The Meq Page 10

  “Yes, it was a good time for leaving. For both of us. We went to Macao and I liquidated everything from there.

  “I stayed in Macao another seven years, living quietly, and still making investments, only they were investments of a more high risk and, how should I say . . . independent nature.” He bent over and lit a cigar on one of the candles. Leaning back, turning toward Sailor and exhaling, he said, “Six months ago . . . we meet.”

  “But how?” I asked. “How did you find him?”

  Solomon leaned forward again and cupped his hands around his mouth. In a false whisper, he said, “I do not think I found him. I still think he found me.”

  Sailor laughed and, pointing his glass toward Solomon, said, “No, no, my friend. If you remember, it was you who walked up to me.”

  “You were too easily found,” Solomon said.

  They both laughed and Carolina, who was sitting up cross-legged in her chair, said, “How did you meet?”

  Sailor spoke. “As I remember, it was outside the Pomegranate, a Taoist refuge and restaurant, in the center of Macao. I was there waiting for someone. There was a fierce sun overhead. I was sweating and, despite the heat, felt something warm bearing down on me through the crowd. I looked among the faces and saw Solomon staring at me. I stared back. He walked straight toward me without hesitation and asked, ‘Is your name Sailor?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know the family Zezen?’ ‘Yes,’ I said again, and he said, ‘There is one looking for you.’ We went inside the restaurant and shared tea. He told me of Zianno and this place, St. Louis. He said he felt like a ghost, but wished to return. I told him he was no ghost and that he should return. He agreed it was time and offered to take me with him and, alas, here I am.”

  Just then, not a second apart, Ray laughed and there was a loud knock at the door. Solomon and Li rose to answer the door; the rest of us looked at Ray. He hadn’t said a word all night.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I guess it ain’t really funny,” he said, rolling his bowler hat around in his hands. “It’s just that this used to be a big world. That’s all.”

  Solomon opened the door wide to allow four men to roll into the room a slightly damaged, but still sound, upright piano—Georgia’s piano. We moved couches and chairs out of the way and Solomon had it positioned in an appropriate and honored place in the room.

  Carolina walked over to him as the men were leaving and placed two fingers on his lips. Then she pulled a chair up to the piano and sat down. She bent over, spreading her arms and laying her cheek on the keys.

  I watched her, but let her alone. She was fine. She didn’t need help, just healing.

  Solomon suggested we call it an evening and we all agreed. Li began snuffing the candles and we exchanged good nights. Solomon walked Carolina to her room. As I was passing Sailor on the way to mine, I said to him, “I had a new kind of dream this afternoon.”

  He smiled his shy smile and said, “You shall have many.”

  An hour later, I was awakened by music. From a sound sleep, I gradually became conscious of a melody, a simple five-note melody, being played over and over on a piano. I stood up and walked toward the sound. It was coming from the big parlor, from Georgia’s piano. In the faint light, I saw Sailor and Carolina also leaving their rooms and walking toward the piano. We got there at about the same time and the melody went away.

  “You heard it too,” I said, looking first at Sailor, then Carolina.

  Carolina started trembling. “That was Georgia, Z. It didn’t just sound like her, that was her.”

  Sailor and I held her arms and helped her into the chair she’d pulled up earlier. She tensed slightly, then relaxed. “It’s warm,” she said.

  I looked at Sailor and he smiled. “There are ghosts all around us, Carolina,” he said. “Some we chase, some we embrace.” Then he looked up at me and said, “It was her touch . . .”

  “It is common,” I said.

  7

  ARTZAIN

  (SHEPHERD)

  A good shepherd is a vigilant man. He is on constant lookout for danger and opportunity. To him, a shift in the wind is information; a common sound a warning; a drink of water a story of what has passed and what lies ahead.

  He guides and guards his flock with patience. He endures drought, blizzard, predation, snakebite, accident, and illness—but most of all—Time.

  He stops at the source of solitude and moves on, often leaving a mark of his passing. In the mountains it may be a carving on an aspen tree, a sapling that will grow and expand, bringing out his image. In the desert it may be a pile of rocks on a barren windswept ridge, “stone boys” he calls them.

  A good shepherd knows Time like no other and a good shepherd sleeps well, even while dreaming of wolves.

  D uring the late spring and early summer, before the real heat and humidity arrive, there is no better or more beautiful place to be than St. Louis. To the east, with the rising sun, the wide Mississippi seems even wider and more majestic in its slow roll around the city. By midday, in the heart of the city, there is the sweet scent of Forest Park. Baseball, music, laughter, and commerce of all kinds surrounds you. To the west, at sunset, the Meramec River curls below the limestone hills and cliffs like a lazy, blue ribbon. It is a place of converging waters, highways, and railroads; a place easy and exciting to live in, but during that time between seasons, difficult to leave. And yet, by the end of the second week in June 1896, that’s just what I was doing.

  After the big feast, and for the next few weeks, we made a sort of home out of the Statler Hotel. We came and went like some extravagant and eccentric family on vacation. Solomon and Carolina went shopping everywhere, with Solomon tipping heavily from a wad of bills that Li carried. We all went bicycling in Forest Park many times and ate lunches on the veranda of the Cottage Restaurant. I insisted that we see a baseball game and we watched the up and coming Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies. As the game went on, I explained it to Sailor and he was fascinated, especially with the fact that the game had no time limit. Ray took us to a “private” club that sponsored their own prizefighting matches. Solomon loved that, but Carolina was bored stiff, agreeing with Mrs. Bennings’s axiom, “Public brawlin’s nothin’ but bad manners.” We even went to the Grand Opera House to see Verdi’s La Traviata and drew inquisitive glances from all around as we took our seats. Dressed in formal attire, we must have looked like some lost cast from another opera. Sailor seemed unaware of the attention and even sang along with the aria, “Di Miei Bollenti Spiriti,” under his breath. We were all busy enjoying life in St. Louis. We were shedding skins and it felt good.

  Carolina already had her plan for the future in place along with the full approval and promise of financial backing from Solomon. I found out about it late one afternoon on a bicycle ride through Forest Park, something we tried to do together almost every day. Carolina had the lead and took me through and out of the northeastern entrance, past Laclede’s Pavilion and into the “old money” neighborhoods around the northern edge of the park.

  “Where are we going?” I yelled ahead. She just looked back over her shoulder and smiled.

  We were in the four thousand block of Westminster, an elegant tree-lined street with one Victorian stone mansion after another. We pedaled through bars of sunlight and shade cast by the huge oaks. It was a rich and silent street; a sanctuary. Suddenly a boy appeared out of the shadows and began running alongside us. He was a handsome, skinny boy, younger-looking than I was, but somehow older than his years, and he had obviously seen Carolina before. He wore knickerbockers with a white shirt and tie and he was smiling as he ran.

  “Hello, Thomas!” Carolina shouted.

  “Hello, Miss Covington!” the boy shouted back as he tried to keep up. “Will you be stopping this time?”

  “No, no. Now, watch where you’re going or you’ll run smack into a tree, Thomas.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Miss Covington,” he yelled, but
his voice was already behind us. I looked back; he had stopped and was standing in the street and staring at the receding image of Carolina on a bicycle. We rode on a bit and I asked who that was and how he knew her.

  “His name is Thomas Eliot,” she said. “He’s a nice boy—wants to be a writer.” She stopped her bicycle and I pulled up alongside her.

  “Well, I think you’ve already inspired him to write something,” I said.

  She laughed and pointed toward the brick and stone mansion in front of her. “Look at this place, Z. Just look at it.”

  I looked at it and it was magnificent, with three stories, climbing vines, big leaded windows, stone verandas, and a driveway that led under a brick arch back to a carriage house half the size of the main house.

  “Thomas told me the family that owns it has it quietly up for sale,” she said.

  I was still confused. “How do you and Thomas know each other?”

  She leaned her bicycle against a tree and started pacing back and forth, looking over the property. “I’ve been riding through here and thinking, Z, about a lot of things. One day, he just came up to me, right here where I’m standing, and we started talking. He’s home from boarding school and I think he was just lonely. He and his family live back there where we saw him and he told me about most of the families in the neighborhood. Most of the things I need to know.”

  “You need to know for what?”

  “To start a new life. Right here.”

  I turned in a circle and looked around at where we were. I saw nothing but wealth couched in castles of abstinence, discipline, and propriety—very conservative, very Victorian.

  “Doing what?” I asked and Carolina looked right at me. Her eyes were bright and her freckles stood out.

  “I thought about it, Z. It came to me the other day when I read in the newspaper that there’s going to be two national political conventions in St. Louis this summer, and Union Station’s got more railroads coming in and out than any other point in the United States, and ‘old money’ like their vices close by, they don’t like the risk in risqué, and then, at the opera, I was sure of it; I studied the faces around me and I knew, I knew, this was the right place.”

  “The right place for what?”

  “A whorehouse.”

  I looked around again. “Here? In this house? On this street?”

  “Yes. That’s the beauty of it. What they can’t get at home, they can get right next door, or at least down the street, or down the street from someone they know. Private. Expensive. Very discreet and filled with beautiful, intelligent women who want to be there, not have to be there.”

  “You’ve thought about this.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Solomon agrees?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Thomas Eliot know he’s going to be living in a red-light district?”

  She laughed and said, “No, and don’t tell him either. He’ll think we’re the Muses. And we will be.”

  We got back on our bicycles and rode until we turned on McPherson and stopped for chocolate at Bissinger’s. I was still thinking about her plan, seeing only disadvantages. “Seriously, Carolina, is this what you want to do? It is against the law, you know?”

  “It’s what I know how to do, Z. It’s what Georgia and I learned. I can’t just quit because Georgia’s gone and it’s illegal. I never make anyone do anything they don’t want to do and I won’t allow anyone around who does. I’ll have Li close by to make sure of that. I’ll also bet ‘the law’ is our best customer.”

  “I guess it is better than having babies.”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Z. Just because I’m for one thing doesn’t mean I’m against another.”

  “I’m sorry, that was stupid.”

  “I love babies,” she said.

  There was an awkward moment that passed between us. It happened rarely, but it did happen; the unspoken knowledge and fact that our difference wasn’t just in our remarks, it was deeper in the blood, further back in time. It was a difference that we ignored, but would forever keep us apart, a difference we could not change. Carolina used the tension to tell me more.

  “Another thing, Z. I know you’ve been thinking about that evil one, that one that did those things to Mrs. Bennings and Georgia. I want you to stop. I want you to let it go and remember Georgia, not avenge her. I know Sailor wants you to do something, not about that, but about something else. I don’t know what it is, but I think you ought to do it. For your own good.”

  Her words hit me hard. Inside, underneath everything else, I knew she was right. I was changing, but all I was really changing was one obsession for another. In my heart of hearts, chasing Sailor had turned into chasing the Fleur-du-Mal, and for all the wrong reasons. I knew she was right about Sailor too. I knew he wanted me to do something, but he hadn’t mentioned his “offer” since that first day.

  “I hope you have lots of babies,” I said, “and I hereby bestow Mama’s baseball glove upon your firstborn.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  We rode our bicycles back the way we came and turned them in at Forest Park. We walked back to the Statler Hotel in the twilight, a long walk, but a good one at that time of year. The next day Sailor made his “offer.”

  We took the train west out of Union Station to the Meramec Highlands, an amusement park that the Frisco Railroad had a direct line to, hauling five hundred passengers a day. Once there, you could ride horses, pedal bicycles, row boats, or swim in the Meramec River. “Privacy in Public” was their motto.

  Solomon, Carolina, and Ray chose horseback riding. Sailor said he wanted to row a boat and he asked for my company. As we launched our boat, I asked him if he didn’t think the name “Mera-mec” was ironic, considering the circumstances. He said no, he hadn’t thought about it, but that was in the area of what he wanted to discuss. We set out on the water, Sailor rowing easily, gracefully, better than any twelve-year-old in the world.

  Several minutes passed. I watched his concentration and the way every stroke was complete, none more important than the other, each with a meaning all its own. While still rowing, he said, “I am reminded of the first time I rowed with passion. It was 2,737 years ago, 841 BC by the Roman calendar. It was the time of ‘Those-Who-Fled.’ ” He stopped rowing and looked at me, trying to catch my reaction. I sat still. I hadn’t asked him about these things, but I wanted to know. He started rowing again and went on. “I was escaping a Phoenician ship in what is now the Bay of La Concha, near the Basque village of Gipuzkoa. We left in the dark when the tide was right so we could float in silence before we had to row. There were forty-three of us, all that would fit in the tiny boat. Others had to stay behind. Choices had to be made. It was decided that the five Egizahar families carrying the Stones would leave and the rest would escape later, somewhere, somehow. There was someone very important to me that we left behind on that ship. Someone whose absence from me made me row with hatred for the Phoenicians and fury against any power that would let this happen. They had violated my family, betrayed our Basque protectors, and stolen my Ameq.”

  “What is Ameq?” I interrupted.

  “My beloved . . . the one for whom I waited. Deza was her name. I tell you this now because you feel hatred for the Fleur-du-Mal and the way he has violated your family, your Giza family. I want you to go with me and meet some of your real family, your own blood, your own protectors, and then make a decision about the Fleur-du-Mal. You may still seek revenge. It will be your decision, but I ask you now, Zianno, to go with me first. There is another way to defeat the Fleur-du-Mal. He knows something we need to know and he thinks we are unable to find it without him. You may have the power within you to find it yourself.”

  “What power?”

  He stopped rowing altogether and drew in the oars, crossing them over his knees. He leaned forward, closing his left eye and searching my eyes with his right, his ghost eye. “Your dreams,” he said. “You are the Stone of Dreams. Your father
and six fathers behind him have carried the Stones since we left that Phoenician ship so long ago. They have all gone deep within their own dreams, but none has found what we need, none has broken through.”

  “What do you need?”

  “The fifth set of Stones and the Bihazanu of the one that wears them.”

  “Bihazanu?”

  “It is an old word, a Meq word; it means heartfear. I will tell you of this and much, much more if you go with me to your western United States, to the high desert. There are people there you should meet, people there you must meet.”

  “What people?”

  “Your protectors; Basque shepherds from the tribe of Vardules and others, old friends of mine.”

  He smoothly slipped the oars back into the water and turned us around in an easy, practiced motion. We headed back to the dock and I noticed that all the rowing boats were painted exactly the same. Coming and going, each one, just like the other.

  “Yes,” I said suddenly, “I will go with you.”

  After that, events moved swiftly. Solomon arranged for us to use his private railroad car and have access to any line on any railroad in the United States; money was no object. We were to meet a man, Owen Bramley, in Denver, and he would make sure everything went according to Solomon’s wishes. Solomon said Bramley was “his man” and would handle everything with efficiency and discretion. “He is one of those damn Scottish men,” he said, “he will pay you no mind and get the job done and done right.”

  Even with Ray going, which Sailor had insisted upon, we had very little luggage. I left my baseball glove with Carolina, this time with her full knowledge, but for the same reasons. We spoke very little on the way to Union Station. It was a beautiful, clear green and blue day. This parting seemed natural, expected, and we were both comfortable with it; but leaving is still leaving.

  “We have done this before,” I said.

  “Yes, we have.” She wore a yellow dress and carried a yellow parasol, unopened. She was sitting on a stranger’s trunk that had been left alone on the platform and she was attracting stares from a few passersby; ladies simply did not sit on trunks.