Dead and Buried (38 page)

Saying what?

And hearing what story from Hannibal? – who was now explaining something, earnestly and urgently gesturing with his shabbily kid-gloved hands. He’d gotten another coat from somewhere – New Orleans abounded in pawnshops – and had braided his long hair back in a neat queue, tied with Nenchen’s pink striped hair-ribbon. In his old-fashioned gaudy waistcoat, January could almost see in him the worthless young sprig he’d been seventeen years ago, carousing through Restoration Paris with Patrick Derryhick’s ‘merry band’. January remembered Paris in those days: he had been there himself, a young assistant surgeon in the night clinic at the Hôtel Dieu. Like them, he’d come to Paris to escape the world in which he’d grown up, this flat green humid land of mosquitoes and lynch ropes. Like them – like Martin Quennell and the Countess Mazzini – he’d turned his back on his mother and his sisters and the people he’d grown up with. Odd that his path had never crossed that of those young men. But in his heart he recognized them, as if he’d heard their laughing voices – and the music of a wild violin playing down the alleyways of that ancient city. Wenchers, drunkards, spendthrifts, who’d left their responsibilities behind with their families and followed their errant hearts.

Droudge bowed several times, then raised his hand, excusing himself; disappeared through a door. Hannibal folded his hands, glanced at the bare windows, through which only darkness would be visible; idly leafed through a newspaper on the desk. While Droudge had been in the room, he’d been very much his usual self, gesturing, chatting – quoting God knew what reams of classical persiflage. Alone, the stillness returned that had been on him since he’d spoken to the Viscount at noon, in that stuffy, stinking infirmary cell beneath the stairs at the Cabildo; a stillness, in a sense, that January had seen growing in him since the day of Rameses Ramilles’s funeral, when he’d seen his friend’s body flung before him in the cemetery mud. Stillness, and a shadow in his eyes, as if he’d known, from that instant, that it would come to this.

Droudge came back with a decanter and two glasses on a tray. He handed one to Hannibal, raised the other as if in a toast.

Exactly as Hannibal had predicted that he would.

January lit a match, moved the flame back and forth across the dark window: back and forth, back and forth. Quietly, Shaw asked, ‘Where’s Mayerling’s room?’

‘Directly above. It’s the one that woman – the maid; what was her name? – was sitting in when she heard the shouting down below on the night of the murder.’

Shaw moved his head a little to glance up at that dark window, but returned his attention at once to the Blue Suite, where Hannibal, still holding his glass as if he’d forgotten it, was explaining something else, at great length, to Droudge.

‘You sure about this, Maestro? Even given that Droudge tommyhawked that Irishman – an’ given he knows Sefton was Derryhick’s pal – that still don’t mean he’d put hisself in a false position with the trial next week. If he’s the man what switched out them sheets an’ set the room to look like the boy done the murder, he’s smarter than that. What could Sefton know that’s worth the risk?’

Droudge and Hannibal both turned their heads – Augustus Mayerling must have run down the service stair the moment he saw the signal. Like Davis and Shaw, the swordsmaster had asked no questions about the part he’d been asked to play that night: in times past, Hannibal had assisted him with keeping a secret of his own.

Droudge answered the door. The moment his back was turned, Hannibal switched the wine glasses, then settled himself back in the chair as Mayerling asked whatever question he had invented for the occasion. Droudge kept his body in the aperture of the door so that the swordsmaster was unable to see that there was another man in the parlor; snapped an irritated reply; shut the door in Mayerling’s face. Then he came back to the table, raised the wine glass, and drank.

Without change of expression, Hannibal followed suite.

It was now Droudge’s turn to explain at length. Gesturing with his long arms, pointing to the ledger on the table. Grave-faced, shaking his head. Hannibal nodded, put in an objection, which the business manager seemed perfectly willing to elaborate upon. Stalling for time, as Shaw had done when first he and January had encountered the traveling Englishmen in those very rooms. This Hannibal had also said he would do.

Droudge rose, walked to the window, and looked out, across at the dark coffin shop—

Calculating the location of Quennell’s handcart again? Making sure the windows of the little cottage were dark?

Droudge was still standing at the window when he shuddered, exactly as if someone had knifed him in the gut, though no one stood near. He caught at the window frame, half doubled-over . . .

And looked back over his shoulder in shock at Hannibal sitting quietly at the table, the empty wine glass in his hands and nothing in his eyes. Droudge staggered, groped for the bell on the table, which Hannibal moved unhurriedly out of the way. Droudge flung out his hands, moved his head drunkenly back and forth—

‘Fuck me!’ said Shaw and sprang to his feet.

‘Go,’ said January – and, indeed, the Lieutenant was halfway to the door. Davis, on his heels, turned back as January got to his feet and staggered, catching the back of his chair as a wave of renewed agony shot through his leg. ‘I’ll be there in—’

Davis came back to him, offered a shoulder to lean on. He whispered, ‘Dear God,’ shocked horror in his voice. ‘He must have been trying to poison Sefton – dear God! But why? And how did Sefton know?’

‘He didn’t,’ lied January, as Shaw’s boots clattered down the stairs. ‘He knew Droudge, and he had his suspicions—’

‘But for God’s sake, why? Sefton’s the most harmless man on the face of the earth.’

January only shook his head. As Davis was helping him toward the door, he glanced back over his shoulder, in time to see Hannibal open the desk drawer, remove an envelope, and read its contents. Then he went to the gas jet on the wall to touch a corner of that single sheet of paper to the flame, and he held it between thumb and forefinger to watch it burn.

Droudge was dead by the time January reached the hotel room.

THIRTY

H
annibal stayed sober long enough to swear an affidavit as to the events of the evening: that he’d gone to Caius Droudge’s room because he had been a friend of Patrick Derryhick, recently deceased; that he’d never trusted Droudge, who had hated him on account of words that had passed between them eighteen years ago when he’d accused the man of cheating on the account books of Viscount Foxford, the father of his friend, the Honorable Alexander Stuart, whose son – the current Viscount – had come down suspiciously ill in the Cabildo after receiving food there from Droudge two days before. No, he’d had no reason to suspect that the wine was poisoned. He simply hadn’t trusted anything the man had touched and had just been making sure.

Did ‘just making sure’ include arranging for observation by two witnesses? inquired Captain Tremouille of the City Guards, present at the questioning and not pleased at having been called from dinner with his wife’s cousins back to the Cabildo to hear the details of yet another foreigner perishing in the Blue Suite of the Iberville Hotel.

‘If the bastard poisoned me, I wanted to make sure he swung for it,’ Hannibal replied.

The affidavit given, he disappeared, presumably – reflected January – to get drunk and remain drunk until the Viscount Foxford was tried, acquitted, married, and had left town with his bride.

January feared that the bullet graze on his leg would turn feverish and prevent him, after all, from going with his family to the cemetery on the following day. But after ten or eleven hours’ sleep (‘Don’t expect me to fetch you your breakfast, M’sieu, since you seem perfectly willing to run about at all hours on your feet,’ had said Rose), he had woken feeling much better. After examining the wound and changing the dressing, he had taken up his stick and limped the three-quarters of a mile to the cemetery, assisted by various of his neighbors who had returned to their houses in quest of trowels or lemonade or napkins or parasols forgotten earlier in the day. With the change to autumn weather the ground had dried, and wherever there was a little clear space among the tombs, families had set up their picnic blankets and opened wicker baskets. Friends and neighbors greeted him with pleasure and pointed out where his mother and Dominique could be found, and where Rose was, over near the FTFCMBS tomb in the section of the cemetery reserved to the
gens du couleur
, presiding over a basket of ginger beer.

Men climbed ladders to daub whitewash on rain-faded plaster; women set out gourds of jambalaya and ‘dirty rice’. Older children dug industriously at the tufts of resurrection-fern that had sprouted between the soft bricks of the tombs; younger ones played hide-and-seek, their squeals of laughter a comfort to the dead – a reminder that life does go on. Old Auntie Zozo had brought her coffee urn;
marchandes
walked about selling flowers wrought of jet beads and wire –
immortelles
– to leave in the vases that decorated the tombs. Somewhere, someone was playing a guitar.

The summer heat was gone. With the sadness of autumn, the air held a cool freshness. It was generally around the time of this commemoration of the dead that New Orleans came back to life: the day when the different sides of families – French Creole, African Creole, Spanish Creole – met in their common task and remembered that blood is indeed thicker than the water of shed tears.

The day – as Hannibal had said – that those dead and buried were thought to come back and assist the ones they loved.

‘Benjamin,
p’tit
, are you sure you should be on your feet?’ Dominique rustled over to him in a delicious frou-frou of yellow batiste.

‘Of course he’s sure,’ retorted Rose, belying the dryness of her tone by bringing up a bench for him into the shade of the Society tomb. ‘He’s certain, if he falls over in a faint, someone can be found to drag him home.’

He mimed a kiss at her. Serious-faced young Alice Truxton, the only one of the schoolgirls who’d remained by the little trestle table set out nearby, brought him over callas, on a bit of newspaper, and a bottle of lemonade. Rose returned his kiss with her quicksilver smile. The girl Alice still looked like she was working to avoid touching anything Catholic, but January had to grin inwardly as she stared around her at the children playing tag among the tombs, at the bright-colored tignons of the women worked up into elaborate points, at old Aunt Titine the gumbo lady, at the men singing out calls and responses from tomb to tomb as they worked.

The
libres
occupied only a corner of the St Louis Cemetery, and throughout the rest of that maze of dead-houses, the Creole French and Creole Spanish – of pure blood, though sometimes six generations removed from European soil – set out picnics of their own. The hard chill had laid much of the graveyard stink to rest, and what was left of it was masked by the smell of charcoal braziers keeping warm pots of jambalaya and plates of meat pies, and by the odors of coffee and pralines and oysters. Rose and the Widow Levesque turned with exclamations of delight to greet the sisters and brother-in-law of St-Denis Janvier, and they brought them over to say hello to January where he sat in the shade. ‘All you need is a scepter and a crown, Ben,’ joked one of Rose’s white uncles, burlesquing a deep bow to him, and January drew himself up with kinglike mien.

‘Darling!’ he heard the voice of Chlöe Viellard – the white wife of Dominique’s protector – and shook his head as the two women embraced. ‘
Please
tell me you made your wonderful beignets,
cher
 . . .’ Her husband’s tiny octoroon daughter toddled over to grip M’am Chlöe’s skirt. ‘Henri’s gone off to vote – for Daniel Webster of all people . . .’

It was Election Day. In-between their work of cleaning the tombs in their own section of the cemetery, the white men were coming and going, casting their votes at the Cabildo and coming back smelling of free Democratic Party rum.

‘White folks,’ sniffed January’s mother, cocking a disapproving eye at him. ‘He goes off and takes care of this
white
Lordship’s troubles, but after all this, does he find the man that snatched poor Rameses Ramilles’s body?’

‘In fact, I did, Maman,’ retorted January. ‘The man committed suicide last night, and good riddance to him. So there.’

‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘you didn’t bring the man to justice, now, did you?’

January sighed. ‘No, Maman.’ He knew better than to try to win any argument with his mother. ‘I fear you have raised a failure for a son.’

She patted his cheek and smiled, then went back to question the white side of the family about the safest investments in the upcoming year. In time, January got to his feet, and with the aid of his stick and his nephew Gabriel, limped to the tomb of Crowdie Passebon’s
libre
grandfather, where Liselle Ramilles’s children were playing and Madame Glasson – still draped in deepest mourning – was telling everyone how much she had suffered in the past month. ‘Far too much to even
think
about bringing my pralines, dearest, and besides I only have the strength to stay for just a moment . . .’ On her knee she held a plate piled with food sufficient to feed an army.