Hans Marble was singing “Something Seems Tingle-Ingling.” The sourness in Isadore’s stomach had spread into his brain. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened—certainly by the end of the evening, before he received his dollar plus twenty-one cents in tips—but at some point during the concert it hit him as strongly as it ever had, the undeniable knowledge that he was floating through life in steerage.
When he went backstage after the show to retrieve his cornet—maybe the pawn would give him a deal, if it wasn’t already flush with abandoned instruments—he found the bassist on hands and knees, vomiting blood.
MARCH 3, 1919—THE GARDEN DISTRICT
During those lost months, as her suspicion hardened into grim knowledge, Beatrice kept returning to the story of Bobby Dunbar.
The four-year-old was last seen on a family fishing trip to Swayze Lake of about fifteen people—Bobby’s parents and younger brother, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends. Around noon, the women were busy tidying up the cabin and preparing for dinner; the men had just returned from fishing. When Lessie, Bobby’s mother, emerged from the kitchen with a platter of trout, she knew something was wrong.
“Who is left at the shore?” she asked.
“No one,” said the men.
The platter fell to the gravel, breaking into shards. Several of the men followed Lessie, screaming Bobby’s name, as she ran to the lake. When they returned to the cabin and Bobby was still missing, she collapsed to the ground.
Three men ran to the wagon trail. Bobby’s father, Percy, had earlier set off for the family farm in Opelousas, summoned by a messenger to notarize a business deal. Perhaps Bobby had followed his father? The men caught up to Percy. He sat astride his horse: the farm was not a half day’s journey but Percy had a cork leg and used the horse when possible. The men explained that Bobby was missing. Percy galloped back to the camp, kicking the horse hard with his cork leg.
Percy jumped from the horse and ran in his troubled fashion past his prostrate wife through the canebrake. At the lake Percy crawled on hands and knees through the brambles, his cork leg dragging a rut through the mud.
A whoop came from the wagon road. The men had discovered small prints in the dirt. Lessie came to her senses long enough to locate a pair of Bobby’s sandals and place them beside the footprints. That they matched she was certain. The party followed the footprints down an incline, across a railroad track, and over an embankment, where they vanished. It was as if the boy had jumped into the sky and floated away.
The search lasted days, joined by hundreds of volunteers. The local fire department dynamited the lake but the only body that rose to the surface was the bloated carcass of a drowned deer. They dragged the lake bed and searched the reed-clogged coves. They shot and disembowled alligators. The dragnet widened to a radius of eight miles. They found no trace of Bobby Dunbar.
Percy set out across the South, searching flophouses, dive bars, and drugstores. He stayed a week in New Orleans.
Beatrice had read in the papers about Percy Dunbar’s search for his son but forgot the story until the following spring, when a boy matching Bobby’s description was located. His guardian was a poor piano tuner named Walters in Poplarville, Mississippi, seventy-five miles northeast of New Orleans. Percy took an overnight train and met the boy at the sheriff’s office. The child’s cheek was blackened with grime, his hair grease matted, his feet scaled with dirt.
“Bobby!” shouted Percy, unable to control himself.
The boy looked up. He looked down. He had lost weight and was obviously malnourished; his eyes were different, squinty. Percy was positive he had found his son. When the cork-legged man approached, arms stretched wide, the boy shrieked in terror.
A parade greeted the Dunbars when they returned to Opelousas. Bands played, schoolchildren marched. But when Lessie was brought to see the boy, she faltered. She couldn’t find the scar above Bobby’s right eye, the trace of a collision with her sewing machine when he was an infant. Also vanished was the mole on his left big toe. Bobby did not appear to recognize her either. But Percy reassured her. Of course the boy was her son.
After the news spread through the South, a woman named Julia Anderson came forward. She claimed that the foundling was not Bobby Dunbar but her son, one Charles Bruce Anderson. The piano tuner Walters had taken Charles for a short trip a year earlier and never returned. Walters himself corroborated the story, at least the identity of the boy—he claimed that Julia Anderson had given away her son willingly. Anderson visited Opelousas, where the reluctant sheriff allowed her one chance to identify the boy in a lineup. She picked wrong and was sent home sobbing.
Walters was convicted of kidnapping Bobby Dunbar in 1914. His lawyers appealed successfully. The first trial had been so expensive, and the evidence so weak, that the prosecutors declined to seek a retrial. Walters had wandered the land ever since, a free but forsaken man.
Two days after the article about poor Louis Besemer and his mistress, Harriet Lowe, the States carried an item about the piano tuner Walters. He had arrived in New Orleans to perform a one-man show he had written about the plight of Charles Bruce Anderson, now Bobby Dunbar. Walters sang and played a harp he had constructed himself, with 287 strings—piano strings, ordered by pitch into discrete sections that, when strummed together, made a chord. It was the largest harp ever built. Walters performed mournful songs about mistaken identity, parental love, and carniverous swamp creatures over baroque chords strummed on his maniac harp.
The grainy newspaper photograph showed, beneath the cheap bowler, a face reticulated by suffering and poverty. But Walters’s eyes were filled with light. They were tricky, mocking. They saw through her.
* * *
How was it to live as mother of a stranger? Lessie Dunbar must have known the boy was not her child. It did not come down to a question of scars or eye shapes. A thousand more intimate signs connect mother and son. Lessie had passed the eight months after Bobby’s disappearance in bed. Undoubtedly she craved release from her nightmare. Her husband certainly did. In a moment of weakness, she capitulated to him. She changed her mind, she later told reporters, after she gave the boy a bath. The insinuation was that, seeing him naked and clean, she could more easily identify her son. But Beatrice suspected that something different occurred: Lessie had exchanged a moment of tenderness with the child and it was the tenderness that brought her back to herself. It was the tenderness—not the boy. But then she was stuck with the boy.
Beatrice could empathize. The man who went by the name of Giorgio Vizzini these last eight months resembled her Giugi all right, down to the scar below his chin and the mysteriously bloody forehead and the strange flap of skin on the helix of his left ear, but the psychic cord between them had stretched and finally snapped. She did not know him anymore. It was a subtle thing. A third party would not tell the difference. Outward appearances remained the same; he hugged her just as forcefully when they saw each other, he smiled his big ursine grin, he called her “Mamma” with the old simpering sweetness. He never missed a Sunday-night supper of Oysters Vizzini and he said that he loved her. But she knew that this Giorgio was an impostor.
Fortunately she had figured out how to stop him.
MARCH 4, 1919—THE IRISH CHANNEL
If he failed immediately to recognize his wife it was because his mind was crowded with Italian grocers—hairy, overweight, sebaceous—and Italian groceries—mold-dusted barrels of pickled pork, greasy tins of anchovies, giant steel fusti oozing olive oil, pallets of prunes, and purple heads of garlic. Bill had never before given thought to how all Italian groceries in New Orleans were nearly identical. It wasn’t just the architecture and layout but the prices. Had the strategy of underselling occurred to no grocer? Variety? Competition? Each grocery was named after its proprietor, that was the main distinction. But it seemed as if they were all run by the same person.
He had had Italian grocers and groceries on his brain since his visit to Rosetta’s. After they repo
rted the body, Captain Capo sent them to canvass the groceries victimized by the Axman. They found Arthur Recknagel behind the counter, scooping salt into a small brown paper bag.
“Officers,” he said, as if overjoyed to see them. “I told your pals everything they wanted to know.”
Bill nodded. “Recknagel’s not an Italian name.”
“German.” The grocer raised his hand in supplication. “But American for three generations.”
“So why do you run a grocery?”
Recknagel gave him a broad smile. “It was an Italian grocery when I bought it in 1916. The business works, so why monkey with it? Only I added sausages.”
They dangled from hooks behind the counter like disembodied limbs. Charlie gravitated toward them.
“Don’t you know the Axman died in the Sick?” said Recknagel.
Bill bit the inside of his cheek. He knew there was a question that would elicit a revealing response from the German; he only had to summon it out of the ether. But he couldn’t. Yet another navy instinct he didn’t have. Charlie was closing in on the sausages, however, so he had better ask something.
“You have any trouble since your door got broken down? Burglaries?”
Judging by the relief in Recknagel’s face, it was the wrong question. “Nope.” He weighed the package on his scale. “Guess it was a fluke.”
LeBoeuf was no more helpful and his mood less receptive.
“They arrested some Negroes,” he said. “Had nothing to do with no Axman, no bogeyman, no Needle Man, no Gown Man.”
Bill remembered the Needle Man: a creep who lurked at night in vacant lots, jumping out of the weeds to stab women with trephine needles. He was never caught.
“The Gown Man?”
LeBoeuf laughed. “They say he’s tall and slender and wears a long black cape. Some men say he’s a ghost. Not women—they know he’s real.”
Bill removed his notebook, wrote down Gown Man, and returned it to his back pocket. In recent weeks his notebook had become a surreal farrago of disconnected words and phrases: false river, blues for dancing, inner harbor, underwater forest. He didn’t know what they meant or why he wrote them down.
“Your grocery is a block from Joseph Romano’s. The stores sell the same stuff at the same prices. How does the block support two groceries?”
LeBoeuf’s eyes deadened at the mention of Romano. “Joseph was my friend. Nobody mourns him more than me.”
Romano’s had been bought by a man who spoke just enough English to inform Bill that the surviving members of the Romano family had left town.
“I don’t get it,” said Charlie, when they were through. “What can they tell us that they didn’t already tell Mooney?”
“They’re saying something. We just have to listen.”
“What beats me is why the man didn’t use a gun. I mean, sure, Gunman doesn’t have the ring of Axman. But the gun is the more effective instrument.”
“You might have something there,” said Bill, but he was thinking about Maze, about the way she laughed when they first met, showing her pink gums and covering her mouth out of embarrassment, before deciding she didn’t care and laughing even harder.
“It ain so hard to come across a pistol. That beats me right up.”
“I see what you mean.”
“The gun,” said Charlie meaningfully, “is the more effective instrument.”
Charlie wouldn’t let it rest until he got a response so Bill forced himself to go through the old catechism. There had to be a connection between the corpse in the Industrial Canal, most likely the grocer Rosetta, and the other grocery murders—but what? Was the so-called Axman still alive and active? If so, what explained his long dormancy? The questions weaved together into a woolen sweater that abraded his neck. But at the end of the day he could take off the sweater. That was the difference since he lost Maze. Six months ago the confluence of clues would have driven him into a frenzy, the old navy instincts crackling and sparking. But Maze’s departure drained him of the old energies. He saw the facts and the connections between them but he couldn’t quite bring himself to study the problem. Then he saw Maze.
* * *
He saw her exiting a grocery: Gino’s on Magazine Street, in their neighborhood. He was on his way home when she emerged, hugging a brown satchel. Her face in the moment before she saw him was bright, amused, free. But when she recognized him she stiffened. A wordless conversation passed between them: Bill asking questions, Maze declining to answer. She looked different but he couldn’t tell how. Maybe her skin was darker; maybe her hair was thicker; maybe her lips were fuller; maybe she was more beautiful than ever. Or maybe nothing had changed and only he was changed, his own internal filters knocked off-kilter, making everything he had known seem strange.
“Can I take that for you?”
She handed over the parcel. It was bulky. He smelled rosewater on her neck.
“I didn’t tell you because I can’t stay.”
“When did you get back?”
She hesitated. “My parents were concerned about the house. Pipes. Mold.”
“You could have asked me to check it.”
“Bill.”
“Paper says the Spanish flu is on the way out. Fewer cases this month than last. Much fewer than January.”
For a moment she resembled the old Maze, the Maze who encouraged him to fight, who said she’d wait for him forever. But only for a moment.
“They said the same thing in November, December. Then it started again.”
“When are you coming back?”
“You lied to me.” She spoke with an odd, mirthless smile. “I thought you were lying about only one thing but then I realized that the one thing was everything.”
“Maze—”
“You lied about that soldier, you lied about what happened in the war. But none of that would have mattered if you hadn’t lied about you.”
Something about her tone brought water to his eyes and he heard himself say, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do.”
“I loved you. I understand how it was in the war. I’m not a child. Of course I wanted you to live, desperately, no matter what the cost. No matter what. But you lied about you.”
The past tense of love entered him like a grappling hook.
“That’s what it means to be married to someone. You’re on the same side.”
“We’re still married.” He instantly regretted this; perhaps, being reminded of the fact, she might begin taking steps to negate it.
“I realized the person sleeping beside me was a plaster cast. Meanwhile you, whoever you are—”
“Whoever am I?”
“You were somewhere else, wandering. You still are, as far as I can tell. Wandering.” When she said the word she made a flighty gesture with her arm that seemed to indicate the entire universe. He saw an asteroid boomeranging around a star and careening out of orbit.
He wanted to tell her that she was talking crazy but he reflected that it was the cold sanity of her words that disturbed him. “How long have you been in New Orleans?” he said finally, to say anything, to break the tears.
“Four days.”
He tried to remember what he had done the last four days. He couldn’t remember anything except for Arthur Recknagel’s gray sausages, dangling from their hooks.
“I’m leaving tonight. On the nine o’clock.”
“I worried you might have caught sick,” he said. “I worried you might have died.”
She was about to reply when some internal tremor distorted her features and she pressed her hand to her mouth to restrain it. It made her face look really beautiful. Four days, seven blocks from their home, and she had made no effort to contact him.
“Stay another night. You’re not acting like yourself.”
“I’m not acting.”
As she took the package from his arms, he inhaled deeply: rosewater, yes, but also salt water and another aroma that he could only describe as the scen
t of her skin when she slept. He tried to picture what he must have looked like, sleeping in bed on the morning when Maze glanced over and decided that he was a plaster mannequin.
* * *
That night in bed he rode the boomeranging asteroid into outer space. It sped beyond the galaxies, escaping the stellar universe, entering an oceanic abyss as dark as it was infinite. Against this blackness his thoughts assumed clarity, like shadows projected on a screen.
You lied to me. She meant something different, he decided. She meant You’re a coward. She was right. He had been a coward. He had been a coward in war and a coward at home. And where had that taken him? His cowardice had rescued him from death, at least once if not twice. But his big sin—his fear of death—had also cost him. It had taken from him the very thing he had tried so hard to preserve: his life. What was the point of living if he was entombed inside the skin of a mannequin? The line of logic continued straight from there. If cowardice was the way in, courage would be the way out. But what kind of courage? What feat would do it? He could appear on the Bones’ doorstep on the North Shore and demand for a second time that Maze return with him to New Orleans, but that hardly seemed bold. When he had tried it before he earned nothing more than a sharp rebuke from Maze’s father on the Bones’ front porch. He returned to the train station without seeing his wife.
The war was over and there was no glory in reenlisting to do aid work. He had already volunteered at influenza wards, but that was hardly extraordinary: thousands of New Orleanians were doing the same. No, he had to find something grander. He had to pursue a great work. He had to defeat a problem that no other man had been able to solve.
He laughed because it was right in front of him. How could he have missed it? He laughed and the asteroid reached its apogee and began to fall back to Earth. It had never left its orbit after all, it was just a big orbit, and now it was falling at the speed of light through the galaxies, reentering the solar system. He laughed because he couldn’t believe he had not seen the thing that had been hovering in front of his face the whole time like a bright glowing star. He laughed all the way back to Earth.
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