Messi@ (28 page)

“Actually, that man over there, that's Major Notz, Felicity's uncle. He always takes a Sazerac cocktail and dinner here on Tuesdays. Tonight he's a British naval commander, I think. Maybe he can tell you more about Miss Le Jeune.”

Joe had to keep in check the urge to smash Dedette with his fist the way somebody'd smashed Felicity's peaches.

Major Notz was wholly absorbed in the leather-bound menu that listed the specialties of the old restaurant, and hardly noticed Joe's approach. Finally, he looked up from the menu, and focusing on the uniformed Joe, said: “Did you know that for one hundred and fifty years, the fire has never gone out from under their turtle soup? In nineteen twenty-three the place burnt down, and the cooks emerged from the flames holding the pot. It's a fact. Ask Ellen.”

“If you don't mind, I need to ask you something. Have you seen Felicity?”

“My Felicity?” The major put down the menu and a dark cloud began making its way over the folds of his neck and face. “Has something happened to Felicity?”

Joe explained what he'd found at her apartment and that she hadn't been answering her phone messages.

“You know,” said the major, “in twenty-four years, with interruptions occasioned only by wars and the service of my country, I have never missed my Tuesday bread pudding with whiskey sauce at Commander's … and I won't now. Felicity is a resourceful girl.”

The major handed Joe an embossed gold card on which was written in cursive script,
H. L. Notz, Activist Historian
, followed by a number. “Call me if you find out anything. I expect that she will reappear. For reasons too complex to expain to you, Felicity cannot be harmed.”

It was the second time in twenty minutes that Joe had been told that he was just a dumb cop. This will not do, gentlemen, he steamed as he left the restaurant. I am of old New Orleans Italian stock, and if I wasn't on duty I would demand satisfaction the old-fashioned way, and I would leave a number of ugly scars on both your conceited faces if I left you alive at all. Joe was admittedly a romantic boy.

When the policeman left the courtyard, the major snapped his fingers, and Boppy Beauregard came running. He had been the major's special waiter for years. These kids now didn't want to be good waiters; they were all actors or painters or something. When he started out, you set out to be a waiter, became the best you could be, and that was your life's aim. The world now was just chasing shadows.

“No pudding, Boppy,” said the major. “A telephone, please.”

Boppy Beauregard was shocked. He regarded his favorite customer with more than professional concern. What was the world coming to when a gentleman of the major's caliber missed out on his pudding? The wobbly pylons supporting Boppy's already troubled world gave way a little more.

“Carbon!” the major shouted into the white phone, “get to work right now.” He cradled the receiver with his monumental chin and listened to Carbon's belabored breathing on the other end as he tried to contact the entities.

“I need to know,” the major bellowed, waving Boppy away, “where Felicity is and what's the point of her disappearance.”

The channeler allowed the other world to penetrate him, and then the lisping voice of Hermes came through.

“You better stick to the point,” the major warned the loquacious entity.

“Doubtlessly, Major,” Hermes replied, “you have noticed that temporal ideas about points and continuity mean nothing to us over here.”

“Okay, okay,” sighed the major, “get on with it.”

“It is said that the job of convoking the Council of the Great Minds should have gone, doubtless, to one of the older, wiser, and more terrible angels, Asophet or Perash or even old Lucifer himself. But as luck would have it, happily or not, heaven has just adopted democracy as its new law, superseding that of Moses, and things have become rather difficult for seasoned angels, who—as representatives of the throne—used to have unquestioned priority on all the plums. The glorious jobs that once were distributed like cheap incense to the senior winged corpus now devolve to those who show the most aptitude for the job. In effect, Zack ran for the job and was elected, though how and by whom is still a mystery. Not all the kinks have been worked out. Heaven is new at democracy.”

“What is this crap?” shouted the major loud enough to unsettle a table full of grandmothers treating their grandsons to mile-high pie. Boppy came running. The upset major waved him away again and threatened the mouthpiece through clenched teeth: “I'm asking about Felicity, not your spirit politics, you winged moron!”

“I'm getting to her. She is helping out the angels. It is said that it has baffled Zack as to why the Meeting of the Great Minds would take place in New Orleans, America, rather than in Jerusalem, Israel, or in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It puzzled him even though, early in his angelhood, reflecting on the crossed nature of his name, he had decided to be surprised by nothing. So he surmised the move from old Jerusalem to America was inevitable, part of the switch to democracy. The Language Crystal tells us to remember that ‘U.S.A.' is in the middle of ‘Jer
usa
lem,' right? But why, Zack wondered, did the New Jerusalem have to be in a humid, fetid, sense-besotted swamp by the sluggish waters of the filthiest river on earth?”

Then a voice in the deeper realm said: “That is it precisely, you geo-ignoramus. New Orleans is a gumbo, a mix like America itself, only more so. Black and white, hot and sour, ocher and pink, male and female—shiftingly and vaguely so—catholic and sweaty, pagan and nude, empty and masked, drunk and ascetic, squat, loquacious, and generous, sentimental, fat, visionary, hallucinatory—it is a window into the soul of a mix that heaven itself will soon become.

“But there are”—the voice paused—“practical reasons as well. New Orleans has the greatest rainfall in North America. Global warming has transformed the subtropical climate into a tropical one. The felicitous humidity facilitates the inhabitants' presence outdoors. The streets are always full of people, and there are continual festivals. Sadly, the entities of heaven need a great deal of moisture in order to embody, to lubricate the passage. At the same time, they can only embody outdoors, which severely limits heaven's choice.

“Your job, angel Zack, has quite a few blessed opportunities for reflection. When heaven stopped being kosher and began admitting souls formerly automatically atomized, we had few earthly models, and New Orleans was among them.”

The deeper voice belonged to Zack's Namer, who'd taken an intrusive liking to Zack and thought that it was his prerogative to intervene didactically whenever he felt like it. It was bad enough that an angel has no privacy anywhere in the spirit and is an open book for all to read, but instant commentary from the namer is more than Zack can bear. Privacy for the angels has to be the next thing in the ongoing democratization of the heavens.

The namer said: “Well, take all the privacy you can pack in your unlustrumed feathers! Who cares enough to read your circular
cogita
anyway? If I bother it's because I'd like to see if it's still possible to educate even one of the spirit's fleas in these days of ceaseless ectoplasmic puddles.”

Major Notz slammed the receiver down.

Carbon was useless. It had to be faced. Having chosen him from among the abundant mass of soothsayers and channelers had been a bow to style over substance. A channeler was only as good as his channel; once an entity got stuck in the pipe, no other could come through, and Notz had had enough of Hermes. And missing his pudding stoked the major's fury. His pipe let out a black cloud. He brushed past Boppy, who was evidently suffering, and said between clenched teeth, “If they touch one hair on her head, they shall be
consumed
.”

Boppy nodded. “That's only right.”

Martin Dedette watched this small drama from the corner table and waited until the major's square back disappeared through the etched glass doors. He then rose and went out the back gate. He headed directly for the mailbox on the uptown corner of Lafayette Cemetery. He took the manila envelope from inside his jacket, read the address,
Our Mirror
. “I wonder who'll get caught with their pants down,” he mused, and dropped the envelope in the box.

The Humvee that picked up the major outside Commander's was chauffeured by a militia type with wraparound shades and a marine haircut. He drove silently onto I-10 East and turned off just before the Mississippi state line, at an unmarked exit.

The personage on whom they were going to call was never far from Major Notz's thoughts. He'd had an extraordinary career since the major had first discovered him. He had been a simple country preacher with a good voice, half convinced of his calling but sure of his charm. He was already being called Elvis by his smitten female congregation, about a dozen housewives who sat at his feet. The major had nurtured this rustic tadpole from a one-room church in Gonzalez to a domed arena in Metairie, from a once-a-week spot on local Christian radio to national television. The major had supervised the phenomenal growth of his begging bowl and had provided him with investment instruction. He had done so discreetly, from the shadows, never calling in his markers. The preacher had done well for himself. The last time the IRS had looked into the vast fortunes of his untaxable nonprofit corporation, they couldn't count all the airplanes. After that investigation, the major made sure that the preacher gained a purpose and focus for his money beyond his cowpoke imagination. Now the reverend was using his money properly: as collateral for borrowing more money. Money, after a certain sum was reached, ceased to be money. It became flows of energy with their own will and weather, sequenced all the way back to the Prime Mover and beyond. Something Mullin wouldn't understand and didn't need to.

He had immediately suspected Mullin in regard to Felicity because he knew the hatred the girl bore the reverend. And Hermes, despite his verbosity, had given him a clue. The major had surmised that Felicity might have trespassed on Mullin and been taken into his infamous First Angels Choir. This choir, which Notz had seen perform, was a genuine triumph of brainwashing technique. The major knew enough of the art of brain capture to know that the reverend had created a masterpiece in his choir. He was not entirely sure what the technique consisted of but suspected that it was a combination of drugs, sound hypnosis, and some kind of yogic zap. The girls Mullin recruited never left the choir. They were eternal slaves but, nonetheless, highly functioning and skilled shock troops. It was said that the few unfortunate wretches who had tried to escape had come to bad ends. Kashmir Birani may have been one of them. It was possible, too, that the assignment the major had given Felicity might have led her into the reverend's path. He had thought of the Birani assignment as busy work, but perhaps it was dangerous after all.

Two miles up the freshly paved road they came to a barbed-wire fence and a gatehouse. A bearded guard armed with an Uzi saluted crisply when he saw the major in the rear seat. Notz returned the salute, and the guard stuck his head in the rear window: “You're a philosopher, sir. What's happening to money? It isn't worth the paper it's written on. I owe the bank ten grand. The bank is owned by somebody who owes ten million to another bank. Who owns
that
bank? Is there an end to this business? Is there someone who owns it all? The Jews? When are we going to do something about the Jews?”

The man's questions annoyed the major—Hermes had wasted enough of his time already. “When we get discipline in the ranks, Soldier!” the major snapped. “The sequence can drive anyone mad. Let us through!”

The poor idiot, working lifetimes to pay off his credit, thought that there was no money because someone was hiding it. The Jews, always the Jews. They had their uses, the Jews. Notz liked to encourage paranoia among common folk; if they never confused debt with money, their anger would keep growing. The money they had already spent was not money to them; that was something they had been owed by the cosmos. Money was what the Jews had. And their anger was their currency, though they did not know it. And
that
currency, thought Notz, is what
I
spend for the betterment of the world. With help from the man with the cross, thank you, Lord, he added modestly.

The wide-bodied car, made for the desert sands of Arabia, drove down a winding gravel road toward what appeared to be a a careful replica of Scarlett's Tara. At the center of the vast manicured grounds was a miniature city of Jerusalem made of rose quartz, above which flew a banner that said,
The unborn are gathering!

The only thing that isn't a replica is the grass, thought the major. And we can't be too sure about that. A study could be made of the fondness of Baptists for kitsch. The Catholics revere some genuine items, at least, in addition to the kitsch.

Reverend Mullin came out to greet the major with outstretched arms, a sanctimonious smile on his face. “Welcome, old friend!”

“Never mind that shit,” thundered Notz, sweeping past the reverend into the cavernous entrance parlor, scanning the surroundings like a hawk. “Did you kidnap my niece? I warn you, Mullin, I can smell her. You have her here, and I'll be on you like scarlet fever!”

Even at his angriest, the major retained his wit. He considered it important to remain quotable. It was a mark of leadership. Of course, the reference to Tara flew right past the preacher. Mullin retained his unnatural affability and swore up and down that he had no idea where Felicity was.

“On my honor,” he said, “and on the Holy Bible.”

“Those things are of inestimable worth, Doctor, but if you deceive me, I will be very upset.” The major liked to style Mullin “Doctor,” knowing full well that the preacher was pristinely unschooled.

Maids with white aprons and bonnets were busy polishing silver in the large reception hall. Mullin led the thundering major gently through a massive cypress door into a small salon. He bade him sit before a black marble fireplace. He then busied himself with a decanter and a cigar box at a small bar. His back was tense. The major could see his muscles knot under the too-tight black silk shirt. But when Mullin turned, his hairy hands were steady and the original welcoming grin was still pasted across his wide country-boy face.