by Brian Hodge
“Browning Hi-Power.”
“Let me see it, bet I can show you something about Brownings you didn’t know.” When it was handed over, Eel turned it this way, that, then jammed it against Hogarth’s chest and cut loose four rounds. He grabbed the body before it might fall against the horn.
Moving quickly, Eel ripped the bandage from his shoulder and tossed it onto the back seat — surely his blood type was on file somewhere. He smudged up the obvious places any stranger to this car would be prone to wiping fresh fingerprints. Mullavey was right on one count, at least: The way things looked was more important than the way they really were. He gathered his sacks, dropped the warm Browning into the largest, and left the car behind, motor still chugging into the night.
He walked in the direction of the river, then, and St. Peter. Where he would, for all concerned, disappear from the face of the earth.
Worries of later discovery were slight, as Eel slipped via his back route into the charred shell of Charbonneau’s. Mullavey was the only one left who knew of the vaults’ existence and Eel bet he wouldn’t tell a soul. Just one more detail, like his brother, that he was probably hoping would fade away so that it might never reflect upon him. As well, the final trapdoor in the subbasement’s floor had been so well blended into the surrounding brick — the door paved with mortar and a thin layer of brick slices — that one had to know it was there before being likely to even notice. It solidly locked with three sliding iron bolts.
Here was a hole you really could fall into, and pull in after you.
Lighting the subbasement with a butane lighter, Eel set his sacks aside and reached overhead. Along a beam ran a wire, slack as a rope, within U-nails. He gave it a few yanks. It ran behind the wall to plunge, unseen, into the chambers below, where it jingled a small bell. They had, years ago, opted for a mechanical doorbell over electrical; a wise move, it had turned out.
Minutes later he heard the muffled scrape of the iron bolts, and Nathan eased the door open.
“Here, take these,” Eel said, and handed the sacks down.
“What’s all this shit?”
“You plan on eating, don’t you?”
Nathan took them and stepped down the heavy wooden stairs to give Eel room to follow. He locked the trapdoor, and they started for the vaults in a soft echo of footsteps, conversation rebounding from walls, and the ever present murmur of the water. Eel wove truth with lies, told Nathan that, given the way things were looking on the streets, it would be safest if he laid low for another night while the grunts mopped up a few opportunistic challengers trying to make the most of last night.
“Just one more night?” Nathan said. His white shirt was soiled with grime, while his eyes roved with the frantic caution of a man unsure how long his head would last if he raised it above a foxhole. “What about heading for A. J.’s instead? One more night down here and I’ll lose my goddamn mind, nothing but these walls.”
Eel waited until Nathan bent to set the sacks down near the entrance to the humfo. While Nathan’s back was turned, Eel slipped the lead-and-rubber sap from his pocket, stepped closer, and gave Nathan a single, solid whack behind the ear.
“Get used to it,” Eel said, and stepped over him.
He knew he had some chains around here somewhere.
Chapter 31
Exodus
When Napoleon saw Twin Oaks again, Friday night, it already seemed a relic from a past more remote than it really was. He approached from the back this time, on foot. Where once he had privilege, he was now the criminal … and would have it no other way.
He felt it more than he saw it, while coming out of the trees to scale the wall, then crossing the back clearing: Twin Oaks was a monstrous house with an even more monstrous pall of misery floating above it like a haze of swamp gas. Perhaps it had always been there, and he’d never bothered to notice. Perhaps, at last, Macandal had opened his eyes to the world as it should be seen.
Christophe Granvier waited at the beginning of his journey. Their meeting had been destined, of course, their strengths and knowledge perfect complements for this night’s task. Christophe with the money, the means by which to rent a bus. Napoleon and his familiarity with the lesser-traveled roads around Twin Oaks; where best to park.
Moonlight was dim, filtered through clouds skimming across the sky in silence eerie for something so black, so massive. He kept low to the ground, stopping every several yards, on around Twin Oaks until he reached the wing housing the servants and the guest rooms.
Sixty yards and waiting, and there was the signal he hoped to see: a single candle burning in the darkened window of Orvela LaBonté. Onward.
It had been almost too easy, really. He had been bold enough to precede his final visit to Twin Oaks with a phone call this morning, from Mama Charity’s shop. It was Christophe’s suggestion — who would answer but one of the very people they wanted to help? The maid who answered greeted him as she might have a relative feared dead. At his request, she turned the call over to Orvela, whose voice he welcomed like that of a favorite aunt.
He explained the option that he was going to take, that was open to them all. And then he listened, tales of life at Twin Oaks since Wednesday night. If ever there was incentive to leave this place, it had come.
Orvela would do the rest. All he need do was come.
Napoleon crossed the remainder of the way to the house, its outer wall like a towering battlement. He tapped on Orvela’s window. A moment later the candle winked out and the window scraped open, then the screen. She was a face hovering in the dark, no more.
“You’re late,” she whispered.
“What time is it?”
“A quarter past ten.”
“Still not doing bad, then, hey.” He grinned and pulled a plastic vial from one pocket, handed it to her.
“You wait here, and you don’t move unless you have no choice, you hear me?” Her whisper was stern. “These are very bad men here, and if they see you, I don’t think they be in any mood to ask questions. You a brave young man. Now wait here and don’t be a stupid one.”
Ah, he’d missed her all right.
As the window slid closed, he settled in by the foundation. It was all up to Orvela for now, to deal with these men of Mr. Andrew’s brother. Orvela had said they drank coffee into the night to keep them awake, and beneath this roof, everyone agreed that Orvela made better coffee than anyone.
And would, on occasion, serve it with pride.
The sky dawned silver-black when a break in clouds revealed the moon, and with its flood upon his face, Napoleon smiled. To gaze upon the moon and stars was like looking back into history. These same lights that, more than two hundred years ago, had guided a runaway slave named Macandal on his mission of poisons. Had he looked up to them and seen the future, its triumphs and failures, and how others might learn from his example? Had he seen nocturnal pathways marked by gods, visible to his eyes alone, and had he known that one day he would ascend to their company?
Sometimes futures could be seen more clearly than history, as viewed through the distortions of time and man, but at least the lessons of the past remained pure, for those with open eyes.
And if he had been ignorant of those herbs and powders that might be brewed into a drink, and cause a man to sleep, then Mama Charity had knowledge enough. And Orvela her nerve.
These should be enough. He prayed they would be.
The moon had risen by the time he heard the soft scrape of the window again, Orvela whispering his name. He stood.
“They sleep like babies now,” Orvela said. “Babies holding guns.”
“What about the others?”
“Miz Kathleen, she gone for hours, takes her pills and sleeps like the dead. Mr. Andrew…” And did she hesitate? Falter, as with a winsome stab of pain? She did. She did. “Mr. Andrew, he should be asleep by now too, gone to bed more than an hour ago.”
He frowned. “What is it?”
Orvela shook her head, glanced be
hind herself into a room too dark for him to see. “Nothing. It’s late, time we go now. We’ll be coming out by the pool, now go, get over to meet us.”
She disappeared as he watched, her face — those lines so deeply carved around her mouth — swallowed by the room.
Napoleon doubled back around Twin Oaks, keeping to shadows so deep they might have been poured. The water of the swimming pool shimmered as dark as oil, out by the soft, lonely splash of the nymph statue at one end. It spouted for no one, mindless.
The back door, finally, one of several. He waited.
And they came, these men and women who had watched him grow from adolescence to adulthood, and a handful of younger ones with whom he had made the transition. Most strangers to one another a decade ago, in the mountains of Haiti, or the steaming cauldron of Port-au-Prince. Forever bound by an ocean voyage some had eagerly taken by choice, because it seemed like a way out at the time, while others had been given no options at all. A few children, too, the infrequent babies born here since their arrival.
They carried little, most belongings bound in parcels they’d improvised from sheets or blankets, and he recognized that look in their eyes: the excitement at the prospect of the new, the terror of its power to overwhelm. And relief? He supposed it was there, as well, in a few faces.
“Wait,” he said to Orvela. “Wait. This isn’t everyone. What about Clarisse? She’s not here.”
When Orvela looked at him, he understood that faltering in her voice back at her window. Even before she pulled him away to one side to explain — a sad pretense to privacy, as if a few feet would be a barrier to all those eyes and ears.
“She’s made her choice, as I’ve made mine,” said Orvela. “My daughter or not, Clarisse, she is no child. If she chooses to stay in this house, with this man, with his wife now gone … I’ll cry for her, but I can’t force her away.”
Clarisse, staying of her own free will? No, he didn’t want to hear this, it was a slap in the face with everything he had ever rationalized about her relationship with Mr. Andrew. He knew that Clarisse served as his mistress, knew that he would sometimes come to her room in the dead of night while his wife slept, and would keep even more frequent company with her when Mrs. Evelyn was away. Napoleon would listen to the man’s weak grunts and tell himself that Clarisse submitted because it was her way to survive. That Mr. Andrew told lies, made threats, exploited his mystique as that most miraculous of people in Haitian eyes: a twin.
Beneath the ageless moon, he knew he could continue to feed himself hope. That Clarisse chose to stay because Mr. Andrew had bewitched her. With his wife gone, he had no more reason to carry on in secrecy, and would blatantly take Clarisse as a replacement. How easily Napoleon could tell himself that.
How easily he would know it to be just one more lie.
“She promises me she’ll never tell him where we’ve gone,” said Orvela, “and she knows he would never hurt her to find out.”
The possibility of Mr. Andrew reaching out to find them, or harm them out of spite, hadn’t even crossed his mind. Miami — he had long wanted to go there, to drive its streets, to swim its ocean, to simply breathe its air and taste the flavor of its life, and it would be enough to know it was something he had achieved on his own. He could bask in warmth on a sunny day and take comfort that his was a different sun than shone on Twin Oaks. Clarisse had never given him any encouragement, so he had no reason for blind fantasy … but knowing she would not be there at all made every anticipation a little dimmer.
“Napoleon,” Orvela said. “Look to be alive, will you?” She gripped his wrists, her palms and fingers with a feel like smooth, warm leather. “All the rest of us, we need you. Now.”
“How can you be leaving, then?” he asked. “She’s your only daughter and you might never see her again.”
“And one day, too, she may wake up and come to her senses, and not want to be where she is no more. So she has a new home to run to, then, if I go first.” Orvela released his wrists, caught one of his hands between both of hers, rubbed it. “So you take me there, Napoleon. Too far for me to walk, I know that much.”
He nodded. This ancestral moon had seen more misery than his own. Then, another realization.
“What about the others?” He gestured downriver, toward the cane fields. “Won’t they be coming with us?”
“No.” Orvela gave his hand one final squeeze. “We came from the same land … and they brought us all to the same place … but those people in the fields, Napoleon, we used to be like them, but not no more. We been living under a better roof than theirs for so long, they look at us now like we done something evil just to crowd under it at all.”
When he shut his eyes he could see nothing but too many empty seats on a southbound bus. “Did you even ask them?”
“Me? No. I sent Tulia and Phillipe.” Shaking her head. “Those people, they wouldn’t even hear all they had to say, didn’t even trust them. Said they were trying to trick them.” She sighed, thin shoulders sagging, and ran one leathery hand along his cheek. “I know you want us all to go, but those people, for no more than they know, they’re still in Haiti … and we’re the rich ones.”
“Maybe we are.” Remembering every comfort he had enjoyed growing up here. How easy it was to feel superior, before you even realized it, just because you spent the whole day clean. Tears and dust, though, these made mud too.
They could waste no more time, so Napoleon began to walk, and lead the way to the gate. Orvela had taken a key from inside, and unlocked it for them all, then hurled the key into the trees.
The path took nearly twenty-five minutes, a serpentine route among trees, across clearings and through bowers shaded by day, and turned by night into blackened wells. The ground sometimes firm, sometimes mucky. When they emerged into the final glade, their pace picked up again, for the bus that sat at the side of a hardscrabble road.
Smiling broadly behind the wheel, Christophe levered the door open. Maybe it wasn’t the load they had hoped for, but it was enough. It was a family, and there was no shame, no failure.
Napoleon tapped one of the men on the shoulder. Bertin Bayume was a few years older than he, shorter by a few inches but thicker through the arms and shoulders. He’d had a gift for growing some of the most brilliant flora Twin Oaks had ever seen, by Mr. Andrew’s own admission.
“Bertin,” he said. “I got one more thing to do back there. It’ll go safer if I have someone with me.”
Bertin nodded. “I’m with you.”
Orvela seized him by the wrist. “What business you got going back? I told you, leave my daughter be, she makes up her own mind.”
Napoleon shook his head. “That’s not it, now think. We could be driving all the way across the country to get someplace else, and it still wouldn’t be any good without the green cards. Now we got to have them, and to have them, I got to take them.”
“Why couldn’t you wake him up and take them while we were still back there?”
Napoleon leaned over, kissed her on the forehead. “Tell you later,” and he slapped Bertin on the shoulder. While the rest were still boarding, they turned and jogged back across the clearing.
“That’s a good question she asks, you know,” said Bertin. “Why we got to go back for this?”
“You know what he is, Mr. Andrew. And so does he,” Napoleon said. “The marassa, the twin. Powerful magic in twins, they say.”
“You still believe that?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, it’s what the rest of them believe that matters. I didn’t want to be waking him up and dragging him around, not for the rest of them to see, or hear. Because you don’t know what he might do. Mr. Andrew, he sees one person afraid, maybe he works on their thinking, changes their mind, then maybe another, and another. Next thing you know, maybe we’re fighting ourselves, just ’cause we got this scary twin telling us what to do.”
Too dark to run by now, and they had slowed to walk.
“He’d
try it, too,” Bertin said. “You didn’t see him two days ago, when Mrs. Evelyn left. When he hit her. Like something in him broke, and this new man was coming out. Even that freaky white man — the white white man — Mr. Andrew backed him down too. Without a gun, and the white man had one.”
Napoleon stopped to consider this. Facing down an armed man? That didn’t sound like Mr. Andrew at all. Courage in business, yes, that he had. But this? Better and better, it seemed, that Napoleon had first gotten the others to the bus.
Back at Twin Oaks, he and Bertin entered through the same door near the pool, and the house swallowed them whole. Hallways dim, never so quiet, nor so empty. They made a quick stop in the kitchen, at the cutlery rack.
After leaving the kitchen they began to find the sleeping guards, slumped in chairs, or on the floor in awkward repose. Two at the front door. One in the dining room, another the front parlor. The last upstairs, on the second floor landing. Not one even snored. Mugs of half-finished coffee were scattered about like the dregs of a party.
Down the second floor hallway, their footfalls soft as those of cats. Along the wall, tiny bulbs glowed at the end of brass fixtures, dim inside globes of frosted glass.
“I’ll go to the bed,” whispered Napoleon. “You stay by the door and turn on the light when I say.”
They paused outside the master bedroom, his hand dropping to the knob, so many heartbeats passing as he began to turn, slowly, slowly. Gritting his teeth at the soft metal click, as Bertin shut his eyes in silent prayer.
Pressure, easing the door open into darkness, widening arc of dim light falling into the room. He opened it just enough for them to slip through, every step taking the deliberation of ten.
The bed.
It had grown, and as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see that they slept in what had been two twin beds, now pushed together. Mr. Andrew nearer the door, and in the other half, the window side, Clarisse. Little more than an outline, on her side. He didn’t think he’d seen her asleep since they were children.
