Cat meanwhile scanned the roofline against the dark of the sky. ‘He’s got to came down there.’ He pointed to a passway between a two-story house and the taller brick block of a town house. Three floors, nobody could jump up that distance.
The Watling boys charged into the passway and January headed for the front door of the house, recognizing it as one which had been converted into rooms to let.
Sure enough, Juju Filoux, slim and graceful as his sister even in the gloom of the ill-lit street, slammed out the door as if shot from a gun moments before January got close enough to intercept him. Faced with the same circumstances, January guessed that Hannibal would have strolled out calmly, betting on the fact that the single street-lamp on this block was fifty feet away and one of the old whale-oil type – and probably would have got clean away while Cat was searching the house. Juju, panicked, ran, and January pounded after him, yelling ‘There he goes!’ If he has that list on him I will run him to earth if it kills me …
Hannibal would have sprung into the nearest cab or carriage with a desperate tale of ‘Those villains are trying to murder me’ and again, might possibly have gotten away with it. But, January reflected grimly as the passers-by dove out of Juju’s way, Hannibal was white and this was the back of town, where beatings outside the whorehouses and barrooms were becoming more and more common.
Juju streaked like a terrified squirrel up Rue Toulouse, heading for the maze of saloons, bordellos, and thick stretches of utter darkness around the basin, where the canal would lead into the open dark of the true swamps, the impenetrable ciprière. He was a much smaller man than January, and lighter on his feet, but Chuy and the woman Esmeralda headed him off when they reached Rampart Street. The darkness there was thicker – the width of the street made it impossible for chains to be stretched across with lanterns – and only Juju’s wild flight made him visible as movement in the darkness. The young man dodged among the mud, trees, and weeds of the neutral ground – if he’d just go to ground we’d lose him – and January realized that was exactly what he was going to do.
Go to ground in the darkness.
He wanted to yell to the rest of the pack, ‘He’s heading for the cemetery’, but it was obvious by that time that was where he was going.
Juju reached the cemetery’s wrought-iron gate twenty feet ahead of the closest of his pursuers, scrambled up it like a monkey. A gunshot crashed behind January and he ducked aside; Juju’s jacket caught on one of the spear-pointed tines of the gate, ripped audibly without seeming to slow the young man down in the least. The gun cracked again – looking back January saw it was Esmeralda, with a cavalry pistol that could have downed an ox – and he knew better than to yell ‘Stop shooting, you idiot!’ at a white woman, albeit a tobacco-chewing hell-cat like that one. But Esmeralda stopped to reload both her pistols, and in that moment of respite – Juju having vanished into the darkness of the cemetery – January pelted across the remainder of the neutral ground and scrambled up over the gate.
Even in daylight, visibility in the cemetery was less than a yard. All around him, tombs crouched in the starlight, eerie blocks of pale stucco, patterned with blackness where resurrection-fern had taken hold in the cracks. Now that his eyes were adjusted to darkness he found the starlight easier to hunt by than moonlight, frail and shadowless. Mosquitoes whined in his ears and he heard, behind one of those stubby rectangles of plastered brick, the scrabbling rustle as his quarry swatted at one – or a dozen …
He hoped Cat had the good sense to send for reinforcements, once Esmeralda told him Juju had taken refuge in the cemetery. On both sides, and at the back, the eight-foot walls fronted the shabby, dirty neighborhoods at the ‘back of town’, and there were sufficient vacant lots and saloons to swallow up a fugitive, if he could temporarily lose his pursuit in the maze of sepulchers. Moving silently, January slipped across to an old bench tomb, crumbling under the onslaught of summer rains and semi-tropical vegetation, and helped himself to a handful of broken bricks. The soft New Orleans clay decayed easily and the cemetery was dotted with these dilapidated relics, wherever the families of the dead neglected to renew the stucco and clean away the fern on the Feast of All Saints. He moved by guess and when he gathered the fragments he felt something living – a cockroach or a crayfish – dart away from beneath his fingers, and made himself freeze.
Make him tell you where he is. Don’t you tell him where you are.
He’d encountered plenty of cockroaches in the sugar mill on Bellefleur in his childhood and though they disgusted him, they didn’t impress him. Freeborn, Juju probably hadn’t been inured to the things.
He pitched a fragment of brick in the direction in which he’d heard Juju’s flailing, watched the starlit aisle between two tombs …
There he went.
Good.
When he tries to go over the wall, he’ll be vulnerable.
January slipped across an aisle, stood in the blackness between two tombs listening, to see if Juju had seen him and fled. Nothing, save the drone of mosquitoes, the faint pitter of crumbling stucco-crumbs as something – cat? rat? – moved along the top of a nearby monument. He trod in a puddle, felt crayfish wriggle away from his foot – the starlight showed him two or three of the things, moving around the cracks in a fresh-sealed tomb. The whole night smelled of mortality.
Movement there – January saw Juju’s thin shape and flung another chunk of brick, startling the hell out of him and driving him toward the wall on the canal side. A moment later he himself dodged a little closer to where he guessed the younger man was, slipped around the side of a huge family tomb. This part of the cemetery, the front part, he didn’t know as well as he knew the rear where the free colored had their tombs. For seven years now he’d gone with his mother and his youngest sister Dominique, ostensibly to clean and tend the graves of family friends but mostly so his mother could picnic with her fellow plaçeés and learn the latest gossip, both white and black.
His education, both in New Orleans as a child and later in Paris, had sponged away most of the tales his aunties had whispered, in the muggy dark of plantation nights: the Platt-Eye Devil that waited in the blackness to devour children, the half-human Stiff-Leg that could nevertheless pounce with a tiger’s speed, the demon Onzoncaire. The witches that would seize and ride those who wandered in the night, and the ghosts that seeped from their graves to drink the souls of those so foolish as to walk past them when the sun was gone.
The stink of decay in the tombs, the recollection of three cholera summers, put such childish efforts at frightfulness to shame. But in the darkness, the memory of old Mambo Jeanne’s tales returned, and he guessed that for Juju, the effect was probably worse. He could hear the distant clamor of the saloons near the basin from over the wall on the St Louis side. He flung a tiny pebble behind the darkness where Juju would be, to get him to turn (Is that danger? Is that just a cat?) so that January could slip a little further toward the wall.
A moment later he heard the young man’s footsteps, running, splashing, tripping in the mud; that’s it, he’s breaking for the wall …
January saw him flick across the aisles, dashed from shadow to shadow, until the cemetery wall loomed ahead of them, a black bar of shadow rimed with starlight at its top. Juju flung himself at the wall, scrambled in its cracks and furrows of broken brick, and January plunged from the concealing blackness of the tombs and seized him around the waist. The young man twisted, kicked, but couldn’t get purchase for a telling blow. He fell backwards, January wrapping his arms around him, knowing he probably had a knife and pinning him to keep him from drawing it. For a moment they writhed on the ground together, Juju struggling to get a hand free and into his pocket.
If he can get to a knife I’m a dead man …
Juju began to yell as figures crowded around them, hands grabbed his shoulders and torso. January loosed his hold and broke free, guessing that these were Cat and his minions – a guess confirmed when Cat yelled an obscenity as Juj
u bit him. Juju’s hand dove for his coat front and January grabbed his wrist as Juju dragged forth a gun, wrenched the weapon away from him. The next moment someone sapped the young man with a slung-shot, and someone yelled from the direction of the wall, ‘Pigs!’
The City Guard was belatedly on its way.
‘Get him to the house,’ said Cat, and the men scooped Juju up and hustled him into the blackness of the cemetery.
January said, ‘This way,’ and led them – half by guess in the dim starlight, half by recollection of years of visits on the Feast of All Saints – back toward the Rampart Street gate.
TWENTY
Cat whispered, ‘Well, dip me in shit,’ as he entered the dining room of Jacquette Filoux’s house and January lit a lucifer-match. One of the dozen men with them (Cat had indeed fetched reinforcements) whistled and said, ‘Fuck me, what’s he been doin’ here?’
‘Searching the place,’ replied January softly. A single candle stood on the table in the center of the room, where all the other furniture had been huddled. January lit it, the sulfur smell of the lucifer-match hanging in the room’s stuffy air. Someone else closed the shutter and the glassed French door behind them, though January knew the feeble light would show through the jalousies. Turning, he saw, rather to his surprise, that one of Cat’s ruffians was Abishag Shaw.
Shaw disappeared immediately into the dark bedroom and among the milling men, in the low and uncertain light, his absence wasn’t any more remarked than his presence had been. If Ganch was hiring men for a raid on some South American town, January guessed, it stood to reason his freebooters wouldn’t all know one another. In the back of town, the absence of street lighting of any sort would make it child’s play for one more unshaven thug to join a group of unshaven thugs …
Still, January had to admire the Kentuckian’s nerve.
He raised the candle, and – like Cat and his men – gazed around him at the ruined dining room. As he’d surmised, Juju had clearly spent the days of his hiding there – Cat had taken the key to the dining-room’s shutters from his pocket – going over the house with a nit comb. The rugs were rolled up and tossed onto the table, three boards had been pulled up from the floor, reminding January a bit of the looted house at Chitimacha. The chairs were on the table as well, and the daybed on which Olympe and Manon had sat five days ago had had its upholstery ripped open and the lining of its bottom pulled loose. The sideboard in which glasses and dishes had been stored had likewise been dragged away from the wall and the dishes removed – they were stacked on the table – and all around the room the baseboards had been pried free.
Rocky looked around for another candle, found none, and took the single light from January’s hand to peer briefly through the bedroom door. ‘Same in here,’ he said, which told January that Shaw had retreated to the cabinet – the creaking of the floor had undoubtedly given him ample warning – and returned to the dining room, where Cat was in the process of stripping the reviving Juju of jacket, vest and shirt.
‘Can I have his gun?’ asked January, and looked around for a napkin with which to scrape the cemetery mud from his arms and face. ‘You got this from your sister, didn’t you?’ he asked Juju, who nodded in terror, his eyes darting from face to face of the men gathered around him in the semi-darkness. ‘His sister’s charged with murdering Brooke,’ he added, to Cat. ‘Between this – the bullet that killed him was from a bigger gun – and the testimony of a cab driver who took Brooke out to Bayou St John that evening, they’ll probably be able to get her off. She’s a good girl,’ he added. ‘I’ve talked to her, she had no idea what he was up to.’
‘Oh, hell, yeah.’ Cat handed him the weapon. ‘I wouldn’t let a dog hang on account of killin’ that slick snake—’
‘You need me to come into court,’ piped up Esmeralda, almost the first non-scatological comment January had heard from her lips, ‘tell ’em this sorry bastard says he stole it from her, you just let me know.’
January turned in surprise, bowed, and said, ‘Thank you, m’am. That’s most kind of you.’
Esmeralda spit, and relapsed into her usual silence.
‘Nuthin’ here, Cat.’ Rocky finished going through the pockets of Juju’s jacket and waistcoat.
‘Look, I … I don’t got nuthin’,’ stammered Juju. ‘I didn’t take nuthin’. Nuthin’ ’cept that gun,’ he added, with a quick, enquiring glance from January to the woman. ‘I … I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I’ll have the money for Mr Ganch next week, I swear I will, I know where I can get it—’
‘An’ where’s that?’ Cat drew a skinning knife like a young sword from his boot.
Juju’s eyes bulged. He was, January judged, younger than his sister – going by the sparse fluff of his undeveloped mustache – and prettier. Like Jacquette’s his complexion was little darker than a Spaniard’s, but his features, though delicate, were unmistakably African. The waistcoat and jacket lying on the table – mud-slobbered from the struggle in the cemetery and now slit in a dozen places by Rocky’s knife – were silk, and costly. January wondered who’d paid for them, if anyone had.
‘I’m … uh … I know this man, owes me money—’
‘Always a man,’ murmured Cat, ‘what owes you money.’ He rested the tip of his knife in the pit of Juju’s throat and drew it delicately down his bare chest and over his abdomen, leaving a trail of blood like a paper cut behind.
Juju began to scream. ‘I didn’t find nuthin’! I didn’t find nuthin’! Only that key that was in his pocket … Oh, God, please—’
‘Where is it?’
‘In the desk!’
Rocky took the candle and went to look. He came back with a small double-sided Chubb key, of a size to fit the lock of the strongbox.
‘What about the list?’ asked Cat, and began to cut the buttons off Juju’s trousers.
‘There wasn’t no list! There wasn’t no list!’ the young man screamed, his face blanched in the candlelight; January thought he was about to be sick, and little wonder.
‘May I, sir?’ he asked Cat, and the Kaintuck looked at him in surprise. ‘He’s gonna faint in a minute,’ pointed out January, ‘or have hysterics—’
Cat smiled, with perfectly genuine friendliness. ‘Be my guest, Mr J.’
January wondered what he’d do if nothing came of his own questions. Let Juju be tortured to reveal the location of the strongbox? Let him die, rather than give up his own possible leverage in getting Rose back?
His own immediate reaction was ‘yes’ and he winced at the promptness with which he’d answered his own question. He felt contempt for Jacquette’s brother, and distaste at all he’d heard about him, but he certainly didn’t deserve this.
At the motion of his hand, Cat stepped back a pace, though the cut-throats who held the weeping Juju’s arms didn’t slacken their grip.
‘Tell me about Saturday night.’
‘I saw him floatin’ in the basin, when I come out of the Cock.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Twelve thirty. I’d run outta money, see. The moon was full, I seen him …’ Juju sniffled, threads of snot stringing from his nose.
‘You know who he was?’ January hoped Shaw was close enough to the bedroom door to listen.
‘Not when I seen him first. I got a boathook off one of the boats, dragged him ashore. There wasn’t hardly nobody around. When I turned him over I saw it was Michie Brooke. I went through his pockets, but anyone woulda! You know anyone woulda! You woulda yourself—’
January slapped him. Not hard, but hard enough to break his terrified stammering. ‘What’d you find?’
Juju gulped. ‘Don’t let ’em hurt me,’ he whispered. ‘I swear I—’
‘What’d you find?’
‘Keys,’ sniffled the young man. ‘The key to Jacquette’s house, that key that man found in the desk, couple others – they’s right there—’
‘Hotel room, looks like,’ reported Cat, bringing it over to the ca
ndle. ‘You got any more lights in this place, boy?’
‘Place’d be bright enough to search,’ pointed out Chuy, ‘if we set his hair on fire.’
‘What else?’
‘Note from some girl, askin’ to see him. Hundred dollars from the National Bank of New Orleans, three five-dollar gold pieces, ’bout ten dollars in silver. But that got stolen from me,’ he added, gabbling in panic, ‘stolen that same night. I was gonna bring it along to Mr Ganch but this man … these men … they …’
January slapped him again. ‘You take that up with Cat,’ he said. ‘Was that all?’
‘Couple receipts. His watch, an’ his stickpin, an’ a ring, but those men, that stole the money, they stole that, too, I swear it. Nuthin’ else, I swear it, I swear it on my mother … I pushed him back in the basin. Then I … I thought I’d go over here, to my sister’s house, tell her Michie Brooke was dead. But when I let myself in she was asleep, an’ I … I couldn’t stand to waken her up. I knew she’d be grieved. I figured I’d come back and tell her in the morning …’
‘And did you?’ asked January, knowing that he hadn’t, and Juju began to cry again.
‘Don’t let ’em hurt me,’ he begged. ‘I swear I searched this whole house top to bottom – I … I knew she’d need his money, see. He always had gold, an’ he had what Jacquette said was certificates of some kind, stock certificates …’
January was silent for a time. It was as if he could feel the heavy beating of his own heart. Oh, no, I found those myself …
Looking at the grinning faces around him, he knew these men would cut off Juju’s balls just for the pleasure of hearing him beg them not to, and without the list, the certificates themselves had only a limited value. Enough, maybe, to buy Rose free, to buy Zizi and Gabriel and Baby John free …
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