Accordion Crimes (6 page)

In the hall he put on his derby, glancing at himself in the mirror, and fumbled through the sticks in the umbrella stand until he found the staff he had bought in England years before on a walking tour of the Lake District. Why had he not
purchased the ebony walking stick with the lead-weighted head he’d seen in London?
Come prepared for action.
He shook the staff, knocking askew a box of stereopticon photographs, sending to the floor the novel scene of two black men hanging an alligator from a limb, a rope knotted around its neck, the men grinning and straining against the weight. He had his revolver.

Halfway down the drive, stubbing the staff so vigorously that the ferrule dug at the crushed oyster shell, he heard Joppo running behind him. The stableman hauled up, panting and jerking his head.

“What is it? I can’t delay now.”

“Sah, sah, we got a king back of the stable, big rat king, sah, swear to Jesus real big.”

“Ah!” He had seen only one in his life, years before, down in the family’s cotton warehouse on the docks, a horror of a thing. “How big?” He loathed rats and vermin; had been a child in the years of the yellow fever plague, when thousands of people died, when his mother died, and they fired the cannons day and night until his head ached from the sound, they burned barrels of tar in the streets to drive out the pestilence spread by fetid vapors, scuttling creatures and foreigners, the invisible seeds of disease spraying out from their loose mouths. Even now the memory of the relentless booming induced a hopeless mood and migraine headache that sent him to the sofa in his darkened study for days. He remembered the corpses stacked on the wharf, from a distance resembling goods ready for shipment. Yes, a shipment to hell, his grandfather had called it, and the rain streaming down the window glass while in the yellow streets the dead carts rolled.

Joppo held up both hands twice—twenty.

“Some a them dead, some a them rotten meat.”

He strode quickly across the grass toward the stable, Joppo lumbering after him and describing the rat king, who had discovered it, how they jabbed and dragged it out from under the floor with a yam fork, the supposed weight and mass.

There was a crowd behind the stable, his stable hands, the cook twisting her apron, some of Colonel Sawday’s darkies coming through the gap in the hedge, falling back when they saw him.

They had it out ten or twelve feet from the wall, a circle of rats perhaps three feet across, the animals facing outward, their tails gripped and twisted in an inextricable tangle from which none could escape. Several of the rats were dead, others showing bright blood on them from the yam fork’s action, and a few gnashing their brown teeth defiantly. He counted them, ticking each on the head with his stick: eighteen. Close enough to twenty. A filthy sight, this rotting clutch; terrible that it had been squealing and scrabbling under his stable floor.

“Better club them.” He hurried away to the street, hearing the clicking teeth and stick thumps.

Where Canal and Royal converged, hundreds of men carrying sticks and clubs, some with pistols or rifles, crowded around the statue of Clay. Three men stood on the base of the statue itself, above the crushing people, above the sea of bobbing derbies and slouch hats that gave the effect of a choppy black lake.

He saw the face of Biles, known to him, a face resembling that of a deer, with his forward snout and fawn-colored muttonchops. Biles raised his stick.

“Pinse! Wondered if I’d see you here, sir. Didn’t see your name in the paper.”

“No. Not in the same list as—I’ve been up at the levee break.”

“This is truly something, isn’t it?”

“They mean business.”

“Oh yes. It was all arranged last night. There are some who see we’ve got to stop this tumult, this labor nightmare. Pinse, recall the screwmen’s strike last year. My sister had five thousand bales of cotton on the dock, not an inch of warehouse room, and the ships riding high and empty. Then the rain. Did you ever see rain like it? Never. And not a bastard would touch a bale. She lost fifteen dollars a bale.”

Pinse snorted into his linen handkerchief. His nose felt swollen inside and his temples throbbed. “I’ve been saying it for years. The dominant American class must assert itself or lose everything. We’re overrun by the mongrels. of Europe. I tell you, this flood of immigrants—I’ve heard it said in some quarters that the Pope is behind it, that it is a secret and massive effort to seize this country for Catholicism. My wife is Catholic, but I begin to wonder if there is not some truth in the statement.”

“You should have seen it last night in Dagotown—a parade with twenty saints, flags flying, singing and music, candles, a parade. They were all drunk. They think they have got away with it, you see.”

Men shouted and gestured, pushed a way through the crowd, the shifting glint of rifle and shotgun barrels. The three men on the platform before bronze-visaged Clay waited to speak, their glances casting over the crowd. One raised his hands for silence. He began, his voice growing louder as he described the treachery of the jury, the evil machinations of
the Italians. “… was a noble man. No one in this country knew more about the Italian desperado than he, no one was braver than he in the face of threats from the dago Camorra.”

Biles sniggered in Pinse’s ear, “nor readier to hold out his hand for dago money.” His black buckeyes shone.

“Will every man here follow me and see the murder of a brave man vindicated?”

A thick-bellied man dressed in a rumpled black suit, his face contorted with passion, climbed halfway onto the base of the statue and screamed, “hang the dagos! Hang the dirty murdering dagos!”

“Who is that?” asked Pinse.

“I don’t know. The rabble turn out for these things.”

The three came down and began to make their way toward Congo Square and the Parish Prison. The crowd surged forward with a sound like a great engine. Whores leaned from half-opened windows above the street. Near Congo Square a wash of ragged blacks filtered into the crowd. Somewhere sticks were rattling and a man scraped at a fiddle.

“You gonna see a different dance than the ‘Hog Face’! Come on, niggers!”

At the prison the mob washed up against the steel main door in subsiding waves, cursing their puny crowbars and sledgehammers. For a few minutes indecision ran around the edges of the crowd.

“There’s a wood door at Treme Street,” shouted someone. At once the mass of people, black and white, sucked back from the main door and flowed like some viscous human lava toward Treme Street, seizing railroad ties from a work site as they went.

Ten or twelve men rushed at the Treme Street door with a squared tie, the crowd shouting HAH with each lunge. HAH HAH HAH.

The jailer fixed his eyes on Frank Archivi, his whiskey breath tiding in and out. “They are coming. The door can’t hold. Hide. Anyplace you can in the prison—best chance is the women’s section, upstairs!”

“For the love of Christ, man, give us some guns!” Archivi’s face was the color of cold bacon grease.

“I cannot.”

The planks tore from the hinges.

Some of them raced up the stairs into the women’s section. Silvano darted into an empty cell and crawled under the mattress. He lay flat against the raw boards. His ears pounded, his back tried to arch. He was rigid with fear, could not control his bladder.

In the street an immense black man came toward the oak door carrying a boulder. He crashed it against the lock plate. A tremendous shout went up as the metal burst and the door sprang open. The mob surged up the stairs, Pinse not far from the front clenching his walking stick.

A guard shouted to them, voice cracking with excitement. “Third floor. They are up on the women’s floor.”

A hundred men thundered up, the stairs creaking and groaning under their thudding feet, and before them the prisoners fled down the back stairs and out into the yard. The gate was locked. Beyond was the street. They could look into the street, jammed with men. The delighted Americans, roaring with triumph, poured into the yard and the Sicilians, their arms linked, crowding together, shrank into a corner. The accordion maker saw the approaching men with searing clarity, a loose thread on a coat, mud-spattered trouser legs, a logging chain in a big hand, the red shine of the engorged faces, a man with one blue and one
yellow eye. Even then he hoped to be saved. He was innocent!

Pinse held his revolver loosely in his hand, had lost the staff in the rush up the stairs, so crowded it had been, looked at the Sicilians knotted in the corner, their wicked eyes glittering, some of them pleading and praying—the cowards! He thought of the rat king, fired. Others fired.

A barrage of bullets and shot of every caliber and weight tore the Sicilians. The accordion maker reared twice and fell back.

At the Treme Street door the crowd had Polizzi, limp and bloody, spittle cascading down his receding chin, but still breathing. They tossed him high into the air, into the hands of other men who seized him and tossed him like a chip above their heads for the length of a block, a game to throw him high, a feat of strength to catch him, until on the corner of St. Ann Street someone strung a rope from the lamppost and put the noose around his neck.

A voice shouted, “twis’ a hang-knot thirteen time or it be bad luck!” Up, up the limp form, raised by shouts and cheers as well as hemp. The body rotated, then, miraculously, the legs of the hanging man jerked, the scrawny arms lifted and the hands seized the rope; a revived Polizzi began climbing up the rope, hand over hand, toward the lamp bracket. There was a thrilled gasp.

“My god!” shouted Biles. Someone in the crowd shot, then many men in sudden laughter, betting who could shoot out an eye, take off the end of Polizzi’s long nose. The arms dangled loose forever.

“That’s enough for me,” said Biles. “I haven’t the stomach
for this kind of thing. But something had to be done.” He retched, apologized.

“Come,” said Pinse, taking his friend’s elbow and steering him toward a street they both knew well. “You need something. Our duty is done.” His headache seemed a little better.

At the Cotton Guild’s bar he said, “two sazeracs” to Cooper, and when the heavy tumblers came, both swallowed the golden drink as though it were water, and Biles snapped his fingers for two more, turned to Pinse, offered him a Havana
oscuro
from his leather case and took one for himself. He wet the head of the cigar in his red mouth and with the nail of the little finger on his right hand, grown especially long for this chore, slit the wrapper and took the burning match proffered by Cooper.

“We are setting up a new company to handle the trade,” said Biles. “With a gentleman you know well. Your name was mentioned. We think of calling it Hemisphere Fruit.”

The crowds surged through the prison inspecting the dead men, kicking the bloodied Archivi who held an Indian club in his stiffening hand, snatched up from somewhere in the last minutes.

A guard discovered Silvano under the mattress and, with his fingers knotted in Silvano’s hair, half dragged him down to the hall where the corpses of the Italians had been arranged in a display like a butcher’s cutlets. Outside in the street celebratory music erupted, a horn and a harmonica full of spit on which someone played fast sucking chords, shouting between pulls on the reeds—
eeh!
chord
hanh!
chord
eehh!
chord—and the same
scraping fiddle, the rattling drum. Silvano’s damaged father—
sfortunato!
—lay on his back, bloody head propped against the wall so that his chin rested on his sternum. His arms, in their lacerated coat sleeves, stretched along his sides as though he lay at attention. The trousers rode up on his shins and the feet pointed outward, the soles of the shoes worn through. The guard watched the boy’s distorted face, seemed eased by Silvano’s wretchedness and pushed him along to the warden’s office where a roomful of Americans pressed in, demanding answers from him, shouting questions in his face, asking for details of how the accordion maker had murdered the chief. One after another knocked him off the chair. A man seized his ears and jerked him to his feet.

“Tell us how he lay in wait and shot.” They cuffed and mauled, someone pressed a lighted cigar against his lip. Suddenly they rushed away when someone said “rum,” and the guard wordlessly thrust Silvano out the door and into the street.

(Decades later the great-grandson of this guard, intelligent and handsome, enrolled as a medical student; he served as a donor of sperm at the medical center’s in vitro fertilization program and was the maker of more than seventy children reared by other men. He accepted no money for his contribution.)

He crouched on the wharf afraid to move, mosquitoes whining around him under a sky like black paint, ribbons of distant lightning curling from it. His throat was raw with suppressed weeping. A shrill tinnitus rang in his left ear. Hopelessness filled him as a chord of organ music fills a hall.
A whistle sounded from a dark recess, a kind of zipping flourish as though someone were blowing a carnival prize whistle, and he folded his arms over his head, believing the Americans were coming again, would kill him this time. He waited for them to advance with their pistols and ropes but no one came. The whistler was silent and rain began, hard drops like thrown coins, then a pelting tropical downpour as warm as blood. He got up and stumbled toward the black bulk of the warehouses. The cobbles streamed. He counted his mother rigid with paralysis, his unlucky father dead, the impossibly distant village, his lost sisters and aunts, himself stranded penniless in this wild hostile world. He despised his father for being dead. A hardness began to form in his chest, a red stone of hatred, not for Americans but for the foolish, weak Sicilian father who had failed to learn American ways and let himself be killed. He made his way downriver in the shadow of warehouses, passing the steamboats and freighters, the flat-bottomed wood boats, moving toward the stink of fish and bilge.