DR07 - Dixie City Jam (9 page)

'How do you know he's a Nazi?'

'I took a wild guess.'

'What's in that sub?'

'Seawater and dead krauts. Jesus Christ, how do I know what's
in there? Like I've been down in German submarines?' He looked at me a
long moment, started to unwrap his cigar, then dropped it on the coffee
table and stared out the window at a solitary moss-strung oak in his
front yard. 'I'm sorry what this guy did to your wife. I don't know who
he is, though. But maybe there're more of these kinds of guys around
than you want to believe, Dave. Come on in back.'

I followed him deep into his house, which had been built in
the 1870s, with oak floors, spiral staircases, high ceilings, and
enormous windows that were domed at the top with stained glass. Then we
crossed his tree-shaded, brick-walled backyard, past a swimming pool in
which islands of dead oak leaves floated on the chemical green surface,
to a small white stucco office with a blue tile roof that was almost
completely encased by banana trees. He used a key on a ring to unlock
the door.

The furniture inside was stacked with boxes of documents and
files, the corkboards on the walls layered with thumbtacked sheets of
paper, newspaper clippings, yellowed photographs with curled edges,
computer printouts of people's names, telephone numbers, home and
business addresses. The room was almost frigid from the
air-conditioning unit in the window.

I stared at an eight-by-ten photograph in the middle of a
cork-board. In it a group of children, perhaps between the ages of five
and eight, had rolled up their coat sleeves from their right forearms
to show the serial numbers that had been tattooed across their skin.

'Those kids look like they're part of a hoax, Dave?' he said.

'What's going on, partner?'

He didn't answer. He sat down at his desk, his massive
buttocks splaying across the chair, his huge head sinking into his
shoulders like a pumpkin, and clicked on his computer and viewing
screen. I watched him type the name 'Buchalter' on the keyboard, then
enter it into the computer. A second later a file leaped into the blue
viewing screen. Hippo tapped on a key that rolled the screen like film
being pulled through a projector while his eyes narrowed and studied
each entry.

'Take a look,' he said. 'I've got a half dozen Buchalters
here, but none of them seem to be your man. These guys are too old or
they're in jail or dead.'

'What is all this?'

'I belong to a group of people who have a network. We keep
tabs on the guys who'd like to see more ovens and searchlights and
guard towers in the world—the Klan, the American Nazi party,
the
Aryan Nation, skinheads out on the coast, a bunch of buttwipes called
Christian Identity at Hayden Lake, Idaho. They don't just spit Red Man
anymore, Dave. They're organized, they all know each other, they've got
one agenda—they'd like to make bars of soap out of people
they
disagree with. Not just Jews. People like you'd qualify, too.'

'Try another spelling,' I said.

'No, I think we've got the right spelling, just the wrong
generation. I'll give you a history lesson. Look at this.' He tapped
the key again that rolled the screen, then stopped at the name
Buchalter,
Jon Matthew
. 'You ever hear of the American-German Bund?'

'Yeah, it was a fascist movement back in the nineteen
thirties. They held rallies in Madison Square Garden.'

'That's right. And an offshoot of the Bund was a group called
the Silver Shirts. One of their founders was this guy Jon Matthew
Buchalter. He went to federal prison for treason and got out in
nineteen fifty-six, just in time to die of liver cancer.'

'Okay?'

'He was from Grand Isle.'

'So maybe the guy who came to my house is related to him?'

He clicked off his computer and turned to face me in his
chair. His head sank into his neck, and his jowls swelled out like the
bottom of a deflated basketball. 'I've got no answers for you,' he
said. 'Sometimes I wonder if I haven't gone around the bend. How many
people keep a rat's nest of evil like this in their backyard?'

I looked into his eyes.

'I don't want to offend you, Hippo, but I don't think you've
squared with me. Is there something about this submarine you haven't
told me?'

'Hey, time for a flash, Dave. You told
me
about the sub, remember? You bargained with
me
about the finder's fee. You think I got secrets, I live in a private
world? You bet your oysters I do. The bars on my house windows, the
electronic security system, the rent-a-cops I pay to watch my kids, you
think I got all that because I'm worried a bunch of coloreds from
Magazine are gonna walk off with my lawn furniture? You're living in
the New Jerusalem, Dave. It's the year zero; it's us against them. We
either make it or we don't.'

'I'm not sure I get what you're saying, Hippo. I'm not sure I
want to, either. It sounds a little messianic'

His face was flushed, his collar wilted like damp tissue paper
around his thick neck.

'Go on back to the worm business, Dave,' he said. 'That guy
comes around your house again, do the earth a favor, screw a gun barrel
in his mouth and blow his fucking head off. Leave me alone now, will
you? I don't feel too good. I got blood pressure could blow gaskets out
of a truck engine.'

He wiped at his mouth with his hand. His lips were purple in
the refrigerated gloom of his office. He stared at a collection of
thumbtacked news articles and photographs on his corkboard as though
his eyes could penetrate the black-and-white grain of the paper, as
though perhaps he himself had been pulled inside a photograph, into a
world of freight cars grinding slowly to a stop by a barbed-wire gate
that yawned open like a hungry mouth, while dogs barked in the
eye-watering glare of searchlights and files of the newly arrived moved
in silhouette toward buildings with conical chimneys that disappeared
into their own smoke.

Or was I making a complexity out of a histrionic and
disingenuous fat man whose self-manufactured drama had accidentally
brought a stray misanthrope out of the woodwork?

It was hard to buy into the notion that somehow World War II
was still playing at the Bijou in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I left him in his office and walked outside into the light.
The heat was like a match flame against my skin.

'It sounds deeply weird,' Clete said,
biting into his po'-boy
sandwich at a small grocery store up by Audubon Park, where the owner
kept tables for working people to eat their lunch. 'But maybe we're
just living in weird times. It's not like the old days.'

'You believe this American Bund stuff?'

'No, it's the way people think nowadays that bothers me. Like
this vigilante gig and this Citizens Committee for a Better New
Orleans. You knew Bimstine and Tommy Lonighan are both on it?'

'No. When did Lonighan become a Rotarian?'

'Law-and-order and well-run vice can get along real good
together. Conventioneers looking for a blow job don't like getting
rolled or ripped off by Murphy artists. Did you know that Lucinda
Bergeron is NOPD's liaison person with the Committee?'

He chewed his food slowly, watching my face. Outside, the wind
was blowing and denting the canopy of spreading oaks along St. Charles.

'Then this preacher whose head glows in the dark shows up at
your dock and tells you he's part of the same bunch. You starting to
see some patterns here, noble mon?' he said.

'I don't know what any of that has to do with the guy who hurt
Bootsie.'

'Maybe it doesn't.' He watched the streetcar roll down the
track on the neutral ground and stop on the corner. It was loaded with
Japanese businessmen. In spite of the temperature they all wore dark
blue suits, ties, and long-sleeve shirts. 'If I were a worrying man,
you know what would worry me most? It's not the crack and the black
punks in the projects. It's a feeling I've got about the normals, it's
like they wouldn't mind trying it a different way for a while.'

'What do you mean?'

'Maybe I'm wrong, but if tomorrow morning I woke up and read
in
The Times-Picayune
that an election had just
been held and it was now legal to run the lowlifes through tree
shredders, you know, the kind the park guys use to grind oak limbs into
wood chips, it wouldn't be a big surprise.'

'Did you ever hear of anybody in the city who fits the
description of this guy Buchalter?'

'Nope. I've got a theory, though; at least it's something we
can check out. He's an out-of-towner. He went to your house to shake up
your cookie bag. Right? There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection
between our man and any particular local bucket of shit we might have
had trouble with. Right? What does all that suggest to you, Streak?'

'One of the resident wise guys using out-of-town talent to
send a message.'

'And whose Johnson did we just jerk on? It can't hurt to have
a talk with Tommy Bobalouba again, can it?'

'I thought he was part of your meal ticket.'

'Not anymore. I don't like the way he acted in front of
Martina. You take an Irish street prick out of the Channel, put him in
an eight-hundred-thou house by Lake Pontchartrain, and you've got an
Irish street prick in an eight-hundred-thou house by Lake
Pontchartrain. How about we have a little party?'

'I'm on leave, and I'm out of my jurisdiction.'

'Who cares? If the guy's clean, it's no big deal. If he's not,
fuck that procedural stuff. We scramble his eggs.'

The cashier cut his eyes toward us, then turned the floor fan
so that our conversation was blown out the open door, away from the
other customers.

'Let me call home first,' I said.

'No argument?'

I shrugged my shoulders. He watched my face.

'How much sleep did you get last night?' he asked.

'Enough.'

'You could fool me.'

'You want to go out to Lonighan's or not?'

There was a pause in his eyes, a fine bead of light. He made a
round button with his lips and scratched at his cheek with one
fingernail.

Lonighan lived a short distance from
the yacht club in an
imitation Tudor mansion that had been built by a New Orleans beer baron
during the 1920s. The grounds were surrounded by a high brick wall, at
the front of which was a piked security gate, with heavy clumps of
banana trees on each side of it, and a winding driveway that led past a
screened-in pool and clay tennis courts that were scattered with
leaves. We parked my truck, and Clete pushed the button on the speaker
box by the gate.

'Who is it?' a voice said through the box.

'Clete Purcel. Is Tommy home?'

'He's over at his gym. You want to come back later or leave a
message?'

'Who are all those people in the pool?'

'Some guests. Just leave a message, Clete. I'll give it to
him.'

'When'll he be home?'

'He comes, he goes, what do I know? Just leave a fucking
message, will you?'

'Here's the message, Art. I don't like talking to a box.'

'I'm sorry, I'll be down. Hey, Clete, I'm just the hired help,
all right?'

A moment later the man named Art walked down the drive with a
pair of hedge clippers in his hand. He was bare-chested and sweaty and
wore grass-stained white shorts and sandals that flopped on his feet.

'Open up,' Clete said.

'You're putting me in a bad place, man. Why'd you have to get
Tommy upset?'

'I didn't do anything to Tommy.'

'Tell that to him. Christ, Clete, you know what kind of guy he
is. How you think he feels when a broad tells him off in public?'

'You gonna open up?'

'No.'

'You're starting to piss me off, Art.'

'What can I say? Wait in your truck, I'll send you guys out
some drinks and sandwiches. Give me a break, all right?'

He walked back toward the house. The swimmers were leaving the
screened-in pool for a shady area in the trees, set with lawn chairs, a
drinks table, and a smoking barbecue pit. The skin flexed around the
corners of Clete's eyes.

'You still got your binoculars?' he asked.

'In the glove compartment.'

He went to the truck and returned to the gate. He focused my
pair of World War II Japanese field glasses through the steel bars and
studied the people in the shade.

'Check it out, mon,' he said, handing me the glasses.

One woman lay on a reclining chair with a newspaper over her
face. A second, older, heavyset and big-breasted, her skin tanned
almost the color of mahogany, stood on the lawn with her feet spread
wide, touching each toe with a cross-handed motion, her ash blond hair
cascading back and forth across her shoulders. A third woman, with dyed
red hair, who could not have been over twenty or twenty-one, was bent
forward over a pocket mirror, a short soda straw held to one nostril,
the other nostril pinched shut with a forefinger. Seated on each side
of her was a thick-bodied, sun-browned, middle-aged man with a neon
bikini wrapped wetly around the genitals, the back and chest streaked
with wisps of black and gray hair. The face of one man was flecked with
fine patterns of scab tissue, as though he had walked through a reddish
brown skein of cobweb.

'When did Tommy Blue Eyes hook up with the Caluccis?' Clete
said. 'They always hated each other.'

'Business is business.'

'Yeah, but the micks always looked down on the greaseballs.
They didn't socialize with them.' He took the glasses out of my hand
and looked again through the bars. 'If you think Bobo and Max are
geeks, check out the cat flopping steaks on the grill.'

A man who must have been six and one half feet tall had come
out of the side entrance to the house with a tray of meat. He had a
flat Indian face, a cheerless mouth, and wide-set, muddy eyes that
didn't squint or blink in the smoke rising from the pit. His hair was
jet black and freshly barbered and looked like a close-cropped wig
glued on brownish red stone.