this fact and intend to keep it that way. My late husband was a member of that club; I, as a debutante a long time ago, was honored to serve as queen. At the upper reaches of New Orleans society, all is not sweetness and light, certainly, but the hallowed custom of exclusionary chauvinism often produces strange bedfellows. The French and Spanish Creole elite–both white and of color–sneer at the Anglo-Saxon elite, but they unite in their distaste for Jews. Unspoken for the most part, but no less powerful. You know of the recent demands by blacks, Jews, and women for inclusion in the musty traditions of this city? Several old-line krewes ceased their public involvement in Mardi Gras, their very reason for existence, rather than admit that the ancien régime has breathed its last.”
“Let the plebeians eat king cake, eh?” Nick said, stunned by this woman’s candor with a virtual stranger.
“You joke, like those who say this masked power structure is now irrelevant. But I assure you, this is very serious business. I have excellent Jewish clients, but Christians outnumber them five to one. Surely you’ve heard of ‘old money.’ Here, that is the polite term for white Christian social and economic snobbery and hegemony. Pleasure and prejudice are New Orleans delicacies; we savor and guard them as a chef protects his recipes. We coined the idea of separate to remain unequal; that should be on our Carnival doubloons, in Latin. You do not understand this city, Nick, if you believe that I would be in business, in any meaningful way, a week after the news broke that I am of Jewish extraction, even at this remove.”
Nick wanted to argue that this was the 1990s, that the Nazis had been bombed to oblivion, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been forever discredited as the political ruse of a czar’s secret police, that even Henry Ford had apologized, eventually, sort of…but he realized he was pretty damn naive. She was right. Teenagers wear the swastika and burn the Klan’s cross proudly these days in just about every state; the reality of the Holocaust is questioned by venomous hucksters on the airwaves, online (despite Hawty’s tutorials, he still wasn’t sure where “online” was), and in college student centers; and the Protocols, that undying canard, and worse are bestsellers in places as far flung as the Middle East and Russia, and as close as certain New Orleans suburbs where freakish minor electoral success had recently emboldened a notorious peddler of anti-Jewish hate to almost take the governorship.
History doesn’t repeat itself; mankind does.
Nick recalled his father drilling this into his memory: “No matter what you do or where you go or how you pray, when your back is turned you’re Nick the Jew.” Naively, Nick in his youth used to think his dad was talking rubbish, having seen what he’d seen during the war, forever scarred by that experience, hypersensitive to a ridiculous extreme. Who listens to his father, anyway–until it’s too late? Now people probably whispered: “There goes Nick the Word-Thief.” He had needed no help from a deadly legacy of bigotry to earn his own personal infamy.
“Why did Corban come to me?” Nick asked.
“He has lost his mental balance, undoubtedly. Perhaps he believed that you, as a writer on genealogical subjects, would broach this discovery to the world. He needs the credibility of scholarship. He has already tried rumor and innuendo, to no very great effect. Fortunately, he does not belong to the class of people with whom Artemis usually deals.”
“Mrs. Armiger, as far as I can see, it’s your word against a disturbed little man’s screwball ravings. Who’s going to believe him? I’m sure you’ve had worse crises in your business. Call your public-relations experts. Get some spin control. Your clients will understand the situation when you explain the truth to them. I think you’re overreacting.”
“Truth is a mask one wears for the evening’s ball. I am not concerned with the truth. Controversy must be avoided at all costs; the slightest scandal could foster a desire to doubt the mask, to seek the homely face beneath. That would be fatal for the romance that keeps the whole affair whirling into the dawn.” She seemed to be envisioning some Mardi Gras gala from her youth. “Stop your work for Max Corban. I propose another assignment for you: track down my link to Balazar, and when you have found the evidence, steal it.”
Nick had had enough of this designer