I sipped my coffee, frowning. That actually hadn’t been the message I’d taken from Aubrey’s possession, but Karen seemed sure of herself, and she’d been doing this longer than I had. We sat quietly eating our heart attack of a breakfast. My fingers played idly in the fallen powdered sugar, drawing a snake in the shape of a question mark and dotting it with a drop of coffee.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said after two or three minutes. “I didn’t mean to snap.”
“Didn’t notice that you had,” I lied.
“You’re kind,” she said. It wasn’t the first time someone had called me that, and I still didn’t know what they were talking about. “I don’t trust riders. Not any of them. I know Eric used to play with fire. I was more conservative.”
“He will heal, you know,” Karen said. It took me a second to figure out she meant Aubrey. “It will take time, and he won’t be the same. It’s even possible that he’ll be better than he was before. Right now, he’s… damaged. Badly. But he’s not out of the game.”
“Like the city,” I said.
“I talked with Ex yesterday after we left the safe house,” she said.
“Did he tell you that it was all his fault that Aubrey and I got hurt?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “Among other things.”
“Ex is a good guy,” I said. “But he can be kind of a dick sometimes.”
“He’s a good man,” Karen said. “Confused, maybe. But at heart, I think he’s a very good person.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “It’s just that we work together, you know? He’s been around since the beginning. He looks at me, and I think he sees the girl I was when he met me. That wasn’t a good night.”
Karen washed down the last bite of beignet with the last swallow of coffee. She’d timed it better than I had. I still had half a lump of sugared dough and nothing to drink with it.
“Back to work?” I asked.
“Let’s,” she said. We walked back across the square, Karen taking my arm like we were old friends. Or possibly lesbian lovers, but I was going for the old friends vibe. Even the few minutes we’d been gone had changed the face of the square. More musicians were gathered. A face-painting table had set up, a thick-faced woman with stars and rainbows running down her cheeks acting as her own advertisement. Tourists wandered through the square, gawking and dancing a little and having their fortunes told. I’d spent my whole life hearing about New Orleans and Mardi Gras. Now that I was here, walking through it all, it seemed both more real and oddly smaller than I’d imagined. I wondered if it had always been this way, or if the glory days had passed. Or if maybe they were still coming.
“Hey, pretty lady!” a man called out from one of the fortune teller’s tables. “Come! Come, sit! I answer all your questions. Tell your future.”
Back at the hotel, Aubrey, Ex, and Chogyi Jake were waiting for the valet to bring out the cargo van. I waved, walking forward with Karen. Aubrey looked a little better. There was more pink in his skin and less in his sclera. Chogyi Jake bowed toward me, smiling. Only Ex seemed awkward and diffident. I thought it was about me until Karen detached from my arm, went to him, and kissed him hello. It involved some unsubtle groping and went on long enough that I got my jaw closed again. I saw one of the bellhops watching us with bare envy on his face.
My mind felt like its clutch had slipped out of fourth gear, and I replayed everything Karen had said about talking with Ex. I couldn’t quite believe what was suddenly perfectly obvious. A stray breeze would have knocked me over.
“Well now,” Karen said, pulling back an inch from Ex’s lips. “Don’t tell me you’re ashamed of me?”
“Of course not,” Ex said, putting his arm around her waist. Karen smiled and leaned into him. Ex looked at me as if challenging me to say something disapproving. Aubrey blinked. Chogyi Jake kept his constant smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
So, okay. Ex and Karen had done more than talk. All right. It wasn’t quite as weird as my mother having a fling, but it was right up there. Not that Ex wasn’t a grown man. And Karen was wildly attractive. I just hadn’t thought…
It wasn’t my business, I thought, angrily. Ex wasn’t my lover, and he could do whatever he wanted with whoever he wanted to. There was absolutely no reason that I should feel betrayed. Or jealous. Or replaced.
The tableau held for two seconds, then three. I turned, waved down a parking valet, and gave her the ticket for the rental minivan. My momentary absence was all it took for the conversation to start again.
“We’re going to start with the one farthest out,” Karen said, “then work our way back in toward downtown.”
“Check in before and after,” Ex said sternly. “If something does happen, we need to know where to find you.”
Karen smiled. A taxi pulled up and let out an older man in a Tulane University sweater.
“If something happens that Jayne and I can’t handle,” Karen said, “you three need to run like hell.”
Ex’s expression went stony, and then to my continuing surprise, he laughed. I looked at Aubrey, who shifted his shoulders in a near-subliminal shrug. Chogyi Jake didn’t meet my eyes. The cargo van-white, anonymous, and belching smoke- arrived. The three men piled in, and we watched them drive away.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Karen asked.
“Mind what?” I said, a little too sharply.
“That I fell into bed with your priest.”
“No,” I said, forcing myself to mean it. “No, of course not.”
Karen sighed. It sounded like relief.
“Good. I told him you wouldn’t care,” she said, and the minivan hove into sight.
For months it had been me and Aubrey and Chogyi Jake and Ex; just the four of us. Karen, as cool as she was, belonged outside the circle. Only now maybe she didn’t. If Ex had a lover, and a lover who was really better equipped to fight riders than any of us, it was going to change things. I just didn’t know how. It wasn’t Ex I was jealous of, it was all of us. The little family that I’d made was changing, and nobody had asked me if I was okay with that. Maybe it was just because I had so little that protecting what was left seemed so important.
I let Karen drive, and half an hour later, we were in a decent-looking middle-class neighborhood, parked in the mouth of an alley, and peering down the street with binoculars. I had pretty much talked myself back to sane. As we drove through, I’d thought the houses looked pretty normal, apart from a bathtub ring four feet above the ground and the ubiquitous, eerie X mark that I’d seen out in Lakeview on the doors. Now that we had stopped, I began to notice other details. The yards with thick weeds and vines. Broken windows. The smell of mold and earth, like we were in the ruins of a place half reclaimed by nature.
But there were also kids navigating their bikes around the potholes, jumping off the crumbling curbs. Dogs barked behind fences. Someone was practicing piano, the slow, awkward march of scales fighting against a distant radio on a hip-hop station. More houses showed signs of life than of death. The house we were spying on-a red and brown two-story with bars on the windows-had a planter by the front door that was already thick with violets. And, as with all the others, the X. I remembered vaguely having seen pictures of it on the news right after the hurricane, but I’d never really known what it was. So I asked.
“It’s the searcher’s mark,” Karen said. “After the hurricane, they would come through and check houses. When they were done, they’d put that on the front. It tells you who looked there, what date, and how many bodies they found. It’s one of the new symbols. You can find it on T-shirts.”
“Grim,” I said.
“There are always two sides. At least two,” Karen said. “The searcher’s X is the symbol of the death. The fleur-de-lis is the symbol of the rebirth.”
“It is?”
“Oh yes,” Karen said.
“It’s everywhere now. It never was before.”
“I thought you weren’t around before,” I said.
“I wasn’t. But I have been since. Okay. We have something.”
I put the binoculars back to my eyes. A black man in his middle thirties was walking up to the door. He had a white plastic grocery bag in one hand, and it tugged at his wrist as he unlocked the door. I watched as he went inside. None of the Glapions came out.
“They could still be in there,” I said.
“Or they might not,” Karen said. “Let’s mark this one off and hit the others. If we don’t have any luck, we can make another pass tomorrow.”
We didn’t have any luck at the next five houses either. Two, in the Ninth Ward, were ruins; the third showed signs of occupancy, but no one went in or out in the hour and a half we watched; the fourth was overrun by at least half a dozen children, all of them white; and the fifth-a duplex in an upscale neighborhood by the river- had mail waiting in the boxes for Adele Grant and Foster Middleton. Amelie, Sabine, and Daria Glapion were nowhere to be found.
“We can try again tomorrow,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.
“This was a good day’s work. We’ve narrowed the field,” Karen said. “We can scratch off the two in the lower Ninth. And I think the duplex isn’t likely. It’s a white neighborhood. They’d stand out. The same with the kids.”
“So the one with the guy, or the empty one,” I said.
“I like the empty one. But if the boys are done with the van, we could also split the work. One car watches one house.”
I nodded. It made sense. Still, I felt restless. Karen slalomed through traffic, the rental blowing conditioned air against me in a losing battle against the day’s heat, and my hand tapping my knee in a slow double beat.
I was used to the idea of riders being a secret, part of a hidden world that I’d stumbled into. Driving through New Orleans, I started to wonder if that was true. I saw a Voodoo BBQ and Grill. A local football team, the VooDoo. A Voodoo dry cleaner’s. Did they know?, I wondered. Was it all supposed to be a joke and kitsch? Local color? Or did the people who named their businesses know that there were predators on the streets?
Generations had lived and died here, but the riders, the
A temple…
