Sillery was even less forthcoming. The yard had been shut and locked by nine o’clock both nights. Ask Jones here, and ’Lilah, if you don’t believe me . . . Ask Miss Maggie. She’ll tell you. The dark eyes that regarded January were wary but calm.
And slaves, January knew, were always wary in the face of questions. When the truth of a black man’s guilt or innocence mattered to so few whites – when the consequences of how a white man would take any piece of information could be so arbitrary and so devastating – how could they not be?
‘She knows something,’ said January as he and Hannibal emerged on to Rue des Ursulines again. ‘Or suspects. The girls didn’t flee until the small hours of Saturday morning. Sillery and Jones could have raised the ladder for them, carried the gold down without knowing what it was, harnessed a team and for all we know driven them to their destination—’
‘Given the efficiency of the City Guards,’ put in Hannibal, ‘it’s unlikely they’d have crossed their path.’
‘Personally,’ January added, ‘I wouldn’t like to go into court with a story about the girls running away and then mysteriously being brought back. Maggie’s right. It was dangerous – and stupid – for the murderer to put himself into Sillery’s hands that way. Why not just dump them in the bayou?’
Hannibal shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you this, though. Hüseyin Pasha’s odalisques weren’t the only ones using that carriage house as a maison d’assignation.’ He dug in his pocket, produced a necklace of cheap beads, such as slave women wore. One of them, rudely-painted black and white, looked like it had come from Africa. ‘This was in a corner near the back.’
The charcoal man, leading his little white donkey along Rue des Ursulines, crossed over the street to the river-ward side as he approached them. On this gray and chilly morning, January was interested to note how many people were doing that, dodging drays and wagons if necessary, to avoid walking near the vèvès written on the walls of Hüseyin Pasha’s house. Even in daylight they looked ominous, scrawled crookedly across shutters and doors. The shopfront that occupied the corner rooms of the ground floor was also shuttered fast, the renter – January recalled the place sold fans and gloves – having no doubt realized that between scandal and voodoo, he had better find another place of business.
As they passed the courtyard gate, the coachman Nehemiah emerged with a bucket of whitewash. ‘I’ve contracted with your sister Olympe to come back after dark and renew the signs,’ said Hannibal. ‘Sitt Jamilla agrees that it’s best that the household doesn’t appear to realize that the signs may have the effect of keeping potential troublemakers away . . . the point being how many of them are likely to read this.’ He took a newspaper from his pocket and held it out: it was the Bulletin, not the True American, but the long letter on the editorial page about the rich men of the city defending an Infidel Murderer was initialed B.B.
January cursed, but in fact only one person lingered on the corner of Rue Bourbon to gawk at the house, and that person, January saw, was Abishag Shaw.
‘Suleiman said as how you was here last night.’ The Kentuckian stepped back to let a couple of slave women pass, crossing themselves even as they stared at the house. ‘One of our boys came by just after dark an’ cleared off a couple of two-legged alligators an’ their girlfriends then. But there ain’t but twenty of us on the night watch, an’ eight of them I couldn’t set to keepin’ schoolboys out of a candy shop. You seen what it’s like down on the levee these days, Sefton.’
‘Indeed I have,’ agreed Hannibal. ‘Chaos, rudis indigestaque moles . . . One reason I agreed last night to take up my residence temporarily under the Lady Jamilla’s roof.’ He nodded across the street. ‘That, and the fact that Russian Hetty turns out to have a boyfriend she didn’t tell me about – not that I would dream of laying so much as a disrespectful finger upon the hem of the lovely Hetty’s garment.’
‘M’am Hüseyin holdin’ up?’
‘As well as can be expected,’ said Hannibal grimly. ‘She asked me about breaking free of the opium habit – and I fear I could give her little encouragement that it would be easy. She has the shakes this morning, but hasn’t taken any yet. It isn’t a condition in which I’d care to try running for my life across the roof ahead of a drunken mob myself, but then a state of stupefaction wouldn’t be much help either.’
‘Damn Breche,’ January whispered. ‘He should try being a slave to the opium bottle, if he thinks it’s so clever of him to start feeding it to her . . .’
‘Oh, he is.’ Hannibal regarded him in mild surprise. ‘I thought you knew. Walk past the shop’s rubbish bins sometime. Somebody in that house is going through four bottles of Gregory’s Soothing Syrup a week, and something tells me it isn’t old master Philippe. Nasty stuff, all sugar and treacle, and not nearly the punch that a good spoonful of Kendal’s Black Drop will give you.’ He shook his head in disapproval at the young apothecary’s juvenile taste in drugs.
‘You got a gun?’ inquired Shaw.
‘Hüseyin Pasha has a number of truly formidable fowling-pieces.’
‘I’ll send you over somethin’ with a little more meat to it. That wouldn’t be your sister’s work –’ Shaw nodded across the street at the vèvès – ‘would it, Ben?’
January shook his head, neglecting to say that by tomorrow morning it would be. The whitewash Nehemiah was applying did little to cover the marks, for the stucco was originally a clear, pale blue and the shutters red. While speaking to Shaw, January had observed the passers-by, and he had to agree that though many stopped and stared, even Kaintucks who knew nothing about what the signs meant kept their distance. A second layer of marks over the whitewash would only increase the eerie appearance of the house – the announcement that the place was sufficiently accursed.
Sufficiently, at least, for those whose only intention was to vent upon the helpless their own anger at the rich.
‘How long before Hüseyin goes to trial?’ he asked. ‘And has any progress been made in finding out about this Mr Smith?’
‘None,’ said Shaw. ‘Nor is there like to be. I sent off letters to the newspapers in Mobile an’ Baton Rouge, but if our bird came in disguise – an’ damn few businessmen walk around wearin’ beards like a keelboat captain’s – stands to reason he had some call to do it. Just as it would stand to reason for anyone wantin’ to start up a bank to go to Hüseyin, him havin’ just about the only specie in New Orleans.’
‘Not any more, he doesn’t.’ January recounted what they had found – or rather, what they had not found – in the alcove in the Lady Jamilla’s room. ‘It looks like the girls sneaked dirt and bricks out of the livery yard a little at a time in their shawls, when Nehemiah let them slip out so that Noura could meet her beloved. They’d carry up the rubbish late at night and substitute it for the gold while Jamilla was asleep.’
‘Well, them clever little minxes.’
‘I’m guessing they hid the gold in the divans in their room,’ put in Hannibal. ‘It’s what I’d have done. Even one piece would be enough to win Sillery’s assistance, for such things as putting up ladders and lugging heavy bags across kitchen roofs in the middle of the night. Far easier to lower the gold by a rope wrapped around the kitchen chimney than lug it down through the house in the middle of the night. I can’t imagine why they didn’t wait until Sunday night, when they knew the servants would be out of the house, but they didn’t.’
‘The only problem,’ concluded January, ‘is that we have not discovered one single shred of proof of any of this.’
‘All we have discovered,’ added Hannibal, ‘is a splendid reason – far better than mere jealousy – for Hüseyin Pasha to strangle our larcenous damsels and toss them out the window . . . as the imaginative Mr Breche is going to point out if we take this to court. So it perhaps behoves us—’
‘It behoves us nuthin’.’ Shaw shoved his hands into his pockets and spat. ‘Monday afternoon Mayor Prieur sent off a letter to the Sultan’s consul in Havana,
askin’ him to send somebody to fetch Hüseyin Pasha an’ deal with him elsewhere – Constantinople, for preference. Captain Tremouille’s like an old maid with an engagement ring: it gets us outta the whole shootin’ match, an’ the word is now that we just hang on to the man, ’til the Sultan’s Guards come an’ take him away.’
‘And leave his family as targets for the rest of New Orleans to shoot at.’
‘That,’ said Shaw, and he spat again, ‘we have been told, ain’t none of our business no more.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘I know the Consul.’ Hüseyin Pasha leaned against the rusted filth of the cell bars, tired resignation in his voice. ‘Like everyone whom the Sultan appoints these days, he sees me as . . . old-fashioned. Obstructionist.’ He sighed and rubbed at the fresh cut beside his left eye. ‘Nevertheless, he knows me. I can only hope that he will not assume – as will any men here who would make up my jury – that I would simply murder two members of my family out of jealousy . . . and certainly not that I would be so stupid as to pitch them from the front window of my own house.’
There was a sharp rattle of wings and a three-inch roach buzzed across the room; the Turk struck it out of the air with an exclamation of disgust, crushed it underfoot. ‘I suppose I should be glad of this,’ he continued wearily. ‘At least the man Breche will not come to Constantinople and babble his fantasies before the judge.’
The stink of the cell nauseated January, even where he stood in the icy corridor outside. The cold did a little to damp the fetor, but through the bars he could see that, despite it, the straw underfoot crept with insect life. Some of the wards of the Hôtel Dieu in Paris had smelled just as bad during the cholera, but at least the roaches had been smaller.
‘Will it be safe for your family to follow you there?’
‘The Sultan is not a man to kill the family of one whom he condemns.’ Hüseyin unwrapped the package that January had brought him as he spoke: in addition to paying a call on the Valentine children, January had set forth that morning with a package from Rose, wrapped in clean newspapers: bread, cheese, apples and bottles of ginger beer. ‘I suppose I should be grateful, that this is not the modern way, the Western way. But there is the chance that my goods will be confiscated and my beautiful Jamilla, and my son, left destitute. Moreover,’ he added, ‘it is clear to me that I was . . . How do you say it in this country? That I was “set up”, maneuvered into this position, though by whom I do not know . . .’
‘Is there any chance,’ asked January quietly, ‘that your enemy Sabid is behind this?’ For a moment he had what felt like a memory, of Ayasha’s voice – So, do you think it was Sabid? – and the ache of something lost . . . ‘Where is Sabid?’
‘Until two weeks ago, I had thought him in Germany.’ On the other side of the cell, two of the other prisoners shouted at one another over whether or not someone named Violet was a whore; a third prisoner yelled for them to shut up. Down the corridor, in the white men’s cell, a thin, frantic voice screamed: Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me! January wondered if Dante had ever spent time in a prison before writing about the sounds and smells of Hell.
‘I have friends, naturally, who have kept me apprised of Sabid’s movements. He has never regained his position at the Sultan’s court, and he holds me responsible for this.’ Hüseyin finished the cheese, drank the ginger beer thirstily and wiped the droplets from his mustache. ‘Thus at least I do not need to fear him if it comes to trial. At the end of last month I received word that Sabid had left Munich; my correspondent knew not his destination. Believe me –’ the Turk’s mouth quirked sidelong – ‘this is a thought that has crossed my mind as well. Yet it sounds as if my poor Noura had begun to plan her sins well before Sabid could have reached this country, if it was indeed he. And how would he have known of their intentions?’
January shook his head. ‘And it seems very – very elaborate – for something which could be done as easily with a rifle some afternoon when you rode in the country.’
‘This is so. As for the man Smith – yes, he could have been paid to arrange with me that the house would be cleared. Looking back on it, I should have been more on my guard. But he was not the first, you understand, to ask for a quiet audience with me. Nor the first to ask that no one be in the house to see him come and go.’
‘Was the letter he sent you in English, or in French?’
‘French. But that is something which anyone in the city could have told him of me,’ he added, as if even in the intense gloom of the corridor he could see the thoughtful look that narrowed January’s eyes. ‘He was doubtless friends with any of a thousand businessmen here. What he said to me – that, within a year or two, cotton prices would recover and all men would clamor for loans to buy new land – is what everyone has said, at every party and ziyafet since I have come here.’
January was silent, turning this over in his mind. A man who disguised himself, to call on someone who had never seen him before . . . A letter written in French . . .
‘What is your advice, my friend?’ The prisoner wrapped the last of the cheese and bread in the newspaper, set them aside. To purchase the goodwill of his cell mates, January guessed. ‘Think you that my son and Jamilla will be in danger, once I am gone and this nuti of a journalist can gain no more readers for his newspaper by slandering me?’
‘I think they will be safe,’ January replied slowly. ‘They can take a smaller place in the Marigny quarter and live quietly. It is a district of foreigners: Germans and Russians and Italians. I will put myself at your lady’s disposal, to help with arrangements. When public feeling has died down I’ll introduce her to friends in the French Creole society, who can help her.’
‘Good.’ Hüseyin ran a hand over the graying stubble of his hair. ‘Since I am to be taken away, I think it a better use of your time, my friend, if you would be so good, to look after Sitt Jamilla for me, and my son, and our servants who have been so faithful to us. After all, if this Mr Smith would cover his face with a beard and lie about his name to see me, he will hardly go to Constantinople to speak for me.’
‘But he will send his affidavit,’ said January firmly. ‘As will the Lieutenant, regarding the distance from M’sieu Breche’s balcony to the window. As will I, and my friend the fiddler Sefton, asking whether, if you had killed those unfortunate girls because of their theft, you would not have put the gold back in your chest. All these can you show your judge—’
‘And my judge will say,’ said Hüseyin with a bitter smile: ‘Here is a man who wishes to keep the old ways of Islam strong in our Empire, rather than turn its rulership over to politicians who see only law, and not into the hearts of men. Just as they say here: Here is a man who does not worship the Christian God – he must have done this evil thing. Or: Here is a black man. Or: Here is a woman. And of course there is a very good chance that my judge will not be able to read French. If Allah wishes me to survive, he will guard me and keep me, my friend, and all that the Sultan can do will fall away. If Allah does not wish me to survive, all that you can do will not preserve my life. Care for my family.’
When January descended the stair and crossed the Cabildo courtyard to the watch room, Shaw solemnly handed him a wrapped-up bundle of umbrellas. ‘Your friend at Hüseyin’s house said he’d need these.’
January took them with a nod. It was illegal for a man of African descent to carry a weapon of any kind, even a walking stick. He guessed, by the length and weight of the bundle, that it contained a rifle, which he duly delivered to Hannibal at the house on the Rue Bourbon. As the woman Lorette conducted January up the stair to the second-floor parlor, he heard the sweet fantasias of Hannibal’s fiddle, drifting down from the floor above, and guessing what was going on, he asked Lorette, ‘Is the Lady Jamilla ill?’
‘Yes, sir.’ A great deal of her haughtiness of Monday was gone. She looked tired and strained – and who would not, January reflected, with rumors going around among the slaves, and the near-certain knowledge that she, a
nd they, would all be sold, to God knew where, in a wretched market? ‘Sweating, and sick, and wanting him beside her, poor lady, just to talk – an’ that nasty beast Ghulaam sitting right there with his sword, like he didn’t trust either one of them . . . What the hell’s the matter with those people?’
January paused in the door of the parlor, and shook his head. ‘What the hell’s the matter with any people, m’am?’
The woman sighed, her wide mouth setting for a moment in wry agreement. ‘You got a point there, sir. I’ll fetch him down.’
January returned to his own home to find Rose beneath the house with two new ‘visitors’, a young man named Del and his wife Peggy. Surprisingly, Peggy had a child with her, a girl just under two. It wasn’t usual for slaves to escape with children that small: ‘—but our master gone off to New Iberia for three days, an’ we had the chance . . .’
‘It’s all right.’ January prayed silently that it would in fact be all right. ‘I’ll see what we can do.’ With Baby John in the house at least no one would question it, if a child’s cries were heard . . .
‘But the last thing we need,’ he sighed as he undressed that night, ‘is for people to be coming around here looking to collect the bounty on escaped slaves.’
‘I shall speak to your sister in the morning,’ promised Rose, taking off her spectacles, ‘and have her put curses all over this house.’ And, when January rolled his eyes: ‘Some people are never satisfied.’
I’ll have to write to Rose.
The thought came to January suddenly as he sat in the window watching the last of the thin spring sunlight on the rooftops of Paris. Birds skimmed above those mossy tiles. The sweet, clear question of the bells of St Séverin, answered by the reassuring bronze voice of Notre Dame.
Happiness at being home again, which made him want to weep.
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 22