A squad from the fifth precinct, a few minutes later, pounded on the door. At last, just as they were preparing to break it down, the key turned in the lock.
In the doorway stood Louis Besemer, 60, the grocer. Blood streaming from his right eye had coagulated on his face. Past him the police pushed. In a bed-room back of the grocery they found Harriet Lowe Besemer, 29, his wife, stretched on her bed, covered with a sheet. Above her ear gaped a deep cut. A heavy blow had laid open the top of her head. One arm was gashed.
“Fractured skulls—both cases,” pronounced the Charity hospital staff a few minutes later. Both are conscious, but close to death …
Tick: Why did Giorgio ask if she was reading about Besemer? Tock: Because Besemer was a client. Giorgio collected the grocer’s tributes on his weekly rounds. Tick: Why didn’t Besemer want to call the cops or bring his wife to the hospital for treatment, even at the risk of death?
She placed it now, the scent she had caught off Giorgio when he walked past. Ivory soap. His hair had lain straight on his head and his clothes had been unrumpled, unstained, and undampened by sweat. He had recently bathed. But where? And why? Perhaps he’d been to one of the more expensive whorehouses, which offered bath service. Yes, that’s where he had been, at a brothel. Safe at a brothel, no different from any other man.
Tick: Why did Besemer refuse to call the cops? Tock: Why didn’t Besemer call the cops? Tick: Why was Besemer afraid to call the cops?
JULY 4, 1918—CITY PARK—THE IRISH CHANNEL—THE WHARF
The barrel of a pistol—a .45 semiautomatic he guessed, army-model issue—pressed into the small of his back, making his shoulder blades pinch. A trickle of urine entered his urethra. So this was how he would wind up: slain in broad daylight, in the middle of a giant carnival, amid thousands of people, in piss-stained trousers. Opposite him Charlie was silently hysterical, his eyes closing up the way they did when he was overmastered by mirth.
“Stick ’em up, mister!”
Bill turned to find a dark-haired girl—fifteen, five foot one, eighty-five pounds—in a cornflower-blue summer frock and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Around her shoulder hung a crimson sash on which gold letters spelled out NEW ORLEANS LODGE OF ELKS. In her free hand she held out two noisemakers.
“Happy Fourth!” she shouted. “Five cents each. Proceeds benefit the naval relief fund.”
“You should know better than to sneak up behind an officer of the law,” said Bill. He realized that he was holding the paper noisemaker lamely in his hand; he tossed it to the grass. Charlie, trembling with joy, flipped the girl a dime. She pocketed the coin, put her toy gun to her temple and, giving Bill a wink, pulled the trigger.
Charlie’s eyes cracked open just enough to allow a fat tear to trickle down his cheek.
“Funny, huh?” said Bill.
“Where’s your war spirit?” said Charlie, once he was able to take a breath. “You’re the only person here lacking it.” He swept his arms over the tens of thousands of revelers swarming across City Park for the annual Biff Bang celebration. The elderly and the children; the young men ashamed not to be in uniform, hiding their faces beneath wide-brimmed Cady hats; the young women hoisting up their dresses to avoid grass stains (and to show off their calves)—they all shuffled from the racetrack, where the Algiers Naval Reserves had bested the Army Reserves in the track-and-field competition, to the inner field, where members of the Forty-Third Infantry positioned themselves for their sham battle. Bill and Charlie followed, having been detailed to the field’s southern perimeter. The battlefield was cordoned merely by a red string, tied around stakes spaced ten yards apart, and police were needed to restrain any spectators from joining the battle. The rifles were filled with blanks, but one thousand men stampeding with bayonets posed safety risks. It wasn’t the bayonets that worried Bill, however, but the noise. The repeated crack of the starter pistol at the track meet had unsettled him; he didn’t think his nerves could withstand an entire sham battle, let alone the fireworks that were to follow. He couldn’t withstand a toy gun pointed at him by a teenage girl.
For he had seen, across the track, a man with an eye patch staring back at him. It was true that, ever since the Obitz murder, he had spotted one-eyed men everywhere: at the Pelicans game, in a crowd across Canal Street, on his own street corner. The track was a good hundred yards from where he and Charlie patrolled, and the incident passed in a second: a shot was fired for the hundred-yard dash, the crowd shifted, and the man vanished. Still Bill was certain: Leonard Perl was here. The only possible counterexplanation was even more outlandish: that he had seen Perl’s ghost.
“What I don’t get,” said Charlie, picking up the conversation he’d begun minutes earlier, before the pretty bandetta had held them up, “is why he lied about his wife.”
Since the outbreak of war, more men had been walking around New Orleans with eye patches—or in wheelchairs, or missing arms. Most of those men were young hearty fellows, just released from service. He felt them staring at him, a herd of maniacal, vengeful Cyclopes. What did they know? More to the point: How could they know? The only men who knew the truth about what had happened in the Forest of Purroy were buried beneath a collapsed dugout eight miles southeast of Lunéville.
“So Besemer was stepping out,” said Charlie. “But did he really think homicide cops would’ve cared one way or another about his matrimonial particularities?”
The revelation that the second ax victim, Harriet Lowe, was not, in fact, Louis Besemer’s wife was one of several peculiar pieces of information that had emerged during the otherwise profitless investigation into the ax attack on Dorgenois Street. First it was discovered that Besemer, a Jew born in Poland, spoke a number of foreign languages, including Yiddish, Russian, and German. Superintendent Mooney suspected he might be a German propagandist: “Hatchet Mystery May Lead to Spy Nest,” ran the Times-Picayune headline. Next Besemer claimed that Lowe was not his wife, but a housekeeper. His actual wife, he said, was an invalid, living in Cincinnati.
“Lowe was his mistress,” said Bill, with some effort. “Once the ax attack made the front page, Besemer probably figured word would reach Cincinnati. So he got honest in a hurry.”
“Married, not married—it’s hinky. Then you throw in the German-spy business.”
“You think Besemer did it.”
“I did. I did think so, I’ll admit it. Figured he might have given himself a superficial wound to cover up. But then I remembered Maggio.”
“Maggio,” said Bill vacantly. The name was familiar. He scanned the crowd. All the men had two eyes. The battalions from Jackson Barracks marched into the inner field and took up their positions. One battalion settled into a drainage ditch that was posing as a trench. The men of the other battalion, two hundred yards away and flanked by cannons, gripped bayonets. Medics stood by with stretchers and first-aid boxes. The crowd quieted. The adults in the audience affected a somber mien in deference to the solemnity of warfare—even sham warfare—but every few minutes a schoolboy squealed in anticipation. Bill was grateful he hadn’t eaten. He felt that he was going to be sick.
“Maggio, the gibroney who ran the grocery on Magnolia. Killed with his wife.”
“That the one from a couple months back?”
“They were killed with an ax, Billy. An ax.”
“You sure?”
Charlie nodded heavily. “It’s hinky.”
Bill remembered. It was the week of the Negro highwayman job: the week he shot the wrong man. Charlie must have recalled the timing and must have decided to avoid mentioning the connection to spare Bill the bad memory. For all his clodding heaviness and patent buffoonery, Charlie could be delicate too.
“Didn’t they bust someone on Maggio? A cousin?”
“They arrested Maggio’s brother,” said Charlie. “A barber. Found him with a bloody shirt.”
“That’s right.”
“They released him. The blood was a wine stain. Never made another suspect.”
“Well, you have the ax.” Charlie enumerated the coincidences on his fingers. “You have two gibroneys and their wives, or so-called wives.”
“I’m with you, Charlie.”
“Right. Same weapon, same class of victim.” Charlie redid the count. “That’s two. Then you have the attack in the middle of the night. You have two grocers.” Charlie had one finger left. He paused, trying to find a fifth point of concordance. “You have two unsolved murders,” he said at last, triumphant.
An excited susurration swept through the crowd. Soldiers dragged machine guns into position, flanking the cannons. They were old models—Browning M1917s, already displaced in Europe by more modern machines—but still capable of firing ten rounds a second from a barrel the size of a circus giant’s thigh. Everything felt too realistic. Bill didn’t like to see the guns trained on the callow recruits. Was it still a game to them, a chance to show off their uniforms before their girlfriends and parents? Or had they realized that they would soon find themselves in the same position five thousand miles away, in a French forest instead of City Park, across from war-hardened enemies firing live ammunition. Each of these boys would shortly have to face the prospect of his own annihilation.
But Bill wasn’t there to gawk at the exhibition. He was on duty. He resumed scanning the crowd for overzealous spectators who might consider rushing the field. And eye patches.
“Yay, Charlie—you happen to notice any one-eyed men today? In the park?”
“You think the man that killed Besemer had one eye? I know for a fact Maggio’s brother has both eyes.”
“It’s nothing to do with Besemer.”
Charlie evaluated his partner as he might a suspect. “You feeling right?”
Bill was not feeling right. He felt like a sewer. He watched a soldier feed a cartridge belt into a machine gun. Did they make blank rounds for machine guns?
“Look, Charlie, if you really think that the Maggio brothers are connected to Besemer, take it up with the lead investigator.”
Charlie nodded resignedly, as if he had been dreading this suggestion. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s impossible.”
“Why? Who’s lead on Maggio?”
“It was Teddy Obitz.” Charlie monitored his partner’s reaction. “He was working the Maggio case the day he died. Captain Cap said Blond was onto something, but he didn’t know what.”
The captain of the drainage-ditch battalion blew a whistle three times. The captain of the bayonet battalion blew his whistle three times. The soldiers, in unison, saluted their counterparts. They raised their weapons.
“I did see a man with an eye patch,” said Charlie, as he surveyed the crowd. “About an hour ago. Lots of men come back ruined from the war.” He paused, glancing quickly at Bill. “Physically, I mean.”
“What did he look like?”
“Just a man,” said Charlie. “Black hat, green greatcoat. That’s all I remember.”
Bill stared at Charlie to see whether he was joking. But Charlie was never joking. He didn’t know how. “Did you think to ask yourself, Detective, why a man would be wearing a greatcoat in the middle of July in New Orleans?”
A shot fired, loud and close. Bill ducked. Charlie seemed newly concerned about his partner’s disposition but said nothing because the sky shook with the clangor of two cannons, four machine guns, and several thousand rifles, a sound that rose from a sputtering carburetor to a thunderstorm before crescendoing into Niagara Falls. The men from the bayonet battalion whooped and set out for the trench. They made rush attacks, scurrying ahead ten yards and falling to the ground, while the next company leapfrogged them. The opposite battalion was invisible behind a curtain of fog. The air thickened with lead, graphite, and the balsam scent of rifle lubricant. Men dropped lit fireworks into the mouths of the cannons, from which they burst in large belches of smoke. Bill’s heart skipped when a young soldier leaped into the air, grabbing his chest, and collapsed violently on the field. Bill was ducking under the cordon when Charlie’s hand landed on his shoulder. Two men from the Ambulance Corps darted over with a stretcher and began to minister to their fallen comrade by sneaking him a flask, which the dead man accepted with a grin and chugged.
The crowd laughed and applauded. Bill must have been the only person in City Park made ill by the sight of the soldiers clutching histrionically at their chests, writhing in the grass. Charlie, getting in on the fun, spun around, grabbed his shoulder, and fell to his knees.
“C’mon, Charlie.” It was too loud for Charlie to hear Bill, so he tapped his partner’s arm. It wasn’t a good example to set, an officer playing like a child. Bill tapped harder, but Charlie didn’t respond, and Bill pushed him. Charlie went over like a felled oak, flat on his face, his head rebounding off the turf.
Bill crouched to inspect his partner. Charlie’s arms were twisted beneath him. Pulling with all of his strength—in a flash Bill saw Teddy Obitz, slumped on top of Harry Dodson—Bill lifted Charlie’s shoulder and flipped him. His face was purple, his eyes flickering. The hand covering his shoulder was greasy red. A young boy beside them screamed; the sound was drowned out by the detonations but his mouth opened so wide that Bill could see the pink, webbed tonsils.
On the field, not fifteen feet away, the two Ambulance Corps members tended to another playacting soldier. Bill ducked under the red string and raced toward them, barely dodging a soldier running with his bayonet extended, and grabbed a medic’s arm.
“Yay! What’s this?”
“My partner’s been shot,” shouted Bill. “Bring your gear.”
“The bullets are blanks,” said the patient, sitting up.
“This one wasn’t.”
The two medics exchanged a look. “We haven’t passed certification,” said one, fondling his crush hat. “The first-aid cases are empty. Except for a bottle of hooch.”
“Find help,” said Bill. “Fast.”
The boys nodded and, dropping their cases, raced along the edge of the field against their rushing comrades. Bill dodged another pair of sprinting bayoneters and ducked back under the red string. A group of men had surrounded Charlie, shielding the children and women from seeing the only fallen man in City Park who was actually wounded. One of Charlie’s feet slowly pedaled the air. Pink spittle bubbled from his lips. A man tied his shirt around Charlie’s shoulder to stanch the bleeding.
“One of the guns must have been loaded with a real bullet,” shouted the man, shaking his head. He removed his straw hat to shade Charlie’s head from the sun. “What a horrible accident.”
“We ought to stop the battle,” yelled a boy with a harelip who looked nearly old enough for service. “It’s unsafe.”
It would be just as easy to call off the fighting in Verdun. “We’re going to need to carry him to the perimeter,” said Bill. “I called for help but I don’t think we can wait.” The bubbles on Charlie’s lip expanded and popped with each breath. His eyes found Bill. Bill leaned over and pressed his ear to Charlie’s mouth.
“Who did this, Billy?” said Charlie. “A soldier?”
The boy interrupted to report that his sister was getting their father, a doctor. He should be there any second. Already the crowd was parting to admit a new entrant. He moved insistently, impatient, pushing his way closer.
“Yay!” someone yelled. “Cool it!”
“Is that him?”
“Let ’im through!”
“Careful, fella! It’s tight in here.”
“Move aside! It’s the doctor!”
It wasn’t the doctor.
Bill saw the eye patch first. A millisecond later he locked with the man’s eye, which, seeing him, darkened like a rotted lemon. Bill turned and ran, pushing out of the circle that surrounded Charlie, back toward the battlefield. He tried to leap over the red string but it caught his foot and he fell headfirst to the grass, where he was stampeded by two soldiers advancing
in the bayonet charge. He leaped to his feet and sprinted along the string, staying in the flow of the battle. He glanced back in time to see Perl duck under the string. Perl aimed a pistol down the line at Bill and it erupted in flame. Either Perl’s depth perception was shaky or he was too far away, but it was his second miss in as many chances. On the first occasion Perl must have figured that he had a clear shot at Bill but instead Charlie was writhing on the ground and Bill was running free.
Bill ducked under the cordon. Holding his service revolver aloft—screaming, “Police!”—he pushed between startled spectators, diagonaling away from the sham battle until he found enough open space to run.
He ran.
* * *
Maze was in the kitchen preparing a giant saddle of mutton. Her hands were caked with flour. Her yellow apron was streaked with blood.
“I thought you didn’t finish till seven.”
“There was a shooting,” said Bill. “Charlie caught a bullet.”
“What? Where?”
“The Biff Bang carnival.”
“Where on his body? Is he dead?”
“It just grazed his shoulder. He’ll be fine. He’s at the hospital.”
“Jesus, Billy!”
“One of the soldiers loaded his gun with the wrong kind of bullet. Only explanation.”
“It might’ve been you!” She moved to embrace him, but stopped abruptly, removed her apron, and placed it on the counter. She hugged him with her elbows, holding her hands behind his neck to avoid dirtying his uniform.
“Should we go to the hospital?” she said uncertainly. “I can stop cooking—”
“There’s nothing we can do right now.”
“If you’re certain.” She appeared relieved for the permission to return to her apron and the mutton. “As long as Charlie is all right.”
Bill began to breathe normally again. It was good to be back in the cool, dark home, the dimity curtains muting the sunlight, his wife’s strange miniature porcelain animal figurines parading along the mantelpiece, and his half-completed watercolor on the dining table where he’d left it the night before, when he fell asleep with his face on the old newspapers he used as canvas. It was calming too, Maze at the stove in her canary-yellow apron, preparing a feast. Tomatoes and okra simmered in a Dutch oven, six boiled eggs cooled in a bowl on the counter, and the rich, fatty smell of the mutton thickened the air. Only now could he take the full measure of his exhaustion. The muscles in his legs were sore, his lungs were singed. But he was relieved. The truth had finally articulated itself. For weeks it had been advancing toward him, from some faraway distance, a gloom at the end of a long canal that, emerging from the fog, took the form of a giant steamship, coming to run him over. Perl was alive. He wasn’t insane. It was easier to face a man than a ghoul. He only needed rest, some mutton, a few minutes to think. Perl would return. But Bill would be ready.
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