Devil's Cape

by Rob Rogers

  The house had been infested with rats, crickets, and roaches when she bought it. One of the interior walls had hidden a perpetual leak from the roof, the water trickling inside and helping to brew a near-toxic mass of mildew, black mold, and roach eggs until the wood and plaster had begun to bulge out with the vile stuff, and roaches had scurried in and out of the faded wallpaper. It had taken her weeks and more than half of her savings just to have the wall replaced. The house had reeked of decay, stale cigarette smoke, and cat urine. A man had been murdered there in 1943, and the house was rumored to be haunted by his ghost; his blood still stained the front room’s hardwood floor.

  But her house’s basic foundation and most of its walls were strong, and the antebellum fixtures and crown molding had held up well over the decades. Room by room, in the years since she’d purchased it, she’d added Victorian lace, painted walls in dark earth tones, and installed new fixtures. She filled the front rooms with decorations and sales items for her customers—shaded lamps, incense, tribal masks and drums, gris-gris, voodoo dolls, crystals, pyramids, dream catchers, tarot cards, and jars of chamomile, willow bark, ginseng, peppermint, mandrake root, catnip, hibiscus, lucky hand root, and St. John’s wort. A bookshelf held copies of books with names like Eshu-Eleggua Elegbara, Voodoo and Hoodoo, and The Cross of Baron Semedi. The back rooms were less cluttered and more to her own liking. Black predominated there—black walls, black ceilings, black light.

  She was sitting in her foyer, patiently polishing a crystal ball with Windex, a bar of Nag Champa incense filling the room with a sweet, earthy haze, Gregorian chants playing softly from her stereo, when the Robber Baron walked inside, leaning on a brass cane that glittered in the dim light.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered to herself, pulling back from the crystal ball, sliding her bare feet to the floor and slowly standing, trembling.

  The Robber Baron didn’t make many public appearances, and when he did, he played the role of the eccentric Devil’s Cape millionaire. His mask, he said, was an affectation, a tribute to old St. Diable the pirate, who had founded the city and worn a similar mask—and of course to the spirit of Mardi Gras. The name Robber Baron, he said, was a nickname attached to him in the early years of his business career by admiring enemies and jealous friends, and he kept it, he claimed, to protect his privacy. “If superheroes can enjoy the anonymity of masks and pseudonyms,” he had famously quipped in a rare interview published in the Devil’s Cape Daily Courier, “why not an aging philanthropist and businessman? The IRS knows my real name and so does one of my ex-wives, and that’s plenty for anyone!” Everyone knew he was a criminal, the type of criminal who frightened other criminals, but he’d rarely even been charged with any crimes, and never convicted. He was too insulated by stooges, graft, and a wealth of secret leverage over highly placed officials in local, state, and even federal government. And except in those circumstances when he utterly controlled the environment, such as the popular soirees on his luxurious riverboat, he kept to the shadows, a recluse to rival Howard Hughes, emperor of a city that rarely saw him and never saw his face.

  Yet there he stood in Jazz’s small house, a black gaucho hat shading his face, his famous scarlet bandit mask stretched over his eyes, its silk ties dangling down one side and barely touching his shoulder. He had a rakish gray beard, trimmed and waxed to a fine point, the moustache curving upward ever so slightly at the edges. His skin was smooth, his jaw strong. He was dressed in a black, crushed velvet topcoat with a matching cravat around his neck, over a blousy scarlet shirt that matched his mask. His black pants were crisply ironed, his black ostrich boots recently shined. Soft black gloves covered his hands. The half-inch or so of bare skin between his gloves and the ruffled cuffs of his scarlet shirt was tan and bristled with fine gray hairs.

  Two people quickly stepped into Jazz’s house behind the Robber Baron, flanking him. The first was a horrifically damaged man, every visible inch of his skin puckered and red with thick keloid scars from horrible burning. His nose was more or less missing; only a thin hump with two gaping nostrils remained. His lips were stretched tight against his teeth, twisting up on one side. What little hair remained grew in short, twisted, dark tufts patched in odd spaces on his scalp. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, though he still had eyelids. The scar tissue around his eyes was smoother than the rest, though that smooth patch ended in roughly scalloped edges on one side, like fingertips, and Jazz realized that, whatever had damaged him, he had thrown a hand over his eyes to protect himself, with limited success. He wore a crisp, bleached white T-shirt over stone-washed blue jeans and a worn leather belt decorated with a large, burnished silver belt buckle engraved with a flaming skull. The smile he directed at Jazz was mean and tight. When he hooked his scarred thumbs in the loops of his jeans, the muscles of his huge, veined forearms bulged with tension. He reeked of decay. She recognized him from the news. He was a member of a group of criminal carnival freaks who had been on the run for years and who were rumored to have come to Devil’s Cape. She’d seen a report on WTDC. The Cirque d’Obscurité. They called him Gork.

  The other person with the Robber Baron was a tall, slender woman with smooth café au lait skin, her ethnicity some mix of white, black, and Native American, perhaps with some Asian thrown in for good measure, judging by the slight curve of her dark-green eyes. She kept her curly rust-brown hair cut very close to the scalp and shaved at the sides. She wore a brown and black caftan, cut low in front, its fabric shimmering and stitched with feathers. As the woman turned and closed the door behind the Robber Baron, Jazz could see that the back of her dress hung out loosely, covering some large bulge back there as though she were concealing a backpack. Or wings. A pair of dark brown gloves hung loosely from a belt at the woman’s waist, the fingertips ending in burnished metal claws. Another member of the Cirque d’Obscurité, Jazz recognized. Osprey, the bird of prey.

  Jazz realized that she was still holding a rag damp with cleanser. She dropped it to the table beside her crystal ball, turned, and switched off the Gregorian chanting. The monks’ voices echoed for just a second in her foyer before dying out.

  The Cirque d’Obscurité was widely rumored to be in Devil’s Cape and had been connected to the Robber Baron, though he had flatly denied it. The fact that he was appearing here with two of the team’s members meant that he was very, very confident that he wouldn’t be caught in a lie. Which didn’t bode well for Jazz.

  The Robber Baron’s eyes flicked around the room, glancing first at a decidedly inauthentic tribal mask hanging from one wall, then at a small stone fountain bubbling in her entryway. He tapped her hardwood floor gently with his cane, its tip resting square in the middle of the old bloodstain of the man who had been murdered in the room in the forties.

  Everyone stood there for a moment without speaking. When Osprey turned away from the door to gaze coolly at Jazz, the metal claws on her gloves clinked against each other. Gork’s breathing was raspy and ragged, though the tight, mean smile didn’t waver from his face.

  Jazz’s mouth felt dry. She wondered if they were there to murder her, though she couldn’t imagine why. “Would you like—?” her voice broke. She stopped and swallowed. “Would you like to have your fortunes told?” she asked.

  The Robber Baron smiled at her then, though the shade of his hat kept her from seeing if the smile reached his eyes. “Can you really see the future then, young lady?” he asked. He stepped forward toward her, leaning close in the small room. His breath smelled of peppermint and tobacco.

  “Not really,” she said, heart hammering.

  Gork laughed, his voice thick with phlegm. “If she could see the future,” he said, “she sure as hell wouldn’t have been sitting here when we walked in.”

  The Robber Baron didn’t really turn his head then. He just tilted it a few degrees toward Gork. That was enough. The man stopped speaking, his tight smile fading a notch.

  “Sometimes I catch a glimpse of something,” Jazz said. “Not
the future. Just . . . an insight that I can’t explain.” She never spoke of this to her customers. With them, it was a running patter of her connections to the loas, her reading of the cards, her knowledge of the lines of their hands and the shapes of their fingers, and what they meant. But this wasn’t an ordinary visitor. And if her insights were telling her anything, it was that she needed to answer him with utter frankness.

  He tapped his brass cane lightly on the floor again, reached out with his gloved hand and wiped a smudge off her crystal ball. “Last week, you read the fortune of Tony Ferazzoli,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered again.

  “You remember this?” he asked. His voice was strong, old-fashioned, the accent difficult to place. Not Cajun, exactly. Not Southern, exactly. It managed to hint simultaneously at rich culture and just a hint of coarseness somewhere in his background.

  “I didn’t know his name,” she said. The room felt humid and hot.

  “But you know who I mean?”

  She nodded, taking a half-step back from him. “I didn’t have many customers last week,” she said. She remembered a fat, balding man in a seersucker suit and a wide tie. He’d walked in, apparently on impulse, and asked for her to read his fortune. His palms had been so sweaty she’d made him dry them off with a towel. She hadn’t recognized him as the notorious mafia figure Tony Ferazzoli, who controlled half the cocaine trafficking in Devil’s Cape, not to mention a hefty percentage of other criminal enterprises, including prostitution, pornography, protection rackets, fencing of stolen goods, and gambling.

  “And with him, you had one of your . . . insights,” the Robber Baron said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yes.” A lock of hair fell in front of her face, and when she reached up to brush it back, she could see her hand trembling.

  “You told him that his boss was going to murder him,” the Robber Baron said simply. There was no anger in his voice. He sounded calm and curious, patient.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know that was you,” she said. Her own palms felt sweaty now, and she wondered what had become of poor, frightened, corrupt, fat Tony Ferazzoli.

  His smile showed white teeth, and she stood there half-expecting him to deny it, telling her that of course he wasn’t Ferazzoli’s boss, that he didn’t consort with known crime figures, that he was a philanthropist who would never dream of hurting anyone. Instead, he said simply, “Of course you didn’t.” He turned to Gork. “Check the back rooms,” he said.

  Her whole body was trembling now as the scarred man brushed past her as he moved into the back of her house. His lumpy skin felt smooth and hot as his shoulder brushed against hers, and she realized that he’d bumped into her on purpose. She recoiled. “There’s no one else here,” she said. “I’m really sorry for what I said to him. I didn’t mean anything. I’d never tell anyone.”

  The Robber Baron lowered himself into one of the ornate wooden chairs she kept for her clients. She’d selected them because the burnished oak looked sophisticated and the carvings exotic, but also because the chairs were uncomfortable enough that no one was tempted to sit in them for too long. He rested his brass cane next to the crystal ball on the small table. “Of course you wouldn’t,” he said. She could hear Gork climbing the stairs up to her house’s camelback loft.

  Jazz felt ill. She breathed deeply, concentrating on the scent of the incense and trying to make herself calm. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked simply.

  Now Osprey laughed, a low, seductive chuckle. “You tell us,” she said.

  If the Robber Baron was annoyed with Osprey’s interruption as he had been with Gork’s, he gave no sign of it. “I was intrigued,” he said, “when Tony told me about what you’d said to him.”

  She swallowed. “I didn’t mean any harm,” she said. “And I didn’t see much. He was afraid. He was terrified.” There had been half-moons of sweat under Ferazzoli’s arms that had soaked all the way through his jacket. “My insight was just that he was scared, that he probably had very good reason to be scared, and that the threat came from someone in authority over him.” She shrugged, ticking off the next facts with her fingers for him. “I had no idea who that person was. He didn’t name any names. And no one would believe a fortuneteller as a witness anyway.”

  Gork walked back into the room. She began to step aside, but he brushed past her again anyway, his elbow rubbing across her chest. As he turned and stood beside Osprey, who rolled her eyes at him, he shook his head. “No one,” he said.

  The Robber Baron nodded once, then stared at Jazz, considering. “That’s not really my concern,” he said.

  “Did the man—?” She couldn’t stop herself. “Did Mr. Ferazzoli . . . die?” she asked.

  The Robber Baron smiled and stroked his waxed beard with a silky glove. “I don’t imagine you’ll be seeing him again,” he said. He tapped on the crystal ball. “Does this give you insight?” he asked. He gestured at the jars and general décor of the room. “Does this?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s just me.” With him sitting down, looking up at her, she could see his eyes. They were a washed-out blue, nearly gray, like storm clouds. “What do you want from me?” she asked. “What can I do to reassure you that I’m no threat to you?”

  And then he surprised her. “Oh, I’m not worried that you’re a threat,” he said, his voice amused. “Tony’s story of you—he was distracted when he told it to me, but he was nonetheless very detailed, very discerning—intrigued me. Tony Ferazzoli had many people to fear for many reasons and yet he focused that fear on me, on your word. Because of your insight. He shouldn’t have been afraid of me—I’d been careful to allay any fears—and yet you persuaded him. He tried to run away and he very nearly succeeded. On your word.”

  “I’m sorry—” she began.

  “Oh, no. I am most curious about your insights,” he said. “You see, someone is betraying me. And I’d like you to tell me who that is.”

  * * * * *

  Jazz ultimately, with great difficulty, convinced the Robber Baron and his trained killers to leave her home.

  She tried desperately at first to find some way to appease him, to get a flash of whoever was betraying him and to give him what he wanted. She would have little compunction about exposing someone in that way, if it could save her from the Robber Baron’s attentions. When she felt nothing—nothing—that gave her any idea of who was betraying the man and why, she pressed him for more details. Why did he think he was being betrayed? What led to his suspicions? He shook his head and said, “It shouldn’t work that way, Jessica.” Her real name sounded, somehow, terrifying to her. “You need to tell me your insights, not vice versa.”

  She briefly considered making something up. She knew enough from the papers to blurt out the names of a few people who worked for him. She could even have named Gork or Osprey, though both looked ready to leap forward and murder her at any moment. But she ultimately decided against lying. Too much could go wrong.

  And so she finally convinced him that, though her insight hadn’t come yet, she would persist. Soon, she told him. She would have his answer soon. And he nodded at her, the genteel manner gone from his face, his expression empty and pitiless. “Soon,” he echoed. “It will have to be soon.” He didn’t bother to elaborate on the threat implicit in the words.

  After they left, Gork’s lashless eyes running up and down her body as he slowly closed the door, she stamped out the rest of her incense, staggered to the bathroom, and, weeping, lowered her face to the sink. She turned the faucet on cold and let the water run onto her scalp and the back of her neck. She stared at the mirror, then, thinking, calculating.

  Sometimes Jazz was filled with a mystical certainty about the future. Tonight certainty filled her again, though of a less supernatural sort. She knew that she was going to die, horribly and very soon, unless she could find some means of protection against the Robber Baron.

  And she thought of Cain Ducett.
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br />   Clean up the Cape. Elect Warren Sims D.A.

  — A campaign bumper sticker

  Chapter Twelve

  Devil’s Cape, Louisiana

  On paper or in person, Warren Sims, district attorney of Devil’s Cape, didn’t seem like the type of man to get a group of heroes murdered. But he did.

  A handsome black man in his mid-thirties, a quarter Puerto Rican, lean and muscular from an intense tennis regimen—he could have gone professional, the commercials said, if he hadn’t been so focused on putting bad people into jail—Sims had come to Devil’s Cape from Miami and taken a position as an assistant district attorney, earning one of the highest conviction records Pirate Town had ever seen. He’d subsequently been elected D.A. off of a “clean up the corruption” campaign that had made pointed references to the Robber Baron and the Ferazzoli and Kalodimos machines. During the election and beyond, he grabbed the city’s attention and respect.

  When Sims was A.D.A., the Robber Baron tested the waters through proxies and found the prosecutor essentially incorruptible. He had no close family and was a bachelor. He was vice-free and fearless. When he wasn’t working cases or playing tennis, he was sponsoring school fundraisers or taking up a hammer to help build houses for the homeless. So although the crime lord himself lost little sleep when Sims was elected D.A., the criminals who worked for him worried. It was hopeless to try to intimidate or bribe him, the Robber Baron’s men told him.

  “I could have him whacked,” Tony Ferazzoli said.