The Meq Page 8

  “Why are you here, Ray?”

  “I was in Cincinnati and I had one of my ’forecasts’ come to me. I thought about you, Z, so I thought I’d come and save your ass, if you were still around. I hitched a ride with the ball club and I been lookin’ for you ever since.”

  “When did you get here?” I asked and glanced at Carolina.

  “This morning,” he said. “Look, Z, I don’t know how much time we got.” He put both his hands over his eyes and looked at the sky. “You mean, you weren’t here last night?”

  “No. Hey, Z, let’s get out of here. Now.”

  I was confused. If it wasn’t Ray, then who . . .

  “Now, Z, now!” Ray yelled.

  “What? Why?” I looked at him dumbfounded. He pointed to the sky.

  “A tornado’s comin’. A big one. I saw it three days ago.”

  I looked at Carolina. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She didn’t know Ray, she didn’t know the “Weatherman,” but I did. She probably thought he was crazy, but I knew he was never wrong about the weather, and he was no assassin. I kept looking at her and her face seemed to change. I was in my dream again and her head was floating, only it wasn’t her head and her face . . . it was Georgia’s.

  “Let’s get to the house!” I shouted.

  We turned and headed out of the exit, but everyone else was doing the same. The storm came in so fast that the umpires had no time to call off the game. All the players and four thousand fans were trying to leave at once. It was chaos. We squeezed, pushed, and ran through the crowd, finally making it to Grand Avenue, where we ran straight into Corsair Bogy. He looked at me. He looked at Ray. Something about us stunned and shocked him, then he saw Carolina.

  “You bitch, you’re supposed to be at the house!” he screamed.

  “Come on!” I yelled and we took off, leaving Bogy in the driving rain and hail.

  The streets were filled with people running for shelter. Streetcars with bells clanging were racing to make it back to their stations. Some fences were already falling down and the blooms of the dogwoods and redbuds were being blown through the air like snowflakes in a blizzard.

  A block from Mrs. Bennings’s House, Carolina stopped in her tracks from a dead run. She was gasping for air and so was I. Ray wasn’t even out of breath. She put her hands over her ears and her eyes seemed to be staring into some unknown hell. “Georgia!” she screamed and tears poured down her cheeks.

  I took her hand away and dragged her toward the house. She was no longer herself. She had fallen somewhere dark and deep inside. I knew the place. Solomon had caught me falling there.

  Suddenly the rain and hail and wind stopped. There was a strange, eerie calm. I glanced at the sky and it was green and black.

  “It’s comin’!” Ray said.

  We made our way around back and I saw the “girls” running from the kitchen to the cellar door. I told Ray to take Carolina down into the cellar with the others. I stopped one of them and asked her where Mrs. Bennings and Georgia were. She said they were still in Mrs. Bennings’s room, the door was locked, and they wouldn’t come out or answer. She ran on toward the cellar and I looked at Ray.

  “Someone is in there or he’s been there, Ray. He was hired to kill and he’s one of us. He’s got green eyes, like you.”

  “There’s only one like that,” Ray said. “He’s somehow related to me on my old lady’s side.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “The Fleur-du-Mal.”

  I stared back at Ray. I reached inside my shirt and pulled out the Stones; holding them, showing them to him. “What about these?”

  “They won’t make any difference,” he said, “not on the Meq, not on him.”

  I turned to go inside and glanced back at Carolina. “Watch out for her,” I said.

  He nodded once. “You’d better hurry. You ain’t got much time.”

  I walked through the kitchen and into the large room that was the parlor. A few gas lamps were lit, but the room was empty and silent. The piano stool was on its side, as if someone had stood up suddenly and kicked it over. I reached the stairs and started climbing the steps one at a time, trying to stay close to the wall. Outside, I could hear a faint but distinct sound, like a distant train.

  I got to the top of the stairs and saw Mrs. Bennings’s door wide open. The girl had said it was locked. I started to call out, then stopped myself. I took a step toward the door, then another. It was then that I heard the laugh. Inside the room, someone was laughing; a low, mean laugh, like Ray’s, only . . . different . . . older.

  I ran to the open door. I looked inside and saw Mrs. Bennings slumped on a couch, her dress split open from the back, blood covering her chest and her throat slit from ear to ear. Next to her, Georgia sat with her head held back by the hair, screaming in silence, a knife blade at her throat. She saw me and her eyes grew even wider. Behind her, holding her, laughing, was the Fleur-du-Mal.

  He looked up at me and smiled. His teeth were a brilliant white. He had deep green eyes, a short ponytail tied with a green ribbon, and two red ruby earrings. He was slightly taller than I was but that was the only other difference.

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  I stood there in silence. I felt a sense of evil and danger I had never known.

  “The weather is bad, no?” he said, laughing that laugh.

  “Let that one go,” I said.

  “No, no, no, mon petit, mon Pequeño Basque,” he said bitterly. “You cannot protect her with your precious Stones.”

  “She’s not the one you want.”

  “No? Then who is she?”

  Just then, the front door downstairs crashed open and a ferocious wind blew in along with Corsair Bogy. He saw me and started for the stairs, yelling, “You little son of a bitch!”

  A tremendous roar followed and the house began to come apart. I looked at Georgia. Her eyes were frozen with terror. The Fleur-du-Mal laughed again, but I couldn’t hear him and he cut Georgia’s throat in one motion from ear to ear.

  After that, I remember nothing. Nothing but the dream; the dream of endless falling through a black hole, of floating heads, trains, and spiders dangling from the masts of ships being torn to shreds in the black winds. And there were stars in the winds; stars made of red rubies, diamonds, and lapis lazuli. I fell through a thousand lifetimes, spinning, weightless, like ash from the fire in a cave.

  They found me with my arm and shoulder under the corner of the piano. My arm and collarbone were broken and I had dozens of cuts and bruises. I knew all that would heal. They found Corsair Bogy under the rest of the piano.

  There was no more Mrs. Bennings’s House. The tornado had raged through south St. Louis and cut a swath a half mile wide, wiping out whole neighborhoods and leaving nothing.

  The Fleur-du-Mal had vanished with the tornado.

  Ray found Mama’s baseball glove not far from where he discovered the bodies of Georgia and Mrs. Bennings. When I was able to look, he showed me something on their backs. It was a signature of the Fleur-du-Mal. He had carved a rose on their backs with the point of his knife before he slit their throats. Ray said his own mother had been killed that way in New Orleans.

  Carolina was in shock and we took her and the other girls to a brewery warehouse where a temporary shelter had been set up.

  Ray and I returned to the wreckage and rubble of Mrs. Bennings’s House. We sat there through the night, the following morning, and the rest of the day. It was May 3, 1896, the day before my birthday. During that time, we talked about where we’d been and what we’d done in the last dozen or so years. He told me he had left the way he had because he’d received information through his network of contacts that his sister was in the Far East, working with a famous courtesan. He combed most of the western Pacific looking for her, but never found a trace. He asked me about Carolina and I told him as much as I could, but I found I was barely able to talk about her. I was becoming consumed with a thought and feeling I
had never experienced. It had many images and shapes, but only one name—revenge.

  I asked about the Fleur-du-Mal and he told me what he knew. The Fleur-du-Mal was an old one, how old he didn’t know. He had come to America with the Portuguese and had been the only survivor when the ship went down in a storm off the coast of Florida. He had many nicknames, one of which was “Sugar,” because he had a habit of eating whole pieces of sugar and the Giza thought it odd that his teeth stayed a brilliant white. His real name was Xanti Otso, but the Meq only referred to him as the Fleur-du-Mal, the flower of evil. He was an assassin, a good one, and had been for centuries.

  We watched the sun come up and it lit a broken, battered world. We checked on Carolina and she said she was fine and wanted to leave. She wanted to see the house even though we told her nothing was there. Arguing was pointless and so we walked through littered streets back to the house.

  Standing in the sunlight, staring at what had been her life and her sister’s life, she scanned the debris until she saw it. To no one in particular, she said, “We’ll save the piano.”

  At that moment, a formal carriage pulled by two stately draft horses turned the corner and stopped in front of us. The driver, who was Chinese and wearing a long, braided pigtail, jumped down from his bench and opened the door facing us. A man stepped out; an old man, tall, with white hair and a white beard. He was dressed in a finely tailored black suit and held a top hat in his hand.

  “Zis is not good business,” he said, taking in the whole neighborhood with a slow turn. He looked at me. I looked at him.

  “Come here, Z,” he said, “there is someone in the carriage I would like you to meet. I think you call him Sailor.”

  PART II

  If only I could be like the tree at the river’s edge Every year turning green again!

  —HAN SHAN

  6

  MAMU

  (GHOST)

  Some moments in life are remembered uniquely. They are most vivid in the mind not because of the event or person or place itself, but because of something that surrounds it, something in the background that only you perceived and yet, when you recall that moment, it is the first thing you think of and the last thing you will forget. It is the moment outside the moment. It is the ghost of memory.

  I remember the sound of a dog barking; more than anything else I remember that. As I walked toward Solomon and the carriage, I heard in the distance a dog barking in a steady cadence, like a chant, and urgent. I was sure there was someone trapped in the wreckage, but alive, and the dog was barking for anyone to come and look; find them; save them. No one else seemed to hear it. I stopped walking and looked past the carriage in the direction of the sound. Then he spoke and the barking stopped.

  “It is long time since we see each other—eh, Zianno?”

  Was it really Solomon standing there speaking to me? I didn’t know until that moment how much I had truly missed my good friend.

  “I must say, Z, my partner, you look much the same.” He winked and made a formal bow, waving his top hat in a low arc across his body before placing it carefully on his head as he rose.

  I laughed out loud. “I wish I could say the same for you, old friend.”

  “What? You must mean these rags?” he said, pulling at the trousers of his very expensive suit. “Or zis?” He yanked on his full white beard. “I am same man, Z. Solomon J. Birnbaum I am, was, and shall be.”

  “We thought you might be dead. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Dead I am not.” He paused and took another slow turn, surveying the refuse and debris that had once been a neighborhood and Mrs. Bennings’s House. Speaking more to himself, he said, “We should have been here two days ago. We were delayed . . . by the weather.” He looked once at Carolina, who was staring at him hollow-eyed, and he glanced at Ray standing easy in his bowler hat. He turned back to me. “We will talk of all zis later. Now, come. Come and meet Sailor.”

  The sun was glinting off the polished black surface of the carriage. Shading my eyes, I stepped between Solomon and the Chinese man holding the door open. As I passed Solomon, I whispered, “How did this happen?”

  He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Business,” was all he said.

  A single shaft of light cut through the darkness of the carriage, catching as it did a hand reaching from the shadows; a hand just like mine but for a small ring on the first finger. It was a ring made of star sapphire set in silver and six different rays of color shot out from it in the light. I grabbed the hand and was helped into the carriage and onto the bench.

  “Happy birthday, I believe, is a proper opening.”

  The voice came from the shadows. It was a measured voice; a voice that accented each syllable evenly; a voice that had studied this language and learned it as it had a hundred others.

  “I had forgotten,” I said. “As you probably know, they start to seem the same.”

  “Ah, but that is not true, Zianno.” He leaned forward out of the shadows, putting his elbows across his knees. I could see him clearly now. “Birthdays are not the same, not a one of them. Whether out of longing or loathing, you must remember each of them fully, if for nothing else—a testament to your survival.”

  I heard him talking, but I wasn’t listening. I was finally seeing, in the flesh, this man-boy I had been looking for half my life. I ran my eyes over him. He wore leather boots like Unai and Usoa, laced to the knees. Tucked into them, black silk trousers held at the waist by an old leather belt with a brass buckle. He wore a burgundy silk tunic open at the neck, and hanging from a single leather strap worn as a necklace were the Stones. His hair was dark and cut short, except for one braid that hung from behind his left ear down to his shoulder, tied with a tassel and an oval of lapis lazuli. His eyes were dark as coffee beans and one of them, his right, had the only physical imperfection I’d seen in any of us. Around the iris, his eye was gray and cloudy instead of white. He was smiling. It was a shy smile, unexpected but genuine.

  “I call it my ‘ghost eye,’ ” he said, aware that I was staring.

  “Your name is Sailor?”

  “Yes, most call me that.”

  “I have been searching for you for much of my life. Now I don’t know what to say. The last thing Mama said was ‘Find Umla-Meq; find Sailor.’ Now, at least, I have found you. Umla-Meq remains a mystery to me.”

  He was still smiling. “Then your journey is over, Zianno.”

  “What? How do you mean?”

  He reached into his pocket, pulling out something small and holding it in his fist. “Let me introduce myself,” he said, dropping his smile. “I am Umla-Meq, Egizahar Meq, through the tribe of Berones, protectors of the Stone of Memory.”

  “You mean, you’re the same person?”

  “Yes. Your mother, Xamurra, must have been trying to tell you, but there was too much to tell and too little time.”

  I looked out of the window of the carriage. I thought, “I am here, Mama, I have made it. I have done what you asked.” I felt something touch my hand and I glanced down at it. Nothing had.

  “It was her touch,” he said, “it is common.”

  I looked at him and then out of the window again. Solomon was talking to Carolina, holding her hand. Ray was kneeling down listening to him, but stealing glances at the carriage. The dog was barking again somewhere in the distance. I turned to look in the face of this boy, this ancient boy who I realized had found me, just like Usoa had said. I had not found him.

  “Open your hand, Zianno. Open your hand and hold it out, palm up. I wish to give you the oldest Meq greeting and exchange.”

  I held out my hand and he placed a cube of salt in it and closed my fingers. In a very low voice he said, “Egibizirik bilatu.”

  I asked him what it meant and he said it roughly translated as “the long-living truth, well searched for.” I told him I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start. He said he would be glad to answer anything he could because that was part of the exchan
ge in the giving of salt. It was the first exchange and the most important; when others are lost and questions asked, answers will be given. Then he did something strange. He told me to turn my head and look in the light. He knelt down and came in close, searching my eyes.

  “You have seen the Fleur-du-Mal, have you not? He has burned himself inside you, has he not?”

  I lowered my eyes and eased back against the seat, out of the light. “Yes,” I said. The same rage and sense of vengeance I had felt talking to Ray came rushing back to the surface.

  “I have an offer to make to you, Zianno. It will involve the feelings you have toward the Fleur-du-Mal.”

  Suddenly there was a commotion outside and I heard Solomon’s voice rising and coming toward us talking to the Chinese man. The door swung wide and Solomon thrust his head in.

  “Zis young woman needs food and rest, Z!” He was red in the face and his eyes were watery. “She told me everything, everything that happened. Great Yahweh, Z! If only . . .” He trailed off and turned to the Chinese man, talking belligerently about having enough room and not to worry. I looked at Sailor and he was smiling again, but not at me, at Solomon. Then Solomon was waving his arms for Carolina and Ray to get in the carriage and for the Chinese man to jump on top and get going.

  “Now, Li! No more protests! Up you go!” he yelled.

  In a matter of thirty seconds, we were all in the carriage and on our way. Solomon removed his top hat and, huffing a little bit, said, “You will all come and stay with me. No questions, no worries. Zis is good business.”

  Ray and Carolina were sitting next to me. I looked at Ray and he shrugged, as if to say “why not.” I looked at Carolina and she seemed worn-out; inside and out, she was beaten down. Almost in unison, we all turned to look at the boy sitting next to Solomon.

  “Carolina, Ray, this is . . .”

  “Call me Sailor,” he said, saying it as easily as if he’d said it a hundred thousand times.

  “We go downtown. We stay at the Statler Hotel,” Solomon said. “We have many, many things to talk about.”