The Lazarus Heart (29 page)

"Oh, fuck this," Jared says. "Finish this tired bullshit, Lucrece. Get it over with." "You can't kill him, Jordan. And you can't kill me." Before the man can move she

takes the gun from his hand and flings it away into the darkness beyond the glare of the floodlight. "You're never going to kill anyone ever again."

Lucrece grips the man by the front of his shirt and lifts him into the air. She holds him almost a foot off the floor, his feet kicking uselessly at nothing.

"How does it feel?" she asks. "How does it feel to dangle with your life in someone else's hands?"

"I am the river . . ." he wheezes. She slaps him so hard that his upper lip splits and his front teeth snap off at the gum line.

"No, you're not, Jordan," she says. "But we've already been through all this once and I don't feel like saying it again. It really doesn't make any difference anymore what you think."

She drops him, but before the man can run she catches him by the back of his collar and shoves him to the floor next to Jared. He moans and tries to scramble away, but Lucrece holds him still.

"I think we have to do this together, Jared," she says. "Or one of us is screwed." From somewhere in the shadows the crow caws a coarse affirmation. And all around them the storm howls and bellows. Cold rain is blowing in through the broken

windows overhead and the walls of the old factory have begun to buckle and groan from the force of the wind.

"Thanks for coming back for me, Lucrece," Jared says as she begins to grind Jordan flat against the concrete. "You didn't have to . . ."

"Yes, I did, Jared," she replies. "Yes, I did."

As the factory that has stood for more than a hundred years beneath the baking delta sun begins to come apart around them, as the floor drops away beneath them and the walls are broken by the hurricane's fury, they crush the life from the man that has robbed each of them of the thing that they loved above all else. Satisfied, the crow rises into the storm-maddened night and the circle closes in the shriek of twisting metal and the crash of falling bricks.

Through the cyclops eye of the hurricane Lucrece carries Jared's body away from the ruin and rubble of the fallen factory. She follows the crow as it flies high above the devastated city, wades past overturned cars and the unclaimed corpses of the freshly drowned. When they reach Prytania Street, Benny is waiting for them just outside the gates of Lafayette No.

1. He smiles gently for them, the same gentle smile that Lucrece has kept inside her for so long, preserved in the imperfect scrapbook of her memories.

Benny bends and kisses Jared, presses his lips to his lover's. Jared's eyes flutter open and tears roll down his grateful cheeks.

"Is it over?" he asks. Benny nods. "It's over."

And then Benjamin DuBois kisses his sister's cheek and the three of them walk together past the other monuments, all the other names engraved in weathered marble and granite, stone worn smooth by time and sorrow.

Outside the crumbling cemetery walls, as the backside of Michael's spinning eye wall reaches the city, the lull in the storm passes, and for the unfortunate living, the long night of rain and anguish begins.

Aaron Marsh nibbles on a space cake as he leafs through an ornithological tome in Dutch, which he is teaching himself from the inside out. He has a little flat high above Prinsengracht with a nice view of the canal if he leans out and cranes his neck a little. The afternoon sky is like damp gray wool. An intermittent autumn rain spits against the thick glass of his window. He has come to love it here.

Aaron got out of New Orleans the night before Hurricane Michael hit, packing only the dodo in its oversized velvet traveling case and catching a Greyhound bus, the one form of transport that never seemed to stop running. At first he'd only gone as far as Birmingham, Alabama, where he stayed with friends and watched the destruction of

his adopted home from afar. He felt very little emotion, even when he learned that the Eye of Horus was a total loss. The water had taken nearly everything and destroyed whatever it left behind. But he'd kept the place well insured, and the payoff might last him the rest of his life, provided he didn't live too long. The only things he really regretted losing were the books.

He found that he had no desire to return. This only intensified a week later, when he saw a news item from New Orleans about two bodies discovered in a warehouse near the river. They'd been on an upper floor and hadn't gotten washed away. Bodies were everywhere, of course, but these attracted media attention when one of them was identified as the cop who'd supposedly confessed to the new Ripper slayings.

There was some doubt about the cop's confession anyway. Several of his colleagues testified that he was a good solid detective, that they could alibi him for the dates of the murders, that the letter wasn't even in his handwriting. Suspicion fell on the other corpse, who turned out to own a Riverside mansion full of the flooded remains of some very sick shit. The cop was given a hero's funeral. The other fellow was still being looked into.

Thanks to a couple of persistent queer activist groups and a sympathetic reporter from the
Times-Picayune,
Jared Poe was finally and publically declared innocent of the Bourbon Street Ripper killings. When he heard of this, Aaron thought for a moment of beautiful, sad Lucrece DuBois and her strange predawn visit to his shop. He wondered what had become of her in the midst of all this hoopla. Mostly, though, he acted like the selfish old man he was, traveling where he liked, pleasing only himself, putting the pieces of his life in order. He has fetched up here in Amsterdam and believes he will stay.

Tap. Tap. Tap.
The rain must be getting harder. Aaron glances at the window, and his hand freezes in the act of turning a page.

It is only a small crow, but it's peering in at him as if it has urgent business here-- and perhaps it does. Even from this distance Aaron can see that it's carrying a tiny scroll of paper in its beak.

He stands up slowly, crosses to the window and hesitates only a moment before turning the latch. The window swings out and the bird hops in, glancing up at him almost apologetically, as if to say,
I know I'm dripping all over the place, I'll only stay a minute.. .

"Make yourself at home," he says, holding out his hand. The crow drops the scroll into Aaron's wrinkled palm as if relieved to be done with it, stretches its wings and shakes out its feathers, glances around the room. It is just beginning to look comfortable when its eye lights upon the stuffed dodo in its gleaming glass case.

The crow gives a single strangled caw of horror, hops backward and disappears through the open window in a black fluster.

"Ah, well," says Aaron and unrolls the paper.

He recognizes the flowing hand at once; Lucrece DuBois came to him with plenty of shopping lists. There are five words only and room for no more, in ink the color of dried blood. But they are five words that will stay with him as long as he lives:

Sometimes fairy tales come true.