City of Sins. Daniel Blake

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ out. Folks got beaten up by the police, she helped them out. She pointed out that she’d never been convicted of anything in her life, not so much as a traffic offense, and yet the Bureau were bugging her like she was bin Laden or John Gotti or someone.

      She was representing herself, she said, so the jury – most of them people of color like herself, just trying to make their way in a world stacked against them – could see what she was really like. No smart-ass lawyer twisting her words for her. The other side could do that all they liked, but not her, not Marie Laveau, no sir.

      It had been pure theater. And now it was time for the curtain call.

      The courtroom itself was so full it seemed almost to bulge. People fanned their faces and tried to stay as still as possible: the ageing municipal aircon system was nowhere near up to coping with a couple of hundred excited metabolisms.

      An expectant murmur fluttered off the walls as the jury took their seats.

      Judge Amos Katash, who looked like the older brother of Michelangelo’s Sistine God and was clearly relishing every moment of this performance, shuffled some papers and cleared his throat. ‘Would the foreman please stand.’

      A gray-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain round her neck got to her feet, glancing at Marie as she did so.

      In the gallery, Selma closed her eyes. Like every cop, she knew the old adage about the foreman never looking at the defendant if they’re guilty – and as Selma had maintained right from the start, Marie was as guilty as anyone she’d ever come across.

      ‘Have you reached a decision?’ Katash asked the foreman.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And is the decision the decision of you all?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘In the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Marie Laveau, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Balthazar Ortiz?’

      ‘Not guilty.’

      Pandemonium in the courtroom; a dissonant vortex of triumphant whoops, frantic applause, tears and outraged shouts. Marie smiled and waved daintily, as though she were on the red carpet at the Kodak Theater. Selma pinched her nose between thumb and middle finger as she shook her head in disbelief.

      Monday, July 4th

      Fourth of July, and New Orleans was hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire.

      Patrese took a sip of daiquiri and pinched at his shirtfront, trying to peel it away from his skin.

      ‘Hell, Franco,’ laughed Phelps, ‘you look like a water cannon’s been using you for target practice. Know what it is? Thick blood. All those steeltown winters have given you sludge in your veins. A couple of years down here, the stuff’ll be running through you like water, and one hundred degrees won’t even make you sweat. Till then, my friend, make like us locals. Laissez les bons temps rouler.’ He clinked his glass against Patrese’s and gestured round the party. ‘Quite something, huh?’

      It sure was, thought Patrese. White-suited waiters glided between the guests, proffering champagne here, stuffed lobster claws there. Three barmen shook and mixed every cocktail Patrese had ever heard of and plenty he hadn’t. A string quartet floated Haydn under the hubbub of conversation and laughter. Exotic fish glided endlessly round ornamental ponds.

      New Orleans held fast to the old ideals of high society. Anybody who was anybody spent their Fourth of July here, at the Brown House, a steep-gabled, Syrian-arched monument to Romanesque Revivalism. No matter if you wanted to go to your beach house or visit with family, when you were invited to the Brown House, you went. It was the largest house in all New Orleans, and it was owned by the city’s richest man.

      Who was, as usual, nowhere to be seen.

      St John Varden’s Gatsby-like absence from his own parties may have been because he preferred to work, because he found other people tedious company, because he wanted to enhance his mystique, or all of the above. Only he knew for certain, and he wasn’t telling.

      Patrese had been in New Orleans only a few months, but that was plenty enough to realize Varden was everywhere and nowhere. The logo of his eponymous company sprouted across the city like mushrooms after rain; his name bubbled up in quotidian conversations, an eternal presence in the ether. But he appeared in public only once a year, at the company’s AGM, and if you wanted a photo of him, it was the corporate brochure or nothing.

      In contrast, his son – St John Varden Jnr, universally known as Junior – was working the guests with practiced ease. In another era, he could have been a matinee idol, all brooding hazel eyes, jet-black hair and olive skin. As it was, he’d been a proper war hero. Purple Heart in Desert Storm, Silver Star in Bosnia, and finally the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan; the first living recipient of the award since Vietnam. He’d left the army and announced his intention to go into politics. Eighteen months ago, he’d become Governor of Louisiana at his first attempt. Massachusetts had the Kennedys, Texas the Bushes: Louisiana had the Vardens.

      ‘Here,’ Phelps said, ‘let me introduce you to a few people.’

      Phelps’ wife had filed for divorce earlier in the year and gone to live with her new lover in Mobile, so Patrese was his plus one today. There were plenty of other people Phelps could have brought – hell, half of Patrese’s new colleagues at the FBI’s New Orleans field office would have killed for the chance – but Phelps, lord of that office, had chosen to ask Patrese, the outsider.

      There’d been protests; whispered and civilized, perhaps, but protests nonetheless. Patrese wasn’t a southerner. Worse, he hadn’t even been a Bureau man until a few months ago.

      All the more reason to show him how we do things down here, Phelps had said; and that had been that.

      Patrese shook hands and repeated people’s names back to them when they were introduced, the better to remember who was who. He already recognized Marc Alper, the assistant DA who’d prosecuted Marie Laveau and was now putting a brave face on the verdict: ‘You can never predict juries.’ Here was a chief justice, here someone high up in City Hall, here a golfing store magnate, all full of backslapping bonhomie, safe and smug in the knowledge that, if you were in here, you counted for something.

      All men, Patrese noticed, and all white. The absolute top jobs – mayor, DA, police chief, pretty much everyone bar Phelps himself – might have had black incumbents, but to Patrese the dark crust seemed very thin, like a pint of Guinness in negative.

      ‘And this,’ said Phelps, his voice rising slightly as though in anticipation of a drum roll, ‘is Cindy Rojciewicz.’

      Patrese knew she’d be a knockout even before she turned, just from the reactions of everyone around them. It was like something from the Discovery Channel: the males puffing their chests out, the females bristling and snarling with affront.

      ‘Hiii,’ said Cindy, in a voice which suggested she’d spent more time than was healthy smoking filterless cigarettes and watching Marlene Dietrich films. ‘Wyndham’s told me a whole heap about you.’ She winked. ‘All good, of course.’

      Such an obvious lie, Patrese thought. Why then was he so flattered?

      Raven hair, cobalt eyes and a dress which straddled demonstrative and slutty might have had something СКАЧАТЬ