The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  Lewis stopped to read the banners – ‘Lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours’; ‘Dry or Die’; ‘Beware the first drink’. One of the women approached him, smiled and handed him a leaflet.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Lewis. He tipped his hat at the woman and peered at the leaflet. At the top was a cartoon depicting something called the drunkard’s progress and underneath a list of benefits the Temperance Movement would bring to the country.

  The Eighteenth Amendment had been ratified earlier that year, and it was just a matter of time before prohibition came into effect. Lewis hadn’t really thought about it too much, but he guessed prohibition wouldn’t make much of a difference in New Orleans. The government had already banned the District, but there it was, still going on. He had a feeling the alcohol ban would go the same way, at least in the Big Easy. New Orleans rarely did what the government told it to.

  As much as he hated the harsh realities of being a Negro in New Orleans, something about the city’s disregard for other people’s authority, for the rest of the world, seemed right to him. A well-mannered rebelliousness that chimed with his own personality. He wrapped the note he got from Lulu into the leaflet and put it in his pocket, and he smiled to himself as he pushed past the crowds and headed home. Now all he had to do was think up a ghost story to tell Clarence.

  33

  Kerry stepped out of the precinct with the letter gripped tightly in his hand and his hand thrust firmly into the depths of his pocket. He could have posted the letter via the internal mail, or dropped it in at the post office a block from the precinct, but the letter was important and he thought the act of posting it should be afforded some kind of ceremony. So he decided to go for an evening stroll, up through Storyville and on to the Tango Belt, and mail the letter at the post office there.

  He crossed over the road, dodging the slow-moving early evening traffic, and thought how hard it was for a man with no friends and family to mark a milestone with anything more than the hollowest of rituals. Although he had made one friend in the city, he couldn’t really tell Detective Talbot what he was up to. He couldn’t tell him about his search, about the real reason he had been rooting through the police files when he’d found the old Axeman cases. Kerry had lied to him when they first met, but only because he was a stranger, and now they were close, it was difficult to tell him the truth. But then again, the detective was keeping his own secrets, too. Kerry had heard the rumors, the ones that said Talbot kept a Negro woman at his house, that he had fathered children by her and kept them locked up and out of sight. Some of the men had even hinted the woman was kept locked up, too, that there was a hint of sadism to the affair. Kerry wasn’t sure about that – Detective Talbot wasn’t the kind of man to inflict pain on anyone. He knew that much. Perhaps if all went well, Kerry resolved, he’d let Detective Talbot know.

  He made his way to Storyville. He liked the old red-light district – it had a character and a brashness to it unlike anywhere in Dublin. At an intersection he heard church music, and thinking this incongruous, he followed it to its source – a group of middle-aged women, Salvation Army types, holding a temperance rally. He stopped and watched the group for a while as they sang and shook their banners. Kerry had come to realize that everything in New Orleans was accompanied by music, from rallies to funeral parades to advertising wagons to the hawking of produce on street corners. It was as if the residents weren’t happy unless they were singing some kind of song.

  He watched as one of the women gave a leaflet to a chubby Negro boy in a suit, who smiled and thanked her profusely. Another thumped the Bible in her hand as she lectured to the people rushing up and down the avenues. Kerry rued his luck – he had arrived in America just as alcohol was being made illegal. He shook his head and carried on with his walk, soaking in the atmosphere, knowing it would make him feel less alone. He wondered what he would do with the rest of the evening, once he had posted the letter. He didn’t want to stay up drinking with the night shift again, and he didn’t want to spend the evening lying on his camp-bed, reading in the bad light of the basement. He thought he might go to the picture house and watch a movie, the new Fatty Arbuckle was out.

  Kerry arrived at the post office and made his way to the letterboxes by the building’s marble steps, where a huge stone eagle looked down on the entrance like a guardian. He was surprised to see that a smattering of offices on the upper floors still had their lights on, a mosaic of orange windows glowing across the building’s facade. When he reached the letterboxes he smiled. He took the letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, pressed it flat with the palm of his hand, and after taking a long breath, dropped it through the slot.

  The job was over. Now all he could do was wait. He turned on his heel and strolled through the dark, wet city, heading towards the warmth and anonymity of the picture house. It was still early and as he traversed Canal Street he watched the people coming and going. Smiling couples were making their way to theatres and restaurants, the women in furs and pearls, the men in suits, smoking cigarettes. Others were returning from shopping expeditions, laden with bags. Kerry watched them all with a smile on his lips, as their forms swayed in and out of glaring shop-lights, their feet stepping in black puddles filled with electric neon from the adverts high above.

  34

  Luca relaxed in a dented and tarnished copper bath that Simone kept hidden behind a muslin drape in the corner of the cabin. She’d done a good job of washing his bruises and cleaning him up, applying ointments from the jars on the shelves to disinfect the wounds. She had asked who had beaten him, and when he said he didn’t know and he didn’t care she took the hint and pressed no more. They’d spent the night in her bed, and when they woke in the morning he’d suggested the bath, against her advice, because bruises needed cold water not hot, but Luca had insisted.

  He watched her approach with a heavy saucepan and pour more steaming water into the bath. Then she put the pan down, took her robe off and stepped in, tiptoes breaking the surface. Luca sat up to make room for her and they lay in silence for a while. He looked about the room and noticed the absence of the pots and other vessels she’d scattered about the floor the last time he was there.

  ‘You fixed the roof?’

  ‘For now,’ she replied with a shrug.

  Luca nodded, leaned his head back and watched the steam from the bath rise up to the rafters, where it condensed on the wooden planks and dropped back down to the floor in cold, clean raindrops.

  ‘You mind me asking a question?’ he asked, turning to look at her. She peered at him and shrugged again in response.

  ‘How comes you never married?’

  She didn’t answer right away, taking some time to weigh up her words.

  ‘You know “Pauvre Petite Mam’zelle Zizi”?’ she asked, and Luca shook his head.

  ‘It’s an old Creole song. About the dangers of falling in love.’ She spoke softly, nostalgically, as if the reference to the song was answer enough.

  ‘How comes you’re not married?’ she asked.

  Luca paused. He’d asked himself the question often enough but had yet to form an answer he was entirely sure was right.

  ‘There were girls,’ he said, ‘but never anyone I liked enough.’ The answer was partly true, at least to his own mind. ‘Sometimes I think maybe I’ve left it too late.’ She stared at him, the slightest frown contracting her brow.

  ‘It’s never too late,’ she said flatly, shaking her head. And with that she closed her eyes and the silence resumed. Luca looked down at his naked torso, shimmering beneath the water, a litany of bruises and cuts spread across his stomach and chest. Then he closed his eyes, too, edged himself a little into the warmth of the bath, and together they listened to the muffled sound of the rain outside.

  He left a couple of hours later and didn’t get back to his hotel till well into the afternoon. The attack hadn’t hurt his legs, but the bruises on his abdomen, and what Simone suspected was a fractured rib, made any mov
ement difficult. He spotted the two plainclothes policemen outside the shop across the street and wondered if Sandoval had managed to get the box to him. As he entered, the concierge, an old Sicilian, chubby and lined, whispered to him in Italian.

  ‘Signore. Something was delivered to you last night. I left it under your bed.’

  ‘Thank you, Paolo,’ said Luca.

  The concierge peered at him myopically and nodded towards his face. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Kids,’ said Luca and made his way up the stairs. When he got to his room he eased himself onto the floor and slid the box out from where the concierge had stashed it. It was made of thin metal painted black and had a clasp-lock holding the top shut. Luca prized it open easily enough with a knife and peered through the contents – dusty banknotes and a few legal papers. He took the papers out and examined them – a notary’s letter, drafted by Schneider, confirming a land sale, and a deed of sale itself for the Belle Terre Estate in Lafourche Parish, by a company called Tenebre Holdings. The name was familiar. Luca sifted his memories. His mind wandered through reams of newspaper print, brown letters with paint dripping off them, wooden slats – a crime-scene photograph from Michael’s files. The graffiti scrawled on the back of the Maggios’ house.

  Mrs Tenebre will sit up like Mrs Maggio when I’m through.

  Luca thought for a moment, folded up the notary’s letter and slid it into his back pocket. He put everything else back in the box, wiped it clean of prints, and took it downstairs, telling the concierge to hide it somewhere safe. Then he stepped out into the rain and hailed a cab.

  Fifteen minutes later he was at City Hall, talking to a spinster in the records room. He guarded his tongue, knowing that whatever he said would be relayed to the policemen following him.

  He was directed to the register of companies and, after making sure the spinster had shuffled back to her desk, he looked through the cards in the file system. He found the details for Tenebre Holdings, registered in Orleans Parish in 1888. Its only filed transactions involved the purchase of the Belle Terre Estate, Lafourche Parish. The company was dissolved nine months later by a board of trustees. The sole owner of the company while it operated was a woman named Mrs Maria Tenebre, of Belle Terre, Lafourche Parish.

  He placed the card back in the drawer carefully, making sure it didn’t stand out from the others, and headed back to the spinster at the reception desk. She peered at him over her glasses as he hobbled towards her, a faintly annoyed expression on her face.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said. ‘If I was looking for a land register for a parish outside Orleans, how’d I go about it?’

  She eyed the bruises and cuts on his face, the black eye, her glare dripping with reproach.

  ‘Land registers are kept in two places,’ she answered primly. ‘In the seat of the parish where the land is registered, or at Baton Rouge. Documents in both places are publicly available, although if you’d like to see the Baton Rouge register, you have to make a request in writing beforehand.’

  Luca tapped his fingers against the registrar’s desk and the spinster peered down at the scabs on his knuckles.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am, you been very helpful,’ he said with a smile, flipping his hat on and heading towards the exit. The victims must be linked somehow to Maria Tenebre of Lafourche Parish. Find her, thought Luca, and I’ll find out why they’ve all been killed.

  35

  The Church of the Immaculate Conception was a towering Jesuit folly built in 1857 at the northern end of the business district. It possessed none of the austerity for which its founders were renowned, but was rather an opulent, dizzying building, a tangle of Byzantine mosaics, Moorish domes, Venetian pillars and Gothic arches that soared flamboyantly into the sky. Sitting in the last row of the pews and staring up at the onion-domed altar, Michael got the feeling he wasn’t so much in a church as a vast majestic theatre-set designed to resemble a sorcerer’s lair.

  Michael wasn’t a religious man, but a few years previously Annette had started taking Thomas and Mae to a Baptist church uptown every Sunday morning, and Michael, left alone in the house feeling bored, listless and antsy, had started to fill the time with great walks around the city. One wintry morning he had taken refuge from the inclement weather in a church, and for the first time since he was a child he had sat to the end of the Mass and found he had enjoyed the experience. It didn’t incite any religious feelings in him, but he liked the warmth and the smiles that broke out at the end of the service, and even the sunbeams that shone through the stained-glass windows and bathed the marble floors in glowing pools of colored light.

  At the altar, the priest was finishing the recital of the Agnus Dei and the congregation readied themselves to receive the communion. There was an expectant bustle about the church, which woke Michael up a little. He never bothered to go up to the altar, preferring instead to watch the people shuffle back and forth, the grandmothers, the children, the somber-faced women and crotchety old men.

  Sitting alone in the pews, his mind inevitably drifted to Annette and the children, who were at that moment sitting in different pews, uptown, in a ramshackle church, separated from him by half a city and a skin-color, and perhaps by a God, too. Annette had the good sense to know they didn’t have to keep living a divided life. She had dreams of heading north, to a bigger, more liberal city. She had even mentioned the rumors that circulated about Paris, of black servicemen who had stayed there after the end of the war, seeing a better future for themselves in a foreign country on a distant shore than in the hate-soaked Cotton States.

  The talk of escapes and new homes had been just one of many shadows cast over their relationship, but the idea of actually moving had always seemed unreal to Michael, distant and dreamlike. The publicity and the stress of the last few months, however, was bringing him round to Annette’s way of thinking. He was increasingly feeling that he was reaching the end of something, and the Axeman was involved, forcing his hand.

  The congregation stood for the prayer after communion and, the service concluded, the people sauntered out of the church. Michael made his way past the Alhambra-style columns and arches and out through the Moorish doors onto Baronne Street. He put his hat on and watched the parishioners talking to each other, catching up and exchanging gossip. Annette and the children would be getting home soon. Annette would prepare a hot lunch and they’d sit and enjoy the meal, and afterwards Michael would play with the children or read the paper. And when the children had gone to bed, he and Annette would lie down on the sofa and wrap themselves up in front of the fire.

  He smiled, lit a cigarette and stepped out into the rain. The business district was dead on a Sunday, the roads empty except for the occasional car or tram splashing its way up the street. He walked along Baronne till he reached Common Street and turned right – it wasn’t the most direct route home, but he had to make a stop on the way.

  The previous afternoon Michael had interviewed the Creole who ran the detective agency, but nothing had come of it. The man had stuck to his story – claiming Schneider had come to him for a bodyguard and he had sent him away empty-handed. He was adamant that Schneider never gave a reason for wanting protection, and despite the fact that Michael knew the Creole wasn’t to be trusted, he believed him in that regard. So he had sent him on his way, feeling sorry for him. If things came to a dead end, he’d bring him in again. Press him some more.

  The results from the manhunt had also trickled in over the previous few days and, as Michael had expected, they too had yielded nothing of importance. Of the eighty suspects they had collated from the prison and asylum records, forty had alibis for at least one of the nights in question, a further score were not in good enough physical condition to be the killer, and the remainder could not be found. Michael had thought briefly about allocating more resources to tracking down these men, but he’d quickly come to the conclusion that it was all a fool’s errand. He’d gone through the reports relating to the 1911 murders more t
horoughly, and now he believed that Hatener was right all along – the 1911 killings had nothing to do with the Axeman. The killings had contained none of the savagery, nor the joy in violence, of the current crop. But protocol was protocol, and the lead had to be chased. Now if the press found out about the previous murders, at least he could say they had thoroughly looked into any possible connection. And so the only lead left was the one Rocco had given them, the name of the man who had paid Ermanno Lombardi to drop off a list containing the victims’ names out in the bayou. The name of the man, and the bar he drank in.

  Tito’s was just a couple of blocks north of the church, on the intersection with O’Keefe Avenue. From the outside it looked like it was closed, but Michael pushed on the door just to check, and to his surprise it opened. Inside was a narrow, sleepy saloon, filled by a long, dark wood bar and a row of stools, and a smell of stale beer and tobacco smoke. A blind had been pulled down over the solitary window, severing all connections with the world outside, encasing the place like a tomb. A clutch of silent barflies sat hunched over their drinks, and behind the bar was a barrel-chested Italian in a yellowing vest who seemed a little bored to be there.

  Michael approached the bar and sat. A few of the customers looked his way disinterestedly, then turned their attention back to the drinks in front of them. Michael wondered why they had chosen to spend their Sunday in a deserted, gloomy bar in a deserted, gloomy business district. His mind drifted back to the Creole he had interviewed in the precinct the day before. A man with the same melancholic air as the patrons of the bar, alcohol-broken and watery-eyed.

  The barman swung a cloth over his shoulder and nodded at Michael.