The fish still hadn’t begun screaming again, but he thrashed weakly, his legs kicking for a surprisingly short time.
Her head fell back onto Bill’s chest, his work now done; their hands rested quietly together on his thighs, the movement of his chest deep and even and satisfied, as after their lovemaking.
When she finally opened her eyes, it was to stare up at the large canopy overhead, the parallel lines of the struts, intersected by cross supports, looking near perfect in their execution, and she soundlessly recited, If a transversal line cuts across parallel lines at right angles it is called a perpendicular transversal…
Her breathing calmed and she rested awhile in a vacant, cool place.
Chapter 30
It had begun to rain in earnest, but the boy was where Nate had left him. They came to Canal Street, where the boy hailed a carriage with a whistle and Nate followed him into its dark swaying interior. Nate had never been in such a covered carriage before and he felt it undignified, the conveyance somehow feminine, and it sharpened rather than diminished his sense of exposure. But he was soon glad to be out of the rain, the trip being too far a distance to cover quickly on foot. The carriage moved down St. Charles Avenue, and once the boy pointed to a group of armed men just exiting a saloon.
“Duverje’s men, looking for you,” he said.
The carriage turned back towards the river on First Street but pulled over after a short distance when the boy leaned out the window and told the driver to stop. He instructed Nate to pay the fare and they stepped onto a street lined with gaslights and large houses tucked behind lush growths of still-green magnolia and live oak.
There were few walkers and even fewer carriages, and the boy moved without hesitation across the street to a two-story columned house. They stood beneath a dense stand of crape myrtles and the boy looked at Nate expectantly.
Nate scanned the second-floor balcony for any open doors but everything seemed closed tight, the windows shuttered and dark. The front of the house was elevated from the ground by a few shallow stairs and, though it was exposed to the street, Nate realized that there were no lights coming from the front windows either, leaving the narrow porch deeply shadowed. A steep brick wall encircled the back of the house, but enough trees grew alongside it to aid anyone wishing to scale the barrier.
He looked up and down the deserted street and whispered to the boy, “What’s your name?”
“Alger.”
“I need you to try and scale that wall, circle round to the back, and see if any doors are unlocked.” He grabbed Alger’s collar and brought the boy’s face up close to his own. “And Alger, you stay in the shadows. You see any movement, you take off, hear?”
The boy nodded and disappeared into the blackness along the side of the house, his bare feet making no sound on the soaked earth. He easily gained a toehold on a magnolia tree and climbed effortlessly up the lowest branches, then dropped to the far side of the wall.
Nate hunkered down, uncertain how and when McGill would approach the house. He had a good view of the street from both directions within the stand of trees, which were dense enough to keep him from being observed from anyone inside the house as well. The wall surrounding the back garden made it difficult for a man to get in unless the back gate had been left open or unlocked, but still, there was no guarantee that while he kept a vigil at the front of the house, McGill wouldn’t gain entry from the back.
The rain pelted first one side of the street and then the other, as though poured from a sweeping, celestial watering can, and the earth and the rotting leaves blanketing it had a keen, wasting odor, like coffee grounds boiled in fish oil, so unlike the astringent, metallic scent of the desert of West Texas or the peppery fragrance of the Big Thicket to the east. It was the smell of long unattended decay, of people living too near one another; the effluvia of extravagant wastefulness.
The minutes passed and the boy still did not reappear. The house remained silent and Nate shifted in restless anxiety with a feeling of worsening dread taking hold in his chest. He stood, determined to follow the boy over the wall, when a hazy figure on the porch caught his eye. The boy had emerged from the opposite side of the house. He paused once, as though listening for sounds, the cameo of his pale face contrasting sharply with the surrounding shadows. He crept to the door and pressed one ear to it before grabbing the knob and twisting it. The door opened easily, and, turning once to signal Nate to come on, he slipped inside.
“Shitfire,” Nate said. He yanked the Dance from his belt and ran, sliding in the mud, for the porch stairs. Quickly scanning the streets, he gained the porch in a few steps, and then stood to one side of the door frame. He took a breath and stepped into the entranceway, his shooting arm extended, the gun cocked. It was dark in the hallway but a lamp was lit to the far side, next to a curving staircase. Alger stood motionless within the halo of light, his back to Nate, looking at something on the floor.
Nate remained still for a moment, listening for any sounds that were not their own, and then toe-heeled his way towards the lamplight. He grabbed Alger around his chest, pushed the boy behind him, and saw what was on the ground. It was a woman seated against the wall, her arms at her sides, her legs sprawled and unbent, the toes of her red-and-white-stockinged feet turned out like a dancer’s. Her head was bowed, as though in prayer, and a solid sheet of drying blood had flowed down her bosom and around her body like a cape carelessly thrown.
Keeping an eye to the stairs, Nate uncocked the hammer on the Dance, knelt down, and pulled at the woman’s hair, tipping her head back and exposing the slit in her throat, which opened like a gaping mouth. There was no mole under the eye identifying her as Lucinda, and he guessed it was Hattie’s missing girl.
He dropped her head, stood, and grabbed Alger by the back of his neck. He shook the boy and whispered, “You get out of here. Wait for me in those trees. If I’m not out in fifteen minutes, go get help.”
“From where—” the boy started, but Nate gave him a push and Alger ran, skating once on the wet marble, and slipped out the door.
Nate moved to the bottom of the stairs, straining his ears for anything to indicate someone else alive in the house. Hugging the wall, he moved up the steps onto the second floor and saw lamplight from an open door at the end of the hall. There were no sounds, no winking eclipses onto the carpet thrown by someone moving in front of the lamp. He walked carefully to the door, inhaled, and moved gun-first into the room.
It was a bedroom containing a massive canopied bed, its heavy satin covers spilling onto the floor; lying motionless on its sheets was a bulging form, fish-belly white. He approached cautiously, his shooting arm testing the room, and saw that it was a man, spread-eagled and naked, his throat cut raggedly from ear to ear. On the far side of the bed was a standing mirror, and a wan oval shape reflected in the glass composed itself into a face with staring eyes.
He wheeled around and saw in the corner opposite the bed a woman painted in blood, her dark hair wild around her head, her knees drawn up defensively to her chest. He held the gun on her for a moment, but her eyes remained fixed and unblinking and he knelt down, placing his cheek close to her mouth and nose, feeling for breath.
He felt nothing and pulled his face back to check for the identifying mark that would prove she was Deerling’s daughter. He looked in her eyes and with a jolt realized that they were now focused with calm lucidity on his own. A rasping sound from behind caused him to turn, and before he felt the blow to the side of his head, he reflexively discharged his revolver, then lay in a throbbing, half-aware state.
He was rolled onto his back, the Dance taken from his grasp, and when his vision cleared, he was looking at the man from the Lynchburg ferry crossing, now beardless and without spectacles. McGill smiled in a genial way, and Nate remembered the liking he had felt for the man, the sense of immediate kinship with a well-spoken and sympathetic traveler.
McGill hunkered down next to him, holding the gun casually, loosely, a
nd said, “Hello, Officer.”
Nate started to sit up and McGill shook his head. He said, “That shot may or may not be answered. New Orleans has such a shocking disregard for the sounds of violence. Nonetheless, I shall be brief. I admire your tenacity. It took courage to follow me into a darkened house. But it was very foolish.
“You now have two choices. I can shoot you, and if I do so, you will die slowly and painfully. Or I can cut your throat, which will be quicker, but I can’t speak to the pain.” He smiled brightly and made a sweeping motion across his throat. “Neither could my most recent encounter. Severs the speech organ, you see.”
Nate raised his head and looked at Lucinda, whose eyes had returned to their glassy unresponsiveness. The blow had fractured his thoughts, but it was McGill’s effortless affability, driving the flow of events swiftly and cheerfully before him, like trained sheep to a corral, that made his stomach clench and heave. Nate said, “There will be others coming.”
“No. I think you are quite alone.” McGill waggled the gun like a finger. “I will give you a few more minutes to decide. Otherwise, I’ll have to choose for you.” He raised the pistol, pointed it at Nate, midbelly. “I’m sure your partner would have decided on the latter, given the opportunity. How long did it take him to die? I’ll bet it took more than a few hours.” He stood then and dragged a small dressing chair a safe distance from Nate. He sat and crossed his legs comfortably, brushing lint from his pants with his fingertips.
“Have you ever pondered your own death, Nate?” he asked. “Not death in the abstract, but the final, inevitable moment when you are confronted with the rushing formlessness of what’s coming next. How is it, do you think, that we have the will to live from day to day through the horrors of life when at the same time we are eaten away by the suspicion, or even the certainty, that after death there is only the eternal black hole?”
He rested his elbows on his knees, holding the gun between his two palms. “I think this deluded belief in an afterlife comes from God. Oh, I believe in God. Or, rather, a kind of god: a malevolent spirit, a trickster that rests in the mind like a disease and whispers to us that we do not stop but continue on in some kind of fever dream in the beyond.”
He gestured towards Lucinda. “Ask Lucy what she has seen after returning from some blasted wasteland of nonbeing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing!” He laughed and settled back into the chair. His expression grew contemplative. “In every infected mind, on every dying face, resides the stubborn hope that somehow one’s aliveness will not end. The constancy of this belief is astonishing, and really quite maddening. But I am the extinguisher of that hope.”
He stood up and pulled the chair to one side. “Do you know what I did during the war? I was an engineer, a builder. And yet, all my accomplishments—the roads, the bridges, the aqueducts—were seemingly pointless compared to the lauded feats of our butchers in the field. I killed not one person in a battle, but now I am the hunted man.” He cocked the trigger and aimed, shutting one eye in an exaggerated stance.
“It’s what I would call the greatest of social ironies.” His finger pulled the trigger, but the hammer remained fixed; there was no resulting blast, and Nate realized before McGill did that the thing that Dr. Tom had warned him about repeatedly had happened. The cap from the previous shot had split and fouled in the cylinder.
With that thought came the desperate reflex to move, but a face, haloed in dark hair, appeared behind McGill’s shoulder, and an outstretched arm pointed towards McGill’s head, the hand curled with graceful fingers around something small and metallic. A dull popping noise was followed by an explosive scattering of the top of McGill’s forehead, and he went rigid, falling to the side opposite the concussion. He convulsed for a short time and Lucinda stood and watched, the Remington remaining in her hand, until Nate could stand and yank it from her grasp.
Her lips were moving as though still in conversation with the dead man when Nate pulled back his fist to strike her, fear still coursing through his body. The remembrances of Tom’s final hours, of the German woman with the murdered children, made him not want to kill her so much as obliterate her, reduce her vacant features and slackened body to an unrecognizable heap.
Instead, he slowly unclenched his fist and took her hand, seeing for the first time that the blood matting her nightdress did not appear to be her own and most likely came from the man on the bed. He led her down the stairs and out the door, where the boy was waiting for them, still keeping vigil in the stand of sodden crape myrtles.
Chapter 31
The boy took them to a shotgun shack on Pirate’s Alley, saying that Duverje’s men had taken up spying positions around the Buffalo House and along Canal. It was rumored that the men had orders to shoot Nate on sight, but the boy assured him that they would be safe in the house until the morning.
Nate sat by the door, unable to rest fully, and he jerked awake whenever his head began to nod into sleep. At times he watched Lucinda, lying on a nearby pallet, wearing a clean day dress brought by Alger. But her eyelids remained closed and motionless, like a person gone from the world. He had seen her eyes dim following the shooting, and he suspected she was not truly sleeping but rather retreating from the knowledge of her lover’s death, shrouding her awareness in the dark like a coal sled being shoved down into a mine.
Alger sat next to him, keeping the hours by whispering a story he had been told of Jean Lafitte’s time in New Orleans and of how he had hidden gold coins within the bricks of the very buildings lining Pirate’s Alley.
Nate asked the boy if he thought the stories were true. The boy regarded him with his young-old face and answered that it hardly mattered whether they were true or not. That people would trail after the merest rumor of gold, cleaving to their worst inclinations, like the inevitable and uncontrollable shakes following a strong fever.
After that, the boy was quiet and Nate spent the remainder of the darkened hours listening to the night’s thunder and rain, rolling like bands of siege artillery in the far distance, and counting the number of miles he had traveled, beginning in Franklin months ago, and the number of bodies given to the earth in search of a treasure that most likely didn’t exist. That he should spend his last night in New Orleans in a place called Pirate’s Alley was a thing he was sure Dr. Tom would have appreciated.
Dr. Tom had once told him that no matter how purposeful a course a man chose for himself, time and circumstance would choose their own path and would, like unseen authors, rewrite a man’s life to suit their own designs. Like Dickens, he had said, pulling Pip out of a perfectly good bed and into a graveyard at night, onto the path of an escaped killer.
From the moment Nate stepped onto the pier, he had certainly felt stripped of his intentions and placed in a narrative that had already been written. Even lying at McGill’s feet with his own pistol being pointed at his belly, he had been confounded by happenstance outside of his control, terror-filled and paralyzed by McGill’s rant of the nothingness following death.
Alger disappeared at dawn to alert Gorman’s men, who would take Nate and Lucinda to the steamer at the docks, but Nate knew that even a regiment escort would not prevent a well-placed shootist on a roof with an unobstructed view from putting a bullet into his skull.
When it was full light, he took hold of Lucinda’s arm and shook her awake. Her eyes opened and she sat up, and Nate wondered how much resistance she would put up to their leaving. But she remained seated at the edge of the bed, waiting to be told how and when to move.
Within the hour Alger had returned with Gorman’s men in a wagon, and Nate sat next to Deerling’s daughter with Alger at his feet, surrounded by armed men. They rumbled down Tchoupitoulas Street towards the pier and they were almost to the docks before he realized that the warehouse workers had collected in the open bay doors as they passed and were watching their progress silently.
A crowd had started to gather, lining both sides of the narrow lane to the steamer docks, and Nate recognize
d some of the street denizens from the rooster shoot a few days before. The attending pickpockets and thieves were straight-faced and leaden, their necks craned warily towards a cluster of men holding shotguns, blocking the lane, and Nate knew them to be Duverje’s.
Someone from the gathering shouted, “Don’t worry, we got your back.” And another man called out, “Yeah, waaaay back.”
There was laughter from the crowd until Duverje’s men moved forward, halting the wagon’s progress, and the driver pulled up on the reins. Nate looked to the ready steamer in its dock not a hundred paces away and recognized Captain Pascal standing on the open deck, watching the crowd.
A small prim man in an expensive, tight-fitting suit stepped to the front of the cadre of armed men and smiled. He pointed at Nate and said, “You and I have something to settle. You destroyed some very valuable property, property that took a lot of time and expense to acquire, and you will repay me. One way or another.”
Nate looked towards the docks and then over the swelling numbers of bystanders; he calculated that the crowd had grown to more than a hundred. He turned to one of the men in the wagon. “Where are my horse and rifle?” he asked.
“Mr. Gorman had them placed on the steamer, as promised.”
Nate looked again at Duverje and the growing mob of spectators and, pointing to Lucinda, shouted, “I’m a policeman, appointed by the governor of Texas—”
“You are not in Texas now,” Duverje interrupted.
Nate stood up. “This is my prisoner and I’m taking her to that steamer. Anyone who obstructs in this will be shot.”