Tuesday was St. Joseph’s Night, always a time of great excitement among Italians in New Orleans. This year it reached a fever pitch. The traditional altars made of a hundred or more kinds of food were built, admired, dismantled, and distributed to the poor; lucky fava beans were handed out by the fistful; the saint was petitioned and praised. Still, St. Joseph’s Night of 1919 would remain indelibly fixed in New Orleans memory as the Axeman’s Jazz Night.
Cafés and mansions on St. Charles blazed with the melodies of live jazz bands. Those who could not afford to pay musicians fed pennies into player pianos. A popular composer had written a song called “The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz, or, Don’t Scare Me, Papa.” Banjo, guitar, and mandolin players gathered on the levees to send jazz music into the sky, so the Axeman would be sure to hear it as he passed over. By midnight, New Orleans was a cacophony of sounds, all of them swinging.
Cagliostro walked the streets for most of the night, marveling (if not actively congratulating himself) at how completely he had brought the city together, and how gay he had made it in the process. No one so much as glanced at him: few people were on the streets, and Cagliostro had a talent for making himself invisible.
He had left the Axeman’s corpse locked in the back of the house where it wouldn’t spoil the groceries. First, of course, he had bludgeoned the face into unrecognizable mush with the Axeman’s own axe. Everything that suggested the murdered man might be someone other than “Mike Pepitone,” simple Italian grocer, was in the satchel Cagliostro carried with him.
On the turntable of his phonograph, as a final touch, he had left a recording of “Nearer My God to Thee.”
When the jazz finally began to die down, he walked to the docks and signed onto a freighter headed for Egypt. There were any number of wonderful things he hadn’t gotten around to learning last time.
Italy, 1945
Toward the end, Mussolini lived in an elaborate fantasy world constructed by the loyal sycophants who still surrounded him. Whole cities in Italy were sanitized for his inspection, the cheering crowds along his parade routes supplemented by paid extras. When Hitler visited Rome, he too was deceived by the coat of sparkle on the decay, the handpicked Aryan soldiers, the sheer bravado of Il Duce.
He believed he had cost Hitler the war. Germany lost its crucial Russian campaign after stopping to rescue the incompetent Italian army in Albania. Hitler had believed in the power and glory of Italy, and Mussolini had failed him.
Now he had been forced into exile on Lake Garda. He was a failure, his brilliant regime was a failure, and there were no more flunkies to hide these painful truths. He kept voluminous diaries in which he fantasized that his position in history would be comparable to Napoleon or Christ. His mistress Claretta lived nearby in a little villa, his only comfort.
On April 25, Germany caved in to the Allies. The Italian people, the ones he had counted on to save him with their loyalty, turned against him. Mussolini and Claretta fled, making for Switzerland.
A few last fanatical companions attempted to help them escape by subterfuge, but they were arrested by partisans on the north shore of Lake Como, discovered hiding in a German truck, cringing inside German coats and helmets. They were shot against the iron gate of an exquisite villa, and their bodies were taken to Milan and strung up by the heels to demonstrate the evils of Fascism.
All in service of the brotherhood of man.
GDMFSOB
by Nevada Barr
(Originally published in 2006)
Versailles Boulevard
All Walgreen’s had was a little kid’s notebook, maybe four by five inches, the binding a fat spiral of purple plastic, the cover a Twiggy — Carnaby Street — white boots — flower power mess of lavender and yellow blooms.
Jeannie put it on the café table, opened it, and carefully wrote, Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch, in her best schoolgirl cursive. The juxtaposition of sentiment and sentimentality pleased her.
Next she wrote, Divorce Rich, then sat back, looked at the words, and took a long luxurious sip of the cheap but not inexpensive Pinot Grigio a harried waitress in too-tight jeans had brought her.
Rich thought she drank too much. Of course she drank too much. She was married to a goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch. She drew a neat line through the word divorce.
Divorce was out of the question. Rich would never grant her a divorce. Not if it meant giving up the “income stream from the family business,” as he euphemistically referred to her earnings as a sculptress.
No. Divorce wasn’t happening.
That left suicide and murder.
When Rich had been particularly demeaning, Jeannie’d had the occasional fling with Dr. Kevorkian, but, in all honesty, she had to admit that she was a decent individual. She paid her taxes — and his — kept a tidy house, and got her oil changed every three thousand miles. And Rich...
Rich was boring.
Not casually boring; he was a bore of nuclear magnitude. More than once she had witnessed him turn entire dinner parties to stone, seen guests’ eyes roll back in their heads and their tongues begin to protrude as he replaced all the available oxygen with pomposity. Not being a jobholder himself, he felt uniquely qualified to lecture on the subject. He told her cleaning lady how to clean, her gallery owner how to present art, the man who cast her work how to run a foundry, her agent how to sell sculpture.
Suicide was out. It would be wrong, un-American even, to deny the world her lovely bronzes while simultaneously condemning it to Rich’s monologues.
That left murder.
In the ordinary run of things, Jeannie didn’t condone murder. She wasn’t even a proponent of capital punishment. But her husband wasn’t in the ordinary run of things. He was extraordinarily in need of being dead.
Kill Rich, she printed carefully beneath the crossed-out divorce.
Another long swallow of wine and contemplation.
Over the eight years of their marriage she had shared all the nasty bits with shrinks, groups, AA, and half a dozen girlfriends. There was so much dirty laundry lining the byways of her past they rivaled the back alleys of Mexico City on wash day. Should anything untoward befall Rich, she would be the prime suspect.
There must be no evidence. None.
She scribbled out everything she’d written, then tore out the page. Feeling a fool, but being a nonsmoker and thus having no recourse to fire, she surreptitiously soaked the page in the wine and swallowed it.
As easily as that, she decided to kill her husband.
Setting her glass on the uneven surface of the wrought-iron café table, she watched the wine tremble as minuscule earthquakes sent out barely perceptible tsunamis and she thought of the things people die of.
Drowning, burning, choking, crushing, goring by bulls, hanging, falling, dismemberment, being devoured by wild beasts, poisoning, exploding, crashing in cars, boats, planes, and motorcycles, disease, cutting, stabbing, slashing, blunt trauma to the head, dehydration, hypothermia, heatstroke, starvation, vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bears’ livers, snakebite, drawing and quartering, asphyxiation, shooting, beheading, bleeding out, infection, boredom — Lord knew Rich had nearly done her in with that one.
Rumor had it people died of shame and broken hearts. No hope those would work on Rich, though over the years she had given it a go, usually at the top of her lungs with tears and snot pouring attractively down her face. A dedicated philandering deadbeat pornographer, Rich had embraced shame as an alternative lifestyle and his heart was apparently made of India rubber.