Previous chapter / Next chapter
Chapter 16: Sack
Morning arrived in New Orleans with a grayish, lazy light, wiping away the last remains of the nocturnal fog.
In the city's most exclusive residential zone, Lucifer woke up in his spacious, high-ceilinged bedroom. For the first time in fifteen years, the constant oppression he felt in his chest upon waking had disappeared, replaced by a strange lightness. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked toward the single armchair in the corner. There, hung with excessive care, rested the long wine-colored coat. His room, usually imbued with the scent of varnish and clean wood, now held a subtle trace of bitter coffee and furniture wax. Lucifer smiled slightly, stretching his arms, feeling that the ghosts had finally granted him a truce.
Meanwhile, in the Creole Quarter, Alastor's routine began with the same neatness as always. The gramophone remained off, letting the morning silence govern the apartment. Alastor, wearing a carmine loungewear shirt with its sleeves neatly rolled up, prepared his black coffee, as bitter as usual.
However, before sitting at the table, he stopped in front of the large bookshelf of literary classics. Between an old leather volume and the empty space where he usually rested his cane, Alastor placed the small cedar statuette that Lucifer had handed him the night before. The light, aromatic wood contrasted drastically with the dark 1930s minimalism that decorated the place. Alastor tilted his head, contemplating the figure of himself with a subtle, almost imperceptible smile that completely lacked the rigidity of the radio. It was the first time in over a decade that he allowed something new to alter his perfect order.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, the usual bustle of the radio station was at its peak. Producers running with tapes, secretaries typing in a rush, and the constant murmur of frequencies filled the hallways.
Lucifer arrived at the facility wearing an impeccably cut gray suit and dark sunglasses that he took off upon entering, maintaining the serious and sophisticated bearing that corresponded to his reputation as a renowned architect. His contract with the station for the renovation of Alastor's booth had already officially ended weeks ago, so his presence in the building did not go unnoticed; several staff members looked at him with curiosity, wondering what the highly sought-after Architect Morningstar was doing back in the hallways. In his hands, he held a neat kraft paper bag where Alastor's coat was perfectly folded.
As he crossed the main hallway connecting to the broadcast wing, he spotted Alastor conversing with two advertising directors. Upon noticing the blonde's imposing and subtly unexpected presence, Alastor interrupted his speech for a millisecond. His chestnut eyes gleamed with a spark of sharp amusement, and his smile widened impeccably.
—Ah, but what a pleasant surprise! The man who revolutionized the acoustics of our studios! —Alastor exclaimed with his eloquent announcer's voice, making a slight bow of his head—. What a pleasure to see you around here again, Architect Morningstar. We were just speaking of how splendid the sound isolation turned out in the nightly block.
—Good afternoon, Alastor —Lucifer replied, adopting his best professional and distant tone, though his eyes betrayed an absolute complicity while handling the executives' curiosity—. I am glad the work meets your expectations. I was passing through downtown and remembered I had left behind the delivery of some... personal items that remained in my studio after the project closed. If you have a free moment before your schedule, I would prefer to hand them over to you at once.
—Of course, my dear. The order and return of belongings always require... immediate attention —the brunette said, bidding farewell to the executives with an elegant gesture.
They walked together toward Alastor's private booth. In their wake, a subtle but perceptible murmur began to spread among the editing desks and the technicians loitering in the hallway. Several employees stood frozen, exchanging looks of absolute stupefaction. At the station, everyone knew of the infamous and frigid relationship that the arrogant architect and the reserved announcer had maintained during weeks of tense design meetings; the remodeling of the booth had been a battlefield of sharp innuendos and cutting silences. Seeing them now walking side by side, with no daggers in their words and with Alastor guiding him with an almost docile courtesy, was perturbing to the staff. One of the secretaries even stopped typing on her machine, following with her gaze the kraft paper bag that the Morningstar carried with such secrecy.
But as soon as Lucifer pushed open the door to the control booth and the heavy acoustic insulation he himself had designed closed behind them, leaving the confused looks of the staff outside, the air changed completely...
Lucifer let out a sigh of relief, dropping his rigid posture, and held out the bag to Alastor.
—Your coat —the blonde said, recovering his natural tone of voice—. Thanks again. It saved me from the cold last night.
—A pleasure, my dear —Alastor took the bag, extracting the garment with a theatrical slowness. He inspected it out of the corner of his eye and let out a playful hiss—. I see Morningstar pride does not tolerate a single wrinkle. It is impeccable. Though... I perceive it lacks a bit of my usual aroma. What a pity.
—Don't start, weirdo —Lucifer huffed, feeling a slight warmth in his cheeks, though he crossed his arms trying to maintain his dignity—. We acted well out there, don't you think? Several secretaries stared at me as if I came to steal your microphones.
—Oh, we are consummate actors, my dear friend —Alastor replied, hanging the coat on the coat rack—. Public tuning requires that the show remain clean of... sentimentalities before the eyes of others. Besides, an architect of your caliber always causes a stir when he decides to visit a humble servant of the air.
Taking advantage of the booth's privacy, Lucifer leaned against the turned-off mixing console.
—...When I finally managed to graduate and open my own firm, I had the necessary resources to move on my own. I invested a lot of money from my first projects and hired private investigators. Very good people from the north. I set them to look in every corner of New Orleans, in the civil registries, in the clandestine orphanages... I wanted to find you no matter what.
Alastor, who was arranging some tape cartridges on the shelves, stopped his hands mid-movement. He tilted his head, paying attention in absolute silence.
—But they never found anything —the architect continued, frowning—. They said there was no trace of a young man with your physical characteristics or your name in the slums. It was as if you had vanished from the face of the earth. It seemed extremely strange to me back then, and it made me fear the worst... Though, thinking about it well now... I suppose I should simply thank the incompetence of those investigators. You hid yourself too well from the outside world, weirdo.
Lucifer let out a small, soft laugh, innocently assuming that Alastor had simply been a master of evasion and an extremely reserved young man who preferred to start from scratch without leaving loose ends to protect his new life on the radio.
Alastor remained completely motionless for a second. The blonde's words resonated in the gears of his methodical mind with the force of a sharp blow. The private investigators were not incompetent. If no one from the outside had found a single record of his whereabouts in fifteen years, it was not because a sixteen-year-old teenager had hidden himself well; it was because someone with immense power had taken it upon themselves to erase his existence from the map to ensure the success of the lie. The senior Morningstars. Mother Stella. The corrupt network that handled the city's elite adoptions.
For an instant, Alastor's first reaction was to open his mouth and let loose the brutal deduction. He wanted to confront Lucifer, demand the names of those investigators, dig into the files of his adoptive family, and expose the web of lies that had kept them apart.
But he stopped dead.
He looked at Lucifer's face: his eyes reflected a peace they hadn't possessed in over a decade, and the soft smile on his lips demonstrated that, at last, the architect was managing to breathe without the weight of guilt. If Alastor let slip that loose end now, he would destroy the fragile bubble of tranquility they had just recovered at the dock. It would sink Lucifer right back into the hell of suspicion and family betrayal.
Alastor kept the secret to himself. He swallowed it completely, lowering the iron curtain in his mind.
A dense, heavy, and uncomfortable silence dropped all at once in the control booth. The warmth of the previous minutes evaporated, replaced by a gelid stillness. Alastor did not reply immediately; he merely locked his chestnut eyes onto the blonde with a fixedness so intense that Lucifer's smile vanished.
—Alastor...? —Lucifer asked, tilting his head, feeling that the air had become strangely thick—. Is something wrong?
The announcer reacted instantly. As if a switch were flipped back on, he widened his smile until recovering the perfect, neat symmetry of the radio. Deep down, he did not want Lucifer to leave with a bad impression or thinking that the truce was broken.
—Oh, absolutely not, my dear friend! —Alastor replied, his voice recovering that impeccable, theatrical modulation of always—. I was merely thinking of how fortunate I am that your northern hounds did not possess a good sense of smell. It would have been highly annoying to have to deal with intruders in my private affairs. But do not worry about the past; the signal is clean now.
Alastor took a step forward and gently adjusted the collar of Lucifer's gray suit jacket with a touch of silent familiarity.
—Besides... the night will arrive soon and my commercial schedule is about to begin. We agreed to meet at the end of the day, did we not? I shall see you outside when the city lights up its lamps.
Lucifer observed him for a couple of seconds, narrowing his eyes slightly. He knew, with that instinct that only develops after a lifetime of knowing each other, that Alastor was hiding something from him behind that eloquent facade. However, before the promise of meeting at nightfall, he decided not to press and let himself be carried away by the warmth of the reminder.
—Yes... we'll meet at the end of the day. Don't be late, weirdo —Lucifer said, returning a lighter smile while adjusting his jacket.
—I am never late to a good tuning, my dear —the brunette decreed, making a bow of his head.
As soon as the heavy acoustic door closed and Lucifer stepped out into the hallway, Alastor's smile transformed into a thin, sharp line. The pommel of his cane struck the floor with a dry echo.
(...)
The rest of the afternoon passed like a game of mirrors, reflecting the highly distinct realities that both had constructed to survive during those fifteen years.
In his office at the architectural firm downtown, Lucifer tried to concentrate on the blueprints for a new corporate complex, but his mind stubbornly tuned into another frequency. His employees noticed immediately that the usually meticulous and implacable Engineer Morningstar was... strangely distracted. He let a minor error pass in a structural calculation—something unheard of for him—and spent several minutes staring out the large glass window overlooking the city, a drawing pencil spinning between his silk fingers.
Whenever the stress of phone calls from investors threatened to overwhelm him, Lucifer opened the drawer of his oak desk. There, hidden beneath some zoning blueprints, rested the leftover cedar wood. As he passed the pads of his fingers over the rough surface, the aroma of a new forest returned him at once to the warmth of the previous night. His aristocratic pride remained intact before his partners, but inside, the architect counted the minutes for the sun to finish setting behind the skyscrapers.
Meanwhile, in the radio station building, Alastor lived the following hours submerged in a cold, methodical genius. Conducting the afternoon block required his full attention, and in front of the microphone, his voice flowed with that velvety, magnetic charisma that kept half of New Orleans glued to the receiver. He broadcasted commercials, presented jazz records, and joked with the sound technicians with an impeccable lightness.
However, behind the control booth and away from the staff's eyes, the announcer's chestnut eyes did not rest. Between song and song, Alastor used the booth's private telephone line to make highly specific calls to old contacts in the underworld and archivists of the local press. He jotted down names, dates from fifteen years ago, and addresses in a small notebook that he kept jealously in the inside pocket of his carmine suit. His smile never faltered in front of his coworkers, but each notation was another gear in the silent hunting net he was weaving around the past of the Morningstar family. The static of his signal vibrated with a contained tension; the predator was at work.
At seven o'clock in the evening, the gas lamps of the French Quarter began to light up one by one, tinting the wet streets with a golden glow.
With ten minutes left before the agreed hour, Lucifer's car parked half a block away from the station. The blonde stepped out of the vehicle wearing a light trench coat over his gray suit, protecting himself from the fresh wind that was beginning to blow from the river. He walked toward the main entrance of the building and stationed himself to one side of the stone steps, right beneath a lamppost whose dim light illuminated his neat profile. He crossed his arms and checked his gold wristwatch. Five minutes left. His punctuality was legendary in the business world, but today, standing there ahead of time held a completely different meaning. It was not an executive meeting; it was a tuning he did not want to miss.
The clock struck seven sharp.
Right at that instant, the heavy glass doors of the radio station opened. Alastor emerged from the structure with his usual elegant, unhurried pace, rhythmically resting his cane against the stone steps. He wore his long wine-colored coat properly put on, the same one Lucifer had returned that afternoon in perfect condition. Upon spotting the figure of the blonde waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, Alastor's smile widened, losing that analytical rigidity with which he had been investigating in the shadows during the afternoon, recovering the warmth he only reserved for him.
—Punctual as a Swiss watch, Engineer Morningstar —Alastor commented, descending the last steps and stopping at a courteous distance—. I see the city's great architect does not keep his audience waiting.
Lucifer let out a small laugh, straightening his back and hiding his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. The vague trace of discomfort he had felt in the control booth dissipated completely upon seeing the brunette in front of him.
—A Morningstar is never late, weirdo —the blonde replied, looking away with that subtle hint of pride, though his eyes gleamed with genuine satisfaction—. Besides... the night is just beginning in New Orleans. Where are you taking me today?
—Wherever the tuning takes us, my dear. Wherever it takes us.
They walked together, moving away from the station side by side, ready to lose themselves once more in the mysteries of the southern night, while the secrets of the past waited patiently in the dark.
