Concerning the Trunk

    The Alligator Crawled over Center Street, skulking from the doors of one club to confront the battle drums and bagpipe trumpets of another. Blues fell like warm rain over South Avenue, steaming on the street, foaming with the alcohol, and drifting with cigarette trails over the Arrowhead Hotel. Less than a block away and marooned by the neon parallel of the district, the hotel occupied a neglected patch of heaving concrete street and alley, in earlier, better days a glamorous lodging now become derelict, graveyard tenement.
  Hoell could hear the jazz clubs like music from the next room, lingering as echoing ghosts in the cracks of dirty brick. There was no lock on the outer door; he let himself in, quietly ascending stairwells dark, wet and crowded with refuse to the fourth floor. The life and light of 42nd and South was just a glimmer of a memory here, replaced by a colicky baby's screams, raised voices of domestic arguments, and the nightly news turned up loud to drown the presence of reality.
   One room, 409, stood by itself at the end of a hall. It had been rented time interminable, but no one living there could remember the last time it saw traffic. Hoell paused before the door a moment, then unlocked it.
   The room was small, and long abandoned. Black mildewed walls peeling paper, bending like lily petals to the detritus and rotted carpet on the floor. A window was broken as by a baseball, letting in the weather and songbirds, the view of a dangerous fire-escape, and the thin refrain of Drunken Barrelhouse Blues. The furniture was the skeleton of a bed frame and a high-back chair, upholstery scavenged for nest lining spilling among the leaves and paper of dime novel pages carpeting the floor.
   Hoell shut the door behind him, moved to a small incision of a closet, where the winds of ages had blown drifts into the back wall. He nudged aside a pile of moldered blankets and the nest of a small animal with his foot, cleared a space in the carpet and newspaper remains to the floorboards while bugs scurried from the way. He pried loose a section of floor, revealing a bootleg space concealing a battered, rusted army trunk. Hoell hauled it to the floor, wrestled Savannah's key in the lock, releasing it with a crash that echoed in the room.
   Wading through a maelstrom of ancient clothing, yellow and brittle newsprint, photographs of long forgotten soldiers. Trinkets, memorandum, charms, and ark of lives unremembered. He brushed these to the side with reverent hands, digging until his fingers touched a blackened tin box the size of a book. He paused, fingers resting on the sides, as though willing himself to pull it out. Then he lifted it suddenly, like jerking a bandage, and closed the trunk. He set the tin on the chest and opened it.
   Midnight blue velvet, blotched and slightly moth-nibbled, folded like ripples of a dark ocean. Hoell pulled them back slowly, as though afraid of what was beneath. It was wasted effort. Nestled within, with a thin patina of dust, was a short handled straight razor, sizable nick missing from the blade. The metal was pitted, wood worn smooth and glossy. It was impossible to guess when it had last been used. Not in Hoell's lifetime. But nestled within the worn velvet guard was a small, sinister dollop, uneven and mottled.
   Hoell exhaled a deep breath, closed the tin, and turned to find the Houngan in the high-back chair.