King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich

Author:Nathaniel Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

MARCH 4, 1919—THE IRISH CHANNEL

If he failed immediately to recognize his wife it was because his mind was crowded with Italian grocers—hairy, overweight, sebaceous—and Italian groceries—mold-dusted barrels of pickled pork, greasy tins of anchovies, giant steel fusti oozing olive oil, pallets of prunes, and purple heads of garlic. Bill had never before given thought to how all Italian groceries in New Orleans were nearly identical. It wasn’t just the architecture and layout but the prices. Had the strategy of underselling occurred to no grocer? Variety? Competition? Each grocery was named after its proprietor, that was the main distinction. But it seemed as if they were all run by the same person.

He had had Italian grocers and groceries on his brain since his visit to Rosetta’s. After they reported the body, Captain Capo sent them to canvass the groceries victimized by the Axman. They found Arthur Recknagel behind the counter, scooping salt into a small brown paper bag.

“Officers,” he said, as if overjoyed to see them. “I told your pals everything they wanted to know.”

Bill nodded. “Recknagel’s not an Italian name.”

“German.” The grocer raised his hand in supplication. “But American for three generations.”

“So why do you run a grocery?”

Recknagel gave him a broad smile. “It was an Italian grocery when I bought it in 1916. The business works, so why monkey with it? Only I added sausages.”

They dangled from hooks behind the counter like disembodied limbs. Charlie gravitated toward them.

“Don’t you know the Axman died in the Sick?” said Recknagel.

Bill bit the inside of his cheek. He knew there was a question that would elicit a revealing response from the German; he only had to summon it out of the ether. But he couldn’t. Yet another navy instinct he didn’t have. Charlie was closing in on the sausages, however, so he had better ask something.

“You have any trouble since your door got broken down? Burglaries?”

Judging by the relief in Recknagel’s face, it was the wrong question. “Nope.” He weighed the package on his scale. “Guess it was a fluke.”

LeBoeuf was no more helpful and his mood less receptive.

“They arrested some Negroes,” he said. “Had nothing to do with no Axman, no bogeyman, no Needle Man, no Gown Man.”

Bill remembered the Needle Man: a creep who lurked at night in vacant lots, jumping out of the weeds to stab women with trephine needles. He was never caught.

“The Gown Man?”

LeBoeuf laughed. “They say he’s tall and slender and wears a long black cape. Some men say he’s a ghost. Not women—they know he’s real.”

Bill removed his notebook, wrote down Gown Man, and returned it to his back pocket. In recent weeks his notebook had become a surreal farrago of disconnected words and phrases: false river, blues for dancing, inner harbor, underwater forest. He didn’t know what they meant or why he wrote them down.

“Your grocery is a block from Joseph Romano’s. The stores sell the same stuff at the same prices. How does the block support two groceries?”

LeBoeuf’s eyes deadened at the mention of Romano.

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