Babayaga

stopped him. “Don’t let us make you nervous, son. There’s no rush. Your friend’s not done yet. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. Stateside-wise, where exactly are you from? New York?”
    “No. Detroit, Michigan.”
    “Oh yeah? No kidding.” Kelly slapped his hands together.
    Flats started singing: “ Michigan water tastes like cherry wine …”
    Kelly ignored him. “Listen, I’m from Detroit too. Black Bottom, you know it?”
    Will nodded. “I grew up over on the west side of town, but, yeah, I know it.”
    “Well, if you know it, forget it.” Kelly’s smile disappeared as his face slid into a bitter expression. “Black Bottom ain’t no more. They bulldozed the whole neighborhood. Paradise Valley district, gone. Club Sudan, gone. Sportree’s, gone. They erased the entire history. I mean, Floyd Patterson grew up there, right? You’ve seen him fight, right? They should be building a statue to that man, not tearing down his damn home. When I hit this town I couldn’t believe it. I mean, Paris has got whole city blocks and neighborhoods that have all been up for centuries. The place where I live is three hundred years old, beautiful place, older than Napoleon. Hell, I bet even Flats’s little bathtub is older than Napoleon. But back home, they raze it down to dirt or pave a tollway through it. That’s why I ain’t never steppin’ foot in Detroit again, ’cuz there’s no Detroit there left to step onto.”
    Will was unsure how to respond. “I know, it’s too bad.”
    Kelly nodded hard. “Yes, it is, son. It’s too bad. It’s like that magic trick where the magician tears away the tablecloth and leaves all the glasses standing. It’s exactly like that, only the opposite.”
    Will felt silenced, he got up and nodded an awkward goodbye to the men and headed out to the street. Stepping through the double doors, he found an evening rain had started. Will lit a cigarette while Kelly’s words about Detroit rang in his ears. It wasn’t news. He would get long letters from his brother and mother describing how the whole city was falling to pieces, pulled apart by forces they could not quite explain. Each had their own prejudiced suspicions: his brother blamed the Negroes, while his mother blamed the auto companies, still stinging from the UAW’s wins and hell-bent on beating the workers back down. Will did not know who to believe. He’d been to all the joints Kelly had mentioned, and over a dozen others, enjoyed his first legal drink at Sutree’s, saw Johnny Hartman sing “Lush Life” at the Sudan. Will knew those clubs had been boarded up. The former patrons—ex-GIs with their new government loans, and union line workers enjoying their latest concessions—had all rushed out to the velvet quiet of the ever-expanding suburbs, while the downtown players, their old haunts, shuttered and abandoned, found their new gigs here as exiles in the City of Light. It seemed Paris somehow managed to absorb all the beautiful things the rest of the world discarded; it was a sparkling and bejeweled box of lost treasures, a wondrous cabinet that hummed with soft horn harmonies played against a grand piano’s minor chords.
    “Well, those boys raised some interesting questions,” said Oliver, coming up behind him.
    “In what way?”
    “You heard it yourself, multiple deaths, eerily similar circumstances. Boris may have had a bad heart, who knows, but there’s no doubt he was helped along in his exit. I don’t like it. I’m sensing a rare pedigree of wickedness, some peculiar evil looming here in our midst.”
    Will tried to ignore Oliver’s dramatic overtones. “Should we check out this Arc Hotel?”
    “Oh, perhaps we should, though I’m not too excited at the prospect. I happen to know the Arc quite well, it’s a terrifically shabby place. We went there last summer to interview an American poet in from Morocco. The man was so high on kef he couldn’t finish a single thought. We literally spent hours patiently sitting at his feet, waiting for something resembling coherence to emerge. From what I saw, the entire place is packed to the rafters with that sort, nodding-off junkies, hashish-chewing automatons, and a pathetic calico that’s relieved herself on every rug in sight, making the whole place absolutely reek of cat piss. Very dingy stuff. But, given what the boys said, there’s probably no avoiding it.”
    “Wanna go now?”
    “Ha ha, no.” Oliver smiled and patted him on the