Simone got lucky enough to get a little job in a Laundromat and lived with some other girls, and little Claude Moreau grew up poor as hell. By the time he was five, he was begging for nickels in the French Quarter so he could go and get himself something to drink. There were plenty of places where bartenders paid no mind to a little kid who couldn't even see over the bar just waltzing in and buying a drink. He started smoking cigarettes when he was eight years old and quickly moved on to marijuana, then cocaine, then junk and anything he could get his hands on.
But Claude was no dummy. He quickly learned that to support his growing habit, he'd have to do better than nickels and dimes from pitying tourists. He began slinging drugs in schoolyards, and that's how he learned all about business.
Claude dropped out in eighth grade, but he had plenty of street smarts. He had some tight connections, even a few black friends who knew him well and trusted him, so he had access to a few of the wards in New Orleans, which meant big business in the drug dealing game.
The seventies were an ideal time to do business. Everyone was smoking or shooting something, but Claude watched a few of his older friends get into the prostitution game. That, combined with drugs, he learned, would really rake in the money. Lots of girly runaways came to New Orleans. It was a transient city, and charming Claude won them over with his devilish grin and wise street smarts, offering to buy them coffee and beignets at Café du Monde while they made up their minds: did they want to come work for him and make some real money so they wouldn't have to go back to those asshole parents of theirs?
He remembered the first one well. She was fourteen years old and from Baton Rouge, and she'd taken the bus all the way down to New Orleans. She had a sweet southern accent, not the distinct New Orleans "yat" accent or the Metairie "Bostonian on Quaaludes" accent. Different. Claude met her in Jackson Square. The pretty little thing was looking around, clearly lost and afraid like a puppy. She had a mop of curly blond hair and blue eyes about the size of saucers with red lipstick smeared dramatically over her pout...a Nancy Spungen looking thing. She wore a black button down collared shirt with a leopard miniskirt and ripped up tights. Claude offered directions, then when she finally admitted she didn't know where she'd be going next, a cup of coffee and some beignets.
"Across the street," Claude motioned with his chiseled jaw. "You might as well get something to eat, yeah?" He didn't wait for her to answer. He was no Sid Vicious with his shaved head and dark skin, but Baby Nancy was already batting her spidery matted eyelashes at him.
"Whatcha doin' down here?" Claude watched Baby Nancy chow down an order of the little fried donuts, powdered sugar floating around like stardust and settling on her black clothing. Claude thought of the snow globe in PawPaw's house, the one he got from Colorado on his only trip out of state.
I'm going to get out of this place, was all he could think as the girl talked about her parents, powdered sugar caking her red lips. I'll put her to work. He had friends who would pay to fuck her. Lots of guys had crushes on Nancy.
As far as Claude's mom...well, Simone didn't really seem to care. She was glad when the Reverend Sal Moreau finally keeled over from a heart attack. She found him crumpled on that old dingy brown shag carpet that blanketed the tiny crumbling brick house, his piss-stained tighty whities hanging off his ass. Simone barely reacted when she found him. Hell, she'd wanted to crush her cigarette out on his dead flesh, the bastard.
At least her son was bringing home color televisions and cigarettes. This was a bit better than the way things were in 1965, that was for sure. And with Sal gone, they'd have the house and a little bit of money from the church. Not too bad.
Claude was in and out of jail all the time, but it didn't matter much. There was so much overcrowding in New Orleans, they'd let a white boy go just to get another black in. As he got older and a little wiser, Claude learned that pimping was far more beneficial to him and less likely to get him thrown in jail, since it was all up to the girls.
He liked one of them a lot. Katalin, Kat for short. He liked calling her Kat, like it was a cutesy pet name. She'd come over from Hungary and could barely string sentences together. Really charming and willing to work all the time. She was smart, though. It didn't always work out really well if they were smart. They "aspired" to better things, as they said. She knew French and her English was getting better and better, so she worked a little as a translator. Freelanced a little, posed for artists here and there (that was way classier than prostituting, sometimes paid more too), lived a kind of bohemian lifestyle.
That really pissed Claude off. He guessed he kind of loved her a little, if he could call it that. When she had come over from Hungary, there was something about her. She wasn't one of those bra-burning chicks who wanted to stomp a man's balls into a pulpy blob...no, there was a certain feminine appeal to her, an innocence, almost like she was too pure for that kind of work, but she did it anyway. He loved that innocence, but being out in the Western world tainted her. She got a taste for money and 70s feminist style ball stomping and couldn't get enough. He tried to keep her in his bed, but her lust for money grew stronger, and she lapped every penny up like a starving animal. Those sex-sweat sheets always smelled of her, reminding him of her absence, her lost innocence, no more naiveté.
Every girl who turned a trick without his permission, every girl who smart-mouthed him, every girl who looked like the pretty young Hungarian got at least a slap. When they were worn out or too used up looking, he started slitting their throats and tying them to cinderblocks to be chucked off into the Mississippi. Once they were at that point, they were of no use.
Claude always felt he was on Katalin's trail, always felt as though he'd just missed her. Sometimes he'd get a whiff of the woodsy perfume she'd wear or see a whip of black hair disappear around a corner. Sometimes he even thought he'd heard her distinct accent in a crowd. She was so close, yet so far away.
Years later, he finally found her. Someone had scratched the name "K. Varga" in tiny print on the buzzer label for an apartment on Dumaine Street, right where he'd tracked her. Her daughter, too. He'd never forget the child's bloodthirsty eyes...those distant, deep pools of grey, like a summer rain storm cloud...
Those eyes, they drew him in, licked and bit at his soul, squeezed the arteries and veins in his body shut until he could not breathe.
Those eyes...they were just like looking into his own reflection.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sophia: No Place Like Home
At night, the desert scenery melted into the inky sky. Only a faint line on the horizon was detectable, but only through strained eyes. Sophia didn't worry about it. She amused herself--she had extensive internal resources and could entertain herself for long stretches of time. She was free in her head despite feeling caged in the car.
Her inner world was rich with colors, smells, and sound. When someone spoke to her, she usually found herself analyzing the cadence and tone of the speaker's voice and not focusing so much on what they were saying. She didn't have to. She had a natural recorder in her head and could recall conversations with alarming detail. She liked to mimic accents, and could remember and repeat long paragraphs or even pages from plays.
Now she thought about Claude and what he always said they should do when things got a little sticky. She could remember every word:
“It’s wise we’re keeping two different warehouses, Sophia. If our cover is ever blown, getting rid of one will virtually eliminate the problem. You’ll be the one to take care of that: a fire at the warehouse in San Francisco is the most logical solution, since we do most of the cooking and preparations there. We only store stuff at the New Orleans location and that’ll be the best place to ship our product from. Not as many questions in New Orleans, you know what I mean? It’s more laissez faire here, live and let live.”
Live and let live. Claude never let her alone and just let her live. She had to get rid of that warehouse in New Orleans. The San Francisco warehouse was
spotless. She always made sure of that. Sophia thought of it like setting a fire in a foxhole to force the critter out. If she got the warehouse and Claude, it could be like a two-for-one deal. She had to burn that bridge, that connection to New Orleans. It weighed her down.
Sophia thought for certain it was Claude following her. Her tingling instincts told her so. They had been tapping her on the shoulder like an insistent friend for a while now. Getting rid of Claude meant no more worries, and she would be able to focus her attention on Paul now. There could only be one. Claude was in the way. She was tired of him.
Also, she always wanted to cook and ship the products from one warehouse. She thought it seemed simpler that way. She knew why Claude wanted the New Orleans location: they got tax breaks from making little commercials for the products, so Claude did all the model recruiting (mostly desperate prostitutes or strippers, they were less likely to alert attention), got them to promote the product, then killed them for more raw material. To him, the whole process was like working with dolls: look at the pretty doll, come here and let me dress you up, now, let me take you apart and melt you down for some other purpose. Sophia thought about what little boys usually do to Barbie dolls. They usually burn or strap them to firecrackers in some gleeful, warped childhood experiment.
That was not how Sophia felt about the men she killed: they were not dolls. Sure, she liked to cuddle with them, but it was more than that. She loved them. Their blood made her feel something, little crackles of energy and real, raw life. And she could follow them for months, drinking up their lives, studying their actions and movements, learning how they lived.
She felt a zing of excitement and hummed a little tune to herself. That cop Black had Claude in his sights. If the warehouse went boom, Claude would be in deep shit. Black would know something was up. It would hopefully look like Claude burned it down to cover his ass.
Sophia continued to hum and even tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she crossed the state line.
* * * *
Sophia was somewhere in Texas. She couldn't remember the name of the place, but its most defining feature was a giant roadrunner statue situated in the dead center of the town. She lay on the threadbare coverlet, which smelled like ten years’ worth of sweating, drooling strangers and cigarette smoke. The carpet felt sticky when she walked on it with bare feet, so she kept her socks on.
The walls were wood paneled, creating a claustrophobic, suffocating kind of atmosphere. The air conditioner sputtered and spat busily, but it had yet to do anything about the heat and stifling humidity in the room. When Sophia looked towards the window, she noticed thousands of little specs of dust floating lazily through the room like snowflakes. Above the bed, there was a painting of an in-flight eagle in front of an American flag. The frame looked worn and frayed, as if something had been chewing on it.
Sophia turned on the television for some background noise... mostly to drown out the noise of her neighbors. She couldn't decide if they were fighting or moving furniture. On the television, a man in a cowboy hat and black cowboy boots shouted that everyone should come on down to Big Bob's Furniture Outlet, because they had the biggest sale on the biggest furniture brands in the whole state of Texas! The commercial wrapped up with Big Bob's family carefully arranged on a tacky red leather sofa, smiling cheap plastic "gimme my 15 seconds of fame" smiles. They were all just about as big as Bob.
Sophia thought about her own family. Again, she thought about that doll. That perfect little doll...but the family was not perfect. No father. Just Sophia and Mother in that lonely house. She remembered a picture that someone had taken of Sophia and her mother. Sophia had been holding that perfect little doll. No one smiled, like the Big Bob family. She wondered where that picture was.
How she'd wanted to crush that doll for so long, to smash its innocent, porcelain-smooth face into a million little bits. Although she'd never said so, Sophia got the impression Mother had wanted her to be as perfect as a doll. To stay beautiful. To be flawless.
To be quiet while Mother took care of business.
Sophia punched the doll in the face one day while Mother was with a "client." Then she set fire to the doll's clothing and hair. When Mother found out, she grounded Sophia for the entire summer, leaving her with only a stinging cheek and a set of encyclopedias to keep her company.
Sophia had conflicting feelings about her mother. On one side of the token, she wanted to be just like her. On the other, she despised her. To this day, she used her mother's accent for most day-to-day interactions, even though she spent most of her formative years in the States.
The States. She had been all over the world, yet part of her found it oddly amusing that she was in a random hotel in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Sophia twisted around to look at the cheesy picture of the eagle and the American flag. She wondered why it even existed. Who painted it? Why was it in this hotel?
She had no real concrete plan. So far, no one questioned her about the white Mazda. She figured someone knew about Denise by now, or was at least starting to suspect. Who knew? She didn't have any contacts listed in her phone for "Mom" or "Dad" or many people at all for that matter.
She'd found some plastic drop cloth at a Wal-Mart in Arizona and wrapped up Denise with it. She put what was left of the meth in Denise's jeans pocket and rolled her into some lake south of Flagstaff.
The next step was to get rid of the Mazda.
The next morning, bright and early, she drove to the town's only home improvement store. Just as she'd expected, several Mexican men stood around, drinking coffee and eating breakfast. She spotted an old Toyota Corolla next to them and hoped one of them owned it. She rolled down the window.
"Hola. Quién es ese coche?" She pointed to the Toyota.
The men smiled and a few of them laughed. One guy pointed to himself.
"You want ride?" He said through a strong accent. The others laughed even harder. Sophia smiled.
"Te comercio. Éste es nuevo," she said through her best movie star smile.
The men just laughed.
"Please? Please trade. Mine is worth more. Please. My husband is crazy and he's looking for me."
She even let her eyes well up with tears.
Driving the little Toyota was a lot different. It smelled like weed and sweat and the clutch felt even more worn than the Honda's. She thought of it parked in the garage, its impeccably maintained engine and parts, its battered and scratched exterior, its utterly nondescript character. The car didn't really fit her personality. She supposed that was why she drove it.
She drove until she could not drive anymore. It was as if Texas never ended. She felt she could drive to the edge of the earth and there would be a damn cactus and the Marlboro man, complete with boots and hat and cigarette and trusted horse. She would still be in Texas.
She stopped in Beaumont. Supposedly, the Louisiana state line wasn't far away, but it felt like light years. Sophia imagined the little Toyota coughing and sputtering over the line, insane cowboys and bulls and animated Tex-Mex foods following them all the way. "You'll never get out of Texas," they'd chant.
She didn't sleep well in Beaumont. Not at all. It felt like her skin seared in that bed, despite cranking the air conditioning all the way up. She tossed and turned, barely coming in contact with sleep. It would come in furtive bursts and dart away, as if teasing her.
When the sun came up, a smattering of condensation covered all over the windows, creeping down in little ivy-like rivulets, collecting other unsuspecting droplets. Sophia could see her breath curling and twisting from her mouth like a grey tentacle. The floor felt like a sheet of ice under her bare feet, but she still felt as though her body was melting...maybe from sin, maybe from poisoning her body so much...the meth to stay awake, the cigarettes...it wasn't good to lose sight of important things right now. Whatever it was, whatever the bad thing was, it was now leaking from her skin, that sticky detox sweat that smells like a sour chemical soup.
Her h
ead felt devoid of all traces of moisture. The air was parched. She envisioned her sinuses cracking like a dry sidewalk. Her throat felt like it was full of gravel. Things felt wrong, weird. This feeling was familiar and her mind flitted to recently, when someone broke into her apartment.
No. She looked around the room. Nothing. It was just Texas, swallowing her up into its giant vortex. Despite the lack of sleep, she checked out and drove the Toyota into Louisiana.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ti: Information Overload
Ti sat in the bay window of her apartment, smoking cigarettes. The light outside barely kissed the earth, and a strange yellow tint covered everything it touched. The sidewalk outside was darker than usual, still wet from the rain. Birds began to chirp with more gusto. Rainy season was ending.
The staleness of life, the burning pit of fire crackling in her stomach, the unsettling feeling of forgetting something...these things all motivated her to find out what happened to Tamara. Especially because now, she knew her father had been involved.
She thought about the first time she saw Sophia, that gnawing feeling they were perhaps connected. Ti would have never dreamed it would be through her father. She wanted to reach into her guts and rip the DNA to shreds, to sever that tie with her dreaded father. The impact he'd had on her mother was undeniable. There was just something off about the man.
Ti had always heard that little girls remember more than little boys. Ti had memories from when she was about two or three years old. She couldn't remember every detail of Claude's face, but she could remember some sort of haze, the dark features, the rail of a body. And the way he smelled: earthy, musty...strange. Ti always imagined him digging, digging, and then trying to cover it with some cheap cologne.
He left, but why exactly? Ti had a very distinct memory of watching him in the driveway, arguing with Mother. Ti had a kitchen knife in her hand and made four little slits across her palm, one, two, three, four, every time Claude slapped Mother in the face. They weren't deep, but they bled enough for Mother to scream and to take her to the hospital.
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