“You know why,” I said turning my head and looking at the nearby crowds. Street performers were out there, dancing, singing, bringing big soft explosions of approval from the crowds. “You know damned good and well why. Because you were there when I was just Born to Darkness. You were there when I stumbled onto these shores and sought to find a companion, and found you; and you were there when we lived all those decades together, you and me and Claudia, and you are the only one living who remembers the sound of her happy voice, her young voice, or the ring of her laugh. And you were there when I almost died at her hands, and when the pair of you fought me again and left me in the flames. And you were there when I was humiliated and ruined at the Théâtre des Vampires, and they murdered her due to my crimes, my weakness, my blunder, my ignorance, my failure to steer one fragile little bark in the right direction, and you were there when I rose from the dead and had my shabby little moment of triumph on the rock music stage, my cheap little hour as Freddie Mercury before the footlights, you were there. You came. You were there. And you were there when I took the spirit of Amel into me, and when all around me were telling me I had to be the Prince whether I wanted to be or not, you were there. You were there when all these streets ran with mud and river water, and when you and I went to see Macbeth onstage, and I couldn’t stop dancing under the streetlamps afterwards reciting the words, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ and Claudia thought I was so handsome and so witty and so clever, and we would all of us always be safe, you were there.”

Silence, or the inevitable silence one enjoys in a crowded noisy café where someone is screaming with laughter at a nearby table, and someone else is arguing with the man beside him over who should pay the check.

I didn’t dare to look at Louis. I shut my eyes and tried to listen to the river itself, the great broad Mississippi River only a matter of yards from us, running past the city of New Orleans and so deep that no one would ever find all the bodies committed to its depths, the great broad river that might swallow the city one night for reasons no one would ever be able to explain, and carry every particle of the city south into the Gulf of Mexico and the great ocean beyond…all that wallpaper, all those gas lamps, all the laughter and the purple flagstones and the shimmering green banana leaves like blades of a knife.