“Hands back up,” he ordered, affecting gruffness.
“Please leave my instrument.” The man’s calm was eroding. “It’s my living. Take my jack, but leave me my living.”
Isadore popped the case. The brass found the moonlight and the reflection shot into his eye. When the glare dissipated, there appeared in its place, as he had feared, a slide trombone. Not just any slide trombone: the bell was unusually small, the slide was wrapped in a green plastic band, and engraved on the lip of the bell was its owner’s name. It confirmed what Isadore already knew and would have known sooner if he had gotten a clear look.
Isadore was jarred from his reverie by the crash of his revolver against the warehouse’s corrugated iron siding. He became conscious a moment later of a burning sensation in his wrist. Dutt Ory kicked him again, sending Isadore to his stomach. Ory throttled him, pushed his cheek into the gravel. Isadore tasted metal and dust and hair.
“I draw the line,” said Ory, “at taking away my livelihood.”
“I don’t want your horn.”
“You were just appreciating it. Admiring how it glows.”
Ory weighed a lot less than Orleania; if Isadore stood up, Ory would slide off. Hard from eight months toiling in the Pit, Isadore could easily toss the older man into the canal or retrieve the gun and do worse. But he had no desire to hurt Ory, or to risk further indignation. So he did not resist while Ory went through his pockets, reclaiming the wallet, watch, and mouthpiece.
“Skulking like a rat along the wharf,” said Ory. “Striking from the shadows. What kind of a man does that?”
“Just get your stuff and leave.”
“I could kill you. I could grab that gun and finish you for good.”
“You could.” Isadore knew he could beat the older man to the revolver. “I don’t doubt it.”
“But I am a merciful man. I know how hard the rough life can be.”
The condescension chafed him. Ory might have known once, yes, but what did he know anymore? He was the embodiment of professional music success, and not just in New Orleans—in clubs from California to Chicago, Ory’s acolytes played his music and sang his legend, building him, note by note, a monument to eternity. It was enough indignity to toil in obscurity and poverty and mud, smothered by the weight of Ory’s shadow, driven even to criminality, but to be thwarted in his desperate effort to support his wife and child by that same man—it was too much to bear.
The weight abruptly lifted and Ory backed away, case in hand.
Here was an opportunity. With a single motion Isadore could snatch the revolver and fire. Just like that, he would be forevermore the man who killed Kid Ory. Or more than that—if Ory was the man responsible for popularizing jazz, then might killing him destroy the music at its root? Isadore Zeno, the man who killed jazz. Yet he didn’t move.
“I’m going to leave you there because I trust you,” said Ory, as he faded into the night. “You will find your way. King Zeno, I place my faith in you!”
Before he could respond, Ory was gone. Isadore rose creakily to his feet and threw off the crab netting. He considered the handgun. Compared to the slide trombone—hell, compared to his own pockmarked cornet—it was a poor instrument. It shot only one kind of bullet.
The cornet was the one instrument he knew how to play and he could make it sing better than anyone else could. How had he doubted it? He was better than Dipper, better than Buddie Petit, and better than Ory. That was why Ory didn’t want Isadore in the Brown Skin Band—he understood that now. Ory was afraid of Isadore’s sound, so new and so big. No, his problem was not the playing. The problem was getting people to listen—enough people, the right people. As soon as the world heard him, it would not be able to hear any other music. The music would come first. Everything else—joy, security, life eternal—would follow.
Isadore tossed the revolver into the canal. He saw a splash but the sound was drowned out by the singing in his brain.
MARCH 10, 1919—THE GARDEN DISTRICT
She could be cunning too.
At eight thirty she blew out the candles and sank into the leather chair in the bay window that gave a clear view of the front gate. She retrieved Rosie’s pale blue envelope every evening at ten o’clock, not wanting to wait until morning, when someone might notice it sticking out beneath the pot of pink azaleas. It wasn’t there yet so Beatrice waited.
Two nights earlier, while reading the evening papers in the library, she had noticed Rosie’s fluttery shape drifting past the gate. Beatrice tapped the window, indicating that she wanted to speak, but by the time she was outside, Rosie had vanished. Beatrice might have concluded that Rosie had not understood the gesture, were it not for the rapid pattering of Rosie’s heels as she turned the corner and raced down First Street.
Nothing in Rosie’s letter that night gave any indication of a problem. The letter she left the next evening was also mundane, but mundane to the point of absurdity. It wasn’t the blandness itself—the reports were often unembroidered lists of events and appointments. Bland was normal. What was abnormal was the absence of detail. The report—when she thought about it, most of the reports of the last several weeks—had been poorly reported. In the first letters, back in September, Rosie had splurged on detail, as Beatrice had requested. A letter might note, for instance, that Giorgio settled a dispute with a john who demanded two girls in a single appointment, though he had only reserved one. Or that Giorgio, between 12:45 and 1:10 in the afternoon, consumed an oyster loaf in the second bedroom; between 1:35 and 1:50 speculated with one of the girls about the origins of the Spanish Death; between 2:10 and 2:45 repaired a hinge on the side gate; and between 2:35 and 3:00, due to the aforementioned exertion, bled from his head. Bleeding stanched at 3:01.
The details had dried up. Perhaps, after a listless six months, Rosie had grown as confident as Beatrice had of her son’s transformation. That was the most charitable explanation. But Beatrice did not pay Rosie to be a judge of character. She paid for details. One entry stated simply: noon–5pm, supervising at Washington Street crib. The next day: 10am–2pm, errands. What errands? And if Rosie was at the DeSoto house, how could she be certain that Giorgio was at the Bouligny crib? Rosie knew Beatrice would not tolerate such carelessness. Had she taken sick? Unlikely—she was healthy enough to hand-deliver the letters, after all. If you had Spanish flu, you didn’t leave your bed unless you thought you could get to the bathroom without spilling fluids on the way.
The clock on the library’s mantelpiece read nine o’clock. It was a cool vaporous evening, breezeless and dark—precisely the kind of evening that unsettled her. Too quiet, too still, a dress rehearsal for oblivion. Better the wind should blow, the cold should ache the bones. Somatic discomforts had their uses; they reminded you that you possessed a body, perceived, were alive. Beatrice lifted the window a few inches so that she could hear footsteps approaching and was rewarded with the distant sound of piano keys. A child played a clumsy ostinato. Her thoughts followed the line, meandering and disjointed, curling into half-completed thoughts that never resolved but returned to the beginning of the phrase and repeated. Rosie’s omissions could not be credited to cockiness, laziness, illness, or carelessness. Was it fear? If Rosie neglected her duties, she might be afraid to fill the gaps with lies. If caught, the sin of a lie would be greater than the sin of neglect. But that excuse didn’t ring either. The reports only drew attention to Rosie’s inattentiveness. They were conspicuously blank. An entry such as 2pm–6pm: DeSoto Street was a frank admission of incompetence. So why the provocation of a blank report?
Beatrice must have allowed her vigilance to lapse, for Rosalba Bucca was standing before the front gate. Beatrice had not heard the clicking of her heels, but soon had the explanation: Rosie held her shoes in one hand. In the other she held a blue envelope. Beatrice was at the front door in a heartbeat—a sharp, ragged heartbeat that tinged her vision red. Rosie was resettling the flowerpot when she saw Beatrice on the porch. Rosie looked a
s if she might speak, but a competing impulse overtook her and she pivoted in her stockinged feet, clutching her coat around her, and began to run.
“Wait!” Beatrice descended the porch steps in two bounds, crossed the garden path, and cleared the front gate. Rosie seemed determined to perpetuate the illusion that she had somehow failed to notice Beatrice. But despite being about fifteen years Rosie’s senior, and perhaps twice her weight, Beatrice was, thanks to Messrs. Fletcher and Metchnikoff, as fit as a Carpathian maiden. She caught Rosie at the corner, beneath the dim yellow streetlamp. Rosie’s eyes looked everywhere but at Beatrice, as if trying to follow simultaneously the paths of a dozen fireflies.
“If you want to quit,” said Beatrice, “I’ll find someone else.”
Rosie shook her head in a kind of silent pleading.
“Do you think your services are no longer needed? Or do you want more money?”
Rosie shook her head more sharply and Beatrice realized her mistake. In Rosie’s evasiveness there was not deceit or cunning. There was only fear.
“Why are you scared of me? Is that why you skulk like a thief—so I wouldn’t hear your approach?”
Even in the dark Beatrice could see how pale Rosie had become.
“You’re afraid of Giorgio.” The fact had a finality to it, once spoken aloud. Beatrice intimidated, she bullied, she caused trepidation. But Giorgio inspired terror. If she were envious of her son, it was for his easy way with fear. He was a clambering bear whose mere presence made the smaller forest animals scurry underfoot.
Lessie Dunbar, after eight months apart, had been able to convince herself that a stranger was her son. Beatrice recalled that the foundling Charles Bruce Anderson, preferring the wealth and love of the Dunbars to the indifference and poverty of the piano tuner Walters, began to answer to the name Bobby Dunbar. Had Giorgio simply become a more persuasive impostor?
A sudden exhaustion consumed her. Denial had been exhausting, all-consuming. She had felt it in her joints, guts, brain. “You’ve been trying to tell me something with your letters,” she said. “Here I am. Tell it to my face.”
“Non lo posso … non adesso.” I can’t—not now. It was as if Rosie couldn’t bring herself to speak in English. Or, in her panic, had forgotten English. She stared past Beatrice, into the dark.
“Rosie, please. Nobody is here but you and me and the night.”
The night interrupted.
“Mamma.”
She turned but didn’t see him. Then she realized that she didn’t see her son because he was so close that his bulk blotted out everything else.
“Rosie here giving you a hard time?”
Beatrice found that she too had lost her breath.
“I was coming to visit.” His voice wasn’t cheerful. It was grim. He sounded as exhausted as Beatrice felt. “What are you doing here, Miss Rosie?”
Rosie put her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a scream.
“You’re bleeding,” said Beatrice finally. She touched her son’s forehead with her forefinger, her gold rings clinking like small cymbals. When she withdrew her hand, one of the rings was smeared.
There followed a moment’s silence. Giorgio was considering something. A thin file of blood, merging with sweat, flowed down his jaw.
“My head,” he said at last. “It’s acting up.”
“Here.” Rosie produced a folded handkerchief. She seemed to surprise herself with the gesture.
“Thank you, Miss Rosie.” Giorgio removed his homburg. The satin lining was stained pink.
“You can go, Rosie,” said Beatrice.
“I’ll be seeing you, Miss Rosie,” said Giorgio.
Rosie turned the corner and, heels in hand, raced into the night.
“She’s in a hurry,” said Giorgio.
“Let’s go inside.” Beatrice told herself to take a reasonable tone. She worked hard at it but could no longer tell whether she was controlling her voice. For all she knew she might have been shrieking. “Then you can tell me why you’re here.”
She had no desire to bring Giorgio into the house with her. But she wanted to give Rosie a head start. Giorgio didn’t protest. He loped to the front gate.
Beatrice tarried, letting him walk ahead of her. She lifted the azalea pot gently and plucked the blue envelope without taking her eyes off her son’s broad, powerful back. Inside, once Giorgio went to the bathroom to clean his head, she tore open the letter. It contained a single page, on which were printed only thirteen words:
All day long: Giorgio behaved very well. I have nothing more to report.
She forgave Rosie. There really was nothing more to report. Beatrice knew everything she needed to know. Bad Giorgio—plotting Giorgio, violent Giorgio, murderous Giorgio—had returned. For all she knew, he had never left.
She shoved the letter into her pocket and waited for her gigantic son to come out of the bathroom.
MARCH 11, 1919—CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT
Capo claimed he was too busy to meet but Bill found him alone in his office, a rosary dangling from his hand, staring into nothingness. He reclined in his black wicker desk chair, which seemed insufficiently fortified to support the weight of his torso. His mouth worked soundlessly.
“Captain?”
Capo looked up, his fist clenching the rosary. “I said tomorrow at four.”
“I found Obitz’s files. There’s new information.”
Capo pursed his lips. They were gray and wet, oversize oysters. “We’ve seen those files. Mooney pulled them last summer.”
“No—his personal files. He didn’t take them into the Department.”
Capo opened a drawer of his immense desk, placed the rosary inside it, and closed it. Before him stood eight neat stacks of documents, most of them in manila folders, each a different open investigation. On top of each stack lay a slip of orange paper on which his secretary had written a single word in neat cursive: HUN, PIETY, ROOSTER. The slip on the tallest stack read AX. Capo patted each pile, enacting some private compulsive ritual, before gesturing to Bill to sit in the oaken armchair opposite.
“Joseph Maggio was paying maintenance fees.” Bill had to sit very erect to see Capo over the papers. “Obitz wrote it in his notes: ‘maintenance fees.’”
“Protection?”
“Exactly. Black Hand. Obitz even drew a little black hand.”
“What’s that mean?”
“A doodle, like. A hand colored in with black ink.” Bill had a momentary image of Eloise Obitz, her black underwear clinging to one ankle, her hands clenching. This was followed by an image of Maze in front of Gino’s, saying, You lied about you. She was right, of course. She didn’t know how right.
“There isn’t any Black Hand.” Capo said this as he might have said, Stop wasting my time. It was common wisdom among navies that the “Black Hand” was not an actual Italian Mafia crime syndicate but a catchall term for any criminal acts committed by New Orleans’s Italian population. But a Black Hand crime hadn’t made headlines for a dozen years, not since the kidnapping of Walter Lamana, the eight-year-old son of an Italian undertaker. When his father refused to pay a ransom, the child was decapitated and buried in a swamp; the kidnappers were found and convicted, their ringleader executed. It was understandable that superstitious beliefs should persist in the port city where the American Mafia originated, but if racketeering did persist, Captain Capo would know about it. Besides being second-in-command at the NOPD, Capo was also the Department’s liaison to the city’s Italian community. His father was born in Palermo; Capo spoke Sicilian at home.
“I know there’s no Black Hand,” said Bill, backtracking. “But it seems that Obitz found evidence of Black Hand–like activity.”
“You interrupted me for this?” Behind Capo, a window looked out to Saratoga Street. A preacher stood on the tailgate of a church wagon parked in front of the station, declaiming loudly to passing officers. A sign on his wagon said MR. JOHN BARLEYCORN BROUGHT US THE PLAGUE.
“I
also spoke with Andrew Maggio. Brother of the deceased.”
“Christ, Billy. You haven’t been this excited since—I don’t know. Before the war certainly.”
Excited—a delicate way of saying crazed or obsessed. Bill had a vision of Leonard Perl pressed beside him, saying, What kind of cop are you?
“I’m close,” said Bill.
“No need to yell.”
Bill lowered his voice. “Maggio told me there were ‘towns within towns.’”
“I’ll be honest, Bill. I’m running out of tolerance.”
“Towns without towns: he’s talking about a protection racket. That’s why Maggio didn’t talk. He was afraid of a reprisal.”
Capo gave him a lidded look.
“Then I spoke with Louis Besemer,” said Bill.
“I suppose he claimed he was innocent.”
“He said that, yes.”
“He’s being charged for murdering his mistress. What do you expect?”
“I don’t think he did it. Unless the ax attacks, despite being nearly identical in method, are totally unrelated. But that’s not the point.”
“I’m waiting for the point.”
“Besemer said something funny. He said that if he did know something, and the Axman were alive, then he—Besemer—wouldn’t be safe even in prison.”
“So you think the syndicates are coming back.”
“Seems that way.”
Capo shifted laboriously in his seat. “Slow down, Billy. Think about it. What do you really have? Mooney has been over this business for months with nothing to show.”
On Saratoga Street the preacher replaced the sign on his wagon. The new sign read JAZZ KILLS.
“There’s more,” said Bill.
Capo’s face remained impassive, heavy, molded of damp clay.
“Andrew Maggio said he’d sold the family business to a bank. I looked in the city records. The bank was Hibernia.”
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