by Ray Celestin
After a few minutes, a towering broad-chested man with a bushy red beard strode into the room. The man unbuttoned the heavy fox-fur coat he was wearing, clipped a safe key onto the ring hanging from his belt and approached the table. He put his thumbs through his belt-loops, puffed out his chest and stared down at the boy. The boy seemed to wither under the man’s glare, looking small and befuddled. They began a conversation, which Ida and Lewis couldn’t hear, but the gesticulations of the boy, and the imposing way the man towered over him, left them certain that the man was the boy’s paymaster, and he was questioning him about that night’s break-in. Eventually the man nodded at something the boy said, pulled a few bills from his pocket and handed them to the boy, who took the money with a grateful smile and a subservient bow of his head. Then the bearded man nodded to the men in suits and all four of them stood and seemed to be getting ready to close the place up for the night.
Ida and Lewis stood back from the fence and shared a look.
‘Let’s head back around to the front,’ said Ida. ‘Watch ’em leave.’
They made their way towards the front gate, hanging back in the shadows of a building opposite, and after a quarter of an hour the front gate was yanked back noisily, and a gleaming black Type 55 Cadillac purred out into the road. One of the men in suits, and the boy they had followed, sauntered out after the car. The suited man locked the gate shut while the car was idling, and the boy stood by the car. The bearded man, who was in the passenger seat, leaned out of the window and addressed him.
‘See you at the usual time tomorrow, Johnson,’ the man said in a Cajun accent, the syllables sliding into each other in a glissando tinged with French.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the boy, his voice frail and cracked. He touched a finger to his cap then ambled off up the street, vanishing into the darkness. Then the suited man was had locked the gate jumped into the car and it drove off in the opposite direction.
‘What do you reckon the time is?’ Ida asked after they had watched the car disappear over the brow of the road.
‘Dunno,’ replied Lewis. ‘Steeple said two thirty ’bout ten minutes before we got here – must be around three by now.’
They trudged back the way they came, smoking cigarettes and hunching their shoulders against the chill. Ida had been right about the boy visiting the latest crime scene, and he’d led them straight to his taskmaster, the man who was paying him to search the victims’ houses. Finding out the name of the big Cajun in the fox-fur coat was the next step. Her thoughts were interrupted by the screech of a night-owl echoing through the empty street. Ida looked up and shared a look with Lewis – local folklore deemed the sound an omen of a death to come. Then she shrugged, as if to dismiss the superstition, and they returned to their silent trek.
When they reached the center of town, Lewis helped Ida into a cab, before he made his own long journey back to Gretna, and, Ida guessed, another argument with Daisy. She rubbed her eyes and looked about her as the cab drove through the streets. The first fingers of dawn were already stretching out over the horizon. The cab turned south, and with the Mississippi to its side, headed into the roaring fire of sunrise.
15
When he heard the rapping at the front door Michael was at the kitchen table eating breakfast. He had been half-reading the newspaper, half-watching Annette with a fascinated eye as she readied Thomas and Mae for school. He studied her as she knelt in front of their son, trying to tug a coat onto his resisting arms. She stopped when she heard the knock, flashed Michael a wary look, and they slipped into a familiar routine, like firemen at the ringing of a bell.
Under Annette’s watchful gaze, Michael rose from the table and approached the door. He hadn’t told Annette of McPherson’s threat, or of Riley repeating it the night before. He had originally decided no good could come of startling her, but now he questioned his decision. Had McPherson called in the threat already? Michael had been expecting to have at least a few weeks’ grace – enough time to arrange for Annette, Thomas and Mae to leave the state and settle somewhere out of the way.
He padded softly through the living room and when he reached the doorway he turned to look at Annette and the children, and lifted a finger to his lips. His son and daughter mimicked the gesture with grins on their faces, as if playing a game, and Michael smiled back at them before stepping out into the corridor.
Their cover-story was that Annette was his maid; a cowardly pretence he only went along with at her insistence. It was, as she pointed out, the most believable of all the lies they could have told. They had concocted the story at the start of their relationship, just after Michael had returned home from the smallpox ward and Annette had moved in to nurse him. It had worked well enough until their son came along and forced their hand. One look at the children from an ill-disposed cop was enough to have them convicted, but even so, they kept their little routines, and a separate bedroom for show, and left the house clear of family photographs, school certificates and the thousand other trinkets that attest to the life of a family.
There were no wedding photographs to hide. When Annette had first realized she was pregnant, they made a decision to travel to Kansas City – the closest place they knew of where the laws were in their favor. They had spent the long, dusty journey across the endless mid-western plains separated from each other, in segregated cars, on segregated platforms, and eating alone in the partitioned areas of station-side diners. And all the while Annette was coming on with her sickness, dizzy from her condition and the heat.
They made it all the way to Kansas City and found the preacher they had heard about, a man who was sympathetic to Southerners in their situation. They wed in a small out-of-the-way chapel, and began the return journey later the same day. Although their relationship was sanctified, it left them in a legal limbo when they returned to New Orleans, and they waited daily for the knock that might send them both to prison. So after McPherson and Riley had made their threats, Michael was especially riddled with angst as he stood before the front door and cleared his throat.
‘Who is it?’
As he waited for a response, a heavy stillness seemed to stretch time. He heard the wispy sounds of children playing somewhere distant.
‘It’s Kerry, sir,’ said a muffled voice outside.
Michael relaxed and opened the door. Kerry was standing on the front step, his green eyes bright with the morning light.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir. The duty officer sent me. There’s been another murder.’
Half an hour later Michael was standing in a kitchen in Gretna, inspecting the corpses of the latest victims while gagging sounds emanated from the toilet next door. Michael was impressed Kerry had made it all the way to the bathroom before being sick. The victims were another married couple, Edvard and Anna Schneider. No one had been able to figure out what nationality they were just yet, but they sure as hell weren’t Italian, and Schneider wasn’t a grocer, he was a lawyer. The pattern established in the earlier attacks had been well and truly broken.
From what Michael could tell of the remains, the Schneiders were a stocky, middle-aged couple. The wife with pale, freckled skin and hazel hair, the husband with a porcine face and a bristling ginger mustache. They were laid out in the kitchen, the husband slumped against the foot of the sink, the wife in the middle of the room. While the husband had only a single slash wound to the head, the wounds inflicted on the wife were much more grotesque. The killer had placed the woman flat on the floor and had cut chunks from her flesh which he had left in a pile in the sink. Her head had been attacked with such ferocity that it was now no more than a splash of red against the floor.
Most bizarrely of all, the killer had traced lines with his fingertips through the bloody pool surrounding the woman’s body. Revealing the white floor-tiles underneath, the lines had dried and created an effect like a photographic negative or a woodblock print. The lines formed crude drawings of what Michael guessed were straw dolls, nightmarish things with screaming
mouths and crying eyes. They had a frantic quality to them, but also a childishness, a playfulness which made them all the more revolting. Michael wondered if the Axeman had planned to make the drawings, or if the decision was spontaneous, a sudden burst of inspiration when the killer looked down at the fresh pool of blood in front of him. Michael turned away from the bodies, crossed himself and walked out of the kitchen.
He slumped onto a couch in the living room, sighed, and lit a cigarette. He had planned on spending the morning chasing up Riley’s tip. Ermanno Lombardi. Checking for the name in the records, trying to find an address or a KA. Instead he had to deal with yet another killing. He ran his fingers over the scars on his cheeks and looked around the room. The place was close with people – officers were going through the couple’s possessions, the Frenchman was taking photographs, a sergeant was collating the reports that were arriving from the neighbors. The doctor emerged from the kitchen and sat opposite Michael on an armchair. They stared at each other in silence, then the older man shook his head.
‘Probably happened between midnight and two,’ said the doctor. ‘He hit the husband with a single stroke to the head and let him bleed to death – probably took a good while for the man to lose consciousness. Then he did that to the wife. I’m assuming it is the wife, of course, there’s no actual way of identifying her just yet.’ The doctor took a puff on his cigar and sighed. ‘Seems to me he planned it all out. He disables the husband and then forces him to watch while he tortures his wife. The last thing the poor man saw was the butchering of his nearest and dearest.’
A bluecoat entered from the kitchen and handed Michael two tarot cards.
‘We found them by the sink, sir,’ said the bluecoat. Michael thanked the man and inspected the cards – the Magician and the Hanged Man. The Magician card showed a robed figure standing in front of an altar, holding aloft some bizarrely fashioned metal tool. On the altar were swords, daggers and strange symbols. The Hanged Man card depicted a man in a tunic hanging upside down from a crucifix, a chilling smile playing on his lips. They were of the same style and type as the other cards, with a hellish quality that he couldn’t attribute to any of the specific elements – the colors, the lines, the faces of the characters portrayed – but only to all these elements in combination.
The door to the bathroom swung open and Kerry stepped into the room, wiping his hand against his mouth.
‘Feeling better, son?’ Michael asked, looking up from the cards.
‘Not really.’
The boy looked green, paler than he usually did. Michael smiled, motioned for Kerry to sit opposite him on the sofa, and they went over the information they’d gathered from the beat-cops.
Two hours earlier the neighbors in the downstairs apartment had noticed a pool of blood staining the carpet in their living room. Realizing the blood was dripping down through the ormolu of a chandelier, they’d alerted the building’s superintendent, who in turn called the police. The front door was locked from the inside when the officers had first entered, and Schneider’s keys were found in the drawer of a sideboard. Uniformed officers were currently taking statements from all the other tenants in the building and from residents of the neighboring blocks, but as yet no one had reported anything meaningful.
In contravention of the new housing regulations, the building had not been fitted with external fire escapes, so entry or exit from anything other than the front door was impossible. Yet the front door was locked from the inside. The Axeman must have picked the lock shut while he knelt in the building’s corridor – a huge and needless risk. Michael imagined the headlines – Axeman Slays Two in Fourth-floor Apartment, Door Found Locked from the Inside.
‘The killer must have cased the building before entering,’ Michael said, ‘then he must have spent a bit of time gaining entry from the street. Once he was in the apartment building he went up the stairs, and must have spent, what, fifteen minutes or so picking the lock to the Schneiders’ front door? Doing it in complete silence, too, or Schneider would have grabbed the gun we found under his pillow.’
‘He could have knocked on the door and asked himself in on a pretext,’ Kerry suggested.
‘That’s possible, but if Schneider kept a gun under his pillow, I doubt he’d have let a stranger in on a ruse. And none of the neighbors heard a scream.’
Michael lit another cigarette and rubbed his face. It was the shifts in the man’s behavior that made no sense to him. He planned his attacks meticulously, then he killed in a frenzy, then he calmly washed himself down, then he took stupid risks like picking doors shut from the outside.
Michael stood and paced the room, noticing with a grimace that a butcher’s smell from the kitchen was steadily making its way into the living room.
‘The first three attacks were similar – the victims were all Sicilian, all took place in the same neighborhood, and the victims were all grocers and shopkeepers. But this one – it’s in a different part of town, the victim is a lawyer, reasonably well-to-do and—’ Michael paused and scratched his head. ‘Has anyone figured out where they were from yet?’ he asked loudly.
‘The wife was German, sir,’ said one of the officers taking an inventory of the room. ‘We found her naturalization papers.’
‘The husband?’
‘We’re still not sure. One of the neighbors said he might be Dutch.’
Michael sighed and took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Maybe Schneider was the lawyer for the three grocers,’ said Kerry.
Michael smiled, glad the boy had made the suggestion, even if it was an obvious one.
‘I’ve already sent a couple of men to check at his workplace,’ Michael said. ‘We’ll know soon enough. Now, say the Axeman was just attacking people at random, moving neighborhoods would make sense – most of the patrols are taking place in Little Italy now. But, why pick this apartment? In a building complex, four floors up? If he was just choosing people at random, he could have picked an easier mark. He made this so difficult for himself, it implies he’s targeting specific people. Which would make these murders planned, and not the random slayings of a lunatic.’
He put his hands on his hips and thought. The tarot cards, the warning scrawled on the side of the Maggios’ house. Specific victims but exaggerated violence. The only thing he could think of that reconciled it all was retribution, vengeance. But what had the victims done to deserve revenge attacks so savage?
‘Kerry, I want you to run an errand for me. Get back to the precinct and run a search on an Ermanno Lombardi,’ said Michael. ‘And don’t tell anybody you’re doing it, OK?’
‘Sure,’ said Kerry, smiling. He stood and straightened his uniform, then flipped his cap onto his head and exited the apartment.
Michael watched the boy go then crossed over to the windows on the far side of the room. He peered into the street below, and was seized for an instant by a ridiculous fear that he might see Luca standing on the sidewalk four stories down, staring up at him with narrow eyes. But all he saw were the police cars, and the cordon, and a gaggle of reporters scurrying about trying to interview the locals. For a moment he felt a strange kind of warmth, as if being removed from the world below made him untouchable, safe. And then he remembered the two mutilated bodies in the next room.
16
When Lewis looked back on the first six years of his life, the years he spent living with his grandmother in the house on James Alley, his memories were suffused with the glow of security, of feeling wanted and loved. The images of that time which had tumbled down through the years into his adult mind – images of his grandmother washing laundry in the backyard, of the streets in the Battlefield where the house was located, of the stream of relatives and callers that came by for visits – for some reason, all of them had faded in comparison to the images of the sprawling chinaball tree that haunted the backyard of the house on James Alley.
The tree was no taller than the bungalow, but it made its presence felt. In summer, clusters of lilac flowers spe
ckled the tree and released a fragrance that wafted through the garden and permeated the house, scenting the washing Lewis’s grandmother strung out to dry. And in winter the tree’s marble-sized fruits made the garden loud with the calls of the songbirds that flocked there to feast on the sticky yellow orbs that dropped to the ground and formed a slick, tarry carpet. When Lewis had been bad his grandmother made him cut switches from the branches, and when he had been good, he was allowed to climb into its canopy and play. And on the day it all came to an end, it was there that Lewis happened to be, unaware he was about to experience the first great wrenching of his life.
When he heard his grandmother’s call, he noticed her voice sounded a little more strained than it normally did, with a little more weight in the tone. But Lewis was only six years old, and he hadn’t yet grasped the importance of subtleties, so he paid it no heed as he rushed into the house to see what was up.
He trotted into the lounge, and was surprised to see his grandmother perched on the sofa with a haughty, stern-looking woman he had never seen before. Both of them wore grave expressions, and his grandmother asked him to sit. He hauled himself up into an armchair and peered at the two of them. His grandmother, a washerwoman and an emancipated slave, a follower of both Catholicism and voodou, had always taken Lewis everywhere with her, even to the houses of the rich folk she worked for, where Lewis would play hide-and-go-seek with the white children who lived there, while she laundered their parents’ linen. So Lewis thought he knew all her acquaintances, which made the mystery of the inscrutable woman sitting next to her all the deeper.