The Meq

crashing to the ground. The beautiful soprano voice was shrill and loud as a siren. The low sighs and moans of the audience became a snorting, slobbering herd of beasts. I could hear the skin of the human snakes slapping as they increased their tempo and passion. I could hear the log itself groan against the stone posts. I could hear Star breathing. I turned and glanced at Ray. He was a frozen silhouette in the darkness, watching me.

I took another step toward the stage. Then, from somewhere in the middle of the cacophony of music and noise, I heard my name. “Zezen,” a voice said in a low whisper. I stopped where I was and waited, focusing. “Zezen,” it said again and this time I knew the source. I looked up at the stage behind Star to a narrow opening, a slit in the oyster shell, and peering back at me through the shafts of red light were two familiar green eyes.

“Bonsoir, mon petit,” the voice said, slow and steady. “I thought you might acquire this ability sooner or later.”

I looked left and right.

“No, no, mon petit. Do not try and deny it. You can hear me easily, can you not?”

I stared back. “Yes,” I whispered. “And I suppose you can hear me just as easily. Correct?”

“Of course, of course. An ability that is a necessity if one is to survive against all odds.” He paused. “You look upset. Not because you are already missing your sycophantic little Meq watchdogs, I pray.”

I waited and tried to gather myself. “Why do you do this?” I asked. “This is sick and unnecessary.”

His eyes darted briefly to Star in front of him. “It is never too soon to start an education. You should know this, mon petit.”

I pulled the Stone out of my pocket. I was gripping it so hard, I could feel it almost piercing the skin on my palm.

“I would reconsider using your precious Stone, Zezen,” he said. “Look to the left of the child, by her throat.”

I looked and there, not two inches from Star’s jugular vein, was the point of a stiletto sticking through another slit in the oyster shell. I knew he would use it without a moment’s hesitation. “Please, I beg of you,” I said. “End this. End this now.”

“Oh, but now would be too soon. Just listen to that voice, Zezen.” The soprano was in full throat, building to a crescendo. “She could be Pamina in The Magic Flute, no?”

I looked at Star’s face. She had the same blue-gray eyes as Carolina, even down to the same flecks of gold in them. The same mouth and hair and freckles, but her expression was lifeless, traumatized, and lost.

“When will you let her go back to her mama?” I asked. “And deal with me. You know I won’t relent. I will not quit. I will find you.”

“You shall only find me when I wish you to, Zezen, and you shall never find me when I do not. In revenge, I am afraid you are a novice and compared to some Arabs I have known, you are truly a child.”

“You must release the girl,” I said. “How could she possibly interest you? She needs her mama and her mama needs her.”

He laughed his low, bitter laugh. “I do not think so. I think her mama will be busy soon with another little Giza abomination.”

My heart froze. He knew Carolina was pregnant. He knew all about it.

“Surely, you won’t, I mean, you don’t plan to—”

“No, no, mon petit, I could not care less.”

I couldn’t figure it out. What was the point? “Then, why?” I asked. “Why do you want Star?”

He laughed again. It cut through the drums, the soprano, and the sudden cry of release as the black man reached orgasm.

“The grandchild, you idiot,” the Fleur-du-Mal whispered. “I want the grandchild.”

At that moment, the red lights dimmed and a curtain began to descend from the ceiling. In a few more moments, the entire stage would be covered.

“Wait,” I pleaded.

“No, mon petit. I do not wait. That is where we differ greatly. I suggest you go off and chase something else. Perhaps Sailor will send you after the sixth Stone, or has he neglected to mention that to you?”

“What?”

“Oh, yes, it is true.”

I thought he was trying to distract me and somehow use my confusion to escape.

“There is a sixth Stone?”

“Oui. Ask Sailor where he got the star sapphire in his ring. Ask the annoying monkey, Usoa, where she got her blue diamond. Chase the truth there, Zezen, but do not chase me. That is pointless and will prove fruitless. Au revoir, mon petit.”

The curtain dropped the last few feet and covered the stage all around, followed almost immediately by seven or eight huge men who surrounded it. Lights in the back came on, and before I realized it, Ray had me by the arm and was leading me to the exit.

“It’s best we get on out of here, Z,” he said and glanced in my eyes.

We squeezed through the crowd and darted out of the door, not stopping until we were three blocks away and Ray pulled me in under the limbs of a magnolia tree.

“It was her, wasn’t it?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yes,” I said. I could hear my own voice sounding like a stranger’s. “It was her.”

By May, Carolina had indeed given birth to a boy, Solomon Jack Flowers, born the evening of April 26 and named after our Solomon and an outfielder for the Chicago Cubs, Jack Murphy, who threw out three Pirate runners at the plate that day and is the only major leaguer to have done so.

Ray and I had not mentioned seeing Star to anyone, especially Carolina and Nicholas. At that point, it would have done no good and neither of us could have found the words.

We heard nothing from Sailor or Geaxi and I needed to ask him a few simple questions, to say the least. Ray and I had discussed what the Fleur-du-Mal had told me and both of us were in the dark. I knew the Fleur-du-Mal was mad, but I wanted to know if there was madness in what he’d said. Nothing made sense.

Adding to it, coincidentally or not, on my birthday I received a gift from the Fleur-du-Mal. There was no card attached, but there was no doubt as to who had sent it. A phonograph player and a single playing disc were delivered to our rooms with the explanation that it had been left for me at the desk by a beautiful woman no one knew. I didn’t make the connection with the Fleur-du-Mal until we played the disc. It was a woman, accompanied by a piano, singing an aria, “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” from a Mozart opera. She was a soprano, the same one I’d heard singing over the drums at Emma Johnson’s. Every month after that, on the same day, we received another phonograph and another disc with the same voice singing a different aria. It was his way of letting me know he could find me anytime he wished, while I could only sit, wait, and guess. Eventually, I had to move my bed to make room for them. I told the management our family were big collectors.

We expanded our search west as far as St. Charles and east along the Gulf coast to Mobile. On July 21, 1905, the Board of Health announced that yellow fever had broken out in the city and there was a general panic and exodus from New Orleans. The disease didn’t affect us, of course, but we thought the Fleur-du-Mal would try to protect Star, now that we knew his long-range motivations. By September, we had combed every port and bayou we could find and come up empty. In New Orleans, there had been 3,402 cases of yellow fever and 452 deaths, but it was over. They had oiled and screened thousands of cisterns and salted miles of gutters to get rid of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried the disease. It was a transition point in the medical history of the United States and the last time a killer disease would sweep through a city.

In October, I kept the promise I’d made to myself to visit Captain Woodget. I crossed Lake Pontchartrain by steamboat and followed the meager directions given to me by Usoa. Outside Mandeville, after several inquiries, I was told it would be easier to find his property on water than land, taking Cottonmouth Slew to where it met the Bogue Chirito just below Covington. “You cain’t miss it, boy. It’s the damnedest thing you ever seen,” they said. I hired an old shrimper to take me there, and by noon as we rounded a bend in the channel, I knew what they meant.

There, anchored and resting between scaffolding erected on a long private dock, was an exact, scaled-down