Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree

by Jimmy Fox

  “Better find me the nearest cheap motel, instead.” What the hell, Nick thought. The old guy would foot the bill; he could afford it. Probably keeps a fortune hidden in his mattress. And then there was Coldbread’s treasure, and Nick’s share of it. Hah!

  “Belay that last order,” he said. “Make it a quaint B&B.”

  Feeling like a big-shot CEO, he looked over Hawty’s report. No extraneous information, just the facts, in outline form. Commendable.

  “One of these current Balzar addresses is near the one in the 1880 census,” Nick said. “Next door, or part of the original house, maybe. Wonder if there’s anything left of old Ivanhoe’s stuff there.” He envisioned trunks of undiscovered material. This Balzar lead looked promising; he’d checked all other parishes, and this was the closest he could come to the surname Balazar.

  Hawty was rolling around the office again, zealously attacking the organizational laxity that had resisted her previous efforts.

  “No!” Nick shouted. She was about to trash some disintegrating pages. “Don’t throw anything away!”

  “These aren’t even yours. They’re from someone who rented here in the forties, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Here’s your first lesson in real-life genealogy. The impossible gap, the worst thing a genealogist can confront: that missing bridge to the past that no amount of research is going to repair. Someone, deliberately or inadvertently–or some force of nature, maybe–has destroyed that bridge. And now there’s no getting across. The impossible gap is worse than simply a temporary obstacle, Hawty. It’s more than not knowing where to search next: it’s the awful certainty that there is nowhere left to search.”

  “Yeah, but–”

  “Once you cut that vital and delicate string to the past, it’s gone. Gone forever. Then the revisionists triumph, the victors write history. The link to the past can be as mundane as an engraved button or stray piece of silverware, as bulky as that stack you have in your hand at this moment. The testimony of insignificant artifacts has shaped our conception of human existence. A fragment of a scroll, a shard of pottery, a chip of inscribed clay in a river. Destroy them, you destroy part of someone’s life, part of a culture, part of history.”

  “What are you on, boss?”

  “Please, just don’t throw anything away, Hawty. Okay?”

  Nick began to read a fascinating new book on Czech immigration to Louisiana, sent to him by a genealogical publishing company. That was one of the great things about being a so-called expert: lots of people sent him free books, hoping for a positive, quotable comment. Too bad they didn’t also send a small donation to brighten his opinion!

  Finishing up the book a couple of hours later, he stretched and looked around. Hawty was gone. He remembered mumbling affirmatively about making reservations for the coming Monday in Natchitoches. He noticed a confirming fax on his desk from Cane Pointe Bed and Breakfast.

  Time for a jog. Usually, he drove over to Audubon Park, across from the hulking neo-Romanesque buildings that occupy the St. Charles boundary of Freret University.

  He went into the bathroom, where he normally kept a running outfit behind the door. The outfit had disappeared. He removed a note stuck on the door. From Hawty: “Washed your nasty old stuff. Drying outside, first window opposite.”

  He slid up the stubborn window to retrieve his shorts, shirt, socks, and sweatband (she’d apparently disposed of his jock strap), all of which were clipped ingeniously with paper clips to a picture wire. Down below, Nick noticed a woman chatting with the two guys who’d made the ramp. The workmen had been painting yellow and blue here and there on the railing and concrete, and hanging signs with the familiar wheelchair icon.

  The woman, power-dressed in a lightweight black tailored suit, looked so stylish that she would have drawn admiring stares on the streets of Paris or Rome. Her handbag was quilted black leather with a gold-chain strap. The whole getup was obviously expensive, and to Nick it whispered Chanel.

  The workmen listened to her every word and seemed eager to please in their responses–in contrast to the gruff brush-off Nick had gotten from them.

  The woman’s platinum hair spoke of artful efforts to disguise the full effects of her sixty-or-so years. When she looked up at Nick staring down at her, he saw a wide angular face with understated makeup, striking narrow chevrons for eyebrows, and a long horizontal zipper of a mouth. Her lipstick was blood red. Four or more decades back she might have been a model of stunning beauty or a silver-screen femme fatale in the Lauren Bacall-Joan Crawford mold.

  Face was character, Nick had always believed; read properly, faces don’t lie. And this one scared the daylights out of him.

  He instinctively shrank from the woman’s penetrating gaze, even though four floors separated them. Slowly he began to move back inside, hoping she’d somehow missed him. That mouth! What internal fear, grief, or hate kept it that shape, like a Ziploc fault line in hell’s outer shell? What poor slob had she eaten sliced up on her cereal that morning? A face like that sent Nick disconcerting vibes of cabals in ancient castles deciding the future of millions of serfs and soldiers–and he was no soldier.

  Just when he thought he was getting a little carried away by his gothic imaginings, she addressed him.

  “Mr. Herald?” she called out. “You are Mr. Herald, are you not?”

  Caught. He poked his head out again. Sheepishly he answered, “Yes, that’s right. What can I do for you?”

  “Invite me up. I’m here particularly to see you.”

  “Natalie Armiger,” she said, extending a meticulously manicured, tastefully bejeweled hand. She sat down, draping one stockinged knee elegantly over the other. Nick, suddenly feeling out of place in his own office, sat in his chair behind his desk.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” she said. “I am engaging you to commit a crime.”

  “Hey, lady…uh, Mrs. Armiger, you’ve got the wrong office, maybe. I’m a genealogist. I do things like pedigree charts, family trees, inheritance traces, applications for lineage societies–”

  “I know who you are. And what you’ve done. I have come to the right place, I am sure. My company is Artemis Holdings. I own this building.”

  Sweat broke out on Nick’s forehead. She was here to draw-and-quarter him about Hawty’s architectural activism. Had to be. But what was this “crime” stuff? Artemis, Armiger…they had a familiar ring. Yes, of course. Una had spoken of Artemis the other day, at the Folio.

  Artemis of Greek lore protected innocence and punished hubris. Mrs. Armiger’s darker incarnation of the mythological huntress seemed distinctly short in the empathy and justice departments. Nick suspected that this Artemis was wholly concerned with making the powerful even more powerful. He didn’t want to find out what it did to people like him.

  “Oh, have no concern about your employee’s persistence in requesting the alterations to the structure. Hawty Latimer,” she said, referring to a small notepad in a plush-looking leather case. “I admire that young woman. We share a certain intellectual impatience. In fact, I offered her a position with my company. She turned me down; she was concerned the full-time job, flexible and lucrative as it was, would interfere with her schooling, and with her work for you. Admirable.

  “These things–cosmetic, really–should have been done long ago by the former owners. We acquired the building only recently. Many such details have been on my list. I find that in business, as in life, the simple things, the easily solved minor problems, are often put off until circumstances demand action. What one must always keep in the forefront is survival.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Nick said, carefully noncommittal. At the moment, Nick was interested in his own survival. He knew he wasn’t exhibiting an exceptional amount of Hemingway’s grace under pressure. When the bull charged, Nick preferred to be behind the protective fence. Ernest would have thrown his drink on him in disgust. This woman intimidated the daylights out of him.

  “You a
re currently employed by a man named Maximilian Corban. You are investigating the history and possible descendants of a man named Balazar. Max Corban is a liar. This is not his family. It is mine.”

  “What? Sorry, you lost me. Are you two related?”

  “Not remotely.”

  “Why would Max pay me to do genealogical research on a family that isn’t even his own?” Though he wasn’t sure he believed her, her words seemed to explain that pebble of doubt he’d had in his boot about Corban. “And how do you know what I’m doing for him, anyway? That’s confidential.”

  “A few innocent questions at the public library and the Plutarch. You see, I have been conducting my own research. I’ll take up the story where I believe he left off. He was indeed unfortunate enough to be a victim of the Nazis. That much is true. I have heard his story, and I sympathize deeply with him. He has even told you the truth up to the time of his arrival and subsequent moderate success here in New Orleans. But in 1987, his story begins to involve me, and my family.”

  There was that ominous tone again under the words “my family.”

  “One of the many divisions of Artemis Holdings is an investment group. We have a public brokerage and advisory service, but we do more work with private clients of considerable means who seek specialized investment services. We have just opened, as a matter of fact, a new mutual fund managed by my daughter, that specializes in what is known today as ‘socially conscious’ companies.”

  She gave what Nick supposed was, for her, a chuckle.

  “A fad of political correctness married to the age-old blind altruism of youth. But the demand among my daughter’s generation seems to be there. I venture to say they will one day realize that money and conscience cannot coexist in the same boardroom. Inevitably, when there is a choice to be made, it will be conscience that yields. My daughter seems to believe the pious claims of company officers…forgive me this little digression. I am proud of my daughter, even though she has much to learn.

  “Now, Max Corban. I’ll refrain from going into the details of his complaints. I can see you are not at home discussing financial matters of these kinds.”

  Right she was. Nick was usually searching for spare change between the cushions of his couch, not pondering interest rates and the Dow.

  “Artemis was found blameless by the appropriate regulatory entities. So, I will simply say that Mr. Corban, like many investors, suffered severe paper losses in the crash of ’87. Unnerving, yes; irreversible, no. He had consistently chosen the riskiest portfolio allocation. His downfall was primarily his own doing.

  “But Max–I call him that, because at one time we were on cordial terms–Max would not listen to me and my staff. He blamed us, and sold. As you may know, the markets enjoyed substantial subsequent gains, with intermittent losses.”

  “Of course,” Nick said. “Who doesn’t?”

  She got his sarcasm. A shadow of amusement. “In fact, we did very well in 1990, considering the extent of that pullback; we had learned a great deal from ’87. I believe that Max could have recouped all his losses and made a handsome profit in a very short time, if he had listened to us. A historic bull market appears to be taking shape even as we speak.

  “My opinion, however, is not what Max wants now. He wants revenge. He is a sick, paranoid man, bent on destroying me. You are helping him do that. He intends to blackmail me with certain information about this ancestor of mine, this Balazar. Specifically, that he was born into the Jewish faith.”

  “Why don’t you file a complaint for harassment or something, take him to court? I’m sure it’s not for lack of lawyers at your beck and call,” Nick said.

  Natalie Armiger waved a hand in the air dismissively. She could have been shooing away a pesky insect. Nick sensed that the mosquito had become a hornet.

  “Max would like that, I’m certain. No. Such steps would not bring to this dilemma the thoroughness, expertise, and–as you mentioned–confidentiality I expect from you.”

  It sounded more like a warning than a tribute.

  “What do you need me for? You already know more about this ancestor than I do,” Nick said. “Knock yourself out, prove whatever it is you’re trying to prove.”

  She smiled faintly, a master chess player watching her opponent make a stupid move.

  “In my case, knowledge is not enough. What I do know is this: my ancestor came to this country, he prospered, he sired heirs, he made more powerful friends than he made enemies, he died. Not such a remarkable story, in this land of opportunity, even for a Jew, saddled with the ancient animus that alleges collective guilt for the Roman crucifixion of Christ.”

  With supreme poise she leaned slightly toward him, as if ready to reveal the secret algorithms of her hedge fund: “Earthly greed and jealousy, economic and doctrinal, of course, have always been the real driving forces behind anti-Semitism. A power game of vested interests, though the common man sees it as a conflict between good and evil played out on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And we know who the eternal fall guy is, straight from central casting: the Jew, who can never be fully accepted or trusted. That is the blockbuster script, written nineteen centuries ago. A comforting theology, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah, if you’re Christian.” Armiger’s a bit of a heretic, Nick was thinking.

  He still smarted from the uttered word “Jew”; his father always heard it as a slur on the lips of a non-Jew, no matter the context. It was a word so freighted with tragic history, so subject to ingrained contempt, that to hear it was to stop everything, try to read intent in the inflection of the speaker…and then, if the eyes and tone betrayed hatred, to punch the bastard in the face. A feisty sort, his father.

  As if I don’t have enough hang-ups of my own, I have to carry around my dad’s, too!

  “Quite so,” Mrs. Armiger said, interrupting Nick’s ruminations. “Excuse my idle philosophizing. As one gets older, one gets more certain of things and less concerned about disguising conclusions…. I’m sure you are well versed in the fascinating story of Jewish immigration to the South, the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in the development of the region? Times were relatively good for Jews here. This ancestor of mine surpassed historical precedent and laid the foundation for my family’s present wealth.”

  “You speak like someone proud of her Jewish heritage, though, obviously, you’re not a practicing Jew. And even if you were, what would be so terrifying about Corban’s revealing that fact? I still don’t see the ‘dilemma’ you mentioned.”

  “I am Episcopalian. And as far back as most people care to go, my family has embraced one of the mainstream Christian branches. Balazar converted; he was Catholic, finally, I believe. Religion for him was a matter of indifference, I suspect, as indeed heretofore it has been for me. Max would have it otherwise.

  “I will relate an anecdote about Jews and New Orleans society: it is said by one of the old-line Carnival clubs that no Jew has ever peeked past the foyer; they’re proud of this fact and intend to keep it that way. My late husband was a member of that club; I, as a debutante a long time ago, was honored to serve as queen. At the upper reaches of New Orleans society, all is not sweetness and light, certainly, but the hallowed custom of exclusionary chauvinism often produces strange bedfellows. The French and Spanish Creole elite–both white and of color–sneer at the Anglo-Saxon elite, but they unite in their distaste for Jews. Unspoken for the most part, but no less powerful. You know of the recent demands by blacks, Jews, and women for inclusion in the musty traditions of this city? Several old-line krewes ceased their public involvement in Mardi Gras, their very reason for existence, rather than admit that the ancien régime has breathed its last.”

  “Let the plebeians eat king cake, eh?” Nick said, stunned by this woman’s candor with a virtual stranger.

  “You joke, like those who say this masked power structure is now irrelevant. But I assure you, this is very serious business. I have excellent Jewish clients, but Christians outnumber them fiv
e to one. Surely you’ve heard of ‘old money.’ Here, that is the polite term for white Christian social and economic snobbery and hegemony. Pleasure and prejudice are New Orleans delicacies; we savor and guard them as a chef protects his recipes. We coined the idea of separate to remain unequal; that should be on our Carnival doubloons, in Latin. You do not understand this city, Nick, if you believe that I would be in business, in any meaningful way, a week after the news broke that I am of Jewish extraction, even at this remove.”

  Nick wanted to argue that this was the 1990s, that the Nazis had been bombed to oblivion, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been forever discredited as the political ruse of a czar’s secret police, that even Henry Ford had apologized, eventually, sort of…but he realized he was pretty damn naive. She was right. Teenagers wear the swastika and burn the Klan’s cross proudly these days in just about every state; the reality of the Holocaust is questioned by venomous hucksters on the airwaves, online (despite Hawty’s tutorials, he still wasn’t sure where “online” was), and in college student centers; and the Protocols, that undying canard, and worse are bestsellers in places as far flung as the Middle East and Russia, and as close as certain New Orleans suburbs where freakish minor electoral success had recently emboldened a notorious peddler of anti-Jewish hate to almost take the governorship.

  History doesn’t repeat itself; mankind does.

  Nick recalled his father drilling this into his memory: “No matter what you do or where you go or how you pray, when your back is turned you’re Nick the Jew.” Naively, Nick in his youth used to think his dad was talking rubbish, having seen what he’d seen during the war, forever scarred by that experience, hypersensitive to a ridiculous extreme. Who listens to his father, anyway–until it’s too late? Now people probably whispered: “There goes Nick the Word-Thief.” He had needed no help from a deadly legacy of bigotry to earn his own personal infamy.

  “Why did Corban come to me?” Nick asked.