Claude Devereux knew this story well, but few others did. Claude also knew the full extent of his richest client’s ambitions. He wondered whether Brody was finally going to reveal his plans to Forrest Knox.
“My daddy owned two stores,” Brody went on, speaking softly. “He sold bootleg whisky on the side, and he used the profits to buy land. We lived in St. Bernard Parish. In 1927, as the floodwater came downriver, the bankers who controlled New Orleans started to panic. In the end, they hijacked the government in Baton Rouge and extorted permission to dynamite the levee that protected our parish.” Brody nodded, his eyes focused on some faraway scene and time. “They dynamited for three straight days. Everything we had went underwater. When the water finally went down, months later, we’d been wiped out. The stores were gone, and three feet of mud covered the land.”
Brody blinked once, which emphasized the stillness of his aquiline features. “Those bankers had promised full reparations before the dynamiting, but they lied. They left us in the mud to rot. Our total compensation, according to those bastards, was twelve dollars and fifty cents. Twelve-fifty for everything we owned. That’s when Daddy started bootlegging full-time. He got in with Carlos Marcello, and he never looked back. Along with Huey Long’s people, they put slot machines into every parish in this state. In the end, my daddy made back all his money and more. Far more. So did I. But every goddamned day, I thought about the bastards who’d done that to us. And ever since that day, I’ve worked to destroy them.”
Forrest nodded but did not speak, obviously sensing that he would gain nothing by interrupting Brody. Claude also figured Knox knew that information was power, and knowing Brody’s deepest motives might well come in handy someday.
“One of the highest and mightiest of those New Orleans bankers was originally from Natchez,” Brody said. “Twenty years after the flood, I married his daughter. She got me what money couldn’t: social position. Fifteen years after that, she climbed into the bathtub drunk, and I held her head under the water until she stopped breathing.”
Claude nearly swallowed his tongue when he heard this admission. Forrest and Randall Regan kept poker faces, but Alphonse Ozan actually smiled. Brody pushed on like he didn’t give a damn who heard him. “By that time I was managing a lot of her daddy’s money. With the stroke of a pen, I cut him out of more than half of it the next day, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He wanted his daughter buried in New Orleans. I didn’t care where they put her, but I told him I wanted to take care of the funeral expenses.” Brody took another sip of scotch. “I sent him a check for twelve dollars and fifty cents.”
No one in the room made a sound.
“I’m a gambler,” Brody told Forrest. “But as a general rule, I only bet on sure things. I’m going to tell you about the biggest bet I ever made.”
“What’s that?” asked Forrest.
“Everybody’s always known that if a hurricane ever hit New Orleans head-on, the city would be wiped out. The whole damn town is nothing but a big bowl sitting below sea level—a bowl of filth waiting for a purging flood. Even the people who lived there knew it. But they just kept the party going, and pretended it would never happen. They formed levee boards, and the politicians swept the money under the table as fast as it came in. Everybody got their cut, even me. But I was laughing the whole time. Because I knew their luck couldn’t hold. I bought lowlying land and insured the hell out of whatever was on it. St. Bernard Parish, the Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview, Navarre, Gentilly, even Gert Town. The city dodged Betsy, then Camille, and four or five other near misses over the years. But I kept buying. Tulane/Gravier, New Orleans East … because their luck had to run out someday. It was simple probability. The only question was, would I live to see it?” Brody smiled for the first time tonight, and his triumph was terrible to see. “Well, I have. At first I thought Katrina was going to be another close call. But then the corruption and the bad engineering and the laissez-faire bullshit tipped the balance. The levees broke, and God swept that city clean like Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Brody laughed with deep satisfaction. “I can’t tell you how I felt watching that water rise on television. Every extra foot put millions more into my pocket. Three months ago I started getting my settlement checks, and it’s more money than you’ll ever see in your life. But that’s just lagniappe. The real payoff hasn’t even started yet! Because the old city’s gone now. The municipal whorehouse that all those decadent old Catholic hypocrites loved to call ‘the city that care forgot’ is dead, and rotting as we speak. A new city will rise in its place, and it’s going to be different.”
Brody took another pull of scotch, his eyes glinting. “You know what killed New Orleans? Not the housing projects or the welfare niggers or even the flood. Those rich bankers did it, with their exclusive clubs and krewes and secret societies. Every time a major corporation moved in there, those arrogant bastards refused to let the officers into the circle. They thought their Gilded Age was going to go on forever. They strangled that city. They married among themselves and shut everybody else out, until all the money and business in the South went to Atlanta and Houston and Birmingham and Nashville. And now their idiot descendants sit down there, eating étouffée in their seersucker suits while their trust funds dribble down to nothing. Katrina was just the final shock. The purge. The future belongs to me.”