“I thought Italians—southern Italians—talk in … Southern Italian.”
“They go back and forth. They said the Axman doesn’t write letters—that he probably doesn’t even know how to write his own name. But he didn’t like that someone was writing letters for him.”
“How do they know who the Axman is?”
“The Italians like to blabber. All day it’s me parley this and tea-parley that.” He paused. “Is this personal with you?”
Isadore didn’t know what to say.
“What’s going on, Iz?”
“You’re going to win this thing, Frank.”
“You leaving? Izzy?”
But Isadore was already in the aisle. He passed the trembling Obitz daughter and her overwhelmed mother, burst through the swinging courtroom doors, down the stairs, and out into Elks Place. He had to get to Orly. When she and the baby were released from Charity, they could not return to the Liberty Street apartment. But where could they go? And what about Miss Daisy? While Isadore had slept on the floor of the women’s ward beside Orly’s cot the last three nights, Daisy had slept at home. She hadn’t said anything about strange visitors but she had only been there to sleep. There was also the matter of the Friday-night gig at the Cosmopolitan Club. That was out of the question. He would tell Sore Dick to cancel it or to find another cornet player.
Outside, as he passed the courtroom window, Isadore realized it wasn’t enough to move his family away from Liberty Street and cancel the gig. If the maniac knew Isadore’s address, wouldn’t he also know that Isadore worked days at the Industrial Canal and nights at Pelican Cooperage? Isadore thought of Barko, tightly collared and wrapped in the clothing of a dead man, resigned to its pitiful fate, a gun pressed into its flank.
But his thoughts were interrupted by the blast of a revolver.
MARCH 28, 1919—THE GARDEN DISTRICT
A normal woman with a normal son living a normal existence would have thought it a lovely spring evening in New Orleans. The sky was pink blending to gold. A few clouds in the west, grimy with a moldlike pattern that might have been detached from the side of a dilapidated white house, sent a breeze to dispel the heat. Had Beatrice been nearly anybody else, it would have been a pleasant day too. In the morning she walked through the Garden District to St. Mary’s. At home for dinner she ate like a laborer—a new habit, of which she was not particularly proud. Lizzie prepared a pan of Oysters Vizzini; a third of a pound of spaghetti in garlic, hot-pepper flakes, and olive oil; spinach, stewed in lemon juice and oil; and a loaf of crispy Leidenheimer rolls to sop up the oil from the oysters, spaghetti sauce, and spinach. There followed three cartocci, which Lizzie had not quite mastered, but were sweet and filling. Beatrice also drank an entire bottle of Frascati. She did not try to get drunk but she did not try to not get drunk.
After a fitful nap on the library couch—in open revolt against the regimentation of Sal’s grandfather clock she had begun sleeping in the library, not only at night but in the afternoon—Raymond drove her back to the Industrial Canal. She avoided Bayou Bienvenue, where the diggers were finishing the excavation. Hibernia had so far hired two additional contracting firms but the Hercules men remained and she did not want to risk having to explain that she no longer had a voice in administrative decisions, would be unavailable for newspaper interviews, and would not appear in the formal ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Her name would be connected to the canal no more closely than the names of Hercules’s anonymous Negro laborers. After an hour or so of standing on the lock, at the point where the canal would join the Mississippi, she returned in a blue reverie to the house on First Street.
Had Giugi been a normal son, Beatrice would have been overjoyed when Lizzie announced, at the end of supper, that he had appeared on the porch. But he was not a normal son and she was not a normal mother. She choked on her ice cream.
“Shall I tell him that you are occupied?”
She was occupied, of course—in thoughts about Giorgio. Thoughts, calculations, schemes. Had her brain summoned him into existence, drawn him to her front porch? But she did not have the opportunity to respond.
“Hi, Mamma.” He was larger than a dream.
“Your head is bleeding.”
He touched his hairline. “Gee. I guess it is.”
“Lizzie, please bring a handkerchief for Giorgio. Also a setting.”
“It’s nice to see you, Mamma.”
“Would you like some supper?” She tried to make her voice sound as normal as possible but forgot what her normal voice sounded like. She tried to pretend as if he had never stopped coming over for their weekly supper, as if they had seen each other since Hugs’s disappearance. “I believe we still have some veal and creamed onions.”
“Chantilly ice cream would be nice. I’m not very hungry but I am hot.”
They sat in silence while Lizzie went to fetch the handkerchief and the ice cream. This gave her a chance to think. But she couldn’t. She was too distracted by the physical presence of her son. In the days she had spent searching the city in vain, trying to imagine where he might be, what he might be doing, what demon had possessed him and how she might exorcise it, Giorgio had become in her mind more than human. He had become a universal force, like inertia or friction. She had forgotten the scale of his face, the ears like potatoes, the eyes like onions, the turnip nose, the hairs on his forearm like rubber coils. The torso like an icebox. The arms like ham bones. The predatory, ursine grin. The hands like celery roots, heavy, ugly, warped. The hands like mallets. The hands like murder weapons.
“You have been looking for me.”
“It’s been weeks,” she said calmly. “I’m not used to going so long without seeing my son.”
“I’ve been busy.”
Fate, or some higher power, had granted her a second chance. Though she was unprepared, she could not waste it. It might be her final chance. She needed time to strategize.
“Busy? How?”
Giorgio grimaced in the shape of a smile. “You know how.”
Lizzie returned holding a tray with place mat, the good purple-filigree-on-cream cloth napkins that Beatrice reserved for important guests, a glass of cold water, and a bowl of chocolate Chantilly ice.
“Angelo Brocato’s,” said Lizzie, proud of herself. “Your favorite, Mr. Giorgio.”
“It’s good to see you, Miss Lizzie.”
“You sure I can’t bring you something else? There is a healthy cut of veal piccata, some beans … might even be some Oysters Vizzini—”
“Lizzie?” said Beatrice. “Why don’t you leave us?”
“Ma’am?”
“Save the dishes for tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Giorgio became lost in the ice cream. He forgot about the blood on his brow. It descended his forehead at the pace of dripping honey. “It’s so cold,” he said.
“Darling. Your head.”
He glanced up in confusion, spoon in mouth, chocolate smeared on his upper lip.
She gestured to his forehead.
“Ah.”
She winced as he pressed the good white napkin to the blood. He pressed another corner of the napkin to his chocolaty lip.
“I came here tonight,” he said, “to thank you. In person.”
“I can’t imagine for what.”
“For helping me.”
“Setting you up at Rosie’s? I went on Saturday. They said they hadn’t seen you for weeks.” Beatrice tried to keep her tone neutral, even. To her ears it sounded convincing but Giorgio was inscrutable. In the past year he had passed from guileless to cunning to what seemed a calculated guilelessness, which was most cunning of all. Maybe even the Chantilly ice was a cover. Maybe Giorgio, like her, was buying time. Plotting.
“Mamma. We’re alone now. Lizzie’s gone.”
She did not like where this was going, did not like her son’s cockiness nor the antigravitational feeling that accompanied her realization that her son was controlling the con
versation. Still she caught herself admiring Giorgio’s newfound confidence, how he sat erect and strong and proud, like a man.
“I thought we had an agreement,” she said.
“We did. You protect me. I protect the shadow business.”
“That wasn’t our agreement.”
“It’s a funny name, isn’t it? The shadow business. Me, I don’t see shadows. I just see business.”
“The deal was that I protect you. And you stop murdering people.”
“Mamma. Your voice.”
“We’re alone.”
“I guess I’m confused. The business can’t work unless people fear us.”
“It’s not about fear. It’s about persuasion.”
“Is there more Chantilly?”
“I can bring you the carton.”
“Persuasion is a big word. I don’t really understand it. But I understand fear. I think most people understand fear.”
“We didn’t need to persuade anymore. We’re getting out of the business.”
“There’s getting out.” Giorgio raised his flattened hand to mark an invisible boundary. Then he extended the hand as far from his body as he could. “And there’s out.”
“The canal was a legitimate job. It was our escape.”
“How do you think Hercules got the contract? Why do you think the Jahncke brothers and Hampton Reynolds withdrew their bids?”
“The cousins were helpful during that process. I admit it. But after we won the contract—”
“The cousins were not very helpful.”
“They were with Mr. Blank.” She saw in her mind a dog’s skull with daggers stuck through the eye sockets.
“The cousins paid the first visit to Mr. Blank. They did not persuade him.”
“But they told me—”
“They told you what I told them to tell you.”
Beatrice sat with this for a minute. The questions sprouted like toadstools but she had no time to ask them all.
“There was also the Tulane professor,” said Giorgio. “Fishman.”
“He wasn’t going to hold anything up.” She thought, People of New Orleans, we must not allow the enemy to breach the fortification! She thought, Why, having spent two centuries defending ourselves from villainous Water, should we invite Her into the intimacy of our homes as if She were a weary traveler?
“Fishman had a meeting with three members of the city council,” said Giorgio. “He collected data that showed the canal walls would burst during extreme inundation. The data was convincing.”
Those were not sentences Beatrice had ever expected to hear from Giorgio. The data was convincing. She needed a moment to recover.
“I never heard about that.”
“I didn’t think you needed to.” Giorgio said it flat, without affect. As if it were just a statement of fact.
“How did you know?” She tried to control her voice. “About the data?”
“I found the studies in Fishman’s credenza.”
She suspected that if she asked where he buried Fishman’s body, Giorgio would not hesitate to answer. In his credenza, he might say.
“There was also the situation with Hibernia.”
“Which situation?”
“Their internal auditor conducted an investigation. He found some odd numbers. He came to Hugh with a whole mess of discrepancies.”
“I didn’t hear about that either.”
“The auditor, Schneider, was threatening to make the numbers public.”
“I don’t believe you. Hugh mentioned no such thing.”
“Hugh didn’t think we should tell you about it. I agreed.”
“Hugh Davenport—he asked you to settle it?”
Giorgio nodded. “I’ll take the rest of that Chantilly now.”
The information was coming too quickly. Not just the information about Giorgio’s mercenary dealings but the information present in Giorgio’s face: sobriety, calculation, shrewdness. Intellect. She had not met this Giorgio before.
“Hugh,” she said. “What happened to him?”
“His uncle, Denzler, was leaning on him. He was prepared to tell Denzler everything: about the audit and about my work for the canal. The newspapers had started again with the ridiculous Axman stories. He was nervous.”
“About what?
“He thought he would be discovered too.”
“Hugh threatened you?”
“I could see what was going to happen. I distrust weakness.”
Beatrice shivered. She couldn’t help it.
“What?”
“An ax … it’s grotesque.”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers. It’s not always an ax. Only when the situation calls. A bullet leaves one message. An ax leaves a different message.”
Her temples throbbed. Her throat was dry. “All those innocent grocers.”
“What innocent? They owed us. They didn’t pay.”
“How careless could you be?”
Giorgio’s eyes became very large. A hot, sudden fear rose in her and she was certain she would scream.
Giorgio smiled. He scratched his elbow. He inhaled. “I was careful,” he said. “When it became dangerous to leave the bodies in the groceries, because of all the attention, I found another place.”
“There are methods available to us in those situations. When someone is late on a payment. When there is a dispute.”
“I am the method of last resort.”
I could see what was going to happen, she thought. I don’t trust weakness. She flashed her son the biggest smile she dared. “I want to apologize. I am the one who should be thanking you.”
“Please be serious with me, Mamma.”
“I am. I see it now, what you’ve done. You’ve held this whole thing together.”
Giorgio stared at his empty bowl. She couldn’t tell if he was bashful or considering his mother’s sincerity or plotting some fresh horror. When he glanced up his face was serene, or more than serene: affectless.
“The ice. I’m sorry. I’ll bring the carton.”
“On second thought, I am hungry. I think I am very hungry.”
“Would you like the oysters?”
“I haven’t been eating too well. I’ve been moving around a lot.”
“Home-cooked meals are the best cure for indigestion.”
“I think I am very hungry now.”
Beatrice rose. “I’ll find you something.”
“Mamma?”
“Yes, darling?”
“I’m glad there are no secrets anymore between us.”
“I am too.” She forced herself to place her hand gently on his shoulder. It was like caressing an anvil.
“I was starting to think you were against me.”
“No! How could you?”
“We’re the same, aren’t we? You made the family strong. I’m trying to make us even stronger.”
“Of course. We’re family. We’re mother and son. We’re Mamma and Giugi.”
“I see it like this: you did things that Papa couldn’t bring himself to do. And I can do things that you can’t bring yourself to do.”
She wondered what he thought she was capable of doing or not doing. But she knew better than to say another word. She gave his shoulder another squeeze.
Giorgio covered her hand with his paw. Its weight was appalling.
* * *
On the tray she had arranged a slice of veal piccata, a small bowl of creamed onions, two rolls beside a mound of currant jelly, and a bowl of Oysters Vizzini, with extra oil. Giorgio loved the oil. He had a habit of tilting each oyster into his mouth until the oily juice drained down his throat. He had always been a compulsive, a systematic eater. She also brought a set of silverware. No steak knife, however. Butter.
“Wine?”
“No thank you, Mamma. The water will do.”
“Good. Eat, my darling.”
He had already begun. He dragged the dull knife through the veal. He grippe
d the knife incorrectly, not between thumb and forefinger but in his palm, as one might the handle of a saw. Just as it was becoming more than she could stand he released the knife and tore apart a roll. He used it as a plow to herd the veal and onions on his fork, to sponge the oyster oil.
“I’ve missed our suppers,” she said.
“Delicious,” he mumbled through a mouthful. His mind seemed to have gone slack. Food alone disabled him—just not enough. She watched him closely, she couldn’t help it, ready to glance away should he notice. But he did not look up until all the oil was gone. With the remaining crust he wiped the residue from his lips and popped it in.
“I have an appointment downtown,” he said, after a swig of water.
“Don’t you want to let your meal digest?”
“It’s a big jazz show. Got to be there on time.”
“I didn’t know you liked jazz.”
“I’ve become very interested in it lately.”
“Yes. I suppose I can see why.”
He smiled. “I’m glad we talked.”
At the door he gave her a powerful hug and she felt as if she might choke. Then he was off, bounding down the steps and turning toward St. Charles Avenue. Nothing about his gait was abnormal, so far as she could tell. He was a big man, but she had made allowances for his size. She had calculated him to be at least twice the mass of his father, then rounded up. It made sense that the effects would not be felt immediately. Still she watched him closely until he disappeared around the corner.
MARCH 28, 1919—THE FRENCH QUARTER
The Axman was clever, but Bill was clever too. He left his uniform at home and dressed in his nattiest—his only—suit, the black Styleplus he had bought for his wedding. Since France he had lost weight and the suit hung loosely, particularly around his midsection, which was convenient because it meant the pistol would not make an impression. It was not exactly the height of fashion but with a black knit tie, his John Stetson, and a clean shave, he could pass for the kind of Uptown swell that might attend an evening show at the Cosmopolitan Club. When Maze saw him in the suit she thought her hallucinations had returned and let out a surprised laugh-shriek. But the humor caught and withdrew into her, where it twisted into something darker and cutting that brought her hand to her mouth and tears to her eyes.
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