"Includin' your sister." Above the edge of the dripping rag, Shaw's gray eyes had a lazy sharpness, not surprised, but interested in how much he knew. "And they could tell you, Maestro.
All I or any of the Guards would get is just I don't know nuthin'about no poisons. And I did think of that. But if we do find arsenic in this poor jasper's tripes it might tell us somethin', too. That it?"
"That's it." January laid the detached stomach on the table, and began to slice it into sections, trying hard not to breathe.
"What do we do now?"
January nodded at the vessel of distilled water. "Make soup."
"Frankly," Shaw went on, as they began the tedious process of boiling and filtering, "I don't think our little friend here is any more Isaak Jumon than you are. He seems to been in the bayou the right amount of time-five, six days-but his arms and hands is chewed so bad it's hard to tell iff n he was a sculptor; hell, it's only his hair tells us for sure he was even a man of color. All he had on was them britches and they could be a wheelwright's or a sculptor's or a fieldhand's. And even allowing for the way a body's muscles stretch when they been soaked that long, I'd say he's too tall. But we'll see what Miz Jumon says."
What Genevi?ve Jumon said, dropping her reticule and fan and clasping her free hand to her face to join the one already holding a vinegar-soaked rag, was, "Oh, Isaak! Oh, my son!" She stood in the theater's doorway, separated from the table by easily twenty feet of student benches. "Dear God, what has that vile woman done!" Then she swayed, and staggered back into the arms of Hubert Granville.
Shaw, who was in the midst of adjusting a retort to pipe the sulfuretted hydrogen gas through the filtered solution, wiped a hand on his shirt and inquired mildly, "Do you identify this man as your son, Isaak Jumon?"
Antoine, almost concealed behind Granville's greencoated bulk, gulped and retreated into the corridor. "Yes! " Madame Jumon pressed a hand-carefully, as her black kid glove was now soaked with vinegar-to her forehead, leaving a long nigrous smear. "Oh, God, my son!"
"You're sure?" Shaw left the solution to bubble odoriferously and picked his way toward them.
"You might want to come a little closer for a better squint..."
"You leave her alone!" gasped Granville, as Madame Jumon shrank from the policeman's sticky grasp.
"I would know my son anywhere, M'sieu," she retorted in a strangled voice. "There is no need to go closer."
January, who had been measuring every limb and surface of the corpse and making notes, slipped past then into the corridor; with his face covered, in his rough trou sets and calico shirt, they gave him barely a glance Assuming him, probably, to be one of the hospital servants.
Granville, he thought. Granville offering Madam Jumon his arm, to escort her up Rue Royale.
Granville' address on the advertisement...
Granville saying something at the St. Margaret Society Ball about trying to raise money...
Antoine was seated, trembling, on a bench in th hall. On a Sunday morning this part of the building wa relatively deserted, save for a couple of orderlies omi nously making up one of the classrooms into an emer gency ward. Light through an open doorway, and fron the window at the end of the hall, twinkled on the boy' cut-jet coat buttons and shone dimly through the ton scarf of mourning crepe hanging from the back of his high-crowned hat.
He was weeping.
January sat beside him, very quietly, kneading some of the tension from those thin shoulders. "It's all right son," he said. "It's all right. No, keep your head down a spell, till you feel better." He spoke in the roughest bastard Creole that he could, the language of the slaves, and didn't lower the rag mask from his face. In any case Antoine didn't look up.
Behind them in the operating theater he could diml hear the run of Shaw's voice, and Genevi?ve Jumon's"Yes, of course, he had a signet ring, gold, given him by his father when he turned seventeen..."
And worthless as an identifying mark, reflected January. If the ring hadn't slipped off after prolonged immersion it could be said to have been taken off before the body went into the water.
"It sure good of Michie Granville to look after your mama that way," he said to Antoine after a time. "Must be a terrible shock for her."
Antoine sighed, and January saw again the look in Madame Genevieve's scornful, suspicious eyes. "I'm sorry," whispered the boy wretchedly. "Yes, I'm glad he's there for her. I wish I could.
.." His voice trailed off, and the small black-gloved hands trembled.
"He a family friend I guess?"
"He looks after Mama's investments." There was a wistful note in Antoine's voice. "He's clever with investments."
And at seventeen, thought January, Antoine Jumon knew already that he would never be anything but what he was: clerk, failed artist, addict. Forever a disappointment to the mother who regarded him with such contempt. He wondered suddenly if that was what had set Hannibal's feet on the road that had brought him up penniless in New Orleans, alone and ill, an Oxford-educated opium addict with a hundred-guinea violin: the desire not to have those who expected better of him see him as he knew he was.
"Antoine." Madame Genevi?ve was standing in the theater door.
Antoine got quickly to his feet and staggered. January caught his elbow without rising-the stab of pain through his back as he raised his arm above shoulder level was like being knifed, but he didn't dare let her notice his height. The mask still covered his face and the hall was dim; he said,
"He still a li'l woozy, M'am. I'd a gone put cold water on the back of his neck but I di'n't want to leave him."
"Thank you." She made her face smile like a woman operating a puppet made from a folded napkin, and at once turned her attention to trying to see, in the gloom, if the pupils of her son's eyes looked as they should.
"Antoine, I expect you to be of support to your mother through the funeral."
Hubert Granville emerged from the theater behind her, and January remained seated as the three of them walked away along the corridor, silhouetted against the wan glare from the doorways along the route: the man's heavy square solidity, the rich curves of the woman, and the boy trailing behind, weedy and defeated in his tight-waisted coat and extravagant, veiled hat.
Redolent of old blood, tobacco, vinegar, rotten eggs, and sweat, Lieutenant Shaw stepped into the hall to watch them go.
"You didn't happen to ask," inquired January softly, "where Madame Genevi?ve was the night her son died, did you?"
"Matter of fact, Maestro, I did." Shaw pulled down his rag mask and began to fish through his pockets for his twist of tobacco. His brownish hair dripped with sweat. "And I wrote the Surete in Paris askin' if this Noemie Jumon was still where she was when she wrote tryin' to get her share of her husband's will, not that that did her a lick of good. And I been checkin' the passenger lists of ships from France, on the just-in-case. But M'am Genevi?ve was at a tea squall with her pal that night: a woman name of Bernadette Metoyer, who runs a chocolate shop in the Place d'Armes."
And who at one time January knew from his mother-had been Hubert Granville's mistress.
EIGHT
"I was horrified to learn of Isaak's death." Mathurin Jumon's harsh, handsome face bore the marks of dissipation; puffiness under the eyes that spoke of late nights and bad sleep; the fine-broken veins that characterized a drinker's nose; and a pallid, unhealthy complexion. The blue-gray eyes were bright and intelligent in their discolored and wrinkled lids, and the late-afternoon light made January slightly embarrassed by his too-ready subscription to Antoine's suspicion of his uncle.
Just as well, he thought, folding his hands before him and lowering his eyes respectfully to the woven straw mats of the office floor, that Creoles as a rule didn't offer visitors of color any kind of refreshment. Hesitation about taking it would look bad. A polite request to test the hypothetical lemonade on the nearest stray dog would look worse.
The Rose and Metzger tests on the stomach of Shaw's victim had yielded no si
gn of arsenic. Not enough, January knew, to clear Olympe of administering poison of some kind-I have been poisoned, Isaak had said, dying. Not, I have been dosed with arsenic. And it could, of course, always be argued that the body wasn't even Isaak's, though January looked forward with morbid amusement to Genevi?ve Jumon's efforts to have it both ways in court.
But it was something. A first-rate lawyer could possibly use it to confuse the jury enough to get both women off: If, thought January, Olympe were not a voodoo. If the jury were educated enough to understand the distinction-which at this time of the year was a dangerous assumption to trust. And January shuddered at the thought of having no better weapon than obfuscation to defend his sister's life.
Isaak Jumon was dead. Celie Jumon had bought something from Olympe, poisoner and voodooienne. That might be all the jury would hear.
"When they told me he had been poisoned, and that Celie of all people was accused..." "Who told you this?" asked January.
"The police, initially." Jumon settled himself behind his desk in the office that opened off the courtyard of the family town house. It was a large room, flagged with granite that had come over as ballast from France, the whitewashed walls undecorated save for a portrait of a fair-haired girl clothed in the extravagancies of French court dress some fifty-five years ago. When the butler had shown January in, Mathurin had been counting money. It ranged in neat stacks along the edge of his desk. Mexican silver, mostly, piled tidily; half a dozen Dutch rix-dollars; four gold sovereigns and six gold, half-sovereigns, plus an assortment of American eagles, half-eagles, and notes. Creole families, January knew, held property in the name of the family; it was only when Cordelia Jumon saw clearly that neither Laurence nor Mathurin would produce an heir that she had sold off the lands and divided some of the money between her sons to invest. January wondered whether this was Mathurin's money, or his mother's. "A vile species of Kentucky buffoon who looked like he came down the river in a load of turnips, but he seemed to know his business. Please sit down, Monsieur Janvier, please sit down." Jumon gestured to the divan that stood at right angles to the desk of plain-wrought dark cypress wood, facing two long windows into a spacious courtyard thick with banana shrubs and roses. Beyond a screen of greenery, the kitchen could be glimpsed, and the tall, slant-roofed quarters of the slaves. The air was laden with scent, butter and onions and roasting squabs mingling with roses and sweet olive on the heatclotted afternoon air.
"This Kaintuck officer came to me Wednesday and asked if I had a nephew Isaak," continued Jumon. "When had I last seen him, were our relations such that Isaak would have come to me in trouble? Then he said that he had received a report-which later turned out to be from Isaak's mother, who as you probably know is a common hatmaker-that Isaak was dead. I suppose the police have told you the contents of this report?"
"Only that Isaak's brother was brought to a house he did not recognize, to be with his brother when he died."
"That's what they told me, yes." Jumon hesitated, trying to pick his words with care. "Now, Antoine was always... always a very fanciful little boy. Not always truthful, I'm afraid, and inclined to exaggerate when he thought he could win either admiration or sympathy, especially sympathy. At least he was so as a child. I haven't spoken to him in close to thirteen years. He may have changed." He sat looking down at his hands: big, muscular hands, despite their smoothness, square and coarse and heavy. "But then, people rarely do change, do they? Fundamental change is... can be much more difficult than one thinks." He fell silent. "Do you think he lied?"
Jumon startled. For an instant January had the impression the man was going to snap, Of course he lied... And that what he was thinking of was not Isaak's death. Instead he sighed. "I don't know." As he passed his hand over his face January smelled the cognac on his breath. He was dressed neatly, in the tailored wool coat and high stock of a gentleman that January considered such a horrifying absurdity in a tropical climate, in spite of the fact that he was clad so himself at the moment: he'd taken great care, on his return from the hospital, to bathe and dress in a fashion that said, I am a free man of color. I have nothing to do with those people who clean out your lamp chimneys and chamber pots those people whom you can buy and sell. "In a way it hardly matters. What matters is that the police believe him-and his motherand are prepared to hang two women on the strength of it. "
A servant woman appeared in the courtyard doors, middle-aged, once pretty, with the figure of a slightly overweight Juno and a kindly face. "Michie Mathurin, sir... Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't see you've a visitor."
She started to back away and Jumon said, "No, Zoe my dear, it's quite all right." He raised his eyebrows at January as he spoke, wordlessly asking if it was in fact all right, something an American wouldn't even have bothered to ask, and January gestured his permission. "Excuse me, sir." The woman Zoe curtsied to January, then turned back to her master. "And I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but your mother sent me to ask you, when will you be ready with the carriage to ride out to Milneburgh, to dine with Warn Picard?"
January saw the surprised look that crossed Jumon's face and, a moment later, the glance the white man traded with the servant: mutual understanding, exasperation, resignation to the foibles of one they both knew too well. Zoe shook her head, it's not my. doing, sir, and Jumon made a wry face.
"Thank you for the warning, my dear." He sighed. "And I suppose the answer is, within half an hour." Zoe tucked away a quick smile, but couldn't keep it out of her eyes. "That's what it most generally is, sir," she said, and curtsied again. "I'll go let Benedict know, and tell Zeus to put up the mirlitons and see what he can save of the squabs." She stepped forward and picked up an old-fashioned drinking-goblet from among the papers on Jumon's desk, brilliant in the office's rather shadowy confines.
January said, in some surprise, "That isn't a Palissy goblet, is it, sir?"
Jumon beamed. "You're familiar with rustic ware?" Taking it from Zoe's hands, he turned the brightly enameled terra-cotta lovingly, cherishing it. "A childish weakness of mine, sir. My mother's always chiding me about dishes that should look like dishes and not like toads and leaves and dead fish. One doesn't see much of it on these shores."
"I don't think I've ever seen any on this side of the Atlantic, sir." Taking the man's undisguised pride for permission, January stepped forward, hands clasped politely behind his back, to study the vessel. It was a beautiful example of outre baroque style, the cup wrought as if of writhing kelp through which seashells and fish emerged. Within, pebbles, shells, crabs, and a little purple sea urchin seemed embedded in sand on the inner surface of the bowl, and at the bottom, through the dregs of the dark amber liquor, a perfectly wrought crawfish raised delicate claws, like St.
George's Laidly Worm emerging from its well. Every detail was exquisitely executed, every bladder on the kelp, every scale on the fish and spine on the urchin, even the bubbles clinging to the leaves; sea snail distinct from barnacle, sand dab distinct from sardine.
The black bright eyes of the crawfish seemed to be boring into January's. He thought of the man at the Charity Hospital, and looked rather quickly away.
"I can't prove it's a Palissy, of course." Jumon sighed. "My business agent tells me it's probably less than a century old, and Italian rather than French. But if it's a fake it's a good one. I shouldn't be drinking from it, of course." He shook his head. "I forget that these things can break. Only the other morning poor Zoe had to bring me the news that she'd found my best serpent pitcher-a genuine Palissy, that was-in pieces on the floor here." He nodded toward the fireplace. "I can only assume it was one of the cats. I'd like to think any of the servants would have let me know if they'd broken it accidentally."
He smiled after Zoe as she bore the goblet away through the jasmine and orange trees. "I suspect she shares my mother's opinion of platters that have half the food on them turn out to be part of the plate, but she's too kind to express it to me." He turned back, shaking his head a little. There was a hard
tuck in the corner of his mouth, exasperation or calculation, thought January, or maybe only a momentary wondering about how much of a half-cooked dinner could be salvaged and put to later use, in this heat.
"To return to last week. A few days after the policeman's visit I received a note from Monsieur Gerard, the coffee merchant, whose daughter my nephew had mar ried. A perfectly lovely girl, sweet and sheltered..."
His smile changed and lightened the whole of his saturnine face.
"I should tell you that in spite of his mother, Isaak was on excellent terms with my brother and myself. That fact brought my brother a great deal of joy over the past five years. I know Laurence planned to attend their wedding, and in spite of my mother's rather-rather unfortunate attitude about his will, Isaak and Celie were of great comfort to me after-after Laurence died."
From the wall, the portrait of the smiling girl gazed down with brilliant gray-blue eyes, and January recognized the bracelets of diamonds and pearls on her wrists as those Madame Cordelia Jumon had worn to the St. Margaret's ball last night. A rapid mental calculation confirmed his thought, that that young lady in pink hoops and a fantasia of blond lace, with tiny models of water mill, miller, miller's donkey, wife, and cuckolding lover embedded in her high-piled fair hair... That was Madame Cordelia, Celie's age, at the Court of France.
Jumon sighed again. "I think that, except for the priest, I was the only white man present when Isaak and Celie were married." Though his movements were per fectly steady, and his speech clear, something in the droop cf his left eyelid triggered the thought in January's mind that the man had been drinking, and drinking rather a lot. "And do you know, I felt honored to have been invited? In spite of being obliged to come up with a succession of the most ridiculous subterfuges to attend. My mother had a soiree of some sort that afternoon, and she would never have let me hear the end of it if she knew I'd gone to the wedding. The mere thought that Celie would have done such an abominable thing is-is altogether beyond the belief of anyone who knows her.
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