Strange Trades Read Online Free PDF

heavy and hot atop my unshielded head. The sand felt strange beneath my bare feet. Deatherage had come with the news while I still wore my robe, and I had gone out immediately with him.
    Charlie’s death was obviously the catalyst for my leaving the dark sanctuary of my club. Yet I felt that subtler forces were also at work. It was as if I had been a fairy-tale prisoner immured, and the death of Kid Charlemagne had set me free.
    Down on the wet, weed-wrapped rocks, a small crowd had gathered for a novel diversion. Three of Deatherage’s men held them back.
    Splayed awkwardly over the slick stones (he had never been awkward in life) lay Charlie Maine. His flesh was puffy from contusions.
    And someone had opened up the old scar in his throat.
    I stood a moment, transfixed. Then I crouched to take his limp hand.
    When I arose, Christina was there. Her eyes were filmy, like two pebbles glazed with snail slime.
    “He’s so beautiful,” she said dreamily.
    And then I knew.
     
    The motor scooter buzzed through the dark, up toward Bosky Knob. Random breaks in the foliage and trees on my right allowed me to see the gaudy lights clustered around the bay below. They looked alien somehow, already distant. Tonight, for the first time in years, my club was closed.
    It didn’t matter to me. I knew I was leaving. Something black inside me that had held me captive all these years had shattered under the impact of Charlie’s death. What the future held for me, I couldn’t say. But it had to be better than the past.
    I had a final chore, though, before my morning departure.
    Events had moved on. Koos van Staaden sat morosely in the Hesperides’ single jail cell. He denied any involvement in the murder, but made no secret of his satisfaction. Henrik Blauvelt was confined to his house under guard, as a possible accessory. Deatherage’s theory was that Blauvelt had pinioned Charlie’s arms from behind while van Staaden performed the grisly murder.
    I hadn’t told him that it took only one to kill when love bred trust.
    I rounded a curve and saw the lights in the windows of van Staaden’s home. The place blazed like a cold pyre. I cut the motor, dismounted, and walked the rest of the way.
    The front door was unlocked. I patted my pocket. The cassette was still there. I had purchased it—an anonymous self-contained unit—on a quick trip to the mainland that afternoon, after the shock of seeing Charlie’s body and after my fatally delayed revelation had worn off. It would never be traced to me.
    I pushed open the door and went in.
    I found Christina in a second-floor bedroom. She sprawled on a divan, beneath a wall-mounted sjambok , wearing silken undergarments that rode high on her thighs and low on her shoulders. She was engaged in a minute examination of the flame of a candle standing on a table beside her. I knew she had probably been sitting that way for hours.
    Once, I had done the same thing myself.
    “Christina,” I said quietly.
    She turned her Circean profile languidly. The candlelight shimmered on the watered silk across her loins.
    “The beautiful Mr. Holloway,” she murmured between her black lips.
    “Why did you do it, Christina?” I asked. “Why couldn’t you just discard him, leave him to the rest of us, once you’d finished with him?”
    “He was threatening to tell Father,” she said. “Tell him about the people we met in Mexico, and what they sold me.” The flickering candle captivated her again. After a time, she said, “But they know me down there now, and trust me. I have my contacts. I don’t need Charlie anymore.”
    “He was a person, Christina. He deserved to live.”
    The black rose of her mouth formed a smile. “He was just a kaffir . I’ve killed them before—accidentally and on purpose. I don’t hate kaffirs , though. Why should I? Do you know that I have a little piece of kaffir’s brain in mine? A piece from a little baby bugger. That almost makes me a kaffir , doesn’t it?”
    She