“Gentle, Gio,” said Beatrice. “It’s sore.”
Something was wrong. Giorgio lacked his typical firmness.
“I wondered,” said Giorgio, “if you saw yesterday’s Item.”
“Since when do you read the Item?” Or any newspaper?
“I saw it in the kitchen.”
Beatrice knew he was lying because the pain had woken her at dawn and she had taken her papers into the study, where they remained.
“I must have overlooked it,” she said. “Anything interesting?”
“Not really.” His touch grew firm again. “Said that sale of liquor would end in the U.S. one year from Sunday.”
“That’s right, caro.” She tried to hide her surprise. Was he beginning to take an interest in business? “We’re well prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that temperance will offer. But by then, with any luck, the canal project will have led to even more lucrative enterprises for Hercules. Higher.”
He adjusted his thumbs.
“Our business will be simpler. We will no longer require supplementary streams of income. We will be free of distraction. It will be safer for us, and more profitable. You can press harder, darling.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
A freshet of blood spurted into her brain. “Gently. I think you’ve found an enraged nerve.”
But the tranquillity was disrupted for good by a tap on the door.
“I’m in a session, Lizzie!”
From behind the heavy door, the maid’s voice was a timid whisper.
“Speak up!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” Lizzie strained her voice to something just short of a scream. “I know it’s your session, but…”
“Open the door, Giugi.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said Lizzie when she entered. She refused to make eye contact. “There’s a man furry eager to talk with you. He’s been ringing the telephone—”
“A man? What man comes here uninvited?”
“Did you say man or men?” asked Giorgio.
“A man, sir.” Lizzie kept realigning her head in slight increments, a starling searching the ground for grubs, as she sought in vain a safe place to perch. Finally she settled on the far corner of the blue hearthrug. “Mr. Davenport. He is standing in the parlor, Mrs. Vizzini. Says it’s urgent.”
“I’ll talk to him,” said Giorgio.
Beatrice was too surprised to speak. She could not remember an occasion when her son had volunteered to engage in any matter of business.
The maid was nodding, and half-curtsying, as she backed away from the door, when she screamed. She had backed into Hugs Davenport. It was Hugs’s turn to scream—or at least let out a muffled yelp—at the sight of his half-naked patroness prone on a massage couch beside the looming presence of her overgrown son. Hugs threw an arm over his eyes and turned away but to his credit he did not withdraw from the doorway.
“Mrs. Vizzini, I beg your apology. But we must speak immediately. Alone.”
“I’m in the middle of a medical treatment, Mr. Davenport.”
“My uncle sent me.”
Now it was Beatrice’s turn to feel the heat rising off Giorgio. She didn’t have to touch him to feel the radiance. It was like standing beside a stove. A droplet of blood formed on his hairline, at the edge of his scalp.
“Very well, Mr. Davenport. I’ll join you shortly.” Hugs yielded, his arm still shielding his face. Beatrice turned to her son. “Why don’t you visit Lizzie in the kitchen? She’s heating a cauldron of Oysters Vizzini. Extra cayenne, the way you like it.”
“Mamma,” he began, in an uncharacteristically beseeching tone—but he gave up his protest there.
Beatrice slipped on her caftan. Her back ached but the pressure had dissipated and the blood again pumped freely through her brain. That was the crucial thing, the flow of the brain blood. When it circulated without impediment she could think clearly, a prerequisite for conversations with Hugs.
She found him in the parlor, pacing between the hearth and the credenza with its cabinets embossed with carvings of mermaids and wood sprites, imported from Palermo when they had moved into the house on First Street, the year that Sal had initiated the shadow business.
“Did you pay a visit to Professor Joshua Fishman?” asked Hugs. “At Tulane?”
“I did,” she said. “But he was not available.”
Hugs frowned. “You found his address?”
“It’s in the book.”
“So you went back.”
“I did not.” She was irritated by the suggestion that she had disappointed him. She hadn’t managed to return to Fishman’s house, but she would soon, perhaps the following morning. “Besides,” she said, “I thought you didn’t want me to speak with him.”
“I didn’t.”
“What is the problem then? Has he published some new screed?”
“No. He has done nothing. That’s the problem.”
“I do not follow.”
“He has disappeared.”
She tried to make sense of the information. Had Fishman heard that she had visited and fled? But nobody had even answered the door.
“Two days ago,” added Hugs.
“So that’s the end of the protest?”
Hugs seemed surprised by the question. He moved his jaw as if chewing a recalcitrant piece of taffy. When he spoke again he sounded exhausted. “It seems so. Pitt—the man who owns the last plot of land in the canal right-of-way, the man whom Fishman had persuaded not to sell? Pitt has dropped his claim. He has agreed to sell at market value.”
Beatrice gave Hugs a firm business smile and extended her hand, the gold rings clinking. “Excellent.” She tried to ignore the misgivings that swam through her like a school of minnows. “Let’s hope that is the expiring wail of our civic dyspepsia.”
Hugs regarded her hand as he might a pamphlet that had been forced into his palm. He released it abruptly.
“We have reason to suspect—”
“Yes?” Beatrice smiled more broadly, mimicking polite curiosity. It did the trick. Hugs’s jaws resumed chewing something that was not in his mouth.
“We suspect foul play,” he said at last.
“I can assure you there was none.” She had to suppress a twinge of disappointment. Part of her wanted to take credit for silencing Fishman.
Hugs was sweating. The slightest exertion and the man seemed to bubble perspiration from his orifices, his ears leaking, the swells under his eyes puddling, his mustache damp. “Let me be clear. If Hibernia Bank, or Hercules Construction”—he gave these last two words a meaningful inflection—“or anyone else associated with the Industrial Canal is suspected of, well, complicity in the professor’s disappearance, the entire project is placed in jeopardy. We have worked very hard, and at great expense, to persuade the public of our virtue, and the virtue of the canal—”
“If you like, I can ask my friend in the Police Department, Captain Capo, whether he has any idea about what happened to the professor.”
“I don’t think that’s a very good plan.” There was a barely restrained insolence in his manner. Beatrice had noticed that he suppressed this insolence around his uncle. But she was no less his superior. She would have to make him appreciate this.
She took a moment to straighten, calmly, the sleeves of her caftan, after which she treated Hugs to her most condescending smile. Be a professional, she told herself. “Hibernia,” she said, “is only as virtuous at Hercules. Without our help, your costs would have trebled, and the delays would have lasted years. We have not merely provided you with diligent, capable laborers. We gave you efficiency. With efficiency comes peace of mind.”
“We are anxious, however, that should any of your, ah, methods be detected—”
“As I assured your uncle when we reached our agreement, our methods are irrelevant because they cannot be detected. We are as careful as we are persuasive.”
Hugs, cheeks blazing, was preparing a response when, sensing a mov
ement in the doorway, he froze. Beatrice turned and saw her son. He carried in one palm a steaming platter of oysters, bobbing in a swamp of melted butter, oil, garlic, and hot-pepper flakes. A thick glaze of oil coated his chin and his fingers.
“Mamma,” he said, though he looked at Hugs, “you were right. Lizzie made the oysters just right.”
Hugs showed himself out.
“Would you like me to begin again?” said Giorgio.
“No,” she said, but her mind was elsewhere.
“What is it?”
“The strangest thing,” said Beatrice. “Do you remember the Tulane professor?”
“The Tulane professor?”
“Hugs mentioned him at the canal? He wrote an editorial against the project. He had convinced the last property owner not to sell.”
“I’m sorry”—Giorgio licked his finger—“I don’t really remember.”
“I had intended to speak with him. But before I could, he went missing.”
“He left New Orleans?”
“Nobody knows.”
Giorgio looked confused. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? The man stopped causing trouble.”
Beatrice examined her son: oil-glazed, simple, innocent as a child.
She made her tone as gentle and delicate as she could make it, which was not especially gentle or delicate. “I’ve noticed,” she said, “that you have lately taken a greater interest in our business operations.”
Giorgio shrugged. “I like to know what’s going on,” he said. “It’s my business too, after all.”
“I am delighted.” And she was. Only—she was also uneasy. “I’m delighted because Hercules is stronger than ever before. Soon we will be strong enough to leave the shadow business in the shadows.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
She removed her handkerchief and dabbed at his temple, where the pinprick of blood had expanded to the circumference of a nickel.
“Ouch.”
She balled up the handkerchief and returned it to her pocket. “The reason we have come this far,” she said, “is because we have been exceedingly careful. We are persuasive, not cruel. Tough, but not violent. Never violent if we can help it.”
Giorgio set the platter of oysters heavily on the fireplace mantel and embraced her. “I love you, Mamma.”
She was enveloped by the warmth of his body, its size, its power. Her boy was a man, all right. “Gentle, caro, gentle,” said Beatrice. “You don’t know your own strength.”
But was it possible that he did?
JULY 2, 1918—THE FUNKY BUTT HALL
Now that the fever was on him, it no longer mattered that he had spent nine brain-suffocating hours in the Pit trying to avoid being chewed up by the Mouth, nor that his bassist was outside the club entertaining one of his endless coughing jags, nor that Big Nose Sidney still hadn’t poked his big nose inside the hall even though they were to go onstage in fifteen minutes, nor that Orly was nowhere to be seen. Well it was a little distracting, Orly’s absence—a scrim drawn over the dazzle of the stage lamps, muting the maniac trill of Achille Baquet’s clarinet—but she would come. She had promised. It was an unspoken condition of their pact: he would snap his spine digging the Industrial Canal and she would support his playing. In the last year she hadn’t made many gigs, which was only reasonable; between her fourteen-hour days at the Tiltons’ and her mother’s endless demands, she had little time for amusement. But she got the life-historical importance of this night. She got the Funky Butt.
Now Isadore did too. The Fiss Fass Jass Orchestra crested into a full giddy frenzy, teasing apart the “Tiger Rag” like an old sweater until it unraveled into something unrecognizable and frightening. Big Head Gaspard’s hands chased each other across the length of the piano; Little Head bent halfway over as if to keep his saxophone from blowing off the roof; and Zutty Singleton himself—Zutty, the hardest-hitting drummer in New Orleans—hit the tom with such force that the stand began to hop away from the rest of the set. At least three hundred souls were in the old Baptist church—a clergy of pipe fitters, ditchdiggers, bread deliverymen, clockmakers, longshoremen, nurses, maids, sporting women, and pimps, all of them praising creation with their shoulders and hips. They called this Satan’s music, did they? Then praise His Satanic Majesty. Praise the demons of the nether regions.
The Butt. A decade earlier the Reverend Right Duplessis, prophesying in which direction the neighborhood was headed, concluded that a dance hall would deliver far richer earthly treasure than a church could provide. He removed the pews and the cross, converted the choir into a stage and the sacristy into a business office, and changed his name to the Reverend Ya-Ya. He hadn’t done much since, apart from offering tithes to the fire chief to avoid capacity fines. The room showed its age. French splayed heels, men’s dancing pumps, and cap-toed boots had scored the dance floor. The area in front of the stage had been ground into a pit of sawdust. A few more Alligator Stomps and the revelers would find themselves underground. The walls were maculated with black spots the color and texture of a rotting cauliflower. The ceiling was worse—when it rained, the band played under beach umbrellas that the Reverend kept backstage. During the day you could look up and see patches of sky. But nobody except the Baptists on Sunday morning visited the Butt during the day.
Isadore would’ve been grateful for rain. The air was choked with cigarillo smoke, squalid perfume, the yeasty aroma of spilled beer. He worried how Orly would react when she saw that the clothes she had so lovingly pressed that afternoon were already damp and smoke stained: his brown box-back suit with thin white stripes, his carmine shirt and pale pink tie, his Edwin Clapp shoes, gingerly polished, even his brown John B. Stetson hat, reclaimed from the pawn with the last of the money from the Bailey jobs. He had told Orly to meet him at the right side of the stage, but maybe she was stuck in the back and unable to squeeze through the turbulent mass of humanity. Or maybe she forgot.
“We better go on quick when these boys leave,” Sore Dick shouted in his ear. “If we’re to hold this crowd.”
“We don’t have a drummer.”
“Crowd’s unruly. We can’t lose the reins.”
It was just like Big Nose Sidney to be late; why should he make any effort just because it was the Funky Butt? He wasn’t a professional—no Zutty Singleton, to be sure—but if he practiced more rigorously, he could get there. Provided that he quit dissipating—he’d have to give up cootch and cootchie both. Yeah right. Isadore solemnly warned himself to stop associating with nonprofessionals.
Zutty tied off his final explosive drum attack, concluding the Fiss Fass Orchestra’s set. The burst of applause that followed had the effect of a magician snapping his fingers. Orly appeared beside him in her good blue-and-white-checked broadcloth dress, a freshly plucked magnolia in her lavender bell hat, and her formal shoes, a pair of faded red pumps.
“Hi, beautiful.” She really did look beautiful. The beauty was intensified for being mixed with a weariness that was also a kind of wariness. She alternated between them: weary, wary, and wearily wary.
“Harold Jr. has his colic,” she said. “And when I finally got home, Mama was having one of her spells.”
“Baby, I’m just glad—”
But Sore Dick was back in Isadore’s ear with his mosquito buzz. “Five minutes,” he said. “Drag’s outside expectorating his lung. Big Nose still ain found.”
The Reverend Ya-Ya leaped to the stage. “The Fiss Fass Jass Orchestra,” he yelled, in his booming Sunday voice. “Praise the devil!”
The crowd, at least those who weren’t busy fanning themselves with their hats or pushing toward the keg or lighting cigarettes or standing mute, paralyzed by mud or muggles, applauded. Scattered through the room, Isadore couldn’t help but notice, were several pale-skinned men.
“Ladies and gentlemen, bats and cats, tigers and lions and pumas—”
“And bears!” someone yelled.
“Opossum!”
“Beavers!”
/> “And alligators and snakes,” said the Reverend. “Don’t go nowhere because in just a few minutes, your prayers will be answered. The Slim Izzy Quartet is in the hall!”
Drag Nasty joined them, a balled-up handkerchief in his fist. “Hiya, Missus Orleania.” He nodded.
She gave him a tight smile, which dissolved into a grimace upon observation of his phlegmy handkerchief.
“Can you stand upright long enough to play?” asked Isadore.
“I’m fine,” said Drag, before erupting into another coughing fit. He was pale; his eyes were rheumy and bugged.
“Keep hawking like that,” said Sore Dick, still sore, “your eyes gone pop out of your head.”
“Izzy,” said Orly.
“Yay, look—” He opened his suit jacket to reveal, dangling on a red ribbon from a T-bar he had affixed to his inner pocket, a silver fob watch. The case was engraved with intricate garlands, which surrounded the central shield bearing the maker’s name: Omega. Orly had inherited it from her father and had two months earlier given it to Isadore on his nineteenth birthday. Seeing it against his chest, cleanly polished, she softened. “Good-luck charm,” he said, patting his pocket. Finally he had done something right.
Drag fell victim to another jag; he sounded as if he were trying to eject his esophagus.
“Better cancel,” said Sore Dick. He always looked on the downside of things—that’s why they called him Sore. That and because of his hemophilia. Whenever he got cut, he kept bleeding, sometimes for weeks.
“I’m right,” said Drag, bending over.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sore Dick. “No Sidney, no drums, no show.”
Over Dick’s shoulder, Isadore saw two blond men enter the hall. One was very tall, hunched over; the other wore spectacles. They had the cautious, cagey look of interlopers.
“Get onstage,” said Isadore. “Set up your instruments.”
“Don’t see how—”
“Dick,” said Isadore, and his tone must have been sufficiently menacing, or deranged, because Dick began walking to the stage.
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