by Steve Cash
Ray was Ray and his presence felt good. He’d found a spot on the countertop instead of a chair and sat there with one leg pulled up against his chest and one leg dangling, swinging back and forth. He was smiling, winking at me, and making faces at Nova, who ignored him. Domesticity had only changed one thing that I could see; instead of wearing his bowler, he was twirling it on his finger. Watching him, I made a decision. I decided not to tell him about the “Pearl,” about Zuriaa. I don’t know why, maybe I thought I had to know more, more of the truth, before I told him. I have never known why we sometimes decide on behalf of the ones we love what they should and should not know. It is a mistake. In the end, we are all found out. I glanced at Nova and marveled. It was apparent she had a quick intelligence and an innate capacity to focus and concentrate, read between the lines of the moment. She was listening to Owen Bramley, but I could tell she was more aware of Carolina, and even me, as I watched and thought about her. Owen Bramley was just finishing his long tale. “So in the end,” he said, “even with the additions, the solution lay in packaging, not logistics.” I had no idea what he was referring to, but then he suddenly changed the subject and said, “By the way, Carolina, where is Li? And where is Star? For God’s sake, I have only seen her in photographs.”
Carolina looked at Nicholas, taking his hand, then she looked at me, wondering what to say. It was impossible to keep it hidden any longer.
“The Fleur-du-Mal kidnapped her,” I said. Eder let out a small gasp and glanced at Ray, who returned her look and dropped his smile, confirming something between them. Even Carolina looked a little stunned. She had never heard me refer to him by name. I went on, “I don’t know why he has taken her, but I have an idea. I am going to New Orleans tomorrow. That is his home, of sorts, and that is where I will find her. and him. Li has disappeared.”
Owen Bramley stopped pacing. “Who in the hell is the Fleur-du-Mal?” he asked.
I looked at Eder first, then Nova, then Ray. He shrugged his shoulders. “You got the stage, Z, tell the man,” and he waved his bowler in front of him as an introduction. I glanced again at Eder and she nodded her head slowly. This was reckless, maybe even dangerous to her. She had never before shared information like this with the Giza. To her, we were still Meq, even the worst of us, and our safety had always been our silence.
“He is. one of us,” I said. “He is one of our kind, but he is also different. He is supposedly an assassin by trade and has been for a very long time. He might, he probably does, have a vendetta against me. All I know is, he has Star, he’s responsible for Solomon’s death, he killed Carolina’s sister and Mrs. Bennings”—and I paused, looked at Eder and Nova, thinking of Baju—“and he may have been behind some other things. I don’t know.” Eder gave me a quizzical look.
Owen Bramley took his glasses off, wiping them furiously and looking back and forth between Carolina, Nicholas, and me. “Did Solomon know this Fleur-du-Mal?” he asked.
I looked at him. Until then, I hadn’t thought about it. “No, why?” I asked.
“Because if he had, this would make more sense. But it does not, it does not make a damn bit of sense. Why haven’t you brought in the police on this one?”
“You know better than that, Owen.”
“But this is Carolina and Nicholas’s daughter! For Christ’s sake, Z, this is not Vancouver!” Then he stopped as if he’d been shot or had shot himself. His freckles all merged into one red blotch and he looked at Eder in panic. “Eder,” he said, “I’m sorry, I never meant—”
“It is all right, Owen. I know what you meant,” Eder said evenly.
“Vancouver?” Carolina asked. “What’s Vancouver?”
“That’s where my papa was killed,” Nova said and all eyes in the room looked to her, even Ciela’s. Nova looked back, one by one, into each and every face. The only sound I could hear was the hiss of a gas jet from the stove behind Ciela. In those few, strange, silent seconds, something happened to everyone in the room. Through the innocence and wisdom of Nova’s eyes, we all drank from a common pool, a quiet place of loss and restoration, and realized one by one a common trust and hope. Without having to say a word between us, we became what Eder said had only been legend — a family — an extended family of Giza and Meq. Not a family formed through time, geography, and circumstances, as we had with Kepa, but a family of strangers, formed in a few moments with love and blind trust.
Nicholas stood and cleared his throat. He put his hand on Carolina’s shoulder and spoke to Eder. “I don’t know if you were planning on staying in St. Louis or not, but if you are, then Carolina and I wouldn’t have you stay anywhere but here. You, Nova, Ray, and you too, Owen, if you have to,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at Owen or even Eder, he was looking down at Carolina. “We’re going to have another baby in the spring. I won’t have our baby being born in some big, empty house. No, ma’am, I won’t have it.”
Carolina looked up at him and smiled. “I agree,” she said.
Ray jumped down from the counter and pulled a chair up next to mine. Owen Bramley sat down too, next to Nicholas. “How do we find Star?” he said. “What can I do?”
Ray said, “Get me and Z to New Orleans.” Before I could say or do anything, he added, “You’re gonna need me, Z. It’s my town.”
So we sat at the long table making a plan and setting up a network of communication. Owen Bramley assured me I would have no problems traveling to New Orleans now or at any time in the future. And I could stay anyplace I chose. Solomon had left me a quarter of his estate and it was so well invested and diversified, he said I would only get richer. The other three-quarters had been willed equally to Owen himself, Carolina, and Star. “A bank account will be set up for you in New Orleans in a matter of hours,” he said, “and there is no need to worry about your youthful countenance. Not with this much money.”
I asked him if he still had the name and address of the French photographer on board the ship in Vancouver. He said he probably did, he’d have to look, and asked what that had to do with finding Star. I told him I wasn’t sure, maybe nothing, and I felt Ray watching me, wondering the same thing.
Then I asked if there had been any word from China and Owen Bramley said he’d received one telegram with one line from Sailor, which he couldn’t figure out at the time, but it said, “Have lost Zianno — gone searching.”
Finally, after a long day and night, Carolina called a halt to the gathering, saying she was exhausted, mentally, physically, and spiritually. Nicholas put his arm around her waist and asked Ciela to show everyone to their rooms. Carolina said, “Don’t leave before I say good-bye, Z.” I watched her walking away and I said, “We’ll find her. I promise.”
But there were no good-byes. I sneaked into Ray’s room at dawn and woke him up with my hand over his mouth. I whispered, “Let’s go,” and within minutes we were out of the door and standing under the stone arch in the driveway, shivering. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees and it had begun to rain again. The seasons were changing. Ray pulled his bowler down low over his eyes. All he said was, “Damn, Z.”
I noticed two huge wooden crates stacked under the arch, side by side. As we passed them, I asked, “Yours?”
“Don’t ask,” he said. So I didn’t.
Our train snaked its way down through Missouri and the eastern edge of the ancient Ozark Mountains. The rain stayed with us the whole trip and once, during a stop in the lowlands of Arkansas, I asked Ray if he could tell how long it would last.
“No, Z. I got no idea.”
“But you can tell when it’s coming, you can ‘listen’ for it, right?”
“No, it don’t work like that, either.”
“Well, how do you know then, what makes it happen?”
“I don’t know. I never have. I just sorta get a vision. I see the whole thing at once and I know when and where it’s going to change. I sorta see the mind of the storm, I guess. But I can’t tell where it’s going after where I see it. I only k
now what I know close-up, like somebody’s face right up against you. You see them real good, but you can’t see anything else around them.”
“And you can’t do it on purpose? You can’t will yourself to see something?”
“No, I don’t have nothing to do with that.”
I looked at him a long time while both of us stood there on the end of the platform like two kids, two brothers or cousins, watching the rain and waiting, waiting for something.
“Do you ever think it’s a curse?” I asked him. “Not just being the ‘Weatherman,’ but the whole thing, being Meq, I mean.”
“No, I try not to think about it like that.”
I put my hands in my pockets and turned to look at the flat cotton fields surrounding the station. I felt the Stone that I still carried there, cold and silent. It never gave me a reason or an answer. “I wish I felt about us the way Sailor or Geaxi does,” I said.
“You sure you want to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel these days.”
He bent down and picked up a penny from the platform in front of him. He turned it over in his hand, then tossed it side-arm through the rain somewhere deep into the cotton field. “You ain’t lived as long as they have,” he said. “Give yourself another hundred years and then ask yourself how you feel.”
When we boarded the train and were back in our seats, he turned to me and said, “By the way, are you gonna tell me or not?”
“Tell you what?”
“Did you find her? Did you find Opari?”
“Yes and no.”
“Yes and no?” He paused, looking at me with streetwise eyes that had seen every kind of bluff and con there was. He took his bowler off and adjusted what was left of the brim, then set it on the seat next to him. I watched him, then turned and looked out of the window at the flat land and flimsy shacks that reminded me of ones I’d seen up and down the Yangtze. I turned back and told him everything, the whole story, and I told him as rapidly as I could, so that when I left out the part about Zuriaa, I hoped he hadn’t noticed. And I told him about the “Honeycircle” and everything that happened there. And then I told him that I was going to kill the Fleur-du-Mal as soon as we found Star.
Ray picked up his bowler again and examined it carefully, looking for any imperfections, of which there were many, and then slowly set it on his head at just the right angle. He looked straight at me with clear green eyes. “Well, Z,” he said. “It seems like that son of a Carthaginian’s got it comin’.”
I almost laughed out loud. “Where did you hear that phrase?” I asked him.
He looked back with a blank expression, then we both sniggered and started to laugh together, loud and long enough to draw attention from the other passengers. “I heard Kepa say it,” he finally answered. “I thought it kinda rolled off the tongue.”
I laughed again and then asked him about Kepa, Miren, Pello, and the others. He said Kepa was still as strong as barbed wire, but he and Pello were worried about the future of the Basque way of life in the territory. More and more, the sheepmen were being forced off free-range land. They had formed mutual aid societies in Boise and other places, but Kepa was not optimistic. I asked him if that had anything to do with him bringing Eder and Nova to St. Louis and he said no, that had been Eder’s idea. Nova would begin the Itxaron the following year and Eder wanted her to know more about the world than just the high desert and the womb of protection that Kepa and his Basque tribe provided. When Ray mentioned Nova, I noticed his concern for her was as great as Eder’s, maybe greater, but he agreed that she should live among the Giza and learn their ways. He said he thought Nova could “see things,” but he didn’t explain it further and I didn’t ask. I did ask if Eder had told him anything of Unai and Usoa, since he had never met them and it was they who we would seek first in New Orleans. He said Eder thought the Wait had taken its toll on them. They had been together so long, she said their only thoughts were for each other.
I looked out of the window of the train and tried not to think of what that meant. Thoughts only of each other, only of your beloved. I could not let myself think that way, not if I wanted to find Star. I looked at the live oaks and cypresses, some thick with moss, and the tangle of rotted logs and brush beyond. We were approaching New Orleans from the west, skirting the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. Suddenly the image of Captain Woodget came to mind and I remembered that Usoa had said he was living there, somewhere across the lake. I promised myself to try to find him, if and when I could.
We wound through the outskirts and finally stepped off the train well after midnight. Ray had not been to his “town” in over forty years and New Orleans, in the fall of 1904, was no longer anybody’s “town.” It was a wide-open and well-lit city with an international port and a legalized red-light district. However, it didn’t take Ray long to adapt. Within twenty minutes of me telling him I knew only that Unai and Usoa lived somewhere near the Vieux Carré, in a house owned by a man named Antoine Boutrain, we were in the French Quarter and he was asking all the right questions in just the right way, streetwise and elusive, vague and straight to the point. He was a master at it and within another twenty minutes we had a description and an address.
The house was less than two miles away on a street just off St. Charles Avenue. The street was dark and claustrophobic with heavy, overhanging limbs on both sides. “Orange trees,” Ray said. “The Creoles loved ’em.” The house itself was stuccoed brick and set back from the street. It had a wide front door and four sets of long, rectangular windows, floor to ceiling. There was a single gas lamp burning faintly by the front door and in the pale light I could see the house had once been painted yellow, but the bricks were now chipped and weatherworn and the color was mostly a memory. Ray said, “Your move.”
I took a step toward the house and stopped. I was certain I heard singing. I looked at Ray and could tell he had heard nothing. I listened harder and even though there was melody, the singing wasn’t really singing, it was more like breathing. Then it stopped abruptly.
I nodded to Ray and he followed me along a brick path around the house and through a trellised arbor of bougainvillea to an open courtyard. In the middle there was a circular, tiled fountain and pond and lying near it, either unconscious or dead, was the woman Isabelle.
“What the. ” Ray said and started toward her.
“She prefers to fall asleep and wake up in the same place, monsieur.” It was Usoa and she appeared out of the blackness like a ghost. “Most often, that place is her own boudoir, but other times, as is now the case, she finds somewhere else to run from her dreams. We always make sure she is safe and wait for her to wake.”
She turned to me and smiled. From behind me, a shadow moved and another voice said, “Bonsoir, Zianno. Again, you surprise us.”
Unai walked over to Usoa silent and barefoot. Indeed, they were both barefoot and wearing long, beaded tunics made of muslin, which looked to be simple nightshirts, but I knew they were more than that and probably from somewhere I’d never been. Usoa reached into a pocket hidden in the folds of her tunic and then took Ray’s hand, placing the traditional cube of salt in his palm. “Egibizirik bilatu,” she said.
Ray glanced at me, then mumbled, “Uh. well. ”
“You are Ray Ytuarte,” Usoa said softly. “We have heard of you through Eder and we welcome you. I am Usoa Ijitu—”
“And I am Unai Txori,” Unai finished.
I noticed they introduced themselves informally. It was unusual for old ones and their whole demeanor seemed more relaxed. Their names together meant “Gypsy/Bird” and standing there barefoot in muslin tunics they seemed just that.
Ray glanced again at Isabelle, who was snoring peacefully on the ground. Usoa smiled at him. “Damn,” he said.
She turned and took Unai’s hand in hers, then lifted it to her lips and held it there, nodding once.
“We have something to tell you,” Unai said. “You will be the first to know.”
“What is that?” I asked.
He paused for only a moment, then said, “We have decided to cross in the Zeharkatu. For eleven hundred years, we have waited and soon the Wait shall end. Next year, in Spain, there will be a Bitxileiho. It is near our home, our ancestral home, and we will use the circumstances to cross. It is right. It is time.”
My mind raced. I had question after question, but I only asked the first one. “Why now?”
Unai laughed and Usoa kept his hand tight against her lips. He said, “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.” Usoa looked up and translated. “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”
He turned her head slightly and kissed her on the lips. I saw the blue diamond in her ear flash in the low light as she turned. Another question I had was being answered. I was envious of their openness and tenderness but realized those very things had made them lose their vigilance. Eder was right — their only thoughts were for each other. They had not lied to me or given me any false indications. They had simply been fooled.
“What about the Fleur-du-Mal?” I asked.
“What about him?” Unai answered. “We are weary of the Fleur-du-Mal, as were Yaldi and Xamurra. He has ’nostalgie de la boue,’ a homesickness for the gutter. We are tired of watching. Besides, you say you have found Opari. The Fleur-du-Mal is irrelevant and obsolete.”
“What if he is stealing children?”
Usoa let go of Unai’s hand and took a step toward me. “He has stolen children before,” she said. “You know that, so why do you ask, Zianno?”
“What if he stole Carolina’s daughter?”
She was standing directly in front of me. She reached up and touched my cheek with her hand. “This is why you come, is it not? This is what has happened?”
I hesitated. I saw so many things in her eyes at once. She looked back at Unai and I followed her. I saw the same things in him. They had survived so long, living with the seed of a powerful, rare, and almost supernatural love, keeping it hidden and suppressed, waiting for the time to let it germinate and live, and then at that moment that same love somehow betrayed them and made them weak, vulnerable. Love, guilt, risk, consequence.