by Steve Cash
“You must release the girl,” I said. “How could she possibly interest you? She needs her mama and her mama needs her.”
He laughed his low, bitter laugh. “I do not think so. I think her mama will be busy soon with another little Giza abomination.”
My heart froze. He knew Carolina was pregnant. He knew all about it.
“Surely, you won’t, I mean, you don’t plan to—”
“No, no, mon petit, I could not care less.”
I couldn’t figure it out. What was the point? “Then, why?” I asked. “Why do you want Star?”
He laughed again. It cut through the drums, the soprano, and the sudden cry of release as the black man reached orgasm.
“The grandchild, you idiot,” the Fleur-du-Mal whispered. “I want the grandchild.”
At that moment, the red lights dimmed and a curtain began to descend from the ceiling. In a few more moments, the entire stage would be covered.
“Wait,” I pleaded.
“No, mon petit. I do not wait. That is where we differ greatly. I suggest you go off and chase something else. Perhaps Sailor will send you after the sixth Stone, or has he neglected to mention that to you?”
“What?”
“Oh, yes, it is true.”
I thought he was trying to distract me and somehow use my confusion to escape.
“There is a sixth Stone?”
“Oui. Ask Sailor where he got the star sapphire in his ring. Ask the annoying monkey, Usoa, where she got her blue diamond. Chase the truth there, Zezen, but do not chase me. That is pointless and will prove fruitless. Au revoir, mon petit.”
The curtain dropped the last few feet and covered the stage all around, followed almost immediately by seven or eight huge men who surrounded it. Lights in the back came on, and before I realized it, Ray had me by the arm and was leading me to the exit.
“It’s best we get on out of here, Z,” he said and glanced in my eyes.
We squeezed through the crowd and darted out of the door, not stopping until we were three blocks away and Ray pulled me in under the limbs of a magnolia tree.
“It was her, wasn’t it?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yes,” I said. I could hear my own voice sounding like a stranger’s. “It was her.”
By May, Carolina had indeed given birth to a boy, Solomon Jack Flowers, born the evening of April 26 and named after our Solomon and an outfielder for the Chicago Cubs, Jack Murphy, who threw out three Pirate runners at the plate that day and is the only major leaguer to have done so.
Ray and I had not mentioned seeing Star to anyone, especially Carolina and Nicholas. At that point, it would have done no good and neither of us could have found the words.
We heard nothing from Sailor or Geaxi and I needed to ask him a few simple questions, to say the least. Ray and I had discussed what the Fleur-du-Mal had told me and both of us were in the dark. I knew the Fleur-du-Mal was mad, but I wanted to know if there was madness in what he’d said. Nothing made sense.
Adding to it, coincidentally or not, on my birthday I received a gift from the Fleur-du-Mal. There was no card attached, but there was no doubt as to who had sent it. A phonograph player and a single playing disc were delivered to our rooms with the explanation that it had been left for me at the desk by a beautiful woman no one knew. I didn’t make the connection with the Fleur-du-Mal until we played the disc. It was a woman, accompanied by a piano, singing an aria, “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” from a Mozart opera. She was a soprano, the same one I’d heard singing over the drums at Emma Johnson’s. Every month after that, on the same day, we received another phonograph and another disc with the same voice singing a different aria. It was his way of letting me know he could find me anytime he wished, while I could only sit, wait, and guess. Eventually, I had to move my bed to make room for them. I told the management our family were big collectors.
We expanded our search west as far as St. Charles and east along the Gulf coast to Mobile. On July 21, 1905, the Board of Health announced that yellow fever had broken out in the city and there was a general panic and exodus from New Orleans. The disease didn’t affect us, of course, but we thought the Fleur-du-Mal would try to protect Star, now that we knew his long-range motivations. By September, we had combed every port and bayou we could find and come up empty. In New Orleans, there had been 3,402 cases of yellow fever and 452 deaths, but it was over. They had oiled and screened thousands of cisterns and salted miles of gutters to get rid of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried the disease. It was a transition point in the medical history of the United States and the last time a killer disease would sweep through a city.
In October, I kept the promise I’d made to myself to visit Captain Woodget. I crossed Lake Pontchartrain by steamboat and followed the meager directions given to me by Usoa. Outside Mandeville, after several inquiries, I was told it would be easier to find his property on water than land, taking Cottonmouth Slew to where it met the Bogue Chirito just below Covington. “You cain’t miss it, boy. It’s the damnedest thing you ever seen,” they said. I hired an old shrimper to take me there, and by noon as we rounded a bend in the channel, I knew what they meant.
There, anchored and resting between scaffolding erected on a long private dock, was an exact, scaled-down replica of the Clover, complete with sails, brass fittings, teak wood decks, and a new name, Little Clover, painted on her bow. Climbing down the mizzenmast was a white-haired, bearded man in faded trousers and undershirt, with a long-stemmed pipe hanging from his mouth. The tam-o’-shanter had been replaced by an old straw garden hat. Captain Caleb Woodget, master seaman and smuggler. It was almost a decade since I’d seen him last.
I paid the old shrimper and jumped onto the dock before he’d even come to a stop. Captain Woodget watched me walk the fifty feet or so between us. He removed his garden hat as I got close and leaned on the railing of his ship. I stopped and admired the Little Clover; the craftsmanship, detail, and obvious man-hours he’d put into her.
“I heard you’d retired,” I said with a grin I couldn’t conceal. “But I thought gardeners planted seeds, not clipper ships.”
“Holy Trident!” he shouted. “If it did not walk and talk, I would think it a ghost.”
He scrambled down a makeshift ladder and we embraced warmly. He was older, thinner, but his eyes were bright and he held my shoulders with hands as strong as any that still worked the sea.
“The last time I saw you, lad, you were spinning a good yarn to a customs agent.”
“I still do, on occasion.”
He laughed and stepped back, running his eyes up and down me. Aye,” he said. “You wee people amaze me,” and he looked around him, then up at the sky. “God in his infinite wisdom and all that, I suppose.”
I smiled and said, “I suppose.” Then I asked for a tour of his ship and he showed me everything, top to bottom, all fifty-three feet of her. He was proud, but hesitant and slightly embarrassed, as if I might think the project crazy. It was crazy; crazy and beautiful.
I asked him if he missed his old life, and just as on the first night I met him, he paused and filled his pipe before he answered.
“I miss nothing about that damn business, Z, but I miss the smells, all of them, good and bad, on the ship, in a thousand different ports and especially the smell of the open sea itself.” He lit his pipe and took two long pulls. “Do you think I’m over the top, lad? Should I be scuttled before it becomes too obvious?”
“I don’t think so, Captain, not yet.” We both laughed. “And I agree with you about the smells, except for a few places in China.”
“China?” he asked. “So, you’ve been to China, have you?”
I nodded and he put his arm around my shoulder and led me on a walk through his property and gardens, which covered several acres to the north and east toward Covington. As we walked, he told me the names of hundreds of flowers and gave me a season by season history of plantings and cutbacks. We walked by trel
lises of roses in every color and under long arbors of bougainvillea. At first, it seemed a wild and random maze, but soon I saw the overview, the grand plan of wildness within order. He told me of his love for Isabelle and how it grew along with his chaotic gardens, unplanned and unavoidable. He said when he walked with her through the disordered beauty, it was the only time she felt peace. Somehow, that made more sense than anything else.
He showed me through the mansion, which had seen better days, and around sunset he cooked a savory meal of catfish and fried potatoes. Isabelle never made an appearance, but I did hear her singing on and off from somewhere in the upper rooms.
He asked me to stay the night but I refused, telling him I still had business in the city that evening. As usual, he inquired no further and drove me to the ferry in Mandeville without my asking. I caught the last crossing of the night and promised to return. Inside, as was usual for me, I had no idea when that would be.
Ray and I were invited to St. Louis for the holidays, but we refused, giving various and vague excuses. Ray even passed on a chance to see Nova on her twelfth birthday, an event I was sure he had promised to share. We were both burning out from our complete lack of success in finding even a trace of the Fleur-du-Mal.
Owen Bramley finally moved to St. Louis from San Francisco in March 1906, just ahead of the earthquake. Ray reminded me of Nova’s prediction and Owen Bramley said his building had indeed been in the center of the collapse and fire. We both agreed Nova may have been born with an “ability” rare for Meq and Giza alike.
We continued to make our rounds in Storyville and the French Quarter. Ray established new contacts in places like Mahogany Hall and the San Jacinto club. Meanwhile, the New Orleans summer seemed to turn everything, even time itself, into a thick, slow-moving syrup.
I was tired of questions and secrets and I felt the weight of not telling things, not telling Ray the truth about Zuriaa, and not telling Carolina the truth about Star. Self-loathing was gaining on my hatred for the Fleur-du-Mal. Even Ray was showing the strain. We rarely laughed or enjoyed much of anything.
Then, in September, Owen Bramley came for a visit and quite by accident, almost as an afterthought, everything changed.
He arrived by train on the afternoon of the fifth and, after a brief meeting with the hotel management, joined us on the balcony outside our suite. The heat was stifling. He wore a three-piece suit, but within minutes had removed his jacket, tie, and vest and resembled the Owen Bramley I remembered, wiping his glasses on his white shirt and complicating the obvious.
“Much warmer here than it should be,” he said. “I’ve talked with several meteorologists and they all agree there is some sort of bulge in the Gulf — overlapping lows or something to that effect.”
“Drink some iced tea,” Ray said and he poured out a tall glass and handed it to Owen Bramley. “It seems to help.”
He drank the entire glass, asked for another, and got right down to business.
“I brought the photographs and negatives of the man who shot Baju. I would have delivered them sooner, but I wanted a friend of mine, a detective of sorts in San Francisco, to see what he could find out first. He found out two things — the man is nearly a ghost and he is not freelance; he works for a single person, a woman, although her identity is unknown.”
My pulse jumped and quickened. Maybe the Fleur-du-Mal had told the truth, maybe the man was working for Opari.
“The problem is,” he went on, “the photographs are ten years old. The damn man has disappeared.”
“Does he have a name?” I asked.
“No, not a proper one, anyway. Evidently, several years ago in Macao, he did some particularly nasty work that the locals referred to as ‘the work of the Weeping Widow.’ He is half Portuguese and half Chinese and supposedly an ex-eunuch, if that is even possible.”
I took the photographs and stared at the fuzzy image of the man with the razor-thin eyes, caught in the act of murder. I was hoping to find some reason or truth hidden somewhere in the picture, but I saw none of that. I only saw a killer.
Ray asked about Eder and Nova and Owen Bramley assured him they were doing fine. He said Eder, and especially Nova, did wonders for Carolina, keeping her spirits high and rejoicing in the new baby. Owen himself, though he masked it well in his speech, showed new lines of concern in his face around the eyes and mouth, and there were streaks of gray in his red hair. I couldn’t help but think that if I had been Giza, I would have shown the same lines and streaks.
At one point, he happened to notice the five phonograph players crowded together in my room and he asked about them. I glanced at Ray, who shrugged, and I had to tell him they were “gifts” from the Fleur-du-Mal, part of a game of psychological torture he was playing where the “gifts” served as a reminder that he could find us, but we could not find him.
Owen Bramley asked if they had come with any notes or messages of any kind and I told him about the discs and the same woman singing from different operas. Then, after we had exhausted every angle and nuance as to what they might mean, he asked if he could take one of the discs with him, “just for the hell of it,” he said. I carefully packed three of them and the next day they left with Owen Bramley and his luggage on his return to St. Louis.
Exactly two weeks later, on September 19, I was awakened by two loud raps on my door and told there was an urgent telephone call for me at the desk. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The temperature had dropped at least twenty-five degrees overnight and gusts of wind were blowing in through the open doors to the balcony. Ray was nowhere in sight. I closed the doors and dressed as quickly as possible, then ran down to the lobby and the telephone. There was static on the line, but I could hear Owen Bramley shouting at the other end.
“Z! Is that you? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “You’re breaking up, but I can hear you.”
“Good. Listen to me. I have amazing news.” He was excited. His voice was a full octave higher. “The girl’s name is Lily Marchand. Do you hear me? Lily Marchand,” he repeated.
“What? Who? What girl?”
“The girl on the disc, the girl singing the operas. Carolina even knows her, for God’s sake.”
“What? You’d better start at the beginning, Owen. I don’t understand.”
The static on the telephone line was getting worse. I glanced out of the front of the hotel where anything loose in the street was blowing away.
“I was playing the discs,” he said. “I was alone in Carolina’s office, Georgia’s room she calls it, and Scott Joplin burst in shouting, ‘I know that voice! I know that girl!’ He was visiting Carolina, you see, and just happened to be there, he just happened to hear it, Z. Well, of course, I said, ‘Who is it?’ and he said, ‘That’s Lily, Lily Marchand. She used to work for Carolina and disappeared right before the World’s Fair. I been lookin’ for her for two years!’ I asked him if he knew where she lived and he said he had only heard it was somewhere around New Orleans, but, and this is why I called, Z, this could be a break, he said a woman named Willie Piazza had known the family for years and might know how to find her. Do you know of this woman, Z, do you know Willie Piazza?”
“Yes,” I shouted. The line was almost all static.
“Find her,” he yelled back. “Find her and you might find—” The line went dead and Ray burst through the front door of the hotel, out of breath, which I’d never seen him, and soaking wet. Outside, sheets of rain were blowing sideways.
“Damn, Z, I missed this one,” he said and shook the water off his bowler. “I didn’t see it, feel it, nothin’!”
“Missed what?”
“The hurricane,” he said. “And she’s comin’ right now.”
The manager of the St. Louis Hotel was standing nearby and overheard. He turned to Ray.
“Did you say hurricane, son?”
“That’s right, sir,” Ray answered. And she’s a big one — still ain’t hit landfall, but she will soon and i
f I was you, I’d get all them shutters shut around this place.”
The manager glanced out of the window, then back at Ray. Ray held his gaze, stone-faced, and even though he wasn’t sure why, the man did as the “Weatherman” requested, clapping his hands and scrambling the staff to close the shutters and prepare for a hurricane.
I grabbed Ray by the arm and told him, hurricane or not, we had to find Willie Piazza now. Without asking me why, he slapped on his bowler and said, “Come on.”
We made our way to Storyville as best we could, corner to corner, street to street. The wind was fierce, blowing in gusts of seventy to eighty miles an hour, but it was the rain that caused the most havoc and danger. I had never seen so much rain fall so hard. Whole streets turned into rivers within minutes. Abandoned carts and automobiles were picked up and washed into buildings, causing balconies to tumble, lampposts to splinter, and windows to crash and break into shards, which were swept away in the water like flashing knives.
Somehow, we found Willie. She was hanging on to what was left of her double front doors, standing in two feet of swirling water and debris, and yelling at three men in two different languages. The men were bound together by a long rope that was anchored to the main building. All three were trying to save Willie’s big sign, which had toppled from the roof to the street and was being sucked into the rushing waters. They were fighting a losing battle.
When we got close enough, I tried to get her attention. “Willie!” I shouted. “Willie, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Not now, honey,” she shouted back. “We got a world of trouble here.”
I kept on. I was only a few feet from her, but I still had to yell. “Do you know Lily Marchand?” I asked. “Please, tell me if you do, I’ve got to find her.”
“Not now, honey,” she said again. “I’ve got to save that sign, coûte que coûte.”
“Just tell me if you know her, that’s all.”