An elderly black maid, with a face that I recognised from the Metairie funeral party, emerged from the house with a silver coffee pot and sugar and cream in a matching set, all on an ornate silver tray. There were three china cups and saucers on the tray. Multi-coloured birds chased each other’s tails around the rim of the cups and a heavy silver spoon with a sailing ship at the end lay neatly positioned beneath the handle of each one. The maid placed the tray on a small wicker table and then left us.
Lionel Fontenot was wearing a pair of black cotton pants and a white shirt with an open collar. A matching black jacket lay over the back of his chair and his brogues were newly polished. He leaned over the table and poured three cups of coffee, added two sugars to one and handed it wordlessly to the burn victim.
‘Cream and sugar?’ he asked, looking to Louis and me in turn.
‘Black’s fine,’ I said.
‘Likewise,’ said Louis.
Lionel handed us each a cup. It was all very polite. Above us, the rain hammered on the porch roof.
‘You want to tell me how you came to be looking for my sister?’ Lionel said at last. He looked like someone who finds a strange guy cleaning the windscreen of his car and can’t decide whether to tip him a buck or hit him with a tyre iron. He held his cup with his little finger cocked while he sipped his coffee. I noticed that the burn victim did the same.
I told Lionel some of what I knew then. I told him about Tante Marie’s visions and her death and about the stories of the ghost of a girl at a Honey Island slough. ‘I think the man who killed your sister killed Tante Marie Aguillard and her son. He also killed my wife and my little girl,’ I said. ‘That’s how I came to be looking for your sister.’
I didn’t say that I was sorry for his pain. He probably knew that anyway. If he didn’t, then it wasn’t worth saying.
‘You take out two men at Metairie?’
‘One,’ I answered. ‘Someone else killed the other.’
Lionel turned to Louis. ‘You?’
Louis didn’t reply.
‘Someone else,’ I repeated.
Lionel put his cup down and spread his hands. ‘So why are you here now? You want my gratitude? I’m going to New Orleans now to take away my sister’s body. I don’t know that I want to thank you for that.’ He turned his face away. There was pain in his eyes, but no tears. Lionel Fontenot didn’t look like a man with well-developed tear ducts.
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said quietly. ‘I want to know why Lutice was only reported missing in the last three months. I want to know what your brother was doing out at Honey Island on the night he was killed.’
‘My brother,’ he said. Love and frustration and guilt chased each other in his voice like the birds on his pretty cups. Then he seemed to catch himself. I think he was about to tell me to go to Hell, to keep out of his family’s business if I wanted to stay alive, but I held his gaze and for a time he said nothing.
‘I got no reason to trust you,’ he said.
‘I can find the man who did this,’ I said. My voice was low and even. Lionel nodded, more to himself than to me, and appeared to make his decision.
‘My sister left at the end of January, start of February,’ he began. ‘She didn’t like . . .’ He waved his left hand gently at the compound. ‘. . . all this. There was trouble with Joe Bones, some people got hurt.’ He paused and chose his next words carefully. ‘One day she closed her bank account, packed a bag and left a note. She didn’t tell us to our faces. David wouldn’t have let her leave, anyways.
‘We tried to trace her. We looked up friends in the city, even people she knew in Seattle and Florida. There was nothing, not a trace. David was real cut up about her. She was our half-sister. When my momma died, my father married again. Lutice came out of that marriage. When my father and her momma died – that was in nineteen eighty-three, in an automobile accident – we took care of her, David especially. They were real close.
‘Few months back, David started having dreams about Lutice. He didn’t say nothing at first, but he got thinner and paler and his nerves started to play at him. When he told me, I thought he was going crazy and told him so, but the dreams just kept comin’. He dreamed of her under water, he said, heard her banging against metal in the night. He was sure that something had happened to her.
‘But what could we do? We had searched half of Louisiana. I’d even made approaches to some of Joe Bones’s men, to see if there was something that maybe needed to be sorted out. There was nothing. She was gone.
‘Next thing I knew, he reported her missing and we had the cops crawling over the compound. Mon, I nearly killed him that day, but he insisted. He said something had happened to Lutice. He was beyond reason by then, and I had to take care of things on my own, with Joe Bones hangin’ over me like a sword ’bout to fall.’
He looked to the burn victim.
‘Leon here was with him when the call came. He wouldn’t say nothin’ about where he was goin’, just took off in his damned yellow car. When Leon tried to stop him, he pulled a gun on him.’ I glanced at Leon. If he felt any guilt about what had happened to David Fontenot, he kept it well hidden.
‘Any idea who made the call?’ I asked.
Lionel shook his head.
I put my cup on the tray. The coffee was cold and untasted.
‘When are you going to hit Joe Bones?’ I asked. Lionel blinked like he had just been slapped and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leon step forward.
‘The hell you talkin’ about?’ said Lionel.
‘You’ve got a second funeral coming up, at least as soon as the police release your sister’s body. Either you won’t have too many mourners or the funeral will be overrun with police and media. Whatever happens, I figure you’ll try to take out Joe Bones before then, probably at his place in West Feliciana. You owe him for David, and, anyway, Joe won’t rest easy until you’re dead. One of you will try to finish it.’
Lionel looked at Leon. ‘They clean?’ Leon nodded.
Lionel leaned forward. There was menace in his voice. ‘The fuck does any of this have to do with you?’
I wasn’t fazed by him. The threat of violence was in his face, but I needed Lionel Fontenot.
‘You heard about Tony Remarr’s death?’
Lionel nodded.
‘Remarr was killed because he was out at the Aguillard place after Tante Marie and her son were murdered,’ I explained. ‘His fingerprints were found in Tante Marie’s blood, Joe Bones heard about it and told Remarr to lie low. But the killer found out – I don’t know how, yet – and I think he used your brother to lure Remarr into making the hit so he could take him out. I want to know what Remarr told Joe Bones.’
Lionel considered what I had said. ‘And you can’t get to Joe Bones without me.’
Beside me, Louis’s mouth twitched. Lionel caught the movement.
‘That’s not entirely true,’ I said. ‘But if you’re going to be calling on him anyway, we might tag along.’
‘I go calling on Joe Bones, his fucking place is gonna be real fucking quiet by the time I leave,’ said Lionel softly.
‘You do what you have to do,’ I replied. ‘But I need Joe Bones alive. For a while.’
Lionel stood and tied the top button on his shirt. He took a wide black silk tie from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to put it on, using his reflection in the window to check the knot.
‘Where you staying?’ he asked. I told him, and gave Leon the number of my phone. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ said Lionel. ‘Maybe. Don’t come out here again.’
Our discussions appeared to be at an end. Louis and I were almost at the car when Lionel spoke again. He pulled on his jacket and adjusted the collar, then smoothed down the lapels.
‘One thing,’ he said. ‘I know Morphy out of St Martin was there when Lutice was found. You got cop friends?’
‘Yeah. I got federal friends too. That a problem?’
He turned away. ‘Not as long as
you don’t make it one. If you do, the crabs gonna be feeding on you and your buddy.’
Louis fooled around with the radio until he found a station that seemed to be playing back-to-back Dr John. ‘This is music, right?’ he said.
The music segued uneasily from ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ to ‘Gris Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya’ and John’s throaty rumble filled the car. Louis flicked the pre-sets again, until he found a country station playing three-in-a-row from Garth Brooks.
‘This be the Devil’s music,’ mumbled Louis. He turned the radio off and tapped his fingers on the dash.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to. Things could get difficult, or Woolrich and the feds could decide to make them difficult for you.’ I knew that Louis was what Angel diplomatically referred to as ‘semi-retired’. Money, it appeared, was no longer an issue. The ‘semi’ indicated that it might have been replaced by something else, although I wasn’t sure yet what that was.
He looked out the window, not at me. ‘You know why we’re here?’
‘Not entirely. I asked, but I wasn’t sure that you’d come.’
‘We came because we owe you, because you’d look out for us if we needed it and because someone has to look out for you after what happened to your woman and your little girl. More than that, Angel thinks that you’re a good man. Maybe I think so too and maybe I think that what you brought to an end with the Modine bitch, what you’re trying to bring to an end here, they’re things that should be brought to an end. You understand me?’
It was strange to hear him talk this way, strange and affecting. ‘I think I understand,’ I replied quietly. ‘Thank you.’
‘You are going to end this thing here?’ he said.
‘I think so, but we’re missing something, a detail, a pattern, something.’ I kept catching glimpses of it, like a rat passing under streetlights. I needed to find out more about Edward Byron. I needed to talk to Woolrich.
Rachel met us in the hall of the main Flaisance house. I guessed that she had been watching for the car. Angel lounged beside her, eating a Lucky Dog, which looked like the business end of a baseball bat topped with onion, chilli and mustard.
‘The FBI came,’ said Rachel. ‘Your friend Woolrich was with them. They had a warrant. They took everything – my notes, the illustrations, everything they could find.’ She led the way to her room. The walls had been stripped of their notes. Even the diagram I had drawn was gone.
‘They searched our room too,’ remarked Angel to Louis. ‘And Bird’s.’ My head jerked up as I thought of the case of guns. Angel spotted the move. ‘We ditched them soon as your FBI friend put the stare on Louis. They’re in a storage depot on Bayonne. We both have keys.’
I noticed that Rachel seemed more irritated than upset as we followed her to her room. ‘Am I missing something here?’
She smiled. ‘I said they took everything they could find. Angel saw them coming. I hid some of the notes in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. Angel took care of some of the rest.’
She took a small pile of papers from under her bed and waved them with a small flourish. She kept one separate in her hand. It was folded over once.
‘I think you might want to see this,’ she said, handing the paper to me. I unfolded it and felt a pain in my chest.
It was an illustration of a woman seated naked on a chair. She had been split from neck to groin and the skin on each side had been pulled back so that it hung over her arms like the folds of a gown. Across her lap lay a young man, similarly opened but with a space where his stomach and other internal organs had been removed. Apart from the detail of the anatomisation and the alteration in the sex of one of the victims, it resembled in its detail what had been done to Jennifer and Susan.
‘It’s Estienne’s Pietà,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s very obscure, which is why it took so long to track down. Even in its day, it was regarded as excessively explicit and, more to the point, blasphemous. It bore too much of a resemblance to the figure of the dead Christ and Mary for the liking of the Church authorities. Estienne nearly burned for it.’
She took the illustration from me and looked at it sadly, then placed it on her bed with the other papers. ‘I know what he’s doing,’ she said. ‘He’s creating memento mori, death’s heads.’ She sat on the edge of the bed and put her hands together beneath her chin, as if in prayer. ‘He’s giving us lessons in mortality.’
Part Four
He had a mind to be acquainted with your inside, Crispin.
Edward Ravenscroft, ‘The Anatomist’
Chapter Forty-Five
In the medical school of the Complutense University of Madrid there is an anatomical museum. Founded by King Carlos III, much of its collection derives from the efforts of Doctor Julian de Velasco in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Dr Velasco was a man who took his work seriously. He was reputed to have mummified the corpse of his own daughter, just as William Harvey was assisted in his discovery of circulation by his decision to autopsy the bodies of his own father and sister.
The long rectangular hall is arrayed with glass cases of exhibits: two giant skeletons, the wax model of a foetal head and, at one point, two figures labeled ‘despellejados’. They are the ‘flayed men’, who stand in dramatic poses, displaying the movement of the muscles and the tendons without the white veil of the skin to hide it from the eye of the beholder. Vesalius, Valverde, Estienne, their forebears, their peers, their successors, worked in the knowledge of this tradition. Artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created their own écorchés, as they termed their drawings of flayed figures, basing their work on their own participation in dissections.
And the figures they created were more than merely anatomical specimens: they served, in their way, as reminders of the flawed nature of our humanity, a reminder of the body’s capacity for pain and, eventually, mortality. They warned of the futility of the pursuits of the flesh, the reality of disease and pain and death in this life and the promise of something better in the next.
In eighteenth-century Florence, the practice of anatomical modelling reached its peak. Under the patronage of the Abbot Felice Fontana, anatomists and artists worked side by side to create natural sculptures from beeswax. Anatomists exposed the cadavers, the artists poured the liquid plaster, and moulds were created. Layers of wax were poured into them, with pig fat used to alter the temperature of the wax where necessary, allowing a process of layering that reproduced the transparency of human tissue.
Then, using threads and brushes and fine point, the lineaments and striations of the body were reproduced. Eyebrows and eyelashes were added, one by one. In the case of the Bolognese artist Lelli, real skeletons were used as frames for his wax creations. The Emperor of Austria, Joseph II, was so impressed by the collection that he ordered 1192 models to promote medical teaching in his own country. By contrast, Frederik Ruysch, Professor of Anatomy at the Atheneum Illustre in Amsterdam, used chemical fixatives and dyes to preserve his specimens. His house contained an exhibition of the skeletons of infants and children in various poses, reminders of the transience of life.
Yet nothing could compare to the reality of the actual human body exposed to view. Public demonstrations of anatomisation and dissection attracted huge crowds, some of them in carnival disguise. Ostensibly, they were there to learn. In reality, the dissection was little more than an extension of the public execution. In England, the Murder Act of 1752 provided a direct link between the two events by permitting the bodies of murderers to be anatomically dissected and post-mortem penal dissection became a form of further punishment for the criminal, who would now be denied a proper burial. In 1832, the Anatomy Act extended the deprivation of the poor into the next life by allowing the confiscation of the bodies of dead paupers for dissection.
So death and dissection walked hand-in-hand with the extension of scientific knowledge. But what of pain? What of the Renaissance disgust with the workings of the female body, which l
ed to a particularly morbid fascination with the uterus? In the acts of flaying and anatomisation, the realities of suffering, sex and death were not far away.
The interior of the body, when revealed, speaks to us of mortality. But how many of us can ever bear witness to our own interiors? We see our own mortality only through the prism of the mortality of others. Even then, it is only in exceptional circumstances, in cases of war, or violent accidental death or murder, when the viewer is a witness to the act itself or its immediate consequences, that mortality in all its deep red reality is made clear to us.
In his violent, pain-filled way, Rachel believed, the Travelling Man was trying to break down these barriers. In killing his victims in this way, he was making them aware of their own mortality, exposing to them their own interiors, introducing them to the meaning of true pain; but they also served as a reminder to others of their own mortality and the final, dreadful pain that would some day find them.
The Travelling Man crisscrossed the boundaries between torture and execution, between intellectual and physical curiosity and sadism. He was part of the secret history of mankind, the history recorded in the thirteenth-century Anatomia Magistri Nicolai Physici, which observed that the ancients practised dissection upon both the living and the dead, binding condemned criminals hand and foot and gradually dissecting them, beginning with their legs and arms and moving on to their internal organs. Celsus and Augustine made similar allegations about live dissections, still contested by medical historians.
And now the Travelling Man had come to write his own history, to offer his own blending of science and art, to make his own notes on mortality, to create a Hell within the human heart.
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