“Yes?” she asked eagerly. “What news?”
Marylin entered and shut the door softly behind herself. “No news, really.”
“Have you a message?”
“Nothing written, ma’am. The boy who did the running thought it’d be safer just to whisper.”
“Did Fenn Calais hear a word of it?”
“No, ma’am. He’s on the second floor with Delphine.”
“Then what’s this news, or this non-news?” Josephine demanded quietly.
“The Texians leaving town are making the scene too crowded, that’s the word from your brother. The bayou boys are holing up and lying low, with Ganymede inside the New Sarpy storage spot where they put it last night.”
“Goddamn.”
“It’s not so bad, ma’am. They got it there in one piece, and everybody’s safe, and nobody bothered them on the way. Everything is fine. They’re just going to wait for one night before they drop her into the river.”
“That’s cutting it awful close. The Valiant … it won’t give them another night to try.”
“I know, and they know it, too. But Deaderick said the Texians have been marching along the main road out of Metairie ever since dawn. Maybe they’ll be finished passing through by sundown, and maybe they won’t. Either way, the boys are staying put. It’ll be all right.”
“It might.” She sat down and squeezed at the arms of her chair, knotting and unknotting her fingers around the padded rests.
“What’s wrong, ma’am?”
“I was hoping for a word with Cly before the boys went all the way to water. When they stop by the wharf, and I join the poling crew for surveillance, I’d hoped they’d pause so I could speak with him.”
“Any special reason, ma’am?” Marylin asked with great and false innocence.
“Not the one you’re thinking. Cly’s a good man and our time together was fine, but that was a long time ago,” she inadvertently echoed Fenn Calais. “I want a word with him because he’s been in Seattle.”
“What’s Seattle got to do with anything?”
“It might have a whole lot to do with the zombis.”
“I don’t understand?…”
“Neither do I, dear. But I’m working on it, and it’s coming together. Cly knows something important, something he hasn’t told me. I don’t know if he’s keeping a secret, or if it just hasn’t come up yet. But I need to ask him some questions.”
“Does this have something to do with that Ranger who came by here last night?”
“Ranger Korman, yes. And Madame Laveau, too, because she’s the one who put the pair of us in touch.”
“It’s funny, ma’am, you working with a Ranger.”
“I’m not working with him. We have a thing in common, that’s all. We both want the zombis gone. It’d be madness to ignore him if he knows anything useful—and if he’s in a position to be helpful.”
“And you think he can help?” Marylin asked.
“Maybe. Texas isn’t real thrilled with him right now, and Austin might not listen to anything he has to say, but I guess we’ll find out. And Captain Cly might hold a piece to the puzzle, though I don’t think he knows it. It might be worth our time—once Ganymede is safely in Union hands—to put those two men’s heads together and see if they don’t crack some sparks.”
“That’s a violent way of putting it, ma’am. I suppose for now we’ll hope for the best.”
“No, we won’t,” Josephine said, rising from the seat, although she’d only just taken it.
“We won’t?”
“Well. I won’t. There’s plenty of daylight left. I’ll take the street rail out and have a word with the good captain before the sun sets. Maybe this delay is a good thing for all of us. I’m determined to find a bright side, goddammit.”
“It’ll let you spend a little extra time together.”
“That’s not the kind of bright side I meant.”
“Didn’t mean to suggest it, ma’am.”
“Oh, hush.”
Josephine gathered everything she thought she might need for the trip, filling her favorite silk-lined leather bag—the only expensive one she owned, not that it looked half so fancy as the ones she wore with her best dresses. She wouldn’t need a cloak, but it felt like a shawl might be in order, so she threw a light gray one over a similarly colored dress and grabbed a parasol.
With a few parting instructions to Marylin, she set out for Rue Canal to pick up the street rail line that would take her back out to Metairie.
Norman Somers wasn’t hanging around the big lot where the transports parked, but Charlie pointed her in the direction of Norman’s brother, Swinton, who was more than happy to drive her the rest of the way to New Sarpy without asking any questions. Likely as not, Swinton knew the answers regardless, but Josephine didn’t feel like talking and the man didn’t feel like making her, so they rode together in silence to the small riverside settlement.
She descended from the rattling, shuddering transport vehicle and thanked Swinton with a few coins from her bag. He made a polite show of refusal, and she made a polite show of insistence. In the end, he took the money and left her there, standing beside an unpaved road at the edge of a collection of squat, square buildings.
Narrow lines of dirt and mud ran between them, not roads, but walkways and driveways. The grass grew up tall among the spaces where wheels and feet came and went. New Sarpy wasn’t an abandoned place. It simply wasn’t much used.
The coughing of an engine announced the impending appearance of a rolling-crawler, giving Josephine plenty of time to get off the street.
She stepped out of the way and stood, watching as yet more Texians made their leisurely retreat from New Orleans. Not many of them this time, only a few dozen, with the rolling-crawler slowly rolling and crawling to keep their pace—its metal accompaniment serving to tote supplies and offer general marching encouragement, since the machines weren’t big enough to hold more than a handful of men.
Texas had larger devices for transporting personnel and equipment, but Josephine didn’t see any of them on the road. She assumed they were being used elsewhere, or perhaps whoever had recalled these forces figured that they were so tough, they could walk awhile. She didn’t know, and cared only because the swiftness and completeness of their departure would mean the difference between success and a miserable near-miss when it came to her plans for Ganymede.
When they were gone, leaving a cloud of dust and the last echoes of their accompanying machine behind them, she was more alone than not. A pair of ancient colored men with fishing poles chatted on their way to the river. Two dark-skinned children chased a puppy across the road and into a ditch, then ran into the field and toward the forest on the other side. One woman sat reading a newspaper on the stoop of a laundry, while behind her the wet, swishing clank of the clothes-washing devices rumbled and roared indoors.
Josephine knew where the warehouse was, the one where Ganymede would be parked and stored. But it felt ill-advised to go stampeding toward it, so she didn’t. She opened her parasol and held it up, covering herself in a thin black shadow as she strolled in the general direction of the river.
It wasn’t far, barely two blocks before she could smell it in earnest when the breeze kicked air across the wide, muddy expanse of the thing, bringing it up to rattle her parasol and infiltrate her nose. Another block, and she could see the corner of the building in question.
She hesitated.
Should she simply approach it and knock? If the men were inside, they’d surely look first and not merely open fire on anyone who dared give a tap at the door. Anything else would topple past caution into counterproductive paranoia. But what if someone saw her? Most of the bayou knew about the mystery ship, if not its precise location or purpose. Almost everyone was aware that this was an operation against Texas, and therefore, almost everyone agreed to cooperate in a display of blanket ignorance.
Almost.
She made up her mind and assumed her best, most confident posture. Avoiding the huge double doors, she instead approached a person-sized door and gave it a series of raps that said in no uncertain terms that she was here on business, and she had every right to be.
From inside came the sound of absolutely nothing.
She listened, leaning her right ear toward the door. Maybe she caught the distant susurrus whistle of muffled whispers. Maybe she noted the scrape of a boot heel as someone tiptoed carefully. Or maybe she heard only rats and seagulls bickering within. Maybe there was nothing to hear.
No.
With a pop, the door unstuck itself from its humidity-swollen frame, revealing only a narrow slot of the darkened interior, and a fraction of a white man’s face.
Only one eye greeted her, a hazel-colored orb offset by a darkly arched awning of an eyebrow. The eye showed neither surprise nor recognition. But it did not show concern or alarm either, and momentarily the door opened a few inches farther to reveal Cly’s engineer.
He was wearing a floppy brown hat and chewing on the wooden end of a matchstick. He was half a head shorter than Josephine, and he looked at her with his chin angled slightly upward—still fixing her in that cool, dead gaze that told her nothing.
He said, “Hello, there, Miss Josephine.”
“Hello, there, Mr.…” She wanted to say Trout, but she knew it wasn’t correct. Troost, she remembered.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes, everything’s fine. I was hoping I could speak to Captain Cly.”
Kirby Troost’s teeth worked around the fraying match. “Well, then. I guess you’d better come inside.” He opened the door to admit her, then shut it fast behind her.
Inside, the warehouse was not as large as she’d remembered it, from the one time she’d been there a few months previously. Then again, last time she saw it, the place hadn’t been stuffed with two large flatbeds and the Ganymede—which had been covered with an assortment of tarps roped down over the sides and concealing most of its details.