. Although it was still early afternoon, the room was so dark that I could barely make out the form of the medium or find my way back to my chair.

For a time there was no sound except for the deep regular breathing of the medium. Then suddenly came the shrill voice of a pickaninny.

"I'se here," the voice cried. "It's Silver-Bell, mammy, I'se here."

I smiled to myself in the Harlem dusk. It was so obviously the usual racket. There was the medium in her ten cent trance—the voice of her "control" was coming through. I had only to ask and I would receive a vague and blotting paper reply to any question.

"I'se here, mammy," the child's voice repeated. "What you want, mammy? Silver-Bell's here."

Madam la Lune snorted and snored on the couch. My eyes had become more accustomed to the dim light and I noticed how she had loosened her blouse so that her superb bust rose in twin-peaked Kilimanjaro against the wall.

"Silver-Bell's here, mammy," the child's voice said again. "What you want?"

"I want," I said, "to speak to Frank Jacklin. He died in the North Pacific about three weeks ago."

There was a pause, during which the snorting breaths of the medium were the only sound in the smelly little room. Then the child's voice rose, shrill and petulant.

"You funning, mammy, you funning. They ain't no Jacklin over here. Jacklin ain' dead. Jacklin sittin' right by yo' side, mammy. He police, mammy, he police."

Madam la Lune stirred and I sensed her sightless eyes turning, turning toward me in the dark.

"No, I'm not police, Silver-Bell," I said. "If you can't find Jacklin, I want to speak to Winnie Tompkins."

For several minutes there was a long silence.

Then came an impish giggle.

"Here's Mr. Tompkins, mammy, but my! he do look funny. He don' look like he used ter look."

Again silence.

"Here he is, mammy. Here he is. What do you want to know?"

"Ask him," I said, "whether he is well and happy."

The hair rose on the back of my neck and a slow shiver ran down my spine as the answer came. The answer was the familiar barking of a dog—deep, strong, savage.

"Is that you, Ponto?" I asked.

The answering bark came "Woof! Woof!"

"Where is Mr. Tompkins?"

More "woofs."

"Where is Commander Jacklin?"

Silence.

"Are you alive?"

"Woof! Woof!"

"Am I alive?"

Silence.

"Is your name Ponto?" I ventured again.

"Where is Von Bieberstein?" I demanded but my question was drowned in a storm of barking.

"I's tired, mammy," came the child's voice. "Silver-Bell's tired."

The voice trailed off, leaving me in the stifling little Harlem parlor with the mulatto woman snoring.

I sat, bemused, in the straight-back chair across the room from her. My eyes had now got used to the thin light that filtered around the heavy black curtain. I noticed a fleck of white about the corners of her mouth and I made silent note of the way her body heaved with its tortured breathing. After a while, she stirred.

"You theah, Mr. Tompkins?"

"Yes, I'm here."

"You fin' out what you wan'?" she inquired.

"I found out that you're a fraud," I told her. "You're welcome to my money but I'm damned if I think you've earned it."

She sat up and adjusted her clothing calmly. "What for you say that, Mr. Tompkins?" she demanded. "Spirits come, and spirits go. You ask questions. Maybe they give you the answers. I don't know."

"Very clever, Madam la Lune," I observed. "Harcourt phones you I'm on my way and tells you what to do. I'm supposed to come in and swallow it all. Well, I'm not interested in that game. All I want to know is how you managed to imitate my dog?"

Madam la Lune rose and peered at me in the dusk.

"White man," she said. "What dog you talkin' about? I ain't seen no dog."

The words I had planned to fling at her died in my throat. Fraud or not, she was superb. Her pock-marked face had a haughty dignity and her bearing was that of a great queen.

"I'm sorry," I apologized, without knowing why. "I'm in trouble. I hoped you could help me. All I got out of your trance was a child laughing and a dog barking."

Her eyes glowed in the twilit room.

"What this dog?" she demanded. "You know this dog?"

"Yes," I told her. "It's my dog. His name is Ponto. He's a Great Dane and he's at the kennels."

"You go, Mr. Tompkins," she ordered me. "You better go fast. That dog—wha's his color now?"

"Black," I said.

"Yes, black," She rolled her eyes until I saw the whites.

"That black dog don' mean no good to you or yours. You keep away fum that dog, Mr. Tompkins. No, suh, I don't want you money. There's no luck with you, white man, with that black dog. I don' know how Ah knows, but Ah does know."

As I walked out into the bright cool air of Lenox Avenue, I felt relieved. Madame la Lune was an interesting enough type. She obviously had the primitive sense of second sight, intuition, whatever it is, that let her penetrate behind human appearances. The medium business was just a trade trick. In Africa or Haiti she could have been a witch-doctor with a pet snake. In New Orleans, even, she would be a voodoo priestess. Here in Harlem, she had become a medium. Of course, she was a fraud, but how had she imitated the barking of the Great Dane?

Then I laughed so loudly that a passing colored man sheered violently away from me. Of course, that was it. I had been right all the time. This was Harcourt's work. He had recommended Madame la Lune to me and then told her how to behave. Damn his insolence!

I stopped dead and only stirred when the violent and prolonged sounding of an automobile horn reminded me that I was standing in the middle of a cross-street. How did Harcourt know about Ponto when he had never seen him? And how could he tell the medium how to imitate Ponto's bark?

On the next corner was a dive—a saloon that advertised "Attractions" and from whose doors welled the jungle thumping of Harlem jazz.

I slipped in and sat down at a corner table. A tall, colored girl, whose scanty white silk blouse was not designed to conceal anything, came over and leaned down to take my order.

"Wha' yo' want, honey-man?" she asked sullenly.

The band on the platform let loose with a blast of traps and trombone.

"Let's dance," I said.

She nodded with a curious dignity and I found myself parading, dipping and swaying around a tiny dancefloor, while the black girl pressed her body against me despairingly.

I pulled off to the side and led her back to my table.

"Why do you do this?" I asked.

She said nothing.

"You need money?" I asked.

She still said nothing.

"Here!" I said.

I pulled out my check-book and wrote out a check for a thousand dollars payable to cash.

"This is for you," I told her. "Take it and do whatever you want to do. The check's good."

The girl looked at me, took the check, studied it. Then she rose, in complete silence, looked at me again and left me. She shrugged her way through the dancers and the waiters to the rear of the room and disappeared. I did not know her name and I never saw her again.

A high-ochre girl came over.

"Change yo' luck?" she asked, bending over so that I could see down the front of her scant-cut dress.

"My luck's done changed," I told her. "Give me a drink and here's a ten-spot for yourself. And I'll be on my way."

She tucked the bill down the front of her dress. "May you have good luck, man," she said gravely.

As she said it, her eyes widened and her mouth hung open. "Gawd!" she muttered. "The black dog's follering you!" and fled.

"I know," I said to the room at large, and left without waiting for my drink.

CHAPTER 32

I walked down Lenox Avenue to the first cigar-store and telephoned the office.

As soon as I was connected with Arthurjean I asked her to meet me at her apartment as soon as she could make it. Then I hailed a cab and was driven south through Central Park to the upper east Fifties' and my secretary's apartment. She was waiting.

"Gee, honey," she exclaimed. "I just got here. What's cooking?"

I followed her in and went straight to the kitchenette. I poured myself a stiff drink and downed it rapidly. I poured myself another and turned to see her staring at me.

"You look terrible," she told me. "What's happened to you?"

"I can't tell you," I replied. "You'd think I'm crazy and you'd turn me in."

"I will not!"

She came up close to me and looked me square in the eye. "I don't care if you're crazy as a bed-bug," she announced. "Go on and 'pit it out in momma's hand. I won't squeal."

"Sit down!" I ordered, "and get yourself a drink first. This is tough."

She sat and listened quietly as I outlined the latest developments.

"So you see," I concluded, "I can't tell anyone. They'd have me locked up for keeps."

She nodded. "Yeah," she agreed. "I can see that.... Maybe your wife—"

"I couldn't tell her," I contradicted. "It would be too damn cruel just now when she's really happy."

Arthurjean sat and thought for a while. "Yep," she remarked, as though she had just concluded a long argument. "You're right. You can't tell nobody that. How about this nosey A. J. Harcourt? Won't he find out? He's still having you tailed."

"I don't see how he could," I told her, "unless that Madame la Lune is a complete phoney—which doesn't make sense. She and I were alone in the room. If it was a plant, there's nothing to tell. If she's on the level she won't remember what went on."

"That's no plant," Arthurjean Briggs announced. "It wouldn't make sense for the F.B.I. to pull it. Harcourt sent you there in the first place but he wouldn't put her up to a trick like that."

"He'll be hot on my trail then," I said. "All those clergymen I saw will have to be checked—when all the time—"

"Do you know what I'd do if I was you," she said abruptly. "I'd get rid of that damn dog—but fast."

"You mean sell it?" I asked.

"I mean kill it. It isn't natural, acting that way. It's been worrying you nigh crazy, that's what it's been doing. You just take it to the vet's and have it chloroformed. They do it all the time on account of the rabbis—"

"Rabies," I corrected.

"That's right, but they do it, don't they? You