Axman murders and jazz heat up ‘King Zeno’
With good reason, through flu epidemics and floods, New Orleans exerts a magnetic pull on the rest of this country. There appetites are celebrated, not curbed; indulging one’s vices becomes a virtue; and even funerals are a party.
The Crescent City turns 300 years old this year, long since outpacing its provincial trading-post past to arrive as one of the nation’s premiere nightlife capitals and a top tourist destination worldwide. But it was a bumpy ride.
In “King Zeno,” Nathaniel Rich’s third novel, the fates of a musician, a cop and a Mafia widow collide with consequences that stretch far beyond their individual lives, threatening to shape the destiny of this undeniably corrupt, but never boring, port city.
Rich smears his lively prose with enough mud, blood, sweat and Oysters Vizzini grease that readers should keep a stack of napkins handy.
The book opens as World War I is winding down and acres of prime swampland are being dredged up to make way for the new Industrial Canal. The City Hall stuffed shirts and top rung of the city’s business community hope the canal will create a shortcut to a more prosperous future. If nothing else, it means a ready source of work for musicians looking to pad their income from unreliable nighttime gigs — and, inevitably, a convenient grave for the victims of a killer dubbed the Axman.
Rich, son of longtime New York Times theater critic and columnist Frank Rich, has lived in New Orleans for more than a decade. A regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, among other publications, and author of the novels “The Mayor’s Tongue” and “Odds Against Tomorrow,” he’s done his homework here. Actual news clippings from the Times-Picayune and other papers of the era set the scene while real-life musicians including Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong (known here not as Satchmo but “Dippermouth”) pop up here and there.
The Axman was real, too. Though the case was never officially solved, the theory “King Zeno” puts forth is as plausible as any. Central to the plot is a letter that really did appear in the Times-Picayune in March 1919, in which the Axman calls himself “a spirit and fell demon from hottest hell” and promises, the following Tuesday night, to spare the occupants of any house where jazz is playing as he flies by. He kept his word; never mind that the letter was a hoax.
The Axman’s murders, which began in May 1918 and lasted roughly a year and a half, form the spine of “King Zeno.” But Rich’s three main characters are equally compelling. All three are haunted in one way or another: Detective Bill Bastrop by what happened to him in France and the fate of one fellow soldier in particular, which is driving a wedge between him and his wife; Beatrice Vizzini by the idea of bringing her “shadow” business into the light and the peculiar behavior of her eldest son; and doubt-plagued Isadore Zeno, hotshot cornet player and leader of the Slim Izzy Quartet.
Izzy has enough troubles for 10 musicians. Not only is he haunted by a growing family and his chosen method of supporting it but by the music in his head. It may be too exotic for his nightly audiences but, he’s convinced, it’s his ticket to immortality. New Orleans, meanwhile, is haunted by the Spanish Flu as well as the Axman’s handiwork.
Rich pushes the story ahead at a ragtime pace, alternating passages of florid description — particularly when Izzy is in one of his musical reveries — and bareknuckle action.
Two of the best scenes are Izzy’s gigs at a converted church known as the Funky Butt and the Cosmopolitan Club, a ritzy hotel’s subterranean parlor that makes an appropriately otherworldly setting for the climax. His reporter’s instincts jibe nicely with his novelist’s imagination.
In New Orleans, the Caribbean meets the Deep South and North America’s longest river meets the Gulf of Mexico. But more than just silt gets buried as the Mississippi makes its lazy course to the sea; so do secrets. “King Zeno,” a novel of underground forests, towns within towns and recurring nightmares suddenly come to life, is a page-turning reminder that in this venerable city, some buried secrets aren’t meant to stay that way.