Felix Delacroix

Broker slayer of House of Delacroix, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line, known as The Red Bridle. Craft: Crowd Charm.

The claim form for a fire has a box for the cause of loss, and Felix Delacroix, who filled in several hundred of them, was the only adjuster in the parish who sometimes wrote in it the truth. He was born in 1957 in New Orleans (Algiers), Louisiana, and died in 1991 of a car accident, aged thirty-four. He worked as an insurance adjuster and, from 1974, as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, in the neighbourhoods, jazz clubs and floodplain of modern New Orleans. The family book knows him as The Red Bridle, and it classes him as a Broker, a hunter who works by introductions, bargains and favours, and who leads a creature by talking, as one leads a horse by the bridle. His craft was Crowd Charm, the art of reading a room and moving it, and his gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was the son of the laundry supervisor Simone Delacroix, a woman of the House of Delacroix, whose husband the family papers do not name, and he was entered in the Ledger as of the House of Delacroix and the Faulkner bloodline. In 1981 he married the diner waitress and slayer Lorraine Trahan Faulkner, and they had two daughters, Linda Faulkner, born in 1982, and Crystal Faulkner Delacroix, born in 1984, neither of whom was called. He was born in a rented cottage three streets back from the ferry landing at Algiers, in the spring of 1957, to a mother who was twenty-seven, unmarried by the family's account and not in the least abashed. Simone was the supervisor of the night shift at a commercial laundry on the west bank, and she took ten days away from it, which she regarded as a generous allowance. The cousins brought a basket. The father, who might have been anyone, was recorded in the Delacroix book as unrecorded, in the careful phrasing that the house keeps for matters that it has agreed to leave alone, and the boy, who was told nothing, grew up with a mother, an aunt, a forewoman and the entire laundry floor. He was a bright, quick, stubborn child with her wrists and an uncanny sense of where people were. By ten he could tell, from the other end of a corridor, who had come in. By eleven he could tell what kind of mood they were in, and by twelve he had found that if he spoke first, and in the right tone, he could generally alter it. The talent was not a thing that the family knew how to use, and they did the sensible thing, which was to give him a job. He was sent at nine to ride on the laundry's delivery cart, to the hotels and guest houses of the Quarter, and he found in it a university. He learned to read a crowd. At the age of eight, in September of 1965, he had been in the basement of the laundry when Hurricane Betsy came up the river, and he had watched his mother start the old boiler on a coal fire, set the mangles on a borrowed generator and wash for a week for the people who had been taken out of the Ninth Ward in rowing boats, and he had been given a bucket. He said later that what he remembered was not the water. It was that every person who came off a boat had been calmed by the first person who spoke to them, and that the first person was nearly always his mother. He was called in the autumn of 1974, in an inn yard, when a guest asked for lodging and would not cross the threshold. He was seventeen. It was a courtyard guest house in the Quarter, one of the old places with a carriage arch, a fountain and a lamp over the door, to which he had come on the evening round with a basket of clean sheets, and he found a man in an expensive coat standing in the yard under the lamp, speaking in a pleasant voice to the porter in the doorway, who had been trying to get him to come in for some minutes. The man wished for a room, a bath and a bed. He had no luggage. He stood exactly one pace outside the sill, smiling, with his hands at his sides, and he did not step over it. Felix, who was a talker, and who could not bear a silence, began to chat with the man, as a boy does with a stranger who is being difficult, and found that he could hold him there, in the yard, in front of the lit door, with a flow of small remarks about the weather, the street and the guest house, for the better part of a quarter of an hour. He was holding a basket of sheets. At the end of it the man looked at him, quite seriously, as one looks at a clever child, and said that it was a very pretty piece of work, and went away under the arch without a sound. The porter, who had retired from the Ledger some years before and had been standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves with a stake in his hand, put it down on the step. He said that the boy had better come and sit down. He came home and told his mother, who was folding a cloth. She heard him through, in the order in which he had been taught to tell it, and said that she had known that it would be soon. Her face did not change. At the door that evening, in the autumn dusk, she said once, in a plain voice, that she was proud of him, and she did not say it again. The cousins who ran the Ledger's Algiers circle took him in hand that winter, as they took in all the boys of the house. They taught him the rules. A creature of the old sort, they said, cannot cross a threshold that it has not been asked over, and a clever hunter does not need to be the one who asks. He needs to be the one who keeps the creature talking at the door. The craft that he made of it he called Crowd Charm, and it was the plainest thing that he ever did, which was to take a room in hand. A creature in a crowd, he said, is a creature that has nowhere to go. In a lit hall, a second-line, a church, a bar on Rampart Street on a Saturday night or the middle of a Mardi Gras parade, it is surrounded by people who have not the least idea of what it is, and a man with a loud voice and a good smile can turn them, by an inch at a time, into a wall. He could move forty people in a room without a word of command. He learned to put a creature at the centre of a ring of strangers and to bring it, by a succession of friendly questions, to the one door in the building that was lit and watched. He took his first in the Carnival of 1977, on the St Charles line, among a crowd of eleven thousand, and nobody there could afterwards say what had happened. The family book, which knows a Broker when it sees one, gave him the name at the end of the year. It said that a bridle was a thing by which one led, and that it was red because he did it in company. He was an adjuster for twelve years. It was a trade that suited him exactly. He left school in 1975, with a diploma, and took a clerical post with an insurance firm on Poydras Street, and by twenty-four he was an adjuster, driving through the parishes in a company car to the sites of fires, floods and thefts, to look at the damage and to talk to the owners. It was, as he said, a job that made a man welcome in any house in the city on the worst day of its life. He was asked the one question that everybody asks, which is what happened, and he was, by profession, the person to whom it was told. A good deal of what the Ledger knew about the eastern parishes in the eighties it knew from his notes. He wrote, in the box for the cause of loss, that a fire had been of unknown origin, when it had not, and the company, which did not care for the phrase, paid the claims all the same. He met Lorraine Trahan Faulkner in a diner, in the spring of 1980, when he was on a claim in the Faubourg and she was waiting tables with a pad in her apron pocket and a pistol in her handbag. She was twenty. She was a tall, level-eyed young woman, the elder daughter of the trainer Charles Trahan and of the hospital cook Lorraine Delacroix Faulkner, and she had been called by a night watch. She told him that the coffee was strong, and that he looked like a man who talked himself into things. He said that he looked like one who talked other people out of them. They were married in 1981, in the church in Algiers, at a Mass which his mother attended in a blue dress that she had made herself, and Simone and her new daughter-in-law sat at the head of the breakfast table and discussed the removal of a bloodstain from a damask cloth. Linda was born in the spring of 1982, and Crystal in 1984, and neither was called. He died in the autumn of 1991, on the Westbank Expressway, in the rain, at night, on his way home from a claim. It was a car accident, and it was nothing else. The Ledger, which does not take such things on trust, sent two of its people to look at the car, and the road, and the tyre marks, and Lorraine, who was a hunter herself and was thirty-one, went with them. They found a wet road, a worn tyre and a truck that had not stopped. She said that she would have been glad to find something else. He was thirty-four. His mother buried him in the Delacroix tomb, with a small stone that she had washed herself, and in the church in Algiers, where she wore the same dark blue dress, she stood through the whole of the Mass and did not sit. His widow, who had been told by a cousin that a man who led by the bridle was a man who would never be alone, put his old red scarf in the coffin. Felix Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as The Red Bridle, the adjuster of the west bank who could turn a room full of strangers into a wall and hold a creature in a lit doorway with nothing but a smile and the weather. In the Slayerverse he stands for the brokers of the Red Ledger, the hunters who won by talk, by favour and by the crowd, and who proved that a warm voice and a good deal of nerve will lead a monster as surely as a rope.