Rook & Tooth and Claw Read Online Free PDF Page A

its faculty.”
    There was a burst of giggling over in one corner of the art studio, and Jim saw Jane Fidaccio quickly knock an immense clay penis off the rhinoceros that she was modelling.
    Ellie drew out three large sheets of paper and spread them on top of the plan chest. They were all painted in reds and oranges and blacks. One showed a man being burned alive on top of a funeral pyre. Another showed a procession of men walking through a jungle. Jim didn’t immediately find it horrifying until he realised that they were walking in line because a long stake had been driven through their stomachs and out through their backs, keeping them together like a human kebab. The third picture showed a naked woman lying on her back, eating her newborn baby even before she had passed the afterbirth.
    “Tee Jay’s work,” she said.
    “Jesus,” Jim acknowledged. “These are pretty strong.”
    “I was going to destroy them, but I thought you’d better take a look at them first.”
    “Did Tee Jay ever do anything like this before?”
    Ellie shook her head. “Only in the last two weeks. I asked him what they meant, and he said they were something to do with his ethnic heritage, but that was all.”
    “His
heritage
? He was born in Huntington Park, so far as I know. Then his father got a job as a chauffeur and the family moved to Santa Monica. What kind of ethnic heritage is that?”
    “Well, I don’t know,” said Ellie. “But it seems to me that he’s been very disturbed.”
    Jim picked up the painting of the men in the jungle. “You see these letters here? V – O – D – U – N. Do you have any idea what these could mean?”
    “No idea at all. Tee Jay wouldn’t say. He said the pictures spoke for themselves.”
    “Not to me they don’t,” said Jim. “Look … what’s he written down the side here? S – A – M – E. Same? What does that mean? Same as what? Or maybe it’s an acronym … Skewer All Men Equally, or something. Or an anagram. Who knows?”
    “Maybe you could ask him?” Ellie suggested.
    Jim nodded. She was a wise woman, Ellie; tender and wise. He said, “Can I keep these?”
    She said, “For sure … I don’t want any of my freshman students seeing them. They might get ideas.”
    Jim rolled up the paintings and twisted an elastic band around them. “I owe you one,” he told Ellie, as she showed him to the door. “Maybe that special Rook pizza I keep on promising to make you. The one with the smoked ricotta.”
    “Not just yet,” she said. “Let’s wait till some of this dust has settled.”
    “Sure, Ellie. I didn’t mean now.”
    “No,” she said, as if none of the men she met ever meant now.
    He went home first, to his second-storey apartment in a pink-painted concrete block just off Electric Avenue, in Venice. There was a small blue pool in the courtyard, around which the residents relaxed in the evening on rusty half-collapsed sun-loungers, drinking warm wine and reading thick blockbuster novels. This evening it was so warm that even Mrs Vaizey was outside, seventy-six years old, in a huge pair of black silk shorts and a shrivelled tube top, and one of those SpaceFace lobster visors that were thought to be such a scream about 15 years ago.
    “You’re looking grim, Jim,” said Mrs Vaizey, shielding her eyes against the sun. “Bad day at Black Rock?”
    Jim nodded. “One of our students was killed today. It’s been pretty heavy all round.”
    “Killed? That’s awful! How did that happen?”
    “We’re not entirely sure. But so far it seems like another student stabbed him.”
    “The world isn’t what it was, Jim. In my day you went to school to get yourself educated, not to kill other students, or to get yourself killed.”
    “Well, that’s right, Mrs Vaizey. But I’m not so sure that this killing is quite so simple as it looks.”
    The pale pink lobster on top of her head gave him a beady-eyed look and dangled its plastic claws. “You think different, do you?