“I’m happy to represent the company,” said Bill.
“I meant last night.”
“Mooney was pleased?” It was difficult to tell what the boss thought without reading the newspapers. There were rumors he would run for higher office; Mayor Behrman was in his fourth term and aging in dog years. Beside Capo, who possessed the bearing of a career navy—relaxed in his authority, courtly, generous—Mooney could pass for a desk clerk. He was at heart a politician. Before Behrman named Mooney superintendent he had been a railroad executive. It was difficult to credit a man like that.
“He was elated,” said Cap. “Can you imagine if the Negro was loose even a day longer? Mooney asked me to thank you personally.” Capo’s jowls wobbled. “A hero abroad and now a hero at home. Billy, it’s an honor. ’S’really a damn honor.”
Bill forced himself to look directly into Capo’s liquid eyes as they shook hands.
In their row Maze had been joined by two other police wives. Bill recognized one as John Mestre’s wife, a brassy heavyset girl with lips painted bright carmine. She traced Dick Robertson with her eyes. The pitcher removed his jacket and began a light toss with his catcher along the third-base line.
“Wish he wasn’t always licking that dirty baseball,” said the other woman, whose nose twisted upward at the tip, as if its designer had lingered a beat too long with his pen.
“But he does it so delicately. With such affection.”
“Ruth!” The women looked around to see if they had been overheard and turned pink when they saw Capo and Bill at the end of the row, trailed by John Mestre and a man Capo introduced as Okie. Capo raised two more nickels in the air. The wives moved down the aisle to make room and Bill noticed that Maze was being ignored by the other women, who inclined toward each other, laughing conspiratorially.
The Pelicans jogged around the field. Robertson lagged twenty yards behind, escorted by a ball boy. The boy handed him a small jar, from which he took a swig. The jar appeared to contain a white liquid, though Bill knew not to believe his eyes. But Mestre, following Bill’s gaze, had reached the same conclusion.
“Milk!” he said, in amazement. “He’s going to make himself pump ship.” Mestre had been sent back in February after some kind of accident and had yet to recover full use of his hearing. “You cain’t drink milk and run at the same time.”
“It’s probably a chalk potion,” said Okie. “With rejuvenating vitamins.”
“Spoken like an actual Okie,” said Capo. “Milk makes the saliva thick. Old spitballer’s trick.”
Okie scratched his ear. “Maybe it’s both.”
“You cain’t drink milk and run,” said oblivious Mestre. “He’s going to make himself chuckle.”
“You’re not from Oklahoma?” said Bill, turning to Okie.
“I was born the eleven hundred block of Melpomene.” He snorted. “Captain Cap thinks just because he served in Manila twenty years ago that he can bully with actual trenchers. You saw the trenches?”
Bill nodded, a vague gesture that communicated either he was in a trench or agreed that Capo was taking too much license with his manner of address.
“I was at Cambrai.” Cam-bry. “Eleventh Engineers. Got in the way of a tank. It burped boiling metal.” He turned to face Bill for the first time and Bill saw the scar, dark purple, branded across his jaw. It looked like a stovepot with a handle. Or the state of Oklahoma. “My name is Guy.”
“Bill.”
“Bill, I commend you on killing that nigger highwayman.”
“I did what any navy would do.”
Bill glanced down the row but Maze was blocked by the two other wives, who waved their hands and laughed. A cheer rose in the grandstand. Marching down the aisle was a Prussian brigade commander dressed in a field tunic, with rounded back flaps like a skirt, a high collar embroidered by red piping, and turned-back cuffs. The Generalmajor was briefly obscured behind a passing vendor of Broussard’s peanuts and when he reappeared he had been transformed, like a magician’s assistant, into A. J. Heinemann, the Pelicans’ owner, who had begun his pre-game tour of the stadium. A chewed-over stogie protruded from his lip. He twirled a cane and fanned himself with a wad of dollar bills. The fans jeered playfully as he strolled the concourse.
“Cheapskate!”
“Skinflint!”
“Criminal!”
Heinemann grinned and mooned and twirled his cane. Since buying the Pels he’d taken it upon himself to direct the fans’ ire away from the woeful product on the field and onto himself. But now that the Pels were decent—second in the Southern League last year—the boos were lighthearted. Heinemann, noticing the cops, pointed his cane at Capo. The navies rose from their seats.
“Gentlemen,” said Heinemann broadly, the cigar sticking to his lip. A tangerine bounced off his shoulder and caromed onto the field. Heinemann didn’t flinch. “Your sacrifices have conferred honor and dignity upon our great city.”
The big man had thick sticky lips, wide ears, and tiny melancholy eyes that withdrew deep into their sockets, like sea creatures shrinking from sunlight, when he smiled. For his act he had applied kohl around his eyes and rouge on his cheeks like a clown, or harlot.
“Great dignity,” added Heinemann. A grapefruit landed in the small of his back with a juicy thud. Heinemann turned to Bill. “Detective Bastrop, I presume?”
“Yes, sir,” said Capo. “That’s the slob hisself.”
“So you’re the man to stop the highwayman? A heroic act.”
“Thank you, sir.” Heroic! Bill felt a wild laughter chattering inside him.
“These Negroes running wild with guns in our streets,” said Heinemann. “It’s as terrifying a prospect as the human mind can conjure.”
“I did what any New Orleans officer would do, sir.” Bill winced internally.
“That detective.”
“Theodore Obitz,” said Capo. “A damn good man.” He seemed instantly on the verge of tears.
“Wasn’t he the one working on the ax murder?”
“Maggio.” Capo nodded. “The Italian grocer on Magnolia and Upperline. Detective Obitz was overseeing the investigation.”
“This city is plum going to shit.” Heinemann shook his head. “Thank the Lord for people like you, Detective Bastrop. You’re our last line of defense.”
The laughter rose again and Bill could not suppress it but managed, at the last moment, to turn it into a cough that he covered with his fist. Heinemann gave him a scrutinizing look but was distracted by the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band, which had taken up position behind home plate, twanging the first bars of “Clarinet Marmalade.” Heinemann led the officers down the aisle. They had to go slowly because, as Bill noticed for the first time, Mestre walked with a limp; in place of his right foot was a block of wood, secured by leather stirrups. An initial burst of jeers at the sight of Heinemann taking the field tapered once the crowd noticed the navy jackets beside him. Heinemann raised his hand and addressed his stadium in his loudest baritone:
“Pelicans and Pelicanettes,” he began, “I present to you three local heroes worthy of the highest honor. They have sacrificed their lives for our nation, only to return home to sacrifice their lives each day for our city.”
Vigorous applause. In the front row Maze had reappeared beside the two other wives. She alone did not clap.
“Officer John Mestre, born in the Seventh Ward, represented us in the Rainbow Division. With gallantry and grit, John marched fifty miles through blinding blizzards, on frozen roads over icy hills, in service of our freedom. He lacked earmuffs or proper boots and suffered a grievous frostbite.” Heinemann looked up from the paper that Capo had handed him and grinned at Mestre. “John, I know you must be relieved as we are to have you back under the skee-orch-ing Louisiana sun.”
Mestre, unable to hear Heinemann’s speech, stared down at his good foot.
“Officer Guy Molony fought at the Battle of Cam, of Cam—”
“Cam-bry,” said Mol
ony, absently rubbing his Oklahoma scar.
“The Battle of Cam-bry—and with great distinction. He served alongside a battalion of British fighting tanks, dodging the enemy’s machine-gun fire, shells, and horses. Everybody, a Pelican cheer!”
Guy snorted. “If’n I’d dodged them,” he said beneath his breath, “I wouldn’t be ruined.” Bill noticed that Mrs. Molony was sobbing into Ruth Mestre’s shoulder.
“Detective William Bastrop, First Ward, was fighting in the trenches at Rouge Bouquet when a shell landed on the roof of his dugout. He and twenty-one other members of the 69th Regiment were buried alive beneath soil and wooden beams.”
Men doffed hats and wiped brows with handkerchiefs.
“Exhibiting tremendous fortitude and valor, Detective Bastrop escaped his muddy grave and, in the midst of bombardment, summoned aid for his trapped comrades.”
To his surprise the crowd rose—the front sections first, followed by those behind. Soon the entire stadium was cheering, including the Pelicans and the Travelers, who stepped onto the top stair of their dugouts. Even Maze applauded. What did they think they were applauding? They weren’t applauding for him, he was certain, at least not for what he had actually done in the Forest of Purroy. But the force of the roaring stadium began to work on him. Maybe he had achieved something great. Wasn’t the ardor of the applause all the evidence he needed? He had brought them joy, after all. They were cheering the idea of heroism, or themselves—applauding their own freedom. It was no small thing to make people feel freedom with such force that they rose to their feet and clapped their palms together. Hero or coward, it had led to the same place, hadn’t it? Just as reports of the highwayman’s death had restored to the city a sense of calm, regardless of whether the dead man was in fact the highwayman. It all came out the same in the end—provided that the truth remained hidden.
Heinemann handed each officer a baseball inscribed in blue ink with the words OFFICIAL SOUTHERN LEAGUE, PAT’D AUG-31-09. Three Pelicans stood in a line behind home plate to receive the pitches. Mestre threw first, an impressive zip. From Molony, a lazy lob. As Bill cocked the ball behind his ear, he spotted behind the visitors’ dugout, about eight rows back, sitting beside a trio of starchy sailors in starched white uniforms, a single person who did not applaud. The man stood out because of his attire—a forest-green greatcoat, much too heavy for the season, and a black bowler, which marked him trebly, for he was also the only person in sight who had neglected to remove his hat. As Bill began to wheel his arm he realized that the man wore an eye patch.
Bill’s pitch veered violently awry. A ball boy standing in front of the Pelicans’ dugout dove theatrically out of the way. The crowd laughed and everyone took their seats. The Pelicans filed out of the dugout, jogging lazily to their positions.
Bill looked wildly for Leonard Perl. His gaze fell on a teenager gurgling a Dixie and children’s faces stretching into scream masks and a woman blithely fanning herself with a program before at last he found the white uniforms of the three sailors. He scanned to the end of the aisle, expecting to discover that Perl had reconstituted, transfigured, or transformed into a different person. But it was worse than that. The seat that Perl had occupied was empty. He was gone. Which meant that in the first place he had been there.
MAY 29, 1918—THE BATTLEFIELD
Isadore sat on the floor of the bedroom near the base of an old chifforobe. Termites had devoured two square feet of the floorboard. The termites seemed to have gotten started on the chifforobe too: its legs were maculated with cavities the circumference of No. 2 pencils. A nudge and it would collapse; the whole dresser, for that matter, might fall through the floor. He could see clear to the ground, some four feet below—a patch of black mud clotted with balled-up glassine papers.
“Virginia throws her Creoleans wrappers down there,” said Bailey from the bed.
“Pralines?”
“She has a sweet tooth. Seven of them actually. The rest fell out.”
Virginia’s bedroom smelled like rot and sickness. To avoid prying eyes she hadn’t cracked the windows or blinds for more than a week, though this perhaps was better than the alternative since the room faced a back alley where the neighbors left their trash. In May the aroma of decomposition in those close, shaded New Orleans alleys was tyrannical. But inside the darkened room it was suffocating too. The only infusion of air came from the hole in the floor, a damp, fetid whisper. The claustrophobia was heightened by the walls’ maroon color, a shade darker than congealed blood. A vanity mirror propped on the chifforobe was overlaid with a coating of green mold. The bed resembled nothing more than a hammock, sinking heavily, as if it were trying to escape through the floor. Isadore empathized with the bed.
“Is Verge supposed to be home soon?” he asked.
“Supposed,” said Frank Bailey, “is a funny word. When you come to think of it.”
He sat at the head of the bed, his small bare feet dangling off the edge. A single candle weakly illuminated his cheek. The cheek was soft, boyish. His eyes, however, were dull, the eyes of an older man. Isadore sat on the floor below the window, reading the States by the sliver of streetlamp light that stole beneath the blind. The rest of the hideout—a shotgun composed of two other rooms, a kitchen and a parlor—was dark. The night outside was dark. But it wasn’t a steady darkness. The darkness advanced from all sides.
“She said she’d be home by ten.” Bailey’s jaw moved mechanically.
Isadore checked his new watch, a black trench with a silver case that said JW Benson. He had inherited it from the driver of the Leidenheimer Bakery wagon they’d ripped off on Melpomene. The man’s lips had quivered, snot leaked from his nose, he wailed something about his mother. Isadore had wanted to console him—explain that he and Bailey were just jobbing, they wouldn’t hurt him. But that wasn’t true, it turned out. Bailey was dangerous. He would shoot—a cop, even! Isadore made a mental note to pawn the watch in the morning. “Five before eleven,” he said.
Bailey shrugged. “The man shot by the police the other night…”
“At the Louisiana Demolishing Company. On Girod. Abraham Price, shot by Detective William Bastrop.”
“How they come to know Price ain the highwayman?”
“First because his boss said he was a night watchman,” said Isadore. With Bailey it was like talking to a child. A child with the memory of a senior citizen. “Second, because you did five more stickups the very next night.”
“You say it like I have a choice.” Bailey pulled a small parcel, bound up in a red rag, from the drawer of the bedside table. “You want me to go back to painting houses?”
“That’s a choice.”
“Between survival and starvation.”
“The dead detective’s partner even made the identification. He identified the wrong man, which means the case would have been dropped. But you couldn’t give it a single night. So they had to admit their mistake.”
“When you’re hot, you’re hot.” When Bailey smiled the diamonds in his teeth sparkled. “Can’t take greens off the stove and expect them to keep warm.”
Isadore shook his head and shook the paper. Not for the first time he questioned throwing his lot in with Bailey. He had joined him in a spirit of wildness and rebellion—against settling down, becoming a husband, accepting a slave job. Bailey said things were easy on the other side, after you left behind the stiff dread of indentured manual labor and became a pirate. Isadore figured he would go along once, for kicks. But one night became two, a week, three weeks. His role was minimal, performed at an antiseptic distance from the action; he had only to stand several yards behind Bailey and flash a weapon, or look out for passersby or navies. He told himself he was doing it to supplant the beer-lacquered pennies he scraped out of honky-tonk tip jars, until his music began to pay for itself. And briefly the pirate life had satisfied more than his money troubles. It had quenched a desire for revenge. He did not know exactly what he was avenging, but robbing the wealthy Uptow
n grandsons of plantation owners seemed to help. The satisfaction did not last. As Bailey broadened his victim pool to include deliverymen, teenagers, even the occasional Negro—anyone who crossed his path—the original thrill was suffocated by a haze of regret and alarm. The more brazen Bailey grew, the more difficult it became for Isadore to extricate himself. Their fates were scrambled. He had to make sure Bailey didn’t get caught and give up the whole operation. He had to control Bailey. If only he knew how.
There was yet a final perverse twist. The highway jobs, instead of enabling his musicianship, cannibalized it. The staking out of locations and getaway routes was full-time work, if you did it carefully, which meant that the Slim Izzy Quartet had not held a practice in two weeks. But the holdups fought against the music in a more damaging way. Isadore had always understood music as a conversation with the Dark Unknown—the dimension of the world that was hidden to the world, that bubbled beneath the surface, or above the surface, or in parallel to the surface, what Miss Daisy called the “spirit realm,” or what he’d once heard Kid Ory describe, in a set at Economy Hall, as “the dominion of the imperceivable.” When you played, the conversation went both ways. The imperceivable spoke back to you. It gave you the feeling that there was more to human existence than hard labor. It consoled you.
The highway jobs, however, were one-directional: take, take, take. It was bad enough to be scared all the time, scared of losing the house on Liberty Street, of failing Orly and Miss Daisy, of starvation. But with Bailey he was terrified all the time. The money diluted the fear, but not enough. It was not nearly enough money for that.
“‘One negro,’” he began in his newspaperman voice, a high, over-enunciating voice meant to disguise the dread that surged upward toward his throat. “‘One negro was killed outright and another wounded as a result of the activity of police and citizens in the search Monday night for the negro who shot to death Detective Theodore Obitz.’”
“I didn’t shoot any detective.” Bailey unfolded the red rag, revealing its contents: a wire brush, a bone toothbrush, a bore brush, a single threadbare white sock, a jar of aluminum polish, a green-glass bottle with a beige label (JED’S RED GUN CLEAN), a rusted cigar tin containing a dozen bullets, and the disassembled sections of his revolver: Colt caliber .45, U.S. Army model 1917, finish full blued, the stock smooth walnut, the lacquer lightly chipped, and a pair of spring-steel half-moon clips to hold the cartridges in place. Bailey glanced at himself in the pockmarked reflection of the cigar tin. Did he see what Isadore saw? A young boy with barely any fuzz above his lip, eyes too close together, dimpled cheeks. A boy trying so hard to look like a man that he only made himself more childish.
King Zeno Page 4