The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  But just as quickly as it came, it was gone. And he suddenly felt fearful. He’d forgotten where he was. What had he been playing? He heard Baby roll out another half-bar fill, signaling the end of his solo and a crash into another chorus. He felt it was too early for sixteen bars to be up, and a sinking, dreadful feeling came over him. He opened his eyes to see what was happening.

  The sound of the cabaret came flooding back first – people were screaming, grins on their faces, others were staring at him open-mouthed. He turned to look at Fate and Fate gazed back at him with something he guessed was pride. The noise of the crowd morphed into shouts for an encore and Lewis felt warm relief run through him and then a boundless joy. They wanted to hear it again, but he couldn’t remember what he’d played. He looked over to Ida, who was beaming at him from the edge of the dance floor. Fate gave Baby a nod and at the next spot Baby hit another roll. Lewis closed his eyes again and dived back into the dark and beautiful light.

  The second solo was played to a stop-time chorus, with long gaps between the band’s thumping chords, gaps that allowed Lewis to show his dexterity, leaping over the silences gleefully, with mercurial, acrobatic vaults. His phrases became ever longer, rising upwards through a spiral of arpeggios, before holding a long high B for four whole bars, his tone perfect, clear and pure. And then he descended from it, like a dove from heaven.

  A roar went up and Ida turned to look at the crowd – Lewis had them spellbound. An eighteen-year-old who didn’t even own his own instrument, speaking a language so elegant and natural that some unconscious part of them understood it and responded with an equally beautiful joy. Ida grinned and made her way to the bar for another drink. She squeezed through the crowds, feeling none of the nervousness she normally felt in these situations. No men were approaching her or staring at her in the clawing way they normally did. There was no sexual element to the party, all anyone was concerned with was drinking and dancing and getting high. The pursuit of a liaison would have drawn them away from the fun they were having, from the beautiful now.

  The crowd at the bar was five deep, and as she waited Ida checked the state of her dress, a pink muslin one-shoulder trimmed with gold beads. She brushed some lint from it and as she moved closer to the front she looked up and noticed two women on the far side of the room, a few years older than her, with bob haircuts, clingy dresses and waifish, porcelain looks. One of the women whispered to the other and the two of them laughed, and for an instant Ida felt lonely and wished she had a friend to share the evening with. The man in front of her moved away with his drinks and Ida approached the bar and ordered a whiskey and ice. She turned again to look at the two women, but could no longer see them; standing there now was a tall man in a black pinstripe suit. The man had a stillness to him, a blank expression and upright posture that didn’t fit with the atmosphere of the place, and he was staring at Ida in a fixed, displaced sort of way that left her feeling unsettled. She turned her gaze back to the bar, wondering if she knew him from somewhere.

  The barman placed her drink on the bar and Ida paid and squeezed back out through the crowd to her spot at the edge of the dance floor. When she turned back around to watch the band, she noticed the man had begun to move through the throng towards her. Ida felt a stab of panic, and with Leeta’s murder fresh in her mind, she wondered if the man posed a threat or if it was just her agitation sparking paranoia.

  As she watched him make his way across the room, he brushed past a dancing couple and his jacket was briefly pushed back by the contact, allowing Ida to see something glinting in the darkness by his shirt. A knife? A gun? She felt another stab of panic and wondered what she should do. The man was getting closer. The people were packed so close he could slip a knife through her ribs and no one would even notice. She could run to the washrooms and hide in the stalls, but maybe he would come in and find her and then she’d be trapped. She’d be safer on the street, where she could run, and people could hear her scream and cops were more likely to be milling about. She made her way to the exit, pushing past people as quickly as she could, causing some of the dancers to turn her way and scowl. She looked behind her. The man had changed direction and was heading her way.

  She sped up and reached the edge of the throng, the space by the cloakroom and the front door, and just as she was stepping out, a hand grabbed her elbow and a chill ran down her spine.

  ‘Leaving so soon?’

  She turned to see the waifish woman she had seen at the bar with their friend. Ida breathed a sigh of relief before looking over her shoulder at the man in the black suit. He saw Ida was engaged in a conversation and he stopped abruptly, turning sideways as if he were inspecting something on the opposite side of the room. Ida turned back to the woman, who was still smiling at her, her face delicate, her eyes reflecting the glow of the rainbow-colored lights above them.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to go,’ Ida said, after staring at the woman for a moment. Then she turned and darted out of the cabaret. When she burst onto the packed street she saw that it was just as busy as the cabaret, cloying with drunk stumblers, people dancing and couples hanging onto each other for support. She made her way up the road, pushing past the hordes, and she turned to see the man run through the cabaret doors and try and find her in the crowd. He saw her and they locked eyes.

  Ida dashed down the street, bumping into people, looking behind her every few seconds to see the man getting closer, slamming people out of his way. She jumped off the banquette and onto the road where there were fewer people to impede her flight. The man caught up with her and grabbed at her just as she was turning a corner. She pulled away and a car swung into the road, blaring its horn, and she leapt onto the other side of the road. The man stopped in his tracks, the car between them, and for an instant they stared at each other. Then, quick on the car’s tail, a group of policemen ran down the street.

  ‘Officer!’ shouted Ida, and one of the cops peeled off from the pack to stop in front of her, breathing heavily from whatever chase he had been involved in. Ida smiled at the policeman and turned to look at the man in the black suit. He had turned away from her and was striding down the street in the opposite direction. Ida returned her gaze to the policeman.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I mistook you for somebody else.’

  The policeman scowled at her and ran off up the street to rejoin his colleagues, and Ida, her heart still pumping, ran to the nearest taxi stand. She caught a cab home, checking behind her constantly to make sure no one had followed her, but even when she got inside her house she didn’t feel entirely safe. Despite double-locking the doors and checking the windows a hundred times, she was unable to sleep until the early hours, lying in her bed anxious and awake. In the darkness she could hear jazz music sounding faintly from somewhere nearby, jumpy and taut, shadowing her thoughts as she wondered who it was that had sent the man to kill her.

  44

  Riley had spent the evening bar-hopping with his old university friends – men who had become rich and influential over the years Riley had been stagnating at the Picayune. They had gone from cabaret to cabaret in their convoy of chauffeur-driven carriages, had sat at the best tables, drinking champagne, smoking cigars, laughing boisterously, full of joy for lives that had done them so well. They all agreed it was the best night in the history of the city, and as for the jazz they were being exposed to, well, there might just be something in this jig music after all. So they raised their glasses numerous times and toasted the Axeman for laying on such a fine spread.

  It had reached the point in the evening, at their fourth cabaret, when Riley could no longer keep up with their spending. They noticed his awkwardness, and aware of his situation, had started buying him drinks, and telling him in slurry, patronizing voices, not to worry about it. But their camaraderie only made him feel worse, and as the evening progressed he increasingly withdrew into himself.

  One of the men suggested that, as they were free from their wives for the night, they should move on to a
bordello and really live it up. The others agreed with raucous cheers, and they asked for the bill, tossed money onto the table like confetti, and stumbled through the crowds towards the cabaret’s exit. Riley’s heart was sinking – a night in the type of bordellos they frequented would set him back a week’s wages. On top of that he was feeling his nightly nausea. He could have stayed with them – he had his little brass pipe in his pocket, along with his emergency supply of resin in a tiny lacquer box. But somehow he craved the peace of the laundry, the anonymity.

  They stumbled out onto the street, five middle-aged men in tuxedos, their faces red from liquor. The scene outside was chaotic; bodies packed the streets, swaying through the rain, the atmosphere heavy with alcohol and abandon.

  The fresh air hit Riley’s wine-warmed head and he suddenly felt woozy and ill. His friends were stumbling about, waving at their chauffeurs, shouting at them through the crowds. He approached them and told them he was going to call it a night, and his friends’ boisterousness dimmed. They grew quiet and frowned at him, and then they asked him questions and he made weak excuses, explaining he wasn’t really feeling up to it. With sad regrets they said their goodbyes and Riley made his way up the street in a mood of self-loathing. He had turned his back on his friends, he had turned his back on the greatest party the city had ever known, to go and sit alone on the floor of a joyless laundry on Elysian Fields Avenue.

  As he made his way out of the Tango Belt, along the roads that led north, the crowds and noise thinned out, until Riley was left completely on his own. He could no longer see any bright lights and revelers, but he could still hear the music, faint and thin, seeping through the streets. There weren’t any cabarets nearby, and Riley wondered from where the city conjured its music.

  Lost in the traffic of his thoughts he didn’t notice the two men in flat-caps stalking along in the shadows behind him. As he reached the river, one of the two men dropped a club from the sleeve of his coat into his hand, and the other checked again the rope that was coiled in the bag slung over his shoulder. Riley had reached the bend on North Peters Street, halfway between Elysian Fields and the dark, nourishing water of the Mississippi, when the two men approached, and asked him the time.

  45

  Carnival sounds drifted in from the street, through the precinct’s open windows and up to the detective bureau, where Michael lay slumped over his paperwork, sleeping fitfully. The street noises seeped into his dreams, mingling into an eye-fluttering nightmare – a walk through a hellish recreation of New Orleans. It was night and the streets were packed as if for Mardi Gras, but the faces of the people were distorted and grotesque, fixed in sneers or narrow-eyed smiles. He saw angels and devils roaming among the crowds, voodou doctors in top hats, Negroes with faces painted white, and whites in minstrel clothes. A skeletal Creole stirred a cauldron over a street-corner fire and Michael stopped to look inside it; a stew of severed limbs and the faces of people from his childhood who had long since died.

  He stumbled on, passing buildings that were on fire, their wrought-iron balconies glowing white-hot, floating like arabesques in the night sky. In other places, hurricanes blew down streets and swept grinning couples up into the air. All through the chaos, people laughed and drank moonshine, or stumbled into embraces, their clothes tearing as they fell, their eyes flaming red. Others linked arms with the demons and danced to the sounds of brass bands playing outlandish nocturnes in a dark land beyond the city limits. The music got louder and louder, began to ring insistently, unstoppingly, in a pain-making dull tattoo.

  Michael woke and rubbed his eyes. The bureau floor blurred into his vision, the overhead lights burning. He lifted the phone off its cradle, more to stop the ringing than anything else. Two o’clock and all was clear in the 7th Precinct – no sightings, no attacks, just arrests for drunk-and-disorderly and other misdemeanors. A minute later another call came through – the 4th Precinct, also reporting the two o’clock all-clear. Within ten minutes all twelve precincts had called. Nothing. If the Axeman had struck at 12.15 like he’d said, either they would have found out by now, or it wouldn’t be discovered till morning.

  Michael rubbed his eyes again and scanned the floor. Kerry lay asleep in his chair on the other side of the desk. Michael decided to stay another couple of hours then call it a night. He was getting cabin fever from being cooped up in the building so long. That morning, as the rest of the men were being assigned their duties, Captain McPherson had informed him that he would be staying in the precinct that night. ‘We want you in the HQ, to coordinate things,’ he had said, matter-of-fact. ‘Central, so you can get anywhere quick if the Axeman does strike.’

  In his attempt to assure Michael that the decision wasn’t a snub, he confirmed the opposite – that Michael was being taken off the streets on the most important day in the history of the department. Dismissed from his own case for the night, for God knew what reason. Michael had stared at the old man incredulously, but he hadn’t gotten angry, he had nodded and gone on his way. He was coming to the end of things, and the knowledge of that made him calmer than he would have been otherwise.

  Earlier that day Amanzo had been up in front of a judge and had made bail. Michael had assigned two men to trail him, and had brought in his alibis for the night of Lombardi’s murder: a fellow bouncer, the manager of the club, and two girls from the chorus line. All of them had backed up his story. The men had searched Amanzo’s apartment and found nothing. Michael’s only hope now lay in Amanzo slipping up, and the two men on his tail catching him out. Either that or someone above Amanzo bungling an attempt on his life. What was more likely, however, was that Amanzo would skip town, Michael’s only remaining lead disappearing into the unknowable vast interior of the country.

  Michael trudged over to the window and gazed down into the street below. It was still engulfed by the festivities, packed with people, drunk, stumbling, their evening dress drenched in rain. The precinct wasn’t even on the main drag – it must have been even worse up in the center of the Tango Belt. He wondered how Annette and the kids were doing, then he went over to the water-cooler and filled a couple of paper cups. He went back to Kerry and nudged him awake. The boy peered at him with bleary eyes, his hair flattened on one side.

  ‘Some water, son,’ said Michael. ‘I’m just gonna go outside for some fresh air.’

  ‘I’ll come, too,’ said Kerry, his voice groggy.

  They drank the water and headed outside, trotting through the lobby and out onto the precinct steps. Michael lit a cigarette and yawned, the iron-clad humidity of the night sapping his energy. He put his hands on his hips and stared out at the revelers swaying their way down the streets. It wasn’t dissimilar to the abandon and debauchery of his dream. He even noticed some ‘baby dolls’ in among the crowd, uptown Negro prostitutes who dressed for parades in revealing lace baby costumes. A well-dressed drunk couple stumbled their way up the street and bumped into the baby dolls, who tutted and scowled until the man smiled and offered the girls a drink from the champagne bottle he had in his hand.

  Further up the block, a blue Paterson touring car started up and made its way slowly down the street, the revelers parting around it like a stream. The car passed the precinct and stopped a few yards further down, the mass of people blocking it from view. Kerry yawned, then Michael noticed men jumping out of the car, something flashing in their hands. They pulled dark tubes from their jackets and swung them towards the precinct.

  Michael shouted at Kerry and gunshots exploded with ear-piercing snaps. The steps around them began cracking as the bullets hit, fragments of stone flying upwards as if drawn to the sky. Michael grabbed Kerry by the collar and they dashed for the cover of the squat stone wall that ran along the side of the building. They fell to the ground behind the wall as volley after volley rained down around them. The stone came alive as it splintered under the hail of bullets. The noise of the metal slugs smacking into the granite sent shrill, deafening noises ringing into Michael’s ears, and
the world became silent. He watched as puffs of stone dust bloomed noiselessly in the air after each bullet hit the scorch-marked steps. And then a sound filled the silent void in his head, the music from his dream, the deathly serenade of the brass bands.

  He looked up – the car was surrounded by faceless men, each one with a shotgun, orange blooms flickering through the rain, gun-flashes tracing a silhouette around the dark mass of the car. He saw bystanders screaming and running for safety, the well-dressed couple cowering in the doorway of a store.

  He wasn’t sure how long it lasted or when the flashes stopped, but he remembered hearing ringing in his ears, then shouting. Then the sound of car wheels screeching. He opened his eyes and scanned the road in front of him – the car was heading off down the street, blaring its horn. He stood to chase after it but nearly fell to the ground, the steps below him rolling and pitching. He put his hand against the wall to steady himself and that’s when he saw Kerry, lying in a pool of blood, limbs twisted at unnatural angles like a ragdoll tossed aside.

  Michael stared at him, then knelt and tried to lift him up, but as he did so, blood gushed from the boy’s mouth. Kerry tried to breathe but his windpipe was clogged, scraps of metal burning into his lungs. He stared at Michael with a pathetic look of fear and shock, and then his eyes turned milky and blank and Michael felt the breath leave the boy’s body in a spasm that shook them both.

  Michael felt dizzy and sick, and Kerry’s body suddenly became heavy in his hands. He had the sense of a pain in his arms, both immediate and distant, and he laid the body down and breathed deeply for a few seconds. He noticed some of the old-timers from the precinct busy about him, some putting hands on his shoulders, others rushing off down the street. He stared at Kerry’s face again – at the scared, pale expression and the rainwater collecting in his forest-green eyes. He reached over and closed the boy’s eyelids, and as he did so a wild, violent anger filled him, making the dizziness, confusion and pain disappear. He stood up shakily, glared at the crowd that was gathering around them, and tore off down the street.