The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  ‘O’Neil’s auto-shop? In the French Quarter?’ Michael asked, coaxing.

  ‘Si, si. You find him there. He knows the Axeman,’ Umigliani said, the rain splattering about his flimsy smile.

  23

  The next morning Luca woke to the sound of rain dripping into the cabin through the myriad cracks in the wooden roof. Puddles had formed on the floorboards and the rain tapped into dented pots and pans spread across the floor. He lifted his head from the pillow, looked around and realized he was alone. He felt tired and sleepy, but in a good way – he’d spent the night with a beautiful woman and the tiredness was refreshing, proof that he was back in the real world. He rolled himself over to the side of the bed, stood and let out a long, body-stretching yawn.

  He could make out the inside of the cabin better now than he could the previous night. The interior consisted of a large single room that had been broken up into smaller sections by hangings and panels and folding screens. The place was brimming with houseplants and flowers lined up in pots and jars across the floor and on every available surface. The plants gave the cabin a soft, homely feeling that it lacked in other respects – there were no photos of family, no paintings, no decorations of any kind except for a crucifix on one wall and a picture of St Luke on another.

  Luca picked up his shirt and trousers from a chair next to the bed, put them on and sauntered into the kitchen. The table had been scrubbed clean, the caustic smell of disinfectant wafting from the still damp wood. Something was bubbling away in a large battered pan on the stove, and when Luca lifted the lid a plume of steam from the broth inside floated into the air. Next to the stove, nailed into the wall, were rows of shelves stacked high with jars of herbs, liquids and spices. Luca ran his eye across them; all the jars were carefully labeled in French, all sparklingly clean and free of dust.

  In another corner was an overflowing bookcase. The books were mainly in French, and mainly on medicinal subjects, as well as some anthropological works on the folk religions of Africa and the Caribbean. On one of the shelves a carved wooden statuette was being used as a bookend. Luca stared at the blank, impassive face with its thin lips, and noticed on the base an inscription identifying the figure as Bulul, the Philippine god of rice.

  The door opened and Simone stepped in – a cloth over her head to protect her hair from the rain.

  ‘You hungry?’ she said, a smile on her lips. She was holding up the hem of her apron with one hand and she lowered it to reveal, nestling in the fold, a half-dozen freshly laid eggs. She set them down and poured the broth from the pan into cups, handing one to Luca.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Luca after he took the cup.

  ‘Teane. Creole tea. It’s good for you.’

  Luca tasted it – slightly bitter, herbal and warming.

  Simone took sips from her cup while getting pans from the kitchen and placing them under the remaining leaks.

  ‘You need someone to fix the roof?’ asked Luca.

  ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she said.

  She prepared the eggs by frying them in oil, melting cheese on top of them and sprinkling them with lemon juice and oregano. She sliced some stale brown bread on the table top, spread clotted butter over the slices, and then they ate, drinking the remaining teane between bites.

  Simone didn’t seem to be bothered by the silence; she ate with the same grace and poise that was her way in everything else, and he wondered how she’d ended up living like an outcast in the middle of the bayou. She looked up at him and caught his gaze and smiled.

  ‘What do you do all day?’ Luca asked, smiling back.

  ‘This and that,’ she replied, shrugging. ‘Look after the chickens. Treat anyone that comes my way.’

  ‘You see a lot of people?’

  ‘Enough to get by,’ she said, downing the last of her teane. ‘What do you do all day?’

  Luca thought. In the past that was easy to answer, but now? His days now had an empty, loose quality to them, despite the fact that he had tried to maintain his prison routine to help him adjust. He woke at dawn as he had in Angola, bought the paper and read it in a diner while he ate breakfast, and he was back at the hotel by 9 p.m. for lights out. What he did in between, he wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘This and that,’ he said with a grin.

  He ate the last of his food and downed what remained of the tea in a gulp, and it was only then he realized he had eaten a whole meal without shooting pains searing through his gut. He stared at the empty cup and guessed she was right when she said the teane was healthy.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  She smiled, picked up his plate and took it to the sink, pouring water from a bucket over it. Luca stood and went back to the bed. He put on his boots, slung his jacket over his shoulders and tried to decide on the least awkward way to say his goodbyes. He suddenly realized that she might be expecting money. Everything had seemed genuine to him at the time, natural even – the conversation, the lovemaking, cooking breakfast and eating, but now he wasn’t so sure. Luca had never wanted for female company in the past. He’d had a string of comares, mistresses with a taste for the high life, and then there were the girls from Monreale the Matrangas had sent his way when Carlo’s wife got it into her head to play matchmaker, and he never had any trouble picking up drunk girls in the cabarets along the Tango Belt. But none of them had ever cooked him breakfast afterwards, or acted so nonchalant about what had happened the night before.

  ‘Thank you for everything,’ he said a little awkwardly as he returned to the kitchen. She turned from scrubbing the plates and smiled at him. He stood and waited. But she said nothing – just smiled at him some more.

  ‘Are we going to do this again?’ he asked.

  ‘If I feel lonely again,’ she replied, a coquettish glint in her eye. Luca smiled, tipped his hat and set off back to New Orleans.

  By the time he returned to his hotel room he was soaked through. He took off his wet clothes, washed, and put warm socks on his cold feet. On his second day back in New Orleans he had gone shopping for clothes – he had bought two suits, both dark blue, a trench coat, a handful of shirts and thick woolen fisherman’s jumpers, a flat-cap and a fedora. All chosen because they were nondescript, allowing him to blend into a crowd, to go unnoticed. He changed into one of the suits and the jumpers, slung the flat-cap on his head and went out to buy the latest editions of all the papers. He returned to his room and read the reports of the Schneiders’ deaths. A series of Sicilian grocers and now a German lawyer? Luca had yet to meet a lawyer who was totally straight. If there was anything that linked all the victims, it had to be something the lawyer had been working on.

  Luca hopped off his bed, crossed the room and slid open the bottom drawer of the dresser that stood by the window. Inside were the necessities he had requested from Carlo before he had started the investigation: a wad of cash, a gun and a case containing a set of tools for picking locks. He took some of the money and the velvet-covered case and left the hotel at once, catching a cab to City Hall to get Schneider’s business address from the commerce register.

  An hour later he was standing outside a grocer’s downtown. To one side of the storefront was a doorway leading up to the apartments above the store. He checked the list of names next to the buzzers and saw Schneider listed as a tenant on the second floor. He stepped back from the doorway and crossed the street. Looking up at the second floor he tried to see if any police were still searching the place, but he couldn’t make anything out from the low angle. He ambled a little further down the road, leaned against a lamppost and lit a cigarette. The street was too busy to use the picks on the door – he’d have to wait.

  He finished the cigarette and saw a coffee-seller’s cart at the intersection a few yards away. He sauntered over and bought a cup. The seller was Italian so they spoke for a little while, the usual talk that occurs between immigrants, and the seller offered to top up Luca’s coffee with some grappa, ‘to keep you warm in this goddamn rain’. Luca
refused politely, the seller shrugged and went on his way, and Luca returned to his spot opposite Schneider’s.

  An hour later, after he had been thoroughly drenched in the rain and was beginning to wonder if he would catch a fever, the door to the apartments opened and an old lady stepped out. He trotted to the door as quickly and nonchalantly as he could, and as the old woman stepped into the street, Luca slipped his hand into the door frame to stop the door locking shut. The old lady peered at him and Luca tipped his hat at her. She glared at him, opened her umbrella and hobbled off down the street.

  Luca breathed a sigh of relief and stepped into the building. He ran up to the second floor and found the door to Schneider’s office. He looked around him, put his gloves on and took the small velvet-covered case from his pocket. He opened the case and took first one then another of the thin metal tools from inside it and began to work the lock. He was disappointed at how rusty he had gotten – it took him as long as twenty minutes to get the holds in place. But eventually he was able to slide open the door and step inside.

  The office was cramped but tidy, and furnished with a row of filing cabinets, a safe, a desk and a swivel chair. Schneider’s diploma hung from the wall, alongside a pair of landscapes in overly ornate faux-gold frames. He found signs that the police had already been there: they’d dusted for fingerprints and there were muddy foot-prints – police-issue boots – on the carpet and floorboards. Luca sat in Schneider’s chair and went through the papers in the desk drawers, hoping to find something incriminating or illegal – anything that would spark against the evidence in his head and form a connection, no matter how fragile. But he found nothing in the desk drawers except a receipt for a batch of ephedrine bought from a Chinese apothecary, and a business card for a John Lefebvre, Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Luca smiled – he hadn’t heard the name in years, and he decided to pay his old acquaintance a visit.

  The rain pattered down all afternoon on the office’s single grimy window as Luca checked the documents in the filing cabinet. From the nature of Schneider’s papers it looked as if he specialized in property law, drawing up deeds, filing claims, working with clients involved in boundary disputes and planning negotiations. His clients were all white-collar – small businessmen, plantation-owners; no criminals that were known to Luca.

  He set to work on the safe. It was an English design, a 1900 Chubb & Son rotary; it had, thankfully, notoriously loud disks compared to the newer designs. It took him just under the hour and a half he had predicted to crack it, and he felt a delicate, satisfied pride when the safe opened. Except for a layering of scuffed dust from the police fingerprinters, the safe was empty.

  Luca sat on the floor and sighed. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall. The afternoon had turned to dusk, then into night, and he hadn’t stopped the whole time except to draw the blinds over the window and light the lamp, covering the upper half of the shade with his coat to prevent too much light seeping out into the street. His clothes were still damp from the rain and he was exhausted.

  It was only because he was sitting on the floor and the lamp was casting oblique shadows onto the floorboards that he noticed, when he opened his eyes, the scratches in the far corner of the room. They were on the edges of two adjacent floorboards – the kind of scratches made by someone levering up the boards with a tool.

  He moved to the corner to have a better look. The scratches were not many, but they were deep, and the dust around the nails in the boards had been displaced. He found a letter opener on the desk, slid it in between the boards and slowly levered them up. He moved the boards out of the way, lowered the lamp into the floor cavity and leaned his head into the dusty, grimy space below. Just next to the lamp was a small metal strongbox. He reached in and lifted it out. He put the floorboards back in their place and then he heard a noise in the street below. He blew out the lamp and approached the window.

  When he moved the blind to the side and looked into the street he saw the old lady he had passed when he came in. She was talking to two uniformed policeman, pointing up to Schneider’s office. He jerked himself away from the window. Visions of Angola flooded into his mind and he cursed himself for being so stupid and so rusty. He moved as quickly as he could, motivated by a dread fear of being sent back to prison so soon. He set the catch on the door to close after him and padded out of the office. Peering down the staircase, he could see the cops already in the hallway below. He leapt up the stairs, and the cops, alerted by his footsteps, burst into a run.

  He prayed there was a fire escape on the top floor, some means of getting onto the roof, but when he got there he was faced with just two doors, both of them locked. He could hear the footsteps of the policemen on the wooden stairs, heavy and getting louder. He glanced around and saw a storage cupboard set into one of the walls. He opened it. It was barely big enough to fit a child and was full to the brim with cleaning equipment – brushes, dustpans, mops, canisters of bleach.

  He took Schneider’s strongbox and placed it in the back of the cupboard, swinging the door shut as the cops rounded the last flight of stairs.

  ‘Freeze!’ they screamed, their faces contorted, flushed and angry. Luca raised his hands into the air but they knocked him to the floor anyway, smashing his head into the boards, and before he knew it he felt cold metal squeezing painfully against his wrists.

  24

  O’Neil’s auto-repair shop was not so much a building as a collection of corrugated-iron sheets thrown together at the end of an alleyway. It was located in the industrial section of the Vieux Carré, just at the top of the bend in the river opposite Algiers. The alleyway backed onto a towering textiles factory, and despite the rain the air was heavy with the acrid, burning smell of cotton bleach.

  An hour earlier Michael had called the precinct from a pay-phone in a post office in Little Italy, and the precinct had searched out the address for him. It was dusk by the time they arrived and they almost missed the shop in the gloom. But Kerry happened to catch sight of a tiny sign with O’Neil’s name daubed across it, hanging above the metal shutter entrance.

  He banged on the shutter with the underside of his fist and the movement sent noisy waves rolling across its surface. After a short wait they heard footsteps approaching and a muffled voice from the other side.

  ‘We’re closed,’ the voice said, more weary than annoyed.

  ‘It’s the police,’ replied Kerry.

  For a moment there was quiet then the shutter shook and slid upwards to reveal a heavy-set Irishman with a bald head and a thick brown beard. He stared at them myopically for a moment, then leaned against the shutter and burst into a coughing fit so violent it bent him over and flushed his face red. Eventually he took a rag from his back pocket and spat into it, then he shook his head, turned and limped back inside the dimly lit shop.

  Michael and Kerry shared a look then followed him in. They were mole-eyed in the darkness until the man turned a knob at the base of a gas-lamp, and the room flooded with orange light. The workshop had three bays, one housing a Packard Victoria, the second a Stears-Knight, and running along the far end was a worktop cluttered with tools and machine parts. But it was the gleaming black Type 55 Cadillac jacked up in the nearest bay that caught Michael and Kerry’s attention. It was an opulent, agile-looking car and it sparkled in the gaslight like a curved slab of pristine onyx. Michael thought it looked almost otherworldly in its sleekness, encased as it was by the dirty, ramshackle womb of the workshop.

  The man leaned against the counter at the far end of the space, crossed his arms and watched them with a bleary-eyed look, an expression that made Michael wonder if they hadn’t woken him from an early evening nap.

  ‘Sorry to have bothered you,’ he said. ‘You O’Neil?’

  ‘Sure,’ the man replied easily, scratching his beard.

  Michael noticed the wall behind him was plastered with photographs of pin-ups torn from magazines. He recognized a few of the face
s – Belle Bennett, Colleen Moore, Betty Compson, waiflike young actresses of the silver screen – fragile and sultry. They had all been shot in the same way – backlit and soft-focused against hazy studio backdrops, dressed in chiffon and lace, reclining on chaise longues, smoking cigarettes and gazing soulfully into the distance.

  The man looked over at Kerry, who was still standing in front of the car with a smile on his face, studying it like a museum exhibit.

  ‘You like the boat, kid?’ said O’Neil.

  Kerry nodded. ‘I ain’t never seen a Cadillac up close,’ he said, almost awestruck by the car.

  ‘Runs like a top when it’s working,’ said O’Neil. ‘Cannonball Baker drove from LA to New York in a Type 51 last year. Took him seven days. Reckon a 55 could do it in six.’

  Kerry smiled, reluctantly pulled his gaze away from the car and sauntered over to the two men. ‘You hear that, sir?’ he said to Michael. ‘From one end o’ the country to the other in six days.’

  O’Neil burst into a coughing fit again and while they waited for him to stop, Michael noticed the smell of bleach from the factory opposite had permeated the inside of the draughty workshop, and he wondered if the chemicals in the air weren’t the cause of the man’s breathing difficulties.

  ‘I assume you didn’t come here to talk about Cadillacs,’ O’Neil said ruefully, his voice raspy. ‘Or watch me cough my lungs out.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘You employ a man by the name of Lombardi?’ he asked.

  ‘’Manno? I used to. Haven’t seen him in a week.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He just stopped showing up. I guessed he got sick of being here. That’s what you get when you hire dagoes. Unreliable. Like the car.’ O’Neil nodded at the Cadillac, then rummaged around the pockets of his overalls for a cigarette. ‘You know where we can find him?’ Michael asked.