An older policeman stepped out of the cottage onto the porch. The crowd surged.
“Lynch him!” someone yelled.
“Throw him to us.”
“Gentlemen!” The man raised his hands in placation. “My name is Captain Thomas Capo. I implore you.”
“We will tear him apart.”
Capo repeated himself sternly and the crowd settled. Isadore focused on the captain’s purple liver spot, about the size of a silver dollar, directly beneath his eye. It was like the mark of a demon.
“I appeal to your better nature,” said Capo.
“Kill the nigger!” a woman shouted. Isadore had an impulse to echo her.
“We have the man under arrest. We took him alive and we’re going to escort him to the station—alive. Many of these crimes remain to be solved. This Negro is the only person who can solve them for us.”
More booing and grumbling. Isadore booed too.
“The police will not hesitate to loose their guns in the defense of their prisoner,” Capo continued. “Any man who is responsible for the Negro’s death will be charged with the crime before the law.”
When Bailey emerged from the cottage, surrounded by a phalanx of officers, the crowd pushed forward again, but halfheartedly. They were more curious than angry. Who was this monster that had terrorized New Orleans? Isadore saw Frank Bailey as a stranger might and understood the confusion that swept over the shoulders and heads craning for a view. Why, Bailey was just a sliver of a man, shorter and skinnier than the officers who surrounded him. He didn’t even look his age: eighteen years old.
A sea of navies carried Bailey into a police wagon. As the automobile advanced toward police headquarters, a crowd trailed like a second line. Isadore split off and wandered down Perdido. When he could be certain that nobody was near enough to see, he transferred the Webley & Scott to his hip pocket, where he felt the crinkle of newsprint. He pulled out the paper, the torn quarter page from the Times-Picayune, unfolded it, and reread the job posting:
WANTED AT ONCE—:
FOR CONSTRUCTION OF INDUSTRIAL CANAL
in Third District, through old Ursulines Tract;
Machinists, Mechanical Engineers, Electricians, Contractors, Foremen, Superintendents, Crane Operators, Dredge Operators, Carpenters, Iron and Brass Melters, Welters, Smelters, Bricklayers, Truck Drivers, Cement Mixers, Fitters, Turners, Shifters, Improvers, experience an asset but not necessary; Boys, eager and willing to learn, not less than 10 years of age;
And 200 Negroes, for Digging.
Days no longer than eleven hours; splendid opportunity; salary secondary to opportunity offered.
Address petitions to Hercules Construction Company, Ltd., 821 Hibernia Bldg., New Orleans.
Isadore had laughed the first time he’d read the ad. Splendid opportunity! He didn’t laugh now. It was a splendid opportunity.
The mob dissolved, though police continued to traffic through the house, gathering evidence and jotting reports on yellow notepads. On the porch two officers interviewed a black woman. Isadore walked close enough to be certain he had recognized her correctly. He had. It was Virginia, good old Virginia Gabriel, and though he couldn’t make out words, he could see that she spoke in a rapid, furtive manner. He noticed another thing that made his flesh creep: Virginia wasn’t crying, not even close.
MAY 31, 1918—THE INDUSTRIAL CANAL
Unngh, went the motortruck, tripping over a root. Uck!
“I’m terrifically sorry, ma’am!” Hugs shouted to be heard over the enraged engine. His face glazed with perspiration. He did not jerk the wheel quickly enough to avoid rumbling over a loose railroad tie and the truck clattered like a bag of bones. “I’m achingly sorry, ma’am.”
“Go faster,” said Beatrice. “That way, if we hit something, maybe it’ll knock your brains back into place.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hugs manipulated the brake. Ahhh! went the motor. Ahhh!
“Not that slow,” growled Beatrice. “We might as well walk.”
“Good point, ma’am.”
She had to remind herself that she did not dislike Hugs for anything he had done. It wasn’t his fault that she could not call him Hugs to his fine-boned face, or even Hugh, but was obliged by the unspoken rules of legitimate business, of which she was making a desperate study, to address him as Mr. Davenport. She did not hate him because of his aquiline nose or girlish figure or even the toadyish, nepotistic pride with which he spoke of his uncle, Hibernia president Rudolph S. Denzler, to whom he owed his position in the bank’s bond department. No, she hated him because he was thirty-two years old—the same age as Giorgio. She hated Hugs because Giorgio had not taken advantage of her own nepotistic largesse, because Giorgio was too blockheaded to have any professional ambition, because Giorgio, despite his immense brawn and physical power, was powerless, ineffective, puny—as weak as Hugs, with his concave chest and pipe-stem arms, looked. She reminded herself of all this. But still she hated Hugs.
“Have you ever been on a motortruck before?”
“No,” shouted Beatrice. “Have you?”
Hugs chuckled, blushing.
The ground passed in jolts and rushes. She held her hand over her chest to prevent her coat’s buttons from bursting off. Silently she chastised herself for wearing the delicate white muslin dress and not a coarser dark garment that would hide the streaks of mud thrown by the motor’s tires. She had prepared for a business meeting, not a country jaunt. So that her gold rings, which encircled each of her fingers except the thumbs, would not be tempted to slip off, she clenched her fists.
They sped across the vast, richly green meadow, uninhabited but for the occasional farmer’s shack, grazing cow, and a single live-oak tree, like a lone umbrella opened on a beach. The meadow ran along a gentle declivity from the Mississippi River’s natural levee to Florida Walk, the country road that traversed the plain like a belt in its midsection, and where Raymond sat inside Beatrice’s Peerless Model 56, which never lurched. She cursed herself for not thinking to insist that Raymond, who was after all a professional, pilot the motortruck instead of Hugs. The terrain became even rougher beyond Florida Walk. The meadow attenuated into a muddy alley, a long brown tongue, that terminated in a dense cypress swamp. It was not easy to appreciate, at this vantage point, and so early in the process, that the spongy land beneath them would one day be a grand man-made river, a marvel of engineering that would allow commercial ships to pass between the Mississippi and the ocean, through the heart of New Orleans.
The truck sank into the turf, the wheels spinning before gaining purchase. They bumped over wooden planks, cow patties, a confusion of discarded shovels. The truck doglegged alarmingly close to the live-oak tree, under which two cows and a mule shaded themselves from the hopeless heat.
“Have you noticed the tree?” said Beatrice.
“What?” Hugs turned to face her.
“The tree!” she shouted, over the engine. “The tree!”
Hugs chuckled. The truck skidded through branches and came to rest several feet from the trunk. The cows stared impassively. The only indication of stress came from the mule, which expelled a shower of feces. Hugs chuckled.
“I wanted to show you this tree,” he said, “because it is the last tree.”
Beatrice anticipated one of Hugs’s self-satisfied monologues. She felt in her brain a twitchiness, an electric circuit sparking to life—the telltale sign of a swelling migraine.
“We are sitting in what was, just four weeks ago, an ancient cypress and oak forest,” said Hugs. “So ancient, it was described in Bienville’s earliest logs. A dense swamp too, five hundred trees to the acre. But in only thirty days, our men—”
“My men.”
“Of course.” Hugs blushed. “The men of Hercules Construction, armed with axes and saws, attacked this swamp and created this right-of-way, extending from Florida Walk to the lake, some four and a half miles. They’ve cleared three hundred and seventy-five acres of primeval for
est. Two hundred thousand trees. Just like that.”
“My men are good. They spend so much time building things they’ve developed a passion for destroying things.”
“We are grateful—and I speak for my uncle—we are grateful for the work your men are doing.”
She believed him. Already he had shown her the mile of Public Belt Railroad track that had been removed in just eight days (except for the stray ties, which the wheels of the motortruck had a way of seeking out); the small, orange-peel-colored dredge that had eaten a channel from Bayou Bienvenue to the site of the future canal; the cypress stumps that studded the dredge’s path, some of them centuries old and buried fourteen feet belowground; and the plots, marked in the meadow by blue stakes, where the Foundation Company and Doullut & Williams would build shipyards. Hercules Construction had won those contracts too. Thanks to Beatrice and her … professionalism.
But the radiance of her triumph, her lucrative monopolization of the Industrial Canal project, had been fogged by disappointment. How ardently she had hoped that her little Giorgio—Giorgio the oaf, Giorgio the sloth, Giorgio the dolt—would mature, if not into Giorgio the wise or Giorgio the industrious, then at least into Giorgio the competent guardian of the family business. But though she had tried for years to prepare him, teaching him about the value in taking on great public-land projects and introducing him to her key lieutenants, he had not inherited his father’s work ethic. She had not forced the issue after Sal’s sudden death, when she might have handed control of Hercules to Giorgio, even though her son was twenty-five, four years older than Sal when he had founded the business. In those rocky months she had needed to fend off Sal’s decrepit older brother, Zio Zo, who insisted that, as the eldest male Vizzini, he should inherit the company, despite the fact that his lung problems had become so tenacious that he barely left the house. She had also to appease Zo’s daughters, Efigenia and Elba—nearly as robust as Giorgio, with faces like sledgehammers—by offering them management of the family’s smaller collection accounts, the laundry services, millineries, and cobblers. She assumed ownership herself only because she believed that her reign would be temporary, that in time Giorgio would come to cherish the family business and its rewards.
It was in this hope that, upon signing the contract for the canal, she named Giorgio vice president of Hercules—the same title that Rudolph Denzler had given Hugs at Hibernia. It was a hopeful title and Giorgio had made no effort to earn it, using it only to wangle drinks at bars from local grunts looking for work. Not that he needed extra leverage to get free drinks. The shadow business meant he never had to pay for a drink in any bar—or a meal in any restaurant, or food in any grocery—so long as that establishment was owned by one of their clients, most of whom were Sicilian. And what establishment not owned by a Sicilian was worth patronizing?
She tried to explain to him that the creation of the Industrial Canal was more than a construction job. It would be a glorious tribute to the family’s work—the work begun by Sal. They were redesigning the very surface of the earth to their own specifications. Hercules would move forest, land, sea. They would create a new river. They would make New Orleans the world’s greatest port again. They would etch their presence into the land, like a signature under a painting. The signature would read Vizzini.
Giorgio’s only concession was to make occasional visits to the Ursulines Tract. He claimed to be supervising the construction, but from what she observed, he did little besides drink bottles of Dixie beer and, when the need overtook him, urinate into the excavation, spraying the heads of the laborers cowering below.
“New Orleans is a delightful city,” Hugs was saying, “but a laggard one. We want to change that.”
“Be careful who you say that to in this town. Particularly in that Chicago accent.”
One of the cows farted loudly. Hugs chuckled. “Do you like steak?”
Beatrice declined to respond. The twitchiness had yielded to a low ringing pain—manageable for the moment but grimly foreboding.
“The cattle we own. They came with the land. The farmer is retiring.”
“I hope you did not bring me here to show me cows.”
“I wanted to show you that everything is coming together. The bond is authorized. The pile drivers have arrived. Tomorrow the men begin digging. The police have been very helpful with the evacuations of the previous tenants.”
“Captain Thomas Capo is an old friend. Something like a nephew. His father I know from Palermo.”
“Italy?”
“Sicily,” she corrected him. “Thomas provided great comfort after Sal’s passing. He made a difficult situation easier.”
“His men have been professional and diligent. They have the city’s best interests in mind.”
“And ours.”
The mosquitoes were becoming a problem. They migrated from the cows, at first just one or two, but then they were joined by their friends and relations.
“It’s one thing to hear about the progress that has resulted from the partnership between Hibernia and Hercules. My uncle wanted me to show it to you. We’ll soon be drinking champagne. Or prosecco.” Hugs gestured magnanimously at Beatrice. “And eating fresh bistecca.”
Beatrice waved at the mosquitoes. “Are there no more problems, Mr. Davenport?”
Hugs wiped his sleeve across his brow. “There’s always something, I suppose.”
“I want to hear about the problems.”
“I knew you would, Mrs. Vizzini. That’s why you’re a natural businessman—businesswoman, excuse me.” He blushed. “Before I explain the situation, I would like you to know that my boss—”
“Your uncle.” She smacked dead a bug on her arm. It left a crimson smear on the white muslin sleeve.
“My uncle believes that a peaceful resolution is imminent. In fact we didn’t even want to bother you about this. But it seems that both the Times-Picayune and the Item will run stories tomorrow.” He paused, blushing, hesitant to go further. Then he spat it out: “We were concerned how you might respond.”
“What do you mean by that?” Beatrice rubbed her temples. It was always there, the shadow business—lurking in the shadows—threatening to undermine all the progress she had made. Sometimes she wondered whether she should relent and sign the whole thing over to Zio Zo and the cousins. But if it weren’t for the shadow business, she had to remind herself, Hercules would never have won the contract. The Hercules business piggybacked on the shadow business as a sea anemone hitchhikes on a hermit crab, stealing food from the crab’s claws and rebuffing predators with its barbs. Its effectiveness was a product of its secrecy. Most of New Orleans believed that the Black Hand had lost its grip more than a decade ago, after the Walter Lamana murder and the mass hangings of Sicilians. And the Black Hand had disappeared. But into the void created by its absence had emerged a stealthier, warier, more modest business operation, founded by Salvatore Vizzini and professionalized by his widow. One day Hercules would consume the shadow business but many shadow transactions needed to occur before that day could arrive.
“The problem,” said Hugs, struggling to keep his tone casual, “is named Fishman. Professor Joshua Fishman of Tulane University.”
“I suppose he owns one of the remaining land parcels.”
“Not exactly.”
“I thought Mr. Blank was the last one.”
“We thought so too. But a man came forward this week with the deed to plot 1248. It is the block bounded by Manuel, Convent, Tonti, and Rocheblave.” Hugs pointed vaguely upriver. “We can drive there.”
“Let’s stay in the shade.” Beatrice preferred the mosquitoes to the direct sun. “The heat makes me intolerant.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re saying this Fishman owned this land the whole time and didn’t know?”
Hugs took a deep breath. “Fishman doesn’t own it. But he represents the man who does. This man, Pitt, lives in Lafayette. He inherited the land last year from his father.
He didn’t know about the canal until Fishman alerted him. Now Pitt refuses to sell.”
“Sounds like Blank.” Even in the shade of the oak tree, the heat had found her. The heat did not help her headache. The pain fondled the backs of her eyeballs.
“Blank held up the sale of his property out of greed. He wanted more money.”
“Then why is the teacher raising trouble? The land isn’t even his.”
“It’s not about money for Fishman. He fancies himself an advocate for the land.”
“The dirt?”
“He says the canal will destroy New Orleans—that by introducing the Mississippi River into the city we are inviting flooding and ruin.” Hugs laughed.
“So you want that we should convince him how we convinced Blank.”
“No,” said Hugs, with as much force as he seemed capable of mustering. “That we cannot do.”
Beatrice did not understand. Blank, after all, had been an easy job. Efigenia—or perhaps it was Elba—visited his home one night, hat in hand. She begged Blank to accept the offer from Hibernia Bank, not merely for the good of New Orleans, but for the good of the nation, which required the canal for naval operations. Blank shut the door in her face. The next day, Elba—or perhaps Efigenia—visited with a similar message, and Blank set his dog, a vicious chocolate-brown rottweiler named Giant, after her. On the third day, Blank’s young son arrived home from school to find on his bed a dog’s skull with daggers stuck through the eye sockets. But the skull did not belong to Giant. The day after that the child came home to a second dog skull with daggers through the eye sockets. This one was Giant. On the fifth day, Blank’s wife stayed home from work. She admitted no visitors and frequently checked her son’s room, alert for signs of an intruder. In the late afternoon, shortly before her son arrived home from school, she found on his bed another skull with daggers stuck through the eyes. This time it was a small human skull—a child’s skull, caked with dirt, that appeared to have been freshly exhumed. By the end of the day Blank had sold his plot to Hibernia Bank.
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