Max decided to double back on himself, turning left along the alley and walking cautiously until it spilled out onto a street. And there in that alley mouth he waited, watching and listening, wondering just what the hell he would do next.
His life was full of questions and dangers. And with every question he answered, two more arose in its place.
His exclusive, one-way viewing of these significant Moments in New Orleans’ history appeared to be compromised now. Back in the plague hospital, the Tordu man had seemed to sense something amiss. And in the Beauregard-Keyes House, both Mireault and the sacrificial victim had looked directly at him. What they had seen he could not guess. Not a whole, solid person, certainly, because Coco would have never let a witness live through that.
Next time, perhaps they would see more.
He backed away from the street and sat on a cold concrete step. He could see out into the street from here, but now that darkness had fallen, he hoped that no one could see this far in. Street lamps were lit, and a few bars and restaurants tried their best to stay in business. The French Quarter was still alive. He smelled food again and his stomach rumbled, but the next time he breathed in he smelled spilled blood and vinegar.
He'd seen Coco taking that boy's organs.
He sighed and leaned back against the steel door. When he closed his eyes, Gabrielle's image leapt out, surprising him with her easy smile and the way her hair always fell over one eye, however much she swept it back. He felt a sudden rush of love for her, and for a beat it was as if she were still there. His eyes snapped open and he felt the loss again, raw and harsh.
Two men walked past the mouth of the alley, talking in hushed tones, and Max sank lower so that he could not be seen. He peered from the shadows, and the men were unknown to him. When they passed the alley he missed their voices. He missed the ease with which they walked the streets, their casual acceptance of the night, and the friendship that seemed obvious between them. Once again, the city made him feel alone.
“Up,” a voice whispered, so quietly that Max frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Up,” it said again. And he felt the point of a blade touch his neck below the jaw.
Slowly, Max pushed himself up, pressed face-first against the metal door. He tried to turn, but the man behind him growled and nicked him with the knife.
Max felt the cool dribble of blood down his neck. He sniffed; this was not Coco. The car driver, then? Or the fat man from the back? If it was the driver, he'd seen the man nursing his head after the collision, so there could be a weakness there. If it was the fat man—
A fist crunched against his back, driving white-hot pain through his kidneys and around his torso. Max groaned and went to his knees, crying out when the knife touched his neck again.
“I said up!” the man said. He smelled of garlic and whiskey, cigarettes and sweat, and Max could tell that he'd been running.
How far behind are the others?
Max stood, hands raised in supplication, knowing that he had to get away.
Had they split up to look for him?
He leaned against the door, gasping as the pain settled into his side and back.
Were Coco and this goon in touch?
“Face the fucking door.”
Max leaned against the door and heard a voice behind it, shouting very faintly.
“What's that in your pocket?”
Max glanced back at the man, taking the opportunity to press his ear to the door. Clanging, metal on metal, shouting, bustle …it sounded like a busy kitchen. “A map.”
The fat man grunted and plucked the map from Max's pocket. He wiped sweat from his big round head, flicking the droplets across Max's face and smiling. “What sort of map?”
“A magic one.”
The fat guy's smile dropped from his face. Something flashed in Max's eye, and then the tip of the knife was pressed to his lower eyelid. Max rose onto his tiptoes but the knife followed him up, never more than half an inch away from his eye.
“Don't fuck with me, dead man,” Fat Man said. “My brother's legs are shattered, they say he won't walk again, if he even lives. But Coco told me he don't want you dead. Least, not yet. But that doesn't mean I can't …cut you a bit. Soften you up for his questions. ’Cos he has plenty of questions for you, dead man.”
Don't push don't push don't push, Max thought, feeling the knife's tip touch his inner eyelid.
Fat Man eased back on the knife, and when Max sighed with relief and lowered himself down, Fat Man flicked the blade.
Max gasped, from shock more than anything else. He felt a drizzle of blood on his face, and then the stinging came in, and the pain, like intense heat or extreme cold pressed in a line on his cheek.
His heart thumped quicker, and fear and anger sharpened his senses.
“What are you—?” he began.
Fat Man pointed the knife at his face. “You don't ask any fuckin’ questions here. Got that?”
Max nodded, resting his head back against the door.
“Now be a good dead man while I give my friends a call.” Fat Man took a cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open, knife still pointing at Max's face.
Max heard footsteps approaching beyond the door, echoing, setting the metal vibrating. A voice called inside, Max felt the door shake as bolts were drawn back, and a man laughed, deep and hearty.
Fat Man was dialing a number, frowning, large fingers clumsy on the small keypad.
The metal door shifted, and Max made sure he had his balance.
“Your brother screamed like a pussy when I ran him down.”
Fat Man's eyes went wide.
The door swung inward, away from him, and Max let himself fall forward onto his hands and knees, twisting and kicking up at Fat Man's hand.
The guy who'd opened the door jumped backward, shouting in surprise.
Fat Man's knife hand was thrown back by the force of Max's kick, but he held on to the blade, fumbling and dropping the phone from his other hand instead.
Once again, Max was faced with a sudden choice: flight, through the kitchens and out into the streets once more; or fight. And he was sick of running.
He stood and swung, his fist glancing from Fat Man's cheek, thumbnail ripping his ear open. The man screeched and stumbled back, and Max heard the crunch of plastic as the man stepped on his own phone.
Behind Max, the man who had opened the door was already retreating back inside the building, the door swinging shut. The man said nothing, but he moved quickly. Max didn't have long.
Fat Man started to swing the knife around again but Max shouldered him in the chest, reached up, and caught his forearm, gripping hard. He planted his feet and spun around, twisting the guy's arm as far and as hard as he could.
He heard a crack, and Fat Man screamed. Max had never done anything like this before. He'd had a fight in fifth grade when his combatant and he had both been sent to the head teacher with blood streaming from their noses. And once, out in Boston with a group of college friends, he'd helped break up a drunken scuffle between two of them, and a flailing fist had caught him in the mouth and made his lip bleed. But that was the sum of violence in his life. He didn't know how to hurt, and the thought of doing it had always been reprehensible to him.
But the Fat Man had grinned as he flicked the knife across Max's face. He had called him “dead man.” And something deeper than memory, something more allied with instinct, kicked in.
Max let go of the man's arm and pushed. Fat Man shuffled backwards and hit the wall, grimacing as his useless right arm flapped at his side. Max stormed forward, aiming a kick at the man's balls and missing, but following up with punches to his face and neck. It was pathetic. Fat Man's knife gone, his arm out of action, he snotted and sniveled, and in what seemed like seconds he was begging for Max to stop. But to stop would be a mistake, Max knew, and he punched again and again. Fat Man slid to the ground, and Max kicked him in the face.
At last he stepped back. It could have
been seconds or minutes, but the red mist of fight and fury lifted as quickly as it had arrived.
Fat Man started laughing. Each time his chest rose and fell Max heard something click, and blood bubbled at his cut and swollen mouth, his eyes seeing little. The beaten man lifted his good hand to his neck and laughed some more, shaking his head as if he'd heard the funniest joke ever told.
“What's so goddamn funny?” Max demanded, unnerved.
The man pointed at him first, and then with great effort his lips parted in a grin, splitting and spilling more blood down his slick jaw. “Dead …man.”
Max glanced around. The metal door to the restaurant kitchens was still open, though there was no sign of any curious faces inside. Someone else's problem, he thought. In the borrowed streetlight he could see Fat Man's crushed phone, like a huge beetle someone had trodden on. He looked around, and moments later he saw the glint of the fallen knife.
He snatched up the weapon and knelt before the man, knowing even then that he could never kill. But he had to convey the possibility that he would.
Max pressed the knife beneath one of the Fat Man's eyes, reversing the situation from minutes before. “What did Gabrielle Doucette have to do with the Tordu?”
Fat Man smiled, and a croaky giggle escaped him.
“I'm going to kill you in five seconds if you don't start talking,” Max said. “Tell me about Coco, the Tordu, Gabrielle, and why you do what you do to people. What's the point of it all? Tell me, or in five seconds I'll cut your throat and watch you bleed to death. One.”
Fat Man stared at him with one partly-open eye.
“Two.”
A car passed by the end of the alley, and Max glanced up. Police car. It did not stop. He looked back down at Fat Man, whose smile had disappeared.
“Three.”
The man stared at him blankly now, chest still clicking every time he took in a breath. His eye was watering. Blood bubbled at his mouth.
“Four.”
Max moved the knife from the man's eye and pressed it to his throat. His own heart was racing, perhaps fooled into the possibility that he might actually go through with this. He tried reassuring himself that this was a bluff, but something inside didn't quite believe.
“Five.” He stared at the man's eye, seeing nothing. “Last chance.”
Fat Man closed his eyes, shutting out the world.
Max pressed the knife forward, his thoughts manic, searching for something that would rescue him from this failed situation, and all he could come up with was a name, dredged up from his memory of Charlie's ranting.
“Seddicus will laugh at you, Fat Man.”
The man's eye opened again, with a soft pop. It went wider than it had before, and even swollen so badly, the other eye opened as well. The man pushed with his feet, struggling to back away from Max, and the fear on his face could not be feigned. He was moaning, and his good arm came up to wipe a sheen of blood from his face.
Max leaned forward, taking advantage of the man's state, and he felt a smile split his own face. “And after he laughs, Seddicus will want you.”
The man's good arm lifted and slapped the wall behind him, fingers twitching.
“Tell me about Coco and the Tordu!”
“You know. You already know!”
Max heard voices behind him. He glanced back at the open doorway. Two people stood there now, the man who had first opened the door and another, bigger man.
“Cops on their way,” the big man said.
“Fuck off and mind your own business,” Max said.
The big man shrugged and the two faces disappeared again.
Max bent to the Fat Man and snatched the map from his jacket pocket. “Be seeing you,” he said. When he stood up again, he saw a vague shape on the pale brick wall, drawn in blood. It was a circle with three lines through it, forming a triangle within the circle, each line trailing beyond its edge.
“Don't think that will help,” he said.
Fat Man stopped breathing. His body froze in a moment, his hand raised, a blood bubble forming at the corner of his mouth and popping.
Max took one more look at the marking on the wall, then turned and sprinted away along the alley. For as long as the street light filtered in and lit his way, he felt Fat Man's eyes on his back, watching him go.
He reached the end of the alley and hit the street. He walked quickly, turning left and then right, working his way west, away from the Beauregard-Keyes House and what had happened there. Eventually he realized that being out on the street, bloodied as he was, would be more dangerous than holing up somewhere. Besides, he was thirsty, and he needed a place to look at the map.
Time was of the essence. However many Moments there were left for him to view, the faster he did so, the better.
He ducked into a café and went into the bathroom to wash the blood from his hands and arm and face—carefully, biting back groans of pain when his fingers touched his bruised nose and cut cheek. He looked in the mirror. In the dark café, and wearing dark clothes, the tacky drying blood would not be too noticeable. That was good. Using a wet paper towel he dabbed at the slash on his cheek. It was already clotting. He looked like a mugging victim, but little could change that.
When he came out, he took a table at the back and ordered a jug of coffee and a chicken po'boy. He was not really hungry anymore, but did not want to look too out of place.
The café was about a third full, most tables taken by couples or small groups. There were a few solo diners, some of them evidently self-conscious, the others quite comfortable in their own company. They read, or drank, or just looked into a distance that Max could never really know. He guessed that the ones not used to eating or drinking alone were from out of town, brought in to help with the cleanup.
He tucked a paper napkin into his collar, trying to hide the blood on his shirt.
No one looked too threatening. The waitress took no notice of Max's clothes. His nose hurt, so he breathed through his mouth.
A car swept by, a black-and-white with no blues flashing.
Coffee poured, waiting for his food to come, Max opened up the map and spread it across the table. He scanned it quickly, but the Sixth Moment did not leap out at him. Frowning, he fixed the location of the Moment he'd just visited, pleased that the boxed words had faded, but still confused. Where is it? he thought. Just where the hell …?
“Didn't mark you for a tourist,” the waitress said, standing beside him and pouring more coffee. She was a short white woman, very trim and athletic, her long hair tied back and hanging over one shoulder. She smiled at him and glanced down at the map.
“Visitor, not tourist,” he said.
“There's a difference?”
“Tourists are happy to be here.” He winced inwardly, hoping he hadn't caused offense. Is she really flirting with me?
But the waitress laughed. “Sure, you don't look like you're having too much fun. And I never met a tourist found what they expected here. ’Specially now.”
“Yeah,” Max said. “It's quite a place.”
“Sure is that. Be quite a place again, too, just you see.”
Max was moved by her confidence, and he felt a lump in his throat. Senses heightened, his emotions had followed suit, and much as he knew he was in mortal danger, he still felt incredibly alive.
“Good to hear some optimism,” he said.
The waitress leaned on his table across from him, looking him in the eye. “You tell everyone,” she said. “When you go back to wherever you came from, you tell everyone that we're still here, and we'll survive.”
Max smiled and nodded, and the waitress turned and went to wait on a neighboring table. He had the sense that he'd been honored somehow, and he watched her for a few minutes to see whether she repeated the performance. She did not. She had seen something in Max that drew that out of her.
Must have more of New Orleans in me than I realized, he thought. And terrible though the city was to him right now, he c
ould not help liking that idea. The Tordu might have been tormenting the city for generations, tainting it with whatever dark magic they performed, but he recalled clearly the wondrous magic he had seen at the moment of the city's founding. The Tordu were a stain upon New Orleans, but they weren't the city. It had a powerful heart that had nothing to do with their darkness, and a sense of joy and hope that was unlike anywhere else in the world. New Orleans was hurting now, teetering, and maybe it would never fully recover. But the Tordu were like rats, infecting the city and feeding off its garbage.
He went back to the map, sipping his coffee, scanning the streets and districts, and then he saw the Sixth Moment. He'd not spotted it before because the blocked square fit so well into the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward.
The Sixth Moment:
Under Cover of Betsy
The End of a Ward
September 9, 1965
Lower Ninth Ward. He knew that had been hit hard during the storm, with the Industrial Canal flood walls being breached and sending billions of gallons of water raging through the streets. Then Hurricane Rita had flooded much of the neighborhood—and Gentilly as well—only a few weeks after Katrina. And he had read about Hurricane Betsy forty years ago, when the ward had suffered a similar fate. But what did “Under cover of Betsy” mean? What had the Tordu done during that hurricane?
Right now, the Lower Ninth would be a bad place to visit, and it was maybe two miles from where he sat. It was dark, he'd lost his rental car, and the city streets were not a safe place at night.
For him, they weren't a safe place by day, either.
But he had to get there. There was no mention of the Tordu for this Sixth Moment, but that did not mean they had not been involved. And then the sobering thought hit him that Coco might actually figure out the trail he was following, and why.
Max shook his head. He could not let suspicions like that derail him. He drank some more coffee, then the waitress returned with his food. She smiled a dazzling smile, and for a beat he even thought she was going to join him. She glanced at the map, then up at him again.
The Map of Moments Page 19
