by Jimmy Fox
The waitress, for all her seeming earlier inattention to Nick’s request, was now delivering the drinks and the message across the crowded barroom. Tawpie at first seemed to think there was some mistake; but he soon realized someone was making fun of him. He scrutinized the dark, cavernous barroom for the culprit.
Nick waved, flashing a big phony smile. He could just detect Tawpie’s jowls jiggling as he launched a fusillade of invective his way.
Tawpie’s curses were drowned out by the laughter of the four friends and by a new song whining at high volume about the difficulties of being twenty.
“All right! The Rotting Fish-heads from Pluto!” Hawty shouted, waving her arms to the frenetic beat. And then to Nick, who was the only one close enough to understand: “I played that. A local band. They’ve really hit it big. I think they’re hot!”
Una and Dion put their fingers to their ears.
Nick almost explained that he’d seen the band live–with Keith Richards–in the company of Zola, and that he now owned the entire Rotting Fish-heads output on cassette…but he decided to keep quiet. He just smiled and nodded, tapping his foot under the table. After all his elaborate lies, they probably wouldn’t believe the simple truth from him.
29
Nick walked down Zola’s street in the cold drizzle.
The latest catalog bauble of the rich dripped limply from porches–large boldly colored flags with cutesy elves, Santas, and evergreen motifs.
Human beings are the flag-waving species, Nick was thinking. Even in our fads, even when there’s nothing worth dying for, we declare allegiances, choose sides, form tribes. It’s innate.
Other than the flags, the houses were about evenly divided in displays of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, blinking at him in syncopated costliness.
The for-sale sign in front of Zola’s house seemed to Nick at odds with the clubby cheerfulness of the neighborhood. Here was someone who wanted out of the game, or perhaps was no longer welcome. The house itself seemed to have lost its purpose, its unity and personality, now merely a collection of boards, bricks, and nails.
Inside, he dodged moving men as they made their way past, hefting boxes or last pieces of furniture. The place looked even bigger than he remembered it, now that it was empty. He looked into the study, to see only depressing barren shelves.
“You’ll be getting a box of those books next week,” Zola said, behind him. “I know there were some you especially liked.”
He turned to face her. She wore blue jeans, a man’s baggy button-up shirt over a black turtleneck, and work gloves. She might have been any woman moving out of her apartment, except for the fact that few women have the luck to look so good, so artlessly. Nick detected a new dimension to her hazel eyes, reflecting the clarity of mind and serenity of spirit that often follow the purifying fires of illness. She was certainly grieving for her mother, but had the innate grace to keep her grief as private as she could.
“Thanks,” Nick said. “Weren’t you going to say goodbye?”
“No. I thought this would be better. After the way I treated you. After I refused to believe that Mother was…not what she seemed to be. I’m ashamed of her, ashamed of myself for not realizing how out-of-control she was. She did terrible things, Nick. The police have finally run out of questions. But I haven’t. I know there’s more that needs to be exposed.”
Nick shrugged. No point in making her suffer for her mother’s wrongs, those she suspected, those she didn’t. As far as she and anyone else knew, her mother’s crimes were the desperate attempts of an unbalanced mind, first to hide the family’s Jewish ancestry, and then to defuse the Balzars’ suit.
Maybe, Nick thought, the ancient harvest of sour grapes has ended for this family; there would be no more teeth on edge.
“You were good to me, Nick,” she said. “You tried to protect me from the pain of the truth as long as you could, but not from the truth itself. When you offered to show me, I ran away. I was a coward.”
There’s more pain out there for you yet, Zola. You’re on your own now–no revolving office in the sky, no more lackeys cringing in your footsteps, no more cocktail parties with disingenuous corporate do-gooders with their hands in your bank account, no more Mother-in-shining-armor.
They had walked over to the large living room, where two shrouded wing chairs faced a cold fireplace. They sat down.
“I’m leaving New Orleans,” she said, looking around the barren room as if she missed it already. “I don’t know when–or if I’ll ever come back. Nick, I just keep seeing the image of Mother, all alone out there in that beautiful setting, physically sick, obsessed with protecting the family name, in her disturbed way. If she’d only confided in me.”
“Yes. A terrible thing,” Nick said. Armiger deserved everything she got; but of course he couldn’t tell Zola that.
“If only I’d known how devastated she was by the difficulties–and that’s what they were, really. Just difficulties. None of this needed to happen. Our more sophisticated clients didn’t give a damn about that suit, or the story behind it; they also happened to be our most important ones. And the $10 million figure I finally agreed on with the Balzars was better than I’d hoped for. The media had exaggerated the scope of the whole affair. In fact, I’ve sold the company for just a bit less than it was valued before all of this. We’ve always had buyers waiting in the wings. Maybe you read about it.”
Nick had. He’d been pleased to learn that the division over which she’d exercised direct control was untainted by fraud. He could tell she was proud of her deal-making abilities; but sadness returned to displace her momentary swagger.
“I just don’t have the heart right now to run that kind of organization.”
Zola was quiet for a few moments.
“She kept so much inside, so many secrets,” she said. “How can a mother and her daughter be so close and know so little about each other?”
“Some people are like that,” Nick replied, trying to be sympathetic and opaque at the same time.
“I loved her; you know I did,” Zola said. “But now I realize what a frightened woman she was. Frightened of the past. I don’t want to be like that…oh, damn it!” Her eyes squinched shut and tears seeped out; she found some tissues in a shirt pocket. “I didn’t want you to see me doing this.”
Nick unclenched her hand from the chair arm. “Here’s my final lecture for this semester,” he said. “You have the power not to be frightened of your past; it can’t hurt you unless you think it can.”
“Like those monsters under my bed when I was a child,” Zola said.
Nick wiped away a rolling tear she’d missed. “Lots of people stop me in family history research when I uncover the first scoundrel. They think a bad apple in the ancestor barrel is a curse, condemning them to misfortune. I don’t believe in curses–not that kind, anyway. It’s all chance and necessity: some things we can change, some we can’t. And we don’t know which are which; that’s frightening sometimes, yes, but it’s also liberating. I say learn and live. Begone, all monsters under the bed! Scram, all you skeletons in the closet!”
He’d produced the intended reaction in Zola. She smiled tentatively.
“So what’s going to happen to the little chateau?” he asked.
“Do you know, she didn’t allow me out there? Her ‘special place,’ she called it.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Oh, I’ve given it to Freret University, along with those atrocious pictures and sculptures. Part of the deal with the government. But I’m really not supposed to talk about that.”
“Hey, I know how it is. Got a few secrets, myself. What about the genealogical treasure trove in those cases? The European stuff. I suppose you’ll be sending that to the places I suggested.”
He wanted it all himself, but he knew it had to be repatriated. Zola had solved his anxiety over returning the Natchitoches material by offering to pay for the relocation of the courthouse’s neglected subbasement archive to the Plutarch Foundat
ion in New Orleans, where future genealogists would have the opportunity to scurry around in it like happy dung beetles. Nick’s pilfered Balazar documents were unobtrusively added, and no one was the wiser.
“Well, not exactly,” Zola said. “My lawyers have told me not to reveal where I’m going, or what I’m going to do, but between us,” she drew closer, continuing in a whisper, just a glimmer of her old fun-loving self in her eyes, “I’m bound for Europe to deliver those items myself. I’ve decided to take some time off, figure out a new direction. In the meantime, I intend to devote my energies to the study of–drum roll please!–genealogy. Learn and live, isn’t that what you said?”
“You know,” said Nick, “maybe I should have been a teacher.”
She gave him her address in the small alpine country where she would be setting up house–or castle, rather–and made him promise to visit.
“Oh, wait.” She ran into another room and returned with a gift-wrapped package. “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday! I was going to send it to you. Go on, open it.”
It was a Breitling wrist chronograph so complex he was afraid he’d never be able to make out the time, much less the altitude–a negative number in New Orleans, anyway.
“No microchip. Excellent!” he said.
“Slightly antiquated, but very charming. Like you.”
“Hey, no fair. I didn’t get you anything.”
“This is all I want,” she said, and kissed him.
Eventually the moving men gave them unsubtle hints that they were about to be loaded onto the truck.
Nick crossed the street, heading for St. Charles and the downtown streetcar. His car had received terminal injuries in its joust with the iron gate. He stopped on the opposite sidewalk and faced the house.
He recalled a particularly important passage from Ivanhoe’s diary, possibly written on a typical dreary Louisiana winter day like this one.
“Zola, my love,” Nick said softly, “may you safely cross all the impossible gaps on your journey.”
30
From The Diary of Ivanhoe Balzar:
Mulatto Barber of Natchitoches
December 21st 1873. Jacob, my half-brother, passed today. I was with him at his deathbed. He held my hand. Maybe he did not recognise me. Maybe he did. The Lord Almitey forgive his sinning soul! Euphrozine, my half-sister, would not let my Mary come in the big house, making her keep to the kitchen with the servants. The plantation house look very bad indeed, and the fields gone to seed mostly. I don’t even beleve Jacob saw to planting anything this year at all, cept for some vegetables that critters got. Euphrozine married a man from up East a few years back, and spend most of the time over in New York. But lately I hear tell she and her husband doing some cofee trading down in New Orleans. His family can’t deal in slaves no more, like they did before the War. But I think Euphrozine is not as bad as Jacob; nobody has to be bad, unless they want to be. She says to me, after we bury’d poor Jacob–I hate this cankrous, rotting, barren place, Ivanhoe! I don’t care what happens to it. It makes me so melonkolie.–Well, I wager we won’t be seeing much of her round here nomore. I’ll miss her. She never hated me, tho, least not as much as that devil of a man Jacob. These past few years been almost enuf to make me deny my dedly pedigre. I’m ready for some Peace. The influenca broke out again, and is spreding. I hear some folks died over near Isle Brevelle. Froze hard last nite and killed three old cows to tuf to eat even. Loaned Logan Younce $6, for two plows, at small intrist because he is my friend. Tom Oliviette has proposed to me a part of a barge that he want to run. I don’t know if I am willing or not. Cut ten heads today, which is about rite for the time. Folks got to go to Church. My prentice cut just four, tho. Erasmus is coming up to three now. All the world is afore that child. I won’t let the Past stand in his way. He can chuse his own Futur the Good Lord tended him to have.*
31
January 1, 1995–3:16 a.m.
From a shadowy canyon of deserted warehouses, stacked rail-sea containers, and barbed-wire fencing, police cars shot blinding spotlights down a rocky embankment to the crime scene below. Two bodies lay in thick, clammy fog at the edge of the Mississippi River, halfway between the French Quarter and the Industrial Canal.
Emergency lights flashed alternating blue and red spasms of diffuse illumination on the crime scene, enveloping the living and the dead alike in a disorienting plasma, as if the fog were a contagion spreading the violence that had occurred here across the city, to cling to the beloved architecture and ancient trees, to suck life from the hallowed traditions, to infect the souls of unsuspecting, innocent residents and tourists.
Muted revelry of diehard New Year’s Eve celebrants in the Quarter reached the cold ears of NOPD uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives, paramedics, and crime-lab technicians as they worked the murders. Two men had been shot at close range. No witnesses, no suspects, just a nameless phone tip.
Dark river water visible near the bank eddied into man-sized whirlpools and unexpectedly flowed backward in isolated pockets; toxic foam the color of dead eyes scudded across the turbulence; unidentifiable shapes lumbered by just under the surface.
A tall black cop stood apart from the methodical dance of evidence gathering. The star-and-crescent badge over his heart reflected the pulsing glow of the emergency lights. In short-sleeves despite the damp chill, his shaved head bare, he clenched and unclenched his big fists like a fighter just before a bout, or just after a knockout victory. Vicious scars scored his thick, ropy forearms. He seemed transfixed by the Orleans Parish assistant coroner’s examination of the blood-caked bodies of the two dead men sprawled like broken kites on gray boulders lapped by the river. His jaw muscles rippling, he brought his right hand to his neck and rubbed under the collar of his light-blue uniform shirt.
A beefy white detective by the name of Gus Roulé found footing on the rocks next to the black cop. Everyone called Gus “Bons Temps,” after Louisiana’s Cajun-inspired unofficial motto: Laissez les bons temps rouler!, or “Let the good times roll!”
“You don’t look so hot, Balzar,” said Bons Temps. “What’s wrong, you never seen a stiff with half its head missin’?”
“Maybe more of them than you, man,” Shelvin replied, without looking at the detective. “More than I can count, in the Gulf War.”
“No shit?” the detective said, easing off his gibing tone of superiority. “I was in Nam, myself. Long, long time ago. You wouldn’t recognize me.” He laughed, slapping his bulging stomach. “Sometimes I think this damn city’s worse…so, Balzar, what the hell you doing here? My information is you’re Sixth District.”
The ‘Bloody Sixth,’ it was called, encompassing the Magnolia and St. Thomas housing projects, war zones festering with such mayhem that cops drove their cruisers to calls rather than present themselves as easy targets in the open courtyards.
“Got detailed to the Eighth up until Mardi Gras,” Shelvin said. “Like I told your partner, I heard the call on my radio, figured I could get here as quick as anybody else. Over in the Quarter, most of our professional criminals already gone to bed; all them other folks just too messed up at this time of night to do anything real bad.”
The detective grinned and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you right. I been wantin’ to meet you, Balzar. Word goin’ round is you don’t take no shit from nobody. They say you haven’t missed a collar yet.”
“Well, tonight could be a first for me, then.”
“Could be. Whoever did this got away clean. Execution style. No way we’ll ever find the gun, but it was a big one. Forty-five, probably. If only that ole river could talk, huh? The poor bastards were kneeling down, lookin’ right at their killer. Looks like somebody evened up a score here, big time.”
“Looks like a drug deal gone bad to me, man,” Shelvin replied, searching Bons Temps’ fog-obscured face for unasked questions. “But you’re the detective.”
Another detective summoned Bons Temps aside; they spoke together and examined not
ebooks by flashlight as a train thundered by on tracks beyond the warehouses.
Shelvin removed his flashlight from his belt and joined other officers in the search for evidence.
Soon the assistant coroner rose from his uncomfortable crouch and directed his team to bag the bodies and put them in the “meat wagon.” Then he began a stumbling climb up the rocky bank, cursing the lateness of the hour and the discourtesy of the victims in getting murdered here.
Bons Temps found Shelvin a few minutes later. “We just got positive ID on the victims,” he said. “Kirk Dagget and Harvey Baspo. I thought maybe that’s who they were, but from what was left of ’em, I couldn’t be sure. Names ring a bell with you?”
Shelvin didn’t answer.
“Let me refresh your memory. These guys were on the force. Uniforms, like you. In their spare time for extra dough they did strong-arm work for Artemis Holdings. Like we all do a little security work to make ends meet, you know? But these guys were real bad apples. Made us all look dirty. They got busted about a year ago, after the Armiger woman died and that genealogist gave the powers-that-be the leads they needed. I wouldn’t think you’d have any trouble remembering ’em, seeing as how they sliced and diced you and your brother.”
“Yeah,” Shelvin said, watching the two coroner’s men heft a body bag up the rocks, “I didn’t recognize them either…you got a point, here, Bons Temps, or what?”
Shelvin had pronounced Gus’s nickname right–a rare thing for a rookie cop–losing most of the ending consonants. Bons Temps seemed flattered.
“Matter of fact, I do. Lotta guys on the force probably think the shooter did us a favor, getting rid of these creeps. They had plenty of enemies; hell, they even screwed me on a transaction or two. The Feds cut ’em a sweetheart deal to spill their guts about their former co-workers–us. They been under house arrest all these months. Nobody’s seen ’em for a couple of days.”