by John Brunner
“Mr. Woodley is not himself a pilot, I seem to recall.”
With frank admiration Fernand said, “That’s right, sir. A legacy enabled him to buy a boat when they were cheap at the outbreak of war. But he had served time on the river—as a mate, I believe.”
“Is he the youngest captain presently? I make him at most twenty-six.”
“Uncle, your memory amazes me! I didn’t know you’d more than heard his name!”
Marocain chuckled. “Tell me, Mas’ In’erlocutor, what do dem dah fireflies do fo’ a livin’?”
Today he was full of surprises. Fernand had never expected to hear him shift from his normal tone to the classic exaggerated style of the end man on a minstrel line. Summoning the answer as best he could, he responded with, “Ah can’t rightly say, Massa Bones, but fo’ sho’ it pay dem well!”
“Whaffo’ yo’ b’lieve it pay dem well?” said Marocain, and supplied the rest, this time in his usual voice. “Because they’re an awful flash crowd. And by now you should have come up with a better explanation for the fate of Drew’s twelve thousand dollars.”
“Well, he could be paying off a debt incurred by his half-brother.”
“That,” Marocain said with mild irony, “fits what facts we have. Confirm our guess!”
Rising uncertainly, Fernand said, “Do you mean at once, or when I finish work?”
“At once! This is work! Don’t dare forget it!”
So sharp was the banker’s tone, Fernand was halfway to the door when—
“I’m sorry, boy. That’s the impatience due to age. So little time remains… If Richard or Eugene should challenge you I can be contacted by tube. I prefer, though, not to be disturbed for the time being.”
Fernand felt a grin spread over his face. He knew exactly what the old man meant: he was to take the far exit from the courtyard so as to avoid being noticed from the shop. It had begun to dawn on him that this stiff-limbed, stiff-mannered patriarch was far more like his scapegrace brother Alphonse than was generally believed, and therefore the stories told about his younger days might actually be true.
“And—here!” Marocain concluded, forcing up the front of his desk. “You’ll need this.” He produced a roll of silver dollars in brown paper. “Account to me for it afterwards, but make no written record. This is what, when I was your age, we used to call ‘trouble-entry bookkeeping.’”
“Yes, sir,” said Fernand, and then with even greater feeling: “Yes, sir!”
There are certain buildings where, it seems, the hand of doom was laid before the foundation stone.
The Hotel Limousin was one of them.
It was large; it was handsome in a florid but much-admired style; it was ornamented with gilt and marble and countless mirrors, and—grand extravagance—it incorporated a bathing establishment. Located within a few minutes’ walk of Tivoli Circle, it might have been expected to prove attractive to visitors having business almost anywhere in New Orleans.
But from the start things failed to work out. Advertised at competitive, and then at dirt-cheap, rates, half its rooms stood always empty. Daily, most of the cutlery and glassware in its spacious diningroom had to be removed for dusting, not washing. At a time when balls were being held even on the premises of the United States Mint, a string band hired at vast expense played to so few patrons that couples were embarrassed to take the floor.
Then, just as it seemed the tide of fortune might be turning, came the war, and the hotel suffered a disastrous blow when it was commandeered to serve as a barracks. Heartbroken, the proprietor was glad to dispose of his white elephant for scarcely more than his fare home to the province of France after which he had sentimentally named it.
The name remained. And, if not exactly in the manner first foreseen, the hotel was now flourishing. Hordes of wealthy young men ascended its broad front steps to seek diversion. Craps could be played here, and report held that the games were more than averagely honest. Roulette was offered on European wheels with a single zero, and a dozen card games. The bars offered a remarkable range of drinks, particularly cocktails; in the kitchen reigned a tolerable chef—though most of his time was misapplied to sandwiches and other snacks for gamblers too impatient to leave their places.
Also there was a ladies’ entrance. This had been patterned after the one at the world-famous St. Charles Hotel and was similarly meant to attract prosperous women traveling without their husbands who were not content with boarding-houses.
It had rarely been used in the old days. Now the door swung constantly to and fro. It bore, as it always had, the minatory legend “Ladies Only”… but while those who came and went by it were indubitably female, to term them ladies in the strictest sense would stretch a point.
Descending from the streetcar that had brought him here, gingerly avoiding the pools of water which, as ever after a fall of rain, turned St. Charles Avenue into a quagmire, Drew stared at the Hotel Limousin. Over the past several years he had had little consolation save in solitude; nonetheless consolation was what he had found, though his few friends and many enemies would have been surprised to hear to what event he traced it back: the discovery, long before the war, of a volume of poetry forgotten by some passenger, which he had opened solely to pass the time.
Books he had naturally known: the Book, which he had been raised to because his mother, his father’s second wife, had been devout; later, functional books of blank or plain lined paper to be hand-posted and grow into ledgers, journals, diaries; on the margin of his awareness, printed volumes ranging from abstruse sermons that he had no time for, clear to the lightest and most frivolous of novels, which he equally despised. Too much reality was inscribed on the Mississippi to let him share the popular addictions to hellfire and make-believe. When he met a preacher or a novel-reader he was… courteous.
But poetry seized him. Once, tackling a tricky cutoff during the first long-trade run after the spring rise, he had astonished the company of unemployed pilots who had begged a free trip of him. Drew looked on them as chickenhearted parasites.
So, savagely, he recited as he spun the wheel and played considerable carillons on his bell ropes:
“Straight into the river Kwasind
Plunged as if he were an otter,
Dove as if he were a beaver,
Stood up to his waist in water,
Swam and shouted in the river,
Tugged at sunken logs and branches
With his hands he scooped the sand-bars,
With his feet the ooze and tangle…
Show yourself now that we need you!
Where the devil are you, Kwasind?”
Blank looks greeted him on all sides. No one could even detect the tag he’d added. It had been in his mind to crack a joke; thus far life had offered him few occasions for humor. Resigned, he made no attempt to explain the point.
In secret, nonetheless, poetry continued to claim his soul. It lit his gloomy passage through the world with scraps of philosophy he had small difficulty in adapting to his own experience. From what he read he culled a succession of memorabilia and for a week or a month or—rarely—half a year resorted to each as his temporary motto. Duty had been taught him before he was old enough to shave. The notion that pleasure might be found in compliance with duty was something his mother had neglected to explain, perhaps because her stepchild was pleasure-loving and undutiful, and the paradox surpassed her skill to resolve.
To her, his duty had been discharged by death… but fate had laid another on him, and—
No matter; this duty would end too, and very soon. He set his shoulders, grasped his staff, and as he advanced on his destination repeated the quotation that, more than any other, had lately been sustaining him:
“Dauntless the slughorn to my lips I set
And blew. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.”
Sleekly affluent now, Langston Barber moved through the public rooms of the Limousin on his daily tour of inspection, pausing now and then to e
xchange fashionable gossip with early-arriving patrons, wondering along with them whether the revived Metairie racecourse would prove a success, whether the true assassin of President Lincoln had been found or whether a megalomaniacal actor had been executed to disguise another’s crime.
Silent in his wake followed his most trusted servants: one white, Jones; one black, Cuffy. Both had been with him since his days out by the Fair Ground. They were not as completely transformed as he, who now sent to London for his shirts, Paris for his cravats, but liveried in dark blue with gold facings they scarcely resembled the pair of pugilists who once had jointly boasted that either could have beaten up Mike Fink.
Today things were going well. It was not until he reached the front lobby—which it was his custom to check more than once a day, because its marble floor and walls made it cool, hence attractive to passers-by who were not patronizing the hotel’s more profitable facilities—that anything disturbed his even progress.
Standing just inside the main door was a stumpy figure bearing a staff and a carpetbag.
A great weight should have been lifted off the heart of Hosea Drew by this confrontation. It marked the culmination of years of struggle.
But what he chiefly remembered afterward was how quickly it was over.
“Captain Drew!” And the imagined villain was an affable man of middle height, extremely well-dressed, his face and hands a trifle swarter than average and ever so slightly shiny. “Be so kind as to accompany me to my sanctum.”
Horribly aware that he had arrived in a different world from his pilothouse or even the Atchafalaya’s once-splendid cabin, Drew complied. In a room paneled with Caribbean woods he sat on a velvet chair positioned by Jones while Cuffy relieved him of his staff and bag. He was offered a cigar—refused. And a choice of liquor—refused. But these did not smack of bribery; they were offhand, a normal courtesy.
And brightly Barber was inviting him to explain his business.
“I think I know your errand,” he added. “But there really was no need, sir.”
“Need?”
The single syllable escaped Drew against his will. He had wanted to pitch a bagful of money at Barber and—
But he had been cheated by the Fates. And this man dared to speak of need!
“It is customary to regard a debt of honor as dissolved by death,” said Barber delicately. “And since your brother Jacob quit this vale of tears some time ago…” A wave of his right hand; elegantly manicured, it displayed a ring set with possibly real diamonds.
“So how did you guess what brings me here?” Drew rasped, reeling under the implications of what had just been said. Throughout his adult life the urge imposed on him by duty had been like hunger, like thirst, like what little he permitted himself to know of lust. Far worse than finding himself armed with a flimsy paper rather than a load of metal was this smooth—this impervious—this waterproof calmness Barber displayed.
“It was not only to me,” the latter said, “that Jacob owed huge sums. Even as early as the time he had to be committed— Excuse me, but it has never been a secret, has it?”
Drew dumbly shook his head.
“Even at that stage, like all my colleagues and associates, I’d have renounced my claims against him. But you, sir, declined the easy option. The manner in which you have rectified the blemish your half-brother left on your family’s good name is famous now. Famous!”
Drew was laying the Marocain draft on Barber’s desk. He blurted, “Are you telling me you don’t hold Jacob’s IOU?”
Barber looked at the draft. Sphinxlike, his face betrayed no reaction. Slowly he said, “It’s in my safe, tagged as a bad debt.”
In tones of triumph Drew retorted, “But it ain’t one!”
And with a grave inclination of his head Barber signified agreement, exchanged the draft for Jacob’s note-of-hand, and personally and cordially escorted his visitor back to the entrance.
All the drama Drew had hoped for from this showdown, all the satisfaction and relief, would have been leached away but for a chance encounter as he and Barber were approaching the exit.
Turning away from the reception desk, a thin black boy in a multibuttoned uniform collided with him, shouting, “Paging Mars’ Woodley! Paging Mars’ Woodley!”
So there was a delay while Barber reprimanded the bell captain. And during it Drew had the chance to notice that the person paying most attention to the page’s progress was a man trying elaborately not to be recognized.
It was the helpful clerk from Marocain’s, Fernand.
Ensconced in an armchair in the smoking room behind the Limousin’s main bar, Cato Woodley awaited the sazerac he had ordered by way of a phlegm-cutter. He was scowling. So far as he was concerned, today had scarcely begun and already it was going badly. And most days were the same.
Apart from a bet or two that looked less promising by sunshine than by candlelight, none of his worries was financial. He had been liberated by the bequest from his father that enabled him to acquire a nearly new steamer and rename her after the author of his good fortune: the Hezekiah Woodley. While she was by no means a crack boat, she was earning her keep, and his.
But he had hoped for more.
What kind of “more” he could hardly define, even to himself. But it had much to do with the concept of a magic barrier to be crossed only by people possessing a certain status, or secret insight, or membership in orders like the Masons of the Scottish Rite.
That notion had been printed in his mind when he was a child by the grand difference between any ordinary day and a special one—a birthday, or above all Christmas. When he was three or four it had seemed a genuine miracle that transformed his home into a treasure cave of presents tied with gaudy ribbon, scented with nutmeg and cinnamon uttered at stentorian volume by great bowls of punch, cross-connected with sounds like the chorus of his sisters around the piano that once a year was put in tune so his mother might display her rusting talents. He was her youngest child and only son.
True to his childhood beliefs, he had imagined that ownership of a Mississippi steamer and the honorific Captain would constitute the golden key.
But it wasn’t so much, really. At twenty-six he was the same age as the governor of Louisiana… Besides, within the closed world of the river there were other intangible barriers. His few years as a mate had informed him that even a boat’s master must defer to her pilot; nothing, though, had prepared him for the real-life bitterness of accepting orders aboard his own steamer.
And so he felt shut out. Here, where he spent much of his free time in New Orleans, he had companionship enough; the fact that he owned a steamer while still in his mid-twenties made him an object of curiosity for many young men who could afford the Limousin’s prices thanks only to their families’ wealth, not to what they had earned themselves. But their patronizing tolerance was too much like what he experienced when visiting his sisters. All of them, and their husbands, believed with religious fervor that he had wasted his inheritance because the day of the steamboat was over and he should have invested in the flourishing Baton Rouge & Opelousas Railroad. Visiting with any of them was therefore like being on the mourners’ bench!
How could he possibly explain to anyone he knew why he wanted above all to be a steamer captain? His motives at bottom were merely sentimental; he knew no grander sight than that of a score of steamers darkening the sky of a summer evening, one by one backing from the wharf and turning into line. So it had dismayed him to discover what dirty, repetitive, boring—and sometimes dangerous—work went into making possible that daily spectacle.
Now he visited the Limousin, or similar establishments up and down the river, searching for that lost glamour in the company of men born to riches, who had “style”—whatever that might be—and drank his health in liquor he had paid for and advised him about racehorses and the newest whores to arrive in the sporting houses.
But what he wanted most was what he could never have. He wanted admission to the
select company of pilots.
Among the other places he frequented in New Orleans was Griswold’s. There it was a popular pastime to watch Captain Parbury playing billiards by sound alone; he always had to be persuaded, but he always gave in, and he always amazed the onlookers, for the sense of position and timing that had made him a master pilot allowed him to judge how hard his cue must strike, at what angle, and for what result, after merely touching the three balls with feather-light fingertips. The spectators wagered on his chance of bringing off such-and-such a stroke; it was, in Woodley’s experience, safer to back Parbury than bet against him. Indeed, on one occasion he had won so much from a stranger and a doubter that he insisted on sharing his good luck with the old captain, and had been vastly surprised to find the offer accepted with touching gratitude. Up to that point he had been timid in Parbury’s presence; with astonishment he thereupon learned that a shy, affection-starved personality was concealed behind the gruff guise of this living legend. He had heard over and over the story of the loss of the Nonpareil, for Parbury never tired of telling it. But each time Woodley expressed his sympathy his sentiments were unfeigned. Along with all his family and most of his friends he had enthusiastically supported the Southern cause. It had been that which led him, on his way here today, to lash out at a blue coat. He had at once regretted the impulse. Not only was it futile to make such gestures now; every time he did that sort of thing, he was betraying his lack of the qualities he admired in pilots: their calmness, their power to analyze faint clues that others missed, to transcend reason and logic and come up with answers making sense…
“Paging Mars’ Woodley!”