Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  It was after nine when they began their odyssey, and, though the streets between Royal and Rampart were by no means deserted, Anna was on alert. As one resident had put it, in New Orleans you were never more than two streets from trouble. It was a violent city, the young men running wild with guns and poverty and deep-seated anger. Even knowing this, it was hard to maintain her edge. The somnolent hum of the Crescent City, people talking quietly on their front stoops, smoking cigarettes, walking dogs, the murmur of a breeze off the river whispering in the palm fronds, belied the danger.

  Geneva led Anna to the piano teachers' homes, and they stood on the sidewalk in the drift of streetlights sniffing and listening. The smell of flowers existed, but, for the most part, it was only a whisper behind the more insistent odors of cooking, garbage, and automobile exhaust. Anna serving as guide dog for the night, Sammy padded complacently along at heel and selfishly kept his fabulous dog nose to himself, his main interest being in the news other dogs had left on fire hydrants and light poles.

  Street by street and smell by smell, they left the residential part of the Quarter behind and were nearing Iberville and Rampart streets on the northwest corner. Shotgun houses had given way to industrial buildings with bricked-in blind windows, gaping parking maws, and dark doorways. On the far side of Rampart was one of the city's many subsidized housing developments, acres of three- and four-story brick buildings around open areas that, one supposed, were intended to be green spaces but had the stomped and neglected appearance of fairgrounds after the carnival has moved on. The apartments, built in the thirties and forties and fifties, housed generations of people with little hope for better and a lot of fear of losing what they had.

  Two streets from trouble.

  Slouching and pushing down the sidewalk from the direction of the projects was a group of boys in their teens. None was old enough to buy cigarettes, but that didn't make them any less deadly. All wore the uniform of the streets: a T-shirt so big it came nearly to the knees, shorts so baggy the crotch was at about a level with the hem of the shirt, and oversized sneakers with the tongues hanging out. The horseplay was limited to what could be done one-armed. Each had a hand that was apparently dedicated solely to keeping the trousers from falling around the ankles.

  The noisy lads might be on their way to late, late choir practice, or to help a friend in need, but still Anna was thinking about turning around and calling it a night. Two middle-aged women, one blind and one too small to scare anybody, might be a greater temptation than nocturnal predators could resist, might even be sufficiently attractive to make, as she'd once heard an apologist claim, good boys go bad.

  "Geneva," she said, laying a hand on her friend's arm.

  "Wait," Geneva said and tilted her head back as if listening or remembering or, maybe, just about to sneeze. "Where're we at exactly?"

  Anna told her.

  "Okay, this is it. This was where the opera singer had a studio. Third floor. Piano. Nilla was her name. Nilla something. Nobody could ever remember because she was so white everybody called her Nilla Wafer, but she had a big black voice. I think she went with an opera company out west. That was a year or so ago."

  "The sound of scales sung loud. Good. That's one out of three of our clues. I'm not seeing a dry cleaner's--or whatever might be the pssssst-chunk part of our equation--and we're not exactly in a big flower-growing neighborhood," Anna said, her hand still on Geneva's arm. "Diesel, more like. Let's head back."

  The boys had seen them and were focusing the way a pack of dogs will when a rabbit is scented but has not yet broken cover. They hadn't noticed, then ignored, the way most kids will when crossing paths with adults. They'd stopped shoving and closed ranks.

  Had she been on her own, Anna would have taken to her heels and run for less isolated environs. If these were nice boys, out for a night ramble, they could have their fun laughing at her and she could have her fun not having to hear most of it. As it was, running wasn't an option. She glanced at her watch. It was after eleven. Was she hoping the violence hour had not yet begun?

  "What's happening?" Geneva whispered sharply.

  "Boys," Anna said succinctly. "Curb," she added as, taking Geneva's arm, she steered her into the street and toward the far sidewalk. Perhaps the boys would be happy with this evidence of their power; maybe they'd be too lazy to bother crossing. "Sammy isn't a Green Beret attack dog by any chance, is he?"

  "Sammy is 4-F due to an amiable disposition," Geneva said. There was still most of a short New Orleans block between them and the boys. "They're crossing," Geneva said.

  Anna glanced up. She'd been avoiding eye contact the same way she would with a wild animal or a paranoid schizophrenic. Eye contact was an act of aggression under certain circumstances. The boys were crossing. They looked older and bigger than when she'd first noticed them. The rodeo clown clothes no longer looked as funny as they had.

  Gangs were not unknown to Anna. In New York they were white and Puerto Rican and black; in Texas, white and Mexican; in small towns, redneck white boys and whoever they found to fight. What she didn't know was how to stop the momentum of a gang event in the making. These kids might be mean to the bone, but she guessed they were more bored and drunk, egging each other on and out to have a little "fun." What defused a group who thought tormenting or robbing or killing was "fun"?

  As the boys reached the sidewalk, they made sure they took the full width of it. To miss them, Anna and Geneva would have to step back into the street. They didn't. Given that showing humility--fear--in ceding the sidewalk hadn't appeased them the first time, there was no reason for Anna to think it would the second.

  Stopping, Geneva at her side, Anna waited, letting the boys close the distance. A faint click, then a snicking sound, made her glance down. Geneva had taken the leash from Sammy's collar, then pulled her segmented and folded white cane from some pocket in her skirts and flicked it into a narrow staff. Not much striking power, but the stings could be diverting.

  Leaving her the cane, Anna took the leash with its metal clasp from Geneva's hand and, surreptitiously wrapping the strap around her knuckles, stepped a bit away from her friend.

  "Good evening, gentlemen," she said when the boys were half a dozen yards away. "Geneva and I were hoping you could help us. Do you know your way around the French Quarter?" She smiled as if she truly believed they'd come to earn their merit badges by helping a couple of little old ladies back across the street.

  "You ladies looking for something special?" the boy marginally in the lead asked. He'd taken an unlit cigarette from behind his left ear and, holding it between thumb and forefinger, was stroking the length of it in an unsubtle gesture.

  "Yes," Anna gushed. "Friends of our said one of the city's best restaurants was on this street, but, gosh, if it is we sure didn't see it. It's called Grandma's." Why that name popped off her tongue, Anna wasn't sure. Possibly because the kids looked like big bad wolves and she was feeling Red Ridinghoodish.

  For a moment, she thought they were going to play the game, at least for a while. Then a shorter boy elbowed the cigarette stroker to one side. "What you got in the backpack, bitch?" He snaked an arm out to try to grab hold of the daypack Anna carried.

  "Okay, then," Anna said flatly. "I guess we aren't going to be friends. What will it take to get you to leave us alone?"

  "Oooooh," one of the wingmen crooned. "Tough mama! Maybe we got to tenderize your ass 'fore you go home to the hubby. Fact he prob'ly be thankin' us for breaking that broomstick you got up your butt."

  So much for civilized negotiations. Her cell phone was in the daypack. She doubted she could dig it out and dial 911 before she was stopped, so she didn't try. Anna sensed Geneva tensing up. The singer hadn't survived childhood trauma and gotten to where she was by backing down or begging. Even Sammy came up from his obedient sitting position and lowered his head as if he were trying to remember where it was best to bite people he didn't like.

  They were going to fight: a small
middle-aged ranger, a blind woman, and an amiable dog, against five streetwise thugs coming into the strength of men. They would lose, of course, but now wasn't the time to think about that.

  Headlights raked the seven of them, and Anna threw her arm across her eyes to keep from being blinded. A cab pulled to the curb under a streetlight fifty feet beyond the boys. A door opened, and a man climbed out.

  "Hey!" Anna shouted, waving both arms. "Cabbie!" Sidestepping into the street, she kept waving. The cab's IN SERVICE light blinked out, and the car picked up speed. "Hey!" she yelled again, stepping farther into the street. The cabbie floored it, swerved around Anna, and cut the corner at the end of the block so sharply his tires screamed.

  "I guess he don't want your sorry white ass in his pretty black cab," the speaker of the gang said.

  "At least he veered," Anna grumbled. "Surely that means he had some affection for me." The sneers didn't waver, and she wondered if they knew what the word "affection" meant, wondered if they'd ever felt it under any name.

  The man who'd gotten out of the cab was standing beneath the streetlight watching the drama as if it were being played out onstage. Anna started to raise her hand to holler at him, and then they locked eyes. It was Dougie, the yellow jacket, the man who had pulled a knife on her and Mackie. He was staring at her hard, and she wondered if he recognized her, if he knew she was looking for him. Then she realized that what had him transfixed wasn't the way she looked but the way she was looking at him, much the way a fox might look at a baby duckling.

  Before she could move or shout, he turned and walked rapidly across the street and out of sight down Rampart.

  The boys were grinning, and the loose chain they'd made around Anna and Geneva began to tighten.

  Geneva leaned her head back and took in a great lungful of air.

  She could scream all she wanted to, Anna thought. Nobody was going to hear her.

  At least nobody who gave a damn.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Clare was standing in a narrow alleyway. To one side was a Dumpster, to the other a windowless brick wall. Just enough space remained between the two for a broad-shouldered man to stand without quite touching anything vile. Narrow as her frame was, she kept her arms close to her sides. The expensive leather shoes she'd been worried about looking too new when the evening started out now appeared as if she'd worn them for ten years and never polished them once. Her crisp linen slacks were limp and wrinkled, the cuffs taking on the color of the sidewalks she'd been tramping.

  Behind her were three young men, almost boys, high school juniors or seniors probably. They'd been joking and smirking and generally bolstering each other's courage till one of them had vomited against the wall a few minutes back. Since then they'd been fairly quiet. Ahead of her two more men stood stolidly without much obvious joy. A third was out of sight ahead of them. Now that the boys had quieted she could hear the guy in front groaning like a man in pain.

  All of them were in line behind a run-down convenience store, pragmatically named Food Store, on the edge of the Marigny, waiting for a twenty-dollar blow job. Already Clare had seen enough female flesh and enough male assholes to send her into a convent for the rest of her life, but there was no quitting, no calling it a night, no going back. Not ever.

  The Jordan who stayed at the high-priced hotel and wore Brooks Brothers clothing had gone somewhere. Not gone, Clare corrected herself, turned his back for a while. The relief at feeling in control was not as great as the fear of being alone, of losing the strength she'd found when Jordan joined her on the train she'd hopped out of Seattle.

  The groaning man had recovered and was elbowing his way back out of the crowded alley, not meeting anybody's eyes. He'd done up his belt, but his fly was still unzipped. Nobody told him.

  The next customer vanished from sight around the edge of the Dumpster, and Clare shuffled up a couple feet in line. The alley was paved in brick, clean enough because of the heavy rains this near the Gulf of Mexico; clean enough she could easily see the two cockroaches that ran for cover when she moved. Two months ago she'd have shrieked and run for a can of Raid. Now she simply watched her fellows with mild interest. Cockroaches didn't bite, didn't rape, didn't set houses on fire or sell one another into slavery. The hero of Kafka's The Metamorphosis might have had it better than he'd thought.

  She'd come to join these cockroaches on the recommendation of the bouncer who threw her out of Hustler's Barely Legal. Time was draining from the world in a palpable way; Clare felt it as if it were blood draining from her veins, the lives of her children dripping away. Pushed by this urgency, she'd taken three different strippers to the private lap dance rooms upstairs and tried to bribe them into getting her somebody younger. A lot younger. To their credit, and her disappointment, they'd all turned her down. One of them had slapped her so hard her ears rang for five minutes. She was probably the one that told the bouncer there was a pervert on the premises, a real one.

  Because she was an actor and because she was playing a pedophile, people believed she was a pedophile. This was what she wanted; this was how she might best find her daughters. It didn't change the fact that the revulsion on the faces of the strippers, and the way the bouncer didn't want to have to touch her to move her from the club, made her want to scream, "I am not one of them! They have my children!"

  The bouncer, a burly fellow no more than thirty, escorted her to the street and said she might find something more her style behind the Food Store. He didn't say it nicely. He was probably setting her up to be beaten or killed, but she came anyway. She doubted his promise of something more in her "style" would turn out to be true. Mass-produced fellatio didn't strike her as having a direct tie-in with child abuse, since she was out of ideas, she stood with the roaches skittering over her three-hundred-dollar loafers, cursed Jordan for his untimely abdication, and listened to another guy getting his rocks off behind the garbage.

  Shoving her hands in her pockets to keep them from straying too close to the Dumpster and the effluvia glistening on its sides, she felt the cell phone in her pocket with its one number: Anna Pigeon. Though she'd only been living without contact with others for a couple of weeks, till now it hadn't crossed her mind to call anyone. She could call Anna now, find out if she'd learned anything. Somehow Clare couldn't bring herself to drag another woman--even the pigeon, even by wireless--into this alley.

  A grunt, a "God damn," and another man, looking at no one, fumbling with his trouser front, lumbered by, hitting Clare's shoulder as he passed. Next but one for a blow job, Clare moved ahead, watched the roaches run, and tried not to think too far into the future.

  Then it was her turn. The energy of rage and shame and doing something that might by some stretch of a miracle lead to her children had trickled away with the vomit and urine in the alley. Had she not come so far and waited so long, had she anywhere else to go to, Clare would have turned and walked from this sewer where a poor debased creature plied her trade.

  As it was she rounded the end of the Dumpster. She'd thought there was a wall there and, maybe, a kneeling pad. The bricks would shred the knees out of anything less than chaps if there wasn't. What she found was greater darkness, a square in the brick of the wall so devoid of light that it seemed like the entrance to a netherworld.

  "Hello, handsome. Let me see what you got for me," came a voice so sultry it almost managed to make the fetid alleyway seem more mysterious than pathetic. Almost.

  Clare stepped toward the darkness, and, as she did, she could see that it was a recessed doorway. In the room beyond, a single candle burned. Between the door and the candle, silhouetted against the feeble light, a woman sat on a low chair, a slipper chair, Clare remembered from the set of The Importance of Being Earnest. The back of the chair curved gracefully up behind its occupant, who sat with long skirts artfully arranged, long-nailed hands drooping languidly over the arms, one holding a burning cigarette. Clare could distinguish little, only that she had a wealth of long blond curls
and that, where the candlelight touched her sleeves, the gown looked to be a deep red color. The room smelled of cigarette smoke, perfume, and the slight metallic odor of what had to be nearing quarts of semen.

  The woman rearranged her skirts, and Clare saw the bronze flash of the rim of an old-fashioned spittoon. The receptacle of ten thousand unborn babies. Of course she wouldn't swallow. At the rate she sold favors, if she had, she'd be as big as a garbage truck.

  "Don't just stand there, honey, time is money, and, unless you want trouble, get those pants down on the double." Low throaty laughter followed this doggerel of house rules.

  Clare stepped closer, fished the Bic lighter out of her pants pocket, and struck a light.

  "Fuck, no," the woman growled and was out of the chair so fast Clare had no time to do anything but freeze in place. The lighter was snatched from her hand as fast, and the woman back in her chair.

  "No light, baby. I got sensitive eyes."

  In the brief flash Clare had seen what the intentional gloom hid. Ms. Fellatio was really Mr. Fellatio in a long gold wig and no teeth. An old fag down on his luck, but with a gig that paid for rent and dentures.

  "You bring out your business," the sultry voice suggested. "I got a line outside."

  Jordan came back on a tide of violence. He jerked out his wallet and brought out a hundred-dollar bill. "I wouldn't put my foot in your mouth, much less my dick," he said. "Want to talk?" He proffered the bill, and the prostitute took it.

  "I love good conversation," the hooker said, then rose and called into the alley, "Y'all come back in half an hour. Lady Kneepads has got to take a break." Shutting the door on the groans and shouts of annoyance, he threw a dead bolt that sounded as if it could withstand Mongol hordes and turned to Jordan.

  "What you need, baby? You got half an hour." He draped himself back onto the low chair, leaving Jordan standing. Fine; the less of Jordan's surface that touched that faggot's work area, the better.