by Orrin Grey
Of course he was talking about the Lesser Keys. It seemed like they were all anybody was talking about. Just another jazz ensemble in a sea of jazz ensembles? Maybe, but the word was they were setting Kansas City on fire, and that in spite of the fact that they’d only play at one place, a roadhouse on the outskirts called Solomon King’s Mine. They were supposed to be good, damn good, but privately Jasper didn’t think that’s what Gerald Tyson wanted them for. Privately, though he’d never say it to the big man’s face, nor to anyone else who might ever breathe a word of it in that direction, Jasper thought that Gerald Tyson just couldn’t handle the thought of anyone having something nice that he couldn’t have. He was going to take the Lesser Keys away from Solomon King just to prove that he could.
Before leaving Chicago, Jasper had asked around to learn what he could about Solomon King and the Lesser Keys. It hadn’t been a lot. Solomon King ran his roadhouse and was supposed to have some sway in the politics of the city, though no one could say how much or what kind. Jasper figured he was looking at another Gerald Tyson, more or less. But he also learned that Tyson wasn’t wrong about the city being a quagmire, something altogether different from Chicago. While the gangsters there owned the politicians, in Kansas City the line between the two seemed even more blurred. The way Jasper heard it, the whole place was in the pocket of this “Boss Tom” character, who made men like Tyson seem petty tyrants by comparison. Jasper wasn’t sure how much stock to put into those rumors, but he planned to keep a low profile in the city as best he could, just to be safe. He’d already had enough of powerful white men to last him a lifetime.
Tyson hadn’t given him a concrete deadline, but he’d also made no bones about the fact that there was a time limit on this job. Still, Jasper was, if nothing else, a man who knew his work, and he knew in his gut that this wasn’t going to be as simple a matter as Tyson made it out. Whatever the secrets of the Lesser Keys were, prying them away was going to take more finesse than marching in with a better payday, and that finesse would require that he know his footing a little better. So that Friday night he didn’t go to Solomon King’s Mine at all. He struck out walking from the front of the boarding house with the intention of sampling the finest night life that Kansas City had to offer. In his experience, that was how you took the measure of a city, and learned what was up from what was down. And Jasper had a feeling that he was going to need to know up from down pretty thoroughly before this job was over.
Caroline Bloom’s driver deposited her at the front doors of the Muehlbach Hotel at seven o’clock. The hotel was supposed to be the finest in Kansas City, though that wasn’t really what had drawn her there. She was told that it already had its very own ghost, a lady in blue who had maybe once been a singer at the Gayety Theatre across the street. No one seemed to know what her fate had been, but the word went that most of the staff had seen her wandering the halls at one time or another.
Caroline had always been fascinated by spook stories, places where murders had been committed, anything that made her blood run a little cold. “Morbid,” is what her mother had called it when she was still alive, as well as “unladylike” and, at times, even less flattering things. Which made it doubly unfair that Jonathon was the one who had gotten into this trouble. Running off halfway across the country with some movie starlet, joining a secret society. These were the kinds of things Caroline longed to do. But because she’d had the misfortune to be born a lady, she had to play at responsibility while Jonathon’s rakish proclivities—while frowned upon—were at least tolerated. It’s just what indolent young men did, she was told again and again. Once his wild oats were sown, he’d settle down.
She supposed she owed him a little, though, for finally doing something shocking enough that Mr. Benedict, who handled their finances, had sent her west to come and track him down, bring him home. Mr. Benedict had wanted to hire a private detective to do the job, but Caroline had eventually won out. “I know Jonathon better than anyone,” she’d told him, more than once before he finally got it through his white-haired old head, “and I’m the only one who’s going to convince him to come home without being dragged.”
Now she was here, on the not-quite-completely-tamed-yet frontier, embarking on at least a little bit of an adventure. While it wasn’t exactly running off with a starlet and joining a cult, it was better than nothing. When she finally tracked Jonathon down, she’d have to thank him for that, right after she socked him in the jaw for running off without telling her.
While she thought of Jonathon, she watched the porters unloading her bags from the car and carrying them into the hotel’s sparkling lobby. Chandeliers drenched the surroundings in golden light and glinted off the checkered tiles of the lobby floor. Outside, night was falling, draping the tall buildings in shadowy cloaks, and the lights were coming on up and down the street as the clubs and dancehalls came to life. She had some leads on how to find Jonathon, contacts in the city that had known her father, places to start looking. But she hoped he proved more elusive than he had in the past, when he’d disappeared on smaller indiscretions closer to home. She hoped it took her some time to track him down. It wasn’t as if she’d never been to the big city, or that Kansas City was anywhere near the size of the places she’d gone back home, but it felt somehow different. Less tame, like the city was just a veneer laid over a sleeping beast to make it look domestic. She knew that the night sky out here would be vast and dark and empty in a way that she’d never seen before, she could feel it in her gut, even though the sun wasn’t yet quite gone. In the spaces between the buildings the blue of the sky was deepening, the way the ocean did as the land dropped away, and when the last light was gone it would be like being in a cave that went on forever. She hoped she would be here long enough to make that feeling last, at least a little while.
And if she was very lucky, maybe she would even see a ghost.
Solomon King stood at the top of the stairs with his arms clasped behind his back. He rocked forward onto his toes, enjoying the feeling that he was about to overbalance, to plunge down into the darkness below. Then he rocked back onto his heels.
Behind him, he could hear the music coming from the main room. Not the Lesser Keys playing, not yet. Just some other band, some boys he paid to entertain the customers. Not bad musicians, full of the passion that only comes when you’re playing to live, when playing’s all you’ve got to live for. But still just men making noises that could only aspire to be music, and nothing more. He tuned them out.
He closed his eyes, as he always did at the top of the stairs, and he visualized the room below him. The basement of the house, what he had actually bought the building for. The vast dark catacomb there, cut into solid rock, connected into a natural cave system that ran out into the surrounding hills. The wooden struts and braces, erected to help support the cavern, to keep the weight of the house above, with all its many revelers and guests, from crashing down into the caves below. The pentagrams, triangles, and Solomonic seals cut carefully into the floor of the chamber, ready to be poured full of sand or salt or blood, as needed. The sigils, painstakingly painted onto the walls, each stroke potentially a literal matter of life or death. The black pool at the back of the cavern, darker and deeper than water could ever be.
The room was perfect, and in it he had already perfected, already set into motion his great machine, the one that would finally do what no one in the debased and cowardly Golden Dawn had achieved, in spite of their grand claims, nor the Rosy Cross who had left them behind, nor the Order of Kings, here in this city, who were taking votes even now as to whether or not to cast him out. He knew of their machinations, knew that they moved against him in their offices and chambers, in their meeting halls in the city proper. His daemons advised him so, and he knew the truth of their words. He had peered into the hearts of these men who thought themselves his betters because their skin was whiter, their money greener. The fools believed that enough corporeal power, fine enough suits, large enough offices,
enough land and money could make them great men. There was more power in the silver ring on his finger than in all of their boardrooms and bank accounts combined, and they knew it, in their weak, fearful hearts. They knew it at night, when they lay down to sleep next to their wives or mistresses. They knew real power when they saw it, and it made them afraid, and so they plotted against him now. They believed they had used him, and that now they could cast him aside. At least, that’s what they wanted to believe.
His father had believed it as well, and it had cost him dearly. Solomon King smiled, turning the silver ring on his finger. There was a stain on the inside of the band, old and dark as a shadow on a tintype.
In the past, the machinations of the Order of Kings would have enraged him, but he found that now he barely cared. Their schemes were already too late, though they didn’t yet realize it. His own machine was now in operation, one much greater than the so-called “Pendergast Machine” that ran this frontier Babylon. They had used his knowledge to strike deals with devils for mortal gain, but he would show them yet the pettiness of their greed. He would show them what a real devil was capable of.
Behind him the sound of horns and pianos slowly died away, to be replaced by the ocean roar of applause, the susurrus of voices from distant rooms. He kept his eyes closed as that sound died away, replaced with a waiting hush, and then the first silver notes of Magda’s song. He always had her sing before the Lesser Keys, the warmup, the oil that would lubricate the machine. As her words rang in the air like clear bells, Solomon King smiled a private smile in the dark at the thought of the music that his creation was about to make.
Progression
For his first few nights in town, Jasper deWitt went to what seemed like every speakeasy, dancehall, ballroom, and night club in Kansas City that would let in colored patrons, except Solomon King’s. He walked down 14th Street, where the whores tapped nickels against their windows at patrons as they passed. If Gerald Tyson could see him, Jasper knew that the big man would be fuming so hot that steam would be coming out of his ears, but there was a reason Tyson had sent him, and this was a job that Jasper knew how to do. Before he could get any good leads on talking that outfit out from under King’s thumb, he was going to have to get the lay of the land, and that meant spending time—and more than a little of his folding money—reconnoitering. Not his fault if the majority of that time and money had to be spent in establishments of loose moral virtue.
On Monday night, he finally hired a car to drive him out to Solomon King’s, but he didn’t go in. Even on a Monday, the lot was full of cars, and they were parked along the road to either side. Seemed like it was a pretty happening place, which supported what Jasper had already heard. Solomon King’s, in spite of its relatively out-of-the-way location, was the most popular night spot in Kansas City, and it had everything to do with the Lesser Keys.
Nobody who had heard them could say what was so special about them. He’d met with an old horn player who could hold forth about every kind of music a man could blow, and the old musician had just gotten a faraway look in his eyes when he tried to talk about the Lesser Keys. “When they play,” he said, “it ain’t like music at all. I cain’t rightly say what it is, but I ain’t heard nothin’ like it in all my born days.”
Whatever it was that the Lesser Keys had, the word was that it brought in everyone who was anyone and a lot of people who weren’t. Though King’s was always packed, he didn’t seem like he was too exclusive. The richest and whitest folks in town rubbed elbows there with petty crooks and street musicians. King seemed to believe in a policy of inclusiveness, and anybody who was on his good list could get in the door of his club. If there was any rhyme or reason to who he let in and who he turned away, Jasper couldn’t see it, and nobody else could illuminate it for him.
That Monday night, Jasper watched the windows spill their embers of light out through the cracks in the shutters, he listened to the hum of the music that he could feel as much as hear, and he looked to try to figure out what it was he was looking for.
When the last song that had been thrumming through the night died out, a crystal birdsong that was only audible to Jasper as an echo, like a memory, he turned to the driver to tell him to take them back but then he stopped. Something had changed out there in the dark. The air was suddenly alive, charged like with a summer storm. Jasper realized that his knuckles had whitened on the dash, his fingernails digging into the upholstery. And then the music started back up.
He still couldn’t really hear it, not at this distance, but he could feel the difference, just as he had felt the charge in the air that preceded them, and he knew that it was the Lesser Keys. Jasper deWitt wasn’t an educated man, and he’d never done anything with his life besides the kind of work he was doing now, but when he was a boy his mother had been deeply religious, and she had taken him to church every Sunday morning. Nothing that the preacher had ever said had gotten through to Jasper, but the music did. The hymns, at their best, could do something more than reach inside a man, he knew that even as a boy. They carried something in them that was more powerful than words and notes, something that could change you, could put you in touch with things that were bigger than you, things that could maybe change everything, at least for a few seconds. His mother called it Jesus, but he wasn’t so sure. All he was sure about was that the music was special, powerful, and he felt something in it that he never felt anywhere else.
All his life, he knew music. He spent as much time around it as he could, and the darkest and most disappointing hours of his life were when he realized that he had no talent for it himself. But he understood it, in his gut, and he knew when it was good, when it could move a person. He knew what band playing what song would get them out on the dance floor, and which one would make them drink, and which would make them tell their friends the next day. It’s how he’d ended up working for Gerald Tyson, and it was the only thing in a long and mostly wasted life that he’d ever been particularly good at. But in all those years, he’d never heard another song that did what the best of those hymns of his youth had done.
Never, ’til now. Even the few straggling notes, dying out in the night air, even the thrum that he could feel running through the car, even that was enough for him to know that what he was listening to was something more than music. If the hymns of his youth had been a peek through the keyhole into another room, this was the door thrown wide open. No wonder Solomon King kept them under his thumb.
When Jasper finally told the driver to take him home, he had to say it three times before the other man snapped out of his reverie and obeyed.
Caroline Bloom stood in Herbert Powell’s office, being told for the third time that the Order of Kings was a fraternal order, and one that he couldn’t get her even a visit with, not under any circumstances. “It’s not as if I have any sway with them anyway, Miss Bloom,” he said, his bushy eyebrows and mustache making his face seem almost comically expressive. He looked like he would have been at home curating a museum or lecturing a university class, not standing in an office full of dark wood and leather-bound books, with a map of the city on the wall behind him. “I’ve never been a member, and I’ve only been to a few meetings as a guest.”
“Uncle Herb,” Caroline replied, “if you don’t start calling me Carol, or at least Caroline, I’m going to come pull your mustache like I did when I was a girl.”
The old man smiled, his small eyes twinkling. “I’m sure you would, too. You’ve never done what you were told, ever since you were a little girl.”
The office was on the top floor of Powell, Wilfred & Lome. The view over downtown from the big window was commanding, and in spite of the urgency of her need, Caroline had trouble keeping her eyes off it to focus on Uncle Herb’s words.
“What I can’t understand,” he was saying, “is why you wouldn’t let Mr. Benedict hire someone to take care of this? Or even if you had to come out, why you can’t get a local man? I have people in the city who handle these sort
s of things for me, I’d be happy to put them at your disposal.”
“As I told Mr. Benedict,” Caroline replied, “it’s not just a matter of finding him. You know Jonathon, he’s as stubborn as a mule when someone tells him he can’t have his way, and technically there’s not much that could be done about him. I’ve got to be the one to find him, so that I can convince him to come home under his own steam. Or at least not give all of both our inheritances to some cockamamie cult.”
“The Order of Kings is a lot more than just a cult,” Powell said, shaking his head sadly, “at least here. Many of the most prominent men in town are members in good standing.”
“So what do they do?”
“The usual stuff, for the most part, I imagine. Ritual trappings wrapped around business dealings and excuses for drunken parties, just as with every society I’ve ever known of, secret or otherwise. There’s some inner circle, of course, and lots of talk about magic and hocus-pocus, but I’m sure they’re just jumped-up Masons when you strip all that away. And you’re certain that Jonathon got initiated?”
“That’s what he said in his letter.” Caroline passed the folded papers over to the old attorney. “I haven’t actually spoken to him.”
“Hm,” Powell muttered into his mustache, reading over the three typed pages that Jonathon had sent from Kansas City back to Boston a month ago. “This does sound serious. He talks as if he’s thinking of marrying this girl.”
“From what I can find out, she doesn’t sound like the marrying type,” Caroline replied. “What do you know about her?”