They made their way cautiously up to Rue des Ramparts, and thence circuitously back to Rue Esplanade. Gabriel met them on the corner: ‘No chickens so far.’ Meaning, police. He nodded down the street. ‘Zizi’s keeping watch down toward the river, and she just signaled me a couple minutes ago.’ He looked as if he were enjoying himself hugely.
‘I hope you’re right,’ said January. ‘Considering what we’re about to do is illegal, the last thing I need is the Watch right at hand.’
Two streets away he saw Hannibal come down the gallery steps from the big Spanish house and stroll up toward them: he was also, January noticed, keeping a sharp eye about him. He had a basket in one hand, containing a pineapple and a half-dozen crawfish. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult,’ he said, when he reached them. ‘The Metoyer cook’s been out three times just since the ladies walked out, to chat with the scissors grinder, a girl selling berries, and Phlosine Seurat’s maid who happened to be passing by. She also walked back to the kitchen when the charcoal man came by, to chat with him. If I ask her opinion about the crawfish when I deliver the pineapple, ten to one she’ll take me back to the kitchen for a consultation.’
‘Good.’ January hefted Rose’s tin cylinder in his hand.
‘What’s in that thing?’
‘Mostly saltpeter and sugar,’ replied Rose cheerfully. ‘With a little gunpowder to make it stink.’
‘I can throw it,’ offered Gabriel.
‘Absolutely not. The last thing I need is for your mother to put a cross on me for getting you in trouble.’
‘I thought you said we wouldn’t get into trouble,’ challenged the boy with a grin.
‘I’ve been wrong before. Hannibal, the minute you hear Rose shout, you run to the house and be there at the bottom of the stair. We need a white man for a witness.’
‘I warn you I charge for court appearances.’
They crossed the street. As it turned out, that was actually the most dangerous item of the program: Rue Esplanade was one of the main arteries of trade from the lake to the River and twice the width of most streets in the town. Between the drays and carriages, the water sellers and strollers and goods wagons, there was no way Gabriel and Zizi-Marie could have spotted Abishag Shaw, had he really been on January’s trail.
Looking like any respectable couple out for a promenade, January and Rose idled a few houses down while Hannibal strolled up to the yellow cottage with his basket and rapped at the French door that opened into the Metoyer parlor.
He would not, of course, have been admitted into the parlor from the street, had any of the Metoyers been home, nor would he have dreamed of asking to be so. But a gentleman did not rap at the window of a lady’s bedroom.
The door opened and Elise emerged, small and wrinkled and cunning as a Roman empress in the arts of intrigue and gossip, and succumbed in five seconds flat to Hannibal’s feckless charm. She emerged from the house and ushered him through the passway to the yard, for a consultation in the kitchen about whether the crawfish in the basket were wholesome or not.
‘How long is the fuse?’ murmured January as he and Rose approached the house.
She held up two fingers, and they stepped through the unlocked French window – he half expected his mother to appear and shriek at him for entering through the parlor . . .
Soundless as spies they passed into the dining room, hugging the walls where their footfalls wouldn’t creak. The stairs from the attic descended through a ‘cabinet’ next to a French door, through which, in the yard, Hannibal could be seen chatting amicably with both women servants in the door of the kitchen.
A careful housewife, Rose turned over a silver tray on the highly polished cherrywood of the dining table to protect the finish. On this she set her smoke bomb, lit the fuse, and both she and January retreated through the door into Babette’s bedroom.
Black smoke belched forth with the stink of gunpowder. It was followed at once by a rolling cloud of white smoke, pouring from every nail hole in the tin. Rose dashed into the dining room, feet clattering in panic, and shouted, ‘Fire! Fire!’
From the yard behind, Hannibal took up the cry, ‘Fire!’
At the door of the cabinet stair, Rose cried, ‘Hubert, run! Fire!’ and stepped back into the bedroom, at the exact moment that Hannibal yanked open the door from the yard.
A man raced down the stair, slammed through the cabinet door. A tall, stout gentleman, whose ruddy complexion and red-gold beard-stubble matched extremely ill the black dye still lingering in his hair. He wore shirtsleeves, trousers, and a handsome lounging-robe of green and gold brocade, and he skidded to a horrified stop at the sight of Hannibal in the doorway. It took January and Rose mere seconds to dash through Bernadette’s room, out to the street, and back into the house through the parlor French door, and their victim hadn’t moved.
‘My goodness,’ cried Rose as they plunged into the smoke-filled dining-room, ‘is that Mr Granville?’
The still-smoking bomb was borne into the yard (‘I can’t imagine who would have done such a thing!’ ‘It must have been those boys we saw running out of the house and down the street, Rose!’)
When January said quietly, ‘Mr Smith, I presume?’ the banker Hubert Granville glowered, but consented to cross the street to the January house to continue the interview. Far too many neighbors were appearing – to be greeted with Hannibal’s shocked tale of malicious boys – for the defaulting banker to wish to remain in the home of his former mistresses.
‘I wouldn’t have left the man to be hanged, you know.’ Granville scowled, but accepted the cup of coffee Rose brought him – brewed by Gabriel, since Rose, though she could judge to the weight of an apple seed how much sulfate of copper to put into a blue firework, couldn’t, as Shaw privately put it, make coffee for sour owl-shit. ‘My partners and I would have hired some fellow to come forward and be Mr Smith, if it had come to trial. And since Hüseyin’s the Sultan’s friend, he’s well out of it if all that happens is he goes back to Constantinople.’
‘But he isn’t the Sultan’s friend,’ said January quietly. ‘I doubt he’ll be hanged when he gets there, because I don’t think even the Sultan would believe that fool apothecary’s affidavit, but your not coming forward has placed his family in jeopardy, if nothing else.’
‘You think they’d have freed him, if I’d come forward and said: No, I was sitting with the fellow the whole time?’ The banker’s small blue eyes glinted shrewdly. ‘Or would they just say: Here’s a man who’ll swear anything, in order to get his hands on the Turk’s gold, and clap me up as well?’
January was silent. He knew Granville was probably right.
‘Was that what you were doing there that night?’ asked Rose. The failure of the Bank of Louisiana nine months previously had wiped out virtually everything she and January owned, except the house, yet her voice was calm and reasonable, recriminations being useless at this point. January knew Hubert Granville was an honorable man by his own lights, and as honest as bankers were capable of being. If he had – as he was widely accused of doing – speculated in cotton, railway shares, and Indian land with the bank’s money, it was no more than what every other member of the bank’s board had done.
And he hadn’t had to come back to New Orleans, to try to re-establish a bank. There were planters – and men of considerably lower social standing – who would almost certainly shoot him on sight.
More to the point, thought January, he had remained in New Orleans, hidden at the Metoyer cottage, following to see what would happen to Hüseyin, when he could have fled back to Mobile or Baton Rouge from the Turk’s very doorstep, washing his hands every step of the way.
Granville took a praline from the plate Rose offered him and turned it, with surprising delicacy, in his chubby fingers. ‘Six of us on the board of the bank have been trying to put assets together to reopen. We’ve been writing to investors about it for months. It will be a few years before we’re able to repay former investors—’ He lifted his hand
as January drew in breath to say something that probably shouldn’t have been said to a white man. ‘You can believe that or not, and it doesn’t matter so far as last Sunday night is concerned. I came into town –’ he fluffed at his cheeks, where he’d previously sported a jawline Quaker beard – ‘suitably decorated, to meet with the Turk.’
‘After asking him to get rid of the servants for the night.’
Granville nodded. ‘I arrived just after dark, and we talked for about two hours. I remember it rained while I sat there. I explained to him that my bank had been involved in the crash, and that it was imperative no one saw me. He’d had the letter out during our talk, and I snatched it up from the desk the moment he was out of the room. Too many people know my hand.’
‘So you were with him,’ said January, ‘when the shouting started in the street?’
‘Oh, God, yes. The shutters were closed, but we both heard the girls fall. When the first struck the ground Hüseyin started up and said something in Arabic – it must have been something like: “What was that?” – and he stood half out of his chair for a minute, listening. I knew his wife was in the house and he’d mentioned she was unwell – I think we both feared it might have been she who’d fallen. Then there was the second sort of thudding crunch – horrible sound! He was already starting toward the door when people began shouting in the street.’
‘And that’s when you fled?’
The dyed eyebrows bunched at the word. ‘I thought there had been some accident. Not ’til the following day did I learn he was accused of any crime. But people were coming in. I could not be seen.’
‘You let yourself out the carriage gate?’ Rose poured him another cup of Gabriel’s very excellent coffee.
Granville nodded again. The request for factual information rather than recrimination for his flight seemed to reassure him. ‘I waited on the stair, and as soon as Hüseyin went into the passageway to the front door I crossed the courtyard and let myself out the carriage gate. It’s around the corner from where the bodies fell.’
‘And no one saw you go?’
‘I dare say some did,’ grunted the banker. ‘But they were too busy running to the four winds themselves. I was nearly knocked down by a wagon coming out the gate of the livery yard—’
‘Wagon?’ said January, startled. ‘What? Who was running to the four winds?’
‘Slaves, I think.’ The big man shrugged. ‘Saw ’em sneaking into the livery yard as I came down the street when I arrived. Half a dozen wagons, there must have been – one of the livery hands opened the gate to let ’em in – and God only knows how many on foot. Not my business.’
Not your business unless you’re trying to work out how the real killer got two dead girls up to the Pavot attic and thence across the roof . . .
‘More my wife’s line,’ the banker went on. ‘It’s not our business how our servants worship, and as far as I’m concerned it shouldn’t be anyone’s. Damn shame that they have to sneak out and meet in a stable, if they want to sing a few hymns and hear a sermon that isn’t all larded up with Popish nonsense, if you’ll forgive me saying so. There’s no harm in it. The man was ordained by a proper church, and they’d never have done that if he were a troublemaker.’
Dazzled and a little shocked – seeing in his mind, for some reason, the cold exultant face of Mother Marie-Doloreuse, as well as the darkness of that stable yard into which one wagon could have been driven among many, bearing the corpses of the girls – January asked, ‘What man? You’re telling me there was a meeting in the livery yard that night?’
‘In the carriage barn there, I guess.’ Granville shrugged. ‘I understand they have a dozen meeting places, all over town. Myself, I think it’s to the niggers’ credit, that they’d take that much trouble to get themselves to proper worship instead of those heathen dances in Congo Square.’
‘What man?’ asked January again.
‘What’s-his-name, that black preacher. Paul Bannon.’
TWENTY-FIVE
‘Credo quia absurdum,’ said January grimly. ‘I believe because it is absurd.’
‘Tertullian said that,’ remarked Hannibal.
‘The man obviously never taught a girls’ school.’ Rose glanced from the paper in her hand to the gateposts of the handsome houses along the Bayou Road, seeking the residence of the Reverend Emmanuel Promise.
Pavot’s servant Jerry had had only the vaguest sense that Paul Bannon lived ‘someplace in the Marigny’, and January had been unwilling to pursue enquiries with the servants at the livery, lest word get back to Bannon that January was still at large. It would have been easy, January reflected, for a minister to ask slaves in the household of Mr Tremmel to set up some kind of false scenario that had implicated January in theft.
He remembered Daniel ben-Gideon, like a great, soft Persian cat in his gray evening-dress at the Tambonneau ball: I’ve always had great admiration for the organization of the Holy Church. It’s astonishing what they can get people to do . . . One would think they all had guilty consciences or something.
‘God gives some men the gift of golden voices,’ he said thoughtfully. Their feet crunched on the shells that paved the Bayou Road, and to their left, the bayou shimmered in the morning sunlight like a sheet of greenish steel. ‘Sometimes they go into politics, and sometimes into religion, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. They can get people to do things.’
‘I say unto one Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh . . .’
‘ . . . and unto my servant,’ January continued, elaborating upon Hannibal’s quote, ‘take this bottle of opium and this Western dress to a girl named Shamira on the Rue St-Honoré whom you’ve never seen before and never will again, and behold, it is done . . .’
‘Considering what some men do with that gift, I find it hard to imagine that it’s God who hands it out.’ Rose drew her borrowed pink skirts aside from the wet weeds at the edge of the roadside ditch. ‘Perhaps my notion of God is limited.’
‘Perhaps it’s only evil fairies,’ surmised Hannibal. ‘As Pope Urban the Second found out when he preached the First Crusade, deus vult seems to cover a multitude of sins. This appears to be the place.’ He stopped at the head of a carriage drive that stretched back through a copse of trees.
To the right of the drive land had been cleared for a lawn, though the project seemed to have been abandoned before the cypress stumps had been pulled. The house was in the American style, two stories, long and box-shaped, with a porch across the short end equipped with pillars in the hopes that these – and the inexpensive coat of white paint – would induce people to exclaim how great a resemblance it bore to the Parthenon of Athens. It rose from straggling thickets of palmetto and elephant ear suggestive of not having enough yard help, though when January, Rose, and Hannibal followed the carriageway to the back of the house, January took note of the fresh droppings in the stable yard, so the Reverend Promise was making enough at least to keep horses and presumably a groom.
But the whole of the property bore an air of neglect. Only two servants – the groom and a woman who might have been the cook – sat at the table outside the kitchen in the mild winter sunlight. The instant the visitors emerged around the side of the house the groom sprang to his feet and walked with purposeful stride back to the stable (‘I’m getting on about my work, sir, I wouldn’t THINK of sitting and taking a rest . . .’), and the woman also started to rise, a sort of tired two-stage motion that shouted to January mid-back pain: probably chronic . . .
‘Please don’t get up.’ January crossed the yard to her.
She cast a quick glance toward the house, then another – warily – at Hannibal, who immediately retreated and looked at his watch. I have no interest in how other peoples’ servants spend their time and wouldn’t DREAM of splitting on them . . .
‘My name is Belloc – my wife . . .’ January made no mention whatsoever of Hannibal, who idled in the background. ‘We’re seeking the Reverend Mr Bannon
, and we hoped that someone here might know where he could be found.’
‘He lives on Caza Calvo Street, just past the big cotton-press, a brown house in the middle of the block.’ The woman glanced at the house windows again, and January saw the flicker of fear in her eyes. ‘River side of the street. I’m sorry it’s a long walk for you . . .’
‘It’s a beautiful morning,’ said January, which was true. The wind that blew in from the Gulf brought an almost springlike balminess, a relief from the gripping cold. By the woman’s speech she was American-bred. When she shook his hand in parting he saw the fresh galls of a strap on her wrist bones, the kind of wound a slave takes when she struggles against bindings as she’s beaten.
The wound was echoed in her eyes. He wondered if there were a way of letting Emily Redfern know about this, and if the widow would care.
If you don’t keep discipline there’s absolutely no dealing with servants . . .
Or maybe that was a truism she only applied to her own household staff.
‘I’ll bet he doesn’t let his own servants out to attend the Reverend Bannon’s services,’ he said, with quiet wrath, when they had once again gained the Bayou Road.
‘By the look of it,’ replied Rose calmly, ‘they couldn’t contribute to the building of his new Tabernacle anyway, so why bother? I’m sure there is more holiness to be gleaned by sweeping the Great Man’s floors.’
January reminded himself that to assume that a man was a murderer just because he was a hypocrite was exactly the same as assuming he was one just because he was a Turk . . .
And a black man could as easily be a hypocrite as a white.
It wasn’t until they reached Caza Calvo Street, a few blocks back from the river in a shabby district of small cottages permeated with the odor of backyard chicken-runs, that he understood fully what had happened to Hüseyin Pasha’s concubines.
Standing on the opposite side of the street from the brown house in the middle of the block, he said quietly, ‘It was Promise who killed them.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 26