Orfeo
M. J. Lawless
© M. J. Lawless 2013
The right of M. J. Lawless to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copying of this manuscript, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the author and her publisher is strictly prohibited.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Black Orion Press, 2013.
Cover design by Arkangel Media.
All rights reserved.
For Simon, who made Orfeo sing for me.
Contents
Part I: Les fleurs de la nuit
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Part II: Orfeo in the Underworld
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part III: After the Hurricane
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Author’s Afterword
Appendix: The Songs of Orfeo
Other books by M. J. Lawless
Part I: Les fleurs de la nuit
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,
O Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,
Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin.
Do you come from heaven or rise from the abyss,
O Beauty? your gaze, infernal and divine,
Confusedly shows the benefit and the crime,
And so for that one can compare you to wine.
(Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal)
Chapter One
They called him the black Orpheus, the man with the golden voice. They said that he could tempt angels themselves to fall, that he could calm the wildest souls of the inferno.
They called him the king of souls and the lord of the night. There were those who said that simply hearing him could drive a man—or woman—to madness, that to listen to his voice was to enter a pact with le diable. As he came onto the stage he smiled at all the names they called him: soul stealer, heart’s thief, love’s criminal. He preferred the name he had been born with. Orfeo.
Where he came from was the origin of nearly as much speculation as the source of his talent, though his birth was a secret at once more mysterious and more mundane. He revealed nothing of his past. All that mattered now was that he was here in New Orleans.
As he turned into the light, for a few seconds he could see nothing but the narcotic smoke that drifted in soft, white clouds across the tables of Apollo’s, the club which—for the time being—he chose to inhabit. The reason why he had chosen to remain there was hidden from him momentarily, blinded by the spotlight that shone across his dark face which caused the beads of perspiration on his black skin to glitter like diamonds. No matter: she was here. He could feel it. His songs would dispel the light and allow him to find her at last, dark blossoms from his voice that would comfort and seduce her.
Behind him the band took in a collective breath, a single, expectant pause as they waited for the time to be right. Judging it to be so the saxophonist was first to break the collective waiting with a long, slow and mournful note that eased itself into the hubbub of Apollo’s and summoned hushed reverence from the gathered crowd. Soon afterwards, the smooth slide of drums set up the familiar rhythm, joined almost immediately by the deep thrum of the bass.
For a few seconds, precious moments, Orfeo closed his eyes and let the music rise up through his bones and into his lungs which swelled and expanded beneath his thin, white shirt, the muscles of his chest powerful with contained melody. Breath itself transformed into music until, at last, he could contain it no more, opening his mouth before his eyes and letting the sounds sigh forth from his lips. The late July air was hot around him, clinging to his body like a spoiled lover, thick with desire.
“Mother of heaven,” he sang, “star of the sea.” The voice that slowly climbed above the soft and subtle notes was deeper than would have been expected in one apparently so young, a baritone darker than his skin, a velvet that caressed the ears of all who heard it. “Guide to the sailor, star of the sea.” He let the words float in the air, taking their form in the spaces between himself and the crowd, shadows resolving as the light that had blinded him faded into vision. “Queen of the floodtide, star of the sea—Ocean moon’s guardian, fair star of the sea.”
The words were becoming bolder now, louder, and his shoulders lifted with the exertion of his passions as his breath flooded out of him, a sea that was turning from the murmur of the distant shore into the pounding waves of a storm from his heart. And at last he saw her, her hair as brazen and as bright as copper, her skin shining softly in the darkness of Apollo’s, and he caught his breath once more before letting it soar between him and her.
“Lady of sorrows,
star of the sea,
merciful mistress—
star of the sea.
Herald of morning,
evensong’s mistress,
good hope in darkness -
bright star of the sea.”
For a few moments he held her gaze, her bright, green eyes fixed upon him, before letting his head dip to the floor as the final notes of the saxophone dwindled away behind him. For a brief eternity there was silence once more before the crowd began to whoop and holler their appreciation. When he lifted his head again he could see her smiling at him, her eyes glistening as she clapped and clapped and clapped as though her very life depended on it.
And depend it did. He had foreseen it all.
Unlike Orfeo, the history of Ardyce Dubois was well known to all who cared to look for it. Her ancestor had come to La Nouvelle Orléans in the 1730s, not long after the city had been founded as a French colony and before it was ceded to the Spanish in the middle of the eighteenth century. Though the Dubois clan traced themselves back to an ancient aristocratic line, the patriarch who had traveled to Louisiana belonged to a branch much decayed. Through trapping, trading, marrying and, later, slave plantations across the state and throughout their Haitian dominions, the Dubois family became immensely rich. Her grandfather had built his own pleasure palace on the edge of the city, appropriately naming it Xanadu, and here Ardyce had lived her own dissolute youth following the untimely death of her parents.
Not that any of this mattered at all to her now as she sat in the darkness at the edge of a pool of light in Apollo’s and watched the young man, so beautiful and black, ascend the stage. Although not yet thirty herself she had experienced too many things already so that her tastes had become jaded and impoverished before their time. In recent years nothing had appeared to reach past her numbness and touch her: her soul had been burnt up in a relentless southern sun, and though her skin retained the delicate freshness of youth she felt inside as though her heart formed a reflection of that damned and doomed picture of Dorian Gray, shriveled up with her former sins.
And so it had been with some astonishment that she r
ealized none of this mattered when she first heard him, barely a month before, here in this very night club. He was an itinerant, they said, wandering from place to place so that it was impossible to know where he would appear next, where that rich, somber voice would thrill and inspire all who heard it. For many it was a surprise, then, that he remained at Apollo’s, his aficionados able to come again and again to hear him sing. For Ardyce, however, it was no surprise at all.
On that first night she had seen him, his face, so proud and strong, lifted up to the light in the solemn clouds of the nightclub when he had closed his eyes as his voice welled up inside him. And as he opened them, by chance—or fate, for in the end it was the same—his gaze had alighted upon her and the room gasped as his voice stumbled and faltered for the merest moment. It was the only time, they said, that he had shown less than perfection.
And yet that flaw was fatal not for him but for Ardyce. She had felt herself pierced by his dark eyes, by the wound on his lips as the words hesitated for but a second. When the melody of his voice found its natural harmony again, that dead, dried up muscle inside her chest began to flower once more, and she felt the blood move through it with a surge of fire she thought impossible.
She was addicted. For Ardyce Dubois, addiction was a serious thing and the sound of Orfeo’s voice meant that every other obsession paled into nothing.
“So, this is your singer,” murmured Baptiste, leaning into her ear. She could smell her friend’s cologne and, though she did not divert her attention at all from the stage where Orfeo, his body carved out of ebony wood, gathered himself in preparation she could almost see the thin moustache on Baptiste’s lips curling in admiration.
“Yes,” she said, not moving her eyes, barely opening her lips. “Mine, so keep your hands off him, you filthy queer bastard.”
“Naughty, naughty,” Baptiste sniggered. “All’s fair in love and war, chérie. You know that better than most.” Now her eyes did flicker sideways, taking in the aging roué’s face as he stared at the young singer with barely concealed lust. She slapped her hand against his leg, making him jump and he stifled a laugh. “Oh, if only you could see your face now. I don’t think your look so much kills as cuts off my head and drives a stake through my heart.”
“He’s mine,” she repeated. “You’ll see, you degenerate old vampire.”
And Baptiste did indeed see. As the young singer on the stage opened his mouth and let such a liquid passion the likes of which the older man had never heard before flood across the room, so the dark eyes of Orfeo hunted for Ardyce—and when they found her they never left her face.
“My, that voice,” Baptiste drawled when the first song had finished and his companion was applauding wildly. “It can do things to a man.”
“Just imagine what it can do to a woman,” Ardyce replied, not taking her own eyes away from Orfeo’s.
The music started again, the drums more syncopated and this time the saxophone replaced by the lilting reed of a clarinet that haunted the fog-bound atmosphere of Apollo’s. For a few brief seconds, Orfeo closed his eyes, searching inside himself in as he sought a power to complement the spell of Ardyce’s gaze: when at last his eyes flashed open, fire seemed to blaze from them toward the object of his desire.
“Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,” the deep, bold voice purred across the hushed crowd. “Ton regard, infernal et divin, verse confusément le bienfait et le crime.”
“So do you come from heaven or hell, beauty?” Baptiste half-translated. “He’s hit the mark with your gaze, though: I think you do confuse benevolence and crime.”
“Oh, do shut up,” Ardyce murmured. “Don’t make me regret bringing you here.”
At this the older man smiled but he held his silence, and when the music died away once more he joined in with the rest to give his most ardent applause.
Within Apollo’s only four figures did not share that general adulation.
The group consisted of three men and one woman, and though they had taken a table far from the stage so as not to attract attention to themselves everyone who saw them immediately recognized their faces and drew away cautiously.
Anyone in New Orleans who haunted certain places and sought certain pleasures knew Earl, and if they were lucky his name was all they knew. Earl. No more, no less. Sitting at the table in his fine, elegantly tailored suit, he looked every inch the man confident that great parts of the city belonged to him, though as the spotlight occasionally flashed toward the table at which he sat his pale skin looked furious, his jaw clenched in anger. Occasionally, one of his gloved hands would ball into a fist and casually tap on the table, its true fury somewhat thwarted.
To one side of him sat a man and a woman. The man, huge and dressed in a suit that barely stretched across his giant shoulders, had the slightly swarthy features that many assumed came from Hispanic descent. The few who had the misfortune to know him with any familiarity understood that he traced his lineage to the Chitimacha, natives who had roamed the southern shores of Louisiana for centuries before any white men came. Like Earl, whatever original name he had been born with had been replaced by a single epithet: Horse.
The woman next to him was more clearly of Hispanic mix, though the strong, fine features of her face were almost hidden beneath an intricate web of tattoos carved in dark blue across her skin, lines and whorls that were said to contain the venom she used to kill her enemies. She could kill with her bite, went the stories, though in truth a blade was her favorite weapon. Her body was lithe and muscular, and if Snake was less formally dressed than her companions nonetheless when she moved her body was a poem of deadly elegance.
Across from Horse and Snake, the fourth and final figure was at first the most unassuming of the group though also the most scrupulous of them all in his attire, moreso even than Earl. He was smaller than Horse, which in itself was of little surprise as there would be few men who could achieve the girth of that giant, but when standing he was barely taller than Snake and certainly shorter than his boss. His skin, while chocolate dark, was also stained with occasional spots of an almost mildewed hue that betrayed his age and belied the fashionable cut of his cream-colored suit and broad-brimmed fedora hat. At first glance, should anyone have seen him on his own they would have likely passed him by without comment.
Yet when Papa raised his head and stared at a person, it was a gaze they were not likely to forget. His eyes were those of a man who had seen too much that should never have been witnessed and forgotten too little of it. While Horse may have been Earl’s muscle, and Snake his assassin, Papa was the man sent out to bear those messages with which no-one else could be trusted.
And so Earl sat in Apollo’s with his three companions. His loa, he called them, his invisibles who served his needs throughout New Orleans. Though Earl was hardly the man to have given credence to those old voodoo gods, some feeling of mystery suitably impressed him to dispatch these servants of his with a sense of irony when they were required to show a victim the way from this world to the next. When one of Earl’s loa came looking for a man, he had no choice but to hear the message that they brought.
Once more Earl’s hands clenched and came down hard on the table, though not so hard to draw attention to him. There was one he did not wish to see him here tonight, not yet. For the time being he considered his task to observe: the right and proper judgment would follow later.
“What does she see in that nigger?” he hissed to no-one in particular.
If Papa was offended by the term he did not show it but instead leaned in closer to his boss. “She comes here every night, apparently.”
“And is it to listen to him?” A tic shot through his cheek, drawing the lids of one blue eye close together in a spasm of anger.
“Lord alone knows why,” Snake sneered. “He sounds like shit. I could do better than that.”
Earl looked at her with his own snarl. “If you think saying stupid bullshit like that is going to impress me, then
keep your fucking mouth shut.” He turned his attention back to the stage where the ebony-black singer had finished his song and now stood with head bowed but eyes slightly raised, burning white as they looked across the room toward Ardyce. She in turn could look nowhere else but toward the sculpted form of Orfeo.
Following the gaze between the two of them, Earl’s lips curled in bitterness. “Anyone can hear he’s got a remarkable voice. Is that all she does? Has she ever spoken to him?”
Papa shook his head slowly. “Not that anyone’s ever seen. They just do this every night. She comes here to listen, and he just glares at her after singing. She don’t go backstage—nothin’ like that.”
Impulsively Earl raised one gloved fist to his mouth and bit on his knuckle as he continued to stare at Ardyce and Orfeo. One strand of dark hair, oiled and black, fell forward across his brow and his eyes seemed to burn with a feverish fire.
“If that’s what she wants, why don’t we hire him, get him to sing for us at Hades?” he asked at last.
“I thought of that. He’s not interested. He doesn’t even get paid for singing here.”
At this response from Papa, Snake snorted in disdain. “You expect me to believe that fucking shit?” she asked. “He’s got a price. Everyone has a price. Ain’t that the truth, Earl?”
Earl nodded, chewing on his glove angrily. Papa, however, remarked ironically: “Perhaps he’s got a big dream instead. Maybe that’s what he has to dance to.”
Now it was Earl’s turn to scoff. “Great. I want her back and I’m surrounded with fucking morons.” His fist came down in a fit of pique upon the table, causing a few of the denizens of Apollo’s who sat closest of them to turn away nervously. “Go over to her,” he said to Papa, calming his voice with a great effort. “Find out what she wants. If it’s this singer she wants to listen to, make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Orfeo Page 1
