Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree

by Jimmy Fox

  Around a few corners from Nick’s place was Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop; the voodoo queen Marie Laveau II killed a man a block away with a curse; down the street Confederate official Judah Benjamin hid the night he hoofed it for England as the South crumbled; Sieur de Bienville, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, Degas, Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice, and Mr. Bojangles all slept or did something else noteworthy nearby…this and more according to the narration of the mule-carriage drivers who routinely make up such stories at will for their gaping foreign passengers.

  Nick’s Dauphine St. apartment was on the third floor; sometimes he caught fragments of these narratives during the pleasant spring and fall days when the weather and the mosquitoes let him open his windows onto his balcony.

  A gift shop run by two gay guys took up the first floor of the building. Coordinated place settings, European cutlery, minor and suspect antiques, silk flowers, soap, potpourri, scented candles…Nick had no use for their merchandise, but he did enjoy their fabulous complimentary shop hors d’oeuvres, which often served as his meals. For favored customers or neighbors, like Nick, most afternoons they mixed excellent drinks. They were the principals of an unofficial gay neighborhood Carnival krewe; all year they planned their outrageously obscene costumes and parade theme. Nick was told that their Mardi Gras ball at a famous Quarter bar was so wild it took several weeks to get over.

  The second floor, as far as Nick could tell, was abandoned. A few years back, a well-heeled family from Colorado got it into their heads that they wanted a cozy French Quarter hotel. Three gung-ho sons, Freret University alumni, spent millions buying his building and the one behind it, made the second floor below Nick the hotel’s back office, and promptly ran the whole works into the ground. The family still owned the buildings, but seemed content now merely to collect rent and let the former hotel decay as the bankruptcy played out and the Formosan termites munched.

  New Orleans will do that, rob usually sensible folks of their mother wit, anesthetize common sense so thoroughly that even a prude with a good upbringing can fall prey to an overpowering desire to bare body parts from Bourbon Street balconies in broad daylight.

  The former tony-hotel courtyard behind Nick’s building was lushly overgrown, the fountain now quiet. Nick liked the aura of gentle decrepitude.

  His apartment must have been gutted at some point in the past, maybe by the big 1788 fire that destroyed most of the original Quarter. Now there were hardly any interior walls, just eighteenth-century bricks, and beams that looked like pieces of a sailing ship. Topography is not a term often associated with human dwellings, but in this place, the elevation wasn’t the same at any two points on the old oak floor. You could stub a toe standing still. Nick half expected the building to crumble any day like so much stale icing. And if the whole Quarter didn’t collapse under the weight of its own enervation, the Big One would eventually come along and wreck it all in a watery Category 5 apocalypse. Whenever he started worrying about such possibilities, Nick said a few propitiatory words to the spirits of both Marie Laveaus, and carried on, like the Quarter itself.

  Who was Ivanhoe Balzar? Nick wondered, reviewing his notes. He’d polished off a leftover portion of a hero sandwich from his favorite Greek restaurant over by the French Market. Cheap but potent screw-top red wine was aiding him in his ruminations.

  For the sake of argument, he toyed with the theory that the missing middle “a” had been dropped from the name somewhere along the line, either accidentally or deliberately. Linguistic disinheritance. The fact that Ivanhoe was mulatto might explain this–often the case during and after slavery, when even a fractional part of black heritage led to exclusion from society in general–at best. Mulatto, a word derived from the French and Spanish ones for mule, was a badge of shame to those who had to bear it. So it didn’t surprise Nick that Ivanhoe had apparently attempted to pass as white on the census, perhaps to establish for the future some baseline of evidence that he was white.

  Louisiana, then as now, sinned first and asked questions later. There was a great deal of mixing, and a complex hierarchy of race was born. Even today the term “Creole” is hotly debated by whites and blacks who define it to suit their traditions and satisfy their egos. Upper-crust customs only magnified the confusion: light-colored beauties were favored by young white French, Spanish, and American rakes as mistresses. In New Orleans, quadroon balls were big social events, where these beautiful young mulatto women were shown off by their mothers to the rich white men in masks. A few mulattoes attained high social status through such arrangements, and many prominent white men maintained separate families–white and “of color”–when mere forbidden pleasure gave way to genuine love.

  In the census, Ivanhoe stated that he was born in Louisiana, but he said his father was born in France, and his mother in Mississippi. The France part got Nick’s attention. He knew that boundaries had shifted frequently in Europe; this man might have been from that contested area that changed hands so often, Alsace-Lorraine. Not too far from Corban’s German birthplace. Was this Corban’s collateral ancestor, the surviving branch the old man so ardently hoped to find? Was Ivanhoe’s father the Balazar who had emigrated, the individual who would unlock the door to old Corban’s American family?

  Ivanhoe was forty-one in 1880, or so he said; he seemed prosperous. His wife, Mary, was twenty-seven. Their children were Erasmus, 8; Amicus, 5; Victoria, 4, all described as mulattoes. Ivanhoe stated that he was a barber; Mary occupied herself with “keeping house,” the usual description of a woman’s activities at the time. One or both had some education, Nick inferred from the somewhat novel names of the children. There were two others in the house, both black: Eliza Crome, 43, “servant” under the relationship column, performed the duties of “cook”; John Crome, 20, perhaps her son, was also a “servant,” his occupation being “laborer.”

  Nick felt sure this Ivanhoe was a crucial link in the story. Since he now had a different strategy, he would need to recheck earlier censuses for Ivanhoe, fill in the picture of his youth, if possible. That could lead him to the father, who just might be the crucial Balazar individual.

  But what Nick really needed to do was rummage around the local courthouse in search of birth, marriage, and death certificates, suits, wills, and deeds–the usual building blocks of the genealogical edifice. That would require a personal visit. He had severe doubts that his car was up to the drive. He’d probably make better time in Hawty’s chariot!

  It was past midnight, but he had an urge to revisit the early days of Louisiana, in which Natchitoches played a pivotal role. Like a bloodhound, Nick hated to let go of a good scent. Stretched out on his couch, he refreshed his memory regarding the tag-team wrestling match between the French and the Spanish and various Indian tribes before the Louisiana Purchase, until the combination of satisfying food, mediocre wine, and fatigue brought the curtains down on the day’s performance.

  “Coldbread?”

  “Stay where you are, Mr. Herald! I’m warning you!”

  “Put that gun away,” Nick said. “What are you doing in my apartment at–what is it–three in the goddamn morning? You must be crazy.” Nick had stood up, but now decided against making a break for his bedroom and the fire escape.

  The neatly and expensively dressed, pallid, flabby little man stood in the corner of the room that served as Nick’s bad excuse for a study. There was a dangerous look in his visitor’s eyes, a mad glaze; a few sad strands of hair hung over his perpetually indignant face. He had been rooting around in Nick’s papers and books, ineptly and not so subtly. Nick could see he didn’t know much about the small-bore revolver he held unsteadily; he didn’t want to use it, obviously, despite his unconvincing threat.

  “That’s what my father used to tell me: crazy,” said Coldbread, lowering the arm with the gun, as he returned to the old slight that apparently burned in his soul. He sighed deeply. “Oh, this. It’s not loaded. I don’t have the heart for this kind of thing, you know. I am but a humbl
e scholar. My father desired ardently that I should be a lawyer, a diplomat, a statesman, as our family tradition dictates. To move in the circles of great men, to enhance the standing of the family with my Ciceronian declamations from the forum of public service. But then I discovered it!”

  “‘It’?”

  “The treasure! Well, not exactly the treasure itself, but the legend of the treasure, and through the years the irrefutable evidence of its existence.”

  There were few words that could make Nick more skeptical than “irrefutable.”

  Coldbread rambled on, as if Nick were his well-paid shrink: “He cut me off without a dime, but my saintly mother supported me for many years and then restored my inheritance on her death. Now, I have the means to attain my rightful status in history. I will be the Schliemann of New Orleans!”

  “That’s great, Coldbread. I’m happy for you. What’s all this got to do with me?”

  “I found this in the trashcan at the Plutarch.”

  He held up a piece of scratch paper with Nick’s scribblings on it.

  “I’m flattered you think my scrawl important enough to dig for in the trash,” Nick said, vowing to himself to be more careful from now on. Maybe he’d get more sleep. Maybe he’d live longer.

  “You’re looking for a man named Balazar. You know! You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  Coldbread seemed to be weighing his options; he scowled at Nick from below his sparse eyebrows. “Oh, all right! You know that Hiram Balazar fought with Lafitte as an underage volunteer, and that he was one of a handful of men near Pakenham when the latter fell, mortally wounded, screaming like a madman the whereabouts of the gold the British officers had secreted after stealing it from a sinking U.S. gunboat in Lake Borgne.” He was on the verge of sobbing. “I’ve been looking for Balazar for three years, and now you’ve found him first and you’re going to find the treasure and be famous and stinking rich instead of me!” He broke down and staggered over to the couch.

  “No, I haven’t found him, Coldbread,” said Nick, sitting beside him, at the same time wondering why he was comforting a man who had just threatened him with a gun.

  “I don’t even know the given name of my Balazar,” Nick continued. “They might be two entirely different individuals. You were going to shoot me over a mistake? There, that’s all right. Stop crying. Give me that gun. Look, I’m a genealogist, not a treasure hunter. It’s just pure coincidence that my guy may be part of your project. I’ll make a bargain with you: anything I find out I’ll share with you; in return, you share the treasure with me. Half.”

  “Seventy-five, twenty-five.”

  “Half, Coldbread, or no deal.”

  “Oh, if you insist! But I get publication rights.”

  “Agreed,” Nick said, vowing to check his lock from now on.

  Nick didn’t trust him; Coldbread didn’t trust Nick; Nick didn’t believe in the treasure; Coldbread didn’t believe in the coincidence. Their faces told the story. Nick understood all this, but he had to get some sleep.

  They shook on it.

  After Nick had shoved the sniffling, apologetic Coldbread out, he was too tired to go to the trouble of going to bed. He turned out the lights and stretched out on the couch again. Coldbread’s gun poked him in the back. He fished it out of the cushions and tossed it across the dark room.

  The gun discharged with a white flash and a sharp pop. Cursing the little incompetent bastard who couldn’t even be relied on to take his own weapon home with him, Nick found the revolver on the floor, figured out how to unload the other chambers, and then searched for the bullet hole, hoping it hadn’t traveled far enough to injure one his strange neighbors. Good thing it was only a .25 caliber.

  For old time’s sake he kept on a bookcase shelf a casual group photograph of the English department from those happier days; he liked to remember whom he hated, whom he liked. The bullet had shattered the glass, and shot the cigarette right out of the mouth of a younger, thinner, but no-less-smug, Frederick the Usurper.

  7

  It was three days after Nick had hired Hawty Latimer.

  He felt fifty, though he still had a good decade to go. A big cup of Styrofoam-tainted coffee and a sticky baked atrocity from an overpriced Quarter grocery were beginning to revive him as he maneuvered through the narrow, bustling streets. He kept his car in whining second gear and let it steer itself on the short straightaways. He wolfed his breakfast as he could, eyeing the scalding coffee sloshing between his legs, threatening to emasculate him. A juicy lawsuit waiting to happen…maybe, but the personal price was just too high, he decided, now holding the cup away from his vitals.

  He was late, according to Hawty’s new office regime. As if on cue, city crews mangled the streets he needed. Familiar one-ways were now no-ways or other-ways.

  The usual assortment of governmental, financial, and legal types strode down the sidewalks near his building, dollar signs of other people’s money in their eyes. The professional bums from nearby Camp Street had turned out for their cadging forays. A family of lost tourists also wandered about, the sevenish boy no doubt wishing he were back at home tormenting lizards, the mother wheeling a stroller occupied by an infant, the father scanning his guide book vainly searching for his bearings.

  Nick lurched into one of his favorite tow-away zones.

  He unthreateningly approached the lost family and directed them to the Aquarium. The man tried to tip him a couple of dollars. Had Dion been right? Did he actually look that bad off? He almost took the cash.

  As he continued on toward his building, he saw two workmen at the front entrance. They were putting the finishing touches on a concrete ramp. The glowering type, they ignored his questions.

  Inside, there was another young fellow, wearing a carpenter’s belt dangling dozens of tools; he was busy widening the door. And down the hall, Nick saw two other workers giving the freight elevator meaningful looks.

  Must be Hawty’s doing; he recalled their first meeting, and her criticisms on the issue of access for the handicapped. Great! Her first week, and it looked like a coup plotted by a guerrilla city-council urban-renewal subcommittee. He wondered how long it would be before the leasing company decided he was too much trouble and booted him out on the street. Surely no one had looked at his lease lately; the rent was astonishingly low. He tried in vain to remember the name of the man he’d dealt with when he rented the place; he should call him, apologize for all this bother, abase himself, if need be. When guilty, always throw down the pity card.

  He rubbed his aching forehead on the way up the stairs. Must have been that last glass of superb cognac after Coldbread’s revolver had gone off and kept him from sleeping for a few hours. Too jittery.

  With his typical prodigality, he’d splurged a couple of hundred of his recently earned thousand dollars on a shopping spree at Martin’s Wine Cellar. With some of the rest he’d raided the fabulous “junk” shops along Magazine Street. In one, he found a suitcase for fifteen dollars filled with old photographs and letters; in another–for six dollars–he acquired an armload of turn-of-the-century Louisiana “mug books,” collections of biographical sketches and photos, in which one could be included for a fee. What history-altering genealogical secrets hid among this discarded junk? The thrill of discovery would be his, all his!

  Now in his office, it took him only a few seconds to realize that something had changed drastically. The place had become a functioning scene of business.

  Where was the dark, dank, dusty hole he’d grown used to and fond of? Where were the piles of books and papers? He gawked at unfamiliar chairs, desks, tables, filing cabinets, rugs, plants (healthy plants, at that), all bathed in bright light. The air-conditioning seemed actually to be working as designed; it was crisply cool. The crazy girl had brought chaos to his beloved chaos, which meant order.

  “Look what the cat dragged in!” Hawty said cheerily, rounding the corner from the larger room. “I hope you don’t mind
. I did a little redecorating. And cleaning. Those nice men downstairs moved a few things in from some abandoned offices and storerooms. They said no one plans to use this stuff–you know, the building’s almost empty–so we might as well have it. Oh, and I bought a few plants; there was a big sale on campus.”

  Nick hadn’t paid much attention to Hawty’s quiet activities the past few days; he’d been in and out of the office, as usual preoccupied by genealogical quandaries and his own life’s failures. He’d asked her to read several introductory genealogy texts. When he bothered to think about her, she seemed a diligent worker, quite willing to take advice, anxious to stay out of his way until she learned the ropes.

  “What’s with all that construction downstairs?” he asked, hoping it was just chance that less than a week ago he’d hired a dynamic disabled woman, and today the place was becoming a model of progressive accessible architecture that somebody was going to have to pay for.

  “Well, I, um, just made a few phone calls, offered a suggestion or two, cited a handful of my favorite ordinances…”

  Better start packing, he thought, heading for his desk. They would surely be evicted by day’s end.

  Hawty had converted Nick’s desk into a strange place occupied by someone with good work habits. The neatness was intimidating. He made a few halfhearted efforts to restore a comforting messiness.

  “I worked up a report for you, there on your desk…boss.” She smiled broadly as she said the word. “I did find a few Balzars in Natchitoches. And three good places to look for original records: the parish library, Northcentral College, and a private collection at an old plantation.”

  “What about the courthouse?”

  “Well, I don’t have to mention that, do I? Oh, they’ve made the old courthouse a genealogical center and museum. But it’s mostly microfilms and secondary material you can find here in New Orleans. I have the name of a good bed and breakfast. Natchitoches is a four hour drive at least, you know.”