Ganymede (36 page)

Before he could mention that she’d grown uncharacteristically silent, she made some excuse to be done. “Tell your engineer I said thank you, and that it was a pleasure to meet him. And it’s been … it’s been good to talk to you again. I’m glad to see you’re still doing well, and thinking of ways to do better.”

Then she left him there, still standing by the river, his hands in his pockets, wondering whatever things he was wondering, but not following her.

She hitched a ride back to the Metairie station, sitting beside a sharecropping woman and her oversized, dull-faced son with sloping shoulders and enormous hands. At the station she waited for the correct street rail car and took it to Rue Canal, opting to walk from the final stop rather than hail a cab. It was only a few blocks back to the Garden Court, and she felt restless for reasons she could not explain—or chose not to.

She looked up from her reverie to note that the sky was going gray. At first she thought it was because the hour was swiftly growing late and the curfew coming soon, then realized that the sky must be shuttered with clouds, and not quite so far toward evening as it felt at first. The river smelled like summer coming in, and dead fish and waterlogged vegetation, and the air that carried those scents from bank to bank and beyond was dragged along the ground by those same dark clouds that blackened like spilling ink up from the south. She regarded the sky and said, to no one but herself, “A storm’s coming.”

Her parasol wouldn’t help her if the bottom dropped out. But she’d been wet before, and she’d be wet again before she died, and it’d never been a catastrophe yet. So onward she went, deeper into the Vieux Carré.

She walked briskly past people who were opening windows to catch the breeze that would billow through before the rain came up behind it. They were tying back curtains and inviting the air to sweep on through, push out the odors of cayenne and Tabasco, crawfish and rum, red beans and rice, and cigars and cheap tobacco. The Quarter exhaled paraffin and charcoal, incense and manure. It breathed diesel and industrial lubricant, barbecue and salt.

It whispered.

Josephine stopped, unsure of what that sound had been—uncertain if it meant anything, or if it’d only been her imagination. A tumbleweed of newspaper went skipping across her path, rolling into the street and stopping in a puddle, where it unfurled to reveal the headline. The first words were blurred, but the remainder of them read,
AT THE ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL
. As she stared, dirty water soaked through, obscuring even that scant message, but somehow revealing another, farther down the page—before the whole thing disappeared into soaked, illegible pulp.

GARDEN

She looked away from the sopping paper. It meant nothing, after all. She found herself casually surprised that she’d bothered to stop for it, and wondered why it’d seemed—even for a moment—like something worth examining.

She resumed her pace. Her feet clapped against the hollow sidewalks with their planed slats, and her skirts skimmed the splinters. Still, she felt odd, as if she’d heard something but failed to understand it. As if she should’ve listened harder. Like she was being chastised at a distance, by a mother or grandmother whose voice she couldn’t quite pick out of a crowd.

The creak of a sign hanging on a chain tickled at her ears. She spied it up ahead, and, catching its text from the corner of her eye, she drew up short again. She could’ve sworn—would’ve sworn, and at great length—that it’d said,
TOO LATE TO WAIT
. But it read only,
TULANE WAITMAN
, advertising a minister’s office.

She stared intently at the sign as she passed beneath it. It performed no further tricks; it only swung squeakily in the shifting air ahead of the incoming storm.

Where was she again? Oh, yes. Rue Galvez, just past Esplanade. Funny how she felt so turned around.

She took the next turn and proceeded via dead reckoning, the kind that was engraved in her blood. She’d lived in the Quarter all her life, and she knew it like the corridors of the Garden Court. She could have navigated it blindfolded, in the fog, at midnight. Even so, her heart pounded, and she did not know why. She knew only that she had to keep moving. “Because of the curfew,” she muttered to herself, but did not believe a word of it.

The streets were nearly empty, and this, too, was strange. True, the businesses were closing up shop against the storm, against the limits imposed by the Texians, but there was also … something else? It was a ridiculous thing to think, but Josephine thought it anyway, and she kept walking, and faster. Just short of a run.

Running would draw attention. She did not want attention, did she?

Well, why not? She was doing nothing wrong. It mattered little if anyone stopped her.

A seagull squawked loudly and flapped far too close to her head, startling her into flinging her hands defensively upward. The bird chattered its displeasure and dropped with a soft slapping of its splayed, webbed feet onto the planks immediately in her path. It stretched its wings, opening and closing them as if in warning, or summons, or some other gesture the woman couldn’t decipher.

“What?” she asked it, feeling ridiculous. “What do you want? Get out of the way,” she said, and prepared to aim a kick in its general direction. She knew from long experience that she’d never hit the thing; it’d be out of her way well in time, which was just as well. She didn’t care to hurt it, but she would not be bullied by a creature the size of a cat.

It cawed once more and stared at something behind her, so she looked over her shoulder and spied—at a brief, outrageous glance—a storefront window that made her gasp. A large white skull filled the entire pane, but only for a split second … before it was replaced with a dress stitched for a bride, advertising the stock at Miss Delia’s Dresses and Wares.

Josephine’s throat went dry, and a warm flush began creeping up her chest. Her hands tingled and went numb. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular. “What’s happening?”

The gull answered with a scrap of stationery in its mouth. It hadn’t been there at first, but it was present when she turned around. The bird dropped the shred of paper printed-side up, declaring in someone’s overelaborate handwriting,
Join us for
something garbled and runny, dampened into meaninglessness. Then,
at Jackson Square, the north corner gardens!

Jackson Square. The Cathedral.

A message, but from whom? From what? And who would communicate in such a fashion?

It would be better to go find out than to always wonder—or that’s the conclusion she came to as the bird flew off, taking the paper with it. She adjusted her trajectory and increased her pace. At first she merely hustled, walking too fast for decorum, but soon she was all but skipping, then dashing outright.

She wasn’t sure why she was running, or what she was running from, though she could take a guess.

“Not yet, not yet, not yet,” she said under her breath as she tore along, ducking down alleys and cutting across intersections.

The whole Quarter ushered her along, clearing the way.

The doors moved and the sweepers stepped aside. Horses drew carriages out of her path, and rolling-crawlers lurched off as she darted toward them. Wisps of fog frayed and split at her approach, and Jackson Square was closer, closer, and closer.

Her chest ached against the bones of her corset, straining against the stays as she panted her way closer to the river. Her skirts tangled around her ankles, twisting around her knees and trying to slow her, but failing. She kicked herself free and pushed onward.

The texture of the streets beneath her changed. They shifted from the wood slats of lifted walkways as those side paths ended, then became the slick cobbles of humidity-damp stones that slipped beneath her feet despite her rubber-bottomed boots. She stumbled and recovered, ran out of steam, and leaned against a large, cool, stone square that turned out to be the foundation of the equestrian statue directly in front of the church.

Gazing up at it, she wondered if it, too, might have some arcane message to pass along. But the rider and horse both kept their silence.

Back behind the church, or somewhere past it, she heard a dull mumble punctuated with gasps and small cries. Catching her breath, she pulled herself together and continued onward, toward the ornate, dark church doors illuminated by fizzing electric torches on either side. She turned to pass them, still tracking the sounds and pushing toward their source.

A tall black fence cordoned off the church’s back yards.

It walled off the gardens.

A crowd was gathering. Josephine joined it at full speed, stopping herself hands-first against the rails, leaving bruises on her palms that she wouldn’t notice for days. She thrust her face between the bars and gazed openmouthed at the scene framed in the vivid green grass of the shadowed yard behind the city’s holy Christian center.

There on the ground, faceup in a state of peaceful repose with arms at her sides, Marie Laveau lay unbreathing, unmoving.

On the lawn around her, items were accumulating. As Josephine watched, three gold coins were pitched through the gate with a prayer, shortly to be joined by hastily improvised bags as small as her thumb. One gris-gris after another went sailing over the fence or through it, to land in a gentle plunk near the serene, still body.

Josephine wrapped her fingers around the chilly bars and struggled to breathe. She watched the small things fly—the ribbons, the coins, the buttons. The bags and beads, the twine-twisted bracelets and bootlaces, the flowers, pebbles, and nails. They accumulated around the queen’s corpse, yet none landed upon her. They gathered like a full-body halo, drifts of clutter, a fog of tiny gifts dredged from pockets and purses.

“No,” she said in half a breath, and with the other half she said, “Not yet. It’s too soon,” she added. “There’s too much I don’t know!”

More mourners gathered, brought to the spot by whatever means had brought Josephine, or by word of mouth filtering from churchyard gardens throughout the Quarter. They joined her at the fence, gawkers who stood with eyes wet and heads bowed, whispering prayers or moaning.

No one heeded the curfew, and as the sun set more fully, the Texians came out to see the fuss. The first who came started with commands to disperse, then saw the uncanny tableau spread out within the fence. They recognized the body lying there and stopped yelling their orders. They, too, joined the lookers at the fence, drawn up close and made quiet by awe, or shock, or some other odd familiarity that told them this was not the time to insist upon anything.

Someone at the back cried, “What’s going on? What’s the meaning of this?” Josephine knew that whoever this was, he’d find his silence, too. But she recognized the voice and turned to spot the speaker. At the nearest corner where the gas lamps were sputtering to light under a colored child’s expert spark, she saw Horatio Korman.

She watched understanding dawn on him and, closely following that, a nervous kind of horror. Their eyes met across the now-crowded side street.

They shared the moment, the fear of knowing—alone, together.

  
Thirteen

Andan Cly ran his finger over the map as slowly as a man learning to read. He traced the curve of the Mississippi River gently, lifting his hand to see a detail here, a notation there. The map was an older one and it had been abridged, amended, and scrawled across to make it more pertinent to the present situation. This sheet included not only the serpentine bends and miniature ports that dotted the way between the city and the ocean; it also included the canals, both commercial and semiprivate—and the docks that Texas likely didn’t know about.

The electric lamps had been dimmed down to nothing, leaving only the oil lamps and rickety wire-frame lanterns to give them any light.

Outside, there were no sounds of soldiers or rolling-crawlers. No marching feet or passing patrols. The Texians had left—at least, those who were leaving were long gone, and no more were on the verge of exiting, so the time had come to put the finishing touches on the plan before putting it into action.

Night had not yet fallen, but it was coming, and it would be there within the hour—black and thick, a perfect shield from the eyes of anyone too interested in knowing about the giant machine hidden inside the nondescript storehouse.