Floodgates (23 page)
How long had she stood there, watching Matt play with a deadly weapon and grow more careless by the minute? Faye didn’t know.
How many times had he pointed that weapon at another human being with an expression that said he was mulling over the consequences of pulling the trigger? She couldn’t say.
All she knew was that there was something creeping up behind Matt. It had the form of a woman, but was it a woman? At this moment, she wasn’t at all sure she would stake her life on that. It was wearing a robe that hung from a frame so skeletal that it seemed to carry no flesh on it at all. Its head was wrapped in a cloth so red that it glowed in the moonlight. It walked barefoot. And it was carrying a knife.
Step by step, it stalked them. Dauphine and Joe never once looked in its direction, which told her that they both saw it, too.
Dauphine’s portrait of the Lady Dantò showed her in a red head cloth. Dauphine had said that the Lady carried a knife that wrought vengeance against men who preyed on women. If ever there was a time for the Lady to show her face, this was it.
Dauphine continued with her hand gestures that were constrained and slow and gentle, but if they’d been done with the power of a fully extended arm moving at top speed, everyone involved would have seen them for what they were—the jabbing and recoiling motion of one person stabbing another, again and again.
Joe and Dauphine were still singing. Matt was still contemplating mass murder, when the Lady reached him. Her face still in shadow, she grabbed his head and yanked it to her left, clearing the path so that she could jab the knife in her right hand deep into Matt’s right hand…his trigger hand.
The blow robbed Matt of complete control of his weapon, but it didn’t render him defenseless. The gun was still clutched in his left hand. He jumped up, trying to twist around and blow his assailant’s head off, but Dauphine threw herself into his legs, trying—and failing—to knock him off his feet. Joe stepped in to help, leaving Faye to do the one necessary thing that required cunning but not brawn. She went for the gun.
The Lady’s knife rose again and dropped like a sledgehammer. Matt screamed and reached for his wounded hand—the left one, this time. Faye saw her chance and launched herself at the gun, grabbing it with both hands and twisting its muzzle toward the sky as hard as she could. She felt Matt’s grip give way and let herself drop to the ground with the handgun aimed, at point-blank range, directly at his heart. Sprawled there, Faye finally got a good look at the Lady as she threw a skeletal arm around Matt’s neck, using her free hand to lift his jaw.
The Lady’s prey was immobilized and waiting for her killing strike, but Faye barked out, “Stop! Don’t hurt him. I have the gun!
I have the gun.
”
Tortured eyes met Faye’s. The knife hand was still upraised, ready to strike.
“He’s no threat to us now. He can’t hurt you any more, sweetheart. He can’t hurt anybody.”
This lady had every reason in the world to drive the knife home, but Faye couldn’t let her.
“Don’t do it, Nina.”
Sirens sounded in the distance, and Faye said, “Jodi’s coming and she’ll take care of this. You’re no killer, Nina. Don’t let him make you into something you’re not. Don’t become the monster that he is.”
Nina was still deprived of useful speech—robbed of her very voice—but her comprehension was unquestioned. The knife trembled in her hand, but she lowered it slowly, slowly, until that arm hung loose at her side.
“That’s a good child. I told you I’d keep you safe, if God willed it.”
Nina turned a wordless stare on Dauphine. The knife fell from her hand and stuck, blade-first, into the soil at her feet. She shrank back from Matt, as if he were toxic or contagious or radioactive. Nina couldn’t physically say what she was feeling, but her body language spoke for her. She couldn’t believe she had actually touched someone capable of doing the things that Matt had done.
Nina’s gaunt form was swallowed by Dauphine’s voluminous, colorful hand-me-down clothes, and the bandages on her injured head were covered by a bright cloth, tied under her right ear. But what else would she be wearing? Dauphine would hardly have let an honored guest stay in a threadbare, dingy hospital gown. She certainly would have wrapped Nina’s battered head in something pretty, knowing that covering her wound would give a woman a sense of dignity and healing.
“
You
took Nina.”
Faye gave Dauphine an appraising glance. She could see that the mambo was feeling a little proud of herself.
Dauphine brushed a wayward curl from her eyes, and said, “I did not ‘take’ her. She went with me of her own free will…though who knows what the child thought when I said we must crawl out of the window?”
Faye got the definite impression that Dauphine thought Faye and Jodi and maybe Joe, too, were certifiably insane.
Dauphine waved a dismissive hand. “Please. Someone had to do it. What were any of you thinking? To leave her in the care of
that
one…impossible. And after she had suffered so much.” Her forbidding tone said exactly what she thought of Charles’ worth as a human being. “I would not trust him with a cat I liked.”
Faye could see her point.
“There was a spell I suggested to you, but you didn’t like it.” Dauphine eyed Joe meaningfully.
Faye remembered Dauphine’s spell to hold a lover. It had involved a jarful of urine underneath her bed. No, she hadn’t liked it, and she certainly hadn’t given it a try.
Dauphine inched a little closer to Faye, who couldn’t move away from a conversation turned suddenly uncomfortable, because she needed to keep holding a gun on a killer.
“Perhaps this will suit you better,” Dauphine purred. “Take a half-spoon of sugar, a spoon of peppermint, and a teaspoonful of candied orange peel; stir this mixture into a glass of red wine and…”
At least this spell sounded tasty. But Dauphine was still being coy about its purpose.
Faye knew the promise that Dauphine didn’t want to say out loud in front of Joe.
Do these things and he will love you forever.
Joe, unaware that Dauphine was promising to ensnare his heart, reached out and took the gun from Faye’s hand, and she let him. She looked at him standing in the candlelight, as silent and powerful and mysterious in his way as Dauphine or even Ezili Dantò. She could barely make out the outline of his face, but she didn’t need to see him. She knew that his green eyes were gentle and steady, and she knew that his lips would always smile when she entered the room.
Why was she dragging her feet on getting married? Now, as she finally understood her fears, they already seemed silly and toothless.
Faye had been raised by a grandmother whose husband abandoned her and a mother whose soldier husband didn’t come home alive. Just a year ago, Joe had been shot, and she’d nearly lost him, too. Her fear of marriage had felt complicated and deep, but the reason for that fear was simple, really. Dauphine had understood it all along, and she was offering to fix it, but this was a fear Faye had to face and conquer for herself.
She was afraid that, someday, Joe would leave her.
But Joe wasn’t going anywhere. She didn’t need to cast a spell, whether it contained candied orange peel or urine.
Joe would never, ever leave her, not if he had breath in his body, and she’d never leave him, either. Yes, one of them might die—they both would die someday—but she’d just have to be willing to take that risk.
Excerpt from
The Floodgates of Hell
by Louie Godtschalk
If Colonel McGonohan could have lived forever, what a book I would have written! Wouldn’t you love to see what he would have made of the twentieth century?
Of course, the resulting book would have been his, and not mine, but I cannot bother my head with worries that can never come to pass. Colonel McGonohan
was
mortal. Thus, when we look at the years after the publication of his memoirs, we must rely on witnesses who had neither his keen powers of observation nor, in some cases, his absolute honesty.
The colonel just missed seeing his dreams for New Orleans come true. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the city at last embarked on a monumental effort to drain the damnable swamps where it was born. Stormwater and sewage systems were built, making New Orleans one of our first cities to separate those two functions and, in the process, making her engineers into heroes.
The success of these heroes can be told in human terms: America’s last epidemic of yellow fever happened here in 1905, having taken more than 41,000 lives in this city alone since Colonel McGonohan served Andrew Jackson so ably in 1815.
Yellow fever cannot kill without mosquitoes to carry it, and mosquitoes cannot plague us without stagnant water to live in. The victory went to the engineers who dug endless miles of canals and built the best pumps the world had ever seen. They sent those pestilence-carriers packing. (Most of them. The survivors, as I can personally attest, are fearsome beasts.) Colonel McGonohan would have been proud.
To close my book, I decided to speak with one of the heirs to these accomplishments. And to acknowledge that the world has changed, I chose an engineer Colonel McGonohan could not have imagined…a woman.
Personal interview with Chloe Scott, 2008
I didn’t decide to be a civil engineer because I was fascinated with sewage and flood control and bridges. I just fell into the field, I guess, because I was good at math and I liked physics and it seemed like there would always be jobs. I mean, we’re never going to stop needing roads and water treatment plants, are we?
Hmmm. I guess we could, but it’d mean that the world had changed so much that none of us would recognize it, and probably not for the better. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen in our lifetimes. You can’t have civilization unless you have things like clean water, and I don’t think water’s going to start purifying itself any time soon. So I think I have job security.
And I’m glad I’ve got civilization. Because I got a good long glimpse of what life would be without it. I’d hardly been in New Orleans a year when we lost it all…clean water, electricity, telephones. Everything.
There was chaos in the streets—the ones that weren’t flooded. I learned something in the days after Katrina—if our civilization ever goes under, I don’t want to be around.
When the water receded and the lights came back on, I found myself at my desk, just sitting. I couldn’t think of any reason to do my work. Why did I feel that way? Well, I’m on the team that’s responsible for the levees that failed.
Did I prepare faulty designs? Did I screw up the geotechnical work? Did I let a contractor get away with shoddy work?
Of course not. I’d just moved to town. Nobody in the world was going to say that any part of the disaster was my fault. My problem was that I could see no way to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. Even if we rebuilt the levees exactly to specs, a Category 5 storm in the right place could open the floodgates again.
I asked myself if New Orleans even had to be here. Maybe there’s no reason for all these people to be in harm’s way. Then I drove across the Mississippi River and saw the boats and barges hauling petroleum and grain and…everything. Yes, I do think we have to be here, and we always have. The dollars-and-cents need for this city has been as constant as the river. And the emotional need for it…
Throwing away New Orleans would be like throwing away a family album full of three centuries of pictures. The French, the Spanish, the English, the Indians, the Africans, they’re all still here—we’re all here—and so is everyone else who ever stayed here long enough to fall in love. Andrew Jackson. Jean Lafitte. Millions of Mardi Gras revelers and jazz lovers. Throwing that away would…well, we have to keep it.
Still, I wasn’t sure I could come to work every day and throw my heart into a design that had a decent chance of failing in my lifetime, all the time knowing that I’d have to watch it happen.
But what if I left? What if I went into…I don’t know…real estate? Would that help? Would it lessen the chance that I would one day be staring at The Weather Channel again, watching the water roll into town? My town? No.
If I stayed, though…could I do anything to make a difference?
Yes.
I could do my job well. A computer model is only as good as the person running it. I could be that person.
I could be an extra pair of eyes, ready to squawk if some poor soul reporting a sand boil was being brushed off.
I could vote for candidates willing to fight for the money we need to protect ourselves.
I could campaign for candidates honest enough to use it well.
I could speak up.
And if that free speech costs me my job, well…wait until you see what I’ll have to say to the blogosphere.
If I were a scientist, I’d have to pack it in, because there’s no way our messy political system will ever produce a fail-safe system based on pure, unassailable theory. But I’m an engineer. We take that pure, unassailable theory and turn it into the most practical design possible. We make the best of the tools at hand. We work within the constraints of the money available.
We get things done.
Sunday
Faye’s cell phone rang and she answered it. This meant that her eggs were going to get cold, but the phone had rung repeatedly all morning, signaling each time that yet another friend had heard that she and Joe had captured a murderer. And nearly died in the process.
This time, it was Bobby Longchamp. “Can I come see you?”
Jodi, Dauphine, Louie, and Joe were already crowded with her around the breakfast table. The tiny apartment couldn’t take another body, but Faye wanted to see Bobby. He made her smile.
So she said, “Absolutely.”
Then she turned off the phone and said, “Pick up your plates and mugs. We’re going to have to move this party outside.”
***
Bobby arrived carrying a big jar of his mother’s fig preserves. He set it beside Jodi’s offering, a plate of biscuits that was still warm.
His smile had the charm of a man whose manners were taught to him by people whose primary accomplishment, these past three hundred years, had been a scintillating social life. Faye thought it was a waste to lock up that smile in a library, where nobody much ever saw it.
“Hello, Cousin,” Bobby said. “I’m glad to hear that you and Joe are alive.”
Faye was touched that someone with Bobby’s reverence for family would acknowledge that they might be kin, just because they had the same last name.
“Yeah, why don’t we consider ourselves cousins until somebody proves us wrong? Thanks, Bobby. I’m glad we’re alive, too.”
“Ain’t nobody going to prove that we aren’t cousins. We might never prove that we are, either, but I’ve got some pretty solid evidence that says it’s true. As solid as we’re likely to get, anyway.”
“Already? How’d you pull that off?”
While Joe got Bobby some breakfast, Faye opened the jar of figs and spread a thick layer of chunky, brown goo on her biscuit. It was the tastiest goo she’d eaten in a long time. The recipe was probably…yeah, three hundred years old. No doubt about it. She hoped the figs themselves weren’t that old.
“How’d I find our family connection? Libraries are my life—” Bobby began, then he shifted gears. “Oh, I’m not going to take credit for this research triumph. My cousin Tish—I told you about Tish—well, she’s just nuts for genealogy. She started from your father, Earle Longchamp, and worked backward until your family tree ran into ours. A hundred and eighty years, it took. The man’s name was Lamarr Longchamp.”
“My father’s middle name was Lamar.”
“I know. Tish told me.”
Of course, she did. Tish seemed to know everything there was to know, genealogically speaking. Louie was laughing, which showed that he had cousins just like Tish.
“But you say there’s no proof?”
“Well—” Bobby’s voice took on the conspiratorial tone of a historian about to spin a good story. Or maybe an incorrigible gossip about to pass on a choice piece of dirt. “Lamarr Longchamp was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Tish’s, too. And we have a document that says he owned your great-great-great-grandfather, Henri.”
Joe put a hand on Faye’s arm. She patted it, so he’d know that it didn’t upset her to talk about her enslaved ancestors.
“Um, Bobby. Slaves aren’t blood-kin.”
“Not usually, no. But Henri was freed as a young teenager. Tish found the papers. Afterward, he took the Longchamp name. He was educated at an academy for wealthy boys located somewhere near Natchez. There are documents that say he was a landholder as an adult. And he owned land that had once belonged to Lamarr Longchamp. Then, when Lamarr died, Henri Longchamp was included in his will.”
Faye wasn’t sure how she felt about this information, but she just said, “That’s not proof.”
“Oh, come on, Faye, don’t be that way,” Jodi said, waving the butter knife at her. “Sounds pretty close to proof to me. Close enough, anyway. Let the man talk.”
Bobby paused to glance at this woman who’d barged into his side of the argument, uninvited. She flashed him a folksy grin that was just as high-wattage as his old-money smile. For a long second, Faye could see that Bobby had completely lost his train of thought, which might have been a first for him. She could also see that Jodi had noticed that Faye’s putative cousin was indeed a pretty man.
Bobby dragged himself back to the task at hand, which was arguing with Faye. “Oh, we
are
kin. You have all my family’s finest qualities. Stubbornness, a fine intellect, bull-headedness, an appreciation for facts…and did I mention bull-headedness?”
Faye proved his point by saying, “Well it’s
not
proof.”
“No. It’s not. But short of a birth certificate, which we’re never going to get, or a letter from Lamarr Longchamp that says, ‘I’ve fathered a bastard child with my wife’s chambermaid,’ then we’ll have to make do with this. All the evidence says that Lamarr freed his out-of-wedlock son, educated him, gave him land, and left him a generous inheritance. Welcome to the family, Cousin.”
He raised his coffee mug, and everybody followed suit, though Dauphine was a little slow, because she’d been fumbling in her apron pocket. Faye sure hoped the mambo wasn’t planning to throw coffin nails at the brand-new kinfolk.
***
“So what’s going to happen to Matt and Charles and Leila?”
Bobby said it as if he wanted to know, but also as if he were thrashing around for a topic that would spark a conversation with the pretty detective beside him.
Jodi came through for him. “Matt’s case is straightforward. He confessed to murder last night in front of Faye and Joe and Dauphine. He came pretty damn close to confessing to Nina’s attack. He also confessed to giving Charles money so that his parents would be rescued quickly. I’ll have to say that I don’t know how the law will deal with him there. Or Charles and Leila.”
Louie had brought
beignets
again, so there was powdered sugar everywhere. Jodi licked some off her fingers and kept talking.
“Those two scumbuckets abused their responsibility and profited from it, but you can’t necessarily call it theft when somebody hands you a barrel of money because they want you to do something for them. It’s corruption, from an ethical standpoint, just as surely as it is when a government purchasing agent takes a bribe. But they weren’t working for the government. They weren’t working for anyone at all. They were volunteers. We’ve got people looking at the legal niceties, but there’s one thing that’s unquestionable.”
“What?” Bobby asked.
Louie and Dauphine asked it, too, but Jodi was looking at Bobby when she answered the question.
“Charles and Leila committed a completely heinous crime. I don’t care what the law says, when we finally figure out what that is. The details of what they did
will
get out to the media, starting with that ambitious little TV reporter that Nina startled so badly. Know why?”
“Why?” Faye said, already knowing the answer.
“Because I’ll make sure she finds out. I’ll make sure she reports every last creepy, slimy, icky detail. I’ll make sure Charles and Leila never look at a face in this town without being aware that the person behind that face knows what they did. Maybe they’ll go to jail, or maybe they’ll just have to leave town, but they’ll pay. Trust me. They’ll pay.”
The glance that passed between Jodi and Bobby said that they both found jail and exile from New Orleans to be roughly equivalent. Faye felt the same way about Joyeuse. No other place would ever be home.
She hoped Charles’ and Leila’s punishment began with exile and mounted steadily higher. It couldn’t be a fun thing to live in a Louisiana prison with people who knew that you sold life and death to Katrina victims. Faye hoped they both got prison terms, and that they both enjoyed them as much as they deserved.