“Somebody hit Remeta?”
“I’m not sure,” Magelli said.
“You haven’t gone into the house?”
“It’s burning. There’s another problem, too. Gunfire’s coming from the upstairs window. Whoever’s in there is going down with the ship.”
Helen and I checked out a cruiser, hit the flasher, and took the four-lane through Morgan City into New Orleans. We made it in less than two hours. We came off I-10 onto St. Charles Avenue, passed Lee Circle, and headed uptown toward the Garden District. When we turned onto Camp, the street was sealed off with emergency vehicles and plumes of black smoke were still rising from the scorched brick shell and cratered roof of the building I had seen in the historical photograph.
Magelli stood behind an NOPD cruiser, looking at the destroyed building, his face flinching slightly when a live round popped inside the heat.
“You nail him?” Helen said.
“We never saw him,” Magelli said.
“You couldn’t get anybody into the first floor?” I asked.
“We kept within our perimeter. We’ve got nobody down. Is that all right with you?” he said.
“You bet,” I replied.
The defensiveness went out of his face.
“We’ve heard ammunition popping for two hours. How many were in a weapon is anybody’s guess. At least two rounds hit a fire truck. Another one went through a neighbor’s window,” he said.
The wind changed, and he turned his head and cleared his throat slightly and spit in the gutter.
“Well, you know what’s inside. You want to take a look?” he said.
“I guess we won’t have ribs for lunch today,” Helen said.
Magelli, two cops in uniform, and Helen and I went through the piked gate and started up the stairs to the second story, our weapons drawn. But the top of the stairs was partially blocked by a pile of burned laths and plaster. A raincoated fireman pushed his way past us and cleared a walkway, then kicked the door loose from the jamb.
The smell inside did not fit in time and place; instead, I thought of a village across the seas and I heard ducks quacking in terror and the grinding sounds of steel tracks on an armored vehicle.
The fire had probably started on or near the gas stove, and the entirety of the kitchen looked like a room carved out of soft coal. The canned goods in the pantry had superheated, and exploded glass from preserve or jelly jars had embedded like teeth in the walls. Portions of the roof had collapsed into the living room, half covering a desk by a front window. On the floor, among hundreds of brass shell casings and shards of broken window glass and a network of incinerated rug fibers, were the remains of two bolt-action rifles, their magazines filled with melted lead, and a .45 and a nine-millimeter pistol, the slides blown back and jammed open.
We neared the front windows, and a fireman gagged behind his face shield. I pressed my handkerchief to my mouth and nose and thought of water buffalo and grass huts and rice in wicker baskets and penned hogs and the kerosene-like smell of a flame arching into a ville from a vehicle we called zippo tracks and another smell that was like the sweet, sickening stench a rendering plant makes. The fireman used the point of his ax to drag a pile of drenched debris off a desk, and the stench rose from the desk well as palpably and thick as a cloud of insects.
“Sorry for the remark outside,” Helen said, her eyes deliberately unfocused as she looked down at the shape curled inside the well.
“Is that Remeta?” Magelli asked.
There was little left of the dead man’s features. The head was hairless, the skin burned black. His forearms were pressed against his ears, as though the flames had contained a sound he did not want to hear. The t
issue around his right eye looked like a scorched and shriveled biscuit.
“He was a geek. I was wrong about him,” I said.
Magelli raised his eyes to mine, not understanding.
“It’s Micah, Jim Gable’s chauffeur. He used to be a carnival geek. He told me people paid to see the deformity on his face so they wouldn’t have to look at the ugliness inside themselves.”
“So?” Magelli said.
“He was a carnie man. He knew better than to shake down a man like Remeta. He was sent here to kill him,” I said.
“You’re saying Gable hired him?” Magelli said.