“I haven’t seen her since, well, since the other night. At your house.”
“What did you do to her, Giorgio?”
Giorgio gave her a look that she had never before seen. It so surprised her that she required a moment to decode its emotional valence. Then it hit her: condescension. Giorgio was regarding his mother with a look of pure, unabashed condescension. It was as if he were trying to imitate Hugs Davenport.
“I’m running the sporting business now,” he said. “Soon I will relieve Zio Zo and the cousins of their duties. And one day, when the time comes, I’ll relieve you.” He laughed, as if it were all just a joke.
“Is that so?”
“I know that I wasn’t always a good business partner to you. Sometimes I think that’s because of how things ended with Papa. But it don’t matter anymore. I’m older. I understand how business works. I’m good at it too. If it weren’t for me, who knows which company would be in charge of the canal project.”
“I am in charge of the canal project. I’ve seen it through. It’s not easy, to see something like that through.”
The condescending smile returned. “Mr. Blank, who wouldn’t sell his land. The Tulane professor, Fishman. The laborers who slacked off.”
“Murder,” she said, “is not a solution.” She was coming unstuck. Or had she already come unstuck? Talking with her son openly about murder! It would be better to come unstuck once and for all. Have it done finally. So much easier than trying to summon the energy required to hold all the pieces together all the time.
“Murder,” she said, “only causes more problems. The police are investigating. They have been to the canal.”
“Yes, Mamma.”
“Don’t ‘Yes, Mamma’ me.”
“Yes, Mam—ma’am.”
“Do you know anything about this Cortimiglia couple in Gretna? With the small child!”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
“Or the grocer buried in the canal?”
“The only detective who knew anything was killed by the Negro highwayman last year.”
“I did not raise you to be a monster!”
“Calmatevi. You are agitated unnecessarily. Let me examine your back.”
“I will not sit down.” She rapped the frame of the chair with her palm.
“I am not a monster. I am your son, your Giugi. That hasn’t changed.”
“I can’t take this anymore.”
“Your blood is deranged.” He raised his hands. “May I?”
“You may not!”
He lowered his hands. When he spoke again his voice was cool, distant. “You did not raise me to be a monster. But you did raise me.”
“What does that mean?”
“I am talking about Papa.”
“What does he have to do with this?” But she was beginning to understand. The shape of it dawned as big as the moon.
“You taught me that when you want something, you got to grab it. If a person blocks you, you knock him down. No matter who he is.”
She had never heard him speak this way. Perhaps running the business did it. Professional success conferred a dignity that was not otherwise available. But it was more than that. Giorgio had traveled beyond confidence and into the next territory, arrogance. He had, perhaps, gone even further: into monomania, the darkest, swampiest country of them all.
“You hated your father.”
Giorgio nodded gamely. “Papa was cruel. Worse than that: incompetent. I don’t blame you.”
They had never come so close to addressing it. She knew that Giorgio understood the general ingredients of Sal’s death: Lizzie sent home early; Beatrice seated beside Zio Zo all evening in the loge of the French Opera House for all of New Orleans to see, though she detested opera; Sal collapsed over his nightly glass of marsala superiore. The coroner asked to test the bottle but Beatrice could not find it—Lizzie must have thrown it out, she told the investigating officer, Captain Thomas Capo. But she had never explicitly discussed the incident with her son. She had not mentioned the letter from Rosalba Bucca, the final bitter argument, the blue vial of mercury bichloride.
“If Sal lived any longer,” said Beatrice, “we would not have secured the contract for the Industrial Canal.”
“I know that.”
“While he dissipated the last of the family fortune in Storyville, our competitors would have run us over.”
“Don’t you understand, Mamma? I’m grateful for what you did.”
“And what do you think I did?”
He laughed. “You gave me another chance at life.”
She leaned on the chair for support. Giorgio, observing her shakiness, guided her into it. It was a relief to unburden herself, to let the heavy cushion absorb her weight.
“I’m only saying, Mamma, that you taught me well.”
When Giorgio was a little boy, she thought he looked exactly like Sal. Not anymore. It’s true he had his father’s imposing size, his flat, squashed turnip nose, and his dark, wide-spaced eyes. But look into those eyes, and there was Beatrice—deep inside of him, staring back at herself.
MARCH 13, 1919—CRIMINAL COURT BUILDING
The clock on the red stone tower of the Criminal Court Building was broken: it read five minutes before ten. A trail of men in business suits weaved through the neutral ground of Elks Place, returning unsteadily from luncheon at the downtown hotels. One pretended to mount the bronze elk that stood at the end of the park; another wobbled into traffic, causing a hansom horse to rear up. None of this elicited any response from the pair of navies stationed in front of the court. They were fixed on Isadore. They had monitored him since he’d turned the corner. It made sense, the clock on the court building being stopped. Justice had stopped. Bailey would soon be forced to stand trial, despite not having any chance of victory; he had even been forbidden from pleading guilty. The state sought his life, all for the crime of being poor, black, and desperate. And, to be fair, for killing a police detective.
“Why you smiling?” The cop’s hand rested casually, but firmly, on his gun.
Isadore was certain that he was not smiling. If his mouth was doing something funny, it was not inspired by cheer but terror. He had deferred the visit for nine months, fearful that his old friend might have let slip the name of his accomplice, fearful that the police might be waiting for him, using Bailey as bait. But Bailey had remained loyal. Isadore owed him, though that wasn’t all. He had become convinced that Bailey, the smartest and stupidest man he had ever met, who knew him as nobody, not even Orly, could—that Bailey was the only person he could trust. Still Isadore couldn’t help but wonder if he was volunteering himself to the gallows. Four police eyes devoured him with gratuitous disdain.
“I’m here to visit an inmate, sir.”
They gave nothing.
“Do I enter through this building, sir? Or better I should go around back?”
“Depends,” said the navy. “You guilty of something?”
The other cop laughed.
Isadore went around back. He entered an antechamber in which an enormous man sat at a broad desk, his bulk framed by a grilled iron door. The jail had the violent smell of raw chicken left out in the sun. Suppressing a gag, Isadore searched the face of the guard to see whether he was aware of the offense, but he was as impassive as a mountain. As Isadore began to wonder whether the officer was sleeping with his eyes open, he slid a visitor’s form across the desk. Isadore selected a dull pencil from a hollow coffee tin. He wrote his name, Bailey’s name, and the time. The clock in the waiting room was not broken: it read ten past three. In jail, the clocks never stopped. Jail was a dress rehearsal for oblivion. Time kept marching while you sat still, doing nothing, thinking nothing.
Isadore did not notice the officer glance at the form, but he must have because suddenly he came to life. He was a volcano trembling before an eruption.
“You’re here to see Detective Obitz’s killer?”
Isadore saw himself
being hauled behind the door and thrown onto the floor of a cell. He saw himself kicked and beaten. He saw himself getting used to the stench of rotting meat until he didn’t notice it anymore.
“A miracle he’s still alive,” the officer snarled. His glare invited a response.
“Sir?”
“The boys were fixing to tear him apart. But the chief forbade it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I figured he wouldn’t last a month. But he’s still here.”
“… Yessir.”
“Not for long.”
“Nosir.”
“He won’t outlast Judge Baker. It’ll be a glorious day for this city when he hangs. I hope they do it in Jackson Square so folks can bring their families. Make a picnic of it.”
Isadore glanced at the iron door. He had the impression that prisons were loud places, that some kind of camaraderie set in among the inmates, as at the Waifs’ Home—that you would hear people razzing each other and laughing and flapping cards. But it was silent.
The officer squinted. “What are you, one of his partners?”
“No, sir. Just a friend.”
“You’re the only one.”
Isadore waited, hat in hand. He concentrated on a section of the wall where the paint bulged and bubbled, unable to suppress some liquid force trying to burst through.
The jailer rose, unbolted the door, and disappeared behind it. An interval of silence was followed by another series of clanks, metal grinding metal, and beneath those a rushed conversation in a tone of low menace. The iron door opened.
“Enter,” said the jailer.
The door led into a second room even smaller than the first. Bailey sat shackled by his wrists and ankles to a rusting metal chair bolted to the floor. The restraints hardly seemed necessary. Bailey had changed. Always he had been hyperactive, carbonated, unwilling to turn off his voice, but now he sat still. He was leaner, almost gaunt. They had clipped his hair too short. His flesh was puckered with insect bites. His features had been adjusted somehow, shifted slightly, the way the furniture looks after a party. Isadore figured it out: Bailey was nearly a year older. The last time Isadore had seen Bailey, he was eighteen. He was nineteen now.
“Izzy?”
“Here I am.”
“I didn’t suspect you’d ever come.”
“I’m sorry, Frank.” Isadore glanced at the officer, who stood with his back to the door, cracking his knuckles. “I’ve been wanting to.”
“Don’t say anything. I’m pleased to see you.”
With nowhere to sit Isadore leaned against the damp cement wall. A small, high window, heavily smeared with grime, permitted a shaft of gray light.
“You look different,” said Isadore.
“I’ve spent nine months and twelve days facing death.”
“C’mon. It’s not going to come to that.”
Bailey gave Isadore a look that mingled sarcasm and pity. “The first thing that goes is all the stories you tell yourself to quiet your fears. I had a great deal of those stories. Like: All I needed was one more holdup and I’d be set for jack. I would never get caught. I had no choice but to run holdups. I would look Spanish if I wore diamonds in my teeth.”
Isadore laughed. “No one says Spanish anymore. It makes people think about the sickness. Tough is more up-to-the-minute. Or clever. Clever like a professor.”
“I didn’t look clever with diamonds in my teeth.”
“I heard your lawyer has a good defense.”
“I bought that lawyer with the diamonds.” Bailey sighed. “It would’ve been better if I hadn’t already pled.”
“It’s not too late.”
Bailey snorted. “When I got taken in—when Verge sold me out—they used the third-degree method.”
“I read that.”
“You know what it means?” Bailey’s jaw moved in a wounded way.
“They did you physical damage.”
“One navy struck me with a stick. Another twisted my arm. They shouted in my face. Spit on me. They punched me in the stomach, where it doesn’t leave a mark. They’re animals.”
Isadore looked at the jailer, expecting him to stride over with heavy fists, but he stared emptily into the middle distance.
“That’s the first defense: illegally obtained confession. They dictated the whole rap to me.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” said Isadore. “I’m just a ditchdigger and barrel maker.”
“You’re a musician.”
“What’s the second?”
“Second?”
“The other defense.”
“Detective Obitz’s partner, Dodson. He identified a different man as the murderer. That’s number two. The old nightman at the Demolishing Company. Abraham Price.”
“I remember.”
“Big country darky.”
“It stands to reason. The judge is supposed to believe that the officer, when he fingered Mr. Price, was lying?”
“It won’t amount to nothing. I haven’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”
“It’s not for you to say.”
A series of inscriptions and drawings was scratched into the green walls. A frowning stick-figure man hung from the bough of a live oak. Next to it was written MY FAMILY TREE.
“Many folks heard me cry out in pain while I was in custody but nobody will admit it.” Bailey caught himself returning to his old excitability and resumed his matter-of-fact tone: “They want my life and they’ll have it. To the gallows I’ll walk without a whimper and not one word will I say after leaving my cell. They won’t hear nothing so I won’t say nothing.”
“It won’t hurt none, having your lawyer make those arguments. I can’t say if it will help. But it won’t hurt none.”
“People in this town think a Negro is nothing. If there is such a thing as a spirit returning to earth, I don’t want to come back. The people want to send nothing from this world and that nothing will stay away forever.”
“Is there mercy for the fact of your youth?” Isadore snuck a glance at the guard, standing behind Bailey, on the opposite wall. The guard appeared comatose.
“They like to get us as soon as they can.”
It made Isadore uneasy, hearing Bailey speak this way. But wouldn’t he feel the same in Bailey’s place? On the wall a prisoner had made a tracing of his hand. Beneath he’d written MY GIRLFRIEND FOR THE NEXT 9 YRS.
“You just got on the left side of bad luck,” said Isadore. “Many get away with much worse.”
“When nothing leaves this earth,” said Bailey, “nothing can be returned.”
“You got your people behind you. You got me.”
“You and my mother. No one else.”
Isadore knew better than to ask about Virginia. He heard she had taken up with a hard man, a grifter type who worked on the wharf. “A lot of people are behind you,” he said. “They just aren’t fixing to come to jail.”
Bailey made to swat his hand, as if to change the subject, but the chains yanked back his wrist, making him wince. “Here’s my question. Who’s going to answer for the deaths of Abraham Price and Louis Johnson, innocent men, who were shot down for the crime that I am to hang for?”
Isadore glanced at the mountain man. He remained as nonreactive as limestone. On the wall behind him was written IF JESUS WAS A NEGRO WHY HE HATE NEGROES.
“I’ll tell you,” said Bailey. “Nobody will answer for the deaths of those innocent men. Because the killers are white. Whiter than white: one’s an Uptown businessman, the other’s a cop.” He shook his head. “The crazy thing,” he said, more stunned than angry, “is that I didn’t kill the detective. I didn’t do it.”
Isadore didn’t know how to respond. It hurt, Bailey’s not being honest even with him. But the jailer was not ten feet away, listening, even if he pretended not to.
“I just wanted to say, I appreciate what you’ve done.” Isadore nodded toward the navy and hoped that made his meaning clear. He couldn’t out and say, Thanks for not
turning over on me. “It means a lot. Means everything.”
“Yah? Then you can do me a favor. We don’t have mosquito bars in there, and the mattresses are crawling with chinches. I got a terrible itch here above my eye.”
“What about—”
“He don’t care. Please. I’m dying.”
Isadore rose slowly. The guard did not budge. Isadore walked slowly toward Bailey. Above one of his eyes a bite had burst and scabbed over. After another glance at the guard, Isadore scratched carefully around the bite’s circumference. Bailey’s skin was raw, moist. It was like touching a fresh corpse.
“A little harder.” Bailey gritted his teeth. “There it is. Thanks. Thank you.”
Isadore returned to the wall. His hand shook. His back was sore. His head was fuzzy.
“And what, can I ask, have you been doing with your freedom?”
He thought of Dutt Ory twisting his cheek into the gravel on Carondelet Walk. “I’ve been struggling, to be honest.”
Bailey’s eyes went somewhere far away. “Sometimes I remember the Waifs’ Home Brass Band.”
“It was Mr. Davis got me started on the cornet.”
“Seefus on trombone. Gateface on drum. Me on bass. Dippermouth on second cornet. Who was the foundling with the fucked-up hair who played clarinet?”
“Family Haircut. Don’t recall his Christian name.”
“That boy could play, Family Haircut. Him and Dipper too. But you were best.”
“I appreciate it, Frank. Not enough people see it your way.”
“You could make sounds on that horn that nobody heard before. Made it cry like a baby, growl like a tiger. You still making it growl like a tiger?”
“I’ve all but given it up, to tell the truth.”
Bailey scowled. “Why? You have a real touch for jass.”
“They call it jazz now.”
Bailey scowled again.
“There’s no audience for jazz in this city,” said Isadore. “Not the real hot kind.”
“For your playing, there’s an audience.”
“We played the Butt. It’s not a living, though.”
“Five minutes,” said the jailer, without looking at them or, as far as Isadore could tell, moving his lips.
Bailey gave Isadore a curious look. “You were at the Butt?”
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