Ran Away

by Barbara Hambly

  ‘Did you go to the study window?’

  ‘It was shuttered,’ said Hüseyin, ‘and I did not. My first thought was that my wife, who sleeps in the room above the study, had come to some harm. Yet I knew Ra’eesa was in the room with her, and moreover I had heard no sound of footfalls overhead. Yet when the second body fell I rushed out on to the gallery above the courtyard, and so down the stairs and through the passageway to the street. By the time I reached the street door men were shouting and banging on the door. I threw it open. It was almost too dark to see, though some of the men had candles, and a lamp burned in the passageway behind me. The bodies of my poor girls lay on the bricks.’

  His face twisted as he said it, and he looked aside. Shaw leaned an angular shoulder against the bars that formed one wall of the cell and spat tobacco at one of the enormous cockroaches, which even in this frigid weather moved sluggishly along the grimy wall.

  ‘They said that I had done it,’ Hüseyin went on after a moment, his voice held steady with an effort. ‘That someone had seen me hurl them down from the attic window.’

  ‘Feller name of Breche, that keeps the shop down the street. Says he saw him clear.’

  ‘The pharmacist?’ January knew the place, though he seldom went there.

  ‘That’s the one. The old man’s son.’

  January fished in his memory for a moment for a picture of the man, small and fair and a little tubby, grinding powders in the back while his father shouted at him: Oliver, where’s that jalap? Oliver, this cinchona has lumps in it you could choke a horse on! Can you never do anything right?

  He looked back at the Turk, who only shook his head.

  ‘It is a lie. I told them that I was with this man Smith. Yet when I led them up to my study, Smith was gone, and with him also the letter that had introduced him to me.’

  ‘Had the attic window been opened?’

  ‘It had,’ said Shaw. ‘Was still open when I got there, which was maybe an hour after the defenestration. But naturally every livin’ soul that had been in the street had gone tearin’ up to the attic by that time to look for theirselves, an’ the attic was trompled up like a brick pit. I had to run the lot of ’em out sayin’ I’d be happy to arrest every man jack of ’em as well as Mr Hüseyin, but there was no question about what room it was nor what window.’

  ‘Any other way to get into the attic?’

  ‘It’s what I intend to have a look at this afternoon, if’fn I can get there ’fore the light goes.’

  January glanced toward the cell’s single window. It was barred on the inside, with a pierced iron plate set into the stucco of the wall outside. The pallid gray spots made by this admitted just enough light for him to see his watch. It was past four. ‘Will you have company, sir?’

  ‘I’d ’preciate it.’ Shaw spat at another roach, with no greater success than he’d had with the first. January had seen the Kentuckian put out a candle with a rifle ball at two hundred and fifty feet. ‘Not officially, but nuthin’ says you can’t call on Mrs Hüseyin in about twenty minutes’ time. Care to have a look at the girls’ bodies? They’s down in the morgue.’

  Hüseyin Pasha’s face worked with distress. ‘What will be done with them? Noura, and Karida—’

  ‘They’ll be returned to Mrs Hüseyin.’ The first gentleness January had heard crept into Shaw’s voice. ‘She bein’ either their next of kin in this country, or their mistress, dependin’ on how the courts look at your domestic arrangements. Will that suit her?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. She was fond of them,’ added Hüseyin quietly. ‘You understand, there was no jealousy, no hatred. She was angry that they took her jewels, of course. But she feared for them as I did, when Ra’eesa came to tell us on Saturday morning that they were missing from their room. And I think it will grieve her, as it does me, that they must lie in foreign soil among unbelievers, with none to care for their graves.’

  ‘That at least can be attended to.’ January put a hand through the bars to touch the Pasha’s shoulder. ‘I will speak to Sitt Jamilla about what can be arranged.’

  ‘Not that it matters.’ Hüseyin Pasha sighed again. ‘Not to them, may their souls rest in Allah. But thank you, my friend. I shall feel better knowing that it is so.’

  ‘Not a man to casually murder two girls out of jealousy,’ remarked January as he and Shaw descended the stair to the Cabildo’s courtyard again.

  Shaw glanced back at him over his shoulder. ‘He’s your friend, Maestro, an’ he done you a good turn. But you know, an’ I know, there are men walkin’ around in this world who rape children an’ cut their little throats, an’ then weep buckets – in purest sincerity, far as I could tell – at their funerals. I don’t know how they think, but I know they exist ’cause I arrested one last year in Marigny, with cuttings of their hair all done up in ribbons in a box under his bed. An’ danged,’ he added, without alteration of expression in his mild, rather high-timbred voice, ‘if it ain’t gonna come on to rain again.’

  He glanced up at the gray sky as they emerged into the Cabildo court. ‘I suggest you get on over to pay your respects to Mrs Hüseyin now, an’ we have a look at the girls afterwards. If there was any marks left on the roof, they’ll be gone inside an hour.’

  January smelled the air and had to agree. ‘Do you think he did it?’ he asked as they crossed the courtyard to the watch room again.

  ‘I don’t know. But I purely want to have a talk with Mrs Hüseyin an’ have a look at that attic in daylight.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘’Cause when they was throwed out that window, both them girls had been dead for the best part of a day.’

  A maidservant – middle-aged, well trained, and obviously purchased from a local Creole family – answered January’s knock on the courtyard door of the big house on Rue Bourbon. ‘I’m afraid Madame is unwell, sir.’

  January handed her his card. ‘I’m a physician.’ This was a lie: he was still only a surgeon, as the woman’s eye told him she knew when she glanced at the pasteboard rectangle in her hand. Mr Benjamin January. Had he been a physician, it would have read Dr, but she was far too well bred to pass judgement on the veracity of any guest, even one so much darker of complexion than herself. ‘I have just come from the Cabildo, from speaking to Hüseyin Pasha, with whom I was acquainted in Paris. Perhaps Madame Ra’eesa is here and would vouch for me?’

  The woman’s mouth pinched up at the mention of Ra’eesa’s name. But she stepped aside, to let January pass before her into the covered passageway that led back into an open loggia that in its turn gave on to the central courtyard of the house. January had played at the Turk’s reception only a week ago, and he’d mentally noted the layout of the place: the stables which faced the loggia across the courtyard, the ballroom built above them, the kitchen that flanked the courtyard on the left and across from it, the back premises of the shop property that made up the right-hand corner of the lot.

  A small parlor where Hüseyin Pasha would deal with day-to-day business and tradesmen opened to the left from the passageway from Rue Bourbon. A stairway ascended from the loggia behind that parlor to a gallery above, on to which would open the principal rooms of the house. Another passageway, wider, led from the courtyard, behind the shop, and out on to Rue des Ursulines; as was usual in New Orleans this wide passage doubled as shelter for the Turk’s very stylish purple-lacquered barouche.

  Though the open loggia was cold, and from it French doors opened into the ground-floor parlor, the maid indicated that he could take a seat on one of the benches in the loggia for all she cared. Her disdain was carefully calculated so that no one could accuse her of being ‘uppity’ – not that a man darker of hue than herself would dare to do so. Her attitude, as she left him and climbed the stairs to the gallery above, said clearly, as if she’d shouted it: You may call yourself a physician, MR Benjamin January, but your complexion tells me your blood is almost pure African. Your parents were slaves, if you weren’t born one yo
urself.

  At a guess – January tried to be detached, to take away the sting of her scorn – she assumed he was a Protestant as well. Many of the American-born – and less mixed-race – blacks in town were.

  There was anger, too, in the set of her back, the angle of her head, anger that she probably wouldn’t own to herself. Anger that a man whose dark skin marked him as part of the slave class should be free, while she – lighter than many of the libré demi-monde who owned their own houses, controlled their own destinies – could be sold like a set of dishes to a Muslim Turk who wanted to impress people with the excellence of his servants.

  This lessened his own annoyance. But he felt gratified when, only minutes after he seated himself on the chilly bench, another knock sounded on the passageway door, necessitating Mademoiselle I’m-Whiter-Than-You to cease whatever she was doing upstairs and come down again to answer it.

  At the maid’s heels came a youngish man in Turkish dress, followed by old Ra’eesa, whose dark eyes flashed with pleasure at the sight of January, though she did not speak.

  The young man bowed to January as the slave maid went on to open the passageway door. ‘M’sieu Janvier?’ He spoke excellent French. ‘My master has spoken of you on several occasions in these last few weeks. I am Harik Suleiman, tutor to young sahib Nasir. Lieutenant Shaw,’ he added, changing to English just as pure, as Shaw’s mild voice echoed in the passageway. He stepped to greet him with an outstretched hand. ‘Please do come upstairs.’

  The maidservant looked as scandalized as a lifetime of being superior to everyone around her would let her.

  Shaw emerged into the loggia and grasped Suleiman’s hand. ‘Pleased,’ he said.

  ‘All has been left as you ordered it last night; the attic locked, and none admitted.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. That’s right good of you. Mr January here bein’ a surgeon, I’d like his opinion as well on the look of things, if’fn it wouldn’t trouble Mrs Hüseyin none?’

  ‘Not at all. You are to have every facility, she has said.’

  ‘Now I take that very kindly.’ Shaw bowed again, like a well-mannered dustman introduced to the Queen of England. ‘If’fn it wouldn’t be rushin’ things a tad, we’d like to have a look up there first thing, as it looks to be comin’ on to rain again. Afterwards I’ll want a word with Mrs Hüseyin, if she’s able for it.’

  Suleiman turned to Ra’eesa and spoke a handful of words, in which January caught the name Sitt Jamilla and the word labbas – to dress. ‘I am sorry,’ said January, ‘to trouble Madame, if she is not well. Please let her know that all of this is vital, if her husband is to be cleared of this crime.’

  ‘Madame will be pleased to join you when you have finished,’ said Suleiman. ‘And I understand that she will be happy to renew your acquaintance, Mr Janvier. She holds you in great regard.’

  ‘You speak any Arabic?’ Shaw whispered as they ascended the stairs to the gallery.

  ‘A little. And Sitt Jamilla’s French may have improved. My wife—’

  They passed the French doors that led to the parlors on the second floor, and January found, for an instant, that he could not go on.

  It was only the hanging on the parlor wall – the sumptuous pattern of crimson and indigo, mountains and stars, that he last had seen in Sitt Jamilla’s library on the Rue St-Honoré. But it was as if he had found, unexpectedly, Ayasha’s comb, still entangled with strands of her hair, or a dropped chemise that still breathed the scent of her flesh. The furnishings of the room – Western chairs, carved tables with their brass insets still polished bright – were all as they had been in Paris, and the sight of them drove like a steel dagger into his heart.

  It was only a glimpse in passing. But January was still shaking inside as they ascended to the upper floor – with its low tables and divans, its lingering smells of frankincense and tobacco – and from there, to the attic above.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘We have kept the window locked, from which Noura and Karida fell.’ Suleiman fitted an iron key to the door of the south-west – or upstream – of the three attic chambers, which, January guessed, corresponded to the rooms on the floor below. ‘This is Ghulaam’s room – my master’s valet, who also serves my lady.’

  Which was, January was aware, the polite way of explaining that Ghulaam was a eunuch.

  ‘From first light this morning, men have been crossing the roof from the house next to this one—’

  ‘Consarn it!’

  ‘It proves at least,’ pointed out January comfortingly, ‘that it’s an easy crossing, from that roof to this.’

  ‘Hell, I knowed that from puttin’ my head out last night.’ When the door opened, the Lieutenant strode across the big chamber, to the dormers that were almost like shafts projecting out to the light.

  The attic room contained a single bed, with a prayer rug rolled up and stowed neatly beneath it. The Turkish cook, the black cook – whom January had met when playing at Hüseyin’s entertainment – and the kitchen boy would sleep over the kitchen; Suleiman the tutor in the garçonnière – the separate quarters for the young men of the household – with Hüseyin’s son Nasir; and the three American-born maids in the long downstream attic whose single dormer looked out over Rue des Ursulines. The walls, and the steeply-pitched roof, were freshly whitewashed, and the room scrupulously neat, with the exception of the floor, a smeared and muddy confusion of tracks.

  January mentally cursed the monkey-like curiosity of humans, that treasures its right to ‘go see what happened’ over the slightest consideration of preserving evidence in situ.

  Shaw was considerably more vocal on that subject.

  The window sill of the upstream dormer did indeed show scrapes in the soot beyond the edge of the sash when Shaw raised it, but there was, as far as January knew, no doubt that the girls had been thrown from here. And when Shaw leaned out, January, looking around his shoulder, could see the trail of scuffs left by dozens of boots across the slates to the brick partition-wall that divided Hüseyin’s roof from his neighbor’s, less than two yards away.

  This partition was only a foot high, dark with chimney soot and fringed with resurrection fern, that swift-growing New Orleans pest that would take root in anything. Beyond lay the dormer of the next house, a tall, thin structure identical in height to Hüseyin’s, but less than a quarter its frontage.

  Still muttering curses, Shaw swung himself out the window – the dormer was quite tall – and crossed the roof, the angle of which was about forty degrees. January looked down. Rue Bourbon, nearly forty feet below, bustled with carts and carriages, children chasing along the banquettes, and marchandes carrying wicker baskets on their heads: pralines, apples, shrimp. The balcony that stretched along the Rue Bourbon face of the house didn’t extend all the way to the property line. Anything thrown from any other attic window would have fallen on it.

  Then Shaw said, ‘Afternoon, gentlemen,’ and January looked up to see two men emerge from the dormer of the next-door house. Their long coats and high-crowned hats marked them as ‘gentlemen’, but only just. Small artisans or shopkeepers, he thought: the coats out-at-elbows, the pale trousers discreetly patched. ‘Mr Pavot know you’s comin’ up through his house, whilst he’s in Baton Rouge?’

  ‘Pavot’s a friend of ours, yes, Americain.’

  The other sightseer added belligerently, ‘Yes, he said to Jerry when he left: If there’s any murder done in the house next door, you’re to let Denys Devalier and Nic Lassurance through to have a look at the windows. What do you think about that, Americain?’

  ‘I think that was right neighborly of him.’ Shaw spat against the side of M’sieu Pavot’s dormer. ‘But bein’ as Mrs Hüseyin got troubles of her own right now, I’m sure you’ll understand her request that visitors be kept off’n the property, no matter how friendly they might be with their neighbors – or their neighbors’ house servants.’ He made a gesture with his fingers, as of rubbing coins together. ‘If’fn you wish, in a nei
ghborly way, to pay your respects to Mrs Hüseyin, I think it’d be best if you was to do so at the front door like regular folks.’

  Rain began to fall while the Kentuckian was speaking. When the men went back into Mr Pavot’s window, he crossed back to the dormer where January stood and stepped through, wiping soot and moss stains from his hands on the thighs of his disreputable trousers. ‘Well, that didn’t tell me much,’ he grumbled. ‘It quit rainin’ just after eight last night, an’ I didn’t get here ’til near eleven.’

  ‘Who sent for you?’

  ‘Breche sent his kitchen boy.’

  January looked across the street and upstream, to the two-story, soot-dark apothecary shop. Under its front balcony it was impossible to see from this angle, but he knew its windows displayed the huge glass alembics which announced the pharmacist’s trade; announced, too, by the color of their contents – blue – that there was no fever in the town.

  ‘And I take it – Jerry, is it? M’sieu Pavot’s servant? – has a good account of himself for Sunday night?’ January drew in his head, latched the window against the increasing downpour. Only a couple of carts remained of the bustle just moments ago, the clack of the horses’ hooves on the pavement bricks strangely magnified by the gray wetness of the air.

  ‘He swears the house was locked up tighter’n a miser’s purse, an’ he was in the kitchen in back the whole evenin’.’ Shaw slicked back his wet, light-brown hair from his eyes. ‘An’ it’s a fact that by the time I got there, he was in the crowd around the bodies in the street.’

  ‘And he’s Pavot’s only servant?’

  Shaw nodded. ‘There used to be a cook – this man Jerry’s ma – but Pavot put her up as security on a loan over the summer, an’ then couldn’t pay. Pavot’s the manager of a little factory over in Marigny, what makes ladies’ straw hats.’ Their footfalls echoed hollowly on the bare plank floors as they returned to the main attic. ‘You know anythin’ about Hüseyin’s enemies here in town? He ain’t been here but a month, but even a man what everybody likes ’cause of his gold got enemies. Or about this Smith feller?’