Fever Season (20 page)

Behind him nothing moved. Only a fleeting impression of something in the already wavering darkness away from the hanging lamps. His first superstitious dread—of the dark stalker Bronze John, the softly clattering bones of the bespectacled Baron—switched immediately to the more real dread of those bearded, whiskered Kaintucks, river pirates and killers who roved the streets looking for drink, or a woman, or a black man to beat up.

Ahead of him a man stepped out of the shadows. Then another, sticks in their hands. Every house between the Rue Marais behind him and the Rue Trèmé before was locked, empty, their inhabitants enjoying the breezes of
the lake in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. January doubled on his tracks and bolted for the dark mouth of the Rue Marais. As he did so, another man appeared in the street behind him, running toward him, as all of them were running now.

It was like flight in a dream, the horrible slow movement with the primordial ooze gripping his feet. Grimly he wondered where the City Guards were, who were supposed to be enforcing a curfew against colored and slaves. He reached the corner of the Rue Marais moments before they did and slithered into the long pass-through which led between two houses to the yard behind. It was a dead end, a cul-de-sac, knee-deep in garbage and night soil, and this house, unlike Agnes Pellicot’s, had no convenient window to force. But one of the few advantages January had ever found in looking like a field hand was that he was tremendously strong.

He drove his foot through the jalousies that covered one of the rickety doors, plunged through in a tangle of curtain, in the dark stumbling into and knocking over unseen articles of furniture. He crashed and thrust his way into the front parlor, hearing the men behind him as they broke through into the rear, groped along the wall. He forced himself to slow down, to move carefully, to feel his way until he touched the door that led into the front bedroom.

He shut it behind him, big fingers shaking as they found the key that such rooms nearly always had, turned it in the lock with a click that made him wince. His pursuers were making far too much noise tripping over furniture themselves to hear. “The curse of Cromwell be after ye, ya stupid pillock!” “Where the Sam Hill’d he go?” “Ye got no more sense than to leave the lantern in the alley.…”

Silent, silent, desperately silent he followed the wall
around the room, thrust open the casement window that looked onto the pass-through to the next house and opened the shutters, the reddish reflections of lamplight falling through to show him the door into the rear bedroom, the rough, battered-looking chifforobe with its broken mirror, and the big wooden bed, the mosquito-bar tied neatly back above it.

He slithered through, pulling shut the casements and pushing closed the shutters behind him. As he’d suspected, there was another man waiting in the street, but he was watching the front of the house. January slipped along the pass-through to the rear of the next house. He used one of the scalpels from his bag to slip the latches on the jalousies, then ducked inside.

It didn’t buy him much time, but enough to move through that house, and the next, cursing every time he fell over a chair or a table, knowing they could hear, they would follow. Thank God it was, on the whole, too dark for them to trace his foot tracks of garbage and muck. He came out a final window on Rue Bienville, and moved along the walls, his heart in his throat toward the high stucco wall at the end of the street, behind which sulfurous yellow light flared like the glare of hell.

He heard them running behind him, the slop and suck of mud under their boots, and the slither and splosh as one of them fell. Four men, he saw, glancing back again, three of them with clubs, one with what looked like a rope. Bearded faces half-unseen under slouch hats, but their hands were white. He had half the length of the street on them now and was of a height to reach the top of the wall with his hands at a jump, dragging himself up and over.

The stench of the place was like liquid muck in his lungs, but at this point he cared nothing about that. The
cemetery of St. Louis lay before him, a horror of gaping pits and standing water. The little white houses of marble and stucco and stone clustered beyond the darkness, like the huts in a village of the dead.

The dead lay along the wall, wrapped roughly in sheets of cheap osnaburg or canvas, the fabric moving with rats. January dropped down onto the piled corpses, sending forth the rats in a shrieking horde, and fled, stumbling, sickened, across the pitted ooze and into the black-and-white jumble of shadow that was the tombs.

The disease isn’t contagious
, he told himself, slipping from tomb to tomb. He dodged behind one, then another, working his way through the dense-packed mazes.
I’ve worked among the dying for three months now and I haven’t contracted it yet
.

He was gasping, shaking in every limb, nauseated with horror and disgust. Roaches the length of his finger crept through the cracks of marble boxes. A rat perched on the head of a bricked-up sepulcher marked
DESLORMES
; eating something, January couldn’t see what. In a spot of open ground, water had worked and thrust arms and hands and legs and shards of coffin wood up through the earth, as if Bronze John’s victims were trying to climb back out of the ground again, and the surfaces of the pools crept and shivered with feeding crawfish.

There were lights by the graveyard gate, and men moving around, slinging sheeted forms, or emaciated and livid bodies picked off the streets, into piles along the wall. Torches stuck in the ground added their grimy light to the glare of pots of burning hide and hair and gunpowder. The men swung around, startled, when January emerged from among the tombs.

“Where you come from, brother?” called out one, and the other grinned and said, “Hey, Joseph, look like we
bury this one alive by mistake. We begs your pardon, sir.” They bowed mockingly, cheerful themselves to be wielding the shovels instead of waiting for them.

But their leader, standing naked to the waist on the carload of corpses, like Bronze John himself with the torchlight reflected in his eyes, asked, “Where you come from, sir?”

“Over the wall.” January gestured back behind him. “I was coming back from the Hospital. I was followed by a gang of white men with clubs.”

“I seen them,” said the man on the dead-cart. “Pickin’ up the dead, I sometimes seen them. Three men, sometimes four, just shapes in the darkness, but they’re carryin’ clubs. Never stop me, though.” And he smiled. “Can I take you somewheres, friend?”

January started to say, “Take me to the Rue Burgundy,” but another thought came to his mind. He thought of his brother-in-law, asking him to look out for a friend’s missing husband; of a woman in a ragged yellow dress, searching through the charity ward for her man. Of his niece and nephew saying, “We packed ’em up.…”

“Take me over to Rue St. Philippe, if you would.” He had no stomach for moving about the dark streets of the French town alone.

The man on the dead-cart smiled again. “Hop right on,” he said.

Eustace Dèlier, being a moderately well off advocate of color, owned a snug little town house on Rue St. Philippe, stuccoed dark rose in color and sporting shutters painted blue. The house was dark and boarded shut, when Bronze John the dead-cart man dropped January off in front of it: “Look like nobody here.” In the heat, beneath the swaying oil lamp’s flare, he was no more than a sheathing of gold over blackness, and the gleam of eyes.

“Somebody’s here,” said January. “If you listen you can hear his violin.”

The music, though stronger in the rear yard, was still muted and difficult to locate, as if, like the harps of faerie, the soft sad planxty issued from beneath the ground. January listened at the shutters of first one side of the house, then the other, but the sound grew no clearer. At length he walked backward until he could see the gables in the roof. From the soft bricks of the kitchen loggia he selected a suitable chip—in Paris there were always pebbles for tossing at windows, but Louisiana was founded on silt, and if there was a pebble in the length and breadth of New Orleans it had probably been imported from New York—and threw it at the blue shutters that overlooked the yard.

The violin did not stop. To do so would be an admission that there was a trespasser in the house.

Knowing the houses on both sides of the Dèliers’ were vacant, he called out softly, “Hannibal!”

He tossed another chip of brick, and called the fiddler’s name again. This time the shutter opened. Long dark hair hanging down over his shoulders, the fiddler’s face was a pale blur in the hot blackness. “But soft—What light through yonder window breaks? Or attempts to break.… Bear you the essences of immortal grape or poppy flower? Good God, Benjamin,” Hannibal added in a more normal voice, “what happened at that Hospital of yours? You smell like you’ve just come out of a common grave.”

“I have,” replied January somberly. “Come down and let me in. I’m not so comfortable, standing outside in the night.”

He pulled off his coat and boots on the open loggia at the house’s rear, and ran water from the rain cistern to wash his hands and face and hair. While he was doing this the shutters that led from the loggia into one of the
cabinets
opened, and Hannibal stood there, resplendent in his usual shabby white linen shirt—he disdained calico—and dark trousers that hung on his too-thin frame like laundry over a fence. “Mind the bath,” he said, holding aloft the cheap tallow candle he carried. It was typical of the fiddler, thought January, that he would purchase candles rather than use the household stores, just as he was sleeping in the attics rather than occupying his unwitting hosts’ beds. The bath of which he spoke was an enormous one, copper and expensive, established in its own alcove under the stairs, with a cupboard for towels wedged in behind. “They store the extra chairs here, too, if you’d care to carry one up. We can return it later.”

“I’ll sit on the floor,” said January. “You’re right. I came out of a shallow grave tonight, and it’s made me wonder about some things that have been happening, since the fever season began.”

Hannibal had brought in a cot from the slave quarters across the yard and a table. Half a loaf of bread and some cheese occupied a tin box, beside a jug of water, his violin, and the inevitable stacks of books and newspapers. A bottle of whisky and another of Black Drop—triple-strength tincture of opium—stood, both corked, on a small packing box next to the cot, near a candleholder of pink-and-blue porcelain hung with Austrian glass lusters. He’d collected all the mosquito-bars in the house and rigged them as a sort of tent over the entire bed, including the packing box. At his gesture, both he and January crawled up under the clouds of white gauze, to sit on the worn, patched sheets while the insects hummed fitfully in the darkness outside. As January had suspected, there was a packet of tallow lights inside the packing box, with a Latin copy of
Metamorphosis
, a stack of old copies of the
Bee
and the
Courier
, and a couple of volumes of Goethe.

“When did the Perrets leave?” he asked the fiddler. “The folk next door?”

Hannibal thought about it a moment, not at all surprised by the question, counting back days in his mind. “Must have been the night of the twenty-sixth. Thursday night. They were packing up on Thursday and sent the carters away with the heavy baggage that afternoon. I saw lights in the house and heard voices when I went out Thursday evening, and they were gone the next morning when I came back.”

“How’d you know they were gone?” Thursday night, the twenty-sixth, was the night Rose Vitrac had come to
find him at the clinic, the night Zizi-Marie and Gabriel had helped the Perrets pack.

“The house was locked up,” said Hannibal. “The plank was up. I’m out most nights—I can still get money playing at Davis’s gambling palace on Rue Royale—but it’s been still as death in the days. If they’d taken sick with the fever,” he added with a wry practicality, “there would have been some sign—flies, and smell, and rats when I come in between midnight and dawn. It’s one thing I worry about here—that I’ll be taken sick, and present my poor hosts with a most unpleasant surprise on their return. I would feel bad about that.”

January shivered, both at the thought that it could happen to the fiddler, or to himself, alone in the garçonnière. His mother wouldn’t even inquire as to why she wasn’t receiving letters from him anymore. She never answered in any case. Olympe would check, he thought, and tried to put from his mind the memory of his own steps ascending the narrow stairs, his own hand on the handle of the door of that Paris apartment.…

“Would you like to move into Bella’s rooms at my mother’s house?” he asked the fiddler. “My mother will be in Milneburgh until the fifteenth. At least you wouldn’t be alone. Or wondering if you’re going to wake up in the morning to find the Dèlier servants getting the place ready for Monsieur and Madame to come back.”

“There is much in what you say,” agreed Hannibal gravely. “Why ask about the Perrets?”