by Jimmy Fox
“He has lost his mental balance, undoubtedly. Perhaps he believed that you, as a writer on genealogical subjects, would broach this discovery to the world. He needs the credibility of scholarship. He has already tried rumor and innuendo, to no very great effect. Fortunately, he does not belong to the class of people with whom Artemis usually deals.”
“Mrs. Armiger, as far as I can see, it’s your word against a disturbed little man’s screwball ravings. Who’s going to believe him? I’m sure you’ve had worse crises in your business. Call your public-relations experts. Get some spin control. Your clients will understand the situation when you explain the truth to them. I think you’re overreacting.”
“Truth is a mask one wears for the evening’s ball. I am not concerned with the truth. Controversy must be avoided at all costs; the slightest scandal could foster a desire to doubt the mask, to seek the homely face beneath. That would be fatal for the romance that keeps the whole affair whirling into the dawn.” She seemed to be envisioning some Mardi Gras gala from her youth. “Stop your work for Max Corban. I propose another assignment for you: track down my link to Balazar, and when you have found the evidence, steal it.”
Nick had had enough of this designer dictator.
“Wait a minute, lady! Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here, ordering me around like some flunky? I’m not one of your cringing minions.”
One of her eyebrows assumed a more acute angle. She fingered her strands of pearls, worry beads for a woman who could probably buy the Vatican.
“Do you know that I am on the Permanent Endowment Board of Freret University? Years ago, I was instrumental in the hiring of Dr. Herman Newtic, who, as you may know, was the first Jewish member of the English department. I squelched all objections to your own Jewish background. Oh, don’t bother asking how they knew that your grandfather had changed his name from Herzwald to Herald when he came to America. Prejudice in this city is a many-eyed beast.”
“Can you blame him?” Nick asked, remembering how strange the name had sounded to him as a kid when he’d first heard it. He hadn’t thought about that buried family secret for thirty years. Genealogist, know thyself!
“No, I cannot say that I do.” Her gash of mouth seemed tickled into the faintest suggestion of mirth. “Being such an advocate for inclusion is my way of beating the bigots at their own game, by working within their system, until I can change it. It is all the more rewarding to know that I myself am one who would be excluded from the highest circles under the old rules. I cannot allow my past to interfere.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Armiger, this is your crusade. I’ve got my own problems. And by the way, it’s not your past; it belongs to everybody. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“You may also be interested to know that I was the single dissenter in the vote to fire you. As a result, in deference to my substantial influence, a quieter settlement was arranged. Was I wrong? It is not too late, however, to rectify my error. I can discredit you in this business. I can make you unemployable in this city, in this state, in this country. Do you begin to understand? Accept my proposal. Perhaps, later, I’ll have other work for you. What is your price? You name it.”
Talk about spin control. Nick felt she could spin him out of this galaxy.
“Your instincts have been correct so far,” she said. “I believe you will find something in Natchitoches, though I haven’t any certain idea what. Isn’t that where you had intended to start?” She checked her notebook. “Yes, that was my information. As you might guess, my family has avoided discussing this man–my great-great-grandfather. A form of self-hatred, I suppose; that is perhaps the most pernicious byproduct of bigotry. Hyam Balazar was his name. There. Now I have told you all I know.”
She held her exquisite gold-filigreed black pen poised to fill in the amount on a check.
Nick wanted to explain that you couldn’t just erase someone from history these days. Records have been microfilmed, copied, disseminated, even written in stone, in the case of grave markers. But the challenge piqued his perverse spirit. His bombastic performance for Hawty earlier in the day had been only partly serious; but now he wondered: if one anchoring strand were cut, might not the whole web collapse? It was hard enough finding records that do exist; one forgery, one deliberate theft, one malicious act of destruction, could cause a perpetuation of error lasting centuries–or forever. It could be done.
“Is twenty thousand fair for your services?” she asked.
“Do you have any idea of the difficulty, maybe the impossibility, of what you’re asking me to do?” Nick said, standing up in desperation. This was all too much. He walked to the windows, trying to rub the reality of this woman out of his eyes. But when he turned around, she was still there. “I could go to jail for this!”
“Forty?” Armiger said. “More? Very well, fifty, then.”
“Fifty thousand…dollars!?” The words didn’t make sense to him, suddenly.
“You drive a hard bargain, Nick.”
She filled in the check with the incredible figure, which represented to him the earnings of a couple of good years.
“This is a credit card for your expenses. Please try not to be too extravagant. When you have something to report, call this number.”
He watched her place the check, the credit card, and a business card on his desk.
Pick the check up, rip it to pieces, Nick thought, again flaring briefly into anger.
But he didn’t.
“You just bought yourself a cringing minion,” he said, a bit out of breath with visions of beautiful women and the south of France. He could buy enough fine wine to float in, purchase whole junkshops whenever he pleased, research and write to his heart’s content…for a while, anyway.
Natalie Armiger’s face was a portrait of conquest; she might have just triumphed in a successful hostile corporate raid.
It was dusk before Nick realized how many times around the Audubon Park track he must have jogged. He had been trying to run away from the death camps tattooed on Corban’s soul, from the fiendish Nazi doctors, from the Queen of Artemis Holdings, from Balazar, Hiram and Hyam–but most of all, from his shame.
8
Saturday afternoon Nick was finally able to summon the courage to call Corban, to break the news that their deal was off.
On the phone, Corban threatened, pleaded, and bribed. It seemed to Nick that discrediting Armiger had become the only thing in Corban’s life of misery. Did he even care any longer for the money he’d lost? Nick was no psychiatrist, but he sensed that somehow, in the old man’s crumbling mind, Armiger had come to represent all of the relentless terror he had seen striding across Europe, casting its deadly shadow on his life.
She might be an unpleasant woman who used questionable means, but did she deserve such harassment? Maybe Armiger was right after all: the old guy just might be bonkers.
For all his skillful rationalization, Nick couldn’t fight the feeling that he had become a genealogical gigolo, a mind and a conscience for hire to the highest bidder.
“I have something for you,” Corban said on the phone. “There is more that you must tell the world. I am too ill to come downtown…yes, yes, I lied to you! Big deal. What is my lie next to hers? A flea!”
Nick tried to interrupt with Armiger’s side of the story. But the old man became even more agitated and cut him off with a volley of impenetrable Yiddishisms that didn’t fail to express vehement disdain for Nick, Armiger, the world in general.
“God forbid she should be one of us! But once upon a time, yes, there was a landsman in her family. Oh, I could hurt her real bad with that.” He whispered confidentially: “Her rich goys, they hate Jews. But that’s not the whole schmeer. I got something better to fight with. I show you what I mean. You don’t understand. She has got to be stopped, before she does more evil! She is one of them, with blood on her hands. Come! I have no one else, except the yentes from the community center. You must come!”
Nick’s
kind heart–and his curiosity–got the best of him. He agreed to see Max Corban the next morning.
That afternoon, though, as he worked alone at his office, he began to feel less sorry for Corban. Wasn’t it the old man’s fault that he had become involved in this mess?
From now on, he decided, no more weirdos for clients.
9
Max Corban wept over the scrapbook, as he had done so often.
Darkness still cloaked the morning outside. Lately, sleep had become more difficult for him. The aches and pains of his damaged life tormented him. But worse: each night he awoke terrified, exhausted, lost. The body could be dealt with; but the mind…he had seen many people go mad in the concentration camps; they were the lucky ones, remaining unaware of the inevitable, ultimate horrors to come. He knew what his mental turmoil meant. It was how the final madness starts.
He had put water on to boil, in the kitchen of his little house. His life now was no more than a teaspoon of instant coffee, sere and bitter. Only another scalding inundation could offer peace, dissolution into a puff of smoke, the peace of death.
It was their fault fifty years ago. Her fault today. No difference.
The scrapbook on his kitchen table held the story of his return from the grave. Liberating soldiers had snapped photos of the stick figures that had once been human beings. Corban moved his fingers over the image of one such figure in a pitiful crowd, as if feeling the bones beneath the stretched skin. It was he himself. Even now, when he looked in the mirror, that is what he saw staring blankly back at him, below the flesh.
He turned pages. There were happier pictures of the years after the war. Of other survivors, new friends, and his future wife; of relief workers and Allied soldiers who had taken a fancy to him; of simple pleasures like card games, picnics, reading…that, after the war, had been so precious to him.
Further on, the scrapbook documented his and his wife’s journey to America, from the first applications for emigration, to the final papers of their naturalization. He read again, for the thousandth time, some of the letters from the people who had helped him. He had kept in contact with a few of them for many years; now, most were gone. And one of them, on his recent death, had finally sent what Max most needed–a weapon of information.
It had been thirty-five years since the sad day he opened the letter on the next yellowed scrapbook page. His friends, the letter informed him, Maurice and Erna Balazar, had been murdered. Thirteen years after the war, they were murdered in their own hometown in Germany, in an act of local terrorism, leaving an orphaned child.
The four of them–Corban and Mignon, Maurice and Erna–had been through a lot together, in those many months in the displaced-persons camps. That is where they had met and nursed each other back to health.
Corban shook his head. The war had changed nothing. Would they always win?
After the war, the Balazars eventually decided to go to New Orleans. They asked relatives there for sponsorship; but difficulties arose. The Corbans, after leaving Europe, had tried New Jersey first as a residence; they had not hit it off with his distant relatives there. Having caught some of Maurice’s enthusiasm for New Orleans, Corban and Mignon wanted a taste of the exotic city themselves. They made it their home.
For many years, Corban did not know exactly what went wrong for the Balazars, even though his friends in the relief agencies had solicited his help after the deaths in 1958 and had sent him copies of some documents relating to the lives and families of Maurice and Erna. But the name of the New Orleans relatives went unmentioned; nor had he any recollection that the Balazars had told him, back in the DP camps or in the few letters from them that very soon trickled to a stop. Maybe these relatives had died or moved away from New Orleans in the intervening years; he presumed the agencies were doing the best they could.
In 1958 the Corbans knew only that there was an orphaned child, and that the agencies needed their help in trying to place her with other American cousins. They knew of no others, but Corban and his wife immediately volunteered to adopt the girl. Suddenly, however, their communication with their friends in the agencies ceased…until several months ago.
He had memorialized it all in his scrapbook. And the scrapbook must be saved. It was his mission. Like Job, he had been chosen to do God’s bidding. There were no coincidences; his suffering now had meaning. God had brought him here, He had thrown him back into the clutches of the beast. The beast that had killed a people, the beast that had killed his family and friends.
The beast was hungry again, hunting, on the move. He knew he did not have much time.
The water boiled, but Corban did not notice it.
He took a large tan envelope from the back of the scrapbook, dumped the contents on the table, and tore page after page from the book, until there were more than two dozen before him. He worked them into the envelope; pieces of the foxed pages crumbled like brittle bones to the floor.
Soon it would be light. He made his way through his neat house, located tape to seal the envelope, and some stray stamps he did not bother to add up. He licked and stuck them onto the thick package, over the older stamps. In the Yellow Pages, he found Nick’s name and address and hurriedly wrote the words and numbers with a pen that was running out of ink.
Corban opened his front door. Outside, it was quiet; nothing moved on the fog-blurred street. He wore pajamas, and though the night was warm, he shivered as he scurried the few feet to the mailbox.
In the last moments of darkness before daylight, Corban stood in the middle of his kitchen, listening. He had heard the goose-steps of doom before; he heard them now. Again the insatiable beast galloped toward him.
He turned slowly to face the evil that was rumbling through the utility room, even now at the kitchen door. Vividly he remembered how, in the camps, such moments of horror took mere seconds, but stretched into infinity as his lagging mind struggled to process them.
The kitchen door flew open, kicked by a strong foot.
Like a match in a tornado, Corban rose from the floor in the grip of the intruders.
He could not be sure how many there were–two, as there had been a few days before, a hundred, a million?…He felt himself rapidly, roughly carried down the hall, into his bedroom. Then there was utter darkness, stifling closeness. He could not breathe.
Yet he was not afraid.
Come then, death. His mind formed the words, but his mouth could not speak them. I am ready. I have won.
10
Nick knew well the area where Corban lived; Uptown, but not in one of the sections being rejuvenated by Yuppies from other states. There was a world-famous jazz club a block away. He had frequented the several quirky neighborhood bars that served boiled crabs and raw oysters weekends during games on television. And students from Freret University were fond of bringing parents to the nearby ramshackle family restaurant that made probably the best poboys in the city, and therefore in the world.
Neighborhoods evolve in seesaw cycles in the old sections of New Orleans. The peeling, dilapidated shanty or battleship of a house becomes the pink, olive-green, or slate-blue showcase, gleaming with brass fixtures and etched glass, the kind of place that ends up in home-and-garden magazines between the recipes and ads. Odds are Artemis Holdings would have something to do with most of these transactions and remodelings.
The Irish Channel, it’s called. The train tracks are close, and the river, too, which meant, a century ago, a good supply of backbreaking jobs for the hungry immigrants, who were the cheap labor that in part helped build many coffee, sugar, and produce fortunes. The neighborhood is still working class suspicious of “foreigners” (who isn’t a foreigner, Nick often wondered, on a hundred-year scale?); but today there seems to be room for just about every other ethnicity in the human jambalaya of this city.
Though predominantly Irish and Catholic around here, there is nevertheless a Jewish cemetery right in the middle; and in March, when the green beer flows, the festive noises of the St
. Patrick’s Day parade echo over the bones and tombstones of Russian, Prussian, and Alsatian Jews who came over in the waves of 1848, the 1860s, and the 1880s–each time the pogroms heated up or cooked shoes started appearing on the dinner table.
Corban lived across an alley from the cemetery. Nick, reading the address, guessed Corban had brought his memories here to rest, a new surrogate urn for the scattered ashes of his dead. This cemetery must have served as a palpable memorial for his placeless mourning, a symbol to grieve over every day when he stepped onto his porch with his coffee, or cough syrup. Nick understood; he too was a man who cherished his tragedies.
Nick knocked, rang the doorbell, knocked, and knocked again, until his knuckles hurt. He leaned on the doorbell button for a full minute. He knew it worked; he could hear it. He went around the back, to a scruffy yard full of cast-off household items and automotive parts, all the while feeling that it was happening again, that his cogwheel train of fate had just taken a sharp, unpleasant turn, or entered a tunnel. The interesting thing about such moments, he reflected, is that you have no doubts, and you act with unusual determination; that was pure stupidity in his book, but others wiser than he had become rich and famous calling it heroism.
A screen door hung off the hinges. Beyond the door, Nick entered what must have been the former back porch; crammed into it were a washer and a dryer that had to be older than he was. Forgotten shirts, yellowed by the elements, hung from nails and wire hangers on the walls. The door to the kitchen was more rot than wood, but there was also some recent damage. It was open a few inches. Nick eased it back with a toe of his desert boots.
Inside, at the range, a gas burner blazed blue under a blistered, red-hot pot, which seemed about to splinter into shrapnel. Corban had been boiling water for coffee; Nick saw the dry grains of instant still in the cup.
Corban’s narrow house was of undistinguished “shotgun” design. The lights were on in the kitchen, but the rest of the house seemed illuminated only by daylight. That made sense, Nick thought; Corban, like most Depression-era seniors, was habitually frugal, and, like just about everyone, probably spent most of his waking hours in the kitchen.
