November Road

“Go home and freshen up.” Guidry gave the brunette a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

In the Quarter, grown men stood on the sidewalk and wept. Women wandered down the street as if they’d been struck blind. A Lucky Dog vendor shared his radio with a shoeshine boy. When in the history of civilization had that happened before? They shall beat their swords into plowshares. The leopard will lie down with the goat.

Guidry had fifteen minutes to spare, so he ducked into Gaspar’s. He’d never been inside during the day. With the house lights on, it was a gloomy joint. You could see the stains on the floor, the stains on the ceiling, the velvet stage curtain patched with electrical tape.

A group was huddled by the bar, people like Guidry who’d been drawn inside by the blue throb of the TV. A newscaster—a different one than before, just as dazed—read a statement from Johnson. President Johnson now.

“I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear,” Johnson said. “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”

The bartender poured shots of whiskey, on the house. The lady next to Guidry, a proper little Garden District widow, ancient as time and frail as a snowflake, picked up a drink and knocked it back.

On TV they cut to the Dallas police station. Cops in suits and white cowboy hats, reporters, gawkers, everybody pushing and shoving. There was the mope, in the middle of it all, getting bounced around. A little guy, rat-faced, one of his eyes swollen shut. Lee Harvey Oswald, the announcer said his name was. He looked groggy and bewildered, like a kid who’d been dragged out of bed in the dead of night and hoped that all this might be just a nightmare.

A reporter shouted a question that Guidry couldn’t make out as the cops shoved Oswald into a room. Another reporter moved into the frame, speaking to the camera.

“He says he has nothing against anybody,” the reporter said, “and has not committed any act of violence.”

The Garden District widow downed a second shot of whiskey. She looked furious enough to spit. “How could this happen?” she kept muttering to herself. “How could this happen?”

Guidry couldn’t say for sure, but he had an educated opinion. A professional sharpshooter, an independent contractor brought in by Carlos. Positioned on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, or on the floor below to put a frame on Oswald, or maybe set up on the other side of the plaza, an elevated spot away from the crowds. After the real sniper made his shot, he wrapped up his rifle and strolled down Commerce Street to the sky-blue Eldorado waiting for him.

Guidry left Gaspar’s and headed to Jackson Square. A priest comforted his flock on the steps of the cathedral. A time to plant, a time to pluck up what has been planted. The usual jive.

Guidry was walking too fast. Cool it, brother.

If the cops hooked Carlos’s sharpshooter and connected him to the Eldorado, they’d be able to connect the Eldorado to Guidry. Guidry had picked up the car from a supermarket parking lot in the colored part of Dallas. Door left unlocked for him, keys under the visor. Guidry’s prints weren’t on the car—he wasn’t stupid, he’d worn his driving gloves—but someone might remember him. A sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado, a white man in the colored part of town. Someone would remember him.

Because this wasn’t just another ho-hum murder, some shoe-leather wiseguy popped in a back alley, the detectives and the prosecutor already snug in Carlos’s pocket. This was the president of the United States. Bobby Kennedy and the FBI wouldn’t stop until they’d turned over every goddamn rock.

A sticky drizzle blew away, and the sun poked through the clouds. Seraphine stood next to the statue of Old Hickory. The horse rearing, Andrew Jackson tipping his hat. The shadow from the statue split Seraphine in half. She smiled at Guidry, one eye bright and liquid and playful, the other a dark green stone.

He wanted to grab her and shove her up against the base of the statue and demand to know why she’d stuck him right in the middle of this, the crime of the century. Instead, wisely, he smiled back. With Seraphine you had to proceed with caution, or else you didn’t proceed for long.

“Hello, little boy,” she said. “The forest is dark and the wolves howl. Hold my hand and I’ll help you find your way home.”

“I’ll take my chances with the wolves, thanks,” Guidry said.

She pouted. Is that what you think of me? And then she laughed. Of course it was what he thought of her. Guidry would be a fool if he didn’t.

“I adore autumn,” she said. “Don’t you? The air so crisp. The scent of melancholy. Autumn tells us the truth about the world.”

You wouldn’t call Seraphine pretty. Regal. With a high, broad forehead and a dramatic arch to her nose, dark hair marcelled and parted on the side. Skin just a shade darker than Guidry’s own. Anywhere but New Orleans, she might have passed for white.

She dressed as primly as a schoolteacher. Today she wore a mohair sweater set and a slim-fitting skirt, pristine white gloves. Her own private joke, maybe. She always seemed to be smiling at one.

“Cut the bullshit,” Guidry said. With the right smile, he could say things like that to her. To Carlos, even.

She smiled and smoked. One of the skeletal carriage horses on Decatur Street whinnied, shrill and disconsolate, almost a scream. A sound you wanted to forget the minute you heard it.

“So you’ve seen the news about the president,” she said.

“Imagine my alarm,” he said.

“Don’t worry, mon cher. Come, I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Just one?”

“Come.”

They walked over to Chartres. The Napoleon House didn’t open for another hour. The bartender let them in, poured their drinks, disappeared.

“Goddamn it, Seraphine,” Guidry said.

“I understand your concern,” she said.

“I hope you’re planning to visit me in prison.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Say it again and maybe I’ll start to believe you.”

She flicked the ash from her cigarette with a languid sweep of a gloved hand.

“My father used to work here,” she said. “Did you know? Mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets. When I was a little girl, he brought me with him occasionally. Do you see those?”

The walls of the Napoleon House hadn’t been replastered in a century, and every one of the antique oil portraits hung just a little bit crooked. Mean, haughty faces, glaring down from the shadows.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was convinced that the people in the paintings were watching me. Waiting until I blinked so that they could pounce.”

“Maybe they were,” Guidry said. “Maybe they worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

“I’ll say it once more, because we’re such old friends. Don’t worry. The authorities have their man, don’t they?”

“It’s just the cops in Dallas, and they only think they have their man.”

Guidry knew that the FBI would never buy Oswald, not for a minute. C’mon. They’d start digging, and he’d start gabbing. No. Check that. The feds were already digging, and Oswald was already gabbing.

“He won’t be a problem,” Seraphine said.

Oswald. That little rat face, vaguely familiar. Guidry thought he might have seen him around town at some point. “So you can tell the future now?” he said.

“His.”

“Where’s the Eldorado?” Guidry said. Seraphine could reassure him till she was blue in the face, but he wouldn’t be safe from the feds until that car disappeared forever. The Eldorado was the one piece of physical evidence that linked him to the assassination.

“On its way to Houston,” she said, “as we speak.”

“If your fella with the eagle eye gets pulled over by the cops …”

“He won’t.” Her smile a bit less serene this time. The Eldorado was also the one piece of physical evidence that linked Carlos to the assassination.

“And once the car’s in Houston?” Guidry said.

“Someone trustworthy will send it to the bottom of the sea.”

Guidry reached over the bar for the bottle of scotch. He felt better, a little. “Is that true?” he said. “About your father working here?”

She shrugged. The shrug meant, Yes, of course. Or it meant, No, don’t be absurd.

“Who’s dumping the car in Houston?” Guidry said. “Your fella who’s driving it down?”

“No. He’s needed elsewhere.”

“So who, then?” Guidry, from his elevated perch in the organization, just a branch or two below Seraphine, knew most of Carlos’s guys. Some were more reliable than others. “Whoever dumps it, you better be damn sure you can count on him.”

“But of course,” she said. “Uncle Carlos has complete faith in this man. Never once has he failed us.”

Who? Guidry started to ask again. Instead he turned to stare at her. “Me?” he said. “No. I’m not going near that fucking car.”

“No?”

“I’m not going near that fucking car, Seraphine.” Guidry remembered to smile this time. “Not now, not a hundred years from now.”

She shrugged again. “But, mon cher,” she said, “in this matter who can we trust more than you? Who can you trust more?”

Only now did Guidry complete the arduous climb to the summit and, panting with exertion, realize just where Seraphine had led him. It had been her plan all along, he realized. Have Guidry stash the getaway Eldorado before the hit so that he’d be thoroughly motivated—his own ass on the line now—to get rid of the car afterward.

“Goddamn it,” he said. But you had to admire the dazzling footwork, the elegance of the maneuver. Who needed to tell the future when you could create it yourself?

Out on the street, Seraphine handed him a plane ticket.

“Your flight to Houston leaves tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll have to miss your Saturday-morning cartoons, I’m afraid. The car will be left for you downtown, in a pay lot across the street from the Rice Hotel.”

“What then?” he said.

“There’s a decommissioned-tank terminal on the ship channel. Take La Porte Road east. Keep going after you pass the Humble Oil refinery. You’ll see an unmarked road about a mile on.”

What if the feds had already found the Eldorado? They’d sit on it, of course. They’d wait for some poor idiot to show up and claim it.

“In the evening you’ll have all the privacy you need,” she said. “The ship channel is forty feet deep. Afterward walk half a mile up La Porte. There’s a filling station with a phone. You can call a cab from there. And me.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Her expensive scent, over the years, had never changed: fresh jasmine and what smelled like the scorched spices at the bottom of a cast-iron pan. She and Guidry had been lovers once, but so briefly and so long ago that he remembered that period only occasionally, and without much feeling about it one way or another. He doubted that Seraphine remembered it at all.

“You and Carlos never miss a button, do you?” Guidry said.

“So you see now, mon cher? Don’t worry.”

As Guidry walked back through the Quarter, Seraphine’s scent faded and his mind worked. It was true that Seraphine and Carlos never missed a button. But what if Guidry was one of those buttons? What if he was worried about the feds when in fact the real danger—Carlos, Seraphine—stood smiling right behind him?

Get rid of the Eldorado.

And then get rid of the man who got rid of the Eldorado. Get rid of the man who knows about Dallas.

The priest on the steps of St. Louis was still going strong. He was just a kid, barely out of the seminary, pudgy and apple-cheeked. He clasped his hands in front of him, like he was about to blow on the dice in hopes of a lucky roll.

“When we pass through the waters, God will be with us,” the priest was assuring his congregation. “When we walk through the fire, we shall not be burned.”

That wasn’t Guidry’s experience. He listened to the priest for another minute and then turned away.

4

Barone got the call at nine. He was ready for it. Seraphine told him to meet her at Kolb’s for dinner in half an hour, don’t be late.

Bitch. “When have I ever been late?” Barone said.

“I’m teasing, mon cher,” Seraphine said.

“Tell me. When have I ever been late?”

Kolb’s was the German restaurant on St. Charles Avenue, just off Canal Street. Dark-paneled walls and beer steins and platters of schnitzel with pickled beets. Carlos was Italian, but he loved German food. He loved every kind of food. Barone had never seen anyone in New Orleans pack it away like Carlos.

“Sit down,” Carlos said. “You want something to eat?”

The place was almost deserted, everyone at home watching the big news. “No,” Barone said.

“Have something to eat,” Carlos said.

The ceiling at Kolb’s was fitted with a system of fans connected by squeaking, creaking leather belts. A little wooden man in lederhosen turned a crank to keep the belts and the fans moving.

“His name is Ludwig,” Seraphine said. “Tireless and reliable, just like you.”

She smiled at Barone. She liked to make you think that she could read your mind, that she could predict your every move. Maybe she could.

“It’s a compliment, mon cher,” she said. “Don’t look so grumpy.”

“Try a bite of this,” Carlos said.

“No.”

“C’mon. You don’t like German food? Let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m not hungry.” Barone didn’t have anything against the Germans. The war had happened a long time ago.

Seraphine wasn’t eating either. She lit a cigarette and then set the matchbook on the table in front of her. She positioned it this way and that, observing it from various angles.

“It’s time for you to proceed,” she told Barone. As if he were too dumb to figure it out by himself. “The matters we discussed.”

“Houston?” he said.

“Yes.”

“What about Mackey Pagano? I don’t have time for that, too.”

“Don’t worry,” Seraphine said. “That’s already been taken care of.”

“Did I say I was worried?” Barone said.

“Your appointment in Houston is tomorrow evening,” she said. “As we discussed. You’ll need to go see Armand first, though. Tonight.”

Carlos still eating, not saying a word, letting Seraphine handle everything. Most people thought that Carlos kept her around—the well-dressed, well-spoken colored girl—for blow jobs and dictation. Barone knew better. For every problem that Carlos could think up, Seraphine had a solution.

“All right,” Barone said.

His Impala was parked on Dumaine, a block off Bourbon. Friday night and hardly a handful of people around. Down on the corner, an old colored man was blowing “’Round Midnight” on the alto sax for a few tourists. Barone walked over to listen. He had a minute.

The old colored man knew how to play. He hit a D-sharp and held it, the note rising and spreading like water over a levee.

The guy next to Barone jostled him a little. Barone felt a hand brush against his pocket. He reached down and grabbed the hand. It belonged to a scrawny punk with pitted cheeks. Needle marks up and down the pale belly of his arm.

“What’s the big idea, pal?” the dope fiend said, playing innocent. “You wanna hold hands with somebody, go find a—”

Barone bent his hand backward. The human wrist was fragile, a bird’s nest of twigs and tendons. He watched the dope fiend’s face change.

“Oh,” the dope fiend said.

“Shhh,” Barone said. “Let the man finish his tune.”

Barone couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard “’Round Midnight.” On the piano, probably. Over the years he’d listened to fifty, maybe a hundred different versions. Piano, sax, guitar, even trombone a time or two. The old colored man tonight made the song feel brand-new.

The music ended. The dope fiend’s knees sagged, and Barone turned him loose. The dope fiend stumbled away, not looking back, hunched over his hand like it was a flame he worried might flicker out.

Barone dropped a dollar bill in the sax case. The old man might have been fifty years old or he might have been eighty. The whites of his eyes were as yellow as an old cue ball, and there were needle marks running the length of his arms, too. Maybe the old man and the dope fiend were partners, one drawing the crowd so the other could rob it. Probably.

The old man looked down at the dollar bill and then looked back up. He adjusted the mouthpiece of his alto. He didn’t have anything to say to Barone.

Barone didn’t have anything to say to him. He walked over to his Impala and slid behind the wheel.

THE WEST BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI, JUST ACROSS THE RIVER from New Orleans, was a dirty strip of scrapyards, body shops, and lopsided tenement buildings, the wood rotting off them. The Wank, people called it. Barone understood why. The smell was something else. A couple of refineries fired night and day, a burning funk that stuck to your clothes and skin. Ships dumped their garbage on the New Orleans side, and it washed up here. Dead fish, too, the ones even the gulls wouldn’t touch.

He pulled off the main road and guided the Impala down a narrow track of oyster-shell gravel that ran parallel to the train tracks. Tires crunching, headlights bouncing over rows of busted windshields and caved-in grills. A stack of chrome bumpers ten feet high.

It was after midnight, but the lights in the office were still on. Barone knew they would be. A man gets in a certain habit, he stays there.

Armand’s office was just a shack, four walls and a corrugated tin roof. The front room had a desk, a sofa with one arm sawed off so it would fit, and a camp stove that Armand used to boil coffee. The back room was behind a door that looked like any other door. Solid steel. Try to kick that in and walk with a limp for the rest of your life.

Armand gave Barone a big smile. He was happy to see Barone. Why not? Barone shopped the top-shelf merchandise and never dickered too much.

“What’s doing, baby?” Armand said. “Where you been at? How long since the last time you come round to see me? Three months?”

“Two,” Barone said.

“You want something to drink? Look at you. Nice and trim. That ain’t me, baby. Man, I just peek round the corner at a plate of beans and rice, I get fatter.” He grabbed his belly with both hands and jiggled it for Barone. “See that? So where you staying at these days? Still over there by Burgundy Street?”

“No.”

“What you think ’bout all that business up there in Dallas? Awful shame, ain’t it? You ask me, it was the Russians behind it. One hundred percent. You just wait and see. The Russians.”

“I’ve got a new piece of work,” Barone said.

Armand laughed. “Down to business. Every time.”

“I need something tonight.”

“What you looking for?”

“Tell me what you have.”

Armand took out his ring of keys. “Well, snubbies, take your pick, two-inch or four-inch. Clean, guaranteed. Or you want something with a little more gris-gris, I got another .22 Magnum, cut down to the stock.”

“How much for the .22?” Barone said.

“Cost me a nickel more than the last one did.”

Barone doubted it. “Clean?”

“Guaranteed.”

“I’m not paying an extra nickel.”

“Oh, baby, you gonna put me outta business.”

“Let’s see it,” Barone said.

Armand unlocked the door to the back room. It was half the size of the front room, just enough space for a few boxes and a steamer trunk. He squatted down to unlock the steamer trunk. The effort made him groan.

“How’s LaBruzzo and them?” Armand said. “You know who I run across the other day? That big ugly rumpkin from Curley’s Gym. You remember him, muscles all over. I know you remember him. Guess who he works for now. I’ll tell you who. He …”

Armand glanced over and saw the gun in Barone’s hand. A .357 Blackhawk.

It took a beat for the gun to register. Then Armand’s face went flat, like a mask coming off. He stood back up.

“I sold you that,” Armand said. “Didn’t I? Threw in a box of .38 Short Colts.”

“A couple of years ago,” Barone said.

There were no cars on the road this time of night, and the shack was a long way from the next yard over. But Barone never took chances, not if he could help it. He decided to wait for a barge to pass and blow its horn.

“Just listen to me now, baby,” Armand said. “You barking up the wrong tree. Carlos is. I ain’t have no idea what this all about.”

He had one hand at his side and the other one on his belly, making slow circles. Barone wasn’t worried. Armand never carried a gun. The guns in the trunk were never loaded.

“Please,” Armand said. “I ain’t sold nothing to nobody. Whatever happened up there in Dallas, I ain’t got the first idea. Put me in front of Jesus Christ himself and I’ll swear it.”

So Armand did have an idea what this was about after all. Barone wasn’t surprised.

“Please, baby, you know I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Armand said. “Always have, always will. Let me talk to Carlos. Let me straighten him out.”

“You remember that big Christmas party at Mandina’s?” Barone said. “A couple of years after the war.”

“Yeah, sure,” Armand said. He couldn’t figure out why Barone was asking about a long-ago Christmas party. He couldn’t figure out why Barone hadn’t shot him yet. He was starting to think that he might have a chance. “Sure. Sure, I remember that party.”

Winter of ’46 or ’47. Barone had just gone to work for Carlos. He was living in a cold-water flat down the street from the Roosevelt Hotel.

“There was a piano player,” Barone said. He wondered if that Christmas party at Mandina’s was when he heard “’Round Midnight” the first time. “A piano player with a top hat.”

“And there was a Christmas tree,” Armand said. Nodding and grinning and finally giving in to hope, the sweet embrace of it. “That’s right. A big old Christmas tree with an angel on top.”

Barone thought about the old colored man playing “’Round Midnight” on his alto sax earlier, his fingers flying over the keys. Some people were born with a gift.

Finally a barge blew its horn, so loud and low that Barone felt the throb in his back teeth. He pulled the trigger.

A quarter of a mile east of Armand’s scrapyard, driving back to the bridge, Barone saw a car coming on, headed in the opposite direction. An old Hudson Commodore with a sunshade like the brim of a baseball cap.

Behind the wheel a woman. Barone’s headlights lit up her face as they passed. Her headlights lit up his.

He tapped the brakes and swung around. When he caught the Commodore, he flashed his headlights. The Commodore pulled onto the shoulder. Barone parked behind it. On his way to the driver’s window, he popped his switchblade and gave the back tire a quick jab.

“Damn it to hell, you scared me to death.” The woman had her hair up in curlers. Who was she? Why was she out here this time of night? Barone supposed it didn’t matter, the who or the why. “I thought you was the damn cops.”

“No,” he said.

She was missing a piece of a front tooth. Her smile was friendly. “The cops is the last thing in the damn world I need right now.”

“You’ve got a flat,” Barone said.

“Damn it. That’s the next-to-the-last thing in the world I need.”

“Come look.”

She climbed out of the car and came around to the back. She wore an old housecoat the color of dirty dishwater. When she heard the back tire hissing, she laughed.

“Well, if that ain’t the cherry on top of my sundae.” She laughed again. She had a nice laugh, like the cheerful jingle of coins in a pocket. “After the day I had, it’s the damn cat’s pajamas.”

“Open the trunk,” Barone said. “I’ll change it out for you.”

“My hero,” she said.

He checked to make sure the road was empty and then cut her throat, turning her a little so that she didn’t spill blood on his suit. After a minute she relaxed, like a silk dress slipping off a hanger. Barone just had to let her slide into the trunk of the car, no effort at all.