Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,51

as he tried to get his car’s engine to turn over.

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15

Nick knew he should be concentrating on further sundering the thread from Hyam Balazar to Natalie Armiger. But wasn’t it possible that Ivanhoe had a place in the direct line of her ancestry, that the Ivanhoe-Jacob conflict wasn’t just a fascinating sideshow? The likelihood of surprises multiplies geometrically the further you go back. No, Ivanhoe shouldn’t be relegated to a ghetto of collateral unimportance just yet.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants for Madame Armiger, finding that her blue blood had black and Jewish tributaries! She wouldn’t have a client left–even in the city of which Huey Long once said that a cup of red beans and rice could feed all its “pure” white people, with some to spare.

Besides, Nick was willing to bet that Jacob Balazar, because he hated his father and his father’s origins and was so concerned with creating his own version of his family’s history, probably had done a lot of the work for him; a few dollars or threats from Jacob might have caused the damage of a dozen courthouse fires or floods…or of one Nick Herald. No wonder so few traces of Hyam existed.

Nick felt entitled to a little genealogical diversion. He was, as usual, curious: did Ivanhoe ever get his “portion?”

Ivanhoe had been right about the old Chirke place: he’d overpaid for it. The terrain didn’t look at all like the rest of mostly flat, fertile Louisiana; Nick drove up and down scrub pine-covered hills that had some pretensions of being mountainous. The distinctive red dirt gave the area a rusty, disused appearance. The property was about five miles from Natchitoches, real estate that must have been undesirable even to developers. But the highway department apparently had liked the desolate location: cars zipped along I-49, half a mile away.

He drove into the dirt driveway of a small wood-frame house with a lean-to carport and a screened front porch. Country silence and red dust enveloped his car when he killed the engine. He knocked on a vertical piece of screen-door frame that had needed painting a long time ago.

“Morning. My name’s Edmund Spenser,” Nick said to the woman who answered his knocks. “I’m a research associate at Freret University, in New Orleans. Are you Mrs. Balzar?”

“Why, yessir, I am. I’m Dora Balzar.” She was cherry wood brown, with purple pouches under her eyes; thick around the middle, in her late fifties. She wore a blue polka dot skirt and a polyester white blouse with lots of ruffles. She didn’t seem to be the pants-wearing type.

“Oh, good. Well, Mrs. Balzar, I’m working on a book, a book about…“ Nick stammered, realizing he hadn’t fabricated the details of his deception on the drive over. “A book on the African American role, uh, in the expansion of the frontier to the West. I have reason to believe that an ancestor of your husband’s might have been a buffalo soldier.”

“A what kind of soldier? You best talk to my husband, Erasmus. I don’t know nothing about buffaloes, and don’t want to, either. Come on in. I’ll go get him.” She opened the screen door and let Nick in, looking back with some suspicion, he thought, at this white stranger who might very well be the taxman or some other figure of authority who would bring hassles.

Nick heard a television from another part of the house. An interview show. The audience erupted in laughter, then groaned in disapproval, then applauded and hooted. The living room was as comfortable as straitened circumstances allowed–lots of discount store furniture and the kind of damaged antiques and knickknacks well-to-do white people discard when aged relatives die. Clearly, the Balzars were proud of this room, and it was reserved for company, though there probably wasn’t much of that.

There was no air-conditioning, but several lethargic oscillating fans kept the place remarkably cool. Nick inhaled the aroma of some wonderful meat dish emanating from the kitchen, and decided that Dora Balzar was one of those great Louisiana cooks who could put any New Orleans chef to shame, but whose artistry was known only to their families.

As he waited, Nick studied family snapshots and Wal-Mart portraits in cheap frames hanging on the walls and dotting every table. Three attractive, happy brown youths, frozen at various stages of life. The newest generation of Balzars. One son looked very much like Dora–probably the eldest, Nick judged. The most recent photo of this young man showed him stone-faced, in