Dead Water (2 page)

“Nineteen.”

January pressed his sister's shoulder. “Thanks.”

There was no sign now of Queen Régine's bright red bodice and red-striped tignon in the groups beneath the trees. The gate on the upstream side of the square opened into a muddy lane that ran past the basin and on beside a high brick wall whose top was a fringed jungle of resurrection fern. The smell of the basin was bad, with the privies of its plank-built saloons draining into it, but the stench from beyond the wall was infinitely worse.

January saw the flicker of Queen Régine's striped tignon as she turned a corner of an even muddier lane—the municipal gutters didn't extend farther inland than Rue des Ramparts, and it had rained that afternoon, as it did nearly every afternoon in summer. He followed cautiously, boots slurping in the ooze. The iron-barred gate that led into the cemetery stood ajar.

Once inside the cemetery, visibility dropped to two feet. Though light lingered in the sky, January knew it would fade fast. The ground was even wetter here, and sent up, with each step, a ghastly reek of mortality. Around him tombs rose like little brick houses in some silent, horrible city. Because the ground-water in south Louisiana lay so close to the surface, even a shallow hole would fill, and corpses buried in New Orleans earth had a way of working to the surface in the winter. After the first flood or two brought coffins bobbing down the streets—giving a new meaning to the phrase “Grandma's coming to visit”—tombs began to be built above the ground.

Some were only brick benches barely knee-high and stuccoed to protect the soft local brick from crumbling away. Others stood as tall as a man, with marble slabs on the front inscribed with the names of their occupants. Some had little railings before them of wrought iron, like yards before the houses of the dead; others were fronted with locked and gated grilles. Nearly all sported spikes or brackets, so that family members could hang wreaths of zinc or jet-bead flowers on the Feast of All Saints, when they came to patch the stucco, renew the whitewash, and picnic among the graves.

It had been seven months and a half since the Feast of All Saints, and even on tombs newly furbished up, resurrection fern had begun to sprout in crannies. Those tombs that hadn't been repaired for a year, or two, or ten, were gay little islands of greenery, with the stucco rotting away and the bricks crumbling within. Crayfish crept in and out of the cracks of such tombs, breeding it seemed by spontaneous generation in the pools where the ground lay low; three-inch roaches and palmetto bugs emerged from crevices almost visibly picking their teeth.

The smell was what one could expect. After passing through two cholera epidemics and any number of fever summers, January was only glad it was no worse. He'd heard rumors that in the rear parts of the cemetery, not only crayfish but small alligators lived in the swampy puddles, and was half inclined to believe it.

Queen Régine, of course, could be six feet from him among the tombs and he'd never see her.

He knelt almost the moment he was through the gate, picking out the tracks of her small, narrow shoes in the mud. There was barely enough light left for that.

They led away to his right, between two high sepulchres that surrounded the still-taller edifice of one of the burial-society group tombs. January followed cautiously. Once the woman he tracked guessed his presence, she would take pains to hide. With night coming on fast, he'd never find her.

Movement caught his eye and he turned. But it was only an undertaker wheeling a black-draped barrow with a little coffin. A solitary mourner followed, a woman. Not the baby's mother, January guessed, for she did not wear black, but a moss-green gown whose figurings of rust and cream blended in the twilight like the pelt of an animal half-hidden in leaves. An old family, he thought, for the pair halted at an unkept tomb whose name had been eradicated by time. The woman unlocked the grille that surrounded it; the faint scrape of metal sounded loud in the cicada-rattling dark.

Was everyone but the child's mother, and this woman, away in some summer home by the lake?

Or was there some other story there, one that nobody would ever know, in the half-secret burial of a child's coffin in the gathering dusk?

January slipped around the corner of a marble-fronted mausoleum inscribed with the name
DUFRESNE
, and saw Queen Régine.

She was on her knees between the two-story tomb of the Blanque family and a low bench surmounted by the statue of a sleeping baby. She dug in the earth with a stick, like a fierce child making mud-pies in the dark. But it was a deadly serious occupation, for graveyard earth, January knew, was the chief component of death-spells, of the jujus of ruin and fear. She worked furtively, glancing around her, pausing now and then to scoop up handfuls of the wet black earth and scrape them into the gourd bottle she carried tied to her belt.

January used the DuFresne tomb to shield him as he edged nearer. He could hear her voice now, a high-pitched jumble of whispered nonsense words, some garbled African, others broken bits of Spanish or Chickasaw, memorized from someone who'd memorized them herself long ago. He heard the name of the demon Ozoncaire, a favorite of the voodoos: “Hex him good, Ozoncaire, don't let him sleep nor eat till he decide this case for Bernadette Metoyer. . . .”

As he emerged around the other side of the tomb, January saw that she was burying something—a split beef tongue was what Olympe used, with the name of the judge in the court case her client wanted to win sewed up in it. He waited and watched as she lit a black wax candle and dripped some of the wax on the newly-turned earth and while she worked a few coins down into the soil.

The Queen buried the candle-stump, corked the gourd, worked a few bricks loose from the near-by tomb to cover the place so the priest of St. Jude's wouldn't see that the earth had been turned. Then she got to her feet to find January standing mere inches away.

She turned to bolt and January caught her by the arm. Her hand whipped to her tignon, and he grabbed her other wrist before she could stab him with the pin she held. She spit in his face, but he was ready for that, too, and didn't loosen his grip as many men would have. “I got a warning for you,” he said.

She froze, seeming to get smaller in his hands, like a rat pulling itself together before it bites. Her lifted lip showed sharp teeth, and gaps where the bearing of children had lost her some of them. “What I need a warning for, me?” she asked. “Ain't nobody can take me on and win, piano-player.”

“They know it's you who was hired to cross Cosette Gardinier. If ill befalls her, they'll know whose door to come knocking on.”

“And who's ‘they'?”

“Those that have her good at heart.”

The voodoo spit again, this time on the ground. “You dreamin', piano-player. There's none got that girl's good at heart.”

“
I
have Cosette's good at heart,” replied January quietly. “And if she dies, you think anyone's going to listen when you say it was someone in the girl's own family behind it?”

Queen Régine tried to pull her arm away; anger blazing in her hot little eyes. “The poison won't kill her. Her mama just want her sickly, to stay out of the way when Yves LaBranche come around courtin' the older girl. LaBranche been lookin' on that Cosette a little too close.”

“That's what they tell you,” retorted January. “Cosette was like to die two nights ago. So maybe somebody else added a bit to what you gave the candy-lady on Rue Burgundy, thinkin' if the girl does die it'll be easy for you to take the blame.”

The accusation of the old woman who sold pralines along the Rue Burgundy was a shot in the dark—January only knew Cosette was deeply fond of the pink-dyed coconut candles—but he saw the anger and alarm flare in the mambo's eyes. Then rage took their place, and she jerked on her hands again, her little wrists like sticks, lost in January's vast grip.

“You lyin', piano-player,” she snarled. “You take your hand off me! No man lay a hand on Queen Régine!”

“Let the girl alone. I'm warning you.”

“
You
warning
me
?
I
warning
you,
piano-player!” And she pulled hard at his grip, so that when he opened his hands suddenly she staggered back, and fell over the low tomb with its chipped marble child. Furious, she sprang to her feet, no more now than a shadow in the darkness, a shadow from which one single skinny finger, clotted with graveyard dirt, stabbed out at him.

“You keep your silence, and you stay out of this matter if you know what's good for you! You think 'cause your sister a voodoo you got a suit of armor, but you don't! I curse you! In the name of the Baron Cemetery, in the name of the Guédé, in the name of the Grand Zombi, I curse you, to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope!”

In the blackness her eyes had a slick silver gleam, like a demon's eyes in shadow. Her voice turned shrill and nasal, like the voices of those ridden by the Guédé spirits in the voodoo ceremonies along Bayou St. John.

“Guédé-vi, take the gold from out of his hands! Guédé-Five-Days-Unhappy, tear the roof away from over his head! Marinette-of-the-Dry-Arms, take his wife from him and let him walk the roads of the earth to search for her, and men hunting behind him and even the priests of God raising their hands against him!”

She stepped back into the darkness, and her voice came to him, normal again. “You leave me alone, piano-player! You will curse your own hands that you raised against me!”

He heard the slop and squeak of her feet, running away into darkness.

Far off a cannon sounded, signaling curfew for all people of color, slave or free—except, of course, those whose professions made life more convenient for white men, like hack-drivers and musicians and waiters and the stevedores who unloaded cargoes on the levee, even at this slow season, far into the sweltering nights.

The drums in the square had ceased. Like the voice of angels rebuking some pagan chant, churchbells floated out over the lamplit town, calling the faithful to evening Mass. January, who had gone to early Mass that morning, wiped the old woman's spit from his cheek with his bandanna and resisted the urge to head straight for the mortuary chapel of St. Jude that stood at the corner of the cemetery, to confess and take Communion again.

Confess what? That he believed that the name of the Guédé spirits had the power to harm him?

Oh, God will appreciate hearing that
.

He made his way out of the graveyard, walking carefully, for it was well and truly dark now and he had no desire to stumble into the brimming brown fluids of the gutter of the Rue des Ramparts.

Along that street, lamps had been lit in a few of the small pastel cottages, where plaçées would be setting tables for a light supper for when their protectors dropped by, seeking quiet and relief after the inevitable and interminable Sunday-dinner gatherings of French Creole families. Most of those houses were dark. Plaçées, protectors, and families alike had retreated to the cooler precincts of Milneburgh or Spanish Fort, or Mandeville on the other side of the lake, leaving the city to the mosquitoes and to the sweltering poor. The Americans, in their own faubourg of big wooden houses and wide yards on the other side of Canal Street, had retreated to such northern resorts as White Sulfur Springs or to the White Mountains of New England. Along the levee the river was low. Most of the big side-wheel steamboats lay drawn up at the wharves to wait until autumn brought higher water and the successive harvests of corn, cotton, and sugar to turn a profit again.

January looked for Olympe as he passed Congo Square, but only a few market-women remained, gathering the last of their produce into baskets and folding up the blankets on which it had been spread. The smell of ashes vied with the stink of sewage and the cemetery reek in the air.

Except for the gambling-parlors along Rue Orleans and Rue Royale—which never closed and never emptied—New Orleans was dark, and quiet save for the roar of the cicadas and the incessant whine of mosquitoes in January's ears.

No, he admitted to himself, he didn't think Queen Régine's curse, or the power of the Guédé spirits, would be able to harm him.

But poison, and surreptitious fires set in the kitchen while he and Rose slept, were another matter. They had bought their house from the French Creoles who owned it for nine thousand dollars, of which half had been paid immediately and another twenty-five percent was due in September, three months away. January didn't think the DeLaHaye family would remit a penny—or allow more time on the loan—should the house itself burn down one night.

He found himself listening behind him, all the way down the breathless street, for the whisper of the voodoo's feet and the rustle of her skirt. He heard nothing.

But he knew she was there.

TWO

The house January and Rose bought when they married the previous October stood on Rue Esplanade, and before this corner of the old French town had been built up, it had been surrounded by extensive grounds. January recalled the place from his childhood, a Spanish house of the kind usually seen on the smaller plantations, two rows of five rooms each with galleries front and behind, built high off the ground to avoid the Mississippi floods. It was angled on its lot so that it wouldn't face directly into the dilapidated old city wall that had still stood at that time—the “Rampart” of Rue des Ramparts—but would instead catch the river breezes.

As a result, the courtyard behind it was an awkward, narrow triangle. A poor man couldn't afford to keep up a house of that size, and a rich one would purchase a regular town-house on one of the more fashionable streets of the French town, Rue Royale or Rue Bourbon, not back here, where these days mostly artisans and free colored plaçées lived. But when, as the result of a singular chain of circumstances, January and Rose had unearthed a small pirate-cache of gold coins in the bayou country, they had bought this place to establish Rose's long-held dream of a school for young girls of color.

Coming around the corner of Rue des Ramparts, seeing the crooked angle of the slate roof, the amber glow of the dining-room window in the sticky cobalt velvet of the evening, January felt his heart lift.

His place. His home.

Rose.

The fear of Queen Régine's silently dogging tread melted in familiar joy. Sometimes he felt he could just stretch out his arms the way he did in dreams and lift off from the dirty brick banquette, and fly to Rose and to that crooked old Spanish house as lightly as a bird. Germaine's mother would have come and gotten her already, he thought as he climbed the tall front steps. He entered the French door of the bedroom—like a civilized person, his mother would have said: only American animals came straight into the parlor, like burglars, like thieves. If Cosette's mother was paying a voodoo to make her sick, he'd have to . . .

Rose was waiting for him in the parlor.

With her was a white man he recognized as Hubert Granville, President of the Bank of Louisiana.

The bank where their money was.

Before a word was spoken—before Rose even could draw breath—January saw her face in the candle-light, and Granville's, and felt as if he'd ducked around a corner to escape a knife in the back, only to take a spear through the heart.

It didn't even hurt.

Yet.

Just the cold of shock.

“What's happened?” His voice sounded astonishingly normal in his own ears.

Your house will be ripped from over your head
. . . .

He had not the slightest doubt as to what Granville was going to say.

And he thought:
I'm going to kill my mother.

Granville was an old crony of his mother's. It was on her urging—as well as because January himself had known the banker for three years—that he'd put the money left after the initial payment on the house into the Bank of Louisiana.

He took a deep breath while Granville tried to find a way to say
Your money is gone.
For months January had been reading about bank failures in the newspapers, the messy aftermath of President Jackson's fiscal policies. All over New Orleans, merchants consulted Bank Note Reporters before any major purchase, to learn how much the notes of any particular bank were being discounted that month, and Bank Note Detectors, in a vain effort to learn if the notes they were being offered were counterfeit. There was no way of telling when any of the state-chartered—or frankly private—banks would collapse, leaving depositors with handfuls of worthless paper.

All this went through January's mind in the seconds between his question and the banker's reply.

“I'm empowered to offer you three hundred dollars.”

“Considering we have over four thousand in your bank,” said January, remembering to add—because he was addressing a white man—“. . . sir. Or we
did
.”

“I have strong reasons to believe that the bank's specie and note reserves were cleaned out by a man named Oliver Weems.” Granville's small hazel eyes were sunk in pouches of fat, their watchful expression like an intelligent pig's. “Weems was—is still, officially—the manager of the bank. He came to us with the highest recommendations. . . .”

“I expect Iago had them, too,” said January in a level voice. “Sir. And the reason you're not going to the City Guards is . . . ?”

“Good God, man!” The banker's square, heavy face puckered with alarm. “All that would do is bring the bank crashing down around our ears! Weems didn't take the silver reserves—about thirty thousand dollars. We can keep going for a few weeks on those, since it's the slow season of the year. But if the police get word of it, that word will spread like fire in a hayloft. If you—or anyone—demand their money in full, our doors will close and no one will get anything.”

You bastard.
January felt the heat of rage sweep through him.
You robbing, irresponsible bastard. . . .

The school was nowhere near self-supporting, and might not be for years. The gold they'd held out from paying for the house in full had been to support them until it could take hold. At this time of the year there wasn't even work as a musician, since anyone with the money to hire musicians for a party was using that money to rent quarters someplace other than New Orleans. His dozen or so piano students had left town, too, with their various parents. The money he'd saved from the winter's lessons, and the winter's work at subscription balls and Mardi Gras parties and the opera, had all been banked with Granville as well.

Because Granville was white and January black, January held his silence, and the scorching wave passed through him and away, leaving its throbbing glow behind. But looking down at the white man's face, he saw, behind the calculation in the piggy eyes, the wariness of a man who has to get himself through a painful and humiliating situation.

And, thought January, Granville was here, at ten o'clock on a Sunday evening. From what January knew of the man, he wasn't going around town informing every one of his clients that they were now as poor as the wretchedest of the derelicts on the levee.

He'd sought January for a reason.

January brought up a chair and sat—the gesture seemed to reassure the banker. Granville's massive shoulders relaxed in the expensive linen jacket, and when he spoke, his voice had lost some of its cautious hardness. “Your mother tells me you're good at finding things, and finding things out. You were the one who solved Simon Fourchet's murder the winter before last, weren't you?”

January nodded. He'd hated Simon Fourchet, the man who had once been his mother's master and his own. Only his mother's blackmail had sufficed to make him work to save the man's life and bring the murder home. “I take it that's what you're offering me three hundred dollars for?” he asked. “To find Weems?”

“To find the money,” said Granville. “I know where Weems is.”

The candles on the small table—one of the few pieces of furniture in that darkly cavernous room—began to gutter. Silently Rose took candle-scissors from the table's drawer and mended the drooping wick. The reviving glow flickered across plastered walls painted yellow, touched the keys of January's beloved Austrian piano, and warmed color from the faded upholstery of the chairs. The light creak of footfalls overhead marked where Cosette was getting ready for bed in her attic bedroom.

January wondered what she prayed, on this night before she was going back to a mother who held her in such contempt.

The oval lenses of Rose's spectacles picked up the candles' orange gleam. It had been January's idea to bank with Granville. Her silence now was like broken glass.

“And where,” January asked, “is Weems?”

“At his lodgings, recuperating from the shock of the theft,” said the banker grimly. “The day watchman went in this morning and found the night man unconscious—the man still hasn't woken up. God knows what happened to him. Sometime last night—Saturday night—all the strongboxes were opened and everything but the silver taken. When I broke the news to Weems this afternoon he collapsed; I could barely get any sense out of him. He couldn't accompany me to the night guard's lodgings, where I had a devil of a time keeping the doctor in attendance from suspecting anything. Afterwards I went for a cup of cocoa at Madame Metoyer's shop in the Place des Armes. . . .”

. . .
Which belongs to your free colored mistress,
January mentally added.
Or one of your several ex-mistresses
. . . He'd never been able to keep track of his mother's accounts of the banker's squadron of ladyfriends.

“. . . and Madame Metoyer happened to mention to me that she'd seen Weems only this morning in the steamboat office, making arrangements to leave town on the steamboat
Silver Moon
first thing tomorrow.”

“
Only this morning,
” repeated January thoughtfully. “Before he'd ‘heard' about the theft.”

“Exactly. And he told me straight out that he'd been in all morning.”

“So the trunk with the money in it—or trunks—will be on board by this time.”

“If he's smart, they will be,” agreed Granville. “And not marked with his name.”

“No.” January stared into the shadows for a time, while Rose got to her feet and slipped quietly through the gap in the sliding-doors to the dark cave of the dining-room, and the pantry that lay beyond.

Seeing in his mind the levee that lay at the foot of the Place des Armes, the bustling offices of the steamboat companies that crowded one side of it, the boxes and bales of goods that even at this slow season piled the waterfront: packets of skins from the mountains of the Mexican territories, bolts of cloth from England and New York. Corn and pumpkins from the river valley to the north, hay and fodder, squealing hogs and chickens in coops. Tools and machinery, plows and harness. Coming down-river or heading up. Quiet at this hour, probably, whereas during the business season, the winter season, the time when the river was high and the cotton and sugar crops coming in, men would be loading and unloading, dragging and rolling and cursing and sweating, throughout the torch-lit nights.

And among the noise and confusion, quiet lines of men and women would be loaded, the chains that linked them together clinking softly in the juddering glare. Slaves bound north for the markets in the new cotton lands of Missouri and Mississippi.

Even through the wooden shutters that closed most of the French doors of the big house, it seemed to January that he could hear the far-off sounds of the levee, the shouting of the gang-bosses, the clank of steamboat bells.

He had been to Europe, to London and Paris, but he had not been farther than St. John's Parish, thirty miles up-river from the city. Even that had scared him.

In New Orleans, he was known. If anything happened to destroy the “freedom papers” that he was required by law to show anyone who asked, there were prominent shopkeepers, merchants, even a lawyer or two who could point to him and say,
That is Benjamin January, the piano teacher. He's a free man, and not a slave.

Once out of town, on the river, that would not be the case.

“And you want me to find the trunks with the money in them, and bring them back?” he asked at last. “Without letting anyone know what happened?”

“Yes,” said Granville. “I'll have a notarized letter of introduction to you by midnight, authorizing you to act as my agent in this matter and requesting the captain of the
Silver Moon
—and whatever law enforcement officials you need—to assist you. But I promise you, if you play that trump-card without having the money right under your hand, all you'll do is lose everything, destroy the bank, and ruin every depositor we have.”

“Ourselves included.” The incomparable smell of coffee filled the quiet gloom as Rose returned with a tray. The coffee would have been warming in the pantry, awaiting his return from Congo Square—it seemed like another lifetime. Rose made excellent coffee, though she was an otherwise execrable cook. It crossed January's mind that without the assistance of the hired freedwoman Abigail and Abigail's daughter, Rose would be quickly swallowed up by the drudgery of cleaning, cooking, and endless sewing that occupied the time of most women who kept house.

Until, of course, the house itself was foreclosed.

His hand shook a little as he took the coffee cup she offered. One bite told him that the sweet biscuits that accompanied it had been made by Abigail, not Rose.

“How much money are we talking about?” Rose seated herself again. “And in what form? How many trunks are we looking for?”

“Three or four at least,” said Granville, turning a little to speak to her. “Maybe as many as ten.”
Having set up four of his former free colored mistresses in business,
reflected January,
at least Granville didn't suffer from the common white man's delusion that women of color—or women in general—were slightly incompetent.
“He stole nearly four million dollars, of which about a hundred thousand was in gold.”