“We must return to New Orleans together!” Ben said when he came up for air. “I will help you find your family. My parents can even adopt you to make your situation kosher with Immigration. I can even—” Ben stopped himself short and drew a breath.
“Marry me?” asked Andrea.
“Why not?” said Ben. “Just for legal reasons, of course.” Flustered, he made an impatient gesture to shoo away the Russian violinist, who had crept closer and was avidly listening.
“Marry me, too!” the musician burst out.
“Fuck you, Boris!” said Ben, reverting briefly to a semblance of normal self.
Andrea licked a small cut on the inside of her lip where Ben had bitten her when they were kissing. She was thinking about America, how her story had led to this, and then, without much connection, she felt very sorry for the people with the faceless bodies tattooed on them. Her mind was racing. She wondered, too, why she’d chosen the name Isabel. Is … Abel. Yes, that was it, of course. She was the daughter of Abel, the nomad, not the child of Cain, the murderer. She would never allow herself to be imprisoned again, whether in a camp or a convent. She had to start moving. She would go to America. Her story had set the wheel of both their fortunes spinning, and Venus gave it an extra push.
Yehuda ben Yehuda ached to kiss Andrea again. But she had drawn back, so he gave himself to words instead. Something momentous had happened, something that demanded, it seemed to him, nothing less than the display of his entire being. Ben believed that if something true had to be told, he told it; and more important, he provided commentary on it, so that the habit of thought would accompany every bit of data. These days, this was a great blessing because most data were free of thought. As were most people. Whatever emptiness was in facts was cleansed by thinking about them. Thought was a “cleansing light.” This was written on the wall above his bed at the yeshiva in big black letters.
“I believe that the world must be talked back to its source!” Ben exclaimed, his cheeks flushed by this imperative that was so much like himself.
Andrea chased a grain of rice on her plate and cornered it with her finger. “I believe no such thing. A kiss is worth one thousand comments.” She squished the grain on her fingertip and brought it to her mouth. Her plate was empty. Everything she had learned had been the result of an action. And in order to act, one had to forget. Andrea thirsted for forgetting and for doing. Words prevented both.
They left the café and walked to the bus stop. Yehuda ben Yehuda walked clumsily next to the lithe orphan, feeling heavy, hairy, and ungraceful. Men looked hungrily at the girl, not hiding their evident greed. Ben was angry on her behalf, but Andrea did not seem to mind. When they passed a jewelry store where the proprietor and his son both waved at Andrea from the door, she thrust out her left hand as if asking them to adorn each finger with rings. The men laughed and made huge kissy noises toward that graceful hand floating in the air.
Ben’s resolve to rescue Andrea grew as they walked past cafés and basilicas, tobacco shops and bakeries. Evening had fallen and the streetlights made Jerusalem glisten, merging its cobblestones with the phantoms peering from behind arabesque grille windows.
Elaborate plans of escape, featuring him as Andrea’s rescuer, passed through Ben’s mind, but while he fantasized half aloud and half to himself, he found himself standing alone at the bus stop. He was still talking when the bus came and he realized too late, after the bus had pulled out, that he had no idea where Andrea lived. She had clambered aboard quickly as a cat. All he knew was that next day she was going to audition for Gal Gal Hamazal. He would be there no matter what happened.
Chapter Seventeen
Where in Joe, the policeman, searches for Felicity. Major Notz, distressed by the disappearance of his niece and rudely interrupted at his meal, swings into action.
Joe, the policeman, was a romantic boy. He could admit this because he prided himself on scrupulous self-examination. He had discovered that while he was outwardly a strong man, with women he was shy and boyish. He still lived with his mother in the old house in the Irish Channel and helped her bake all the breads for their annual Saint Joseph’s altar. These loaves were artistically shaped to depict saints and churches, and Joe excelled at detail. One year he had created such an elaborate replica of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Times-Picayune came to photograph it. It was a good thing, too, because the next day a stray dog sneaked in with the crowds who’d come to see their altar after the photograph appeared in the paper and ate the basilica—cupola, balconies, tiny pope, and all. Joe was often cited by other mothers in the neighborhood as an ideal example of a good son.
Felicity had aroused in him emotions reminiscent of his first crush, on Angela Damato, who had dashed his hopes by eloping with a black accordionist from Breaux Bridge. Angela had been a classic beauty of the local Irish-Italian type, green eyed with long chestnut hair, a small waist, and bazoombas out to here. Everyone expected her to marry Joe, but she surprised them. And now, Joe told himself, I’ll surprise them. A Creole girl dick is very much like a black zydeco accordionist. What will Mama think? He’d left seven messages on Felicity’s tape machine over the past two days. In the first one, he told her that he had retrieved more of the Kashmir Birani file for her. In the next six, he asked only, “Where are you?” in tones ranging from anxiety to anger.
When his seventh message elicited no answer, he went to her apartment. He found the front door of Felicity’s office wide open. A scene of utter devastation met him inside. Everything had been turned upside down, ripped open, torn apart. Felicity’s bed cover had been tramped on with muddy shoes. Felicity’s books were all over the floor, many of them torn in half by a doubtlessly insane person or persons. Her collection of coffee mugs from various volunteer jobs she had performed over the years were smashed into smithereens. A bowl of fruit had been turned upside down; the oranges had been stabbed and the peaches had been crushed with a fist or a hammer. When Joe looked under the bed, a lone unmolested orange hid there. Even the contents of the refrigerator littered the small kitchen. Someone had even probed a jar of mustard, spattering it on the wall above the sink.
Joe had seen plenty of burglaries, but this was something else; this was demented. There was, however, no blood anywhere and no sign of a struggle. If Felicity had been anywhere near this maelstrom of devastation, she would have left some mark. Whoever had done this had been in a rage. He had destroyed her stuff as if seeking to obliterate her essence.
Joe couldn’t determine if anything had been taken, or whether the vandals were even looking for anything. This seemed to be destruction for destruction’s sake. He remembered Felicity telling him about her laptop, but there was no laptop in sight. Perhaps she had it with her.
Oddly enough, the only object left untouched was the telephone answering machine. The savages had left it whole on purpose. Joe turned it on. There were two messages in addition to his seven. The first was from somebody named Martin, with a private school accent: “Felicity, darling, I hope you possess the whole integrity of your superb physique. You haven’t called as you said, but I will wait for you in the lobby at Commander’s Palace tonight at eight.”
The second message was a voice steeped in smoke, whiskey, and blood. It said: “Put this in your jigsaw puzzle, bitch!”
Joe called his sergeant and reported the break-in. When the detectives and crime-scene technicians arrived, he made sure fingerprints were collected from every surface. They finished about eight, and Joe headed for Commander’s Palace. At eight-thirty he parked his patrol car in front of the flock of valets assisting bald men and starched matrons out of taxicabs, and rushed into the lobby. The lobby was full of more baldies and consorts waiting for their tables, but Joe spotted a dandy with a yellow rose in his hand, who kept glancing at his Rolex.
“Martin?”
“Yes,” said Martin Dedette, worried. “Something wrong, Officer?”
“I hope not. Could I ask you a few questions?”
&
nbsp; Martin nodded and led Joe through Commander’s pepper-smoky kitchen to the bar in the courtyard beyond. Martin waved a greeting to a fat man dressed in some kind of uniform, seated at a table near the bar, then chose a table in the far corner.
“Okay, what can I do for you?”
“When did you last see Felicity Le Jeune?”
Martin Dedette told Joe the entire story of his chance encounter with Felicity and their meeting with the Shades. He did not mention the envelope or her instructions, but he hinted at a shared romantic past that was just too complex and too subtle to share with a cop.
“Actually, that man over there, that’s Major Notz, Felicity’s uncle. He always takes a Sazerac cocktail and dinner here on Tuesdays. Tonight he’s a British naval commander, I think. Maybe he can tell you more about Miss Le Jeune.”
Joe had to keep in check the urge to smash Dedette with his fist the way somebody’d smashed Felicity’s peaches.
Major Notz was wholly absorbed in the leather-bound menu that listed the specialties of the old restaurant, and hardly noticed Joe’s approach. Finally, he looked up from the menu, and focusing on the uniformed Joe, said: “Did you know that for one hundred and fifty years, the fire has never gone out from under their turtle soup? In nineteen twenty-three the place burnt down, and the cooks emerged from the flames holding the pot. It’s a fact. Ask Ellen.”
“If you don’t mind, I need to ask you something. Have you seen Felicity?”
“My Felicity?” The major put down the menu and a dark cloud began making its way over the folds of his neck and face. “Has something happened to Felicity?”
Joe explained what he’d found at her apartment and that she hadn’t been answering her phone messages.
“You know,” said the major, “in twenty-four years, with interruptions occasioned only by wars and the service of my country, I have never missed my Tuesday bread pudding with whiskey sauce at Commander’s … and I won’t now. Felicity is a resourceful girl.”
The major handed Joe an embossed gold card on which was written in cursive script, H. L. Notz, Activist Historian, followed by a number. “Call me if you find out anything. I expect that she will reappear. For reasons too complex to expain to you, Felicity cannot be harmed.”
It was the second time in twenty minutes that Joe had been told that he was just a dumb cop. This will not do, gentlemen, he steamed as he left the restaurant. I am of old New Orleans Italian stock, and if I wasn’t on duty I would demand satisfaction the old-fashioned way, and I would leave a number of ugly scars on both your conceited faces if I left you alive at all. Joe was admittedly a romantic boy.
When the policeman left the courtyard, the major snapped his fingers, and Boppy Beauregard came running. He had been the major’s special waiter for years. These kids now didn’t want to be good waiters; they were all actors or painters or something. When he started out, you set out to be a waiter, became the best you could be, and that was your life’s aim. The world now was just chasing shadows.
“No pudding, Boppy,” said the major. “A telephone, please.”
Boppy Beauregard was shocked. He regarded his favorite customer with more than professional concern. What was the world coming to when a gentleman of the major’s caliber missed out on his pudding? The wobbly pylons supporting Boppy’s already troubled world gave way a little more.
“Carbon!” the major shouted into the white phone, “get to work right now.” He cradled the receiver with his monumental chin and listened to Carbon’s belabored breathing on the other end as he tried to contact the entities.
“I need to know,” the major bellowed, waving Boppy away, “where Felicity is and what’s the point of her disappearance.”
The channeler allowed the other world to penetrate him, and then the lisping voice of Hermes came through.
“You better stick to the point,” the major warned the loquacious entity.
“Doubtlessly, Major,” Hermes replied, “you have noticed that temporal ideas about points and continuity mean nothing to us over here.”
“Okay, okay,” sighed the major, “get on with it.”
“It is said that the job of convoking the Council of the Great Minds should have gone, doubtless, to one of the older, wiser, and more terrible angels, Asophet or Perash or even old Lucifer himself. But as luck would have it, happily or not, heaven has just adopted democracy as its new law, superseding that of Moses, and things have become rather difficult for seasoned angels, who—as representatives of the throne—used to have unquestioned priority on all the plums. The glorious jobs that once were distributed like cheap incense to the senior winged corpus now devolve to those who show the most aptitude for the job. In effect, Zack ran for the job and was elected, though how and by whom is still a mystery. Not all the kinks have been worked out. Heaven is new at democracy.”
“What is this crap?” shouted the major loud enough to unsettle a table full of grandmothers treating their grandsons to mile-high pie. Boppy came running. The upset major waved him away again and threatened the mouthpiece through clenched teeth: “I’m asking about Felicity, not your spirit politics, you winged moron!”
“I’m getting to her. She is helping out the angels. It is said that it has baffled Zack as to why the Meeting of the Great Minds would take place in New Orleans, America, rather than in Jerusalem, Israel, or in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It puzzled him even though, early in his angelhood, reflecting on the crossed nature of his name, he had decided to be surprised by nothing. So he surmised the move from old Jerusalem to America was inevitable, part of the switch to democracy. The Language Crystal tells us to remember that ‘U.S.A.’ is in the middle of ‘Jerusalem,’ right? But why, Zack wondered, did the New Jerusalem have to be in a humid, fetid, sense-besotted swamp by the sluggish waters of the filthiest river on earth?”
Then a voice in the deeper realm said: “That is it precisely, you geo-ignoramus. New Orleans is a gumbo, a mix like America itself, only more so. Black and white, hot and sour, ocher and pink, male and female—shiftingly and vaguely so—catholic and sweaty, pagan and nude, empty and masked, drunk and ascetic, squat, loquacious, and generous, sentimental, fat, visionary, hallucinatory—it is a window into the soul of a mix that heaven itself will soon become.
“But there are”—the voice paused—“practical reasons as well. New Orleans has the greatest rainfall in North America. Global warming has transformed the subtropical climate into a tropical one. The felicitous humidity facilitates the inhabitants’ presence outdoors. The streets are always full of people, and there are continual festivals. Sadly, the entities of heaven need a great deal of moisture in order to embody, to lubricate the passage. At the same time, they can only embody outdoors, which severely limits heaven’s choice.
“Your job, angel Zack, has quite a few blessed opportunities for reflection. When heaven stopped being kosher and began admitting souls formerly automatically atomized, we had few earthly models, and New Orleans was among them.”
The deeper voice belonged to Zack’s Namer, who’d taken an intrusive liking to Zack and thought that it was his prerogative to intervene didactically whenever he felt like it. It was bad enough that an angel has no privacy anywhere in the spirit and is an open book for all to read, but instant commentary from the namer is more than Zack can bear. Privacy for the angels has to be the next thing in the ongoing democratization of the heavens.
The namer said: “Well, take all the privacy you can pack in your unlustrumed feathers! Who cares enough to read your circular cogita anyway? If I bother it’s because I’d like to see if it’s still possible to educate even one of the spirit’s fleas in these days of ceaseless ectoplasmic puddles.”
Major Notz slammed the receiver down.
Carbon was useless. It had to be faced. Having chosen him from among the abundant mass of soothsayers and channelers had been a bow to style over substance. A channeler was only as good as his channel; once an entity got stuck in the pipe, no other could come through, an
d Notz had had enough of Hermes. And missing his pudding stoked the major’s fury. His pipe let out a black cloud. He brushed past Boppy, who was evidently suffering, and said between clenched teeth, “If they touch one hair on her head, they shall be consumed.”
Boppy nodded. “That’s only right.”
Martin Dedette watched this small drama from the corner table and waited until the major’s square back disappeared through the etched glass doors. He then rose and went out the back gate. He headed directly for the mailbox on the uptown corner of Lafayette Cemetery. He took the manila envelope from inside his jacket, read the address, Our Mirror. “I wonder who’ll get caught with their pants down,” he mused, and dropped the envelope in the box.
The Humvee that picked up the major outside Commander’s was chauffeured by a militia type with wraparound shades and a marine haircut. He drove silently onto I-10 East and turned off just before the Mississippi state line, at an unmarked exit.
The personage on whom they were going to call was never far from Major Notz’s thoughts. He’d had an extraordinary career since the major had first discovered him. He had been a simple country preacher with a good voice, half convinced of his calling but sure of his charm. He was already being called Elvis by his smitten female congregation, about a dozen housewives who sat at his feet. The major had nurtured this rustic tadpole from a one-room church in Gonzalez to a domed arena in Metairie, from a once-a-week spot on local Christian radio to national television. The major had supervised the phenomenal growth of his begging bowl and had provided him with investment instruction. He had done so discreetly, from the shadows, never calling in his markers. The preacher had done well for himself. The last time the IRS had looked into the vast fortunes of his untaxable nonprofit corporation, they couldn’t count all the airplanes. After that investigation, the major made sure that the preacher gained a purpose and focus for his money beyond his cowpoke imagination. Now the reverend was using his money properly: as collateral for borrowing more money. Money, after a certain sum was reached, ceased to be money. It became flows of energy with their own will and weather, sequenced all the way back to the Prime Mover and beyond. Something Mullin wouldn’t understand and didn’t need to.
Messi@ Page 21
