A Separate Country (53 page)

“What is that rot?”

Sebastien cinched up his belt and pulled his coat around him. “We have many reasons to go to the Beauregard house, and we must do it tonight. Now. Eli has his mission, and I have mine.”

“I have none.” Rintrah, stubborn, tears in his eyes.

“You have one too.”

“What?”

“I think it will become apparent to you if all goes well. And dammit, Rintrah, you’re the only man in New Orleans I was ever afraid of crossing, quit your whining like a woman. You’ve got interests here. Hood was your friend. He was not my friend. Father Mike was not my friend, either, but he was yours. And Paschal would have been outraged to see you like this.”

“The hell you say. You got no right to talk about Paschal like you knew him.”

“I did know him. Now get the hell up and let’s get some real pistols. Do you still know how to get in a second story? You were a burglar once, no? Your money didn’t appear out of nowhere. You can break in?”

“I can.” Rintrah looked at me sideways, checking to see if I’d caught the mention of his previous occupation. I made a face at him.

“Then bring your ropes.”

Sebastien walked out of the room and down the hallway. I followed behind Rintrah, who never stopped clenching his fists but marched on anyway.

*   *   *

We got into the house easy enough. At the back entrance, behind the courtyard, the gate had been left open. Inside, in the portico, two men lay bound, gagged, and tied to each other. One was unconscious, the other was starting to stir. They’d been gagged hard with twisted pieces of burlap. Blood ran down their heads and into their ears. Sebastien didn’t barely look at them. Rintrah looked down and whistled appreciatively.

Later I would be on the roof, among the gables and dormers, slipping on the slate tiles. From there I would see three sets of bound and trussed men, the two men we’d seen on the way in, and a pair each at the two front entrances, all of them pulled into the shadows. These were big men, big white Creole men, and it was amusing to watch them roll around on the ground like potato bugs. They’d been tied up good. In fact, the whole house had been prepared for our arrival. Lights in the courtyard had been doused, the servants’ quarters cleared out. In an empty cistern in the back corner of the courtyard lay two long pistols.

“This one is for you,” Sebastien had said to Rintrah. Rintrah had looked at him in surprise, but nodded his head.

“And this one, for Mr. Eli Griffin,” Sebastien said, handing me the other. “It’s loaded this time.”

“Well, thank you for that, mister.”

“Don’t shoot yourself.”

“Go to Hell.”

Later, from my perch on the roof, I saw three men in the distance, slipping in and out of the shadows on street corners surrounding the block. They stopped people walking down the street and told them to move on. White and black, man and woman. No one got past them, and no one challenged them either. Now I knew why we’d stopped to see the three negroes. One of the men, the old man, looked up at me and saluted.

It was Rintrah who had sent me up onto the roof as a lookout. I’d climbed the waterspouts in the corner, tied a rope around one of the chimneys, and thrown it back down to Rintrah and Sebastien on the ground. Sebastien climbed using every ledge and uneven brick and crack in the masonry to ascend, only rarely putting his weight on the rope. I had the pistol in my pants so I could hold on to the roof with both hands. Rintrah struggled with a long thin wire and tried to flip the inside latch on the window. Finally he got in and stuck his head back out to signal Sebastien up.

Sebastien had disappeared. I hadn’t seen him go. Rintrah craned his neck up at me, or up at the moon, or some such, and hissed, “We’re getting cocked up good on this one. Son of a bitch, he’s going to have us killed, you watch. Lying bastard.”

I didn’t intend to watch. If it came to it, I reckoned I’d run across the roof and slide down one of the far waterspouts and out into the dark city before anyone could catch me. I was invincible up there on that roof, above everything, even the mist coming off the river. The roof was dirty and the soot came off in my hands like chunks of earth, but even so I felt clean like a man whose got a second chance, like someone who’s a new man. I would be leaving the city soon.

I sat up there like a cat for a long time. One hour by the bells. I kept looking for Rintrah, and listening for his whisper, but there was nothing.

I could see over to Rintrah’s house, through the forest of lightning rods and vents and chimneys. During that hour I watched it, close. I imagined I could almost see the hearses moving in and out, the men pulling out the crates of liquor, the negroes climbing in to make their escape from the plague. I imagined that attic room where Paschal had lived his last days and died. I wondered if the bed was still there. There had been so much going on behind my back, out of my sight. Mystery on mystery, secret behind secret. It was too much, I wanted to be gone.

A fire broke out in Rintrah’s courtyard. Not a big fire, but big enough to send up a column of dense black smoke. I remembered the horses, and nearly slid back down to the ground, but I didn’t dare. There was too much at stake to leave Rintrah behind. Had I been thinking straight, nothing would have stopped me from getting back to Rintrah’s house. But I was thinking like a man above everything, someone who’d got others to do his dirty work. I was half asleep. Fifteen minutes later I understood the mistake I’d made.

An ugly man with a yellow feather in his hat ran into the courtyard as if being chased by hellhounds. I recognized him instantly, though I’d never seen him with my own eyes. I saw Hood’s eyes, in that box above the lottery, looking down on the floor as they dragged off the dead and as a man with a yellow feather in his hat hurried away from the scene. I saw him through Anna Marie’s eyes, having his drink in the café, watching the old men whisper about him.
Hector
,
the negro killer
. I felt Anna Marie’s hate then, just as real as my own.

He looked behind him, in front of him, below him, whipping around like a man battling unseen things, ghosts. He even looked up, and I don’t know if he saw me or not. If he did, he didn’t care. He should have looked again to the top of the garden wall before he tried to run for the back door of the house. There, crouching, appeared Sebastien Lemerle, his hands full of knives.

Sebastien leaped to the ground in front of Hector, cutting him off. Hector’s ruined, pocked face glistened. He pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket and began to raise it. Sebastien calmly threw a knife ten feet and buried it in Hector’s right shoulder. Hector groaned but did not scream. He tried to raise the pistol again, but when he did he dropped the weapon. He bent to retrieve it and as he did so Sebastien moved quickly behind him and bound him in his arms. From a distance it was an embrace as if between lovers. I could see Sebastien whispering in Hector’s ear, and Hector shaking his head,
no, no, no, no
. He was crying, he was praying. Sebastien reached down and inserted his knife and ripped at the back of his leg roughly, hobbling it. This time Hector screamed the scream of hellfire, like he was burning up. Sebastien shushed him and patted his head, but the screaming would not stop. A lamp was lit on the second floor at the other end of the wing Rintrah had disappeared into nearly an hour before. I saw a figure in the window looking down.

Sebastien hobbled the man’s other leg. Hector screamed like a beast tumbling over a cliff. He fell to his knees and Sebastien walked around to face him. He kneeled down and held Hector’s chin in hand. He looked straight into the man’s eyes, and then leaned forward as if to kiss him. When he pulled back, Hector had no nose. Sebastien spit something into the yucca plants that lined the courtyard. He stood up and Hector fell over, now screaming without sound. Sebastien walked over to the wall that he’d come over, reached up, and pulled down a smoldering thing he slung over his shoulder, sending black ashes lighter than air up toward me. He threw the thing down in front of Hector, and I recognized it as my saddlebag.
The fire. It was in the fire
. I nearly slipped from the roof, but held on to the near chimney. Sebastien crouched in front of Hector, who had swallowed some of his pain and had quit screaming. Sebastien asked him something, and Hector nodded. Sebastien stood up, looked around at the roofs until he saw me. He called up to me in a voice that was deep and full of gravel, a voice I didn’t recognize. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned back to Hector.

The Hood book had been in that saddlebag.

Sebastien lifted Hector from the ground and made him kneel. He ran the knife across the top of his forehead, sending blood spilling down Hector’s face, and prepared to peel the scalp back. Then the figure in the window called out.

“That’s enough, Sebastien. Bring him in. I have a friend of yours up here who would like to say hello before he dies.”

“I’ve got no friends, monsieur.” Not startled at all.

“Bring him up here.” Calm and cold.

Sebastien glanced quickly at me and then, probably realizing he was giving me away, looked up all the way at the sky and rolled his eyes dramatically, covering for me. He hauled Hector up under his shoulders and dragged him up the back steps and through the door, disappearing into the dark house.

In the courtyard my saddlebag still smoldered.
The book. The book.

I took hold of the rope around the chimney and swung down and into the open window Rintrah had used. I walked through the room, which was a woman’s dressing chamber, and into the thick carpeted hallway. I walked down toward the light, to my reckoning. I had failed. I pulled the pistol out and held it in front of me as if it could light my way.

They were in Beauregard’s library. Through a crack in the door that led onto the hallway—there were three doors that opened into the room, which was at the heart of the house—I saw a thin, slight, black-eyed man dusting ash from his crisp-pressed sleeve before tossing the last sheets of a pile of paper into the fireplace. In his other hand he held a pearl-handled revolver pointed at Rintrah, who slumped in one of Beauregard’s horsehair chairs, angry and humiliated. I recognized the paper the man tossed into the fire. It was the scrap paper I’d used to write my own words down. The last of Anna Marie’s ledger books turned orange and green and blue in the fire. Rintrah watched it, his face sagged with sadness and horror.

I could see the door from the back hallway across the room, and as I watched it was flung open and Hector flopped into the room at the prissy man’s feet. He was barely conscious, and he looked up at his master as if he wished to be put down.

“The blood on the rug will cost you, Sebastien!” the man called out. “And when I tell General Beauregard who perpetrated this atrocity, he will have your head.”

He paused, listened.

“Who else is out there? Is the idiot Griffin out there? Are you listening, idiot Griffin? Would you like to know why I have kept your little friend alive? This abomination, this freak? Hmmm?”

He kicked Rintrah in the stomach and I heard the
uumph
as the air went out of Rintrah. He slowly brought his eyes back to his attacker, looking up through his hooded eyelids.

“My name is Jean Dauphin, and this man tried to steal from me. Sebastien! Do you mourn the death of the priest, Father Michel? This is the man responsible. Listen to me, Sebastien. This is the man who bribed the blind boys at my lottery. My. Lottery. This is the man who got a priest, peace be upon him, to play his role in the swindle, the role that got him killed. This is the man, Sebastien, not me.”

Then I saw it, for the first time. The lottery man, Monsieur Dauphin, who had the gall to try to enlist Hood in the lottery racket, who had turned Generals Beauregard and Early into his dancing puppets, this man of great wealth and resource was
scared
. His hand shook, his eyes swung from door to door to door, waiting for them to open again. Hector groveled at his feet and he did not notice.

“Should I have let them steal three hundred thousand dollars from me, Sebastien? Would that have been right? Is it my fault that this dwarf thought that there would be honor among the accursed, and that the blind boys would have loyalty to a half-man? They sold him out! They came and told me about the fix just as soon as he arranged it. He should have known better! Sebastien!”

I was pushing the door open then, ready to fire my pistol, when a set of big hands wrapped themselves around my neck and lifted me off the ground. Beauregard’s big butler, the one who had chased me out the last time I was in the house. He smashed my head against the wall in the dark, and I saw bright lights on the inside of my eyelids. He laughed a big belly laugh and called out, “I’ve got that killer right here, he ain’t nothing much, sir,” he called out. “He look familiar.”

“Good, good!” I could hear the sound of relief in Dauphin’s voice.

I was tossed to the ground and I was preparing to be beaten when I heard a great gurgling, and then the butler fell on me. Something hot and wet ran over my chest where his head lay. A hand helped me up. I couldn’t see. I leaned against the wall and felt Sebastien’s dry hands against my cheek.

“More to do,
mon frère
. Come on.”

He went through the door first, and I followed. Dauphin tried to turn and fire but Sebastien was on him quick and took the pistol right out of his hand and whipped him with it. Dauphin sat down in Beauregard’s chair with a thump, dazed. Sebastien turned the pistol on Dauphin and pulled a second from his pocket. This one he turned on Rintrah, who had leaped from his seat with a big smile on his face.

“Sit back down, little man.”

“What is this?” Rintrah shouted, his face red and puffing.

“Sit. Down.”

Rintrah sat. Sebastien turned to me.

“Put your pistol on the desk there, next to the dwarf’s.”

I’d forgotten I even had it. I was dazed, I was happy to give over control to someone else. I put the pistol on the desk.

“You
are
an idiot, Griffin,” Rintrah muttered.