The Map of Moments (13 page)

I almost died just now,
Max thought.

He left the café, and that street, and the people who had seen but done nothing. The thought crossed his mind that he should tell the police, but he had no proof or witnesses, and it would be a waste of time.

But who or what were the Tordu? Some kind of gang? That was a question for Corinne. She would not volunteer the information, but he had a feeling that if he found things out for himself, she'd be more than willing to talk about it. Maybe she
needed
to talk about it.

And then, of course, there was Coco's warning…

He walked until he found an old pay phone on the side wall of a convenience store. Digging in his pocket for some change, he racked his brain for Corinne's number. He'd called it often enough over the past couple of weeks, arranging his trip down here, and he cleared his mind and tried tapping it in.

On the third try, he got it right.

“Hey,” he said when she answered, “it's me.”

“Max. Didn't think I'd hear from you again—today, at least. Meet your friends at Tulane?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “Corinne, what's Tordu?”

Silence. Max shifted and the line crackled. “Corinne?”

The silence continued. He was sure she was still there, but he heard nothing; no breathing, no heartbeat.

“Corinne, I need to know—”

“Go back to Boston, Max,” she said. “Really. If you ever listen to anything I say, listen to this: go back to Boston.” Then she hung up.

Max dialed her number three more times, but she did not pick up.

“Shit!” He banged down the receiver, looking around to see if anyone was watching him. He seemed to be alone in the busy street.

Dropping the change back in his pocket, he felt Ray's map. He looked up at the clear sky and thought of rain coming from nowhere, and then he remembered the name of the Second Moment on the map:
The Pere's Kyrie.

He'd only come down here to say good-bye, to close the
door on a part of his life that had left him scarred. Instead, with every passing moment he seemed to be opening more doors, and each one led into mystery.

Max was sick of mysteries. He needed to stop asking politely for answers. He could still feel the point of Coco's knife on his throat, still hear the threat in that silky voice. It should have made him do just what Corinne recommended. Run back to Boston.

Well, fuck that. Corinne obviously had some of the answers he was looking for, and she wasn't likely to cut his throat for asking. And if whatever he'd seen or witnessed yesterday was more than a drunken, drugged hallucination, there was one other mystery he could solve right now.

Jackson Square was ten minutes away. He started walking.

The Square was beautiful. He'd been here a few times with Gabrielle, sitting in the park and eating lunch, throwing down bread for the birds, staring at St. Louis Cathedral and wondering at the history of the place. It wasn't busy now— none of New Orleans was—but there were still a few people wandering through the circular park, eating from paper bags, smoking, staring at their feet.

Even here Max saw the scars of Katrina in the boarded windows, broken trees, and the air of dejection that seemed to flow from the shops and restaurants around the Square. It felt like a place where the last parade had already marched by, and all that remained was the cleanup. Then God would put up the chairs, lock the doors, and turn out the lights forever.

Max really hoped that didn't happen. A lot of people obviously still had faith in New Orleans. And maybe faith could be enough.

He sat on a bench in the park and opened the map. The Moment was still there, and the box it was written in ended in a sharp point in front of the cathedral.

Max looked up. There was nothing out of place here, no mysterious other-world where he would witness events from the past and taste the air of yesteryear. People walked back and forth before the cathedral steps, and nothing disturbed them.

They haven't drunk that stuff from Ray's clay bottle,
Max thought. But he shook his head, confused. In the cool light of day, and so soon after having his life threatened, yesterday was starting to seem even more like a dream.

He folded the map, stood, and walked toward the cathedral.

And he heard singing. He paused, head tilted to one side. Was there a service today? Nobody else seemed to be listening, and he walked on, realizing he must present an odd sight standing there in the afternoon sun.

A dozen yards from the cathedral steps he stopped again. Two young women parted to walk around him, and one of them muttered something that made the other one laugh. Max turned to watch them go, and when the taller woman looked back, the smile dropped from her face.

What does she see?
Max thought.
What is it about me that dries her laughter?

He took another step—

—and the rain struck him, driving him to his knees.
Heavy and unrelenting, it battered him down to the rough stones that had been smooth a moment before. The rain, and the darkness…

It was daytime in the Square, but nighttime for Max. His guts knotted and he felt sick, but he swallowed it down, tensing his muscles against the spate of cramps that twisted them up.

Twisted …“Tordu” is French for “twisted”!

The singing grew louder, a deep, beautiful tenor singing the Kyrie. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. Another Moment. Another storm. Once again he had slipped into long ago. The Square here was old, less arranged, functional rather than beautified for tourists. And it was strange. Some of the buildings he recognized, yet even in the downpour they seemed newer, their stone not so weathered and the façades smoother.

A priest stood before the cathedral, hands clasped before his chest as he sang that wonderful chant.
The Father's Kyrie!
Max thought. Before the priest, a group of people were gathered around six rough pine coffins that were lined up in front of the steps. On the steps themselves were the stinking, rotten remains of six human beings.

The priest said something in thickly accented French that Max could not translate, and the people started trying to lift the remains. The bodies fell apart. They must have been here for a long time, lying rotting on these steps with no one removing them—like the bodies left all over New Orleans after Katrina; like Gabrielle in her attic—and Max could not understand why.

Criminals? Heretics? Blasphemers?

But the priest sang on, and the weeping people ignored the stench of the dead to nail their loved ones at last into their coffins.

Shadows moved through the rain and flitted at the limits of Max's perception. They wore armor and carried weapons, but the downpour seemed to keep them at bay. And the rain, he realized, carried the priest's song. His words did not emerge from one place, but all around, coming at Max from left and right, up and down. Each splash of a raindrop was part of the priest's voice, and every touch of water on Max's head felt like a baptism into this man's complete and wonderful faith.

“Who are you?” Max shouted, but nobody heard.

He stood and started backing away. The rain and the voice followed.

The priest and his funeral entourage walked away from the Square, passing out of view along an alley beside the cathedral. As darkness swallowed them, those armed shapes moved again, casting shadows on the rain that were washed away with another burst of that voice. They wanted to get at those coffins and the people who dared join the procession, but the Pere's Kyrie kept them out.

The singing continued, as though every drop of rain was making a small part of the sound, lifting it and echoing it from the sodden ground.

Max backed away some more, his clothes soaked through, and he wondered what song the rain would sing next.

He was lying on the ground, and an old black woman knelt over him.

“You okay, baby?” she asked.

Max blinked up at the clear blue sky. The song was gone, but it echoed in his mind.

“You shouted at me, asked who I am. Then you fell down. Sorry if I startled you. I'm no one, really.”

Max sat up and looked around. The Square was real, this woman was real, and his clothes were dry once more.

“Where's the rain gone?” he asked. “There was a storm.”

“Sure was,” the old woman said. “Sure was. But we'll get by.” Then she stood slowly, groaning as her old joints creaked, and walked away.

Max found his feet and staggered back to the park, dropping onto a bench.
That was no dream,
he thought.
That was no hallucination.
He wondered whether, if he approached those steps, he'd see it again. But then he remembered the map. And when he took it out and unfolded it, he was just in time to see the last traces of the Second Moment's ink fading away, and the first of the Third Moment appear.

w
hatever Ray had given him should have been out of his system by now …unless whatever it had done to him was permanent. That thought scared Max, but not as much as the idea that magic had touched him. Magic was for fairy tales and kids. To Max, it meant card tricks and making coins appear out of thin air.

But it was too late for denials, especially after what he'd seen, what he'd experienced. And he felt it now, too, like static in the air around him. Maybe that was why that woman had looked at him so strangely on the steps of the cathedral. Ray had said something about gathering the magic, and somehow that's what he was doing. Perhaps
static was the right way to think about it, but eventually, static would build into a shock.

Steadying his breath, he read the words of the Third Moment:

Nodding, he folded the map. He needed to see Corinne, talk to her, but after what he'd just experienced he could not just break away from Ray's map. If it was real, if these moments really
were
the magical history of New Orleans and he could witness and feel them, maybe the other things the old man had said were also true. Maybe crazy Ray hadn't been so crazy after all.

Impossible hope rose in him and Max chuckled, an edge of hysteria building up inside him. Screw Coco, and Corinne, too. Maybe there was another way to get the answers he sought about Gabrielle. Maybe he could ask her himself.

The Third Moment was only three blocks from here, on the corner of Chartres and Ursulines. In fact, if he wasn't mistaken, he knew precisely which building that address and those words referred to.

He slipped the map into his back pocket and headed out of the park, past the black wrought-iron fence, and up to the corner of Chartres and St. Ann. He hesitated in the shadow of the cathedral, wondering if he would hear the
Pere's Kyrie again. But that moment had passed. He felt its loss, and he wished there was music in the air to take its place. Once, he wouldn't have been able to leave Jackson Square without having heard a brass band playing, or at least a sax player on the corner blatting out something for the tourists. But in what was perhaps the most telling sign of the catastrophe that had befallen New Orleans, the musicians had fallen silent.

Max hurried up Chartres, long past the time when he could have appreciated the balconies on either side of the street. The little barbershop where a barrel-chested old Cajun had once cut his hair—reluctant to be pulled away from the chair on the stoop of his storefront—was boarded up, the brown water mark on the wood only a foot above ground level.
GONE
TO T
EXAS
had been spray-painted on the boarding, and Max wondered what that old man would do in Texas, so far away from his culture and his city.

It took him only a few minutes to walk to the intersection marked on the map. He passed other people on the street, but not many. Some drove cars through the Quarter, looking as if they were on some kind of safari, afraid to get out but wanting to see the place, just the same. Max wanted to shout at them, direct them to Lakeview or the Lower Ninth, today's
real
New Orleans.