Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (15 page)

He slipped his rosary from his pocket, rested his forearms on the back of the pew ahead of him to take the weight from his aching shoulders, and fingered the blue glass beads. In his dreams last night he had found the chicken foot on his bed again, but when he'd tried to pick it up it had turned to a rotted thing, like decomposed meat, in his hand. On the wall over the head of his bed, where in the waking world a crucifix hung, he'd seen nailed the dried snake that was tacked to the wall in Olympe's parlor, a rolled-up slip of paper in its mouth; he had known that that paper bore his name. At the shutters he'd heard the dead white thing from the cipriere pat and rattle the hinges and the latch, whispering to be let in.

“Do you remember the First Commandment?” asked the priest softly, when January confessed to the sin of doubt. By his voice January knew it was Pere Eugenius, a young Spaniard new to the parish, to whom he always confessed if he could. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. You felt fear, you said. . . . Of course you felt fear, for you were taught to fear these things as a child. God understands what fear is. When a gun goes off near your head, you duck-of course, you duck. But a soldier then gets back up and goes on doing his duty.

“Satan will use your fear, my son. He'll use it to get you to do things that look harmless-and they may be harmless. But then he'll ask you to do similar things, things that look the same, that are evil, and against the will of God. When you put your faith in something other than God, you damage your faith. Light a candle for yourself and pray to have your faith made stronger, that you may trust in the armor of God.”

After hearing Mass and taking Communion, January lit a candle, not only for himself but for Olympe as well. Coming out of the Cathedral he thought he saw Mamzelle Marie, kneeling before the statue of the Virgin, telling over the beads of her rosary, the halo of votive lights outlining the seven points of her tignon with gold.

When January reached home his mother looked up from her pain perdu and coffee and said, “Remember that your month's money is due Tuesday, Benjamin. These came for you.” She held out to him two folded sheets of paper, the grimier of them simply creased into quarters, the other sealed the old way with three neat chunks of crimson wax and addressed to “Benjamin January, fmc.” Unfolding it, he read,

Mr. Janvier,

It cheers me considerably to realize there are still men in the world who understand that more information widens the possibility of arriving at a correct conclusion, despite whatever distaste they may feel for some of that information, or some of the people who may impart it. Please consider my time at your disposal this afternoon between luncheon and dinner. I very much look forward to the opportunity to do whatever I can to assist my poor nephew's widow, and your unfortunate sister, in clearing their characters and freeing themselves from this appalling difficulty.

Most sincerely, Mathurin Jumon

The other was scrawled in Shaw's erratic hand.

Myst

Maistr

Mr. January---

We found a body.

“Nasty varmints, crawdads.” Abishag Shaw spit tobacco onto the floor of the smaller of Charity Hospital's two surgical theaters, and produced a brass knuckle-duster from the pocket of his coat to prop open a copy of Orfilia's Treatise on Poisons on a lectern dragged in from a classroom next door. “Had one for supper t'other night musta been five inches long.”

“Do you think Madame Genevieve will be able to identify him?” January tied a vinegar-soaked rag around his mouth and nose, and blinked a little in the fumes of it as he considered the bloated, ghastly thing that Shaw's men had fished up out of Bayou Sauvage early that morning.

“I ain't got the smallest doubt she will, and give us a good three-hanky weep for our trouble. Iff'n she don't bury someone she won't have no claim on the money, now, will she?” Shaw blew his entire chew into the sandbox and pulled up the rag that had been around his own neck-the corpse had been in the water five or six days.

“You familiar with this German feller's test for arsenic?”

“I've heard of it.” January checked off with his eye the apparatus spread over the theater's smaller table: carboys of acid and distilled water, a small alembic, and assorted other paraphernalia essential to the production of sulfuretted hydrogen gas. A brazier of coals contributed its heat to the already suffocating ambience of the room. Rose, he reflected, would be fascinated, as she was by anything chemical. “It sounds perfectly straightforward.”

He picked up a scalpel and advanced on the corpse, already deeply regretting Bella's pain perdu.

“You know this isn't going to tell us much,” he gasped, as he and Shaw retreated to the window from the rolling surge of gases when the gut was punctured. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day in the cemetery during the cholera? . . . “There are vegetable poisons that could have produce almost the same symptoms as arsenic but won't show up on a test. Indian tobacco, or Christmas rose-Mamzelle Marie or any root doctor in town could tell you a dozen.”

“Includin' your sister.” Above the edge of the dripping rag, Shaw's gray eyes had a lazy sharpness, not surprised, but interested in how much he knew. “And they could tell you, Maestro. All I or any of the Guards would get is just I don't know nuthin'about no poisons. And I did think of that. But if we do find arsenic in this poor jasper's tripes it might tell us somethin', too. That it?”

“That's it.” January laid the detached stomach on the table, and began to slice it into sections, trying hard not to breathe.

“What do we do now?”

January nodded at the vessel of distilled water. “Make soup.”

“Frankly,” Shaw went on, as they began the tedious process of boiling and filtering, “I don't think our little friend here is any more Isaak Jumon than you are. He seems to been in the bayou the right amount of time-five, six days-but his arms and hands is chewed so bad it's hard to tell iff'n he was a sculptor; hell, it's only his hair tells us for sure he was even a man of color. All he had on was them britches and they could be a wheelwright's or a sculptor's or a fieldhand's. And even allowing for the way a body's muscles stretch when they been soaked that long, I'd say he's too tall. But we'll see what Miz Jumon says.”

What Genevieve Jumon said, dropping her reticule and fan and clasping her free hand to her face to join the one already holding a vinegar-soaked rag, was, “Oh, Isaak! Oh, my son!” She stood in the theater's doorway, separated from the table by easily twenty feet of student benches. “Dear God, what has that vile woman done!” Then she swayed, and staggered back into the arms of Hubert Granville.

Shaw, who was in the midst of adjusting a retort to pipe the sulfuretted hydrogen gas through the filtered solution, wiped a hand on his shirt and inquired mildly, “Do you identify this man as your son, Isaak Jumon?”

Antoine, almost concealed behind Granville's greencoated bulk, gulped and retreated into the corridor. “Yes!” Madame Jumon pressed a hand-carefully, as her black kid glove was now soaked with vinegar-to her forehead, leaving a long nigrous smear. “Oh, God, my son!”

“You're sure?” Shaw left the solution to bubble odoriferously and picked his way toward them. “You might want to come a little closer for a better squint. . . .”

“You leave her alone!” gasped Granville, as Madame Jumon shrank from the policeman's sticky grasp.

“I would know my son anywhere, M'sieu,” she retorted in a strangled voice. “There is no need to go closer.”

January, who had been measuring every limb and surface of the corpse and making notes, slipped past then into the corridor; with his face covered, in his rough trou sets and calico shirt, they gave him barely a glance Assuming him, probably, to be one of the hospital servants.

Granville, he thought. Granville offering Madam Jumon his arm, to escort her up Rue Royale. Granville' address on the advertisement . . .

Granville saying something at the St. Margaret Society Ball about trying to raise money . . .

Antoine was seated, trembling, on a bench in th hall. On a Sunday morning this part of the building wa relatively deserted, save for a couple of orderlies omi nously making up one of the classrooms into an emer gency ward. Light through an open doorway, and fron the window at the end of the hall, twinkled on the boy' cut-jet coat buttons and shone dimly through the ton scarf of mourning crepe hanging from the back of his high-crowned hat.

He was weeping.

January sat beside him, very quietly, kneading some of the tension from those thin shoulders. “It's all right son,” he said. “It's all right. No, keep your head down a spell, till you feel better.” He spoke in the roughest bastard Creole that he could, the language of the slaves, and didn't lower the rag mask from his face. In any case Antoine didn't look up.

Behind them in the operating theater he could diml hear the run of Shaw's voice, and Genevieve Jumon's“Yes, of course, he had a signet ring, gold, given him by his father when he turned seventeen. . . .”

And worthless as an identifying mark, reflected January. If the ring hadn't slipped off after prolonged immersion it could be said to have been taken off before the body went into the water.

“It sure good of Michie Granville to look after your mama that way,” he said to Antoine after a time. “Must be a terrible shock for her.”

Antoine sighed, and January saw again the look in Madame Genevieve's scornful, suspicious eyes. “I'm sorry,” whispered the boy wretchedly. “Yes, I'm glad he's there for her. I wish I could . . .” His voice trailed off, and the small black-gloved hands trembled.

“He a family friend I guess?”

“He looks after Mama's investments.” There was a wistful note in Antoine's voice. “He's clever with investments.”

And at seventeen, thought January, Antoine Jumon knew already that he would never be anything but what he was: clerk, failed artist, addict. Forever a disappointment to the mother who regarded him with such contempt. He wondered suddenly if that was what had set Hannibal's feet on the road that had brought him up penniless in New Orleans, alone and ill, an Oxford-educated opium addict with a hundred-guinea violin: the desire not to have those who expected better of him see him as he knew he was.

“Antoine.” Madame Genevieve was standing in the theater door.

Antoine got quickly to his feet and staggered. January caught his elbow without rising-the stab of pain through his back as he raised his arm above shoulder level was like being knifed, but he didn't dare let her notice his height. The mask still covered his face and the hall was dim; he said, “He still a li'l woozy, M'am. I'd a gone put cold water on the back of his neck but I di'n't want to leave him.”

“Thank you.” She made her face smile like a woman operating a puppet made from a folded napkin, and at once turned her attention to trying to see, in the gloom, if the pupils of her son's eyes looked as they should.

“Antoine, I expect you to be of support to your mother through the funeral.”

Hubert Granville emerged from the theater behind her, and January remained seated as the three of them walked away along the corridor, silhouetted against the wan glare from the doorways along the route: the man's heavy square solidity, the rich curves of the woman, and the boy trailing behind, weedy and defeated in his tight-waisted coat and extravagant, veiled hat.

Redolent of old blood, tobacco, vinegar, rotten eggs, and sweat, Lieutenant Shaw stepped into the hall to watch them go.

“You didn't happen to ask,” inquired January softly, “where Madame Genevieve was the night her son died, did you?”

“Matter of fact, Maestro, I did.” Shaw pulled down his rag mask and began to fish through his pockets for his twist of tobacco. His brownish hair dripped with sweat. “And I wrote the Surete in Paris askin' if this Noemie Jumon was still where she was when she wrote tryin' to get her share of her husband's will, not that that did her a lick of good. And I been checkin' the passenger lists of ships from France, on the just-in-case. But M'am Genevieve was at a tea squall with her pal that night: a woman name of Bernadette Metoyer, who runs a chocolate shop in the Place d'Armes.”

And who at one time January knew from his mother-had been Hubert Granville's mistress.

“I was horrified to learn of Isaak's death.” Mathurin Jumon's harsh, handsome face bore the marks of dissipation; puffiness under the eyes that spoke of late nights and bad sleep; the fine-broken veins that characterized a drinker's nose; and a pallid, unhealthy complexion. The blue-gray eyes were bright and intelligent in their discolored and wrinkled lids, and the late-afternoon light made January slightly embarrassed by his too-ready subscription to Antoine's suspicion of his uncle.

Just as well, he thought, folding his hands before him and lowering his eyes respectfully to the woven straw mats of the office floor, that Creoles as a rule didn't offer visitors of color any kind of refreshment. Hesitation about taking it would look bad. A polite request to test the hypothetical lemonade on the nearest stray dog would look worse.

The Rose and Metzger tests on the stomach of Shaw's victim had yielded no sign of arsenic. Not enough, January knew, to clear Olympe of administering poison of some kind-I have been poisoned, Isaak had said, dying. Not, I have been dosed with arsenic. And it could, of course, always be argued that the body wasn't even Isaak's, though January looked forward with morbid amusement to Genevieve Jumon's efforts to have it both ways in court.

But it was something. A first-rate lawyer could possibly use it to confuse the jury enough to get both women off: If, thought January, Olympe were not a voodoo. If the jury were educated enough to understand the distinction-which at this time of the year was a dangerous assumption to trust. And January shuddered at the thought of having no better weapon than obfuscation to defend his sister's life.

Isaak Jumon was dead. Celie Jumon had bought something from Olympe, poisoner and voodooienne. That might be all the jury would hear.

“When they told me he had been poisoned, and that Celie of all people was accused . . .”