Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  “But this is a school,” Scott objected. “Why wouldn’t they keep me in hospital?”

  “You were out of danger,” Coleen added. “They needed the space. It’s bedlam right now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Piano smiled at him, a hint of gentle pity in it. “Can you stand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Coleen, give me a hand here.”

  The pair led Scott from the bed over to the large window. As he approached it, Scott saw the perspective change, from the sky above to the land—no, not land—below. The window’s lower half was raised open, a soft breeze sneaking in. Scott put his hand against the wall to steady himself. He needn’t have worried about tumbling out. The water would have broken his fall.

  A river stretched across the way from the houses opposite. Scott leaned farther out and looked directly down. They were on the second floor and the water came right to the walls below him. As far as he could see, it crept up the steps to each and every doorway, lapping to within inches of each and every low window. The trees lining the scene seemed to float on the surface of it, their broad leafy branches reflecting on its mirrored skin. It all looked tranquil, customary. It might have been Venice. Just then, Scott spotted a man in a motor boat approach up the middle of the… canal, creek—he wasn’t sure what to call it. The boat veered toward their building and butted to a stop against steps which rose from the immersion around them.

  “My ride is here,” Piano announced. He offered his hand. “Coleen will see to your arrangements now.”

  They watched the boatman ferry Piano back the way he’d come. Hypnotically shimmering ripples fanned out in the boat’s wake and kissed the houses it passed.

  “Is that the Mississippi?” Scott asked.

  “No. That’s State Street,” Coleen replied.

  Scott was still confused. “Is that normal?”

  “There is no more ‘normal’.”

  Scott returned from showering that evening to discover a suit cover hung on the back of the bedroom door. On the bed were several boxes, all branded from the same men’s store as the suit: shirt, underpants, shoes, socks. Everything was his exact size.

  A thermos of coffee sat on the table, a note taped to it. Next floor up, fourth door down—Coleen

  “Come in,” she answered his knock when Scott arrived to the door.

  Coleen was seated at a desk in a small office. The window behind her looked down into an enclosed courtyard at the rear of the school building. As flooded as the street out front, the yard could easily be described as a pond.

  “You found the clothes?”

  “Yes. Thanks, but you didn’t have to go to that trouble.”

  “Not me. Courtesy of Mister Sanders.”

  Scott did a double-take. “Come again.”

  “Thomas Sanders. He made the arrangements for you to be here.”

  “Tom Sanders? Boston Tom Sanders?”

  “Yes. He’s a long-time benefactor of the Academy.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Not in the academy, no. It was organized through one of the trustees. After everyone evacuated, you were brought in and they asked me to stay on and take care of you.”

  “I don’t know Tom Sanders. I know of Tom Sanders. Why would…what’s going on?”

  “It’s late. You still need to rest. We have a long day tomorrow.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Now that you’re mobile, we have to leave. I’m taking you to Hammond.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Other side of the lake.”

  “Is he there?”

  “I don’t know. But we can’t stay here.”

  “I have to find Julianna. I have to stay here and find out where she’s got to.”

  “Scott, that cannot be done from here.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “There is no power, no communications, no law and order anywhere in the city right now. Listen to me…” Coleen came from behind the desk to face him. “Anyone who was anywhere in the city or that went to the Dome or the Convention Center has been moved on. 80 percent of this place is underwater. Every inch of dry land is effectively a warzone. Any searching you need to do has to be done away from here. And unless Julianna happens to be a cop, soldier, or reporter, she isn’t here. Trust me.”

  “Why would Tom Sanders want to help me?”

  “I don’t know. But if it’s any consolation, I have your personal possessions here.”

  Coleen opened a drawer behind the desk and took out two large padded envelopes: one slim, one bulky.

  Scott suddenly became agitated. “The clothes I was wearing. My own suit. Where is it?”

  “The black one?”

  “Yes.”

  “That came with you as well but it was pretty beat up. I put it in the trash.”

  “Shit!”

  “Oh, don’t worry. It’s still there. You really think we’re getting trash service anytime soon?”

  “You can get it?”

  “Sure. But why would you want it?”

  “I need something. Can you show me where it is?”

  They returned downstairs, where Coleen retrieved a black plastic bag from a small dumpster in the laundry room. “That’s the rest of what came with you from Baton Rouge.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry if I’m being a little spazzy. It’s been a weird week—three—whatever.”

  “No problem. Get some sleep. Our boat arrives early and it’s going to take all day to make our way up there.”

  Back in his room, Scott rifled through the pockets of his old suit and breathed a massive sigh when he found what he needed. It was the worse for weather but it was still legible.

  The satphone and cellphone from Bienville were gone, as was the driver’s license of the man whose name Scott could not now recall, only that he had killed him in self defense.

  Scott tore open the bulky envelope and found his watch, wallet, Blackberry, and wedding ring.

  In the slim envelope he found a book he’d never seen before.

  A journal.

  The front of it was engraved with the same Almonester-Pontalba emblem as the broach. It hit Scott that the broach probably rested under the ashes of Henry’s house now, most likely a fused blob of precious metal, without meaning or mystery.

  He opened the journal.

  More familiar to him, Julianna’s ‘Forgive me’ note—from a lifetime ago—was nestled inside the cover. Scott pulled it from its ivory envelope and breathed the scent of her.

  The first three pages of the journal were filled with one word, repeatedly written in dense columns across the sheets—JULIANNA.

  He turned the page…

  Dear Scott,

  I can start at the end and you will know me as a liar.

  …and she began.

  Chapter 55

  As the car coasted down University Avenue, Scott watched the crucible of light that was the sports stadium in the distance, a brilliant white spot amidst the falling gloom in east Hammond. As though teasing his impression that it was a nest of fireflies, one single point of light rose from there and drifted past overhead. The thrashing blades of the Chinook receded, as the transport copter banked toward New Orleans along the line of the interstate which they had come up.

  The car pulled into a lot and stopped at the side door of a low brick building.

  “It’s ok,” Coleen assured him as Scott started gathering his things in the rear. “You can leave them. Jed will take you to the motel when we’re done here.”

  Inside the door, Scott stopped her. “Look, I know I‘m sounding like a broken record but I want to see Tom Sanders.”

  A man in a black suit, with short silvering hair and a neat goatee, came around a corner and down to them. “Sister Coleen?” he inquired.

  “Yes. Lance?” Coleen shook his hand. “Sorry. We got delayed. Thank you so much for staying back.”

  “It’s not necessary,” he assured her without a
trace of good humor. “We hardly leave these days.” She nodded solemnly.

  The man looked at Scott briefly. “Do you want me to come with you?” he asked Coleen.

  “No,” she decided after a moment. “Just tell us where.”

  He pointed down the plain corridor. “To the end and round. Last door on the right.”

  Coleen rubbed his arm. “God bless.”

  “Take as long as you need,” he said, returning round the corner he’d come.

  Coleen looked at Scott. There were no words but her eyes told all to him.

  “No,” Scott said.

  Coleen pursed her lips, put her hand on his shoulder. Scott could feel her own trembling through the contact.

  “No,” he repeated, shaking his head.

  “The day…” Coleen swallowed, “the morning after, a boat crew went to inspect the London Canal breach. On the way back, they heard barking somewhere in Greenwood cemetery.”

  Scott staggered back from her grasp, stopped against the brick wall behind him.

  “They followed it to a dog trapped on one of the crypts. She was with it but it was too late.”

  “You’re wrong,” Scott whispered.

  Coleen shook her head. “She had her wallet.”

  “What type?”

  “What? What type of wallet?”

  “Dog. What type of dog?”

  “I don’t know. It wouldn’t leave her. It must have been there for hours. Even when they got her back to dry land, they had to sedate it to allow them to take her away. They took it to a shelter after.”

  “She… wouldn’t… I wanted to teach her. She hated the water. I didn’t understand until—”

  “She didn’t suffer. You have to believe me. It’s an envious sliver of comfort that many here since would want for their own pain. They brought her out straight away. Mister Sanders had her taken here, to be readied… to be ready for you.”

  Coleen led him down the corridor of the funeral home to the last closed door on the right.

  “Scott,” she restrained him. “She has marks from the animal biting—holding—her, pulling her out of the water.”

  She put her hand on the handle.

  “What if you’re wrong?” Scott snapped. “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s beautiful. Now that I know everything you’ve been through, it can only have been for one such as her.”

  Scott stiffened, pulled his emotions back within.

  “Don’t,” Coleen said.

  “What?”

  “There haven’t been enough tears. Don’t deny her yours.”

  “You should have told me that years ago.”

  “Tell her now. She’ll hear you.”

  Coleen opened the door. Scott stepped through. On legs which were no longer his own, he walked across the room and approached the table where Julianna lay, wrapped in a black velvet shroud, her face serene, her hair lying around her shoulders.

  She was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

  He stroked his hand across her cheek and brought his lips down to hers. “Hey,” he whispered and pressed his mouth to her ear. “I gotcha. I gotcha.”

  Coleen stepped from the room and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 56

  The Holocaust Memorial framed Scott’s view of the river bend. He focused through the spaces between its series of decorative flat panels, followed a slow barge moving across the polyptych which the rectangular blades made of the Mississippi River scene.

  A glossy black SUV appeared in the small lot to his left. Scott straightened on the bench and watched Tom Sanders emerge and come along the path toward him.

  Sanders was impressively tall, in his earth-brown pinstriped pants and buttoned-up waistcoat, the turned-up sleeves and open-neck of his shirt the only casual touches on him. He led each step toward Scott with a large black crooked cane, without any stiff effort, as though it were an extension of his own spry frame.

  His silvering hair was close-cropped, the tufts above his forehead springing up in the heat. Apart from two strong jowl creases either side of his mouth and a single fold of age across his throat, Sanders’s complexion was fresh and unbothered. He stopped and fixed Scott with eyes which were brown-black under his slim sharp eyebrows.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” he said in an accent somewhere between Boston and Belfast.

  “Did I have a choice?”

  “Not really.” Sanders sat on the bench beside Scott and propped the cane between his knees, rested his wrists across its broad flat palm grip. “How are your digs at the Monteleone? Are they looking after you?”

  Scott returned his gaze to the river. “I’ve seen you before.”

  “Yes?”

  “On the morning of the wedding. You were in the lobby of the hotel.”

  “She wouldn’t see me.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “This is the last amicable contact we ever had.” Sanders twisted the cane and considered an inscription on the handle. “I slipped on the steps outside the Union Club a few years back. Damn doorman hadn’t salted them properly. She bought this as a birthday present on Jonathan’s credit card. He almost popped his pipes when it showed up on his bill. It’s Irish bog oak.” Sanders chuckled as he read the personal inscription Julianna had engraved there. “Have Cain. Be Abel. The only thing worse than a smartalec is a classically-educated smartalec.”

  Scott continued to stare into the distance. “Why did you give me the book?”

  “She wanted you to have it.”

  “But she gave it to you. You could have just burned it.”

  “Down here you must have a story. It’s expected. You’re nothing without one. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It only matters how you tell it. If I had stopped her telling hers to you as she intended, I would have killed her all over again. I suspect the nuance of how that works is lost on you but no matter.”

  “I could go grab one of those cops over there, tell them I’ve got a fugitive from justice, a real live gangster.”

  “Go ahead,” Sanders grunted. “I guess I was wrong. You’ll fit right in. It’ll be a fanciful tale, nothing more. As it is, I hear all the records of the day were destroyed in the flood. Singularly good planning on the part of the Sheriff’s department—as always—putting them in the basement. Maybe that’s for the best. This cesspool can have a clean slate. Everyone gets a fresh start. God knows, most here needed it.”

  “You don’t seem too cut up about your people.”

  Sanders snorted. “They’re hardly my people. That jackass on TV the other night; he had it all wrong. Forget about Bush not caring about black people. Rich people—that’s my people—don’t care about poor people, period. That’s the natural order and God bless it. As for these eejits here—well, they’re all too wrapped up in their own contradictions to be of consequence to anyone but themselves, too confined in the here-and-now of nostalgia to worry about the future. Except, that is, their preoccupation with the hereafter. Here’s a tip for you. If you take the cemeteries tour, remember that the bigger the crypt, the bigger the bastard. You need an extra leg-up to Heaven when the Devil has you by the ankle.”

  “So you left here because you’re a higher class of scumbag? Town ain’t big enough. Was that it?”

  “A more pragmatic class of scumbag. Henry was lazy with his lot, too old-school. I knew the gig was up the moment they parachuted that pretty boy Reagan into the Oval Office. There was a new game about to start, one where you get to rob and pillage and they even let you define what’s legal and what’s not before you open the cookie jar. The American Dream? Baloney! Reaganomics was just a fancy euphemism for a plunderer’s paradise. If you’re lousy at it, you end up in jail. Me and mine… we’re the ones built and run those very same jails. In the final reckoning, there’s only two types of scumbag: the dumb ones locked behind the prison gate and the smart ones with their name above it. The Arkie even offered me an ambassadorship for my t
roubles. Turned him down straight. Give me Boston over Ballsbridge any day.”

  “You certainly cashed Henry out.”

  “Five million and change. I was in a hurry to join the party and I needed my stake. Word to the wise, Scott. You only get rich by starting rich.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him when you had the chance? Afraid to get your hands dirty, like you still are?”

  “I made a snap judgment call, one as it happens I regret now. It seemed apropos to let Henry take the fall. He had more to answer for. It was fortuitous at a time when I needed to disappear. Sparing Henry was a calculated gamble. I figured Little Man Marcello would catch up with him soon enough.”

  “You lied to her. She put her trust in you and you betrayed her.”

  “I didn’t make the worlds the way they are. She was neither breed in this one nor blood in the other. But I got her out alive. Heck, I didn’t even owe her that. Don’t think to lecture me on matters you had no part in.”

  “What’s to say I don’t just beat the crap out of you right here and then go home and kick Jonathan’s fat ass too?”

  “It wasn’t him, by the way. I assume you think he was complicit.”

  Scott looked directly at Sanders. “What?”

  “She sought me out. Jonathan never knew.” Sander’s voice was lower now, less assured. “She was hysterical. She said… she said she was pregnant but the baby was…” Sanders sighed, “There were complications. She said it had Downs, that it was too late for a legal termination. Unless… unless I intervened, made accommodations for her.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe me, don’t believe me! I don’t give a damn either way. I didn’t want to be involved. She said if I didn’t make arrangements she was going to do it herself. Or worse. She told me that I owed her this one last thing, that she wouldn’t ever contact me again after that, that it would finally be done between us.”

  “And you agreed to her… fixing herself as well. Anything for a quiet life, eh?”

  “I didn’t know that. I just made arrangements, nothing more. I didn’t even believe her about the Downs. It didn’t matter anyway. She had something far worse, something no procedure was ever going to right.”