Ray and I had not mentioned seeing Star to anyone, especially Carolina and Nicholas. At that point, it would have done no good and neither of us could have found the words.
We heard nothing from Sailor or Geaxi and I needed to ask him a few simple questions, to say the least. Ray and I had discussed what the Fleur-du-Mal had told me and both of us were in the dark. I knew the Fleur-du-Mal was mad, but I wanted to know if there was madness in what he’d said. Nothing made sense.
Adding to it, coincidentally or not, on my birthday I received a gift from the Fleur-du-Mal. There was no card attached, but there was no doubt as to who had sent it. A phonograph player and a single playing disc were delivered to our rooms with the explanation that it had been left for me at the desk by a beautiful woman no one knew. I didn’t make the connection with the Fleur-du-Mal until we played the disc. It was a woman, accompanied by a piano, singing an aria, “The Abduction from the Seraglio,” from a Mozart opera. She was a soprano, the same one I’d heard singing over the drums at Emma Johnson’s. Every month after that, on the same day, we received another phonograph and another disc with the same voice singing a different aria. It was his way of letting me know he could find me anytime he wished, while I could only sit, wait, and guess. Eventually, I had to move my bed to make room for them. I told the management our family were big collectors.
We expanded our search west as far as St. Charles and east along the Gulf coast to Mobile. On July 21, 1905, the Board of Health announced that yellow fever had broken out in the city and there was a general panic and exodus from New Orleans. The disease didn’t affect us, of course, but we thought the Fleur-du-Mal would try to protect Star, now that we knew his long-range motivations. By September, we had combed every port and bayou we could find and come up empty. In New Orleans, there had been 3,402 cases of yellow fever and 452 deaths, but it was over. They had oiled and screened thousands of cisterns and salted miles of gutters to get rid of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carried the disease. It was a transition point in the medical history of the United States and the last time a killer disease would sweep through a city.
In October, I kept the promise I’d made to myself to visit Captain Woodget. I crossed Lake Pontchartrain by steamboat and followed the meager directions given to me by Usoa. Outside Mandeville, after several inquiries, I was told it would be easier to find his property on water than land, taking Cottonmouth Slew to where it met the Bogue Chirito just below Covington. “You cain’t miss it, boy. It’s the damnedest thing you ever seen,” they said. I hired an old shrimper to take me there, and by noon as we rounded a bend in the channel, I knew what they meant.
There, anchored and resting between scaffolding erected on a long private dock, was an exact, scaled-down replica of the Clover, complete with sails, brass fittings, teak wood decks, and a new name, Little Clover, painted on her bow. Climbing down the mizzenmast was a white-haired, bearded man in faded trousers and undershirt, with a long-stemmed pipe hanging from his mouth. The tam-o’-shanter had been replaced by an old straw garden hat. Captain Caleb Woodget, master seaman and smuggler. It was almost a decade since I’d seen him last.
I paid the old shrimper and jumped onto the dock before he’d even come to a stop. Captain Woodget watched me walk the fifty feet or so between us. He removed his garden hat as I got close and leaned on the railing of his ship. I stopped and admired the Little Clover; the craftsmanship, detail, and obvious man-hours he’d put into her.
“I heard you’d retired,” I said with a grin I couldn’t conceal. “But I thought gardeners planted seeds, not clipper ships.”
“Holy Trident!” he shouted. “If it did not walk and talk, I would think it a ghost.”
He scrambled down a makeshift ladder and we embraced warmly. He was older, thinner, but his eyes were bright and he held my shoulders with hands as strong as any that still worked the sea.
“The last time I saw you, lad, you were spinning a good yarn to a customs agent.”
“I still do, on occasion.”
He laughed and stepped back, running his eyes up and down me. Aye,” he said. “You wee people amaze me,” and he looked around him, then up at the sky. “God in his infinite wisdom and all that, I suppose.”
I smiled and said, “I suppose.” Then I asked for a tour of his ship and he showed me everything, top to bottom, all fifty-three feet of her. He was proud, but hesitant and slightly embarrassed, as if I might think the project crazy. It was crazy; crazy and beautiful.
I asked him if he missed his old life, and just as on the first night I met him, he paused and filled his pipe before he answered.
“I miss nothing about that damn business, Z, but I miss the smells, all of them, good and bad, on the ship, in a thousand different ports and especially the smell of the open sea itself.” He lit his pipe and took two long pulls. “Do you think I’m over the top, lad? Should I be scuttled before it becomes too obvious?”
“I don’t think so, Captain, not yet.” We both laughed. “And I agree with you about the smells, except for a few places in China.”
“China?” he asked. “So, you’ve been to China, have you?”
I nodded and he put his arm around my shoulder and led me on a walk through his property and gardens, which covered several acres to the north and east toward Covington. As we walked, he told me the names of hundreds of flowers and gave me a season by season history of plantings and cutbacks. We walked by trellises of roses in every color and under long arbors of bougainvillea. At first, it seemed a wild and random maze, but soon I saw the overview, the grand plan of wildness within order. He told me of his love for Isabelle and how it grew along with his chaotic gardens, unplanned and unavoidable. He said when he walked with her through the disordered beauty, it was the only time she felt peace. Somehow, that made more sense than anything else.
He showed me through the mansion, which had seen better days, and around sunset he cooked a savory meal of catfish and fried potatoes. Isabelle never made an appearance, but I did hear her singing on and off from somewhere in the upper rooms.
He asked me to stay the night but I refused, telling him I still had business in the city that evening. As usual, he inquired no further and drove me to the ferry in Mandeville without my asking. I caught the last crossing of the night and promised to return. Inside, as was usual for me, I had no idea when that would be.
Ray and I were invited to St. Louis for the holidays, but we refused, giving various and vague excuses. Ray even passed on a chance to see Nova on her twelfth birthday, an event I was sure he had promised to share. We were both burning out from our complete lack of success in finding even a trace of the Fleur-du-Mal.
Owen Bramley finally moved to St. Louis from San Francisco in March 1906, just ahead of the earthquake. Ray reminded me of Nova’s prediction and Owen Bramley said his building had indeed been in the center of the collapse and fire. We both agreed Nova may have been born with an “ability” rare for Meq and Giza alike.
We continued to make our rounds in Storyville and the French Quarter. Ray established new contacts in places like Mahogany Hall and the San Jacinto club. Meanwhile, the New Orleans summer seemed to turn everything, even time itself, into a thick, slow-moving syrup.
I was tired of questions and secrets and I felt the weight of not telling things, not telling Ray the truth about Zuriaa, and not telling Carolina the truth about Star. Self-loathing was gaining on my hatred for the Fleur-du-Mal. Even Ray was showing the strain. We rarely laughed or enjoyed much of anything.