The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

NAIN ROUGE by Barbara Nadel

RITCHIE WAS AS drunk as a sack when he first saw it out of the corner of his eye. Shuffling down Selden towards Woodward Avenue, it was talking and laughing to itself and knitting its tiny fingers in a nervous sort of a way. Ritchie’s first thought was that he was seeing things. It had been a long time since he’d put away anything apart from the odd bottle of Bud, much less nine…or was it thirteen?…beefy great shots of vodka. His body was clearly in some sort of revolt at the violence he had done to it, but Ritchie’s attitude was just simply, “Deal with it, bastard!” If his body didn’t like the booze he’d tipped into it, then that was its problem. He had much bigger issues to deal with than whether or not his guts wanted to tolerate spirits, or whether his arteries were hardening every time he put a cigarette into his mouth. Now he was seeing the freaking Nain Rouge, which could only mean one thing. He’d lost his mind.

Through all of Detroit’s many and various vicissitudes, Ritchie Carbone had always managed, somehow, to cling on to his business. It wasn’t much! It hadn’t been much. A Coney Dog joint on 2nd Avenue. Detroiters loved Coney Hotdogs. What wasn’t to like? Nothing! So a lot of people had moved out of the Cass Corridor over the years? So there was a reason for that, namely drug-fuelled and gang-sanctioned violence, but, hey, it was Detroit! Tough city, tough crowd.

But then as Ritchie knew very well, that only worked up to a point. When some little shit who called himself ‘Da Man’ had pumped a bullet into old Freddie’s head, that had been enough for Ritchie. That had been it…through, finished, gone. No more Coney Dogs on 2nd and a whole heap of trouble about how he was going to explain how he voluntarily made himself unemployed to Welfare. And now, to top it all, a crazy little mythical freak laughing at him from underneath a lamp post. Instinctively he put one hand up to his face so that it wouldn’t be able to recognize him. But it was probably way too late.

Of all the many badasses that Detroit had endured over the centuries, the Nain Rouge, or Red Dwarf, had to be the baddest. It was just legend, of course, but it was a legend that went back a long, long way. A small, child-like creature with brown fur, red boots, blazing eyes and rotten teeth was said to have attacked Detroit’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, in 1701. Shortly afterwards, Cadillac, a wealthy French businessman, suffered a downturn in his fortunes from which he never recovered. His altercation with the Nain is said to have rocked Cadillac to his core. But then the Nain Rouge was a creature that he would have recognized from his native country. A variety of lutin, the Nain Rouge was a common figure in the folklore, myths and legends of Normandy. Ritchie Carbone knew of it from the annual Marche du Nain Rouge, an old Detroit custom that had been revived in 2010.

His buddy, Jigsaw, had told him about it first. Jigsaw had been a Ford employee back in the day; now he made his living ripping copper and other metals out of derelict buildings to sell for scrap. He’d walked into Ritchie’s place almost a year ago and said, “You heard they gonna banish the Nain this year?”

Ritchie had frowned; he remembered it well. “What? You mean they gonna have that march where everyone gets dressed up so they can fool some thing that don’t even exist into walking into a fire?”

“That’s the thing.” Jigsaw had had his usual; a large dog, fries and a bottle of cherry pop. “Hey, Ritchie, this what you think they call gentrification?”

Reviving the old Marche du Nain Rouge was something that, to Ritchie, certainly smacked of middle-class people amusing themselves. Although most people with money had moved out of the city years ago, a new type of urban elite was trickling back into pretty old buildings like the Fyffes place on the corner of Adams Avenue and Woodward. They liked old customs like the banishing of the Nain Rouge every springtime. It was said that if the Nain could be banished on the nearest Sunday to the Vernal Equinox, the city would be safe from misfortune for another year. Heaven knew it needed it!

Ritchie Carbone, in spite of having a father from Italy, was Detroit through and through. His mother, Agnes, could trace her ancestry back to Cadillac’s French compatriots and her folks, the Blancs, had stayed in the city ever since. At fifty-eight, Ritchie had seen the riots of ’67, the many vicissitudes of the automobile industry, the urban ruins, and, more latterly, the first little flickers of possible city renewal. He knew that the place needed every bit of help it could get, and if that included banishing an evil fantasy figure from its streets then so be it. But that had been before that little shit Da Man had taken over large swathes of 2nd; before he’d put a gun to Freddie’s head and pulled the trigger without Ritchie even having a chance to consider his offer of “protection”.

Still with his hand in front of his face – to let the Nain see you was dangerous, lest it come back sometime to take its revenge – Ritchie yelled at the creature. “Hey, you!” he said. “Get out of my city! Don’t you think we got enough problems, huh?”

But the little bastard just laughed, bared its rotten teeth at him and then began to scamper off at speed towards Woodward. Why Ritchie Carbone decided to stagger off after the Nain wasn’t really clear to him at the time, apart from the notion that he was generally angry. But this was actually at Da Man as opposed to the mythical Nain. Not that that mattered a bean! Ritchie drained his last shot of vodka down to the very last drip and then he got up and ran.

Laughing all the while, the little freak quickly got to Woodward and then turned right. It was, or appeared to be, heading back into the city. Ritchie, adamant that that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, followed. So, it was just some supernatural fairy or whatever – if it meant to sock what remained of Detroit in the guts once again, he was going to give it a hammering it would never forget. His mind had clearly gone, what the hell did it matter if he smacked around some bastard that wasn’t really there! What did he have left to lose anyway? The business had gone, his wife had left him, the freaking gangstas had even shot his freaking dog, for God’s sake!

Apart from the odd bus, the cars on Woodward seemed to fall into two categories: junk wagons just about held together by rust, and great big gleaming gangsta mobiles, brimming with blacked-out windows, guns, and the odd diamond-encrusted finger just glanced through the windshield. Someone like Ritchie couldn’t relate to any of that! Apart from his friendships with junkies like Jigsaw and Black Bottom Boo, he’d always been a straight-down-the-line, middle-of-the-road kind of person. Being white in a majority black neighbourhood had never bothered him. He’d got on with everyone, just like he had when Cass had been largely white. God rest her soul, his momma had even had him take Coneys up to the hookers on Cass Avenue when he was little more than an infant.

“Those girls gotta make a dollar just like everyone,” Agnes Carbone had said whenever she’d made up a bag of food for the ladies of the night. White, black, Jew or Gentile, she’d never cared and neither had Ritchie – until Da Man had come into his life. All swagger and crazy jewellery, tooled up homies and attitude, Da Man had started their “conversation” by calling Ritchie “white trash”. For the sake of his customers, as well as himself, he’d taken it. Until Da Man had shot Freddie.

There’d been no need to kill the dog like that! Hound was old and blind and he hadn’t known what the hell had been going on. The customers had high-tailed out, screaming. Not long afterwards Da Man and his crew left as well, but not before they’d told Ritchie that he had to somehow find a thousand dollars a week to pay for his own “protection”. It had been after that that Ritchie had impotently thrown all of his hotdogs, his bread and his French fries after the gangstas. They’d just landed on the sidewalk, the waste inherent in their disposal making him want to weep. Since when had he become this hopelessly vulnerable and impotent old man?

The Nain started to cross over Woodward, dodging between the cars and laughing uproariously as it did so. Sometimes a Focus or a Hummer or a Jeep would look as if it was about to barrel into the Nain, but it would always, somehow, evade a collision and come up smiling. At one point it even climbed on to the hood of some great big gangsta mobile and tapped its clawed fingers against the windshield, but then it slid off again and landed on the tarmac, giggling. The car went on its way, its driver seemingly oblivious to the danger he or she had been in.

Still on the sidewalk, Ritchie swayed on rubber legs, looking for a gap in the traffic. In New York crossing anywhere but a designated point would have had him up for jaywalking, but in Detroit nobody cared. He launched himself out into the wide road just before he got to Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. The Nain, across Woodward now, flicked him the finger and Ritchie, at that moment, decided that, real or not, the Nain Rouge was history. Even if he couldn’t prove his manhood with some teenage gangsta, he could at least vent his spleen on this little shit!

The Nain Rouge skipped, hopped and babbled its way into the old middle-class professional district of Brush Park. Once a place where doctors, attorneys, auto executives and lumber barons lived, Brush Park was now a wasteland of spectres, a graveyard for old houses that were rotten, abused, and haunted by the shades of lifestyles long since over with. Ritchie Carbone remembered it well. He’d had an old grade-school friend from Brush Park, a Jewish attorney’s son called Ron Sachs. His family had moved out in the sixties and Ron had eventually gone to Harvard. Last Ritchie had heard of him, he’d been practising law in LA. Good for him.

Up ahead, the Nain stopped outside the moonlit remains of a Gothic mansion and bent double. Then it pulled its pants down and it farted at him. Infuriated by its rudeness, Ritchie could feel his blood-pressure go through the roof as his head began to pound with anger and with booze and with the unaccustomed exercise he was getting. His father had died from a stroke back in the eighties; he’d have to be careful. But what for? The Nain, fart over, shuffled on, grunting and babbling and laughing through its awful, cracked teeth.

What for? Ritchie thought again. What am I breathing, what am I existing, what am I living for? Even before he’d sold the business, his marriage had been on the skids. Maria, his wife, had been so over serving Coneys, she’d run off with a professional poker player back in 2008. Now, apparently, she and this Ralph were holed up somewhere outside Reno. Her kids wouldn’t see her, but then neither Kathy nor Frank came to see Ritchie that often either and he was the so-called “injured” partner. No one lived in Detroit any more, no one dared.

Old Jigsaw had offered to buy him some apparently very fierce German Shepherd off a junkie from Eastern Market, but Ritchie had passed. Freddie hadn’t been a guard dog, he’d been a friend. Ritchie didn’t want to have some beast he was terrified of stopping him from leaving his own apartment.

He followed the Nain on to John R Street and then stopped to catch his breath. This part of Brush Park was completely gone to urban prairie. There was nothing. No wrecked houses, no vegetation – apart from grass – and no objects but litter. People reported seeing skunks in such places, even coyotes. The nothingness of it made Ritchie shudder. This was a district where he’d played as a kid, where he’d had tea with Ron Sachs and his family in his dad’s elegant, turreted mansion. All gone. He looked around for the Nain and just saw a void. Even the creature that traditionally presaged doom for the city couldn’t stand this. Maybe Brush Park represented “job done” to the evil little freak. After all, the destruction of Detroit was its final aim.

Over the centuries since Cadillac had founded the city, almost every disaster that had befallen it had been heralded by a sighting of the Nain. Back in ’67 during the riots there had been a lot of sightings. Then Detroit had survived, but it had changed too. Black folks had had enough and so they’d expressed their anger and they’d forced change. Ritchie had cheered them all the way. So what Da Man had done to him hit still harder. As he’d tried to tell the boy at the time, “This white trash has always been on your side!” But it hadn’t meant squat. Not to Da Man or to any of his crew.

There was a frigid late-February moon in the sky and the frost on the ground was so hard it was almost ice. Cold as unwilling charity, it was too bitter to snow and all but the most desperate addicts, the dying junkies, the most deprived of the deprived, were inside their homes, their squats or their crack shacks. No one was about and the silence, with the exception of the blood pounding through Ritchie’s head, was complete. Come March it would be Nain-banishing time again – unless of course he could get the little prick dealt with early. But it had disappeared. Not that it had ever really been anywhere in the first place. A product of vodka shots, the Nain was just bile-scented vomit from his sick, tired and bitter mind. It wasn’t Detroit that was falling apart, at least not completely and not yet, but Ritchie Carbone. With no savings, no pension and only a small apartment on Cass by way of assets, he was pretty much finished. With Welfare he could exist, but he couldn’t live. His pa had died when he was only two years older than Ritchie was now, and he’d been ready to go. Agnes, his wife, had been dead for almost thirty years by the time old Salvatore died at sixty. Ritchie still remembered how the old man had cried for her every single day.

Then something sharp jabbed into one of his buttocks and he turned around to see the Nain, its vile fingers jabbing into his butt. When he looked at it, it screamed with laughter and Ritchie, furious, said, “You are so freaking dead!”

The Nain took off like a rocket back towards Erskine Street, whooping and chuntering and waving its disgusting furry arms in the air. It was having a high old time!

Heavy, breathless and now seeing stars in front of his eyes, Ritchie Carbone pulled his unwilling body after it, his mind seething with visions of carnage and revenge. Nobody jabbed him in the butt! Not even Da Man and his crew had stooped to that. Some freaky thing from his subconscious wasn’t going to get away with it! He ran after the thing and was about to follow it into some rotting house when he recognized exactly where he was. He stopped. At one time there had been two turrets attached to the old Sachs house, now there was only one. But it was definitely where Ron and his family had lived. Ritchie put a hand up to his chest as he gasped for air and tried to deal with the shock. Mrs Sachs had been house-proud crazy! What would she make of the place now? Ritchie knew that it would break her heart and it made him want to cry in sympathy. Mrs Sachs had always made chocolate refrigerator cake, which had tasted so wonderful he’d closed his eyes with pleasure every time he’d eaten it. He’d been young and he and Ron had often talked about what they wanted to do when they grew up. Ritchie hadn’t wanted to go into his Pa’s Coney Dog business, he’d wanted to be a US Air Force pilot…not just a broken dream, but one literally hammered out of him by necessity, by recession, by the systematic destruction of his city.

As he ran up the teetering staircase to the place where the Sachses’ front door had once been, Ritchie let out a howl like a wounded wolf. But then suddenly he stopped because it was in front of him. The Nain, scowling and spitting and yet at the same time laughing at him too. He wanted to pull its rotten head off, reach down its neck and pull its wicked heart out.

It laughed one more time and then he was upon it, tearing at its ghastly red flesh with his fingers and with his teeth.

In spite of the cold, Ritchie slept better in that terrible skeleton of the old Sachs house than he’d done in his apartment for months. The Nain had fought, of course it had, it was well known throughout history for its viciousness. But he must have prevailed because he was still alive even though his body hurt and he could see a spider’s web of small scratches on his hands. Amazingly, to Ritchie, he’d had neither a stroke nor a heart attack. Maybe killing the Nain had somehow, magically, restored him to full health again.

But then what did he mean by ‘killing the Nain’? Now that he was sober, there was surely no more craziness and so therefore no more Nain? He had a bunch of small cuts all over the backs of his hands, but then he probably got those scrambling up into the old Sachs place. How he’d remembered where to find the house after so many years, especially drunk out of his gourd, was hard to work out – until he remembered. He’d followed the Nain. But then that wasn’t really possible, because the Nain Rouge didn’t exist. It was just a folk tale.

Ritchie stood up and felt the rotted floorboards splinter underneath his feet. If he remembered correctly, the Sachses had had a basement. Ritchie moved as carefully as he could until he felt he was on rather more solid footing. He’d just congratulated himself on surviving that particular ordeal when his eyes were caught by the sight of a tattered, miserable bundle underneath the remains of a great bay window. It was very, very red, and although Ritchie knew that it couldn’t possibly be the Nain, because the Nain didn’t really exist, he knew that he feared examining it.

For what seemed like hours he tried to formulate an excuse he could give to himself for not seeing what the bundle contained. But he couldn’t. On the one hand he never wanted to see what was in there, while on the other he wanted to do that more than anything else in the world. If it was the Nain all his preconceptions about reality and the world he thought he lived in would be shattered. If it wasn’t…

As quickly as he could, before fear consumed him, Ritchie reached down with one shaking hand and pulled the thing apart. When his hands came away, they were covered in thick, crimson arterial blood. In slow motion, or so it seemed at the time, the tiny head rolled out of the rags that had once constituted the little girl’s tattered clothes and fell to the floor at Ritchie’s feet. Her long, thick, bright red hair had been hiding the terrible stump that had been her neck, that he had hacked and hacked and hacked at until it came away in his hands…

Ritchie Carbone dropped to his knees as the thundering of his own blood threatened to deafen him. She had to be seven years old at the most! A tiny child, probably the daughter of some spaced-out junkie, playing with him, taunting him, being the Nain Rouge and…But had it been like that, or had he made her run?

He didn’t know! He couldn’t remember! Not like that, not in any detail! He looked down into her glassy-eyed, horrified little face, and the hammering in his head became a wild, discordant cacophony. Suddenly weak, Ritchie Carbone tipped forward and lay across the tiny body, twitching and unable to speak. Later it snowed and so neither of them were discovered for well over a week. A ghastly and macabre tableau that the police, when they attended, could only speculate about.

Come the Vernal Equinox, the Marche du Nain Rouge still managed to banish the little horror for another year. Everyone saw the evil dwarf burn, in effigy, on a big bonfire in Cass Park, just minutes from where Carbone’s old Coney Dog place used to be. A lot of the revellers said that it was a pity there was nowhere left in the Cass Corridor to get a decent Coney any more. But then they all agreed that it had probably been meant to be. Why, after all, should anyone get a lovely hotdog treat after burning even a mythical being, in effigy, to death?