Michaels raised his hands high in surrender and came out.
Outside Antoine’s, the rain came down in buckets. Inside, with oysters Rockefeller and a whiskey and soda in front of him and the prospect of an excellent lunch ahead, Neil Michaels was willing to forgive the weather.
He was less inclined to forgive the soldiers from the night before. Stubbing out his Camel, he said in a low but furious voice, “Those great thundering galoots couldn’t have done a better job of blowing my cover if they’d rehearsed for six weeks, God damn them.”
His companion, a dark, lanky man named Morrie Harris, sipped his own drink and said, “It may even work out for the best. Anybody the MPs arrest is going to look good to the Johnny Rebs around here.” His New York accent seemed less out of place in New Orleans than Michaels’ flat, Midwestern tones.
Michaels started to answer, then shut up as the waiter came over and asked, “You gentlemen are ready to order?”
“Let me have the pompano en papillote,” Harris said. “You can’t get it any better than here.”
The waiter wrote down the order, looked a question at Michaels. He said, “I’ll take the poulet chanteclair.” The waiter nodded, scribbled, and went away.
Glancing around to make sure no one else was paying undue attention to him or his conversation, Michaels resumed: “Yeah, that may be true now. But Ducange is dead now. What if those stupid dogfaces had busted in on us while we were dickering? That would have queered the deal for sure, and it might have got me shot.” As it hadn’t the night before, his smile did not reach his eyes. “I’m fond of my neck. It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“Even without Ducange, we’ve still got to get a line on the underground,” Harris said. “Those weapons are somewhere. We’d better find ’em before the whole city goes up.” He rolled his eyes. “The whole city, hell! If what we’ve been hearing is true, the Nazis have shipped enough guns and God knows what all else into New Orleans to touch off four or five states. And wouldn’t that do wonders for the war effort?” He slapped on irony with a heavy trowel.
“God damn the Germans,” Michaels said, still quietly but with savage venom. “They played this game during the last war, too. But you’re right. If what we’ve heard is the straight goods, the blowup they have in mind will make the Thanksgiving Revolt look like a kiss on the cheek.”
“It shouldn’t be this way,” Harris said, scowling. “We’ve got more GIs and swabbies in New Orleans than you can shake a stick at, and none of ’em worth a damn when it comes to tracking this crap down. Nope, for that they need the FBS, no matter how understaffed we are.”
The waiter came then. Michaels dug into the chicken marinated in red wine. It was as good as it was supposed to be. Morrie Harris made ecstatic noises about the sauce on his pompano.
After a while, Michaels said, “The longer we try, the harder it gets for us to keep things under control down here. One of these days—”
“It’ll all go up,” Harris said matter-of-factly. “Yeah, but not now. Now is what we gotta worry about. We’re fighting a civil war here, we ain’t gonna have much luck with the Germans and the Japs. That’s what Hitler has in mind.”
“Maybe Hamlin and Stevens should have done something different—God knows what—back then. It might have kept us out of—this,” Michaels said. He knew that was heresy for an FBS man, but everything that had happened to him since he got to New Orleans left him depressed with the state of things as they were.
“What were they supposed to do?” Harris snapped.
“I already said I didn’t know,” Harris answered, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. What did the posters say?—loose lips sink ships. His loose lips were liable to sink him.
Sure enough, Morrie Harris went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The Johnnies rebelled, killed a few hundred thousand American boys, and shot a President dead. What should we do, give ’em a nice pat on the back? We beat ’em and we made ’em pay. Far as I can see, they deserved it.”
“Yeah, and they’ve been making us pay ever since.” Michaels raised a weary hand. “The hell with it. Like you said, now is what we’ve got to worry about. But with Ducange dead, what sort of channels do we have into the Rebel underground?”
Morrie Harris’ mouth twisted, as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. “No good ones that I know of. We’ve relied too much on the Negroes down here over the years. It’s made the whites trust us even less than they would have otherwise. Maybe, though, just maybe, Ducange talked to somebody before he got killed, and that somebody will try to get hold of you.”
“So what do you want me to do, then? Hang around my hotel room hoping the phone rings, like a girl waiting to see if a boy will call? Hell of a way to spend my time in romantic New Orleans.”
“Listen, the kind of romance you can get here, you’ll flunk a shortarm inspection three days later,” Harris answered, chasing the last bits of pompano around his plate. “They’ll take a damnyankee’s money, but they’ll skin you every chance they get. They must be laughing their asses off at the fortune they’re making off our boys in uniform.”
“Sometimes they won’t even take your money.” Michaels told of the trouble he’d had unloading the Lincoln half-dollar.
“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Harris said. “If they want to cut off their nose to spite their face, by me it’s all right.” He set a five and a couple of singles on the table. “This one’s on me. Whatever else you say about this damn town, the food is hellacious, no two ways about it.”
“No arguments.” Michaels got up with Harris. They went out of Antoine’s separately, a couple of minutes apart. As he walked back to the New Orleans Hotel, Michaels kept checking to make sure nobody was following him. He didn’t spot anyone, but he didn’t know how much that proved. If anybody wanted to put multiple tails on him, he wouldn’t twig, not in crowded streets like these.
The crowds got worse when a funeral procession tied up traffic on Rampart Street. Two black horses pulled the hearse; their driver was a skinny, sleepy-looking white man who looked grotesquely out of place in top hat and tails. More coaches and buggies followed, and a couple of cars as well. “All right, let’s get it moving!” an MP shouted when the procession finally passed.
“They keep us here any longer, we all go in the ovens from old age,” a local said, and several other people laughed as they crossed the street. Michaels wanted to ask what the ovens were, but kept quiet since he exposed himself as one of the hated occupiers every time he opened his mouth.
When he got back to the hotel, he stopped at the front desk to ask if he had any messages. The clerk there today was a Negro man in a sharp suit and tie, with a brass name badge on his right lapel that read thaddeus jenkins. He checked and came back shaking his head. “Rest assured, sir, we shall make sure you receive any that do come in,” he said—a Northern accent bothered him not in the least.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Jenkins,” Michaels said.
“Our pleasure to serve you, sir,” the clerk replied. “Anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, you have but to ask.”
“You’re very kind,” Michaels said. Jenkins had reason to be kind to Northerners. The power of the federal government maintained Negroes at the top of the heap in the old Confederacy. With the Sixteenth Amendment disenfranchising most Rebel soldiers and their descendants, blacks had a comfortable majority among those eligible to vote—and used it, unsurprisingly, in their own interest.
Michaels mused on that as he walked to the elevator. The operator, a white man, tipped his cap with more of the insincere obsequiousness Michaels had already noted. He wondered how the fellow liked taking orders from a man whose ancestors his great-grandfather might have owned. Actually, he didn’t need to wonder. The voting South was as reliably Republican as could be, for the blacks had no illusions about how long their power would last if the Sixteenth were ever to be discarded.
Suddenly curious, he asked the elevator man, “Why don’t I see ‘Re
peal the Sixteenth’ written on walls along with ‘Yanks Out’?”
The man measured him with his eyes—measured him for a coffin, if his expression meant anything. At last, as if speaking to a moron, he answered, “You don’t see that on account of askin’ you to repeal it’d mean you damnyankees got some kind o’ business bein’ down here and lordin’ it over us in the first place. And you ain’t.”
So there, Michaels thought. The rest of the ride passed in silence.
With a soft whir, the ceiling fan stirred the air in his room. That improved things, but only slightly. He looked out the window. Ferns had sprouted from the mortar between bricks of the building across the street. Even without the rain—which had now let up—it was plenty humid enough for the plants to flourish.
Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring gave Michaels plenty of time to watch the ferns. As Morrie Harris had instructed, he spent most of his time in his room. He sallied forth mostly to eat. Not even the resolute hostility of most of white New Orleans put a damper on the food.
He ate boiled beef at Maylié’s, crab meat au gratin at Galatoire’s, crayfish bisque at La Louisiane, langouste Sarah Bernhardt at Arnaud’s, and, for variety, pig knuckles and sauerkraut at Kolb’s. When he didn’t feel like traveling, he ate at the hotel’s own excellent restaurant. He began to fancy his trousers and collars were getting tighter than they had been before he came South.
One night, he woke to the sound of rifle fire not far away. Panic shot through him, panic and shame. Had the uprising he’d come here to check broken out? How would that look on his FBS personnel record? Then he realized that if the uprising had broken out, any damnyankee the Johnnies caught was likely to end up too dead to worry about what his personnel record looked like.
After about fifteen minutes, the gunfire petered out. Michaels took a couple of hours falling asleep again, though. He went from one radio station to another the next morning, and checked the afternoon newspapers, too. No one said a word about the firefight. Had anybody tried, prosecutors armed with the Sedition Act would have landed on him like a ton of bricks.
Back in the Loyal States, they smugly said the Sedition Act kept the lid on things down South. Michaels had believed it, too. Now he was getting a feeling for how much pressure pushed against that lid. When it blew, if it blew . . .
A little past eleven the next night, the phone rang. He jumped, then ran to it. “Hello?” he said sharply.
The voice on the other end was so muffled, he wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman. It said, “Be at the Original Absinthe House for the three a.m. show.” The line went dead.
Michaels let out a martyred sigh. “The three a.m. show,” he muttered, wondering why conspirators couldn’t keep civilized hours like anyone else. He went down to the restaurant and had a couple of cups of strong coffee laced with brandy. Thus fortified, he headed out into the steaming night.
He soon concluded New Orleans’ idea of civilized hours had nothing to do with those kept by the rest of the world, or possibly that New Orleans defined civilization as unending revelry. The French Quarter was as packed as it had been when he went through it toward Jackson Square, though that had been in the relatively early evening, close to civilized even by Midwestern standards.
The Original Absinthe House, a shabby two-story building with an iron railing around the balcony to the second floor, stood on the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. Each of the four doors leading in had a semicircular window above it. Alongside one of the doors, someone had scrawled, Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. Michaels thought that a distinct improvement on Yanks Out! You weren’t supposed to be able to get real absinthe any more, but in the Vieux Carré nothing would have surprised him.
He didn’t want absinthe, anyway. He didn’t particularly want the whiskey and soda he ordered, either, but you couldn’t go into a place like this without doing some drinking. The booze was overpriced and not very good. The mysterious voice on the telephone hadn’t told him there was a five-buck charge to go up to the second story and watch the floor show. Assuming he got out of here alive, he’d have a devil of a time justifying that on his expense account. And if the call had been a Johnny Reb setup, were they trying to kill him or just to bilk him out of money for the cause?
Michaels felt he was treading in history’s footsteps as he went up the stairs. If the plaque on the wall didn’t lie for the benefit of tourists, that stairway had been there since the Original Absinthe House was built in the early nineteenth century. Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte had gone up it to plan the defense of New Orleans against the British in 1814, and Ben Butler for carefully undescribed purposes half a century later. It was made with wooden pegs: not a nail anywhere. If the stairs weren’t as old as the plaque said, they sure as hell were a long way from new.
A jazz band blared away in the big upstairs room. Michaels went in, found a chair, ordered a drink from a waitress whose costume would have been too skimpy for a burly queen most places up North, and leaned back to enjoy the music. The band was about half black, half white. Jazz was one of the few things the two races shared in the South. Not all Negroes had made it to the top of the heap after the North crushed the Great Rebellion; many still lived in the shadow of the fear and degradation of the days of slavery and keenly felt the resentment of the white majority. That came out in the way they played. And the whites, as conquered people will, found liberation in their music that they could not have in life.
Michaels looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three. The jazz men were just keeping loose between shows, then. As he sipped his whiskey, the room began filling up in spite of the five-dollar cover charge. He didn’t know what the show would be, but he figured it had to be pretty hot to pack ’em in at those prices.
The lights went out. For a moment, only a few glowing cigarette coals showed in the blackness. The band didn’t miss a beat. From right behind Michaels’ head, a spotlight came on, bathing the stage in harsh white light.
Saxophone and trumpets wailed lasciviously. When the girls paraded onto the stage, Michaels felt his jaw drop. A vice cop in Cleveland, say, might have put the cuffs on his waitress because she wasn’t wearing enough. The girls up there had on high-heeled shoes, headdresses with dyed ostrich plumes and glittering rhinestones, and nothing between the one and the other but big, wide smiles.
He wondered how they got themselves case-hardened enough to go on display like that night after night, show after show. They were all young and pretty and built, no doubt about that. Was it enough? His sister was young and pretty and built, too. He wouldn’t have wanted her up there, flaunting it for horny soldiers on leave.
He wondered how much the owners had to pay to keep the local vice squad off their backs. Then he wondered if New Orleans bothered with a vice squad. He hadn’t seen any signs of one.
He also wondered who the devil had called him over here and how that person would make contact. Sitting around gaping at naked women was not something he could put in his report unless it had some sort of connection with the business for which he’d come down here.
Soldiers and sailors whooped at the girls, whose skins soon grew slick and shiny with sweat. Waitresses moved back and forth, getting in the way as little as possible while they took drink orders. To fit in, Michaels ordered another whiskey-and-soda, and discovered it cost more than twice as much here as it had downstairs. He didn’t figure the Original Absinthe House would go out of business any time soon.
The music got even hotter than it had been. The dancers stepped off the edge of the stage and started prancing among the tables. Michaels’ jaw dropped all over again. This wasn’t just a floor show. This was a— He didn’t quite know what it was, and found himself too flustered to grope for le mot juste.
Then a very pretty naked brunette sat down in his lap and twined her arms around his neck.
“Is that a gun in your pocket, dearie, or are you just glad to see me?” she said loudly. Men at the nearest table guffawe
d. Since it was a gun in his pocket, Michaels kept his mouth shut. The girl smelled of sweat and whiskey and makeup. What her clammy hide was doing to his shirt and trousers did not bear thinking about. He wanted to drop her on the floor and get the hell out of there.
She was holding him too tight for that, though. She lowered her head to nuzzle his neck; the plumes from her headdress got in his eyes and tickled his nose. But under the cover of that frantic scene, her voice went low and urgent: “You got to talk with Colquit the hearse driver, mister. Tell him Lucy says Pierre says he can talk, an’ maybe he will.”
Before he could ask her any questions, she kissed him on the lips. The kiss wasn’t faked; her tongue slid into his mouth. He’d had enough whiskey and enough shocks by then that he didn’t care what he did. His hand closed over her breast—and she sprang to her feet and twisted away, all in perfect time to the music. A moment later, she was in somebody else’s lap.
Michaels discovered he’d spilled most of his overpriced drink. He downed what was left with one big swig. When he wiped his mouth with a napkin, it came away red from the girl’s—Lucy’s—lipstick.
Some of the naked dancers had more trouble than Lucy disentangling themselves from the men they’d chosen. Some of them didn’t even try to disentangle. Michaels found himself staring, bug-eyed. You couldn’t do that in public . . . could you? Hell and breakfast, it was illegal in private, most places.
Eventually, all the girls were back on stage. They gave it all they had for the finale. Then they trooped off and the lights came back up. Only after they were gone did Michaels understand the knowing look most of them had had all through the performance: they knew more about men than men, most often, cared to know about themselves.
In the palm of his hand, he could still feel the memory of the soft, firm flesh of Lucy’s breast. Unlike the others in the room, he’d had to be here. He hadn’t had to grab her, though. Sometimes, facetiously, you called a place like this educational. He’d learned something, all right, and rather wished he hadn’t.
Counting Up, Counting Down Page 8
