The Meq (36 page)

Suddenly there was a loud crash and Captain Woodget was shouting, “Holy Trident and dammit to hell!”

Ray and I ran down the hall, toward the light. We pushed through the door and Captain Woodget was standing over a wine decanter he’d knocked off a long wooden table, a table similar to Carolina’s.

He’d stumbled into it when he saw the man and woman sitting at the table, across from each other, their faces flat against the wood, their arms and hands splayed out on either side. Their throats had been slit. The table was covered in blood and pools of it swirled at their feet. The man’s shirt had been ripped open, as had the woman’s blouse, and both their backs were covered with a bloody rose, carved into the skin with the point of a stiletto.

I knew it was Lily Marchand and most likely her brother, Narciso. I looked up and Ray’s face was frozen with disgust and disbelief. I remembered that neither of us had seen the Fleur-du-Mal’s handiwork and unmistakable signature since Georgia and Mrs. Bennings.

“We missed him,” I said. “He must have known. He must have known we were coming.”

“You better come down here, lad,” the captain said. He had regained his balance and was standing at the other end of the table. “There’s another one—a Chinaman.”

“A Chinaman?” I bolted for the end of the table and looked down to see what the captain had found. I expected to see “Razor Eyes.” I saw Li instead.

He wasn’t stripped and carved up like the others. He’d been stabbed just below the heart and his throat was partially slit. There was a green ribbon stuffed in his mouth. I had no idea where he’d been or how he had got to where he was. We’d never seen a trace of him the whole time we were in New Orleans.

Ray reached down and pulled the green ribbon out of his mouth, and as he did Li opened his eyes and saw me. He was alive. I knelt down and he tried to grab my leg and missed. He made a raspy, coughing sound and then he spoke directly to me.

“She . . . go . . . ma . . . lee”

It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me and the last. His mouth went slack and his eyes dulled.

I leaned over to close his eyelids and Ray said, “Who’s Molly?” That triggered something in my memory, something I’d learned about the Fleur-du-Mal from Unai and Usoa.

“It’s not a who,” I said. “It’s a where. The Fleur-du-Mal is taking Star to Mali—the country.” I looked out of the window at the never-ending rain. The wind rattled the window in its casing. “How?” I said, almost to myself. “How did he know?” Ray was wrapping the green ribbon, first around one finger, then around another. His expression was black and lost, like mine. “We’ll never catch him now,” I whispered.

Captain Woodget knelt down beside me and ran a fingertip through Li’s blood, which was spreading on the floor. He looked at me. “This blood is fresh, Z,” he said, then he winked at me.

At first, I didn’t get his meaning. Of course it was fresh, I thought, Li had just died. Then it hit me.

“Captain,” I said. “Do you recall the trawler we passed in the channel?”

“Aye, lad, and going at a fair rate of speed, not minding the weather.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Can you catch her?”

“If we can make it to Pontchartrain and she’s not yet all the way across, I know I can. I can play this breeze in open water. The trawler won’t be able to.” He gave me another wink.

I insisted we take Li with us. “I don’t want to remember him here . . . like this.” Ray and the captain nodded in agreement.

The three of us carried Li’s body to the
Little Clover.
The only place we could secure him was on a bench in the stern, in an upright position, tied to the railing. Whatever obsessions had driven him to this end were at rest now. He resembled Buddha at the center of the storm, sleeping and dreaming.

We set out for Lake Pontchartrain. It was late in the day and we were losing what little light we had. Without paying heed to channels, currents, or traffic, the captain steered us on a course that brought us critically close to one bank, then another. The rain was dense and constant. The trawler was nowhere in sight.

Then, as we spilled into Lake Pontchartrain, the captain caught the wind and made a good line almost directly for New Orleans. He guessed we were doing twenty to twenty-five knots. The
Little Clover
was well made, but I could feel and hear the strain on her hull.

The rain and fading light obscured the horizon by the minute. I couldn’t tell if we were gaining on the trawler. I had Ray tie a rope to me and I climbed up the mizzenmast, hoping to use my “ability” to listen for the trawler. Ray helped the captain hold the wheel and fight to keep the line. The rain felt like tiny knives and the wind whipped my canvas slicker like a handkerchief. I heard a foghorn and turned, but it was too far in the distance, too far west.

Then slowly, like a pulse or heartbeat, I heard the steady chug-chug of a steam engine, plowing through the wind and water. We were close, closer than I thought. I yelled to the captain, “Port, ten degrees!”

He managed the slight change in direction and we gained even more speed. Suddenly I could see the trawler. It was a faint black dot, bobbing on the horizon. Smoke poured out of the smokestack. It was no more than a mile ahead of us.

We closed the gap. A thousand yards . . . five hundred . . . one hundred. Then, just as I thought I saw a figure on board the trawler, I heard a ripping sound. Our foresail was shredding and the ship jolted from side to side. I heard a crack, followed by another crack, louder and longer. The
Little Clover
was coming apart.

Ray pulled the captain out of the way just before the mainsail fell on them. I tried to slide down to the deck and was thrown overboard as the ship actually snapped in the middle. The waves tore at the opening, and piece by piece, the
Little Clover
disintegrated.

The rope tied around me was still attached to a section of the mizzenmast and I used it as a raft while I looked for Ray and Captain Woodget. I could see the trawler steaming away and a single figure on deck, staring back. I could even hear him. He had a white smile and a familiar, bitter laugh.

I found Ray holding on to Captain Woodget, who was unconscious. He was struggling to reach something with his free hand and barely staying afloat. I helped him with the captain and he finally snatched what he was after—his bowler.

The last thing I saw of the
Little Clover
was a section of the stern, a bench with Li still strapped to it. Within minutes, he disappeared into Lake Pontchartrain and it seemed like an appropriate grave. He had paid his mysterious debt to Solomon in full. The rest, the running tab he kept inside himself, was anybody’s guess.

Three days later, we were on the balcony of the St. Louis Hotel, waiting for the weather to finally break. Captain Woodget was in hospital recovering from a collapsed lung and exposure. We swam four miles to shore that night, through rain and debris, and the experience took its toll on the captain.

I talked to Owen Bramley several times and told him what I could, but no matter how I worded it, the story had the same conclusion. I asked him to come to New Orleans and check on Captain Woodget and make sure he had the money to rebuild the
Little Clover
again.

I informed him that Ray and I had booked passage to Africa. Everything else was unknown.

The hurricane of 1906 lasted five days and killed three hundred and fifty people in Louisiana and Mississippi. The assistant to the mayor of New Orleans said in a public statement that his city owed a great debt to the unfortunate of the city of Galveston, which had lost so many lives to the hurricane of 1900. “If all those folks hadn’t died,” he said, “we wouldn’t have learned what we learned and then we would have had more people die last week.”

I have always wondered if he knew what he was saying.

12

GEZUR

(LIE)

Have you played the game? The game where all sit in a circle and you whisper something to the one sitting next to you, who whispers it to the next, and so on, until it has made the round of the circle and comes back to you—a new whisper, a new “truth,” a tale that, somehow in the transfer, evolves and mutates into something that bears no resemblance to the original. How can this be? Is it willful, accidental, inevitable? Can truth be so easily turned, folded, pierced, twisted, and tossed like a toy from one to another?

If played honestly, the game is always good for a laugh. Truth has many masks. A lie, only one.

R ay and I left New Orleans with no fanfare or ritual. We were both in it now, both deep in the obsession. Ray no longer thought of New Orleans as “his town,” or anyplace else. For us, it was just another stop, another place on the map. We were disappointed, but not discouraged. We were still in it, still on the Fleur-du-Mal like dogs. We had only momentarily lost his scent. The problem was with the word “momentarily.” A moment for us could equal weeks, months, even years in the lives of Carolina, Nicholas, and Star. Ray knew this as well as I and even though, if I was honest, I had to admit we were following a hunch at best, we both felt the urgency of finding Star, if she was ever going to know her parents or have a chance at a normal life.

My hunch was really a deduction with a leap of faith at the end. Li told me Star had gone to Mali and the Fleur-du-Mal himself had told me he wanted “the grandchild.” In his way, he had hinted at her future education and training, as sick as it was. Usoa had also mentioned Mali and the Fleur-du-Mal’s centuries-old fascination with it, for reasons never known to the Meq. I knew Star could not have a child for several years. I knew the Fleur-du-Mal was unpredictable, but something told me he would not have the patience to wait for that event. He would instead keep her somewhere remote with someone he trusted, while he followed his other pursuits and interests. This was my hunch. The leap of faith was that we would find the somewhere and someone in Mali, somehow.

Our ship sailed just before sunset on the evening of October 7. It wasn’t much of a sunset. The light was low and flat under a cloud cover and it spread and faded into darkness without inspiration. Ray and I stood by the railing and watched in silence. There was nothing to say. We were both in it, I knew that, but still I couldn’t help feeling guilty for bringing him into it. Earlier in the day, I had read a story in the sports pages about Ty Cobb and his teammate, Ed Siever. The day before, during a game, Ed Siever had cursed Ty Cobb for not hustling in the field and they got into a fight. Cobb knocked him down and kicked him in the head. Ray was more than a teammate to me and he would never curse me for not hustling, but standing there by him in the fading light, feeling his blind trust and determination, I felt just like the honorable Ty Cobb.

Neither of us knew much about where we were going. In all my time at sea, we had rarely dropped anchor, and then never for very long, anywhere off West Africa. The ancient kingdom of Mali was a complete mystery. I wasn’t even sure of the languages we would encounter, let alone the dangers.

Ray had scoured the streets in the days before our departure trying to find connections, names, and places of anyone we could use. He came up with nothing. The only time he had heard Mali or any other country in West Africa mentioned was in a tale told by a grandchild or great-grandchild of a slave. Every connection and transaction between New Orleans and West Africa had at some point, in some way, involved slavery. Ours was no different. She was only one child, and white, but she was a slave. Even our route would be close to the routes of the old slave ships; New Orleans—Havana—Puerto Rico—Dakar. The irony was complete when we changed ships in Puerto Rico and boarded a small passenger steamship named the
Atalanta
. The name was that of a maiden in Greek mythology who challenged and defeated all of her suitors in footraces until she was tricked by Hippomenes and stopped to pick up the three golden apples he had dropped along the course. It was also the name of a Spanish slave ship that had sailed into Havana in 1821 with 570 slaves still alive. The deaths at sea had been uncountable.

We were sailing east, toward Africa. It was late 1906 and the evil of slavery had long been abolished and we were going back, back to where it had begun. Times had changed, but Ray and I knew evil had not.

I stood by the railing and looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Ray was strong. What he didn’t know, he learned fast, and what he couldn’t change, he accepted—to a point. In our preparations for leaving, the only thing he sought for protection was a talisman, a good luck charm. A woman he knew, a voodoo priestess, gave him a collection of small bones, “directions for your dreams,” she called them. For my part, I had exchanged bank drafts for brand-new double eagle gold pieces and assorted small gems. Enough, I hoped, to buy protection, false identities, bribes, tolls, whatever it took to survive and locate Star. Ray had found two money belts to carry the gold and gems. They had been difficult to find because they had to be small enough for us to wear, yet sturdy and secure. When I noticed Ray stuffing one of the pockets on his belt with the bones, I asked him if he didn’t think that space should be used for gold rather than bones.

“Damn, Z,” he said. “It’s as clear as a tear, ain’t it? We can get more money, but I don’t want anybody stealin’ our luck.”

On the Atlantic crossing, I watched Ray enjoy the open ocean almost as much as he had the mountains. He gained his sea legs early and we ignored the Meq custom of staying out of sight and wandered the decks at will, watching the sea spray by day and the star spray by night. Whenever asked, Ray was always willing to talk and tell our story, which got longer and further from the truth with each telling. His white lies changed color depending on the interest of the listener. I don’t remember exactly how far he went with it, but his original story was that we were cousins from New Orleans; Spanish Catholics being sent by our parents to visit our dying grandfather in the old country. He was good at it and I could see that it gave Ray a wicked, but harmless, thrill to spin his tales for the Giza, giving them what they thought they wanted, just enough to quell their curiosity and spark their interest at the same time. In two days, half the passengers had become our adoptive “travel” parents. We were covered in the kindness of strangers.