A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition (7 page)

“Why not? You should be proud of your ability,” Pride said, turning all the force of his talent on his companions. The three glanced at one another.

“Come on,” Lust said, throwing an arm over Sloth’s shoulders. “You, me, and Gluttony? It’ll be like old times. Remember all those Roman orgies? It’ll be fun.”

“Well …” Sloth hesitated. Pride gave every erg of energy he had in him. Sloth shrugged a quarter of an inch. “All right.”

It
was
almost fun to watch. To Pride’s chagrin, it worked all too well. A man and a woman who had been slapping one another across the face moved closer and closer into a passionate kiss as they were overtaken by a wave of red heat from Lust. Gluttony caused fragrant waves of steam to travel north along St. Peter and St. Ann Streets from the Café du Monde, the aroma of beignets and chicory coffee all but hooking themselves into the noses of half the people in the square. They forgot all about their arguments and wandered away in search of fried dough smothered in powdered sugar. Sloth overwhelmed hundreds of his followers with endless waves of ennui. They simply stopped fighting and sat down on the grass, too exhausted or lazy to continue. Half of them fell asleep where they landed. One by one, the revelers departed.

“Is that all of them?” Pride asked.

“Yes,” Greed said, surveying around them. From elbow-to-elbow crowds, the big park seemed almost empty. They sensed beyond the square throughout the city. Every single mortal who hadn’t gone home to bed was either eating, drinking, or carousing. To his great relief, the ennui that had stifled the souls of the humans during the day had fled. These people felt alive again. No more emptiness.

“Success,” Pride said, smugly. Envy gave him a look of utter disdain.

Behind the Manifestations, the chimes of the church clock tolled a single time. One o’clock.

“We’re here too late,” Sloth yawned. “Are we gonna get in trouble for running over time?”

“Doubt it,” Anger said, with dark humor. “If the Big Guy wants to make everyone sin without us He’s going to have to come here in person.”

“It’s not fair that He loves mortals more than us,” Envy complained.

“Watch it!” Pride said. “That kind of comment IS going to get us in trouble.”

“What more?” she asked. “I was shut out of every party in town. You treat me like a lesser talent, and kudos go to the self-indulgent sensation hounds in our number. Four of us end up with
no
followers. It’s been a horrible day. What else could happen?”

A torrent of water hit her suddenly in the face. The water cannons had finished their work on the side streets and arrived in Jackson Square. All the Manifestations were soaked to the skin before they could vanish into the nearest portal to the real world. Pride’s beautiful suit was dripping, and his tie had been knocked askew. Greed was laughing.

“Did I mention the Big Guy has a wry sense of humor?” Pride asked.

After Midnight

Closer. Just a little bit closer. Irmani Sim leaned forward in the polished wooden pew, folding her hands in the lap of her slim-fitting, green satin dress, trying to look as if she was praying. If only that fat man in the shiny blue suit didn’t look back at that moment, she’d be in the money—literally. As the minister called out the next hymn, the fat man stood up with the rest of the congregation. He was missing his wallet now, but with any luck, he wouldn’t even notice until he tried to pay for breakfast somewhere. Irmani dropped the worn leather billfold into the green crocodile handbag between her feet. Her partner Gib gave her a silly, lopsided grin, teeth shining in his good-looking, dark-skinned face.

“You’re going to Hell for that. Stealing in the house of God. Before His very face!” a wispy voice hissed.

Irmani looked around. A stern, wrinkled face like a piece of wadded up newspaper glared at her. The old woman had to be at least ninety, but sharp as broken glass. Irmani frowned. She thought she hadn’t been observed. Never mind. She crossed her forefinger over her thumb and pointed it at her accuser.

“You didn’t see anything,” she whispered. The old woman’s face crumpled with confusion for a moment. When it cleared, she smiled a little vacantly at Irmani, then went back to her prayer book.

Irmani and Gib exchanged the kiss of peace with the rest of the congregation and headed back to their seedy little hotel to change out of their Sunday best.

“How much you get?” Gib asked, handing over the two wallets he had lifted during the service.

“Just four,” Irmani said, counting twenties with that inward thrill that she always got at the sight of money. “But the pickings will be good this afternoon, I promise. The city is just full of tourists!”

“Hey, sorry, babe,” a tall, fair-skinned man said, clutching her arm with an unsteady hand. His eyes were bloodshot, the result of drinking all the Hurricanes that had been in the stack of cups he carried in his other hand.

“No, it’s all my fault,” Irmani assured him, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. Gib nudged up behind him and lifted the wallet out of his pocket and that of the equally drunken friend who swayed and giggled beside him. “Hey, you all have a nice day, huh?”

“We are, babe, we are!” At her mental nudge, they noticed another booth selling Hurricanes on the street and staggered toward it, holding out their towers of glasses. Too bad they weren’t going to be able to afford another one unless they left their ATM cards back at their hotel.

With its ornamental painted tiles and fancy curlicue ironwork, the 300-year old French Quarter looked dressed up for Mardi Gras already. There was magic all around the place. Irmani felt it and loved it. Her own talents were shallow by comparison. The Jedi mind trick she pulled on the old lady in the church and the two drunken frat boys were about all she could do, but she was aware of the strong underpinnings of magic in the old city around her. Music was both a part of it and a result of it. She knew little about New Orleans before she got there, but Gib had insisted it would be fun to go to Mardi Gras, so they went.

Irmani laughed at the girls who stood on the antique balconies and yanked up their shirts for strings of beads thrown up to them by shouting men down on the street. There was no way she’d make a public fool of herself for anything, particularly not plastic beads. She noticed that it was only the tourists who did it, not the locals. In fact, she noticed the locals watching her with suspicious eyes from the doorways of residences and shops as she went by, as if they could see the growing stash of purses and wallets in her tote bag. Did they know she wasn’t the innocent shopper she appeared to be?

New Orleans was a strait-laced town, much more than she had expected from the come-as-you-are, anything-goes travel brochures. Sure, it was still more than half messed up since the hurricane, but it still had the feel of a place that knew its own mind. It was definitely a Catholic city, like Boston, where she’d spent one miserable week the summer before, but this had a real mind to it, like none of the others had. New Orleans possessed character. It didn’t really approve of all those drunk, happy people with money in their pockets, buying round after round of Hurricanes, collecting throws and hot sauce and t-shirts and masks, paying no attention to the condition of wallets or purses, or of her and Gib, either, but it behaved kind of like a maiden auntie. It would let them go on making their own mistakes. It was perfect for her. Irmani had already cleaned up enough to pay for her expenses and still pay rent for two months. What with the Mardi Gras festivities cranking up to full, she might be able to get enough money so her basics were covered for the rest of the year. It’d be nice to take time off. Easier on the nerves.

She and Gib followed the happy crowd down Bourbon Street, around the corner down St. Ann, into Jackson Square. The people were as jammed together and as colorful as jelly beans in a jar. Irmani nodded approval to Gib. This was a good place to start dropping the wallets that they had already emptied of cash. She could count on the press of people to ensure no one could tell who had lost them, just as she could count on human nature to ensure that most of what she dropped would be carried off by someone else who would never think of picking a pocket but would crow over their good fortune and someone else’s bad luck. Served them right if theirs was the next billfold to fall into her grasp.

Irmani jumped as she caught two gigantic blue eyes gazing at her. Forcing her heart to slow down, she saw that they were in the massive face of a jester in gold, green, and purple motley that loomed over the heads of the crowd. It was part of a parade float, parked in front of one of the 19th century buildings on the square. If anything, the press of humanity was thicker around it than anywhere else.

“What’s going on there?” Gib asked.

“Don’t know,” Irmani said. “Sounds like opportunity knocking to me!”

“Hear ye! Hear ye! Welcome to all the good subjects of Comus, King of Mardi Gras!” A thin-faced white man in a very fine gray-striped suit stood on a dais just inside the entrance to the Presbytère. “Be of good cheer! Welcome to all revelers! I am pleased to introduce to you the king and queen of the oldest krewe in all of New Orleans, Comus and his queen!”

He stood aside, clapping his hands. Up onto the dais stepped two of the most fantastic costumes that Irmani had ever seen. She didn’t care about the people wearing them, but the outfits had life of their own. Acres of white silk satin had been sewn with thousands of pearls, rhinestones, and sequins into patterns like lace. Velvet cloaks swung from their shoulders, clasped with bejeweled knobs of gold that Irmani swore even from the back of the room were real, as were the necklaces, tiaras, bracelets, and rings. The glorious painted masks that covered the upper part of their faces weren’t leather or plastic. Could they be ivory? So much wealth in one place took her breath away. A heavy hand dropped on her shoulder.

“Easy, girl,” Gib whispered. “Not for you.”

“I know it,” she whispered back, peevishly. It didn’t do any harm to dream.

The king was speaking. “… As of the earliest members of our sacred order, we want to enrich our mutual heritage. As a token, we are bestowing upon the Presbytère and the Louisiana State Museum these fine artifacts that, according to the documents we have recently discovered, were worn by my many-times predecessor and that of his queen in 1902.” He patted the top of a glass display case that was just visible at his left hand. “That makes these older by eight years than the
parure
already on display here. I hope you will enjoy them and the spirit of Mardi Gras.
Laissez les bon temps roulez!
”

Irmani waited impatiently in the long line.

“This had better be worth it,” she said to Gib for the nineteenth time. There was no opportunity to increase their personal wealth in the meantime. Gib had pointed out the security cameras aimed down at them from six different spots on the ceiling. She might have been able to fool the minds of the guards, but video tape was out of her reach.

The line took them through a forest of gorgeous costumes. Each was arranged on a life-sized mannequin that wore a wig and a mask. Looking into the empty eye holes gave Irmani the creeps, so she concentrated on the dresses and tunics, and read the posters on the walls.

Properly speaking, the big party going on outside was Carnival. Mardi Gras was only one day, the last blowout. Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, preceded Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Irmani had childhood memories of meatless days and fish on Fridays.

“Did you ever have to give stuff up for Lent?” Gib asked, as if reading her mind.

“Never paid much attention to it, except when I was in Catholic school,” Irmani said, dismissively. “The nuns made us do it. We never had to give up anything necessary, only pleasures and vanities, but it was hard. I hated it.”

“We had to write ours down,” Gib said. “I made it up most times, but my mom wouldn’t make dessert all the way through Lent. I mean, is it really giving anything up if you don’t get to make the choice? It’s supposed to be free will, giving up stuff for God.”

“He doesn’t care,” Irmani said. “If He did, would He have blown this place up with a hurricane?”

Gib shrugged his shoulders.

Finally, it was their turn to pass by the glass case. On a lining of folded purple velvet was a collection of jewelry, the
parure
, as the King of Comus said. The tiara intimidated her, with its rose-cut diamonds, and the ivory domino on a lorgnette was too fussy for her taste, but she couldn’t stop looking at the strings of filigree gold beads interspersed with colored gemstones. She knew at once that they were the real thing. Fantastic. She felt her fingers curling into her tingling palms.

“I gotta have that,” Irmani breathed.

“Uh-uh,” Gib said. “We don’t take anything but money. Just money. We don’t want anything that hard to fence.”

“I don’t want to fence them,” Irmani said. “I just want them. They are gorgeous!”

“You don’t need them, baby,” Gib argued. “Look how many throws you’ve got! Dozens!”

“But they aren’t real,” Irmani said. “
These
are real.”

Gib knew there was no arguing with her once she’d made a decision. The two of them went back out into Jackson Square for the afternoon. Irmani had to drag her mind back over and over so as not to get caught when they did a little business among the steadily increasing crowd.

Just before closing time at five o’clock, they wandered casually in, as if for the first time. Irmani followed the man in the suit, the curator. She sidled up as he was about to lock the cases and gave him a mind-blowing smile. He returned it a little uncertainly, then went back to his task, never realizing there was a gap in his memory as to how many items were in the display after the pretty girl with
café au lait
skin had gone away.

Irmani grabbed Gib, who was hanging out among the mannequins, and dragged him out to the street.

“I got them,” she gasped, pulling him around the ironwork fence that blocked off the looming façade of the Presbytère from her sight. Leaning into the branches and leaves that poked through and provided a natural screen, she picked three strands out of the thick rope of sparkling beads that hung around her neck. Gib gawked.