by Ray Celestin
At the time of what came to be known as the Abner affair, Michael was partnered with a more experienced detective called Jeremiah Toby Wilson. The two men had been assigned to transfer a suspect, Reginald Abner, from the precinct to the courthouse and then on to the city jail. Transfers were not generally the work of detectives, but Abner was a special case. He had been arrested the day before on a murder charge, and in an attempt to get his sentence reduced, he had informed the bureau that he was willing to turn over evidence he claimed he had against Carlo Matranga, which could see the man electrocuted. The captain of the bureau at the time, although not completely convinced of Abner’s story, assigned two detectives to babysit the transfer just in case. Michael and Wilson were considered among the most trustworthy of the bureau members, Michael on account of his youth, Wilson on account of his age.
But Wilson didn’t show for work that day, and in his absence Luca was given the job of overseeing the transfer. Michael had heard the stories about Luca, and he knew of the rumors that linked him to the Matrangas. So the fact that the captain had chosen Luca to oversee the transfer made Michael uneasy.
The two of them met in the bureau and headed down the stairs that led into the yard. The yard was a dusty, open space that housed the precinct stables and its wagons, and was surrounded by high brick walls. It was sunny when they entered, the day falling in the sweet spot between the foggy season and the height of summer. The wagon assigned for the transfer was already horsed and waiting for them, standing just in front of the bolted iron gates that led out onto the street. Luca ordered Michael to ride up top with the driver, while he accompanied Abner in the back. One of the stable hands opened the heavy, squealing gates and the driver leashed the horses out onto the street.
They rode without incident for a quarter of an hour, slowly threading their way through the morning traffic. The sun beat down on them, making the wagon’s buckles and running-boards gleam and the horses’ bodies glisten with sweat. As they reached the edge of the business district, where the thoroughfares became a little wider and unencumbered, they were halted by a blockage in the street ahead of them – a market man’s stall had overturned in the road. Vegetables and fruits had spilled along the manure-strewn street, and a crowd of people had formed, some trying to help the owner right the stall, others surreptitiously helping themselves to the produce.
The driver halted the wagon behind another two carriages that had been gridlocked by the blockage and, crossing the reins over his knees, let out a sigh. Among the crowd, Michael heard the wail of a watermelon man. ‘Watermelon! Watermelon! Red to the rind! If you don’t believe me just pull down your blind!’
Then he heard a metallic noise to his side. He turned and peered down at the wagon door. Against all regulations, Luca had gotten out of the back of the wagon and was approaching the blockage, leaving Abner unaccompanied, and, to Michael’s amazement, he had left the door unlocked.
Michael moved to get down off the top of the wagon, but the driver grabbed his shoulder in a strong, farm-hand’s grip.
‘Where you going, son?’ he asked.
‘Going to keep an eye on the prisoner,’ Michael replied.
‘Stay here.’ The driver clamped his hand firmly on Michael’s shoulder.
He should have noticed the driver’s tone – that he was issuing advice not an order, but Michael grimaced, pulled away and jumped off the top of the wagon.
‘Goddamit!’ yelled the driver after him.
Michael was stepping round the side of the wagon when Luca happened to turn his way. Luca froze when he saw Michael, then he sprinted forwards. Michael heard people in the crowd screaming and he saw Luca shouting at him, but he couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Confused, Michael scanned his surroundings – he could see the open door of the carriage, and Luca running towards him, his face fixed in a shriek, and he could feel the uproar in the crowd, and then he saw them dispersing in a wave. Three men, red bandanas over their faces, guns gleaming in their hands, were running through the crowd, knocking people to the ground.
Michael rushed forward to get the door locked before the men reached it, even as they were raising their weapons towards him. But something heavy grabbed him from behind and knocked him to the floor. The men reached the wagon and swung the door back. Michael heard Abner’s horrified screams then the crack of gunshots, shrill and bursting in his ears. The bullets ripped into Abner and the man collapsed onto the carriage floor. The men fired countless rounds into the body, then they turned to make their escape, sprinting through the now emptied road, disappearing round a corner.
The whole episode only took a few seconds, but to Michael it felt like an eternity, a long and silent shadow play he was too shocked to understand. He remembered where he was – pinned to the ground next to the wagon he was supposed to be protecting. The men were gone, but Luca was still holding onto him. Blood from the wagon was dripping out of the door, pooling on the grimy street. The crowd had come out of hiding, raising up a chorus of wails through which Luca hissed into Michael’s ear.
‘You tell them I knocked you over to save your life. You tell them they jimmied the door.’
Michael said nothing, still too shocked to speak.
‘Got it?’
Luca’s breath was hot on his ear and the back of his neck. He could smell cigarettes and the ferrous tang of blood. Michael nodded and Luca got off him. The crowd watched them as they both stood. Luca dusted himself down and went to speak to the driver.
Michael glanced about him, dazed, head spinning. He stared into the wagon, at Abner’s slumped form, half his head sprayed across the interior. The crowd came closer, peering at Michael and the wagon. Michael suddenly felt claustrophobic and he started hyperventilating, feeling like he might fall to the floor again. He put a hand against the side of the wagon and breathed deeply and slow. He peered up and caught the eye of a teenage girl in the crowd.
‘He stopped you,’ she said flatly, nodding towards Luca.
‘I know.’
Later that day, still dazed by what had happened, Michael found himself sitting in a waiting room in the judicial buildings that housed the District Attorney’s offices. A secretary, of the type Michael had only ever read about in magazines, swung her hips into the waiting room and ushered him into a west-facing office that was filled with the glare of the afternoon sun. Three men sat behind a table in front of a long bank of windows, their features dimmed by the blazing light behind them. Michael recognized one of the men instantly – the Deputy Inspector of Police. Another he knew to be an official from the District Attorney’s office, but the third man he had never seen before, and no one took the time to introduce him. Michael got the impression from the man’s dress and the authority he seemed to have over the other two that he was either from the administration in Baton Rouge, or from an agency further north.
Michael took a seat and the official, a bespectacled, birdlike man, asked after his health, if he had suffered any ill effects from the day’s events. Michael answered that it was still too early to tell and the response caused the three men to smile awkwardly. Then the DI cleared his throat and addressed Michael in a fatherly tone, stern but with a little warmth.
‘Son, we read your report and we’re not buying it. Witnesses came forward. We know they didn’t jimmy the door. We know D’Andrea held you back. If you continue protesting that’s what happened we’ll charge you with accessory to murder, along with D’Andrea, and you’ll wind up in Angola with the three animals that actually fired the bullets.’
Michael suddenly noticed a dryness in his throat, a feeling of broken glass when he swallowed. He peered up at the men, but the light blazing in from the windows behind them hurt his eyes, and he had to put his hand up to his head.
‘D’Andrea being put in charge of that transfer wasn’t an accident, son,’ the DI said. ‘We planned it. We gave him enough rope to hang himself and, well, he’s hanged himself. In the most spectacular fashion imaginable.�
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The DI smiled and leaned over the table towards Michael, something silhouetted in his hand. Michael realized he was offering him a cigarette. He took one from the pack and nodded his thanks.
‘We know you’re honest, an exemplary record and so on, that’s why we partnered you with D’Andrea today. We’d like to make you an offer.’
Michael lit the cigarette and took a drag and the smoke felt like rubble in his throat. The glare of the sun was making his head pound, and he was straining his eyes to make out the silhouettes of the three men. He assumed the alignment of the table in front of the window and the afternoon sun was deliberate.
‘We’d all like to see an end to D’Andrea and his cabal,’ the DI continued. ‘We could bring him down on charges for today’s little incident, but that would only sever one of the hydra’s heads. What we’d really like to do is get the lot of them, and to do that we need someone on the inside. That’s the offer we’d like to make to you, son. Gain D’Andrea’s confidence, become a part of his group, document the goings-on, and then we can take down the whole sorry lot of them. So what do you say, son? Would you like to help safeguard the integrity and reputation of the bureau?’
Michael looked about him for an ashtray and he realized that although he had offered him the cigarette, the DI himself wasn’t smoking. He needed a painkiller and a dark room to lie down in. He squinted his eyes against the burning windows. Would they really charge him with accessory to murder for what had happened?
‘I, uh, I don’t know D’Andrea at all, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how I could infiltrate his clique.’
At this the third man leaned forward and smiled at him. ‘That’s perfectly fine,’ he said, his voice unruffled. ‘We’ve already planned that out for you.’
19
The day after Ida and Lewis followed the house-breaker to the docks, Ida attempted to retrace their steps, hoping to find the warehouse the boy had met the Cajun in before the breadcrumb trail of her memories disappeared once and for all. She’d been surprised to learn that the man paying the boy to search the crime scenes was a Cajun. What business did a Cajun furrier have with a group of Italian grocers? If she could find the warehouse, she could find out who owned it and put a name to the face, and she cursed herself for not getting the details the previous night.
In the couple of hours she had managed to sleep, she had dreamed a memory of the night’s events, somehow mixed with a recollection of Sherlock Holmes’s nocturnal search among the docks of London in The Sign of Four, a search which, she remembered with a pang of panic on waking, had proved unsuccessful. She didn’t bother to eat breakfast, instead drinking a glass of milk before making her way down to the docks with a sting in her eyes and a light head from lack of sleep.
She only realized after she arrived that the docks were not a fit place for a person made clumsy by sleep deprivation. Coal barges, freight ships, tugboats and ocean liners jostled for space in the harbor, a forest of sails, masts and funnels swelling on the water. And on the wharves, carts, wagons and people shifted about endlessly. Cranes swung freight from the bowels of ships onto the dockside, building up stacks of cargo boxes that towered into the sky like giant anthills, which were dismantled just as soon by an army of stevedores and loaded onto wagons headed for the train depot.
The workers were Negroes for the most part, roustabouts who couldn’t read or write, so the movement of cargo was arranged by the use of a system of colored flags, hundreds of which, in myriad schemes and colors, fluttered over the cargo areas, ships’ hulls, train wagons and wharves, and lent the docks a festive, jaunty air. The workers were anything but: they were hard, taciturn and weather-beaten men, but on seeing Ida some of them changed their demeanor, declaring undying love for her with grins and elbows in their coworkers’ ribs. Ida ignored them and bumped past knots of businessmen and shipping clerks with inkstained fingers, who were attempting to impose some kind of order on the chaos, and she staggered past bleary-eyed passengers from Liverpool, Lisbon and Le Havre disgorged by the giant transatlantic ocean liners that brooded silently in their berths. She fell in with the flow of people, aimlessly pushed along the wharves, only hearing vaguely the blasts of ships’ whistles, the gull squawks, the crash of machinery, the slap of the yellow river against the banks and the constant work-songs of the men.
At some point she arrived at a jetty where a crowd had gathered in a hushed cluster. They were standing by the edge of some planks that overhung the waters, circled around some activity that Ida couldn’t make out. The atmosphere was solemn and expectant, like the mood outside the newspaper offices when crowds gathered to hear the election results. She stopped to see what was going on, but couldn’t get a good view. She slid through the press to get closer to the center and managed to catch a look at three stevedores, muscled Negroes in dirty shirts and jeans, fishing at something in the water with a pole. Two policemen stood next to them, directing operations with barks and gesticulations. Something had been found entangled in the mooring posts off the jetty and the crowd whispered at what it might be.
After a few minutes, the two larger stevedores took control of the pole they had extended into the waters, and with a back-bending heave they hoisted something onto the jetty. It took Ida a few seconds to realize what it was – the decomposing corpse of a naked young girl. The crowd gasped, and the policemen attempted to form a cordon around their doleful catch. Ida stepped back in shock, casting her gaze as quickly as she could from the girl’s dripping body, from the lifeless green eyes, the blackened nails, the mess of blonde hair.
A taste of vomit rose into her mouth and she lumbered backwards, out of the throng. She raised a hand to her head and only vaguely heard the crowd as it murmured and prayed for the unfortunate soul. Ida stumbled on, trying to get the image out of her head, feeling like she might be sick at any moment. She let herself be taken up again by the movement of the people and she lost track of time. She wasn’t sure how long she drifted among the crowds, but at one point, far from the center of the docks, she realized the crowds had thinned out and she found herself alone on an almost empty wharf, standing in front of a tin-shack café. She wandered in and ordered a tea, a drink she only ever consumed when ill. She sat for a while cradling the steaming cup, taking sips and trying her hardest not to vomit. The café was quiet, and looked out onto the wharf, where some longshoremen were loading sacks of grain onto a wagon. They had set the sacks on a raised platform to stop the wharf-rats – the vagrants who lived under the docks – from running knives between the gaps in the planks of the wharf and siphoning off the contents of the sacks. Ida was close enough to hear the longshoremen’s work-songs and she listened to them singing as she finished her drink.
Got the riverfront blues and I’m blue as can be
That ole Mississippi sure makes a fool outta me . . .
The song had much of the river to it, a soothing sound, lullaby-like, a lilting, back-and-forth rhythm, soft like the tide, or the slap of waves against the docks.
My baby is there when the man gives me my check
But when I looks at the river I feel like cuttin’ my neck
Ida left a nickel on the counter and stepped out onto the wharf. A flock of gulls flew about above her head, excited and arcing around in circles – a sign of bad weather to come. A couple of pan ladies walked past her, vendors of hot pies, sandwiches and candies carried in cloth-covered trays at their waists. The women looked at Ida, then one of them said something to the other, and they laughed. Ida watched them for a moment, then she buttoned up her coat and left the docks, the serenade of the river and its workers softening as she walked.
Up every morning when the clock strikes five
And I don’t know if I’m even comin’ back alive
She made her way along the spider’s web of streets and alleyways that radiated from the ancient wharves like Amsterdam canals, checking for landmarks and paths from the previous night. Eventually, as dusk was approaching, and quite by chance,
she found the warehouse. Circling it, she came to the entrance gate, and next to it a sign listing its owner and occupier – a fur-trading and garment-manufacturing company owned by a man named John Morval. Even in her half-dazed state, she recognized the name, and realized with a sinking feeling that her theories about the killer might well be all wrong, and the answer might not lie in the goings-on of a counterfeiting gang. Morval was the man who owned the garment company Mrs Romano had worked for – the company that had mysteriously paid the Axeman’s victim a monthly allowance after she was blinded at work.
20
Luca walked from Bechet’s house in the 7th Ward to Florida Avenue and caught the streetcar westwards, all the way to the City Park, where he got off and continued the journey on foot, heading north up Bayou St John. Before it fell into disuse, the bayou was the main transportation route between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. Now it collected weeds. As Luca journeyed north along its bank, he noticed that rich people had built picturesque summer houses on the stretches nearest the city, where the grasses and reeds had been cut back to give the bayou a tame, contrived beauty. Further away, the summer houses gave way to the dwellings of poorer families, who had set up homes on the bayou itself, in slipshod, leaky riverboats.
Addresses didn’t mean much out in the bayou, so the paper Bechet had given Luca contained instead a set of directions and a name. Luca journeyed northwards till he was about halfway between the lake and the city before turning west and heading into the maze of paths that snaked through the swamps between the bayou and Metairie. The swamps were a desolate, secluded place, an empty half-world of water and land that had an unsettling effect on Luca. The more he trekked into the mangroves the more eerie he felt the landscape become; twisting tree roots rose up out of the water, snaking around bulrushes, water-lilies, tamaracks and a hundred other plants whose names he didn’t know. Above him willow trees, cypresses and palmettos linked their branches over the pathways, clustering so thickly that Luca felt as if he was journeying through a rabbit hole. This impression was heightened by the Spanish moss that blanketed the trees like teal-colored snow, hanging off branches, smoothing the edges of the world until the landscape lost its sharpness and everything merged into a single bewildering shape, indistinct and otherworldly.