The Meq

to where he was. We’d never seen a trace of him the whole time we were in New Orleans.

Ray reached down and pulled the green ribbon out of his mouth, and as he did Li opened his eyes and saw me. He was alive. I knelt down and he tried to grab my leg and missed. He made a raspy, coughing sound and then he spoke directly to me.

“She. go. ma. lee”

It was the first time he’d ever spoken to me and the last. His mouth went slack and his eyes dulled.

I leaned over to close his eyelids and Ray said, “Who’s Molly?” That triggered something in my memory, something I’d learned about the Fleur-du-Mal from Unai and Usoa.

“It’s not a who,” I said. “It’s a where. The Fleur-du-Mal is taking Star to Mali — the country.” I looked out of the window at the never-ending rain. The wind rattled the window in its casing. “How?” I said, almost to myself. “How did he know?” Ray was wrapping the green ribbon, first around one finger, then around another. His expression was black and lost, like mine. “We’ll never catch him now,” I whispered.

Captain Woodget knelt down beside me and ran a fingertip through Li’s blood, which was spreading on the floor. He looked at me. “This blood is fresh, Z,” he said, then he winked at me.

At first, I didn’t get his meaning. Of course it was fresh, I thought, Li had just died. Then it hit me.

“Captain,” I said. “Do you recall the trawler we passed in the channel?”

“Aye, lad, and going at a fair rate of speed, not minding the weather.”

“That’s the one,” I said. “Can you catch her?”

“If we can make it to Pontchartrain and she’s not yet all the way across, I know I can. I can play this breeze in open water. The trawler won’t be able to.” He gave me another wink.

I insisted we take Li with us. “I don’t want to remember him here. like this.” Ray and the captain nodded in agreement.

The three of us carried Li’s body to the Little Clover. The only place we could secure him was on a bench in the stern, in an upright position, tied to the railing. Whatever obsessions had driven him to this end were at rest now. He resembled Buddha at the center of the storm, sleeping and dreaming.

We set out for Lake Pontchartrain. It was late in the day and we were losing what little light we had. Without paying heed to channels, currents, or traffic, the captain steered us on a course that brought us critically close to one bank, then another. The rain was dense and constant. The trawler was nowhere in sight.

Then, as we spilled into Lake Pontchartrain, the captain caught the wind and made a good line almost directly for New Orleans. He guessed we were doing twenty to twenty-five knots. The Little Clover was well made, but I could feel and hear the strain on her hull.

The rain and fading light obscured the horizon by the minute. I couldn’t tell if we were gaining on the trawler. I had Ray tie a rope to me and I climbed up the mizzenmast, hoping to use my “ability” to listen for the trawler. Ray helped the captain hold the wheel and fight to keep the line. The rain felt like tiny knives and the wind whipped my canvas slicker like a handkerchief. I heard a foghorn and turned, but it was too far in the distance, too far west.

Then slowly, like a pulse or heartbeat, I heard the steady chug-chug of a steam engine, plowing through the wind and water. We were close, closer than I thought. I yelled to the captain, “Port, ten degrees!”

He managed the slight change in direction and we gained even more speed. Suddenly I could see the trawler. It was a faint black dot, bobbing on the horizon. Smoke poured out of the smokestack. It was no more than a mile ahead of us.

We closed the gap. A thousand yards. five hundred. one hundred. Then, just as I thought I saw a figure on board the trawler, I heard a ripping sound. Our foresail was shredding and the ship jolted from side to side. I heard a crack, followed by another crack, louder and longer. The Little Clover was coming apart.

Ray pulled the captain out of the way just before the mainsail fell on them. I tried to slide down to the deck and was thrown overboard as the ship actually snapped in the middle. The waves tore at the opening, and piece by piece, the Little Clover disintegrated.

The rope tied around me was still attached to a section of the mizzenmast and I used it as a raft while I looked for Ray and Captain Woodget. I could see the trawler steaming away and a single figure on deck, staring back. I could even hear him. He had a white smile and a familiar, bitter laugh.

I found Ray holding on to Captain Woodget, who was unconscious. He was struggling to reach something with his free hand and barely staying afloat. I helped him with the captain and he finally snatched what he was after — his bowler.

The last thing I saw of the Little Clover was a section of the stern, a bench with Li still strapped to it. Within minutes, he disappeared into Lake Pontchartrain and it seemed like an appropriate grave. He had paid his mysterious debt to Solomon in full. The rest, the running tab he kept inside himself, was anybody’s guess.

Three days later, we were on the balcony of the St. Louis Hotel, waiting for the weather to finally break. Captain Woodget was in hospital recovering from a collapsed lung and exposure. We swam four miles to shore that night, through rain and debris, and the experience took its toll on the captain.

I talked to Owen Bramley several times and told him what I could, but no matter how I worded it, the story had the same conclusion. I asked him to come to New Orleans and check on Captain Woodget and make sure he had the money to rebuild the Little Clover again.

I informed him that Ray and I had booked passage to Africa. Everything else was unknown.

The hurricane of 1906 lasted five days and killed three hundred and fifty people in Louisiana and Mississippi. The assistant to the mayor of New Orleans said in a public statement that his city owed a great debt to the unfortunate of the city of Galveston, which had lost so many lives to the hurricane of 1900. “If all those folks hadn’t died,” he said, “we wouldn’t have learned what we learned and then we would have had more people die last week.”

I have always wondered if he knew what he was saying.

12. GEZUR (LIE)

Have you played the game? The game where all sit in a circle and you whisper something to the one sitting next to you, who whispers it to the next, and so on, until it has made the round of the circle and comes back to you — a new whisper, a new “truth,” a tale that, somehow in the transfer, evolves and mutates into something that bears no resemblance to the original. How can this be? Is it willful, accidental, inevitable? Can truth be so easily turned, folded, pierced, twisted, and tossed like a toy from one to another?

If played honestly, the game is always good for a laugh. Truth has many masks. A lie, only one.

R ay and I left New Orleans with no fanfare or ritual. We were both in it now, both deep in the obsession. Ray no longer thought of New Orleans as “his town,” or anyplace else. For us, it was just another stop, another place on the map. We were disappointed, but not discouraged. We were still in it, still on the Fleur-du-Mal like dogs. We had only momentarily lost his scent. The problem was with the word “momentarily.” A moment for us could equal weeks, months, even years in the lives of Carolina, Nicholas, and Star. Ray knew this as well as I and even though, if I was honest, I had to admit we were following a hunch at best, we both felt the urgency of finding Star, if she was ever going to know her parents or have a chance at a normal life.

My hunch was really a deduction with a leap of faith at the end. Li told me Star had gone to Mali and the Fleur-du-Mal himself had told me he wanted “the grandchild.” In his way, he had hinted at her future education and training, as sick as it was. Usoa had also mentioned Mali and the Fleur-du-Mal’s centuries-old fascination with it, for reasons never known to the Meq. I knew Star could not have a child for several years. I knew the Fleur-du-Mal was unpredictable, but something told me he would not have the patience to wait for that event. He would instead keep her somewhere remote with someone he trusted, while he followed his other pursuits and interests. This was my hunch. The leap of faith was that we would find the somewhere and someone in Mali, somehow.

Our ship sailed just before sunset on the evening of October 7. It wasn’t much of a sunset. The light was