“Are you quite sure that this is it?”
“I’m sorry,” said Raymond. “I thought you wanted to see Bayou Bienvenue.”
“I did.”
Raymond nodded. They sat in silence for a minute, looking at the marsh. “I suspect it don’t look the way you recall,” he said finally.
She should have anticipated this—the bayou, after all, belonged to the parcel purchased by the city for the canal. The fishing camps that lined the bank would have been seized in advance of the job. Most were demolished, leaving a few splintered stakes behind, sticking out of the ground like the skeletal ribs of an unburied beast. About a hundred yards offshore there floated a rowboat holding two people. One was an adult, the other, unmistakably, was a child. A fishing rod was propped over the stern.
“No,” she told Raymond. “This is exactly how I remember it. Let me out.”
She leaned on his arm for support. Her shoes, sinking into the mud, were instantly ruined. She didn’t care. She only wanted to know who was in the boat.
“It’s been a moment since the last pill,” said Raymond. “Would you like one?”
“No time.”
Raymond followed behind her solicitously. The mud was cake batter. Reeds tugged on her skirt like the fingers of beggar children.
“Careful, ma’am. Ain no place for a lady just here.”
“Can you get their attention?” she said, as they approached the bank.
“Ma’am?”
“The two in the boat. Can you call them over?”
Raymond looked between his boss and the rowboat.
“Before they get too far,” she said.
Raymond yelled so loudly he seemed to surprise himself. The oars lowered and remained submerged for a moment. Then they rose. The boat pivoted in a wide arc toward shore. Because the man faced backward, and the boy sat on the bench behind him, it was impossible to see their faces. She could hear their voices—the father’s low bass hum and the son’s persistent chirping. She could not make out the words. But it sounded as if the father spoke in a Sicilian accent. It seemed possible that he was teaching his son to fish, that no time had passed and nothing had changed.
“Ma’am, if I may?”
“Hush now. Can you hear what they’re saying?”
“What is it you’re thinking they might be saying?”
“Hush.”
Gradually their speech clarified.
“But why?” said the boy.
“Because,” said the man.
They glided into view.
“Ma’am?” called the boater. “Sir? Y’all lost?”
She was, in fact, lost. The man was slender, with a welcoming, kindly face; he wore a crushed green flat hat and had a poorly trimmed beard. The hair on his face was red. He did not look in the slightest Sicilian, let alone anything like Sal. A moment later she saw the boy’s face. But it was not a boy. It was a girl.
“Y’all must be lost if you’re all the way out here without a boat.”
“Tell them to leave us,” she said, under her breath, to Raymond.
“What’s the matter?” the girl asked her father.
“I’m sorry, mister,” said Raymond. “We mistook you for a friend. Awful sorry to interrupt your fishing.”
The man smiled. “Ain’t nothing biting anyway. Happy for the exercise.”
“What’s wrong with that woman?” said the girl.
“We’re on our way, darling.”
“Why is she staring like that?”
Raymond took Beatrice’s elbow and guided her back to the car, the spindles of weeds scraping her arms like knives. He handed her an aspirin. When he turned away, she let the pill fall from her hand. Aspirin was a joke before the force of her headaches; the only relief was total osteopathic reconfiguration. Aspirin could not right displaced bones, loosen contracted muscles, or purify the blood. Raymond would not know anything about that, however, so she did not mention it.
Raymond drove at a much faster speed than before. It felt less like a Sunday tour in the country than an ambulance racing to the hospital.
“I’ll ask Miss Lizzie to boil that tea you like,” Raymond was saying. “You just go straight upstairs. Miss Lizzie will fetch the tea to your bed.”
They sped over the St. Claude bascule bridge, the men rising to salute her. People of New Orleans, we must not allow the enemy to breach the fortification! Have we already forgotten the great storm of 1915, the fallen steeples of our churches, the ripped-up roofs, the Lake invading through the drainage canals? In 1915 the collapsed steeples and exploded roofs had been the least of it. Coffins from Lafayette Cemetery burst from the ground and floated down Washington Avenue like canoes; the row houses were laid bare to the world, the exterior walls falling away like drapes; the dray mules, trapped in the district stable on Tchoupitoulas, floated in their flooded pens. Professor Fishman was the only person without a financial stake in the matter to protest the canal. Nobody else had worried how the canal might respond to future inundations. It had seemed intuitive: in high water the canal should flow into the lake or the river. But the natural scientist likely had a different analysis. If he had not disappeared, he might have described more precisely the nature of his fear.
“Folks have their likes and their dislikes,” said Raymond, glancing nervously into the mirror. “Childhood rudeness is my dislike. I abominate rudeness in a child. In anyone, mind you, but most especially in a child.”
It was true, as Fishman said, that the canal would invite water into the fortified city. It was true that the canal flew against two centuries of municipal strategy, which called for keeping water out of the city at all cost, first with a parapet of earthen levees and later the modern drainage system. But what would happen if the rain kept coming? If all the springs of the great deep burst forth and the floodgates of the heavens opened, overwhelming Mr. Wood’s screw pumps? The lake swelling, the river rising. The water finding the weak spots in the canal walls and bursting through crevasses into the defenseless city. The Industrial Canal would no longer be “the realization of a splendid vision” but a ravenous wolf exacting vengeance. Beatrice’s river had divided the city; with reinforcements it would conquer. The drowning citizens would curse her name as they fled by rowboat and pirogue, the hospitals overwhelmed, iceboxes left to rot, the houses sinking, the infirm, the cocky, and the weak marooned—
“These touring trips get tiresome, don’t they?” said Raymond. “Almost home now, though. Almost to bed.”
“Wait. Turn here.”
“We’re just about home, ma’am. We’ll come back another day.”
“Turn left. Take me to St. Mary’s.”
“Service is probably out already,” said Raymond, but in a diminuendo that reduced the end of the sentence to a mumble. He turned left.
Mass had ended and a cluster of families lingered by the entrance, waiting for an audience with Father Scramuzza. Beatrice gave Lizzie a two-dollar bill each Sunday to hand to Scramuzza but had not herself attended mass since Sal’s funeral. Still she had fond memories from the days when Scramuzza delivered the homily in Sicilian. She had taken pleasure in dressing Giugi for church in his little jacket and tie, combing his blond hair with a dab of pomade, shining his tiny shoes—
She saw her son.
“Stop here!”
Raymond smashed the brake with both feet. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Are you hurt?”
She was already out of the car. Giorgio was tussling with another boy at the end of the block.
“Giugi!”
Giugi wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders. Laughing, the boy flung him off and began playfully to jab Giugi in the back. Giugi escaped, running in the direction of St. Mary’s, toward Beatrice’s outstretched arms.
“Giugi!” she yelled. “Amore mio!”
The child, suddenly aware of her presence, dodged, but not fast enough. She enveloped him in a giant hug.
“Darling,” she said in Sicilian. “I have been looking for y
ou everywhere.”
The boy pulled back in shock.
“I miss you horribly.”
“Get offa me, lady!”
“You can still change. I can change too. Let’s not hide from each other.”
The boy tore away and ran to the church. “Help!” he shouted. “This woman is nuts!”
“Come home, Giugi,” she yelled. “It’s not too late. Come home.”
“Please, Mrs. Vizzini.” Raymond had caught up to her. He stood before her, blocking her from chasing after the child.
“That’s him!” she shouted.
“Let’s get back into the motor, Mrs. Vizzini.”
“Giugi!” she yelled, but there was no use. A young couple herded the child around the corner. “Goodbye, my love,” she called after him, with all the volume she could muster. But her throat, filled with fluid, would not cooperate. It became difficult even to see; her eyes were hot with tears. Still she tried once more, with the final measure of her energy.
“Goodbye, Giugi!” she screamed. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”
MARCH 24, 1919—UPTOWN—CRIMINAL COURT BUILDING
Giving your wife an enema: there was marital intimacy for you.
It had been a blurry weekend of cold sweat, ice bags, temperature taking, vaccine dosing, sodium bicarbonate suppositories. A weekend also of softness, pity, and understanding, which is to say, love. It was not their old love, the teenage fervor and mystery—that was a faded memory—but a new love, mundane and heavy and inevitable. Enema love. He did not want to call her friends and did not want to see the Bones, so he served as nurse himself. His duties included preparation and administration of the enemas: one dram of sodium bicarbonate in a pint of water, inserted every three hours through a soft rubber catheter. It did not bother him, once he got used to it: he was happy to do something. The hours bled. Maze’s fever dreams mixed with his own until he couldn’t tell whose dream he was dreaming. He felt a faint desire to return to his investigation but he couldn’t risk leaving Maze for more than a couple of hours at a time. At night he felt he couldn’t risk leaving her long enough to use the bathroom. On Monday morning her fever began to fall. When the doctor appeared shortly after dawn to examine her lungs, kidneys, and heart, he ordered Bill to leave the house. Bill was excessively piqued, the doctor concluded, and his presence could only make matters worse. She would need him to be strong and clear minded for the next stage of her recovery. Better Bill should return to normal life. He laughed at that: “normal life.” On his way out, Maze told him not to worry. She told him that she loved him. It restored his strength. It made him want to do good work. Big work. Not to prove anything to her, or even to himself, but because it was right. It was human.
On the street the fresh air was like a foreign climate. It abraded his skin. He began to order his thoughts again. They all led to the same place: the Axman’s letter.
It might not be likely to lead to the killer, but it was all he had. Theodore Obitz used to say that clues were like witnesses: each told a different story and even the lies provided information. Even a forged letter might lead to the truth. He was certain at least that Capo had not pursued it sufficiently. He may have shown it to the Department’s forensics chief, but Bill didn’t trust the old man, whose specialty was ballistics, after all. He only knew to study documents for fingerprints, stains, watermarks. He didn’t understand how graphological science had matured. The new theory was that handwriting was itself a kind of fingerprint, capable of revealing aspects of character and habit. Handwriting told its own story. That, at least, was what Mary Eager had taught him.
He had been waiting for nearly an hour outside her office at Sophie Newcomb College when she arrived. She wore a lilac jacket and carried an oversize handbag swinging from her shoulder; her manner was brisk, assured, impatient.
“William Bastrop.” He extended his hand.
“The Gallier suicide.”
He had consulted with her on a murder case; she testified that a suicide letter was in fact written by the victim’s husband. Though a psychologist by training, Eager was an expert in the burgeoning field of handwriting analysis, having published papers with titles such as “Garlands or Arcades: A Crisis in Graphology” and “Bar Sinistrality.”
“I telephoned the department on Friday,” said Bill. “The secretary said you’d left for the weekend. So I tried your residence.”
“I was at my mother’s in Slidell.” Her eyes paused on his face. She did not appear to be reassured by what she saw. “I have class in an hour. Can you return this afternoon?”
Bill produced the Axman letter.
“I saw that in the paper.”
“This is the original.”
“Hasn’t it been solved?”
“He’s still out there.”
“If I don’t help, I suppose another grocer and his wife will be murdered. Their blood will be on my hands.”
“You’re already making my job easier.”
There were footsteps behind him. Bill’s hand went to his hip. He turned to find a boy holding three books under one arm. At the sight of the cop, the student dropped his books.
“Don’t be concerned, Henry,” said Eager, as she moved behind her desk. “Unless you plan on giving me an excuse for missing today’s class.”
“I wouldn’t miss class for the world, ma’am,” said the student, hastily gathering the books. He ran down the stairwell, taking two steps at a time.
Eager gave Bill a professional smile. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. And I’m sorry to doom yet another grocer to a gruesome execution. But there’s no way for me to conduct a proper analysis in the next hour.”
“Can you cancel class?”
“Absolutely not.” She withdrew a file and a pencil from her handbag.
The dizzy feeling was returning, gathering about him like a cloud of bees.
“Don’t get torn up about it,” she said. “I’ll telephone the station with the results this evening.”
“Forget the proper analysis. Can you simply take a look?”
“I already did.”
“Did you reach any conclusions?”
“None you couldn’t have reached yourself.”
“You might overestimate me.”
“Well, it is obvious that the writer is not the Axman.”
“How do you know?”
“You mean apart from the demand that everyone in New Orleans play jazz music?”
“Other than that.” He placed the letter on the desk.
She sighed. “The diacritics—the dots of the i’s and the crosses of the t’s—are consistently sharp. Look at spirit. Invisible. Victims. That tends to indicate wit, originality, imagination.”
“The Axman is nothing if not original.”
“The clean penmanship indicates that the letter was written with great deliberation. The writing gets slower as it goes. You see the roundness of the vowels toward the end? Devils. Nether regions. Tartarus. The writer is trying to hide something. Or he is anxious to get it right.”
“Trying to hide something.”
“These are hardly conclusive observations. It would be like a doctor saying that a patient with a sore tooth must have scurvy. In a proper analysis one considers more than three dozen criteria. One looks for commonalities, patterns. One creates a profile.”
“Nothing you’ve said proves the writer isn’t the killer.”
“You’re right. I suppose that’s my conclusion as a psychologist, not as a graphologist.”
Bill returned the letter to its folder.
“I expect that you’ve already tried to determine whether any local schools still teach Spencerian?”
“Excuse me?”
“You can see that the letter is written in Spencerian script.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
She put down her pencil. When, after a pause, she resumed, her voice took on a distinctly pedagogical tone. “Spencerian script was taught to American schoolchildren in
the second half of the last century. It was designed by the abolitionist Platt Rogers Spencer. He believed that a formal system of penmanship, taught to schoolchildren of every race and creed, was an essential foundation of a democracy.”
“You mean how the writing looks like a government document?”
“Or your parents’ correspondence.”
His parents didn’t have “correspondence” but he did not interrupt.
“Schools adopted the Palmer Method by the turn of the century, or the Zaner-Bloser script. Most likely you use Palmer.”
“Why would somebody write in Spencerian?”
“Maybe because they’re older,” said Ms. Eager. “You’re the detective.”
* * *
The old obnoxious New Orleans heat. The sunlight on St. Charles was a thousand needles poking under his collar, beneath the band of his belt where his shirt bunched, in the soles of his feet, along the rim of his hairline. Applied suddenly, in extreme quantities, the heat stirred visions. It made the streetcar driver exactly resemble Leonard Perl. It made Maze materialize in the shade of a palm tree, only to melt into the ringed patterns on the bark. It sent a young man angling toward him down the avenue brandishing an ax. The ax was a baseball bat, he realized, the man heading to Audubon Park, but the shock quickened his pulse. Navy instincts—ha!
Still the fuzziness had its benefits. It shuttled his thoughts out of their regular circuits, creating new transferences and patterns. Was it possible that the Axman was an older man? Perhaps. But what older man would demand jazz music? What older man had heard of jazz music? And if the letter was a hoax, what end did it serve? What kind of lunatic would go through the trouble?
Two police skills Bill did have: observation and memory. They had not abandoned him entirely. He knew because he could feel the weight of a memory pressing into his consciousness, making him uneven, like a hand pushing down on one shoulder. He had seen the Axman’s florid script somewhere before, and not in old letters from his parents. He remembered thinking it was silly, particularly given the context, but it was not until he searched through case files at the department that he found it. Frank Bailey, the Negro highwayman—the man who shot Teddy Obitz—wrote his confession in Spencerian script. The lavish loops, the fussy flourishes: it was as if he had written it with a quill. The other navies had laughed at the idea of a griffe Negro writing like a member of King Arthur’s court.
King Zeno Page 30