Deadly Pedigree

29



Nick walked down Zola’s street in the cold drizzle.

The latest catalog bauble of the rich dripped limply from porches–large boldly colored flags with cutesy elves, Santas, and evergreen motifs.

Human beings are the flag-waving species, Nick was thinking. Even in our fads, even when there’s nothing worth dying for, we declare allegiances, choose sides, form tribes. It’s innate.

Other than the flags, the houses were about evenly divided in displays of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, blinking at him in syncopated costliness.

The for-sale sign in front of Zola’s house seemed to Nick at odds with the clubby cheerfulness of the neighborhood. Here was someone who wanted out of the game, or perhaps was no longer welcome. The house itself seemed to have lost its purpose, its unity and personality, now merely a collection of boards, bricks, and nails.

Inside, he dodged moving men as they made their way past, hefting boxes or last pieces of furniture. The place looked even bigger than he remembered it, now that it was empty. He looked into the study, to see only depressing barren shelves.

“You’ll be getting a box of those books next week,” Zola said, behind him. “I know there were some you especially liked.”

He turned to face her. She wore blue jeans, a man’s baggy button-up shirt over a black turtleneck, and work gloves. She might have been any woman moving out of her apartment, except for the fact that few women have the luck to look so good, so artlessly. Nick detected a new dimension to her hazel eyes, reflecting the clarity of mind and serenity of spirit that often follow the purifying fires of illness. She was certainly grieving for her mother, but had the innate grace to keep her grief as private as she could.

“Thanks,” Nick said. “Weren’t you going to say goodbye?”

“No. I thought this would be better. After the way I treated you. After I refused to believe that Mother was…not what she seemed to be. I’m ashamed of her, ashamed of myself for not realizing how out-of-control she was. She did terrible things, Nick. The police have finally run out of questions. But I haven’t. I know there’s more that needs to be exposed.”

Nick shrugged. No point in making her suffer for her mother’s wrongs, those she suspected, those she didn’t. As far as she and anyone else knew, her mother’s crimes were the desperate attempts of an unbalanced mind, first to hide the family’s Jewish ancestry, and then to defuse the Balzars’ suit.

Maybe, Nick thought, the ancient harvest of sour grapes has ended for this family; there would be no more teeth on edge.

“You were good to me, Nick,” she said. “You tried to protect me from the pain of the truth as long as you could, but not from the truth itself. When you offered to show me, I ran away. I was a coward.”

There’s more pain out there for you yet, Zola. You’re on your own now–no revolving office in the sky, no more lackeys cringing in your footsteps, no more cocktail parties with disingenuous corporate do-gooders with their hands in your bank account, no more Mother-in-shining-armor.

They had walked over to the large living room, where two shrouded wing chairs faced a cold fireplace. They sat down.

“I’m leaving New Orleans,” she said, looking around the barren room as if she missed it already. “I don’t know when–or if I’ll ever come back. Nick, I just keep seeing the image of Mother, all alone out there in that beautiful setting, physically sick, obsessed with protecting the family name, in her disturbed way. If she’d only confided in me.”

“Yes. A terrible thing,” Nick said. Armiger deserved everything she got; but of course he couldn’t tell Zola that.

“If only I’d known how devastated she was by the difficulties–and that’s what they were, really. Just difficulties. None of this needed to happen. Our more sophisticated clients didn’t give a damn about that suit, or the story behind it; they also happened to be our most important ones. And the $10 million figure I finally agreed on with the Balzars was better than I’d hoped for. The media had exaggerated the scope of the whole affair. In fact, I’ve sold the company for just a bit less than it was valued before all of this. We’ve always had buyers waiting in the wings. Maybe you read about it.”

Nick had. He’d been pleased to learn that the division over which she’d exercised direct control was untainted by fraud. He could tell she was proud of her deal-making abilities; but sadness returned to displace her momentary swagger.

“I just don’t have the heart right now to run that kind of organization.”

Zola was quiet for a few moments.

“She kept so much inside, so many secrets,” she said. “How can a mother and her daughter be so close and know so little about each other?”

“Some people are like that,” Nick replied, trying to be sympathetic and opaque at the same time.

“I loved her; you know I did,” Zola said. “But now I realize what a frightened woman she was. Frightened of the past. I don’t want to be like that…oh, damn it!” Her eyes squinched shut and tears seeped out; she found some tissues in a shirt pocket. “I didn’t want you to see me doing this.”

Nick unclenched her hand from the chair arm. “Here’s my final lecture for this semester,” he said. “You have the power not to be frightened of your past; it can’t hurt you unless you think it can.”

“Like those monsters under my bed when I was a child,” Zola said.

Nick wiped away a rolling tear she’d missed. “Lots of people stop me in family history research when I uncover the first scoundrel. They think a bad apple in the ancestor barrel is a curse, condemning them to misfortune. I don’t believe in curses–not that kind, anyway. It’s all chance and necessity: some things we can change, some we can’t. And we don’t know which are which; that’s frightening sometimes, yes, but it’s also liberating. I say learn and live. Begone, all monsters under the bed! Scram, all you skeletons in the closet!”

He’d produced the intended reaction in Zola. She smiled tentatively.

“So what’s going to happen to the little chateau?” he asked.

“Do you know, she didn’t allow me out there? Her ‘special place,’ she called it.” She sighed, shaking her head. “Oh, I’ve given it to Freret University, along with those atrocious pictures and sculptures. Part of the deal with the government. But I’m really not supposed to talk about that.”

“Hey, I know how it is. Got a few secrets, myself. What about the genealogical treasure trove in those cases? The European stuff. I suppose you’ll be sending that to the places I suggested.”

He wanted it all himself, but he knew it had to be repatriated. Zola had solved his anxiety over returning the Natchitoches material by offering to pay for the relocation of the courthouse’s neglected subbasement archive to the Plutarch Foundation in New Orleans, where future genealogists would have the opportunity to scurry around in it like happy dung beetles. Nick’s pilfered Balazar documents were unobtrusively added, and no one was the wiser.

“Well, not exactly,” Zola said. “My lawyers have told me not to reveal where I’m going, or what I’m going to do, but between us,” she drew closer, continuing in a whisper, just a glimmer of her old fun-loving self in her eyes, “I’m bound for Europe to deliver those items myself. I’ve decided to take some time off, figure out a new direction. In the meantime, I intend to devote my energies to the study of–drum roll please!–genealogy. Learn and live, isn’t that what you said?”

“You know,” said Nick, “maybe I should have been a teacher.”

She gave him her address in the small alpine country where she would be setting up house–or castle, rather–and made him promise to visit.

“Oh, wait.” She ran into another room and returned with a gift-wrapped package. “Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday! I was going to send it to you. Go on, open it.”

It was a Breitling wrist chronograph so complex he was afraid he’d never be able to make out the time, much less the altitude–a negative number in New Orleans, anyway.

“No microchip. Excellent!” he said.

“Slightly antiquated, but very charming. Like you.”

“Hey, no fair. I didn’t get you anything.”

“This is all I want,” she said, and kissed him.

Eventually the moving men gave them unsubtle hints that they were about to be loaded onto the truck.



Nick crossed the street, heading for St. Charles and the downtown streetcar. His car had received terminal injuries in its joust with the iron gate. He stopped on the opposite sidewalk and faced the house.

He recalled a particularly important passage from Ivanhoe’s diary, possibly written on a typical dreary Louisiana winter day like this one.

“Zola, my love,” Nick said softly, “may you safely cross all the impossible gaps on your journey.”





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