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hearing it just once (true); they believed he was Sidney Bechet’s long-lost brother (ain’t we all?); they murmured that like the bluesman Robert Johnson, Falk would only play facing a corner, his back to everyone (handsome devil like Falk? think again) – and speaking of the devil (and Johnson), they reckoned he’d made a pact with hell itself, traded his soul for those damned clever lips.
    I don’t know, maybe that last one is even true.
    Then in the fall of ’81 a few more details come out. In an interview Hammond gave, he claimed the kid died in ’48, after leaving Mauthausen. Died of some chest ailment that August, of a pulmonary embolism. Pulmonary embolism? Somehow that ain’t struck folks as right. ‘What really happened to Hieronymus Falk’ become something of a journalist sport. All sorts of nonsense started up. One article said Falk got pleurisy. Another said pleurisy of the suicide variety, implying he brought it on himself, one too many rainy walks in that frail body. Still another said forget the lungs – it been his heart that give out, cardiac arrest due to starvation. More romantic that way, I guess. No one seemed to get it right. All of this was like an old knife turning in me and Chip’s guts. Leave the poor kid dead, we felt. Let him lie.
    Through all of it, Hammond stuck to his guns.
    ‘It’s like I said, Sid, pulmonary embolism,’ he told me later. ‘I’ve never been more astonished than when everyone refused to believe it. A man like Falk, though, I guess he’s got to have a glamorous death. With the right kind of death, a man can live forever.’
    Hell , I thought when I heard that. A man like Falk ? Hiero was just a kid . Ain’t nobody should have to grow up like that.
    ..........
     
    I stood a long time behind my door, listening for Chip’s shuffled footfalls on the stairs. Then I locked the two deadbolts, rattled the chain into place.
    Chip Jones , I thought grimly, as I went back down the hall. Chip goddamn Jones. The man don’t understand limits .
    Not that I believed him. Even for a second. I returned to my quiet living room, turned off the lights, stood at the window with one slat of the blinds held down, staring out into the street. After a minute Chip appeared, a small silhouette in the gathering darkness. He crossed the street, walking slowly, then turned and glanced up at my apartment. I released the blinds with a crackle and stepped back into the shadows.
    After a time I sat, looked at my hands. The room darkish now, the late afternoon haze laying shadows against all the furniture. Everything looked heavier. I could smell Chip’s cigarillo like the devil’s presence.
    Then I said to myself, be fair, just picture it for a minute. What if this wasn’t some prank of Chip’s, what if these letters did exist, what if somehow, like the proverbial voice from beyond the grave, the kid was reaching out to us? What would you do, Sid, if all that was possible? After what you done, wouldn’t you owe it to him to go? I sat there until the room went full dark, staring through my warped living room blinds into the street.
    It was no use. I did not believe it.
    I knew I should get up, get back to packing, but I didn’t move. An odd feeling come over me then. I could feel my hands and feet tingling like they wasn’t my own no more, and then it seemed like some shadow passed over my heart. I shivered.
    I must have slept. I woke with my head twisted hard to one side, a long line of drool dampening the front of my shirt. It was still dark. I got up, checked the clock, grimaced. Still a few hours yet.
    Then I was packed and wrestling the battered suitcase down the stairwell and out to the waiting taxi. It idled there in the cold early light, the clouds of exhaust hauntingly white in the street. Gave me a chill, seeing it.
    I got into the cab with a groan. The peeling seats smelled bad, like garlic or onions. ‘BWI,’ I mumbled. ‘Don’t go taking no scenic routes either. I got a