Keeper of the Flame. Jack Batten

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      “We are?”

      “Very ugly, man. Very.”

      Chapter Four

      Jerome stopped eating his spaghetti and meat sauce.

      “Goes back a long way, the thing I’m about to tell you,” he said.

      I stopped eating too.

      “Before Mr. Carnale discovered Flame,” Jerome said, “he was an unknown kid, like I said earlier. So, up in his bedroom, this one day a lotta years ago, he wrote the words for nine songs. Didn’t put them on a video, didn’t tape himself singing them. They were just words on nine sheets of paper, and these lyrics, man, they disgusting. They anti-gay, they against woman, they racist. I’m telling you man, these songs were so gross you couldn’t imagine them in your worst nightmares.”

      “The little I know about rap customs,” I said, “putting down gay people is a popular theme in the lyrics. Right up there with denigrating women. Faggots and whores — two universal rap themes.”

      “Not like these ones of Flame’s,” Jerome said.

      Both of us paused, then resumed eating.

      “What Flame did all those years ago,” Jerome said, “he put away these nine sheets of paper in the drawer in the place where he lived with his mama, the words for each one of the songs written down on the sheets. Flame’s mama saved all that shit to the present day. At her house, she’s stored away every single song Flame ever wrote. That includes these nine sheets causing the problems, man.”

      “And that’s what the Reverend Alton Douglas now has in his possession?”

      “Everything on the song sheets is in Flame’s own handwriting, his signature on every sheet,” Jerome said. He reached for his slim black briefcase on the floor beside his chair, and took out a handful of white pages held together with a paperclip.

      “These here,” Jerome said, handing me the sheets, “are copies the Reverend handed me the night before last. Monday that was. You can keep the damn copies for the time being, man, while you’re workin’ on the case. Personally, I don’t care if I never see this stuff again. But here’s the crux of the situation, man. The Reverend told me he gonna put these nine pages on the Web in two weeks’ time unless we pay the man eight million dollars.”

      Under the paperclip holding the nine pages, Jerome had fastened the Reverend Alton Douglas’s card and his own card. I removed the paperclip, put the cards in my inside jacket pocket. And then I started to read the first page of Flame’s song lyrics.

      “Hold up, man,” Jerome said in a peremptory tone. “Don’t read them right now, not when you’re eating your nice pasta. I’m warning you.”

      “I’ve got a cast-iron stomach, Jerome,” I said, “if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

      I read down the page. It appeared to be a song about two men making love with one another. And as they got intimate, one man used a very sharp knife to cut off the other man’s testicles.

      “Oh dear Jesus,” I said.

      “Brace yourself, man,” Jerome said. “There’s much worse in there, man. One’s about people pooping on other people.”

      I was still on the first song, the one that mixed semen and blood. It got very specific in its descriptions. Even as a kid, Flame seemed to have a talent with words. Waxing lyrical about one guy torturing another guy. The spaghetti lurched in my stomach.

      I looked at Jerome, and my face must have reflected what was going on in my belly.

      “Cast-iron, man?” Jerome said. “The way you appearing right now, it’s more like a leaky tin foil.”

      The waitress came to our table.

      “The spaghetti Bolognese not agreeing with you, sir?” she said to me, her expression showing concern.

      “Nothing an espresso won’t fix,” I said. “Double, if you don’t mind.”

      I didn’t speak until the espresso arrived, and I took a sip.

      “I assume the other song lyrics are in the same spirit as this first one,” I said to Jerome.

      “Worse, if anything,” Jerome said. “Two women dancing with no clothes on get their boobs shot off by a dude with a rifle watching them. Another song does what you might call variations on the n-word.”

      I read my way through all nine pages of lyrics. Two of the songs did imaginatively sick things with urine. All of the songs, taken together, added up to the most repulsive catalogue of written work I might have ever read.

      “If these see the light of day,” I said, “Flame can kiss away his chances of succeeding to the Cary Grant mantle.”

      “Those damn songs would definitely smear my man’s image.”

      “It would be hard to look at him as a mature and profound performer.”

      “Not a chance. Everybody’d stop thinking of him that way, man.”

      “All because of a youthful indiscretion.”

      “You might say so.”

      “I’m assuming the words Flame wrote all those years ago don’t reflect the big-time songwriter and singer he grew into today. What I’m asking, Flame’s not popular because he’s a musical master of misogyny and homophobia?”

      Jerome put down his knife and fork, and gave me a long look.

      “I wouldn’t be working with the dude these last six years if I thought he was the kind of guy you see in those words,” Jerome said. “He’s a very fine and decent and thoughtful young man, Flame is.”

      “The ugliness was some kind of youthful abberation?” I said. “It’s all gone now?”

      “You got my word on that, Crang.”

      I nodded, and both of us took a moment to reflect on where the two of us stood on the matter of Flame’s problem.

      “As I see the situation,” I said, breaking the silence, “my assignment for you and Roger comes in three parts. Get back the original sheets of lyrics from the Reverend Alton Douglas. Be as sure as I’m able that the Reverend isn’t hanging on to more copies of the lyrics. And avoid paying the eight million or a large part thereof.”

      “You save any of the eight million, man,” Jerome said, “Mr. Carnale no doubt gonna give you a nice little bonus. But that’s not at the top of the damn list. We want the original song sheets back. All of them, man.”

      “You’ll probably like to know how the Reverend got his hands on the originals in the first place,” I said. “How did the sheets of lyrics get to him from Flame’s mother’s house?

      “Definitely that’d be of interest.”

      “The mother doesn’t know how that happened?”

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