The reek of pipe smoke and the murmur of voices rose to meet him as he descended the narrow twist of steps toward the dim blur of a few candles, bright against the utter blackness of the stair.
‘Soon, we’re not going to be able to feed our families at all,’ a man’s voice was saying, urgent against the background mutter. ‘Does the King care? No more than his fat brother did.’
‘We need more than talk, Maurice,’ said someone else. ‘Votes are what we need! And those fat Ducs and Marquises would sooner sell their mothers than open up the Chamber of Deputies to anyone who isn’t their brother or their cousin.’
‘We must have education—’
‘It’s useless to talk of education if it is only for men!’ chimed in a thin, dark young man in a corner. ‘The whole system must be reformed! Women, too, must be educated—’
‘Education won’t do us a damn bit of good until we have the vote!’
‘The vote won’t get us a fart in hell until the king makes it possible for wheat to be brought into Paris at a cost that poor men can afford to pay!’
Heads turned as January appeared in the dark of the doorway. Someone started to shove a stack of pamphlets out of sight behind a bench, then recognized him – by his height more than anything else, the only thing discernible in the tobacco fog. The speaker at the center table, a tall fair man like a denatured Viking, nodded a greeting and immediately went back to his harangue on the price of potatoes. After a short pause to let his own eyes grow accustomed, January saw the man he sought at a table near the stairs. Round-faced, smooth-haired, and genially epicene, he seemed as out of place among the working men and journalists around him as a pêche glacée in a soup kitchen. The rough shirt and short corduroy jacket that hugged those plump shoulders had more the air of a disguise than of garments in which actual work had ever been done.
January had helped break in that jacket when it was new, lest those who habitually gathered at the White Cat to defy the royal statutes against discussing politics should mistake its wearer for a police spy, and an incompetent one at that.
‘Benjamin!’ Daniel ben-Gideon held up one moist, plump hand to shake. Though suitably dirty, it was soft as a maiden aunt’s.
‘You’re never going to convince anyone you’re poor until you grow some calluses.’ January clasped the ladylike fingers in greeting. ‘And lose some weight.’
‘My dear Benjamin, not a soul in this room – saving your excellent self – has ever spared me so much as a glance from the speaker, the newspapers –’ the plump man gestured to the enormous pile of journals and pamphlets heaped on the table before him – ‘and whoever it is he’s arguing with. I could come in here in a court coat and knee breeches and no one would look up. Besides –’ ben-Gideon moved his chair aside as January leaned closer to hear over the sudden flurry of shouting around the speaker – ‘I tell anyone who asks the truth: I am the proverbial Rich Man’s Son. My heart has been captured by the writings of M’sieu le duc de St-Simon, and my father has hired detectives to keep me away from the cause of the working man.’
‘That’s what you call the truth?’
‘Well, it’s true that I am a rich man’s son, anyway. Shall we go upstairs? Once Maurice gets started on internal tariffs not a great deal else gets “discussed”.’
They reascended, bought a bottle of wine from Bourrèges, and settled in the darkest and least noisy corner of the White Cat. It was marginally less black than the cellar – mostly owing to the lamps out in the colonnade – and the air marginally more breathable, and, January reflected, if the place got raided by the secret police there was a far better chance of getting out. Bourrèges paid a substantial bribe to the local Prefect of Police every week to make sure that the insurgents of the ‘Political Reading Club’ could talk sedition in his cellar in peace, but with increasing unrest throughout the city, this was no real guarantee.
‘I’m looking for a girl,’ said January.
‘In the Palais Royale? Benjamin, I’m shocked.’
January mimed boxing his companion’s ears – something that would have gotten him arrested in his home city of New Orleans, one reason that he had no intention of ever returning to New Orleans again as long as he lived, secret police or no secret police. ‘If a Jewess from the East – her family comes from Cairo, I gather – were to find herself in need of help in Paris, where would she go?’
‘To her family,’ replied ben-Gideon promptly.
‘I’m not sure she has one in Paris.’
‘Benjamin, my mother spends eleven and a half hours out of twenty-four going from sister to sister, from aunt to aunt, from the houses of her sisters-in-law and second-cousins to the grandparents of my father’s old business-partners, lugging my sisters along with her, and what do you think they all talk about? Family.’ Ben-Gideon ticked off subjects with his fingers. ‘Who’s marrying whom. Who shouldn’t have married whom and why not. Who’s expecting a child and who isn’t bringing their children up properly. Oh, was she the one who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-Yakov and is now operating that import business in Prague? . . . No, no, that was the OTHER Cousin Rachel who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-CHAIM and THEY’RE in Warsaw, where THEIR son is a rabbi . . . Every rabbi from Portugal to Persia will tell you that women’s minds are incapable of the concentration required for study of the Torah, yet I guarantee you that not a single word of this lore is forgotten. You can drop any Jew over the age of seven naked in the dark out of a balloon anywhere in Europe, and he or she will locate family in time for breakfast. Who is this girl you’re looking for?’
‘Her name is Shamira,’ said January. Any one of his Aunties back on Bellefleur Plantation, for their part, could tell him where their brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, former husbands and parents and parents of former husbands, had been sold to, and no traveler came up or down the river but that his valet and groom made their way out to the quarters with word from Cousin Rasmus in Ascension Parish or Aunt Felice in Mobile. ‘Her family hails from Cairo, but her father had business connections with Constantinople. I think they dealt in wheat.’
Shamira had spoken little of her family, Ra’eesa had said. Certainly, she had never given her father’s name, out of shame at what had become of his daughter.
‘Her father died last year, and Shamira went into the household of Hüseyin Pasha—’
Ben-Gideon’s brown eyes opened wide at the mention of the Plenipotentiary’s First Deputy.
‘—and that is not for mention abroad. The girl has fled his household. If she’s retaken, I don’t believe the King will stop the Pasha from taking fairly serious revenge.’
‘And for whom are you working?’ Ben-Gideon’s round face – smeared artistically with a little lampblack, to counterfeit, in the low light, the stubble that would be out of the question in his daytime incarnation in his father’s banking house – lost its childlike quality behind a watchful mask.
‘The girl herself.’
The black eyebrows quirked in polite disbelief. ‘She hired you to find her after running away? What an original approach to escape.’
In few words, January outlined the attempt at poisoning and the circumstances of the girl’s flight. ‘It’s hard to see how the girl could have genuinely fled with a lover,’ he concluded. ‘She hasn’t been out of the grounds. According to the Lady Jamilla, the Pasha’s first wife, the concubines are permitted outside only in the garden under a guard of eunuchs. She has neither seen nor spoken to anyone not of the household since her arrival.’
‘Yet the escape sounds extremely well planned.’
‘Exactly. So it must either have been set up by someone in her family, or someone whom she thinks is in her family. And there lives in Paris an enemy of Hüseyin Pasha’s, a man named Sabid al-Muzaffar, whom Hüseyin caused to be exiled. I – and the Lady Jamilla – would like to satisfy ourselves that the girl is in fact out of harm’s way before the Pasha himself returns on Friday. But I have no intention of info
rming anyone of the girl’s whereabouts until I’ve spoken with the girl herself.’
Ben-Gideon considered the matter, turning the cheap pottery wine-cup in his fingers. Snatches of song from the music hall next door came through the wall. Men passed among the crowded tables, and now and then someone would emerge from the cellar and glance watchfully around before gliding out the rear door into the grimy little yard, and so away over the wall in the direction of the Halles. Raised on accounts of the liberté, egalité, and fraternité won by France, January had been vexed – but not surprised – to find on his arrival that far from being liberated, the country was once more under the control of a King and of nobles who appeared to have learned nothing from the events of 1789.
And King or no King, fraternité or no fraternité, nobody in France was any more likely than they were in the United States to hire a black man to come anywhere near them with a scalpel.
But it was something at least to be able to smoke a cigar in public, or carry a knife in his boot if he happened to be passing through an unwholesome part of town. The ferocious censorship clamped by the King on newspapers and journals was no worse than the systematic attempts of the American whites to prevent blacks from learning to read. At least here, the whites could get a taste of what it was like – those that cared, and a great many simply didn’t. And there were always places like La Chatte Blanche where banned journals and seditious pamphlets could be read and talked about with men – and a few women – who still cherished the liberties of which neither Napoleon nor the present King had approved.
Since the old King’s death two years ago, and the accession of his feckless brother to the throne, censorship had grown stricter. It was now against the law to criticize the Church, and men had started disappearing, arrested by the White Terror – the secret police – for no particular reason. Political parties – even political discussion-groups – were outlawed, and it was in fact illegal for more than twenty people to meet together for any purpose whatsoever, which made parties in the painter Carnot’s attic rather chancy affairs.
For which reason January found it interesting that Daniel ben-Gideon – the son of one of the wealthiest bankers in Paris – would have taken up haunting the White Cat. Were there to be trouble some night, none of the nobles surrounding the throne would put himself forward to rescue Moses ben-Gideon’s son from punishment: a Jew, with merely money to recommend him. A jumped-up banker who’d made his fortune lending money to such appalling parvenus as the Bonapartes.
Which meant that ben-Gideon, who made it a point to belong to every social circle in Paris and to read every one of its hundred-plus newspapers, was of the opinion that the radicals who called for the King’s downfall might very well win.
‘I’ve met Sabid,’ said ben-Gideon at last. ‘He’s as fanatical about bringing factories and State education to the Sublime Porte as Hüseyin is about handing everything over to the imams. If I hadn’t, I’d have said: Good luck and leave me out of it . . .’
‘But God help anyone,’ said January quietly, ‘who is caught between two fanatics. Particularly a woman.’
‘Amen.’ Ben-Gideon stood up, plump and comfortable in his shabby clothing, a balding mama’s boy of thirty-two – January’s own age – who sweated when he walked and would undoubtedly call for a bath the moment he returned to his parents’ very elegant town-house . . . But who had not, January guessed, wasted a moment of his evening of drinking bad wine and listening to what was being said by the angry poor.
‘I’ll find out what I can. My impression is that Sabid al-Muzaffar is the kind of man who would not baulk at harming the innocent to regain his position in the Sultan’s good graces. But I want your word, Benjamin.’ Ben-Gideon shook an admonishing finger. ‘If you find this girl has located her family and gone back to them, you’re not to breathe a word of it to Hüseyin without asking me first. If she’s managed to get herself to safety I’ll not have anything to do with sending her back. For one thing,’ he added with a quick grin, ‘the Rothschilds would cut Father completely if I did, and then I’d be in the street.’
January crossed the fingers of both hands, the way the children did back on the plantation for luck: ‘May the witches ride me three times around the moon if I tell,’ he replied solemnly, picked up his wine cup from the table and tipped the dregs on to the floor, as all his aunties said that you were supposed to do, to keep the spirits away. ‘Family is family, but the Rothschilds—’
A child in the colonnade called out, ‘Flics on the way!’
So much, thought January, for Bourrèges’ program of bribery. Ben-Gideon said, ‘Damn!’ and the men at the table nearest them said things considerably stronger, and January caught his friend by the wrist and plunged at once for the back door. Men were pouring out of the cellar door, blundering into those who were trying to fight their way out and toward the Rue des Petits Champs. January dragged ben-Gideon out the doorway, across the stinking little yard, through the gate and into the nearest doorway—
‘Hey, there, mister!’ protested the woman already occupying that dark niche.
A faint, youthful voice from between her and the wall added: ‘Look here, now—’
‘Pardon us, Mademoiselle.’ January bowed, and his companion dug in a pocket for a couple of coins. ‘Pardon us, M’sieu.’
In the Rue des Petits Champs voices were raised. There was the sound of blows. The police had been waiting for fugitives there.
January tested the door at the rear of the rather crowded embrasure, found it locked, and kicked it – hard. The wood jerked and cracked – ‘You’re paying for this, you know,’ he informed ben-Gideon – and he kicked the door again. This time the lock splintered away from the frame, and January, ben-Gideon, the girl, and her customer all tumbled inside just as the owner of the establishment, an elegantly black-clothed gentleman with a countenance straight out of an antique painting and a vocabulary straight out of the sewers, strode into the tiny back-room.
‘What the goddam hell—?’
‘Flics.’ Ben-Gideon caught the gentleman’s wrist and deposited five silver francs on the palm of his white kid glove.
His face like a Flemish saint who’s just bitten on a lemon, the gentleman said, ‘Well, you ain’t bloody goin’ out through the goddam salon an’ upsettin’ my goddam gentlemen. This’s a goddam respectable place. You stay the fuck here an’ don’t cause no goddam trouble. You—’ He caught the girl’s arm in one hand, her customer’s in the other: the boy looked about sixteen, pasty-faced and terrified. ‘Get back out there.’
‘Oh, here.’ Ben-Gideon handed the gentleman another two francs. By the sound of it, the police raid had boiled back into the alley and a riot was starting. Shouts echoed from the high walls, and the fouled cobblestones rang as roof tiles and bricks were hurled from the windows of the rooms above. ‘They’re with us.’
The gentleman shoved the back door more or less back into position and shot the bolts. ‘Fucken Jacobins.’
January, ben-Gideon, the student – whose name was LeMoreau and who hailed from Brussels – and the whore all remained in the back room of what January guessed was the downstairs portion of the gambling hall Au Bon Oncle for an hour or more. Since the downstairs was mostly a wine shop, the glow of lamplight came through the curtain and with it the rise and fall of voices; upstairs, January knew, there would be new-style Argand lamps and almost total silence broken only by the rattle of the dice box and the voices of the croupiers. Here, downstairs, there were women’s voices as well. Once someone asked, ‘What on earth is going on out there?’
The owner’s deep voice replied, ‘I believe it to be police trouble, sir. Nothing to concern us here.’
‘I presume he pays the police more than Bourrèges does,’ murmured January.
‘Nonsense,’ retorted ben-Gideon, perched on a box of candles playing cards with the girl. ‘Nobody pays more than Bourrèges does.’
The shouting in the alleyway reached a crescendo, then faded away.
January guessed that police had come into the White Cat from the front as well as the alley, and if so, there had probably been fighting in the colonnade as well. But he guessed Ayasha had had the good sense to head straight into the dark central gardens at the first sign of trouble, and stay there.
When the disgruntled gentleman returned to the back room to give them the all-clear and unbolt the back door, nothing stirred in the wet blackness outside except a few scurrying rats, definite proof that things were back to normal. Stumbling on broken bricks and roof tiles that littered the alley, January and his companion worked their way around through the maze of medieval streets and stinking gutters that lay between the upriver side of the Palais Royal and the Butte St Roche, and so, eventually, back into the Palais gardens again. To judge by the crowds, one would think nothing out of the ordinary had happened – which in fact it had not. As he’d suspected, he found Ayasha at the café table where he’d left her, playing dominoes with Carnot.
‘There!’ she said in triumph. ‘You owe me ten centimes!’
‘Witch.’ The painter dug in his pocket. ‘You need to keep better control of your wife, Janvier – bloody hell, I haven’t a sou. Let me paint a portrait of you—’
‘You come up and carry water upstairs for me,’ retorted Ayasha, ‘and I’ll forgive you. There was scarcely any fighting out here, Mâlik; Bourrèges is swearing he’ll have the Police Superintendent’s job for this. A hundred francs a week, he pays! Will you join us for coffee, Daniel?’
‘I think –’ ben-Gideon bent to kiss her hand – ‘I shall decline the pleasure for the moment. Benjamin, I shall see you tomorrow night, I hope with something to tell. Heaven knows if I shall even be able to get a cab, dressed like this. I’ve had rather enough excitement for one evening.’
January – remembering back to the morning’s abrupt wakening in the fog – replied, ‘I couldn’t agree more.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 5