Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (23 page)

A few times Nick’s eyes burned with tears. Just the chlorine, he tried to convince himself. He looked down at his legs and
arms and hands, acutely conscious of a gift and freedom he normally took for granted. He wondered if, in a similar situation, he could find such courage.

After another twenty minutes, the session was over. The young therapists helped the swimmers out of the pool, allowing the more able ones to support themselves on gymnastic parallel bars. Hawty stood grasping the bars, drying herself off, waiting for someone to bring a wheelchair over so she could roll herself into the dressing room.

Nick was proud that others were seeing how independent, how capable Hawty was; he had known that fact since the very first day he met her. In a few minutes, back in her chariot, she emerged from the dressing room in a gown-length red-orange-green cotton-and-lace dashiki and matching headband that an African princess would have envied. Her hair, coiled inside the headband, looked like black silk.

“How long have you been here, spying on me like a voyeur, Mr. Leopold Bloom?” she asked.

“Who’s your new man, Hawty?” teased a young woman, as she and two other swimmers rolled by in a chorus of
Oooooh
s,
Uh-huh
s, and
Look out now
s.

Hawty waved them on with a good-natured vexation.

“I’ve been here long enough to be exhausted myself,” Nick said. “That was some work-out.”

“You’re telling me! I’m still kind of shaky. They say it’ll get easier. But I’m going to do it before I pass from this earth. I’m going to walk again! You mind pushing me over to the UC for a cold drink? My batteries need charging—my body’s
and
my chariot’s.”

“A pleasure,” Nick said, taking the handles of her chariot. “Speaking of Leopold Bloom, we can delve into Joyce’s use of allegory in
Ulysses
. I want to hear how that paper of yours is coming along for your Modern Lit seminar.” He watched in wonder as she unfolded two solar recharging panels and placed them on her work shelf. “And then we can talk about another
Allégorie
.”

Thirty minutes later they sat under a shady tree on the quad in front of the University Center.

College, the great leveler. Nick couldn’t distinguish the rich kids, whose parents had sent them to Freret because the country-club set styled it “Yale on the Bayou,” from the poor kids, who had finagled a scholarship to attend the academically excellent school. Each of them was smart; you had to be to get in. But the frolicking students on the quad seemed blissfully unconcerned that it was costing somebody $25,000 a year for them to exhaust their reserves of decadence. Take your time, Nick wanted to mount a park bench and tell them; it’s a mean world out there in the trenches of capitalism.

“You heard about Professor Plumlaw?” Nick said.

“Um-hmm,” Hawty replied, finishing a gulp of the healthful smoothie she’d bought on the way. “It was all over the news last night, and the campus paper did a screaming front page story. The type was bigger than what they used at the end of World War II.”

“He died with a secret we need to know.”

“What you mean, ‘we’? This is beginning to sound very unkosher.”

“Well … if you’d rather not be a part of something extremely exciting, something that may immeasurably enhance the reputation of our firm—”

“Something illegal?”

“Just slightly,” Nick admitted. “I need you to break into Plumlaw’s computer. Quickly and quietly. I don’t trust anybody else to do it. The murderer has a lot of influence, but he’s juggling too many plates in the air now. He’s worried, maybe even scared. We need to mess up his rhythm, force a mistake.”

“Another hunch, huh? Are we, by any chance, talking about Preston Nowell, here?”

“What I’m asking you to do will help us answer that question. Can you handle it?”

Hawty proceeded to assault Nick’s technologically deficient brain with a numbingly complex survey of the current state of remote computing. Nick could make out only a few terms with any degree of certainty: encryption, firewalls, /files/02/74/18/f027418/public/private keys, LANs, proxy servers, bandwidth, Wi-Fi, Blackbeard—

“Blackbeard?” Nick asked with a grin. “How strangely appropriate to our eighteenth-century nautical focus.”

“Bluetooth, not Blackbeard!” Hawty retorted. “Sure, I can handle it. I know the guy who designed the campus network; if the machine’s still powered up and connected to the wall, it’ll be child’s play. Are you certain what you’re looking for is there?”

“No,” Nick confessed.

“Tell me about it while you push me to the LIFT-van stop.” Hawty lived in a sorority house nearby.

Nick explained that he thought Nelson had discovered information detailing the transformation of the
True Faith
into the
Allégorie
. He didn’t know exactly what that evidence would be, but he had a feeling it had arrived via computer, perhaps even as he sat talking to Nelson for the last time.

“And you think Nowell killed Nelson Plumlaw.”

“Yeah. And the others, too. Bartly has next to no physical evidence. He’s not even sure what precisely killed Nelson, much less who did it or if it was deliberate. With a motive that suggests a plausible reason for Nowell to do in the victims, the cops could have some leverage to search Society headquarters, maybe question Nowell more pointedly, take the gloves off. So, what I want you—”

“Stop! Stop!” Hawty whispered harshly, slapping his hands away from the handles of her chariot.

“What? Stop talking, stop walking?”

“Stop pushing! Come walk beside me. I don’t want him to see me being pushed.”

“Who?” asked Nick, bewildered, looking around at the students lounging on the grass or throwing Frisbees. But he obeyed and quickly got in step beside Hawty. She began to guide her chariot with the joystick.

A handsome young man approached on the walkway. He was dark skinned, medium height, youthfully lean, and, like most twenty year olds, full of suppressed energy. He sported a gold nose stud and an earring made, apparently, from a microchip. There was a labyrinthine design—a printed circuit?—cut into his hair. It seemed to Nick that the young man’s pants were
about to fall down; he had to remind himself that this was the style nowadays.

“Hi, Kedric. This is my boss, Dr. Herald. What are you up to?”

Kedric shook hands with Nick, his eyes on the ground, embarrassed for no reason, still in the grip of the social awkwardness of adolescence. He mumbled something about the computer lab.

“Kedric’s the computer whiz I was just telling you about,” Hawty said. “He’s working on a remote control for my chariot, so when I start walking—and falling—I can call it to come to me.”

Nick noticed that Kedric was about to bolt. The emotional ordeal of simultaneously meeting a new adult and receiving the praise of an obviously infatuated older woman was apparently too much for him. He remembered being that way, too, at that age.

“I’ll see you later, Hawty,” Nick said. “I’m late for an appointment. Nice to meet you Kedric.”

He looked back as he walked away; Kedric had stayed after all, and Hawty was explaining something with great animation, commanding the young man’s full attention.

CHAPTER 21

N
owell’s latest near brush with death had taken a toll on the staff of the Society library: all looked as if they’d lost a close family member. Some of them shelved books with quivering chins; others were overtaken by sobbing in the middle of their tasks; a few sat at their desks, dazed. Nowell himself, Nick learned from the stoic and somber young man in the Rare Documents Room, was at home, recuperating.

Had they felt this broken up by Bluemantle’s death? Preston Nowell hadn’t, Nick felt certain.

He found his own way to the room designated as his office: it was spotlessly clean and commendably outfitted with office supplies, still in store wrappers. A fax from Nowell said: “My profuse apologies for missing your first day. Had planned to welcome you personally. Shall return as soon as possible. In meantime, please enjoy our splendid library—and make yourself at home.” The fax was dated Tuesday, eight in the morning. It was nine, now.

“What a terreeble spring, Nick Herald,” Florita said. “First dear Dr. Bluemantle, then poor Jillian’s father, then this very horreeble bad thing with the boat of Mr. Nowell and the death of his friend.”

Nick had lewd thoughts about Florita’s mouth and his own anatomy each time she trilled an r, which happened invariably when she let his last name linger and purr on her tongue. She was drying her eyes with a lace handkerchief. Her midnight hair cascaded down her shoulders like a rainforest waterfall.

“And now, I break up with my boyfriend.” She covered her face; it was too much grief to bear.

Nick walked around her desk and sat on her calendar desk pad. He reached for a hand.

“Florita, I realize this is hard on you. These tragedies that end lives are cruel to the living, as well. But you see, I promised Captain-Director Nowell that I would work on an urgent project. I take my responsibilities seriously, and we must all carry on. I hate to let him down, or bother him with minor details of access to the library after hours, or before—I’m an early riser.” Florita took great interest in this confidence. “Teach me,” Nick urged. “You can do that for me, can’t you? Teach me what I need to know? I see you are a caring, giving woman, with a great many things a man would wish to know.”

She looked up, a smile of expectation coming to her tear-streaked face. Nick let his ambiguity hang in the air. Did he mean lessons of another sort? …

She squeezed his hands in hers and then let go with a sigh. “Yes, you are right, Nick Herald. We must go on.”

In the following five minutes, Nick, struggling with Florita’s barrage of Hispano-English, heard how to open the front door with the key she provided, enter her password into the computerized security and personnel systems to deactivate the alarm and gain access to the library itself, turn on and off lights, distribute accumulated faxes to the appropriate trays if he felt like it, fill the Rare Documents Room with breathable air, and bring in the newspaper and feed the stray cats. Other instructions hit him, but didn’t stick.

He hoped he remembered an eighth of it all. He hoped Florita didn’t see him drop the envelope with Bluemantle’s condo keys in it, and slide it with his foot under a chair. He made a great show of finding it.

“What’s this?”

“I have been searching for that many days now!” she exulted as she snatched it from his hand. “Gracias, Nick Herald. You are no longer in my debt.” She raised her eyebrows, as if to suggest it was indeed a pity that the score was now even.

“What do you say, Florita, we keep the account open, just in case we feel the desire to borrow something else from each other.”

She stood up and nestled between his legs as if she belonged there. Then she brought her lips to within microns of Nick’s lips: “A good idea, Nick Herald. Perhaps we will feel the desire soon.”

What she did to those
r
’s! … it made him sweat.

CHAPTER 22

H
ugh Montenay’s funeral took place in one of the vast cities of tombs bordering I-10 at the end of Canal. This prestigious cemetery dated from the Reconstruction period, when passions ran higher than normal in this hair-trigger city. It looked like the Roman Forum to Nick. Columns, statues, classical temples, ostentation in stone, monumentality in miniature.

The legend was that a planter had not been invited to a ball at a neighboring plantation. In a rage of indignation, he drove his neighbor into bankruptcy through market manipulations, bought the neighbor’s land, and then spitefully turned it into the cemetery in which Nick stood on this bright, hot Wednesday, twelve days and three more deaths since Bluemantle’s murder.

For Nick, this cemetery and its story said a lot about the character of New Orleans. Here, people have always loved the grand passion and the dramatic gesture. Honor is an obsession, injured pride grounds for retribution. But a medieval fatalism pesters the souls of locals and like a malarial mosquito injects a certain fevered surrealism into the blood, a profane infatuation with death. As voluptuous as life can be here, the physical world
ultimately is mocked as a mere tinsel doubloon snatched from the surging Mardi Gras crowd. To live in New Orleans is to take part enthusiastically in a morality play, to march to a demonic tune in the noisy, bawdy, petty parade that leads one out of this sham of life, ideally to a death with style, the final act accompanied by a jazz band and a raucous street wake, and at last crowned by several tons of marble in a beautiful cemetery.

A good genealogist learns to be a connoisseur of cemeteries, and New Orleans has some of the oldest and most interesting in the country. Since burying below ground isn’t done—an old Spanish custom, it is said, and definitely a concession to the soggy soil and frequent flooding—raised tombs and impressive vaults give the city’s many cemeteries their distinctive character. New Orleans venerates its dead in a very Latin way. On All Saints’ Day families come to picnic in the shade of their ancestors’ houses of bones; and their ancestors may return the favor of a visit: coffins sometimes float in the streets during bad floods.