by Ray Celestin
Whenever Riley was faced with such an event, where thinking wasn’t really required, he split his intelligence between the job at hand and dreaming up names for the literary journal it was his ambition to found, a journal that he envisioned would become the cultural diary of the city, where he could publish his criticism and the essays of other great minds. But the journal was forever being put on hold by the demands of his job, by a lack of funds, by his nightly trips to Elysian Fields.
‘In our short but illustrious history,’ continued the mayor, and Riley wrote down his words in an automatic shorthand, ‘we have had to face over fifty major floods and over fifty hurricanes; in fact a hurricane heads our way roughly every two-and-a-half years. Faced with such destructive and constant force, is it any wonder we have gained a reputation for enjoying a good time?’
The mayor paused for a beat while the students laughed, and Riley stifled a groan. He had originally thought of naming his journal The Stylus, in honor of his hero, Edgar Allan Poe. But as the years dragged on he became worried that, like his hero, he might die prematurely, before he ever got his journal off the ground, and so he used his spare moments to search for a name with less morbid associations.
‘We’ve had to deal with epidemics of malaria, smallpox, yellow fever and cholera. And just last year the Spanish Influenza that took so many of our fellow citizens from us,’ said the mayor. ‘And the swamps that surround our beautiful city are home to alligators, bears, cougars and coyotes, a variety of venomous snakes and spiders, and –’ the mayor paused for comic effect ‘– Republicans.’
The students laughed once more and the mayor continued. ‘Such is the fortitude of New Orleans that it has managed to survive this hostile environment, and not just survive, but flourish. In the battle between man and nature, New Orleans stands as a testament to what can be achieved by small groups of men, properly united by a common goal and a resilience of thought.’
Riley stopped his daydreaming to wonder about the battle between man and nature. New Orleans flooded every couple of years, and storms and fires destroyed its landmarks just as often, the marshy land caused the streets to crack and the buildings to subside, the high groundwater level meant they couldn’t even bury their dead properly. If New Orleans was anything, he thought, it was a symbol of man’s weakness in the face of nature, and he wondered from where exactly the mayor got his optimism.
‘We have been ruled by the Indians, the French, the Spanish and the Americans, and if it wasn’t for the help of a ragtag band of soldiers and pirates, we’d have been ruled by the British too. It is perhaps this mixed history that has given rise to our reputation as a place where . . .’ the mayor paused again, ‘things are a little different.’ The students tittered, but Riley couldn’t help but agree. New Orleans was different – it was the dark side of the country. Its Francophone population, its blurring of racial boundaries, its tropical climate – the rest of America thought New Orleans an exotic, foreign enclave, hidden away in the heart of the Deep South. A place that had more in common with the murky, steamy ports of the Caribbean and Brazil than the cities of the puritan north.
‘Everything’s different in New Orleans,’ continued the mayor. ‘It’s an American city, sure enough, but it’s an American city named after a French Duke, in a state named after a French King. We drink our coffee different, cook our food different, play our music different. We name our squares after African countries, and our streets after Greek myths. We bury our dead aboveground, but build our city below sea level. We celebrate Mardi Gras, not Shrove Tuesday, we have parishes not counties, we don’t ban vice, we legalize it. We’ve been different since a handful of French traders came here and decided, against the good advice of their Indian guides, to build a city on a marsh.’
The mayor droned on and Riley returned to daydreaming about journal names: The Southern Review? The Artist? The Reader? As he dreamed and copied down the mayor’s dawdling speech, a drop of sweat fell from his brow onto his notepad. And then another. He put his hand to his face and realized he was not only soaked in sweat, but that his hand was shaking too.
Eventually the students were on their feet, applauding, and the mayor was smiling at them and waving regally. Riley thanked God, pocketed his notebook and jostled his way through the crowd. He exited the hall to see the streetcar approaching along St Charles. He sprinted to the stop and waved his hand at the driver, and he thanked God a second time when the streetcar slowed down and he hopped aboard. He’d be in the Vieux Carré soon enough, and from there he could walk to Elysian Fields.
He took a seat at the front and as the streetcar sped him through the city, he thought about the lecture. The mayor was just repeating to the students the stories New Orleans told itself, stories about its past, about its character. Stories told so many times the place was in danger of crumbling into a myth of its own making, into a past that never was. If the city was a person, thought Riley, it would be an ageing whore. Smeared in rouge and yellow smiles, affecting airs and graces, wrapping herself in faded French silks. Coquetry and frills concealing decay.
He got off the streetcar at Decatur Street, stalked through the Vieux Carré and arrived at Faubourg Marigny. He thought about the mayor’s idea that New Orleans was some kind of beacon, fighting the proud fight for mankind against marshes and fires and diseases. And he thought about the Axeman and the chaos he was bringing to the city. Riley knew more about the Axeman than he should. He knew more than the police and more than the Matrangas. He came into so much information through his work it would be impossible not to find out something. And as he walked he wondered, as he had been wondering for the last few weeks, what he should do with that information. What could he do that was honorable but didn’t put him in harm’s way?
He turned right off Chartres Street and onto Elysian Fields. The avenue was the widest in New Orleans and connected the Mississippi with Lake Pontchartrain to the north. Bernard de Marigny had envisioned the avenue as a French-style boulevard with shrubbery and landscaping and a waterway down its center filled with swan-boats. He had named the street after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, which itself was named after the Elysian Fields, the Ancient Greek name for heaven. Riley relished the aptness of the city’s Chinese laundries being located on the road to heaven. But thanks to a protracted streak of bad luck, de Maringy’s plans never came to fruition and the thoroughfare was eventually leased to the Pontchartrain Railroad Company, which built a railway for belching, noisy trains down the center of the avenue, in the exact place where the French nobleman had dreamed of gilded swan-boats.
After a few minutes Riley approached the Jiang Launderette. He opened the door and stepped inside and the girl at the counter recognized him. She smiled and nodded to a door by a row of steaming vats. Riley smiled back and went through into a long dingy corridor, then he stepped through a second door into an even longer room, dimly lit and heavy with smoke. The room was decorated with drapes and rows of mattresses, each one separated from the next by squat latticework screens. Along the walls were badly painted Chinese landscapes – endless seas and fantastic mountains, dotted by tiny, faceless figures.
Jiang, the proprietor, a slight man with a ready smile and a wispy mustache, saw Riley and cast a quick glance at the sweat on Riley’s face, at his paleness, and Riley guessed from the man’s expression that he was perturbed by what he saw. Jiang raised his hand and led Riley through the room, past the other patrons lying on their mattresses, past the latticework screens and the other pieces of cheap chinoiserie that littered the place. They reached an empty mattress and Jiang stopped and bowed, and Riley nodded, took off his coat and lay down. Jiang disappeared, and it was only when he was alone that Riley noticed the music – Chinese flutes and nameless stringed instruments playing foggy, empty chords. He had never heard music in the laundry before; he looked about him and saw a gramophone in a corner, and slumped next to it a Chinese girl in a traditional robe, her hair dangling over her face as she swayed to the music.
He lit the lamp with a shaking hand and scraped the resin from the bowl with the needle. He transferred a pea-sized amount into the second bowl and mixed it with the yen pox within. As he prepared the mix, Riley looked around the room at the people gathered there from all over the city, the Chinamen and the whites strewn around their mattresses, sleepwalkers in search of a dream. He had been noticing a lot more white men since the end of the war, young, strong-looking men with shell-shocked eyes, soldiers lost and fallen into the poppy’s sour embrace.
Once the mixture was ready, Riley prepared the pipe. He screwed the pipe stem onto the bowl, placed the mixture in the bowl, placed the bowl over the oil-lamp, waited for the vapor to form, and inhaled.
He sucked the acrid fumes into his lungs and as he waited for the hit, he noticed he had stopped sweating, that he had stopped shaking, that his mind was no longer panicked. He gazed at the Chinese landscapes on the wall. The artist had left the space between the mountains and clouds untouched, and the untouched paper became, by inference, the sky. The sea was painted in a similar way, the boats floating on empty paper. Nothingness, turned into matter and given meaning solely by Riley’s brain. The mountains and seas seemed to overpower the figures, making them tiny, insignificant. Riley heard echoes of the mayor’s speech, of man against nature, and he guessed the view of the artist was more in keeping with his own – that man was too small to ever win such a battle, no matter how noble the intentions. Build a city, Riley thought, and eventually some agent of chaos would come along and destroy it, be it a hurricane or a fire or a flood. Or an Axeman.
Suddenly a thought occurred to him: the mayor had forgotten an item in his list of names for New Orleans, an old name, a reference to the waterlogged expanses the city was built on – the Floating Land. He liked the name, with its hints of Yoshiwara, of enchantment and magical realms. It felt appropriate as he looked around his dim surroundings, the girl swaying to the music, the sleepwalkers floating in their dreams.
PART TWO
The Times–Picayune
Saturday 12th April, 1919
Local News
Anger Grows As Latest Axe Victims Buried
‘Who’ll be next?’ is the question being asked by the Italian citizens of New Orleans, as the latest victims of the elusive slayer were buried this week. Resentment at the police’s handling of the case was high as the bodies of Mr and Mrs Joseph Maggio were laid at rest, Friday afternoon, in the same vault in St Louis Cemetery, No.3 Esplanade Avenue.
Mourners crowded the mortuary parlor of Valenti & Bonnet on Toulouse Street, and later, at St Mary’s Italian Church, where the caskets were carried by members of the Cefalutana Benevolent Association. The crowd reached such proportions it overflowed into the street, blocking traffic during the services.
Although the officiating priest, Father Scamuzza, made no mention of the murders during his oration, the Axeman was high on the minds of the mourners we spoke to at the funeral. Many were frustrated by the police’s lack of progress in the case, and annoyed that the Police Department seemed to be directing their energies towards questioning members of the Italian community, when the prevailing belief among the residents of Little Italy is that the crimes are the work of a crazed Negro.
The Police are allegedly directing their inquiries in such fashion on the orders of Det. Lieut. Michael Talbot, orders which have naturally caused anger among the law-abiding Italians of the Quarter, with some going so far as to call the Police’s tactics harassment. One man at the funeral, who wished to remain anonymous, said: ‘I’ve known the Maggios for years. Suggesting they were involved with the Mafia is not only wrong, it’s insulting. The Mafia doesn’t kill women and children.’
As the sad scenes unfold and anger grows there is yet more unsettling news for the embattled lawman. Luca D’Andrea, the former Bureau Detective who was imprisoned in 1914 on corruption charges, was freed from prison a few days ago.
Readers may remember that it was Det. Talbot who was the main witness against his former mentor D’Andrea in the corruption trial which rocked the Police Department some five years ago. The return of the erstwhile lawman just as Talbot is under pressure to solve the Axeman case is synchronous to say the least. D’Andrea spoke to our reporters as he left a secret halfway house outside the city.
‘I’m not surprised Talbot is making no headway into the case,’ said the former detective. ‘He only got where he is because he squealed. It’s the chickens coming home to roost. If the Department really wants to solve this, they should give the case to someone who reached the level of Lieutenant Detective on merit.’
11
A few days after Ida and Lewis had met at the funeral, the two friends found themselves standing outside a cheerless tumbledown house on the northern edge of the Battlefield. Ida was fidgeting with the clasp of her handbag, snapping it open and closed, open and closed, for no good reason at all. Lewis glanced her way, and was about to say something when a stout middle-aged colored woman opened the door a crack. The woman, who was of the opinion that an unsolicited knock at the door only ever meant trouble, eyed them with a suspicious glare.
‘Mrs Millicent Hawkes?’ Ida asked in the sweetest tone she could manage.
‘Yeah. Who’s asking?’ said the woman.
‘My name is Ida Davis, and this is my associate, Lewis,’ said Ida, gesturing towards Lewis, who tipped his Stetson at the woman.
‘We’d like to talk to you about Mr and Mrs Romano,’ said Ida. ‘We ’re private investigators.’
‘Private investigators?’ said the woman, putting a fist on her hip. ‘You barely out of diapers, girl. I already told the police what I had to say, I ain’t wasting my breath on you.’
She took a step back and moved to close the door.
‘It’d be in your interests,’ said Ida quickly, and the woman stopped the door mid-swing. ‘You paying?’ she asked.
‘Kinda,’ said Ida.
‘Kinda how?’
‘We know a few years back you tried to sell information on your old employers to a detective agency,’ said Ida. ‘Talk to us, and we’ll make sure the police don’t find out.’
The woman narrowed her eyes.
‘You blackmailing me, girl?’
‘I believe I am,’ said Ida, smiling back at her.
Lewis caught the riled-up look on the woman’s face and wondered if she might not take a swing at Ida.
‘Shit,’ said the woman eventually, ‘I always knew going to the Pinkertons was a bad idea.’ She nodded to herself, as if confirming the assertion, then swung her arm from the doorjamb. ‘I guess you better come in.’
The woman stomped back into the house and Ida turned to Lewis and beamed. The woman led them along a dim corridor and into a cramped kitchen lit by a solitary window that looked out onto next-door’s brick wall. Freshly used dishes and pans were peeking above a high lather in the sink, lending the room an aroma of soap powder, onions and fried fish. Mrs Hawkes took a seat at a table by the window and gestured for Ida and Lewis to do the same. They sat opposite the woman and as Ida took her notepad and pen from her bag, Mrs Hawkes stared at her with a curled lip.
‘What the hell are you anyway?’ she asked, and Ida caught her meaning.
‘I’m the same as you,’ she replied, meaning she was colored, too.
‘Oh yeah?’ said Mrs Hawkes, looking her up and down. ‘Last time I looked in the mirror, I weren’t high yella,’ she said,
using the derogatory term for a light-skinned person, ‘and I weren’t dicty to boot.’
The two women stared at each other, and Lewis could feel the atmosphere thicken. He’d heard people call Ida dicty plenty of times, meaning they thought she put on airs and graces, that she thought herself better than the average Negro. Lewis knew the insult always caused his friend to spin off into a bout of frustrated introspection, trying to find a reason why people thought that about her – was it her bearing, the way she spoke, the way she appeared a little cold to people, or was it just the way she looked?
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, ma’am,’ Ida said. ‘We just came cuz we wanted to know what it was you tried to sell the detective agency.’
‘Pay me and I’ll tell ya,’ said Mrs Hawkes. ‘That was the deal then, and that’s the deal now.’
‘I understand that, ma’am,’ said Ida. ‘But things are different now – you’re involved in a murder investigation.’
The woman got that same haughty look in her face that Lewis had noticed on the doorstep, and something in the expression reminded him of his mother, the fragile pride of those who have nothing.
‘How do I know what I tell you ain’t gonna end up on some police report?’ said the woman, rubbing her neck at the collar of her tuck blouse.
‘You can trust us. It’s not in our interests to tell the police,’ Ida replied. ‘I can guarantee whatever you say goes no further.’
Mrs Hawkes thought for a moment, drumming her fingernails against the table.
‘OK,’ she said when she had finished her deliberations. ‘I’ll tell you. On condition that after this little chin-wag, I never see either o’ you again.’