“You should’ve seen us. Zutty Singleton played with us.”
“Hey! That’s all right.”
“But we didn’t get any other chances out of it. I got an audition with Ory but … it didn’t come to pass.”
“No hotel gigs?”
“I did a show at the Cave, but it was a fill-in. It wasn’t even jazz.”
Bailey thought about that. “What did you play at the Funky Butt? What’s your routine?”
“You got to play the old milky stuff, so they get accustomed to you. ‘Clarinet Marmalade,’ ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘Livery Stable Blues.’ That’s the way to get gigs. Then, after you get to the top, you deliver the piping-hot stuff.”
“But you never got to the top.”
Isadore shook his head. “It’s hopeless.”
“Don’t tell me about hopeless.”
“Sorry, Frank, that’s not—”
Isadore was interrupted by Bailey’s laughter. “You’re doing it all wrong.” Here was the old Bailey: quick to give counsel on things he knew nothing about. “Nobody cares about another young Negro playing the same old music. You need to start off with something new. Look, every man who’s made it has some trick that gives him glow, right?”
“You mean like Bolden playing three times louder than everyone else?”
“That’s right—the people at the front would clear right out. Or King Oliver wearing the bright red fireman’s underwear beneath his shirt. The ladies see the flash of red and they’re like bulls seeing the flag. And Ory—what’d Ory do? He must have done something.”
“He was the first to play trombone in the tailgate fashion. Playing smears and slides in conversation with the trumpet line. Before him trombonists played straight rhythm.”
“The point is he did something new. I did something similar myself.”
“What, when we were in Mr. Davis’s band?”
“No—the holdups. Nobody ever heard of a Negro highwayman making white businessmen before me. Why do you think I got so much play from the newspapers?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do if there’s only a few people to see it. Since the Spanish flu, the city has gone silent. I’m working two jobs just to survive.”
Bailey shook his head. “You’re thinking too trifling. You can play, but you’re not thinking strategically.”
Isadore laughed. Look at Bailey, advising him on strategy. “Is there anything I can do for you from the outside?”
But Bailey was off in his own land. “It’s a double trouble.” He nodded. “Nobody’s going to appreciate your music if they don’t see you play it. But nobody is going to come see you if they don’t already appreciate the music. You’re double-troubled.”
“Add the fact that nobody in this town seems to care about jazz music, or want to pay to see it, and you got troubles treble and quadruple.”
Bailey thought for some time. The light coming through the window had dimmed. The walls grew dark, olive-hued. The room shrank.
“You have to get their attention,” Bailey said at last.
“That’s all for palavering,” said the jailer, stirring to life. He began separating himself from the wall. “Back to murderers’ row.”
“I’ll come back soon.” Isadore tried to sound cheerful.
Bailey ignored him. “What motivates people to do something? How do you get into them and make them go out of their normal ways?”
The jailer lowered himself to one knee to unlock Bailey’s ankle shackles.
“I think back on my situation. Why did the whole city turn against me? Why did Superintendent Mooney send the entire police force into the streets to find a Negro highwayman who hadn’t stolen more than two dollars from a single person?”
The jailer, having chained the two anklets to each other, rose to unlock Bailey’s wrists. Bailey pressed his palms together to make it easier for the officer. It saddened Isadore to see how deeply the routine had become ingrained in Bailey, how easily he participated in his own imprisonment. But perhaps we all do this.
“Because you went after a U.S. district attorney?” asked Isadore.
“Fear,” said Bailey. “That’s why. Look at this Axman situation. It’s got folks hiding in their houses, seeing ghosts, setting up all night with shotguns on their laps.”
The jailer pinned Bailey’s wrists behind his back and pulled the slack in the chain.
“I guess I’ll be seeing you, Frank,” said Isadore.
“How do you bring a city to its knees?”
The jailer dragged Bailey to his feet by yanking on his shackled wrists. The metal cuffs pressed into Bailey’s wrists, slicing into the flaky skin, but Bailey seemed used to that too. He was in the other place.
“Fear!” Bailey’s eyes were getting large. “Fear is how you do it!”
The jailer pulled him toward the door.
“Fear them into seeing you play.”
“All right, Frank. May it go well with you.”
“I don’t fear no more because I have seen the darkness. I live in the darkness. But outside these walls?”
Isadore backed away. He would not return to this horrible place. Bailey was not himself. The Bailey he knew was gone. And yet—
“Fear!” Bailey yelled, as he disappeared behind the cellblock door. “That’s the answer, Izzy. Fear is the only truth.”
The door rattled shut. But still his shout came through.
“Fear!”
PART THREE
THE UNDERGROUND FOREST
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 3/16/19:
MYSTERIOUS PERSON’S NOTE DATED ‘HELL,’ SIGNED ‘AXMAN’
Immunity Promised All Families Who Have Jazz Band Playing in Their Homes When ‘Fell Demon from Hottest Hell’ Flies over City
The Times-Picayune has received a letter from a mysterious person who declares he is the Axman wanted for five murders in New Orleans and vicinity. In it he characterizes himself as “a fell demon from hottest hell.” He also admits that he is fond of jazz music and makes the interesting announcement that next Tuesday night at 12:15 he will fly over New Orleans, but promises immunity to all families who have a jazz band playing in their homes.
The letter received by The Times-Picayune came in Friday’s mail:
“Editor of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans:
“Esteemed Mortal: They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether which surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axman.”
CALLS POLICE STUPID
“I shall come again and claim other victims. I shall leave no clue, except perhaps my bloody ax, besmeared with the blood and brains of he whom I have sent below to keep me company.
“If you wish you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way in which they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid so as to amuse not only me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they never were born than for them to incur the wrath of the Axman. I don’t think that there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure that your police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.
“Undoubtedly you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished to I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.
“Now, to be exact, at 12:15 o’clock (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to the people. Here it is:
“I am very fond of jazz music and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions, that every person shall b
e spared in whose house a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for the people. One thing is certain and that is some of those persons who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the ax.
“Well as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and as it is about time that I have left your homely earth, I will cease my discourses. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee, I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or the realm of fancy,
“THE AXMAN.”
The letter is dated “Hell, March 13, 1919.” Its authorship will be subjected to the investigation it seems to warrant in view of the recent ax murders.
MARCH 18, 1919—THE INDUSTRIAL CANAL—CHARITY HOSPITAL
They found the body in the canal. It made no sense. The corpse was buried twenty-five feet underground. But it wasn’t a skeleton. It wasn’t a skeleton. It wasn’t a skeleton.
“Don’t figure,” said Charlie, shaking his head. He had been at the scene for thirty minutes. Bill, arriving from the hospital, had left too quickly to remember his scarf. “Cold? I’d say it’s making at least seventy degrees.”
Bill pulled his collar as high as it would go. It did not feel like any seventy degrees. It felt like twenty.
They stared into the chasm. The body squad below erected stakes around the corpse. Several hundred feet away the men continued digging. The Texas dredge had made its final pass across Florida Walk and seemed destined to reach the lake by the end of the month. They would next shore the levees and seal the walls with slate panels, before finally opening the gates at either end of the canal. On that day the brackish water of Lake Pontchartrain would rush to meet the freshwater of the Mississippi River and submerge everything between them, but for now there were still underground forests, and the occasional corpse, to exhume.
The foreman from Hercules came rushing in a hansom along Florida Walk. He gestured out the window and screamed, but the words escaped in the wind. They ignored him.
“What do they have?” said Bill.
“Not much yet. Don’t even know the sex.”
“How’s that possible?”
“They’ve only found legs and arms.”
Bill shook his head. “They blaming the dredge again?”
“The dredge is way yonder.” Charlie gestured in the direction of Florida Walk.
“Then how’d they find the body?”
“They didn’t.” Charlie clapped his hands, obliterating two mosquitoes at once. “Coroner got an anonymous call.”
“That so?”
“Said there was something the police would want to see at yard marker ninety-five. Came here and found an arm sticking straight out of the ground.”
“Hand-side up?”
“As if the victim was trying to pull himself out a grave.”
“I will never understand human nature.”
One of the body men ascended the ladder to the brim of the canal. He held under his armpit a heavy parcel wrapped in a yellowed edition of the New Orleans Item.
“We don’t know who called it in?”
Charlie shook his head. “A male. He hung up.”
“That’s a new one.”
“They dug down, came to see the arm wasn’t attached to nothing.”
The foreman’s hansom came to a stop and he jumped out. “Yay!” he shouted. “You cain’t be here! How many times I have to explain this?”
“See this?” Bill indicated his badge. “It says we can go anywhere there’s a dead body.”
“The dead body was two weeks ago, pal. And it was half a mile that way. Didn’t your captain tell you to stop harassing my men? Oh. Oh my.”
The body man dropped his parcel at their feet. It landed with a thud, releasing an angry handful of blackflies. The man sliced it open with a knife, and the old newsprint peeled back like a blooming flower, revealing a dismembered leg. It was heavily flaked with mud but they could see patches of red and brown and wrinkled white flesh.
“Look,” said the officer. “It still bends at the knee.”
The foreman vomited.
“Here’s the amazing thing.” The officer pointed at the uppermost part of the leg. “Cut clean.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Charlie.
“Means the killer is strong,” said Bill. He thought of Perl on the wharf, removing his jacket, folding it twice, placing it neatly on top of their guns. My intention all along was to murder you with my hands.
“Extremely strong,” said the body man. “Strong enough to cut straight through the femur. It’d require a sharp tool, but mainly extraordinary physical strength.”
“It means another thing too,” said Bill. “The victim didn’t resist.” He felt another shiver coming along. But it wouldn’t come. It was like not being able to sneeze, a lingering pressure behind his sinuses.
“More likely the victim was already dead,” said the coroner’s man. “It’s a butcher job. Look at the composition of the corpse.”
It wasn’t just flies, Bill saw. The decomposing leg seethed with euphoric carrion beetles, their yellow pronota like wriggling jaundiced eyes.
“Who told you about this?” The foreman wiped his mouth. He looked away when he spoke, addressing the distant Mississippi. “Does anyone else know?”
“Just us. And whoever did it.”
The foreman nodded and headed back toward the hansom. After several feet he broke into a sprint.
A shout came from the bottom of the canal. They walked to the edge and looked down.
One of the body men had planted his shovel into the ground and was gesturing. “We got a head!” he yelled. “It’s a beauty.”
* * *
“It’s my head,” she kept saying. Or: “It’s inside my head.” Or: “Get it out of my head!”
After sprinting to the hospital, Bill had wasted twenty panicked minutes with the receptionist, who could find no record of Maisie Bastrop in the rolls. Was Mr. Bastrop certain that his wife was not at Presbyterian or the Hotel Dieu? He showed her the Charity Hospital envelope addressed in Maze’s hand, the terse letter, written with an odd formality: I caught it, Bill. I’m at Charity. I’m sorry. The receptionist could only shrug and review the list of two hundred influenza patients admitted to the hospital. After interrupting her search to admit two new cases—a German husband and wife, leaning into each other, the wife’s nostrils bleeding profusely—the receptionist consulted patient lists from the other departments. Perhaps Mrs. Bastrop had entered surgery? Some of the most critically ill influenza patients had been sent to the operating room. But she could not locate a Maisie Bastrop. There is another list, she said, in a chilly, remote tone that Bill immediately recognized, having used it himself with wives of murder victims. It could mean only one thing: the list of patients sent to the morgue.
But Mrs. Bastrop’s name wasn’t there either. In his desperation Bill burst past the receptionist, ignoring her shouts, and ran beneath the archway bearing the inscription WHERE THE UNUSUAL OCCURS AND MIRACLES HAPPEN. He flashed his badge at the security guard at the foot of the stone stairwell and sprinted to the second-floor landing, where he was staggered by the odors of camphor, stale urine, carbolic acid, and the sugary tang of blood. The ward extended before him in a grid of iron bedsteads, each occupied by a miserable. The nurses wore gauze masks and the goggles that motorists used to shield their eyes from dust. They glided among the beds, taking temperatures, handing out ice bags and, in one case, administering an enema with a rubber catheter.
“Officer?” said a goggled nurse, her eyes magnified to the size of golf balls. “It is necessary to don protection.” She pointed to a pair of tin boxes set on a table near the doorway. No goggles remained, but he removed his cap and placed a gauze mask over his mouth.
“Have you treated a woman named Maisie Bastrop?”
“The eyes,” said the nurse, “are an atrium for disease
. Goggles are required.”
He continued past her, bile rising in his throat. He stepped over a young woman who had fallen out of her bed and convulsed on the floor. He negotiated bedpans and Murphy drips. It was difficult to make out the patients’ faces; he peeled back the sheet of one woman whose thin brownish hair resembled Maze’s. When a person died, how much time elapsed before her name was entered on the morgue list?
He climbed to the third floor. A nurse told him it was restricted to male patients.
“Are there influenza patients on any other floors?”
“Negro male patients are on the fifth floor. Additional female patients are in the women’s department next door. White women on the second floor, Negroes on the third.”
Down the stairs, across the courtyard, into the women’s health building, past the guard with another wave of his badge, up a flight of stairs. He shoved through a pair of French doors into yet another, smaller ward, and spotted Maze immediately. She sat up in bed, propped on a pillow. Her hospital gown was open; a breast was visible, the nipple erect. A nurse applied a poultice to Maze’s chest. He called her name.
She looked confusedly in his direction. He pulled down his mask. She didn’t seem to recognize him. Blinking, she pulled the edges of the gown together.
Should he feel offended that his own wife felt modest before him? Or ashamed that, despite her sickness and the semipublic setting, surrounded by patients and the reek of death—should he be ashamed that he was aroused by the cold nipple, the underswell of her breast?
“Ms. Bone? Do you know this man?”
“Bone?” said Bill.
Maze’s eyes came into focus. “He is my husband.”
“Officer Bone, I ask that you wear goggles. And please reapply your mask. The influenza is highly contagious.”
“It’s Detective Bastrop. And she’s Mrs. Bastrop.”
“Nurse,” said Maze. “Will you grant us a moment?”
“I’ll return with a new poultice in forty minutes.” The nurse made a note on Maze’s medical chart, wiped her goggles with a sanitary tissue, and delivered Bill a final skeptical glance.
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