Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (7 page)

He was certain that he sprang from illustrious loins. Just as he was certain that Nowell was trying to steal his ancestry!

But he had the goods on the guy, now—if he could only figure it out. Old Monty at the nursing home had redeemed himself by providing Wayne with the key to the whole mystery, the ugly cover-up. As well he should have, for it was Old Monty in the first place who’d turned Wayne and his grandmother on to the Society. Well, not exactly. Old Monty didn’t say much that made any sense, but Wayne
had
noticed his ring. The only trouble was, Wayne didn’t know what the old fart had meant the other day when he scribbled:

ALLÉGORIE = TRUE FAITH.

Wayne’s efforts to decipher the cryptic message so far had been unsuccessful. It was the city’s fault, for squandering the funds that should have gone to the library, that no doubt went into the bank accounts of the mayor’s cronies. If he only had more time for research! Nowell was probably somehow to blame for that, too. The infamy of these people cried out for justice!

Wayne had spent the last six hours in the bar of a rundown Chinese restaurant near the Medical Center, drinking beer chased with shots of tequila, and losing every dollar he had on video poker. Now he headed for his car, parked behind the tall Holiday Inn on Loyola Avenue.

The building had once housed the Howard Johnson’s that became infamous on a cold January day in 1973. Wayne vaguely remembered news coverage of the sniper incident that ended on
the roof of the old Ho-Jo with the shooter blasted by gunfire from a Marine helicopter. The dude—and maybe another guy who got away—had killed nine people and wounded ten.

That wasn’t Wayne’s style, though he understood where the dude had been coming from. Rage, blinding rage against unseen enemies all around you. But in the long run, a sharp intellect is much more powerful than a rifle, Wayne had come to believe. Besides, he couldn’t afford a decent assault weapon.

He tripped over a curb but regained his balance.

The Superdome rose to his right, surreally huge like a giant egg ready to hatch vicious spawn. He’d heard rumors at gun shows, read bizarre tales on websites, that aliens had brazenly set up a transporting center inside. That was a load of crap, in his opinion.

The real story was that the government and the phone companies were conducting microwave experiments on dissidents; drove them mad, turned them into junkies, made them impotent. He knew it for a fact: they had kidnapped him while he slept several years ago and tried it on him. But he had resisted. That explained his continuing Area 51-like nightmares, of course, and other things, of a rather personal nature.

Wayne turned his back on the Dome as he walked from Loyola Avenue to Gravier Street. The sidewalks and parking lots threw weird shadows and giant echoes at him. There was hardly any traffic. It didn’t even seem like New Orleans, more like a set from
The Outer Limits
. The streets seemed bigger than during the day. He fantasized that he was the sole survivor in a post-apocalyptic world.

He walked along an arcade sheltering offices, a diner, and shop entrances. Above, a tall, slumbering building cloaked the sidewalk in deeper shadow. Aggregate concrete planters held brown and withered yew and oleander.

Suddenly he felt an odd, hot pain in the left side of his chest. The words “heart attack” popped into his mind, but when he glanced down, he realized that something else had happened.

Wow, man, look at that: a beautiful shaft of silver light, coming from the shadows of an arch, in front of that travel agency. Goes right through my coat, and—damnit!—right through my bag of dope and Old Monty’s note. Right through my ribs, and my heart, and my back …

Wayne understood fleetingly, in those few seconds before he died, that a white glove held the other end of the shaft of light connecting him to the darkness.

CHAPTER 5

T
he frosted glass in the oft-shellacked wooden door read:

New Orleans Genealogical Services
Worldwide, Inc.

J. N. Herald, Certified Genealogist, PhD

About as accurate as calling a lemonade stand General Motors.

Nick’s office filled two rooms on the fourth floor of a sparsely occupied building in an undistinguished section of the Central Business District. It was close enough to Canal to hear the streetcars’ unmistakable roar, to the Quarter to hear snatches of jazz and drunken, bawdy cheers, and to the river to see ocean-going vessels riding high, dwarfing buildings in the line of sight. Otherwise, no outstanding characteristics much recommended it. The area called to Nick’s mind post-Cold War East Germany more so than guidebook New Orleans.

His business wasn’t incorporated and was far from being worldwide. Nick had no qualms about the slight misstatements he used in the course of his business. His experiences had taught him to be no more ethical than he had to be. No one else was.

From his doomed fight to save his academic reputation he’d learned that the living bend the present to their needs. From years of sifting through censuses, conveyances, and wills he’d learned that the dead deceived no longer: the certainties of their lives had solidified into diamonds of truth, buried and silent. Nick’s passion for the meaning of words strung together in poems and narratives had given way to a passion for helping give voice to the unimpeachable testimony, the poignant beauty, the tragedy, and the glory slumbering in the recorded events of the lives he studied. Woodrow Bluemantle’s death hid such secrets; Nick was determined to unearth them.

He sat behind his messy desk, his head propped on his hands, his fingers woven into his brown hair. A long gray strand fell on the piece of junk mail he had lost interest in a half-hour before.

Dear MR. HERALD: The history of your family name, available now to you at a discount during our special
50
^th
Anniversary Sale
! Yes, now you can learn about your ancestors of the famous HERALD line. Where they came from, what great deeds they performed … even what the HERALD coat of arms looks like and signifies! Wouldn’t your neighbors be impressed by an authentic full-color shield bearing the HERALD coat of arms? Our research specialists search our extensive archives… .

They would even put his “coat of arms” on a credit card. There were more and more of these frauds landing in mailboxes
these days, beguiling the naïve into thinking that genealogy could be purchased like a box of cereal. Would the saps who fell for this ever learn—or want to—that armorial bearings were granted to specific individuals and could be passed on only to certain descendants in strictly defined ways? Possession of a surname guaranteed nothing. Nick shook his head. What devious, unethical scams—

Lucrative scams, he had to admit. Why shouldn’t he have his own genealogical swindle? Just a small one that didn’t really hurt anybody?

In ghostly rebuttal, he heard the chastising words of his murdered friend, Bluemantle:

What about your responsibility to the past, to me?! You know very well that your grandfather dropped the ethnic consonants in your Old World family surname to make it easier for his descendants in an anti-Semitic world. You were Herzwald before you were Herald. An irony, there, isn’t it Nick: that you bear the name of the ancient guardians of the past, heralds, yet you are so willing to violate that trust, join the purveyors of pseudo-genealogy? What do you believe in, my friend, if not the truth? It is your mission, one that chose you.

Never compromise, never surrender. There is no substitute for systematic individual research, for conclusions based on the best possible evidence.

In genealogy, as in murder. Doubt, above all! Lineages and lies, Nick; all is not yet Bristol-fashion, shipshape.

The final words had haunted him throughout that resplendent Wednesday morning and afternoon. But he had not been inactive.

“Hello?! Hello?!” a female voice demanded. “Anyone home in that head of yours, boss?” Hawty Latimer, Nick’s assistant, was accustomed to his speculative fugues, when a genealogical puzzle could keep him distracted like this for hours.

“Have you found it?” he asked in reply.

“Not yet,” she admitted, sitting in her wheelchair in front of the monitor of the office computer, where she had been working quietly and diligently. “Still searching.” Hawty’s tone conveyed her frustration: she hated to be stymied, in any undertaking.

There were days when no more words needed to be spoken between them. They worked well together and implicitly understood each other. Nick wasn’t the kind to tell her how much he valued her. Just as well. She wasn’t the kind to take such praise graciously.

Hawty scooted her battery-powered wheelchair over to the wall of bookshelves opposite the windows in the narrow main room; she used her telescoping grabber adeptly to reach the volumes she needed.

She was a dual-degree candidate at Freret University—English and computer sciences; she also taught freshman introductory literature classes. An overachiever bound for fame in any discipline she would finally choose. She had become fascinated with genealogy, to Nick’s good fortune; and he felt like a proud parent watching her knowledge and enthusiasm grow.

Her “chariot,” as she called her souped-up wheelchair, was a veritable rolling laboratory of cutting-edge digital communication and mechanical miniaturization. The contraption was the pet project of the computer-sciences division at Freret, and each week it gained some new, astonishing capability.

Technophobe that he was, Nick couldn’t help admiring the ingenuity of it.

As a child, Hawty had suffered some devastating illness that left her with chronic, polio-like weakness in her legs and hips. He didn’t like to ask her about it, but he seemed to remember that it was either a reaction to a swine-flu shot or an attack by one of the spinal viral maladies that prey on children.

Hawty was brilliant, hard working, and as tough and sassy as growing up poor and black in north Louisiana can make a person. Her given name was Harrieta; she preferred Hawty, and five minutes with her showed why “haughty” was an adjective that sometimes applied. She could be headstrong and downright rude, a tough customer, if she didn’t like or respect you. He had Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus to thank for her—and for much else.

“Why Bristol?” Hawty asked, now again at the brawny new computer she’d convinced Nick to buy on credit a few months earlier. At the moment, the workstation was querying Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C., Houston, and New York City for vital records—birth, death, and marriage information—to fill out the family trees of several clients. Hawty was also searching for a particular reference source Nick wanted:
Ship Departures & Passenger Lists from the Port of Bristol to America, 1700-76.

“Just a hunch,” he replied.

“Oh, it’s just a hunch? Why am I not surprised?” she wisecracked.

Una and Dion had been his best friends in the English department at Freret. For a time, Una had been even more. They’d both stoutly defended Nick when the charge was
broached that, in a published article on Keats, he’d stolen ideas from a long-dead scholar. He didn’t do it; he’d never even read the man’s work. The department’s fancy computer—with a flawed word-matching paradigm, Hawty maintained—figured in the gathering of evidence; and Frederick Tawpie, then an assistant professor in charge of the “inquiry,” cared more for his prospects for advancement than for the facts.

The inquiry proceeded strictly according to rarely invoked rules. Tawpie and the other professors on the departmental affairs committee conveniently forgot their own constant struggle for originality in a publish-or-perish world, and glossed over their own past accidents of similarity. Deals had been struck, alliances cemented. It would have taken a mere raised hand to stop the locomotive heading for Nick, tied to the tracks. He became a target of opportunity in an ideological war that was then raging between increasingly powerful and strident postmodernists who saw ogres of colonialism and capitalism everywhere, and resurgent new traditionalists who promoted the “Western canon” and empiricism as the best grounding for a good education.

Tawpie had ridden the coattails of the former group, now out of vogue and in decline; Una and Dion were still leaders of the latter. Nick had traveled a middle road, discerning some value even in the most flamboyant absurdities of postmodernist systems … until the betrayal.

Having scaled the icy peak of cynicism, he now looked down with scorn at the pitiful hamlets of theory.
You must have facts, Nick, yes, but also the wisdom to know when they’re lying!
as Bluemantle used to shout at him.

Who had brought the initial charge of scholarly misconduct? Nick suspected Tawpie, who had always coveted the top job in the department and had feared that Una would get it one day, as she so richly deserved. She clearly had the superior mind and the deeper soul, along with a more impressive academic record.

The plagiarism allegation, lacking a clearly smoking gun, soon degenerated into a suggestion that Nick
should have
read the earlier critical work; but the damage to his reputation was done. Nick firmly believed that Tawpie had sacrificed him on the altar of his ambition, to prove his power to everyone, especially his power over Una, to demonstrate definitively his skill at conspiracy. By the time the compromise was made for him to resign before being fired, Nick was lower in spirits than he’d ever been. He was fed up with departmental politics, fed up with Frederick Tawpie, fed up with life in general. Vengeful, bitter, directionless, dangerously depressed. Other people go through worse tribulations—much worse—and continue soldiering on. Nick comprehended that fact.

But if you couldn’t be self-indulgent with your own misfortune, then it truly was an unjust world. This disgrace was his very own bête noire, and, like a tragic lover in grand opera, he embraced it without reserve. He’d be damned if anyone was going to deprive him of his full measure of self-pity.

Soon thereafter, Tawpie, as a reward for his ignoble career of guile and ass kissing, made the leap to assistant department head, and recently, to head of the department on the death of the beloved Whitman scholar who’d been at the helm for nearly fifty years. Tawpie delivered a fulsome graveside eulogy that had all the sycophants sniffling, but not Nick, Una, Dion, and a
few other departmental subversives, who had long since dubbed Tawpie “the Usurper.”