Gods of New Orleans (35 page)

“How’s the kid? Conroy? Is he okay?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says, folding her arms and softening her face a bit. “I heard he’s in trouble with the house mothers, but that’s all I know about it.

“the house mothers? Dammit. What’d he do?”

“I said that’s all I know about it. Now what are you doing here? What do you want?”

Before Brand can reply, Miss Farnsworth dips a hand into her pocket and pulls out the envelopes.

“You can have ‘em, Brand. I don’t want them anymore. I don’t know where Aiden is and I don’t care what you think I’m supposed to be. Take ‘em back!”

Brand shifts his eyes left and right, but they keep going back to the envelopes pinched between Miss Farnsworth’s fingers.

“I‌—‌”

There’s a shout from outside, a woman talking sharp and fast. Brand spins around and sees a white lady, one of the house mothers. She’s on the mooring deck with her hands on another woman, one with dark skin. That woman has a crowd of girls behind her like ducklings. Brand’s seen the house mother before. Just the other day. She was with Bacchus when Brand made a delivery.

Miss Farnsworth whisper at him from across the cabin. “You’d better get out of here, Brand. Go on. Scram.”

Brand doesn’t waste a second. He lifts the curtain, ducks out of the cabin, and stalks back into the mud tunnels behind New Orleans. He’s learned to inhabit the place pretty well since he arrived. Even the guys who moan and groan for a piece of him don’t bother him anymore.

“Hi, fellas,” Brand says to the mud men that come out of the walls. Their hands reach, but he swats them aside like he’s learned to do. They don’t really want much. Just somebody to remember them. That’d give them a reason to care enough to wake up every morning and say hello to the day.

Brand has his own reasons, and he just left one of them on an airship with a storm of who knows what coming her way. The other one, though . . .

Conroy. Hang in their, pal. Just give me a call, and I’ll come runnin’. Ol’ Mitch will be there.

Brand shuffles through the tunnel thinking about Conroy and knowing he can’t promise the kid anything. But he wants to, so he says it just the same.

“I’ll be there, Conroy. If you can be there for me, too.”

~•~

Emma stuffed the envelopes into the top drawer of Brand’s desk and went to the cabin door. She crossed her fingers that nobody outside, not Lisette, the house mother, or the girls, had seen Brand. He’d scooted like she told him, but he could just pop back in any second and throw another wrench in the works. Emma figured Lisette had to know about things like gods and monsters, but Brand was somewhere in between and would probably put the woman right over onto her backside if he pulled his jack-in-the-box routine now.

Out on the mooring deck, the house mother gave Lisette two earfuls and then some, just for good measure. Emma waited until the house mother was gone before opening the cabin door. Lisette came into the cabin with a beaten look on her face. Emma had a question on her tongue, but she waited until they’d reached the gala house and Lisette had taken the girls inside.

When Lisette came back, Julien greeted her at the cabin door and stayed by her side as she stepped on unsteady feet. Emma took a breath and went to work on her.

“Are we doing this or aren’t we?”

“What you mean, Miss Emma?” Lisette asked, drawing up short in the middle of the cabin. “Doin’ what? What we got left to be doin’?”

Before the tears could start, Emma went to Lisette and gripped her by the arms.

“Sister, now isn’t the time to go soft in the head. Your little girl is in that house and some New York City fat cat is planning to buy her for a handful of folding money.

Lisette shocked her by knocking Emma’s hands aside.

“
You think I don’ know it?
” she yelled in Emma’s face. “You think I don’ know Mr. B got my baby Juliette in that house and ‘bout to put her up on the auction block?”

“I know you know it, and I know you want to stop it. Or you did before Bacchus put our plan out to pasture. So now we need a new one. Fine. Let’s figure it out.”

Lisette’s eyes glistened and her lip quivered, but she held it in and stepped over to Brand’s desk where she sat in a rush, like she’d have fallen over if the chair wasn’t there to catch her.

“How?” she asked as Emma came closer to her. “How we gon’ do this?”

Emma didn’t have an answer right away. She took in Lisette’s clothes, the standard dress and heels of a chaperone, a bonnet that had come untied with all of the woman’s sobbing and shivering with fright or rage or both.

“You got those dresses,” Emma said, suddenly seeing the way out of the mess they were in. “The ones from my closet.”

Lisette’s eyes went round with recognition and she almost let her lips curl into a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, we did get them dresses. So let’s go get them dresses on and then we go in there an’ get my Juliette. That what you thinkin’ Miss Emma?”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m thinking, Lisette.”

“Okay then,” Lisette said. “But it ain’ like to bein’ easy as that. We can’ jus’ waltz on in and out and again. People be seein’ us come in and won’ go lettin’ us out we try an’ take Juliette out their hands.”

“They won’t see us coming, sister,” Emma said, her eyes rounding as a rush and drive flooded her chest. “The plan is we get dolled up right. We go in there and make a ruckus somehow. Everybody’ll be going this way and that. None of Bacchus’s boys will go shooting up a room full of his best paying guests. We get the room going crazy and then we get the girls and run like hell.”

Lisette nodded fast and stood up faster. “Yeah. We get my Juliette back. And then we run.”

“And the other girls,” Emma reminded, putting a note of caution into her voice. Lisette picked up on it and nodded again, but she kept her face firm and cold.

The women each took a dress and got ready in the bunkroom. Lisette helped Emma put her hair right with some extra pins and a brush she had in her handbag. Emma didn’t look the part of a proper flapper, but it would have to do. They took turns in the washroom putting on a little of the face paint Lisette carried, too.

“Julien,” Lisette said as she and Emma came back into the cabin, “you keep this ship locked up. Hear me? But you keep an eye. When you see me an’ your sister comin’, you open that door and be ready to close it just as quick. Mr. B gon’ have his boys on our tail.”

“Yes, Momma,” the boy said, his eyes flashing left and right and that hand still hovering around his collar.

~•~

Emma and Lisette got held up at the gala house door, but the one-time chaperone worked her magic with the toughs there.

“Mr. Bacchus say he want me inside,” Lisette explained. “My little girl on the block tonight and I’m s’posed to see it. It’s Mr. B’s parting gift to me, he says. See my little girl off proper.”

The tough didn’t do more than nod and get out of the way. Emma and Lisette stepped inside and took in the room. In that instant, Emma knew they were sunk. She and Lisette stood at the back of a throng in glad rags all packed in like sardines with that sweet stink of hooch dripping from every tongue.

Emma spun in place as a group came in the door behind her. She ended up face-to-face with the flapper from the Rising Sun.

“Well,” the woman said. She took a puff from the cigarette she clutched in one hand. Emma stared at her, thinking the woman held in a mouthful of venom. But she blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth and into the crowd beyond. “I do think you’ll want to keep your hands to yourself this time,” she said while tossing a nod at the men standing to her left. Emma looked at the bruisers and recognized the two doormen from the Rising Sun.

The flapper and her little group made their way through the crowd and Emma turned to see where Lisette had ended up, but she couldn’t find her in the tangle of suits and beads and skirts. All she could see were straw boaters, cloche hats, bobs, finger waves, and peacock feathers. The men all had paddles with numbers on them, and the women all held cigarettes or drinks, or just the arm of the man they were with.

Between two women standing close to her, Emma caught sight of a white suit. A sleek jacket and trousers over a pair of fine shoes, and a white fedora to match up top. The man held a paddle, too. Emma felt a stab of fear when she recognized the Birdman, but then the man turned to the side and Emma spied his eyepatch.

The Ghost turned again, as if he could feel Emma’s eyes on him. He put a finger to his hat brim and winked with his one eye above a slim smile that faded as fast as it came.

Emma thought to push through the crowd to catch up to the Ghost. As she stepped forward, she heard Eddie’s horn. Her heart skipped before she remembered his betrayal and what he’d been a part of and known he was a part of the whole time.

When she got her thoughts together again, the Ghost had vanished into the crowd that kept pressing around Emma and trapped her where she stood.

Where is Lisette?

~•~

Aiden crept out of the cot and opened the hatch. He slid his good hand down the side of the ladder as he stepped down the rungs to the corridor. Whoever had been in the ship was gone now. The cabin was empty and quiet at the end of the corridor, so Aiden stepped down to see what he could see out the windows.

At the bunkroom door, someone jumped out at him, and Aiden caught sight of a blade glinting in the moonlight coming through the cockpit windows.

“Oh, damn, Dove Conroy!”

Aiden stumbled backward and saw Julien standing in the bunkroom door holding a kitchen knife.

“What the hell you doin’ here?” Julien asked. His face was tight and scared. “I almost stuck you like a pig there. What you doin’ on this ship? And how you get in without me hearin’ you?”

“I was hiding up there,” Aiden said nodding back at the engine room hatch. “My ma . . .”

Aiden stepped down the corridor, past Julien, who stayed back in the bunkroom but hissed a warning at him as he went by.

“Don’ go out there, dove. They see you, it all gonna go wrong.”

Aiden ignored his friend and went to Mr. Brand’s desk. He couldn’t say why, but he felt like he should be sitting there. So he did and opened the top drawer. Two envelopes sat there mixed in with some of Mr. Brand’s old news notes from Chicago City. Aiden lifted out the envelopes and saw one had Miss Farnsworth’s name on it. He put that one back and opened the one with his name.

Innocence,

I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, so I won’t bother. You’ve been in my way for too long, and now you’re going to pay for it. Say good good-bye to Mommy Dearest and get the hell out of New Orleans.

Yours,

Hatred

Aiden’s heart did a flip-flop. Then he heard a commotion coming from outside and looked out the window. Miss Farnsworth was in a tangle with two tough guys holding her arms. Aiden felt his heart flip again when he recognized one of the toughs: Theo Valcour. Aiden hadn’t seen the older boy since he’d chased Aiden through the streets and into the pile of mud with all the tramps.

So that’s where you ended up. Sitting high and fat after you took my money
.

Behind Aiden, in the corridor, Julien again hissed a warning, so different from the first time the boy had called Aiden’s name outside the Ghost’s alleyway. Aiden looked back at his friend and shook his head. Then he reached up, pulled back the curtain of the city, and left the airship cabin.

~•~

Emma bumped and bustled her way through the crowd until she felt a hand on her arm. At first she thought it had to be Eddie, because nobody with dark skin ever put a hand on her there except for Eddie.

But it was some tough guy from Bacchus’s krewe. He was young, but big, and Emma felt him urge her to leave the room. Then another heavy took her other arm and the two of them hauled her out of the house as the auctioneer started to rattle off his litany and the paddles went up.

~•~

Aiden grabbed Theo Valcour from behind, putting his one good arm to the task. He got the bigger boy by the scruff of the neck and yanked as he stepped back behind the curtain. Theo toppled backward almost coming down on top of Aiden, but with a quick dodge to the side, Aiden was out of harm’s way.

“The hell is this?” Theo yelled, scrambling out of the mud and putting his fists up like he was ready to kill. Then he seemed to notice where he’d ended up. And who had brought him there. His eyes went left and right, like a scared rabbit’s, but his fists stayed balled.

“You must be ready to die, damn fool dove. Touchin’ on a man bigger’n you and stronger’n you. And a man in Mr. Bacchus’s krewe. You know what he gon’ do after I’m done with you? Birdman gettin’ your name, dove. He gettin’ your momma’s name, too. Time your whole family got plucked.”

While Theo busied himself talking, Aiden kept an eye out for movement in the tunnel. Sure enough, as Theo stepped up with a fist pulled back and ready to fire, the wall came alive to Aiden’s left. He stepped back and Theo moved to follow until a muddy arm wrapped around the bigger boy’s mitt.

Theo hollered at first and shook off the mud. Then more of the wall came to life, arms and legs, fingers curled into claws that stained and smeared. And those gaping, moaning mouths that spoke of nothing but hunger and sorrow.

Aiden kept stepping back, flashing a look left and right to make sure the mud men didn’t come up on him by surprise. But they seemed content with their prize. Theo struggled and wrestled against the hands that wrapped over his mouth and face now. He howled and roared. And then he screamed and flailed his limbs.

But it was done. Aiden slipped out from the tunnel and back into the airship cabin. Julien stood there at the corridor entrance, mouth open like the mud men, but only with shock and fear on his face.

“Dove Conroy, you‌—‌”

“Yeah,” Aiden said. He saw Julien’s face squeeze up in fright and then the boy’s eyes rolled up and down he went.