back to their stations. Some fences were already falling down and the blooms of the dogwoods and redbuds were being blown through the air like snowflakes in a blizzard.
A block from Mrs. Bennings’s House, Carolina stopped in her tracks from a dead run. She was gasping for air and so was I. Ray wasn’t even out of breath. She put her hands over her ears and her eyes seemed to be staring into some unknown hell. “Georgia!” she screamed and tears poured down her cheeks.
I took her hand away and dragged her toward the house. She was no longer herself. She had fallen somewhere dark and deep inside. I knew the place. Solomon had caught me falling there.
Suddenly the rain and hail and wind stopped. There was a strange, eerie calm. I glanced at the sky and it was green and black.
“It’s comin’!” Ray said.
We made our way around back and I saw the “girls” running from the kitchen to the cellar door. I told Ray to take Carolina down into the cellar with the others. I stopped one of them and asked her where Mrs. Bennings and Georgia were. She said they were still in Mrs. Bennings’s room, the door was locked, and they wouldn’t come out or answer. She ran on toward the cellar and I looked at Ray.
“Someone is in there or he’s been there, Ray. He was hired to kill and he’s one of us. He’s got green eyes, like you.”
“There’s only one like that,” Ray said. “He’s somehow related to me on my old lady’s side.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“The Fleur-du-Mal.”
I stared back at Ray. I reached inside my shirt and pulled out the Stones; holding them, showing them to him. “What about these?”
“They won’t make any difference,” he said, “not on the Meq, not on him.”
I turned to go inside and glanced back at Carolina. “Watch out for her,” I said.
He nodded once. “You’d better hurry. You ain’t got much time.”
I walked through the kitchen and into the large room that was the parlor. A few gas lamps were lit, but the room was empty and silent. The piano stool was on its side, as if someone had stood up suddenly and kicked it over. I reached the stairs and started climbing the steps one at a time, trying to stay close to the wall. Outside, I could hear a faint but distinct sound, like a distant train.
I got to the top of the stairs and saw Mrs. Bennings’s door wide open. The girl had said it was locked. I started to call out, then stopped myself. I took a step toward the door, then another. It was then that I heard the laugh. Inside the room, someone was laughing; a low, mean laugh, like Ray’s, only. different. older.
I ran to the open door. I looked inside and saw Mrs. Bennings slumped on a couch, her dress split open from the back, blood covering her chest and her throat slit from ear to ear. Next to her, Georgia sat with her head held back by the hair, screaming in silence, a knife blade at her throat. She saw me and her eyes grew even wider. Behind her, holding her, laughing, was the Fleur-du-Mal.
He looked up at me and smiled. His teeth were a brilliant white. He had deep green eyes, a short ponytail tied with a green ribbon, and two red ruby earrings. He was slightly taller than I was but that was the only other difference.
“I know who you are,” he said.
I stood there in silence. I felt a sense of evil and danger I had never known.
“The weather is bad, no?” he said, laughing that laugh.
“Let that one go,” I said.
“No, no, no,
“She’s not the one you want.”
“No? Then who is she?”
Just then, the front door downstairs crashed open and a ferocious wind blew in along with Corsair Bogy. He saw me and started for the stairs, yelling, “You little son of a bitch!”
A tremendous roar followed and the house began to come apart. I looked at Georgia. Her eyes were frozen with terror. The Fleur-du-Mal laughed again, but I couldn’t hear him and he cut Georgia’s throat in one motion from ear to ear.
After that, I remember nothing. Nothing but the dream; the dream of endless falling through a black hole, of floating heads, trains, and spiders dangling from the masts of ships being torn to shreds in the black winds. And there were stars in the winds; stars made of red rubies, diamonds, and lapis lazuli. I fell through a thousand lifetimes, spinning, weightless, like ash from the fire in a cave.
They found me with my arm and shoulder under the corner of the piano. My arm and collarbone were broken and I had dozens of cuts and bruises. I knew all that would heal. They found Corsair Bogy under the rest of the piano.
There was no more Mrs. Bennings’s House. The tornado had raged through south St. Louis and cut a swath a half mile wide, wiping out whole neighborhoods and leaving nothing.
The Fleur-du-Mal had vanished with the tornado.
Ray found Mama’s baseball glove not far from where he discovered the bodies of Georgia and Mrs. Bennings. When I was able to look, he showed me something on their backs. It was a signature of the Fleur-du-Mal. He had carved a rose on their backs with the point of his knife before he slit their throats. Ray said his own mother had been killed that way in New Orleans.
Carolina was in shock and we took her and the other girls to a brewery warehouse where a temporary shelter had been set up.
Ray and I returned to the wreckage and rubble of Mrs. Bennings’s House. We sat there through the night, the following morning, and the rest of the day. It was May 3, 1896, the day before my birthday. During that time, we talked about where we’d been and what we’d done in the last dozen or so years. He told me he had left the way he had because he’d received information through his network of contacts that his sister was in the Far East, working with a famous courtesan. He combed most of the western Pacific looking for her, but never found a trace. He asked me about Carolina and I told him as much as I could, but I found I was barely able to talk about her. I was becoming consumed with a thought and feeling I had never experienced. It had many images and shapes, but only one name — revenge.
I asked about the Fleur-du-Mal and he told me what he knew. The Fleur-du-Mal was an old one, how old he didn’t know. He had come to America with the Portuguese and had been the only survivor when the ship went down in a storm off the coast of Florida. He had many nicknames, one of which was “Sugar,” because he had a habit of eating whole pieces of sugar and the Giza thought it odd that his teeth stayed a brilliant white. His real name was Xanti Otso, but the Meq only referred to him as the Fleur-du-Mal, the flower of evil. He was an assassin, a good one, and had been for centuries.
We watched the sun come up and it lit a broken, battered world. We checked on Carolina and she said she was fine and wanted to leave. She wanted to see the house even though we told her nothing was there. Arguing was pointless and so we walked through littered streets back to the house.
Standing in the sunlight, staring at what had been her life and her sister’s life, she scanned the debris until she saw it. To no one in particular, she said, “We’ll save the piano.”
At that moment, a formal carriage pulled by two stately draft horses turned the corner and stopped in front of us. The driver, who was Chinese and wearing a long, braided pigtail, jumped down from his bench and opened the door facing us. A man stepped out; an old man, tall, with white hair and a white beard. He was dressed in a finely tailored black suit and held a top hat in his hand.
“Zis is not good business,” he said, taking in the whole neighborhood with a slow turn. He looked at me. I looked at him.
“Come here, Z,” he said, “there is someone in the carriage I would like you to meet. I think you call him Sailor.”
PART II
