Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree (5 page)

They waved to Dion as they left the Folio and stepped onto the quieter sidewalk in the humid evening.

“Virgin Mary. Perfect,” Nick said. “He thrives on the blood of innocents.”

“That certainly describes his marriage, as everyone knows,” answered Una.

“I guess I shouldn’t let him get to me like that. Hey, people lose their jobs all the time, and the powerful have stomped on the little guy from time immemorial.”

“You’re only human. That’s why I still love you.”

She was late for the meeting the next morning, and hung-over. Ignoring the terrible throbbing in her head and the indignant stare of the Usurper, she smiled with a private joy and inhaled the invigorating aroma of her coffee.

.

4

B
alazar. An uncommon name, Nick found over the next week.

He checked a few favorite reference sources first, many of which he had on his crowded office shelves: bound indexes of early Louisiana censuses, Gulf and Atlantic port-entry records, state birth and death indexes, state military service lists.

No dice.

Today he headed for the New Orleans Public Library.

Summer is the most popular time of the year for beginners in genealogy. Students have lots of free time, and families pile into their vans for vacations. Amateurs who have knocked their heads against bureaucratic walls of correspondence all year flock to libraries around the country for a few days of frenzied searching.

Nick could tell them that some rural county courthouses would probably be a better place to spend their summer days; and they could perhaps learn more from that aged distant cousin in the retirement home in Florida. The desire to do something, anything, drives these eager amateurs from one how-to book to the next, from one library genealogical section to another, without much to show for their labor when they get home except a much thinner wallet.

The librarians who staff the genealogical sections, usually calm and polite during the rest of the year, become testy and unhelpful during the summer. Rarely do they point out to these pesky beginners the riches of their facilities, such as wonderful old maps and manuscripts that don’t appear in the general card catalogs, material which might hold in dusty, crumbling pages the crucial bit of information–say, for instance, that a state carved County X from Counties Y and Z at the end of the eighteenth century, and that Old Great-great Uncle Pete, who seems to be nowhere around during the period in question, lived in that often overlooked county, or parish in Louisiana.

Nick tried to avoid searching microfilm at public libraries during this hectic time of the year. Microfilm viewers could be tied up all day during June, July, and August, or so overworked that most were out of commission, awaiting repair.

Now, here on the third floor of the library, the crush was as bad as he’d ever seen it. Full sign-up sheets hung from every viewing machine, and the fiftieth person that hour had just asked the harried librarian at the counter for copier change. A friend of Nick’s, she looked at him across the crowded room and made a gun of her hand and put it to her temple.
Stressed to the screaming point, poor woman
.

The dozen or so round cream-colored Formica-covered tables were packed with researchers. The uncomfortable wooden chairs around the tables played hell with a hundred sacroiliacs. Nick wandered for a few minutes, half-heartedly looking for a place to light, wishing just a few of these rookies would throw in the towel and give him a crack at their family history impasse. The big room reeked with the public funk of too many people who’d sweated and cooled too many times in the New Orleans oven outside. Conversations rose to distracting levels from the stacks, as retirees droned on about who begot whom in their families.

“Excuse me, ma’am, is this seat taken?” Nick asked an overweight, bug-eyed, wheezing woman with thin hair dyed henna.

She said nothing and merely raked a large mound of books and papers toward her. But she did favor him with a withering glare, as if he’d just asked her to do something extremely objectionable to her moral sense.

He worked for a few minutes in the stacks, frustrated to find that most of the books he needed were out–probably in the possession of the ogreish woman at the table.

Nick was treating Corban’s familial oral tradition with a large grain of salt–a wise course for a genealogist. Much of the time, the sort of legend the old man related only confuses and misdirects the uncritical family historian. Take for example the common one that tells of three brothers who emigrated from the Old Country. One stayed in the New World base, where they landed, one went west, and the other south. The brothers, of course, did no such thing, if the individuals even existed at all. Most families have such an innocently misleading story tucked away in their collective memory. The truth usually proved to be more complex, sometimes even unpleasant. Human lives do not follow nice and easy symmetrical patterns or unfold according to formulas.

But Nick fought another doubt about Max Corban, as well. Was he leading him somewhere for a purpose other than normal familial curiosity? He sensed something lurking within Corban’s story, something dangerous in the subtle details of their meeting. Nothing definite he could put his finger on, but still, certain things about Corban bothered him…the old man’s vehement refusal to consider probably useful overseas research; his peculiar preoccupation with blood; his failure to recall even the name of the ancestor at the end of the interview. Nick had learned to rely on his intuition to lead him through the fog of life; a faint warning was sounding somewhere in his mind.

Ah, forget it, he told himself; get back to work. Maybe he was being too hard on the old guy; maybe it was time to start trusting people again.

He’d decided to check the phone books. It was a long shot that a genealogical search like this one, so devoid of details, would have such initial success–finding the right family of the right name, such an odd one at that, in the most accessible of places: a book everybody has in a kitchen drawer. But Nick was a gambler, especially when the losses came from someone else’s pocket. Genealogists have to be gamblers–the most certain clues can turn out to be nearly useless; the chance discoveries from wholly unrelated sources often point the way. You never know when you’ll draw the joker or the ace.

And if you got lucky, a simple phone call could crack a difficult genealogical case, make the family tree sprout with previously unknown generations. A handful of times he’d located a living survivor of a lost lineage this way, who guarded a wealth of family lore, and who’d waited years simply for someone to ask the right questions. Nick had found few things in life as exciting as those unexpected revelations.

Genealogy is like drilling for oil: lots of dry holes, but the stuff is down there, somewhere, in amazing plenty. The cardinal rule is to start with the simple, then work up to the complex, start with the living and work back to the dead. Corban wasn’t helping him do that, so Nick was improvising.

Was there a breathing bearer of the name Balazar somewhere in the state?

In dozens of Louisiana phone books he could find nothing exactly matching the name. There were plenty of Balthazars and variants, and even a couple of Belshazzars. An unfortunate surname, that one, he thought, scanning the blue plastic cards of microfiche, the transparent writing so small that to the naked eye it looked like specks of sand.

“‘
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,
’” he mumbled several times, enjoying the incantatory sound of the words and remembering the great story of the judgment of a king written supernaturally on a wall.
Your days are numbered, you are weighed and found wanting, your kingdom will perish
, Daniel told the terrified Belshazzar. Genealogists rediscover the truth of that prophecy each working day.

The woman at the next microfiche machine shot him a worried look and clutched her bulging purse.

He still wasn’t discouraged. Finding no Balazars might simply mean that this family had no phone, or that the number was unlisted.

He tried several current and old city directories–fascinating volumes of data that aided businesses with marketing information about local citizens and other businesses. These directories can sometimes fill in the years between the decennial censuses. Nothing there, either. Not an unusual state of affairs. Many people slipped through the fingers of those who would tabulate them, especially in the days of fierce pioneering individualism, when distrust of the ever-curious government was stronger even than it is today. And there were whole classes of people who, according to the prevailing notions, simply did not count.

Next he searched the genealogical indexes for articles or existing family histories dealing with or referring to the surname Balazar. Nothing again. Even the scholars and family historians of the past were letting him down.

Nick was a resourceful researcher and had more tricks up his sleeve.

He phoned a friend, a volunteer congregant, at the local Latter-Day Saints Family History Library. She made a quick search of the computer catalog of the main Salt Lake City library for anything relevant. Eight times out of ten the Mormons, who have a world-renowned commitment to genealogy as an article of their faith, came through for Nick. This, though, was one of the two times that nothing turned up.

It was time to search the federal censuses page by page, household by household, for the individuals who might have been skipped in the various indexes.

But not here, he decided.

He had a more secluded venue in mind, a secret he kept closely, knowing that popularity and crowds would irreparably damage it.

The Plutarch Foundation was only a few blocks from Freret University, filling with its thousands of books, original documents, microfilms, and exquisite antiques a superbly kept, stately Uptown “American cottage”–a cameo in a frame of ancient oaks, veteran camellias, and brick walkways worn smooth and friendly with nearly two centuries’ use. Scholars dreamed of places like the Plutarch.

Seldom were there more than a handful of people in the large two-and-a-half-story building, two or three being volunteer staffers. If they liked the researcher, these staffers might personally guide him to the required source, and later offer coffee and sweets in a sitting room overlooking a lush English garden at the back of the house. Though it specialized in the Battle of New Orleans, the Plutarch was an excellent all-round genealogical facility–a fact few knew.

“Man alive, am I glad to see you,” Angus Murot said to Nick, who stood in the foyer, dripping from a sudden downpour that had caught him on the walkway.

“I got this letter here from France,” Angus began, without further preamble, excited as usual over his long-running genealogical project. “I can’t make head nor tails of it. That French gal at my urologist’s office–you know, the one that helped me write my letter–she run off with one of the doctors.”

Angus had ushered him into a small book-lined room with a central worktable that was genuine Duncan Phyfe, Nick knew. Around the room, among other pieces of museum-quality furniture, there were shelves, stands, and cases displaying rare editions or splendid objects of historical interest.

“I dragged you in here,” Angus whispered, full of awe, “because Coldbread’s out there. You know how he gets when there’s noise.” He limped over to close the door a few more inches.

Angus had a false leg from the knee down. He had lost it fighting the Japanese on New Georgia, as he would readily tell anyone with the slightest interest and a few hours to kill. For a decade now he had been tracing an ancestor, a member of Lafitte’s entourage, who was personally commended by General Andrew Jackson for bravery. Angus had a certified photocopy of this letter, along with expert opinion that the now-missing original was not a forgery. Maybe, maybe not, Nick believed but had never said. A disconcerting portion of genealogy is based on half-truths and honest errors.

The taciturn Mr. Coldbread was a cranky fixture at the Plutarch; no one knew exactly what he had been researching here for six years, but it had something to do with hidden treasure and the Duke of Wellington’s brother-in-law Sir Edward Pakenham, who died with many of his men in the disastrous 1815 attack on General Jackson’s defending forces at New Orleans.

“Says here,” Nick said, struggling to translate, “that they find no trace of the guy in that
département,
or province. Who was he, anyway?”

“The second cousin of the soldier that got commended.”

“There’s more: you owe them a little over seven dollars.”

“After all the money I already sent them, after all we did for those Frenchies in the war?! Why, they didn’t even have the courtesy to write me back in my own language, like I did for them. Can you believe it?!” Angus’s face was beet red. “Just look at it: like some chicken walked all over the keyboard, with them, them accent marks going every which way.”

“Some memories are short when gratitude’s involved, Angus. Better get used to this kind of thing. Genealogical research can be like that. Tell you what you do. Read this article first.” Nick wrote down the title of a brief treatment of the vicissitudes of foreign research at a distance. “I know you have a copy here. Then we’ll send them a few international postal coupons, along with some other questions you and I’ll come up with. I’ll help you with my miserable French. And don’t worry: they’re proud but efficient, and probably really want to help. After all, you’re their countryman. We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Nick made sure to send an annual donation to the Plutarch, but it was payment of this kind that really kept his welcome warm here.

Little Mrs. Fadge, profoundly deaf but always cheerful, helped Nick find the census microfilms he needed, though he didn’t really need her help. After promising her to have coffee and cookies when he finished his work, he entered the converted butler’s pantry that now housed five microfilm viewers, of sixties vintage and bulk, but in perfect, dustless order.