She gave me a twisted grin and the finger. I chose to ignore the finger.
‘I’m thirty-three but I admit to thirty, if the lighting is right. I have a cat and a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, but no one to share it with currently. I do step aerobics three times each week and I like Chinese food, soul music and cream ale. My last relationship ended six months ago and I think my hymen may be growing back.’
I arched an eyebrow at her and she laughed. ‘You do look shocked,’ she said. ‘You need to get out more.’
‘Sounds like you do, too. Who was the guy?’
‘A stockbroker. We’d been seeing each other for over a year and we agreed to live together on a test basis. He had a one-bed, I had a two-bed, so he moved in with me and we used the second bedroom as a shared study.’
‘Sounds idyllic.’
‘It was, for about a week. It turned out that he couldn’t stand the cat, he hated sharing a bed with me because he said I kept him awake by turning over all the time and all my clothes started to smell of his cigarettes. That clinched it. Everything stank: the furniture, the bed, the walls, the food, the toilet paper, even the cat. Then he came home one evening, told me he was in love with his secretary and moved to Seattle with her three months later.’
‘Seattle’s nice, I hear.’
‘Fuck Seattle. I hope it falls into the sea.’
‘At least you’re not bitter.’
‘Very funny.’ She looked out of her window for a while and I felt an urge to reach out and touch her, an urge enhanced by what she said next. ‘I still feel reluctant to ask you too many questions,’ she said, gently. ‘After what happened.’
‘I know.’ Slowly, I extended my right hand and lightly touched her cheek. Her skin was smooth and slightly moist. She leaned her head towards me, increasing the pressure against my hand, and then we were pulling up outside the entrance to the cemetery and the moment was gone.
Branches of the Fontenots had lived in New Orleans since the late nineteenth century, long before the family of Lionel and David had moved to the city, and the Fontenots had a big vault in Metairie cemetery, the largest of the city’s cemeteries at Metairie Road and Pontchartrain Boulevard. The cemetery covered one hundred and fifty acres and was built on the old Metairie racecourse. If you were a gambling man, it was an appropriate final resting place, even though it proved that, in the end, the odds are always stacked in favour of the house.
New Orleans cemeteries are strange places. While most cemeteries in big cities are carefully manicured and encourage discreet headstones, generations of the dead citizens of New Orleans rested in ornate tombs and spectacular mausoleums. They reminded me of Père Lachaise in Paris, or the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, where people still lived among the bodies. The resemblance was echoed by the Brunswig tomb, which was shaped like a pyramid and guarded by a sphinx.
It was not simply the funerary architecture of Spain and France that had caused the cemeteries to develop the way they did. Most of the city was below sea level and, until the development of modern drainage systems, graves dug in the ground had rapidly filled with water. Above-ground tombs were the natural solution.
The Fontenot funeral had already entered the cemetery when we arrived. I parked away from the main body of vehicles and we walked past the two police cruisers at the gate, their occupants’ eyes masked by shades. We followed the stragglers past the four statues representing Faith, Hope, Charity and Memory at the base of the long Moriarity tomb, until we came to a Greek revival tomb marked with a pair of Doric columns. ‘Fontenot’ was inscribed on the lintel above the door.
It was impossible to tell how many Fontenots had come to rest in the family vault. The tradition in New Orleans was to leave the body for a year and a day, after which the vault was reopened, the remains moved to the back and the rotting casket removed to make way for the next occupant. A lot of the vaults in Metairie were pretty crowded by this point.
The wrought-iron gate, inlaid with the heads of angels, stood open and the small party of mourners had surrounded the vault in a semicircle. A man I guessed to be Lionel Fontenot towered above them. He was wearing a black, single-breasted suit and a thick black tie. His face had been weathered to a reddish-brown and deep lines etched his forehead and snaked out from the corners of his eyes. His hair was dark but streaked with grey at the temples. He was a big man, certainly six-three at least and weighing close on two hundred and forty pounds. His suit seemed to struggle to contain him.
Beyond the mourners, ranged at intervals around the vaults and tombs, or standing beneath trees scanning the cemetery, were four hard-faced men in dark jackets and pants. Their pistols caused the jackets to bulge slightly. A fifth man, a dark overcoat hanging loosely on his shoulders, turned at an old cypress and I caught a glimpse of the tell-tale sights of an M16-based submachine-gun concealed beneath its folds. Two others stood at either side of Lionel Fontenot. The big man wasn’t taking any chances.
The mourners, both black and white – young white men in snappy black suits, old black women wearing black dresses gilded with lace at the neckline – grew silent as the priest began to read the rites of the dead from a tattered prayer book with gold-lined pages. There was no wind to carry away his words and they hung in the air around us, reverberating from the surrounding tombs like the voices of the dead themselves.
‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’
The pall-bearers moved forward, struggling awkwardly to fit the casket through the narrow entrance to the vault. As it was placed inside, a pair of New Orleans policemen appeared between two round vaults about eighty feet west of the funeral party. Two more emerged from the east and a third pair moved slowly down past a tree to the north. Rachel followed my glance.
‘An escort?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth . . .’
I felt uneasy. They could have been sent to ensure that Joe Bones wasn’t tempted to disturb the mourners, but something was wrong. I didn’t like the way they moved. They looked uncomfortable in the uniforms, as if their shirt collars were too tight and their shoes pinched.
‘Forgive us our trespasses . . .’
Fontenot’s men had spotted them, too, but they didn’t look too concerned. The policemen’s arms hung loosely by their sides and their guns remained in their holsters. They were about forty feet away from us when something warm splashed my face. An elderly moon-faced woman in a tight black dress, who had been sobbing quietly beside me, spun sideways and tumbled to the ground, a dark hole in her temple and a damp glistening in her hair. A chip of marble flew from the vault, the area around it stained a vivid red. The sound of the shot came almost simultaneously, a dull subdued noise like a fist hitting a punchbag.
‘But deliver us from evil . . .’
It took the mourners a few seconds to realise what was happening. They looked dumbly at the fallen woman, a pool of blood already forming around her head as I pushed Rachel into the space between two vaults, shielding her with my body. Someone screamed and the crowd began to scatter as more bullets came, whining off the marble and stone. I could see Lionel Fontenot’s bodyguards rush to protect him, pushing him to the ground as the bullets bounced from the tomb and rattled its iron gate.
Rachel covered her head with her arms and crouched to try to make herself a smaller target. Over my shoulder, I saw the two cops to the north separate and pick up machine pistols concealed in the bushes at either side of the avenue. They were Steyrs, fitted with sound suppressors: Joe Bones’s men. I saw a woman try to run for the cover of the outspread wings of a stone angel, her dark coat whipping around her bare legs. The coat puffed twice at the shoulder and she sprawled face forward on the ground, her hands outstretched. She tried to drag herself forward but her coat puffed again and she was gone.
Now there were pistol shots and the rattle of a semi-automatic as Fontenot’s men returned fire. I drew my own Smith & Wesson and joined Rachel as a uniformed fi
gure appeared in the gap between the tombs, the Steyr held in a two-handed grip. I shot him in the face and he crumpled to the ground.
‘But they’re cops!’ said Rachel, her voice almost drowned by the exchange of fire around us.
I reached out and pushed her down further. ‘They’re Joe Bones’s men. They’re here to take out Lionel Fontenot.’ But it was more than that: Joe Bones wanted to sow chaos and to reap blood and fear and death from the consequences. He didn’t simply want Lionel Fontenot dead. He also wanted others to die – women, children, Lionel’s family, his associates – and for those left alive to remember what had taken place and to fear Joe Bones more because of it. He wanted to break the Fontenots and he would do it here, beside the vault where they had buried generations of their dead. This was the action of a man who had moved beyond reason and passed into a dark, flame-lit place, a place that blinded his vision with blood.
Behind me, there was a scuffling, tumbling sound and one of Fontenot’s men, the overcoated man with the semi-automatic, fell to his knees beside Rachel. Blood bubbled from his mouth and I heard her scream as he fell forward, his head coming to rest by her feet. The M16 lay on the grass beside him. I reached for it but Rachel got to it first, a deep, unquenchable instinct for survival now guiding her actions. Her mouth and eyes were wide as she fired a burst over the prone frame of the bodyguard.
I flung myself to the end of the tomb and aimed in the same direction, but Joe Bones’s man was already down. He lay on his back, his left leg spasming and a bloody pattern etched across his chest. Rachel’s eyes were wide, her hands shaking as the adrenaline coursed through her system. The M16 began to fall from her fingers. Its strap became entangled in her arm and she shook herself furiously to release it. Behind her, I could see mourners running low through the avenues of tombs. Two white women dragged a young black man by his arms over the grass. The belly of his white shirt was smeared with blood.
I figured that there must have been a fourth set of Joe Bones’s men who approached from the south and fired the first shots. At least three were down: the two killed by Rachel and me and a third who lay sprawled by the old cypress. Fontenot’s man had taken one of them out before he was hit himself.
I helped Rachel to her feet and moved her quickly to a grimy vault with a corroded gate. I struck at the lock with the butt of the M16 and it gave instantly. She slipped inside and I handed her my Smith & Wesson and told her to stay there until I came back for her. Then, gripping the M16, I ran east past the back of the Fontenot tomb, using the other vaults as cover. I didn’t know how many shots were left in the M16. The selector switch was set for three-round bursts. Depending on the magazine capacity, I might have anything between ten and twenty rounds left.
I had almost reached a monument topped by the figure of a sleeping child when something hit me on the back of the head and I stumbled forward, the M16 slipping from my grasp. Someone kicked me hard in the kidneys, the pain lancing through my body as far as the shoulder. I was kicked again in the stomach, which forced me on to my back. I looked up to see Ricky standing above me, the reptilian coils of his hair and his small stature at odds with the NOPD uniform. He had lost his hat and the side of his face was cut slightly where he had been hit by splinters of stone. The muzzle of his Steyr pointed at my chest.
I tried to swallow but my throat seemed to have constricted. I was conscious of the feel of the grass beneath my hands and the glorious pain in my side, sensations of life and existence and survival. Ricky raised the Steyr to point it at my head.
‘Joe Bones says hello,’ he said. His finger tightened on the trigger in the same instant as his head jerked back, his stomach thrusting forward and his back arching. A burst of fire from the Steyr raked the grass beside my head as Ricky fell to his knees and then toppled sideways, his body lying prone across my left leg. There was a jagged red hole in the back of his shirt.
Behind him, Lionel Fontenot stood in a marksman’s stance, the pistol in his hand slowly coming down. There was blood on his left hand and a bullet hole in the upper left arm of his suit. The two bodyguards who had stood beside him at the cemetery walked quickly from the direction of the Fontenot tomb. They glanced at me, then turned their attention back to Fontenot. I could hear the sound of sirens approaching from the west.
‘One got away, Lionel,’ said one. ‘The rest are dead.’
‘What about our people?’
‘Three dead, at least. More injured.’
Beside me, Ricky stirred slightly and his hand moved feebly. I could feel his body move against my leg. Lionel Fontenot walked over and stood above him for a moment before shooting him once in the back of the head. He looked at me curiously once more, then picked up the M16 and tossed it to one of his men.
‘Now go help the wounded,’ he said. He cradled his injured left arm with his right hand and walked back towards the Fontenot tomb.
My ribs ached as I returned to where I had left Rachel, after kicking Ricky’s corpse from my leg. I approached carefully, conscious of the Smith & Wesson I had left with her. When I reached the tomb, Rachel was gone.
I found her about fifty yards away, crouching beside the body of a young girl who was barely beyond her teens. As I approached, Rachel reached for the gun by her side and spun towards me.
‘Hey, it’s me. You okay?’
She nodded and returned the gun to its resting place. I noticed that she had kept her hand pressed on the young girl’s stomach for the entire exchange.
‘How is she?’ I asked but, as I looked over her shoulder, I knew the answer. The blood oozing from the gunshot wound was almost black. Liver shot. The girl, shivering uncontrollably, her teeth gritted in agony, was not going to live. Around us, mourners were emerging from hiding, some sobbing, some trembling with shock. I saw two of Lionel Fontenot’s men running towards us, both with pistols, and I took hold of Rachel’s arm.
‘We have to go. We can’t afford to wait for the cops to arrive.’
‘I’m staying. I’m not leaving her.’
‘Rachel.’ She looked at me. I held her gaze and we shared our knowledge of the girl’s impending death. ‘We can’t stay.’
The two Fontenots were beside us now. One of them, younger than the other, dropped to his knee beside the girl and took her hand. She gripped it tightly and he whispered her name. ‘Clara,’ he said. ‘Hold on, Clara, hold on.’
‘Please, Rachel,’ I repeated.
She took the younger man’s hand and pressed it against Clara’s stomach. Clara cried out as the pressure was reapplied.
‘Keep your hand there,’ hissed Rachel. ‘Don’t take it away until the medics get here.’
She picked up the gun and handed it to me. I took it from her, slipped the safety on and put it back in my holster. We made our way from the focus of the mayhem, until the shouting had diminished, then I stopped and she reached out and held me tightly. I cradled her in my arms and kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her. She squeezed me and I gasped as the pain in my ribs increased dramatically.
Rachel pulled back quickly. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I took a kick, nothing else.’
I held her face in my hands. ‘You did all that you could for her.’
She nodded but her mouth trembled. The girl had an importance to her that went beyond the simple duty to save her life. ‘I killed that man,’ she said.
‘He would have killed us both. You had no choice. If you hadn’t done it, you’d be dead. Maybe I’d be dead too.’ It was true, but it wasn’t enough, not yet. I held her tightly as she cried, the pain in my side inconsequential beside her own suffering.
Chapter Forty
I had not spoken of Daddy Helms in many years, not until I talked of him to Rachel, recalling the part he’d played in the lingering death of my mother.
Daddy Helms was the ugliest man I had ever seen. He ran most of Portland from the late sixties to the early eighties, building up a modest empire that had started with Daddy Hel
ms boosting liquor warehouses and moved on to take in the sale of drugs over three states.
Daddy Helms weighed over three hundred pounds and suffered from a skin ailment that had left him with raised bumps all over his body, but most visible on his face and hands. They were a deep red colour and formed a kind of scaly skin over his features, blurring them so that the observer always seemed to be seeing Daddy Helms through a red mist. He wore three-piece suits and Panama hats and always smoked Winston Churchill cigars, so you smelt Daddy Helms before you saw him. If you were smart enough, this usually gave you just enough time to be somewhere else when he arrived.
Daddy Helms was mean, but he was also a freak. If he had been less intelligent, less bitter and less inclined towards violence, he would probably have ended up living in a little house in the woods of Maine and selling Christmas trees door-to-door to sympathetic citizens. Instead, his ugliness seemed to be an outward manifestation of some deeper spiritual and moral blight within himself, a corruption that made you think that Daddy Helms’s skin might not be the worst thing about him. There was a rage inside him, a fury at the world and its ways.
My grandfather, who had known Daddy Helms since he was a young boy and was generally a man who empathised with those around him, even the criminals he was forced to arrest when he served as a sheriff’s deputy, could see nothing but evil in Daddy Helms. ‘I used to think maybe it was his ugliness that made him what he is,’ he said once, ‘that the way he behaves is because of the way he looks, that he’s finding a way to strike back at the world he sees around him.’ He was sitting on the porch of the house he shared with my grandmother, my mother and me, the house in which we had all lived since my father’s death. My grandfather’s basset hound Doc – named after the country singer Doc Watson for no reason other than that my grandfather liked his rendition of the song ‘Alberta’ – lay curled at his feet, his ribs expanding in deep sleep and small yelps occasionally erupting from his jowls as he enjoyed dog dreams.