Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (9 page)

In genealogy, apparent coincidences usually aren’t. Nick had schooled his mind to see patterns in family history: given names that appear frequently in records might honor parents, siblings, in-laws, or friends; a deed given or received by one branch of a family might suggest a look at nearby land for another branch; birth dates, death dates, marriages, migrations, and disappearances … each small fact adds a clump of clay to the sculpture that is the saga of a family. People do things for reasons. They plan, adapt, act, or fail to act, all for reasons that the genealogist with determination and, especially, imagination can discover.

Bluemantle, Therman? Bluemantle, Therman? Bluemantle, Therman?

His running shoes hitting the pavement drummed this central question into his brain, and the question drew him on to further speculation.

Both men had some relationship with the Society of the
Allégorie
. Both were at the seminar. Both were now dead, murdered. Coincidence?
Nick didn’t believe so. Was Jillian somehow “involved,” to use Bartly’s loaded participle? She too had been at the seminar; more ominously, she had discovered Bluemantle. Nick was, he admitted to himself, biased in her favor. His memory of her graceful body sent him into a dream for a mile and more.

The running was doing its job, allowing his mind to be fluid as his senses dulled and his flesh moved through the humid air.

The newspaper hadn’t made much of Bluemantle’s murder; the television stations even less. Therman’s murder had also been lightly covered, written off as just another victim of the city’s rising tidal wave of random violence. Maybe Hawty was right. A fresh outbreak of corruption in NOPD was the lead story; the Public Integrity Division was working overtime. New Orleans residents were jaded when it came to murder; to elicit any reaction greater than a yawn, it needed to be spectacular, involving famous locals whose high-profile misfortunes offer catharsis for the lucky survivors who’ve made it through another day, dodged another bullet. Bluemantle and his missing finger, Therman and his enigmatic note, didn’t cut the Creole mustard.

Detective Bartly had dozens of other murders to solve. There were more than enough conscienceless killers in New Orleans for these two incidents to be wholly unrelated. He had admitted to Nick that the only common threads he saw were the obvious ones: that both of these men had obsessive interest in genealogy—for different reasons—and that this interest had prompted contact or conflict with the Society of the
Allégorie
. A good starting point, possibly, but he had as yet come up with
no suspects, and no motives. The weapon used on Therman had not even been determined precisely: a knife, perhaps a sword.

Preston Nowell, when interviewed about both deaths, had pledged the full resources of the Society and had pleaded with Bartly to find the perpetrators, if indeed Bluemantle’s death turned out to be murder. It was awful publicity for the Society, he’d complained. He was distraught over Bluemantle’s death, but understandably less broken up about Therman’s passing.

That morning, Nick’s independent track of investigation had taken him to the Architecture School of Freret University. There he had sought a friend’s help in seeing the framework—if there was one—below the façade of the recent strange events.

To the thudding rhythm of his stride, he replayed his meeting with Nelson Plumlaw.

CHAPTER 7

“A
mirror image on the water, a doppelganger,” Nelson Plumlaw had said that morning to Nick. “Intriguing. Two ships, one French, one English, sailing into colonial New Orleans essentially at the same time, but only one sailing on to fame. And you want me to help you determine which is the real one, which the illusion?”

The two men walked up the broad stone stairs of the massive old building that housed Freret University’s Architecture School.

“The two countries were not exactly getting along during the time in question, you know, Nick. An English ship would not have been welcome anywhere near the area. Besides, Bienville’s
Code Noir
discouraged Protestants—and banned Jews outright—from settling in the vast expanse of Louisiana. What makes you think this is a case of mistaken identity?”

“Intuition,” Nick said.

“I’m not much on intuition, my friend. You know what an empirical rascal I am. You don’t make buildings out of intuition, and, in my humble opinion as a non-professional genealogist, you don’t make family history out of it, either. For buildings you
need numbers, tools, concrete, lumber, and steel; for genealogy, you need sound evidence.”

Nelson Plumlaw was a tenured architecture professor at Freret University, who just happened to have a lifelong enthusiasm for genealogy. He was about forty-five, but there was an engaging adolescent playfulness about him that would probably never desert him.

It was nine-thirty; Nelson and Nick were walking through a hangar-like room that housed the drafting tables of about twenty architecture students, all intently hunched over their work. The matte-black ceiling and exposed ductwork contrasted with the soft naturalness of the wood floor. A wall of windows of unusual design gave a restful view of grassy quadrangles and hoary oaks; many panes were flipped open, and wind chimes made soft music of a gentle breeze. In the middle of the room there was a foam-board model of a structure, rising ten feet, so far. The class project, Nelson informed Nick: the fanciful building incorporated design elements from Greek temples, the Pompidou Center, and the Sydney opera house. It could have sprung only from the insatiable minds of students gorging on the world’s knowledge, Nick thought. He was reminded how much he missed the fecund energy of the college hothouse.

Nick recited a favorite line of poetry half to himself.

“What are you mumbling about, Herald?”

“That’s Roethke. From a poem called ‘Cuttings,’ about the miraculous regenerative powers of nature, the mind, and humanity. All this creative juice, this urge to grow, Nelson! It’s downright invigorating, enough to make
me
want to enroll.”

Nelson chuckled. “You literary types, always wearing your emotions on your sleeve. Yet, I’ve always envied your ability to call up a quotation when you need it. I’m the slave of a thousand reference works. Perhaps that’s why I’m in architecture.”

They continued toward Nelson’s office.

“It’s nice in here,” said Nick. “Not at all like a hundred-year-old building. It’s all in the details, I guess. Architects pay attention to things like doorknobs and windows, furniture arrangement, light, space. And it always seemed to me that architecture students were cooler, weirder, more extroverted than English students. An oral-anal continuum.”

“Keep your voice down, please.” Nelson grimaced and looked over his shoulder. “Can’t you think of another analogy. You’re supposed to be so good with words, Mr. Former English Professor.”

Nick had momentarily forgotten that Nelson was gay and not especially happy to have the fact broadcast or even hinted at—especially around here. It had been almost a year since Nick had seen him, but he was sure Nelson still kept his sex life strictly off campus. New Orleans, in popular myth a thriving, anarchic fusion of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Mississippi, actually lives by strict rules governing her renowned lewdness. And Freret University, as one of the last loyal courtiers of the old-guard aristocratic families, knew when to bow and scrape and enforce the elaborate decorum that keeps people and their peccadilloes in their places.

“Oh, sorry. Let me put it this way, then,” Nick said. “My picture of the architecture student is a guy who spends all year
napping in the sun under a tree, and then stays up for three days on coffee and speed to build his amazing final project. These are the people building our bridges!”

They continued their stroll, pausing now and then at a student’s board as Nelson admired the design silently, or criticized the work with a sarcastic remark. Some students took his words to heart, others good-humoredly waved him away, as if he were a prying older brother.

“You see, Nick, the reality of architecture is a bit more prosaic than the Romantic ideas you have of it. But I don’t deny that the two disciplines do indeed attract two distinctly different personalities. I rather like your analogy, actually. Architects are generally extroverts, who live fast and crash hard, who show their meticulous work with a flourish. The writer, or the scholar, on the other hand, is reticent, insecure, secretive, as anxious about his product as a mother with her newborn infant. Of course, generalities seldom pan out. I would say on that continuum, I am somewhere between the two extremes.”

Sitting now in Nelson’s tidy office, which held more books than standard-issue office furniture, Nick indeed saw nothing extreme about his friend. Nelson sported a spiffy bow tie at the neck of a perfectly pressed French-blue shirt, and red suspenders that secured generously pleated dark-gray gabardines below his epicure’s belly. His ruddy, chubby face was smoothly shaved. But his hair contrasted with the generally conservative tone of his
clothes: close-cropped on the sides, piled with glistening brown noodles on top. A small declaration of unconventionality.

On a shelf behind Nelson, Nick saw the five exquisite genealogical books the architect had researched, written, laid out, and published. It wasn’t that no publishing house had been interested; Nelson simply didn’t want to relinquish artistic control to anyone. He had commissioned an old, renowned London bookbindery to make his fine volumes, and collectors reportedly considered them highly desirable. The books dealt with the various lines of his own family, over a period of some six centuries. They had garnered several awards, as well as many accolades from genealogical professionals since he’d first begun to produce them, at the rate of one every two years or so. And they had secured a somewhat unwanted reputation for him as an expert on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century passenger ship migration. Nelson was fond of complaining about the increasing demands on his time from strangers seeking genealogical help of all sorts, but Nick was sure he actually enjoyed his modest fame.

Nelson leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms, and locked his hands behind his head. “Let me ask you this: why hasn’t your client … an elderly gentleman, you said?”

“Yeah. From out of town.”

“I see. Why hasn’t he contacted the Society?”

“Pride, I suppose,” Nick said. “You know how these things are. He doesn’t want to face the indignity of being turned down if his theory’s wrong. He wanted a quiet investigation before he approached the official certifying body, the Society itself.
Very upper-crust guy, lots of cash—which largely explains my interest. If you ask me, my client needs another lineage society plaque on his wall like a hole in the head. But, hey, who am I to tell him what to do?”

While Nick spoke, Nelson, like someone who suspects that he is the butt of a joke, studied his visitor closely. At last he appeared to buy Nick’s story—which was made out of whole cloth.

“All right, then,” Nelson said, aligning three drafting pencils on his desk. “You say this ship entered the struggling French outpost of La Nouvelle-Orléans in—what year was it?”

“Same as the
Allégorie
. 1731.”

“Ah, the retrocession. The year the Company of the Indies dumped New Orleans back in the lap of the French government. Well, passenger arrivals aren’t centrally indexed for this early period; and the National Archives will be of no help. You’ll need to check Filby and Meyer’s
Passenger and Immigration Lists Index
for the surname, and Filby’s
Bibliography
for any references to the ship. Of course, these show only what’s already appeared in print. For the still unpublished material, I suggest the various incarnations of the Louisiana State Museum in Jackson Square and elsewhere, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. You’ll want to explore the Notarial Archives, and the public library, downtown, which bills its collection of colonial manuscripts from about 1769, but quite often you’ll find earlier material. When the Spanish took over, they inherited some French records, which sometimes appear unexpectedly. You might also swing over to Loyola and check the Spanish Documents Project. But the French
Archives Nationales
, in Paris or La rochelle or on
microfilm, is still your best venue for Company of the Indies records …”

Nick held up his hands to stop the flood of sources he already knew. In fact, he’d spent a very full day Tuesday in a fruitless effort to find this phantom ship—if it was a ship. He didn’t want to tell Nelson he had no actual surname to search for, the usual way to begin. All he had was a possible ship’s name,
True Faith
, and an equation in a dead man’s pocket that might also have figured in the death of Bluemantle.

“There’s my problem, Nelson. I’ve checked around, and there’s no sign of my individual’s name or of this ship arriving here in 1731. But that doesn’t mean there was no such ship, just that maybe that bit of information slipped through the cracks.”

“The proverbial impossible gap, eh? Perhaps you’re right. I really despise those. But let’s remember that not so long ago, startled researchers uncrated thousands of volumes of passenger lists at the Washington National records Center in Maryland. Filby, I understand, compiles two thousand new references a week. It’s my opinion that impossible gaps are rarely impossible after all.”