I’d known Edgar Manning for a number of years, and I was there at the event that introduced him, rather notoriously, to the rest of London.
I was at Lizzie Fox’s restaurant in Little Newport Street. A group of us had been to the races the weekend before, Mrs. Fox having had a weakness to the laying of money on horses akin to mine. Lizzie won seventy pounds. I’d lost a hundred, and another hundred on champagne. Manning, who was also there, won, but not as much as Lizzie.
Which is what started it all.
I’d been sitting in my usual place by the window, reading the paper, smoking. Watching the door. Watching Yankee Frank come in, his ugly face made even uglier by the cheap cigar in his mouth. He came straight up to Manning and demanded a pound.
"I have not a pound to give you," Manning said. His manners have always been impeccable, and his voice stayed quiet and calm.
"You’re a fucking thief," Frank said. "I know how you’re earning your living."
There was a moment of silence. London may have not, by that time, heard of Edgar Manning, but the people at Mrs. Fox's had, and that silence should have served as a warning to the faux-American.
Manning merely shook his head.
"You’re a fucking shitpot," Frank said to him. I saw Manning’s handsome black face go blank as he contemplated Yankee Frank’s future. He may have let him go at that, but then Frank turned to Molly O’Brien, an actress and a slip of a girl who was sitting at a nearby table. "You’re a bloody prostitute," he told her, chewing on his cigar.
Mollie may have been slight, but she wasn’t one to take insults from anyone, and certainly not someone like Yankee Frank. "It’s a pity you don’t go and work for a living," she said to him. "You’re only a ponce."
It was true – Frank’s main form of income was from small-scale extortion of local hoodlums, an act commonly knows as poncing – but it didn’t mean he liked Mollie calling him that. Before I could move he threw the cigar at her and punched her in the eye. Blood swelled up over delicate, white skin. "If there wasn’t so many people in here, I’d do something else to you," he said, and ran out.
I looked at Manning; his face had closed even more, unreadable as a fetish mask, but it was open and kind when he asked Mollie if she was all right, before leaving a short while after.
What happened next became a legend, and it happened like this:
Outside, Mollie O’Brien ran into Yankee Frank again, who was walking with his brother, Charles. As I said, she didn’t take crap from nobody, and she let him have it.
In turn, he punched her in the stomach and ran off. The two brothers then met up with a friend, Robert Davies, another lowlife.
They were just turning down
Shaftesbury Avenue
when, outside the Palace Theatre, they met Manning.
They attacked him.
Manning ran around a passing bus. Then he pulled out a piece, and, with careful aim, he kneecapped all three men.
This much is public knowledge. The News of the World delighted in the headline "Evil Negro Caught" and called Manning the "King of London’s dope traffic". He was Jamaican, the son of slaves. A jazz musician who came to England from America during the war. He was always impeccably dressed, articulate, attractive.
In the event, he was sentenced to only eighteen months.
When he got out of jail he came to see me.
It was a cold November night; my apartment by the meat market of Smithfields was draughty. It was a bad night, and I did not wish to be disturbed. I had cleared the floor of all furniture and arranged half-melted candles in a Star of David on the floor, contained within a chalked pentagram.
I was about to begin when there was a knock on the door.
Outside, wet lights blinked in the dark. On the steps stood Manning, hat in hand: the time in prison had bulked him up, and his face looked lined and worried.
"Tzaddik, I need your help," he said.
"Come in," I said. He followed me into the hallway. "Sorry about the mess."
Manning took only a desultory look at the arrangements on the living room floor. He knew my working methods. I led him into the small kitchen and set to making tea while my guest sat down.
"I didn’t know you got out," I said.
"It was only two days ago," he said. "And I’ve been trying to lay low for a while. Luckily my network of employees is still mostly in place. Here–" He reached into a coat pocket and took out a small paper packet, which he placed carefully on the table. "For you."
I didn’t need to look in the bag to know what was inside. Nevertheless, I did. I placed some of the powder with care between my thumb and forefinger and snorted it, feeling exhilaration take hold of my brain.
"They don’t call it joy dust for nothing," I said.
Manning nodded, but his face did not reflect my lightening mood. So, "What is it?" I said.
He looked up at me, his fingers wrapping around the mug of hot Earl Grey I had given him as if seeking to draw strength from it. "It’s Billie," he said. "I’ve seen her. I don’t know what to do."
I sat down opposite him and looked at his eyes carefully. His pupils were normal-sized, his eyes anxious.
"Billie’s dead," I said.
Manning slammed a fist on the table; droplets of tea decorated the tabletop like liquid marbles. "I know that, Tzaddik!"
And then he started to cry.
Billie.
Billie Carleton.
The World’s Pictorial News called her "the very essence of English girlhood". Billie Carleton, with her short cropped hair and large eyes that hinted at both tragedy and joy. A small, perfect mouth and a voice to match. I saw her in her first big performance, when she replaced Ethel Levey in the lead of Watch Your Step at the Empire. Charlie Cochran, who gave her that first break, later recalled her as "a young girl of flower-like beauty, delicate charm, and great intelligence".
She was also a cocaine addict.
I thought of those beautiful eyes, closed in death, and of a certain gold box I had kept, out of sight, in the sea-chest upstairs.
"She’s dead," I said again.
Manning’s voice, when it came, was dangerously quiet. "You and I both know, Tzaddik, that death is not an entirely unknown country."
"Isn’t it?" I said. "I’ve never been there to know."
And Manning slowly smiled. White teeth made his mouth look like an ivory gate into the dark. "No," he said. "You haven’t."
It is dangerous to deal with men who know your secrets. So, "Tell me about it," I said, and waited.
"I started seeing her two months ago," Manning said. "She came to me in prison. At first only in my dreams. Her face, as beautiful as I remembered it to be. She was trying to tell me something. Her mouth moved, but if she spoke I couldn’t hear her."
"You were dreaming," I said. He ignored me.
"I got to a stage I didn’t dare go to sleep anymore," he said. "She haunted me until I feared sleep." His tea stood untouched on the table. I pushed the bag of snow on the table toward him, and he helped himself to a pinch and snorted it. "So she began to appear when I was awake. Eighteen months, man, eighteen months of hard labour. I thought I was losing my mind."
"You still have to convince me you haven’t."
He laughed. "She gave me this," he said, and reached into his pocket. "One night she came into the cell and touched me. I could feel her skin, warm and alive, and I could smell her, the scent of French perfume and lilacs. She gave me this," he repeated, and put a small, gold box on the table, watching me.
"A snuff box?" My voice was steady, my hands weren’t. Manning could see that.
Well, damn him. I reached for the bag and helped myself to another pinch of cocaine. Damn Manning, I thought, and damn Billie too.
"Her coke box," he said. "The one that was resting on the table beside the bed the night she died." His eyes searched my face like a snake charmer watching his cobras. He noted the hands but didn’t comment, and I gave him credit for that.
> "Can you raise her?"
It was a request, not a question, and I had seen it coming.
"Possibly," I admitted. "Not a good idea. Not tonight. Not on any night." I was babbling, and in his eyes I could see he was reading me, not knowing but still guessing the source of my anxiety.
"Will you do it though?" Manning’s large hands rested on the table, palms open as if in appeal.
"Can you not get a houngan to do it?" I said.
Manning laughed, short, dry laughter that sounded like a cough. "I tried. The loa are refusing to communicate with me. Apparently." His tone of voice suggested he was not much pleased with the voudon priest, and I suspected the man was probably dispatched himself as a sacrifice to Baron Samedi. Manning was not a man to tolerate incompetence.
I needed to think. I needed to buy time to think. "I’ll have to make some enquiries," I said. "Also, some preparations. Where are you staying at the moment?"
He measured me up. "At the Montmarte Café," he said at last.
"With Zenovia?"
"Yes."
"All right," I said, decided. "I’ll find you there. If you need to contact me, leave a message with Motty in the sandwich shop."
Manning smiled unexpectedly. "Motty still there?"
I nodded.
"Still dealing to the tourists?"
I smiled back. "We’ve all got to make a living," I said.
Manning nodded. The smile evaporated as he stood up.
At the door, he turned to face me. The expression on his face was unreadable. His hand felt warm and heavy in mine as we shook. He looked like he was about to say something, thought better of it. I watched him disappear into the darkness.
I shut the door against the outside and raced upstairs, searching for the box. But it was gone, and by then it was too late, and the darkness had already filtered inside.
At that time of the night--so late it was almost morning--Limehouse was shrouded in fog; a pack of small dogs rooted through the garbage outside the Shanghai restaurant, and from a distance came the muted sound of a late-night reveller stumbling out of an opium den and throwing up on the pavement.
There were no lights behind the windows of the Shanghai. I watched the place for a while, unseen, but no movement was visible. After fifteen minutes I gave up my watch and progressed down the causeway until I reached a small, unmarked door at the end of a narrow alleyway.
"You no come in." It took several loud knocks before the door was opened by a young Chinese man who stared at me with hostility.
"I’m looking for Chang," I said.
The lad looked blank. "No Chang here!" he said, and tried to close the door in my face.
"Not so fast, butterfly," I said, and pushed the door open again. I reached into my pocket, watching him. "My card."
He moved his hand away from the knife hidden in his coat and accepted it. When his head came up again, he was grinning. "So you’re the Tzaddik? Sorry about that, you know what it’s like around here at this time of the morning."
His sudden cockney accent could have broken glass, and there was something familiar about the shape of his face. "Are you related to Xing He?" I asked as he closed the door behind me.
His entire face lit up. "He’s my uncle. Says you’re the best player of pai-ke-p’iao he’s ever seen."
"Don’t believe everything he tells you," I said, and we both laughed. "Is Chang around?"
He shook his head. "You can wait for him here, if you like," he said. "I’ll do you a pipe on the house."
He saw my face and lowered his voice. "From what I hear, he’s got a new lady friend somewhere near Seven Dials. Should be back before too long."
Brilliant Chang always had a new lady friend. The son of a wealthy family based in Hong Kong, he drew women to him: I believe the Sunday Express once quoted a group of flappers who enthusiastically referred to him as "the rich young chink". I knew the man, and knew his methods: he once showed me the pile of identically-worded notes he carried everywhere in his pockets, to hand out like sweets to women who caught his fancy:
"Dear Unknown–" it said. "Please do not regard this as a liberty that I write to you, as I am really unable to resist the temptation after having seen you so many times. I should extremely like to know you better, and should be glad if you would do me the honour of meeting me one evening where we could have a little dinner and a quiet chat together. I do hope you will consent to this, as it will give me great pleasure, and in any case do not be cross with me for having written to you." It was signed, "Yours hopefully, Chang. PS – If you reply, please address it to me at the Shanghai Restaurant, Limehouse-causeway, E14."
"All right," I said to the young Chinese man. "I’ll take you up on the offer." He smiled, and led me away into the main room of the house.
At this time of the morning few people were inside: two sailors in one corner, lying comatose with the glowing remains of a pipe still clutched in their hands; a man and a woman, with clothes that marked them out as members of the privileged class, sat together on large red cushions on the other side, similarly indisposed. Low-hanging lanterns cast dim light.
In yet another corner a man lay in shadows; the scent of incense wafted heavily throughout the room as did the pungent smell of burning opium. I took a seat on one of the cushions as my companion began preparing a pipe for me.
I let the sweet smoke fill my lungs and felt my eyes threaten to close as the drug took hold of me. As always, when it did, images of my expulsion from the Thirty-Six invaded my mind. What are drugs to an immortal? I shouted at them. They found me in the boarding house in Paris, in that other, even-dirtier century: I was lying comatose on the barren floor, my arms and legs bare and punctured, lying in my own excrement. The thirty-five other men and women of my circle, the hidden guardians of our people. Immortals, Guardians, Tzaddiks, call them what you will. In Hebrew the word means someone who is righteous: and they looked at me then with expressions ranging from pity to disgust.
Another breath of opium, and another, and the memory faded. The room receded into darkness, and I let my mind open, welcoming in a rare sensation of peace. There will be time, I thought, to tackle the problem of Billie Carleton. For now, let this be enough.
I watched the room with my eyes hooded. The toffs had finally got up and were escorted out of the room, a cab no doubt already waiting for them outside. The sailors, I decided, did not look like they were going anywhere in a hurry. My young Chinese friend was busy preparing another pipe for them.
And that person whose face I couldn’t see... I watched the corner of the room and tried to guess at the features of the one who sat there. I felt a prickling at the back of my neck, as if I, in turn, was also being watched. I opened my senses wide, cast a net around the room. I felt the drug-induced haze of the two sailors, nightmares of raging seas and visions of monstrous creatures rising from the deep, felt the sweat forming on their skin, the taste of bloodied salt on their tongues. I tore myself from their shared nightmare and tried to focus on that corner of darkness I was after, but to no avail: it was as if nothing living were sitting there, nothing that could feel, or touch, or remember.
I rose from my seat and stepped toward the shadows, the pipe falling from my hand. But it was not my body that had stood: I was a pale, transparent form, a ghostly semblance of my body lying still and cold. I walked towards the darkness, my steps making no sound.
That corner of the room attracted and repelled me now. Its shadows thickened, became solid as walls. I thrust my hands into the darkness, drawing myself closer, intent on seeing the face hidden within.
My spectral hands formed shapes in the air, and a cold white fire burst from my fingers, penetrating the darkness.
There were not one, but two figures sitting there: two faces, clearly seen for the briefest of seconds, before a force I did not reckon on encountering hit my chest and pushed me violently back into my own body, where I lay, shivering and vomiting and no longer in the throws of delirium.
&n
bsp; Two faces, glimpsed for the briefest of moments: I shivered again as I recalled Billie’s beautiful diamond eyes looking into mine, and beside her, his hand on her thigh, a man with no face, whose body was shadow and bone.
I had my fingers wrapped around Brilliant Chang’s neck and I wasn’t about to let go. He hung against the wall, the expensive fur coat flapping in time to his legs kicking the empty air.
"What the hell," I said, "did you get yourself involved in?"
I let him go and watched him fall to the ground, clutching at his neck and breathing hoarsely.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about!" he said.
"No?" I took the small gold box from my pocket and waved it in his face. "Do you recognise this?"
It was Billie’s snow box. The box that had lain secure in my sea-chest since her death on that night at the Victory Ball in the Albert Hall. The box that, somehow, made its way into Manning’s hand, given to him by a ghost.
Chang’s eyes widened when he recognised it. "Where did you get this?" he said.
"Bill," I said, "let me ask the questions, all right?" I was breathing hard, the after-effects of the opium dream hitting me in waves. "There was a man in your establishment earlier today. I want to know who he is."
Chang looked at me. We weren’t friends, but we'd worked together in the past, and he could tell I was anxious and angry. I looked into his eyes and read understanding there, but also fear, a fear I was certain was not inspired by me. It was not an emotion I had seen in Brilliant Chang’s face before.
I watched him think it through. Then, "Let me buy you a drink," he said, and rose up slowly to his feet. He looked at me and smiled lopsidedly. "You might need it. I know I do."
I had found Chang at Lily Rumble’s flat off Holborn, alone and preparing to go out. I’d gone there straight from Limehouse: when I recuperated from the psychic attack, the mysterious man and his ghostly companion were gone, as if they had never been there. The young Chinese lad, Xing He’s nephew, had also disappeared. A waiter at the Shanghai Restaurant finally gave me, after I coerced him, the address and swore Chang would be there. I left him to contemplate the prospects of the information proving incorrect and made my way to Holborn.
HebrewPunk Page 9