The Beatitudes

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22729850934330637392012-02-01T05:25:22.749-08:00The BeatitudesOut of New Orleans before the catastrophe that was made by a hurricane and, as Dante wrote, “of false gods who lied,” comes The Beatitudes, part one in the New Orleans Trilogy. The Beatitudes portrays New Orleans as Dante’s purgatory, a place were the sins of men are exposed for all to see, where redemption is close at hand but most often lost.scrimphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16431268067667173137noreply@blogger.comBlogger21100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2272985093433063739.post-10955407361983535802009-07-11T09:34:00.001-07:002009-07-11T09:51:13.182-07:00THE WHITE ARMYTHE WHITE ARMY BOOK I THE NEW ORLEANS TRILOGY A PINCH & SCRIMP ODYSSEY Lyn LeJeune Quotes from Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio from the verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum FOR THE PEOPLE OF NEW ORLEANS Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man Evil is good perverted. Paracelsus I was pure and prepared to climb unto the stars. Dante Purgatorio Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount gave the world its first knowledge of The Beatitudes. Dante’s Purgatorio juxtaposed the concept of The Beatitudes with that of the deadly sins. The Beatitudes still walk among us in this modern age; they look like you and me; they act in the interests of others; they are blessed; they provide solace; they are the saviors of our souls. Look around you and in these chapters. Perhaps there is within you the seeds of at least one Beatitude. And then, there is sin. THE PURE OF HEART ………… THE PERSECUTED ………… THE MERCIFUL ………… THE SORROWFUL ………… THE PEACEMAKERS ………… THE MEEK ………… THE POOR IN SPIRIT EPILOGUE………… .THEY THAT HUNGER AFTER JUSTICE I THE PURE OF HEART To course across more kindly waters now My talent’s little vessel lifts her sails, leaving behind herself a sea so cruel; Dante, Purgatorio My best friend Pinch was murdered while I slept. The police reported that she was caught off guard, snuck up on, as Pinch would have said. I don’t believe that for one blasted minute. I know she looked her killer in the eye, sized him up, laughed, then spit in his face. It all happened before my very eyes; I had dreamed about her death over the past year. The first dream came the morning after the murder of the first foster child. Marisa was found fully clothed, wrapped in a pink swaddling blanket, as though dreaming of many tomorrows and games and parties and toys; and then eight more dreams, eight more foster children murdered, all left on the trolleys of New Orleans; then again the same dream after the presumed murderer had been arrested; and finally the last one, after I had lost my job, accused of negligence in the care of two of the slain children under my charge. And when Pinch was butchered, my dream coming horrifyingly true, my life spinning out of control, I had, for the second time in my life, lost everything, lost control, was unwittingly blown away by the winds of a dispassionate fate. Or so I thought at the time. Pinch, born Earline Washington, had been my friend and colleague in the social work department located in Greater New Orleans for almost five years. In a bureaucracy that seemed always under siege, its employees ceaselessly dispirited, Earline was one of the few welcoming faces I encountered when I started my first day as a social worker. I had the feeling that I had walked into a hive of Sisyphean slaves; but this woman’s splendid, dark face, embellished with green eyes and an earnest smile, captivated me immediately. My innate and all-consuming reticence vanished. It seemed a natural coming together, our early fraternity, as though we were soul mates. She called me Hannah love, and then our relationship grew to perfect friendship. We read each others’ thoughts, knew when the melancholy clouds of sorrow from our pasts had suddenly descended upon us, even as the bright nimbus of southern nights beckoned. All of my life I had experienced Sundowner’s Syndrome, but with Pinch the carmine shadows of evening became an event not without hope. We shared our failures as potential social saviors, but never allowed each other to give up. She had grown up in a New Orleans housing project shamefully named Desire. Desire had been constructed in an isolated area northwest of greater New Orleans, bordered by industrial canals and railroad tracks. Pinch often recounted her nights as a young child lying on the floor under a matted blanket listening to gunshots in the night. Desire had been built in the late 40s over the Hideaway Club where Fats Domino had played his first gigs. Pinch swore she could hear Fats sing “My Blue Heaven” just for her. As Pinch’s childhood tumbled forward, she learned survival skills. By the age of twelve, she had tried just about every street drug going and stole to keep from going hungry, acquiring the nickname Pinch. She would have been doomed to a child’s death but for the help of an aged aunt. Pinch pulled herself up, finished high school, and made it through college by working sometimes two shifts as a housekeeper in seedy hotels that bordered the Ninth Ward. A city auditor once asked her why she hadn’t worked in the Lafayette Square District or the famous 625 St. Charles suites. “You could have paid for a Ph.D. with the tips alone.” And she replied: “Well, I guess ‘dis sista just feeling mo’ secure wid da brothers. Ozanam Inn be my place, homeless peoples and all.” Then she rubbed his arm. The poor guy broke out in a sweat, brushed his thinning hair back with an aged-spotted trembling hand, and looked at me for intervention. Later I asked Pinch why she’d stuck it to the auditor; she shrugged her shoulders and replied: “I guess just every once and a while I have to remind myself where I come from. Pride has many forms, love.” Pinch had overcome. She was the bravest person I ever knew. My name is Hannah DuBois. I grew up on the banks of the bayous that run between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. This area was once God’s breeding ground, for it held the muck and stuff from which life evolved. But by the end of the Reagan Administration, fouled by oil, gas, and the rapacious march of progress, it came to be called Cancer Alley. My grandparents did not speak English, and my mother stopped talking altogether the night my father went to town for a beer and never came back. Like Pinch, I grew up poor; I was sixteen before I ate pizza, and saved almost every dime I made. I moved to New Orleans soon after my mother died, leaving the only home I had ever known; I exchanged the precious land for the urban jungle. My grandparents had left me a little money and a small monthly income from the Standard Gas Company, so I kept my promise to my long-gone father and enrolled in college. All of my money went to school and rent, and it seemed my hunger was unending. You can eat well in New Orleans if you find the right places, places where food was cheap, good and abundant. But I also loved junk food. I guess any food. My pockets were stuffed with crackers and sugar, mustard, and ketchup packets from fast food joints. “Want not” was my motto. So Pinch nicknamed me Scrimp. We made quite a pair. In May of 2005, the New Orleans Social Services Department finally got divine guidance and mandated that all social workers had to have a partner. The division called it “the buddy system.” The new directive came as a result of what the Times-Picayune dubbed The Foster Child Murders. Nine children had been murdered in the last year; “suffocated tenderly,” said the Medical Examiner, “their baby bodies placed in the back seat of the city’s trolleys.” He continued in his clinically obtuse, yet lyrical, way, for which he was famous: “Fragile spirits fluttering into the moss latticed oaks, riding to God on the St. Charles line.” The children had already endured endless and unexplainable pain during their short time among brutal adults. Sexual abuse, torture, starvation, all criminal in their lack of connection with life. One of the trolley drivers, a black man who had worked the St. Charles Line for over forty years and had witnessed life on the mean streets, broke down in front of the cameras and wept. He said he saw a fine mist swirl around the child he had found, a little black girl of eight years old, the “dancing fog” vanishing into popping fireflies as he approached her. The same Medical Examiner, always around for public events, used the word “reposed,” saying that in all his years of working on the most vicious murders, this was the first time he was truly terrified. “When I cut them open,” he told a reporter, “I saw their little souls rise up, and then I heard a child giggle.” His name was Harlan Boudreaux and he retired after autopsying the ninth child. Pinch and I were made “buddies” the day after the ninth child was murdered. Our caseload became not only intense but also hardly manageable, and we were assigned to investigate child abuse cases in the most forgotten areas of the heavenly city of New Orleans. This was Pinch’s territory, so she approached our assignments with ease I could not summon. When we confronted an abuser, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to fling the creature into the fires of hell. I saw beyond their human form a lurking aura that stank of primordial sewage. So I stopped seeing both the abusers and the murderers as pathological. They were simply evil, doomed, without hope of redemption. Evil is evil no matter how many times you toss the coin. I had met five of the murdered foster children during some initial investigations; two were my cases and I had placed them in foster care. Tasha and Jamie were lucky, I thought; they had gone to caring foster parents. Tasha was the ninth child, and it was a week after her murder that a malefic power began dismantling my life. * The memory of the Atlanta Child Murders of the late seventies and early eighties remain fresh in the minds of those who administer the great urban cities of America. Over sixty children and young adults were brutally killed; all had been born and raised in one of the most blighted urban areas of Atlanta. It has been estimated, however, that there were many more than sixty deaths. Records and reports show that the investigations were shoddy, evidence ignored or prevaricated, and assumptions rather than real proof were brought to trial. Back then, DNA evidence techniques were new and still legally suspect. Wayne Williams was finally convicted of the murder of a few, but not all, of the victims. The police, FBI, and other authorities failed to gather sufficient evidence in a timely manner to make a substantial list of all of the cases that could have fit into a serial pattern. All eyes were on Atlanta during that time. I was only a child then, but I have seen the newspapers and magazines and tapes of television shows and events during the trial; they all attest to an America that, at least to the rest of the world, had become a profoundly broken society. The incompetence of the authorities in brushing away clues and the ignored agonized outcries from the all-black neighborhood that had withstood the crimes was further proof that our cities were becoming cesspools. And I know that over the years we have not become much better; I have seen it first hand, have heard the screams become so shrill that we are deafened, have smelled the odor of sin, have tasted the perniciousness of it all. For the mendacious among us, learning from the past is often an easy task. After the third foster child’s murder, New Orleans officials had sent out signals to the public that NOLA was not going to be another Atlanta. Unlike those murders, our murders had an abundance of starkly similar causes and signatures. All the children had been “gently” smothered, their bodies had not been physically violated, they were all found on the trolleys, and they were all foster children whose lives had been placed in the hands of the Greater New Orleans Social Services Division. Because the crimes were committed within the confines of New Orleans, The FBI had not been called in; all investigations were left up to the NOPD. How easy could this have been, really, when the mayor’s office and the newspapers had already made the case? All they had to do was find a perpetrator and place blame upon those who could have prevented the crimes in the first place. Well, the city was going to be cleaned up and made ready for the Jazz Festival, the Food Festival and just about every festival the tourist board could make up in order to bring money and thus power to New Orleans. This was how you grew the Heavenly City. “That alone should give anyone with half a brain pause,” Pinch had said, while she read me an article about the sixth murder, the child of one of the most prominent members of New Orleans society, Judge Ignatius Patton. So here the dissimilarity with the Atlanta murders surely was stark; not all of the children were from the poor sections of this Crescent City. Now the investigation and its speedy denouement would be ratcheted up. Then two more murders and the Mayor appeared on television with the governor and Judge Patton and if you tried riding the trolleys or wanted to wander the streets at night you were suspect. Cops on horses, undercover liaisons, and patrol cars everywhere. I could smell them all a mile away. I began to live in a world of shadows. “What’s up?” Pinch had asked one evening as we walked through the French Market looking for a good bottle of wine to go with the shrimp gumbo I had made for our supper. “I’ve been getting funny feelings. Like something is going to happen, like my whole body is shot full of caffeine and my head is buzzing. I jump every time I hear a loud noise, see movement around me and there’s noting there.” “You just need some good food in you, some soft music, and a couple of glasses of wine. It’s been a long day. Don’t you think I’m going off the deep end too thinking about our kids?” “We live in twisted times,” I sighed. * After the death of the ninth child, one of the children I had placed, public outcry reached a bilious crescendo. So the mayor and his cohorts began hearings into the murders and thus began not only a more intense and wired search for the murderer, but a hell of a lot of scapegoating. You don’t have to be cynical to guess that the social service workers, especially those who had placed the children, would be the first to be interrogated. But you’ve got to be really stupid not to wonder why they hadn’t done that long ago, at least when the first or second or at least the third child was murdered. I had talked to Helen and Elliot Myers the day after Jamie was found. Their grief and guilt would stay with them for a very long time, if not for the rest of their lives. Jamie had been the third murdered child, abducted from a little league baseball game; he was shortstop. Every time I had gone out on my follow-up visits, Jamie’s face registered a new sense of self-awareness that surprised me; he was happy and grateful for it, and the memory of his years of being his parents’ punching bag was something he had willfully locked away in his heart. When I had hugged him goodbye the last time, I felt a quickened flutter in my chest, the kind that comes with premonitions. There are still days that I wake with the sensation that he is still in my arms. Before I could make it out to Tasha’s foster parents’ home, I was notified by the head of my department that I was to appear at a public hearing and I was barred from contact with any of the foster parents I had worked with. The hearings weren’t supposed to begin until ten, so I started off at eight, carrying the tallest double-shot latte I could find in one hand and a cherry tart in the other. I walked to the courthouse traversing a course down Dauphine and then to Burgundy then down Conti. I was moving on autopilot and I kept turning around to see who was following me. No cop cars, no men in black, no suspicious trons pretending to glance at display windows when I turned around to look. Only vibrations and waves of strange chilled air on an early spring morning. Cumulus cobalt thunderclouds had already moved in from the west and I knew we were in for a lightening storm. I do not, to this day, remember how I arrived in front of the Romanesque building in which I knew my future would be ordained. But there I was; and then I walked in and waited on a bench pointed out by an NOPD officer I had once had a late supper with. That night was in another lifetime, happened to another me; all he did was drink and talk about how mean his wife was, how she had taken out a restraining order against him, and how she had finally vanished from New Orleans. He had gotten so drunk, he never noticed when I shoved off, leaving him with the bill and a sorry, depleted life. When I walked through the courthouse doors, my feet clicking on the hard glacial floors, he looked at me with eyes that said nothing, nodded and pointed to the bench with his nightstick. We must be grateful for small things. The first to be called for questioning was a young man by the name of Harley Bailey. He had placed murdered child eight, Oprah Jones, a child with multiple disabilities, with a single foster mother. I never saw or heard that Harley was anything but diligent, although he was sick at least once a week and had been put on probation. Pinch had told me once that she didn’t think he was up for the job: “He’s sort of, what should I call him . . .meek. One day he’s gonna be the one raped and murdered.” I still remember his demeanor as he exited the courtroom after about an hour; his face had become even more anemic than usual, his bare arms were fiery pink, his shoulders rounded and trembling into his body, his tie was gone and his white shirt loosened, exposing his bare chest upon which the gold cross he always wore glittered. His legs refused to go forward, so he clung to the cold marble walls of the hallway, sliding forward into his own special purgatory. I did not get up to help him. I watched, along with the small crowd that had gathered, as he slipped and then crawled to the swinging door of the men’s room, disappearing as though an ancient paladin had come to rescue him. A stocky man laughed, pulled out his camera from what looked like a flight bag, and rushed into the men’s room. Harley resigned the following morning, returned to his parents’ home in Philadelphia, and committed suicide by jumping off of a high rise. And then it was my turn. “Look,” said Pinch the night before. “Don’t give them an inch. You know what they’re doing. Elections are coming up, the mayor and the council all need to make you and the department look bad.” “They already have,” I whispered. “It’s our lot and you know it. Just keep saying to yourself: damn you, damn all of you. Keep it even, love. Remember: look them in the eye and think of them as nothing but soul-naked sons-of-a-bitches.” “Easy for you,” I said. “You’re not on the list for the inquisition. I kind of know how Galileo felt.” “Now look. Don’t go and get medieval in there, okay love. Nobody’s gonna get your references to whatever great and good personage you quote. And don’t go pontificating like you usually do about the system and all. They won’t listen and they don’t give a rat’s ass and you know it. Stay cool.” My name was called out and its syllables echoed into the hyperborean halls of blind justice. I walked into the courtroom that was usually reserved for major trials, sat at a long table and on a hard wooden chair, and twisted my hands in my lap. I was cold; I had worn only a green blouse with sleeves to my elbows, a brown skirt, old scuffed black patent-leather pumps, no hosiery, my hair in a French twist, sans makeup. I looked positively nun-like. I started to shake, crossed my legs and ankles, and waited. The jarring voices in the crowded room magnified and I realized that this was all just a show trial. Wood hit wood, a booming sound, and then silence descended. There were six of them: three men, three women, two African-American, two very white, one, and two, well, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, I couldn’t tell. The multi-cultural tribunal. I recognized three; Mark Spires, councilman, Agnes Burke, something to do with Loyola University, Nita Moreau, well known, pictures in the papers all the time, but I couldn’t remember why. “Ms DuBois,” said Spires. “According to the records given the committee you placed two of the children that were so brutally murdered. Jamie and Tasha.” “Yes.” “Now. Jamie. It seems you put him in the home of foster parents by the name of Myers who had three other foster children already.” “Yes. But you have to understand, if you are trying to make the point that four is too many, that’s simply not true.” “Didn’t the Myers have ten children at one time?” “Not all at the same time, no. As I remember, it was ten in the last five years.” “You don’t think that’s a burden, especially on the children?” “No. I don’t. Six of those children have left the system. All are successful adults. One is in medical school, one a teacher.” A loud clearing of a throat interrupted me. It came from an aged, sallow looking woman that sat at the far right of the committee table. She had white fuzzy hair, black arched eyebrows, and dull dry skin, lips that receded into her mouth. She reminded me of an old chicken that must be stewed for hours before being edible. I tried to smile. She cleared her throat louder the second time; it was a reprimand perhaps. “Yes Mame?” I said. “Oh, please, chil’. I suppose we could site many successful cases. But, Ms. DuBois, wouldn’t it have been better to place this young man in a home more, what shall I say, befitting his background.” “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I asked. I was becoming exasperated already. I looked at the guy sitting next to her, the chandeliers reflecting off of his glasses, his face an aloof piece of stone, and I thought: damn you, damn all of you. I took a deep breath and uncrossed my legs. “We do try to make sure that we place children in culturally significant homes, but we have so few foster parents that we have to juggle.” “Well, then let’s get on to Tasha,” said Spires. “Yes. I placed her in a home with a wonderful foster family. Culturally, it was right on.” “Right on, indeed,” chirped in another committee member. She was very young, with long straight brown hair, very glossy black skin. A gold charm bracelet clinked every time she moved her arm. I wanted to rise up and tear it from her wrist. And most annoying, she was one of those lip pursers. Eff you too, lady. “But, please, Miss DuBois, let us be truthful.” “That’s Ms. Ass.” I said. The room mumbled and rumbled like a wave moving toward shore before a winter storm. The chairman of the committee of six slapped his hand against the table, plucked at his extruding microphone with his middle finger making it pop, pop, pop and then he whistled shrilly between his teeth. The wave of sound skittered back crablike, taut, hesitant, disquieted, while embers from a far away fire rained down upon us all. Shards seemed to singe my hands. I turned around and saw Pinch shake her head at me. The room fell into an eager hush and when I looked around the room, I knew that I was the only one who saw the fires before all of them, saw shapes between humans, heard ghosts calling. Hannah, chin up girl. Your journey begins. Fear makes you strong. Remember the children. The voice was behind me, in front of me, around me. A lance of sunlight faded in chimera-like, falling onto the white marbled-floor; thousands of black-bordered octagons whirled and came to rest at my feet. I fought the urge to let go and just faint dead away. “You put this child with a family in the Ninth Ward?” she said with the utmost, asinine shit-eating grin daubed across her face. I took a deep breath and bit my lower lips, looked down at my folded hands. I said nothing. I unfolded my hands and placed them spread-eagle on the shiny mahogany table. When I looked at her eyes with all the contempt I could muster, she blinked and rubbed her left cheek. “There’s not a damn thing wrong with any of the foster parents in the Ninth Ward. Tasha’s foster parents were great. She thrived. She started reading. She won an essay contest at her school.” “Ms. DuBois,” came the voice of another interrogator. “I’m looking here through your records. Here is Jamie’s folder. Here is Tasha’s. I cannot seem to find where you recorded your home visits.” It was like an arrow penetrating my heart, my arms, my thighs. My body tensed. I looked around the room for Barb Boyd, my supervisor. I couldn’t find her. I gazed backward at Pinch. Her eyes were closed, as though she had moved inside herself, had removed her being from this god-awful experience. Not that I hadn’t known what was going to happen here. I am not naïve. Like the criminal, the judges before me were simply playing with justice; they clanged her scales, they lifted her blindfold; they had long ago left their own signatures and prints on her body, and had for some time spoke blatantly and without shame about their common modus operandi: Greed, power, envy, pride, lying, demeaning others. This hearing was all theatre, a production of state that even Machiavelli would have found brutish. That history would deem cruel. But what was closer to home was that I was being set up; I was going to be the patsy; they’d had my number for a long time. “There’s a mistake. I am very diligent about my records. You can ask my supervisor, the department administrators, state auditors. Someone has doctored the records. You need to look at the real ones.” The room was as silent as a church during a funeral. And I was the dead guy. I looked at all of the members of the committee. My hands were shaking again. I was so damned cold. “Oh, but, you see. We have,” said Michael Harrington, who had duly volunteered to attend the committee. I suddenly remembered where I had seen him before; he had recently declared his candidacy for Congress and already posters dotted the city. I suppose he needed my humiliation as part of his political resume. Someone yelled “lunch break” and then the cameras went off all around me. Click, click and more clicks and shouts at me and then I felt a hand grab my arm and pull me away and into a side room where my supervisor waited along with a district attorney. I was informed that I was not to be charged with any felonies, not even misdemeanors, but that I was now on unpaid suspension until further investigation or notification concerning my role in the Foster Child Murders. The lawyer, who I recognized because he had assisted me in some legal matters of child placement, handed me a piece of paper to sign. His hair was slicked back, not by hair tonic, but by the sweat of his own guilt. And he knew it. “I’m not signing anything,” I said without looking at the paper. “You don’t have to,” he replied. “But a low suit will never fly, so you might as well.” “And you,” I said to Barb Boyd between clinched teeth. “You helped set me up. Where are my records? Go to hell and don’t come back.” * I lay in my bed, listening to the thunder. Pinch had covered my head with a wet towel. I tried to cry. But I was too angry, too full of sheer mind-shattering rage. “You’ll make a pretty good picture for the papers,” said Pinch. “Very funny. You escaped the cameras.” “Well, for the first time in my life my color did well by me. Besides, none of the dead were my kids. And I placed more kids than you. The odds just don’t stack up, do they? Besides, it’s the election season, and no matter what, they just ain’t gonna come down on one of the sisters.” “Nice to be politically correct.” “I’m going out for a while,” said Pinch. “You need some alone time. Some sleep. I’ll meet you in the morning at the office, help you clean things out.” “When you pass by Mario’s could you ask them to deliver me a pizza with everything? I have to have some food; the world is spinning. I think my blood sugar is at about five. Thanks.” Pinch leaned over me and kissed my cheek, then brushed my tangled wet hair away from my face. “You have the prettiest red hair in the world, a mind that could challenge the best of them, and a pure heart. Did I ever tell you how much I love you?” “What would I do without you, huh Pinch? Sometimes I feel like I’m just melting away, that if I close my eyes I’ll not even know it’s happening. You’ll come back tomorrow and find my clothes here on the bed with no me inside.” “Like the invisible woman. I can dig that.” “Yeah. Like you always say, that would be cool.” “We’ll get through this together. I promise.” And she walked out of the door and I heard only the sibilance of her footsteps as she left me. Again the dream: Pinch smiling, her skin glistening, her smile solemn. The pliant light of dusk folds over her body. A deep purple cloak spreads white, colors like a kaleidoscope ripples at its heart, red, blue and pale white. A hand moves out of it’s chest and swiftly, before I can wake, before I can scream, she is run through with an instrument that flares gold, blood bubbles and a whiff of vapor coils across the scene. A voice that is me but not me calls out a truth that I have known for too long: that when I wake to the soft shadows of dawn, she will be no more. They say that cops routinely dream about their partner’s death. So why should it be different for social workers? This is my dream of Pinch’s murder. It is as clear as I see myself in my bathroom mirror, in the soap and grease-encrusted mirror at work, and in the mirror that is Pinch’s eyes. I had told her about it, about how sometimes what I saw in my mind came true, how other times I just couldn’t know because it happened in places far away. She said she understood. Her grandmother had practiced voodoo. “Perhaps you’re a Gran Met. A voodoo guide or something,” she had laughed. It wasn’t until a week later that I remembered to look up the term in a history of voodoo in New Orleans. Gran Met: intermediary between the living and the dead. A priestess. Mildly shaken, I had gone to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and watched as tourists with cameras hanging from their necks scratched three Xs on Marie Laveau’s crumbling tomb. Mold and soot attached themselves to the stucco encasement no matter how often it was cleaned. Admirers and sycophants had cluttered the area with tokens, most of them trinkets that symbolized appeals for a better life. And then I heard children laughing, a sonorous but faraway tinkling, like a bewitched wind chime. There are times when we scoff at what we perceive as the irrational, brushing away stentorian alarms; and we pay dearly for that foolish action. I had done that most of my life, hushing the voices that begged for validation, closing my eyes to the pulsating shapes that followed me. As I surveyed the gaggle of tourists on that now far away day, I saw no children. Gran Met with two souls, one the gros bon ange which gives her the will to live and survive and connects her to the living and should she wish, if good works are done, she may return, I guess be reincarnated, for a better life. Soul number two: our personality, the face we see in the mirror, our earthly essence: ti bon ange. I walked away shaking my head and thinking perhaps it was time I paid another visit to the department’s psychiatrist. I had watched my mother sit at our kitchen table talking to people who were not there, soothing their fears, understanding their pain. The year before she died, she stared at me as though I had become air; the night she died, I was but a ghost in her life. My mother died a madwoman and that was something I never wanted to tell Pinch. Better a voodoo princess than the madwoman of New Orleans. I woke on the first morning of my suspension just as the sun crested the rim of the world. City noises reverberated and called the people to work. But I would not answer the call today. I dressed quickly, washed, pulled on my boots and headed out for coffee and a big breakfast. I stumbled along Royal Street, sensing rather than seeing my trilling reflection in the show windows. Antiques, shadow, paintings, shadow, an undulating form sparkling. I stopped abruptly, turned, and looked at the glass. I hadn’t realized that I had dressed in complete black. A black turtle neck sweater, black jeans, black leather boats with steel toes. My face was devoid of makeup; my skin was pallid, as though a vampire had taken my substance during the night. I turned sideways; I had become almost stick-like except for my protruding breasts. A very tall form moved into the picture, an older man some two heads above me with a mane of white hair. Some doll, uh? He asked. I turned, fully expecting to have it out with him, but there was no one there. I finally made it to Café du Monde and sat as far away from others that I could get, against a wall that hedged on an embankment. Beyond the embankment was the Mississippi River; already horns from freighters split and cracked the air, gulls circled overhead in search of garbage. In front of me, I could see St. Louis Cathedral and Jackson Square amassed with tourists, vendors and natives heading for work. A young man approached me and I bought a Times-Picayune, knowing my face would be spread across the front page. I waited for my espresso and beignets before opening the paper, before confronting the fact that I had been made a fall guy in the press. The picture screamed louder than words; eyes widened in uncomprehending fear, the mouth ejaculating in supplication, hair tousled, the nose porcine. The headlines: Foster Child Murderer Captured. Jeremiah Johnson, janitor who cleans the trolleys for the City of New Orleans, was arrested at his home in Araby, a suburb in St. Bernard Parish, for the murders of the nine foster children. Police would give out very little information about the clues that led to his apprehension. However, Mr. Johnson was known both by neighbors and other city workers to be a deeply religious man. When the members of the NOPD special homicide unit searched Mr. Johnson’s shack-like home, every room was inundated with Catholic objects, such as crucifixes, statues, candles and several other items identified as voodoo talismans. The suspect also has a record, having been convicted of three burglaries; the last one he stole bread and aspirin from a Winn-Dixie and immediately high-tailed it to a liquor store were he took a bottle of Grey Goose Vodka. He had been released on parole a month before the first foster child’s murder. When asked why he had hired a felon, the head of the transportation department said that he was following a city policy of rehabilitating ex-convicts. I folded the newspaper and glared into the hordes that had descended upon the French Quarter. Three fat people wearing shorts with cameras hanging from their shoulders and fanny packs wrapped around their bulks stood near my table staring at me, thinking that uncivil act would make me leave. I signaled for one of the tiny Vietnamese waitresses and ordered black coffee and another order of beignets. With all that had happened to me, I just couldn’t help being a royal prick. So, they caught the bastard, I thought. Well, if all went as the authorities planned, Jeremiah would be meeting Old Sparky posthaste. To the general public, he looked like a wretched soul whose life served little purpose, and wouldn’t it be fitting to just end it all and save the state and society the burden of his presence. This is the usual morally hollow argument for capital punishment. Social workers who go into the soul-bending work of dealing with child abusers, learn quickly about the affects of the abuser, simply because we do not have the resources to marshal investigative methods. Sometimes we go on instinct: The slant of the face, the body language that challenges, the gestures and words that are totally bereft of ordinary concerns, and the eyes. I have seen too many eyes absent humanity, eyes that are perverse, unholy and pestilential in scope. Although it was only a photograph, Jeremiah Johnson’s eyes just did not emit the Mephistophelean ardor that had always jolted me into prayer. But, then again, what did I know, really. A social worker on suspension, a pittance of an income, rent to pay, and the need for food that consumed most of my waking moments. Maybe I hoped Jeremiah was the murderer and it would all be done and over with and I could get on with my life. But I knew how it worked, how the man would come down on me hard and with double-speak, how my career would be adjudicated without trial, how I would simply have nothing to say about what happens to me. I will receive a letter in which my connection to the department and the children that still live will be severed in less than a paragraph. When our system of justice is traced from the Greeks, through the Romans, then the Enlightenment, to these American shores, until today, it is lauded as the pinnacle of judicial rightness. But I have read Plato and Aristotle, and I sometimes think that the Philosopher King concept is much saner than what I see before me; the masses have no will to set things right. The bells of St. Louis Cathedral clanged ten o’clock. I sauntered across the Square listening to the dying repercussions, tapping the newspaper against my leg, hearing the name Jeremiah in my head. And then the voice: if you go to them, they will not listen. I stopped, trying with all my might to bring forth the image. Yes. “Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem,” a famous painting my Rembrandt. God had said that to Jeremiah, if you go to them, they will not listen. Who had said something like that to me just yesterday? Pinch: They won’t listen and they don’t give a rat’s ass and you know it. I hurried forward, anxious to meet up with Pinch and to say adios to my former way in the world. All of my personal things were in a small box that had once been used to ship miscellaneous office supplies third class; someone had placed it at my doorstep. There was no note, no writing on the box to tell me who had left it; but I was sure that Barb Boyd was behind it, hoping that this would deter me from coming into the department and thus saving her chicken-shit self from a confrontation. I was famous for never decorating my office space with much that was either personal or permanent; I lived my life ready for flight, as though I had already anticipated what had happened yesterday. So the little box held lumps of my corporeal matter, God particles of what I was for five years: an old tube of clear lipstick, a nail file, a smashed but unopened box of Junior Mints, used tickets to the Saints game from two years ago, and something that did not belong to me: a scapular with two brown strings that looked like shoelaces attached to a square piece of cloth with the red, white and blue image of the Virgin Mary. I stretched the strings out and pulled it over my head and let Mary rest between my breasts. My mother wore one of these every day of her life, under her clothes, and only took it off when she bathed. Once she had forgotten to put it back on and left it on the closed seat of the toilet. I had put it on just like I did on this day, looked at myself in the mirror, and prayed that she would let me take First Communion. When she found me admiring myself, my arms aloft, my hands holding my red hair in a winsome repose, she had slapped me. A child’s memory is cruel. While I munched on the Junior Mints, I dialed the department and asked for Pinch. No one had seen her. I called her cell phone and left a message telling her I was cleaning my apartment and would wait on her for supper. I washed some dishes, then opened the top-most book on my nightstand and lay down to read, determined to escape the crazed changes in my life. It was Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote that I think I had bought because I loved the red cover with that awesome helmet. I am not only a fool for good books, but pretty books, well-crafted books. And I know that when I read in bed, I fall into an obedient sleep within twenty minutes. We live our lives always with regret, don’t we? When I had told Pinch about my dream, I didn’t tell her that her murderer was a ghost, a haunting, a fiend, evil, a form I refused to challenge because I lacked courage. And I didn’t tell her either that a Gran Met could stop evil. We live our lives always as an act of retribution, don’t we? * I had to identify Pinch’s body. Her eyes had been gouged out, her cheeks slashed with a sharp knife or maybe a razor blade. The devil had run her through with an ancient pirate sword that was later traced to the Cabildo. It had been stolen from that museum a week before Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday. Lent and days of penitence. As I looked down at her face, the edge of the blue blanket that covered her fluttered softly and stilled. The rank odor of bleach enveloped us and I could hear from far away the abrasive shouts of the crowds that lined the Mardi Gras parade route. They were bellowing gimmie sometin’ mister, gimmie sometin’ mister. I touched her cheek, running my finger along thick black sutures. Beautiful, desecrated Pinch. And then I felt a familiar breath upon my cheek and I smelled lilacs. Of course I was questioned to no end about her murder, voices implying my collusion, asking me if I knew Jeremiah, where I had been on the night the child died, when Pinch died. Had I walked past the Cabildo as her murder waited for her? Could I have stopped it had I known? I asked and asked about the time of her death and only figured it out when I was told I was free to go because a group of tourists had seen me at Café du Monde the morning before. “They said they wouldn’t ever forget you by your looks; very New Orleans, they said. But you really pissed them off hogging a table to yourself.” I was too distraught to take in the details of the interview. I had become numb, dead to the world, irrelevant and bereft. I lived in a state of extreme suspension for the next few days. I pulled the phone from the wall, locked the door, closed the curtains, and left the apartment in darkness. I ate from cans, dry cereal chased with swigs of wine, beer and then vermouth and then vodka. I slept but did not dream. Then the taxi driver banged on my door, yelled that he was there to take me to a funeral, and literally carried me down the stairs and dumped me into his cab. Who called the cab and who arranged the funeral? I was beyond caring. I somehow managed to wipe my face and underarms with Handi-Wipes and tie up my hair with a purple ribbon. It was late morning, but the sky had taken on the tint of Stygian gloom. We passed through the French Quarter and then took St. Philip’s and headed north, passing Louis Armstrong Park. Clouds swirled and meshed, a spear of lightening jettisoned earthward, and then a burst of thunder hit and rolled over us. It seemed I had lived in this same storm for days. The cab driver whistled. “Whoa! Mais, I tink God done come on down and gonna tell us what’s be what.” I pulled myself forward, my head pounding, and said: “He already has.” I plopped back and pulled my legs up, my heels balanced on the seat, cupped my hands to my head, and suppressed the urge to throw-up everything I had ever eaten in this forsaken life of mine. In just a few days I had forfeited everything and had been let lose, unanchored, abandoned just like the children I had tried to save. The cab rocked and turned and stopped and the fume from the city buses was like the poison piped into hell. I breathed in, choked, and then the cab rocked from the wind. A large black man with white hair who smelled of peppermint helped me out. “Come on, darlin’, you gonna get tru ‘dis. We be hera ta hep ya.” Then I was standing alone, wobbling like a wounded wild duck. My hair clung to my face and shoulders, my clothes flattened to my body. I looked around for the driver, but saw only a rain funnel sprouting toward the sky and old ladies in black dresses, a priest shrouded in white vestments, and some young men with bandanas and sleeveless sweat shirts, their arms decorated with colorful tattoos. Gang members, I whispered, and laughed like a demented crone. I have finally gone mad, Mama. And who said I wasn’t like you? Fou, fou, fou. She was buried next to her mother in a graveyard that had endured since the Civil War. Out of deference to history and remembrance and rage, the community had left a wooden sign that read: Colored Cemetery. It rained straight down on me as I stood watching her casket descend into the ground. Ninety-five degrees and raining, I heard an old lady grumble. Steam rose off the bodies standing around Pinch’s grave. Mud and branches and pieces of rusted metal slid into the hole along with her coffin. Then a little girl in a yellow rain coat sprang from behind another lady and grabbed the metal. She sloshed through the mud on baby feet, stretched her arm up toward the priest, her round eyes shining as though she had found the source of life. In her hand was a rusted crucifix. The priest smiled at the child and nodded, telling her to keep it. Such a beautiful child, turning towards me in slow motion, braided pigtails moist with raindrops, yellow ribbons dancing in the wind like butterflies. She smiled with Pinch’s smile; looked at me with Pinch’s eyes; waved at me with Pinch’s baby hand; she was Pinch as a little girl. I stifled a sob and looked around the cemetery, imagining dead confederate soldiers molding along with slaves who would never be free. Ghosts were everywhere. The little girl hid behind a woman’s body; only a patch of yellow against a black sky. The priest mumbled words I did not want to hear, about dust and departed and a good life not without struggle and then the thudding reverberated in my head as mud and dirt slammed down on a shiny black box and finally she was covered and gone. Red plastic flowers that were stuck into the ground by a few unidentified mourners clacked in the wind. I walked away from Pinch, angry at God, at the unfairness of her life, and mostly at myself. How I made it home I don’t know; perhaps by the kindness of the cab driver, the old man and his scent of fatherly peppermint, someone carrying a piece of yellow ribbon that I found clutched in my hand. When I thought of the last hours as I lay in a hot bath, it was like looking at one of those old home movies where the reel sputters, the tape breaks, then the life of the family, the anniversary party, grandma’s eightieth birthday, come to ill-timed ends. Frames pulled at my consciousness, the reel moved back and forth, slowed and split moments of time came into focus. I saw that no one from the department, or the mayor’s office, or the NOPD attended Pinch’s funeral. I put that down to nothing but a uniform arrogance, one that comes from the unreflective belief in the self, one that is both carnal and deadly. What was she to them anyway? One of the last things she had said was about her being invisible. And now, so was I. Another frame, a big man gradually withdrawing deeper into the picture when I looked closely, the little girl, the gang members. I could see right through them and beyond was a clear vision where a multitude of crooked crosses lay askew upon a pure, blue sky of another morning. I am with you, now and at the hour of my death. I visited Pinch again the next week. I had gathered my wits enough to order a small plain headstone to set upon the white slab of cement that was to cover her for eternity. I had these words chiseled on the headstone: She Was The Enemy of All Cruelty. * I left her, and drove south, hooking onto Claiborne and then to Iberville. Even in the pouring rain, the sidewalks were filled with people. Black citizens in the northern sections, and as I drove south and toward the city a cultural mix, and then mostly white. Finally the French Quarter where I watched like a voyeur as tourists, businesspeople, artists, hangers-on, street performers, hawkers, prostitutes, and homeless went about their lives. Shadows filtered through the early light and indistinct images refracted in magnificent colors, descending like an aura of peace upon the faded hood of my car. On the far corner to my left, I saw three young men leaning against a once thriving grocery store, their bodies so luminescent they converged, becoming one with the show window that was impaled by fliers announcing human activity and frayed masking tape left by the continuing threat of another hurricane. Dark clouds separated as though a hand had pushed them aside and the sun was displayed and the earth was warmed and all the shadows departed from my path. My old car clunked and threatened to die when I stopped for a red light. The streets were so familiar, filled with images of our days and nights together. No more Pinch. A year ago, while we waited for a stream of children to cross the street at the corner of Ramparts and St. Peter, she had jumped out of the car and pummeled a pimp who was slapping a prostitute that was not but thirteen years old. He had fled, but not before brandishing a knife and calling Pinch her mother’s fucker. Memories are plagues. A sob rose in my chest and I lay my forehead on the steering wheel. The old feeling of abandonment came rushing at me, moved over me and I felt as though I would be swept away into oblivion. I hoped for it. And I felt the crack in my heart widen, and my heart broke in two. One side was grief, the other revenge. And the voice came at me: you must see first and then you may die and live again. I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes and waited, breathing and counting, and I made the panic part of me. Pinch’s death finally severed the organic fibers that had held me in check, which had postponed my inevitable affirmation of what I was. So how should I then proceed? Isn’t revenge a part of who we are? Are we not entitled to impose pain upon those who have killed without good cause? Can I be judge and jury? I wanted so much to pull a trigger, stick a knife into the stomach of Pinch’s murderer, and plunge the needle into his arm. And if I did those things, in my waking dreams or in the panic of my nights, what would I become? I would become him; I would wipe away the good Pinch achieved; I would shame her name. So then, where do I begin? I begin with Pinch and a piece of advise she once gave me when I had told her about the death of my mother, my suspicions about her possible suicide, and why the priest refused to bury her in consecrated ground. But not her madness; I walked around that subject as though I were skimming the edge of the world in fear of falling. God, it was a long story that I told Pinch as we ate lunch on a deck that overlooked the rising waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Boiled blue point crab, fried shrimp, okra gumbo. That food is still part of me. When it was all told and over with, my plate empty, my eyes dry despite the pounding in my chest, Pinch had looked across the shaking brown water, her eyes squinting against the gold patches of shimmering sunshine, and said: We all, at some time in our lives, think about what it would be like to be dead; most of us casually wish for it like we wish that a husband or parent would just disappear. Many long for it. I believe truly, Scrimp, that suicide, if it is to be prevented, and if the person really wants to live, can be prevented only with the help of others. We both know that; that’s one reason we became social workers. Her voice had been unusually measured, as though she had seen the future and had simply accepted it. So, with Pinch’s voice echoing in my head, I decided to take care of my grief first and fast, with full intention of getting through all five stages by the end of the day. How else could I focus soundly and without reserve on finding her murderer? And why was she murdered? The instrument of her pain, the sword from the Cabildo, the motive, the manner of her death, as though someone were sending a message. Why kill a poor hardworking social worker for Christ’s sake? The violent death of a social worker right smack dab in the middle of the heinous murders of foster children? An investigation that was more than a year old, a suspect in custody, so the expectation that finally New Orleans would attain a certain normality and get back to business and fun. None of it rang true, none of it felt good, and it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that something was rotten as hoary shit in the city of New Orleans. * I had visited Dr. Jessica Hines about four years ago. I had found the body of a foster child in the back bedroom of a crack house. I had been diligent in keeping up with the little boy’s whereabouts, who the foster parents where, checking them out, following up on leads. I had not placed the boy but had spent weeks trying to convince my supervisor that he was in danger. I had gone to the foster parents home one morning for a regular follow-up visit only to find the house empty. After much questioning of neighbors and searching possible whereabouts, I finally found him. Well, it was the first death under my charge and it put me into a tailspin. I came in late to work everyday for two weeks. Voices and images followed me even to the toilet. I began to lose weight even though I ate everything I could get my hands on. I ran up tabs in every bar and restaurant within walking distance of my apartment. My supervisor ordered consultation with Dr. Hines; it was that or my job. Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly the most cooperative patient. I told the good doctor that all I needed was a months’ supply of Xanax. But she made me talk and talk so that I surprised myself and after every session I puked my guts out then ate a five-course meal at Brennan’s or two muffalotta sandwiches. I was growing tired of visiting my inner child and told Dr. Hines that at every session; but I kept on talking and puking and eating. That lasted for three months, every week for three freakish months. Afterward she agreed to release me, I kept losing weight and eating like a pig, but I no longer threw up. Finally, the good doctor gave me my Xanax and I returned to work. I never finished the bottle of pills. Her office was still as it was then; cool, absent distracting pictures like the girl sitting under a tree having accepted her fate thanks to her therapist. I sat in a maroon leather chair across from Dr. Hines, as I had then. She had changed only in that she was even more beautiful, as though the years and the pain of others had been massaged into her entire being and she rejoiced in her martyrdom. Her solid black hair was cut in a pageboy that lightly touched her shoulders. Her face was devoid of makeup, but her thin lips were soft and very pink. She smiled at me; her long black lashes an angelic contrast to her white, porcelain skin. A forest green frock covered her body and her stomach protruded in the shape of an over-inflated basketball. I stared at her large breasts and watched them move up and down with the regularity of sunup and sundown. So she was with child. Dr. Hines had breached professional ethics only once with me and had told me that she never wanted children. “Life and death, life and death,” I whispered, surprised by my own voice. I looked up at Dr. Hines’ face expecting reproach or at least incredulity. She nodded at me, her round brown eyes unblinking, and said nothing. I compressed my lips and focused on Dr. Hines’ swollen bare feet. “I’m becoming a complete loony tune,” I began. “I want so much to lash out. This is the worst I’ve ever felt. I feel helpless. I want revenge. I want to kill somebody.” She rubbed her feet together, then reached down and scratched between her toes with a long red fingernail. “Hannah,” she whispered hoarsely, “your partner has been dead for only two weeks. You lost your job. What you’re feeling is normal. You expect too much from yourself.” “Normal,” I blurted out. “I don’t care what’s normal. I’ve never known what that is. God help me, I did try, but I don’t want that.” “Then why have you come to me? This time of your own free will, isn’t it?” “I need a script for something. To calm me down, rein in the beast, as they say. I told you, I’m going crazy. Seeing things again.” She pulled her chair closer to me without getting up, grunting as she moved forward. “Come on, Hannah, you can get anything you want. You know the streets. Please don’t tell me that you made an appointment, which, and I remember how cheap you are so you’re paying for this, just for a prescription? You think drugs will solve this?” “They’ll help. Then I can get on with finding who killed her.” “Did they help before? Weren’t you the one who said you were melting away? If you let this get the best of you, well, you’re just waiting to dissolve.” I took a long breath and let it out, made the church and steeple with my hands and fingers and pointed at Dr. Hines. “She is what took the pain away the last time. Put me straight, let me know I was worth something. Hell, compared to her life mine was a piece of cake.” “Really? All that talking and throwing up you did didn’t help? You don’t need help now?” “Look, I’m not in denial. She’s dead; my friend is dead. I saw her body; I went to the funeral. I’m angry and I won’t accept her death. She just didn’t die; she was murdered.” “And that’s all that this is about? Getting revenge?” “Dealing with her death so that I can breath and then yes, revenge, revenge and more revenge,” I said. “Dealing with it to the extent that you can go out there and seek revenge and probably get yourself killed too,” she replied. “I don’t have a death wish if that’s what you’re implying.” “I’m not implying anything, Hannah. I’m just trying to get you, us, to begin in a place where you can begin to heal.” “Really? Healing? You don’t know what this is like. I’ve been coping with the murder of those kids; I placed two, Jamie and Tasha. Tasha, Tasha, Tasha. Didn’t I know better? Didn’t I? “Hannah, you can’t blame yourself for the deaths. What could you have done to stop Tasha’s murder? And surely not your friend’s. Surely not. “So fucking what. Look where I am now. Didn’t you see how they dragged me in front of the inquisition? What have I got now but myself? “And that is not so much then?” “She took the pain away then. Now it’s worse and there’s no her.” A sharp pang rose from my stomach to my chest, I started to sweat, a drum echoed in my head, I closed my eyes waiting for the black cloud, the voices, and death. I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder and then a cool glass was placed in my hand. I leaned into the glass and drank. The cloud moved on to tarry until another time. I pulled air into my lungs, opened my eyes, and focused on Dr. Hines blood-red fingernails. “Do you realize you haven’t used her name? You keep saying she and her and my friend.” I looked down at my hands and plied my fingers apart and let the glass drop to the beige carpet. A dull ache had settled behind my eyes. I rubbed my forehead, squeezed my nose. Minutes went by. Finally I looked up at Dr, Hines and said: “If I speak her name, then she is really, really dead. “Hannah, drugs will make it worse. Drinking will make it worse. Is this how Earline would want you to act?” My head popped back and I glared at her. “Don’t you dare lay that kind of guilt on me. Don’t you even dare,” I said between clenched teeth. “Say it, Hannah. Say it,” she murmured and reached out and touched my cheek. Her hand was warm, her wedding ring embedded in the puffy flesh of her finger. “Pinch, Pinch, Pinch, Pinch. Earline Washington is dead. Dead as a doorknob, dead as a fish, gone, no more, flew the coup, taken by the hounds of hell,” I hissed. She said nothing; silence pervaded the room except for the outlying rumble of an airplane heading into New Orleans. Finally, Dr. Hines got up from her chair and waddled to her desk and poured a glass of water. I watched as she drank slowly, her head titled, her form seeming to grow taller and slimmer. I closed my eyes and suppressed an upsurge of bile. I will not start that again, I said to myself. I opened my eyes and Dr. Hines was staring at me. “So, Scrimp love, you want revenge?” she asked. I jumped from my chair, sweat seeped from my pours; it was as though my bones were rattling in my skin. “What did you call me?” I shouted. She laughed, the sound low and throaty. Then she smiled broadly, her pearly white teeth shining from her thickening lips. A small black mole appeared on the left side of her mouth. Pinch had that, Pinch had that, kept echoing in my head. I gasped. I remembered that Dr. Hines had small teeth that were almost perfect, except for tiny sharp incisors. And no mole. Now the teeth were big and square. Her lips grew even larger, her skin darkened. She laughed louder, a wonderful and bright laugh. Then she clapped large black hands, fingers splayed, exposing pink undersides. I was terrified; I backed away from her and towards the door. I tripped and reeled backward over a potted banana plant and landed on my back. Dr. Hines glided toward me, big dark hands reaching out to help me. I looked up and into Pinch’s face. I ran out of there; skedaddled like a devil out of the fires of Hades, knocked over a couple people, raced out of the cold building and into the hot, humid air of my beloved city. I looked around, trying to locate my car and finally remembered that I had left it on a side street and taken the bus. I jogged toward Magazine Street and then shimmied into the middle of the crowd of people waiting for the bus. I smelled rancid old man sweat, onions, sweet perfume, skin, meat, toothpaste, deodorant, a purple plum, semen, and exhaust from passing combustible engines. Good God, I thought, the familiar fragrances of home. I looked behind me and at the building from which I had just escaped. “I guess I’ve gone beyond the pale,” I said out loud. “What you say?” asked a little black lady standing next to me. She looked like she was Methuselah’s mother. Her eyes were two giant orbs of compassion; her skin shriveled, her wide mouth smiling as though she carried within her the secrets of the universe. “Oh, sorry. I was talking to myself.” “Okay, Hon,” she replied and squinted her eyes at me. “Doin worry, I tell ya. Talk to yoself, nobody care dis way or dat.” I counted and breathed in and out to calm down. I felt excited, like I had been freed of something. It didn’t make sense. Before I had gone in to see Dr. Hines, well, if someone would have put a gun to my head and threatened to blow my brains out I wouldn’t have even flinched; I would’ve said go ahead, get the whole damned thing over with. I looked back again, and knew that I would never see Dr. Hines again; she had represented my need to be normal, and I just wasn’t. “Bus here, Grammy,” yelled a little white boy with blond hair who was holding the hand of a very dark-skinned middle-aged lady wearing a white uniform. Things haven’t changed much. Methuselah’s mother pinched the edge of my shirt, shook it, and laughed. “No, dey sure haven’t atal, sweetie pie.” The bus screeched to a gentle halt and I watched her limp toward the bus as the sea of silent people parted and made safe passage for her and then she rose up and went through the closed doors of the bus and disappeared, leaving only the staggering scent of our history. I followed the line of people, got on last, and deposited my coins in the slot as the bus took off with a jerk. I fell forward and a solid hand grabbed me by the elbow. “Sit here, petit,” said a gentle voice. I looked down and a young girl about fifteen slid over to the window seat pulling me with her. “Thanks,” I groaned and plopped down. “These drivers gonna kill somebody one day. Then they can sue the city and the mayor and all the boocrats for alls theys got,” she chuckled. I looked down at her. She was lovely. Her hair was cropped close to her head, a long silver earring with a blue opaque stone dangled from one ear. She smelled of lilacs dancing in the breeze and Colby Jack cheese. She held on to the back of the seat in front of us with both hands; fingers long and tapered and bare of any jewelry. The hands of a child not yet a woman, the flash of so many baby hands that will not hold another’s when love comes softly. “Yeah,” I replied. “You can get killed just minding your own business sometimes.” “Get killed just trying to help lil’ kids, it seems. Murderers.” I looked at the side of her face; she was staring straight ahead, but I could tell she was smiling. “What did you say? You take care of kids?” “Mais, non. I be a waitress, sha. Up to the Warehouse District. Three to eleven and even after.” “Aren’t you a little young?” “Non, I be twenty-five. What you tink?” “I don’t know. What do I know, anyway?” “You be confused about someting?” She asked. “Very,” I replied. “My Mamma, may she be resting with peace, she tol’ me that when you confused you needa seek help from others,” she chirped brightly. I was staring at her moving lips. I hadn’t notice the mole on the left side of her mouth. “Where were you born?” I asked between shallow breaths . She turned and looked at me. Her pupils were black, the sclera yellow with bright sparks popping. “Why, don’ you know, love? We sure talked about our childhood enough for five psychiatrists. Time you get on with what you done need to get done. Se precipiter dans son travail.” I bolted from the seat and headed towards the back of the bus just as it lurched to a stop and the middle doors emitted a deep sigh and opened. I jumped out and onto the sidewalk. The bus took off leaving a cloud of fowl exhaust fumes bathing my face. Ghosts were gathering all around me, Pinch was haunting my every move, and I had to stop running away. I looked after the bus and then around to get my bearings. A gaggle of yelling schoolchildren were coming at me from the right, a person in a wheel chair from my left. I glanced from one to the other, back and forth several times, trying to decide which one would become Pinch this time. I looked across the street and saw the white and blue tiles spelling out the words Fountainbleu Drive. I ran across the street, entered the Fontainbleu neighborhood and headed toward Saint Rita of Cascia Catholic Church on Lowerline. Saint Rita’s was Pinch’s favorite Church; she loved the huge pipe organ and the stained glass windows depicting the saints. She had always said that she found peace there, that the music reminded her of her mother. As I walked along the oak canopied streets, past bungalows and Spanish style homes, I thought that I would try talking to a priest. Hell, if I had truly tripped and lost all sense of reality, the case being that everyone was not only reminding me of Pinch but also becoming her, then what had I to lose? Crazy means seeing omens in the ordinary. Maybe I was led here, maybe my subconscious wanted me to find the answers not in one place but many. How many sources of advice should I seek before I settle on my own counsel? Well, I guess I was heeding Pinch’s advice or the girl on the bus; seek help. The Gran Met moves forward. And then again, maybe I was absolutely mad and was looking for someone who no longer existed. I knew this about myself; I feared being alone more than anything. It was late afternoon. A sense of deferred quiet inflated the air. The sun had already moved below the line of oaks and magnolias. I looked at the schedule for mass and was happy that I would have the place to myself, barring intruding penitents. I walked through the large doors; it was unusually hot for a church. I had always sought out churches during summers days during foster home visits because they were some of the few places that were serene and cool. The organ rose up and down in waves and I could hear the music coming from a distance too far to gauge. Yet the church was empty. I walked up the center aisle and to the front row, genuflected, slipped into the pew, kneeled, touched my chest with two fingers and felt the outline of the scapular. Then I folded my hands as I had as a child, when prayer had been my private and vexed flight of solace. I looked up at the suffering Jesus on the crucifix. I began a low chant: Bless me Father for I have sinned, I have had these thoughts. It has been years and years. “Too long, my child,” came words from behind me. I stiffened. A bolt of fear ran through me and I looked to the right and left of the altar. Nothing moved. “Who are you?” I asked, my voice reverberating. Silence permeated the thick air. I waited, still looking up at Jesus. Then I heard a delicate flapping like the movement of a bird outside a bedroom window. The noise grew more intense and I thought of avenging angels flung from heaven. “Please. Tell me who you are.” “Do you come to confess and seek absolution or do you just want answers to your prayers?” “I’m not praying,” I croaked. “Oh, yes you are,” it said in a singsong voice. I turned around quickly. He was dressed as a priest, bald, with patches of scaly skin on his reddened face. He was scratching his neck with one hand, trails of blood oozed from small wounds. His nose was large and bulbous. He had no eyebrows. But he had a smile that was welcoming, beauty within ugliness. He cocked his head to the right and gave me a smile so genuine, so good, that for the first time in weeks, I smiled back at another human being. We stared at each other for a while and slowly I realized that I had seen that smile so often before; it had comforted me through days when I thought I would give up and go home to the swamps; it had given me permission to eat and enjoy the foods I loved; it had loved me for who I was, what I would become. It was Pinch’s smile. I mouthed its name: “Pinch.” He nodded and brushed away the hair that did not exist, just as she had done when confronted with a difficult decision. “The music is beautiful today, isn’t it?” “I don’t hear music,” I murmured. “Oh, sure you do, Scrimp. I told you before. Close yours eyes, love, and let it go into you. Pretend it’s a big old’ piece of pecan pie.” That’s when the hunger hit me so hard I doubled over. A searing pain roiled through my stomach and I could feel perspiration wetting my underarms. It passed slowly and I righted myself. He had disappeared. The pew was empty, but I heard a squeak coming from the entrance to the church; I watched as the door leading to the outside closed gradually. And the voice said: I am your mirror. That I had lost all reason was clear; or was it? Perhaps Pinch had not died. Maybe the body was someone else and all those sutures binding her face together hid another’s face. Maybe, maybe, maybe. So, I had tried the rational approach to my dilemma and Dr. Hines became Pinch; I tried the spiritual approach and the priest became Pinch; the worldly aspect, the girl in the bus, Pinch. What was left? I knew what was left. Pinch had told what I was long ago. Grand Met. Voodoo. Across another threshold, through another doorway. I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take me to Eslina Duveau’s Voodoo Parlor on Esplanade. He laughed when I gave him the address, which I didn’t mind at all because I saw not one feature or gesture in the man that reminded me of Pinch. I sat back, rolled down the window and tried to relax. But the hunger pain that had seized me in the church had turned into dull, pounding pangs that did not let up. I needed food, and lots of it. When the cab turned onto Esplanade, a thousand aromas floated through the window and surrounded me. We passed a few bars, shops, houses, hotels, and several restaurants. The cabbie pressed on the brakes slowly and eased to the curb. A neon sign blinked pink and green announcing the voodoo parlor. Next door to the squat, unpainted building was a restaurant with a large bay window decorated with a faded plastic ivy vine. Checkered blue curtains were attached to the sides of the window and bright lights sparkled from the inside. Several people entered the restaurant through a red door. A sign dangled from the low overhang of the slated roof: Festo and Sons - Better Than Italy. “Do you know that restaurant?” I asked the driver. “I don’t remember ever seeing it before.” The driver leaned over the passenger side of the cab and looked out of the window. “Oh, yeah, dis is a real good place, lady. Been here tree, maybe six time. My wife, she like the baked ziti and dem eels. Me, I like just spaget and balls.” “Thanks. I think I’ll try it,” I said, handing him a twenty and jumping out of the cab. Blessed, blessed release. Things may be getting a little better. First the priest-Pinch smile and now food. Glorious food. Garlic, EVOO, parsley, thyme, oregano, salt, tomato, white pepper, squash, meat, bread, and four, no six different cheeses. I pulled open the red door by a gold knob shaped like an outstretched hand and walked into a heaven on earth. “Hey, fungo, fart-head. Papa say you didn’ give Mr. Manelli ‘nough meatballs in his soup,” yelled a skinny young man from behind the bar to my left. “Up yours,” replied a small boy with slick black hair that reached to his shoulders. He was walking across the room, dodging tables filled with customers and heading toward the bar. He wore a spotless white apron wrapped around his torso, a yellow shirt, and a red tie. He was laughing. “That guy’s a creep. He better keep his hands offa me being next time he come in his own balls gonna end up in da soup.” Two fat men in black silk suits walked in behind me and headed for an empty table for two in back of the dining area. I hurried past them and sat at the table, grabbing the menu and hiding my face behind it. I waited until I heard one of them say something about bitchin’ the rag. Mafia farts, I said to the menu. The tallest man banged his fist on my table; I moved the menu away from my face and looked up. “What?” I asked as prissy as I could. “Ya gonna shoots me fa a table, eh?” The man touched his breast pocket, looked at his partner, then they both smiled and walked toward the back of the restaurant, ducking under a hanging sign for the men’s room, and entering through a back door. They never came out again. I looked through the menu quickly deciding on what I thought could be prepared fast. “May I help you?” said a squeaky voice. It was the young girl from the bus. Her hair was pinned high on her head, the earring gone. “I thought you said you worked in the Warehouse District,” I said. “I get around. What do you want tonight?” There was no more Pinch in her; no mole on the side of her mouth; no hint of humor; her hand was small and the nails were bitten to the quick. Maybe it wasn’t the same girl, maybe the two Mafia guys weren’t following me, and maybe the city wasn’t inundated with ghosts. I ticked off what I wanted on my fingers: “Minestrone, a bowl; three cheese appetizer; hot bread and butter; five meatballs; baked ziti; fried calamari; half carafe of red house wine; chocolate cake; water with lime.” She stopped writing just as I touched my little finger. “That’s ten exactly,” she said. “You must be hungry.” “Very.” She started to hurry away then suddenly turned and smiled. “Numbers make order out of chaos. Right?” She spun around and walked with that little swagger that Pinch displayed when she had solved a problem and was pleased with herself. The food was wonderful, something worth living for. And as I ate I thought about the last stage of grief. Acceptance. Well, not yet. Not yet. Voodoo is a religion or way of life that is misunderstood by most people. Not that New Orleans doesn’t have truckloads of charlatans that should be driven out of town and dumped in the Intracoastal Waterway. But hey, tourists make their own gullibility, and a buck is a buck when you come from the destitute and sinfully ignored land called Haiti. So when some poor Haitian touts voodoo with made up stories, dead chickens, the walking dead, herbs and potions so your guy can get it up, well whose fooling whom. It takes two to dance the dance of unmitigated gall. But Eslina was one of a kind, a true voodoo priestess who had been interviewed by scholars from around the world. She rarely took money from thrill-seeking tourists and had been reputed to stop murders of innocent people by her spells as far away as New Zealand. Eslina is said to be an advisor to several prominent heads of state around the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had advised the Pope; it was just too much for me to contemplate. Several times she had called the social services department trying to get someone to listen to her about what she knew about the death of the foster children. I hadn’t heard about these phone calls until a week before Pinch’s murder. Pinch had told me that Eslina had seen a shadow of a man standing over a child that looked like Theresa. The man was white, tall and slim. How did Pinch know that? Eslina was her aunt removed a few times and a confident of the aunt who had raised Pinch. There is no way for me to be kind when it comes to Eslina’s body; she is fat, huge, rotund, a grande. She greeted me with open arms, wrapped me in into her body and squeezed so hard I was afraid food would squirt out of me like a tube of toothpaste. Then she thrust me away and looked into my eyes. “So, petit, you suffer too much for what has not been lost.” “What? Are you talking about Earline Washington?” I asked, knowing that she was talking about Pinch.” “Vein ici. To the back. We will talk of old times and times to come.” She closed the door to her shop and flicked a switch. The neon sign buzzed, dimmed, then finally darkened. I looked out of the window and into the night. A man walked past following a yellow dog that was free of a leash. The back room was decorated in shades of red: crimson, vermilion, magenta, fuchsia, and maroon. It was like walking into the newly excised cavity of a large animal. Eslina glided ahead of me like a black whale descending upon Jonah. A gyrating lamp threw shadows against the walls; my mind was spinning, my heart pounded in my chest, sweat poured from my forehead. Then Eslina turned off the light and drew back the heavy curtains from the only window in the room. A diffused beam struck the floor near my feet and when I looked out of the window and into the night. I realized that it was moonlight. Clean and pure and heaven-sent. “Come, chil’, sit. We will talk and clarify the confusion and pain that has taken over your life,” said Eslina. She wrapped her large hand around my upper arm and guided me to a maroon overstuffed chair. Swirling, tufted brocade embraced me as I sat and tried to release the muscles that clutched my spine. I massaged the raised patterns of the dark material, breathed deeply and leaned my head back. My eyes seemed to close of their own will. I plummeted into a deep sleep and for the first time since Pinch’s murder I felt a sliver of peace. I knew that I was smiling, that the dream that seized me was the kind that the gods grant to children, that adults long far but lose by their refusal to believe. I woke to the smell of honey and cinnamon, the pressure of warm flesh, the sound of human voices in the distance. As with the dream, the awakening was tranquil; I did not have to pull myself out of sleep afraid of what the world would throw at me. “Time to get yourself together, girl,’ whispered Eslina. She sat across from me, smiling, sipping from a large white cup; her full lips widened and puckered as she drank. Her almond-slanted eyes reflected the moonlight. I sat up and smiled back at her and accepted the cup she offered me. I drank the sweet tea quickly, my stomach burning with pleasure as the liquid rushed into me. “Thank you,” I said.” “Okay. So you want to know what you should do now that your friend is dead, oui?” “Yes. But how did you know?” “You come to the voodoo and you ask how did Madame Eslina know? Come, come. You of all people should know that. You have neglected your heart, petit.” I finished the tea and placed the cup on a small table next to my chair and stood up. I turned toward the window; a mimosa tree swayed in the warm summer breeze, pink and white puffed blossoms gave off a pungent odor that reminded me of Pinch’s skin. “Did you go to Earline’s funeral?” I asked. “ No, no. I don’t do funerals. It’s a useless thing to do. Just a body, a shell of what was, a vessel of what is.” “I have sought help. First, a psychiatrist.” “Ah, the rational.” “Yes. Then the Church.” “The spiritual.” “And then I came here. Pinch, Earline, once told me that I was a Gran Met. A voodoo priestess. Like you. At the time I thought she was making a joke, trying to help me understand why I had these crazy premonitions, why I saw ghosts all over the place, why voices were trying to contact me, why I ignored it all. But now, now that she’s dead, I’m not so sure.” I waited for her to say something. A breeze blew in and tapped me on the check. “No, that’s not true. I am sure. I just want to get my ducks in a row. Does anyone say that anymore?” “Voodoo considers all sides of the world. By now you probably suspect that,” she said, as she struggled out of her chair. The hanging flesh of her upper arms jiggled like dark chocolate pudding. She picked up a small leather bound book from the table that was cluttered with various strange items. “This is the Book of Souls. Lost souls that continually strive to be free.” “Can I see that?” I asked. “Sure, but you won’t be able to understand it yet.” “Are the souls here in this room?” “They are everywhere in this city,” she laughed. “It’s funny?” I asked.” “Funny, no, but we must look at the world as it is. After all, some souls are free and there is pleasure in knowing that. Free ghosts have a sense of humor.” “I take it you’re not afraid of dying,” I said.” “Of course not. Are you?” I swallowed hard, handing her my cup and waiting for a refill. “What’s in this anyway?” “Herbs, a potion. You know, voodoo stuff.” “Really?” “Really.” “Okay, back to why I’m here,” I began. “Fear?” “I think it’s not my death I fear, but not being able to understand or control events,” I said. “I dreamed about her murder, you know. But I just let it go, thought it was just my old anxiety popping up at me. Then it happened.” “And you think you should have stopped it?” Eslina asked. “Yes, of course!” I blurted out. Eslina leaned back in her chair, the pressure of her body like the deflating of a large balloon. “Let me ask you this, petit: Do you want peace or happiness?” “I want Pinch,” I said without having to think. “Okay, so if you have Pinch would you have peace or happiness?” I stood up abruptly and walked over to the window. The full moon had moved above the line of trees making a large shadow against the azure sky. I held my right hand up against the night, five fingers like a hungry spider. “I would be happy,” I whispered. “I would have loved her forever. We had almost five years together. People thought we were lesbians, but we hadn’t gotten that far yet. Pinch still had a way with me, if you know what I mean.” “That’s good!” she chirped. “Very good. Happy are they that mourn for they shall be comforted. You will be comforted, my child.” I turned, staring at her with such confusion. “That’s very Catholic. Doesn’t that come from one of Jesus’ sermons? I thought you were voodoo. That I’m voodoo?” “They’re not that different. Anyway, Voodooism and Catholicism are indistinguishable in New Orleans, surely you know that already. But let us get on with this so that you can fulfill your purpose.” “What are you talking about? My purpose?” “You have seen her in others, haven’t you?” “Yes.” “That is your comfort. She is with you.” “I know that voodoo spells are supposed to bring people back from the dead. But, come on, this is too much,” I said. “Is it? Is it really? Look at the world as it is, as most people, on television, in books, magazines, politics, the stock market, see it popular music. Petit! What has happened to the children and to you and to Earline? And you say voodoo is too much? Then stop and think. How crazy is all of that? Mumbo jumbo. And people think that ghosts and spirits are the imaginings of the mad.” “You’re right there,” I laughed. “Happiness comes when each of us finds our own authority, our purpose in life. For the ordinary person, it is family, job, country, children, and a reason to get up in the morning and get going. The good ones sustain the world and no more. They do not change it. You, chil’, have a greater purpose. It’s within you,” she said, taking a deep breath, as though she had said all that was in her. I smiled at her, brushed back my hair from my face and said: “Something like the kingdom of heaven being within you?” She flipped her hands upward and cackled, “That’s it. That’s it!” “Then what is my purpose?” I asked. “Come on, think! Your friend is murdered, all those lovely children taken by a devil from hell and you ask what is your purpose?” I stared at her and it was like my final day on earth, like when your life flashes before your eyes. Premonitions, death, children, my being a social worker, Pinch revealing herself to me slowly, my inability to be sated, my . . . “I, I don’t believe it,” I groaned. Eslina came to me and held me, rocking back and forth. Comforting me. “Hunger is a sign of health, Hannah DuBois, longing a sign of love.” So how was I to proceed now that I had learned that Pinch’s death was somehow defining my life? Was I to look for Pinch in every person I met? Wait until some unknown shaman or ghost or devil tapped me on the shoulder? All of my life I had known that I was different; a child abandoned at an early age; friends coming and going like hairy dandelion seeds blowing in the wind; fear that my isolation would lead to madness; an unexplainable hunger that had plagued my waking hours. Eslina had told me that it was an intrinsic longing that plagued me. But longing for what? If it were true that I was born to some purpose, some life defined as such, would my own efforts or those of others fulfill me? Was my purpose to find the murderer of the foster children? Pinch’s murderer? I felt like that character in Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist.” Hunger can be a way of life. I who longed for justice. “Why isn’t Pinch voodoo? You two are related.” “In all faiths, from Catholicism to Voodoo, as considered by Buddhists and Muslims, there is always one who intercedes; that’s you. But Earline is more than even you.” “Where do I go from here?” “Sha. Enough talking. Go,” said Eslina. “Take this barrette for your gorgeous hair. Never cut it.” The barrette was gold, about three inches long, with etched Roman-like figures holding cups of wine. “Is it a voodoo charm? Will it protect me?” “No. I just thought it would bring out the color of your hair, your white skin. Face it, petit, you look a mess.” * When I had first come to live in New Orleans, just out of mind-numbing high school in the Louisiana country, I started to drink. I was one of the fortunate ones, though; I was physically incapable of getting rip-roaring drunk. As soon as I felt the rising nausea, I would quit and have a solid sleep. And besides, I’d eat so much while drinking I think the alcohol was soaked up by the food. And that is what I did when I went home to my apartment after receiving the news about my life from the power of voodoo. I downed three fingers of straight vodka and slept deeply, feeling my body and consciousness fall hard into a dark world. And I did not dream of the past or of disordered realities or future mishaps. My entire being received solace in nothingness; and gave me time and energy to wait and plan. Pinch came to me two nights later. She caressed my head and told me not to worry. Come on Scrimp. Girl, you know I’d never leave my buddy. I woke up to the dull New Orleans sun streaking onto my bed and the memory of Pinch comforting me. My hands clutched at my shirt, my chest felt bruised, as though I had been bashed with great force. I turned on my back and took a deep breath and watched the apparitions playing on the ceiling, made by the sun reflecting on the half-full vodka bottle that lay at my side. Again sweet lilacs. Tears flowed down my face wetting the pillow. Had she really been a heartbeat away? Had the last weeks been a delusion? I closed my eyes and swallowed; my mouth was dry and gravelly, as though someone had poured sand down my throat “Well, partner, it’s about time you rise and shine.” “Stop it!” I yelled, slapping my hands over my face. “Scrimp. You’ll have to face it. It’s me, Pinch. No dream, just some good voodoo and little ol’ bad ass me.” A moment can be an eternity, waves hitting the shore, waking dreams becoming visions. I reached out and my hand entered a wave of brown, cool air. A face formed from silver sparks and then it floated away. “Pinch?” I whispered as I let my hands fall to the bed and looked at the tattered wicker rocking chair next to the window. It moved backward and forward in time with the thrumming of the palm fronds on the cracked windowpane. A spectrum of countless tones twirled and settled as a prism in the chair. “Please, please, don’t do this to me,” I moaned. I hugged myself and waited. Then the rainbow of colors reformed into an outline of a body that moved upward and towards me, hands outstretched, arms waving, and then slipped down beside me on the bed. A cool and joyful mist entered me. I turned toward the head, seeing eyes that had yellow points, like popping fireflies. Now Pinch was golden brown, her once burnt umber skin sparkling and I smelled sweet fudge. Her wide, thick mouth was her clearest feature. She smiled at me. The mole at the corner of her mouth glowed. “So, Scrimp, what do you think? Pretty nifty, huh? Don’t be afraid. Lie back down, sleep with me, get used to this. From now on you have to stop and ask who loves you.” And I did. I didn’t ever want to fall asleep again. I was afraid that Pinch would disappear and everything would be a dream. As I looked at her, watched her form move in and out of space, into dimensions hidden from the human eye, I felt what poets must feel as they put pen to paper; transcendent passion, the overwhelming emotion when the person you love most and thought dead comes back. “This is a great mystery, isn’t it Pinch?” I breathed. “Oh, indeed, love. Mysterious as is most of life. And I mean that in many ways.” I looked around my bedroom, ran my hands over the spread, smelled the light odor of magnolia – the perfume I used – mixed with the scent of lilacs and listened for the noises of the outside world. “That life rolls on as always,” I said. “Yep. Just a rollin’ along down the dirty Mississippi. But ghosts like me have always been here. Part of it all. Transubstantiation within the living world. Can you dig it?” “Hard to believe,” I said. “But the last day or so was proof enough for me. Like I should’ve accepted it all before. Then we wouldn’t…” “Uh, uh, uh. No regrets. All it takes is love to become a believer.” “Then I believe.” “You have to know a little more. This is the city of the dead and it’s not just in books or tourist brochures. We all walk as ghosts among ghosts. It’s just that the older ones are immune to change, like being exposed to time has made them no longer susceptible. I suppose I will be like that sometime in time. Do you still believe?” “I suppose you’re asking me if I have faith?” “Oh, Scrimp. Can’t you see it all around you? Didn’t you feel it before I died? It was a bound to happen, this,” she said spreading her arms and taking in the room. “You were supposed to be murdered? And what of the children?” I asked. “We cannot control evil, love. Them that killed the children are shit of the devil. Merdre. Le diable,” she laughed. It was a wry laugh, one made of graceful acceptance. “If you put it that way, I will have faith,” I said. “Good. Then let’s get on with it. Our purpose. Eslina told you about that.” “You know about that?” “Of course. I was with you whole time, love.” “Then how long can you stay here, Pinch, on earth? What are you here to do exactly?” I was on my third cup of strong coffee and chicory, made thick with white cream and sweet with lots of raw cane sugar. “Well, from what I gather so far, and you have to understand that I am as new at being a ghost this as you are at being voodoo, is that I’m sort of your guide. As long as I’m busy, I can stay.” “What do you mean?” I asked, hoping she meant a long time. “Doing something; I got to be doing something. Not just sitting around spying on everybody. I live in the realm of the Holy now. How fortunate you are to have known me.” “Pinch, I saw you die. In my dreams. A ghost killed you, didn’t he? It?” “Oh, it was a he alright. I know that much, by the odor. Man, you’d think seeing what I am that I would remember who it was. Could’ve been another ghost, and maybe not. That’s for you to find out.” “I’d like to know why you were killed in the first place. We need to know a lot of whys before we find out the who. They have Jeremiah Jackson for the murder of the children and things went so crazy I don’t even know if anyone started looking for your murderer.” “He didn’t do it,” said Pinch. “Jeremiah Jackson is just a poor schmuck.” “How do you know?” “Two ways. First, I’m a good ghost; otherwise I wouldn’t be here to help you. So, good ghosts know the heart of a human. Jackson stole things, he gets all mixed up about God and the devil, I guess like all of you humans, but he does not have a wicked heart.” “Second,” I rushed in. “Think about it. Nine children dead, left on trolleys, no bruises even, and the poor fellow didn’t even have a car. He took the bus to work then cleaned the trolleys. Now how in hell was he to get all over the damned place with a kid and do all what he was supposed to do. The NOPD is not that stupid. God, what you find out reading an eddy-biddy article on page twenty-five of one of those weeklies.” “Well. That’s all I have to say and all I know about that. It’s now up to you. You are now the investigator. I’m dead. No time, no inclination to read newspapers.” “Can I get this straight? So if you do something and you are good, can you stay with me a long time?” “Yes. And as time moves on, the clearer I’ll get to you. But you need to stop thinking of events in terms of human time.” I walked out to the balcony of my apartment. I lived in the French Quarter, about three blocks from Royal Street. Midday smells infused the Saturday air. Mrs. Mendoza, my neighbor, was cooking sweet andouille sausage and onions. In the courtyard her two children sped around the bubbling fountain on big wheels. The trickling water grew louder, like an avalanche, and then again the mutated shattering glass played with the air. A blue mist rose up beyond the rooftops and scurried away like banished haunts, towards the Mississippi. A steamboat tooted a lonesome sound that shook me to my core. “Time is endless, Scrimp,” said Pinch. I turned toward her and smiled. “So we’ll still be partners.” “Sure thing.” she tinkled. “Them honky cops of yours and the big bad brothers of mine can’t find their own dicks in the dark, seems like.” “Now you’re sounding more like Pinch.” I laughed, reaching out to her, my left hand slowly moving to her shoulder and then dissolving into her body. Again fireflies danced. “Will it do that every time I touch you?” “Yes. But I think you’ll start to feel something one day. Substantial me.” “I think I already do.” “I’ll be near you just about all the time. I can get into places you can’t. Eavesdrop. What a team we’ll make. But I can’t fight for you. My body’ll just go through them. I am a limited entity on one hand, yet powerful on the other. A big contradiction. And I’m the thinker now. Did you ever think I’d become a philosopher of sorts?” “Don’t let it go to your head.” I whispered and moved my hand over her body. “You were always a philosopher of sorts; you don’t have to read Zeno to know the way of the world. We will be desperados.” “More like virtuous outlaws.” “I’m trying to understand you and me together now. In many of the great stories of the world, the loved one who dies returns to give comfort to those left behind. Most of the time the death is at a young age, like yours, like those of the children. This us reminds me of Dante and Beatrice. Dante loved her so much; he placed her as the driving force of his greatest work, The Divine Comedy. Beatrice was his prime mover, the one glorious thing that that could show humanity, as we traverse hell and purgatory then finally arrive in paradise, that miracles are possible.” She did not answer me but moved away from me and slid, like a snake shedding its old skin, out of the window and into the life of a radiant New Orleans morning. I was alone again, but not abandoned. * The question of my suspension became a moot point. For pure pleasure, I called Barb Boyd and resigned with one sentence: I quit, go to hell, Barb. What difference did it make, there was no way they were going to give me a second hearing. I was old news and easily forgotten. I had worked for the agency for five years, beat my head against the tainted wall of bureaucracy, managed on the scraps the politicians threw its way, and felt pride not in the agency or the system but in the eyes of a child when a hand of a kind and loving foster parent offered a home. And then the murders began and the more questions I asked, the more I was confronted with silence and the trilling of fear and out right neglect that didn’t even hint of the benign. I feel shame now that I didn’t make a fuss, call a reporter, and make them write articles to stir up the public. And in the end, would it have made a difference? I have to think so; and therein lay my supreme motivation for finding the real murderer of the children. And this I know now that Pinch is with me: That I love life again, and I have to stop them, bring them to justice, because one sin just begets another one and then another until no philosopher or theologian will ever be able to tell one from the other. Just one big fat sin and we might as well call it quits. I went to the public library on Loyola Avenue and searched through the Times-Picayune going back a year. I had given most of the news a perfunctory review, relying more on the information I heard at the department. Besides, I lived in a constant state of exhaustion simply getting the visits and investigations and paperwork done. Articles on the murders spread across the front page on the day each of the children were found and for weeks afterward. The articles were at first thorough, quoting Harlan Boudreaux and a variety of NOPD officers, sometimes the chief, sometimes investigators on the special victims squad. Pictures of the children, added information on the foster parents and the failure of the foster care system. And then of course there were the hearings. I didn’t see my picture anywhere. A few articles were sprinkled here and there noting the non-progress of the investigation and the efforts that were made to contain hysteria. Somebody was doing a good job. The clues were as sparse as sparse can be. Depleted and intentional if you really cared deeply and read between the lines. I recognized the consistency of the reporters’ names for the first five murders, then all of a sudden, a new name jumped out, and the articles became not only thin, but also badly written. So much for the public’s right to know. I had spent three semesters in political science classes with the same professor and I learned a lot from the guy; mostly this: that a conspiracy in a democracy is successful when the subversion of the public’s right to know is the first order of business. Right on, Professor Giles, right on. I made a note to call the first reporter and Professor Giles, and then pulled out the article on Pinch’s murder. The famous Cabildo Museum, where on December 20, 1803 the Louisiana Purchase took place, was the scene of the murder of social worker Earline Washington. The body was found in the Sala Capitular by a workman who had arrived early in order to prepare for a visit by several congressmen and delegates from the Middle East. Her face was cut, though she was still recognizable. Apparently a sword dating back to the Battle of New Orleans killed the social worker; it was still sticking up from her stomach. As yet, there is no motive for the crime. I looked through the paper for the following week and there was no more mention of Pinch’s murder. What an odd thing: this was quite a showy murder, one ripe for a good mystery novel or the tabloids. Poor kid from Ninth Ward becomes social worker, she’s beautiful, murdered just as suspect arrested for Foster Child Murders, friend of another social worker, place of death; it would have made a great story. Any good reporter could have milked the story for all it was worth. Perhaps the crime gave satisfaction to only one person, the murderer, and no great message was being sent by the method. But again, whence goes the power of the press? Pinch was right; we had become invisible. I went to the computer section of the library and had to wait about twenty minutes for a free spot. I relaxed on a worn orange burlap covered chair, the seat caved inward by years of butts, and flipped through several magazines that had been haphazardly thrown in a pile on the table next to me. Some were fashion magazines with mostly advertisements about how to stay gorgeous and sexy, get gorgeous and sexy, or get a gorgeous and sexy man. All the men and women, some children if you looked closely, were posed and pouting, bodies exhausted, skin flat, their eyes too large, black lashes shrouding inner hysteria. Someone had drawn a red circle around the photograph a young girl; she looked about fifteen, the entire background was white, and she wore only pink panties and a bra that pushed her tiny breasts upward. Her long brown hair was fastened to the top of her head and her shoulders were turned in an obviously seductive attitude. Very Lolita-like, very depraved. I Goggled “ritual murders” and got more than 45,000 hits. As I scrolled through the first few pages, I realized the most of the sites were thrill-sites, not even trying to give or gather information to stop horrible crimes, torture, and killings for pleasure. After about ten minutes, I logged off having learned very little, except that the world may have lost its capacity for grief, much less the urge to atonement. The Foster Child Murders were no doubt ritualistic and the one great but small tip-off lay in the article I had read days ago: that religious objects left on victims was a way for the murderer to cleanse them of sin. I knew I was making theories out of unmatched pieces of information. But too often the police try to fit the crime into a world that is logical, as though the puzzle had been put together by some deity and all that has happened was someone had taken a few pieces away. That is why they had arrested Jeremiah Johnson; it was a piece that fit so neatly into the puzzle. But I was looking at these murderers in a different way, after all I am voodoo and I see the world in pieces, there is no picture puzzle, only moral equations and rules and unseen motives and methods the cops have yet to dream of. I suppose that is why civilization, nay cities, falls so easily. We do not listen to our dreams, we expect only the expected; we have lost our imagination. I took a break for lunch and walked toward Mother’s on Poydras Street, anticipating a big crawfish etouffee omelet, and giving myself time to think. The traffic was light, the sun hot, the air still. I knew I was being followed everywhere I went, but I had yet to be afraid until now. I had sensed something hovering around me at the library, heard the shuffle of feet, the whispering. When I had looked down the cold isles, I had seen a young man and woman kissing. And then there were the constant shadows that vibrated here and there, filtering through and around the stacks like haunted scholars fearful of burning books. That had been a somewhat comforting feeling. But this, this was real, tangible, human. I saw from the corner of my eye the forward movement of a black car; the faster I walked, the more the car moved to stay just at my back. I carried no weapon; except for a Swiss pocketknife I had found when I slipped on the only other pair of black jeans I owned. I fingered the folded knife and knew it was just about useless except as some kind of charm. Then car moved forward enough so that I could see the driver’s window that was masked in darkness and reflected my own disheveled image. The window slid slowly downward, stopped, moved downward, then stopped again, then finally a big head and arm were thrust toward me and I felt a hand seize my right wrist. I looked at one of the big men from Festo and Sons. His face was aglow with grease and laughter. He pulled at me in little jerks and said: be very careful, bitch. Remember what done happened to your nigger buddy. And then he released me and I saw pinned to his white shirt a large gold medallion with the red, white and blue image of the Virgin Mary. The car sped away and I still clutched at the knife balled in my fist and stuffed in my pocket as though I had been paralyzed by the assault on my body. Why kill Pinch, why kill the children, why come after me? The pieces are making a puzzle that wasn’t. * “What’s on your mind, Scrimp? Out with it,” I had gotten the omelet as take out and sat on my bed, the spread covering my feet, as I ate and told Pinch about my day. “Before I go on and on about what I’m thinking, tell me what do ghosts do all day.” “Well, I have to get to know the lay of this new New Orleans. Most of what I am is instinct; I suppose that’s how you humans would understand it. But it’s a new way of seeing, of making peace with the other ghosts. You wouldn’t believe how utterly wondrous things are from my new perspective. Like being in another zone. And sad, so very sad. Such crimes against humanity and for very little. Nothing, really.” “Are all ghosts good?” “Hell no,” said Pinch and she laughed and the tinkle of glass reverberated like we were encased in an echo chamber. “We need to find out who killed the kids. I think your murder and theirs is somehow connected. Maybe the same people. And some thugs with badges of the Virgin Mary are following me. I see another murder coming Pinch! But I can’t see where or who. The image pricks at my mind. I won’t be able to stop it will I?” “I don’t think so. We’re just getting to know ourselves again. That’s the sad part. To know and not be able to make all things right.” “If it happens again, then they will know that Jeremiah Jackson isn’t the murderer.” “Or maybe they’ll do what you would expect: say he has an accomplice. No use in putting themselves down.” “Well then, we best move it along then,” I said, my voice was shaking, uneven. “Are you afraid of your own death?” “Weren’t you afraid to die before you did?” I asked . “Yes, all too human. All humans fear death even when they want it. So, anyway, how do you propose to find the murderers since the police and everyone else haven’t found the right ones?” I told her about my research at the library, and how when I got back to my apartment I called the reporter and the line was disconnected and the college told me that Professor Giles had gone to Rome to teach and about the guys who followed me down Poydras. “Well, before all we had to work with was the system, the man. It was all we had to work with. Now we have ourselves.” “Right!” I yelled, jumping from the bed. “You see, you’re right there with me. I think this is how I fulfill my purpose, have some kind of life that means something.” “You always had a purposeful life, love. You just were... what should I call it? Constrained.” Pinch threw her head back and the sound that came from her was like tiny church bells chiming in unison. “We’ll get along now!” she jingled. “Well, it sounds like my death gave you your opportunity.” “Oh, Pinch, I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I’m sorry.” “I’m kidding you, friend. I’m all for it. What a time we will have!” I watched as Pinch’s form turned to shadows and rainbow and I heard the click of raindrops on the tin roof of the building. The sun was still shining, the sky cerulean blue, the air as pure as a baby’s first moment of life. My friend the ghost turned in a brown whirl like deep chocolate in a blender and then she slowed and settled in the rocking chair. She smiled at me and her form exuded an aroma that bent my very soul. Time stopped and then moved forward. “Pinch. What were you doing in the Cabildo?” I asked. My throat was dry, my voice frog-like. She cocked her head to the left then to the right in a smooth movement. “You called me, love. Asked me to meet you there. Said you found out who killed little Thomas Patton. So, I went out to meet you.” I walked over to the window. The sun was moving below the rooftops. I puffed my breath onto the glass, making steam, and wrote the letters P and S with my finger. I felt Pinch next to me, saw another puff of steam on the window, then sparkling mist and I heard tinkling laughter. “It wasn’t me, you know that of course.” I said. “Of course I know. When I came back, as a ghost, this thing that I am now, I wasn’t even surprised. Dang, it was like this is finally what I was supposed to be. You can’t imagine how free I am, Scrimp.” “Maybe you’re an angel,” I said as I tried to feel her hair. I saw an image but felt nothing but light air. “Maybe, just maybe, there is justice.” “Justice? Oh, I don’t know about that. This is just the way it is. You see all the world is really magic of many kinds.” “Religion?” “That and imagination.” “There’s a reason all this is happening to us, isn’t there?” “Oh sure. Like we were meant to be together. I told you before, Scrimp. You have the sight. The power to do good. And well, hell, think about it. Here we are planning to solve crimes in this corrupt city.” “Okay, I think I’m following. But, just come out with it. What do you know that I don’t?” “You are a go between for the living and the dead. C’est moi, eh?” she laughed.” But you have a power that you’re afraid to look at square in the face.” “I’m having a time with you and me like this still. I need more energy than I have now.” “It’s like they say on the streets. You ain’t got control of sometin’ done done.” “Are you afraid?” I asked. “That’s not part of what I am anymore. There’s an old saying in the world that I now come from: Never fear those whom you do not love.” A prickle touched the back of my neck. The confidence that had been building in me melted a little and I looked at Pinch with my old feeling of caution. Her form threw a shadow on the wall and I remembered a line from a story, something about our being shades of ourselves. “Well then, I guess you’re right,” I said. “It’s just the way it is. Let it come.” I pushed the curtains away from the window and leaned against the casement. “Look out the window at the horizon. The skyline is as varied in hues and texture as this city. We live among the living and the dead. Mostly, we can no longer tell which is which.” “I can.” said Pinch. “You read mostly stuffy books, but some good crime novels. I used to like the quick reads, Himes, Mosley, always lots of dead black people. Remember: it’s important to find out what the dead know, as well as the living.” The tenth child was found on the trolley that made its last stop in front of the now deserted Kress Department Store. Kress had folded, and armies of trolley-riding old women had lost jobs they had worked for over fifty years. The child was named Theresa Guidry. She was not yet a year old and a foster child since the age of two months. Her body reposed on the back seat, wrapped in a powder-blue blanket. Sesame Street characters danced on her tiny yellow sneakers that were made for a three year old. A small pearl rosary wrapped her left hand. Her picture was on the front page of all the newspapers, even USA Today. Now the eyes of the world were on New Orleans. The reporter wrote a poetic piece that would have been better left for a novel rather than an investigative report of a crime. The new ME went mute, saying that he hadn’t finished his autopsy and again the hobbled story, as though this had all happened during the Middle Ages. My anger and motivation turned to outrage pure and simple and so I started with the children. Sometimes you have to go back in order to go forward no matter how painful the process. Someone had to do what the authorities would not do and I had nothing to lose except my very soul. I am a list-maker. I write my lists at midnight, when the muddled discoveries of the day vanish and I can make sense of my world. The act itself, the product, the black ink on a white page, the sequence of numbers seems to give my life a direction, define my day. I have done this since I was about twelve, when I would waken in the cool mornings, and knew that my survival was up to me. That Grandma and Grandpa were dead, that Mama had long gone to a faraway place in her head that no one could follow 1. Get water from the bayou and boil it. 2. Wash face. 3. Wash private areas after going to the bathroom. 4. Brush teeth 5. Fix lunch (baloney and pop rouge on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Peanut butter on Tuesday and Thursday). 6. Make sure Mama knows that the robin gumbo is in the icebox. 7. Leave for school by six-thirty. My lists would go on until item fifty-three or more, or until I knew that I could finally lay my head on a pillow because Mama was asleep dreaming of God knew what. By the age of fifteen, I had convinced myself that my only exit from the life of necessary lists was finishing school, or Mama’s death. I finished school; Mama died; I still make lists. I would have confessed my last thoughts about Mama to our parish priest, hoping for temporary redemption. But I knew then, as I do now, that I would think the same thoughts over and over again, so why bother. My guilt persists to this day, although the more I have worked with children, the more I understand that my feelings are natural given the circumstances of my life back then. Perhaps my work is an attempt at making amends; perhaps I simply want to do something good before I bite the dust, disappear with the winds, hopefully to join Pinch. We each redeem ourselves in whatever way we can. So, it was midnight and I made a list of the murdered children. Marisa Stone: Age six. White. Abandoned at six months. Natural parents never found. With foster parents John and Salina Falcona for five years. Adoption in process at time of death. Cece McNamara. Age three. White. Sexual abuse by mother’s boyfriend. Taken from mother. Father unknown. Foster parents Estelle and Mark Jones. With FP six months at time of death. Jamie Michael Mendez: Age seven. Extreme physical abuse for five years before taken from natural parents. Foster parents Helen and Elliot Myers. Extraordinary changes in child for the better after only one year. Natural parents signed papers giving up legal custody two weeks before death. I placed. Paul John Salino: Age twelve. African-American. Neglect. Found outside of crack house. Homeless. Selling sexual favors to survive. Foster parent Margaret Jones, single. Loving relationship formed after two-year struggle. Paul in school and on honor role. Request for adoption by Ms. Jones at time of death. Shamara Jackson: Age two. African-American. Cocaine baby. Neglect. Starvation factor. Foster parents Taala and Frank Simons for six months. Natural mother in rehab and expected to resume care of child at time of death. Thomas Patton: Age eight. White. Physical abuse. Natural parents dispute removal and suing the city (father a judge). Foster parents Harriet and Jason Zimmerman. Returned to natural parents three days before (strings pulled) at time of death. Delia Smith: Age ten. Mixed race. Sexual abuse by multiple men. Mother jailed re: complicity. Foster parent George and Martha Mannheim. Mother gave up legal custody. Adoption pending at time of death. Oprah Jones: African-American. Age eight. Neglect. Found on street. No natural parents found. Severe physical disabilities – clubfoot, blind in one eye. Foster parent Linda Becker. Adoption papers signed day before death. Tasha Clay: Mixed race. Age ten. Neglect. Found in apartment alone. Mother unknown. Father sent to state hospital for schizophrenia (tent. diagnosis). Foster parents Cynthia and Evan Hebert. Fostered since age eight. Good progress. Won essay contest on good citizenship (in papers) week before death. (Harlan resigned after this autopsy). I placed. Theresa Guidry: White. Age 10 months. Physical abuse by both parents. Fostered For eight months. Multiple foster parents in short time. Difficult baby; would not sleep. Day before death foster parents notified SS they could not cope. I had looked through all of the files before I left the agency. I didn’t remember anything specific that would lead me to suspect the foster parents. In several cases, I would not have agreed with the placement and wanted to know how the children had been abducted from either the home or other area where they should have been watched. I had met five of these children, and had directly placed Tasha and Jamie, so I was most anxious about their cases. What had I not seen? Didn’t I do a thorough workup of the FPs? When I read over the names of three other children, something clicked. If the FPs did not have something to do with the deaths, there was at least something off kilter in those cases. I drew a circle around numbers one, four, and six. Why? One and four had no pasts that were ever traced; it was as though they had simply appeared on the earth. And number six child? Who could have had the power to take a child away from a prominent judge and who then had the power to give the child back? He who taketh away giveth back? Now that will be a difficult course to steer. For this one, Pinch would definitely be needed. I was in no mood for political jockeying in the halls of government nor did I want to be alone when I questioned the most venerable Judge Ignatius Patton. And Thomas Patton was the little boy about whom the phantom me had summoned Pinch the night she was murdered in the Cabildo. I had already talked with the Myers and I did not sense anything that I could learn from them. So I added Tasha to my list, making four visits to start with. Start with what the dead can tell you, let them get to know you, trust you, and then they will speak. Pinch told me I had to find out what I was made, for only then could I proceed to find the murderers. So I had to go back into places I had refused to visit for so long, at least in my own mind and heart. Our pasts, a great writer once said, should open slowly and in full splendor like the feathers of a peacock. * When my father decided to disappear into the American Unknown, he left very little behind. There’s me, a silent woman who was my mother, and her parents, whose lineage goes so far back into the Acadiana swamp that, even if I tried, I would never be able to trace it. But I sometimes ask myself if I want to know where my blood comes from and into which bayou it flows. Is there anything left in this crowded and vain world that can still be described as exotic, strange, even awe-inspiring? I want to scream every time I hear kids tell me that they ran away from home or their foster homes, took whatever kind of drug, simply because they were bored. This world is so full, so rich, so vulgar. How is it that we have become a bored civilization? Numb to faith and the sheer necessity of loving. The Bible, Pinch once told me, declares that boredom is a sin. So maybe I have a ghost gene in me, as well as a vision gene. Well, Pinch is already my sister: we are the same in spirit, in common love of our own existence, however fragile the cold ground on which we walk, the thick air that envelops us, the vague spirits we seek. I think now, when I look at what Pinch is, that we have great adventures ahead of us. We need only hold on to what is good. What my father did leave me is tangible in form, ephemeral in substance. Books, three wooden boxes hued for the transport of tomatoes on the now rusted railroad tracks that run from South Louisiana near Abbeville then into Texas, where the rails are now blunted by exhausted time. I used to eat those Creole tomatoes for breakfast, lunch, and supper, the sores on my mouth expanding with each dripping bite of the tart fruit, and Daddy sucking on green pickled globes in between swigs of his swamp whiskey. Smiling at me with furrowed eyebrows that used to remind me of big, black caterpillars. I still have those boxes; they are polished and lacquered so that the red and green of the tomatoes are clear and vivid; they give me the connection with my past that I need. The books are dog-eared, stained by dark chicory coffee mixed with Jim Beam, a treat Daddy said he needed because reading was the art of a gentleman, and for some brief moments of his ordinary life, he could at least act the part. The aroma of his life is still so strong on those books that I know him by gently pushing my face to the open pages, anticipating the gasp I know will come. To inhale that kick he must have felt when he downed that first big, necessary swallow, the one that he knew would get him through the night and beyond the first ten pages so that he would finally lose himself in another place, another time, fit to be the man I think he may have wanted to be. Three boxes of pulp novels published in the forties and fifties, a few on the edge of the sixties, when Daddy’s southern world would change in a cloud of bloody rage. He never talked about the killings that took place at our doorstep, or gave a hint in his nightly whiskey-filled ramblings about his political leanings. But I guessed, or made up a story about what he believed in that clinging-soul way that children do. I have faith with all my heart that my Daddy was a hero. I think he went off with the Freedom Riders and his bones lie deep in the swamp near Breaux Bridge, or under a pile of red dirt in Mississippi, too deep to be found by digging hands. This is what I imagine: One day a bulldozer will scoop up the earth, a hand will appear, and dangling on the bone of his ring finger will be the gold ring, its purple stone glimmering in the sunlight. Only then will the world know, and I will be sure in my head, that Raymond DuBois was a graduate of a small southern college and not some ignorant coonass. A child’s memory is a jaded thing. After he was gone, I read every one of his books twice, some, three times. Of course, I loved Hammett the most. Where Daddy had gotten copies of Smart Set magazine is a mystery. There are no label addresses on them, and we lived so far out near Henderson Swamp that I couldn’t see that any of the local grocery stores would carry words from strange places. I used to bring the mail back from Gaston’s Grocery and Emporium on Friday afternoons, the white oyster shell gravel cutting into my bare feet, sweat soothing the mosquito bite welts and poison ivy scabs that dotted my legs. Me running past the Hulin boys’ shack so that their jeers and ici, petit, you want some, eh! would be over quickly. I just wanted to take Grandpa’s cane knife and cut their balls off. It wasn’t until I set off to New Orleans and started college courses that I appreciated the collected works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, which I found in the third box on a cold Louisiana night, when I heard my silent mother sobbing in her bedroom that led out to the back gallery and the lonesome swamp. I saw Mama read only once, a free copy of one of those true romance magazines that you could send for when you bought a twenty-pound sack of rice. Under the weeping willow that hung over Mouton’s Coulee, a bunch of us kids passed it around, laughing at our developing sexuality and imagining what really happened to Haley after she went into the bedroom with her brother-in-law. Maybe Daddy had brought his books back from the army, accumulated as he got what little payback for having his leg shot off in Korea; or maybe they were delivered on the train, already packed in the boxes by someone who knew he needed the books, or who waited for him at the end of the railroad line the night he disappeared. I suppose I should have hated him for leaving me, for repudiating my childhood, perhaps for escaping to a more adventurous world. But I was better at storytelling rather than rancor; it just hurt so much less, even brought with it a sense of hope. Making up stories, making up a life. A child’s memory is a fractured thing. My father, my mother; I had a family once. And it took the death and rebirth of my best love to make me remember this. I had hardened my heart; Pinch had told me a couple years ago. So now I remember sometime, somewhere in the dark swamp that is my ancestry, I was given a gift: Sight and a power to affect the course of evil. Think, Hannah, think; make it come back fully, that night, a baptism without a Catholic priest. A little man, Mama, the hallowed ring of destiny. Is this all childhood’s flagrant memories? No, Pinch is the evidence that anything is possible. So I will go with the events, find the murderers, save the children, reverse the advance of evil. I will do as much as my humanness allows. I have walked around in the darkness of my own imperfect spirit and have seen beyond the threshold. The call to act is the memory of my own childhood and the instruments that were given me. I am Gran Met; this I accept. “Jesus, help me,” I whispered, and massaged the scapular that still rested on my heart. * We had gone for a stroll along the river and I told Pinch the whole story of my past remembered. I had left so much out when she was my human friend; I had not fully trusted that friendship. I was never a mean person, but I held people at arms length and more. Besides, to me they were mostly dull, conversations went on and on about children and jobs, and buying this and that, useless paraphernalia of stunted lives, and the food that was supposed to make human conversation was both bland and unexciting. And then came Pinch and she was interesting and different and spoke with a true light in her eyes, an earnestness that made me feel important. Now here she was a ghost; I really know how to pick ‘em. To those who passed me, I was talking to myself; just another nutcase in this twisted city. “Scrimp. Your father gave you knowledge, your mother blood,” sighed Pinch, her breathing touching my cheeks. I longed to hold a firm warm hand, look out over the Mississippi, at the muddy waters that had carried life to this city that still sustains its economy and way of life, that accepts our pollution with groaning agony only a few wish to hear. The Port of New Orleans has been built over and over again to satisfy our wants and needs. What, really, have we given back to this poor, tired old man river? “Makes you wanna cry, doesn’t it?” asked Pinch. “Yeah, sure does. I read once that the river is the way to a nation’s soul. Ports and cities feed the heart, opens the body politic to the rest of the world.” “Philosophize all you want, Scrimp. That port you’re looking at fed this country a big damned dinner called slavery. Stop fucking romanticizing it all the time,” she hissed and then floated away from me. The sun hit her straight on, forming a steaming shadow that hightailed it along the shoreline of the Mississippi and straight through the bodies of a gaggle of schoolchildren. She turned away and headed into the city laughing at the screams from the terrified children as they felt the impartial hand of death for the first time. I had just learned that ghosts, at least my ghost, had little patience with the living. I looked up and down the river and then across to Algiers. Lights twinkled, the Canal Street Ferry labored toward Mardi Gras World, jam-packed with tourists and partygoers. A tugboat horn wailed, the sound drifting over the night and then it came again and again, and I thought of the sacred rams’ horns that were used to warn the Assyrians of the coming of the barbarians. It was a clear night and I could see for miles. Who owned this place, how much money was invested, how many nations, what had they all to lose as the news about another child’s death was broadcast? Those in power should have pushed for an all out investigation; they should be hounding the NOPD, the mayor’s office. Money really ran this city, all cities. It didn’t make sense. And where was the outrage from the religious organizations, especially the Catholic Church. The land along the river and about a mile or so inward represented untold wealth. It began when New Orleans won the rights to the 1984 World’s Fair. Prime property, besides being one of the biggest gateways in and out of the United States. Huge tankers passed each other in the night, large white-crested waves parting the brown water into an imperial V. Some of the freighters were getting ready to leave port and a few were docked. I could make out words and letters from so many places of the world: Greece, Middle Eastern countries, Italy, China, New Zealand. I couldn’t shake the feeling that instead of moving outward, growing, becoming part of the larger world, New Orleans was turning inward, eating its own flesh, the flesh of its people. Something, someone was trying to isolate the city by spinning a web of corruption and isolation, and anyone trying to get in or out would be tomorrow’s meal; a city cannibalizing itself. Great civilizations fall when they ignore the plangent warnings, when they refuse to look in the mirror in fear of seeing nothing. No hope of romanticizing that. * With the situation Pinch and I were in, I decided to take Hammett’s advice now: in real life the detective may face altogether too many clues. I needed to work diligently to know what was real, and what was a figment of my vision. As far as the advice given by St. Tom and old Kant: good is good, evil is evil. Welcome to a universal, timeless moral struggle. We are all fallen angels, pushed off the head of that pin. My job was to find out who was doing the pushing. I ran through the names of the children and my conclusions as Pinch sat listening, her body floating above the floor in restful repose. “Look,” said Pinch. “I don’t know nothing about Hammett or shamett. I can tell you about Shaft, but hell, somebody like him comes busting into this investigation, he’d be lost. Dead kids just wouldn’t be his bag. Honestly, Scrimp, you go off on too many tangents.” “It’s not a tangent to settle our initial direction, plot our course.” “Okay, I sort of see your point. But you’re human and I suspect your not going back to the agency. How much money do you have? You know how much it takes to feed you.” I laughed at the normalcy of our conversation. “Number one, you don’t cost anything, and I’m not trying to be cute. Number two; I have about ten thousand in my savings. Remember my grandparents left me rights to the gas drilling on their farm.” “You keep the farm?” “Absolutely. You’ve been there. It’s a piece of heaven away from this dismal world. The lease runs out next year, and I’m sure as hell not renewing it. Assholes can get their gas somewhere else.” “Scrimp, you sure about all of this? I’m afraid for you sometimes. Are you up to this?” “Goddammit, Pinch! Whatever is going on, whatever, I’m gonna get the bastards that killed the kids, killed you, or my life isn’t worth even the crap we walk through every morning in this city! Instead of being so impatient with me, how about a little encouragement.” “Mon Dieu! Take it easy, Scrimp. I’ll try to go at your pace, okay?” “I sure as hell hope so,” I said. “But for now all I know to do is follow the human clues and believe what my still indistinct premonitions tell me. Given the circumstances, you know, all that’s happened is just a few days; I think I’m doing pretty good. I know more than the cops.” “Maybe. You’re really trying, they’re not.” I had exhausted myself, had needed to expend something in me. I sat in the wicker rocker and pushed off into the comfort of movement. I felt Pinch’s hand on my shoulder; it was a gentle weight, momentary and cool. I looked up and saw that her body had become an acute form, brown-hued like a thoroughbred racehorse, muscles rippling, elegant, strong. “How many glasses of anger you intend to drink today, Scrimp?” she asked. I felt a releasing sorrow, one I hadn’t felt, ever. Tears fell onto my cheeks like an involuntary dream, like when an orgasm seizes you just before you wake. “As many as it takes to end this horror. I look at the list of the children and it’s all I can do not do break into a million shards of glass. Let myself just shatter, let the fragments of who I am rent through the winding sheet that’s covering up the crimes. And if I feel like this, it is just unimaginable how a parent must feel when a child is no more.” “To foster: nurture, cherish, take care of. Parents of murdered children are probably the loneliest people in the world.” “Yes,” I said. “Yes. And our culture just about shuns them, focuses on the killers, as though they were the important elements even when they have been caught. We live in a time when methods of death, no matter how horrendous, are visual entertainment. Slasher movies, can you imagine?” I held her cold hand, rubbing it against my cheek. I was going into a place that was pleasant but full of voices still shouting at me. “Pinch, love,” I whispered. “What do you need?” “Need? I have no needs. I have wants, compulsions, a burning in my brain. It is all one thing: satisfaction. Plain, hell-bent satisfaction.” “Vengeance is yours?” “No. It is the satisfaction that I’ll get in seeing the faces of the killers when they know that they’ve been had, when I can see right through them, my eyes as clean-cut as the sword he used to go straight through me. I want to see fear in all their eyes. I want to hear echoing cries, a chorus chanting on high for Mother.” “Look, we need to find out why you were killed, why Patton’s son, why me calling you, me being the fall guy here. What did you know, oh mighty dead one, that you can tell me?” “When we go out to see the Judge at his house, we need to stop at my old home. I want you to do something for me. I have to go now.” I guess I had to get used to Pinch just disappearing on me, though it put me on edge when she did it. Perhaps it was her way of giving me space, time to lay the pieces in front of me, accomplish some of the things she could not. So it struck me when her comments came back, about the killer knowing he’d been had. I think that those who murder feel a certain omnipotence, a sense that by killing they do not have to die themselves. In the days of human sacrifice, the high priests, the gods, whoever had convinced the society that it had a one-way communication with heaven, always called upon the young as sacrificial lambs, whose pure blood would bring rain or good crops or just plain old you’re not gonna die too mentality. But in this crooked world, when good is bad and murder is entertainment? I stopped, trying to sort out where I was going. Why kill foster children? Ritual killings? Sacrifice? Religious component. Kill the bad ones; cleanse the world. Religious fanaticism I believe is a type of terrorism; it twists the mainstream of religious thoughts, rules by fear, and in the end, must do something so extreme, offer something so unattainable, that the demented among us are drawn into a web of madness that is not only criminal and pathological but absent redemption. * Pinch rode the St. Charles Line for two days and two nights, convinced that dead souls beckoned her. She told me that she could feel the warm bodies of the dead children covering the seat on which they once lay in stillness. “Look, love, I’m tired of floating around while you’re getting all of the nooks and crannies in your brain in order. We need to get moving. It’s been over a week and you’re the one said something’s going to happen again.” It was after eight on a Monday morning and the noise outside of my second-story window was almost deafening. Horns, yelling, jack hammers pounding into the pavement, and an occasional laugh that bounced up and into our office. I wasn’t sure if it was human. Then, the aroma of bacon and eggs and grits hit me so hard, I swung my chair towards the window and leaned out, smelling for the source of the food. “It’s George’s Diner on the corner,” said Pinch. “You that hungry?” “How’d you know?” I asked, as I turned and pushed myself up.” “Heightened senses. You’ll get that too, constant hunger, being friends with a ghost.” “Constant? It was pretty bad before. I’ll go down in a minute if I can wait. But let’s go over what we’ve learned so far during my vacation.” “And my permanent one.” “Yeah. What did you find out from the police files, Pinch?” I asked as I took out a tablet and pen I had borrowed from the Holiday Inn down the block. “Ready.” “You’re not going to write anything down,” said Pinch. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and I could see a shimmering outline of her swinging legs, like the silver lining of a cloud on a hot summer evening. I put the tablet and pen on the floor feigning annoyance. “Write things down, you leave a trace. Well, that’s what I found out trying to read the police files. Not much there. Either they’re illiterate or whoever investigated the cases is purposely leaving information out.” “How did you turn the pages?” “ I can move some things a little. You know how the NOPD is about their files. I can’t figure if it’s because they won’t or can’t write things down.” “Well, so much for that. We’re not getting much from the living, that’s for sure. But I talked to three cops. I was really surprised then even talked to me. I’m not sure they keep up with what’s happening outside their own division. They all know me.” “Maybe they just don’t care much; off the radar. Did they ever show much enthusiasm for what we did?” “Most did, at least before these murders. Next time come with me when I talk to them.” “I was busy.” I settled back in my chair, the pleasure of the squeaking from the old wicker moving up my legs, and I put my hands behind my head, closing my eyes so that the memory and scent of it all would come back clear as the day it was done. Good cop, John Conrad. Been with NOPD for five years. Homicide. Interesting choice for this big an investigation since he’s from New York and is essentially a rookie. Why put him on such a tough case?” “They’re trying to avoid more bad PR. Good looking. Can’t be accused of inside favoritism. You know the script: We are open to outside ideas. Sure.” “Right. He has the softest eyes I ever seen. Smooth skin and smile that could melt a block of ice.” “He’s supposedly gay, Scrimp. Very stereotypical too. He was one of the cops came to the scene of the first murder. Kid six years old. Went to live with a white family out in Araby. Remember? How the kid got all the way to the St. Charles line is a mystery yet. Nothing in the files I could get to about that. Anyway, this Conrad fellow, he’s leaning over the body, I’m trying to get information I can tell the foster parents, and he’s crying, his shoulders shaking. I think he’s was puttin’ on.” “Faking it, uh?” “Anyway, he told me that what he knows of the investigation was tightly under wraps, but that they were getting more information every day. I got this out of him, though. Remember Theresa had a rosary in her hand? Do you remember anything specific like that with the other kids?” “Not so blatant. But yes. The police files for every kid, all ten, noted that a religious ‘artifact’ was found on the bodies. Just like you mentioned before.” Pinch jumped off the bed and walked to the window. She stood where a sunbeam had been warming the thick green carpet. The ray of light parted. “What’s the difference between Catholicism and the stock and trade religions and voodoo or witches or Zen or all the alternative religions?” “Don’t forget the old and new paganism movements. Even the armed forces are making room for that one. But the differences? I see them just about all the same in their inability to accept the world for what it is and change it for the better,” I said. “Shit, Scrimp. I’m not asking you a theological question. Investigate, dammit!” “Fine. Conrad said this to me: there’s too many people vying for God and the devil’s attention.” “I know what he meant. He’s smarter than most, I’d say. The artifacts on the kids were all Catholic.” “How many of the kids went to Catholic foster parents?” “I don’t know. Can’t be all. Rosaries, scapulars, one even had a bottle with a cross on it filled with water. Probably holy water. Except it had a yellow tint to it.” I went to the window and stood next to Pinch. The heat from the sun and her body were almost too much for me to stand. I walked away, thinking. “Innocence,” I whispered and walked back to my chair. “You know my vision thing? It’s happening in a different way now.” “What do you mean?” asked Pinch, her voice now far away, like she was thinking of something else. “Conrad smelled like red beans and rice. Probably what he had for lunch. But I swear I could tell you how much hot sauce he had put in it, my sense was so strong.” “Red beans and rice. Great clue. Go eat, Scrimp.” “Yes, it is. Yes, I will. But listen: because you know what I smelled on the other cops?“ “Oh, oh. This is going to be good.” “Lila Broussard. Her odor – it reminded me of late fall in New England, the kind of days when the northern winds ruffle the trees and the last golden leaves spiral to the ground, faltering and taking in and exhaling their last primordial breath. We had a very interesting conversation, though the whole scene was off kilter. Like I was in some kind of dream and she already knew her lines.” I stopped, closed my eyes and told Pinch the story: The back of the police station looks like an old loading dock to me. There are always crates and beat up cars scattered about, as though a giant had lifted them up from a colossal cargo ship and flung them to the ground right in that spot. Broken glass and cigarette butts and even used condoms are strewn all over the cracked asphalt. I once got a flat tire there. It’s a hard place, and it’s one of the things that makes me believe that being a cop is as difficult as being a social worker. Except they have guns, they have the force of the law behind them, a large and tightly braided buddy system, a fraternity. No fraternity for social workers. I always think how I would feel being arrested for a crime I did not commit and was brought there. I drove in slowly, maneuvering to avoid an object that would slice my tires. Luckily, it was early; maybe the shifts were changing. I pulled behind the garbage bin so when someone came out of the main doors they wouldn’t see me right off. Then I noticed a movement on the platform, something silver, and then I saw her. Lila Broussard, one of the first women to make captain, I think it was. Or detective. I waved and called her name. She stopped and waved back and came down to meet me. I had only seen her in person once before, and she was changed. She looked younger, yet her hair had gone gray, almost white. She was smiling and it was really nice. I put out my hand but she just kept on smiling; she did not offer me her hand. “You going on or off?” I asked her. “Oh, it just seems like I’m always on now days. What brings you here?” “I’m wondering if you could kind of help me out, you know, on the QT?” “You’ve had a hard time lately, Hannah DuBois. Heard about the inquisition thing. It’s rough, I know. Went through one myself back in ’86. And then poor Earline. I really like her. A credit, she sure is a credit.” “Yes. But, you see, I placed a couple of those kids and no one seems to be looking into Earline’s murder. Since I’m on the outs anyway, I thought I’d just ask a few questions.” “Until somebody tells you to stop. You all be careful. What can I do you for, honey.” “Where you involved in any of the foster child murder case investigations? What can you tell me that may not have been in the papers or the files?” “Files. Shit. Forget that,” she shifted a little and looked beyond me, as though she had heard someone call her name. Then she looked at my face and blinked. “I worked on Cece McNamara’s case. Poor baby. She was so little; her face was as blue as the little dress she wore. The killer had wrapped her in a blanket, just like all the other ones. A lime green blanket with little animals dancing all around. I will always remember that because I bought my son one of those for Christmas one year. Poor sweet baby.” “Do you recall the ME or anyone else mentioning her background? Like, did they connect it in any way as in similar motives?” Again she smiled and this time shook her head as though the whole world should have been shamed at the idea of this child’s end. She’s one of those people that can say a lot by an expression. “He said: another one of those throwaway children. Throwaway children.” “Who said that,” I asked. I was getting excited. “Who, Lila?” “Chief.” “Are you religious, Lila?” “Honey, as can be. And yes, I know about the religious items on the babies. Cece had a little medal pressed into her chest, as though it had grown into her skin. The Virgin Mary. Imagine taking our Mother’s sacredness in vain.” “What was the reaction in the department? I mean, how did they plan the investigation?” “They be talking to the monks off St. Charles,” she laughed. “The Diocese people?” Then she looked beyond me again and I heard a jazz band start up and followed her stare and saw nothing but the BFI garbage truck rumbling towards us and straight for my car. I turned to tell Lila to wait for a minute so I could move my car, but she was gone. Pinch had not moved while I told her about Lila, but she had that old Cheshire cat grin wavering over her mutating face. “Then I had the unfortunate opportunity to talk to Flynn Stanis. Neo-Nazi changes his blues to browns every night, I suppose. Wouldn’t even talk to me at first. But that’s telling. I asked if he was still deep into the investigation, if he had been able to find anything out that his buddies didn’t. That hit him. Hates women, but still wants to impress them. Said that he found out that all the kids had been abducted in public places, that witnesses said they had seen nothing or anyone suspicious. ‘Unusual in all ten cases’ he said.” “That guy’s such a creep,” snorted Pinch, a sound that came from her like a tugboat horn. “He used to beat cokeheads and drunks out at the projects just for fun. Off duty and on. Him and his gang used to come out every Saturday night, pretending they were looking for drug deals. Hell, I think they were deep into the sale end if not direct dealers themselves. They beat up one kid so bad, he had to stay in Charity over a month. Got brain damaged and sent up to the psych floor, if that makes any sense. I tried to help his mama find him after he was released. I tried everything. He had simply vanished. He probably just lay down up river and died trying to find peace. Social work and messing with filthy Nazis. The police department knows about Stanis’s Neo-Nazi connections. I saw the notation in his file while you were talking to him. I just had to look.” “The Neos are all around us, Pinch. In the police, government, in the suburbs, maybe next door here in the city, in the Quarter. They’re punks and skins and politicians and businesspeople. Some probably attend the opera, seek the Holy Grail and sit on the boards of some organization or charity.” “You think they’re connected?” “As much as the Mafia. They beat up rich white people as well as poor blacks. They’re all thugs. But, no. Neither group does kids. You can’t intimidate innocence. I smelled death and blood on Flynn, sure as I’m sitting here and you’re standing there. But it was old, old as the city streets, old as the sin of hate.” Something was bugging me; a phrase I had read somewhere, about types of evil. “Well, so far we know that there’s religion and very bad humans behind the murders. Not just one sick bastard.” And then it came to me and I shouted: “A hierarchy of evil; that’s what it is. Not one, but many. ” “A conspiracy? Why kill innocent kids?” said Pinch, twirling her arms above her head, a blast of cold air circled the room. “Indeed, Watson, indeed. Isn’t that the point of all this?” “Yes. I think I would like to talk to Lila again, though. I think she knows more than she said, or had time to tell me. She’s been on the force over twenty years. Being one of the first women, breaking ground, I guess she’s someone to admire.” “Scrimp, Scrimp, Scrimp,” sang Pinch. “Don’t you know yet? When’s your voodoo eyes gonna kick in, love? Lila was raped and stabbed two days after Cece died. Lila is a ghost.” My heart knocked away in my chest and the emptiness of my stomach screeched and groaned. “I should’ve known. From now on, I’m going to pay attention, try harder, work at this thing I am. And think of it, Cece was only the second child to die.” Pinch wanted to investigate more of New Orleans with her new senses. I needed lots of food and I was tired. But I wanted to talk to more people and nighttime was better. Tongues were loose at night. I told Pinch I was going down for food and would meet her at Chang’s Bar and Grill at seven. I got a take-out from George’s and ate the egg sandwich with blackened ham as I walked towards Canal Street hooking onto Common just as the trolley rumbled to a stop. I jumped on, the conductor rang the bell, and the rickety carriage jolted forward, the friction of iron wheel on iron tracks sending a shudder through the passengers and then the overhead conductor spit electrical sparks into the charcoal night. As the trolley rounded Lee Circle and headed down St. Charles, the older homes along the boulevard slowly gave way to bed-and-breakfasts and hotels. The trees were still burdened by glittering bijouterie thrown from the floats during the last Mardi Gras parade. Those who believed themselves to be the true proprietors of their city retreated into the Garden District, followed swiftly by the Catholic retinue that held sway along Tulane and Loyola. Or they achingly tried to rebuild their heritage by reviving mansions along places like River Road. So much for the new south where few shaded faces live. Heading toward Canal, the homes lose the ambience of wealth and descent and take on the face of the working people. Here restaurants sport neon signs, doors are propped open and the aroma of olive oil and garlic captivates. This is my favorite section; this is where the best food is. And then Canal Street is truly the street of the people. A cultural mix, yes a gumbo, of the hard working. It is a crowded street always; all ages, all colors, tourists, cabs, noise that batters the senses. I rode up St. Charles and back around to Canal, reveling in a city that had given over to tourists and false history and the ghosts were gathering pointing away from the circular path of the red trolley and to the outlands were the real New Orleans begged for attention. Shadows moved with the trolley and I heard the voices, warning, informing: death happens away from here, but the murderers are here. They leave their sins there, there where you sit. I hopped off the trolley, ran across Canal, made it to Royal and headed into the French Quarter and my apartment. Here the streets make a labyrinth, filled with good and bad hearts that lead to love and death and rendezvous, often to no purpose that is decent. But, I guess a few meet with happy endings, or perhaps just a few hours of kindness. What do I know about it? I’ve walked this city for ten years now and every day held the unexpected. Anyone staying in New Orleans for a week or more will look forward to morning, the smell of fresh bread and coffee, the sound of trucks picking up piles of garbage, men shouting profane and friendly words, the rattle of empty bottles, the click of plastic cups, chloridized water for cleaning away used condoms. It is all oddly exhilarating, for it tells us how far we have come as a species and how far we have yet to go. And I wonder if we’ll ever make it. Mrs. Mendoza was standing at the large wooden green doors that lead into the courtyard entrance. She was holding a broom and a silver pail and looking up, eyes squinting against the bright morning light as though she were thinking on a problem. “Morning, Mrs. Mendoza,” I said, turning to look up at the place on which her eyes were still fixed. “What’s up?” “Ah, Miss Hannah. Look up to you place. Somebody in there looks to me. Not you. You here.” I looked up to the window of my sitting room and saw the lace curtains move once, as though a light breeze were announcing the morning. “I’m going up. The door’s closed, but I think it’s the wind,” I said, trying to reassure her. I knew something was up there. “So, you be good careful,” she said. Her black hair had fallen from the sea-green hairpins she always wore, the ringlets bouncing on her shoulders as she put her pail down and started to sweep the sidewalk. She was a beautiful woman, round and solid, with olive skin and deep black eyes. Her gentle love of her four children moved me, all four obeyed her with both love and respect, and in the five years we had been neighbors, I have not once heard her raise her voice or seen her hand touch them with anything but kindness. I have never seen her husband. Mrs. Mendoza told me on several occasions that he was still in Spain, fighting against the government, somewhere in the mountains, and would come to America when the Basque war was over. I knew that I would never meet her husband. I took the twenty steps to my apartment slowly, glancing back at Mrs. Mendoza, knowing she was watching me from the corner of her vision. I tried the doorknob. It was cold, and when I twisted it, it would not give. I put the key in the lock, turned and pushed the door open, edging my head in first. I smelled water, clean and pure, and it soaked the air with its intensity. I walked from the sitting room to the kitchen and then into my bedroom. The bed was still made, the red chenille spread unwrinkled, the same books piled on the small shaker nightstand I had brought from Pennsylvania last year. The kitchen sink was piled with the dirty dishes I had left there for over a week. So the intruder, like me, had little penchant for housecleaning. The light was blinking on my answering machine, the wicker rocker swaying as though a cold body had retreated sometime ago, leaving only a draft of spirit. I punched the button and saw that I had one message: So, you choose to interfere with what God has deemed. Good luck, mon ami. It begins. I lay on my bed and thought about the voice and tried to conjure a face to go with it. I had heard it before: purposefully guttural, sexually charged and without accent. An actor’s voice. Then I slept and dreamed the dream I had not had for so long and had, until this voice intruded into the investigation, forgotten. I am in the confessional, the side of my face pressed against the webbing; the red marks are evident on my cheek. I am crying. The priest’s black head is moving; he is mumbling words that frighten me, but I cannot hear them. I walk out into the church, the stained-glass windows pushing in a spectrum of light that falls at my feet and on the marble floor. I hear the tapping sound of footsteps coming from the altar. I look up and see a little man dressed in a black robe like a priest, but the collar is red. He smiles and holds his hand out, then fades away into a fine mist. I smell incense, thick and strong; the church bells clang so loud I want to scream. The sound fades and I am cold. I walk out of the church, but then I turn back to dip my hand into the white marble fountain that is gurgling streams of holy water. Dried mud wraps around the lips of the fountain like a scalloped pie shell. I cross myself and hear a voice from the jumping shadow that is made by the nook of lighted candles. There is no justice. I look toward the voice and a statue of the Virgin Mary, robes of red, white and blue, stares at me. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa until the day that I die. The rapping on the door was Mrs. Mendoza. She was worried, she told me, because I had been up here alone for so long, no noise, and no smell of cooking food. She held a Pyrex bowl covered with foil. “I made some sausage and peppers for supper. Some for you. Beine. Eat.” I told her I was fine, just catching up on my sleep before I started work again. “You know how it is, Mrs. Mendoza; waiting for time to straighten me out.” “Time does not heal, Hannah sweetheart, it is love.” Behind her, the huge banana tree fronds moved as though a hand had hit them with a big stick. I smiled, took the bowl, and kissed her on the cheek. I leaned on the door, clutching the warm bowl and listened to the crickets and cicadas and night bugs sing in celebration of their evanescent life. I have known their kind of nights, fleeting and sweet because I had been born on a night such as this, every inch of my body and soul wrapped in the sounds of the marshlands where the false lights of civilization dared not dim the enduring call to procreation. The hot air envelopes you like the arms of your mother when you are sick, the smell of dried hay and boiled sweet potatoes, a darkness that is pacifying no matter your station in life; and finally the overwhelming contradiction that taints all things, for everywhere crimes have been committed in the name of God. My dream left me with doubt and the dim memory of a little black man. * I waited for Pinch on a bar stool at Chang’s, which I’ll swear in court has the best crawfish pie in the French Quarter. Tell me that the crawfish comes from Vietnam or China and I’ll prove that every one of the little crawling buggers are from the rice fields of Vermilion Parish. Live in Louisiana long enough, eat enough species from this land, and you can pinpoint their parish of origin. Chang’s made pure Louisiana pie. I forked one crawfish at a time, not believing how ravenous I was after eating Mrs. Mendoza’s leftovers an hour ago. It was going on eight and I was on my second beer, had eaten about half of my pie already, and had kept looking for the fireflies and silver shadows of my partner. Every once in a while I would see a spark, but it was never her. Perhaps snaps of cameras, fake jewelry catching the glow from the thousand neon lights, or other ghosts, fanciful, vibrant, deadly. Where had she gone, and could ghosts die? The streets were filling up with locals and tourists, some coming in busloads to gawk at our crooked excesses. What goes on here between ten and four in the morning cannot be planned; it is totally nonredemptive, irrational and so human. The French Quarter simply succumbs to the will of the masses. I smelled him. Man sweat, the heat from an opened furnace, the shock at the base of my neck, the whiff of baby shit, the kind that comes when the mother stops breast feeding and puts the baby on solid food and cow’s milk. We used to caution new mothers about early “people feeding,” that it was best to breastfeed the baby unless the mothers were cokeheads or hooked on some other drug that would hurt the baby. We knew when mothers were feeding babies junk food, potato chips, French fries and, if the baby was lucky and didn’t choke, Happy Meals at the age of five months. Stupidity. Rotten acorns, bad cognac, that’s what it smelled like to me. I turned to meet the shadow head on. I saw white teeth, beautiful green eyes encased in a shimmering helmet laughing at me with such force that my heart tumbled into my stomach. I looked around with savage intent, hoping Pinch was near, and I grabbed for him. My hands were on fire, blisters rising red on my palms, a thumb callus melting, and then he was gone in a swoosh of sound that hurt my ears. I looked around at the crowded bar, at the jazz band that was still playing “The Sweet Hereafter” and the streams of people in the street. They had heard, seen and smelled nothing. All was as though the fiend had been nothing to anyone but me. I was standing next to the barstool, a fork clasped in my hand. My skin was as smooth and pink as before, devoid of any trauma. “What’s the matter Hannah, don’t like the food tonight?” said a voice to my left. Harry Chang was standing behind the bar, his black, straight hair hanging in his eyes, his mouth in an exasperated grin. He was still missing his bottom teeth knocked out by a drunken tourist who had accused Harry of watering down his beer. “Oh, the pie. It’s great,” I said, turning my head away from him and looking into the street. I heard his laughter, clear and piercing as though God had turned off the voices of man so that I could hear only him. “Did you see anyone talking to me awhile ago?” I asked Harry. “Hannah, you been standing there seems like ten minutes. Your food’s cold and you haven’t touched your third beer. What’s up?” I threw a twenty on the counter, telling Harry that the pie was great as usual but my appetite wasn’t good tonight. I ran into the crowd, following the voice of the laughing phantom. I followed him down Royal, past the Collection and then straight down to the Marketplace. The streets were crowded as usual and I tried not to knock anyone down. He laughed like I imagined the devil would. Come and get me, bitch. Plug up y’all hole. Then suddenly the voice stopped. He had vanished. I was standing in the passageway that led to the Jazz Museum. Slender cords of those tiny white Christmas lights had been strung along the buildings, making an arch that swayed and popped in the wind that blew in from the river. The night was falsely lighted; blotting out what I knew was a full moon. My shirt was drenched with perspiration, my body was chilled, my face hot with frustration. “Damn it,” I hissed. Then someone pushed me from behind and I whirled around, ready to hit. “Hey, lady, watch out,” said a young man with a Red Sox baseball cap. When he saw my expression, he turned away, muttering, “Up yours, fucking A.” I wanted to say up yours too, but thought that I didn’t need any trouble and conflict of any kind, so I turned away and headed towards the Jazz Museum. The Museum was run by the Parks Department, USDA approved. I didn’t even want to know why. Tonight the guard had put on Satch’s “What a Wonderful World,” his rough voice was flung over the brick walkway and around the shops that hawked trinkets, things you can bring home to Mama, that she will put on her knickknack shelf and that you’ll take home with you when you are the only one left to pack up her belongings after she dies alone on a sweltering June night. “Hey, Scrimp, Hon,” whispered Pinch. “Ol’ Satch ain’t what he used to be what with all these lights. Glad to see you’re getting out and about. You need to test your powers, love.” “Where in hell have you been?” I asked, not turning to look at her. “With you all along. Man, Chang was really pissed you didn’t finish your pie.” “Why didn’t you let me know you were there?” “Didn’t want to scare old Romeo away. We’ll need him soon enough.” I turned towards her voice. She was clear to me, clearer than ever. Her smile bright, her skin wet with dripping moisture; it was as though she were all water and mist. “Romeo?” I asked. “Yeah. A brother from the Projects. Got knifed, oh, maybe five years ago. Nice fella. Used to give me a bottle of root beer and a nickel to get vanilla ice cream for a float.” She laughed, giggling like a child. “Did you hear what he said to me? Doesn’t sound like a benevolent haunt.” “Oh, the bitch and hole part? That wasn’t him. That was the one he was chasing.” “Dear lord,” I sighed. “How in heaven am I going to tell the difference?” “Time and practice.” “You’re mighty jovial tonight. First time since you died,” I said, reaching out to touch her shoulder. It felt as though I had put my hand in a bowl of chocolate pudding. I laughed too. “I guess we’re making progress. So this Romeo is a friend?” “Oh, no. I don’t think he knows about me yet. But we need him. If I’m a ghost, then I want to know where he came from. I think he’s a good ghost, like me. Where the bad ghosts go, or come from, is the question.” “How’d you find him?” “I was scanning through the crowd, watching the rap dancers on Moon Walk, and felt a surge of air. The clothes of the people ruffled and I followed the air to Jackson Brewery. He went through there like the Tasmanian Devil, lifting ladies’ skirts, looking down blouses, even pulling toupees off of guys and laughing to beat the band. Then he comes to you. It was great fun.” “Great. Did you lose him?” “Yeah. But, like you, I can tell the scent a mile away. He’ll be back.” “Look. I tried going on the trolley by myself. There are ghosts and vibrations I just couldn’t get a hold of. Come with me. There’s nothing we can learn here. I want to see if we can feel the children together. I don’t think I’m strong enough yet.” * We got on the trolley at Common and St. Charles and headed out toward Lee Circle and the Garden District. Six of the ten children were found on this line and it was possible we could pick up a clue, a smell, a presence that would give us a lead, a why to the trolley, and a why to the murders in the first place. “Do you know where they impounded the trolley the last kid died on?” I asked Pinch. “Probably in the yard back of the station.” The green iron and red-rimmed windows of the trolley were supposed to be cheerful, giving visitors and residents a taste of history mixed with modernity. I sat at the open window. Pinch was standing just behind the trolley conductor, who kept flicking at his ear as though a mosquito were after him. I smiled, thinking how he would react if he knew he was being harassed by a beautiful ghost. We rode up and down the St. Charles line several times. At about eleven the trolley had emptied and I told the conductor that I was investigating The Foster Child Murders. He looked at me straight in the eyes, shaking his head and sniffing. “You ain’t gonna find notin’ here no mo. They done wiped my cars clean as a whistle down the Mississippi.” “You don’t have to put on the heavy accent for me, ” I told him. “Save it for the tourists.” He laughed, wiped his face with his hand, and pulled on the trolley string; the ringing hurt my ears. He was a tall man, not more than thirty and his skin was more yellow than black. He had on a conductor’s hat that looked new, a white shirt and a green vest. His hands were dry, his knuckles, like the shell of a brown snail. I looked around for Pinch, but she had disappeared on me. Again I was alone, grist for the ghosts. “Did you see, hear or smell anything the night those children died?” I asked his back. “See? No. Hear? Yes. Smell? Definitely.” “What?” “Just like that examiner told the papers and the cops. Giggling. The smell was like acid. No. Incense. Like they burn at church.” “You Catholic?” I asked. He pulled the bell string again and turned to me. His eyes were green with yellow, shooting specks. I could see the veins distend on his neck. “Yeah. Born to the faith and I keep the faith. Whoever killed those little children gonna burn in hell.” The trolley stopped near Walnut and a bunch of girls in school uniforms got on. “You sure you didn’t see anything?” I asked. I got up from my seat and stood next to him, looking toward the front of the trolley and the laughing girls. I watched one reach into her knapsack and take out a joint, light it, puff, hold her breath and hand it to an obese girl next to her. I looked at the conductor. He was looking at the girls, smiling. “Anything at all?” “Not me. But you can ask Jerry. He did. And, boy, he likes to talk about it. Says the devil’s after him.” “Jerry who?” “Jantor wid mos’ a da baby bodies.” A bunch of people was hauling themselves onto the trolley, their cameras swinging on their hips, hairy legs, fat stomachs, blanched skin. “Why do you put on that act? What purpose does it serve?” “Jeremiah done got hisself ‘rested. Go on and talk to him,” he chuckled. He turned his head away from me, staring into the slow-moving darkness off of St. Charles. The rhythmic clang of the church bells sped through the thick air, the tourists jabbering about their next meal, the schoolgirls silent and smiling. I rode up the line, listening to the conversations of the people on the trolley, wondering what their lives were like, what they would do when they returned home, if they cared that maybe, just maybe, the seats on which they sat once held the body of an innocent. Saddened by my own helplessness, seeing no ghosts and feeling nothing but ordinary human life, I hopped off the trolley near Common, waved to the conductor and bumped into Pinch. “Learn anything?” she asked. “Just that incense and murder go hand and hand, that some people think that imitating our shameful past is a joke. But our instincts are leading us to religion, or to people who see gris-gris and voodoo and rosaries as part of the same genre of faith. What’d you find out?” “That riding a trolley as a ghost is a hell of a lot more fun than as a person. Got to see, smell and know a lot more about people than before. There’s drawback, though. Shit, some people really stink deep down there. I can smell the mean things they done in their sorry lives. But, I know this: that the murderers are as real as you are and as ghostly as I am.” “Conclusion?” I said, my footsteps on the sidewalk echoing against the vibrant dark night. A wind had moved in from the river and with it scents and sounds that followed us, becoming louder and stronger as though we were pursued by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. “Sometimes it comes not in words but in the things you see and don’t see. When the ghosts desert a place, they are telling you something. The ghosts have left the trolleys and the ride to the humans, to mortality, and because so few mortals can talk the talk of the dead, they lead you away from the truth. I know you hear and smell what’s coming. The weather’s changing; the winds of righteousness cannot be stopped. But it will be nothing more than a warning. Humanity may be given another chance. Maybe.” “There’s a certain rationality to the world of ghosts. Incongruity abounds. Well, it’s time I start learning the language of the spirit.” * The first time I visited New Orleans I was about seven years old. Mama, Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa and I drove into town in our white Chevrolet. Uncle Philo lived off of the old Chef Menteur Highway in a dull gray shotgun house with his wife, Ida, and two sons, Peter and John. The house was full of Catholic symbols: each of the three bedrooms had one wall that was made into a prayer center, equipped with a pew, altar, crucifix, candles and lots of plastic red, pink and yellow flowers, and a statue of a blue Virgin Mary. The first night I stayed in the room with my cousins, who were five and eight, I thought I was going to suffocate. My heart was beating out of my chest, I started to sweat; my legs and arms were pinned to the little cot Aunt Ida had put in the corner for me. The candles that were lit for our bedtime prayers had burned down into the marooned glass cups, making creeping shadows on the wall. I threw up all over the bushy carpet as I ran onto the porch calling for Mama. I felt the same way as I opened the door to my apartment. “Scrimp, you said you thought another murder was coming. But nothing’s happened. Why?” Pinch was sitting in my chair, moving back and forth like a metronome. Her body had taken on an almost completed form, although her breasts were flat. “I think your murder stopped something for a while. It’s connected. It’s just all connected, like the power is trying to regroup for a bigger assault. The mafia-type guys with the medallion, the negligence of the authorities in seeking the foster child murderers, your death given such short shrift you never know it even happened. And think about it, you were killed at the Cabildo, in the room where Louisiana became French lands, the use of that sword.” “More dead children?” “One more is all I can see, no feel it, sense it. I almost wish I didn’t have this second sense thing. It tears at my soul. Pinch; tell me more about the night you were murdered. You said you didn’t see anything. The next thing, what? You were in my apartment and a ghost?” “It’s a blur, my whole passage to where I am now. Like I told you, I don’t even remember pain. The only thing that has stayed with me is a shadow. Like now. When I look at you, there’s something behind you. You can’t touch it; you can’t see it. Do you sense it yet?” “Sometimes. And I can see the ghosts now, like Lila, and often I think it’s a group and all of a sudden, puff.” “It’s like a shadow without sunshine. Almost like it’s part of you.” “Let’s go back to your murder. Do you know anything about Patton besides he’s a Judge, he’s powerful, and his kid Thomas was murdered? He’s the odd one out here. All the other kids were abandoned. When I tried to look at the file when I was still at the agency, it was sealed. No, let me take that back. Non-existent.” “I’m really not following you,” said Pinch. She got up from the chair, leaving it to sway without her. “These are serial killings in the truest sense of the word. Brutal in the absence of overt violence. Not like the Atlanta murders.” I stopped the chair and sat down, feeling an icy cold on my ass. “Yes. But that’s the point!” I yelled, slapping my sides and sitting up in my chair, making it stop moving. I leaned back, loving the squeaking noise, thinking that I would never oil the damn thing. “There is here, shall we say, a grand purpose, a calling that, at least in the minds of the perpetrators, is apocalyptic.” “What we are up against, love, is awesome to the nth degree. I get scared for you; you need to arm yourself.” “What do you mean? A gun? You know how I feel about that,” I said, turning to look out of the bare window. The iron casings slashed across the night sky, illuminated by the city lights, the full moon’s enchantment diminished by the necessary economies of scale. “Feel all you want. But you need to protect yourself. I can’t help you against a sword. I can warn you. That’s it. Those Virgin Mary guys come after you, how you gonna protect your- self.” “Why should I lower myself to a killer’s standard?” “How you gonna protect the next kid if you have to? Slap the guy silly?” “I cannot believe you telling me this. Aren’t we supposed to be the non-violent ones in all of this?” I spit out the words. “Anyway, I’ll think about it,” I said. “Great, and I bet, knowing you, you’re gonna tell me that’s a moral concession?” “What other kind is there?” “Shit.” “Let’s drop it. And why do you keep changing the subject about Patton and your murder? Every time I’ve mentioned . . . ” “ I don’t know. I don’t know everything. You’re the voodoo person. So far, it’s the only thing that has made me feel, how can I explain it to you? Negative. His name makes me feel negative. And I’m going out now. You do the living. I’ll do the dead.” “He can’t hurt you, Pinch.” “Well, there’s the residuals, love. Something cannot become nothing. Check one of your great philosophers; there is no nothing.” I saw silver streaks on Pinch’s shimmering brown face, and her arm moved up in a whipping movement. “Scrimp, baby, we both see it coming. The white man cometh and he holds the black snake in his right hand,” she yelled. A slender dancing wisp of fog congealed into a hot ball and vanished through the closed door. All I could think of was what Pinch had said about ghosts and power and nothingness. I sat on my bed and looked at the line of books. The light from the floor lamp flickered and a beam moved over the books as though a pneuma were navigating a child’s ship to port and away from a coming storm and came to rest on Dante’s Divine Comedy. And then I got it, I got it: ghosts will assist the living in order to get out of purgatory, to release the agony of soul whether they go to heaven or hell. Well, I suppose I’d always seen it coming; I had a better rapport with ghosts than my fellow humans. II THE PERSECUTED And when my face had opened, my eyes came to see that those primal creatures had paused in the scattering of flowers . . . Dante, Purgatorio Slats of mustard sunlight spread across the page, massaging the red circles I had drawn. around the names of the children. Scabs refusing to heal. I was starving; the smells of coffee and chicory and frying meat were strong and drifting through the crack in the window. I went to the window, pushed away the blue-laced valance, and pulled on the ragged cord, ripping the Venetian blinds upward; white light blasted in my face. I looked at my watch. It was already seven thirty. I had been up all night twisting facts and perceptions and knowing that making sense of it all was perhaps not part of my new life’s equation. I had to harness and channel the powers of the Grand Met, go with the flow. Pinch had not come back. I left my home and headed down the two flights of wooden creaking stairs two by two, the heels of my boots echoing through the narrow, cold portico. When I turned onto the street, I clicked the steel toes on the crumbling red bricks along the wall, watching albarium chips fall like dried blood upon the sidewalk. I was getting not only more paranoid than ever, but I saw in just about everything the veil beyond, the grotesque. The garbage trucks had been out already, washing down the streets, and the air felt clean and fresh making the world falsely sinless. I stopped in at a new shop and got two bagels with cream cheese and lox and a large black C&C to go, and then I headed back to my apartment for a shower before calling Harlan Boudreaux for an appointment. He who had visited death so often knew more than he had told the public or had written in his reports. Part of the privileges of working for an agency connected with government, and believe me if you’re honest there are very few, is getting access to files without too many people knowing. Each time a foster child was murdered, I expected the world to inflate, badges come riding in and go ape-shit for information. But that didn’t happen and it drove me nearly insane. It was as though an unknown potentate simply reached over to the switch on the big generator controlling New Orleans and turned it off. But not before I got to read the autopsy reports on the at least eight of the children, along with the photographs. As a social worker for some five years, I saw too much of the degradation, the evil acts humans practice upon each other. Random acts are left for the police to figure out, acts of sustained malice inflicted on the living falls upon the shoulders of those public servants that politicians now call the do-gooders, those who are paid crapola with the money that is too often accumulated by graftola. It is one of the greatest shames of this country, leaving the living and those who try so desperately to alleviate suffering to their own devises while using them as scapegoats. I wish that every one in high and middle government were made to look at the photographs of these dead children. Maria Stone, her face fashioned in death as though ready for an advertising take; eyes gently closed, china-doll skin, red lips, no mark on her body save the precise line of the autopsy cut. Or Paul Salino, the darkest of all the angels, his once drug-infested, man-infested body briefly gained strength and life - now lying homeless again. And my child, yes Tasha, mixed spirit, child of madness, taken by loving hands, her mind not only growing but excelling; you soared, Tasha, you really soared and then they brought you down. When will you become a ghost or are you one already? I think that the authorities would experience moments of horror and then discomfort and then play-act incredulity and then do very little. But I am not so much a cynic Tasha, not to believe that you went straight to heaven. The files were more than perfunctory; they were purposely depleted. The photos of the children oddly posed, almost like those in the fashion magazines. Harlan Boudreaux took great pride in his work, but evidently not in the results of his work. There was so little that could be used to find the murderers, no mention of fibers, or prints, or traces of skin oil, not even notation of his having scraped under the fingernails. Harlan was well placed, having served as ME for so many years I bet few people could remember who had preceded him. Maybe he had become too old for the job, senility had set in, he forgot how to the do his job; I tried to think of anything, any logical reason for this unforgivable negligence. But I could think on none that would convince a jury of reasonable people. I’m sure that Harlan chose his successor, who, from all indications, was simply starting where he had left off. Harlan was, of course, not listed in the NOLA telephone directory. When I called the Medical Examiner’s Office, I asked for Cherie Cache, who had been Harlan’s secretary for years and, I think, confidante. I remembered a story about Harlan autopsying Cherie’s mother after her brutal murder. Cherie was only seventeen then and Harlan had paid for her education at a small technical college near Baton Rouge, and it was rumored that he also supported Cherie’s illegitimate child. In all public scripts about Harlan, it was noted without fail how he exhibited that old-fashioned Southern gentlemen style, as though it were something to be admired. Okay, I’m suspicious by nature, and it is also part of my training, but I always wondered why in any conversation with Cherie or the story about her mother was there never mention of any other man but Harlan. I think that our past will always be with us. Yet I make no presumptions about Cherie’s life; she was, and still is, perhaps one of the most discerning people in bureaucracy I have ever met. She was apolitical to a fault. She gave me Harlan’s unlisted telephone number, laughed when I asked her about her son’s latest adventures on the FSU football team. “Heading for first place again, Hannah. What a boy God gave me.” She told me that Harlan always admired my “lighter touch,” and would be happy to talk to me “under the pad, so to speak.” I did a little begging and asked her if I could get to the autopsy reports one evening after everybody had left the building. “I am still in emotional hell about the kids and I still want to see what may have gone wrong,” I had practically whined. “I think Harlan still has the keys,” she laughed. Discerning, loyal and protective even when Harlan was no longer the Chief Medical Examiner and I was no longer with the department. I took out my files on the foster children and plotted the next two days. I would visit one, four, and, the two most difficult, six and nine only with Pinch. John and Salina Falcona lived out in Chalmette, a middle-class suburb of St. Bernard Parish. The drive down North Ramparts and then into this area is frustrating and very sad. It is like being hurled into slices of the past twenty years where neglect and poverty were simply allowed to move in willy-nilly, as though those two social ills were endowed with their own volitions. There are red lights at just about every intersection, buses pulling out without warning, businesses with pocked-out windows or black iron bars. People hang around these streets; gang members trading in crack, little old people with mangled grocery carts piled with unidentifiable objects, prostitutes emerging from nights spent with too many weasels that either physically injured them, gave them a STD, or refused to even pay up. Just another hell on earth. I drove through on the left lane, sped around the buses, until I reached the tip of suburbia. I know only two things about St. Bernard Parish: this is where the Battle of New Orleans was fought in 1812, and in 1965 Hurricane Betsy blew in from the Gulf, the levees holding back the Mississippi River and the bayous and canals broke and water poured into the streets and homes of sleeping citizens. Some of my colleagues at the department live out here, and they still tell stories about waking up in the middle of the night, swimming for third floor apartments in which they had to stay with strangers for days, watching from balconies as water moccasins and dead bodies flooded by, wondering what happened to their friends and family. “I jus’ about thought God done brought down the end of the world,” I had heard Barb Boyd screech, her grating voice ramped to ten decibels. And God did send the angel of death after all. The house in which Marisa spent five years of her short life was located two blocks from the high school in a small faded ranch house that looked like it had been built in the seventies. If the house numbers hadn’t been nailed to the sides of the doors, it would have been near impossible to tell one house from the other. At number 55 there was a blue Dodge van in the driveway; the front end was smashed in and it was missing both front tires. A mangy brown dog started barking and howling as soon as I pulled into the driveway behind the van. It took about thirty seconds for my car to stop clanking when I turned off the key. It was a bright red 1990 Camaro and I detested it, but the car was all I could afford when I bought it off a prostitute I had helped bail out of jail. I spent most of my time, it seemed, looking for parking spaces and hoping that it would be stolen. I walked along the far side of the van and went to the door of the house that was located under the carport. The screen door was hanging loose and the door was open. I could hear both the television and some kind of rock music playing. I yelled hello several times and waited. The music stopped and a youthful voice called out for someone to turn the damned television off. A minute passed and a boy approached the door as though gliding through space, black hair, porcelain skin, his eyes were both remote and exotic, reminding me of a displaced celestial being who had lost his way journeying through the cosmos. He was about fifteen and shirtless, his chest completely devoid of hair and whiter than his face. He was smiling as though he had expected me, gently moved the screen door so that I could enter the house and said, “Madame, you are greatly expected. We here at the castle greet you with inner peace, praying that love and good deeds precede and follow you.” I looked at him and saw the sparkle in his rounded gray eyes, the pupils dilated. “I’m Hannah DuBois, social services,” I sort of lied. “Is your mother home? And that was some greeting. Very Arthurian.” “Actually, Good Goth. And thanks. I’m into the third series of the legends trilogy. Great stuff. Mom!” Salina Falcona was about thirty, with long black hair that reached to her waist and bangs that came down to the top of her eyebrows. Her skin was white and moist, her lips naturally rosy; she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She told me that she knew nothing more than what the other social service worker had told her about Marisa’s past. It was a good five years that Marisa had with them, that they all loved her and she loved them. “One would have never known,” said Salina, “that we were not her natural family. She loved her brother the most.” “The young man that greeted me?” “Yes,” she laughed. “He’s a real cut-up. A sense of humor like his father. They can both look at this terrible world and just take the good. Jamie is a wonderful stepson.” “Marisa must be missed,” I said. “Oh, of course. Every day Jamie mentions her. Marisa would have liked this and Marisa would have liked that. Sometimes I wonder if he even believes that she is really gone.” The music came back on, a lighter sound, from the back of the house. I recognized it as the music from Camelot. King Arthur. Merlin. Magical returns and a very weird taste for someone his age. Perhaps Jamie believed that Marisa had gone to a better life. Oh, hell, the kid was stoned, the aroma of pot wafted in the air together with the bitter tang of almonds and burning matches. “Did Marisa ever display any signs of remembering her past or any behavior that worried you? She was almost one when she came to you.” Salina went to the kitchen sink and filled a large stewpot with water and put it on the stove. Her hands shook the whole time “Would you like some mint tea?” she asked. I said yes. “The only thing that worried me, really made me afraid, was the way she acted when we went to church. We’re Catholic, you see. She was so afraid of the stained glass windows. She’d stare up at them and moan. Moan like someone was …oh, God, I was going to say ‘going to kill her.” Her thin body folded over the stove, her hair falling near the gas jet, her hands clutched the handles of the pot and then her arm went into spasms. I got up, poured still cold water in the cups and I guided her back to the kitchen table. She rubbed her arm and I saw needle marks at her inner elbow. “So, we stopped going,” she sighed. “All of us. Things were fine after that. Jamie didn’t mind. He always seemed bored with it all. Never liked Father Allende.” “You know ten children have been murdered. I’m trying to find out who, what, why, so there won’t be another tragedy. Do you remember anything at all, something you haven’t already told the police, Social Services, about Marisa’s disappearance?” She chewed on the end of her thumb, the skin around her eyes tightened, but her cheeks were sunken and she suddenly looked twenty years older. “Marisa wouldn’t go to sleep the night before she disappeared. She kept going to the window and laughing, pointing up to the sky. Fireflies, Mommy, fireflies.” Marisa had vanished from the grocery store when Mrs. Falcona turned away from her to pick out apples. She had been found on the trolley on December 23, an unusually cold winter day in New Orleans. The police had searched everywhere Marisa could have gone, taken fingerprints, and had reported that they had found nothing significant. “Now when I wake in the morning,” cried Salina, her head on her arms, “I yell for Marisa to get up but the house is cold and quiet, like God has taken our souls for no reason. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” “Yeah, he just keeps doing that,” I whispered. She looked at me then and a bemused look came to her eyes. “Did the social worker who placed Marisa with you tell you anything about her first six months of life?” I asked. “She did tell me her file was incomplete. No one knows.” “Yes, but I just thought, you may have been told something during the years she was with you. Maybe during the home visits.” Salina stared at me, her lips compressed, her fingers entwined. Then she got up and opened a drawer next to the stove and pulled out a small blue envelope. She smoothed it out with her left hand, smelled it, and then handed it to me. “I received this on Marisa’s third birthday.” I opened the envelope and pulled out a folded card; it was a ginger-colored vellum, the kind used by calligraphers. The writing was in a bold, black medieval-looking script. The child you hold dear bears the mark of heaven. On the right hand side of the card was a miniscule insignia depicting the Virgin Mary descending to heaven. I looked at the outside of the envelope. The return address was that of the Ursuline Convent. The aroma of burnt almonds rose up and entered the pores of my face and then it mixed with the rooms’ acerbic yet sweet trace of high quality marijuana. “Do you know who may have sent this?” I asked trying to brush away the sensations, the hunger that was fomenting in my stomach and head. “Father Allende told me that the association sends that out to all of God’s saved children.” “What association?” “Wait, let me think. Wait.” She pushed her long fingers against her temples and closed her eyes. “Something about God’s army. I can’t remember exactly.” “The White Army, Mom,” said the young man in a voice changing from childhood to manhood, confused by multiple drugs. He was leaning against the door jam dressed in a blue terrycloth robe badly trimmed with red silk ribbon; his hair was spiked with something that looked like axel grease. “That snakehead Allende, he’s scary.” * I drove back into town thinking I’d like to kick the crap out of whoever had placed Marisa in a house where drugs were a way of getting on with life. Or was that something that had started after Marisa’s murder? No, at least for the foster mother it was long-time use. I looked in the rearview mirror; the familiar black car was still following me and I could make out the arm and fat hand thumping on the doorframe in time with music I could not hear. I pulled over into the empty section of a supermarket parking lot. The black car followed but drove to the far side of the lot and stopped. The arm went in, the windows went up. I looked though the file folder I had brought with me, flipping through my notes until I found the page about Marisa. Nancy Runfalo had placed her. I tried to bring her face into my mind; it was as though the people I had worked with had been aliens from another planet. Nancy, Nancy. Why couldn’t I remember her? I reached in my purse for my cell phone. Shit, shit, I yelled and banged on the steering wheel, it belonged to the department. I gave it back. I drove to the front of the store where one of the few remaining pay phones waited for obsolescence; I was going to give it one more chance to be useful. I dialed the department and asked for Nancy Runfalo. I was put on hold, dropped another quarter in the slot, and waited, holding the gummy receiver with a Kleenex and thinking about all the pathogens that were recombining not two inches from my mouth. A small wind tornado formed in the empty lot next to the store, then whirled and picked up paper and leaves and rose with its treasure and moved toward me. I turned away from the assault and it passed quickly and dissipated near the automatic door out of which hobbled an old man and woman, walking arm and arm, their legs bowed, their faded eyes still infused with a love for each other that for the first time in days and days gave me some hope for humanity. “Hello. Hello?” “Yes, wait.” I put another quarter in the slot. “You’re looking for Nancy?” “Yes. I used to know her in college. I’m in town for a while, just wanted to touch base.” “I’m sorry, but Nancy Runfalo is no longer working here.” “Do you know where I could get in contact with her? Is she still in New Orleans?” Then I heard muffled voices and another voice said: “Nancy left to become a sister. A nun, you know. She is at the Ursuline Convent, but I don’t know if they’ll let you talk to her. Okay? Goodbye.” I hung up the phone and some quarters fell jingling into the change slot. I pried them out with my fingers and handed them to a little boy walking by carrying a deflated basketball. “Thanks, lady,” he said. “A whole fiddy cents. Now that’s gonna buy me a fucking load of hash.” An engine revved and I looked over at the black car heading my way. Why don’t they just get it over with and try to kill me too, I thought, as I slid into my car and took off hoping that Pinch would appear and come with me to Margret Jones office. I sped out onto the street and made a quick right and headed into the traffic. I rode for a while; going in and out, looking back and then took a speedy left on to St. Claude Avenue. I stopped at a crosswalk and waited until the crossing guard signaled that I could move on. Glancing at my side mirror and then the rearview, I exhaled when I didn’t see the black car. To my left was a schoolyard where some kids were playing with a Frisbee, to their left two older teenagers were talking and smoking. A shot penetrated the after school lull and I pulled over, jumped out of the car and looked towards the children. The Frisbee players had stopped in mid-play and stared down the street; the teenagers had taken off running toward the sound. I followed them with my gaze as they approached a dark blue car that was still running, it’s hood opened, where another teenager greeted them and they all began laughing. I replayed the sound in my head, thinking it was a backfire, but it was truly a gunshot; I guess these kids just got used to their own neighborhood’s version of after school fun. There is a well-known television interview of a medical examiner in Los Angeles who had the horrendous job of autopsying gang members. He bemoaned the necessity of the work, said it didn’t really make much difference what he found, a “dead amigo was a dead amigo.” When he was berated for his callousness he replied: “Look, I’m just trying to be a little more respectful of these people’s families. They come to my table so damned full of holes I sometimes have six, seven bullets from six, seven different guns. I got to cut them up into little biddy pieces to get the bullets out. The city doesn’t have enough resources to work on real mysterious killings, much less try to trace all them bullets from stolen guns. We know they just killed each other. It’s all just a sad exercise in futility.” He exited the cameras but someone forgot to take the microphone off of his lapel and the whole world heard him say: “What to do? Ship the mother fuckers back to Mikeeko.” Dealing with death has many practical sides to it. What to do with the bodies: Should they be honored by the tombs with imposing statues and crosses that make New Orleans one of the most unique places to visit and die in? Perhaps we could use funeral pyres and let the spirits of the dead drift upward toward heaven, or just put the ashes in a mason jar. My nerves were singing. Why didn’t they kill me? Why just follow me? When was it going to happen? Or you could just melt away, love. Flow right down into the bayou. I looked up St. Claude Avenue and into a low cloud that had formed into an almost perfect circle. A flock of birds soared frantically around the cloud and then flew into it and disappeared. I drove toward the cloud and St. Roch Cemetery, my body beginning to shake; it was as though I were losing all governance of myself. And then I knew that it was not fear or the awesome responsibilities that some force had imposed upon me that was making me frenetic; it was hunger. I grabbed for the cooler on the passenger seat, tore off the lid, seized a wedge of Havarti cheese and stuffed it in my mouth. I could feel the instant flow of energy, my metabolism kick in. Then I ate everything I had brought with me: two chocolate candy bars, a pack of peanut butter crackers, two bananas and downed it with a bottle of ginger beer. By the time I pulled up to the entrance of St. Roch, I was ready for what waited, whether it be the prospect of death, more ghosts, or the murderers. You enter under a black wrought-iron rainbow that spells St. Roch’s Cemetery and then under that an announcement in smaller black words: Campo Santo, place of the dead. The tall gates are open, inviting you in and you look straight ahead and up the well-trod road and there is Jesus, his arms thrust upward to each side of the cross, six inch nails are hammered into his hands, you hear the pounding, pounding. His head is at an angle, looking to the ground as though in profound and everlasting disappointment with those he sought to save; he is crying soundlessly; his face is all compassion for a little girl saved more than a century ago from the yellow jack, her statue resting in his line of sight; you think his eyes are closed, don’t you? By his grace he sees. His legs are so muscular, feet lapping one over the over, leathered soles that have walked bare over a thousand miles of stony roads just to end up here. You wait, for you know that you will hear him scream why have you forsaken me. The image is protean, it brings one to ecstasy, it has been made into false amulets, it is evidence of our failings I went around the crucifix and entered the chapel. It was midday and a tourist group was standing near the alter listening to a young woman wearing the habit of a nun in training. Her voice was low and respectful as only a novice’s can be. I approached the relic room where those who suffered disease, deformities, injuries, or sickness of the spirit, came to pray and leave proof of their tribulations. Crutches, old shoes, ragged clothes, items that could only be identified upon close inspection. Here in New Orleans in 1867 the yellow fever killed thousands, so this little church was dedicated to St. Roch who had ministered to plague victims in Europe centuries ago. St. Roch’s Chapel is also well known as a place where, during the yellow plague and other brutal times, voodoo queens came to ask for guidance and beg the Christian forces for help. Illumined orbs of various sizes, usually no bigger than a hand, appear and float slowly in space and are considered timeless, accumulating radiant light as they wait for purchase. And then the sun moves to a far horizon and these ghosts retreat into the night. I heard the tour group coming my way, so I reached out and touched an orb that was encased in a silver sheen. I closed my eyes and heard a child giggle and she said: I’m here. Come visit. Please, Miss Hannah. Oh, please. As I walked out of the church, the guide’s words rang after me telling the group about the legends of the voodoo rituals and that if they looked closely at the relic room they would see the unexplainable phenomena called floating orbs that are supposed to be energy left from voodoo queens, such as Marie Laveau. “But I believe that they are the souls of those who have been persecuted while young, whose lives were taken from them by the monarchs of corruption. There is strength here that only a few can take unto themselves, and it is by those few that the world will be cleansed; they are one of the beatitudes, the pure of heart.” I stood at the threshold of the church and saw that the novice was waving goodbye and smiling at me as though she had known me all of her life and was now wishing me Godspeed on my new journey. I rounded the side of the church, passing the Stone Mourner, who will forever be placing flowers on the grave of her beloved, and slowly approached a little tomb at the far edge of the cemetery. Here lay my sweet baby Tasha. A tiny marble angel stood at the head of her grave, its face much like hers in life, its wings unfolding as though ready for flight. Someone had left a clear glass vase with a bunch of pink tulips. I knelt at her side and pulled weeds that had already overtaken the plot. The sky was without clouds, the noises of the city stilled, and I started crying. “I’m so sorry, Tasha. I should have been better at this, shouldn’t I? I should have saved you, known what was coming because of the others.” “Oh, they be fine, Miss Hannah. Doin’ you go and worry none.” The tiny angel turned its head to the east. A wing moved ever so slightly. So, now I would talk to the dead through cold stone and marble. “I was so proud of you when you won that contest at school. So bright, so good. You gave it all that you had, didn’t you baby?” “Oh, Miss Hannah. You shouldn’t be cryin’ none. I had two splendid years with my foster parents. Now you see how I learnt tings? Splendid. Dat be one the first words I done learned to spell. I’m gonna carry it wid me always, learning to use it. Like: my but he be such a splendid boy; dat dere be a splendid flower; the clouds be splendid today; I knows tings now dat I never, ever could bein’ a little girl and ain’t dat just splendid.” “You still like to talk to beat the clock,” I said. “Tasha, please, did you see who took you away? A man, a lady? Can you tell me anything?” “I doin’ ‘member but a head full of stars.” “A hat? A costume?” “Tanks for coming ta see me. I be here next time, but ya gotta give me some warning first. I gots many a splendid ting ta do now. I love ya to death, Miss Hannah.” I finished weeding Tasha’s grave and left St. Roch Cemetery much closer to knowing how and when to discern a plethora of ghosts from my buzzing imagination. Something was settling inside of me, finding a home at last. I has reached into the world of the dead and talked to a child. And a child shall lead. * Pinch was leaning against my car in a near human configuration, her arms silhouetted against her body, her hair like a new spun roll of white cotton candy. The hot sun made sparkles of her head. “So, now you know a little more about man and beast. I told you that you’d find things out on your own.” “Pretty soon I won’t even have to talk to you anymore. You seem to know everything I do and say.” “And think. “ My head jerked back, an involuntary reaction to the thought of no longer having a private self. “You mean you can read my thoughts?” “Well, not exactly. But if I could, wouldn’t it then be up to you to stop me. Free will and all that.” “Man, you’re like the FBI, CIA, CSI and Interpol and whatever other secret spy drones are around now days all rolled into one.” “Nah, nah. I’m much better than them.” And her laughter was like an icicle, dislodged by the warmth of the sun, falling to shatter on the sidewalk. “Let’s go. We have an appointment with Margaret Jones. You should appreciate this interview for many reasons, one of which is that it will be our first full-fledged interview as the dynamic duo.” As we drove along toward the Central Business District and Jones’ high-rise corporate lair, I reviewed some of the things we had learned about the murders: all foster children, all left with religious items on their bodies, basically Catholic, method same, the authorities, all but the dead one, Lila – not only reticent and incompetent but downright mute; a social worker murdered going on a fools errand by someone pretending to be her partner about a foster child who was also the son of a judge, powerful ME who quits his job, ME and judge and probably lots of others heavily involved in doings of Port of New Orleans and politics. Pinch just listened as I jabbered on, punctuating my dissertation with conclusions about Salina Falcona and Nancy Runfalo. “So you think that the murderers are targeting children in homes that are less than attentive?” “No. Exactly the opposite. I think it goes much deeper than that. It goes back to the birth of the children; they were born in sin as though the murderer just wants to tell the world that they were not worthy. For fanatics, the true zealot, what at first thought seems good, all God’s children should be honored for example, and then they go on and on about sinfulness and purity and about how the world is just full of sin and then they go back to the concept of children born in sin will then bring sin unto the world. I disagree with the Catholic Church about many things, some things I still believe in, and I have accepted it as part and parcel of being a Gran Met and growing into the role.” “You’re digressing and drawing a hell of a lot of conclusions.” “Yes. Until she receives first communion, a child’s soul remains in limbo; should she die without receiving the last rites, or some other ritual, her soul still remains in limbo. Now there are the born again people. A child who dies without consciously receiving their god into his heart cannot attend the rapture. They’re just all the same. As far as I’m concerned, this is nothing but a desecration of innocence. Let’s just purify the world from its beginning, so to speak. Start all over again.” “You got that from listening to Tasha, didn’t you?” Pinch asked. “That and just some good old-fashioned noir detective deduction.” “Speaking of the human, how about we stop off at my old home. I need you to take care of some unfinished business.” Pinch had bought a small house on Felicity Street in Central City when New Orleans decided to give low-cost loans to city employees for first time house purchases. The plan was part of the grand urban renewal movement and was also aimed at preserving the history of the neighborhood, for Central City had given birth to such jazz greats as Kid Ory, Baby Dodd, and Jelly Roll Morton. I turned onto the commercial corridor where all the shops and some theatres and art museums are located, named Oretha Castle Boulevard after one the most successful civil rights activists of the sixties. Felicity Street is also the location of the main access gate to the upper river terminal for the Port of New Orleans. Like most houses in the neighborhood, Pinch’s house is a small shotgun raised to about four feet by burnt umber brick piles in case of flooding from the nearby canals and the Mississippi River. When she moved in, Pinch fixed the porch first, saying that one of her greatest pleasures would be to sit out and watch the world go by without being afraid of getting murdered. I had been the assigned painter, slapping on two coats of lemon yellow while Pinch complained about my sloppiness. When we had finished the porch and her neighbors had brought over two hand-tooled rocking chairs as moving in presents, we had a little party; bowls and plates of fried chicken and ham and potato salad and boiled crawfish and red beans and rice were delivered on bikes and thumping muscle cars; old ladies showered us with stories about their long lives and afflictions and lost children mixed with moments of great joy. The Reverend Honore Lucy from one of the AME churches blessed the new house and Pinch and her friends and said something mighty about the Lord working in “extreme and wondrous ways. “Say Pinch,” I said. “Do you think Mama DuLuc still makes those tasty little praline patties?” The house stood lonely, eyes closed, yellow paint peeling under the windows, the ruby azalea bushes in bloom, the two rocking chairs stilled. It reminded me of a child’s picture book, where the empty house of a friend who has moved away cries for its former occupants, the story meant to be a lesson in how to handle loss. We went to the porch and I pushed open the door that was unlocked. The combined living and sitting room was as she had left it, all her things intact and waiting. Her mail had been stacked on a side table by a concerned neighbor. “Looks like I’m more popular dead than alive,” said Pinch. “Give a look at what’s in there while I take a last look around, will you. There’s probably mortgage stuff and bank stuff. I need you to pay this house off then sell it. Remember I left whatever I have after bills to you. I want you to take care of just one kid from Desire, see that the kid gets to college alive.” I shuffled the envelopes going through mostly junk mail then opened her bank statement and saw that she had over $15,000 in her savings. Her mortgage statement from the bank had a zero amount due. I hadn’t remembered her telling me she owned her home free and clear. Stapled to the notice were the title and the details of the history of her property. I read through the details of the search then reread the mortgage settlement. Though Pinch’s name was on the envelope, Earline Washington, the documents stated that said The Delbanco Corporation of New Orleans owned property on Felicity Street, located in the same building as the offices of Caldwell and Caldwell, where Margaret Jones worked as a law partner. I locked the door behind us and followed Pinch back to my car where on my seat was a used tin decorated with Christmas ornaments and holly. It was full of little patties of pralines. * We arrived at Margaret Jones’ office about 1:30. Why would a successful corporate lawyer, a woman and African-American to boot, who had made it to the top of her profession, agree to care for a ten-year-old boy prostitute? It was an unusual placement, especially since Ms Jones must be a very busy woman. Yet, she was single and wealthy and could provide the child with an upper class life style. So what? What John Paul Salino had needed most was love, understanding and a whole lot of transitional therapy. Jones’ secretary had been kind enough to make an appointment for me when I had called early in the morning and said that ‘the boss’ had asked her to get us lunch. I settled for pastrami on rye and German potato salad. And a pickle; I made sure I told her a pickle. Yes, yes, root beer. When I pulled into the parking garage, my stomach felt like a cannon had blown a hole in it. I smelled food coming into the cold cement cave of the garage, and the cold came with the feeling that soft hands that meant me harm were touching me. I quickly parked my car next to a silver Mercedes. On the wall in front of me was written Reserved for Clergy. I took out the blue and white clergy sign from my glove compartment and put it on the dashboard, looked around to see if a human was about, or threatening popping lights, or waves of air, then got out of my car and sprinted to the elevator and pushed the button for the lobby. I had hoped that Pinch would come with me, serve as my sounding board, perhaps see something in these hollow halls that I could not. But she had vaporized as she stood next to my car, her thoughts lingering on her former home, and said that she had friends to make and that Romeo was going to show her a life beyond beating hearts. As I had stared into the empty plenum that was Pinch, I understood that we each had our roles now, sometimes we would act in concert, sometimes alone; but we would always come together with information or when longing consumed our new states of being. The lobby was frigid but graced with a profusion of large flowers of all colors. I recognized the gladiolas, but the other flowers looked tropical and somehow false. I looked closely at one display that was stuck in a huge vase covered with hand-painted medieval characters. The figures were carrying crosses and brightly tinctured clay jars and were followed by horses burdened by sacks from which gold sprigs of wheat stuck out. On the bottom of this great vase was a river that flowed red with blood; fish bobbed their heads out of the moving fluid as though they begged for quick death. The scent of gladiolas made me sneeze. I walked to the information desk where a uniformed black man watched a monitor screen. “Excuse me,” I sniffed. “I have an appointment with Margaret Jones, Caldwell and Caldwell.” He just stared at me, a bead of sweat running from his forehead. “I know you. You can go up. You’re expected.” I felt a hand pass over my back. I turned quickly to push it away, but no one was there. I turned back to the man, who was smiling as though he had seen a secret part of me. I rode the elevator alone to the tenth floor, my arms wrapped around myself, breathing deeply to calm down. Elegant signs touted the expansion of the Port of New Orleans, the billions of dollars invested, its importance as a gateway to the world’s commerce. I noticed the names Harlan Boudreaux and Judge Ignatius Patton listed as investors in the newly formed Delbanco Corporation. Two powerful, connected men - both somehow involved in the foster child murders, the acquisition, or rather theft, of land in New Orleans, and perhaps the slaughter of my friend. I had recently read a short history about the men who had worked at the Port unloading bananas from Columbia for the United Fruit Company. Their greatest fear was the tarantulas that spun their webs deep between the fingers of the bananas on the journey from South America. No one knows how many men died from the bite of the spider or the blood poisoning that the company recorded as ‘source unknown’ so it would not have to pay medical bills or compensation to the families left behind. Life, death, and commerce made a web of deceit. From behind my thoughts I heard the murmur of my mother praying, “Holy Ghost, give me this day, break my bread, help Hannah on her way.” I hadn’t thought of my mother for days now. Perhaps I was only hearing the movement of the elevator. I felt a jolt as the elevator stopped; the doors swished open, and I looked into the face of a very dark-skinned black woman with penetrating green eyes and square bone white teeth that jutted from red smiling lips. Her face was framed by black shiny hair with a white streak that started at her left temple. My head jerked backward at the charm of Margaret Jones. “Ms. DuBois? Maggie Jones. Come. Food awaits.” “Thank God,” I blurted out. Margaret Jones was not only unpretentious; she loved to eat as much as I did. Her hourglass body, encased in emerald green silk, rode along on long, muscular legs like an exquisite and rare animal. Her office was almost as big as my apartment; a long conference table was pushed up against the wall and was laden with sandwiches, a bowl of pickles, potato salad and brownies. Margaret Jones waved towards the table of food. “Come, let’s partake of this wonderful food. I’m famished, as always. Pull that gray chair over and I’ll bring mine. Come. Don’t be shy.” I pulled the chair to the table and sat next to her as she handed me a large white plate without a hint of decoration. I took two pastrami sandwiches, two pickles and nodded my head when Margaret Jones piled my plate with potato salad. “Thanks,” I said and took a bite of the sandwich. It was as though life immediately flowed back into me. I knew how diabetics must feel when the crisis finally passes and their kidneys begin to function normally. “So, you’re not a social worker anymore?” she asked. I looked at her, trying to hide my surprise. “You don’t think I would talk to you without checking you out first?” “You used a private investigator?” I grunted. “Well, yes. Just to see who you are. I assure you, nothing extensive or personally intrusive. I needed to know that you weren’t dangerous or trying to hurt me in any way. I’ve had some bad times with very strange people. Why did you leave the service?” “Now you already know that, don’t you? You read the papers, you know, from your position, just about everything that goes on in this city. Actually, I would have thought that with your connections all you had to do was pick up the phone and call the social services department. Anyway, you know and I know that once your face or name ends up in the news, whether it is proved you did something, shall we say untoward, you’re out. So, I thought I’d save myself a lot of pain. Besides, I also thought I’d accomplish more outside. Now we can begin with a modicum of truth. What do you think?” She touched my shoulder, a touch that sent a jolt through me, like when you plug in the toaster with a wet hand. I shrugged her away, looked at her face a saw a light I hadn’t expected to encounter. “Well,” she sighed deeply, “we all have our interior altars at which we pray when our existence in called into question, our professions of dubious purpose. For months now I have prayed just about every waking moment. I became a lawyer because I thought that the law was the way to a more civil society, perhaps pave the way for people who choose to do what you do, make things easier, better. Now you know some of my truth.” “But this is a corporate law practice,” I said. “Yes, it is. Anyway.” She was silent for a moment, looked at the table, her eyes going from one end of it to the other. “You must miss your partner,” she said. “What was her name again?” I didn’t respond but locked eyes with her, and watched her chew, the left side of her cheek puffed out from the big bite of sandwich she had taken. I turned away and continued to eat my sandwich, took a bite of pickle, some potato salad, then looked around for something to drink. “Just a minute,” she said, getting up and going over to her desk. She pressed a button on the phone console. “Evelyn, what the heck. You didn’t get us drinks. Cokes, Dr. Pepper.” She looked at me and I nodded. Within a minute a very old white woman pushed a cart into the room. Evelyn looked like her name: she wore a Prussian blue dress with lace at the collar and wrists, a cameo brooch jiggled over her sunken chest, and her bony thighs were like old dried up sausages packed in black hose with the black line snaking along the back of her legs. Her hair was pure white and sparse so that her pink scalp was visible, her eyes were sunken into her skull but they sparkled with both clarity and guile. She had come from another time. I couldn’t help staring after her as she left the cart next to the table and ambled out of the room in silence. “I love that old lady,” sighed Margaret Jones. “I brought her with me after Mother died. She’s a love. Oh, don’t look so surprised; us rich black folk got Mammies too.” We finished our meal in silence. Then I was directed to a large black leather chair in front of Margaret Jones’ desk. She sat looking at me, her hands folded in front of her, and I imagined that she could really make a witness sweat, bend the jury to her way of thinking. Behind her was a large window that reached from floor to ceiling, and I could see on the left and through the crack between the high-rise buildings the steeple of a church with a gold cross that seemed to take in the heat and humidity of New Orleans, smelting and running into a pool of liquid bullion. On the right was the edge of the Superdome where that morning an outside computerized sign rippled red letters announcing one of the largest prayer meetings in the south. Pray for New Orleans, pray for our sins, now and at the hour of our deaths. Time of repentance. Time to repent. The words were shouted in my ears while we ate, and the more the words assaulted me the more I ate. Then I made myself think of the ghosts of New Orleans passing the signs and breaking into gales of laughter and then rain and wind comes and hail cracks the cement walkways filling the streets with mounds of ice of Biblical proportions. And gold treasure boxes filled with money lay at the feet of the newest pop-evangelist. The color of gold was all around us. I had traveled abroad only once; going to Rome with a foreign language club I had hooked up with from Loyola. Everywhere we went there were gold crosses on churches, on monuments, on museums, even on houses. Everywhere. Until the entire course of the trip became more oppressive than interesting or joyful. My most vivid memory was a run-in with a Catholic priest who insisted he knew me, swore that I had been baptized by the devil. He had to be pulled off of me by several of my friends while he screamed at them that I was a child of the underworld. I never had a desire to return to Rome. I stared back at Margaret Jones, rubbing my left wrist. “I’m looking into the deaths of the foster children. And I want to ask you about Paul.” “Unofficially, of course? Don’t you trust the police?” “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of being thorough.” She smiled broadly. White teeth, green eyes. “Do you enjoy picking through the debris of other people’s lives?” “That’s not what I do. I’ve worked with children and families for years now. I’m just continuing my work in another way.” “And you don’t think you need to explain why to me?” “No. I don’t.” “Do you know who Caldwell and Caldwell is?” “I suspect a big law firm, given the building you’re in. But we’ve established that. Who do you work for?” “Our clients hold the greatest power in this city. Political as well as religious. Otherwise, any other information is privileged.” “Not if there are cases that deal with the common good; that’s public knowledge. But let’s start with the Archdiocese of New Orleans.” “Yes. I love pro bono work.” “Well, that sure as hell must keep you busy.” “You don’t like the Church?” “I no longer feel one way or another. Baptized, yes, confessions up my ass, if you want to know the truth. I can’t see how the world is any better off.” “I prayed for a long time for a person like Paul to come into my life. And he did.” Margaret Jones got up from her chair and walked over to the window, her arms folded as though she were protecting herself from a coming blow. “It was a struggle, but he came around and I know that he truly came to love me. And I, him.” “And then he was taken?” “You think that I would blame God or the Church for that? We should respect what joy comes to us. Ms. DuBois, I don’t understand you. You are so, so, well, cynical. Yet you spend your days, and I’ll bet your nights, hunting down the devils that kill and hurt children. What motivates you?” “Have you ever read Dante?” “Are you here to give me a lesson in Christian morality? Didn’t you just say that you no longer trust the Church? Anyway. if you want to talk Dante, you’re going much too far back in time. I would question the relevancy of Dante in today’s world.” “You ever think maybe that’s the trouble with the world today?” She smiled. “Okay, you got me there. But I haven’t set eyes on The Divine Comedy, much less the Vita Nouva, in years. Really. Not since college.” “You went to Loyola, didn’t you?” “Yes.” “Anyway. O avarice, my house is now your captive: it traffics in the flesh of its own children-- what more is left for you to do to us?” Margaret Jones turned so quickly to the window that I jumped up in surprise. Both of her hands were splayed against the clear glass and she groaned. “Every morning I curse God for letting my child die. I consider myself a devout Catholic. Where do I go from here?” I waited for her breathing to slow down before guiding her back to her chair. Much can be revealed by a kick in the solar plexus. Margaret Jones was all about secrets, and the more she talked, the more she revealed that she was not what she pretended to be, and she somehow did not belong as handmaid to Caldwell and Caldwell. “Did you have Paul’s life investigated before you took him in?” I asked, keeping my voice level and hard. “Of course.” “Well, you know that we had nothing on his parents. He seemed to have simply appeared in the projects at about the age of ten, selling crack and hustling. Did you find out anything that could help me in finding his killer?” “I used the investigator for the firm. He’s top notch. All we could find out, and believe me he interviewed everyone in the projects, even some of Paul’s johns. All we know is that his mother was probably from Haiti, last seen, at least one junkie told us, when Paul was about five. She seems to have vanished. No unidentified body was found near the time of her supposed disappearance. As to the father, zip.” “Have you any idea how Paul got from your home to the trolley?” “Well, I live in the Garden District so whatever happened, there wasn’t far to go. Not like the others.” “How much do you know about the others?” I asked. “Don’t you think I’ve not carried out my own investigation? Do you think I would simply let his death lie? You think the police are not thorough? You’re kind, Ms. DuBois. I think they are simply incompetent.” She leaned over and pulled a drawer out from her desk and handed me a Baby Ruth bar. I nodded thank you, tore the wrapper off and took a bite. I watched Margaret Jones eat hers in two. “Paul was on a field trip with his school. He was supposed to be home by seven. He never came home. That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows.” “I’m sorry to ask you this, really. But did you by any chance get access to Paul’s autopsy?” “By that incompetent Harlan Boudreaux?” She snickered. “Yeah.” “Sure. There was nothing there. No marks on Paul, no strangulation. Nothing that would lead us to a killer. No damn clues. Suffocated like the breath was simply sucked out of him.” “You had your own physician look at Paul, didn’t you?” “Of course.” “You must miss him?” I asked. “What a question,” she said, and then she threw the gold pen she had been running through her fingers at the far wall. “This is ridiculous. Why are you really here? You’re overstaying your welcome, Ms. DuBois.” She walked to the door and covered the gold knob with one big hand. I stood up and walked to within a few feet of her and stood my ground. “The Delbanco Corporation. Do you do work for them?” She hesitated. “Yes. And what of it? “ She leaned against the door, her movement acquiring a nervous edge, as though I had struck a nerve or had revealed in just one question something she had yet to consider. “You know about the commonality of the murders, you are a religious person, you work for some, if not the most, powerful people in New Orleans. My God, lady, you’re a lawyer and I would have expected you to put the clues together way before me.” “Look, there are things beyond your understanding here.” “You couldn’t even dream about how deep and unusual my understanding is. I’m willing to bet right here and now that you know what the possibilities are and you are just too chicken-shit to do anything about it,” I said. “What could a lowly, disgraced social worker know that I don’t?” “The murder of these children is all about power and money. The criminals, when caught, and perhaps not in they way you might think, will never be rehabilitated, I can guarantee that. It’s with me always, the knowledge of what they are. Call in your sociologists, criminologists, penologists, every human expert on the planet and I promise you that they will be dumbfounded at what confronts them. But they will not understand the most important moral lesson: evil cannot be contained behind bars, it cannot change; it just is. No plea-bargaining for those who have killed the children. So you can save yourself a little time and thought; the murderers will not need a lawyer.” It was like waiting for one of us to draw our guns to end the tension and may the best woman win. She made the first move by releasing the doorknob and folding her arms across her chest. “I worked very hard in my early days helping to get the Victims Crime Act passed. I paid my dues trying to send those who had committed abominations to jail forever. One morning I woke to a headline that sealed my fate; without my even knowing it was happening, a man who had murdered his own three children and who was sent away for life had been released on a technicality. I saw this technicality ploy being used by my colleagues to get the most hardened creatures out. I felt my time had passed, so I went into corporate law.” “Gee, and now look who you are helping along. I suggest you look into your own client’s activities, unless you’re part of it. The Delbanco Corporation is buying out properties promised to low income residents, and guess who’s on the board?” Her eyebrows drew inward, her eyes widened. “Go read your own elevator,” I said. “One technicality and you sold out. Sorry, Ms. Jones, I don’t think you tried very hard. You fall down; you get up again. Well, at least that’s the way I look at.” “Time for you to leave. Now,” she hissed. “Just a couple more questions, please. Did you ever get a note about Paul from the Ursuline Convent?” “Well, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you. Yes. Just a little note saying that Paul had the mark of heaven.” “You didn’t think that curious?” I asked. “Of course I did. I checked it out. The nuns said they knew nothing about the note. The stationary must have been stolen. There were no fingerprints or DNA evidence on the paper.” She smiled broadly, and then leaned on the door. I pushed back to my chair, sat, and crossed my legs. “My, you are thorough,” I smiled back.” “If you have no other questions, I do have work to do, and thanks for having lunch with me. It was very interesting. Good luck. Call me if you find anything you think I would like to know. Evelyn will show you out.” “I will,” I blurted out and stood up. “Just one more question. Do you do any work for the Port of New Orleans? ” “Why do you ask?” she said, her wide eyes now narrowed. “Oh, I’m just trying to cover all my bases. I have to tell you, Ms Jones, the murder of these children, your Paul, goes deeper than the work of some psycho. I think you already know that. I think you may know more than I do, maybe even the police.” “If I did, I would certainly be cautious about who I tell, now wouldn’t I?” “Sure, but I’m thinking as I’m standing here, looking around, knowing who you work for, that you’re not entirely free of the taint of it all?” “Are you threatening me?” “No. I’m just trying to get you to help me. I think you know, being a lawyer and all, that power corrupts so deeply that those who use it come to the point that they no longer recognize boundaries.” “As you say. I know how often lines are crossed.” “That’s legal, Ms. Jones.” I hurried on. “I’m talking common decency, values, and goodness. You can sin and not break the law.” Margaret Jones pulled the door open and Evelyn stood waiting. “I think you should finally go, Ms DuBois. I’m very busy. I know were to find you should I want to. Oh, and just a little advice: when you ask for help, sometimes it pays to try a little finesse. I forgave you your rudeness; others may not.” I walked towards her, placing my feet directly in front of each other, toe to heel, and brushed up against her arm and turned: “Why didn’t Paul ever take his First Communion? He was twelve, way old enough.” I walked to the large doors and toward Evelyn. Warm air moved in from the outside waiting area. I turned to Margaret Jones and asked: “Did Paul ever talk about seeing fireflies the night before he died? Are you part of the White Army?” “Get out,” she growled. She turned her back on me and lifted her head, gazing at the movement of white clouds across the sky as though she were commanding the gods to hurl a lightening bolt and smite me. I hesitated another minute. “I didn’t see him the night before he died. I was at a dinner party.” Her shoulder shook and she lowered her head. I couldn’t wait to get out of there, away from sorrow, a mother’s regret, and the power of greed that the building symbolized. I thought that Margaret Jones was a prisoner of her own ambitions. I sensed no ghosts or movement of regenerative life in the place where she worked; it was a place of dead things, of a past that no caring person would want to go back to. Jones didn’t belong there. By allowing me entrance to her thoughts, however reticent she was, I knew that we both had the same goals. I was learning to use my power, to stop and look into the person who stood before me, to see into their souls at least to the extent that I knew when they had the makings of a beatitude. Besides, I had given her enough information to decide whether she was with me or against me, whether she would pick up her telephone and tell the murderers that I was hot on their trail. And so I trundled down the stairs, pushed open the door into the parking garage, hoping no one was behind the door, and ran to my car. When I got in I locked the door, started the engine and screeched out of the building’s dank cavern and didn’t let out my breath until I made it to Canal Street. There are times when entering the realm of ghosts is comforting, that of humans daunting. The mass of humanity that thronged up and down this busiest city street went about their daily lives in a somnolent fog, disengaged, the needles on their moral compasses held by a magnetic field that would only budge after what I was about was all finished, one way or another. My confidence was blossoming with each interview, each time I learned more about both the murderers and the victims, because I was penetrating the territory of the enemy I took a right and headed out to the river, then a left and finally found a place in a parking lot near River Walk. I needed desperately to walk in the sunshine. I looked at my watch. It was only five o’clock, yet I was hungry again and decided to get a beer and sandwich, no matter what. I had two hours to go before my meeting with Harlan Boudreaux. It was turning out to be quite a day. I headed toward Jackson Square, an oyster po-boy and a Jax beer. I sat on the cement ledge across from the Cathedral and the Cabildo and listened to a jazz band as shadows passed like phantoms in the glass of the Cabildo’s long windows. I thought of going in, but knew that Pinch had been through the place several times and had felt and smelled nothing unusual. Who could have sanitized a murder scene so thoroughly that even a ghost could not see what humans could not see. All the swords were in their archetypical places, except the one that had murdered the human Pinch. Pinch had gone to see the instrument of her death and new ghostly life but it was no longer in the evidence locker at the police station, nor had it been returned to its other place in history. Was the weapon taken as a memento or to subvert an inquiry into another death? I saw the knife as I did in my dream of Pinch’s murder; about three feet long, a metallic handle festooned with purple bijoux, the blade sharp and doubled-edged; perfect for putting someone to the sword. The sun was hot on my back, the aroma of hot dogs and fried food glorious, and the music was rhapsodic, probably better than any club that you’d have to pay to get into. I felt better being out, reveling in my city, getting away from what I felt deep down in my soul was a bad place. Caldwell and Caldwell, legal eagles to the political and religious powers of the metropolis. Who really runs things around here? The band finished playing and started to put their instruments away. I looked up at the Cathedral clock. It was already six o’clock; tourists, pilgrims, street artists, and even the palm readers were packing up and heading for restaurants, clubs and home. A new crew would emerge at nightfall. I hurried to the clarinet player, a black woman about thirty, who was not more than five feet and almost as wide as she was tall. But, man, could she play that instrument. “Wait, wait,” I called to her, holding out a ten dollar bill. She turned to me with a smile that lit the world. Her hand met mine, and we touched lightly and she took the money. “I thank you. I hope you enjoyed our music. Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Oh, I’ll be back lots.” I smiled back at her and started to walk toward Pirate’s Alley. “Best you visit the church before you head out,” she called out. I turned to ask her what she had said and why, but she had already passed through the entrance to Jackson Square headed for the river. I watched as she disappeared into a group of rapping teenagers. She seemed to have been swept away by the song and the dancing. Crazy love, you gotta have crazy love, motha fucka’. And then a hot inrush of air tumbled through the gates inducing a sonorous clicking, like tongue against palate. Tattered pieces of cardboard flapped against the wrought iron spikes that surrounded Jackson Square; eyes watched me, laughing eyes, a nose here, a youthful smile, fragments of those who had been murdered in this heavenly city. New Orleans, like many cities in America, has longed been described as exhibiting a “culture of death.” Murder rates have risen, the court system clogged with too many cases to litigate, criminals set free for lack of prison space, gang warfare, once a province of the night, has moved into the arena of sunshine. Sex, drugs, money, manipulating the rules, random madness. Some sociologists who study this pathology of the city will put out spread sheets and accumulated data going back twenty years in order to prove that unmitigated poverty is the underlying reason for New Orleans being the murder capital of America. In most respects, and given my experience as a social worker, taking many of the abused and neglected children from areas with few resources, where cycles of poverty are so evident it slaps you in the face when you have to enter any of the housing projects in New Orleans, I agree. And those who have the opportunity to change the future of my city have done so little. Civil authority has failed the people, all people, for it has neglected its children and that is not something that is benign. It is a sin of omission and for that they should all go straight to hell. When I think of the business community, I think of the sin of sloth and greed and the old saying that eventually corruption becomes a way of seeing the world so that right and wrong cannot be distinguished and one becomes the other. And the religious organizations? Well, the eyes that were looking at me, the mouths that smile, the baby noses, are shards from the photographs of the murdered. Every Sunday after Easter there is a special mass held at St. Louis Cathedral to pray for the victims of violent crimes. Posters with photographs of the victims are attached to the wrought iron gates across from the Cathedral that gives entrance and exit to God’s house. Imagine that, one day in every year a mass for those who have suffered, who have lost their lives, who are left behind with memories and little, if any, awareness of justice. I touched each fragment that fluttered in the wind, trying to identify Tasha or Paul or Marisa, any of the murdered foster children, but I could not. Imagine that, Hannah, one blessed day of prayer. That in itself is cause for the tears of a decade or two. I turned and looked up at the doors leading into St. Louis Cathedral; people were going in and out, and as the doors opened I heard the clear and shrill voices of a children’s choir. The sound was high and piercing and I stood and listened, voices in and out, in and out, mixing with the rap and bounce from Moon Walk. The voices of children going in and out and through me: Oh holy, oh motha fucka’. A sweet draft enveloped me and it whispered: “Oh, you some pretty woman. But my new mama she smelled like roses. My picture done flew away. I chased it but my hands doin' work just yet. See; it’s caught down by that there trash can. Get it. Try not to be too sad when you look at it ‘cause it ain’t gunna help matters none. Tell my mama to watch for herself, they’s all coming down. All coming.” I separated discarded cups from bottles from Styrofoam food containers that had fallen from the overflowing trash container until I found the dirty soiled photograph. A boy about ten or twelve, wide smile showing bucked teeth, ears flat against his head, a pale blue background enhancing his dark skin and navy blue jacket. A shadowy gold insignia of a private Catholic school was still evident on the jacket. “That’s me alright. Thanks pretty woman. Gotta go. Be cool, too.” “Wait, stop, tell me first did you see who took you?” His voice came as a low tune on a harmonica, but I could make out the words: a head full of stars. A pocket of air sucked away from me, the city losing another positive atom for its future. “Bye, Paul,” I said, and then took in the pungent aroma of good food, music meant for tourists, the bleat of boat horns on the river, the silence of the ghosts as they waited for me to do something, anything more than one mass on the day Jesus rose from the dead to save the world from sin. I was drawn into the church by the cool air that lured me, the smell of the incense that reminded me of one of the worst days of my social work career, and the counsel of a clarinet player that was not human. I decided to follow the portents set before me. Three years ago, I had to track down the grandmother of a young boy who had been found wandering Esplanade Avenue at two in the morning. The kid was lucky; a patrol car noticed him and the officer had been trained as an EMT and could tell that the boy was in shock. He bundled him up in an old blanket, brought him to the nearest station and called the Social Services office, which paged me. I was on call. I will never forget the look on the kid’s face. Shock in a child is different than in an adult. You think: Well, an adult has had time to filter the world, good and bad and the expectations that come with it. But the child? How the hell can he know when he is confronted with something so bad, so outside of his experience, that it throws him into a temporary hell or perhaps, if he’s lucky, a safe place in his own childhood and away from the real world. His name was Brian. He was eight years old and skinny and raw skinned, like one of those starving hound dogs you find lost in the swamp. I held him, got a clean blanket and convinced him to slowly eat some hot chicken soup. I was lucky to get him into Charity Hospital, in a semi-private bed, pulling strings with the nursing director I had gone to school with. Five days went by and he came around and started to talk to me. He told me he had come to New Orleans with his mother and father to the Jazz Festival and had somehow gotten lost. That’s all he remembered. He never saw his parents again. He was a smart kid, knew his address and grandmother’s telephone number. I rode out to Sulphur, Louisiana, alone, from I-10 onto a paved road and then a gravel road that went far into the lowlands. The rotten egg smell of sulfur followed me, turning my stomach. I finally turned onto a wooden bridge and noticed a sign, hand-painted in black with the name Delaware. I had seen smoke in the distance when I had turned onto the gravel road, but it wasn’t until I went over the bridge and headed down the oyster shell road that I saw and smelled the large plume of smoke that covered the eastern horizon. The trailer had burned almost to the ground; a red pickup truck with an American flag stuck to the driver’s door sat abandoned in a detached carport. When I neared the trailer, a sudden wind pushed the smoke in my face and I smelled burning flesh. After the smoke cleared, I warily entered the burned-out doorframe and saw two black skeletons sitting at a table. The plastic seats of the chair and human skin had fused together, as did the skin of the arms onto the Formica table. I imagined a game of bouree and that this had been the ultimate trick in the game. After investigation, it was found that Brian’s grandparents were not his real grandparents, but part of one of the most heinous crimes in America: the making and selling of snuff films. Brian’s case was assigned to another social worker out of my catchment area and I never heard from him again. Something had told me to go out to Sulphur. I am not a prideful person, or at least I hope that I am not, but my interference led to the smashing of that enterprise. Every month or so for a year afterward, I’d look in Brian’s file to see what he was up to. In one year, he had three foster placements and the last notation was that he had run away and could not be found. I should have fought to keep him as my case; I should have watched after him better. He would be eleven today; is he singing rap or is his voice soaring towards heaven? I always think of Brian when I smell incense and I force myself to imagine him whole and happy. There were about twenty people scattered in the pews around St. Louis Cathedral. As I entered, the candles blinked in unison like tongues of fire licking the air. The setting sun sent fractures of light through the stained-glass windows that depicted Jesus’ journey with the cross on his shoulder. Thorns glistened; his face was radiant red with blood. How far had he to go in order to forgive us our sins? How far had he yet to go? When would he have to retrace his steps because of us? Dominus, Deus, Sabaoth. I had been in this church many times during my early years as a social worker. When I first came to New Orleans, I used to come into the French Quarter, taking the city bus out from my old apartment near LSUNO to get red beans and rice, a beer, and to walk the streets hoping that my loneliness would be temporarily assuaged. I would sit in the back pew of this church and thank God for bringing me this far, for the existence of this city, for helping me in school. But I never kneeled, never folded my hands, just sat and mumbled to the statues that stood silent. When I started interning and saw my first abuse case, a little girl beaten so badly that she was unrecognizable, I came to this church for succor, for answers. The statues stood silent. As time went on, I came less and less, remembering finally the very first time I came here. It was for the first communion of my cousin. I had sat in the front pew with my mother and father, for families were allowed a front-row seat, and watched the children dressed in white, candle flames touching their young faces, slowly making their way up the aisle to be blessed, to be taken into the bosom of the church in order to avoid the steep ascent into purgatory. A child cannot distinguish between ceremonies that involve the innocent or the damned, so this ritual seemed less potent than the one I had dreamed of when my mother took me out into the swamp. I never did make my first communion, but always began my entreaties to the forces I was yet to understand, much less acknowledge, with these words: In the solace of my days. The murals of St. Louis Cathedral are awesome, depicting the grandeur of not only the church, but also its teachings. There is nothing American in here; it is of another time and place. I looked up toward the ceiling and read the words and thought of sacrificial lambs, God the Father, God the Holy Ghost, and written in French these words: Feed my lambs, feed my sheep. I heard a soft whisper and the cold of strong winter seized my left side. I shuddered, grabbed my left arm, my breath coming in rapid gasps, and started to sweat. A heart attack, here in a church that I no longer trusted. I turned toward the whisper and saw Mary holding a smiling baby Jesus; sha, sha, sha went my heart and the word love, love, love came to me. My arm throbbed and I looked toward the altar, thinking that I would have to yell for help. The priest was raising the gold chalice toward the shimmering cross of gold, and I saw blazoned on the far wall the word veritas. Voices on both sides of me whispered, run, you better damned well run if you want to make it out of here. I’m gonna kill you like I killed your colored friend. Run, bitch, run. I stumbled out of the church and made my way through the gates and into the garden, threw myself under a tree, and tried to calm myself with deep-breathing exercises. I heard a child cry, a mother saying hush now, the neighing of horses, and loud rap music still pounding the air. The children no longer sang. My breathing leveled and I sat up. The doors of the church were closed, the bells were silent and I watched the street fair people setting up their tables for the night crowd. I looked at my watch: it was only six thirty. I wondered if the ghost that had been following me since I’d left Margaret Jones’ office would show itself; I was tiring of the subtle jabs at my psyche, the gold ribbons of light that assaulted my peripheral vision. I stood up. “Follow me if you want, but stay out of my way,” I said as I turned in a circle, my arms outstretched, hoping to at least feel benevolent air. Three times around, and it went through me with a soft whisper: you are safe, for now. Then came the familiar man smell and I smiled and whispered back: Romeo, oh, Romeo, wherefore art thou? But where was Pinch? Didn’t she tell me she was going to find Romeo? Would she come if I summoned her? No, I don’t think she will hear, she is about other business and will know when I need her. “Then follow me Romeo,” I whispered to the ghost. “You come with me, until I can see something of what you are, until we meet.” * Back in the fifties, the area around Lake Ponchatrain had two very distinct identities. One related to decadent wealth, where white-columned houses stood hidden behind great, moss-laden oaks, where streets wound about like the braided hair of a beautiful mulatto girl. On the other side of the avenues, smack dab on the lake, was the place where the common and tired could go for fun. Ferris wheels and fun houses, mirrors, trap shows, cotton candy; a place where children could still run up and down the midway unescorted by parents and there was very little fear of abduction or murder. I never heard that Harlan Boudreaux was ever on the take. But he lived in one of the largest houses in this fading wealthy district. Eight white columns rose high into the dark magnolia that covered the top of the house like protective hands, ancient and thriving oak trees hid most of the house from view, and incongruous clusters of bamboo swayed in the wind, blocking the house from the neighbors on both sides. It was a kind of spooky place. I had been to Harlan’s home only once before, to attend the reception for his daughter Genvive’s graduation from law school. She had interned in the Department of Social Services, giving free legal advice to punks and druggies who, most of the time, were out of their minds and skins when she talked to them. “I can hear their blood sing, smell their urges, feel their burning psyches, almost taste their crooked ways; it’s very exciting,” she had told me. Genvive was an interesting young woman, capable of great things, and had a natural questioning instinct that is sometimes absent in younger generations. Back then she displayed a skewed social conscience, and often said that bad could become good, and vice-a-versa, with just a little help from her friends. Did Genvive ever realize, as her father surely did, that, either way, it had to be the right kind of friends? I had gone to the reception, not because I admired her, but because I felt sorry for her. She was an idealist and idealists come in many forms; so for her graduation present I gave her a leather-bound volume of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Selected Writings and a collector’s copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake. I think my daddy would have approved of my choices. That was about three years ago. The last I heard, Genvive was living in Japan, the wife of a diplomat, a good friend of the royal family, and she had written a series of women’s crime novels that had been nominated for the Edgar. I read all of her books. I don’t think she ever cracked open old Tom, but she sure knew her noir detectives. A fine American tradition continues, I thought, as I drove into Harlan’s driveway. But there was always something off about her writings, something profoundly disturbing: A complete and utter lack of compassion in any of her characters, even the protagonists. Her bad guys were endowed with abundant intelligence and never suffered; some went scot-free, others were given an easy death. Writers usually hate or love the characters they create. Genvive loved only her villains. When I had called Harlan that morning, I told him I would arrive by seven at the latest. The sun had not set, and the glow of light from the western sky reflected against his stark white house and hurt my eyes. All I heard was a buzzing silence. No cars sped down the street, no music drifted in the breeze, no human voices called out to children that supper was ready or that a special television show was about to begin. The Cleavers had never lived in this neighborhood. The street was lined with weeping willows and mimosa trees; their pink and white powder puff blossoms shimmered and gave off an aroma that was a reminder of a South that remains apart from mainstream America; old, decaying, the stuff that makes myth. Christ-haunted. I felt a chill move in from the bamboo cluster and wrap around my heart, the same fear that I felt the night Pinch was murdered, when the phone had not rung, but I could feel the approach of inevitable bad news. And then I smelled the sharp odor of barbecue and my stomach turned in vacant and painful hunger. I had not eaten in almost an hour. My senses were going out of control. The walkway to the front door was laden with burnt-sienna brick, the kind they use to restore run down inner city sections, giving the buildings what I called the “factory effect,” then charged six thousand dollars a month for rent where once single mothers, drug addicts and the homeless shuffled through life. The bricks were slippery with mold, as though no one had walked on them in a very long time. I looked around for Romeo, saw a mottled adumbration quiver near the front window, then I pushed the shining doorbell button that was shaped like a caduceus. My hand was trembling, my mind bombarded with a fleeting vision of me wandering in a dark tunnel where only a somber glint of light shone from a candle carried by the silhouette of a stout child. An unexpected quiet descended, as though a curtain rose on the stage that was this world, the audience breathless, waiting. I looked out into the night that was sightless, no cars passed, no far away voices calling for companionship or loss. An orb much like the one I had seen at the relic room in St. Roch’s bopped up the walkway, hovering in front of me, and giggled. The curtain feel, the world started turning again, but the audience did not clap, they sat silent, their eyes pierced by what they had seen. I am them, I thought. Now I have to see the world through the eyes of those who will be persecuted. A car passed, slowed and the lights of the city rose, overtaking the night, and I saw in the car two figures and knew that it was Harlan’s body guards. An elfin woman with short white hair, a gray dress and a white apron opened the large door. Her eyes struck me. They were blue and inert, set deep in her wrinkled face and made more peculiar by the dark red lipstick that had last been popular sixty years ago. Mrs. Harlan Boudreaux seemed to have aged centuries since I had last seen her. She held a large fork in her right hand and her apron was splattered deep red with barbecue sauce. The smell was wonderful and my stomach turned for want of food. But, damn, I couldn’t remember her first name. “Hey, you must be Hannah,” she said. “Come on in, darlin’. Harlan’s waiting out back.” “Thank you,” I blurted out, watching as she waved the fork toward me then toward the back of the house. “I don’t mean to disturb your supper. I did tell Doctor Boudreaux that I would be here at seven.” “Well, darlin’, I know that. We put an extra chicken on the grill for you. Come on back. Come on now.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the house. “Now follow me and we’ll ask Tisi to get you a drink as we pass through the kitchen.” The house had not changed since I had been there years ago; from the outside one would expect a spiraling staircase, chandeliers, huge vases of flowers, a maid and a butler. But the Harlans lived for themselves and left their small pretensions for the outside world. Here, the environment was sparse with very little indication of accounted-for wealth. A regular staircase, hewn from cypress and transported here from Harlan’s family home near Pecan Island, went straight up to the second floor. Tables and lamps that could have been purchased in any department store along Canal Street lined the entranceway. Two small vases with pink azaleas and blue hydrangeas adorned the room. The walls were a severe white, an arid, flat, desolate color I had never seen before. Then I was stunned by what looked like a medieval religious painting of Jesus and another man who was bound, his face stained with blood, his eyes rolling, and his head cocked towards opened clouds from which a vapid silver light emanated. I guessed that was heaven, however uninviting its effect. Jesus stood to the left of the man, smiling, his face contorted not in empathy but amusement. Except for the silver, the rest of the sky was dark and opaque, as though God the Father had truly deserted the earth, had given his son over to the caprices of mankind. I had not seen that picture when I’d been there before. I tried to make out the signature at the bottom right corner of the painting, but couldn’t. “That’s a saint there with Christ,” said Mrs. Boudreaux. “What saint?” I asked, leaning closer to the painting. “Well hell, it sure ain’t Saint Peter,” she cackled. “Now, come along, the chicken and Harlan are waiting out back.” . I followed her through the hallway and to the kitchen. Her gait was slow and she limped, favoring her left side. Her head shook rapidly and I guessed she had either Parkinson’s or early Alzheimer’s. She didn’t seem to remember me; but then again, I couldn’t remember her name. The entire kitchen was yellow, with studio lights shining from a high ceiling. Mrs. Boudreaux’s sister, Tisi, stood at a chopping block, slicing bright red tomatoes that smelled of the country, acidy and sweet. I had seen her picture in the Times-Picayune often, always standing next to her sister from whom she refused to be separated. They were not twins, but if Tisi had answered the door instead of Mrs. Boudreaux, I wouldn’t have known the difference. Same dress, same lipstick, same eyes. They had been born ten years apart and had never been separated except when Mrs. Boudreaux went on her honeymoon to Rome with Harlan. The sisters were purported to be the main money behind the great charities of New Orleans, giving away in massive amounts the hundreds of millions their late father, Hermone Batin, had left them. It was said that they had done more than anyone to support needy children, had cajoled the Catholic Church, and built shelters for women, children, drug addicts – well, you name it. But there was always a catch; they furiously controlled the use of their donations, sometimes threatening agencies and individuals and more than often caused the demise of many careers. They were dubbed “the furies” of New Orleans society. I had heard some talk about a third sister by the name of Meg, who had drowned in the canal near the Batin family’s ancestral home, and as rumors often abound especially after someone in society dies, there was talk that she was insane and a drunk. Anyway, combined with Harlan’s influence as Chief ME, his presence on multiple boards, including the Port of New Orleans, I was dealing with a very powerful family. Religion and commerce and money and politics are predictors of how we live and how we die. “Sis, you remember Hannah DuBois. She’s a social worker and friend of the family. Now, Hannah, what can we get for you to drink?” “Just ginger ale, please.” I said. “Ginger ale,” laughed Tisi. “It’s time to relax, petit. This is New Orleans. You’re a good Cajun girl. How about a vodka tonic?” “Thanks. Just ginger ale. I’m working,” I said, displaying my biggest smile and hoping I would not be pressed too hard. “But, I’ll have some supper.” I followed Mrs. Boudreaux out to the patio where Harlan was standing at a brick barbecue pit, turning chicken halves. “Harlan, honey, Hannah’s here,” said Mrs. Boudreaux. Harlan turned and let out a deep breath; his lips were puckered, his eyes narrowed, as though he had been thinking of something unpleasant. Seeing me, a smile came to his lips, but his countenance never changed; it was as though he had long ago taken my measure and decided my portion. I could not tell whether he liked me or not, but it was not hate that I saw in his expression as he considered my presence in his home. He was tall, almost too thin, with a mass of white hair that enveloped his head and fell lightly over his ears. Discernable stubble sprouted from the line of his chin. A red shirt brought out the smooth whiteness of his skin, the bright green of his eyes. He had stayed on as ME well beyond the expected age of retirement, so I guessed he was about seventy, though he looked no more than fifty. He was an extraordinarily handsome man, debonair, polite, brilliant, and demanded loyalty from everyone who came under his professional and, I would suspect, personal domain. I felt a gelatinous film stretch a great mass of connective tissue across the lives of these people so that the divination that I thought was becoming stronger was simply blocked. I could only see through the senses of the ordinary human. “Doctor Boudreaux,” I said, extending my hand to him. His hand was hot and strong, and all I could think of was the many bodies he had cut open, the dead eyes that had stared up at him and begged for retribution. When he squeezed my hand, I felt a tremor as though I had never really met this man before and I was way out of my league. “Aw, come on now, Hannah, you don’t have to be so formal anymore. I’m retired. Seems we both been cut loose, so to speak.” “Yes. I suppose you could put it that way,” I said. I tried to pull my hand away, but he held firm, inspecting my face, his smile now on the sharp edge of provocation. “Oh, my dear child, I do apologize. I know you have been through some mighty trying times. I meant no arrow to your heart. With all the honesty I can conjure, let me give you my condolences on the death of your friend.” He released my hand. I breathed with relief. “I’ve resigned from the agency. I want you to know that up front, because I’m here to ask you some questions about the foster children; in an unofficial capacity you see. I’m hoping that you’ll want to help.” He waved his hand as though he were shooing flies. “We will get to that later. Let’s not be too formal and above all, please dear. I have a policy about business and pleasure. Pleasure first. You call me Harlan and my wife sure wouldn’t mind you just calling her Alectina. We’ll eat and have a drink or two. Then we’ll talk. I know why you’ve come here. Alec, is the table set? The chicken’s ready.” Alectina Boudreaux had retreated under a large jasmine bush as Harlan and I talked. I had sensed her lurking the whole time, like a cat ready to protect her master. When he called her name, she slid out from the recess and held a large blue platter out as Harlan removed the chicken from the still fiery pit. Then she turned toward the house and chirped. “Now Hannah, isn’t Harlan just about the best barbeque chef you ever met? He even cut the chicken into expert and perfect pieces. We only bring home the best chicken from down home, whole and live, kill them right here. Fresh as fresh can be.” The meal was wonderful. The chicken scrumptious and tender with seared-on hot sauce, potato salad, okra and tomato stew, and peach pie for dessert. I tried to resist seconds, but my body was like a driven organism. I couldn’t stop until I had reached an embarrassing level of satiation. Harlan talked as a proud father would about Genvive and her writing career and her recent move to Rome, and about his new hobby playing on the Internet, how the world was moving to the brink of disaster, that there were too few resources to sustain every person born. A firm hand and proper governance was the answer, he said, although he declined to elaborate on the specifics when, between bites and chewing, I asked him. Tisi smiled and nodded, but rarely talked except to tell us about the new priest at St. John’s where she volunteered every morning to pray for the souls of the dead. She kept drinking vodka tonics and ate little. Alectina ate along with me, though her portions were smaller, and chatted about religious charities and books that I had never heard of, like The Mystery of the Third Millennium, Souls Reunited, Soldiers of God, and finally and most intriguing, The Coming of the Fourth Crusade. So I nodded and smiled and ate and tried to pretend I was an ordinary down-and-out ex city employee come to ask Harlan for assistance. Anyway, I had a hard time paying attention when I was eating, the senses of the act became overpowering, almost ritualistic, and I couldn’t control them. Harlan ate nothing. He drank an entire bottle of Beaujolais and seemed to be amused by the unusual performances at his dinner table. “It’s good that you eat with such voluptuous gratification. I think it regrettable that young women today deny themselves one of the few pleasures possible. As a physician, I declare it dangerous, especially should they wish to birth a healthy child.” “Now Harlan,” giggled Tisi. “The young lady does not need to hear you pontificate on, well, on things that are of no concern to her.” “You are drunk. Best you go up to bed now. Alec, get your sister to bed.” Tisi finished the drink she held between her hands, nodded my way, and left the room, her back arched backward in a pose of anger and hurt, much like that of a humiliated child. We finally finished eating and Harlan cupped my left elbow in his strong hand and led me into a large study, leaving his wife engaged in gathering the dirty dishes. The room was sweltering, heat poured out of a blaze in the towering marble fireplace. I had decided on a long-sleeved black silk blouse and my usual black jeans, anticipating a warm evening; now I felt like I had entered a steam room set on full blast. I pulled away from Harlan as we approached the fire; the touch of his hand, along with the heat of the flames and the overwhelming smell of pine, was a sensuous experience that disturbed and thrilled me. I had secured my hair in a French roll with the barrette Eslina had given me, but drops of sweat wet the straggles of hair on the nape of my neck and dribbled down my back. “It’s a gas-running fireplace. Fake wood. You just have to turn on the gas and voila. Alec thinks it adds a sense of place; that’s what she calls it. Hoity-toity Alec, I call her, trying to portray herself better than her upbringing. But, we both miss the island and the marshland. So in order to divert her desires, she goes to too many of those book readings by such and such writers who seem to be seers and see the end of the world. I suppose we’ll be moving back home soon. If you get hot, let me know and I’ll turn the air conditioner up.” He talked as he moved closer to me, sheathed his hand around the back of my neck, rubbed it gently, and then pulled away licking his hand. I supposed it was meant to be a sensual act, an older man coming on to a younger woman, subtle jabs to the psyche. I was betting that he couldn’t even imagine why such moves would never work with me. I pulled up the collar of my blouse. He was already on his second glass of cognac, and added to the bottle of wine at supper, his inclinations and come-ons, if that’s what was happening, should have been laughable. His eyes were bloodshot, but his speech, perfect. The look of stone perturbation that I had seen earlier had returned to his face, indeed had entered his entire composure. “So what is it you want to know, Hannah? Why are you pursuing this on your own?” “I want you to tell me what the breath of a child smells like.” The sound that came out of him was like the snorting of a horse. “You’re too young to be so dramatic,” he said. He snapped his right hand, his fingers popped, and then he walked to a large porcelain umbrella stand next to the fireplace and pulled out a shiny black walking stick. He tapped it along the floor as he approached me. I did not move, but said: “Really? How much death and abuse do you think I’ve seen working social services?” I swallowed hard. “Would you mind, Harlan, getting me a cognac, Please.” He poured my drink, held it up to the light of a lamp, and then handed it to me. “I suppose too much. Sorry, I underestimate your dedication, however misplaced it may be.” I took a sip of the cognac and it was great. “Why do you say that?” I asked, moving away from the fire and him and sitting in a deep green chair pushed up against a wall that was all bookcases and nursed my cognac. The liquid burned my throat, rushed to my chest and flowed through me. It was really great. “Because you think you can make humanity better by fighting one horror at a time. Because you think that in our lifetime man’s essential nature will in some way be affected to the better. I hate seeing you hurt and all your intentions go to naught.” “Well, don’t worry about me. Just help me out. No skin off, as the kids say today.” My back was pushed against the back of the chair, my spine, tense; I was overcome with the feeling that he might suddenly leap at me. I finished my drink then handed him the empty glass. “Another?” he asked, smiling down at me. “Yes, thanks,” I croaked. “And how about you just answer my questions, please.” “Well, my dear, I wouldn’t want you to think I’m some old curmudgeon or just drunk. I’m sorry. Let’s start over. I’m getting a little testy with this retirement. Too much time on my hands, not enough human contact. Dead or alive.” He laughed, pulled the twin to the chair I was sitting in close to me, and sat so that our knees were almost touching, the black walking stick resting between my legs. “Are you ready?” “Absolutely,” I said. I could feel sweat forming on my forehead and under my arms. I glanced at the window to my right, but the curtain was closed tightly. I turned and stared into Harlan’s eyes and felt his hand on mine. I sensed desire, or was it pure lust? I jerked my hand away. He laughed and raised his head, his white hair like the mane of a powerful horse. “The breath of a child smells like heaven, like what God has promised as redemption, like the aroma of the rapture. That is the divine description. The earthly description? All sins, cognac and the odor of crushed acorns. Like a woman’s sex. I remember my first cadaver in medical school.” Harlan stopped and looked into the fire, his eyes wide as though the picture he was about to describe appeared in the flames. He took a sip from his glass, ice tinkled, and I wondered why the ice had not melted yet. My drink had been straight up, undiluted. “The cadaver had come from a body bank that stores unknowns for medical schools in and around Philadelphia. It was a woman, a young woman. No more than twenty, if I remember. She couldn’t have been dead for more than a week. I remember so vividly even today that her eyes were opened and staring so wide, as though she had been surprised that she had been born only to end up on my table for dissection. What am I doing here? I can still hear that question. What am I doing here? I wanted to touch every part of her without surgical gloves, get the feel of her real flesh, make sure she was truly, deeply cold and dead. I was so concerned, Hannah, that she could possibly still be alive. So, I did it, took my gloves off and caressed every part of her. It was then that I knew I wanted to be a pathologist.” “Because you wanted to make sure they were all dead?” I asked. “Yes,” he whispered and looked at me. He was smiling and shaking his head. “So, you understand. It was God speaking to me.” I folded my arms across my chest, cupping my glass in my right hand, afraid that he would try to touch me again. “And then I took that scalpel and cut her open. The ME cut, from stem to stern. They hadn’t told me, or I suppose they didn’t know, that she was pregnant. The fetus simply popped up when the scalpel passed over her belly. Hello! it said. It’s me. Baby, baby. Can you imagine that moment, Hannah? “Yes,” I mumbled. “ I guess you can.” He stood up, looking down at me, leaving the stick leaning on my right thigh. “That young woman was homeless, a drug addict, and there she was carrying a baby that was just going to keep it all going. I felt so sorry for that little soul.” He took a sip from his glass, realized it was empty and poured himself another. “The one thing I pride myself on in all the years I was a pathologist is that I never treated the body of a child with anything but pity. Now, you want to know about the foster children and if I found anything to help you in your, what shall we call it? I know: quest. You want to know what the police don’t know because, knowing you, you’ve already gotten to their files. You were a very good social worker, Hannah. A bit too naïve. You want my files? You don’t need them. I’ll tell you what you need to know. They were all suffocated; that you know. Can I tell you anything about the killer or killers? There were no marks on any of the bodies that had anything to do directly with their deaths. Oh sure, they had marks, scars mainly from past trauma, but you already know their dismal histories.” “Why did you quit?” “Tired, tired of it all. What purpose was I serving anymore? Nine autopsies and I couldn’t even help anymore. A person starts to know when they’re going crazy. When that happens, it’s time to stop. Hannah, I can see that you’re just about there.” “You think I’m going crazy?” I asked. “Well, look at you. You’re beautiful, talented, and now you’re wasting yourself on trying to do other people’s jobs. Let the authorities handle the murder cases.” “Tell me something. Why are your reports so skimpy? And what are you hiding? And furthermore, what relationship does the Diocese have with the foster child murders? You’ve always been tight with the Church people.” He walked to a table, refilled his glass with more cognac, and poured the liquid down his throat. “You don’t mince words, do you young lady?” he said. He was looking into the fire again as though he was collecting his thoughts. Then someone knocked on the door, a soft tentative knock, and the door opened and Alectina stuck her head in up to her nose. “Harlan, there’s a phone call. “ She raised her eyebrows, a signal that it was important, and disappeared. He followed her out the door I stood up, pushed his walking stick away, and walked to the back of the chair and gripped its top with my hands, eyeing the bottle of cognac that had maybe two more drinks left. So I had another and paced in front of the fireplace, thinking of a way I could penetrate Harlan’s armor. But then again, as I reviewed what he had already said, I was sure that I already had to some extent. The look on Harlan’s face when he returned told me that whatever news he had just been given had delighted him. When he looked at me, I could tell that the cognac was finally getting to him. “Why don’t your reports have any toxicology information, any examination of the vital organs?” I asked hurriedly. “You either didn’t want to cut them open because you already knew how they died, or someone told you not too. It doesn’t take much analysis to see that this whole investigation is being manipulated. Who and why, well, I haven’t figured it out yet. But Harlan, you dropped the ball for a good reason and I’m going to find out why.” “You know, Hannah, I’d rather hate to see something bad happen to you,” he said still glaring at the fire. “I always had a particular liking for you. As I said before, you’re very beautiful.” “Oh come on, can it. This case is making New Orleans into a cesspool and you’re contributing to it. What the hell is going on?” I waited for him to respond. It seemed as though hours had passed. A shallow breeze touched my cheek and I let out a sigh. “Try this question: You’re a powerful man. You sit on all the important boards, like the Port of New Orleans, your family pours money into this town like there’s no tomorrow. What do you gain by it? You’ve lived here most of your life and you’re letting it rot away.” My voice was almost a shout and he still had not answered me. I stared at him and waited. He sat in the chair he had been in before and looked up at me. “Are you a religious person, Hannah?” I smiled. “In the sense that I believe in sin, in the sense that I believe there are some basic moral tenants that we should follow, otherwise we are nothing but brutal beast, our lives purposeless. Then yes, very much so.” “Do you believe that some people deserve to live while others should not?” “What criteria are you using, Harlan? Aren’t we all born equal in the eyes of God?” “Okay, let’s just say yes, we are. Then, who of us is responsible for making sure God’s will is carried out?” “What is God’s will?” He clapped his hands and laughed out loud. “Oh, Hannah, you are a treasure. I know no one else that could banter with me, especially using St. Augustine.” “And Kant, don’t forget Kant,” I said. “Just so, just so. But it’s late. Perhaps we can continue another time. Perhaps without your histrionics in the well of sorrows.” “Yes,” I said. “That would be an interesting evening. But, before I leave, could you just tell me why you found it necessary to have Judge Patton’s son’s autopsy sealed. It was one I could never get a look at. And what are the two of you into with The Delbanco Corporation? And what is God’s Army, the White Army?” He turned and looked at me, the grip on his glass so strong his knuckles had turned to ivory. “Who are you anyway? What right do you think you have to come into my home and ask me questions? I played my part as the gentlemen and for old times sake gave you my hospitality. But frankly, my dear, none of this is your business. You have no idea who and what you are dealing with. Continue to pursue this and the part you will play will be one you can’t even imagine in your wildest dreams.” His opened his mouth exposing his straight white teeth and then he licked his lips. “Show yourself out.” I am a person, you will note, who must have the last word, so I said: “Thank you for your hospitality, Harlan. But I will proceed with this quest, as you call it. There are many reasons I’m doing this and none of them are your business after all; your actions have convinced me of that. This is no ordinary serial murder case; usually when these things happen the community goes ape-shit buying guns and pepper spray and bars for their windows. This one, well it’s foster children, children people acknowledge, but say isn’t it ashamed what is happening. But because people like you don’t do their moral jobs, there is a disconnect in the extreme because it’s not their children, they are society’s children, the systems responsibility. If that connection doesn’t somehow heal, we might as well call it quits. There will be no hope of salvation.” He shook his head and smiled, picked up his walking stick, then twirled it through his fingers. “Now, if you are finished with your lecture on ethics in the modern world, I insist that you leave now.” * I was happy. I had succeeded in getting a rise out of Harlan without using my voodoo; I had cut through the membrane and seen into Harlan’s heart and it was black. I left him knowing that if he didn’t know why, how and who killed the children, then he and others were using the crimes for some other purpose. There was something crooked about the people I had just left, not crooked like in crime, but like in their perception of their place in the world. Faulkner would have enjoyed meeting the Boudreaux family, but I’m sure he would have turned away in disgust; a man can only take so much of southern gothic shenanigans. I suppose Harlan’s reactions did not surprise me; perhaps I was more surprised at my reaction to him. But in the end, it was the painting that bothered me the most. I had taken several art courses at Loyola; one was on the religious function of art in the history of the Catholic Church; I had never seen or heard of a painting, or a story for that matter, in which Jesus relished the pain of another human being. Alectina Boudreaux had made the remark that the suffering man was not Saint Peter, as though the thought was ludicrous. Before he ascended to heaven, Jesus gave Peter authority over his church on earth with these words: feed my lambs, feed my sheep, a statement that was supposed to convey compassion and love and responsibility and vocation. The Boudreaux family had a reputation of being the prototype of the good, Catholic family whose roots went back into the French Acadian countryside. The depth of that faith is enduring. I should know; I was raised in the milieu that followed the teachings of the Papacy without fail. So what the hell were the Boudreaux’s into? How twisted had their perceptions of their faith become? The mention of a fourth crusade, even though it was a book and not something I had heard about as fact, scared the crap out of me. I was jazzed; blood sped through me like it was looking for an outlet. I needed at least one moment, one place where I could find peace, put the past days behind me and regenerate. As I drove away from Lake Pontchartrain and the verdant call of the creatures of deep water and lost time, I decided to go to one of my favorite places on earth: The Maple Street Book Shop. Built in 1964, it is one of the few remaining independent bookstores around, even when in New Orleans Mr. Faulkner and Tennessee Williams are given their own days of celebration, where famous authors from here and around the world come for signings and readings. I parked a few spaces from the little blue shotgun style house and walked down the sidewalk. The lights were on inside and through the long window I saw hands and shining eyes beckon. I went through to the back sitting room, grabbing a napkin full of cake left over from an author reading earlier in the evening, and was lucky that no one was there. I felt no presence, no ghosts, no fallen words of aspiring writers, dead fabulists, or entranced readers. On the floor next to a red couch was a pile of some ten or so books and a few scattered on the floor. One book was left open with a glass of green liquid next to it as though the reader had been abducted in mid-thought. I sat on the couch, moved the glass to the side and picked up the book. Red splats dotted both pages and as the overhanging bulb reflected on the pages, I could see a gloss. I touched one of the dots leaving my fingerprint on the book and a mark of blood on my finger. I glanced at the top of the left page: A History of Voodoo in New Orleans. I started to read: One of the constant legends concerning Marie Laveau is how she saved the life of a young boy by placing Guinea peppers under the seat of the judge who had condemned him to death. After praying at St. Louis Cathedral, she went to the Cabildo. I skipped over to the other page: and then there is Sanite Dede who regularly sold her wares outside of the Cabildo; they are both considered Gran Mets. Well, I thought, so much for my peaceful time. Who or what was trying to send me a message again? Can’t I get some effing downtime? There was nothing new in this material; I’d heard it all before. Ghosts of repetition. I yawned as though I had kept the urge in for years. I put the book down and listened and closed my eyes trying to discern anything that would lead to or away from my temporal sanctuary. Sleep moved over my entire body and I felt warmth and submersion into soft arms, a gentle humming, transport; I was leaving. He’s coming. Hush, hush now baby girl. And then the body floats up and away; oh it was so wonderful. Sine qua non. From inside of me, coming, a soft rustle enters the room and then a deep croaking whisper and I am jerked out of the warm fluid of my birth. “Excuse me, but I was sitting there.” He was middle-aged, white, a peppery beard shaped to hide his age, perhaps a scar or the absence of lips. His eyelids folded downward so that I could not see the color of his eyes. And he pursed his lips and jutted his chin at me. “If you don’t mind. I said I was sitting there and that is my book and that is my green tea.” “Sorry. But you weren’t here and, well, I was a little concerned. There’s blood on the book,” I said, shaking my head. “Yes. And look here. See. My hand started bleeding again, as if that would be any of your business.” I walked out of the room without another word, but looked back at the entrance to the place of no peace. He was standing in the middle of the doorway, hand on his hips, a gaping smile pasted across his face, his mouth wracked with crooked, dirty teeth; and it was then that I saw from that far away the color of his eyes. They were yellow. Before I left I asked a pleasant young man to order the books Alectina Boudreaux had mentioned; he assured me that they were available and would have them in within three days. “You’re like the tenth person asking for one of those books today; the crusade one.” “Really?” I asked. “I know you can’t tell me who ordered the books, but would there be a reason that you might let me know about?” He looked behind him. An older woman was stacking books. He leaned toward me and said: “Some old lady book club I think.” “A club?” “Yes,” interrupted the woman, as she cleared her throat. “It’s called The Joiners Workshop. I’ve seen some of their flyers around town so I’m not giving out private information You know those people that raise money for things like the rosary fund or clean rectories? Something like that. I’m new here and not Catholic, so I don’t get a lot of it.” * They got me as I bent over my car, fighting with the stubborn lock. I knew it was coming, frankly I was getting impatient with them, almost tried to will them to the act as they followed me from the French Quarter to Harlan’s and finally here. Perhaps I could meet them on their terms, in their territory and find out who they were and why it was taking them so long to just get rid of me. One on each side of me, hands seized both my arms, twisted them across my back and my head was pushed against the car window. Tape went across my mouth and then a cloth bag that smelled of dirty shoes covered my head. I thrashed about pretending to fight even though I knew there was nothing I could do to escape. These were no ghosts and I just wasn’t going to get away any time soon. They picked me up and I was carried away and then I heard the squeaking of a trunk and then I was gently placed inside. They said nothing, but the grunts were mild considering the efforts they were making to subdue me. And I thought of the two mafia-type guys and as the spring air slowly diminished, sucked out of the trunk and my lungs, I settled into a nook trying to ward off the smell of rubber. I lost consciousness just as I saw in my mind’s eye the gold sparkle surrounded by the red, white and blue colors of the Virgin Mary medallion. Take it real easy, sweet Hannah, Romeo here taking a ride, ain’t nothin’ like a poor white girl’s pride, beatin’ her hide.” “Oh, shut up, Romeo,” I murmured, “Where the heck is Pinch?” Then I went to sleep. When I woke up and looked around me, the scene could have been convincing enough to make me believe that nothing that happened the previous weeks was real, or I had truly crossed the line over to non compos mentis, suffering from a reality disorder of the highest existentialist kind. I was in a combination beauty shop, Mardi Gras costume store, and dinner, a period set piece for a 1950’s noir crime movie that had become colorized before its time and had long been deserted, perhaps a grotto of some eccentric collector. The door to the shop was closed, the slanted wood paddles of the blinds turned so that only shards of broken sunlight peeked into the room, a red and white “closed” sign dangled from the brass doorknob, a thick black drape covered the windows, hiding any view from the outside. I was sitting in a raised chair typical of beauty shops, wearing a pink plastic cover that had been tied too tightly around my neck, my mirthless image gazing back at me from a mirror that spanned the wall. Behind me, the reflection of a collection of Mardi Gras masks ogled me, some laughing, some crying, some with eyes and mouths suspending any display of emotion until what was going to happen to me was over with. Three large publicity type posters where tacked from ceiling to floor: first Buddy Holly, his thick black glasses overpowering his baby face, then Hank Williams, exhibiting his solemn but sexy smile, and finally below Hank, Elvis – a full-bodied photograph – he was holding his guitar in one hand, dressed in that fabulous white silk suit with the flowing cape trimmed with gold, one knee thrust forward, one arm splayed over his head. Roses lay at his feet. I wondered how different the world would be today if he were alive, if they all were here strumming and singing and telling us all about pain. As though someone in the back of the shop was reading my thoughts, or perhaps I had willed them to do it, Hank started to sing “Cold, Cold Heart.” No doubt about it, we would be one step nearer the Lord. My wrists were secured to the arm of the chair with Duck Tape, my ankles tied with a purple ribbon, but I was free to at least raise my legs. I smelled fried oysters and hot sauce and turned as best I could toward the aroma; if I hadn’t felt my normalcy of deep hunger before, it sure hit me then. To my left was a faded gray Formica counter, the kind that had silver flecks throughout. Containers of sugar, pepper, mustard, hot sauce and a plastic glass filled with water were on the counter. Muddled voices came from an open doorway; a greasy white cloth was pulled away from the entrance and attached to the door jam by green plastic hooks shaped like mini-magnolias. My mouth was no longer taped, so I guessed that someone wanted me to talk. “Hey,” I yelled. “Who’s back there? Come on out and let me go. Come on.” A large man sauntered in from the doorway, leaned over the counter, and drank from the glass of water. His hair was black and slick, his face puffy and red and soaked with sweat. He wore a white waist length apron that was spattered with a rainbow of splats from food or paint or blood, a real Jackson Pollock outfit. He pulled a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and started digging into the space between his front teeth. “We got stuffed pork chops special today. I use the oyster dressing. If you don’t want that, we got Pasta Chu Chu. Pastrami and wild mushrooms, that’s what makes it good. Which you want?” I swallowed hard, my mind following his words, every ounce of the food becoming a dream rolling into another and then I gasped. “Let me go and then I’ll decide.” “No. You decide; we will do what we brought you here to do, and then you can eat.” He pushed away from the counter and looked at me for the first time, his ballooning stomach stretching the apron, his hands folded on his hips in fists. He cocked his head and smiled with a look of sympathy and resignation. “Okay. I’ll give you a couple bites of Pasta Chu Chu, then Miss Burdine and Miss O’Dell gonna fix you up like you supposed to be. Then you get the whole shebang. ” I relaxed. Looking into the mirror I saw waves of light appear, two waves, one on each side of my image. Within a few seconds, two dark forms took shape. Romeo and Pinch. I smiled and struggled to get up, the tape was hurting my wrists. “It’s about time you get here,” I said to Pinch.” “Sorry, I’ve been busy, Amazing grace and all that. Let the guy feed you, let them get on with it. We’ll watch.” And they both snickered.” “What the hell is going on?” I asked. “Look,” said the guy, “Cooperate and then it’ll be over quick. Be difficult, well, I’m just not in control of events beyond the food.” “Ach,” said Romeo, “That’s Bobo Barcella. Dumb as shit, but he got muscles, he got game.” “What’s he doing here then?” asked Pinch. “He used to be in the mob years ago. They let him retire, as in not dead, because he’s probably the best cook in New Orleans. Even ghosts get high smelling his stuff. I hear he got religion, confessed he killed thirty people in his life, but stopped short of telling the priest the names.” “Well, I guess priests don’t want to know the details of sin. But, he is a good cook; smells great,” said Pinch. “Ya’ll can smell?” I asked. “Lady,” said Bobo. “Open your mouth.” “Go ahead,” said Romeo. “It’s not poison.” I looked at Pinch and she nodded, and then floated up to the shelf below the mirror where I could see her figure closer to mine. Well the Mafia and Romeo were right. It was ambrosia, food of the gods, all of them. When the spoonful of Pasta Chu Chu melted on my tongue it all hit me and it was one of the greatest highs I’d ever had. How can I describe it? Sweet, salty, pungent, sour, hot, cold, searing, mellow, tart, ripe, extravagant, and then the elements, it seemed like hundreds rolled around in my mouth and then became me, overpowering, ecstasy, pure and heaven baked. “See, it’s good. You sit back and I’ll tell Flo and Sally that you’re ready.” They were really old, Flo and Sally, and could have been in advertisements for any retirement community for widows on their last legs in south Florida. Both were white and their makeup made them look like aged ghouls; eyebrows drown in black pasty arches, orange rouged cheeks, apple red lipstick, and their faces powdered a matted eggshell white where the deep wrinkles in their skin looked like mud canals. They had turkey necks, the skin loose and flapping as they hurried into the beauty shop. They wore light green frocks with large pockets at the hips that were stuffed with combs, brushes and bottles, and large scissors. They each wore a big rhinestone brooch at their right shoulders that looked like dime store rejects. As they came closer, I realized the brooches where shaped like the Virgin Mary medallion, but these were all white. I looked for Romeo but he had disappeared, then I looked at Pinch for help. She smiled and nodded toward me. “They’re not going to kill you. We both know that. But yes, I see that medallion thing. We will get to that soon, love. I’ve found out it is the symbol of The White Army, sometimes called God’s Army. But I think you already knew that. What they do to you here will be another clue, won’t it? It’s all coming together, all just a matter of time and place.” “Just take notes, so to speak, huh Pinch.” “Hush, girl,” said one of the ladies. “We can’t get you beautiful, see how it’ll turn out if you don’t just keep still.” Which was Flo and which was Sally I just didn’t give a shit. They inspected my neck, my cheeks, my hair, touching me with long bony fingers, red nails filed to points, and then they started on me. They pulled my hair, sprayed it with noxious formulas, curled it with their fingers, and pinned it up on my head so that I looked like a crazed Marie Antoinette. Then my face; first came the witch hazel swabbed from head to breast bone and it burned like hell. I yelped and one said to act like a lady and then they ladled on pancake makeup that was the color of the Gobi Desert and then they made me look like a younger version of themselves. When they finally finished and patted me down as though they were trying to make it all stick to me forever, I resembled a smirking clown, bride to the zany droll from hell, a true Stephen King character. I was hideous. “You know, you could try to get them to talk,” said Pinch. “I know this whole thing is making you nuts, but don’t miss an opportunity. I bet they’d be happy to talk if you egged them on.” “Yeah,” said Romeo, who had come back without my noticing. “I had an aunt like that, old biddy. Once you asked her a question, she couldn’t ever stop talking. Yackety-yak, don’t talk back. Whew!” “Son of a bitch, Sally,” twittered Flo. “You can’t use that color lipstick. She’s too young. Here’s this one. Change it now.” “Now pucker your lips, darlin’.” Cooed Sally. “Look, “ I said. “Why are you doing this to me?” They both stopped working on me and inspected me again. Brushed a stray hair from my cheek, touched up the crap on my neck. “Now don’t leave one of those lines on her chin,” said Flo. “Flo! Flo!” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing to me and why?” “Such a way for a young lady to talk. Now clean up your act. There’s wonderful things in store for you, darlin’. You just can’t imagine.” “You know,” said Pinch. “So far not one person, that is the living, that you’ve encountered, has been very good. If their souls aren’t already indistinguishable from muck, there’s this brown patina darkening. Doesn’t that tell you something?” “A soul shown, darkly,” said Romeo. “Very good!” said Pinch. “You’re getting to be a poet of sorts.” “I’m practicin’.” Flo and Sally left and Bobo started spooning food into my mouth. I swooned. And while I ate, while the food strengthened me, I thought about how I was going to avoid getting into these fixes. Wasn’t I supposed to be a Gran Met? Wasn’t I therefore supposed to have powers beyond these human fools that had just inflicted the greatest humiliation possible upon me? Just look at me! “Pretty bad,” said Pinch. Then I remembered something I had read in The Book of Souls that Esline had lent me. The Gran Met is only as strong as she chooses. The forces that gather around her, the good or bad ones, are freely appointed according to what she, that’s me, wishes to accomplish. There was Pinch and Romeo and the ghosts of the children and Lila Broussard. Had they come to me because I knew they were there? Had I willed them? I saw so many things before me and my strength was diminished or compounded by my own will. My power will grow as I do things; take a direction, whether it is good or evil. Down the second path lies misery and emptiness, the other wholeness, self-possession and love. There will be many forks in the road. Perhaps as a Gran Met I had much growing up to do, as though I had began weeks ago as a child. This process, I realized, just as Bobo shoved the last spoonful of oyster stuffing in my mouth, was not much different than the old classic dictum of know thyself. But never, never, would I get so wrapped up in my own self that I would forget the purpose of the moment; finding the murderers, the first order of business. The insipid perfumes, the color of my new skin, the caricature they had made of me, the attempt at turning me into something that I was not, really pissed me off. Often, we just have to be slapped across the side of the head to get moving, keep it straight. But then, as I swallowed and looked at Pinch waiting, an amused look on her face, I wondered what did this all have to do with the murder of the children, of Pinch. What would be gained by making a monkey out of me? And as the thoughts whirled in my head, as I vowed to be the best Gran Met possible, sleep washed over me like waves lapping onto the shores of the bayou near my childhood home when in the distance I had often seen the dark clouds of a swamp lightening storm roiling over me. * “Miss, oh miss, you be okay?” This time a tiny voice filled with concern and innocent compassion. The scent of vanilla and chocolate, the sound of people laughing, and then the band starts to play. A base, a deep voice, I am swaying and the boat engine reverberates and the paddles turn and we move sideways and the song begins. I listen, happy, feeling the little hand on my forehead. “You like da music, huh lady?” I bring a finger to my lips. It is Robert Johnson’s Kind Hearted Woman. I smile. Sometimes I’m thinking You’re too good to die Sometimes I’m Thinking You’re too good to die. Other times I’m thinking You oughtta be buried alive. I wait until the song ends and the people clap and they stop and an eruption of noise inflates the air: voices, dishes, silverware, water slapping against the boat. My entire body aches; I moved my legs, my shoulders. I still had clothes on. I squeeze the hand that still holds me. “Who are you?” I ask, my vision still fuzzy, my head stuffed with cotton; it is as though I am experiencing the lost weekend with Ray Milland. “I be the first. The first dead one. But not dead no more.” I start crying; a reservoir of grief held in all of these days, no years, came forth and I feel as though I will just go the way of all flesh. “Please, please,” I sob. “Let me go.” “It be okey-dokey, lady. I doin’ get punished here now. I like it. Jus’ wantin’ ta say hiddy.” I open my eyes and look into Marisa Stone’s face. So this is what grace is, I think. Beneficence that will never be matched by those whole still walk terra ferma. “Are you alone?” “Oh, no. I’s never alone no more. Dey say you gonna find who killed us. That true, lady?” “My name is Hannah. And yes.” “Well, good. Those lil’ chirren that still livin’ can have themselves a Christmas and Easter and Hanukkah and mommies and daddies anyway dey ain’t the true ones. Can’t be got by dem peoples with stars in theys head.” “I promise I will do everything in my power. But do you remember who the people were, what they looked like?” “Guess we cain’t ask for no more dan dat. Bye-bye, lady. All I kin say is all I kin know.” And she was gone. I blinked the vision of Marisa away and stumbled to the ladies room to make sure my injuries amounted to only consequences of being roughed-up. I had to pee so badly and I damn well made sure I wasn’t raped. That I would have known about. I hate those movies where the woman wakes up the next morning in another person’s bed trying to figure out if they’d had sex the night before, especially Doris Day, who of course was a virgin, as though these women were not in charge of their own bodies. Yes, I am a virgin, odd in this day and age, but for whatever reason, and I have thought about it; my Catholic upbringing, a father fixation, just waiting for the right person, time or place, or because it is just part of who I am. There is an element of arrogance in my virginity, I suppose. But then, I am still human after all. I had not been violated, but there was a mess of jelly around my vagina much like that left after a gynecological inspection. The Swiss knife was still in my pocket and in the other the message that my abductors meant to send. A note wrapped around that damned medallion and written on the same ivory vellum like the other notes from Ursuline Convent: Dear Hannah: It is with great effort that I resisted the beauty of your body. This time. It would be best that you confine your daily activities to more womanly concerns, such as shopping and cooking and perhaps getting with child. I would be glad to help you with the later, but would like to see a more genteel demeanor, however. I mean to see no harm come to you. But there are greater purposes working and destiny will win out. As though things weren’t hard enough, the intimations confusing, now I had to cope with a secret admirer. When I looked in the mirror, my face was flushed, the heavy makeup that had been used during my brief captivity was smeared across my cheeks, the mascara had liquefied and I looked like a rabid coon. I washed my neck and face, pulled down my hair and combed it out with my fingers. I rubbed the scapular and wondered why they hadn’t taken it; it had become soiled by the greasy pancake goop they had lathered on my face. There was nothing I could do about the outfit now; a rose cotton blouse with a red tie and blue trim. I rolled up the sleeves and noticed a band-aid at the crook of my elbow, under it a tiny puncture; someone had taken my blood. There were scratches along my forearm coated with Mercurochrome. I had been someone’s guinea pig. I couldn’t wait to find out the whole story from Pinch. I joined the festivities on the deck and helped myself to the scrumptious buffet. The showboat had just rounded the river crescent at Woldenberg Park. The lights from Jax Brewery and the Aquarium of the Americas swathed upward into the clear sky. Stars burned between the flashes of human light, and then retreated, and I saw in the western sky a glow that pulsed and then the voices called to me from the city. Come, it is time. The city waits, the children pray, the ghosts laugh. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. As the Cajun Queen slowed, turned and headed for shore, a strange sort of anxiety took over me; for the first time in a very long time I felt truly happy and strong and confident. I looked again at the blinking western star and realized that my happiness came from looking at myself in the mirror, seeing Pinch beside me, and recognizing what I was made of. We docked at Spanish Plaza and I sauntered along River Walk, listened for a while to the thumping music at Moonwalk, crossed over to Jackson Square, then stood for another moment in front of St. Louis Cathedral, then headed deep into the French Quarter and home, followed by ghosts and body guards and members of the White Army, maybe some cops. Only once did I turn and look behind me, smiling without apprehension; but tonight I did not invite any of them in. III THE MERCIFUL O Niobe, what tears afflicted me When, on that path, I saw your effigy Among your slaughtered children, seven and seven! Dante, Purgatorio I had never loved the dark until that night. I felt liberated, free of panic, an entity unto myself, yet still connected to two worlds by a regenerating chorion, a pulsing organism. The streets were quiet, not even the muted city noises or grunts of stragglers making their way home drunk or lonely. A perfect time for reflection, a perfect time for listening to the soft hushing sounds of ghosts. No better time for appreciating the sparkles that signaled the presence of the other world that had become, to my growing pleasure and amazement, my second home. My creaking apartment door brought welcome comfort after the Boudreaux house and my stint with the beauticians from Gehenna. I felt at least that I had come back to the real world, my real world, imagined or not. I was so damned tired; the muscles in my back had formed a knotted vine around my spine; a dull ache was rising from the depths of my stomach and I knew I was starting my period. I wanted a vodka tonic, a scotch, Demerol, anything to take away the pain I knew was coming. I sat on my bed, pulled open the top left-hand drawer from the side table and took out a sample packet of muscle relaxants, given to me by a generous if somewhat exasperated gynecologist when I complained about the cost of drugs, the corruption of pharmaceutical companies. She had laughed and given me an entire box of samples. Pinch was not waiting for me; her silver shadow did not blend with the starry night that beckoned from the window. But on my pillow was a note written in Pinch’s familiar handwriting, tall letters, distinctive as a child’s, intent on impressing a teacher. I didn’t know that ghosts could write: Making spiritual friends. Meet you at home first thing in the morning. And yes, you did get a very thorough examination by the two crones. Love P. I read the note twice, then as I picked it up to put it away in the drawer, I saw the letters fading from black to gray to nothingness. I sniffed the air and looked around, but no ghost was near, no human watched. The blinking light on the answering machine caught my attention. I punched the message button. There were four messages: two hang-ups and one garbled message. The twisted nature of the Boudreaux’s hit me again; their scent seemed to cling to my skin. But Marisa’s face would be with me for the rest of my life and that gave me both solace and heartache. I could have sworn the garbled voice was that of Tisi Boudreaux. The fourth message came in loud and clear and I recognized it at once, a deep male voice with a heavy Cajun accent, distorted as if it had traveled centuries to reach me. It was Father Henry Delcambre, the dead priest who had once ministered at a halfway house down by the Irish Channel. We’d had a long lunch together a couple of years ago at Parasol’s Bar on Constance Street. He had called the department about a homeless family and I had the good fortune to take his call. When he learned I was raised near his home in the bayou area, he invited me to lunch. While I enjoyed boudin balls and shrimp etouffee, Father Delcambre talked about his mission and how homesick he was for his family. I suppose he saw me as a link to his past, and he needed someone to listen to his heart. When he paid the bill, he smiled and said: “This is probably the best food around, but dang, it’s sure not like Mama’s.” The last I’d heard, he’d been murdered, his body found in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 at the end of Canal Street; he had been placed on top of a burial vault and wrapped around its stone crucifix. Dark clouds hung low in the sky. The newspapers carried this eerie photograph and story for weeks, but his murderer was never found. That was about a year ago. Now I sat in my darkened apartment taking muscle relaxants and listening to the dead man’s voice: Meet me at the River Walk entrance to Jackson Square tomorrow night at eleven. I promise, you will know me when you see me; I shall be transfixed by the celestial shaft. Bring Pinch. I turned on my computer and logged onto the Times-Picayune archives and found the article on Father Delcambre’s death. He had started a halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics, extending his ministry to rehabilitation and job programs. Naysayers were astounded by his success, particularly among young people. He was able to get over 70 percent of his enrollees stable, still working, and off habitual substances for three years. God’s House was touted as an example of how love and good work could redeem the body and soul. Delcambre was admired by all, praised by the Church Fathers, loved by many, hated by none, affectionately called Pere Henrie mostly because of his heavy Cajun accent and joy for life. His body was found the day before the murder of the first child. “Drowned. No evident trauma. Probably robbed and pushed into a canal, his body floating and disintegrating with time, eventually making its way into the variegated and ancient channels near the crescent docks. My theory is that whoever found his body probably put it up on the crypt as some kind of joke, one meant to demean all that is holy,” said the ME, Harlan Boudreaux. I stared at the pulsing line next to Harlan’s name and thought about how dramatically our opinion of a person can change once we really get to even suspect their true motivations. A telephone message from a dead priest would have frightened me a couple of months ago, or I would have put it down to a mean-spirited prank. But hell, I was going to meet my partner first thing in the foggy New Orleans morning, and she was a ghost. I picked up a muffaletta sandwich at an all-night bar, opened a can of Jax, and sat in my wicker rocker, contemplating the half moon and the shadows fanning across the sky. I no longer knew what lines divided time, place or space or what was real and what were figments of my own imaginings. I lived in two worlds, but I knew I wasn’t crazy; I just wondered if a time would come when I would have to choose one over the other. Maybe the world I had known was headed the way of evil totally and irreversibly and there was nothing I could do, not even in my own small way, to stop the fall, to bring back the light. My father used to stare into the night for hours, his feet dangling from the wooden gallery, perhaps looking at a moon such as this, a night like my night. My mother would go to bed, silently, and I would tiptoe to the front window and watch my father. He always knew I was there. “Petit,” he would whisper, “what you doin’ up?” And I would run back to bed, giggling. When I was about twelve, the year before he vanished, I finally got up the courage and asked him what he was looking at. “I saw, to one side of the path, one who had been created nobler than all other beings, falling, lightning-like from heaven.” He had said that in a strange voice, a man not my father, talking to someone other than me. It wasn’t until about ten years later that I had read Dante’s Purgatorio in a world lit class and knew where those words came from. In all the mysteries of the world there is one theme that runs like an unbroken cord: light incarnates. And I keep going back to Dante. I stared at my bookshelf as I finished my sandwich and beer. I had filed my books alphabetically by author when I had moved into this apartment two years ago. Pinch had laughed at me, mentioned my obsessive nature and jokingly asked where I kept my card catalogue. I had pulled out the bottom drawer to my rickety old desk I had purchased from the Salvation Army Store and handed her a small tin file box with alphabetical dividers filled with neatly inscribed five-by-seven cards for each of my books. She had opened the box, a cagey look of surprise on her face, and remarked that I had neglected to use the Dewey decimal system. I washed my hands in the kitchen and pulled out Dickens’ Hard Times. I put the book to my nose and smelled my father, the nutty aroma of his black beard, the acidity of his skin when I had pressed my mouth and nose into his cheek. How I had loved him. I put Dickens back, aligned the bottom of the book with the edge of the shelf, and reached for The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio. My hand was shaking. I turned to the page where my father had highlighted a section in yellow. Automatically, my fingers caressed the words and I read from the top of the page: Still on the First Terrace; The Prideful. My eyes and fingers moved rapidly, picking out significant words. The angel of humility. Ascent to the second Terrace. The First Beatitude. One P erased. Then to the text: Now I was on my way, and willingly I followed in my teacher’s steps, and we together showed what speed we could command. He said to me: “Look downward, for the way will offer you some solace if you pay attention to the pavement at your feet.” As, on the lids of pavement tombs, there are stone effigies of what the buried were before, so that the dead may be remembered; and there, when memory - inciting only the pious - has renewed their mourning, men are often led to shed their tears again; so did I see, but carved more skillfully, with greater sense of likeness, effigies on all the path protruding from the mountain. I saw, to one side of the path, one who had been created nobler than all other beings, falling lightning-like from Heaven. I saw, upon the other side, Briareus transfixed by the celestial shaft: he lay, ponderous, on the ground, in fatal cold. I could smell dawn, pure and clean as ascension into heaven. My skin felt moist, as though I had been walking in the night mist. I held the book hard against my chest, the pressure sending the thumping of my heart to my ears, my body moving with the flow of my blood. The curtain pushed inward; cool air rushed in and around me. Popping firelight and an effervescent shadow coalesced into Pinch. “Hi ” I said, smiling. “You’re forming into something that looks human; it’s almost too bad about that. And you’re early.” “That would be unfortunate, my love.” Pinch whispered, then her form became one. “I’ve come to like what I am, who I am. Wouldn’t wish to be human again for nothing. Not after what I learned, not how I feel. Freedom at last.” She sat crossed-legged on the edge of the bed, the red cover a wonderfully inspiring contrast to her brown, luminous skin. For the first time, her voice was preceded by a low hum, like a swarm of bees moving across a field of wildflowers. “You’re happy, aren’t you?” I asked. “Beyond that, Scrimp. I don’t even know if I can describe this who I am thing to you. I am spirit, I am life, and all obsessions have left me. This is true freedom, to be apart yet one with the world. Only the good touches me. I don’t think that a human, you Scrimp, can understand that,” she said. “I can’t feel or understand it completely. I know that. But I can long for it. I’m feeling something like it. My own sense of freedom. Tonight maybe it all begins and ends.” “You would have to long for death.” “Yes,” I whispered, suppressing tears, rubbing the lower part of my back. “So much has happened to us, things neither one of us would have imagined months ago. Who were we then, what are we now?” “Scrimp, crying is a good thing. Something you may need to do once in a while. I don’t think that we are different than we were, not deep inside of us. We have and will change in order to meet the challenge of the mission that has been placed before us.” “You’ve been thinking the same thing as I have. But I’ve never believed in destiny. Who’s feeding us clues, what is guiding us in our search for the killers, and will we succeed in time to stop the next murder?” I asked. “I suppose we need to get to work,” Pinch said. “Yeah, let’s get on to our work. So, how are your new friends? I think I really like Romeo. He just doesn’t seem to stay put for very long.” “I know. He’s checking you out, trying to angle how he’s going to help. But for now, I can tell that you’re hungry. It’s time for your first breakfast. Why don’t we get you something to eat and we can review the investigations of the day.” “How do you know I’m hungry?” “I know all about you now. And that is part of the story I’m going to tell you. You asked about my new friends. So, take out the mustard and ketchup from your pockets, Scrimp, and lean back. I have a hell of a story to tell you.” I filled a bowl with Cheerios, a sliced banana, and a spoonful of canned figs, and wolfed the cereal while I told Pinch about my visits to Jones and Harlan, the messages, and the stories about Father Henry Delcambre and Marisa. Then I read the passage from Purgatorio, repeating, “stone effigies of what the buried were before” and said that our first visit after she told me her story was to be Tasha’s foster parents on Delery Street in the Ninth Ward. She listened without comment, her shining eyes moving rapidly around the room, her new way of processing her thoughts. Then I took the barrette from my hair and let the red curls fall to my shoulders. Pinch leaned over and smoothed them out as I realized her touch was becoming solid. I pulled off my boots, my shirt, my bra and jeans and slipped a yellow flannel gown over my head. The night had become suddenly cold, so I pulled down the bedspread and wiggled under the soft green blanket that the manager of a local hotel had given me last year. He wanted to thank me for getting his nephew out of jail and into a decent rehab center out near Lafayette. I fluffed my pillow, leaned against the headboard and watched as the entire Pinch moved around the room like a full, brown sea sponge. Finally she settled on the bed next to me, all substance and very little form. “There is, Scrimp love, somewhere in the vast space that is our soul something that they, who live out in the streets of our city but cannot be seen, call the mighty power of ancient love.” Her mouth talked but did not move, her eyes wide and reflecting a light that was not in my apartment. I had never seen Pinch so beautiful. Her hands were soft like a baby’s, her hair, once curly black, had turned white. “Who are they?” I asked. My voice had begun to quiver, and I was increasingly afraid of what Pinch was becoming, that perhaps she was moving away from me. “Hush. How can I tell you what I’ve learned in our city if you talk? Would you like a glass of cognac to sip while I talk? This will take awhile, a long while it will seem, to tell you a tale, sweet Hannah DuBois, sister mine. But notice this. Look at the clock. It is six-thirty and dawn moves in slowly. When my tale is finished it will be no more than seven. You will think that we have lived a lifetime, but ghosts can manage time; we measure it and chart our course. We have so much to do before death plays with the air.” I thought of getting up for a drink to sooth my quivering body. “Do you want a drink?” asked Pinch. “No. No booze. Cognac reminds me of bad things. It distracts me after all. Please. Start.” “I hated this city until I died. Every day of my life was painful, always full of memories that haunted me. The few people that loved me seemed forsaken or gone. I went from living in one hell to trying to makes things better for little kids that lived in the same, godforsaken place. What kind of life is that? Then there was you and then there is me like this. Now this city is life unto itself. I no longer hurt physically; my longings are for what is good. That dull hurt I carried with me, the one that was called revenge, no longer exists. When I left you yesterday, I moved out into the street straight into a sky the color of oxidized mercury. I would never have thought or said that before, would I, Scrimp? My mind is full of words and pictures that would astound the greatest scientist. What would Einstein think of me? Time, space, matter, infinity. It’s like I acquired a brain and lost a body. Great god almighty, if Granny could see me now. Voodoo, hoodoo. My memory is so sharp I can taste her living skin; the day she killed that old pedophile and grabbed me in her arms. The faces of the people in the street. Well, they were looking beyond me, at their futures, and there was too much fear. Steam moved up through the manhole covers and I smelled abundant life. I wanted to go down and not up into heaven. For a while I was confused and thought that I was going to hell. The neon lights were an assault, so I headed out towards St. Charles; thought I’d try to find the guy that disappeared on me. I hopped on a trolley again and stood beside the driver. Y’all bidness done done up here. I thought it was the driver talking, but I felt warmth on my butt and knew it was Romeo. Get offa hea, babe. We gots lots a talking to do. Been waiting for help. We needs help.” “Oh, Romeo was one hot ladies’ man in the projects. But things like that don’t matter to ghosts anymore. It’s just as well. I don’t think I even have a vagina anymore. Haven’t looked, haven’t needed it. Well, I guess some things don’t change when you become a ghost. Romeo, he used to talk like a hurricane moving down the bayou, mouth going, big lips, eyes popping. Could’ve sold life insurance policies to the Klan. I followed him to Algiers Point. Way across the river, can you imagine that? Well, we just got there; ghosts don’t walk or ride. He taught me not to even try anymore. We just knew where we were going and there we were. I could still smell the fire in the air and see the smoke rising. Usually I don’t feel hot or cold anymore, but I felt it then. I knew that if I really tried, I could conjure the whole history of Algiers. How it was in the beginning when the boats landed with slaves, when the yellow jack moved over the inlets and into New Orleans. Off in the distance, as I turned and looked over the muddy waters, I heard the moans of the dying, empathized mightily with what it feels like to die. I was not afraid. Then the smell of burning wood, cloth, skin. Children screaming.” “The fire of 1895?” I asked. “Yes. Hush.” I settled into my pillow, covered myself and watched the shimmering Pinch, listened to a voice that came to me from another New Orleans. “Our history goes before us. Humans live in false time. The buildings were burning but not burning, even though black smoke swirled in the air. Romeo was still beside me, then not there anymore; then I saw him walk out of the smoke like a developing Polaroid. He still has that same kick-ass smile. He pointed up and I saw a church steeple in the sky, and around it flew buzzards. Seven buzzards a-flying, said Romeo. Seven sins. They dipped and went up and then down, silently. Were they after the meat of the dead? I could smell only the scent of wisteria in the air, no bodies, no dead things, no smoke. I asked Romeo, why are we here? And he said: dem dead they all around here, sweet Earlene. They bodies, some like us, waiting to be used by time. But why are we here? Here to show you what you be looking for. A hole in the world. Our time has come, for all the suffering done to us. They say we blessed, you for some reason, me for another. I been told my poor spirit makes me be a ghost. Poor in spirit, that be me. Been down so low my spirit goes high. You Pinch, I think you be the pure of heart. We need one you know already and I hear dem talking all around us that she be known as the one who hungers and thirsts for justice. We all have a purpose. You, well, you be blessed. I be blessed. All I know is I’m supposed to take you here, help you on your way. I asked dem to ask him, the one dey calls Nobler, to let me fly up and be free. I done what they asked, sweet Earline. I’m free now.” “Scrimp, I kept looking at Romeo, the way he was talking, and I was just looking at that big face coming into the orange light, and I asked him what the way was. If I knew the way, then we could follow, find the clues, have an end to the endless agony. He said: `member the scary stories Big Man Juke used to tell us in the projects? `Bout da hole in the projects? Well, there be a hole alright. But not in da projects.’ And then I said to Romeo: “All New Orleans seems to be one now.’” I couldn’t help myself. I had to talk, to ask questions. “What hole, Pinch? Like in the universe?” “No. When we were little, Big Man Juke told us if we were bad we would go to hell through a hole and that’s where all bad children go. Well, I guess most of us got thrown into that hole somehow or other.” “What happened with Romeo?” “Romeo said find the hole, search the city, you will know when you find the way. And then he was gone. All that going from here to there and then he’s gone, telling me about a hole and to find a little Nobler guy. But I understood him, except for the Nobler part. We have to search New Orleans, go into the underworld, the belly side, a worst side of things, the very worst, things we’ve never seen or imagined. Go to the source. We will go to a whole other world, where there are different rules.” Pinch put her hand over mine, and I could feel the tension flowing into me. I felt her completely for the first time since she had become a ghost. I understood and knew what we had to do. I told her again about Harlan and how I was very suspicious of the Judge Patton because of his links with the powers that had given his son back to him, that it was him that was behind her death. Why else summon a social worker to the Cabildo on the false voice of a friend. “They’re both so influential. Both are on many powerful boards; like the Port of New Orleans. Death, commerce and religion.” I threw the covers off and went to the bookcase, pulled out Dante’s Purgatorio and flipped to the entry about the nobler one and the celestial shaft. I read the entire passage again, this time out loud. “We will enter the anarchy of the night,” I said to Pinch. “We are the night,” she replied. “As I said, our history goes before us. Remember the fun house, the one with mirrors? I went there once and, man, it scared the shit out of me then. Every time I would look in a mirror I would see a horned goat laughing at me. Never went back. Know what that means?” “I know that a horned goat is a symbol of evil.” “Ha, like that’s news to us. How do you keep the evil away? Gris-gris, voodoo, spells, prayers, the rosary, all the same and probably all just about useless for what we’re up against.” “Yes,” I said, getting up and pulling on my clothes. “To the source. There’s another thing about what Romeo told you. About us.” “What did you divine from the story, my dear Scrimp?” She smiled her big, shiny smile. “The poor in spirit, the pure of heart, the one who hungers and thirsts for justice. Three of the Beatitudes. From Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.” “Don’t remember them all exactly.” “Me neither. I think there’s seven or eight. The meek, the sorrowful, the peacemakers.” “I know another one!” yelled Scrimp, and literally flew around the room. “The persecuted!” “The children. The persecuted,” I said. Suddenly, puzzle pieces falling from a giant box. The lid of the box obscured, hidden from our eyes. “Hell, there’s one more, one more. What is it?” asked Pinch, still buzzing around the room, faster and faster and finally settling back on the bed. An icy blast, her breath, reached me as I finished dressing. “The merciful,” I said. “That’s eight. Do you think we are supposed to find them all?” asked Pinch. “I don’t know. But it’s a start, a good start. Let’s go.” “Where are we going first?” “Home; your home and Tasha’s home. The Ninth Ward. Then I think I’ll try to have a talk with the Archbishop. Then the judge, the father of the sixth child, and then Father Henri Delcambre, deceased. We have an appointment with him at eleven tonight.” “Well, that’s going into the bowels of hell,” laughed Pinch. “Then the underworld. We have to go into the underworld like Romeo said. Through the hole.” “Yeah, but any of those three can be the way,” I said. “Or, they can all be leading us into something that is not the way to solving these crimes. I still don’t know who we should trust, if anybody.” I pulled open the front door headed down the stairs. “I’m hungry. Let’s stop for breakfast and then see if I can pull a few strings, bring in a chip or two and get a few minutes with old Archie.” “Fine. I’ll watch you eat,” laughed Pinch, as she floated next to me. “How do you eat?” I asked, buttoning my shirt, amazed that I had not thought of Pinch’s primary needs. “Don’t have to eat. My needs are met by my being. I have only the need to settle mysteries. Ain’t that great? You know, Pinch, there’s nothing more liberating than our chains, once they’re gone. For me, my bygone body.” “You have nothing to lose but your body?” I laughed. Pinch disappeared and I heard a sharp laughter. When I opened the door and walked into the restaurant that served the best crawfish omelet in New Orleans, I saw a radiant image flutter downward like the feather from an angel’s broken wing and wait for me at a once empty table next to the bar. Two police officers were sitting on stools drinking beer, guns hung low on their hips, equipment belts weighing them down into the red vinyl seats. I looked at Pinch. She was smiling. Soft taps hit the windows and I knew that at least this section of the French Quarter was feeling a light sprinkle of love. Ettienne Broussard had served beer, very strange mixed drinks, and good New Orleans dishes for almost forty years at the bar that he named after his mother. Ouida’s was known throughout the world for cuisine that was original, a combination of Bayou cooking, Parisian French recipes and flavors and ingredients from the Caribbean Islands. Quida’s was also a cookbook, translated into five languages. The walls of the bar were pine, shipped from Ettienne’s home near Houma as a tribute to his father, who had fought the oil companies, erecting a fortress around his house with electrified barbed wire. The legend goes that his own devices electrocuted Gaston Broussard. But Ettienne, and indeed most of us, knows that electrified barbed wire rarely kills a grown man. Oil company thugs, Ettienne was convinced, murdered Gaston. Fortunately, the land had been left to Ettienne by his father’s will, and Ettienne did the only thing he knew to get revenge for his father’s murder. He gave all the Broussard lands to the federal government, forever to be designated as a wildlife preserve. He now spends most of his money on court fees, trying to stop the government from granting oil leases on his father’s once pristine land. Ettienne played psychiatrist to me when I first came to NOLA. I was a lonely kid, not yet eighteen, who insisted on drinking straight vodka in the early afternoon. We had a lot in common. His eyes were dark, his blond full head of hair had acquired brown streaks since I had last seen him, and his skin was like leather. Ettienne’s face brightened when he turned from the row of liquor bottles and saw me standing at the end of the bar. “Hannah,” he shouted. “Where the hell have you been, gal? Pretty as ever. But you’ve lost weight. What can I make special for you?” I laughed and held my hand out. When he took it in his, a slight tremor hit me. I looked into his face and an image of his death by fire came rolling over me. I looked around at Pinch, at her face that told me that we knew the same thing and that we could do nothing about it yet. “Every time I see you, Ettienne, I think of my father. Thank you,” I said “My, my, we are sad today. Come, what can I get you to eat?” I ordered a crawfish omelet with side orders of crawfish rolls and fried okra. “Jesus, you must be starving,” he laughed. “What a breakfast.” “The second,” said Pinch. From the corner of my eye, I saw the two police officers watching me as they sipped their early morning beer. I turned to go to the table where Pinch waited then looked them straight in the face. Their entire demeanors were world-weary, as though they had seen something horrible creeping through the night, hurting, betraying, and leaving a trail of heartache. “Morning,” I said. They returned my look, smiled and raised their glasses. I called Margaret Jones from the pay phone near the ladies room, surprised that the telephone book still hung by the short rusted chain and that the phone was still attached to the wall. Her secretary, I guessed the little white-haired lady, put me through to her immediately. I knew that Margaret Jones was not having me followed, but would relish knowing what I was doing, and what my conversation with the Archbishop would be. If she had anything to do with the murders, I figured she would want to tag along, at least vicariously, on my journey. If she wanted to have me followed, then Pinch would know if they were ghost or human. I didn’t give Jones any information, just that I believed that the children had, including Paul, been found with Catholic articles on them when they had died and that I suspected a conspiracy. None of the foster parents, including her, indicated that the children had worn these articles before, so the presumption was that they had been placed. Did she know that Paul had a scapular entwined around his testicles? No, she replied. Then perhaps, I said, the Archbishop could be of help. She didn’t suggest a lower minion in the church hierarchy and I knew she wouldn’t. I waited for Jones’ return call while I ate my breakfast. Pinch was playing with the officers, driving them crazy when they could find no flies or mosquitoes to prove what was biting and annoying them. Someone had turned on music and it drifted from the street and into Ouida’s. Pinch came to rest in the chair next to me, her head bowed almost to the table, the police officers stopped chatting, and I put down my fork and listened. A low exquisite sound, the voice of a man who had seen God and decided never to turn away, whose eyes had been taken, whose voice had been given wings in exchange. “It’s Blind Willie,” whispered Pinch. “I haven’t heard him in so long. Wonderful, isn’t he?” “Yes,” I said. “I’ve never heard that song. What is it?” “If I Had My Way I’d Tear the Building Down.” The sweet movement of the slide guitar echoed an ending. When the pay phone rang, I ran to it before anyone else could get to it. I had an appointment with the Archbishop of the Diocese of New Orleans at three-thirty. “Better get yourself a cell phone,” said Ettienne as he walked to our table with a bottle of hot sauce. “They’re planning to take out all pay phones within the next year. When this one’s gone, it’s gone.” “Merciful heaven,” said Pinch. “Somebody’s getting jittery somewhere, getting you in to see the big guy. And how can you eat that with so much hot sauce?” “Brings out the true taste. And, yeah, somehow I figured Jones knew more than she told me, more than meets the eye, so to speak. Something real interesting is up with her. Well, let’s get to Tasha’s house, then the judge’s house. Talk to whoever is there. Take a chance. I don’t think we’ll get to see him in his chambers, if at all. Too hardnosed, and we’d surely end up with some intern who knows zilch.” “If that,” laughed Pinch. The police officers had gotten up from their stools and were staring at me again. The fat one had his hand on his gun holster, his partner, a tall, thin white officer, took a toothpick out of his mouth. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked. “Yes, why?” “You talk to yourself all the time?” “Yep. All the time. Do my best thinking that way. Work out my problems. That a crime?” “I know you,” said the fat one. “Do you?” I asked. “Yeah. Social worker. Messed up with those foster children got killed. Stopped working after that friend of yours got herself killed.” “No. She had nothing to do with it. She was murdered. She didn’t do it to herself.” “Uh?” “Never mind.” I said, and walked out of the restaurant, waving to Ettienne and telling him to put breakfast on my monthly tab. I was out of cash. “On the house,” he yelled, as I turned left and headed down the street hoping that my car had not been stolen or vandalized. “Not today, not today,” I said. “It’ll be there,” said Pinch. She floated beside me, the morning sun moving through the magnolia and willows and painting her body with patches of sparkling gold and emerald green. * The Ninth Ward is many things to many people. It is said to have the highest collection of historic structures in southern Louisiana. Many of our artists grew up and still live here; Fats Domino has never left, and the first hip-hop radio personality, Mr. Magic, probably learned the nuances and beats of his songs here. The Ninth Ward was once viewed as an example of multiculturalism, where whites and blacks lived side-by-side, if not together, in a peaceful co-existence, sharing and creating a viable cultural stability. In the 1960’s, when the federal laws integrated schools, whites moved out of the area, a phenomenon called “white flight.” I am not a sociologist, nor have I studied the genesis of racial neighborhoods in New Orleans. But I have worked in this area with children and families all my years as a social worker and I know that it is still a vital area, steeped in history, where communities thrive and the citizens take care of each other. But there is great poverty here also, lots of crime, and gangs roam the streets now even in the daytime. It is a grand juxtaposition: the blight of abandoned factories and lost jobs along side of barbershops and grocery stores and churches on every corner, a place where Wal-Mart has yet to tread. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy flooded the Ninth Ward, but it recovered, it came back, but it became more and more an enclave unto itself. “You know, love,” said Pinch, “I was at first surprised that you came out here so often, took the cases without squawking.” “You mean like the other whites?” “Yeah. You never seemed to even be afraid. You were a redheaded white chick coming out here telling people what to do. You could have left that impression; wouldn’t have been good.” “I admit I was a little afraid the first couple of times. But I made a deal with myself: this was my job, if I didn’t want to come out here, then I shouldn’t do it.” “Not too practical.” “I made friends with most of the priests and reverends at the churches here. I think that paved the way. And you know as well as I do, that once you do right by one of their children, the word gets around that you’re okay; don’t touch, don’t hurt.” “Yeah, but sometimes some of the gang guys have no conscience. They don’t listen to their mothers, much less a person of God.” I turned off of St. Claude Avenue then onto North Claiborne and then Delery Street. We passed small houses surrounded by chain-linked fences, some were brick, some shotgun, all well kept, and arrived at the home of Cynthia and Evan Hebert. It was a pretty little house, redbrick, scalloped window casements, and a mulberry tree bursting with green fruit overhanging the left side of the house. A cement walk led to the front door; it was lined with old rubber tires painted white, blue and yellow and filled with petunias and daffodils and Sweet William. We both sat looking at the house and unwilling to move and confront the sorrow that waited inside. The Heberts could not have children; they had tried for almost twenty years. A baby they had adopted ten years ago had died of a burst appendix at the age of seven. They had decided to apply to be foster parents, believing that they could better cope with short-term care and love. And then came Tasha. A little bird that had pulled in her wings and refused to fly. She had a history of failure to thrive and although she was eight when I met her, she looked no more than five. Her father had tried to care for her, but his schizophrenia threw him into places where Tasha did not exist. Her mother had long vanished from her life and no relatives could be located. Her spindly legs were full of sores from fleabites and her continual scratching made them a breeding ground for infection; I had feared she might lose her ability to walk. She wore a dirty X-Men t-shirt and too big blue jeans that she had succeeded in securing with pink-tipped diaper pins. She wore no underpants. She was referred to us by a member of St. Maurice Church who had seen Tasha at a local grocery store stealing a candy bar and a bottle of orange juice. She would not speak to anyone I was told, but after three days under our care in a half-way center, she opened up, her eyes lit when I walked in the room and I brought her to visit her father after he had been given medication to calm the fury of his mind. When she looked at him and hugged him goodbye before he left for the state hospital, it was as though she knew that she would never live with him again. I guess it was love at first sight between the Heberts and Tasha. For two years she thrived, became a little girl that giggled and played and whose eyes shone when she was handed a book. She was indeed a splendid child. “I see someone passing back and forth across the window,” said Pinch. “It’s time.” Evan Hebert was a large man with wide shoulders and muscular arms. He had grown a beard since I’d seen him last, sculptured and white like his hair, a sharp contrast to his black skin. He worked as a supervisor at a sugar refinery on a second shift so was home vacuuming. When he saw me standing at the screen door, he smiled and motioned for me to go in. He hugged me and offered me a cup of coffee. “Nice little place,” said Pinch. “I grew up on the other side called ‘Cut Throat City.’ Not so nice.” I looked at her, surprised at her acerbic comment. “I’m just saying. No judgment.” We drank our coffee in silence; I suppose neither of us knew how to begin. “How’s Cynthia?” I asked Mr. Hebert. “She’s fine. Working first shift at the hospital. Maybe be promoted to head nurse soon.” “That’s wonderful.” “Miss DuBois,” he started, but stopped, his eyes focused at the window. “I suppose you know I’m not working as a social worker anymore.” “What they said about you ain’t true, we know that. They just trying to find somebody to blame for what they cain’t do themselves.” I put my cup on the coffee table and leaned toward him. “Mr. Hebert, I’m still trying to find out what happened, who murdered Tasha. Would you mind very much if I ask you a few questions?” “Very delicately done,” said Pinch. “Sure. I hold no bad feelings about you,” said Mr. Hebert. Tasha had disappeared while playing with friends two houses away. The two girls had told the police that the last time they had seen Tasha she was skipping towards home. Neither Evan nor Cynthia remembered her coming in the house. They had searched the neighborhood for hours and then had been joined by over a hundred people. She was found on the trolley the following night. “Ask him about the week before,” said Pinch. “How about the week before,” I said. “Did anything unusual happen?” He slumped back into his chair and rocked back and forth for a while. Then stopped. “Two white ladies came to see us after Tasha won that essay contest on being a good citizen. Said they came to help us; brought us turkey bags full of canned vegetables, bags of rice, soap.” He smiled. “Cynthia was fit to be tied. They think we’re some poor niggers or something? She screamed. This is what they think, those white bitches. We live in their slave quarters? Anybody tell those two that slavery ended long ago? They gave Tasha some Bobbie pins with little pink butterflies. Cynthia wanted me to throw them out, but I figured no use to cause a scene for Tasha.” “Did they say who they were?” I asked. “Something religious. Go with God, like that.” “White Army?” “Yeah, that sounds right. Cynthia called and left you a message about them. Wanted to know if you knew they were coming.” “I never got that. I’m so sorry.” “She’s here,” said Pinch. “In her little bedroom.” “Would you mind if I looked at Tasha’s room?” I asked Mr. Hebert. “Maybe I can see something that would help.” “Sure. Come along.” A child’s room, with Golden Books and reflecting stars stuck to the ceiling and curtains with the dish running away with the spoon and a bedspread to match; a crucifix without the dying Jesus over the bed, a browned palm frond blessed during Palm Sunday Mass tacked to the wall, on the nightstand a photograph of Tasha and her father taken when she was allowed her first visit. In the corner of the room was a child’s desk and chair and there sat Tasha waiting. She was holding a baby in her arms. “I tol’ you come back and visit, Miss Hannah, and you did. And you bringed a friend for me to meet.” Pinch moved to Tasha’s side and enveloped her and bright sparks flew into the air. “Who is this you’re holding, sweetie?” asked Pinch. “Theresa. She just come to us. I’m gonna take care of her, be her sister.” Two orbs formed and they vanished out of the window. “You know,” said Mr. Hebert. “Those two ladies came before Tasha died. For a while, people helped. But now nobody comes to see us or even ask after Tasha, except once or twice the police came back. It’s like her death cursed us, like we have a disease and if they get too close maybe the same thing will happen to their kids.” I put my hand on his arm, squeezed it. “There is nothing more precious in this world than a child. They are so afraid. It’s hard to understand their reactions, I suppose. People ought to be more generous. Have you and Cynthia gone to the Victims’ Support Group meetings?” “Finally we did last week. We didn’t want to. We’ve been through this before. But something came over us, a voice in the night Cynthia said. It was good.” We walked back into the living room and he gave me that same card from the Ursuline Convent that the other foster parents had received. “I’m so sorry, but what did those two ladies look like?” And he described Tisi and Alectina. I waited in the car for Pinch and then we passed by the cemetery where Pinch’s body lay in repose. I idled the car and we saw on the headstone a long yellow ribbon fluttering like a butterfly bound for the sweet nectar of blooming azalea. “I like what you had inscribed on my headstone,” said Pinch. We drove out of the Ninth Ward area, away from Pinch’s childhood and corporeality and into the bright shining moment of a late morning full of sadness and hope. “You know Pinch, I can’t wait until I have the power to put curses on people, maybe stick pins in their ass, make their lives miserable.” She laughed; tinkling and then rain fell on the windowpane, tapping like pieces of ice falling from a blue hibernal sky. “They’re both with Marisa,” said Pinch. “Splendid.” I said smiling. “That’s splendid.” * You would think the distance from the Ninth Ward to the ritzy Garden District would be far. But it takes less than a half hour, depending on traffic, how many times you stop, and how fast you drive. I drove too fast and had to stop and get a snack. I was munching on a bag of fried cracklin’, sipping a grape Nehi, and thinking out loud to Pinch. I had taken an extension course at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette during my summer vacation a couple years ago. I had desperately wanted to take the course because it was going to be taught by one of my favorite living authors. I don’t even want to invoke his name, I was so disappointed. I had read all of his books and thought that he was the greatest. Then he got up in front of this full auditorium, that’s how popular he was, and drones on and on about his childhood and his mother and where he writes and when, and even what he likes to eat and drink. Yep, lots of drinking. Some of us tried to ask questions about the import of his books, where his ideas came from, the deep meaning of, say, Maxine’s death at an early age. He would say things like: “Well, and what do you think? And what is your interpretation of her death.” After a couple of weeks I sat in the back of the room, noticed that the student body was thinning out, and so I snuck out to wander around the campus pond where cypress stumps jetted out of the swampy water like guideposts from another age and where willows hung low over the green water, where azaleas and camellias bloomed red and pink and white. The air had smelled of learning and wonderment and all good omens. And then I’d gone to Johnson Street, the strip that was populated by nothing but stores and restaurants. It was the first time I had dirty Cajun rice, fried chicken, and sauce piquant from a fast-food joint. But for the food, it was a disappointing summer vacation. “The guy must have had a ghost writer,” said Pinch. “You reading my mind?” “Just another way we can communicate. But then, is there a point to that story or are you just reminiscing?” “Oh, yeah. The guy did mention the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He used that theme several times in his books.” “A very original kind of writer,” she giggled. “Anyway, the first horsemen wields a sword and wears a crown of stars. At least that’s how he and several scholars have interpreted the Bible passage.” “I’m following. Marisa and Tasha and Paul all told you about the head full of stars.” “Yeah, the head full of stars. I just thought of that symbol. But then again, it could be a real simple clue.” “Simple. Who wears stars on their heads, on a hat? Police, military, sailors, baseball caps, those guys in the movies about Russia.” “That’s red stars,” I said. “But it’s all they could remember. I saw a head full of stars. It would have had to be someone they trusted. We went over and over with the kids about strangers and screaming and saying no. I don’t remember any report or mention of anyone hearing a child scream near the time or places of their abduction.” Judge Ignatius Patton lived deep in the Garden District where the very wealthy elite of New Orleans has lived for generations. Except for some mafia families that had moved in and bought out families whose fortunes had been lost by fate or simple mismanagement of their lives and family businesses. New families were moving in, spiffing up the place. Some of the finest restaurants were here, but many were not open to the general public. When I had finally received my social work degree, my advisor treated me and brought me to a restaurant that he told me had been in existence for four generations, serving a very privileged class, Pascal’s Manale. I had ordered barbequed shrimp and thought I’d act sophisticated and tried escargot. I had never, not even when I seined the Gulf with my father, seen shrimp almost as big as my fist. And the escargot was like eating paradise with pure melted butter. I had glanced at the bill, which could have paid for a month’s rent at my first apartment. I rarely had to go into this section of the city, not that the people here couldn’t have used my services. Crimes against children happen everywhere. It’s only the methodology and motives that differ. “You smell that?” asked Pinch. “It’s lovely here, at least to look at. To smell.” I drove into the District very slowly, watching the trolley rumble past. Pinch was next to me like a shimmering rainbow. Sometimes she would turn to almost her full form, and then fade away suddenly. “Pinch, why are you going in and out?” I asked. “Deep breathing, practicing the art of dissembling.” “Dissembling? Where in hell are you getting all these big words?” “They just come to me, like I told you. I’m changing in many ways.” We rode on for a while; Pinch pointed out lambent light that she told me were mists of former lives. Not quite ghosts, just cool air keeping the city alive. I hooked onto Washington and then Prytania, passing Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. “They sure make a lot of movies here,” said Pinch. I glanced up at the wrought iron sign at the entrance to the famous Lafayette Cemetery and the long muddy path that ran between the large crypts. “Yeah, I think Anne Rice’s vampires live in there.” “Ever been to her place?” asked Pinch. I shook my head and smiled. “Nope. Good books, though. You know, fantasies about the living and the dead. She’s moved out, I hear.” “Cities of the Dead, that’s what all these cemeteries are called. You know, this whole Garden District used to be a plantation, slaves and all. And look at me now, uh Scrimp?”. “You are truly a phenomenon, Pinch. A credit to the dead.” “I’m sure glad you didn’t say credit to my race. Even if I am.” Her laugh was good, a temporary reprieve in our present journey, which, for all we had already gone through, was just beginning. “So, Scrimp. We haven’t talked about this and we should: Why do you think you’re not dead like me?” “I think about that every time I have to eat. It’s become such a compulsion and pleasure at the same time that I think: If I’m dead, can I enjoy shrimp gumbo or pecan pie or even a fried apple turnover? But it’s become near uncontrollable. So, I’m not afraid to die; why should I be when I see you and the way it has all gone for you. But I will miss some things. Hell, I almost envy you.” “You should,” said Pinch, and she touched my shoulder. “But how do I know I would become a ghost if I died?” “You don’t. But you are voodoo, so who knows. I just don’t see you dead quite yet. I think you have too much to do.” I looked in my rearview mirror and at the yellow Volvo that had been following us from the French Quarter. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see if it was anyone I knew. “Speaking of dying and guns and bumps in the night, that car behind us, the yellow Volvo, is following us. Used to be a black coupe with the medallion guys.” Pinch slid to the back seat, her body turning into shimmering air. “Don’t recognize. I’ll check it out when we park.” “We can’t say we haven’t been warned,” I said. “We’ll just tool along, kinda nonchalant. I don’t think anybody’s going to hurt me. I made sure a lot of important people know what I’m up to.” “At this point, they probably think you’re just an annoying woman.” “Crusader Joan, the pain in the butt,” I laughed. “Yeah. Soon they’ll put the pieces together, Scrimp. From what you told me about Harlan Boudreaux, we may be just a few steps away from some serious trouble.” “Then we better move it along.” I parked along the street in front of the Judge’s house. The Volvo parked a block away. The house was hidden behind ancient jasmine vines and white dogwoods that vaulted up and above the two-story structure. Birds flittered through the dogwood branches bringing food to a nest of babies. The path towards the house was made of flagstone and as I walked I noticed that no weeds or mold grew between the spaces. The yard was manicured so severely that nothing that was not preordained was allowed to domicile here. I smelled emptiness, like some force had taken life away from here when it had dared to intrude. The way was dark, but through crevices in the branches and leaves, I could tell that large stones and marbles graced the portico that led to the front door. A breeze ruffled leaves, petals from the dogwood danced and came to rest on the green lawn like unsuitable snow flakes, making a sound resembling far away castanets. A squeeze of the soul, a pop in the brain stem, the past and future converging into something most people would turn away from and high tail it out of there. “Do you hear that sound?” asked Pinch. “It’s a ghost becoming.” “I smell nothing coming at us, feel nothing but the lonely night. There is emptiness here. Do you sense that?” “That and loss, complete and utter as the poets say. Before you ring the doorbell, can I ask whether you called ahead?” “No. I did not. For just the reason that I didn’t want to go to Patton’s office. If Patton’s not here, I want to talk to the wife, catch her off guard, maybe get some truth about her son’s death.” “Without due influence?” “Exactly.” “You don’t think Ms. Jones will snitch on you? Call the Judge about you going to see Archie?” “You think they’re all connected then? Well, I think Jones is a person who likes the thrill of the game, wants me to lead her to the killers of her foster child, then she’ll deal with them, it, whatever, in her own way. There was something definitely cockeyed about her, but I don’t think she’s dirty.” “Maybe I’ll pay her a ghostly visit some time. Maybe the person following us is working for her.” “I wouldn’t doubt it. She checked me out before. Right now, I don’t really trust anyone living. I’m pressing the doorbell. Stay with me most of the time, then case the joint.” “Case the joint! Wow, we’re becoming true blue detectives.” I pressed the small doorbell and listened to chimes play “Ave Maria.” Really. Then we waited while Pinch hummed along with the dinging sound. Follow the bouncing ball. When it stopped, the door opened and an aged woman thrust her head through the crack between the door and the green marble frame. Her eyes were black and small and set deep within her sallow face. Her lips were so thin, they were almost nonexistent; her skin held tightly to her bony head so that her face was unwrinkled. She reminded me of an emaciated refugee fleeing the oncoming armies of hell. Loose strands of her gray hair danced in the cold air that came from inside the house. She was tall and I suspected had once been described as stately, aristocratic, effective.” “Yes, what do you want?” Her voice was low, cracking with each word she spoke, suspicious and disquieted. “Good evening. My name is Hannah DuBois; I’m a social worker. I’m very sorry to disturb you, but we, I mean I’m, working on the foster child murder cases. Would you tell Mrs. Patton that I would very much appreciate a word with her? It’s about Thomas. I knew him briefly.” “White liar,” said Pinch. The lady stared at me, blinked several times, then opened the door and stood back to let me in. We went through the doorway and into an anteroom that was all sand-colored marble and as frigid as the icehouse Daddy and I used to go to on Saturday mornings before fishing. I could smell the chill, rancid odor of the sides of beef that had been thrown out, left to rot in the hot Louisiana sun. Pinch was next to me, her hand on my arm, her sweet lilac scent compensating for the overpowering decadence of this place. “Man, this is too human and lost for even me,” she said. “I’ll stay with you for a while, then I’m going upstairs to the Judge’s study. There’s probably one; there always is. I bet he has some good reading in there.” “Take a look at Thomas’ room too.” The woman was staring at me, fear widening her eyes, her mouth trembling. “Whose here with us?” she asked. “Pardon?” I said, surprised. “I hear a voice. I can’t make out what it was saying and your lips weren’t moving.” “I guess I was mumbling; sorry.” “God, I know I’m already nuts, but this is new.” She put her hands over her ears, and I could see tears filling her eyes. Her body rocked with anxiety. I went over to her and put my arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Can you show me the kitchen? I’ll get you some water. Maybe you should let Mrs. Patton know I’m here.” She shrugged my arm away, thrusting her shoulders back. “I’m Mrs. Patton,” she said. “You thought I was the maid?” “Yes. I didn’t expect you to answer the door.” “Well, Emily’s gone to the store. Come out to the sun porch and we can talk. Come.” “She recovered quickly,” said Pinch. We followed Mrs. Patton as she strutted away from us in silence, her red suit much too large for her frail stick of a body. The heels of my boots echoed against the granite floor and off the walls. We went through a dining room with a table that must have been set for over fifty. The deep green walls were decorated with portraits of people I knew had long since left this world. Lighted wall candles were placed on every side of the portraits, giving the faces an eerie, keening, otherworldly quality, cadavers that had not yet passed over, perhaps because they were not welcomed even in hell. They all had high foreheads, black raised eyebrows, and deep-set eyes that were entirely humorless and deadly. Scorpions of the old south. “They aren’t friendly ghosts, I’m telling you that,” whispered Pinch. “Guy with the sideburns going up to his nose looks like he was one of those man-beast things in that movie.” “Shush,” I hissed at her. “This lady seems to be able to here you a little. Anyway, that was The Island of Dr. Moreau. It was a book too.” “Jeepers, Scrimp. Get over yourself. These guys owned slaves. Now this judge sends people to jail for no reason.” Mrs. Patton turned and looked at me, her mouth squeezed tightly. I smiled and lifted my shoulders. “Sorry.” We entered a cavernous kitchen filled with shining steel equipment. The walls were made of engraved, hand-painted tiles with scenes that looked religious in content. I looked closely as we passed through and noted Mary appearing to some little children as they knelt in front of her. “Check some of these out,” I whispered to Pinch. The sun porch was enclosed and completely encased in glass. Large potted plants bordered the room; exotic flowers gave off aromas I could not identify but made me want to flee. One large planter contained a wisteria vine that had made its way up the far side of the glass enclosure and across the ceiling. A cloud of magenta clusters moved gently, releasing petals that fell gracefully through Pinch, then rested on the floor. The room looked out into a yard filled with purple and yellow flowers. Fountains spewed water from sculptured fish mouths. Three large statues faced us, each with their hands outstretched and beckoning: The Virgin Mary and two angels. I guessed Michael and Elijah. “We live in a degenerate world,” said Mrs. Patton. “Falling angels everywhere. Please have a seat there so you can look out into the gardens. It’s peaceful, isn’t it? Here out where the twisted light shines on us. This is the only place I feel any comfort. Away from in there.” She shrugged and sighed then turned to me. “Would you like a drink, Miss, what was your name again?” “DuBois. Hannah Dubois.” “Hannah. I like that name. Sounds good, like you’re good person. Are you a good person, Miss DuBois?” “I try to be.” “Well, that’s just fine. Sit. Would you like gin, vodka, or whiskey? It’s nice to have company for a change.” “Nothing to drink, thank you. But if you don’t mind, can I just snack on those olives?” She looked at me and smiled, went over to the bar and poured a glass full of gin, and then took a long pull. She picked up the bowl of green and black olives swimming in thick oil and handed it to me. “Here, enjoy.” “Yum, yum,” said Pinch. Mrs. Patton sat next to me where we both faced the garden. The chairs were large, Prussian blue and puffy. When Mrs. Patton sat back, her skinny body was almost lost in the chair, like she had become one with it. My long legs stuck out, so I folded them under me, the bowl of olives in my lap. Mrs. Patton squinted at me and smiled. I watched her take another swallow, not even flinching as the liquid rushed down her throat, coursing into her veins. She let out a sigh. I ate three olives. I looked at her again; her eyes had closed, her breathing was steady, a wistful smile cut like a healed scar across her face. I thought she looked like a woman battered not by time or hateful hands, but by compromise and the betrayal of her own needs. What must it have been like married to Patton, losing a son, living in the midst of all of this material bounty which could not even blunt the onslaught of each of her empty days. But I saw her to be a weak and tiresome woman. “You’re right, Miss DuBois,” she said without moving. “ I am weak. Spineless. A bad mother. I let Thomas die. I will go to hell and there’s not a thing those three out there can do about it. Slothful, that’s what I am. Anyway, they’ve started laughing at me. Whispering behind my back.” “And what are they saying?” “Oh, that I am to blame for everything that has happened to me.” “For Thomas’s death?” “That and the demise of my soul.” “Mrs. Patton, we are masters of our fate, as they say, but you cannot stop all the bad things that happen to you. Surely, not all of it.” “How would you possibly know?” she asked and finished her drink, got up and filled the glass again. Her face had reddened and tears ran down her cheeks. “I lost my only child, let him be damaged and stood back and let it happen, even watched sometimes. What kind of mother am I? I wish that when I die, I would feel every searing flame that the devil reserves for people like me. It was worse than doing it myself.” “So your husband did abuse Thomas?” “Abuse him? That’s a mild term. He terrorized the child. Day in and day out.” “Who called the authorities when he was taken away?” “Well, not me. I didn’t have the courage for that. I was too busy hiding.” She drained her glass, got up and filled it again. She was shaking. She took another swallow and came back to her chair, slipping along its edge. I jumped up and eased her down. She didn’t spill a drop. “Who called, Mrs. Patton?” “Emily. Our maid. Laughable almost. To this day I don’t think Ignatius knows it was she. He truly thought it was I.” She snorted and shook her head. “My one moment of courage was not to tell him the truth. But I sure paid for that one.” “He beats you, doesn’t he?” I asked. “I’m going to find the Judge’s study,” whispered Pinch. “This is getting too good.” “Oh, sure. It’s great sport. Runs in the family.” “Whose family?” “His. You saw all those portraits of the fabulous Pattons as we walked through the dining room?” “Yes.” “Well, did you see portraits of any women? Any children?” “Now that you mention it, no,” I said, my mind reeling at the audacity of all this, at the sheer horror of it: The famous lawyer family, renowned for its work in setting up the judicial system of Louisiana, indeed most of the south. Co-opting civil rights laws, extending a caring hand of justice. “Mrs. Patton, are you telling me that Judge Patton and his ancestors are abusers, generations back?” “Ha!” she laughed, draining the glass. “My husband is a judge who believes in good and evil. There are no shades, no shadows, no excuses, no extenuating circumstances. Nothing haunts him, Miss DuBois. He believes himself to be pure, his family lineage, the same. But you know what they say about a good man being hard to find.” “And what of Thomas? He was his son, the new generation,” I said, getting up and going over to the bar and picking up a bowl of peanuts, then stuffing a handful in my mouth. “Get yourself a Coke,” said Mrs. Patton, her speech finally becoming slurred. I opened the small refrigerator. It was full of soft drinks, tonic water, and several small bottles with black crosses on them. I grabbed a non-diet orange soda and one of the bottles and quickly closed the door. I carried the nuts and drink back to the chair, slipped the bottle into my shirt pocket and sat, pulling my chair around so that I faced Mrs. Patton. Her head was turned toward the garden and I knew she was listening to the whispering statues. “They are telling me to trust you,” she said. “So, what of Thomas? What did your husband do to him?” “Ignatius hated Thomas from the moment he set eyes on him in the hospital. God, I remember that day so clearly. Yes, yes, I will tell her everything! From that moment, I think he set out to persecute him. Poor, poor persecuted one. He must be in heaven now; he must.” “A beatitude,” I said. “What?” “He is blessed, I’m sure” was all I knew to say to her at that moment. “Please continue.” “You see, Thomas was small, his skin smooth and white, and he had red hair. As red and bright and shiny as a cockscomb.” She turned to me shaking. “Your hair is a little lighter than his. Softer. But he was angelic from the beginning. Positively angelic. I had produced an angel. Then spent the rest of my life allowing an angel of God to be destroyed by a devil. What am I now?” “Mrs. Patton. Why did Emily call the authorities, finally?” “Finally. It was Thomas’s birthday. He was eight years old. How he had endured eight years of torture is a mystery. A holy mystery. Now you better act like a man is what Ignatius said to poor Thomas. He was still so skinny, almost emaciated. I brought him to many doctors, so many, to see why he wouldn’t eat. Laughable, isn’t it? Why would a child beaten almost every day of his life not eat? Two doctors reported us. Nothing ever happened and I think they were transferred, fired; I don’t know what happens to doctors.” “The reports were never found in the hospital records, Mrs. Patton.” “Ha! Big surprise. You already know, don’t you? That’s why you’re here” “Well, not the whole story. Not the who, not the why.” “Yes, well. Have you met my husband?” “No, but I’ve seen pictures, read articles about him,” I replied. “He’s quite handsome, rugged, dark, masculine, cruel. So you see, Thomas embarrassed him, embarrassed his family. When I let him perpetuate the cruelty on my son, I became an accomplice. I sold my soul to a heritage that I wasn’t even part of.” “Mrs. Patton, the world no longer cares about those things. The world is different. You can assert that all you want, but it’s never an excuse.” “Yes, yes, yes, yes, Miss DuBois, the world is different, but the Pattons are not; this side of New Orleans is not. Fou, we’re all drowning. My portrait, luckily, will not hang in that room with the others.” “As you said, there are no women there.” “And no children. Thomas was and will forever be my only child.” “What did Judge Patton do when the authorities came to take Thomas away?” “Oh, he laughed, said go ahead, take him, prove abuse; just try it. He didn’t even bat an eye. Then his wheels of justice started to turn.” “Who was responsible for getting Thomas back from the foster parents and the state?” She sighed deeply, looked at her empty glass that she still held tightly in her hand, and shoved it at me. “Please.” I got up and filled her glass and handed it back to her, sat and waited. “You three shut the fuck up!” she yelled. “I’ll finish soon enough.” She looked at me, tears running down her cheeks. “What is the triangle of evil?” “I don’t know. I could guess,” I said. “I’ll tell you. Money, religion and power. Ignatius was convinced that Thomas was gay. Imagine. Eight years old and already my husband and his church condemned him. Bargains are made across altars all the time. I think the Zimmermans were probably nice people. Thomas would have been happy with those foster parents; I’m sure of it. Better than here. He didn’t even cry when they took him away, didn’t look at me and cry out for me, his mother. “ “Children have a survival instinct that is beyond us,” I said, looking out at the statues. They still pointed at us, but I could swear their heads had moved a little, their smiles broadening in understanding. “Man, you should see what I saw, Scrimp. This place is the Dachau of the District,” said Pinch. I felt a light touch on my arm. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, this is an appalling place,” Mrs. Patton said. She was looking out into the gardens again. “My brother hanged himself when he was only twenty. That was thirty years ago. He was gay too, a priest, a man of God. He was the best person I have ever known. How I have missed him all of these years.” “So, the Church and the law pulled strings, or paid somebody off, to give Thomas back. I suppose a threat to sue the city by a prominent judge, with backing of the Church, will cut a good deal.” I watched her reaction to my statement. She turned to me and smiled. It was one of the most desolate expressions I had ever seen. “Yes, he cut a good deal. A man who decides people’s fates every day is a monster. You cannot fathom how much I hate him. It is the only pleasure I have left.” “Mrs. Patton, tell me about the day Thomas disappeared. Do you have any idea who would have abducted him?” She closed her eyes and let go of her glass. It shattered on the stone floor. Tears wet her face. She gasped, then opened her eyes and looked at me from a deep well of loneliness. “Thomas begged me to let him go to the school Halloween carnival. I didn’t want him to go, didn’t want him to ever go anywhere except with me. But I gave in, knowing that it would be the last good fun he would have for a while. You see, I had gathered my strength finally and purchased two tickets to Paris. Can you believe I had to scrimp and save the money from the household funds? I have no access to the Patton wealth. I am a prisoner in all ways. Anyway, we were to leave the following day, so we went to the carnival. Just the two of us. Ignatius was at some meeting, as usual. It was a beautiful evening: full moon, soft breeze, the aroma of popcorn and apples. Thomas ran around like a happy child. It had been so long since I’d seen him that way, if I ever had. I had such hope. Then someone tapped me on the shoulder, a young man, and asked me where the pumpkin-carving contest was going to take place. I said I didn’t know, then turned to tell Thomas it was time to get something to eat, and he was gone.” “How horrible for you,” I said, and reached to take her hand. “Her heart is in tiny pieces,” said Pinch. “Do you remember what that young man looked like?” I asked Mrs. Patton. “Yes; I’ll never forget them. His eyes were so blue they were almost white. Opaque. Tall, of course, taller than me. Maybe in his twenties. That’s all I can remember. Oh, yes, he had a tattoo on his left arm, I think. A heart with a sword through it. And a brown hat.” She squeezed my hand and pushed the broken glass with her foot. “I ran around in circles screaming his name. Thomas, Thomas, baby, where are you? Please, please answer me. I already knew, in my soul, that he was gone. Our freedom had been too close. I’d sinned. I did not deserve happiness. Oh, God, why are you so cruel?” she yelled. Pinch moved over Mrs. Patton like a soft blanket until she sighed and put her head back. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” Pinch whispered. “Please, another drink,” begged Mrs. Patton. “What did your husband say when he was told that Thomas had disappeared?” I asked. “Nothing. He nodded to the detective, looked at me, shook his head and never spoke to me again. When he received the telephone call about Thomas’s death, he sent his assistant to tell me. My son is buried in my family’s plot near New Iberia.” “Mrs. Patton, I am trying to solve the murder of your son and all of the other foster children. I want to stop another killing. There have been ten. Have you any idea why there’s been so little efforts at solving this?” I took my hand away from hers and stood up. She looked up at me, her eyes dry, her mouth clamped in anger. “Because they want the world as their own. I told you about the three evils. I heard conversations, whispering, plotting. But I was but an unworthy vessel and Thomas defective to them. Yes, Miss DuBois, do not doubt conspiracy. It must be stopped, but what am I but a sinner of no consequence.” “I promise to do all I can,” I said. “You, little ol’ you? How in God’s name?” she blurted out, then stood up and walked to the bar, again pouring straight gin. “We must try, don’t you think?” I asked. “I suppose you’re going to lecture me about love? I loved my son and look what happened.” “Tell her that the power to diminish love is ours alone,” said Pinch. I looked up at Pinch not understanding where she was going with her comments. She smiled and shrugged. “Mrs. Patton, does your husband have any stake in the Port of New Orleans beyond being on the Board?” Her head fell to her chest then jerked up abruptly. “Okay, damned fucking bastards. I’ll tell her.” She turned and looked at me, her eyelids drooping. “Ignatius and his family seem to think they own half of New Orleans. From the port on down the mighty Missi, Missi.” “Ippi,” said Pinch. “Thank you,” hiccupped Mrs. Patton. “What do you mean?” I asked, shaking her. “The deeds, he has deeds. He hates what this city done become,” she giggled. “Ha, done become.” “Leave her alone, Scrimp,” said Pinch. “We can find out about deeds and land in other ways. How reliable do you think she is drunk like that? Besides, she’s handing us such a line and she’s stark, raving mad. I found all we need to know upstairs.” “Just two more questions. Mrs. Patton, listen to me. Did you get a note about Thomas from the Ursuline Convent and did he mention fireflies the night before he died?” Her head had fallen on her chest again, but she perked up and sighed deeply. “Yes and yes, Miss DuBois,” she said, without a hint of drunkenness. Pinch sighed. “Mrs. Patton,” she said in a voice louder than I heard her ghost self use before. “What did that man at the carnival have on his hat?” She giggled. “Stars, stars one two three and four.” We left Mrs. Patton sitting in a chair, drinking gin and listening to her only companions. Emily had not returned from the store, but I really didn’t think she could add much to the story. “It would have been nice to meet a good person for a change,” said Pinch. “Yeah. You know how we are seeing the beatitudes as clues? Well, when Mrs. Patton was talking about her husband, I started to think of the opposites. Like sins.” “Good and bad?” “Sort of. I’ve started to read Dante again. The Divine Comedy, especially Purgatorio. I read you a passage last night, remember? “Look who you’re talking to, partner.” “Sorry. Anyway, when Dante descends down the terraces, there’s seven, each punishes a sin.” “Like?” “Like pride, wrath, avarice, envy. Mrs. Patton said sloth. To do nothing in the face of wrong.” “That’s right on the mark, I’d say. Then there’s gluttony,” she said, looking at me with a wry smile. “Oh, shut up,” I laughed. “I can’t control this eating thing. Besides, I’m not gaining any weight from it. And thanks for reminding me how hungry I am. Nuts and olives. I’m stopping at the next grocery and getting an oyster po’boy.” We parked in the shade along Carrolton Avenue and I ate my po’boy and drank my root beer while Pinch told me what she had found in the Patton house. “Except for the kitchen and the sun porch, you’d never know two women lived in that house. The bedrooms are spare; only beds, dressers and desks. All old fashioned, you know the kind; dark heavy wood, carved images of faces, horses, satyrs, robed figures. Terrifyingly masculine. No books.” “Spartan bedrooms. And colors, what colors?” I asked. “Dark green and brown. Very heavy curtains, so hardly any light comes in. The rooms are big, I mean big, with high ceilings. Smells stale, the taste of ashes.” “Any religious things?” “Every room has a crucifix with the palms attached. Except for Thomas’s room; twin beds, a baby desk, and a small dresser. The closet is full of handcuffs, ropes, even a cattle prod and branding iron. No Teddy bears, dinosaurs, books, Gameboys, nothing that speaks to childhood. It was the saddest place I’ve ever been in. The letter V was on the iron, just the letter V. It was a torture chamber, Scrimp. Good God in heaven. The cave of a monster.” “I’d like to look through Patton’s case files, Pinch. I’ve always heard rumors about his judgments, but nothing ever touched him in the papers or in the courts. I can’t remember one time hearing that his legal ethics has been officially questioned.” “There’s that,” said Pinch, “and the fact that not one of the autopsy reports mentioned a brand on the children, did they? Damn Harlan. You think he’s part of all this?” “There is some kind of conspiracy, and it runs so deep my bones ache from thinking about it. Harlan isn’t the only one who knows about the V. Someone’s rewriting the records, purposely distorting the facts. Yes, Harlan must be in on this. He’s one among many, I’m afraid.” “You know. It’s a damn good thing I’m your partner. You’re assuming that the Judge is the who one abused Thomas.” “Mrs. Patton? She’s truly loony, isn’t she?” “Truly. And add to that, I zipped out and got a look at the guy in the yellow Volvo, the one parked across the street. Mrs. Patton’s phantom, the one with the opaque eyes and heart tattoo and hat. Heart also has the crown of thorns around it, besides the sword. Right through the heart.” “Do you think it’s all a set up? Like maybe Mrs. Patton had Thomas kidnapped?” “You know, all this religious stuff you’re talking about, sin and beatitudes? Sometimes people just do things for good old-fashioned greed and evilness. Power? Sure. A path to heaven? They may think so, but it ends up being their own special hell. Money? You bet.” “And sex and impotence,” I laughed. “Don’t laugh, love. Look at New Orleans; the biggest sin city in America. You can get any kind of sex you want for cheap or for nothing. Last night, I floated down Bourbon just to see how it is being a ghost in that place.” “And?” “Fascinating. Orgasmic to the nth, as they say.” “Wow,” I laughed. “No wow. I don’t care about that; it’s just a sensation that doesn’t mean anything to me. Maybe because of what I am, I get my kicks in other ways. Payback maybe for being raped when I was little.” “You know, the world out there, the people who think they’re keeping the world so straight and narrow, don’t have a fucking clue about the real world do they?” “Sure don’t.” “All the things that go on, they don’t bother me so much because it’s an adult world. I know, I know, they have horrendous pasts that drive them. We both took psychology 101. But it’s the children. Damn, it’s the children.” “Calm down. You’re sweating and I can smell what you ate in the last twenty-four hours. All we have to think about is if we can help some kids, then maybe their lives will be a little better than what we see around us.” “Kind of taking care of a little of our own turf?” “Tape forward, Scrimp: Somebody’s gonna be after us soon. I can feel that white man coming again.” “Thomas was being punished for what he was. He was already in prison.” “Yeah. Solitary confinement. Poor kid.” “Mrs. Patton said the Judge beat him every day,” I said. I finished my po’boy and drink and put the soiled wrapper and bottle in a paper bag and threw it in the back seat. Pinch hadn’t said anything and I felt an immense breath on my neck. “What’s wrong?” “I can still cry. Ghosts can still cry, but it comes out not in tears but a sigh into the world. Remember when I said ghosts’ sighing keeps the city going. We cry for the persecuted, the sorrowful.” “Thank you,” I said. “Eh, prego.” “What?” “Nothing. On to the Judge’s study. A treasure trove of corruption could bring down many powerful ones. All earthly stuff and most of it we already suspected. Now we know where the proof is. Politicians, lawyers, religious people, you name it. Those who run things.” “We need to get to those files. Can you carry them out?” “No, you know I can’t,” said Pinch. “Scary,” I said. “We’ll have to go back there soon. I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere. Ignatius is too arrogant to suspect anyone knows anything. Mrs. Patton, I know, will not tell him about us, unless she’s in on it. But why do that to Thomas? Who’s the guy in the car? How are they linked to Harlan? Remember what Mrs. Patton said? About the triangle of evil?” “All those people are so damned arrogant, they don’t seem to think they can be touched never mind stopped.” “Yeah. It’s like they’re not much afraid of getting caught at anything. And then there’s us.” “We’re sure not arrogant,” snorted Pinch. “I found something you would never expect a judge to have. And I don’t think it had anything to do with one of his legal cases. This stuff was personal.” “Come on! Give,” I said, as a couple walked by on the sidewalk, stopped and looked at me. “Oh, hi, practicing for an audition. I’m an actor.” I watched them walk away, holding hands. “One day somebody’s gonna put me in a straitjacket if I keep talking to myself, to you.” “Maybe one day we can try telepathy a little more,” Pinch laughed. “Anyway. He had all these pamphlets about the Virgin Mary and the Ascension published by a company called Veritas.” “Truth. And the V on the branding iron. But Veritas may just be a business, plain and simple.” “There were also lots and lots of religious things. Crosses, scapulars, rosaries.” “You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked. “Sure am. But you can’t prove anything. The Judge has lots of religious things, so what. Did he kill the kids? I can’t see the guy sneaking out and doing that. He had accomplices and a plan. How did they do it, who are they and why are they doing this? Who and what is Veritas?” “Doesn’t the Judge sound pretty sick to you? And the guy they have locked up, Jeremiah Johnson, was pegged for being not too much different than Patton. He was just poor with no influence. “Sick is a mild word for Patton” said Pinch. “I would go with horrific. But there’s more than him to all this. The ghosts, the religious things, the messages, the underworld. If you prove it’s him, you think any authority’s gonna believe you? No. We have to get to the source, the answers, and the mystery of it all. I think that if the Judge is involved, he had lots of help, and that help is greater than just his political and religious cronies.” “Pinch, may I say that you are becoming quite an investigator. It’s almost three o’clock. Put the Church, beatitudes, sin, and Veritas together and I’m wondering what old Archie will say about them?” The list of clues was growing, but the solutions seemed to be moving away from our grasp. The more we knew, the more we needed to know. I took the small bottle I had taken from Mrs. Patton’s refrigerator and put it in the glove compartment. “Remind me later to find out about the ritual for making holy water,” I said to Pinch. * The religious and secular citizens of New Orleans hold the Archbishop of their Diocese in great esteem. For almost four centuries, Catholicism had wrapped this city in a cultural and religious grip that reached into the very heart of its people. It didn’t matter whether you were Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Buddhist or Muslim, Agnostic, or Wicca, old Archie was one “big dude,” as Pinch once said. But it is also catholicism with a little c. Street names like Saint Peter and Saint Charles, parishes like Saint James, Saint Bernard and even Ascension, where presumably everything rises, converges, splits apart and congeals. It’s quite a unique gumbo. And then Mardi Gras is a wholly Catholic holiday. School children are shunned if they do not give something up for Lent, no matter their religious persuasion. Immigrants often look upon Catholic forms as a means of integrating into a new society. And the Archbishop is the center, the arbiter, of catholic tastes. That is what the Vatican presumes, and bets a lot of gold coins on it. The first Archbishop of New Orleans was French, one of the Brothers DuBourg. Pierre DuBourg owned a plantation called Plaisance and was a Mason and considered to be the Father of the Louisiana Grand Lodge. His brother was the Archbishop of the Diocese of New Orleans. The family was rich, aristocratic, and arrived on the American soil by way of escaping the French Revolution and slave insurrections in Santo Domingo. How do I know all this? I attended Catholic school in a deeply religious and uncompromising parish, where the rituals of the faith mingled with a magic that lay hidden in the atavistic swamps. It was magic brought forth by a people who remembered their own past as far back as the caves and mountains of their native France. The nuns and priests relied upon rote memory, and the entrenchment of Catholicism in Louisiana was the means of solidifying the influence of the Church. I remembered the DuBourg story simply because as a child I did not understand how the goodness of the Church and slavery could live together in one heart. Converging, congealing, and thus we are what we are. “You sure they’re going to let you talk to the big Dude himself?” asked Pinch, as I parked my car and looked up at the grandiose building that housed the soul of a city. I had seen photos of the Archbishop being wined and dined by dignitaries. His unusual refinement was impressive; he spoke seven languages, wrote eruditely and carried himself like a gentleman. My impressions of the Church’s organization were that it was stuffed with a bunch of pooh bahs. The present Archbishop was a man wrapped in contradiction. “That’s what I was told,” I said. “That Jones lady sure must have pull.” “Yeah, well, let’s go. You know, Pinch, I’m actually nervous, like I’m going to meet someone I can’t penetrate.” “Like maybe somebody that’s sort of, well, holy?” “I suppose. Though you know that I don’t believe anymore. So why am I apprehensive?” “You don’t believe in all the muck-a-muck, the symbols. But, Scrimp, you do believe, deep down. At least in the basics about good and bad. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. My granny once told me that I should follow Jesus, and if I didn’t want to go to a church and sing and pray and beat myself in the chest silly, well, then, that was okay. Jesus, she said, didn’t even know what a church or Pope or reverend was. The entire world was his temple. Follow Jesus, that’s all there is.” “Is that how you feel? After all you’ve gone through in your life?” I asked. “I don’t feel anything but what I am. Who made me this, what my purpose is, I just go along. I know it’s all good. I’m your partner. I guess I’m on a mission from God. Which one, I just don’t know and it’s not my place to find out. That’s your human problem.” “I suppose. Okay, let’s go. Stay close and I hope this guy can’t hear your mumbling to me. Test him once or twice and then if we’re sure he can’t hear you, give me some direction. Throw in some questions I need to ask to see if he knows anything about what Patton and Harlan are up to. Or if he can give us some guidance about the death of the children.” “You think he believes in ghosts? It was odd how Mrs. Patton had some inkling of my presence.” “Got me if he does. As for Mrs. Patton, well, perhaps she’s close to redemption or hell. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon enough. I just feel we don’t have a lot of time. Old tattoo’s still with us I see.” “You feeling something more about the next child?” I could feel Pinch lean toward me; a shallow breath touched my cheek and then a kiss. And honest to goodness ghost kiss. “I felt that, Pinch. How lovely. I needed that.” “About time. I’ll be glad when this is all over. Then I guess it’ll start all over again,” she said. A young man greeted me. He was about twenty, clean-shaven, short black hair in a crew cut, long white hands that stuck out from a black garment. He smiled constantly while directing me to a large maroon leather chair. He answered the telephone, nodding as he talked, his voice but a soft whisper. I thought he would be great at confessions, soothing the sinner into penitent submission. He smelled of nutmeg and hope and youth. Every once in a while he looked up at me, smiled and pointed one finger in the air as though he were saying just awhile more, just awhile more. “How old do you think he was when he went into the seminary?” asked Pinch. I put my hand over my mouth and turned to her. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to me playing here’s the church here’s the steeple with her fingers. “I’d guess about fourteen. He doesn’t have a southern accent, so he’s probably from out west somewhere.” “Oh, come on. Please.” Pinch chuckled. “Excuse me, Ms. DuBois,” came his lilting, low voice, and I looked at the young priest and wondered if he ever got angry. “His Eminence will see you now.” I stood up and felt Pinch’s hand on my elbow, helping me up. My legs were a little wobbly. Damn, I thought, this is crazy, but boy oh boy, what if my aunt and cousins could see me now. We followed the young priest into a large room with windows that reached from floor to ceiling. The door snapped closed behind us. The entire room was made of dark wood that was obviously polished daily, which reflected the sunlight that blasted through the open windows. I had expected darkness and mystery. The curtains were all Venetian red with threads of gold. Portraits of past prelates lined the wall, with sconces and one large crucifix. Along a far wall were framed photographs of the Archbishop with prominent people, dedicating shelters, schools and medical facilities. I had seen some of these before. The fragrance of combined flowers overpowered the room, and I could make out each one separately. I was overcome by this phenomenon: Wisteria, gladiola, rose, lavender, and baby’s breath. “You smell all that, don’t you?” asked Pinch. “And I sense a presence here, one that is coming towards us and that will not hurt you.” “I know, I feel it too,” I said. “The merciful,” said Pinch. I took a seat in front of a large desk near one of the windows, thinking that was what I was supposed to do. Pinch stood behind the chair. The door opened with a squeak and in rushed a tall, thin man dressed in black, gray hair in tufts around his ears. “I wish someone would get around to oiling that door,” he laughed. I stood up quickly and he waved his hand for me to sit. “Ms. Dubois, I’m so glad to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.” His eyes were deep blue with little sparkles of violet; he had bushy white eyebrows falling down like winglets. His face was smooth and young, yet he must have been over seventy to attain the rank he held in the Church. The large cross around his neck caught the sunlight as he sat in a big brown leather chair, which squeaked when he sat. He winced at the sound. “How do you know about me?” I asked. “Oh, we keep up with the good that is done in this city. You have worked hard for many years with the Social Services Department, saved lives, done much to help God’s children.” “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Pinch. I looked at the Archbishop and he was staring, smiling at me. He had not heard Pinch. I cleared my throat, looked into his eyes, and decided that I was not going to be intimidated by who he was. “Too bad we couldn’t get a little more help from our friends here and up there,” I said smartly. “I’m sorry about the loss of your friend,” he said. “She was in our prayers.” “Wow, lucky me. Must’ve worked,” chuckled Pinch. “Thanks. But I’m here to see if you can help me in my inquiries. I’m trying to find out who killed the foster children. To be blunt, Archbishop, I would like to know what you know that could help.” “Isn’t this for the authorities to take care of?” “You would be the first to admit that there are many authorities. I have my own curiosity. But yes, there are the cops, the law, you, the Church. So, I know you have met many times with all of the authorities, except me. So, do you have any ideas for me?” “My, you are forthright, aren’t you? But I suspect that you’ve also come out of a sense of guilt. You are not responsible for the murders. The hearing was dubious.” “My responsibility lays elsewhere, Archbishop.” “God sends strange messengers to us, Ms. DuBois. We should listen to them.” “What messenger are you talking about?” “Why, you Ms. DuBois, you.” My hands started to shake and I felt Pinch take hold of my shoulder. “Steady, ask him how he knows this.” “How do you know this, Archbishop?” “Do you think that we deal only with the worldly ways of knowledge? After all, the Church has her beginnings in heaven. The ages have wrought such misconceptions about who we are and what our purpose is.” “Your purpose here on earth,” I said. “Why am I a messenger?” “Because you are the only one, at least so far that is a living person, who seeks the truth, truly. Everyone else who is trying to find the murderer or murderers of the children have ulterior motives. Oh, that they solve these crimes is good, but each seeks elevation to something higher, an enhancement of their own selves, so to speak. You, Ms. DuBois, are doing it, well, because it must be done, because it is right.” “Tell him that you are one who hungers and thirsts for justice and see what he says,” whispered Pinch, squeezing my shoulder. “Ouch!” I said. “Are you alright?” asked the Archbishop. “Yes, I just thought that what you said would make me one who hungers and thirsts for justice.” “Well then, that would make you a beatitude,” he laughed. “Listen, let’s not get into a theological discussion, okay? You know Harlan Boudreaux, of course.” “Of course.” “Then why do you think he would do such a shoddy job reporting on the murdered foster children?” ”What do you mean?” “You know what I mean. The hand of your church, yours, is into everything that happens in this city. And while you’re coming up with an answer, throw in Ignatius Patton and the Port of New Orleans.” He smiled at me, his eyebrows nearly covering his eyes. “Harlan Boudreaux retired with accolades from just about everyone in this city.” “You mean the official everyone.” “Just so. Those who need to know have reviewed his files. If they are deficient, well, there’s nothing that can be done now.” “Why, because the kids are dead and buried.” “Ms. Dubois, why must you be so petulant.” “Ha,” laughed Pinch. “Petulant, good God almighty. He’s hiding so much, Scrimp, he’s going to bust open from his white collar down to his black suede shoes.” “Okay. What about Patton and the Port of New Orleans,” I asked. “What do you mean?” “Okay, I’ll play along. I’ve talked to Mrs. Patton and a lawyer named Margaret Jones. Jones got this appointment with you for me, so there’s a reason first off. Second, you, Patton, Boudreaux and countless others are on the Board of the Port. Coincidence?” “The Port is, historically, the reason New Orleans exists at all. Of course, I’m on the Board. The Church must exert its influence.” “Sure, sure,” said Pinch. “He’s saving the soul of the man. Man done have black soul becoming white.” “I see. So you’re job is not saving souls, but making sure the coffers are full?” “So young, so cynical,” he said shaking his head. “You said I’m a messenger. I’m bringing you a message.” “And what would that be, Hannah?” “Maybe that all roads lead to Rome,” I blurted out. “You can’t believe that the church, my office, had anything to do with the murder of those children.” “Not even helping to suppress evidence?” I asked. He sighed and sat hard into his chair, the squeak penetrating the air. “Damn,” he said. “Speaking of Rome, I saw a painting at the Boudreaux house. Christ was laughing at the torture of another man. When I asked Mrs. Boudreaux who the person was that was being tortured, she laughed and said surely not Saint Peter.” “Did you see the name of the painter?” asked the Archbishop. “No. But I was instantly reminded of the phrase you must see what, every Sunday or so at St. Louis.” “Feed my lamb, feed my sheep. You are getting so close so soon, child.” “Thanks. But tell me why you think someone would place religious artifacts, all Catholic, on the bodies of the children after they were murdered?” “Yes, I have been told that. I have thought about it, and I think perhaps that the murderer wanted to make sure that the souls of the children went to heaven. Do you know how many of the children were baptized or received their first communion?” “No, I don’t know that. That’s a good point,” I said. The glistening crucifix around his neck, the movement of his soft, pink hand, caught my eyes as he touched it lightly. “So they wouldn’t have to stay in purgatory. A place of atonement.” “Ah, so you know some things about the Church.” “You know I was raised in the faith. Went to Catholic school, did my penance being hit on the hand by the nuns, shunned by the church in my parish because I saw what was coming, had premonitions so to speak.” “Really? Who was your mother?” “My mother? Why?” “Bloodlines are important in what we are, how we conceive of the world, how we live our lives. Ms. Dubois, Hannah, one does not have to be Catholic to understand sin and redemption.” “In Louisiana, not a big surprise,” said Pinch. “My mother was Inez Beguenet. Born and raised out near Henderson, in the swamp lands. My family goes back to the persecution of the eighteenth century. That’s all I know. My father was French also, DuBois. Of the woods. I’ve never gone deep into my family history.” “One day you must take time to do that. You will be surprised at who you are.” “Do you know who I am?” “Not who, maybe a little of what. You are simply rare today; a beatitude.” “Jeepers,” said Pinch. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked him. He smiled and leaned back in his chair, moved forward again, leaning over his desk, his hands folded. “The Holy Ghost. And, well, this is New Orleans after all.” He laughed. His eyes caught me and held me for an endless second. I thought about how he was supposed to be God’s voice on earth. Then he blinked and the bodies of the children flashed across my field of vision. “A friend once told me that the ghosts of the dead, the good that have died, are responsible for keeping the city alive. What do you think of that?” “Why are you asking this, and what does it have to do with the children?” “Harlan Boudreaux autopsied the children; he could find no evidence of, say, human hands in the murders. I’m thinking ghosts, haunts, devils, you know that kind of thing.” “I’m a practical man, Ms. Dubois. But I am also a servant of the Holy Church. I see the hand of God in all things. God works here on this earth.” “Excuse me, but I can think of few other religions besides Catholicism that push the spiritual, the heavenly, beyond the earthly human thing. It’s almost a cult.” “Catholicism does have its mystical side.” “You bet, and fanatics.” “Yes, the fanatics often discredit the faith. They are different from devotees. They perpetuate actions and thoughts that, in the end, become the opposite of what the true belief is.” “What about fanatics that are Catholics, or just Christians who have killed millions in the name of an idea? Your Church has many ideologies, and you protect them.” “Oh, yes, there are many sects, many who have taken the beliefs of the Church and twisted them.” “Like the Children’s Crusades?” “Yes, but many would argue that there was purpose to that.” “You’re kidding,” I said, horrified. “Little children come unto me, “ said Pinch. “Archbishop, I’m thinking that the children’s deaths, what with the Catholic artifacts left on their bodies, and other small pieces of evidence you may not know of, point to religious fanatics. Who are the Charismatics? What is Veritas?” “Surely the Charismatics have nothing to do with this. “ “I didn’t say they did. But sometimes knowledge of one thing leads to another. Go with me on this. Please. For the children.” “I see. The Charismatic Movement began in the 70’s. It is part of the Marian Renewal, which focuses on the Virgin Mary. Remember the Marian prophecy: All generations shall call me blessed? These Charismatics are not fanatics; they believe in compassion, intercession, and a calling together.” “Ask him what calling together,” said Pinch, pushing me forward in my chair. “What calling together?” I asked. “It comes from Luke. The eleven Apostles gathered together all with one heart and devoted themselves to prayer with Mary the Mother of Jesus as means of getting to Jesus. Behold your mother! is a prayer often used in times of crisis. Without a mother, that is Mary, one cannot live, love or die.” He leaned back in his chair, held the crucifix around his neck, and looked away from me as though a very painful thought had come to him. “What is the fourth crusade?” “A myth and nothing more.” “They had no mothers really, those poor, poor murdered children,” I said. The Archbishop rose from his chair and went to the window, his back towards me, his hands clasped behind his back. “Here it comes,” said Pinch. “The big speech.” “Many today say that the Church is lost, that our faith has devolved into bureaucracies, that it has become self-serving, a tourist attraction in this great city. Do you know Amos, the prophet?” “Not personally,” I said. “Well. This is what he said: Behold the days are coming when I will send a famine on the land. Not a famine of bread or thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the lord; they shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the lord but they shall not find it.” “A famine of faith?” “Yes, I suppose that’s it. Babel with no substance. I am not blameless in all this, ” he said, turning and looking at me. “When then does faith turn into cult, religion into fanaticism, spiritualism into evil? We agree on the questions, don’t we, Hannah?” “And you say you don’t believe in ghosts or spirits when we are talking about a profoundly screwed up world.” “I suppose you’re right. I wouldn’t admit this to any of my colleagues. Ghosts. Of course there are ghosts. Especially in this new age. Carpe diem. The bells call the people to prayer, but who comes but the ghosts? Stand at the entrance to St. Louis at dusk, listen to the bells and see what comes.” His eyes had become almost radiant. He was crying. “I have,” I said. “Ask him about Thomas,” said Pinch “Just one more question. Please. You said you know Judge Ignatius Patton?” “Of course. For many years. Why?” “Well, as you know his son was one of the murdered children. Taken from him because of abuse, then was about to be given back to him when Thomas was murdered. Thomas was abused, Archbishop; there was no doubt about it and it was the Judge who did it. For years and years, according to Mrs. Patton.” “I knew of the abuse. I have no direct knowledge of who did it,” he said . “What is direct knowledge?” I asked. “Evidence? Documents? Things said in the confessional? Yes, politics, religions and government. Mrs. Patton said something to me just not too long ago about a triangle of evil.” “All I can say to you is to be careful. One sin begets another.” “But how many good deeds have to be done to make up for one sin. Ask him that,” said Pinch. “There are so few good deeds in the world it seems,” I said. “How many make up for one sin?” “An exponential amount,” he said loudly. “God banished those angels in order to purify heaven.” “The fallen ones,” whispered Pinch. “Can you not help with finding the murderers?” I asked. “I am, in my own way. My path is already laid out for me, you understand.” “You have no choice? No free will? You live in a damn cocoon.” “Take it easy,” said Pinch as she rubbed my shoulders. “No. No, I won’t. You need to get out there, you and your priests. You need to know how it feels, the bone-searing weariness at the end of the day when you have to kneel in front of some kid, ask them to pull up his pants, take off his shirt, so you could count the number of cigarette burns, old ones, new ones, that some putrid adult inflicted on their own kid. Tell me about redemption, tell me about confessions when you hear that behind your screen. Imagine waking up the next day and doing it all over again. “Stop it, Scrimp. Just stop,” cried Pinch. “Have you read The Divine Comedy?” I asked the Archbishop. “Yes. In seminary.” “Jesuit?” “Yes.” “My father loved Dante,” I said, and stood up. “Think of it, a man of the swamp, quoted Dante to me when I was a kid.” “That’s admirable,” said the Archbishop. “You bet. So anyway, Dante begins his journey and faces three beasts: the leopard of disordered appetites, you know drinking, eating, lust, that kind of thing; the lion of bestial doings portends what happens when we use our intellects, our sources of good for bad, very bad things; then there is the lean and hungry wolf, that’s the sins that occur when we use our intellect and capacity for good in the service of darkness, cruelty and desecration of life itself. The Holocaust, slavery, or the murder of children.” “You think I have not seen the beasts?” he asked me, moving forward in his chair. “Yes, I think you have. But I am reminded of this passage: The power that perceives the course of time is not the power that captures all the mind. That’s from Purgatorio. My friend, the one who was murdered and you prayed for recently, told me that time was endless. I don’t believe my path is laid out for me. I still choose which way to go and who to go with.” “Then I hope that you have as good a companion as Dante’s Beatrice as you make your journey. I will pray for you.” He was dismissing me. I moved toward him slowly, feeling Pinch moving with me. My eyes locked on the Archbishop’s. He was sad, in spiritual pain, I could sense that; a man with great power who was immobilized by his position, by his belief that he could function only within the clothes that he wore, the trappings of the Church. As best he could, he proceeded mercifully. The hell of it was that the sins of omission are often greater and more damaging than those of commission. So sayeth the lean and hungry wolf. “Don’t underestimate him,” said Pinch. “He has more power than meets the eye. I smell goodness and a troubled soul. He is only a man after all. We shall meet him again.” “Another last question. Please,” I said. “What is it?” he sighed. “Why did you really consent to see me?” “Because I have seen you standing along the path that I am traveling. You are part of the resolution; you will find those who are gathering together and are feeding the wolf.” “Do you know who the Nobler One is?” “That is for you to find out.” He pushed a button on his desk, the door opened and there stood the young priest ready to escort me out of the building. I turned to go; all energy had left me and I was overcome by an overwhelming hunger. I could feel Pinch’s arm around my shoulder, giving me support. But I willed myself to turn and look at the Archbishop once more. “What is Veritas?” I asked. But the room was empty, the smell of lavender had vanished, and I heard only the squeak of another closing door. Pinch and I walked across the oak-strewn gardens. Sweet azaleas surrounded the walkway. Magnolia, hydrangea, and night jasmine bloomed as the shadows of early evening moved across the ordered lawns. Time moved before our eyes. A bell rang out. It was five o’clock. What had the Archbishop said? The bells call the people to prayer, but who comes but the ghosts? I started to tremble, the blood in my body stopped running, I was cold, my head felt as though I had been hit by a hammer. I looked for Pinch, I reached out. I was falling. “Help me. Something is happening. Pinch. Help me.” I rose from my knees and looked up. The buildings vaulted skyward, large, massive and heavy. Reaching towards God, yet sinking into the earth. Each spire held a cross that may have been gold at holy inception, but now they were almost black from the corrosive effects of soot and burned industrial waste that blew across the intermittently violet sky. Darkness rendered no shadows. I stood in the middle of the quadrangle surrounded by artificial homage to a dominant religion that had forsaken a well-intentioned faith. I turned slowly in a circle, impressed mostly by the agonizing silence; where were the clerics, the secretaries, the school children, the bureaucrats? Large stained glass windows reflected the hurrying clouds making a kaleidoscope in the air. Shading my eyes with my hands, I peered up to the large window at the top floor of the tallest building. The blood red curtains were drawn back and I saw the dark figure of a man that I knew was looking down at me. The Archbishop. Did he sense my coming back? Or had he prayed for it? Was he ready to help me again, or had he given up all hope? The curtains closed gently, his large white hand withdrawing, leaving a single fleeting sparkle from the gold band that united him to Christ. Thunder boomed from the east and west, wind whipped around me, warm wind, a southern wind, squalling from the Gulf of Mexico. Calamity. Hannah. Calamity. I ran through the large wooden doors, pushing on the brass polished handles. I felt grease on my hands and wiped them off on my jeans and ran up the stairs two at a time. When I had come here hours ago – it was hours ago, wasn’t it? Years? The first time I had met the Archbishop of New Orleans, it was with a small amount of awe mixed with resentment. On this new day, I came with fear mingled with gut-wrenching resolve. Hallowed be thy name. Hollow is thy name. “I must hurry before he shoots himself.” He is a coward. Can’t you see that? The worm has eaten him. “Shut-up. Just shut the hell up.” The Book says there are murderers all around you. “I know. I know them already.” This and that are not what they seem. Remember to dream. The marbled floors were spectral, laden with dust that glittered azure and copper in the dying light that fell through the windows lining the hallway. I followed the singular pair of footprints, solid, large, intentional. The sound of my boots on cold marble echoed like signals to a doomed submarine and devilish laughter pinged in my ears. The sensation was like being in the crazy house of mirrors at Lake Pontchartrain Fairgrounds when I was a kid; the night I got lost, the wind off of the water, lightening cutting the black sky, the smell of burned flint. I was so damned lonely. Hannah, Hannah, Hannah, over and over he called to me. A deep voice, pleaded for me. Come, save me. I blasted through huge wooden doors that vaulted to the ceiling. Flecks of serrated gold cascaded from the medieval paintings that adorned the walls; I saw eyes that held every emotion but forgiveness. There will be no redemption here. Hot air enveloped me and I realized that I was still holding on to the door handle in fear that I would fly into the universe if I weakened and let go. I closed my eyes and swallowed the bile that had risen to my throat. He will be kind, I told myself. No, he won’t, fool. “Come in, Hannah. I’ve waited for you it seems like five fucking weeks. Bitch.” The Archbishop sat crossed-legged on his desk. His face was lined with deep furrows, his skin pocked like that of an ancient, diseased medieval mendicant. Incense swam through the air so thickly I had to cough. His once beautiful, and I had thought, angelic and wise eyes, looked at me with contempt and amusement. White branches of braided dirty hair danced in the air; they were organic, alive, part of the dying tree of life. His mouth slashed across his face, as though at his second birth someone had simply run a sharp knife though his chin. Blood seeped from the pores of his face and coursed slowly down into the skin folds of his puckered neck and congealed. “You are not the Archbishop,” I said. “Old viper. Evil.” “Prove it,” he chuckled. Burgundy drops of spit ejaculated from his mouth and he wiped them away with his black sleeve. Darkness hid the blood. “I am him, surrendered.” “No, I don’t believe it. You’re not him. You can’t be.” He jumped off the desk and started running around and around it, singing. “Ding, dong, the bishops dead, they killed the Canterbury ghost.” “What have they done? Where is the real Archbishop?” I screamed at him. “Now. Tell me or I’ll shake it out of you.” I balled my fists but held them at my side. I had never felt such anger, such a will to lash out. “Oh, good Hannah, good girl. See, you’re just like all of us. You want to kill me before you even know who I am,” he said. Then he stopped not a foot from me, smiling, taunting me, daring me to violence. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Letting go of the animal in you.” “No, it doesn’t feel good. Who are you? What are you?” He backed away from me then jumped on the desk, swinging his legs like a combatant, jeering child. His black pant legs had risen to mid calf exposing white, hairless skin that was dotted with red wheals. The odor of mold wafted towards me and I stepped back. “Smell remind you of someone?” he laughed, clapping his hands. “Of evil, I suppose. That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it? The trap is that if I believe you are the Archbishop turned evil, then I will lose hope.” “Smart Hannah, shit Hannah. Can’t put one over on you.” “Okay. I’ll play along. You have succumbed to what is happening out there. To the corruption. So tell me, what’s in it for you? Or have you forsaken us?” “Don’t get biblical with me. I see through the words that are not words that no one pays much attention to anyway. Crapy, crap and all that. You think I came all this way in the Church to give it all up. It’s all burlesque, this Church, these words, whether we keep Latin or speak the idiom.” “So, you became a practical man, so to speak.” “Oh, shut the fuck up, would you. You came here for solace, advice. From me? And you haven’t learned shit yet. Join the spiral of history, why don’t you.” “No, not yet.” “Yes, yes,” he cackled and jumped off the desk. He walked toward the large stained glass window, his hands entwined behind his back. It was this posture that reminded me of the man I had respected, that made me hold back, not want to turn and run. “You can still be saved,” I whispered. He turned so fast he left forms of himself in the air. His eyes blazed. His mouth coalesced into a hole. “My city is no more. City of God, City of God. Look the hell around you, idiot. Look! Hell and high water, judgment day.” He covered his face with his hands, the knuckles had enlarged and his fingers had curved outward. He sobbed. His shoulders shook. I walked to him and touched his hands. The heat from his skin was like fire. He jerked his head up, looked at me as though I had come to murder him and hit me across the face. I flew backward, a pain shot through my left shoulder as I hit the wall and I fell to the floor. I don’t know how long I lay on the icy floor. When I opened my eyes, all I wanted to do was throw up and flee. A shadow stood over me, waiting, the scent of rotting meat played in the air, and sporadic notes of laughter cut into my head like a buzz saw. I pushed up onto my elbows and looked up at the Archbishop. “Nel mezzo del commis di nostra vita,” he said, and thrust a hand out to me. “No,” I spat out. “Get away from me.” I pushed up and stood against the wall, between the large paintings of Saint Bernard and St. Thomas. “Hannah, Hannah,” he said, the words coming so smoothly and fatherly. “Let me help you. We are all fallen and alone. Without the words, you will have peace. Trust me.” “You hit me, you goddamned hit me,” I said. “So. Did it hurt so much? You need to know what it is to be purely human, finally,” he laughed and reached out for me. He grabbed my face and squeezed. He pulled me from the wall and toward the window. Still, he laughed. His eyes like two black agates. His mouth was bleeding, the purple liquid falling like a faucet that had been turned on to full. “Please, please,” I panted. “Don’t make me do this. I know what you’re trying to do. I can’t, I can’t kill you.” “Sure you can. When it’s me or you, you can, you can, can.” His right hand tightened on my jaw. I watched his left hand rise up and seize my head and squeeze. The pain shot though my neck and I gasped in order to stay conscious. “Ready yet?” he asked. Then he loosened his grip. “No. What did you say to me, in Latin?” I whispered, hardly getting the words out. “Smarty pants, don’t know your Latin. And you call yourself a Catholic. Okay, I’ll tell you since you’re going to die anyway. You had your chance. You are midway along the journey of your life, or something to that effect. I quoted verbatim.” “From what?” He let out his breath in my face, the stench lifting me off my feet. “Why, love, love, love. The Inferno. You are going through purgatory soon. Hell first.” He lifted me up by my chin and head with his hands. The prism of colors from the stained glass windows washed over his face. My body moved higher in the air, tears rolled down my cheeks. “No, no,” I cried. “Begin at zero,” he said. “Nostos. Want to confess?” Suddenly the doors swung open, banging against the walls, and massive fluttering shadows moved into the room. I tried to move my head toward the sound, but his grip would not ease. When I strained to look, I saw only the shadows and the fluttering sound became singing, high-pitched and piercing so that I longed to cover my ears. And then he let me go and I fell to the floor at his feet. I looked up into his face. He was going to kill me. “See,” he yelled. “You have made them come. Why can’t you just leave things come as they are ordained?” I felt the blows on my head. I covered myself with my hands, staring at his legs and then I lunged for him, seized his legs, pushed myself up with all my strength and twisted him up into the air. The gold of the window framed him, the particles of God’s colors dispersed in bright beams, frigid air bowed the window. I turned quickly and saw the forms of children dancing above the floor, popping fireflies of light spewing from their heads. I looked up into the Archbishop’s face and let him drop until I could grab him at his waist. Then suddenly, the stained-glass window shattered and a tunnel of wind sucked at us. I felt my grip loosen but I held onto him, trying desperately to pull him back into the room “Let go of me,” he whispered. “Let me go, Hannah. You can do nothing against the forces. They will kill you. If you don’t let me go, I promise, I promise, I will help them.” I held on then looked behind me. Silence had overtaken the room. The shadows had vanished; the children I had failed to save had deserted me. They had left me to my own reserves. Again, I looked at the Archbishop, at his pleading eyes, the mustard yellow sclera, the purple veins, the blood. My stomach lurched and I let him go. I watched the black body as it was propelled into the vortex of the window that had once depicted Jesus’ first step in the Way of the Cross. The crown of thorns twisted on Jesus’ head and then splintered into a galaxy of stars. Behind me I heard a child whisper: There is no pity here. No mercy this time. You will find only justice. And then I smelled the clear scent of holy water, the aroma of nothingness. The strong song of a nightingale came in from the broken window and I walked to the sharp edge that was littered with glass. I pressed my hands down onto the ledge until I felt the searing pain as shards of glass pierced my palms. I closed my eyes; my blood trickled outward, life flowing out of me, and I held my hands up toward the sky, watching crimson drops descend in slow motion to the ground below. “Remember the birds in flight and remember love,” I whispered. Then I looked down and at the black-clad man laying face down on the emerald green grass. He was surrounded by a rainbow of broken glass, except for the dark river of liquid that oozed from the top of his head. And I knew in my heart that the Archbishop had died for our sins, had given his life to save the knowledge that his Church had persevered, for good or evil, for centuries. And it had come to this: that I had to be the one to kill him when he had given over to the city of man. By his death he had ended what cooperation they had expected of him and the Diocese of New Orleans and the worldwide church was on its own. I looked at my hands, at the window, and knew my fingerprints were everywhere, to be left here forever as a sign that I had tarnished my own soul. I was still staring at my hands, rubbing them, the ache in my shoulder excruciating. Birds sang; the shadows of evening lay at my knees. The orange of the western sky glowed and painted my body with a tincture that only Caravaggio could have mixed. I looked around; Pinch librated near by, a ghost, no longer exhibiting the semblance of human substance. “What happened to me? Pinch, I killed him. I am a murderer.” I said, gasping. “No, love. You have just had your first full-blown vision. You have grown so much as a Gran Met. You have seen what can be; through you, what the world it capable of becoming; how one person can give up and become nothing; how one person can make a difference for good or evil. The Beatitudes will suffer through you and will become magnificent. Come. Let’s get you some rest, sustenance. We have much to think about, to do. Oh, the places we have yet to go.” IV THE SORROWFUL “Master, are those whom I hear, spirits?” I asked him. “You have grasped rightly,” he replied, “and as they go they loose the knot of anger.” Dante, Purgatorio Rising out of the early dawn, out of saffron clouds that reminded me of a newly formed nebula, out of aromas of exotic spices – cassia, ajowan, kokum, anise, zedoary, and grains of paradise – she came, gold shadows followed in her ellipsis, and she settled on my bed that was fashioned of red cloth, in this small apartment, in this city. It was this vision of Pinch that convinced me that we had become separate. Yet in that separateness my strength blossomed, that which would allow the fruition of our common goal of finding the murderers, the villains, the White Army, and somehow disposing of their evil. Pinch had become the arbiter of my quest. Her words were convincing; it was no dream, she still spoke of her other life, for this was how I learned the next step, where to go from one place in time to the next: Go there, she tells me. Don’t let there be forgetfulness; let’s cross the river of forgetfulness; to do penance is not to forget. “I had always known I wouldn’t live beyond middle age,” said Pinch. I suppose it was childhood instinct. When I was human, I heard people calling me a ‘survivor,’ and I never knew if that was a compliment or not, whether they considered me damaged. All the foster children; they are survivors. Then what? It’s as though someone was elected or appointed and can’t ever think of anything else to do with us but say: ‘okay, so you survived once, let’s see you do it again.’” “Some people say that because they can’t understand other people’s suffering,” I said. “They reward people for having lived through past sorrow as a way of tempering their own guilt. There is no penance without empathy.” “Arrogant, don’t you think? Praying doesn’t do anything to help little children, praying for their souls while they wallow in filth, hunger. That’s sympathy; it’s useless in changing things.” “Prayer is an arrogant act, yes, I see that. But Pinch, where are you going with this?” “This is my final confession before I cross over, so to speak, totally. It’s connected to what we are doing, how far we have come in finding the murderers. If you understand my past completely, then you can let go, love. You have to let go and be strong.” “Okay, then,” I said. “I’m listening.” “When I was eight,” said Pinch, “a man who called himself my uncle raped me, stuck the first needle in my arm and told me that it was the only way to make the pain of the world go away. This went on for about four years. Day in and day out, it seems, and I can’t understand how I endured; except maybe something deep inside of me just wanted to outlast the bastard. Now, you listen to the news, read magazines in the check-out lines, waiting to buy fresh fruit, milk, real food, and there’s health reports about how cigarettes are bad for high school kids or that young children are too fat and they should play more soccer. I want to laugh to high heaven. What dangers we place in front of our children. And just down the street, not four blocks away, some insane brother, coke and blow up his ass, is humping some poor little girl and that world, the one that’s so concerned about cigarettes and too many donuts, turns its back on her. It’s not that people all up and down the class line, the religious line, the economic line, don’t believe what’s really happening in this country; they’re afraid to believe. If they did, if one morning they woke up and suddenly it all added up, what they see on TV or read, or even experience in their lives when they take a wrong turn and end up in street with no name and they wished they had put that gun in their glove compartment, they would have to truly see themselves in the mirror. They would have to confront the fear that will follow them all the days of their lives. What fear is that? Each of us is alone only because we make it so.” “I was wondering when you were going to tell me about all of your childhood,” I said. “We kept so much from each other before, as though we were afraid of the rarified experience of deep friendship. Too see each other, just like you’re saying about people looking at themselves in the mirror.” It had started to rain, slowly, and I watched the splash of the raindrops on the windowpane as Pinch continued talking. She had become a silver monochrome shape, rippling from side-to-side like a celestial dolphin. Her voice was clear, and behind each word came a small echo, as though a power far, far away were confirming her story, trying to diffuse the mystery, give truth. “I think it’s all about this beatitude stuff you’re talking about,” Pinch continued. “I’ve been going through this hard as I can, trying to name maybe one or two humans who fit into the beatitude categories. Unless it’s the poor in spirit, those with too much humility to do them much good on this earth. My granny, she was brave but humble, had no pretensions to be other than what she was. I think she was many beatitudes wrapped up in a small black package – merciful, pure of heart, meek. Aren’t the meek supposed to inherit the earth? But the rest? Shit, the world’s done gone way, way south to the waters’ edge. So here I am cast as a ghost. Very Shakespearian, don’t you think?” “She would have approved. But go back. How did you get away from your uncle?” “Oh, it’s not such an unusual story. You’ve probably seen the same theme over and over again on one of them ‘Hallmark Fame’ shows. Here comes an old granny guts to the rescue, chases the bad guys away, and takes over. The whole sorry bunch of them respects this lady, because she’s so old they don’t come near, don’t try to get at the little girl again. They respect age. Can you believe that crap?” “Her age and her power. Sometimes it’s the force of their character.” “Well, you’re damned right. You know how Granny kept the fools away? Voodoo and hoodoo. When you down low and see nothing in front of you, no future, you believe anything: spells, gris-gris, curses, signs.” “All religions have their trinkets,” I said, touching the bulge on my chest. “Thing is, a lot of them are real and useful.” “You bet. One time, well, I’m going to start laughing when I tell you this one.” “What happens when you laugh?” “It rains. No, really. It’s raining now, steam like swamp clouds. Romeo is laughing his fool head off. I don’t doubt it for one minute.” “You’re putting me on?” “Not at all, and you know it. Anyway, stop interrupting me, Scrimp. You always interrupt when I’m talking out a problem. So here comes Granny and she gets an abandoned apartment right smack in the worst part of the Desire Projects. Well, I think, damn she’s brave, setting up living there. But, I guess it was the cheapest one available. She comes and gets me from my aunt and uncle’s house, tells uncle that he comes near me again she’s gonna send every hound of hell she knows from Hades and the beyond. Remembering it now, I guess I have to smile and really appreciate the whole scene. She stared at him, hissed like some old wrinkled she-devil, took out a long pin with a pearl attached to it from one of her dress pockets and out of the other a little straw doll. She sticks the pin in the doll’s leg and says: You see that dere pin, where it be now? You touch dis hera lil’ gal I stick the pin in you jack and den in you brain. I gonna say a prayer you go straight to hell and some big brown hounds gonna come and take you sorry black ass away. You be burning like a crispy critter. Then she hissed again and took my hand and away we went. I looked back at uncle shit and don’t you know he was rubbing his leg and gritting his teeth. Yet the thing I remember so vividly is her old dress, how the purple frayed cloth of the pockets was nothing but threads trembling and twirling in the hot wind. Even now I feel the threads brushing against me, entering me, like they have become my ghost-veins. All of her clothes were either purple or lavender, or at least had a worn hint of those colors. Anyway, you know what?” “What?” “I never saw old uncle or any one living with him again. Never. I heard he got sent up to Angola. That’s kind of like going to hell, so I guess I got my wish.” “And I guess your Granny’s spells and curses worked after all.” Pinch sighed, a trembling sound like the rapid movement of a giant fish’s gills. She had changed again; iridescent, a yellow slice of matter in the slender ray of sunlight that had broken through the clouds and came in through my window. I needed to get used to her changes, however much it unnerved me at times; I kept thinking that the next time she would go away for good. “Well, Granny made me go to school,” Pinch continued. “I got dressed fast every morning, shaking like I was dying. She poured orange juice down me until I choked. I think a year went by before I calmed down. They should’ve hired Granny for drug rehab programs.” “Orange juice. Like being diabetic,” I whispered, my mind and body pulling away and then coming back, a feeling that what I had experienced in the past month would pale compared to what was coming. I listened to her voice and beyond it, waiting for a sign, a message that would tell us what to do next sent on the straight line of time by an ancient semaphore. “Yeah. Granny was a maid for some white families out on River Road. When she came to my rescue, she came with a little bit of money, the clothes on her back, and an old cardboard suitcase with her trinkets. I still had that suitcase. It was under our bed when she died; she had told me to be sure and take it, keep it. Anyway, I remember going to the welfare offices with her. We sat on soiled orange plastic chairs in a hallway. The place smelled of urine and old people. Kids were screaming, then there would be the sound of a slap and you shuts yoself up and then more crying. I can’t tell you how long we waited. I know I was hungry; lunch had long passed before a fat yellow lady came swaying at us, all gussied in a red dress and those big, fake rhinestone earrings. Okay, come on. You. And she pointed at us with a file folder. Then we sat and listened about how Granny was supposed to get a job to support me or they were gonna put me in foster care. Granny asked who’s gonna take care of her if I work. And the lady said can’t you find someone. And Granny said why the hell you think I come here, is to get her away from them who won’t take care of her. This went on and on like some damned freak show. Finally, Granny hissed at the lady and we left. No money to take care of me, and Granny said she’d be run over by God’s chariots before somebody’d take me to foster care. So, you know what Granny does? Hot damned, she sets up her own business in the projects. Five bucks a voodoo spell. Good ones mostly. Only time she ever put bad spells is when she knew for sure it would be on somebody real bad.” “Don’t tell me she supported you all those years on voodoo?” “Sure thing. Scrimp, remember you once said it: this is America; you can make a buck selling anything. So I’m telling you this story because of the voodoo spells.” “What do you mean?” I asked. I turned my body towards her and looked into her eyes. They had suddenly become clear and tangible. The rest of her body still glimmered like a child’s kaleidoscope. “Why was I killed? Did I know something? Who was after me? Why’d they take my home? When Granny died five years ago, about the same time you and I met, I started having little accidents. From the time Granny came to me until she died, my life was great. I went through school, then college, then got the social work job, and it was always scary to me that everything was so easy. It was like someone was atoning for the life I had led for my first twelve years. Then I hook up with you, Granny dies and I get in a car accident. Remember that? I get shot in the leg; I get food poisoning. I could go on.” “Wait, wait a minute. You think when Granny died the voodoo wore off? That she was your charm, so to speak?” I asked. “Yes, exactly that.” “But then there’s me.” “Yes, then there is you. Add to that Romeo and Big Man Juke and the hole in the world. I knew something that I shouldn’t have. Big Man was murdered just before Granny came to the projects and Romeo, when we were in high school. Lots of other people that I knew.” I stared out into the world. I needed contact with reality, but I no longer knew what that was. I was afraid that our mission, if that was what we were into, was spinning out of control. The rain stopped. Loneliness, utter loneliness is what I felt, even though Pinch was with me. Maybe it was just the New Orleans weather, the heat, the humidity, the hell of it all. “Well, Pinch,” I said, my voice hoarse, “where you grew up, it’s always hard to tell why people die or are murdered.” “But, you see there’s some connection?” she asked “Yes. I do. All of these things are connected: Your murder, our investigations, our involvement with the foster children, the religious aspects, Romeo appearing. I think we have been on the trail of something so big that something or someone with great power is going to try to stop us. There are forces here we don’t understand. Why aren’t I dead and why didn’t I become a ghost like you?” I massaged the back of my neck, hoping to loosen that ornery muscle that clutched at my spine. “Why me and not you?” “I’m thinking that I was somehow protected too,” I said. “Am protected. It would be so easy to kill me and not send me to a beauty makeup session. Just too weird.” I straightened my back. “I had a dream about my mother. She took me out into the swamp when I was a little girl. It was night and in my dream I saw dark figures and a little man with a big head. It was a ceremony. I think I was being blessed. I think that may be how I became voodoo.” “So our coming together, becoming friends, was preordained?” “No doubt about it. And I know that we have been connected by something that cannot be explained in the rational course of an investigation. Every time we would find some kid beat up, sexually abused, such horrific things done to the mind, body and spirit, society expected a rational explanation. Why did the father do that? Why did the mother let the boyfriend control the children, punish them like they were in a concentration camp? On and on and on. And if the social service worker, or the agency bureaucrats, couldn’t explain it, for good or bad, a resolution was left up to the legal system. We were supposed to play psychiatrist and priest, rabbi, and then were blamed when we couldn’t point a finger and let everybody else off the moral hook. Now, I know we have to find killers who play by rules beyond the dictates of law and order. Pinch, I know we don’t have a choice but to do what we are doing.” “You said the opposite to the Archbishop.” “I know,” I said as I rested my head on my arms. “I guess I was trying to be strong, show we didn’t need him. But he’s one of the pieces of the puzzle that are surely being placed on the table before us; my God, I killed the guy. What’s funny is that I am no longer afraid to look at the picture that will soon be displayed on the box cover. It’s what will stop these monstrous acts.” Pinch blew out ghost air, a sound like the tugboats on the river. “I was once a captive of my past, confined by the walls of my own childhood. No more. It’s done and now I never have to think of it but as an aspect, a particle of my new being. Yet that’s not the case with you, love. You’re not free of that. It will stay with you like a bullet that cannot be excised but for your death.” “I know that. I carry that with me and it is one of the things that help me to go on with this. I cannot change my past, I can understand it, and that’s not such a big deal idea. But in the end, all I want to do is to bring some happiness to the living by removing what makes misery, what brings it down to so many children being the sorrowful. Sorrow should not be a mark of childhood.” “We both walked through the fire to get where we are now.” “Yes, and shall we then proceed? We have so much to do. Pinch, do you know where your Granny’s suitcase is now?” “Probably at Aunt Bella’s. She’s the one paid for me going to school, stepped in to help Granny when she got sick at the end. Don’t you remember her being at my funeral?” “Don’t recall much about that at all. Remember, though, we used to stop in at her corner store up on Claiborne. God, she made the best ham and collards. Maybe we’ll make a point of going by to see her. Think she would let me look at the suitcase if she still has it?” “Sure,” murmured Pinch. “I’d like to see her again, anyway.” I had no doubt that we were letting ourselves become too sad, me, for the loneliness of the flesh, Pinch, for the loneliness of the spirit. The light of the world had faded, night had settled in and I didn’t know where time had gone. My hunger rumbled and I felt shaky. “Well, best we get on,” I said. “Night’s come on us. Don’t we have to meet the dead Father Delcambre?” “Yep, at eleven at the entrance to Jackson Square.” “What did he say again? Something about a celestial shaft?” asked Pinch. “Transfixed, in fatal cold, ” I replied, reciting the passage in my head. I glanced at Pinch. She was looking out of the window, her head nodding as though she were sending a message to a friend. We waited in silence. I saw in my mind the city lights coming on in a burst of reality, just as they always did as dusk sent signals to the wires of civilization; the streets had already dried, and I could smell the aromas of cooking hitting me in hard waves as they rushed out from the restaurants that tenant the French Quarter: Chicken, crawfish, tomatoes, mozzarella, Brie, garlic, onions, parsley, sausage, lemons, limes, bananas, basil, paprika. My mind was spinning out of control, my stomach was tied in knots and a balled fist squeezed my gut every time each distinct aroma penetrated my senses. I quickly looked at my watch. I had bought it in Rome, liked it because it had big hands and numbers that were illuminated in the dark. The front cover of the face popped opened and a person could feel the numbers if sight impaired. The band was red and had retained its color and texture for more than ten years. I had bought it off of a blind street vendor; eyes covered by a white luminous sheen, hair and beard thick and white and unkempt and it covered most of his upper body, like a hair shirt. I still feel it: the touch of his hand on mine, his guttural voice telling me to go with God and to take the watch because it is the numbers that illuminate. He had spoken to me in English. Everything was out of place at the time. I remembered being afraid. He had smelled of incense and roses and acorns and death. The numbers illuminate. The numbers illuminate. Seven sins, eight beatitudes, ten children. Purgatorio. Infinity. “Where are you?” asked Pinch. “Back in Italy,” I said. And then I told her what had come back to me, about the numbers “You know what?” said Pinch. “I think we’re about to find out what hell is like for a lot of people. You cannot be human and not sin.” Silence came swiftly, as though someone had turned off the natural world, the false world, and the world of humanity. I heard footsteps thump gingerly, thump once then stop, then continue coming up toward my apartment. I looked at Pinch; she nodded. I walked to the door and waited for the knock. I had few visitors, ever; Mrs. Mendoza, utility people, a few drunks, maybe tourists looking for a place to rent in the most famous part of the city. I waited. Silence. Then a soft, tentative knocking, a knock imbued with anxiety, but subtle purpose. I was not afraid. How can you have murdered an Archbishop, even in your vision, and be afraid? I looked at the palms of my hand, at the bright cherry blotches, and then opened the door. The crowded noises of New Orleans came into my apartment as did a woman not much older than me; faded brown hair reached to her shoulders, rimless glasses pinched the bridge of her nose, wisps of hair dangled like filaments of fine thread, the sleeves of her dark green cotton blouse covered most of her hands in which she held three books. I recognized her then; the lady from the bookstore who had said she was not from New Orleans, that she was not Catholic. “Hi,” she chirped. “I thought I’d bring these by, you were so anxious for them. Someone returned them not an hour or so after you left. So I thought I’d take a little detour and come over.” “Yes, thanks,” I said. “But how did you find me? I didn’t give you my address.” She pushed the books towards me and I took them, looking down at the book on top of the pile: The Fourth Crusade, a small brown book, leather bound. I held the other two books in the crook of my left elbow and turned the small book over, flipped to the first page, to the title page. “This book doesn’t have an ISBN number,” I said. “Published by a company called Veritas – NO-4thC. I’ve never heard of that publisher. Is it here in New Orleans?” “You can only get that book special order; so it’s good you came to us and not one of those chain stores. Anyway, may I come in a minute? I’m so very tired walking through the streets. I got lost several times, right at the corner of Royal and Toulouse. Finding a parking place you see.” Pinch moved toward her and tried to move into her, but nothing happened. “She’s going to try to kill you,” said Pinch. “I know,” I murmured staring into the woman’s eyes. I moved towards her, ready to grab her arms; I saw a slight bulge in her pants pocket and her large purse was still hanging from her right shoulder, resting on her hip. She smiled, looked around the apartment, and then exhaled through discolored teeth as though suppressing a rising anger. “What’s your name?” I asked her. “You’re very beautiful, she whispered. “I can see why he chose you. But you have to know that I am still the one. My name is Laurel.” Her eyes widened in a burst of rage, the dullness turned to a striking topaz, then varicolored, as though she had become a beast. I pushed her toward the door and dove across my bed. Then her purse exploded and glass spewed all over the apartment. I looked at the woman; she was in flames. I ran to the small fire extinguisher under the sink, flipped the knob and turned the spray on her, but the flames had reached the curtains and my apartment was on fire. Sirens filled the night; how did they get here so soon? And then something wracked the woman’s body as she crumbled to the floor all dark and light and I looked at the door and heard Pinch say run, run, it’s Tattoo and I looked at the door again and there stood the tattooed man with a big gun in his hand and he shot and shot at the lady and I tried to kick at his arm. He only looked up at me and smiled and turned and ran. I had seen it coming, had known the consequences. Had I let it happen? Or was I still not able to know my enemies fully or control the moments of time? I grabbed the books and a wallet that had flown out of Laurel’s purse and my copy of Dante and fled my apartment, weaving through the firefighters and their hoses. I stood with Mrs. Mendoza and looked up at my apartment at the starry night that reflected the vastness of the universe. The fire had been contained to my apartment; smoke rose from the doorway and funneled upward and over the rooftops. Mrs. Mendoza held my hand and in her other hand she held the hand of her daughter, who in turn held the hand of her brother, who held the hand of the oldest girl, Carla. “You can stay with us,” said Mrs. Mendoza. “Until you get your things out. Not all is lost.” “Thanks,” I whispered. “But I think I’ve got it covered,” I answered. “Well,” said Pinch from behind me. “It looks like you’re homeless. Ever live in a car?” “Let’s get out of here before the cops come and they start asking questions,” I whispered. “Go, Hannah, go fast,” said Mrs. Mendoza. “I’ll hold them with lots of sly talk. And the children and me will go up and save what we can. Hurry away.” I stared down at her in surprise, her eyes twinkled, her mouth was set and determined to defend me. “I have been through things what makes this fireworks. I lived with fascists for many years, Hannah, so this is all in a days’ coming.” She pushed me away and gathered her children in her arms. * It was almost ten o’clock, so we headed toward Jackson Square stopping at Chang’s bar so I could at least have a beer and a shrimp po’boy. I sat at the end of the long common table in a dark nook where very few people passed except to go to the men’s room. Then I opened Laurel’s large black wallet; fifty dollars in assorted bills, no driver’s license, but in a zippered pocket I found a passport. Her name was Laurel Batin, born September 6, 1965 in Louisiana; nearest I could tell from the stamps she had traveled to Italy three times, Japan twice. Her photo was like most passport photos, making the subject look like she was a refugee entering through Ellis Island and escaping from the last pogrom. Don’t ever smile. But it was the name, the slant of the jaw, the blunt color of her eyes as I remembered them when she had looked at me just an hour or so ago, that convinced me that she was related to the Boudreaux family; a Batin, on the side of the two furies. But if Tisi had not married, or never had a child that anyone knew of, and Alectina and Harlan had only Genvive, then what place in the family did Laurel take? She would have been forty years old this coming September. Illegitimate child, child of the dead sister, niece, and why did she try to kill me? She had said: “I was the one.” The one what? She was out of the loop and it was that which drove her to madness. It was in her eyes, her sense of abandonment, and the consuming knowledge that her own family had deemed her not worthy. There is in each of us a secret firmament that holds our greatest desire. I believe it is revealed, it blossoms or it bursts free in our moments of delirium, when desire can no longer be controlled. That is what happened to Laurel Batin when she tried to blow herself and me to smithereens. It was jealousy; I saw it in her innermost being, her soul; I see it now. She was supposed to be the one and not me. Am I the one? Could Laurel have abducted the children and killed Pinch? Did she have the fortitude? There were no stars on her head, she was nondescript, a woman who had taken on the affect of an orphan, a wallflower, so she would have been of little note. Why would she work in a bookstore, wear the clothes she wore, when she probably had all the money she needed from her family. Or did she? Was she an outcast? Tattoo killed her and escaped in the night; and the last thing I saw was the self-satisfied look on his face as though he had done the job to which he was appointed, the insentient nature of his eyes. And the two crones at the beauty shop and the mafia guys – all had exhibited towards me rather controlled demeanors, all things they did had to do simply with appointed rounds. No, Laurel Batin did not have the self-governance or constancy to be part of a conspiracy or to be trusted to protect the conspiracy. I had done her a painful injustice without knowing it, or someone else had, and she acted out of paroxysmal rage. I needed a schematic vision, not one that would hit be from out of the blue and then I would have to conjure its meaning. I once read that within the space-time continuum, there is nothing that does not leave a print or some residue that cannot be linked to its origin. Things change because someone else changed this or that probably by just a mere touch. So what of randomness? Would Laurel’s death change the ultimate plan in the murder of the foster children and Pinch? Perhaps for them, but for me, it brought me one step closer to knowing who they were and where they resided. I had to clear my head for a while, but the television was blaring a pre-season baseball game and then it stopped and a commercial came on advertising beer, so I ordered another one. “Damn TV,” I said. Then a special bulletin came on, the reporter noting that it would be brief so there would be limited interference with the game. “It’s only bad news,” said Pinch. “I don’t want to know that there’s a world out there; sometimes I’d rather we’ve been gobbled up by some alternate universe.” “Too late,” laughed Pinch, as pearls of rain dotted the sidewalk, then fell in silver pellets, tapping on the tin overhang of the bar. Chang turned the volume down, but I could hear the amplified voice of the news reporter, a woman with a low sultry voice, practically screeching about a murder that has set the city rocking. New Orleans legendary Judge Ignatius Patton was shot and killed this evening at about nine o’clock at his home. The police received a telephone call from his wife, at which time she told them that she had shot her husband. Reports are that when the police arrived, Mrs. Patton was sitting on the back sun porch drinking gin straight from the bottle. She was still holding the gun, talking to no one, did not resist arrest and did not ask for a lawyer. She has been taken into custody and I am told that charges are pending investigation. “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Pinch. “I bet that was a long time in coming.” “But why today, why so soon after we had left her?” “Well, she was eerily calm when we talked to her. I think she’d already made the decision.” “We don’t know that she did it. Remember what she said, how much she knows about what’s going on.” “Who else would kill Patton if not her?” “She may be taking the rap for someone else.” “Maybe old tattoo did that too,” she said. “You know what else struck me about that news report?” I asked . “You way back there? Well, it was short and sweet?” “No. It was as though she had no first name. The reporter called her Mrs. Patton and she and her.” “Scrimp,” said Pinch as she tapped me on the shoulder. “What was her first name?” “We never did get it either, did we, Pinch?” “She’s one of the sorrowful. Sorrow. We all experience sorrow.” “Yes, the human condition, I sighed. “But she’s in on it and she’s now a murderer? Yet what does this do for us? I just know that we won’t get any information from the Judge now. He won’t have to pay for his crimes. We needed to talk to the Judge about all that religious crap he had.” “I agree. I think he was part of some kind of conspiracy that involves the children. And definitely one of the sins. I would say, um, pride. But they will pay, Scrimp, they will all pay.” “Oh, remind to stop by Bella Luna when this is all over, okay Pinch?” “What the hell are you talking about?” “Those herbs I smelled back there. Chef Pfeifer at Bella Luna grows them. Made me hungry.” “Dear God in heaven,” Pinch snorted. Then she burst out laughing and I smelled the man sweat, felt the cold air from the seat next to me. “Well, gals, you sure know how to put a case together. You best not believe that jive the man been feeding you.” “Romeo! So you finally decided to show yourself,” I yelped. “Yea, yea, yea. It’s me. Romeo. Thought it come time I hep you out. And Earline, you more pretty than ever, bettrn’ las time” “I have some of my only good childhood memories because of you,” said Pinch. “Scrimp, I want you to meet Romeo DeLuc in the ghost matter.” I glanced at the seat and was surprised that I could actually see the form of a man. “Nice to meet you. Any friend of Pinch’s.” “Damn, girl. You best be getting on. Step on it, we got some talking to do ‘fore you go down the hole. You best get there soon, babe. I been dead fifteen years, so I learned tricks of this hera ghost trade.” His voice was like a thumping song. “You shave your head now?” Asked Pinch. “You like? Wanna look like that rap singer, what’s his name. Uh, uh, yeah, Masper P.” “That’s not rap, it’s hip-hop. Like bounce. You been back to Treme lately?” “Sure, I go. Mosta my old buddies gone. Some dead, some moved on. It’s not the same home place anymore. And I’m telling ya da truth, I been busy.” “So, Romeo, tell us what you come to tell us,” I said, looking at him intently and actually seeing a large black image forming, shiny head, sparkling eyes. I suppose he hadn’t aged since his death; he looked like he was no more than seventeen. “What I know is Tattoo ain’t no ghost and he’s mean as the devil. You already know he been following ya’ll, killed that gal, but you know why? “Why?” asked Pinch. “He reports back about what ya’ll doing, making phone calls on his cell all the way. I cain’t get a name though. He never says who is talking to.” “You think he’s dangerous to Scrimp.” “Scrimp. Pooh, yea! What a name. And you, Pinch.” “Okay, Romeo!” I blurted. “He’s dangerous if you get too close. But, me and Pinch can slow him down.” “How?” Pinch asked. “We go through him, scare the bejesus out of him. Ain’t you figured that we can do a lil’ this an’ a lil’ that to the real evil and the real good?” “Not the in between?” I asked. “Majority of the people in the world are morally neutral; that’s what he’s trying to say,” said Pinch. “Yeah, that.” “No more beatitudes, no more sorrowful ones. You would think, with all the technology we have, all the resources, the murderers would have been found. The rub is that no one really cares. No one makes a stink or demands justice,” said Pinch. “Yo, you got it,” blurted Romeo. “They sure like to put the grimy shit on TV though.” “Morally numb I’d say. So Romeo, tell us what we need to know, okay,” I said. “Right. That lady you saw over in the Garden District. She shot the dude right through the head ‘bout a hour afta you left. She held the gun up and tol’ him that she didn’t sit around all her life and be left with nothin’. Her daddy had made a deal when they were married, that she’d get the land around New Orleans and she said she wasn’t ‘bout to wait for him to keel over. So, bam, bam.” “But she’s in jail now,” I said. “What good’s it all gonna do her now?” “She made a phone call after she bammed him. Said it’s done. Now I’m in. I’ll sign the land over when you get me out on bond.” “Who was she talking to?” asked Pinch. “Don’t know that,” said Romeo. “Do you know who killed the foster children?” I asked him. “A lot of them done it. Not just one. I never saw it, no ghost I asked did. But it was human hands what smothered those poor babies. We can only get there after the soul goes up.” “It was you then, wasn’t it,” I said, the shock of the realization taking my breath away considering what Pinch had told me about ghosts sighing and crying. “Me what?” he asked. “The fireflies.” “No. That’s before. Maybe angels, not ghosts.” “This is crazy,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “We have to meet Delcambre.” “Oh, yeah. About that. When you get back, I think I’m supposed to show you something. But you have to go one place before the other. Nobody learns by just being told. You sometimes have to take a journey. Look at me, fifteen years and my journey is finally beginning.” “You must’ve had some sins to take care of,” chuckled Pinch. “Well, girl, just a few, and them not so bad.” And then he was gone. “Imagine that,” laughed Pinch. “A hip-hoping ghost.” I looked at the clock behind the bar, the neon needles blinked telling me it was ten thirty. Pinch had been silent, now she was swaying, her eyes forming into glowing sparks and then I heard her hum as though she were trying to pickup the rhythm of a tune that she couldn’t quite get. Then she floated towards the doorway and I heard her say – I shall meet you near the shaft of light at eleven. Don’t be late. I opened The Coming of the Fourth Crusade, inspected the leather binding, the paper. At first glance the book had appeared to be an old book, perhaps a collector’s edition, but in actuality it was a new book simply made to look important. The first few pages opened easily, but the others had not even been plied open, so it had been printed and glued in the old fashioned way; no digital printing here. I read quickly through the pages where the author described the ‘fourth crusade’ as a fight for preserving and enhancing the white race in the interests of all the progeny of Christianity, the “symbol of our endearing movement and its success is the Virgin Mary. All women who come to us, who birth the children who will populate the Fourth Crusade, must emulate Mother Mary.” Chapter one was entitled “We Are Descendants”. I plied apart the first pages and read about Richard the Lionhearted and Charlemagne and wondered how it was possible for someone to be able to makeup history and have absolutely no idea who or what they were writing about. Talk about illusions of grandeur. Charlemagne had forged the first Holy Roman Empire, and Richard was responsible for the Third Crusade in Europe way, way back in twelfth century. So here the conclusion is that those who wanted to create a new empire, a holy empire, were necessarily descended from these two people, and yes, they were both Franks, that is, French. The next pages went to great length to delineate how members of The White Army in Louisiana were descended from these two persons in history. I didn’t believe any of it; how could anyone with half a brain? The lines and births and begets and begats didn’t make sense, at least not in the natural order of procreation. But as I hurriedly scanned the pages, I don’t think that mattered to the author. I knew just a little bit about Richard the Lionhearted, culled from my memories of freshman western civilization 101: most historians thought he was gay; but there were those rumblings as always happens with the kings, but never queens, of old Europe, about the illegitimate child. It was always good grist for those seeking power to claim progeny. But here with these White Army people, I think that their claim of descent was based on illegitimacy. Well so much for the pureness and the Mary virgin stuff. No good Catholic would buy into this bunk. And I wondered what the Archbishop would make of it all. I inserted my forefinger in between two other pages, slit them open, and read about the White Army in Louisiana. I could hear laughing from the bar and looked over to see two young women downing tequila and licking salt off of their hands and then sucking on half of a lime. Every time they poured the little glass of alcohol down their throats, the crowd of young men surrounding them roared in approval and encouragement. The neon clock ticked to fifteen minutes to eleven. I looked down at the page quickly, tried to do Evelyn Wood speed-reading and noted several things that disturbed me profoundly. The White Army recalled the 1867 organization, with constitution and by-laws, of an organization that disgraces the nation- The Knights of the White Camellia. Formed during the reconstruction, its purpose was to preserve the white race, and resist interference from outsiders, especially sectarian federal control. The Knights, unlike the Klan, were never overtly violent, but tried to infiltrate and control government and other societies that made up the filigreed organizations of the south. The members were lawyers, judges, newspapermen, church officials, all from prominent families and well-educated and well-situated professions. It was easy to draw parallels to what was happening here in New Orleans today. Wasn’t the Knights originally formed in New Orleans by a man of French ancestry? I couldn’t remember his name. And the foster children? Purity? Racial mix? Cleansing? For those who perpetrate these kinds of horrendous organizations, who kill for ends that serve evil, that engage in pleasures of decadence, they can take any fact and draw conclusions that make no real sense, make up history, and thereby pull in anyone else already wielding power and simply wanting more and more of it. This is how corruption takes over. I was shaking at the thoughts that were going through my mind; my arms jumped in an involuntary spasm and the Fourth Crusade book fell to the floor. The copy of The Divine Comedy that I had rescued from the fire lay open before me. It was the copy that my father had given me and in which he had inscribed: To Hannah, with all my love on Your Birthday, May 4, 1980. The page that I stared at held the black and white engraving by Gustave Dore from Canto 3: “The Company of souls upon the Cliff.” To the high left in the engraving was a host of souls draped in white and looking downward from a cliff; beams of light fell upon Dante as he looks upward, waiting to begin his journey; next to Dante a larger figure, I think Virgil, comforts and instructs him. The page to the left contained the first part of Canto 4 and my eyes went to these lines: My thoughts, which hitherto had been restrained, Loosened their bonds; and eager to know more, I set my face toward the mountain-steep. From the bar, the howling interrupted my thoughts and I looked at the time. I had ten minutes to get to Jackson Square. I gathered the books and asked Chang to keep them for me in a very safe place and then ran out into the night. I turned down Royal Street and took a right heading to the parking area near River Walk. I had to stop every block to let streams of people cross the street. Most were carrying beer and cups that I knew were full of hard booze. To my left, on a corner of Jackson Square, stood a stark white figure, white robe, expansive white wings. It was one of the street performers dressed up like an angel, skin whitened, standing in suspended time like a statue, the eyes following me, distracted only by the clink of coins dropped in an El Producto cigar box at the angel’s feet. I was going to meet a dead guy, a stiff, a former priest, now a ghost, a spirit. At least I assumed he had turned into a ghost and I only hoped he had become, like Pinch, one of the good ones, the ones that keep this city alive by their laughing. He hadn’t sounded like a jovial ghost. His purpose reached beyond this city, beyond time. There was never even a suspect in Delcambre’s murder as far as I saw in the news reports or the medical examiner archives. But given that Harlan did the autopsy, I wasn’t surprised. That’s what was so strange about all of this. No suspects, no arrests, nobody pays for these crimes. You’d think they’d at least cover their bases, do a better job of finding better fall guys than Jeremiah Johnson and me. “Funny isn’t it, love? How many people have to be murdered for the crime to be classified as against humanity?” “Hi Pinch,” I said. “I wasn’t worried about you. But to answer your questions, I’d guess over a million. Was the Children’s Crusade a crime against humanity? Was the Turkish invasion of whatever country, I can’t remember? The Holocaust, yes, Stalin, yes, Mao, yes, Kosovo, yes. Cambodia. On and on. And here we go again with this Iraq crap. It just never ends.” “Oh, I get it. It has to be against a people. The Jews, the Poles, the White Russians, the infidels.” “Sounds good, but they don’t all fit so neatly. Maybe it’s defined by who has the greater power, who imposes the punishment.” “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to convene a tribunal. The Pinch and Scrimp Tribunal to Bring Justice to the Murdered Children.” “Hell!” I yelled, slapping my hands together, “that’s the idea of the new century.” “I hope that Father Henry Delcambre is cooperative,” said Pinch. “How much did you know about the guy when he was alive? Romeo said he’s definitely dead and ghostly.” “Father Delcambre was forty-five years old and had practiced in Louisiana all of his life. Matter of fact, he was born and raised on a rice farm out near Pecan Island. Just like Harlan Boudreaux. According to his obituary, he came from a family of eleven children and didn’t leave his parish of birth until he was sixteen. That’s when he went off to seminary here in New Orleans. Here’s where it gets really interesting, and here is why I think he called me, dead or alive. It’s a sad and sorrowful story.” “Sorrowful?” “Very sorrowful. I suppose some would say his death was a godsend.” “That can happen,” laughed Pinch. “ Look at me.” I felt a cool mist envelop me; the wind moved silently through the open spaces as I picked up my pace. In the distance the shrill call of a rusted freighter framed the night as a warning, a portent of things to come, a voice beside me saying you are entering the river of forgetfulness, the M..i..s..s..i..s..s..i..p..p..i. I looked at Pinch from the corner of my eye and detected something new, something forming. Her hair had become not only completely white, but also had taken on a silver hue. She was still smiling. A new heat roiled deep in my stomach; it knocked against my solar plexus, floated away into the city air. I imagined it twisting around the buildings, guided by good purpose, finding the places wherein resides the power to corrupt. “Why don’t you tell me what you know about Delcambre before we get to him. I already smell death, something rotting,” said Pinch. “Okay,” I said. “But let’s go up near the river. I need to breathe New Orleans. And we’ll see him from there.” * The night was beautiful. I wanted to live in it forever. Once I feared dusk, now the thought of morning light eddying across dark streets brought on a new apprehension. Darkness, come and stay, I thought. A soft breeze blew in from the water, carrying the smell of fresh fish and spices. The water gave off sparkles that called forth a time when the river was clean, when steamboats symbolized promise, when Mr. Clemens could write about childhoods that were adventurous and magical. I leaned on the iron railings, looking out towards the lighted bridge to my left. I had once read that a bridge was considered a symbol of hope for new civilizations. A big gray pelican was volplanning towards the shore, heading straight towards us. Pinch shimmered beside me, the glow from bright neon decorating her body. “Father Henry Delcambre was performing confessionals as he usually did on Saturday afternoon. It was about three o’clock and the church was in the poorest section of Algiers. According to the newspaper account, the good Father was waiting for his next penitent. A witness, an old lady saying a novena, testified that she saw a young white man go into the confessional. About three minutes later, there was a noise, then what sounded like tearing or wood splintering and then a loud scream. Suddenly the man ran out of the confessional and out of the church. Father Delcambre staggered from the confessional, holding his throat. Several people in the church ran to the priest and saw blood flowing from between his fingers as he clutched his throat. Delcambre then ran to the altar and threw himself down, sobbing and yelling forgive me father, forgive me father. The ambulance arrived and he was taken to the hospital. He was not seriously wounded. His throat was bandaged and he returned to his church.” “Okay, Scrimp. All very dramatic, so what happened to his throat?” I thought you’d never ask,” I said. “Human bite. Seems the guy, whoever he was, tore open the grill between himself and Delcambre, reached in, grabbed Delcambre and bit him in the throat. Kind of like a werewolf thing; anger, revenge. When questioned, Delcambre, of course, said that all things said in the confessional are sacred, so no one ever knew what the guy had said to him.” “And then he’s murdered about a year later?” “Yep. But that’s not all. Father Delcambre became progressively ill. Losing weight, showing signs of dementia, losing track of where he is during the mass. One of the ladies of the holy name of whatever, roses or Virgin Mary, I can’t remember, recognized what was wrong with him, being she had a son that had died of AIDS. Seems the guy that bit Delcambre had AIDS. After all, where else could he have gotten the disease? According to all persons who knew Delcambre, he never betrayed his vow of celibacy. With man or woman.” “Poor, poor soul,” said Pinch. “But let me guess: By the time he was murdered it’s just as well ‘cause he was in the final stage?” “You got it. So now he calls me, and wants us to meet him. He knows us, so he’s going to either help or hinder us in finding out who murdered the children.” “Maybe he knew one of the children or the real parents.” “I think he knew something about a conspiracy. You know that this is some kind of conspiracy. Delcambre was killed to keep him quiet.” I looked at my watch and smiled. “We’ve go about two minutes. I’m so hungry. Nervous I guess.” We walked together along the river, me bumping into people who were having a good time, drunk and not. Pinch went through a couple of people; they screamed, and then she disappeared. I knew she was waiting for me where we were to meet Delcambre. A rap band and dancers had convened across from Jackson Square and the crowds had assembled to watch them. The blasting music was turned on high and coming from a speaker system, horns from river boats started to moan, and a huge spotlight tore through the streets, hitting the crowds with red, green, blue and yellow gaseous lights. I ran across the street at the first opening in the traffic and was within a few feet of the entrance when suddenly an oxidizing white beam hit the black wrought-iron gates. It was like a lightning bolt. Ozone permeated the air. Pinch stood facing a tall man dressed in black, his face so white it was as though he had powdered himself with flour. Pinch’s back shimmered silver and she backed away from him. His hands were folded in front of him; his eyes were hollow holes in his face. I ran towards them. Pinch turned to me, holding her undulating hands out to me. I looked into her face. She was calm. She waved for me to approach them. The music and the lights of the French Quarter vanished. The world became black and metallic, as though we had suddenly became players in an old noir movie. A gentle cold descended upon us. I walked into the celestial shaft. “We must stop the world as it is in order to give penance,” said Henry Delcambre. His voice was baritone but smooth, as though he had spent eternity giving out blessings to distressed souls. “Come,” said Pinch, “He won’t hurt you. He’s here to help us.” I walked slowly, looking into Delcambre’s boundless eyes