by Rob Rogers
Devil’s Cape
If New Orleans has earned its “Sin City” nickname for its debauchery, then its nearby sister Devil’s Cape has earned its “Pirate Town” moniker for the violence and blatant corruption that have marred the city since its founding. Yet Devil’s Cape draws us, like a glittering treasure dangling from a skeleton’s beckoning hand.
— Excerpted from A Devil’s Cape Traveler’s Guide
Chapter One
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Early March, thirty-five years ago
Pericles Kalodimos wiped his forehead with the back of his sun-darkened hand. Scars from spattered grease pockmarked his arm, and the pale scar tissue glistened in the fluorescent light of his restaurant like chips of mica on brown earth. He’d turned up the heat in order to keep his newborn children warm, but he’d turned it up too far and the room was stifling even to a man used to standing over hot stoves.
He watched the sleeping babies, who looked to him like a single child beside a mirror. Often, they even moved in sync. Desma had snorted and rolled her eyes when he’d suggested tattooing each on the foot to tell them apart, but he still wondered every time they bathed the twins if he hadn’t somehow mixed them up.
It had taken some quick talking to convince Desma to leave him alone with his sons for these brief two hours before their baptism, but he had a baptism of his own in mind for the boys before the family arrived. His family. He sighed. Whatever he could do to keep his sons out of the Kalodimos “family business,” he would do.
Pericles walked over to his restaurant’s front window, his bad leg forcing him to take five halting steps instead of the three he might have taken in his younger days. He’d named the restaurant Zorba’s after Zorba the Greek, had plastered red velvet on the walls, then hung neon signs, bottles of olive oil and ouzo, and framed posters of the Parthenon and the Aegean Sea. It was everything that someone who knew nothing of Greece would expect a Greek restaurant to be. The air hung thick with the scents of spiced meat, feta cheese, and strong coffee. At the window, he flicked off the open sign and the overhead lights, shut the window’s thick Venetian blinds, and reached over to lock the door. It left the room dark and quiet. The only light in the room—the red light of the exit sign—flickered across his sons’ faces.
Stepping into the kitchen, he filled a small basin with warm water then carried it back and set it beside his sons. He reached over to one of the tables and lifted up a small, sealed urn, its face decorated with the black-etched figures of Greek heroes wielding spears and swords. The urn was dusty and smooth in his palm. He held it in front of his sons’ faces. As one, both boys woke and reached for it, their newborn attention gaining new focus. He smiled and pulled it back.
“Not quite yet,” he said. He ran a knife-scarred finger along the urn’s surface. “It is entirely possible, my boys, that your father has been sold a bill of goods. If so, I’d appreciate it if you kept it secret, yes?”
His broad smile revealed cracked, coffee-stained teeth and a flash of gold. Then, with a sudden squeeze, he crushed the urn in his hands. It made a popping sound like an old balloon. The odor of stale air filled the room. He let the clay dust and shards flow between his fingers, then fall to the deep blue tablecloth. Two long, gold hairs remained in his hand, glistening like wounds in the red exit light.
“These strands,” he said to the boys, who looked in his direction in mute fascination, “are from the Golden Fleece itself. I was told they can pass on the strengths of the mighty Argonauts.” He shrugged self-deprecatingly. “It is foolishness, of course, but it is all I have.”
The boys reached out their arms toward each other. Their fingers entwined. Slowly and carefully, he pulled one of them away. They both began to wail. Moving quickly now, he dropped one of the golden hairs into the basin of water. It sank below the surface, curling and uncurling, and he imagined that he saw steam rising from the water, though it wasn’t hot. He pulled off the infant’s diaper, then lifted him into the air.
“This is Julian,” he said.
He dipped the boy below the water’s surface, and it seemed to shimmer with gold. When he pulled Julian out, the boy had stopped crying and stared around as if in sudden wonder. The strand of golden hair—or fleece—was gone.
He repeated the process for the boy’s brother, this time saying, “This is Jason.” As he lifted Jason from the water, the boy peed on him and Pericles laughed heartily. He cradled the boys to him then, both dripping wet from the basin, one clutched in each arm. “I love you, my sons,” he said. “I hope I have done you good this day.”
Then he carefully dressed the boys and prepared the restaurant for his family’s arrival.
The hooded crime lord called the Hangman rose to power shortly after the Second World War and quickly became the most feared man in Devil’s Cape. His hold on the city lasted until thirty years ago in December when he . . .
— Excerpted from The Masks of Devil’s Cape, special documentary airing on WTDC News, Jason Kale reporting
Chapter Two
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Mid-December, thirty years ago
Cap de Creus Street, the main artery of Devil’s Cape’s business district, was named for the farthest eastern point of the Iberian Peninsula, where the winds could carry a fisherman’s cap out of sight between two heartbeats or send the beam of a sail whipping around with murderous speed. The sailors of the Pyrenees called Cap de Creus “Devil’s Cape,” and when the masked pirate St. Diable founded a city of his own in Louisiana in 1727, he chose to honor not just himself—for his name, of course, meant “Saint Devil,” and he was notorious for the flowing black cape he wore—but also the deadly winds of Cap de Creus. “I slit my first throat in the waters off that Devil’s Cape,” St. Diable was reported to have said, “and Devil’s Cape is as good a name as any for the place I make my mark.”
Perhaps by coincidence or perhaps by the pirate’s own design, Cap de Creus Street was angled in such a way that the breezes from off of the gulf seemed to mingle and breed there, and the tightly packed buildings formed a wind tunnel that whipped and howled for most of the year. “You can walk up Cap de Creus Street in ten minutes with the wind behind you,” the locals were fond of saying, “but it will take you twenty to get back again.”
Even on its best days, Cap de Creus Street didn’t have the hustle and bustle of Wall Street or Michigan Avenue. On warm days, which were most of them, men would walk slowly down the street in sweat-dampened seersucker suits, calling out to each other, conducting more business over three-hour lunches of freshly shucked oysters and iced bourbon than they ever did in their own offices. And when the weather was bad, the street became so empty that no one walked the sidewalks except ghosts.
On this day, the weather was especially bad—and cold, as well. An arctic front had made it all the way down to the Gulf, and the wind roaring up Cap de Creus Street had an icy sharpness. Costas Kalodimos, a thin, dark-green overcoat wrapped around him, stood shivering against the side of a Masonic lodge. Hatless, he hunched his shoulders forward, staring through the wind, a toothpick clenched in his teeth. Mint-flavored. He’d picked the toothpick up after an early dinner at his brother’s restaurant. Maybe he’d ask Pericles why he’d switched to mint-flavored. Conversation with his brother, who didn’t approve of Costas, was always strained. Costas realized that it was a sign of the chasm between them that he would struggle to make a conversation about toothpick flavoring just to ease the time.
He snapped the toothpick in half with his chattering teeth and spat it on the sidewalk. His ride was late. One hand reached under the overcoat to the pistol he had stowed in a pocket, a Luger his Uncle Ilias had brought back from the Second World War. He traced his fingers along the handle, then pulle
d them away. The weapon was cold.
His Uncle Ilias.
Uncle Ilias had told their grandmother he’d won the pistol in a poker game he’d played with a German soldier during a Christmas Eve détente, but Costas and Pericles had always known that that was a lie. Uncle Ilias had killed for it. Something in the way he held it, the way he talked about it, told them that much. He’d given it to Costas many years before, something else Pericles had disapproved of, although Costas’s brother didn’t know what Costas had done to earn it.
Uncle Ilias wouldn’t be pleased to know of the meeting Costas had agreed to on this cold day. He wouldn’t be pleased at all.
Finally, Costas spotted the car. It was long and quiet, a dark blue Lincoln Continental with a golden roof and trim. The windows were tinted dark, shrouding the driver in shadows. The car braked to a stop beside Costas and the passenger door opened. Warm air and the scent of tobacco drifted out. He stepped inside and lowered himself into the golden leather seat, pulling his coat around him and slamming the door shut, shivering despite himself even as the car’s heaters began to take the edge off the cold.
“I apologize for the inconvenience,” the driver said, quickly starting the car rolling down Cap de Creus Street. Once away from the curb, he didn’t accelerate much, and Costas understood that he was in no particular hurry to be anyplace—he just hadn’t wanted anyone to pay undo attention to the sight of Costas Kalodimos, feared second in command of the Kalodimos crime family, climbing into his car.
Costas didn’t answer at first. He just rubbed his fingers against the cold. The skin on his calloused knuckles was dry and cracking. The gold of his wedding ring barely glistened in the shaded car. He waited a few seconds, then turned slowly and deliberately to look for the first time at the man driving the car.
He’d been told to expect the mask, so it didn’t come as a surprise, but still it drew his immediate attention. It was a bandit mask like Zorro might have worn, but blood-red, tied at the back of his head, the ends dangling down from the knot. His skin was tan and smooth, his nose aquiline. His beard and moustache were neatly trimmed and might even have been waxed. His hair was jet-black. He wore a loose-fitting red shirt that matched the mask, and black pants, vest, and gloves. His eyes crinkled in amusement as Costas took him in.
“So you’re the Robber Baron,” Costas said.
The driver gave the barest hint of a nod. “Do you like music?” he asked. “I have a nice Verdi.” He gestured vaguely at the glove compartment.
Costas shook his head. “I don’t have much use for dagos,” he said.
The Robber Baron clicked his tongue against his teeth then shrugged dismissively. “You might need to learn to get over that,” he said. There was steel in his voice.
Costas turned and looked out the window. They had turned onto Old Clancy Boulevard, a curving four-lane road that made a meandering loop around the entire city of Devil’s Cape. This particular stretch was flooded with flashing neon from a dense pocket of strip joints, massage parlors, and adult bookstores. Costas had been in most of them. “So it’s true about you and the Ferazzolis, then?”
“I am not certain what you’ve heard.” The Robber Baron’s voice was cultured, reserved. But again there was that touch of steel. He was treating Costas respectfully, but there was no question that he intended to be in charge of the conversation. “But yes, we have an understanding.” He brought the car to a stop at a red light. A police car sat at the opposite side of the intersection, waiting for the light to turn, but the Robber Baron gave it barely a glance. “Arturo Ferazzoli was not particularly interested in an alliance, but Lorenzo has proven much more . . . pliant.”
Costas swallowed, his eyes drawn first to the police car, then to the Robber Baron again. There was no hint of hidden meaning in the man’s blue-gray eyes, but still . . . Arturo Ferazzoli had been found in an alley behind one of his dry cleaning joints three weeks before, his belly split open with a boning knife, his two bodyguards in the wind. His brother Lorenzo had stepped into his role as head of the family. Costas opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, then shut it again. The car rolled through the intersection and past more neon lights. The police car moved down a side street.
Costas turned back to the masked man beside him. “What is it you want?” he asked.
The Robber Baron smiled, reached down to the console to turn the heater down. “You know,” he said.
Costas stared at him, unblinking.
The car accelerated. They crossed a bridge over the Lady Danger River, and the Robber Baron frowned slightly as a gust of wind hit the Continental broadside and the car shimmied. After they were over the bridge, he turned back toward Costas, any hint of humor gone from his face. “The Hangman,” he said. “It’s time for the Hangman to die.”
The Hangman. Costas sighed, wished he had a cigarette, wished he still had that damned mint-flavored toothpick to chew on. Anything to busy himself. Uncle Ilias might run half the numbers rackets, extortion schemes, and money-laundering operations in Devil’s Cape, but the Hangman ran Uncle Ilias.
Costas had met the Hangman, the most feared criminal in the city, a handful of times. An aging bull of a man, he wore a mask, too, but there the similarities to the Robber Baron ended. The Hangman’s mask was a hood—more or less a burlap sack with eyeholes cut into it—that covered his entire head. He wore rugged clothes—often a gray flannel shirt and workman’s jeans—and heavy, well-worn leather gloves and boots. He never wore a belt. Instead, he wore a length of rope, perhaps as much as ten yards of it, wrapped several times around his waist. They said he’d used that rope for the first time in the early ’60s to lynch a black civil rights activist. They said that the Hangman had carried the man up to the roof of his own church, tossed one end of the rope around the top of the steeple, and nearly pulled the man’s head off while stringing him up. He’d killed dozens of people over the years with that rope, which always looked streaked and spattered by the residual blood and gore.
And he stank. He rarely changed his clothes and never seemed to clean that heavy, soiled hood or the gloves or boots. He smelled of old sweat and blood, of tobacco and spoiled food and whiskey and death.
Uncle Ilias sided with the coarse Hangman in part because he had to. The Hangman was simply too powerful a force in the city to be overthrown. But they also shared many hatreds. For blacks. For Italians in general and the Ferazzolis in particular. For the police. Those hatreds united them.
Costas Kalodimos shook his head. “You should be patient,” he said. “The Hangman won’t live forever. When he dies, maybe then you and I can talk about an alliance.” He looked over at the Robber Baron, whose eyes were flat and expressionless behind his mask. “Uncle Ilias has sworn an oath to the Hangman and I’ve sworn an oath to Uncle Ilias.”
He tapped his fingers nervously on the car window. They were driving through the edge of the city’s Soirée Bleue Ward. He spotted the diamond store where he’d bought Agatha her engagement ring.
His mind flashed from his wife to the Hangman. The last time he’d seen the Hangman had been in a dive of a strip club called the Naked Eye. Between sets, the hooded man had leaned close to him, patted him on the leg with a heavy gloved hand. There was nothing sexual in the pat, but it was territorial. Exerting his dominance. “You be good for your uncle like he is to me and you’ll be rewarded,” the Hangman said in his thick Cajun accent. His breath stank of cigarettes, beer, garlic, and decay. “Be a good soldier,” he said.
“I hate him,” Costas said suddenly. “I hate him.” He swallowed. “But I can’t help you without betraying my family.”
Of course, he was betraying Uncle Ilias just by meeting with the Robber Baron without the old man’s knowledge. And he was in danger, he knew. If the Robber Baron decided that Costas was of no use to him, then the Luger in his pocket might not be protection enough.
“I will keep this meeting confidential,” he said. “It goes no further. But I can’t help you kill the Hangman.
”
The Robber Baron said nothing for a minute. He hit the turn signal and moved the Continental onto a side street. They climbed a low hill—Devil’s Cape didn’t really have many high hills—and stopped at the side of the road. They were on a sort of bluff, and Costas could make out several brightly lit buildings in the panorama below them. Here it comes, he thought. The Robber Baron would murder him and roll his body down the bluff. Costas slowly moved his hand under his coat toward the pistol.
But the Robber Baron made no aggressive move. He put the car into park, then casually drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “You misunderstand me,” he said.
Costas hugged himself, shivering from the cold. The motion allowed his fingers to close around the handle of the gun. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I don’t expect you to help me kill the Hangman,” the Robber Baron said. “I don’t expect you to betray your uncle. They are of no consequence.” He reached down to a vest pocket. When he saw Costas tensing, he smiled. One tip of his waxed moustache twitched. “You don’t need to shoot me, Costas,” he said. “I’m only reaching for my tobacco.”
Costas’s face hardened. He put his finger onto the trigger. If he needed to fire, he could do it right through the pocket and the coat. “Go ahead,” he said.
If the fact that a gun was being held on him made the Robber Baron nervous, he didn’t show it. He unhurriedly pulled a velvet pouch out of one pocket and an antique meerschaum pipe from the other. The head of the pipe, carefully and exquisitely carved into the face of a man with a plumed hat, had been stained a rich golden brown by years of use. “What I want from you, Costas, is the same type of loyalty you have shown to your uncle.” The Robber Baron carefully tapped some tobacco from the pouch into the pipe. He packed it down with a gloved thumb.
