Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Clare had taken six beers from the refrigerator, paid for them, and set them on one of the cubes. Delilah, come to carry Star home, had joined them. Wondering what was going on, Tanya stayed. She sat on the edge of the makeshift stage near their table, her feet in canvas high-tops, her body hidden under an ankle-length gypsy skirt and a long white linen tunic belted with a print scarf. The rest were in plastic chairs crowded around two cubes Clare had shoved together. Star and Delilah were smoking. Candy was yawning and playing with the fringe along the edge of Tanya’s scarf.

  Beers served, Clare waited till everyone’s attention was focused on her. Anna wondered if it was a trick she’d learned in acting school.

  When everyone was looking at her, Clare said, “I’m not Jordan—”

  “Yeah,” Delilah said. “Star filled us in. You lost a kid, followed the snatcher to New Orleans. Pick it up there. Danny’s going to be up in two hours, and I’m gonna be there to make him breakfast.”

  “Tanya?” Clare asked. She had morphed into the very heart and soul of sanity, warmth, and the smell of baking cookies and talcum powder. The woman was good. Who wouldn’t want to help her find her little girl? If Anna, who’d had a lifetime of looking behind people’s facades, couldn’t see through her, what chance did the dancers have? The question had barely formed in her mind when she realized they’d undoubtedly had more experience in that quarter than she. Many of her clients were animals in the best sense of the word. These women saw animals in the worst sense most nights of their lives.

  The stage set, Clare introduced what characters she had: the young freak in the canary yellow leather sport coat, the Cajun with the thick black hair and hard-muscled shoulders, a little girl named Aisha with long dark hair and the eyes of a doe. Careful not to give away so much detail they’d guess who she was, she told them that her husband had a factory business, used undocumented workers, and, she believed, took the children they brought with them and delivered them to someone in New Orleans.

  “The Cajun said ‘Bourbon Street Nursery.’ Maybe where the kids were taken. The man he was on the phone with, he called the Magician. The yellow-coated freak was called Dougie. The Cajun was called Blackie.”

  “Like half the Cajuns in the bayous,” Delilah said. “It’s the coon-ass version of Slim or Tex.” She stubbed out her cigarette, then shook another from the pack lying on the cube. As if it were a signal to rally ’round a dying cause, Star and Clare dug out their own packs and lit up. Candy held out a hand for one.

  “You can smoke or you can touch my scarf,” Tanya said, “but you can’t do both. This thing is silk and cost me two nights’ tips.”

  Candy drew her hand back and returned to letting the slinky silk fringes tell through her fingers.

  “So, big announcement: no dick, no daughter. What do you want us to do about it?” Delilah asked. There was no malice in her tone, only a desire to move the meeting forward.

  “If any of you know who might be trafficking in children, or anybody who spawns rumors of that kind of activity, it would give us somewhere to start,” Anna said.

  Waiting for the public life of Dick’s to bump and grind to a close, she’d gotten so tired she could barely yawn. Now that there was a chance at information, she was wide-awake. “Has anybody heard of a Dougie or a Blackie or even the Magician in the context of illegal trafficking in minors?”

  “They give traffic reports on the radio all the time. Why don’t you just listen,” Candy said helpfully.

  “Not car traffic, baby. Kid whores, you know, like you were before you started here.”

  “I use to know a bunch of working kids,” Candy said, proud to be the center of attention. “They’re probably dead or gone off.” She seemed indifferent to both fates.

  “I’ve got something special that only you can do,” Clare said to Candy. “If you would help me, I’d sure appreciate it.” She used her warm apple pie voice and added the sugar of a smile to it.

  “How much will you give me?” Candy asked.

  “How about twenty dollars?”

  “Some nights I get more’n that for one dance. I had forty-three dollars stuffed in my string once.”

  Candy might not have been blessed with all the brains in the world, but she counted money just fine.

  “Hmm, that’s a lot,” Clare said, pretending to consider. “How about a hundred?”

  Anna knew she’d give the girl a thousand if it came to that. She’d probably known intuitively that a number that big might have scared Candy. Too much for too little. Canniness had filled in for the baby stripper where intelligence should have been.

  “Okay,” Candy said quickly. She didn’t ask what the favor was. For a hundred bucks she would probably do anything that didn’t hurt too much.

  “Good girl,” Clare said.

  “Wait a damn minute,” Star said. “What are you going to have her do for her money?”

  “Be hypnotized,” Clare answered. “I want to see if she can remember more about the fancy house she was in before she was put on the streets.”

  Mollified, Star took another swig of beer.

  “The law busts a few hookers now and then to prove they’re on the job—”

  “Or because they didn’t get a free blow job,” Star cut in.

  “That, too,” Delilah agreed, “but mostly they leave them alone. But kids are different. You don’t hear much about it unless you’re in that groove, if you know what I mean. Too volatile with the politicians and the media. Gets the moms in from the suburbs with torches storming city hall.”

  They sat with that thought for a moment.

  “Dougie and Blackie could be anybody. Might not even be their real names,” Star said.

  “I might have heard of the Magician,” Delilah said after more thought. “There’s this woman, used to dance, then went to hooking because the money was better but quit and started reading tarot on the square after a john nearly killed her. Andi—you remember Andi,” Delilah said to Tanya. “Did a pretty little Bo Peep deal, made more than anybody not hooking could with her private lap dances, got canned?”

  “Right,” Tanya said. “Larry Flynt’s. Got turned in by a john that didn’t want to pay for the extras he’d got.”

  “We talk sometimes,” Delilah said. “Seems like I heard her mention a guy gets his reading done a lot. She could have called him the Magician. Then maybe it was the Musician. If I see her, I’ll ask.”

  The leads weren’t exactly coming fast and fresh. The long night and the poisonous air were beginning to tell on Anna. What optimism she’d brought to the table was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Clare evidently felt the same way, but as she sank, Jordan rose. He came into her eyes like a fever, into her hands till the knuckles seemed to grow harder and the skin coarser.

  “Fuck!” A fist slammed into the plywood with such violence the rest of them jumped. “There’s got to be something! The pedophiles find kids somehow, for shit’s sake!” Jordan was back with his redundant vocabulary.

  “You know Les Bonnes Filles? That five-star boutique hotel between St. Peter and St. Louis up toward Rampart?” Tanya asked slowly, as if reluctant to divulge the name.

  Everyone but Anna and Clare nodded.

  “I used to get work out of there.”

  “No shit!” Star exclaimed. “Our little college mama hooked for a living?” She laughed. “Now that was worth staying after school to hear.”

  “Not for a living,” Tanya said.

  “For pin money,” Clare suggested.

  “For fun,” Tanya said and glared at them, defying anyone to pass judgment.

  Nobody did. They were all denizens of the glass house in Dick’s that night.

  “The place has a high-end clientele—rooms run four hundred and up a night, and there’s no gym and no parking to speak of. What they sell is service. I don’t know if the hotel doesn’t know about it or just pretends not to, but the head concierge has a thriving little referral business. I don’t know what-all
services he’s got on his speed dial, but it might be worth a shot. Pervs come in all financial brackets.”

  “Thanks,” Clare said sincerely.

  “Don’t use my name,” Tanya said as she reeled in her scarf from Candy’s fingers and stood to go.

  “I won’t,” Clare said.

  Anna wouldn’t if she didn’t have to.

  Jordan might just for the hell of it.

  Tanya left, twitching her scarf like a cat’s tail.

  “When are you going to do that thing to me and give me my hundred dollars?” Candy demanded.

  “Tomorrow when we have had some sleep and haven’t had any beer,” Clare said. “What time do you get up?”

  “Noon,” Candy said.

  “Try three thirty or four,” Star said.

  Candy stuck her tongue out.

  “I’ll be over in the afternoon,” Clare said, and the meeting was adjourned.

  Candy left with Star and Delilah. Anna and Clare remained where they were, sipping the last of their beers. Anna’s eyes were so heavy and so gritted with sad lives and cigarette smoke that, if she listened carefully, she fancied she could hear the skritching when she blinked. The fatigue that earlier excitements had banished was back, but in the version where one is too tired to sleep. She had expected little from the dancers. As it was, Tanya had given them a direction to try; that was more than she’d hoped for. Still, the sense of letdown and the enormity of the task blossomed in the dregs of the night.

  Clare dug another nonfiltered Camel from her pack of cigarettes. Anna watched as she went through the ritual of tapping and lighting, then pinched a piece of tobacco off her tongue. “You know a mistake a lot of actors make?” Clare asked.

  Anna said nothing.

  “When they smoke they flick tobacco off their tongues, but they smoke filters. No tobacco. Makes me crazy.”

  “Speaking of crazy,” Anna said. “Who smokes? Jordan or Clare?”

  “He smokes more than I do,” Clare said defensively. If she found the question—or her answer—odd, Anna saw none of it in her face.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Anna and Clare left Dick’s by the front door, Clare double-locking it behind them. Even at 5:00 A.M. Bourbon Street was not devoid of life. As the last of the revelers were staggering back to their hotel rooms and the bartenders and dancers were counting their tips, the Quarter’s distinctive cleaning vehicles were launching an assault. Small, shiny black three-wheelers with silver-white Texas longhorns emblazoned across the sides, they invaded like an army of dung beetles, sweeping up and washing away another long night’s ordure. They dropped down a block for the more pleasant walk along Royal.

  Toward Dumaine, where the classic iron fence wrought in the shape of cornstalks kept guard over the gently decaying old hotel of the same name, a huge rat trundled down the gutter.

  He was sleek and fat and unafraid, putting Anna in mind of Templeton in Charlotte’s Web.

  “God, I hate rats,” Clare said. Jordan flipped his cigarette butt at the little beast. “Did you hear a year or so back about rats eating that baby down here?”

  “I did. Maybe the baby was dead before the rats came on the scene.” She doubted that was true, but she shared it because, since Templeton was the only bona fide fur-bearing wildlife she’d seen in a while, she felt duty bound to protect and defend him.

  The farther from the tourist area they walked, the darker the streets grew. Vintage streetlights were right for the city but didn’t cast much light, and what they did was absorbed into green-gold halos of mist around the lamps. Fog had come in off the river, bringing with it a glamour that cloaked the historic quarter in timelessness, the illusion heightened by the distant clop of horses’ hooves as one of the carriage drivers came into the Quarter to do whatever a coach driver might do in the predawn respite.

  “Hey.”

  A whisper out of the dark. Whispers were almost impossible to locate directionally; too much air and too little sound for the eardrums to separate out the niceties.

  To either side of the street were the houses New Orleans was known for: shotguns and shotgun duplexes with steps to raised doorways, deep porches, barred shutters, brick alleyways between the houses no more than a yard wide. Regardless of the city’s ambient light, there were a whole lot of darks left.

  Anna stopped Clare while they were at least a baseball bat’s reach from the shadows.

  “Up here, shit-for-brains.” The whisper had become a croak. Rude as it was, the insult bespoke a familiarity that allowed Anna to let her guard down a fraction of an inch. She and Clare followed this slightly more robust vocalization back to the man making it.

  “Hey, Danny,” Clare said. At the top of a stoop, crowded into a portico that would not have been deemed spacious by a Labrador retriever, at least three of Jordan’s punk pals had crashed in a tangle of limbs and ragged cloth and bits of metal poking out of inked-on skin.

  “Step into my office,” Danny said. A hand with long broken fingernails and ingrained dirt floated out of the darkness. A finger crooked, and Anna couldn’t but admire the man’s flair for the dramatic. Edward Gorey’s works as performance art. The steps were cement with low cement banisters flaring into flat circles at the bottom. Clare sat on one; Anna propped her foot on the other. She was not yet secure enough to compromise her ability to run away.

  “You have something for me or not?” came a snarly voice, and Anna corrected her earlier assumption. It was not Clare who’d taken a seat at the bottom of the stairs, it was Jordon. Having witnessed again the seamlessness with which Clare shed one skin and slipped on another, Danny’s act paled in comparison, somewhere south of walk-on and north of chorus boy.

  “Tinka here—” Danny’s hand, a pale spidery smudge in the nest of punks, lifted the head of a girl sleeping on his lap. It looked as if he lifted it by the hair, but surely not, Anna thought. “Tinka spotted your yellow jacket for you.” Two black holes appeared in the gray oval as Tinka opened her eyes.

  “Ungh,” she said, and Danny gently lowered her head back onto his thigh.

  “So you said we could have drugs, money, whatever we wanted,” Danny said.

  Jordan lit a cigarette. He moved his wrist as if to offer Danny a smoke, then changed his mind and tucked the pack back into his pocket. “What do you want?” he asked when he’d gone through his routine of breathing toxins and pinching bits of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.

  Watching this process, Anna could understand why, back when sex wasn’t dangerous and cigarettes were still sophisticated, so many actors in so many movies smoked so many cigarettes. The ritual of lighting and puffing gave the audience time to enjoy the nuances brought to the screen. Despite the dim light, Anna had watched Jordan slide from interested to deadly bored. Or maybe just plain deadly.

  “Why, I want what everybody wants, man, I want it all. Drugs and money and money for drugs.” Danny smiled. Anna caught the glint of his teeth through the beard and general dinginess. The guy had to brush regularly to keep his teeth that white. Maybe good oral hygiene was his only failing in his chosen profession.

  “What have you got for me?” Jordan asked on an exhaled stream of smoke that curled up into the fog illuminated by the streetlight.

  “I told you. Tinka saw the guy in the jacket. How many assholes can there be with leather jackets the color of a lemon?”

  “Saw him where?”

  “Money first, man.” The hand drifted out of the shadows again, palm up, as if he were feeding the birds or checking for rain.

  “You haven’t given me shit,” Jordan said in bored tones.

  For once, Anna was glad Jordan, and not Clare, was at the helm. Clare would have been turning her pockets inside out, too desperate for any scrap of information to negotiate.

  “When did Tinka see him?” Anna asked. Both Jordan and Danny ignored her.

  After another minute of tobacco and testosterone, Jordan said, “When did Tinka see him?”

  Anna would have rolle
d her eyes had anybody been interested enough to notice.

  “I don’t know. Midnight maybe,” Danny replied.

  “Where?” Jordan asked as casually as Clare would let him.

  “End of Bourbon, near Canal. We’d been up there on the bikes—”

  “Were you with her?”

  “Nah. I’d—”

  “Did she follow him?” Jordan asked. “See where he went?”

  “Jesus, man! Back off. Tinka!” Danny took his annoyance out on the sleeping—or otherwise unconscious—girl, jerking his leg until her head bounced off his knee. Tinka pushed herself up with unsteady arms, and the jittering leg smacked her hard on the nose.

  “Whuh the fuh . . .” she muttered, struggling to a seated position and patting her nose. Her hands were encased in gloves with the fingers cut off, and in the shadowy entryway it created the disturbing illusion of white grubs congregating in the middle of her face.

  “What’d yah hit me for?” she whined.

  “Jordan asked me to,” Danny said, and his clean white smile flashed in the dark. “Tell him about the yellow jacket.”

  Tinka blinked. A trickle of blood, black as tar, trickled from her nose. The punks were wasting their time panhandling, Anna thought. They could make serious money just lying around in dark corners along the Vampire Tour route.

  “I saw him,” Tinka mumbled.

  “Did you follow him?” Jordan asked.

  “Yeah. He went into the McDonald’s on Canal.”

  “And after that?”

  “I dunno. I was eating fries somebody left, and some fucking bitch threw me out.”

  Thrown out of McDonald’s. Anna hoped the girl would find her way up in the world—at least to being tossed out of Applebee’s or T.G.I. Friday’s.

  “You better take what we got, because you don’t have much time to catch up with this jerk-off you’re so hot on,” Danny said.

  Anna’s flagging interest was doing its best to ally with a sleepless night and fog her brain. This remark brought her back to full alert.