“Well, I—”
“I knew it! Someone ’ave complained about my past. They pretend to love me, but all the time they are stabbing me in the back. And you ’ave found out where I worked. So? Here we say I was PA to several remarkable men. Everyone know what is meant by that. Who has complained to this bishop?”
“Ah... You have never met the bishop, have you?”
“Not yet. I was away visiting my sister when ’e came ’ere.”
“I suspect you will not meet him. There will be sudden illnesses, or pressing family business that prevent his usual routine visits.”
“But why? Am I so disgusting to his refined tastes?”
“By no means. He will not come here because you have met him before.”
Svein fished in his pocket and brought out a photograph of the bishop he had found in the files of Bergens Tidende. “This is Bishop Rose.”
She took it eagerly.
“Ha! Pious Pete! The only man who got on his knees and begged forgiveness before rather than after. Like a sort of grace. ‘For what we are about to receive.’ ’E is a ’orrible ’ippocrite.”
“Yes — I think that about sums him up. He was afraid you would recognise him and talk about his brothel visits.”
“Oh, I’d recognise him all right. But I’d never talk about ’im. All the priests and clergymen wanted anonymity — I pronounce that right? — but Pete, ’e was a complete mystery. I only know ’is name because one of the sailors knew ’im.”
“Yes. I’ve been looking him up on the Internet. He was pastor at the Seaman’s Mission in Marseilles. He must have known many of your... customers.”
“ ’E always wear a scarf over ’is face, coming and leaving. This sailor only see ’is face because ’e trip down stairs — legs tired out — and ’is scarf fall down when ’e tries to save ’imself. Ha! Pious Pete! Where do you get your satisfaction now? Not from anyone as kind and discreet as Mme. de Stael.”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps he has a ‘good friend’ in Oslo. Oh yes — a little more gin would be most welcome. Now what I propose to do is to ring him — he will appreciate there being no written evidence — and tell him what I found out in Marseilles, mention that he may have heard of the Hotel de Nuit when he was at the Seaman’s Mission, underline that I found no evidence of ‘scandal and concern’ in the congregation, emphasize that you are a woman of extreme discretion, and advise him strongly to do nothing further. It will be quite safe for him to visit Bergen. Then I will send him a very large bill.”
“Punish ’im for ’is ’ippocrisy. Good! I will talk to Edwin, tell ’im there was a misunderstanding, say it is all solved now, and everything can go on as before.”
“Excellent,” said Svein, getting up. “Thank you very much for your hospitality. Most welcome. Loyd thanks you, too.”
“Lovely to ’ave a dog in the ’ouse. I shall get a dog.”
“So you should. I’d advise against a poodle. There is a stereotype—”
“I know. I know. Remember you are talking to a woman of the world.”
“Quite, quite.” Svein paused at the door. “There is one question, rather embarrassing, that I’d like—”
“Of course. Everyone wants to ask it. To you I can reply honestly. Why did I marry my overweight, rather dull English vicar? Because ’e was the best lover I ever ’ad. You cannot believe it? You’d better, as the Yanks say. I am a woman who always insists on the best.”
Storm Surge
by Meenakshi Gigi Durham
© 2008 by Meenakshi Gigi Durham
A professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa, Meenakshi Gigi Durham got her start as a fiction writer in our Department of First Stories in 2004. Her new tale for us is set in what (as a result of her long marriage to a New Orleans native) she calls her “adopted hometown.” She uses the momentous events of Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop to her fictional murder.
I saw Riley on TV the other day. I am sure it was Riley; there could be no mistaking that knobby head of slicked-down Snoop Dogg braids, the red plastic glasses, the wonky eye with the scar blazing from brow to cheekbone — a souvenir of the time his stepdad threw a steak knife at him when he was a toddler.
He was slouching between two respectable-looking white people, a man and a woman, and some cleft-chin TV announcer was saying something about how they had befriended him while they were Red Cross rescue workers in the Dome. How the two white people were going to adopt him. His name was not Riley anymore, it seemed. “Antoine,” he said into the microphone. “Antoine Dupree. My family all drowned in the storm.” His good eye twitched, the way it always does when he is lying. But the adults around him were beaming, hugging him around the shoulders, talking about his bravery and his sweetness.
I wanted to call to him, Riley, it’s me! — knowing that I could not, knowing he could not hear me. Knowing full well what our rules were. Knowing that we were never supposed to see each other again, or even admit that our paths had ever crossed. (Swear on your mama’s life, Kiran? I swear, I swear.) If ever I saw him in real life, he would look away, he would feign ignorance. Neither one of us could betray, with the slightest flicker of emotion, that we were linked in any way.
It was important for Riley not to know me, I reminded myself. It is important sometimes for deep bonds forged in childhood to remain masked, especially when the real reason for the bond is murder.
Riley and I entered the same orbit two weeks before that storm, the storm, hit New Orleans. It was not our choice; children’s lives are inevitably governed by force of circumstance, and we were, at the time, in the same circumstances. Ordinarily, that could not have happened, for we inhabited different worlds, Riley raised in the slough of the St. Thomas project, I in the effete elegance of Uptown. But our similar situations gave rise to our unlikely convergence.
It was Sister Olivia who took us into her home — a “safe house,” they had called it when they whispered the address to my mother, a shotgun cottage on Calhoun. All of this was bewildering and terrifying to me; I knew, of course, why we were going there, but I had not known it would happen. I was aware that my mother’s life was in constant peril in our elegant Uptown villa, but not that my mother would ever actually leave my handsome, rich, and sadistic father.
Oddly, coming to this house, this “safe house,” unhinged her. Until then she had been invincible, to my way of seeing. She had taken the blows and the invective stoically, unflinchingly, hiding her bruises and her pain from the world; doing this for me, I knew, though I also knew that I was never in any danger — I was flesh of his flesh, the fruit of his loins. She was his target, not I. It was she who had finally made the arrangements to leave, after weeks of whispered telephone conversations and furtive glances and silent tears. We had brought nothing with us, except the small images of Hindu gods that she now lined up on the battered dressing table in our bedroom, praying incessantly to them as the sun beat down on the streets outside. She abandoned me to Sister Olivia’s care, submerging herself in her new isolation, in the solace of her babbled prayers.
She didn’t know that Sister Olivia was in fact keeping her own vigil, at Riley’s mother’s Charity Hospital bedside. “I had to drag Ma here,” said Riley. “He found out we were gonna leave, and he beat her till she like to died. But I knew where this was, and I got her here.” He was tall for thirteen, but thin as a live-oak sapling; he looked at me expressionlessly from his seat in front of Sister Olivia’s old computer.