The Map of Moments (18 page)

Besides, he was out of circulation now. With the windows of his room covered, he might as well be underground. He could stay here for a day or two, lie low, and maybe when the time was right he'd find his way to a police station, speak to someone senior, tell them about Coco and Corinne, and what he'd seen and heard…

He wondered what the two cops had filed in their report.
Suspect sighted but lost after a chase?

He needed help. He needed someone to talk to about Gabrielle, and perhaps through them he could find out more about the Tordu. If he was to remain in New Orleans and protect himself, that must be his main aim.

But who? Crazy Ray? Max laughed bitterly. Even if the old man allowed himself to be found, Max was sure he and the Tordu must be entangled somehow.

His friend Charlie, back at the university? Sitting there with his empty classrooms, emptied bottles, mourning whatever future he saw in the bottom of a glass? Charlie had been in New Orleans all his life, and he might well know about the Tordu, past or present. But the last thing Max wanted to do was to put his friend in danger.

Not after what had happened to Corinne.

Who, then? He stood and paced the room. His feet ground in grit on the carpet, and in one corner the floor gave a little where the floorboards were rotting. This was the second floor, and Max knew that this area hadn't been flooded that deeply, so it wasn't Katrina that had done this.

Not like in that attic where he and Gabrielle had loved, and she had died. Max had dreamed about that, he was sure, though only the vague shadows of images came back at him, not the scorched pain of memories. At least, not of the flood.

Months before, though…

The kid's name had been Joseph Noone, a student from Max's class, and Max had walked in on him and Gabrielle having sex.

“Joe Noone,” Max muttered. Nothing changed around him, but inside he felt a flush of optimism. If anyone knew what Gabrielle had been embroiled in, it would be the kid she'd left him for.

He sat up on the bed and leaned back against the wall. On the opposite wall hung a picture, a cheap reproduction of an old New Orleans street scene, and he wondered where that place was.
Near the Fourth Moment?
he thought.
Tordu banishing the yellow fever in 1853?
He closed his eyes and tried to recall where exactly on the confiscated map that Moment had been located. If he thought about it some more, he'd be able to find that place, he was sure. And if he was a little way off …well, so long as he was in the locale, he'd find his own way there.

“ ’Cos I've got magic static,” he whispered, and he remembered Corinne sitting across from him as they ate breakfast, and he started to cry.

Oh, Christ, she's dead.

The tears quickly stopped, but the grief did not. Guilt made certain of that.

And then the idea came that if Ray had been right, and

he
could
help Gabrielle …then maybe he could help Corinne, too.

For that, he would need to follow the Moments. And to do that, he needed a map.

He lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling and making a whole new world out of the cracks and spiderwebs across its surface.

M
ax ate breakfast alone. He'd come to believe that he was the only resident of this cheap hotel, although the noises issuing from the kitchen gave the impression that the old man was preparing breakfast for a dozen. The pancakes and bacon were excellent, though, and afterward Max found the offer of an omelet too tempting to turn down.

It was a brand-new day, and never had Max felt that so keenly. He had a plan for today, and that felt good; he was flushed with a sense of purpose. The old man served him quietly, inviting no conversation. Max was happy with that. He ate to the sound of ’30s jazz crackling through a pair of
speakers older than him, while the landlord clashed pans and dropped plates in the room next door.

“Stayin’ tonight?” the man asked, clearing Max's plates.

“I'm not sure yet. Can you hold the room for me?”

“No one else comes, it's yours.”

Max nodded, but the man did not catch his eye. “I owe you for the breakfast,” he said.

“Leave it on the table, got wet hands.” And the man retreated into the kitchen again, apparently dropping Max's dirtied crockery into the same pile as everything else.

Max dropped a twenty onto the table and left.

Daylight showed him just where he had ended up the previous night. The building he'd slept in was not the only run-down place here, but there were a couple of shops opposite that were already open, shelves of books standing on the pavement before one, clothes rails outside the other. A few cars drifted along the street, and lone pedestrians passed by, keeping to themselves. Max felt a quiet determination in the air, a sense of defiance at the waters now long gone, and his respect for this city grew another notch. He'd seen good things in its history as well as bad, and that was enough to maintain his hope.

He jogged across the street between traffic and approached the bookshop. A middle-aged woman was stacking a wooden bookshelf propped against the wall beside the entrance door, and she gave him an open, friendly smile.

“Day's going to be a nice one,” she said. She glanced up at the sky, and Max took the opportunity to appraise her. She had a slender body, firm and athletic, and luxurious blond hair. It was her face that aged her; wrinkles, bags
under her eyes, and the skin of a heavy smoker. Her habit had given her a yellow fringe. When she looked at him again, he saw the same guarded distance he'd found in many New Orleaneans, and not for the first time he wondered why it was so obvious that he was a stranger here.

“Sure hope so,” he said. “How's business?”

The woman shrugged and looked away. “You searching for something in particular?”

“Well, yeah. Do you sell maps of the city?”

“As it is now?” she asked, and Max heard a cool challenge in her voice.
What does she think I am? A vulture?

“No, just a city map. Street names, districts, that's all.”

She smiled again and nodded inside the shop. “Rack on the left, by the counter. Find what you want, give me a call.”

Max nodded his thanks and entered the shop. It was gloomy, and the shelves and walkway seemed to disappear deep into shadows at the rear of the large room. But he found the smell of old books as welcoming and comfortable as ever.

Corinne's hesitant smile played across his mind, and Max sighed, his shoulders sinking.

He found the rack and chose a folded tourist map of a similar size and scale to the one Ray had given him. The shopkeeper came in before he had a chance to call, and they concluded the deal silently. Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask something about the past or comment on the future, but his mind was elsewhere, his attention already drifting beyond the streets and buildings he could see and back toward Tulane University.

When he emerged from the shop, it felt like walking out
into danger. The watchers he had sensed in shadows were still there, but now the shadows had been replaced by the blank faces of strangers, and with every step he took, he was sure he was being followed. He walked quickly along the street, trying to look as though he had a purpose and an aim in mind, and he stopped frequently. Pausing in shop doorways, he would bend to tie his laces and look back the way he had come. Sometimes a person passed by, swapping an awkward stranger's glance with him, or more often not looking at him at all. A couple of times he changed direction completely, looking out for faces he had already seen.

When he reached a fenced parking lot, the Superdome hunkering on the horizon like a giant sleeping tortoise, Max slipped through the fence and sat on the ruin of a block wall. A couple of dogs were rooting through piles of refuse dumped on the opposite side of the lot, but apart from them he was alone.

He breathed deeply, trying to calm the cloying paranoia that threatened to darken the day.

Taking the map from his pocket, he cast his mind back to the terrible events of the previous night. He blinked away the memory of blood and the stink of Corinne's murder, trying to see past them to the moment when the short cop had opened the map, pointed at the Fourth Moment, and asked him what it meant.

Where had it been? Not too far from here, he was sure, but not the Quarter. Tremé, perhaps? He'd never visited that neighborhood, but knew that it was off the beaten track for most tourists—a private, proud place, laden with history much like the rest of New Orleans.

He opened the map, catching the whiff of new ink and printing chemicals. It felt and sounded different from the old map, its crinkles sharper, folds more defined. As he laid it out across his knees, pulling its edges to straighten it, angling it so that the sun did not reflect from its newness, the weight and feel of the paper changed.

It grew older.

Max gasped and his hands fisted, fingers breaking through more brittle paper. The colors before him faded, becoming more diffused. Shaded areas grew pale, and clear areas became built up. He blinked, certain that something was making his vision blur. But his eyes were clear.

He watched a small box appear on the map, and within its sketched edges manifested the words:

The box appeared to indicate an area north of the Super-dome, on Perdido Street. Max wasn't sure what was there, but…

But this thing just changed in my hands!

He almost dropped the map. His grip loosened, but his fingers snagged on the paper, and the map rested on his legs in all innocence.

Ray had given him the Map of Moments, but the gift had been more than the physical map. The magic hadn't been imbued in the paper, but in Max himself. It traveled.

He folded the map quickly, suddenly needing to hide what had happened. Seconds later he had left the lot and was walking along the street once again, and minutes later he could even doubt what he had seen.

Or he could
try
to doubt, even though that did not really make him feel any better. With everything he had witnessed over the last couple of days, doubting his eyes was starting to feel like a fool's escape. His world had changed, and he had no choice but to go along for the ride.

Fishing into his pocket, Max found the card the taxi driver had given him the previous evening. He stood on a street corner and stared at it for a while, remembering the journey, wishing himself back there knowing what he knew now, so that Corinne could still be alive and he could pay the driver to go faster.

He found a working pay phone just inside the door of a pharmacy and dialed the number. The cab operator sounded tired and uninterested, but she told him the cab would be with him in ten minutes. It came in five. Max guessed taxi service was one of a thousand businesses hurting right now.

This driver was even quieter than the one who'd brought him to the Garden District last night. That did not bother Max. He rested his head back on the seat and used the fifteen-minute journey to try to clear his head.

“You walk from here,” were the first and last words the driver spoke. Max paid, tipped, and started walking even before the taxi pulled away.

If there was any other way of getting Joe Noone's address, he'd take it. But this was all he could think of right now. His head was a mess, his heart thumped, and he felt
the predatory touch of eyes on the back of his neck whichever way he turned.

They'd known he had called Corinne. How? Was her phone tapped, or was it his at the hotel? He didn't know.

He wanted to get in, find his old office, and hope his file of student information was in the place where he'd left it; look up Noone's address and contact details, turn around, and leave. He did not want to bump into Charlie, because he knew that if he did, he'd end up talking with him about the Tordu. And, impossible though it may be, he was sure they'd know about that conversation as well.

Max already had enough guilt to last a lifetime.

“In and out,” he whispered to the warming morning air, and when he blinked he saw Gabrielle grinding herself onto Joe Noone's lap. They'd heard him leaving, and she had called him back, standing naked at the head of the narrow staircase. He'd always wondered whether she had known he was there all along.

The campus was still a mess, and he crossed it quickly, one of only a few people traveling these roads. The students were continuing with their lives somewhere else.

The history building's front door stood open, as it had the last time he'd visited. Things had been relatively normal then, with the memory of that first strange Moment sitting uncomfortably in his hungover head. Max entered quietly, wincing as his shoes ground on dried mud and grit still smeared across the floors. He walked along the corridor to the far end of the building.

It was silent, and felt deserted. A building with people inside didn't feel like this, whether they were out of sight or
not. He was alone, and for the first time since leaving his dingy digs that morning, he no longer felt watched. Strange to feel so observed in a city so deserted. Maybe the relief was because he was somewhere familiar, somewhere that had once been safe, and a place of which most of his memories were good.

He went up the stairs and stood at the head of the second-floor corridor. It, too, was silent. At the far end was Charlie's office, and three doors from where he now stood had been his old room. The corridor looked very familiar, though much had changed in the months since he had left, both in New Orleans and within himself.

The sign on his former door named a stranger, but Max did not feel like an intruder as he went inside.

The office had been moved around. He'd had the desk against the wall just below the window, so that he could sit back sometimes and look out across the campus. Most of what he'd seen in those moments had been Gabrielle; her smile, her half-closed eyes, her breasts. Whoever had taken over when he'd left a month before the end of the semester had pushed the desk against the blank wall, and the only thing on that wall was a plaque printed with a quote from the Bible:
Consider that I labored not for myself only, but for all them that seek learning.