Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard (20 page)

“She didn't even take off her hat.” The maid chuckled. “And my, what a hat! Good thing M'am Geneviève didn't meet no Guards, or she'd 'a been arrested sure, for wearing such a hat! With a crown this high, and roses, and lace off the back of it. . . . She hadn't hardly come through the door when a carriage comes up in the street, and she gives everybody a kiss and says, Now, remember I was here all night! And off she goes with Michie Granville that runs the Bank of Louisiana!”

“Monsieur Granville!” January managed to look both startled and hugely entertained. “Why, M'sieu le Baron took dinner with him and his wife the other day. He said a more united couple would be difficult to find.”

“Oh, he's quite the man.” Lury twinkled in a way that made January wonder exactly how far afield the banker's fancies had taken him. “He kept company with Mamzelle Bernadette, back when he was President of the Union Bank, and with her sister Blanche after Blanche parted company with Michie Lisle. He has a little house out on that new canal, on Constitution Place, that his wife doesn't know about. That's where I think they went, Warn Geneviève and Michie Granville.” And she simpered, pleased with herself.

Walking back to his mother's house through the slanting rain, January mentally calculated where the new development had gone in along Florida Walk last year. Constitution Place, if he remembered correctly, lay just over a mile from the Jumon town house on Rue St. Louis. The rain grew heavier. Thunder growled over the river. As he dodged along the banquette from one gallery overhang to the next, January found himself glancing back over his shoulder or around him at the passways and carriageways between the houses on Rue Burgundy, wondering which of them concealed a man with a rifle. Which of those empty houses, shuttered tight now while their owners were at the lake, could be used for an ambush? The trappers who hunted in the Mexican Territories could shoot the head off a squirrel at a hundred yards: his aching shoulders cringed under the wet corduroy and he found himself stopping and starting, hurrying and slowing, as if that would somehow save him.

Times were slow. Tomorrow would be the Culver girls' last lesson for the summer, before the family went hack to their native Philadelphia to avoid the fever. In a way he was glad-he felt safer within the French town-but he knew already his mother was not going to abate one dime of the rent she charged him to live in the room he'd occupied as a boy. If she wasn't demanding an extra dollar a week toward household provisions while she herself was enjoying lakefront breezes in Milneburgh, he knew it would cost him nearly that to feed himself. His remaining savings were slender. That morning's breakfast at Dominique's had been uncomfortably close to a cadge, and his skin crawled with embarrassment at the thought.

In ordinary circumstances, after the last engagement of the social season-Councilman Soames's Fourth of July Ball in his lakefront summer house-January would have sought what meager employment was offered by the gambling halls, or played an occasional danceable out at the Milneburgh hotels.

But playing in a gambling hall he would be, for all intents and purposes, alone, without backup or defense. And obliged to remain where anyone could see him and come at him, through gruelingly long evening shifts.

And it was a long way back from the lake, once the steam-train ceased running at midnight.

“Honestly, Ben, I knew there would be trouble if you took up the cause of that voodooienne,” his mother greeted him as he came through the passway at the side of the house and emerged into the yard. That, too, was the result of long childhood training-neither he nor Olympe had ever been permitted to enter the house from the street. “The whole affair has got Bella in such a state she burned the coffee and scorched the back of one of my petticoats.”

January stepped through the French doors into the dining room, shed his coat and slapped the water out of his cap. Three crates stood along the wall, among neat piles of old newspapers. His mother, who loudly deplored Dominique's habit of taking everything that might possibly add to her comfort or beautiful appearance when she traveled, would not dream of spending three months without her own coffee set, veilleuse, writing equipment, tea service, wineglasses, sewing box, and music box; her favorite trinkets and backgammon set; not to speak of the crimping-irons, gauffering irons, and other equipment Bella had to bring to care for her mistress's extensive wardrobe. Though Livia owned a cottage on the lakefront, she rented it out every year to a white sugar broker and his family and stayed in two lovely rooms of the small boarding hotel in which she owned a halfinterest: she was currently, January knew, negotiating to buy another cottage.

January sighed and made a mental note to confine Les Mesdames-dozing on top of the crates-to the spare room that evening lest the cats disappear when it came time to fetch out their wicker travel boxes. He opened his mouth to say, “That voodooienne is your daughter,” but didn't; “I'm sorry, Martian. Bella will get over it when you get out to the lake, you know, and by the time you return, this will all be taken care of.”

Livia Levesque glanced sidelong at him, as if to ask how he could remain so cavalier in the face of burnt coffee, and for a moment her eyes were exactly like Olympe's. Then she sniffed and turned away. “Remember to air out all the rooms every day,” she said. “The front steps will need to be cleaned as well. You know how filthy the air is, with the steamboats making all their soot and the rain turning it to mud. I truly don't know what this city is coming to. And make sure the gutter in front of the house stays cleared out. Those people the city hires haven't done their job in months. Send me your month's money care of the Hotel Villefranche, as usual. I'll take July's tomorrow morning before I leave.”

It would leave him without a picayune-and he knew already she'd let the stores of food run down because she was leaving-but there was a tone in her voice that would not even hear, Can't you let it go for a week?

“I'll give it to you now.”

“No, tomorrow will do.”

Returning to the garçonnière, he checked the room carefully for further signs of interference; and though he found none, he could not rid himself of the thought that there was some evil there somewhere: the feathers of his pillow twisted into the shape of a rooster or a dog, or a ball of black wax and turpentine secreted under the floor. A white man would hire a killer, he thought. Maybe even hire a voodoo for that first warning. But the second tricken bag-and the sense that there were others, secret words of death-pointed to color.

Mosquitoes whined in the corners of the ceiling, but such was the curdled heat that he couldn't bear to close up the shutters. He spread out the mosquito-bar around the bed, took his candle and checked the inside thoroughly for chance invaders. Bringing several candles in under the bar-though it was still twilight outside, in the room it was now quite dark-he settled down with Wolf's Prolegotnena in Homerum. A decent antidote, he thought, to the eerie shadows of secrets and half-guessed at fears.

When he crossed through the rain to the house again for supper he found a letter by his plate, folded in the old-fashioned way and sealed. “That came for you this morning,” said his mother, without glancing up from her perusal of the Louisiana Gazette. The seal was broken. It crossed January's mind for he knew not what reason to wonder if Madame Cordelia Jumon read her son's letters. He unfolded the paper, though he recognized the Italianate beauty of the handwriting on the address.

I have made contact with Madame Célie Jumon. She and I will meet you at Monsieur Nogent's on Wednesday at noon.

Rose

“I hope you don't think I'll be of any use to you if your mother's place is stormed by armed bravos.” Hannibal looked vaguely around the attic, coughed, and picked up the nearest bottle-they dotted every horizontal surface, in various stages of depletion. “Persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade.” He coughed again, and sat down on the bed, while January found the fiddle case, wrapped the time-stained and ancient instrument in its usual swaddling of half a dozen frayed silk scarves, and began to assemble from the various corners of the long, mildew-smelling space some books, shaving tackle, and a couple of threadbare linen shirts. “Still, what stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?”

“At the moment you're in'betrer fighting shape than I am,” January replied. Through the open door drifted men's shouts, cursing and laying wagers, and beneath them the savage snarling of dogs. “And it's mostly your presence I need, so there'll be less chance of me being taken unawares.”

Hannibal drained the bottle and set it with great care back on the rafter from which he'd taken it. “The watchdog's voice that bayed the whisp'ring wind, ” he quoted, “And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind-and you'll be getting both together for the same price.”

There was tired bitterness in his voice, to which January had no reply. With his mother's departure for Milneburgh that morning he had betaken himself immediately and by the most circuitous possible route to Perdido Street, to inquire of Hannibal if he'd like to spend the summer in Bella's room instead of in the attic of Kentucky Williams's saloon. The fiddler's breathing was labored, and two or three plates of congris and grits, uneaten but carefully covered to thwart the local rodent population, attested to a resurgence of his illness.

“You'll be all right,” said January finally, and Hannibal turned, drug-bright eyes glittering.

“It's kind of you to lie to me,” he said, “but in point of fact I am not going to be all right. I am going to die. If not of this bout, of the next, or the next. That's why I left Dublin, and that's why I came here. I'll try not to be a burden to you but I undoubtedly will be; you could more profitably purchase a watchdog for fifty cents.” He was trembling, his face ghost-white, like a skull in the dark straggling frame of his hair, and there was anger and a savage contempt in every tone and word. He must have heard it, for he looked away, biting his lip. January saw the cuffs of his sleeve were spattered with blood.

“I know I could.” He walked over and laid a hand on the fiddler's shoulder. “But at the moment I don't have fifty cents.” And he felt the stabbing bones under the patched linen shake suddenly with a breath of wry laughter.

“Don't look at me to loan it to you.” Hannibal stood, steadying himself on his friend's arm, and checked the books January had boxed up. “That should do- Athene has more of them over at her place.” Athene was his name, in jest, for Rose Vitrac. “You might consider finding Mr. Nash's employer and offering to murder yourself for two hundred dollars-I gather that was the fee agreed upon. Can you carry those? Not that I'll be able to help you in that, either. . . .”

“Two hundred?” remarked January, as they descended the outside stair. Coming into the open made him flinch, and brought his breath quick with panic, a situation not improved by the presence of some fifty men in the muddy yard behind the saloon, watching a dogfight. “I'm flattered.”

The smaller of the two dogs, a lean yellow wolfish animal, had been wounded badly, bleeding and snarling as it tried to defend itself against a heavy-boned brindle mastiff with the torn ears and scarred face of a longtime champion. The stink of blood mixed with that of churned mud, spit tobacco, and piss: slouch-hatted gambling men, keelboat ruffians in greasy plaid shirts, filibusters with knives at their belts and in their boots. January glimpsed the blue boiled wool of a trade-goods shirt and shuddered, but the man wearing it, although a trapper, was short and dark in buckskin leggins; kneeling on the edge of the crowd screaming “Tear him! Tear him, Duff!”

“Surprising what a little cocaine hydrochloride will do for a dog's spirits,” remarked Hannibal, leading the way down the steps with a certain amount of care. Though his speech wasn't slurred January knew that he had to be very drunk, or very drugged, to speak of Dublin, or of anything touching on his life before coming to New Orleans; he paused at the bottom of the steps, his own shoulders screaming at even the weight of a dozen books, for the fiddler to get his breath. “Billy must have killed four of the poor brutes before he got the dosage right. This one's lasted better than most.”

He skirted the outside of the crowd, where pickpockets skirmished discreetly, like wolves around the fringes of a herd. Kentucky Williams slouched in the rear door of the saloon, angling her head as if by doing so she could see what was going on in the ring of jostling backs. She wore a soiled Mother Hubbard, and quite clearly nothing under it except a pair of men's boots.

“Kentuckilla my pearl.” Hannibal bowed deeply, and kissed her grimy hand. “What is it that you were telling me about the gentleman who hired Mr. Nash to assassinate my friend?”

Williams took the cigar out of her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke. “This's just what I heard from Kraut Nan down to the Salt River Saloon. Say, wasn't you the nigger got his back hurt? Set them books down,” she ordered January. “You boys want a drink?” It wasn't ten in the morning but she'd clearly had two or eight herself. January shook his head. Even Hannibal avoided the potations dished from the barrel behind Williams's plank bar. “All I heard was it was a white man,” she informed January. “A toff Slick tailed coat, plug hat-big bastard, Kraut Nan says. Walked in, handed the man the money, walked out. No word said. Didn't even buy a drink, but Ned came straight over and bought one, so she knew it was money he give him.”

“Did Mamzelle Nan say whether he was dark-haired or fair?” January remembered Mathurin Jumon's powerful height, Hubert Granville's broad shoulders and heavy neck.

The saloonkeeper thought about it a moment. Then she shook her head, and scratched under one massive breast for fleas. “Just he was big.”

“Big is all Kraut Nan sees in a man anyways,” remarked Railspike, sauntering back from the crowd. She added a physically impossible speculation concerning Kraut Nan's amorous capacity and added, “You the nigger askin' about that boy Isaak over to the TurkeyBuzzard? Gimme a drink, fiddler.”