Page 11 of Truth in the Treme

She stepped into him and put her arms around his ribs and held on. He held her back, and over the top of her head he looked at nothing, and he understood that the ground he had been standing on for a century had begun, very quietly, to come apart.

He left her reading on the couch with a promise extracted from both of them, hers to call at the first wrong feeling, his to answer on the first ring, and he went to Rampart Street.

Maman's shop held its usual cool dark, the air thick with dried herb and candle smoke, the shelves crowded with bottles that caught the light and held it longer than glass should. He had been coming to this shop on Rampart for the better part of a century, and it had not changed in any way that mattered, though the street outside had changed past all recognition three times over. The same dim held the same crowded shelves. The same jars kept their patient dreadful contents. The same smell of tallow and river-mud and something sweet gone slightly wrong hung in the air, the smell of a place where the veil between the city's two worlds had worn thin from long handling. Maman had worked her craft out of these two rooms since the days when men still fought duels beneath the oaks, and stepping into them had always been, for Bastien, a stepping out of time altogether, down into the old dark New Orleans that went on living beneath the bright new one. She did not look surprised to see him. She set a second cup down before he had asked for coffee.

“I did not come to have you look at her again,” he said.

“I know why you came. Sit.” She poured. “You came to ask me about the fires. You want to know if a clever enough hand could hide a working inside one, bury it so deep that even you walk through and feel nothing.”

“Could it.”

“Magic can be hidden, mon cœur. You know this. A good practitioner can fold a working small and quiet and tuck it where no one thinks to look.” She wrapped her hands around her cup. “But hidden is not the same as gone. A buried thing still breathes. It leaves a smell, a warmth, a wrongness in the grain of a place, and a man who knows how to look will always find the edge of it if he is patient. You have been patient. You have walked both those houses with everything you have.”

“And found nothing.”

“And found nothing.” She let that sit between them. “That is what troubles me, and I will be honest with you, it troubles me more than a curse would. I have spent my whole long life cleaning up after things that leave a mark. In all that time I have never met a true working that left none at all. Either your arsonist is the most gifted hider who ever lived, gifted past anything I have heard of, or there is no working in those fires to find.” She looked at him over the cup. “I cannot tell you which. I will not tell you it is safe to stop looking. But I will tell you that if you keep hunting for magic in that smoke, you may be hunting a thing that was never there.”

He left Maman's shop with no more than he had carried into it, and the afternoon had gone hot and white by the time he found Tib at the back table of a bar off Decatur, a plate of red beans in front of him and a paper cup of coffee he had clearly judged and found wanting.

“I already know what you are going to ask,” Tib said, “and the answer is no. I had two of my people walk past both scenes once the smoke cleared. Quiet. Downwind, careful, nobody sniffing around where the cameras could see. You want to know what they got?”

“Tell me.”

“Smoke. Gasoline, or close enough to it. Burned wood, burned wiring, and about forty frightened humans who had stood too near it.” Tib pushed the beans around. “No sulfur. No grave-cold. No fae sweetness, no vampire, nothing dead, nothing summoned. If a working had gone off in either of those houses, one of mine would have caught the bottom note of it a block out. They caught nothing but a crime.” He shrugged. “For whatever a wolf's nose is worth to you. It has never once been wrong about this.”

“It is worth a great deal,” Bastien said, and meant it, and disliked what it told him.

Back at the office he did the thing he had been avoiding, which was to take the case seriously on its own terms.

For two centuries he had worked his cases inward, magic first, the unnatural assumed until ruled out. He cleared the corkboard on the wall and started again from the other direction. He pinned up Maya's diagrams of both scenes, the three origins circled on each. He pinned the witness statements beside them, the contradictions underlined in his own hand. He tacked a map of the city to the center and pushed a pin into the house off North Villere and a second pin into the corner double across town, and he stood back and looked at the shape of two pins and admitted he could not yet see one.

His phone buzzed on the desk. Maya.

Mya: Lab came back. Same accelerant, both scenes. Commercial grade, same product. Same buyer, most likely. You were right to make me wait on it.

He typed back a short reply and set the phone down. The board in front of him had no demon in it, no curse, no relic, no name from his own world. It had a person with a steady hand, a can of accelerant, and a reason he could not yet read. He had spent his whole life certain the worst answers lived on his side of the veil. He stood in his office and let himself consider, fully and without flinching, that this one did not.

She asked him that evening, after the dishes, with the lamps low and the windows open to the street noise.

“Tell me about her,” she said. “About Delia. Not the fire. I have enough of the fire to last me. Tell me something good. Tell me one good thing about her, so she is more to me than the way she died.”

He could have refused her. He had refused everyone for a hundred years. He looked at the woman on the couch with her feet tucked under her, asking to know the woman she did not know she had been, and he found he did not want to refuse her at all.

“The first time I made her laugh,” he said, and sat down beside her. “I had been trying for weeks to impress her. I was very serious in those days. I thought a serious man was an impressive one, so I stood very straight and chose my words very carefully and bored her half to death, I am sure, though she was too kind to say so.”

“That sounds like you.”

“It was worse than me. Then one evening a storm came up off the river with no warning, the kind that empties the sky all at once. I had my coat off and around her shoulders before I had thought about it, very gallant, very grave, certain I had finally struck the right note. And I stepped back to admire my own gallantry and put my foot straight into a gutter running over its banks, to the ankle, in front of God and half the street.” He felt his own mouth tilt at the memory. “I stood there with one ruined shoe and all my dignity in the gutter with it, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to hold the wall. She laughed until she cried, and she apologized while she did it and could not stop, and it was the best sound I had heard in two hundred years.”

Delphine was laughing now, her hand over her mouth, her eyes bright. “You did not.”

“I did. And I decided, standing in that gutter, that I would happily ruin every shoe I owned if it kept her making that sound.” He looked at her, at the laugh he had earned twice now across the gap of a century. “So that is my good thing. That is what I would want you to know about her, before anything else. That she had a laugh worth wrecking yourself for.”

She leaned over and kissed him, still smiling against his mouth, and the story passed from him to her and became, in the passing, a thing they both now held.

She fell asleep before he did. He sat at the desk with the lamp turned down and took out the notebook. The apartment was quiet around him, quiet in the particular way of the small hours in the old Quarter, when even the ghosts had gone in and the only sound left was the river and the wind moving in the banana leaves of the courtyard below. He had kept this book for a hundred years as a ledger of everything the fire had taken from him. Tonight, for the first time in all that time, he was going to write in it a thing the fire had given back.

He turned past the pages he had filled with the theater and the smoke and the dying, past the record of grief he had been keeping since the first episode. He found a clean page near the front, smoothed it flat, and uncapped the pen. At the top, in the careful hand he had not used for anything tender in longer than he could remember, he wrote four words, and then he began, underneath them, to fill the page.