City of Sins. Daniel Blake

      ‘Yeeuch!’

      ‘Not “yeeuch”, honey. It’s perfectly natural; it’s just part of the, er, the bag which holds babies inside their moms’ tummies. Uncle Franco was one of those babies. And having a caul is special.’

      ‘Why’s it special?’

      ‘Lots of reasons. If you have a caul, it can mean you’re psychic …’

      ‘I wish,’ Patrese muttered.

      ‘…or you can heal people, or you’ll travel all your life and never tire, or –’

      Bianca stopped suddenly and clapped her hand to her mouth.

      ‘What?’ Patrese said.

      She spoke through her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Tell me.’

      She took her hand away, put it on his shoulder, and looked him squarely in the eye.

      ‘It means you’ll never drown.’

      Boone rang as Patrese was driving back home.

      ‘This a good time to talk, buddy?’

      ‘Er … sure.’

      ‘You OK? You sound a little, er, distracted.’

      Patrese glanced at the caul jar on the passenger seat. ‘No. Just driving.’

      ‘OK. You asked about the Bureau? Got a name for you: Wyndham Phelps.’

      Patrese laughed. ‘Sounds like someone from Gone with the Wind.’

      ‘Good Southern name. I told him all about you, and he wants to meet with you.’

      ‘Where’s he at?’

      ‘He heads the field office in New Orleans.’

PART ONE

      Friday, July 1st

      The jury were coming back in today; Marie was certain of it. And that meant she could leave nothing to chance.

      She took six white candles, stood them in a tray of holy water, and lit them. Then she took twelve sage leaves, wrote the name of one of the apostles (with Paul standing in for Judas) on each leaf, and slipped six into one shoe and six into the other. This was so the jury would decide in her favor.

      She dabbed court lotion on her neck and wrists, just as she’d done every day during the trial. She’d made the lotion herself, by mixing together oils of cinnamon, calendula, frankincense and carnation, and adding a piece of devil’s shoestring and a slice of galangal root all mixed together. This was to influence the judge and jury.

      Finally, she took a white bowl piled with dirt. The dirt she’d gathered herself, with her right hand, from the graves of nine children in the St Louis Number One cemetery. She placed the bowl on her altar, facing east, between three white candles. Then she added three teaspoons of sugar and three of sulfur, recited the 35th psalm, asked the spirits to come with all their power to help her, and smeared the dust on the inside of her kaftan. This was so the court would do as she wished.

      She was ready.

      The sidewalk outside the courthouse was packed: crowds four or five deep, pressing against hastily erected barriers and watched by police officers who shifted uneasily from foot to foot in the oppressive heat. The gathering felt more like a street party than a demonstration. People passed food to each other, creased their faces in laughter. Marie wasn’t the only one convinced she’d be acquitted, clearly.

      The trial had lasted only a week. Marie’s defense had been simple: Ortiz had killed himself. The ‘problem’ she’d referred to on the surveillance tape was his carrying a gun: she’d seen it on his waistband as he’d shifted position. Then he’d brought the gun out and, before she’d even been able to react, he’d shot himself. As to why he’d done so, she had no idea: but then the burden of that proof wasn’t on her, was it?

      She’d brought in witnesses who testified that she funded many amenities in the Lower Ninth. Folks got in trouble with their finances, she helped them 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