Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (10 page)

It was nearly five in the morning when January was conducted by a guardsman down the rear stairway—out of consideration to those still in the gambling rooms— and into Froissart's office.

The place smelled overwhelmingly of burnt tallow and expectorated tobacco. “I'd have started with the mothers, myself,” sighed Lt. Shaw, pinching off the long brownish winding sheet from one of the branch of kitchen candles guttering on the desk. In his shirtsleeves the resemblance to a poorly made scarecrow was increased, his leather galluses cutting across the cheap calico of his shirt like wheel ruts, his long arms hanging knobby and cat scratched out of the rolled-up sleeves. Windrows of yellow paper heaped the desk's surface, and a smaller pile on the side table next to a graceful Empire chair marked where the clerk had sat. January wondered how accurate the notes on the costumes were.

He was a little surprised when Shaw motioned him to a chair. Most Americans—in fact most whites—would have let a man of color stand.

“You're right about that, sir,” he said. “They're the ones who would have seen anything worth seeing.”

Coffee cups stood in a neat cluster in one corner of the desk—presumably brought in by the men when they were questioned. Even at this hour, voices clamored drunkenly in the street, though the general tenor had lowered to a masculine bass. The brass band, wherever it was, was still going strong, on its fifth or sixth iteration of the same ten tunes. On the way from the back stairs to the office January had heard the noise from the gambling rooms, as strong now as it had been at seven-thirty the previous evening.

“Now, there's a fact.” Shaw stretched his long arms, uncricking his back in a series of audible pops. “I sure wouldn't want to go bargainin' with one of them old bissoms, and I don't care what her daughter looked like. I seen warmer Christian charity at Maspero's Slave Exchange than I seen in the eyes of that harpy in yellow. . . . Leastwise this way the daughter gets the good of it, and not some rich man who's got a plantation already. You know Miss Crozat?”

“By reputation,” said January. “I met her once or twice when she was little, but her mama kept her pretty close. She was only seven when I left for Paris in 1817, and she wasn't a student of mine. I taught piano back then, too,” he explained. “I expect I'd have met her sooner or later, now I'm back. Her mother and mine are friends.”

“But your sister says you say you talked to her tonight.”

January nodded. “I'd been charged by a friend to arrange a meeting with her at my mother's house, tomorrow afternoon . . . this afternoon. I haven't had time to talk to my mother about it yet. I've lived with my mother since I came back from Paris in November. It's on Rue Burgundy.”

Shaw made a note. “Any idea what the meetin' was about? And could I get the name of your friend?”

“I have no idea about the meeting. If it's all the same to you . . . sir,” he remembered to add, “. . . I'd rather keep my friend's name out of this. The message was given in confidence.”

It was his experience that white men frequently expected blacks or colored to do things as a matter of course that would have been a dueling matter for a white, but Shaw only nodded. The rain-colored eyes, lazy and set very deep, rested thoughtfully on him for a time, shadowed in the rusty glare that fell through the fanlight, as Madame Trepagier's had been shadowed. “Fair enough for now. I might have to ask you again later, if'n it looks like it has some bearin' on who took the girl's life. Tell me about your talk with her.”

“It wasn't much of a talk,” said January slowly, sifting, picking through his recollections, trying to excise everything that would indicate that the one who sent the message was white, Creole, a woman, a widow . . . connected to Angelique . . . present in the building ...

With his dirty, dead-leaf hair and lantern-jawed face, Abishag Shaw gave the impression of an upriver hayseed recendy escaped from a plow tail, but in those sleepy gray eyes January could glimpse a woodsman's cold intelligence. This man was an American and held power, for all his ungrammatical filthiness. As Froissart had said, there was a world of matters the Americans did not understand, and chief among them the worlds of difference that separated colored society from the African blacks.

“She refused to meet with my friend. She said she'd received notes before from . . . my friend, that she had nothing to say to ... them.” He changed the last word quickly from her, but had the strong suspicion that Shaw guessed anyway. “She said her father was an important man, and that my friend had best not try any . . . little tricks.”

“What kind o' little tricks?” asked Shaw mildly. “You mean like brick dust on the back step? Or accusin' her of being uppity an' gettin' her thrashed at the jail-house?”

“One or the other,” said January, wondering if he'd let the answer go at that.

Shaw nodded again. “She say anythin' to you? About you?”

Genuinely startled, January said, “No. Not that I remember.”

“Insult you? Make you mad? Phlosine' . . .” He checked a note. “Gal named Phlosine Seurat says she heard the door slam.”

“It was Galen Peralta who slammed the door,” said January. “He came in—”

“Galen Peralta? Xavier Peralta's boy? One she had the tiff with earlier?” Shaw sat up and took his boots off the desk, and spat in the general direction of the office sandbox.

January regarded him with reciprocal surprise. “Didn't anyone else tell you?”

The policeman shook his head. “When was this? Last anybody saw of the boy was when he tore that fairy wing o' hers in the lobby, an' she went flouncin' off into that little parlor in a snit. Last anybody saw o' her, for that matter. This Seurat gal—an' the two or three others who was up in the upstairs lobby—say the boy stormed off down the stairs, and somebody says they seen him in the court, but they don't remember if that was before or after or when.”

“There's a way in from the court to the passage outside this office,” said January. “He could have changed his mind, had what they call 1'esprit d'escalier ...”

“Bad case of the I-shoulda-said,” agreed Shaw mildly, sitting back again. Outside, men's voices rose in furious altercation; there was the monumental thud of a body hitting the wall that made the building shake. “I dunno how many sweethearts come to grief from one or the other of 'em comin' up with just the right coup de grace halfway down the front walk. Go on.”

“If he came up the back stairs nobody in the lobby downstairs, or upstairs, would have seen him. Because he did come in, as I think she knew he would. She thought I was him, when I first came into the room, before she turned around, and she had her lines all ready for him. The boy had a temper. And there isn't a seventeen-year-old in the world with the sense to just walk away.”

“God knows I didn't,” said Shaw, getting up and stretching his back. “Near got me killed half a dozen times, when I came up with just the right thing to say to my pa when he was likkered. And you left then?”

January nodded. “Yes, sir. There was no reason for me to stay, and the boy would have ordered me out in any case. My sister and Marie-Anne Pellicot were hunting for Mademoiselle Crozat for the rest of the night. Galen's father, too. I thought at the time the two of them went off somewhere to have their fight in more privacy, but it may be that he left fairly soon—during the jig and reel we started up to distract everyone from Bouille and Granger—and that she was still in the room fixing her wing when the murderer came on her.”

The colorless eyebrows quirked. “Now, where you get that from?”

“Here.” January got to his feet, Shaw following in his wake. They climbed the dark of the back stairs, turned right at the top, to where a sleepy constable still guarded the parlor door. A cup and a half-eaten pastry lay on the floor beside his chair. He got to his feet and saluted.

“We got everything up off that rug, Mr. Shaw. The mother took the girl away, like you said she could.”

“And no sign of them geegaws that's missin'?”

“No, sir.” The man unlocked the door.

The candles were guttering in here, too. The windows had been shut, and the room had a crumpled look and smelled of smoke and death. The brass band outside had silenced itself, and the voices of the few passersby rang loud.

January crossed at once to the stiffened gauze wings, still leaning where Dominique had propped them, against the armoire that had concealed Angelique's body. He reached down, very carefully, and touched the needle, hanging by the end of the thread. “Mostly if a woman stops sewing she'll stick the needle into the fabric to keep the thread from pulling free,” he said. “Few things drive a woman crazier than having to rethread a needle when she hasn't planned on it. I don't know why this is.”

Shaw's ugly face cracked into a smile again. “Now, there's a man been married.” He looked around for someplace to spit, found no spittoon, and opened the window and shutter a crack to spit out across the balcony. January hoped Cardinal Richelieu was on the street beneath.

While Shaw was so engaged, January glanced down at the table, where the candles had been pushed aside around the top of a cardboard dress box. January lifted the box gently and angled it to the light, studying the dozen different colors of ribbon laid out in it, the innumerable tag ends of thread; two needles and fourteen pins; the peacock eye and the pearls and a large number of shreds of dyed and undyed ostrich plume. A ball of swansdown shreds the size of a sheep's stomach. Lace snagged from someone's petticoat.

Haifa
dozen hooks and eyes. Somebody's corset lace. The servants of both ballroom and theater would be picking up pounds of this kind of trash all morning.

From the midst of it he picked a leaf of swamp laurel. “The Roman in the golden armor,” he said. “Jenkins, I think Granger said his name was. He was wreathed for victory.”

“You got quite an eye for furbelows.” Shaw strolled back, hands in pockets, as if only such bracing kept his gawky body upright. “That was smart, 'bout the costumes.”

“My wife was a dressmaker.” January turned the bits of thread, pearl, ribbon in his kid-gloved fingers. There were two ways a man could have said what Shaw did, even as there were two ways he could have earlier remarked on Minou, Beautiful gal. “There never was a time when I wasn't surrounded by ribbons and lace and watching her match them up into some of the prettiest gowns you ever saw.”

He smiled, remembering. “There was a lady—some baron's wife—who drove her crazy, asking for more of this and more of that and not offering to pay a sou for it. Ayasha put up with this till this old cat started coming on to her about how a Christian woman would have thrown it in as lagniappe. Then she just changed the color of the ribbons on the corsage—and mind you, that color was all the crack that year, and this old harpy was delighted with the change—and I've never seen one woman get so ugly so fast.”

He shook his head, and saw Shaw's gray eyes on him again, as if hearing the pain that lurked under the joy of any memory of her.

“Your wife was an Arab?”

“Moroccan—Berber,” said January. “But a Christian, though I don't know how much of any of it she believed. She died last summer.”

“The cholera?”

He nodded and picked up a pink velvet rose that had to have come from Dominique's mask, tiny in his huge hands. “She would have been able to tell you every person who'd been in this room from these bits. My sister can probably tell you most of them.”

“Don't mean whoever done it leaked beads and ribbons here to be obligin',” remarked Shaw. “If that Peralta boy was in plain evenin' dress, less'n she tore off a button there'd be nuthin' to show. Now that Jenkins . . .”

“He was looking for her,” said January. “Prowling in and out of the ballroom and the lobby. He could have come in here.”

“You hear this tiff of theirs? In the lobby?”

“Everybody did. She flirted with Jenkins. From what I hear, she flirted with everybody, or at least everybody who had money.”

“Even though Peralta's daddy's been . . . What? Buyin' her for his son?”

“Not buying her” said January, though he could tell from Shaw's voice that the policeman knew the placees were technically free. “Bargaining to buy her contract. That way the boy doesn't get skinned out of his eyeteeth, and the girl doesn't have to look like a harpy in front of her protector—and her mother can come right out and say, 'I want to make sure you don't marry some Creole girl and leave my child penniless with your baby,' where the girl can't. It's all arranged beforehand. Signed and sealed, no questions.”

Shaw considered the matter, turning the leaf of swamp laurel in his hand. “Smart dealin',” he said. “What kid's gonna pick himself even a half decent girl on his first try? When I think about the first girl I ever fell in love with—Lordy!” He shook his head. “You think Miss Crozat was flirtin' with the Noblest Roman of 'em All to run up her price?”

“If she was, it was working. The boy was wild when he came into the room. But whether an American would have arrived at the same arrangement as a Frenchman is anybody's guess.”

Shaw regarded him for a moment from narrowed eyes, as if weighing this criticism of the habit American planters had of simply buying a good-looking slave woman and taking her whether she would or no. But he only stepped to the window and spat again.

January followed him to the lobby, where Hannibal Sefton slept curled on a sofa under the flicker of the gaslights while two servants picked up stray champagne cups and swept beads and silk flowers, cigar butts and ribbons, from the brightly colored rugs. The ballroom gaped dim and silent to their right. When they descended the main stair, Shaw sliding snakelike into his weary old green coat, even the gambling rooms behind their shut doors were growing quiet.

A constable met them in the downstairs lobby, where a broad hall led to the silent dark of the court. The air smelled of rain and mud. Dawn light was bleeding through the half-open doors.

“We've searched the building and the attics, sir,” said the man, saluting. “Nothing.”

“Thank you kindly, Calvert.” He pronounced it as the French did. Someone—probably Romulus Valle— had placed January's hat and music satchel on a console in the lobby. January and Shaw walked out into the courtyard together, Shaw turning back to crane his neck and look up at the Salle d'Orleans, rising above them in a wall of pale yellow and olive green.