TEA AND MRS. JENKINS
By Louis Baum
Working as a courier for Mr. Luppo, Jack had been sent to acquire many things, but this object must have been the strangest.
“Really, a cockroach?”
“Yeah,” one of Mr. Luppo’s hirelings, or — as Jack fancied them – goons.
Jack persisted. “Mr. Luppo is going to send me from New York to New Orleans to pick up a cockroach?”
“Yeah, it’s a rare specimen or something. Hey, you know better than to question his orders.”
Jack had ended it there. He did know better than to question his orders. What the boss wanted, the boss got, and Jack was often sent to acquire it. Whether the “It” in question happened to be diamonds, rare coins, rare stamps, or some of the stranger things; dolls, shrunken human heads, strange tinctures and medicines, various occult artifacts, bizarre items of supposed mystical power, but a single cockroach must take the cake as the oddest request so far. Shrunken heads Jack could understand, they had a history, a macabre air, and if Luppo’s assertions were correct, contained some level of preternatural power. Jack could not see the point of coming thousands of miles for a roach however, even a rare one.
