by M. D. Elster
FOUR KINGS
a novel
M.D. Elster
Copyright © 2016 by M.D. Elster
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
All images used under license from Shutterstock.com or available in the
public domain in the United States
First edition published by Exquisite Skeleton Books
exquisiteskeletonbooks.com
paperback ISBN 978-0-9982560-7-8
ePub ISBN 978-0-9982560-5-4
This book is dedicated to Susan Sun Shin.
New Orleans, 1945
CHAPTER 1.
Before I even open my eyes, the first thing I notice is the scent in the air: iodine, dusty radiator, and sheets that have been slightly singed by an iron. Slowly, I take in the room around me. It is a small, thoroughly unfamiliar room. The walls are a dull green color. Where am I? The window, I think: The window should offer a clue. But the two windows — both of them on one wall only — are not very large and both are too high up to see out of properly, especially not from my bed. They give a cold, blue, weary light. With a sense of bewilderment I notice there are wire cages over the windows, bits of rust beginning to bleed through the white paint like orange lace. My gaze falls to the floor; they fasten on the vivid red-and-black checkerboard pattern of the linoleum. I see a figure standing in the far corner of the room and flinch.
It is a woman in a starched white uniform, her pale hands folding what look like bandages.
“Is this a hospital?” I ask. “Am I ill?”
At the sound of my voice, she spins around. Her complexion is distinguished by the yellowing skin of a lifelong smoker, her carefully-drawn eyebrows register surprise.
“Am I in a hospital?” I repeat, when she doesn’t answer.
Her frowning mouth is bracketed by two parentheses.
“Oh dear,” she says, clucking her tongue. “If you keep that up, I’m afraid I’ll have to send for one of the nurses who can actually speak French.”
I blink at her stupidly. I wasn’t aware I was speaking French.
“Although, in your case, I suppose French is something of an improvement,” she continues. She looks at me, and smiles, but it’s clear now she doesn’t really believe I can understand her; she’s only prattling to herself. “At least it’s more comprehensible than whatever it was you were speaking earlier. What was that? German? Dutch? Or just gibberish?”
Vlaams, my brain provides. She means Flemish. I must’ve been speaking Flemish. I used to speak Flemish with my father. But that was a long time ago. Yes; many years ago, before he died. Suddenly, at the thought of my father — not my stepfather but my real father, my father by blood, who I have not seen for such a very long time — a dark cloud descends over me. I feel a sharp pain in my head. I try to swallow, but my mouth is dry.
“May I have a glass of water?” I ask the nurse.
“Ugh,” she sighs, shaking her head, exasperated. “Look, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Marie-Jean is Creole or Cajun or what-have-you; let me see if I can get her to help you.” She stands in the doorway and leans her head out. “Marie-Jean!” she shouts down an echoing hallway. “Can you come here a moment? I need someone who can talk French!”
A few seconds pass while my nurse waits at the doorway with her arms folded, then a lovely ebony-skinned woman floats into the room.
“Bon-swa, mademoiselle!” she twangs in a strange, musical French, “Sleeping Beauty has woken up, eh? I trust you are feeling better?”
I blink, still startled by the notion that I wasn’t speaking English all this time. I am also knocked off balance by Marie-Jean herself: Her strange, musical accent, her amused-looking smile, her dark skin. Then I remember: I am in New Orleans — an American city, with its wrought iron balconies, its long, haunted drifts of Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees, its jazz musicians and alligators and Voodoo priestesses. Yes, that’s right… I slowly remember. The war. My stepfather and I left Europe behind us, and came here.
“I don’t understand. Have I been ill?”
“Bah, oui. You were suffering terribly, ma chérie,” she replies, that strange clip in her voice. “No one could calm you. We thought you might do violence to yourself. You were… you were what we call manic,” she explains.
Something about how she says what we call manic strikes a chord. I straighten up.
“Where am I? What kind of hospital is this?”
“Shhhhh, shh, shhhhhh,” Marie-Jean urges, “Laissez-tranquille. Be calm.” She darts a paranoid eye around the room. “You have taken a very hard bump to the head. You don’t want them to see you upset. Not like before. Please, chérie. It will make things very difficult for you.”
“Difficult for me?” I ask. “Who is ‘they’? Why don’t I want them to see me upset?”
“Shhhh,” she urges again. The amused smile from earlier has vanished. “When you make such a fuss, you disturb the others. The orderlies, ma chérie, they will not hesitate to put you in restraints.”
Restraints? The very word sends a shiver down my spine.
“Have I…” I venture, terrified of the potential answer. “Have I gone mad?”
“No, no, no,” she says. “Okay, oui, peut-être, that depends. Maybe you have gone a little mad, and only for a little spell. The lawyer is certain you will make a full recovery, that you will be good as new, that you will be able to testify.” She laughs — a low, ironic, confidential laugh, “Which is good for you if you want to rejoin the living world, and more important, is very good for him and the court case, no?” She is beautiful, her manner is light and friendly, and yet when she chuckles about the court case it makes me uneasy. “Anyway, we must be sure to make you better. The top boss wants you well.”
“Court case? What happened to me?” I ask.
“Oh good!” the first nurse exclaims, turning around from where she has been folding bandages, humming to herself and pretending to ignore me and Marie-Jean as we talked. “Well, I recognize that much, at least. You’re speaking English again!”
“I am?” I say. It all sounds the same to me: English, français, Vlaams — the input is reaching my ears in equal fashion; it is the output I seem to be unable to control.
Upon hearing me say — I am? — the first nurse comes over to my side, patting my shoulder with her ice-cold, tobacco-stained hands. “Oh, why, yes!” She turns to the other nurse. “What do you think, Marie-Jean? Should we bring her to see Dr. Waters? Think this good spell will hold?” she asks her companion.
Marie-Jean shrugs. “Oui, peut-être. I don’t see why not…”
The first nurse reaches for a hand-mirror. “Would you like to spruce yourself up at all before seeing the director, Anaïs?” She deposits the mirror in my hand.
I stare at it, a little frazzled, trying to make sense of the image. A fourteen year-old girl with white-blonde hair and blue eyes looks back at me. My expression is slightly vacant and fuzzy as I study my own face, the look a person gets when trying to recall the details of a dream. My complexion is smooth, but relatively colorless. My cheekbones are pretty; my eyes are slightly too close together. Pale and washed-out, I see a composite of my mother and father’s faces, buried under a layer of teenage baby-fat.
The first nurse is waiting expectantly, so I make a few quick gestures, attempting to smooth my wispy blonde hair into place. I rub underneath my eyes at
the strange dark rings I’ve acquired — how can someone who remembers nothing but being asleep have such dark rings? After a few seconds, the first nurse dashes out of my room, into the hall. I hear the birdsong of mechanical wheels; there is a squeak-squeak-squeak as she returns with an uncomfortable-looking wooden wheelchair. “The director said he wanted to see you as soon as he thought you might be feeling better and looked capable of a little small talk.”
“Small talk?”
“Small talk, yes,” she says, brushing aside what looks like some kind of belt from the lap of the wheelchair. “And you seem to be talking along just fine now! Let’s get you to Dr. Waters while your mind is alert, and while you’re in a chatty mood, to boot!”
“Dr. Waters?”
“Yes. Dr. Waters will explain everything,” she says in an assured tone. She and Marie-Jean lift me into the wheelchair, and off we go. The hospital is a bit run down at the heel, very Spartan, echoing and bare. I realize I have very little sense of my location; I wonder where on the city map this hospital is located. I have not lived in New Orleans for so many years, but the city I know is full of electric streetcars clattering on their tracks, of brass bands and people clapping and singing and hollering in the streets. This feels remote. Outside my dull green room I learn the hallways are white, but emblazoned with terrible brown water-stains. The air feels very damp, but then, I suppose it is almost always humid in New Orleans and the humidity tends to creep inside. But something about the water-stains, something about the condensation dripping like tears down the face of a holy statue, loosens some kind of memory in my brain, like a can wiggling free at the top of a grocery store display, the recollection tumbles down and knocks me on the head. A hurricane… I think I remember something about a hurricane…
“Was I… was there a storm recently?” I ask the nurse as she pushes me down the hall, the wheelchair announcing our rusty arrival. It is clear she is no longer interested in my idle curiosities, but is instead eager to turn me over to more authoritative hands.
“Oh good,” she says. “That’s promising — Dr. Waters will be glad to hear it. After all, that storm would’ve been hard for a person to forget.”
She doesn’t explain further about the storm, other than to confirm it in the abstract, and I am left to dig through the flashes and fragments in my brain, trying to remember the details. She stops the wheelchair outside an office door with a tessellated glass window in it. I shiver when I feel her pat my shoulder again.
“We’ve been waiting for you, Anaïs. The whole staff has been waiting for you to come back to us. You’re the only hope of setting everything right, you know.”
CHAPTER 2.
As bare as the rooms and halls are in the hospital, Dr. Waters’s office is rather the opposite, with an ambience not unlike that of an old curiosity shop.
There is so much to look at, I find myself completely overwhelmed at first. The floors are covered in sumptuous rugs, all of them overlapping so that not an inch of floor is left bare. China, Turkey, Persia! — the rugs whisper with their fine wool and rich, jewel-toned dyes. The shelves are lined with every manner of clutter: antiques, souvenirs, seashells, figurines, and other assorted bric-a-brac, collected from various far-flung corners of the world. Butterflies and beetles are pinned on dark purple velvet. There are multiple clocks in the room; I can hear them ticking slightly out of sync with one another.
All these knick-knacks appear to be trophies, collected from the director’s travels, and his travels appear to be extensive. It is possible, too, that he is a hunter, or at least good friends with one, for there are taxidermy heads on all four walls: bison, elk — even a lioness, her mouth stretched wide in a snarl, her yellowing eyeteeth sharp and gleaming. All of them very new-looking and clearly mounted with a great deal of pride.
There are the requisite Louisiana curiosities, too: several alligator heads of assorted size. Voodoo dolls. A harlequin jester wearing a terrifying grin. His office is a regular sideshow, a place for the curious to stop and ogle.
My eyes alight upon one object in particular — a leathery spherical thing, hanging at the end of a long braid of black hair from a hook on the bookcase behind his desk.
“A shrunken head from one of the fearsome tribes of Amazonia,” Dr. Waters offers, catching me squinting at it. “A gift from my wife, who found the obvious pun on my profession quite amusing.”
I have heard the expression I think he means, and it sinks in that he has just confirmed my worst suspicions. He is indeed a psychiatrist, which means the hospital in which I now find myself must be, in fact, some kind of asylum. He sees the horrified expression on my face, but assumes it has to do with the shrunken head.
“Would you like to examine it more closely?” he asks. “You’ll find the object itself is quite harmless, for all its grotesquerie. The first explorers to the Amazon imagined the natives shrunk the heads of their enemies by virtue of some sort of witchcraft, but upon rational investigation, of course, a very natural scientific explanation has been found.” He unhooks the long braid of hair and lifts the head from where it dangles, passing it over to me.
I hardly want to touch the wretched thing, yet I reach out with automatic hand.
“See? Quite harmless.”
The whole head fits into my palm. I hold it and stare into the tiny mutilated face, observing its features. The gruesome purple eyelids that have been stitched shut. The nose is shrunken and somehow deprived of its cartilage so that the nostrils are disproportionately large and retroussé: a pig’s snout. The lips are also out of proportion — swollen, bulbous, too wide for their miniature canvas. They, too, are stitched shut. I read about the practice of shrinking heads, in an edition of National Geographic I once read. The natives did it to silence their enemies, I suppose, to ensure such an enemy could never do any evil against his murderer, not even from beyond the grave.
“Well now, I’ll have it back from you, if you don’t mind,” Dr. Waters says, reaching across the desk and retrieving the shrunken head. He hangs it by its braid back on the hook, and I sneak a closer look at the man who is to be, evidently, my doctor. He is a rather egg-shaped man, with small shoulders and wide hips. His belt runs around his widest point like the equator dividing two hemispheres: a striped sweater-vest to the north, and dark slacks to the south. Despite his overweight figure, he is relatively dapper in his appearance. He has a ruddy, somewhat jowled face, and wild reddish hair that has been oiled into disciplined order with a good deal of hair tonic. His most distinctive feature is his moustache: Not quite a handlebar, but a thick walrus moustache, neatly combed and ever so slightly curled at the tips.
“You know, Anaïs, I wouldn’t let most patients handle that artifact,” he says now, sitting down in his upholstered leather desk chair. “It would disturb some of the others far too much; they don’t have the mental capacity for it. It might even touch off a small riot.”
Wordless, I blink at him.
“Do you want to know why I let you handle it? Do you want to know why you’re special?” he asks.
I nod.
“Because, Anaïs, it speaks to the confidence I have in you,” he pauses, and gives me a serious look, arching an eyebrow. “It speaks to the confidence I have in your recovery. Your full recovery. You came to us in a state of extreme hysteria. You were lashing out at everyone who tried to come to your aid; there was no reasoning with you. But now — obviously — that has ceased. And I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that with you again, will we?”
“I… I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t remember anything,” I stammer. “The nurse — the one who wheeled me in here… she said something about a trial, and about ‘setting things right.’ What did she mean? Where is my stepfather? Why isn’t he here?”
Dr. Waters rests a heavy paw on the desk and sighs. “Yes. I wondered if you would remember; it seems you don’t and I will have to be the one to inform you. I hate to be the bearer of such bad news.
”
My blood runs cold. I do not like the way he is dithering. “Just tell me,” I command, a note of forcefulness in my voice.
“Well, it concerns your stepfather,” Dr. Waters says. His eyes are wide and fully engaged with my own, locked onto my gaze as though searching for a spark of recognition. My brain flits involuntarily to random impressions of my stepfather… my stepfather, the man who saved me, protected me, generously provided for my passage to America, and became my guardian here in New Orleans. “I’m going to speak to you very plainly, Anaïs,” Dr. Waters says. He clears his throat. His brow becomes a map of heavy furrows.
“Your stepfather was shot,” Dr. Waters finally says in a curt, matter-of-fact voice. “During the hurricane. Your house, your stepfather’s estate — magnificent though it is — suffered considerable damage in the storm. A large oak tree was toppled by the hurricane and did quite a bit of damage, half the house was flooded; the entire property was wide open to the elements. And… and, well, open to intruders as well. At some point during the terrible ordeal, one of your stepfather’s employees confronted him, and shot him in cold blood.”
I cannot believe my ears. At some point, I am aware of the shocked expression on my face.
“You were there, Anaïs,” Dr. Waters continues. “You witnessed the whole ordeal. That was what Nurse Kitching meant when she said we are hoping you can help set things right.”
“I don’t understand.”
He sits back in his chair and sighs. “The newspapers have followed his shooting closely — I do believe the people of New Orleans see him as a symbol. The hurricane damaged so much of the city, but even worse than that is the way looters robbed the citizens’ good spirits. Your stepfather… in the wake of his shooting, the newspapers have written about all his heroic deeds during the war. They’ve written about his activity in the French Resistance, and I dare say everyone is quite moved. They want justice for him.” Dr. Waters pauses. “Speaking of which, perhaps this subject will help us determine the extent of your amnesia. Do you recall anything at all, Anaïs, about your time in France and your stepfather’s role in helping to undermine German occupation?”
