‘First thing when I get back.’
‘Fat lot of good that’ll do me when your mother claims the house.’ She added his waistcoat to the bundle.
‘Tell her I’ve left town and will be back in six months—’ January pulled off his boots: most of the men on the levee worked barefoot despite the cold, and he knew he couldn’t afford to replace them if he left them behind on the ship when he went over the side. ‘Then hire somebody to be me.’ He kissed her, swift and passionate – Bannon looked shocked – trying to keep his mind from the fact that he might very well get himself killed on the Najm.
That he might leave her a widow, Baby John an orphan. And for what?
Do unto others as you’d hope to God somebody would have the decency to do unto you in this benighted country . . .
From his boot he pulled his knife, which it was illegal for him to carry but which he was never without, and thrust it into his waistband, under his shirt. Then he glanced around, made sure no one was looking, and picked up the nearest sack from a pile left on the wharf. He joined himself on to a group of stevedores carrying similar sacks up the gangplank on to the black-hulled brig and didn’t look back.
The Najm was about a hundred feet long, of which less than eighty was deck. She was the kind of low-built, sleek vessel made for pirating among the islands; two years ago January and Rose had traveled to Mexico on a ship much like her. The crew – Cubans, in whom Spanish and Indian blood was mingled with greater or lesser degrees of African – clustered around the hatch amidships where the water kegs were being lowered. The forward hatch that would lead down to the forecastle was shut.
An awkward arrangement for the men who slept there . . .
The fo’c’s’le was the place January would have stowed a prisoner, particularly one he didn’t plan on taking farther than the river’s mouth at Balize.
He descended the aft companionway into deep gloom barred with dim daylight. Beyond a door, light from the open hatch showed him two crewmen settling the water barrels. There was little cargo, only stores; in this weather it could take a week to reach Havana. Two tiny cabins, barely closets, flanked the captain’s quarters behind him. One of them upon investigation belonged to the ship’s carpenter, whose chest contained a pry bar. The other – allotted to the mate – held a sea chest, the hasp of which January simply wrenched free with the bar. He had no idea how long it would take him to pick a padlock: Hannibal could do it in seconds, but his own time ranged from five minutes to infinity.
There was a pistol in the chest, and a horn of powder. He bent the hasp back, turned it to the wall. Worthless if he was going to remain on board for more than a few minutes . . .
And I have it on Bannon’s authority that the Bible says it’s perfectly appropriate to despoil the Egyptians . . .
Men scrambled up the companionway to the deck. An officer shouted. Someone else bellowed in sloppy cane-patch French that this is it, you lazy bozals, time to ficher this tub . . .
One thing about brigs: it took a lot of men to set their sails, particularly against a headwind such as the one now blowing up from the Gulf. The currents around Algiers Point were treacherous, and the crew would be picking their way among steamboats, packets, ocean-going craft and wood boats like the Black Goose, all angling for space at the docks . . .
January stepped through into the now-empty cargo-hold, then through into the smaller hold just aft of the fo’c’s’le, where, as he had suspected, hammocks and sea chests taken from the fo’c’s’le had been heaped higgledy-piggledy, to clear the room for the prisoner. The hatch overhead was closed, increasing the gloom. He wriggled himself down between sacks of corn, barrels of water, pulled a couple of spare sails over himself. Something indignant wriggled away from his foot, and squeaked. If worst comes to worst I can always claim I’m a slave on the run . . .
If Sabid’s men didn’t remember his face as clearly as he recalled theirs.
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, he prayed, PLEASE let Rose have found Natchez Jim.
PLEASE let Hannibal get to the Cabildo in time to speak to Shaw . . .
Voices on the deck. The thick planking muffled them, but he heard feet descend the aft companionway a few moments later. Mingled with the creak of belt- and boot-leather, the clink of chains.
Hüseyin Pasha said something quietly in Osmanli, and, sharp and steely, the voice of Sabid al-Muzaffar replied.
They passed through the aft hold, and from his hiding place beneath the canvas, January caught a fragmentary glimpse of Hüseyin’s brown hand and torn and grimy green pantaloons. Sabid added something else as they passed him. Listening carefully – the purposeful uproar of launch had begun on the deck above – January heard the clack of a key in a lock, the woody creak of a door.
The jingle of chain. Another metallic clack.
Men passed him again and ascended the companionway to the deck. The decking underfoot dipped as the river took the Najm and they luffed away from the wharf.
Hannibal quite obviously hadn’t located Shaw. Perhaps – judging by the time it would take the fiddler to walk from the blue-water wharves to the Cabildo – he had met Sabid, his guards, and his prisoner on the way.
And here’s where Dauntless Dick charges into seventeen enemies armed with nothing but his sailor’s knife and his virtuous American courage . . .
Through the wood of the bulkhead, he could hear Hüseyin praying. ‘In the name of Allah, the most Compassionate, the most Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord who is the Creator, Sustainer, and Guide of all the worlds . . . Thee alone do we worship, from Thee alone we seek help . . .’
Ayasha had taught January the words in Arabic, practically the only part of the Qur’an she knew by heart.
He slipped from beneath the sails, crossed to the shut door in two strides. Voices drifted down through the grilled hatch-cover: orders shouted in Spanish and Arabic, running feet, the creak of rigging. In his mind January pictured, like a desperate conjuration, the low dark shape of the Black Goose disengaging itself from the tangle of wood boats and keel boats and steamships and sloops, hanging off the Najm’s stern . . .
In his mind he made Sabid say to his officer: We can’t kill him until we’re clear of the town . . .
Hugging the wall – though there was little chance of anyone looking down through the hatch cover – he scrambled over boxes, sacks, kegs to the door.
‘Sahib Hüseyin!’ he hissed.
There was a judas in the padlocked fo’c’s’le door, but the blackness beyond it was impenetrable. The voice stopped, and metal clinked.
‘Hüseyin, it’s Janvier!’
A whisper from the darkness, ‘Ya-allah.’
January wedged the pry bar under the hasp, leaned on it with all his strength. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Bruises only, my friend. But the chain is locked to a staple in the wall. How many are with you?’
‘Just me.’
‘Ya-allah,’ said the Turk again. ‘They will come to fetch me soon, do not risk—’
‘Not ’til they’re clear of the shipping.’ January panted as he worked the pry bar deeper, braced shoulder and thigh against the door and pushed again. The wood gave with a splintery crack that he could have sworn was audible on the deck. ‘It’s the middle of the afternoon. Sabid will hardly dump a man’s body in full view of every steam packet and cotton importer from here to the Balize. He isn’t really working for the Sultan’s consul, is he?’
‘Would any official have set sail so promptly? I doubt the consul’s secretary has even yet put the Police Chief’s letter into the consul’s hand. No, Sabid has friends at the consulate in Havana, so heard of my misfortunes while he was in Vera Cruz. He pays well for information. He claims my arrest was none of his doing, but—’
‘He’s telling the truth.’ January pushed the door open, slipped into the tiny chamber as he fumbled from his trouser pocket the candle end he always carried, the tin of matches, and Hannibal’s picklocks. The cell was smaller t
han a whore’s crib and reeked of bilge water. The iron staple bolted into the wall would have needed an ax to chop loose. ‘Hold this.’
He pressed the pistol into Hüseyin’s hand, lit the candle. ‘And this. Good, it’s a slave shackle . . .’
‘And this is a good thing, my friend?’
January bent over the iron tube, probed with the flattened T-bar picklock. ‘It’s a simple thing,’ he said grimly. ‘It has to be, because there are so many of them required for the trade. I have a collection of all the different sorts of screw keys – at present reposing in the storeroom under my house – but a friend showed me how to pick these . . . Got it.’ With delicate care, he turned the screw mechanism within the tube. Hannibal could pick this type of lock with one of Rose’s hairpins while carrying on a conversation about who had actually written the Iliad; January fought to keep those tiny, invisible pins in contact with the equally tiny probe.
‘One would think,’ murmured Hüseyin gently, ‘that you are versed in robbing other men of their property in this fashion.’
January glanced up at him, saw amused enlightenment in his eyes. ‘I’ve been known to violate a law or two, M’sieu.’
‘The ways of kismet are mysterious. If—’ His head turned sharply, and January heard it, too: feet on the companionway, voices in Spanish—
January blew out the candle, turned the picklock gently . . . Wrapped his hand around the loop of the shackle to muffle the grate of its teeth sliding from the iron tube. He heard his companion’s breath go out in a whisper of thanks, gave him his knife and thrust him against the bulkhead to the left of the half-open door, then stood to the right with the pistol held as a club.
For a split second he feared that the crewmen would simply turn around at the fo’c’s’le door and go back up to the deck: My lord, the Turk has escaped . . .
But they came running instead to make sure. January would have liked to let all of them come into the cell before attacking, but when the second man came through the door he had the wits to turn around and saw Hüseyin, cried out an instant before the Turk stabbed him. Thus January had to plunge out through the door – not knowing how many were outside – to keep them from simply slamming the door again. There was only one other in the forward hold and he’d already turned, racing for the companionway.
He was a small man, and fast, and used to moving with the pitching of the deck. But January knew that his own life was at stake, and the knowledge gave him wings. He leaped over barrels, boxes, kegs, caught the man a foot short of the bulkhead and slammed him against the timbers with all his force. Whether the blow killed him or not January didn’t know. He heard someone on deck above the open aft hatch shout something. Hüseyin burst from the cell at a dead run, bloodied knife in hand, and January raced full tilt through the aft hold, up the companionway – if they close the hatch we’re dead men . . .
A man was silhouetted against the daylight, slamming the hatch above him. January fired the pistol at a range of about five feet, and the man jerked back, those around him leaping clear. January burst up out of the hatch, dodged sideways from the inevitable shot and stooped to tear the dying sailor’s knife from his belt. And a lot of good that’s going to do . . .
Hüseyin Pasha sprang up the companionway and fired – one of the men at the cell must have had pistols – at almost point-blank range into the sailors and guards clustered near the aft hatch. A musket ball tore a chunk from the hatch molding inches from January’s chest, and past the milling confusion he glimpsed Sabid, standing on a coil of rope near the mast, reaching for another musket from a man behind him.
‘This way!’ January flung himself at a guard where the crowd was thinnest. He slashed with his knife, heard another pistol close beside him, then Hüseyin was at his side, swinging the empty pistol like a club. Someone grabbed January’s arm, and January turned, punched his assailant with the whole of his force, plunged for the rail. ‘Jump!’
He was in the air and headed for the water before he realized that he had no idea whether Rose had been able to locate Natchez Jim or not.
Another shot, and he struck the Mississippi like an arrow.
And thank God the current here’s too strong for gators . . .
He came up, gasping. Musket and pistol balls hit the water around him; men lined the Najm’s rail. Sabid’s green coat was not among them.
Hüseyin was swimming strongly toward him, brown stubbled head like a bobbing coconut on the dun-colored waters, fighting the current that swept them both toward the sea.
More shots behind them. January turned and saw the low black hull of the Black Goose skimming toward them like a somber Valkyrie, with Rose’s spectacles flashing among the men clustered at the bow.
Crimson banners flickering against the smoke of the burning cane-fields, the Najm swung over out of the wind. The massive current of the river carried her downstream, past the landing at Chalmette and away toward the sea.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Even with all sails set to the smart wind that blew from the Gulf, it took the Black Goose the rest of the short winter day to fight the current back to New Orleans. Wrapped in rather grubby blankets in a corner of the deck, Hüseyin Pasha listened in silence to Bannon’s account of Karida’s reconversion to the religion of her childhood, and of what the Reverend Promise had considered the appropriate destination for money belonging to unbelievers.
‘I should like to think that he meant that gold to go toward the building of his church,’ said the young preacher quietly. ‘That he was merely misguided – culpably, criminally so – rather than simply . . . greedy.’ He turned his face away as he said it, looked out across the sugar fields, where the trash of harvest smouldered – leaves, cane tops, weeds – that the ash might nourish next year’s crop. When the roulaison was done, the bagasse – the crushed waste of the cane scraped from the grinding wheels – would be raked into huge mounds and fired as well, so that from the levee the whole of the land had the appearance of the sixth circle of Dante’s Hell: Dis, the city of the damned.
‘It didn’t take much for the Reverend Promise to convince Karida to extract the gold from your chest, little by little, over a period of weeks,’ January said, to cover the younger man’s bitter silence. ‘She’d gather whatever she could from Valentine’s yard, while Noura met with Oliver Breche. Maybe Noura had already started this, before she met Breche . . .’
‘I would not put it past her.’ Hüseyin sighed. ‘I knew it of her, of course – that she was a minx and a schemer. But, she had a vision greater than I realized.’
‘One she could not have accomplished,’ pointed out Rose, ‘in Constantinople.’
‘And perhaps not in America,’ added January. ‘I suspect that if Promise hadn’t killed her for the gold, Breche’s father might well have taken it from her. She planned well: hiding the bricks and shells and clay in a corner of the stable, under the hay, then moving them up a little at a time at night, when your Lady slept under the spell of Breche’s opium.’
‘For that,’ said the Turk softly, ‘I owe him a reckoning. Will she be well? So many ladies of my country fall under that spell. You are a physician, my friend—’
‘Would that I could speak words of reassurance to you, my friend,’ said January. ‘It takes . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I do not know what it takes. My friend Hannibal the fiddler has not touched it for over a year now, but what his fate will be if his illness reawakens, I don’t know.’
‘Nor can any man.’ The Turk folded those heavy, brutal hands. ‘So we must assume that our ignorance also is the will of Allah. And having robbed me – they put the gold in their own room, did they not, until the night of their escape? – these clever girls had only to fix the night of their leave-taking with this Christian imam, whose followers –’ he glanced at the silent Bannon – ‘it seems were as deceived as they.’
‘We won’t know until his house is searched.’ January had resumed his boots, waistcoat, and jacket, but still shivered, for the
wind that streamed up from the Gulf was sharp as a knife blade. ‘But yes, I think so. And after he had killed them, and hid their bodies in his house, it was likewise easy for him to arrange that the Sunday meeting of the Protestant slaves should take place in the livery carriage-house, so that he could drive a wagon with the girls’ bodies in it into the yard unnoticed in confusion and darkness. And, of course, Jerry would be at the service. Promise could get Pavot’s key from Sillery and pass through the house with ease. We may never know if the girls told him that their master was meeting with someone Sunday night. But Promise must have learned that you would be wanting your gold and would find that it was gone before he could make arrangements to get it out of Louisiana.’
‘My poor Noura.’ Hüseyin sat silent for a time, staring across the yellow-brown water at the smouldering lines of fire in the darkening afternoon. The steam-packet Montezuma, gaining behind them for the past hour, sloshed past in great clouds of smoke and churning of paddles, small figures on the deck pointing at the brightly-painted Creole houses beyond the levee, the keelboats working their way up the banks.
Even as he himself had looked, January remembered, leaning on the rail of the Duchess Ivrogne, when he had returned at the end of that cholera summer of 1833. Gazing at the land he had remembered for the sixteen years he’d been in France.
Curious, he thought. For four years now he had recalled as if it were yesterday the day of Ayasha’s death. But only recently had those other memories of Paris stirred to life.
He wondered if Hüseyin Pasha – ten years older than himself – dreamed with similar clarity of the house on the Rue St-Honoré, and of Shamira’s face.
‘And depending on how much Noura told him,’ said Rose softly, ‘or Karida – who sounds like she had a confiding nature – he might even have guessed that Oliver Breche would still be watching the house on Sunday night, desperate for news of Noura, so would be a witness to the supposed murder of the girls.’
Ran Away (Benjamin January Mysteries) Page 28