Excerpt from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Cahokia Jazz

With the building dark beneath it, the skylight on the roof of the Land Trust was a pyramid of pure black. Down the smooth black of the glass, something sticky had run, black on black, all the way down into the crust of soft spring snow at Barrow's feet, where it puddled in sunken loops and pools like molasses. On top, a contorted mass was somehow pinned or perched. But the moon was going down on the far side of the Mound, and dawn was an hour and more away. The whole scene on the roof was a clot of shadows, and the wind was full of wet flakes. Along the way, at the small obstacle of a couple of cops on a roof, the snow caked Barrow's coat and got in his eyes, plastered Drummond's back where he'd turned it as a windbreak. Drummond was trying for a flame from his lighter, but even with his hat shielding the flint every spark was instantly quenched.

'Joe, can you go git the patrolman's flashlight?'

'Sure, Phin. Hold on.'

Barrow stepped carefully back towards the little hutch holding the door to the stairs. There was already a mess underfoot. As he expected, the uniform who'd called them in, from the phone down in the lobby, was waiting only a few steps down, on the narrow flight winding round the top of the elevator shaft. Just behind him was the night cleaner who'd found the door unlocked originally. She'd gone out onto the roof, and then run screaming onto Creekside to flag down the patrolman. Neither of them looked what you'd call avid. The cleaner, a heavyset taklousa in her forties, had her mouth clamped shut to hold in shock or nausea. The patroller, only twenty or so, was doing the classic takouma stone face – the set pose for male strength when something bad happened. He'd been out to the skylight too. Not rubberneckers, not spectators. Yet there they still were, keeping close; commanded somehow by the presence of death, compelled to wait attendance where it had visited. It took death repeated over and over, in Barrow's experience, death repeated in quantities too great for meaning, to wear that solemnity away. It took a war. Soldiers could learn to just walk on by in the presence of death, not many other people.

'Gimme your torch, tastanagi.'

'Yessir.'

'Just "Detective".'

'Yes, Detective. Sorry, Detective.'

Perhaps not even twenty, thought Barrow.

'Hey,' he said, 'had the snow started when you went out?'

'Not really. Just a few flakes, maybe?'

'But nothing on the ground.'

'No.'

'Uh-huh.' So, nothing to be learned from footprints; no reason to worry about churning the snow. He turned.

'Officer?' said the cleaner. 'I need to go soon. My babies will be waking up, and my man's on the early shift.'

'You must wait in case there are questions!' the patroller said to her.

'Yeah, stay put,' said Barrow.

He went back out, jiggling the flashlight. It made a tinny rattling sound, from a loose contact. For a moment, the scene remained as it had been, whirling and blind, the snow that had congregated wormily in the dim blue streetlamps down on Creekside Drive blowing up and over the three sister-towers of Water and Land and Power, and spattering the looming bulk of the Mound behind them, and weaving away in lines of flickering grey over the dark immensity of the Plaza beyond. Fifty-seven varieties of dark. Then the switch caught. In the beam, the flakes turned to pearly swimmers. And what had been black on black leapt out into scarlet.

'Whoa,' said Drummond. 'Messy.'

'Yep,' said Barrow. 'Phin, you're standing in it.'

'Shit,' said Drummond, backing, and crouching to swipe the porridge of blood and snow off his black oxfords.

The huddled object on the skylight still didn't make complete sense. A body, of course, and one which had bled out in gouts down the glass; oozed in the other ways death inflicted, judging by the smell reaching his nose through the chill of the snow and the city's usual bouquet of coal-smoke and river. But though at one end it terminated in a pair of ordinary man's legs, dressed in the pants of a dark blue suit, at the other it seemed to have a bundle rather than a head, and from the wreck of the chest between, where blood seemed to have exploded more than just run, rose a shape like a pair of fans, or fish's fins. Rope ran a couple of times round, hog-tying the corpse to the summit of the glass, and forcing the violated chest up.

Excerpted from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2024 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.