Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree (21 page)

It was during his shift that they reached the right level. At first, as Nick shone a flashlight on the papery rotted wood, he had a second of panic. Had Ivanhoe buried his mother in a simple wooden box that was now decayed to such a degree that nothing was left inside?

No, there was something else there.

Shelvin used his hands to clear away debris. To Nick’s relief, he saw below the crumbling wood a zinc lining, which was a common burial practice in those days for prosperous families. Nick surmised that Hyam had left Mulatta Belle quite well off and that their son, Ivanhoe, did not skimp on his mother’s burial–for a reason besides love, he now hoped.

Pickax in hand, Nick carefully lowered himself into the crowded space, and when Shelvin worked free the several bolts with an evil-looking assault knife, Nick pried the lid off.

The corpse did not cackle and fly into the air. It was just the leathery, bony husk of life they saw. Nick’s momentary revulsion gave way to fascination.

Over time, insects had found ways into the coffin, and heat and moisture had done the rest. There were fragments of lace, the dust of an outline around the bones.

“That was probably her favorite dress,” Nick remarked.

Mulatta Belle’s mortal remains lay before them. Did her delicate skull smile in gratitude at Nick, or was it just the interplay of shadows? He wasn’t sure, but he was too exciting to care.

Below her gruesome arms and hands crossed on her chest was a lovely small velvet Bible, considerably damaged…and a sealed cylindrical glass jar, the kind barbers often use even today.

Nick held the jar up to his light. He’d guessed right: the family Bible and important documents were never far apart in the Balzar family. Inside the jar was a rolled-up piece of paper. He gingerly took it out and read to Shelvin the letter, in Hyam Balazar’s own firm hand, bequeathing to Ivanhoe Balzar, his son by Mulatta Belle, 1000 acres of Mitzvah Plantation; to Jeremiah Putnam, a slave, his freedom and 500 acres; and to Chapman Winn, 250 acres. The letter was dated May 16, 1859–two days before the making of the nuncupative will and Hyam’s assumed death date.

They had reburied Belle as best they could.

Shelvin drove Nick back to the hotel in his truck. Nick said that he would have a rare-documents specialist make certified copies of the letter. He would keep the original safe and send copies to the Balzars.

Shelvin hesitated but agreed.

Crusty with dirt and sweat, the two of them staggered into the lobby at three-thirty.

“Get that lawyer,” Nick said to him, in farewell.

The door to the bedroom in the hotel suite was closed. Nick crashed on the couch.

At dawn, without a word to him, Zola emerged from the bedroom and left, slamming the door.

Nick took a bus back to New Orleans.

.

24

A
prearranged workshop gig–a paying one, of course–took Nick to a regional conference at a hotel in Memphis, where in a small, over-air-conditioned room, he expounded for a week on the genealogical treasures of New Orleans to shivering empty nesters, retirees, widows, and widowers. He also schmoozed with a few star speakers of the genealogy conference circuit, hoping to become one, and literally bumped into Gwen at a booth selling books of interest to Louisiana researchers.

Gwen tearfully confided that since her precious work had mysteriously gone up in flames in Natchitoches, she hadn’t been the same. As she swallowed a handful of antidepressants with a gulp of diet soda, Nick, in a sudden attack of remorse, begged her to let him to do what he could to help reconstruct the material that–still unknown to her, thank God!–he’d incinerated.

On his way back to New Orleans, Nick hit as many county courthouses in Mississippi as he could for a new client’s project, until his car broke down in Hattiesburg. He tried to handle the exorbitant repair bill with Natalie Armiger’s credit card.
What’s she going to do, fire me? I should be so lucky!
But the card had been canceled.
Bad omen
. He wrote a check that possibly wouldn’t bounce.

At last, he headed home, having done a lot of thinking.

The Armigers’ premier downtown property was the city’s tenth tallest building. It stood sentinel over the river at the foot of Canal.

“So, this is the famous Artemis Holdings?” Nick said to Zola’s beautiful visage on a color monitor behind the security desk in the lobby.

She’d called him that morning, three weeks after their trip to Natchez, summoning him to her office. It was a sparkling fall day, the first truly temperate one of the season. He’d walked here from his apartment, his steps unconsciously quickened by his repeated, mumbled rehearsal of what he wanted to say to her.

“Nick, thanks for coming,” Zola said, from the monitor. “I’ll meet you on thirty.”

The guard hung a visitor’s tag on Nick and directed him to the proper elevator. Thirtieth through thirty-fifth floors. After a rapid ear-popping ride, he emerged into what sounded like a college football game.

Actually, he found himself on a sort of catwalk; there were offices with sliding glass doors behind him, each with two or three people clutching several phones at once. Below him, in an auditorium-sized room, were a hundred or so men and women at banks of keyboards and monitors and multi-buttoned desk phones. Digital displays and clusters of large screens with rapidly shifting numbers and graphs dangled from the high ceiling.

The scene reminded Nick of the medieval Boschian representations of the damned, occupying themselves with their imbecilic activities or suffering the torments of divine judgment for their earthly sins.

Zola stepped from another set of elevators down the catwalk. Her dark hair was coiled at the back of her head; she wore a rather staid suit. But her grace and beauty radiated through even this business disguise. She walked up to Nick, grasped his right hand in both of hers and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek. Friendly, and no more than that.

They had to step aside to let several hurrying workers pass. Nick caught snatches of their conversation, which seemed to be mainly about some interconnectivity of an Asian currency crisis, a shortage of ship capacity, and a very good coffee crop somewhere.

“Just part of the company, the stock, bond, and commodities trading pit,” Zola said of the scene below them, indicating that they should walk toward the elevators to the higher floors. He could see she was amused by his inexperience in this arena of world finance, and proud at the same time of this anthill of capitalism. But there was something else behind her eyes, something Nick sensed he would hear before this morning was through.

He fondled the small box in his coat pocket for reassurance, for courage.

“On the floors above us,” she said, “are our departments for private investment banking, property management, and insurance. I think we have time for a short tour, don’t we, Gloria?”

Zola checked her watch and glanced for confirmation at the young woman shadowing them. Gloria shrugged with good humor and went to work rearranging her boss’s schedule on an electronic office-in-a-pad.

Thirty minutes later, he sat with Zola in her office on the top floor. It was a big circular room that resembled the windowed observation decks atop airport control towers. Was he crazy or hungover, or was the whole place…rotating slowly? He struggled to remember how much wine he’d drunk the night before. Too much, obviously.

He’d gone through most of the Armiger cash with disconcerting, guilty speed, buying books and documents that interested him, paying off several years’ worth of debts to merchants, credit-card companies, the IRS, his ex-wife–and buying cases of rare Burgundy, single bottles of which in previous days he wouldn’t have even picked up in any shop for fear of dropping them.

“The rotation? It’s very gradual. Most visitors notice it, if at all, only much later,” Zola said. “After an hour or so you get used it. But the view of the city
is
breathtaking. Sometimes I forget to even look, and it takes someone else’s surprise and delight to bring me to a new appreciation of it.”

“This building used to be, uh”–he snapped his fingers trying to remember–“what was the name of that company?”

“International Maritime Consortium,” she said, “New Orleans’ attempt to emulate Lloyd’s of London. Went bust a few years ago, and we snapped up the building at the foreclosure auction. Yes, there used to be quite a renowned bar up here, the Sextant Club, which I’m sure you frequented at some time in your reckless youth.”

“Ah yes, back when I was a shipping magnate. I recall many a fine Havana and glass of cognac enjoyed here, discussing the price of bauxite.”

Their forced, hollow laughter soon died. Zola looked down, seemingly unable to say what was on her mind. He leaned back in the chair, his arms behind his head. That was a mistake, because he got a dizzying sensation of perilous movement, accompanied immediately by an irrational feeling that he was about to plummet thirty-five stories.

He straightened up quickly and focused on the things moving around with him. The outer ring of the circular floor was divided into two segments by the arrangement of furniture, art, and plants: one segment was the domain of Zola, the other of Mrs. Armiger. At certain points in the rotation, he could see that Armiger wasn’t at her desk, 180 degrees opposite. In an unmoving island in the middle of the floor were the elevators and several desks and chairs used by the personal staff of the two women.

Nick marveled at the quietness that encapsulated them. He reached in his coat pocket and removed the jewelry box. He concealed it in his hand, below the edge of Zola’s desk.

If you don’t do it now, you never will.

“Noise-cancellation technology,” said Zola, interrupting the crucial moment of action. “We’re underwriting a start-up company that specializes in it. We wanted to try it out for ourselves. It’s really amazing. Research being done with Freret. You see how we’re able to dispense with isolating walls and partitions. We think this is going to be a tremendously successful product. More coffee?”

She signaled a secretary; the young man quickly brought the cup and returned to his desk.

“Nick, I have a problem.”

“I know. Should you get me the Breitling or the Rolex for Christmas?” She’d taken him to task often for having no watch.

“No, no,” she said, laughing sadly. She put on a serious face. “Sometimes your flippancy can be so annoying. I’m trying to talk about something important, here. It’s this situation with the Balzar family…”

“Your family, remember?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so,” she said. Her hesitant tone told Nick that she’d been looking in the rearview mirror a lot lately; her audio technology couldn’t cancel that out. “But really, I don’t feel at all close to these people. It’s a terribly distant connection. Merely a hypothetical line on a pedigree chart. I just don’t think it merits all this controversy, and cost.”

She showed him a small back-page clipping from the
Wall Street Journal
, describing a class-action suit against Artemis Holdings, and Natalie and Zola Armiger personally. Nearly forty provable heirs of Ivanhoe wanted the equivalent of 1000 acres–with a hundred-and-thirty-odd years of interest and damages. The article speculated that a big chunk of cash could be on the line, even if it was settled out of court. The opposing lawyers were preparing for battle, which could go on for years and years. Nick thought of Dickens’
Bleak House
, and what a disaster such a case could be for everyone except the lawyers.

“Mother says that your original project was simply to investigate some vague family rumors she’d heard as a child, about this alleged Natchitoches ancestor of ours. She felt it was time to know the truth.”

“‘Alleged’? You don’t believe me? Is having a Jewish ancestor such a problem for you, too?”

“Of course not! But in Mother’s day, and even now, for people like us…” She set her coffee cup down and held it with both hands, as if seeking answers from it. “The point is, why are you doing this to us, Nick?”

“It’s a long story I don’t want to go into now. But this much I will say: your saintly mother paid me $50,000 to obscure your family history, not to bring it to light. The truth was never part of our deal.”

“‘Obscure’? What does that mean? My knowledge of genealogy is deficient–thanks to you–but that doesn’t seem possible. You’ve been completely unsupervised on the project she gave you, and you’ve failed to make timely reports to her. Mother was your client, she trusted you, and yet she had no idea what you’d found. We now think that in the course of your research, you uncovered this somewhat controversial past of ours, and then decided to make some money from it.

“This is all your fault,” she said. “Far from obscuring our presumed family history, I understand you told the Balzars where to look for a fast buck: at the last of our line of the family, and the only one, apparently, with any wealth. That seems highly unethical to me. We’re considering a complaint to the proper genealogical certifying body–whatever it is.”

Zola stopped talking and took a deep breath. Waiting for a denial, Nick thought. But he kept quiet and rubbed his hand over his mouth. He would blurt out too much if he started at all. He would tell her what her beloved mother was really like, what she had done, what she was capable of doing, why he was striking back in the only way available to him. He would try to persuade her to break free of Armiger’s poisoned protection, to find the truth on her own, to let him share the joys and sorrows of that search. He had worked it out in the past few days–their escape, sailing away in a magical galleon on a river of red wine…

He slipped the box back into his pocket.

Zola was saying, “Mother wanted to make an offer, handle this affair as quietly as possible. I insisted that we go through the legal system. I was wrong. This thing has turned nasty. We’re hearing very insulting whispers here and there, at our clubs, at restaurants, at parties. I never thought people could be so horrid. We’ve already lost a good deal of business.” She lifted a few pages from a stack of reports on her well-ordered desk. “Investors aren’t sure what our liability is. Confidence is a big issue. This should have been stopped before it became public.”

“You’re beginning to remind me more and more of your mother every day.”

“Meaning?” she countered testily.

“I can see your idealism gradually transforming into her style of moral sophism.”

“Please, Nick, don’t try to turn me against Mother. She is a great woman, a pioneer in this industry. You don’t know her. She’s been terribly upset by this. In fact, she’s quite ill and hardly comes to the office anymore. Her doctors have advised heart surgery. What gives you the right to speak of her in such disparaging terms? Who are you to preach to us? You’ve lied to me and others; you’ve accepted money under false pretenses. In spite of our…our friendship, you’re not part of our family, even at the remove of these Balzars.”