The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  He waved his gun in the air and screamed at people to get out of the way and joined the old-timers in their pursuit. Revelers shrieked and watched in shock as the gang of police pushed them out of the way. They made it to the corner and saw the car at the end of the street – its path blocked by something, the driver honking the horn wildly. The men in the backseat looked behind them. Michael fired shots in the air and bystanders ran for cover. The men in the car leaned out of the windows and fired back but Michael carried on running at them. He shot at the car, releasing every bullet in the gun, praying each one would find its mark. But the bullets clanged into metal, and then the obstacle in front of the car cleared, and it swerved around the corner and sped off into the night.

  Michael carried on chasing it, even though he knew there was no chance of catching up. He continued to run until he suddenly felt jelly-legged and sick. He fell to the ground, his revolver bouncing along the street, and after a moment, he vomited.

  Eventually the old-timers caught up with him and he heard them discussing gunshots, arteries and blood, and in his dazed state he couldn’t catch what they were talking about. But then he looked to his shoulder and saw blood streaming from it and he realized he had been shot. The old-timers lifted him up and walked him back, stumbling past the crowds as they went. They reached the precinct and Michael caught a glimpse of Kerry’s body, still splayed out on the steps. A few of the bluecoats had formed a cordon to hold back the onlookers, and another was laying a blanket over it. He noticed Kerry’s blood dripping down the steps, swept by the rainwater towards a mud-caked gutter.

  PART FIVE

  The Times–Picayune

  Weather

  United States Department of Agriculture, New Orleans, La, 14th May Weather Conditions: New Orleans, La, 13th May, 1919, 9 p.m.

  Unusual weather patterns set to continue

  Possible storm warnings in place

  Pressure and wind conditions over Santo Domingo and the Bahamas indicate the possible presence of a disturbance over the eastern Bahamas. National Weather Bureau Officers have received an evening report from Nassau suggesting any possible storm will landfall in the Florida region. If the direction changes hurricane flags will be raised.

  Forecast

  Louisiana: Wednesday, rain and wind set to continue in the north, possible storm in the south portion: no change in temperature. Thursday, lighter winds, chance of rain in south portion.

  46

  The next morning Ida woke heavy-eyed and hung-over and her mind flashed back to the man who had pursued her, to his stony face, to the look of cold menace in his eyes and the glinting of the weapon concealed beneath his jacket. A spike of agitation ran through her chest, and in its wake, a sickly feeling in the pit of her stomach. It took her a while to get out of bed and summon up the will to try to make something of the day. She had time to kill before she met up with Lewis and Buddy, so she washed and dressed and made her way to the tram stop, looking over her shoulder the whole time.

  She had spoken to Lewis the previous night and he had told her that Buddy had completed his reconnaissance of the house and they had arranged to break into it tonight. But with the events at the cabaret she wondered if it was still a smart move to make, if someone wouldn’t be watching them all the way. That she was no longer conducting her investigation in secret changed so many things, and she wondered how it was that she had been found out. They must have told someone who had told someone else. Leeta? Buddy? Lulu White? Lefebvre?

  It was only when she sat down at the back of the tram, knowing she was on her way without anyone in tow, that she relaxed a little. She noticed someone had left a newspaper on the seat next to her, so she picked it up to keep her mind from brooding. The front page was mainly taken up with an article about the preparations for the previous evening, the newspapers having gone to press long before Axeman Night itself unfolded. There were quotes from the mayor and a police captain on how the city would protect its citizens, and mention was made of the detective in charge of the case, Michael Talbot.

  Ida had never seen the detective, but she had heard Lefebvre talk about him on a few occasions, most recently just a few days before, when he cursed the man’s name after two policemen visited the office, asking Lefebvre to accompany them to the precinct to answer their questions. There were many rumors, most of them concerning a colored woman the detective supposedly kept hidden in his house.

  Eventually the tram reached her stop and she rang the bell, descended and walked to the Louisiana Retreat for the Feeble-Minded, entering the building from the front this time. When she had seen the soup kitchen for veterans two nights previously and understood its connection to the case, she wasn’t sure what she should do with the information. But now that her cover was blown, she had nothing to lose by going straight to the source of the mystery. She made her way up the path to the porch of the main wing and stepped into the reception area.

  She shook the water off her umbrella and approached a desk, where a middle-aged nun sat staring at Ida with a faint smile on her lips.

  ‘Hello, miss,’ said the nun, nodding at Ida’s umbrella. ‘Terrible weather out.’

  ‘It sure is,’ Ida replied with a smile. ‘I’m here to visit Brigadier Kline.’

  The nun eyed her for a moment. ‘What’s the nature of your call, miss?’ she asked, her tone sweet but suspicious.

  ‘I work for John Lefebvre. He’ll understand.’

  The nun peered at her for a moment, her smile strained.

  ‘I’ll see if he’s free,’ she said finally, rising and striding out of the reception area through a swing-door that shuttered loudly after her. Ida peered about her while she waited. It was a simply decorated place, black-and-white tiles checkered the floor, and ferns in bulblike terracotta pots had been placed in the corners. Behind the desk was a portrait of a medieval monk, and underneath it a name plaque, ‘St Vincent de Paul’, the patron saint of the order that ran the sanatorium. Ida stared at the portrait for a moment, at the kindly old Frenchman in a black cassock. She heard a noise and looked up to see the nun returning with a smile on her face. ‘Please fill out the visitors’ register,’ she said, gesturing to a ledger on the desk, ‘and I’ll take you to see the brigadier.’

  Under the curious gaze of the nun, Ida filled out the register in the name of Carmelita Smith. Then she was ushered out of the reception area and down a long, carpeted corridor. They approached a numbered door and the nun rapped her knuckles against it gently.

  ‘Come in,’ called a voice from inside.

  The nun opened the door and gestured for Ida to step in. Ida smiled and entered. The room looked more like a presidential suite than a cell in a psychiatric hospital – spacious and clean, and well-appointed with French-era furniture. A mahogany desk and bookcase stood in one corner, and in another a reception area with a coffee table and button-back armchairs. A great window looked out onto the rain-swept gardens at the rear of the building where Ida had bribed the maid on her previous visit. In front of the window, sitting in a baize chair, with his hands pressed together in front of his chin, was an ancient-looking white man dressed elegantly in a navy-blue lounge suit and burgundy cravat.

  He smiled at Ida with a slight look of puzzlement, and opened an unsteady hand to the chair opposite him. Ida smiled and sat primly where she’d been bidden.

  ‘Brigadier,’ she said.

  ‘Samuel,’ he replied warmly.

  He had the air of a patrician about him, friendly, urbane and statesmanlike – no hint of madness, no glint of evil.

  ‘I’m here to talk about John Morval,’ Ida said flatly, and Kline raised his wispy eyebrows.

  An hour later Ida left the sanatorium, the mystery of the Axeman solved as well as she could have hoped, but she didn’t feel any elation, or a sense of achievement, just a heavy, clawing dread. She caught the tram to the city center and stopped by the Hibernian Bank and Trust Co, where she kept her meager savings, and withdrew almost all of them. Then she wal
ked along Lafayette Street in the rain, looking for a lawyer.

  47

  Luca trudged through the outskirts of the city in the pre-dawn twilight, heading towards the river. An army of stevedores were making their way to work, and he fell in line with them, following the Mississippi as it arced its way south. Even before dawn and with the rain pelting down, the river smelled of heavy industry, of gasoline, turpentine, sewage and smoke. Luca turned westwards as they reached the city center and headed towards the French Market. The traders were already out, setting up their pitches, and he stopped to buy a coffee and a pastry from a cart. He headed to the post office opposite the market’s entrance and used the payphone there to call the hotel. The concierge told him a letter had been left for him that morning and Luca asked him if the police were still outside the hotel. When he was told they were, Luca asked the concierge to open the envelope and read him the letter. He noted down the details then told the concierge to burn it. The message was from a former steward of the Belle Terre estate in reply to Luca’s own letter. The man was willing to talk, but he wanted money.

  Luca hung up and walked to Sandoval’s office, a well-appointed three-room suite in the business district. Sandoval seemed a little preoccupied when Luca arrived, and handed over the money without too many questions. Luca gave him his thanks and headed back out into the streets.

  He stopped by Krauss’s and bought a new set of clothes, asking the shop assistant to throw away the ones he had worn to the store, and five minutes later he was in the Terminal. He lapped the concourse twice over and failed to notice anyone following him, so he went to the ticket counter and bought a return to Lafourche, then made his way through the crowds and boarded the train.

  After a brief wait, the train pulled out and Luca watched the buildings and houses spin past crookedly through the raindrops racing across the windowpane. The train rattled over the river bridge and passed through the outskirts. Just as it was crossing the second bend in the river, he noticed something: workmen on the banks, frantically moving soil and laying down sandbags. The river was overflowing. Not a great deal of spillage, he thought, but if the rain didn’t stop soon it could escalate into a flood. It was the same story when the train reached open country; all along the levees gangs of workmen and farmers were at work, barking orders to each other, fear and anxiety on their faces.

  Luca got off the train at a stop that was nothing more than a rundown station-agent’s hut and a pair of wooden walkways on either side of the tracks. Beyond the stop he saw a clump of buildings and, further on, empty fields all the way to the horizon.

  He reached the plantation after a half-hour’s walk and began to explore, trying to trace a path along the estate’s boundary lines. The estate fields were set aside for sugarcane, field after field sprawled out over lightly undulating hills, and as the sugarcane was on a new ratoon it was low enough for him to get a decent view of everything. After an hour he had circled what he thought was the estate’s perimeter and he had seen nothing unusual. No dope plants, no whiskey stills, no copses or woods or other places where the owners could hide illegal cargo or crops.

  He found a signpost for the estate at the head of a muddy path, and trudged along it. After a few minutes an abandoned antebellum plantation house came into view, a sprawling building at the end of a long avenue of oaks, magnolias and pecan trees. Luca guessed that at some point the gardens surrounding the house had been well-maintained, brimming with camellias and azaleas and other delicate plants that needed an army of workers to tend to them. But any order imposed on the grounds by its keepers had long since broken down under the strain of neglect, and now the gardens looked more like fallow fields, puffed up with wild grasses, bushes and saplings.

  He reached the end of the avenue and stopped to stare up at the house, scanning its broken facade with a rising disquiet. It was three stories high, with a row of white Doric columns across its front, a veranda, balconies on each floor and gabled dormer windows dotted along the roof.

  But it had been left to rot. The windows had been boarded up, and the wooden planks that coated the house had been twisted, broken and battered by storms. Birds had made nests in the eaves and had fouled the walls, and the white paint that had once coated the house was cracked and scarred. In its emptiness and dilapidation, the house gave off a brooding, haunted air.

  Luca stepped through the tangle of bushes, shrubs and vines that grasped at the building, and hopped onto the veranda. As he approached the front door he noticed there was a smell of death about the place, of rotting flesh. He wondered if animals had not entered the ruin somehow, and had found themselves trapped, or if bears brought their kills there to eat them undisturbed. He felt a malevolence emanating from the building as it stood amidst its own decay.

  He peeked through the cracks in the boards that covered one of the windows to the side of the main door. Slivers of a view – an empty, dusty space – and the same scent of putrefying flesh wafting outwards. Two rats scurried about what he assumed to have been a ballroom, sending waves gliding across the pools of rainwater that blanketed the great carpets and the parquet floors. Towering blooms of mold had flowered across the walls, and the gilded friezes that once ran along the upper sections had fallen to the floor, lying at broken angles, glinting in the dirt. At the far end, he could see a grand staircase with its carpet and oak balustrades still intact, spiraling into the darkness above.

  He stepped back from the window, disconcerted by the house and its rotting scent, and the malignancy that seemed to emanate from it. He turned and made his way back across the veranda, returning through the bushes to the avenue. He checked his directions once more, glad to be away from the house, and took a path that veered off to the right.

  After a few minutes’ walk over a small hill and past a dilapidated sugar mill, he reached a large cordwood cabin, set alongside a stream. He approached and saw an old man sitting on the porch, staring out over the rain-swept fields, smoking a cheroot, gently rocking back and forth in a rocking chair. As Luca got closer he saw, next to the man, a side-table piled high with books, an ashtray and a porcelain cup.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ said Luca, taking off his hat. ‘I’m the one who sent you the letter.’

  The old man peered at him and nodded.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t get so many visitors so as not to know who’s who.’ He spoke slowly, taking his time with the words, his voice rich and drawling. ‘You better get in outta that rain, boy,’ he continued. ‘Rosie’ll fix you up with a towel and a change o’ clothes.’

  A woman as old and frail as the man appeared from the door that led into the cabin and smiled warmly.

  ‘Well, look at you. Get inside and we’ll dry you up,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  She led him into a bathroom and fetched him a basin of hot water, a towel and a rough cotton shirt and trousers. He washed in the basin, dried himself and changed into the clothes. He hung his old clothes up to dry and transferred Sandoval’s money to the new shirt.

  When he returned to the porch the old man was still rocking back and forth, staring out across the fields.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘Rosie’s left you a cup of tea on the table there.’

  Luca thanked the man, sat and took a sip of the tea – mint with plenty of molasses. The two men stared out over the fields, watching the rain batter the plants. On the far ridge Luca could see the house he had passed on his way, standing out above the horizon line, silhouetted against the storm clouds.

  ‘Crop’s pretty near ruined,’ said the old man flatly, no hint of pity in his voice. ‘Sugar-cane don’t like waterlogged soils. You farm?’

  Luca shook his head and the old man nodded.

  ‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do now ’cept wait for the rain to stop. I’m Jacob.’ He turned his head to look Luca in the eye.

  ‘Luca. Glad to meet you,’ Luca said, holding out his hand for the old man to shake.

  ‘Italia
n?’ The old man made no movement to take Luca’s hand.

  Luca nodded and the old man eyed him suspiciously.

  ‘Yeah. I thought as much when I saw you walk up the path,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hold it against ya.’

  The old man finally reached out and shook Luca’s hand.

  ‘First things first, I guess,’ he said. ‘No matter how old you get, things like this don’t get any less awkward.’

  Luca smiled and pulled the packet from his shirt pocket. The old man took it, counted the bills and put the envelope in an inside pocket.

  ‘Greatly appreciated,’ he said. He leaned back in the rocking chair and set it off rocking once again. ‘So, what do ya already know?’ he said. ‘And what do ya wanna know?’

  Luca thought for a moment before speaking.

  ‘I know this estate is owned by a holding company, and the owners of that company have been killed off one by one by the Axeman. I know the company got hold of this place back in 1888 by duping a local drunk called Maria Tenebre to act as intermediary and that a few months later they killed her off. I also know the lawyer who arranged it all tried his hardest to keep it a secret, and that you were registered as the estate manager here from 1902 till you retired.’

  Luca stared at the old man, who stared back at him hawkishly for a moment before replying.

  ‘If that’s all you know, son,’ he said, ‘then you don’t know the half of it.’

  The old man smiled, stopped the rocking chair and leaned over to the table. He took a cheroot from a tin tobacco box and put it in his mouth, running it around his lips for a moment. He offered one to Luca, who accepted, then they lit up and the old man settled back into his rocking chair.