The Lazarus Heart (18 page)

"But you wanted to talk about crows," the old man says at last, peering at her from under his eyebrows as he blows on his own steaming cup of tea.

"Yes," she says, setting her cup on the table. "What do you know about crows and the dead, about crows and ghosts?"

Aaron frowns and tugs at his beard.

"You got me out of bed at four A. M. because you wanted to hear fairy tales?"

"It's very important," she says, stealing a glance at the grease-stained clock above the stove. It reads 4:20. She wonders how long Jared's been gone, where he might be now. Or
maybe I imagined the whole goddamned thing,
she thinks.
Maybe I'm just a crazy woman wandering around in the rain talking about birds.

"Mythology and folklore are not my areas of expertise," Aaron replies, and slurps his tea.

"But you must have picked up a lot in your studies. You must have heard a lot of strange things."

"Strange
things," he says, and laughs, closing his eyes a moment as if savoring the flavor of the tea or losing himself in some bit of memory. "Everyone sees and hears strange things, Lucrece. If they live a little while and keep their eyes open. Especially when one is a young boy in New England. Or an old man in New Orleans."

"Did you ever meet Jared Poe?" she asks, afraid she's losing her nerve. "Benny's lover, the photographer?"

Aaron narrows his eyes, blows on his tea again. "You said crows."

"I know," Lucrece replies.

"I met him once," Aaron says, setting down his cup. "And I know he was killed in prison. I heard that on the radio a week or so back. The Bourbon Street Ripper killed in a prison brawl."

"Yeah." Lucrece begins to wish she'd gone to someone else. Someone more inclined to believe ghost stories than this outcast scientist, this snowy-haired man who might have invented doubt for his own particular pleasures.

"What's he got to do with crows, Lucrece?"

"Jared came back home tonight," she says, just like that, the whole thing out at once before she can change her mind. "He came back, with a crow."

Aaron Marsh doesn't say anything, just stares down at his cooling tea, the antique china cup decorated with cobalt blue sparrows painted beneath the cracked glaze.

"Why would I make something like that up, Aaron?" Lucrece whispers.

"That's not for me to say." Aaron sighs loudly and folds his hands in front of him. "In India the crow is the bird of death. Many cultures make that connection. It's natural enough, since crows are carrion-feeders. Crows are seen to feed on the dead, so we get legends and traditions of the crow as a sort of guide for souls, escorts between the land of the living and the land of the dead..."

"But does anyone ever mention it working the other way round?" Lucrece asks him, and he looks up at her. His eyes are almost the same shade of blue as the birds on the little teacups.

"I suspect that you have acquaintances better suited to answer a question like that," he says. "There's no shortage of occultists and spiritualists in this neighborhood."

"But I trust
you,
Aaron, because I know you won't just tell me what I want to hear, or listen to me and only hear what
you
want to hear. You're a scientist."

"I
was
a scientist," he corrected. "Now I'm an old homo who sells pigeon feathers and powdered chicken bones to would-be voodoo priestesses."

"And apparently spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself," Lucrece adds, not bothering to hide her growing impatience and doubt.

"Yes, well," Aaron says.

"I'm sorry to have bothered you." She gets up to leave, not wanting to waste any more of his time or hers, but Aaron immediately motions for her to sit down again.

"I
can't
tell you a great deal," he says. "But there's a German. Weicker, I think..." He worries at his beard. "Hell. Hold on a minute. I'll be right back."

Lucrece sits back down as Aaron stands and leaves her alone in the kitchen. She sips her tea and listens to his footsteps moving along the hall and then down the creaky steps to his shop. The man behind the bedroom door calls out, "What the fuck does she
want,
Aaron?"

"I said to go to sleep, Nathan," Aaron Marsh calls back, his voice muffled by distance and the storm, the rain drumming endlessly on the roof, a car passing out on Dumaine Street. He sounds a lot farther away than just downstairs. In a few minutes her cup is empty, only a few black specks of ground tea leaves left in the bottom. Soon she hears him on the stairs again, and when he steps back into the kitchen he's carrying a dusty old book bound in black cloth with faded gold printing on the cover and spine.

"I was right," he says. "Weicker.
Der Seelenvogel in der alten Literatur und Kunst."
Aaron holds the book up so she can see the title printed on the cover, even if the German doesn't make any sense to her. "He writes a good bit in here about birds as death spirits and images of death, images of the soul, psychopomps and what have you..." He trails off, flipping through the brittle old pages.

"And crows?" Lucrece asks.

"Almost all the Corvidae. Crows, ravens, rooks ... many of them are often portrayed as death birds. Ah, yes, here." He begins to read aloud, tracing a line of text with one finger.
"'In habentibus symbolum facilis est transitus. '"

"I don't speak Latin either," she says. Aaron frowns at her, a very professorial frown, as though she hasn't done her homework or has been caught passing notes. But he apologizes and then repeats the line in English.

"For those who have the symbol, the passage is easy. '" He pauses, then adds like a footnote, "The passage from the land of the living to the land of the dead."

"And what's the symbol?" Lucrece asks him, but he only shrugs.

"That depends. It could be many things." He goes back to the book. "Weicker records something here, a bit of a fairy tale that he thinks may originally be Hungarian or Wallachian." Aaron reads slowly now, translating for her as he goes. "'These people once believed that when a person died, a crow carried his soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes something so bad happens that a tremendous sadness is carried with it and the soul cannot rest. Then sometimes the crow can bring that soul back to the land of the living to exact vengeance against those responsible for its disquiet.

'"So long as the spirit pursues only those responsible, the crow protects it from all harm and it is invulnerable to harm by man or beast or any other evil spirits. But should the spirit turn aside from this narrow path, the crow may be forced to abandon it and the spirit will be left to wander the living world alone, forever, as a ghost or revenant. '"

Aaron pushes one finger at the bridge of his nose, force of habit, adjusting glasses he isn't wearing as he closes the book and lays it on the table between them.

"So," he says, "in this instance I suppose the symbol is the soul's pain and that pain's connection to the living."

"Jesus," Lucrece whispers, and stares down at Aaron Marsh's black book.

"It's only a
fairy tale,
Lucrece. These same people thought that the souls of suicides came back as vampires."

For just a second she wants to tell him more, tell him every detail of Jared's appearance in the apartment and the thoughts she read in the crow's nervous bird mind. Wants someone else,
anyone
else, to know the things she's seen and felt. The second passes. There might not be much time if she's going to help Jared.

"Thank you, Dr. Marsh," she says, sliding her chair away from the table. "It was very kind of you to try to help and I'm very sorry for waking you and Nathan..."

"A fairy tale, Lucrece. That's
all,"
he says. She smiles for him, though it feels like a sickly grimace.

"I should be going now," she says. For a moment he looks uncertain, as if he might be thinking of calling a doctor or the police. But she steps past him toward the hall and he follows, mumbling about the storm, what he's heard about it on the radio. Together they descend the creaky stairs and walk back past the moth-eaten dodo in its glass and maple prison. Aaron opens the door for her while she's putting on her wet coat and retrieving her umbrella.

"Be careful," he says as she steps across the threshold, into the rain blowing in under the awning.

"It's only a fairy tale," she tells him. He nods, a small, optimistic nod that says he at least wants to believe she means what she's telling him. "I'll be fine."

And then he says good-bye and the door to The Eye of Horus jingles shut again and Lucrece is alone on the wet, dawn-hungry street.

It's hardly an hour after dawn, and if Frank Gray has had worse hangovers, his head hurts too badly to let him remember them. His partner is driving. As the police cruiser turns right off Canal onto St. Charles, rain hits the windshield so hard he's amazed it doesn't crack. His head feels that brittle, as if simple drops of water could break it into a thousand pieces. His stomach rises and falls like the gusting wind.

"Christ,
Wally," he says, his voice ringing inside his head, bouncing off the walls of his crystal skull. "See if you can
miss
one or two of those potholes, okay?"

Wallace Thibodeaux has been his partner for over a year, a burly gray-haired black man ten years his senior. And Wallace Thibodeaux hates drunkard cops almost as much as he hates dirty cops. He has told Frank so on more than one occasion.

"So what was it last night, Frank?" Wallace says, squinting to see through the rain, using one hand to wipe away some of the condensation clouding the inside of the windshield. "Gasoline and turpentine? Aqua Velva with a Drano chaser?"

Frank stares out at the white-columned houses lining the street, half obscured by the driving rain, and grunts for an answer.

"Well, sir," Wallace says, "if you got anything in you left to puke up, you better get it done before we get to the park, 'cause I got a feeling this one's gonna be bad."

"I'm fine," Frank says, and rubs at the throbbing place between his eyes.

"Yeah, you
look
fine. Fine is just exactly how you look." A streetcar rumbles past, a blur of red and green and spinning wheels, and Frank moans.

"You drive like an old woman," he says. "We're getting passed by fucking streetcars." "I can't see shit, Frank. In case you haven't noticed, we're having a goddamn

hurricane."

Frank remembers passing out in front of the television, remembers the Weather Channel and the pretty white swirl of clouds on the blue satellite photos of the Gulf of Mexico. "Oh, yeah," he groans.

Frank half dozes for a few minutes. When he conies to, they're passing Tulane, its not- quite-Ivy League facade of respectability like a shield against the corruption and slow, inevitable rot pressing in from all sides. Wallace pulls in behind a tomato-colored Honda and parks, stares across the street, past the streetcar tracks, at the entrance to Audubon Park. There are already four patrol cars parked on the river side of St.

Charles, probably more inside the park. The rain dulls their strobing red and blue lights to something Frank can stand to look at.

"You sure you're gonna be okay, Frank?" Wallace asks, buttoning his raincoat. "I don't wanna have to be explaining why you're puking all over the place."

For an answer Frank opens his door and steps out into what seems at first like a solid wall of falling water, rain that would make Noah proud. He is soaked to the bone in seconds. But the cold and the wet make him feel a little more alive, and he thinks that maybe he can deal with this after all.

Wallace has an umbrella but the rain's blowing right up under it. They cross the neutral ground, splashing through the ankle-deep puddles and swollen gutters, and they stop at one of the patrol cars. The cop in the driver's seat cracks his window an inch or two.

"Did we beat the coroner?" Wallace asks the man inside the car. Frank looks up

into the rain, opens his mouth, and sticks out his tongue like when he was a little boy. But the rain doesn't taste the way he remembers, tastes faintly of oil or chemicals, and he spits on the asphalt.

"Yeah, I think so," the cop tells Wallace. "But I better warn you guys, if you ain't heard already, this is a messy one. I mean a real gut-churner. I'm just glad it's fuckin' rainin' and the sun's not out, know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Wallace says. "I know what you mean." Frank spits again, but the chemical taste of the rain clings to the inside of his mouth like fried-chicken grease.

The cop rolls his window up again and Frank follows Wallace into the park, between the masonry pillars framing the park entrance. The rain begins to taper off to a simple, steady downpour.

The fountain is only thirty yards or so into the park, marble and concrete and a verdigris nude for a centerpiece, a bronze woman balanced on a bronze ball, her arms spread wide as if she has summoned this storm for her own secret purposes. There are two bronze children at the edges of the fountain, small naked boys astride turtles, one on either side of the woman. The fountain has already been cordoned off with bright yellow crime-scene tape strung along an irregular ring of wooden barricades. The tape flutters in the wind, ready to tear free at any moment and go sailing away into the voracious storm.

Frank and Wallace flash their badges. One of the beat cops nods and steps aside just as a particularly strong gust seizes Wallace's umbrella and turns it inside out.

"Fuck," he says, and Frank manages a small laugh that makes his head throb. "You were getting wet anyway, Wally."

But Wallace just frowns humorlessly down at the ruined umbrella and tosses it to the ground, where it shudders and rolls about in the wind. The black umbrella makes Frank think of some sort of bizarre alien bat. He looks away, steps over the crime tape, and gets his first look at what's waiting for them in the fountain.

"Jesus H..." Wallace turns away, coughs into his hands. But Frank cannot look away. He stands staring at the pink-red water and the raw, floating things in it.

"Pretty amazing, huh?"