genealogical stringers all over the country, all over the world. At least those lucky few he’d paid on time and in full; the others wouldn’t give him the local time of day. And so what if he wasn’t really incorporated? On the battlefield of business, as in the ivory tower of a college English department, Machiavellianism ruled supreme. In his former career, he’d learned that lesson too late.
Was his minor deception ethical? he asked himself, as he stood up and walked over to the windowsill for the dregs of the coffee. Hey, it was an imperfect world. Nobody had elected him to fix it? Next question, please.
The tooting of a big ocean-going ship on the river, the faint roar of a streetcar and other traffic clamor, and ephemeral brass-band notes from deep within the French Quarter merged with the asthmatic drone of the window air-conditioner. If it rained later, as the white anvil clouds rising above the humid city seemed to promise, he could jog down St. Charles Avenue without risking a heat stroke. That would be better than sitting in his office, breathing stale memories, wasting electricity.
Nick still dressed with the indifference to taste of a college English professor; but because he seemed younger than his actual age, he looked more like a dissolute graduate student at the end of his monthly stipend. Today, as usual, he wore baggy khakis, a wrinkled once-white Oxford shirt, and a pair of Clark’s sand-suede desert boots that had seen better days. When he needed a touch of formality, he donned a coat and tie hanging in a closet of the outer office. Too much thinking, too much drinking, and twenty-or-so years of recreational jogging had left him a bit too lean for his 5’10” frame. His hair was dark brown with only a few irascible gray ones; he wore it a bit longer than was wise for a professional genealogist, who, as a rule, dealt with people of a more conservative bent, especially here in the South. But haircuts were expensive.
That morning, in the office bathroom, he’d scraped his morose face with a dull razor; already he had an early five-o’clock shadow to go with the dried blood of nicks. His thick eyebrows extended in a nearly continuous bar above his brown eyes, which now surveyed the dusty still life that was his office.
Stacks and stacks of books, manuscripts, documents, and letters leaned precariously against the office walls and crowded every inch of shelf space. His apartment was full, too. He collected indiscriminately, compulsively. It had all started after his ejection from the faculty of Freret University.
Why did he impoverish himself gathering this material, traveling wherever in the area there was a likely repository of irreplaceable genealogical material about to be consigned to the dump? He saw his collection as a kind of witness-protection program. These yellowed and crumbling products of human interaction were those witnesses. Someday, they would reveal a lost connection, rescue a reputation, or resolve a mystery. His own career might have been salvaged by just such testimony.
As a genealogist, though, he’d learned never to trust any written record without question; false records, like mindless machines, repeat the lies of their creators. Doubt everything was his credo, as it had been for Descartes. He kept a small bust of the seventeenth-century French philosopher in a place of honor, high atop a section of shelves. It was a souvenir of a happier time, the summer he directed a study group in France and England. The bust had become something of a household god for him, a constant reminder that we can know only part of any story.
Nick’s humble office occupied two rooms on the fourth floor of a 1920s building, on an easily missed oblique street of downtown New Orleans, across Canal from the French Quarter. He had chosen the neighborhood precisely because it was off the beaten track. His address allowed him the solitude that, more and more, he had come to treasure, while still keeping him somewhat accessible to intrepid clients. If he lacked the acquisitive drive to be a genealogical tycoon, at least he could enjoy his marginality.
The neighborhood was a perennial casualty of the boom-and-bust cycles of the Louisiana economy. Empty lots, with tile floors of the buildings that had once occupied them, spoke of surgical arson. Nick had a relatively good view of the river through one such gap. New Deal-Art Deco government buildings and neo-Doric banks hulked over the modest, short block–symbols of power