The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  Time passed and at one point Jones perked up.

  ‘Hey-ho. I think we got our bird,’ he said, nudging Michael.

  They sat up and peered through the windows. On the opposite side of the street, a few houses down, a front door had opened and a short Italian man stepped out into the rain with a travel case in one hand.

  ‘That’s him,’ Michael said.

  Jones started up the car, put it into gear and kept it on the biting point. When Amanzo was a few feet away from them, Jones put his foot down. The car lurched forward, bumped over the curb and screeched to a halt in front of Amanzo. Hatener swung open his door and caught Amanzo by his coat. Amanzo flailed his arms about, swinging the edge of the travel case into Hatener’s stomach. Gregson ran around from the other side of the car, kneed Amanzo in the groin, and together with Hatener, one pulling, one pushing, they bundled Amanzo into the car. Gregson jumped in on top of him and Jones reversed into the road and tore off down the street, the back door flapping in the wind. Amanzo struggled on the seat, twisting his body around, trying to land punches and kicks on whoever he could. Hatener took out his gun from his coat, and cracked it against Amanzo’s skull with a noise like a snapping branch, and he kept on doing it till Amanzo lost consciousness. Then Gregson leaned over and pulled the flailing door shut, and the sounds of the storm became instantly dull.

  51

  Luca got back to the train station with less than a quarter of an hour to spare before his train arrived. He used the telephone in the station agent’s hut to place a call to Sandoval and waited anxiously for the few minutes it took the operator to connect him.

  ‘Alessandro? It’s Luca,’ he said when he finally got through.

  Sandoval’s voice crackled over the line. ‘Luca? The line’s bad. Where are you?’

  ‘Out of town,’ said Luca, switching into Italian to guard his words from the ear of the station agent, who was sitting at his desk staring at him. ‘Tell Carlo I found out who he is. It’s a Creole by the name of Davide Baudet.’

  Luca glanced at the station agent who made a show of checking his pocket watch, standing, and stalking out onto the platform.

  ‘I need you to check up on a man called Rodrigo Bianchi,’ Luca said. ‘If he’s still around, he’s next on the list.’

  ‘You got an address?’ asked Sandoval.

  As Sandoval spoke, Luca heard his train approaching, its engine clattering, its wheels screeching as the driver applied the brake.

  ‘I don’t have an address,’ Luca shouted over the noise of the train. ‘Sandro, you need to find him.’

  The train came to a halt and its engines hissed. Luca peered out onto the platform and saw people bustling about the train, loading and unloading.

  ‘OK, I’ll get things moving,’ said Sandoval quickly. ‘When are you back?’

  ‘Tonight. Leave an address at the hotel.’

  Luca put the phone down and stepped out of the hut. He jostled his way along the platform and hopped onto the train just as the station agent blew the whistle for it to leave.

  He spent the return journey staring out of the window, thinking about what he had learned. Bechet had known all along. Luca had asked him for someone who could help him find the Axeman, and Bechet had sent him straight to the Axeman’s sister. She can help you out. In more ways than one, he had said, and Luca had misunderstood his meaning. All Bechet’s comments started to make sense as Luca reran their conversation through his mind. Conspiracy is greater than witchcraft. Luca realized he hadn’t really been listening at all. He thought about Simone, and her behavior began to make sense, too – why she was so eager to keep him around, why she had been out of sorts when the two policemen followed Luca to her house, why she was worried about a storm coming, a storm that might drown her brother who lived out in the backwaters.

  And the intricacies of the case began to make sense, too. The letter the Axeman had sent to the newspaper, for all its talk of demons and jazz, had directed the police into New Orleans on the night Baudet had left the city to kill the accountant. Luca guessed there was a high chance of Baudet being caught under normal circumstances – a lone colored man travelling into a secluded, rural district to carry out a hit. But the letter had drained all the surrounding parishes of their law-enforcement, funneling them into New Orleans. But why had he killed the accountant in a different manner to the other victims? And why had he left no tarot card?

  Maybe there was no need. Baudet had killed his parents’ murderers with an axe, playing out his revenge with the exact same weapon they had used to commit their crimes. And the tarot cards added to that revenge. The tarot cards, and the doors and windows locked shut at every crime scene. Baudet was making himself seem like a demon because the Italians had thought his mother a witch, and so he had couched his attacks in occult imagery and conceits. Luca imagined what it must have been like for the victims, wondering if there was not some unearthly form of justice at work. Then he thought of what the old farmhand had told him about fear, about the demons lurking in the back of people’s minds. Baudet had taken their fear and made it real.

  It took Luca two hours to get from the New Orleans Terminal Station up to Simone’s. The storm had unleashed torrents of rain and wind onto the city, making the paths through the bayou treacherous and waterlogged. By the time he reached Simone’s he was tired and soaked to the skin.

  She was at the table mending a piece of clothing when he entered. She peered at him, at the glare on his face, and Luca could tell from the way her expression became solemn that she had realized he had discovered the truth. He pushed the door back against the wind and approached the table.

  ‘Your brother,’ he said coldly.

  She said nothing. She put down the cloth and peered at him with a blank expression, and they stayed like that, staring at each other wordlessly, for a long, leaden moment. He had expected an argument, recriminations, tears, but now he felt sapped of energy, despondent and strangely calm, and he got the feeling Simone felt the same. Neither of them had the desire to fight. They were too old to claw at each other, and too wise to blame their situation on anything other than the callow whims of fate.

  He sat at the table opposite her and put a hand to his head.

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said eventually, rubbing his temples.

  ‘I know. But how could I have told you? I didn’t know who you were.’ She paused and looked down at the table in front of her. ‘He’s sick, Luca. He has been ever since my parents died.’

  Luca studied her. She didn’t shake, or make any noises, and her voice didn’t waver, but tears began to well up in her eyes and Luca remembered what the old man had said about her mother’s elegance and poise.

  ‘I have to look after him,’ she said. ‘What would you have done?’

  Luca put his hand on hers.

  ‘How did you find out?’ she asked.

  ‘I went down to Belle Terre today. Spoke to the old farmhand. He told me what happened to your family. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ she said flatly, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  ‘I’ll protect him if I can,’ he said, and she smiled and wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand.

  ‘He said he would stop,’ she said. ‘After the next one. He said there’s one more.’

  Luca nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘Just let him do it and you’ll never hear from him again. I swear.’ She sniffed back her tears, then shook her head. She put her hand to her face and Luca stood and moved across to her, stooped down and they hugged. It was only when he couldn’t see her face that she started to sob.

  After a while she moved away from him, stood and walked over to the stove. She took a bottle of rum and two glasses from a shelf and came back to the table. She poured them both shots and they drank. The rum was dark and sweet and it warmed Luca with a sharp burn.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He lives out in the swamps
northeast of here. He comes sometimes, for food.’ She sniffed back more tears and looked Luca in the eye. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

  Luca wasn’t so sure about that. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of damp, unsmokeable cigarettes.

  ‘You got anything to smoke?’ he asked.

  She nodded to the shelves behind him, where he found a pouch of tobacco and some cigarette papers. He brought them back to the table and started to roll them a cigarette.

  ‘What happened after you ran away?’ he asked.

  Simone poured herself another shot of rum.

  ‘We stayed in swamps for a while,’ she said with a shrug. ‘We had to look after ourselves. Davide had to trap animals. One of the old farmhands used to give us food. Eventually we got taken in by a Cajun family that lived in a fishing village up by the lake. We stayed there till we were older. I moved to New Orleans, and then on to here. Davide joined the army, the Buffalo Soldiers. He travelled around, Cuba, the Philippines. Fighting and killing, winning medals.’

  She stood and went to one of the bookshelves that ran across the walls of the cabin. She opened up a tin box, took a photograph from it and returned to the table. She held it out and Luca took it. The photograph was a portrait snap of her brother during his army days. The man in the photo was young and somber-looking, and his jacket was heavily laden with medals. Luca recognized something of Simone in her brother’s face – the same high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, the same natural elegance in his bearing.

  ‘They started sending him on special missions,’ she went on. ‘He’d never say what. But when he was discharged and he moved back here . . . he was never the same.’

  Luca nodded. A military past made sense. If the army had sent him on special missions, he must have been trained in stealth, which explained how he could plan his attacks so well, how he could get in and out of buildings undetected. Whatever had happened to Baudet during his years of active service, it had unhinged an already unstable mind.

  ‘A while ago he came to see me,’ she said. ‘He told me he’d found out from someone in New Orleans where all the people were that killed our folks. Said he was gonna set things right. I told him it wasn’t worth it, but he wouldn’t listen.’

  She stopped talking and they stared at each other. Then Luca passed her the cigarette he had rolled. She lit it and they shared it, passing it back and forth, inhaling deep mouthfuls of the heavy, dry smoke.

  ‘The man your brother wants to kill. The last man,’ said Luca. ‘He’s being guarded.’

  Simone frowned and stared at him with a pleading look.

  ‘Luca, he’s the only thing I’ve got left,’ she said, shaking her head, and Luca’s heart sank. He realized what he had done, and that he had no choice now but to go. He had to cross back into the city and see to its conclusion the train of events he’d set in motion.

  ‘I’ll try and help him if I can,’ he repeated, his voice low and somber.

  He rose and kissed her, and they stared at each other despondently. Then he crossed the room to the cabin door, and stepped out into the howling storm beyond.

  52

  Just after eight o’clock, when they’d heard the car start up and the sound of its engine gently recede into the distance, Buddy had turned to Ida and Lewis and nodded at them that it was time to move. Buddy’s reconnaissance of the house over the previous few days had established that the father took the two girls of the house out at eight o’clock most nights, and didn’t bring them back till after midnight. So when he met up with Lewis and Ida earlier that day, Buddy had suggesting waiting in the alleyway behind the house until they heard the car depart. The plan made sense to Ida, but it meant they had to stand in the open during the rainstorm, and now the three of them were thoroughly drenched.

  Without a word, Buddy jumped the back fence of the house and opened up the gate for them from the inside. They stalked through a shadowy yard until they reached the rear entrance, a kitchen door covered by a porch. Buddy knelt down, took a flashlight from his pocket, quickly switched it on and shone it at the lock. He peered at the lock for a couple of seconds before hastily switching off the light again. Then he took a greasy canvas roll about the size of a large cigar from the inside pocket of his coat and unrolled it onto the porch. The canvas had strips of cloth sewn into it that formed a series of loops, each of which held some kind of pick – slim instruments of dull metal. He took two from their loops, prized them into the keyhole and got to work. Blowing on his hands and rubbing them together to keep them warm, it took Buddy just over five minutes to pick the lock, the tumblers eventually falling into place with a noise like someone clicking their tongue. He smiled and turned the door handle, sliding the door open slowly.

  They crept inside and found themselves in the kitchen. It was dark, but they could make out the shape of a door at the other end of the room. They tiptoed towards it and into a corridor, where they found a door under the stairs, which they guessed was the entrance to the cellar. Lewis tried the door but it was locked. He looked at Buddy and Buddy rolled his eyes playfully, then knelt and got to work once more, repeating his actions with the flashlight, the canvas roll and the picks. After a few minutes the cellar door was open and Buddy smiled to himself, stood, and rubbed his knees.

  He took two candles from the inside of his coat and handed them to Ida and Lewis.

  ‘Don’t light them till you down in the cellar,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna have a mosey round the house.’

  Buddy winked at Ida and sauntered off down the corridor. Ida grimaced at his retreating figure. Buddy had been flirting with her all evening, showering the conversation with innuendos, sly looks and smiles, and she had grown evermore annoyed at him. Even though she knew it wasn’t just Buddy that was responsible for her bad mood – she had a horrible feeling there would be no evidence, that she had led them all into danger for no good reason at all. Her visit to the Retreat earlier that day had made her understand just how high the conspiracy went, and that it would require incontrovertible proof to make a solid case against Morval. She had realized with a growing sickness in her stomach that there was only the most minuscule chance of finding just the right piece of evidence, and most likely, just the right piece of evidence didn’t even exist. But Buddy and Lewis had already arranged everything, and Ida felt a duty to Leeta to see it all through. She wanted to prove Leeta right against all the odds, and find the smoking gun in the place she’d said it would be. And on top of that, this was the only lead Ida had left.

  They descended the stairs, and at the halfway point they lit the candles. The orange glow threw the space below them into long shadows. The cellar was big, covering the whole floor-space of the building, and all across it was a pool of water almost a foot deep, which reflected the light from their candles. They looked at each other and grimaced – the rain was flooding the basement, and they’d have to wade through the water. They swung their candles about and illuminated the hulking, half-soaked shapes below them – old furniture covered in dust sheets, and in one corner a stack of cardboard boxes which was leaning over to one side, the bottom boxes having been drenched by the water.

  They stepped down into the cold, dank water and made their way over to the boxes. Ida handed her candle to Lewis and began to go through them. Each one contained dossiers and files – mainly business reports, accounting ledgers, lists of expenses and contracts, and a folder containing property deeds.

  The fourth box Ida opened had the evidence – files relating to the accounts of cribs in the District, lists of employees, license fees, revenue streams, and a small book containing a list of initials, addresses, dates and dollar amounts. Ida took the book and sat on the stairs with it, flicking through its pages intently. If she could find the name of the person Morval had hired to carry out the killings, maybe that person could implicate Morval. Maybe one of the names in the book was the right one, maybe a set of initials was the clue, or one of the addresses.

  ‘What you found
?’ Lewis asked her after a while.

  ‘I dunno.’

  She thought for a moment, and realized with a sense of despondency that this little book was the closest she was going to come to any real evidence. She’d need to sit down and study it more closely and see if it contained any clues to the whereabouts of the man Brigadier Kline had told her about, the man who had served in the army with the brigadier, the man Morval had hired. But there was no sense in studying the book here, where they were exposed and vulnerable.

  ‘Let’s get outta here,’ she said, stuffing the book into her coat pocket.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lewis asked as they climbed the stairs.

  ‘I’m thinking maybe that book’s got the name of the killer Morval hired in it,’ she said.

  ‘You ain’t taking no stuff about Morval’s stable?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘Morval’s stable ain’t got nothing to do with it,’ Ida replied. ‘It’s all about how the mayor fell out with the Matrangas. Morval had those people killed because the mayor asked him to kill them.’

  ‘The mayor?’

  They reached the top of the stairs and blew out the candles.

  ‘In return, Morval got to run all the brothels outside of Storyville.’

  Lewis stared at her and frowned.

  ‘Ida, there ain’t no brothels outside of Storyville,’ he said.

  ‘Not yet there ain’t.’

  They stepped into the corridor and out into the lounge. Buddy was sitting on the sofa on the far side of the room, a silent smile playing on his lips, his head tilted back. Lewis noticed something wild in his eyes, something strange about his smile, and then he saw the red line drawn across his throat.

  ‘Buddy?’ said Lewis, before something swung towards him and the world turned black.

  53

  The Hospital for Incurables was a sprawling collection of abandoned buildings set behind a razor-wire fence in scrubland to the southwest of the city. It had been closed down by the mayor’s administration a few years before and the police had been left in charge of its security until its fate was decided. Somehow Hatener had managed to procure the keys. The hospital grounds were large enough to muffle the noise of what went on inside, and as they dragged Amanzo’s body from the car, Jones had informed Michael, with a sinister smile, that the hospital’s incinerator was still in working order.