The Ballad of Black Tom

1

People who move to New York always make the same mistake. They can’t see the place. This is true of Manhattan, but even the outer boroughs, too, be it Flushing Meadows in Queens or Red Hook in Brooklyn. They come looking for magic, whether evil or good, and nothing will convince them it isn’t here. This wasn’t all bad, though. Some New Yorkers had learned how to make a living from this error in thinking. Charles Thomas Tester for one.

The morning of most importance began with a trip from Charles’s apartment in Harlem. He’d been hired to make a delivery to a house out in Queens. He shared the crib in Harlem with his ailing father, Otis, a man who’d been dying ever since his wife of twenty-one years expired. They’d had one child, Charles Thomas, and even though he was twenty and exactly the age for independence, he played the role of dutiful son. Charles worked to support his dying dad. He hustled to provide food and shelter and a little extra to lay on a number from time to time. God knows he didn’t make any more than that.

A little after 8:00 a.m., he left the apartment in his gray flannel suit; the slacks were cuffed but scuffed and the sleeves conspicuously short. Fine fabric, but frayed. This gave Charles a certain look. Like a gentleman without a gentleman’s bank account. He picked the brown leather brogues with nicked toes. Then the seal-brown trooper hat instead of the fedora. The trooper hat’s brim showed its age and wear, and this was good for his hustle, too. Last, he took the guitar case, essential to complete the look. He left the guitar itself at home with his bedridden father. Inside he carried only a yellow book, not much larger than a pack of cards.

As Charles Thomas Tester left the apartment on West 144th Street, he heard his father plucking at the strings in the back bedroom. The old man could spend half a day playing that instrument and singing along to the radio at his bedside. Charles expected to be back home before midday, his guitar case empty and his wallet full.

“Who’s that writing?” his father sang, voice hoarse but the more lovely for it. “I said who’s that writing?”

Before leaving, Charles sang back the last line of the chorus. “John the Revelator.” He was embarrassed by his voice, not tuneful at all, at least when compared with his dad’s.

In the apartment Charles Thomas Tester went by Charles, but on the street everyone knew him as Tommy. Tommy Tester, always carrying a guitar case. This wasn’t because he aspired to be a musician; in fact he could barely remember a handful of songs and his singing voice might be described, kindly, as wobbly. His father, who’d made a living as a bricklayer, and his mother, who’d spent her life working as a domestic, had loved music. Dad played guitar and Mother could really stroll on a piano. It was only natural that Tommy Tester ended up drawn to performing, the only tragedy being that he lacked talent. He thought of himself as an entertainer. There were others who would have called him a scammer, a swindler, a con, but he never thought of himself this way. No good charlatan ever did.

In the clothes he’d picked, he sure looked the part of the dazzling, down-and-out musician. He was a man who drew notice and enjoyed it. He walked to the train station as if he were on his way to play a rent party alongside Willie “The Lion” Smith. And Tommy had played with Willie’s band once. After a single song Willie threw Tommy out. And yet Tommy toted that guitar case like the businessmen proudly carrying their briefcases off to work now. The streets of Harlem had gone haywire in 1924, with blacks arriving from the South and the West Indies. A crowded part of the city found itself with more folks to accommodate. Tommy Tester enjoyed all this just fine. Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived.

Tommy took up more room than most because of the guitar case. At the 143rd Street entrance he had to lift the case over his head while climbing the stairs to the elevated track. The little yellow book inside thumped but didn’t weigh much. He rode all the way down to 57th Street and there transferred for the Roosevelt Avenue Corona Line of the BMT. It was his second time going out to Queens, the first being when he’d taken the special job that would be completed today.

The farther Tommy Tester rode into Queens the more conspicuous he became. Far fewer Negroes lived in Flushing than in Harlem. Tommy bumped his hat slightly lower on his head. The conductor entered the car twice, and both times he stopped to make conversation with Tommy. Once to ask if he was a musician, knocking the guitar case as if it were his own, and the second time to ask if Tommy had missed his stop. The other passengers feigned disinterest even as Tommy saw them listening for his replies. Tommy kept the answers simple: “Yes, sir, I play guitar” and “No, sir, got a couple more stops still.” Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant — these were useful tricks for a black man in an all-white neighborhood. Survival techniques. At the last stop, Main Street, Tommy Tester got off with all the others — Irish and German immigrants mostly — and made his way down to street level. A long walk from here.

The whole way Tommy marveled at the broad streets and garden apartments. Though the borough had grown, modernized greatly since its former days as Dutch and British farmland, to a boy like Tommy, raised in Harlem, all this appeared rustic and bewilderingly open. The open arms of the natural world worried him as much as the white people, both so alien to him. When he passed whites on the street, he kept his gaze down and his shoulders soft. Men from Harlem were known for their strut, a lion’s stride, but out here he hid it away. He was surveyed but never stopped. His foot-shuffling disguise held up fine. And finally, amid the blocks and blocks of newly built garden apartments, Tommy Tester found his destination.

A private home, small and nearly lost in a copse of trees, the rest of the block taken up by a mortuary. The private place grew like a tumor on the house of the dead. Tommy Tester turned up the walkway and didn’t even have to knock. Before he’d climbed the three steps, the front door cracked open. A tall, gaunt woman stood in the doorway, half in shadows. Ma Att. That was the name he had for her, the only one she answered to. She’d hired him like this. On this doorstep, through a half-open door. Word had traveled to Harlem that she needed help and he was the type of man who could acquire what she needed. Summoned to her door and given a job without being invited in. The same would happen now. He understood, or could at least guess, at the reason. What would the neighbors say if this woman had Negroes coming freely into her home?

Tommy undid the latch of the guitar case and held it open. Ma Att leaned forward so her head peeked out into the daylight. Inside lay the book, no larger than the palm of Tommy’s hand. Its front and back covers were sallow yellow. Three words had been etched on both sides. Zig Zag Zig. Tommy didn’t know what the words meant, nor did he care to know. He hadn’t read this book, never even touched it with his bare hands. He’d been hired to transport the little yellow book, and that was all he’d done. He’d been the right man for this task, in part, because he knew he shouldn’t do any more than that. A good hustler isn’t curious. A good hustler only wants his pay.

Ma Att looked from the book, there in the case, and back to him. She seemed slightly disappointed.

“You weren’t tempted to look inside?” she asked.

“I charge more for that,” Tommy said.

She didn’t find him funny. She sniffled once, that’s all. Then she reached into the guitar case and slipped the book out. She moved so quickly the book hardly had a chance to catch even a single ray of sunlight, but still, as the book was pulled into the darkness of Ma Att’s home, a faint trail of smoke appeared in the air. Even glancing contact with daylight had set the book on fire. She slapped at the cover once, snuffing out the spark.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“There’s a place in Harlem,” Tommy said, his voice hushed. “It’s called the Victoria Society. Even the hardest gangsters in Harlem are afraid to go there. It’s where people like me trade in books like yours. And worse.”

Here he stopped. Mystery lingered in the air like the scent of scorched book. Ma Att actually leaned forward as if he’d landed a hook into her lip. But Tommy said no more.

“The Victoria Society,” she whispered. “How much would you charge to take me in?”

Tommy scanned the old woman’s face. How much might she pay? He wondered at the sum, but still he shook his head. “I’d feel terrible if you got hurt in there. I’m sorry.”

Ma Att watched Tommy Tester, calculating how bad a place this Victoria Society could be. After all, a person who trafficked in books like the little yellow one in her hand was hardly the frail kind.

Ma Att reached out and tapped the mailbox, affixed to the outside wall, with one finger. Tommy opened it to find his pay. Two hundred dollars. He counted through the cash right there, in front of her. Enough for six months’ rent, utilities, food and all.

“You shouldn’t be in this neighborhood when the sun goes down,” Ma Att said. She didn’t sound concerned for him.

“I’ll be back in Harlem before lunchtime. I wouldn’t suggest you visit there, day or night.” He tipped his cap, snapped the empty guitar case shut, and turned away from Ma Att’s door.

On the way back to the train, Tommy Tester decided to find his friend Buckeye. Buckeye worked for Madame St. Clair, the numbers queen of Harlem. Tommy should play Ma Att’s address tonight. If his number came up, he’d have enough to buy himself a better guitar case. Maybe even his own guitar.

2

“That’s a fine git-fiddle.”

Tommy Tester didn’t even have to look up to know he’d found a new mark. He simply had to see the quality of the man’s shoes, the bottom end of a fine cane. He plucked at his guitar, still getting used to the feel of the new instrument, and hummed instead of sang because he sounded more like a talented musician when he didn’t open his mouth.

The trip out to Queens last month had inspired Tommy Tester to travel more. The streets of Harlem could get pretty crowded with singers and guitar players, men on brass instruments, and every one of them put his little operation to shame. Where Tommy had three songs in his catalog, each of those men had thirty, three hundred. But on the way home from Ma Att’s place, he’d realized he hadn’t passed a single strummer along the way. The singer on the street might’ve been more common in Harlem and down in Five Points, or more modern parts of Brooklyn, but so much of this city remained — essentially — a bit of jumped-up countryside. None of the other Harlem players would take a train out to Queens or rural Brooklyn for the chance of getting money from the famously thrifty immigrants homesteading in those parts. But a man like Tommy Tester — who only put on a show of making music — certainly might. Those outer-borough bohunks and Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s knockoff version might still stand out.

On returning from Ma Att’s place, he’d talked all this through with his father. Otis Tester, yet one more time, offered to get him work as a bricklayer, join the profession. A kind gesture, a loving father’s attempt, but not one that worked on his son. Tommy Tester would never say it out loud — it’d hurt the old man too much — but working construction had given his father gnarled hands and a stooped back, nothing more. Otis Tester had earned a Negro’s wage, not a white man’s, as was common in 1924, and even that money was withheld if the foreman sometimes wanted a bit more in his pocket. What was a Negro going to do? Complain to whom? There was a union, but Negroes weren’t allowed to join. Less money and erratic pay were the job. Just as surely as mixing the mortar when laborers didn’t show up to do it. The companies that’d hired Otis Tester, that’d always assured him he was one of them, had filled his job the same day his body finally broke down. Otis, a proud man, had tried to instill a sense of duty in his only child, as had Tommy’s mother. But the lesson Tommy Tester learned instead was that you better have a way to make your own money because this world wasn’t trying to make a Negro rich. As long as Tommy paid their rent and brought home food, how could his father complain? When he played Ma Att’s number, it hit as he dreamed it would, and he bought a fine guitar and case. Now it was common for Tommy and Otis to spend their evenings playing harmonies well into the night. Tommy had even become moderately better with a tune.

Tommy had decided against a return to Flushing, Queens, though. A hustler’s premonition told him he didn’t want to run into Ma Att again. After all, the book he’d given her had been missing one page, hadn’t it? The very last page. Tommy Tester had done this with purpose. It rendered the tome useless, harmless. He’d done this because he knew exactly what he’d been hired to deliver. The Supreme Alphabet. He didn’t have to read through it to be aware of its power. Tommy doubted very much the old woman wanted the little yellow book for casual reading. He hadn’t touched the book with his bare hands and hadn’t read a single word inside, but there were still ways to get the last sheet of parchment free safely. In fact that page remained in Tommy’s apartment, folded into a square, slipped right inside the body of the old guitar he always left with his father. Tommy had been warned not to read the pages, and he’d kept to that rule. His father had been the one to tear out the last sheet, and his father could not read. His illiteracy served as a safeguard. This is how you hustle the arcane. Skirt the rules but don’t break them.

Today Tommy Tester had come to the Reformed Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn; as far from home as Flushing, and lacking an angry sorceress. He wore the same outfit as when he went to visit Ma Att, his trooper hat upside down at his feet. He’d set himself up in front of the church’s iron-railed graveyard. A bit of theater in this choice, but the right kind of person would be drawn to this picture. The black jazz man in his frayed dignity singing softly at the burying ground.

Tommy Tester knew two jazz songs and one bit of blues. He played the blues tune for two hours because it sounded more somber. He didn’t bother with the words any longer, only the chords and a humming accompaniment. And then the old man with the fine shoes and the cane appeared. He listened quietly for a time before he spoke.

“That’s a fine git-fiddle,” the man finally said.

And it was the term—git-fiddle—that assured Tommy his hustle had worked. As simple as that. The old man wanted Tommy to know he could speak the language. Tommy played a few more chords and ended without flourish. Finally he looked up to find the older man flushed, grinning. The man was round and short, and his hair blew out wildly like a dandelion’s soft white blowball. His beard was coming in, bristly and gray. He didn’t look like a wealthy man, but it was the well-off who could afford such a disguise. You had to be rich to risk looking broke. The shoes verified the man’s wealth, though. And his cane, with a handle shaped like an animal head, cast in what looked like pure gold.

“My name is Robert Suydam,” the man said. Then waited, as if the name alone should make Tommy Tester bow. “I am having a party at my home. You will play for my guests. Such dusky tunes will suit the mood.”

“You want me to sing?” Tommy asked. “You want to pay me to sing?”

“Come to my home in three nights.”

Robert Suydam pointed toward Martense Street. The old man lived there in a mansion hidden within a disorder of trees. He promised Tommy five hundred dollars for the job. Otis Tester had never made more than nine hundred in a year. Suydam took out a billfold and handed Tommy one hundred dollars. All ten-dollar bills.

“A retainer,” Suydam said.

Tommy set the guitar flat in its case and accepted the bills, turning them over. 1923 bills. Andrew Jackson appeared on the front. The image of Old Hickory didn’t look directly at Tommy, but glanced aside as if catching sight of something just over Tommy Tester’s right shoulder.

“When you arrive at the house, you must say one word and only this word to gain entrance.”

Tommy stopped counting the money, folded it over twice, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket.

“I can’t promise what will happen if you forget it,” Suydam said, then paused to watch Tommy, assessing him.

“Ashmodai,” Suydam said. “That is the word. Let me hear you say it.”

“Ashmodai,” Tommy repeated.

Robert Suydam tapped the cane on the pavement twice and walked away. Tommy watched him go for three blocks before he picked up his hat and put it on. He clicked the guitar case shut. But before Tommy Tester took even one step toward the train station, he got gripped, hard, on the back of the neck.

Two white men appeared. One was tall and thin, the other tall and wide. Together they resembled the number 10. The wide one kept his hand on Tommy’s neck. He knew this one was a cop, or had been once. Up in Harlem they called this grip John’s Handshake. The thin one stayed two paces back.

The surprise of it all caused Tommy to forget the pose of deference he’d normally adopt when cops stopped him. Instead he acted like himself, his father’s son, a kid from Harlem, a proud man who didn’t take kindly to being given shit.

“You’re coming on a little strong,” he told the wide one.

“And you’re far from home,” the wide one replied.

“You don’t know where I live,” Tommy snapped back.

The wide one reached into Tommy’s coat and removed the ten-dollar bills. “We saw you take these from the old man,” he began. “That old man is part of an ongoing investigation, so this is evidence.”

He slipped the bills into his slacks and watched Tommy to gauge his reaction.

“Police business,” Tommy said coolly, and stopped thinking that the money had ever been his.

The wide one pointed at the thin one. “He’s police. I’m private.”

Tommy looked from the private detective to the cop. Tall and thin and lantern-jawed, his eyes dispassionate and surveying. “Malone,” he finally offered. “And this is. ”

The wide one cut him off. “He doesn’t need my name. He didn’t need yours, either.”

Malone looked exasperated. This strong-arm routine didn’t seem like his style. Tommy Tester read both men quickly. The private detective had the bearing of a brute while the other one, Malone, appeared too sensitive for a cop’s job. Tommy considered that he’d stayed a few paces back to keep away from the private dick, not Tommy.

“What’s your business with Mr. Suydam?” the private detective asked. He pulled Tommy’s hat off and looked inside as if there might be more money.

“He liked my music,” Tommy said. Then, calm enough now to remember the situation, he added another word quickly. “Sir.”

“I heard your voice,” the private detective said. “Nobody could enjoy that.”

Tommy Tester would’ve liked to argue the point, but even a corrupt, violent brute could be right sometimes. Robert Suydam wasn’t paying five hundred dollars for Tommy’s voice. For what, then?

“Now me and Detective Malone are going to keep strolling with Mr. Suydam, keeping him safe. And you’re going to go back home, isn’t that right? Where’s home?”

“Harlem,” Tommy offered. “Sir.”

“Of course it is,” Malone said quietly.

“Home to Harlem, then,” the private detective added. He set the hat back on Tommy’s head and gave Malone a quick, derisive glance. He turned in the direction where the old man had gone, and only then did Malone step any closer to Tommy. Standing this near, Tommy could sense a kind of sadness in the gaunt officer. His eyes suggested a man disappointed with the world.

Tommy waited before reaching down for his guitar case. No sudden moves in front of even a sullen cop. Just because Malone wasn’t as rough as the private detective didn’t mean he was gentle.

“Why did he give you that money?” Malone asked. “Why really?”

He asked, but seemed to doubt an honest answer would come. Instead there was a set to his lips, and a narrowness in his gaze, that suggested he was probing for an answer to some other question. Tommy worried he’d mention the performance at Suydam’s home in three nights. If they weren’t happy about Tommy talking with Suydam on the street, how would they act upon learning he planned to visit the old man’s home? Tommy lost one hundred dollars to the private detective, but he was damned if he’d give up the promise of four hundred dollars more. He decided to play a role that always worked on whites. The Clueless Negro.

“I cain’t says, suh,” Tommy began. “I’s just a simple geetar man.”

Malone came close to smiling for the first time. “You’re not simple,” he said.

Tommy watched Malone walk off to catch up with the private detective. He looked over his shoulder. “And you’re right to stay out of Queens,” Malone said. “That old woman isn’t happy with what you did to her book!”

Malone walked off and Tommy Tester remained there, feeling exposed—seen—in a way he’d never experienced.

“You’re a cop,” Tommy called. “Can’t you protect me?”

Malone looked back once more. “Guns and badges don’t scare everyone.”

3

Tommy’s best friend, Buckeye, arrived in Harlem in 1920 when he was sixteen years old. At fourteen he’d left the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat to work on the Panama Canal, and from Panama made his way to the United States, to Harlem. He arrived expecting to do the same work as he’d done on the canal — construction — but soon found out what Otis Tester had long known: Negroes had no protection. Buckeye broke an ankle at the age of seventeen and found himself out of day labor for two months. When he was ready to return, the job had been filled, and besides that, the ankle never healed well. He couldn’t be on it for long hours, couldn’t tote much weight without it giving out. Soon he found his way to Madame St. Clair and her famous numbers game. She hired him because she needed men from the Caribbean, who knew and would be trusted by the recent West Indian immigrants. Madame St. Clair evolved in changing times, and because of this she thrived. The regular kickbacks to local police also helped. Buckeye met Tommy Tester in this milieu. Tommy played a club where Buckeye made business. One evening Buckeye sidled next to Tommy at the bar and asked where he’d learned to sing so badly. Did he take lessons or was it a natural gift? They became fast friends.

Now Tommy Tester led his father out of their building and down the block. He’d returned home from the encounter with Robert Suydam, with Malone and the private detective, and felt himself in need of a night out. It took time to convince Otis to step out. Otis never left the apartment, hardly left his bedroom. He’d become like a dog gone into the dark so he could die alone, but Tommy had different plans. Or maybe he needed his father too much to let him go easily.

Buckeye left an open invitation for Tommy at the Victoria Society. It was on 137th Street. The walk was a mere seven blocks, but because of his father’s health, it took them half an hour to arrive.

The Victoria Society consisted of three modest rooms on the second floor of an apartment building. It was a Caribbean social club. Down on the street Tommy and Otis were in black Harlem; in the Victoria Society they entered the British West Indies. The flags of every Caribbean nation were fixed to the walls of a long hallway. A much larger Union Jack hung at the far end. At the doorway to the warren of rooms, Tommy Tester had to give Buckeye’s name three times. The greeter at the door remained unmoved until Tommy used Buckeye’s given name, George Hurley. That worked like a spell.

Tommy and Otis followed the greeter at a distance. One of the society’s rooms was reserved for men playing card games or bones; the second showed men in lounge chairs smoking and listening to music played at a respectable volume; and the third had card tables set out with tablecloths and chairs, for meals. Buckeye had invited Tommy to the Victoria Society many times in the years since they’d made friends, but Tommy had never come until now. He felt a sting, like a slap, across his face. This was the place he’d described to Ma Att? The shorthand for a den of crime and sin? The place where Harlem’s worst criminals were too afraid to go?

He’d assumed he knew what kind of place this would be. Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants? The American Negroes in Harlem got up to awful gossip about those newcomers. And now he’d come to find the Victoria Society might as well be a British tearoom. He felt slightly disappointed. He’d brought his father because he’d meant to show his dad a scandalous night. He’d heard women danced in nearly nothing, so close they practically sat in your lap. Being inside now, seeing this place truly, was like learning another world existed within — or alongside — the world he’d always known. Worse, all this time he’d been too ignorant to realize it. The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.

Tommy and his dad sat, and the older man blew out a deep breath. Otis spent a long time adjusting himself in the chair to minimize his back pain. He moved like someone ancient. Otis Tester was forty-one years old.

A thin woman came to the table offering dinner she’d made in her kitchen, then brought here to sell. She was Trinidadian. Her dinner plates were already prepared, and she rolled them through the dining room on a cart. Saheena, pineapple chow, and macaroni pie. A bowl of cow heel soup. Tall cups of passion fruit juice. The whole meal, for both men, came to a dollar. Tommy paid.

“I don’t know what any of this mess is,” Otis said, watching the plate in front of him like it might strike. “Why didn’t we go down to Bo’s place?”

Tommy found himself watching the Trinidadian woman because she reminded him of his own mother. That wiry frame and splay-footed walk. Irene Tester, gone four years now. People who knew her well used to call her Michigan because she never could stop talking about the place where her parents came from. She collapsed on a bus, died thirty-seven years old among strangers. Life as a domestic wore her out just as surely as construction did Otis. Tommy looked to his father, wondering if he’d also been thinking the Trinidadian woman looked like Irene, but the old man only stared down at the plates, mystified.

“Come on, now,” Tommy said. “There’s something here you’re going to like.”

Otis scanned the table looking for something he recognized. He lifted a fork and poked at the macaroni pie. “This is just cheese and noodles, yes?”

Tommy Tester sank a fork and knife into his serving. He brought a portion to his mouth and chewed. After swallowing, he nodded, but his father prodded at it anyway, as if he didn’t trust his son. He set the fork down without eating.

“Now, you say this white man is going to pay you how much?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“All that just to play at his party?” Otis asked. He grabbed the cup of passion fruit juice, brought it to his nose, sniffed, set the drink back down. “All that for you to play at his party?”

Tommy chewed at a bite of the pineapple chow. It was sweet, but the kick of lime juice and hot pepper followed soon after. He gulped his juice to cool his throat.

“That’s what he said.”

Otis raised his hands in the air, held them as far apart as he could.

“That’s the distance between what a white man says to a Negro and what he really means.”

Tommy knew this, of course. Hadn’t he lived twenty years in America already? His whole hustle—entertainment—was predicated on the idea that people had ulterior motives for hiring him.

When he dressed in those frayed clothes and played at the blues man or the jazz man or even the docile Negro, he knew the role bestowed a kind of power upon him. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They won’t realize you’ve juiced them until they’re dry. Ma Att had essentially paid him to deliver a worthless item, hadn’t she? If he had to play the role of quasi-gangster to get paid, then so be it. He played the roles needed to enrich his bank account. But all this would sound criminal to Otis. Or demeaning. The man had an outsized opinion of dignity. Nobility didn’t pay well enough to make Tommy want the job.

“I’ll be real careful, Daddy.”

Otis Tester watched his son quietly. The rest of the dining room grew louder as more tables filled, but a kind of quiet, a bubble of reserve, surrounded their table. Otis was father to a twenty-year-old black boy who’d blithely explained he’d be going out to Flatbush, in the middle of the night, into the home of a white man. He might as well have told his father he planned to go wrestle a bear.

“When I left Oklahoma City,” Otis Tester said, “I rode on the railroads. Hobo’d all the way east.”

Not the first time, nor the five-hundredth time, Tommy Tester had heard this story. Tommy ate to keep from expressing his disappointment. Hadn’t Otis heard the most vital detail? Four hundred dollars.

“I avoided crossing Arkansas,” Otis continued. “Whether you were Negro, white, or a red man they were pretty rough on hoboing in Arkansas. They had chain gangs, you know. I went to East St. Louis, over to Evansville. I got taken off the train once in Decatur. I wasn’t making a direct route here. I was real young so I had the need to see much more than my final destination.”

Finally Otis Tester ate the macaroni pie, as if storytelling had sparked his appetite. He took one bite, chewed cautiously, but after he swallowed the first, he chomped down two more.

“Like I said, they took me off the train in Decatur. And that’s when it turned out I had to use my head.” Now he took the risk of a drink. The passion fruit juice clearly pleased him. He sipped slowly, then set the drink down. “I had to use this.”

Otis Tester unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt right there in the dining room. Tommy stiffened, feeling like a five-year-old whose daddy was about to shame him in public. But before he could scold his father, or reach over and try to cover Otis’s exposed skin, the old man pulled something from around his neck. It was hanging there on a coarse string. He slipped it off and clutched it in one rough hand while he buttoned his shirt again. Tommy leaned forward trying to see what his dad held. Otis Tester extended his hand, opened it.

A straight razor lay in his palm.

“I carried this with me the whole time I rode the trains,” Otis said. “White man, Negro, or Red Indian was not going to get an easy shot at me.”

He knocked one end of the razor on the table loudly.

“In Decatur, I made some people understand this,” Otis said.

Tommy looked from the razor to his father. All his life he’d known his dad and mom as pillars that solidly, stolidly, held up the roof of Tommy’s world. Reliable, supportive, but not particularly remarkable people. To think of Otis now, suddenly, as a teenage boy who’d defended himself with this weapon. That past became yet another world, a new dimension, of which Tommy had just become aware. Again, the pinch, the pain, of such a revelation.

Tommy Tester took the straight razor from his father’s hand. When he did, he could see the man’s thick fingers trembling.

“You’re a grown man and I can’t stop you from making your way,” Otis said. “I wouldn’t even want to. But you don’t walk into that white man’s house unarmed or unaware. Anything goes bad, you get out, and you get back to me.”

Tommy Tester nodded but didn’t speak. He simply couldn’t right then.

“I don’t care if you’ve got to spill blood to do it, but you get out of that house at the end of the job and you get back to me.”

Otis meant to sound stern, determined, commanding, but Tommy realized he’d never before seen his father look so scared.

“You hear me?” Otis asked.

“Yes, sir,” Tommy finally said.

They ate quietly, and when the food was done, they left the Victoria Society. Down a flight of stairs and back to Harlem. In three nights Tommy would visit Robert Suydam’s mansion. He understood the journey now as travel to another universe. No wonder his father felt fear; his son was about go so far.

“Why’d you bring that razor with you tonight?” Tommy said. “I never knew you owned the thing.”

“Told me you was taking me to that damn Victoria Society,” Otis said, almost laughing. “Thought I might need the strop if those Caribbeans got wild. But I think you and me was the most dangerous Negroes in the place!”

Tommy had one arm looped through his father’s to help the old man walk. His other hand was in his slacks clutching the weapon.

“If you’re going to play at that party,” Otis Tester said as they ambled back uptown, “I’ve got one more song you should learn. It’s old, but it’s got something to it. You understand what I’m trying to tell you? The razor is one way I want to arm you. This song is the other. Your mother taught it to me. Conjure music. We’ll practice for the next three days till you’ve got it.”

“Yes, Pop,” Tommy Tester said.

Late night in Harlem on a Friday and the streets more full than at rush hour. Tommy Tester cherished the closeness, to his father and to all the bodies on the sidewalks, in their cars, riding buses, perched on stoops. The traffic and human voices merged into a terrific buzzing that seemed to lift Tommy and Otis, a song that accompanied them — carried them — all the way home.

4

Three days had passed, and this was the third night, and Tommy Tester left the safety of Harlem. He rode the same route out to Flatbush as he’d done when he met Robert Suydam, but now the journey felt more threatening because the sun was down. If he’d stood out among the train riders in the early morning, he might as well have been carrying a star in one hand rather than his guitar case now. Throughout the train car people squinted at him. At four different times white men asked him exactly where he was going. These weren’t offers to help him get there. If he didn’t have an exact location — Robert Suydam’s mansion on Martense Street — he believed he would’ve been thrown off the train. Or under it.

When he arrived at the station, he was trailed by three loud-talking young men. The loud talk concerned Tommy. Tommy tried his best not to listen to it because he knew they were trying to scare him. If he shouted back, turned to fight, that would be the end of the night, no money earned, just a trip to jail. The streets of Flatbush became less crowded, more residential, and the young men quickened their pace. Tommy wore his father’s razor around his neck like an amulet, but even that wouldn’t help against three men.

By the time Tommy reached the grove of trees surrounding Suydam’s house, the three young men were near enough that Tommy felt them at his heels. One walked so close the toes of one foot repeatedly kicked at the back of Tommy’s guitar case. Tommy saw the mansion now, two stories and dimly lit, glowing from within the trees. If he’d been alone, he would’ve found the sight frightening, but because of his escorts, Tommy ran toward it. He crossed onto Robert Suydam’s property; if he made it to the door, he might be let in before the white boys landed any blows. He didn’t understand he was running until he was out of breath.

When he looked back, the three young men no longer followed. They remained at the fence line of the property. Even stranger, they no longer watched him. Instead they watched the Suydam home. They cowered before it. Tommy finally saw that these boys were younger than him. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Children. Studying the Suydam home with fear.

Relief played from Tommy’s eyes to his heels. Tommy crouched, looking for a stone. He found one the size of a baseball and weighed it in his palm. He set down the guitar. He wanted to hit the biggest of the three young men. They still hadn’t returned their gazes to him. It was as if the house had mesmerized them. No better moment than this to take aim. He made a wish that the rock take out one of their eyes.

Then the door of the mansion opened. Barely a squeak behind Tommy but enough to make all three boys literally hop. They bolted like kittens, wriggly and mewling. Behind Tommy there was a groan as someone stepped out the front door and onto the boards of the mansion’s wraparound porch.

“If you blind one of them, the police will be called.”

This wasn’t said sternly, almost with amusement. Tommy Tester turned to find Robert Suydam coming down the steps, one hand out. Tommy gave him the rock and Robert Suydam weighed it in his hand as Tommy had done. Rather than throwing it back into the dirt he slipped the stone into the pocket of his coat. Now he looked at Tommy expectantly. The moment lingered. Suydam waited. Tommy took a full minute to remember the word he’d been instructed to use.

“Ashmodai,” Tommy finally said quietly.

Robert Suydam nodded and turned and walked back up the porch steps. When he entered the mansion, he left the front door open for Tommy to follow.

5

The cloak of trees around the mansion did a great deal to hide its age, its infirmity, but inside there was no cover. The floorboards were old and poorly maintained; they looked splintered and parched. When Tommy entered the home, the entryway was lit by a single electric lamp, and he found the same in all three rooms on the first floor. This caused the edges of each room to lie in shadows, and it became difficult for Tommy to really understand the dimensions of each space. As if the mansion’s interior was larger than its exterior. The smell of age, meaning undifferentiated time, had settled throughout the home, a musty odor, as if the winds of the present never blew through here.

Robert Suydam led Tommy down the long first-floor hallway, and Tommy clutched the handle of his guitar case as if it were a guideline leading back to the front door, down the steps, out the yard, out of Flatbush, back onto the train, to Harlem, and by his father’s side. While they walked, the old man almost trotting, Tommy felt his guitar case jiggling as it had when the white boys had been kicking at it as they followed him. This spurred a suspicion that someone else — something else — was following him now. Twice the case almost flew out of his grip, but Tommy couldn’t make himself look back into the darkness of the long hall. Instead he only followed faster.

Suydam opened a set of double doors and entered a room so brightly lit Tommy squinted as he followed. As soon as he was inside, Suydam pushed one of the doors shut, then the other. Just before he shut the second, Suydam peeked into the hall. Tommy felt, distinctly, there’d been another presence trailing behind him. Then Suydam actually spoke — a single mumbled word, a command? — before the old man shut door and locked it.

Only then could Tommy turn to take in this room with its high ceilings. It had to be the size of the entire apartment Tommy and Otis shared. It might be larger. It had three towering walls of inset shelving, every one full of books. In addition to the books on the shelves, there were others spread across the floor, towers of tomes stacked as high as Tommy’s shoulder.

“I’ve read them all,” Suydam said. “And yet there’s still so much I must learn.”

Tommy stood the guitar case by his side like an upright rifle. “I’d say you earned yourself a break.”

Suydam shook his head faintly. “If only there were time for rest.”

Suydam walked to the far end of the room, toward the high windows running along one wall. A single great chair stood by the sill. Suydam sat in it. His feet dangled, not touching the floor. A strange sight because he wasn’t a short man. The chair didn’t appear oversized, either. The old man’s shoes swayed, three inches from the floorboards, and Tommy watched them, confused by the incongruity. Then, as if Suydam had noticed Tommy’s interest, the feet lowered to the ground. But Suydam hadn’t moved the rest of his body. Instead it was as if the old man had, by some power, made his legs grow at will. It was so odd, visually, Tommy actually became nauseated. Tommy looked away and back again and, sure enough, Suydam’s feet were flat on the floor. He waved a hand to catch Tommy’s attention.

“Won’t you play now?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, as if trying to get Tommy’s mind onto something other than the strangeness — shape-shifting — he swore he’d just seen.

Tommy looked around the library. The only other guests seemed to be the books.

“The party is tomorrow night,” Suydam said. “But I felt like meeting with you tonight first. You didn’t think I was paying you that much money to play for one evening, did you?”

“No, sir,” Tommy said. “Whatever you like.” He opened the guitar case and took out the instrument.

He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that’s exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man’s reality is remade at will.

Suydam reached into a coat pocket and revealed a fold of bills so thick it choked down all of Tommy Tester’s pride. Suydam set it on the windowsill, then grinned at Tommy. Tommy strummed and played as expected. The old man stared out the windows.

Mercifully, the man wanted to talk more than he wanted Tommy to play. Tommy had only four songs in his repertoire, after all, including the one his father recently taught him. After playing for nearly thirty minutes, Tommy’s fingers and shoulders, the small of his back, all ached terribly. He slowed his playing, strummed lightly, until he simply hummed in the cavernous old library. Finally Suydam — who hadn’t once looked away from the great windows — cleared his throat and spoke.

“And it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead,” he said.

Suydam wasn’t speaking to Tommy, just reciting something half remembered. But Tommy, slightly dazed from the strangeness of this engagement, still responded.

“I’m sorry, sir?” he asked, and instantly regretted it.

Robert Suydam turned away from the windows irritably and glared at Tommy as if he’d caught a burglar breaking into his home. Normally, when a white man gave Tommy this look, he had a series of useful defenses. Looking down at his feet abjectly often worked; a smile might sometimes do. Tommy tried the latter.

“Well, what could you be grinning at?” Suydam demanded.

A third option, considered in a panic, was to get his father’s razor out and cut this old man’s throat, take the money, and flee. But by now, well past eleven, Tommy couldn’t imagine making it to the train station. A Negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden. And if they found him with that wad of money, well, he’d be fortunate if the police were called. They might only beat him, then take him to jail. Much worse would happen if he got snatched by a mob. No razor then. He was, in essence, trapped here until morning.

“I asked you something,” Suydam said. “And when I speak I expect a response.”

No good deflections left, so Tommy Tester raised his head and returned Suydam’s gaze. Might as well try honesty.

“I’m confused,” he said.

“Of course you are,” Suydam said. “The veil of ignorance has been set over your face since birth. Shall I pull it free?”

Tommy pursed his lips, trying to decide his best response. So far honesty had worked. At least the old man wasn’t glaring at him.

“It’s your money,” Tommy said.

Robert Suydam clapped. “Do you know why I hired you? Why I was drawn to you three days past? I could see you. And I don’t mean this charade.” Suydam extended one hand and gestured from Tommy’s purposefully scuffed boots to his well-worn suit to his guitar. “I saw that you understood illusion. And that you, in your way, were casting a powerful spell. I admired it. I felt a kinship with you, I suppose. Because I, too, understand illusion.”

Suydam rose from his chair, and faced the wall of tall windows. The old man tapped at one pane lightly. Because of all the lights inside the library, it was impossible to see outside into the night. The windows had turned into a sort of screen reflecting Tommy and Suydam and the expansive library. Suydam waved Tommy over, and as he walked closer Tommy thought he saw movement behind him. The reflected image of the library’s double doors buckled twice, as if someone were in the hallway, trying to push them open. Tommy turned quickly, but the doors weren’t moving now. Tommy couldn’t make himself turn back to Suydam yet.

“Your people,” Robert Suydam began. “Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence.”

If anything could pull Tommy Tester’s attention from the door it would be this. He turned to Robert Suydam expecting to find the man sneering, but the man had one hand on his belly, patting it gently. He looked up and to the right, like a man trying to remember a speech.

“Policemen despair of order or reform and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion,” he continued.

Tommy held the neck of the guitar tightly. “You talking about Harlem?”

The spell broke. “What?” Suydam said. “Oh damn you! Why did you interrupt?”

“I’m trying to understand what in the hell place you’re talking about. It doesn’t sound like anywhere I’ve ever lived.”

No applause for honesty this time.

“Mind your tone,” Suydam said. He covered the money with one hand. “You haven’t been paid yet.”

This motherfucker, Tommy Tester thought and took one step closer to the old man.

Even Robert Suydam, for all his authority, sensed a change in the room. For a moment he looked like a man who realized a meteorite was about to crash into his planet. He raised an open hand, a gesture of peace.

“Tomorrow night you’ll be playing at my party,” Suydam said. “And the guests will be men like you. Negroes from Harlem, Syrians and Spaniards from Red Hook, Chinese and Italians from Five Points, all of them will be here by my invitation. All of them will hear what I am now telling you.”

Tommy’s temper became cooled by his curiosity. A white man’s home crowded with Negroes and Syrians and all the rest. Suydam might be the strangest job he’d stumbled into yet.

“So why do I get the preview?” Tommy asked.

“I needed to practice my words,” Suydam said. “To see how they affect a man of the proper type. Also, I admit you were convenient,” Suydam said. “I needed those police to give me some room. The time they spent with you was enough for me to slip away. Thank you for that.”

“You knew you were being followed?”

“My family has doubts about my sanity — this is what they say. More likely they have doubts about my will, and to whom, exactly, I’ll leave this home and all its contents. Which of them will inherit the land on which it all sits. But they don’t see it that way. Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.

“My family is convinced I’m in danger. They’ve made the police believe the same. They hired that private detective, too, the brutish one. His name is Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard and Detective Malone are collecting proof of my mental inferiority. For my own good, of course!”

Tommy laughed. “Talking to a Negro on the street won’t help you look sane.”

Suydam took his hand off the money and turned toward the window fully. He leaned with both hands against the ledge. “I know that I am high born. I mean that my family’s old wealth, and their bearing in history, should afford me all the comfort I need. But comfort can be a cage, you know. Certainly it can stunt the mind. Time spent with my family, with my old friends of means, began to feel like bathing in porridge, drowning in a child’s meal.

“So I sought out others, entirely unlike myself, and when they spoke of secret wisdom, I listened. What men like myself would dismiss as superstition or, worse, pure evil, I learned to cherish. The more I read, the more I listened, the more sure I became that a great and secret show had been playing throughout my life, throughout all our lives, but the mass of us were too ignorant, or too frightened, to raise our eyes and watch. Because to watch would be to understand the play isn’t being staged for us. To learn we simply do not matter to the players at all.”

Now he touched the window, tapping it, and the reflection seemed — for an instant — to ripple, as if they were staring into a pool of water rather than panes of glass.

“There is a King who sleeps at the bottom of the ocean.”

As Suydam said this — against all possibility — the windowpanes took on the color, and apparent depth, of the sea. It was as if Tommy Tester and Robert Suydam, standing in this room, in this mansion, in this city, were also peering down at distant waters elsewhere on the globe. The guitar fell out of Tommy’s hand as the image appeared. The thump it made, the sour note that played once, these hardly registered. A rush of cold seemed to enter not only the room, but also Tommy’s bones.

Suydam said, “The return of the Sleeping King would mean the end of your people’s wretchedness. The end of all the wreck and squalor of a billion lives. When he rises, he wipes away the follies of mankind. And he is only one of many. They are the Great Old Ones. Their footfalls cause mountains to topple. One gaze strikes ten million bodies dead. But imagine the fortunes of those of us who were allowed to survive? The reward for those of us who helped the Sleeping King wake?”

Suydam tapped the window again and the ocean — truly Tommy was seeing a vast and distant sea in the windows — churned, heaved, and from its depths a shape, too massive to be real, stirred. Tommy’s throat tightened. He didn’t want to see this. He thought he might shatter the wall of windows with his own hands if that thing in the sea depths became visible, distinct.

But then the image shifted, the perspective rising, leaving the sea far below. They left the continents behind. Was it possible? They left the world. They rose into the night sky. It really seemed as if these two men in a house in Flatbush were now adrift in farthest space. Tommy Tester clutched at the windowsill for balance.

“From here you might understand,” Robert Suydam said quietly.

But Tommy didn’t understand, he only wanted desperately to be home. He let go of the windowsill, turned, and picked up his guitar, and he ran across the library. He ran toward the locked library doors. Robert Suydam shouted after him. Indecipherable words. Tommy barreled through the stacks of books on the floor, sent them flying. He wanted to be home with his father, damn the cost. If he’d stared out that window any longer, something terrible would have happened to his soul. For all his confidence about his hustle, he understood that Robert Suydam was playing with a more potent force. He reached the double doors of the library and he opened them.

And Malone, the police officer, stood in the hallway.

Malone with his service revolver pointed forward.

“What?” Tommy said. “What?”

Tommy clutched at the doorknob. In his other hand he held the guitar. He expected to die as soon as Malone pulled the trigger. Was this who’d been behind him when he first entered Suydam’s home? Had Malone been the one kicking at his guitar?

But then Tommy realized something strange about Malone, or about Malone’s surroundings. While Tommy stood in the library of Robert Suydam’s home, Malone stood in what looked to be the lobby of an apartment building and most certainly not the hallway of Robert Suydam’s estate. What the hell was going on? It was as if the two locations — mansion and tenement lobby — had been stitched together by a haphazard tailor, Tommy Tester and Detective Malone facing each other because of a bad splice in reality’s fabric. And actually both men looked mystified. In a moment Robert Suydam — breathless — reached the library doors and threw them shut. Then he slapped Tommy Tester in the face.

“What did you see?” Suydam shouted. “Tell me!”

“I don’t understand,” Tommy said quietly.

“Was it Him?” Suydam yelled. He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out the stone he’d taken from Tommy. He raised it, intending to break open Tommy Tester’s skull. “Did the King see you?”

“The cop,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “The skinny one.”

Suydam held the stone high for two moments more. “Malone?” Then he lowered the rock. “Only Malone,” he said quietly to himself.

“I don’t understand where I’ve ended up,” Tommy said.

Suydam breathed deeply, swallowing. “We can’t leave this room yet,” he explained. “Not till morning.”

If Tommy looked baffled, it’s because he was baffled.

“If we tried to open that door again, the results would be even stranger than what you’ve just seen. And potentially more dangerous.”

Tommy looked back at the doors. His forehead went cold. “Malone was standing in the hallway, but it wasn’t your hallway out there.”

“I believe you,” Suydam said. “But believe me it could’ve been worse. You might’ve opened that door and encountered. ”

Suydam moved himself in between Tommy and the doors and stayed there the rest of the night.

6

Charles Thomas Tester left Robert Suydam’s home at seven the next morning. When the sun rose, when they could peek outside the windows and see the streets of Flatbush again, that’s when Suydam said it was safe to open the library doors. Before then, all through the night, Suydam explained, his home had been Outside. The term, the idea, seemed commonplace to the old man, but Tester had a terrible time understanding. The mansion had been Outside? But of course it was. Where else could a mansion be? This hadn’t been the old man’s meaning, though. Finally Suydam described it this way:

“Imagine a strip of medical tape with the adhesive gum on one side. Then a tiny ball of cloth is dropped onto the center of that tape. My library is that ball of cloth in what we call normal time and space. It is affixed to one place, one plane. But then imagine crumpling the adhesive tape tight in your fist. That ball of cloth now touches not just one surface, but many. In this way my library travels beyond human perceptions, human limitations of space, and even time. Those are meaningless strictures on a cosmic scale. Tonight we traveled quite far, though it seemed to you we were always in Flatbush. We weren’t. We went to the shadow-haunted Outside.

“One of the places we traveled was the threshold of the Sleeping King. His resting place at the bottom of the sea. We were so close that with some effort I might have reached out and touched his face, seen his great eyes open. But last night was not the proper time. Not quite. When you ran to the library doors and breached them, I feared my years of planning had failed because of one panicked Negro! But we enjoyed some luck instead. All you saw was the cadaverous detective. Malone.”

There had been much more like this. For hours. Suydam rattling off names, or rather entities, as effortlessly as the preachers who crowded certain Harlem street corners. But Tommy focused on the idea of the blip of cloth lost inside the ball of medical tape. This concrete image made the impossible easier to grasp. Hadn’t he seen an ocean through the windows? Hadn’t he witnessed the planet from the vantage point of the stars? Hadn’t Malone been on the other side of the double doors, looking desperate and bewildered?

Throughout the night Robert Suydam returned to this Sleeping King. Like the planet revolves around the sun. The Sleeping King. At some point Suydam called this being by another name, his true name, but Tommy Tester could never recall it. Or perhaps his mind chose to forget.

When the sun rose, Robert Suydam concluded with one final piece of wisdom. He retrieved the stone from his pocket again. This time he pressed the rock into Tommy’s palm.

“How much did this stone matter to you, to your existence, before you picked it up to use it on those boys who followed you? That’s how little humanity’s silly struggles matter to the Sleeping King. When he returns, all the petty human evils, such as the ones visited on your people, will be swept away by his mighty hand. Isn’t that marvelous? And what will become of those of us who are left? The ones who helped him. Think of the rewards. I know you’re a man who believes in such things, and you’re smart enough to make sure they come to you.”

Then Suydam handed over two hundred dollars and walked Tester out of his home. Tommy remained on the porch long after Robert Suydam shut the door. A bright morning in Flatbush, that’s what Tommy saw, but he had a tough time walking down the steps, and down the treelined path, and out to the sidewalk. He kept expecting he’d set one foot off the porch and fall right into an ocean where the Sleeping King waited. And why couldn’t this happen? That’s what paralyzed him. If all the rest could be true, then why not so much else?

Finally, the feel of the rolled bills in his hands returned him to the porch. He looked down at the money and told himself this was enough. Two hundred dollars would support Tommy and Otis for almost half a year. Go back to Harlem now and never return. Robert Suydam would never find him, because he’d never told the old man where he lived. Whatever Suydam had planned meant less than nothing to him. Let the old man have his magic. Otis and Tommy would spend the night at the Victoria Society, talking and eating well. He would make it back to his father, as he promised. That was enough. Tommy squeezed the bills once more, then dropped the roll into the sound hole of his guitar. It fell with a gratifying thump. He slipped the guitar back into the case and one hand into his coat pocket. The stone Suydam had returned to him rested inside. Instead of dropping the rock back into the dirt, Tommy took it with him. Eventually he’d spend his money, but the stone would serve as a souvenir of the night he’d been Outside.

On the train back to Harlem, Tommy didn’t notice anyone else, and if they noticed him, he was unaware. The conductor made no small talk this time. Maybe Tester cut an odd figure. A Negro in worn clothes with a guitar at his feet and his attention focused on a stone in his hand. He must have looked feebleminded, and thus unthreatening, and thus invisible.

7

Harlem. Only away for a night, but he’d missed the company. The bodies close to his on the street, boys running through traffic before the streetlights turned, on their way to school and daring each other to be bold. As he descended the stairs from the station, he smiled for the first time since he’d left Suydam’s mansion.

Tommy walked toward home, but found himself so hungry he stopped first to eat at a counter on 141st Street. The strangest moment came when it was time to pay and he had to fish into his guitar for the bills. The counterwoman looked uninterested right up until the roll appeared, as thick as the middle of a Burmese python. Tommy liked the way she looked at him after he paid from that knot, even better when he put down a whole dollar for a tip. Could Robert Suydam really make a man like Tommy a prince in his new world? Wouldn’t that be damn fine? By the time he left the shop, he’d changed his mind about returning to Suydam’s place. The old man had been right. Tommy Tester did enjoy a good reward.

At ten in the morning he approached his block, sunlight kissing every face and facade. The streets weren’t as tranquil. He hadn’t noticed the traffic when he’d left the counter, but by now the streets clearly had a clog. The roads became more flooded as he approached 144th. His block looked positively underwater. Three police cruisers — Ford Model T Tudor Sedans — were parked midway down the block, a much bigger Police Emergency Services Truck behind them.

Tester moved slowly. The sidewalks so dense with bystanders that people filled every stoop, too. The only time he’d ever seen Harlem this crowded was when the 369th Regiment marched Manhattan in 1919 after returning from the war.

Halfway down the block, the police had thrown up a barricade. Cops stood in pairs keeping all the gawkers back. By now Tommy saw they were blocking everyone from entering a specific building. His building. Tommy made it to the edge of the crowd, right up to the barricades, and waited.

Malone appeared at the building’s front entrance. Mr. Howard moved beside him. They came down the steps at the same pace, with the same gait, and for a moment Mr. Howard became Detective Malone’s shadow. Two more police, in uniform, came out seconds later and shook hands with both men.

Then Malone looked up and found Tommy instantly, as if he’d been sensitive to Tester’s scent. He pointed and the two patrolmen ran to the barricade. The first grabbed Tester’s neck, just as Mr. Howard had done when they first met in Brooklyn, and the other patrolman grabbed another Negro who happened to be standing there. They led both men around the barricade, to Malone.

“Not that one,” Malone said, pointing at the second man.

The patrolman looked slightly abashed but then routinely went through the other Negro’s pockets. When nothing illegal was discovered, he pushed the man back toward the crowd. No words had been shared between the two. When the man reached the crowd again, he simply turned, like the others, to watch what they’d do to Charles Thomas Tester.

“Your father’s dead,” Malone said.

This was reported neither with relish nor with sympathy. In a way, Tester liked this best. No pretense of concern. Your father is dead. Outwardly Tester took the news with great calm. Inwardly he felt the sun close its distance from the earth; it came near enough to melt the great majority of Tommy’s internal organs. A fire ran through his body, but he couldn’t show it. He couldn’t open his mouth to ask what happened to Otis, because he’d forgotten he had a mouth. He stood there as blank as a stone.

“Tell me my father’s dead and I’m going to take a swing at you,” Mr. Howard said. “But these people really don’t have the same connections to each other as we do. That’s been scientifically proven. They’re like ants or bees.” Mr. Howard waved one hand at the building beside them. “That’s why they can live like this.”

Tommy felt the weight of the stone in his pocket. Your father is dead. He only had to reach it, swiftly bring it out, and spill these white men’s brains on the streets. Your father is dead. The certainty of his own demise moments afterward brought him no fear. Your father is dead. He would have done this right away, but he simply couldn’t move.

Mr. Howard watched Tommy a moment longer, but when there was still no reaction, he spoke in a more matter-of-fact tone, as if addressing a grand jury.

“I approached the home at approximately seven this morning,” Mr. Howard began. “After finding apartment 53 I knocked several times. After receiving no answer I checked the door and found it unlocked. I entered the apartment, clearing each room in order, until I reached the back bedroom. In that room a male Negro was discovered displaying a rifle. In fear for my life I used my revolver.”

Tester couldn’t understand how he remained upright. Why wasn’t he collapsing? For a moment he felt himself — his mind at least — slipping out of his skull. He wasn’t here. He was Outside. Didn’t even need to be in Suydam’s library to make the trip.

Mr. Howard pointed at the building. “Because of the orientation of the apartment, the back bedroom faces an air shaft. This left the back room in darkness. After defending myself, it was discovered that the assailant had not been brandishing a rifle.”

Malone, who’d been watching Tester steadily, offered. “It was a guitar.”

Mr. Howard nodded. “In the dark, this was impossible to know, of course. Detective Malone was called to the scene. He’ll be writing up the report exactly as I’ve explained.”

Tester looked from one man to the other. Tester’s voice finally returned to him. “But why were you here at all?” he asked. “Why did you come to my home?”

“Mr. Howard was hired to track down stolen merchandise,” Malone said.

“My father never stole a thing in his life,” Tester said.

“Not your father,” Mr. Howard agreed. “But how about you?”

Malone’s long face slackened, and he pawed through the pockets of his coat. Finally Malone retrieved a pad, a policeman’s notebook, and flipped through a series of pages. Arcane symbols and indecipherable words were scrawled across each page of Malone’s book. Tommy doubted Malone’s notes had anything to do with police work. He thought of Robert Suydam’s library, so full of esoteric learning. Malone’s notebook might be a journal of the same unspeakable knowledge.

Finally Malone came to a largely empty page, a few numbers written across the top. He showed the page to Tommy. Tommy knew it instantly. Ma Att’s address in Queens.

“I’m going to tell you what I think,” Malone began. “You figured you’d found a loophole in the job you did for the old woman. You followed the exact wording of your contract. You figured this made it impossible for Ma Att to come after you. Because you hadn’t broken the rules. But it’s 1924, Mr. Tester, not the Middle Ages. Her sorcery couldn’t get you, so she hired out for help. She employed Mr. Howard.”

Now Mr. Howard patted at his coat. “As I moved to secure your father’s rifle, I learned it was a guitar. I then discovered the page I needed, hidden right inside.”

“Don’t you understand why I kept the page from her?” Tester asked. “Don’t you understand what she can do with that book?”

Mr. Howard laughed and looked at Malone. “Did this man just confess to a crime?”

Malone shook his head. “Let it alone,” he said.

“You understand,” Tester said, glancing at Malone’s notebook. The detective flipped the cover shut, slid the pages back into his pocket.

“I understand you weren’t home when Mr. Howard arrived,” Malone said. “As a result, your father was left vulnerable.”

“It’s my fault, then?” Tommy asked. “Will you be putting that in your report, too?”

Mr. Howard’s mouth opened slightly, an undisguised expression of surprise. “I hate the lippy ones,” he said.

Malone meanwhile seemed nonplussed. “Want to tell me where you were last night?” Malone asked. “Or shall I guess?”

Charles Thomas Tester had a sudden flash, an image of his father, half asleep, looking up to find some white man at the doorway in the semidark. What did Otis Tester think at the moment? Was there time, at least, to picture his loving wife or the son who’d worshipped him? Was there time for a breath, an exclamation? Time for a prayer? Maybe better to imagine Otis never woke up. That made it easier on Tommy, at least.

“How many times did you shoot my father?” Tester asked.

“I felt in danger for my life,” Mr. Howard said. “I emptied my revolver. Then I reloaded and did it again.”

Tester’s tongue felt too large for his mouth, and for the first time he thought he might cry, or cry out. He felt the weight of the stone in his coat pocket, heavier now, as if dragging him to the ground. His night with Robert Suydam returned to him, all of it, all at once. The breathless terror with which the old man spoke of the Sleeping King. A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?

“Indifference would be such a relief,” Tommy said.

8

Charles Thomas Tester found himself cast away. First Malone and Mr. Howard brushed him back from his building — he wouldn’t be allowed inside the apartment until the coroner finished up, and the coroner hadn’t arrived yet. Malone and Howard walked Tommy back to the crowd. The crowd parted around him, swallowed and digested him. In minutes he’d been expelled at the far end of his block. Surrounded by onlookers but undeniably alone. He walked without thinking, found himself in front of the Victoria Society. He went upstairs and the greeter, recognizing him now, let him pass.

Tommy walked to the dining room, half full with an early lunch crowd, sat at a table in one corner, far from the table where he’d eaten dinner with Otis just four days ago. Tester stared at the table as if Otis might suddenly sit down, Malone and Howard having played an awful joke. Eventually three men did sit at the table, so Tommy turned away.

In time Buckeye arrived. It seemed like luck, but really the Victoria Society’s greeter called Buckeye in. A greeter being only as good as his memory, he’d remembered the name Tester used for entry. Before Buckeye sat with Tester, he checked in at other tables, took numbers from those who wanted to play, and paid off one heavyset man whose number hit yesterday. Then Buckeye sat and bought them both lunch — this time cooked by a woman from South Carolina — a plate of Gullah rice, fish head stew, and hush puppies. Buckeye ate, but Tommy couldn’t look down at his plate.

Buckeye hadn’t heard yet about what had happened to Otis, and Tommy had no desire to speak of it. Still, the news — the horror of it — felt as if it wanted to leap out of his throat, an unclean spirit wanting to make itself known. To prevent himself from talking about his father’s murder, he spoke of Robert Suydam instead. Even the wildest detail seemed less fantastic than the idea that right then, only seven blocks away, his father’s body lay in their apartment, shot through until dead.

Though Tommy told Buckeye everything, he kept returning to three words in particular: the Sleeping King, the Sleeping King, the Sleeping King. Finally he put food into his mouth, not because he felt hungry, but because he couldn’t think of any other way to shut himself up. He must sound mad.

By this point Buckeye had stopped eating. He watched his boyhood friend quietly, narrowed his eyes.

“When I worked on the canal,” Buckeye said. “You remember I told you I was there for a year? When I worked on that canal, we had boys from all over the world. All of us brought our stories with us. You know how people do. And no matter how hard you work, men always make time to tell their stories.

“Well, we had some boys from as far as Fiji and Rarotonga. Tahiti, too. I couldn’t understand the boys from Tahiti. They spoke that French. But the Fiji boys, two brothers, I swear they said what you been saying. The Sleeping King. Yeah. Them Fiji boys said it more than once. But they had another name for him, too. I can’t remember just now. Couldn’t hardly pronounce it if I tried. ‘The Sleeping King is dead but dreaming.’ That’s what they said. Now, what in the hell does that mean? Those weren’t my favorite stories. I kept my distance from those boys. You not planning to fly out to Fiji, are you?”

Buckeye laughed but it was forced. How could his friend from Harlem come up with the same story as two brothers from Fiji? Especially when both died during the construction of the Panama Canal? How could such things be?

Tommy, if he’d been listening, might’ve laughed along, but he stood, took his guitar, and ran out the dining room. Just like that. His case slapped the food off two different tables and the men cursed Tommy’s back as he fled the Victoria Society. Tommy made toward the elevated train that would take him from Harlem to Flatbush. Hours ago he’d considered never returning to Robert Suydam’s mansion, but now where else could he go?

The party wouldn’t start for eight more hours, so Tester paid his train fare and waited on the station platform. Fiji must be damn far from Harlem. He knew it was an island in some distant sea. Buckeye’s story served as some last corroboration. The Sleeping King was real. Dead but dreaming. He took out his guitar because he needed to do something to distract his mind. He practiced the tune his father taught him four days ago. Four days ago his father had been alive to teach him this song! The one Irene taught Otis and Otis passed on to him. Conjure music, Otis called it. As he began, he felt his father and mother were much closer to him, right there with him, as real as the chords on his guitar. For the first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.

“Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” Tommy sang. “Don’t mind people grinning in your face.”

Few on the platform gave him their attention, another guitar man in Harlem being as unremarkable as the arc lights along the sidewalks.

“I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find. Don’t you mind people grinning in your face.”

Until the end of the work day, Tommy played on the platform. His fingers never tired, his voice never gave out. Early evening he boarded the train to Flatbush. Either he was humming to himself the whole way or the air itself hummed around him.

9

“Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.”

Robert Suydam said this at half past ten. The party had been going for hours, but Suydam had yet to gather the group’s attention. Instead he’d welcomed Tester early, and then, an hour later, the guests arrived, men and women and some in-between, as varied a group as Suydam had promised. The party was held in the library. All his books had been cleared from the floor. In their place were banquet tables, high-backed chairs, serving carts with cut crystal bottles of liquor — not bootleg swill — and glasses to match. The room babbled with languages. English and Spanish, French and Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, Egyptian and Greek, patois and pidgin. But the only music came from Tester’s guitar. Suydam set Tommy by the bank of tall windows. He played standing beside the great chair. He sang to himself and avoided the eyes of the other guests. Tester knew how to recognize a room full of roughnecks. This bunch qualified. Suydam had haunted waterfronts and back alleys to find this crew of cutthroats. The kind of place Tommy imagined the Victoria Society would be was what these criminals called home sweet home.

Tester played and played. It was the same tune he’d been singing since morning. He warped and rearranged it, sang the words for a time, then hummed along for a while, and returned to the words again.

“You know they’ll grin in your face,” Tester sang softly. “They’ll jump you up and down. Just as soon as your back is turned, they’ll be trying to crush you down.”

His playing was interrupted only once. Robert Suydam came close and raised one hand to stop Tester’s strumming. He leaned in until his mouth was an inch from the guitarist’s ear.

“You’re with me, then?” Suydam asked. “I want to ask you before I address them. If I am Caesar, you are Octavius.”

Tester spoke, though his voice strained from all the singing, the words coming out a hoarse whisper. “To the end of this world,” Tester said. “I’m with you.”

Robert Suydam stepped back and watched Tester’s face solemnly. Tester couldn’t be sure what expression his own face held. Had he said the right thing? He spoke the truth; it would have to do. Finally Robert Suydam turned away, grinning to the crowd, and he slapped the top of the great chair forcefully. The men and women in the room became silent. When he sat in the great chair, the guests found places at the banquet tables. Suydam flicked his hand to send Tester away. No one allowed in the spotlight but him. Tommy wasn’t sure where to go, so he walked to the far end of library and posted himself near the double doors. Then Robert Suydam leaned forward and spoke.

“Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do,” he said. “I am one of those few. Let me show you.”

Suydam turned to the tall windows. Night out now and the lights of the bright library turned the panes into a screen just as they had before. Tester watched the crowd of fifty gangsters. He wished to see their reactions as Suydam’s magic played.

“Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor,” Suydam began. “But what if that could change?”

The image in the windows turned a deep green, the color of the sea as seen from the sky. So they were Outside now? Suydam could do it just that fast? Tester lifted his hands and played, hardly touching the strings, no singing. Suydam looked up and seemed pleased. He played the conjure music quietly. The crowd of rowdies never looked away from the windows, but the music and Suydam’s words worked together, an even stronger spell.

All the old man said three nights ago was repeated. The Sleeping King. The end of this current order, its civilization of subjugation. The end of man and all his follies. Extermination by indifference.

“When the Sleeping King awakes, he will reward us with dominion of this world. We will live in the shadow of his grace. And all your enemies will be crushed into dust. He will reward us!” the old man repeated, shouting now. “And your enemies will be crushed!”

They shouted back. They clapped each other on the shoulders. Founding fathers of a new nation, or even better, a world now theirs to administer and control.

“I will guide you in this new world!” Suydam called, standing and raising his hands. “And in me you will finally find a righteous ruler!”

They stamped and knocked over their chairs. They toasted Robert Suydam’s reign.

But Tommy Tester couldn’t celebrate such a thing. Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could’ve tempted Tommy, but today such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn’t make messes; mankind was the mess. Exhaustion washed over Tommy and threatened to drown him. Thinking this way caused Tester to play a series of sour keys.

Suydam noticed even if others didn’t. He looked up at Tester sharply, but quickly his expression changed. His annoyance shifted to surprise as he saw Tester raise the expensive guitar and bring the body down against the floor. Shattered. Tester turned to the library’s closed double doors. Suydam shouted. First a command, then a plea. Not yet, he called. Not yet, you ape! The old man ran toward Tester, but the rowdy guests got in his way. Robert Suydam watched as Charles Thomas Tester grabbed the two handles and pulled the doors open. Then, to Robert Suydam’s horror, Tommy walked through them and shut the library doors behind him.