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“Still,” she said, “that doesn’t make it right, what they’re doing over there. ”
A faintly burning chemical stink joined the city’s odors, trapped in the humid fog of Gulf water and river water that crept through the Quarter like a warm, wet bath. Gunpowder and animals, men and women, alcohols sweet and sour—bourbons brought from Kentucky, whiskeys imported from Tennessee, rums shipped in from the islands south of Florida, and grain distillations made in a neighbor’s cast-iron tub. The night smelled of gun oil and saddles, and the jasmine colognes of the night ladies, or the violets and azaleas that hung from balconies in baskets; of berry liqueur and the verdant, herbal tang of absinthe delivered from crystal decanters, and the dried chilies hanging in the stalls of the French market, and powdered sugar and chicory.
Josephine leaned her head on Deaderick’s shoulder as she hugged him good-bye. She breathed, “We’re drowning like this, you know,” and she saw him off with tears swallowed hard in the back of her throat.
Two
Andan Cly folded the telegram shut and said, “I’ll be damned. ” He slipped it into his shirt pocket, then changed his mind and set it instead on the bar—as if he were reluctant to touch it, but didn’t want to let it out of his sight.
“What for?” Angeline drew her feet up onto the stool’s bottommost rung and looked at him expectantly. She was dressed in her usual preferred attire, a man’s shirt and pants cut down to size. A slouch-rim hat sat atop her head, crowning the long gray braid that hung down her back.
The pilot and sometimes-pirate cleared his throat and signaled the bartender for a glass of something stronger than what was already in front of him. “It’s … it’s a message. From someone I used to know, a long time ago. ”
“Must be a woman. ”
“I didn’t say it was a woman. ”
“If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be hemming and hawing like a schoolboy. ”
“Hush, you,” he told her, not for a moment expecting her to do so.
Lucy O’Gunning slipped a shot in front of him and then put a bottle of whiskey beside it. “One for you, too, Princess?”
“Since you’re offering. ”
Lucy poured another drink, using her one mechanical arm as deftly as any bartender ever used two of the usual kind. “And what have we got here?” She reached to pick up the cheap slip of transcription paper, but Cly snatched it back, crumpling it in his hand.
“It’s a note from a woman,” Angeline informed her. “He won’t admit it, but that’s what it is. Telegram came up from Tacoma. Freddy Miller brought it in his sack with the last batch of mail; I just brought it along, ’cause I was passing through anyhow. ”
“A woman?” Lucy gave Andan Cly a suspicious squint. “You airmen, all the same. A girl in every port. ”
“It ain’t like that,” he insisted. “I haven’t seen this woman in … I don’t know. Eight or ten years. She’s a few thousand miles away, and she didn’t dash off a note because she missed me. ” Under his breath he added, “I can promise you that. ”
“Ooh. ” Lucy leaned forward, planting her matronly bosom on the countertop and propping her chin in her clockwork palm. “Sounds interesting. ”
“What does she want?” Angeline asked bluntly, unconcerned by the blush that climbed the fair-skinned fellow’s neck. Cly’s hair was cut close to his scalp, and it was light enough to plainly show the pink when embarrassment made it all the way to the top of his considerable frame.
“She wants to hire me. ”
“For what kind of job?” Lucy asked.
“She wants me to come to New Orleans. There’s a craft she wants me to fly, but I don’t know anything more than that. The telegram is thin on details. ”
Angeline harrumphed. “Sounds like a trumped-up excuse to bring you out for a visit. ”
“She’s not that kind. ”
“You don’t sound so sure of it,” Lucy said. She waited for him to down his shot. When he did, she poured him another before he had a chance to ask for it.
“I’m plenty sure of it, and now you’re just trying to liquor me up so I’ll tell you more. ”
“You complaining?”
“No. Keep ’em coming. ” He cleared his throat again and said, “There’s got to be a catch. New Orleans is a huge place—big port, big airyard. She could get a perfectly good pilot by setting foot outside her front door and hollering for one. ” Unfolding the paper, he reread a few lines and said, “All I know is, it’s got something to do with this thing, the Ganymede. ”
The bartender asked, “What’s a Ganymede?”
“A dirigible, I assume. She needs someone to take it from Pontchartrain to the Gulf, and she’s willing to pay … but it’s only a few miles, from the lake to the coast. Why she’d want me to go all the way out there to move it for her, I just don’t know. ”
