Canaan's Tongue (14 page)

Abduction from the Seraglio.

I CAME BACK FROM MEMPHIS A KILLER THRICE OVER, Virgil says. And I had one murder in me yet.

I arrived at 37 alone, off a stern-wheeler bound for Baton Rouge. My idea was to kill Morelle at the next of our match-and-candle sessions—kill him quickly and with a minimum of fuss—and go straight to Clementine with the news. I truly believed that I could do this—: I’d just put a bullet in his double, after all.

But Morelle was a far cry from Morris Barker. For six days he showed no inclination toward a reading, and I never once caught him unattended. South Carolina had just announced its secession, and his thoughts turned upon this fact like wool upon a spool. I grew more and more restless, more impatient to see Clementine—; on the seventh day I found I could wait no longer. I boarded the next down-river steamer, a new boat christened the
Hyapatia Lee,
though Morelle himself cautioned me that my old rival Lieutenant Beauregard was on it. The date was December 27, 1860.

As there was no hope of avoiding the lieutenant for the duration of the trip, I resolved to seek him out at once. With his uniform and moustaches he was an easy mark—: I found him reclining like Caesar Augustus on a divan in the front saloon, following a game of faro at a nearby table with the bashful fascination of a child. His hair was now distinguished by a romantic sprinkling of gray—; his eyes had a melancholy satisfaction to them. The port wine he sipped was evidently to his liking. He looked at me blankly when I greeted him, then broke into a pearly-toothed grin, clapped me on the shoulder, and motioned to the bar-boy for another glass.

“Lay down your burden, brother!” he said, patting the cushion next to him. “How long has it been? Four years? Six? Aren’t you surprised to see me?”

“I’d heard you might be on this boat,” I said.

Beauregard squinted back at me with genuine wonder. “How, by god?”

“I’m not the Redeemer’s
only
opera-glass, Lieutenant.”

This half-hearted joke was lost on him, of course. He regarded me soberly for an instant, then replied—: “Either Morelle’s hoo-doo works better than I’ve credited, or the Trade’s grown even bigger than I thought. I myself didn’t know that I was going to be on this boat, Mr. Ball, until five o’clock this morning.” He pushed the bottle toward me.

“What are we drinking to, Lieutenant?”

His air of satisfied stolidity returned. “You knew I was going to be on this boat, sirrah, and yet you ask me that?”

I poured myself a glassful, took a good-sized sip—it was really very fine—and felt suddenly inspired. Only one thing could have put him in such high spirits. “To your promotion?”

“You’re a sly old toad, and no mistake!” Beauregard crowed, striking me between the shoulder-blades three times in quick succession, as though I was choking on a giblet. He seemed to remember me as his dearest, truest comrade—; and I was disinclined, just then, to set him straight. I detected the Redeemer’s hand, clear as heat lightning, behind Beauregard’s turn of fortune. Perhaps I’d discover something I could use.

I drained my glass and the lieutenant refilled it at once. This, it was evident, was not the afternoon’s first bottle—; it was safe to assume that the promotion had been a large one. I wondered which wires Morelle had tugged upon, and precisely which advantages he stood to draw. War between the states—the possibility of war—was at the bottom of it, that much I knew. It had been his sole obsession the last few months.

We drank to one another’s health. “It must be quite an advancement, Lieutenant, if they’re calling you all the way to New Orleans,” I offered.

Beauregard held up a crack-nailed finger. “
Not
New Orleans,” he said. “I’m off to Charleston in the morning—; to the battery in Charleston harbor. And guess
why
I’ve been sent for, Mr. Ball.” He scratched his head thoughtfully, as though trying to work out a sum. “Guess in what
capacity.
”

“Mess cook?”

He gave a loud guffaw at this—; nothing, it seemed, could spoil his self-regard that evening. “Not on your
life,
sir! Not by half.” He wetted the ends of his moustaches with his tongue. “I’ve been commissioned, Mr. Ball. Three stars.”

I hushed for a spell, genuinely stunned. “
General
Beauregard,” I said, when I could say anything at all. “I’ll be damned.”

“Not yet,” Beauregard said, grinning like a donkey. “Not until I get to Charleston.”

He went quiet after that, focusing, no doubt, on some point in the foreseeable future when he’d be crowned first commander-in-chief, then president, then Imperator of the New World by a diet of generals, congressmen, financiers, and kings. As I watched him, the memory of our first meeting at Madame Lafargue’s—his arrogance, his insults, Clem’s following him downstairs—came back to me in luminous detail. No sooner had it done so than the desire to murder him stole over me like laudanum.

I resisted the urge, however, potent though it was—: to indulge it would have cost me the Redeemer. Looking back, of course, I regret my decision bitterly. How much might have been different if General Beauregard had never reached Charleston harbor!

At the time, however, I was ignorant of the Redeemer’s true design. And so, I soon learned, was Beauregard himself.

“Have you had much contact, lately, with He Who Shall Go Unnamed?” I asked.

Beauregard shook his head sleepily. “The Trade doesn’t need me to cover its tracks anymore, Virgil. Mightier personages than myself have its interests in their care.” He filled our glasses yet again. “I haven’t heard from our benefactor in over a year.”

“He hasn’t forgotten
you,
though, it seems.”

I’d thought this might finally rouse him, or at least put him out of sorts—; but he only pursed his lips. “I
know
he hasn’t. I still get my dividend, first of every month.”

“That must be a comfort.”

“I don’t mind telling you, sir, it
isn’t.
” Beauregard frowned. “I’m a man who likes to work for his upkeep, strange though that may seem.” He ran a hand through his thick, bear-greased hair, on which the rim of a lieutenant’s cap was still perfectly imprinted. “I’m hoping our little friend won’t get wise to my change of address.”

I couldn’t help but grin a little. “Oh! I think he might,” I said.

Beauregard only grunted.

“What’s the state of things, by-the-bye, with the Yankees up in Charleston?”

He bit his lip. “Touchy. There’s a good bit of—debate, I guess you’d call it—about a fort on an island in the harbor. Name of Sumter. The Yankees have it, you see. And they don’t want to give it over.”

I’d heard the name of Sumter before, from the Colonel and Kennedy. “And what’s your opinion? Should they?”

Beauregard shrugged his shoulders charmingly. “I don’t
have
an opinion, actually.”

I smiled at him. “You’ll most likely have to develop one, General, if you’re taking command of the Dixie batteries.”

“It won’t be
my
decision,” Beauregard muttered. I’d finally gotten him riled. “You do comprehend, don’t you, that one hasty decision there could start a war? Rest assured, Mr. Ball—: my orders on the Sumter question will be handed down from on high.”

“I have no doubt of that,” I said.

I was beginning to see the scale on which Morelle was playing, and it robbed me of my breath. Close as I’d been—or
believed
I’d been—to him, I was utterly confounded by this new intelligence. My brain went hot and pricklish, cringing and expanding, trying to get the outline of it clear.

My thoughts ran as follows—: (I) Abolition, if the papers were to be believed, had free run of the Union. (II) Even our new president was rumored to indulge in it, if thus far only in secret. (III) Abolition provided the Trade its cover, but an over-dose would prove lethal—; even secession, that most desperate of bluffs, might not manage to save us. (IV) If bluffing fell short of the mark, what then—?

“What’s the likelihood of war, do you think, General?”

Beauregard chewed on this a while. “I don’t think it must
necessarily
happen,” he said at last. “There’s a good deal of talk, on both sides, about preserving the Union. In spite of the all the fire-works—” He paused. “To be honest, I have no idea. If some manner of common ground could be reached on the slavery question—on slavery in the
territories,
at least . . .”

I thought back to my parting words with Morelle. Divided as they were over slavery, he’d said, North and South were united over one thing—: the Trade. The powers that be—all of them—had come to view it as an intolerable evil. “They hate us heartily, dear K,” he’d said to me. “We can only hope, for the sake of our little métier, that they hate each other more.”

Now those last words had a new import for me. I sat on the divan in awe-struck silence, staring past the faro-tables at the tumbling brown river. The card-players had fallen strangely silent—; Beauregard, for his part, was adrift in a port-tinctured reverie. His exultation had altogether passed away and he looked haggard and remote. I excused myself and retired to my cabin.

I lulled myself to sleep that night by withdrawing into the most private recesses of my mind and gazing in calm fascination at the chaos Morelle had wrought there. My understanding of the Trade, of the country, and of my place within both had changed so drastically since my last visit that I wondered whether Clem would even know me. The shambles Memphis had made of me were terrible to behold. My allegiance to Morelle was shattered, my sense of right and wrong perverted past all remedy. The most fatal change of all, however, remained hidden from me still. My rationalism, which had been faltering for years, had been unseated in a single stroke. I had witnessed things in Memphis that would have sent Descartes himself scrambling for his rosary.

Thus, as Providence—or chance—would have it, Morelle’s influence over me doubled when I took him for my enemy. Reason was useless against him—; that much was clear to me after Memphis. To revenge myself on the Redeemer I’d have to enter, naked and half-blind, into the Redeemer’s world of symbols.

I awoke that night to a shape unlike any I’d seen with my blighted eye before. A glittering, scintillating sphere, the color of obsidian, revolved above me in the dark. Its surface was cut into facets, and all manner of images danced across them—: ramparts of smoke, rows of sallow, bearded faces, scores upon scores of boot-prints filling up with rain. The shape spoke in a language of trills and clangs and stutters, like the sound of valves opening and shutting in a boiler. Try as I might, I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I understood the pictures perfectly. I was being presented with the future—: not harbingers of the future, not abstract portents, but the future itself, in body and in blood. I needed no charts to make sense of what I saw.

It was war.

I sat up in my berth at half-past six, wide awake and grateful for it. To all appearances I was still aboard the
Hyapatia Lee.
I passed a hand over my face, trying to recollect my vision, then looked warily about the cabin. The shape had shrunk to the size of a chestnut, but it persisted in the far corner of the room, throwing off chiaroscuro sparks. Do what I might, it stubbornly refused to vanish. It kept me company all the way to New Orleans.

The change in me had now become impossible to ignore. For the first time since the start of the Trade, I’d made sense of a vision unassisted. But that was not all. I’d done more than simply make sense of what I saw—; I’d done something stranger still, more remarkable, more dreadful.

I’d believed in it.

IT WAS IN FULL EXPECTATION of calamity, then, that I made my way up the levee to Madame Lafargue’s. I moved through the Quarter as if through a stage-set to an opera which, having finished its run, might be struck at any moment.

I entered through the niggers’ door on Lime Alley—a trick Morelle had taught me on my very first visit—and slipped up the filigreed iron steps. Clem’s door was unlocked, and I pushed it open. She lay fast asleep under her tent of netting, her hair spread over her precise white features like a courtesan’s in the Arabian Nights Entertainments—; best of all, she was alone. I eased myself down onto the powder-and-wine-stained coverlet. Her eyes opened and fixed on mine.

“It’s you,” she said. She seemed relieved.

“Were you expecting someone else?”

She kept her eyes on mine, steady and unsurprised, and let the sleep drain out of them. When finally she chose to return my smile it was with a gentleness I’d despaired of ever seeing in her. I bit back the pleasantry I was about to give voice to—; my tongue thickened in my mouth and my lips went dry as parchment. Something had happened to Clementine while I was gone.

“I dreamt about you just now.” She stretched herself and yawned into her sleeve. “That’s how I knew to expect you.”

I brushed her hair aside with my finger-tips, looping it carefully behind her ears. I ached for a kiss but was afraid, as always, to touch my mouth to hers.

“Did you do me justice in your dream, Miss Gilchrist?” I said. “Was my waist-coat elegant? Were my stockings clean?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell, Aggie. It was dark. And you were tucked away in bed.”

“Were you tucked away beside me?”

She shook her head. “I was spinning above you in the air. We were in a steam-boat cabin.”

My hand must have made a subtle jerk, because her eyes darted toward it. “What is it, Aggie?”

I took up her hand and kissed it. “I’ve missed you, darling. Terribly.”

Her eyes were clear now and she was looking at me closely. “Is that all?”

“I’m tired.”

“They work you hard, poor boy.”

I bowed to her. “We Jews are like the olive, Miss Gilchrist, as the Talmud says. We’re at our best when we are being crushed.”

She said nothing for a time, holding tightly to my arm. I savored the pressure of her thin, determined fingers at my wrist.