Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (66 page)

“I’ve heard terrible stories about New Orleans,” she said. “Gangsters and voodoo — all kinds of awful things.”

“It’s not so bad, Miss Gray,” McIsaac said. “Why, I lived there almost twenty years, and nobody shot at me — well, no more than twice. Maybe three times…”

Miss Gray laughed along with the others, and reached for her glass. She was a little tight, Lewis thought. The Harvard boy — Newhouse, his name was — was having a bit of a time keeping her balanced, though he didn’t seem to begrudge the effort..

“I heard there were some terrible murders there in the teens,” she said. “Somebody hacked women to death with an axe.”

“And here I thought that was a New England thing,” Paulie said. “Lizzie Borden took an ax —”

“Oh, can it,” Mitch said.

Lewis glanced at him, startled, and McIsaac raised an eyebrow.

“You know about our Axeman, Mr. Sorley?”

Mitch shook his head. “I’ve never been to New Orleans.” He tossed back the last of his drink, reached out to grab a passing waiter.

“So it’s true?” Miss Gray said.

McIsaac shrugged. “It’s true that there was a murderer with an axe who scared the daylights out of people back in ’19. And, no, they never caught him.”

“I remember that,” Rayburn said, slowly. “A bunch of Italian women, wasn’t it? And he wrote to the papers and said that he was the Devil himself but because he was a jazz man that one night he wouldn’t enter any home where his own music was playing. The Devil’s own jazz.”

“The Axeman’s Jazz,” McIsaac said. “Some damn fool even wrote the song for him.”

“Did it work?” Miss Gray asked. “Did he keep his promise?”

“I was living in the Quarter then,” McIsaac said. “He wrote to the Times-Picayune and said he’d pass over the city on St. Joseph’s Night, but he’d spare any home where jazz was playing. I remember his exact words: ‘some of those people who don’t jazz it on Tuesday night will get the axe.’” He shook his head, his accent suddenly stronger. “You never saw so many parties, and there wasn’t a musician in town, good, bad, or indifferent, who didn’t have a gig that night. My boss had a party that night himself, and come midnight, every girl in the house was in the middle of the dance floor, jazzing it as though her life depended on it. And maybe it did. But nobody died that night. Not then.”

“But he came back,” Miss Saltonstall said.

McIsaac nodded. “Four times more. Four more people dead. Eleven of them in all.”

“That’s horrible,” Miss Gray said.

“It’s like Jack the Ripper,” Charlie Saltonstall said. “He wrote to the papers, too. And they never caught him.”

“It’s a load of crap,” Mitch said. He drained his fresh drink. “The Devil writing letters to the newspaper? Come on, McIsaac.”

Alma was frowning, visibly worried, and McIsaac spread his hands.

“Nobody knows if the letters were real,” he said. “But the bodies sure were.”

Mitch started to say something more, and Alma kicked him under the table, catching Lewis a glancing blow. Mitch closed his mouth, scowling, and pushed back his chair. “Sorry, I’m not good company,” he said. “I’m heading back to the hotel.”

Lewis looked up at him, wondering if he should go with him. Except that meant leaving Alma, which wouldn’t do, and Mitch — surely he wasn’t drunk, even on two quick drinks.

“You want us to go with you?” Alma asked, and pinned him with a glare.

Her tone seemed to get through to Mitch, and he visibly relaxed. “No. No, I’m just beat, I think. A good night’s sleep, and I’ll be fine.”

Alma hesitated, obviously on the verge of going with him anyway, and Mitch managed an almost normal smile.

“Really, Al. I’m fine.”

“All right,” she said, and Mitch turned away, threading his way through the tables to the door.

“We don’t have to stay too long,” Lewis offered, as the conversation began to pick up again around them.

“We probably shouldn’t,” Alma said. Her eyes were still on the door, and Lewis leaned close. To a casual observer, he might just be whispering endearments.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“None at all,” Alma said. “None at all.”

The dream, Lewis thought suddenly. Jazz and nightmare and a killer in the dark, staying his hand just as long as the music wailed, intoxicated by his own power. “The Axeman. That’s what my dream was about.”

“What?” Alma leaned back to look at him.

“McIsaac’s story.” Lewis shook his head. “But why I’d dream that…”

“You’re sure it’s not a prediction?”

“I don’t know.” Lewis closed his eyes for an instant, trying to recover the feelings that had come with the image, but there was too much noise, too many people, and he shook his head again. “I didn’t think so at the time. I don’t really think so now, not directly. But…”

“We need to take it seriously,” Alma said, and he nodded.

J
erry made his way back to his room, leaning heavily on his cane. His stump was hurting, the dull pain that came from standing too long, and he dropped onto the bed with a sigh. It would have been nice to go with the others, have a drink in the discreet speakeasy around the corner, but the walk would have left him aching, and he wanted to be fresh in the morning. He’d never really thought that being a passenger would be quite so much work.

He slipped off his glasses, throwing his arm up to cover his eyes. In just a minute, he’d start the tedious business of getting himself ready for bed, but for now — no. No, he’d get up and do it now, and then he could really relax.

Jerry hauled himself upright again, wincing as his weight came down on to the wooden leg. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to get a raw spot on the stump, and that would be almost impossible to heal while they were in the race. He went into the bathroom, shedding jacket and tie on the way, and busied himself at the sink and toilet. As always, the frustration clawed at him: if he were whole, he could lie down any time he wanted to, could do things without worrying about the consequences, but instead he had to plan every step so that he wasn’t caught without his leg, forced to drag himself on crutches or, worse, hop or crawl. And even with the best planning, the most careful choreography, there was no real dignity left.

He scowled at himself in the mirror as he splashed warm water on his face, the stubble rough beneath his hands. Tonight he looked every day of his years, every sharp edge blunted, and he wished that Gil were here to tease him out of this mood. For a moment, he could almost see Gil’s face behind him, the wry smile curving his mouth, tightening the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Gil had been skin and bone at the end, but still himself, though that had been a mixed blessing.

He swore under his breath and swung away from the sink, pausing only to pick up the Dopp kit he’d left on the sinkboard. It was time to patch up his leg and go to sleep and hope for better in the morning. He tossed the kit onto the bed and wrestled himself out of his clothes, then sat down to unfasten the harness that held the wooden leg in place. The straps had bitten into his skin, leaving familiar marks, but there were no particular sore sport, and he eased the leg off the stump with a sigh of relief.

After he’d been hit, the damaged foot had festered, healed, and festered again, the infection simmering in the bones, until a year after he’d come back to Chicago. The fevers had come back, and the swelling, and in the end the surgeons had amputated his leg just below the knee. He’d been lucky, they told him, lucky to still have the joint and enough leg left below it to allow for a prosthesis, but he wasn’t in the mood to count his blessings. He cocked the stump over his good knee, wincing as he probed the new red patches. More ointment on the raw bits, and extra moleskin in the socket, and it if wasn’t enough, well, he’d just live with it.

He reached for the tube of ointment, and instead his fingers found silk: Henry’s necklace. He froze, remembering the look on Alma’s face when she’d handed it to him. Better to leave it where it was — except that he was curious. He pulled it out, unexpectedly weighty in his hand, unfolded the pale blue silk. Iron flowers, a hard, unlikely beauty, each dull black blossom perfect, each paired with two leaves and a delicate bud. It would lie heavy on a woman’s neck.

He knew the story of Berlin iron, for all that it wasn’t his period. The ladies of Prussia gave up their jewels to finance the war against Napoleon, pledged themselves to wear only worthless iron until the monster was defeated, wore it in defiance after Napoleon crushed them, and in celebration when he was finally exiled. Henry had said this piece was cursed, that a dying woman had cursed the soldier who took it, thief and murderer, and that every woman who had worn it since had died a violent death. French women, most of them, Bonapartist women — plenty of them had sought refuge in the Americas.

He spread the handkerchief on his thigh, laid the necklace across it, the metal cool even through the silk. It was easy to imagine those women — he could almost see them, an aging exile with gray in her short black curls, the pale eldest, the proper middle sister, the last-born girl as wild as her mother. Two died at their husbands’ hands, the proper one in a robbery, the youngest in her box at the theater, the iron necklace she flaunted bright with blood. All of them sacrificed to the curse, blood on pastel satin, smearing silken skin. Another stranger shot by moonlight, the necklace black against her skin; later still, a night of rain, the gas flames shivering in their lamps, a thread of blood in the gutter, trailing past a kid-leather shoe and a crumpled shape in a dress that had once been palest ivory.

And why not? Why should they live? Theirs was a crime of blood, let it be paid in blood. Why should anyone live? Too many good men were dead in the War, too many worthless souls alive in their stead. The War had taught him that there was a certain pleasure in the kill. There was a razor in his kit, honed to a perfect edge, the ivory handle easy in his hand. It wouldn’t be hard. And it would serve them right, all of them who were alive when Gil was dead…

And not a single death, not a single drop of blood, would make Gil live again. He caught his breath like a drowning man, and carefully folded the silk back over the necklace, tucking the ends tight around the iron flowers. Gil was dead, and nothing would change that, true; but nothing could change what they had had. He put the necklace back into the kit, nestling it as far from the razor as he could manage, and reached for the cream to tend his raw leg.

The maid had left the window open, and a breeze curled in from the street, smelling of rain and the dusty street. For an instant, the scent was almost the same as memory, spring rain on cobblestones, and Jerry closed his eyes.

They had managed leave together, in the spring of 1918 before the Army got properly organized, and he and Gil had holed up in the back room of the penzione, huddling into the featherbed against the draft, the window cracked open to let out the smoke of the fire and the cigarettes and the smell of sex. The lamp flickered, drawn perilously close to the bed, and he sat up over the book Gil had brought him, printed in 1805 with engravings from much earlier, feeling the ritual take shape in his mind, correspondence leaping to join correspondence, all the things he had believed dead suddenly alive and waiting.

“It’s all real,” he said, still needing to hear the words, unable to keep the wonder from his voice, and beside him Gil rolled to face him, draping an arm across his thighs.

“I told you so,” he mumbled, his face still in the pillow.

“No, it all makes sense,” Jerry said, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. He only needed them for reading, especially in this light, and to decipher the marginal notations someone had left in blue ink and a sprawling hand, and there hadn’t been time to get them fitted before he shipped out. “I can see — I want — do you have an ephemeris?”

“Yes.” Gil didn’t open his eyes.

“Well, where is it?”

“In my pack.”

Jerry pushed back the covers, but Gil’s arm tightened, and he stopped. “What?”

Gil levered himself up onto one elbow. “It’ll be here in the morning, Jer.”

“But —” Jerry stopped, and Gil sat up, holding out his hand.

“Give.”

Reluctantly, Jerry handed over the book. Gil found the ribbon marker, tucked in into the pages, and set the book firmly aside.

“The stars will be better in the morning anyway,” he said.

Jerry frowned. “Not necessarily — you have no idea what the astrological conditions are, do you?”

Gil grinned, not the slightest bit abashed at being caught out. “Nope.”

“So in fact this could be the correct hour for —” Jerry stopped abruptly as Gil’s hand slid beneath the edge of the heavy sweater he was wearing, began plucking at his undershirt.

“It’s a better hour for this.”

Jerry grinned in spite of himself, leaned in to the exploring hands. “God, Gil, there’s so much to learn, so much — I thought it was all dead.”

Gil reached up to cup his cheek, his expression for once serious and tender. “The Gods aren’t dead, you know.”

“No,” Jerry said, and couldn’t repress his own smile. He shrugged out of his sweater, and slid down into Gil’s embrace.

The hotel room smelled more insistently of rain and gasoline, the exhaust from a truck passing beneath the windows. Jerry took a deep breath, his eyes stinging. That was the Mystery, the thing Gil had given him that could never be taken away. The greatest of these is love.

Chapter Twelve

"A
jealous Latin husband. How boring!" Stasi folded the tabloid newspaper next to her morning coffee cup with the picture on top. There, in lovely black and white, Alma Segura walked across the tarmac of some landing field or another, her arm around Mitchell Sorley's waist. Behind, Lewis Segura brooded jealously. Actually, Stasi thought, he looked more uncertain and perhaps annoyed that there were photographers there, but it was close enough to make the caption work. "Enchantress of the air Alma Gilchrist Segura and decorated ace Mitchell Sorley have been business partners for ten years as well as sharing a house. Mr. Segura is a recent addition to the ménage."