He looked at the water to see if it was poisoned. The reptiles and birds didn’t seem to mind, but they were hardier species, and ones that didn’t need to spend all their time in the water.

“Over here,” said Marianne. “See it?”

There was a sign in the near distance, marking the entrance to the Fairgrounds. It had been a very long time since they had a fair, or a music festival. This had most recently been a refugee camp—as so many such places seemed to end up in recent years—one of the biggest in the hemisphere. Camp Zulu was the place where many people found they had hit a wall. The place where they were trucked after illegally crossing a border or a state line, and made to live behind the wire, if they were lucky enough to stay out of the Superdome. A place where people had lived long enough for kids to grow up in there, and have kids of their own. Some of them Donny’s clients. The place—or one of them, at least—where the real spark of revolution was ignited. And where the atrocities of war were buried underwater.

Only, not exactly there, according to Marianne. Closer to the bayou that flowed between there and the park.

“Up in there,” said Marianne. “The big tree.”

The directions they had were not the kind that involved a street address.

The tree Marianne was pointing at was a huge live oak that stuck up out of the water, on a high point that was no more than an inch or two submerged.

“How old do you think that tree is?” said Donny.

“Very old,” said Marianne. “Older than the city.”

He pushed the boat to it as Marianne stood up in the prow, and they both peered into the dark water spectrally illuminated by flashes of morning sun, and looked for the faces of other specters, of bodies put here to hide the evidence.

43

Marianne was right: the party that night after they returned from their excursion was like Mardi Gras.

Just without the rich people.

Marianne said she would catch up with him later, after she finished updating her report.

Donny made his own mask, sacrificing one of his neckties to the project with the aid of a borrowed pair of scissors.

Donny had been to Mardi Gras in the good old days, before the floods and the fighting. Back then the way it worked was that parades were organized by different insider circles, most of them the elites, in a city built from elaborate social codes of class and ancestry. The rich people, usually rich white people, were the ones on the floats. Throwing plastic jewels and coins to the gathered mob below. Misogynistically expecting women to expose themselves for those trinkets, and making sure they were liquored up enough to comply.

At the new May Day parades, they threw real money, and real jewels.