January – whose skin was dotted with growing bumps where neither the bayou-water nor his shirt-tail had succeeded in protecting him – went into the tiny garden patch that Rose cultivated at one side of the yard, and cut a fleshy leaf from one of the aloes that grew there. From the kitchen he fetched the little pot of beeswax Olympe had given him, the astringent smell of witch hazel blending with the softer odors of lavender and cloves. Beyond the shelter of the kitchen’s abat-vent, the afternoon’s rain had begun to fall, soft and steady, making the whole town smell of mold. ‘It’s probably not going to kill the itch completely,’ he warned, slitting the leaf and squeezing the drops onto the fiddler’s reddening skin. ‘But it should help. Rose tells me mosquitoes are fonder of men who drink.’
‘Hmph. That must be what my tutor back home meant, when he said I would regret my fondness for brandy for the rest of my life. Nasty little vampires. I wonder if they get drunk themselves? How would one tell?’ And in another tone he asked, ‘Will you be all right?’
January anointed his own bites, first with the juice of the aloe, then with the itch-paste. ‘I don’t know.’ He returned to the kitchen, for the remainder of the hoppin’ john and for another jug of ginger water. ‘It depends on what time I get there, and how drunk the clientele is, that I might meet in the yard.’ In truth, faced with the prospect of venturing after dark across Canal Street and down to the waterfront upriver of the French Town, he hoped he would reach the saloon at all.
The rain was barely a whisper today, and scarcely touched the heat. January stirred up the kitchen fire to fry sausages, and reflected that he’d have to cook tomorrow, if he lived til tomorrow …
Sleeping, in the exhaustion of last night’s wakefulness, he could still smell Rose’s hair on the pillow: chemicals, lavender, and soap. He feared – as he had feared in the early hours of this morning, in the wake of Oldmixton’s visit and the rush of blood to his heart when he’d realized where to find the treasure that Jared Ganch sought – that he’d dream of Rose. Dream of her in the dark of the old slave barrack behind the indigo mill, listening to the men in the house nearby shouting drunkenly at one another.
Dream of her fears – fears she had only with difficulty confessed to him – of this second childbirth …
Dream of Zizi-Marie, and the way such men as Cat Watling would look at her …
But when he slept, dragged into the dark realm by chains of exhaustion his body could not break, he dreamed of the chill rain of autumn in Paris, and of Anne Ben-Gideon in the prison of Saint-Lazare. Anne thin now, in the wake of her trial, and terrified, clinging to Daniel’s hands. ‘I sent no note,’ she kept saying. ‘How can they say they saw one when I didn’t write such a thing?’
And January, who had spent the weeks between the preliminary hearing before the juge d’instruction, and the assizes, in tracing down the movements and whereabouts of the Comte de Belvoire himself (at Noisette, irritably deploring the absence and habits of both his sons), of the comtesse (ditto), of the Marquis de Taillefer, and even – without letting Daniel know – of Daniel’s father (he’d been in and out of meetings with representatives of Jacques Lafitte and Rothschild Frères), could only say, ‘There has to be something we’re missing.’
But what that might be, he never knew.
NINETEEN
January waked to the stifling heat, and the sound of quiet voices briefly in the parlor, then the shutting of a door and the soft retreat of booted feet across the gallery and down the steps. The rain had ceased. By the gray quality of the light he knew it was near sunset, and thought, Ganch should be at the Flesh and Blood soon. But for a time he didn’t move. Only lay staring at the cradle that stood in a corner of the bedroom, ready for tiny Secundus who might never lie there. He could turn his head and look through the door to the chamber that he’d been painting and fitting up as a nursery for Baby John.
Please, dear God …
He wanted to grab the hem of God’s mantle and scream. Promise anything …
Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Please don’t do it!
Like Armand de la Roche-St-Ouen, all those days in his sister’s prison.
In time he got up, and passed through the parlor to the dining room and thence out to the back gallery, where Hannibal sat reading over a list of names. For a moment – though he knew it had to be Shaw’s list of the inhabitants of the up-river bank of Bayou St John – his heart gave an illogical jolt: Brooke’s list …
‘Shaw left this for you.’ The fiddler looked up. ‘Miles Kentuckiensis.’ As he came to the rough table January could see the Kaintuck’s familiar, painstaking blockprinting, dotted with spots and smears. ‘Five of American extraction, seven of French. Four took up residence there within the past two years. All seem to be respectable owners of property and slaves: two cottonbrokers, a banker, two rentiers, the owner of the steamboats Red Dog and Memphis, a wine merchant, a widow who seems to live on the income of various securities, two importers, two planters, and an officer of the Bordeaux and Havana steamship line. Ages, names, and the names of slaves, wives and children appended. I’m not sure how we’d determine why any of these would wish to murder Henry Brooke, though that widow looks promising.’
‘With luck,’ said January, ‘Uncle Juju will have whatever Brooke – or O’Dwyer – had in his coat pockets, and we can deal with the issue of who actually murdered Brooke, and why, next week, and still be in good time for Jacquette Filoux’s trial. Without luck …’
He stood for a time, turning the folded pages of Shaw’s list over in his fingers.
‘Without luck—’ The fiddler took them back from him – ‘we would neither of us have waked up this morning. Well, yesterday morning, in my case. Damnéd spirits all … They willfully exile themselves from light/ and must for aye consort with black-browed night. With your permission, amicus meus, I am heating water in the kitchen wherewith to shave and otherwise adonize myself in preparation for sweeping Madame Lovelace off her feet with passion. Might I borrow a clean shirt? Your nephew’s should fit me – I fear if I return to the Broadhorn I might find myself pressed into service at the gambling tables again: Stuss-Finger Scrump having fallen afoul of a large gentleman from Missouri Friday night, the Pearl of Lexington is temporarily short of a dealer.’
An hour and a half later, January slipped across Canal Street, and worked his cautious way past the handsome houses of Lafayette Square and down into the less salubrious precincts closer to the waterfront. The yellow glow of cheap oil lamps made gaudy rectangles in the blackness, but threw little light onto the wet brick streets, and the noise of rattling pianos or small orchestras of fiddle and coronet – to say nothing of men’s voices arguing politics with drunken fervor – effectively prevented him from listening behind him to see if he was being followed. In addition to the knife he usually carried in his boot – wholly illegal for a black man to use – and Shaw’s equally illegal little pistol, January had armed himself with a slung shot, several ounces of birdshot tied in the toe-end of an old sock, a weapon which could be thrown away without regret and without possibility of identification. Not that a member of the Second Municipality’s City Guards would have the slightest hesitation in identifying him as the owner of an illegal weapon, should he offend them in any way.
Around his neck he wore, on a string, a tin ‘slave badge’, identifying him as some other man’s property – in this case, the property of Hannibal Sefton, from whom he carried a letter authorizing his slave ‘Ben’ to be out after curfew. A free black man might be abducted with virtual impunity: a slave was worth fifteen hundred dollars to somebody, and kidnappers knew a man’s owner would come after them. In addition to this he carried an extra copy of his freedom papers – Hannibal’s forgeries were nearly indistinguishable from the official documents – in case someone happened to tear up the copy he carried in his jacket pocket.
When a free black man ventured into the American section of the city – or anywhere near the waterfront at night – virtually anyt
hing was likely to happen.
Close to the wharves, Girod Street boasted half a dozen saloons within a few blocks. Some of them were larger and more solidly built than the collection of shanties and canvas-roofed makeshifts around the basin or in the Swamp, but as many were as squalid as anything to be found at the back of town. The Flesh and Blood fell into the former category, in that it was built of bricks, had a sort of plank sidewalk in front of it, and was three stories tall, combining the amenities of barroom, gambling parlor, whorehouse and bathhouse under one roof: panel house and opium den as well, January suspected. In the alley behind it was what was locally termed a ‘grocery’, meaning a shop which sold liquor to blacks, both slave and free, as well as an assortment of cribs housing the bottommost dregs of the waterfront prostitutes, most of them black, all of them too old, too diseased, too damaged by abuse, alcohol and opium to command more than a dime from the drunkest of sailors, or the most penniless of slaves.
One of them was cursing a customer – or possibly a rival – as January made his way down the alley, a spew of abuse screamed at the top of her lungs. In the door of another crib he saw two children sitting, a boy and a girl, listening indifferently. The girl looked up as he passed and said, ‘Twen’y cents for a blow-job, mister?’ It was to avoid this, he understood, that Jacquette Filoux had put up with Henry Brooke’s abuse.
Ti-Gall was sitting on the back step of the Flesh and Blood, smoking a cigar with a look of tired misery on his face. His eyes widened when he saw January and he leaped to his feet.
‘Mr Ganch in?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Cat Watling?’ January removed his slave badge and pocketed it.
‘Cat’s here, yes, sir. Did you …?’
January touched his finger to his lips. ‘I think so. Not where you think. But I need to speak to Cat. He sober?’
‘Pretty much, sir. He don’t drink as heavy as his boys.’ And with this rather surprising piece of information, Ti-Gall ducked back into the lamplit gloom of the barroom.
From this gloom Cat Watling emerged a few minutes later, smiling genially around a cigar himself. ‘Mr January.’ He stuck out his hand. ‘I was hopin’ that’d be you.’
‘I think I’ve found Juju Filoux,’ said January quietly, shaking the man’s hand. ‘But the place needs to be surrounded, and we’d need to go in fast, or he’ll be away and disappear again like a cockroach.’
The American whistled softly, and said, ‘That’s damn fast work, my friend. You got a hella better organization than Mr Ganch an’ that’s a fact – not that some of the sorry-assed tosspots Ganch keeps around him give you much competition in that department, mind you.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir,’ returned January respectfully. ‘But if you’ve got any choice in the matter, you might want to bring in your better men on this, not just whoever’s handy. The place is in the middle of town, and the man’s slippery.’
‘You’re a man after my own heart, Mr J. You want to wait for me here? Corrine,’ he yelled back into the kitchen, ‘get this man a drink. You hungry? No? He holed up? Or just sort of roostin’ in a tree?’
‘Holed up,’ said January. ‘I think – but I can’t be sure – one of his girlfriends has been dropping off food for him in the middle of the night.’
‘Wimmen.’ Cat shook his head. ‘You give me half an hour, an’ I’ll have my best dogs ready for the hunt. Where’s he at?’
January gave the man a thin but genuine smile. ‘Where I should have seen him all along,’ he said. ‘Right under our noses.’
Catastrophe Watling stationed one of his ‘best dogs’ – a stocky Tennessean named Joe – in Rue Burgundy, just on the Swamp-side (as they said in New Orleans) of Jacquette Filoux’s house. The boatman Chuy loitered in Rue St Louis, one street upstream; the lantern-jawed woman, whose name was Esmeralda, in Rue Dauphin in case Juju headed for the river itself. It was early in the night – just after nine o’clock – and the streets still clamored and rattled with the business of summer nights – the Sabbath notwithstanding – at the back of town. Whores sat in the windows of Sally Boudreaux’s house next door, or lingered by the door of Shinna Gordon’s two houses down towards the river. Marchandes called their wares with lungs of brass: rags and horseradish, pralines and melons. ‘Sand yo’ kitchen, sand yo’ floors, sand yo’ doorstep, sand yo’ doors …’ A few ragged children played in the open gutter.
‘I’d say, wait til later,’ said January softly, as he, Cat, and Cat’s brother Rocky walked up the street, ‘but if Juju’s going to go out, I’d guess it’ll be later in the night, when the crowds are less. And if we wait til he’s gone and hide there to wait for him, he could be carrying what Mr Ganch wants on his person, and someone in the neighborhood might warn him.’
‘Not to speak of Chuy an’ Joe at least bein’ in the habit of getting’ shit-hammered drunk by ten o’clock, come what may.’ The big Kentuckian scratched his bristly chin. ‘No, Mr J., this’s the best way to come callin’.’ He paused, and studied the rundown little house, shuttered up and dark.
‘Sure as gun’s iron looks deserted to me,’ opined Rocky, who had been about to close a bargain with one of the whores at the Flesh and Blood and hadn’t liked being called out to work. ‘Why’d anybody want to stay in town when Mr Ganch’s lookin’ for ’em?’
‘Yeah, if Mr Ganch was lookin’ for you,’ retorted his brother, ‘you’d keep a light on just so the boogie-man didn’t scare you in the dark, wouldn’t you? Lord God, if I was as stupid as you I’d hang myself.’
‘And I think once we get inside, sir,’ added January, in his most placating voice, ‘you’ll see Juju’s spent the past four days searching that house with a nit comb, trying to find those stock certificates of Brooke’s. The place has a kitchen in the back, across the yard, sir,’ he added, to Cat. ‘The kids’ rooms were above that, and Juju may be living in one of those, instead of in the main house.’
‘Well,’ said Cat, ‘if that’s the case he got to come through the yard. Rocky, you hit the rooms above the kitchen, same time Mr J. an’ me goes in the main house. Just the one stair goin’ up to ’em?’
January nodded. ‘My money’s on the main house, though.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘The lock plate on the dining-room door. It’s scratched up – scratched far worse than it was when I had a look at it first, on the fourth of July. Somebody’s been unlocking that door, and unlocking it in the dark. Madame Boudreax, and some of her girls, have been keeping an eye on the house; they’ve said no one’s been in or out. That means somebody’s been sneaking in and out at dead of night.’
‘Well,’ said Cat admiringly, ‘ain’t you the clever nigger.’
January thought it wiser to shake his head, and reply deprecatingly, ‘I just have way too many friends who’re burglars, sir,’ which got a laugh. He’d learned a long time ago that despite an occasional flash of admiration, on the whole, white ruffians preferred their niggers dumb. ‘The real tip-off was the outhouse,’ he added. ‘In a hot summer it doesn’t take brains to tell that somebody’s still using the place.’
That got another laugh. These men would haul Rose out to Texas and sell her for a cottonhand, he thought, and rape her on the way. Sell my son for a couple dollars and kill the baby rather than take the trouble to keep a child that young alive. Dear God, don’t let her have gone into labor yet! Sell Zizi to a whorehouse and Gabriel to some planter in Florida … So they’d better not think I’m smart enough to realize all this, and resent them.
And they apparently didn’t, any more than that rufous-bearded American businessman at the Verandah Hotel had realized that it did not behoove him to insult and make trouble for people who handled his food.
‘You stand in the yard,’ breathed Cat, as they drew near Jacquette Filoux’s dark and silent little house. ‘I’ll go in the front. You got a gun?’
January shook his head, another complete lie. ‘I’ll get a stick off the woodpile. L
ike as not I’d shoot myself in the foot if I had one.’
Cat was still chuckling over this as January and Rocky moved out of the main stream of foot traffic on Rue Toulouse, and opened the latch on the passway between Jacquette’s house and that of Madame Boudreaux. Only the dimmest reflections from the whorehouse windows filtered into the yard’s pitchy darkness. January and his hulking companion stood for a moment at the inner end of the passway, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the deeper dark. The wooden upper story of the kitchen seemed to loom above the shadows in the yard like an island over a lake of ink, and January pointed silently to the stair that led up to the garçonnière. He did go to the woodpile, collected the stoutest stick of firewood that remained.
Evidently Uncle Juju, despite his treatment of women in general, retained his charm, because the next moment a hand and arm thrust out of the little gable window of Madame Boudreaux’s, a metal handbell gripped in a delicate fist. The bell rang wildly, then was dropped as the girl – whoever she was – bolted into hiding. (As well she better, if she doesn’t want her nose broken …)
January heard the crash of a body against the shutters in the front of the house, and in the same instant one of the dormer windows that overlooked the yard was flung open, and a man’s form slipped through. January yelled, ‘Cat! In the back!’ and Rocky, his bear-like clumsiness vanishing as if by magic, bolted half-down the garçonnière steps and then leaped over the rail into the yard. Uncle Juju dashed across the roof and sprang the four feet to the roof of the house next door – he was lucky he didn’t break his neck, thought January – and dashed across that …
This was all he saw, for even as Juju was making that portion of his escape, January dashed from the yard, nearly colliding with Cat and Rocky when he reached the passway. ‘That way!’ he gasped, pointing downriver; all three ran in that direction, knowing Juju had to drop into a yard somewhere soon and then would try to disappear into the street. They spread out, watching the gates of the dark little passways between the cottages – the yards behind were high-walled, for precisely that reason: so that slaves couldn’t dodge from one yard to the next. January had tried escaping across roofs once or twice in the French Town and knew one couldn’t get far that way.
Murder in July Page 24