Steve Cash - The Meq

“I know who you are,” he said.

I stood there in silence. I felt a sense of evil and danger I had never known.

“The weather is bad, no?” he said, laughing that laugh.

“Let that one go,” I said.

“No, no, no, mon petit, mon Pequeño Basque, ” he said bitterly. “You cannot protect her with your precious Stones.”

“She’s not the one you want.”

“No? Then who is she?”

Just then, the front door downstairs crashed open and a ferocious wind blew in along with Corsair Bogy. He saw me and started for the stairs, yelling, “You little son of a bitch!”

A tremendous roar followed and the house began to come apart. I looked at Georgia. Her eyes were frozen with terror. The Fleur-du-Mal laughed again, but I couldn’t hear him and he cut Georgia’s throat in one motion from ear to ear.

After that, I remember nothing. Nothing but the dream; the dream of endless falling through a black hole, of floating heads, trains, and spiders dangling from the masts of ships being torn to shreds in the black winds. And there were stars in the winds; stars made of red rubies, diamonds, and lapis lazuli. I fell through a thousand lifetimes, spinning, weightless, like ash from the fire in a cave.

They found me with my arm and shoulder under the corner of the piano. My arm and collarbone were broken and I had dozens of cuts and bruises. I knew all that would heal. They found Corsair Bogy under the rest of the piano.

There was no more Mrs. Bennings’s House. The tornado had raged through south St. Louis and cut a swath a half mile wide, wiping out whole neighborhoods and leaving nothing.

The Fleur-du-Mal had vanished with the tornado.

Ray found Mama’s baseball glove not far from where he discovered the bodies of Georgia and Mrs. Bennings. When I was able to look, he showed me something on their backs. It was a signature of the Fleur-du-Mal. He had carved a rose on their backs with the point of his knife before he slit their throats. Ray said his own mother had been killed that way in New Orleans.

Carolina was in shock and we took her and the other girls to a brewery warehouse where a temporary shelter had been set up.

Ray and I returned to the wreckage and rubble of Mrs. Bennings’s House. We sat there through the night, the following morning, and the rest of the day. It was May 3, 1896, the day before my birthday. During that time, we talked about where we’d been and what we’d done in the last dozen or so years. He told me he had left the way he had because he’d received information through his network of contacts that his sister was in the Far East, working with a famous courtesan. He combed most of the western Pacific looking for her, but never found a trace. He asked me about Carolina and I told him as much as I could, but I found I was barely able to talk about her. I was becoming consumed with a thought and feeling I had never experienced. It had many images and shapes, but only one name — revenge.

I asked about the Fleur-du-Mal and he told me what he knew. The Fleur-du-Mal was an old one, how old he didn’t know. He had come to America with the Portuguese and had been the only survivor when the ship went down in a storm off the coast of Florida. He had many nicknames, one of which was “Sugar,” because he had a habit of eating whole pieces of sugar and the Giza thought it odd that his teeth stayed a brilliant white. His real name was Xanti Otso, but the Meq only referred to him as the Fleur-du-Mal, the flower of evil. He was an assassin, a good one, and had been for centuries.

We watched the sun come up and it lit a broken, battered world. We checked on Carolina and she said she was fine and wanted to leave. She wanted to see the house even though we told her nothing was there. Arguing was pointless and so we walked through littered streets back to the house.

Standing in the sunlight, staring at what had been her life and her sister’s life, she scanned the debris until she saw it. To no one in particular, she said, “We’ll save the piano.”

At that moment, a formal carriage pulled by two stately draft horses turned the corner and stopped in front of us. The driver, who was Chinese and wearing a long, braided pigtail, jumped down from his bench and opened the door facing us. A man stepped out; an old man, tall, with white hair and a white beard. He was dressed in a finely tailored black suit and held a top hat in his hand.

“Zis is not good business,” he said, taking in the whole neighborhood with a slow turn. He looked at me. I looked at him.

“Come here, Z,” he said, “there is someone in the carriage I would like you to meet. I think you call him Sailor.”

Some moments in life are remembered uniquely. They are most vivid in the mind not because of the event or person or place itself, but because of something that surrounds it, something in the background that only you perceived and yet, when you recall that moment, it is the first thing you think of and the last thing you will forget. It is the moment outside the moment. It is the ghost of memory.

I remember the sound of a dog barking; more than anything else I remember that. As I walked toward Solomon and the carriage, I heard in the distance a dog barking in a steady cadence, like a chant, and urgent. I was sure there was someone trapped in the wreckage, but alive, and the dog was barking for anyone to come and look; find them; save them. No one else seemed to hear it. I stopped walking and looked past the carriage in the direction of the sound. Then he spoke and the barking stopped.

“It is long time since we see each other — eh, Zianno?”

Was it really Solomon standing there speaking to me? I didn’t know until that moment how much I had truly missed my good friend.

“I must say, Z, my partner, you look much the same.” He winked and made a formal bow, waving his top hat in a low arc across his body before placing it carefully on his head as he rose.

I laughed out loud. “I wish I could say the same for you, old friend.”

“What? You must mean these rags?” he said, pulling at the trousers of his very expensive suit. “Or zis?” He yanked on his full white beard. “I am same man, Z. Solomon J. Birnbaum I am, was, and shall be.”

“We thought you might be dead. You know that, don’t you?”

“Dead I am not.” He paused and took another slow turn, surveying the refuse and debris that had once been a neighborhood and Mrs. Bennings’s House. Speaking more to himself, he said, “We should have been here two days ago. We were delayed. by the weather.” He looked once at Carolina, who was staring at him hollow-eyed, and he glanced at Ray standing easy in his bowler hat. He turned back to me. “We will talk of all zis later. Now, come. Come and meet Sailor.”

The sun was glinting off the polished black surface of the carriage. Shading my eyes, I stepped between Solomon and the Chinese man holding the door open. As I passed Solomon, I whispered, “How did this happen?”

He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Business,” was all he said.

A single shaft of light cut through the darkness of the carriage, catching as it did a hand reaching from the shadows; a hand just like mine but for a small ring on the first finger. It was a ring made of star sapphire set in silver and six different rays of color shot out from it in the light. I grabbed the hand and was helped into the carriage and onto the bench.

“Happy birthday, I believe, is a proper opening.”

The voice came from the shadows. It was a measured voice; a voice that accented each syllable evenly; a voice that had studied this language and learned it as it had a hundred others.