by John Brunner
Clearly Barber had been indulging in nothing so mild. He went on talking and smoking a succession of cigars, for the lighting of each of which he asked permission of Eulalie, but took it for granted so far as to have signaled Cuffy for a match before glancing his question. It was going to be a long time before Joel managed to steer the conversation his way.
He began with a valiant attempt, saying, “Mr. Barber, you are still part owner of the Atchafalaya, aren’t you?”
“I don’t expect to be so for long,” Barber replied. He brushed back a strand of hair from his face; he was very flushed, and shiny with perspiration in the warm wet evening air. “Finally I broke Hosea loose from his prudish refusal to lay bets.”
“I don’t quite follow,” Joel admitted, sipping his wine and finding it good.
“You haven’t heard, and you a newspaperman? I thought the news would have fled up and down the river like fire on oil! Why, Hosea will win my share of this boat if he beats the Nonpareil, and we’re in a fair way to managing that, are we not? And I shall never have lost a bet with better grace! My natural environment, Mr. Siskin, is not this unstable luxury afloat on the water, contrived of planking painted to look like marble and mirrors cunningly hung to make a cabin seem like a ballroom! No, all that I’ll leave to Hosea, and it may console him for his greater loss.”
On the last phrase his look and tone became so sad, Joel was startled. He said, “You’ve heard about his sister-in-law, then?”
“Jones brought the news a minute before you put in your appearance. I sent him to express all our sympathy, but it appears Hosea wants none of it right now. Condolences in their due time, then. But at all events, so long as we beat the Nonpareil, I shall regard the bet as lost, and I shall not complain. How do you think of me, Mr. Siskin?”
At a loss, Joel stumbletongued. Barber continued as though he had not been expecting an answer anyhow.
“I have not lived without my share of opprobrium, you know. At our first meeting Hosea himself was prepared to loathe me, and never entirely recovered from it, though I may say with some slight satisfaction that his dislike has evolved from the personal to the general; he will never love me so long as I continue to be a professional gambler. Nor will many others, particularly those whose money I have taken when they believed they were in luck. Never talk about luck to a gambler, Mr. Siskin! Many of them will speak of it to you, but if you view the matter dispassionately, you’ll notice that one good reason why Hosea and I have ultimately reached an accord is that I don’t believe in it and nor does he. For this run, as for his run with Larzenac, he made exquisite preparation. He left as little as humanly possible to chance. Are not his arrangements for coaling, for example, far superior to those which Woodley made? Has not his policy of engaging and then paying to keep a first-rate group of officers, backed by an outstanding crew, better repaid the time and trouble he went to than all the efforts Woodley made to sign pilots on long-term contracts, then offend them by hiring so-called specialists for the upper river?”
The grammar of his question might be dubious; the logic of his argument was not, and Joel said so with a trace of respect, adding, “I had not believed you so well informed about steamboating, sir!”
“I believe in careful analysis of whatever I invest in,” Barber said, preening a little. “It was not luck which carried me from my first gaming rooms at the Fair Ground to my present position of—well, if not of eminence, then of notoriety at least! It was forethought and calculation.”
All the signs indicated he was about to launch into a string of reminiscences. Hastily Joel said, “But, sir, there are some things which can’t be foreseen. Might I have a word in private?”
Barber checked on the brink of another sentence. He blinked a couple of times, reading Joel’s face as he might that of someone who had just raised him in a poker game. Then he tilted his head ever so slightly toward the vacant rear of the cabin. Joel nodded, and he heaved himself ponderously to his feet.
“Ladies, you’ll excuse us,” he muttered.
Catching sight of movement from the corner of his eye, Cherouen called from the card table.
“Any more bad news for us, Langston?”
“I shall share it if it’s fit to be shared,” was Barber’s reply. And he continued as he accompanied Joel sternward, lowering his voice, “You heard the phrase bedside manner?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Cherouen doesn’t have it. It could well be a merciful release that Mrs. Susannah Drew has escaped his ministrations, and I hold out no special hopes for the surviving Grammont child. He is so obsessed with his own special methods, he can’t descend to the level of us ordinary mortals. You heard that one of our engineers was badly scalded not long after departure?”
“The story was in newspapers brought aboard the Nonpareil at Memphis.”
“He deigned to attend the poor devil—once or twice. Thereafter he left him alone, though Hosea and the chief engineer and I myself have attempted to persuade him to pay more attention. I’m told Walt’s shoulder is suppurating and he’s feverish, though he insists on working regardless. Meantime Cherouen blames the loss of his nurse for his indifference. Did she wind up aboard the Nonpareil? Cuffy tells me a rumor is rife to that effect.”
Joel realized with a start that Jones and Cuffy were following them, with tread totally silenced by the carpet.
“Yes, she did,” he admitted, not wanting to mention his and Auberon’s part in bringing her there. Quickly he added, “And the most amazing thing happened, too! It turned out she is—well, a conjuh woman rather than a nurse!”
“So she is Mam’zelle Josephine, is she?” Barber murmured as they reached the end of the cabin. It had plainly been his intention to step out on deck by the rearmost door; however, he had just caught sight of someone leaning on the after rail in a posture eloquent of total gloom. “Stop,” he added to Joel. “We’d best remain in here. One wouldn’t wish to interrupt our French genius, hm?”
Joel was confused by the change of subject. He had paid no attention to the man outside, though now he recognized him.
“That’s the celebrated composer Monsieur d’Aurade,” Barber said with a faint chuckle. “At least he will be celebrated, so he claims, if he’s given the chance to concentrate on music for the funeral of the Grammont boy. He has been complaining nonstop about the way he’s interrupted. He was positively cheering when we transferred the bulk of our remaining passengers to the Thrale.”
Which should have given Joel his opening to mention Whitworth and the explosive, but something else took precedence. He blurted, “How in hell did you know about Mam’zelle Josephine? Because so many of your customers patronize her?”
There were chairs and tables here, and comfortable sofas, but neither ashtrays nor cuspidors, smoking and chewing being regarded as exclusively masculine habits. Barber’s cigar was spent; he thrust it at Cuffy and the black departed at a run to dispose of it and fetch their glasses and the newly opened bottle of champagne, while Jones handed him a fresh cigar and struck a light.
Dropping onto the nearest sofa and indicating a chair for Joel, Barber said meditatively, “Don’t like my men—the waiters, I mean. Nor Vehm and Amboy, who take a share of the tips. Sometimes I wonder how they’d feel if they had to deal with one of these here noblemen you hear tell of in Europe, who won’t move without a whole damned squad of flunkies… But you were saying”—puffing the new cigar into life—“how did I know about Mam’zelle Josephine?”
Joel nodded, and by reflex whipped out his notebook and pencil.
For a second Barber seemed inclined to tell him to put them away again. Then he changed his mind and sighed.
“Ah, I guess I can tell the truth at last. I can take off the mask, the disguise, the Mardi Gras rig… and why not to you, because I think you’re an honest reporter?”
Joel stared at him with a distinct sensation of having missed at least one important phrase. But Barber’s attention was no longer on him,
nor indeed on anything in present time—though by reflex he picked up his glass when Cuffy filled it.
Eventually he said, “No, Mr. Siskin. The suggestion you just offered is of course correct: like Marie Laveau and Athalie Lamenthe, Josephine has served the needs of gamblers, and many have been customers of mine. Far more to the point, I like to keep my ear to the ground where my own people are concerned.”
There was a pause, during which Jones and Cuffy exchanged looks of amazement.
“Why the hell do you think I was rubbing Cherouen’s nose in my pleasure at the company of Madame Lamenthe and her soon-to-be-daughter-in-law?” Barber snapped at last. “He has often slighted the colored people in my hearing, and I— Damnation, I am making confession because I need a priest and you’ll be one for the nonce! All this Sunday I have reflected on my plight, and you come handy when I’m drunk enough to speak out. In vino veritas!”
His voice changed abruptly.
“I am a doomed man, Mr. Siskin. Without wife or children and no family that I know about. I have it on the word of a doctor whom I vastly admire, who used to be Edouard Marocain’s physician too. Excessive liquor, excess in diet, excess in staying up nights at the tables, excess in everything took its toll of my body, and chiefly, he tells me, of my liver. I shall not collapse tomorrow, or next week, but it is too late to think of marrying and founding a dynasty! Next year, the year after… who can tell?”
He gulped more champagne.
“Presumably,” he went on, “it’s the news you brought to Hosea which has turned my mind into such a melancholy channel, but the sensation is not the less real for being accidental. Though you may not speak of luck to a gambler, chance is what he perfectly comprehends! And the miraculous chance that this winning boat is piloted for much of her run by a colored man has been of extraordinary help in winding me up to this pitch. Mr. Siskin, I acknowledge my status as a Creole, which I have for years denied, invoking Spanish blood to explain my complexion.”
Absently he touched his left cheek, brushing it as to disturb a fly.
“Did you ever hear a rumor to the effect that I had hired armed men to restore freed slaves to their former owner?”
Joel gave a cautious nod.
“That was done, but not by me. What I did do, and had no credit for, was rescue starving black folk from the city streets and return them, at their own wish, to the country, where they might scrape a subsistence. Then the dispossessed landlord fought a lawsuit and won back title to the land they had settled on, and sent discharged soldiers with guns to reclaim it, and shot those of the new settlers who tried to flee, and…” A shrug. “It was a gamble, and one I lost, for I was not rich enough to outdo him in the courts. And in the upshot what I did grew confused in the public mind with what someone else did, and that was among the reasons I preferred to go on being regarded as wholly white.”
He drained his glass and held it out for Cuffy to refill, the while shaking his head despondently.
“Did no one know the truth?” Joel demanded, finding himself touched more deeply than he would have liked in his role as a hard-boiled reporter.
“Oh, old Edouard knew. Edouard Marocain, I mean. He was all sympathy in his distant, formal way. His name, he pointed out to me, meant Moroccan. In other words ‘of African blood’! But he was a man who only discovered late in life how to grant freedom to his feelings. Much like myself, come to think of it. I must pluck up the courage to tell Fernand about this, too. After all, I’m in a better position to stand godfather to his firstborn than Hosea is, and he’s asked Hosea.”
“I don’t quite…” Joel began, and his words trailed away. Memory supplied the image of Fernand and Dorcas at the Limousin the night of Mardi Gras, and a pattern formed that he had not previously suspected.
“It’s a strange other world one lives in under such circumstances,” Barber sighed. “Knowing how Athalie Lamenthe willed her powers to Eulalie, who sits yonder like some grande dame fallen on hard times and doesn’t realize I know this boat was sown from bow to stern with magic charms at her behest—which, at her son’s, were wiped away again.”
Joel sat still as rock, his head ringing with uncontrollable insights, wondering how he could have been so foolish as to opt for the Nonpareil when the Atchafalaya was electric with these secret and unguessable events.
He ventured finally, “You must therefore have been aware of Miss Var’s connection with my cousin Auberon and ultimately myself?”
Barber sighed and nodded. “Among the reasons I learned to distrust the notion of luck was because, when you look closer, you often find that what appears to have been accidental was nothing of the kind. Oh, I don’t mean that the universe is like a great machine, only that it’s too complex for any single person to comprehend, and the Deity has preserved a degree of inscrutability which my faith obliges me to respect as a divine mystery! So we lack keys to such confluxes of events as—oh, Fernand meeting Dorcas and giving her into the charge of the doctor who found her a place in Parbury’s home, thereby leading to this race, in a way… But I suspect you may disagree. You said some things cannot be foreseen, as though you’re a mystic rather than a fatalist. What were you referring to?”
Joel remained silent for a while, listening to the boat and thinking how much he would prefer to be a novelist instead of a reporter. He would have liked to omit Whitworth’s deed from the world, as he had resolved to leave it out if he ever based a story on his experiences. It was ignoble; it spoiled the glamour of the race.
But he must not let the matter be hushed up. Someone capable of doing that might do something worse later on. (What was worse than blowing up a loaded steamboat? Starting another war?) And it could bring him fame, even glory…
His hand was withdrawing the pocket safe. His thumb was flicking open its lid. He heard his voice saying, “Do you know what this is? No? Then I’ll tell you. Mica powder! And if it hadn’t been for me, there would be a stick of it on the way to the Atchafalaya’s furnaces. As it is, all you’ll be burning is an empty cardboard tube.”
“Tell me the story,” Barber invited, leaning back and folding his hands.
When the recital was over, he said meditatively, “The man’s name is Whitworth, hm? Same who used to be Drew’s watchman?”
“Of course! So you must have met him!”
“No, he wasn’t aboard the one time I rode the Atchafalaya before, which was her maiden voyage. And now I hope to go to my grave without making his acquaintance. But I know of him… yes. Jones, Cuffy!”
Neither of his bodyguards uttered a word, but they donned identical grins.
“This here Harry Whitworth: you heard what the man said?”
Twin nods; it was as though the black man and the white had grown into brothers during their service.
“He won’t make another trip on a riverboat, will he?”
And twin headshakes followed.
“That’s settled, then,” Barber said, and reached to pour the last of the champagne.
Which he spilled.
At that same instant the Atchafalaya went aground, and seconds later the rear door of the cabin flew open and in marched Gaston, furious, carrying a writing board with an inkwell set in the corner that had just slopped half its contents not only over his composition but also his sleeve. Swearing in a fountain of French, he strode by in search of help.
Time stopped in measure with the Atchafalaya’s paddle wheels.
Then started up again, with shouts and orders from outside. Barber said glacially, “For a moment I surely would have believed Whitworth’s explosive had found its mark. As things are…” He heaved himself to his feet. “I shall go and offer a prayer.”
“But what happened?” Joel exclaimed.
“I guess you ought to turn around,” Barber murmured. He had taken a seat facing the bow; Joel had his back to the rest of the cabin. “See, they just opened the forward door. And what’s coming in, if it ain’t the densest fog you could wish not to meet?”
&n
bsp; With an oath Tyburn hit the backing bell rope, then seized the speaking tube that connected with Drew’s stateroom, intending to announce what had happened and apologize.
Indeed, it could in no way be termed his fault. It was just late enough into the twilight period for the blurring of landscape that accompanied the march of fog to be mistaken for ordinary dimness. Even if he had had field glasses glued to his eyes, he might well not have realized how thick these traces of evening mist were liable to become around the next bend.
But it was like steaming full tilt into a wall. One moment he had been preparing to swing the Atchafalaya’s bow through the necessary few degrees to line her up on his next marks; then the marks had vanished, and in the time it took him to blink, and wipe his eyes, and have second thoughts, she had grounded in what on his last St. Louis trip had been the deep channel.
Maybe Woodley’s idea of hiring specialists for the upper river wasn’t such a bad one after all…
At least no harm would have been done. He was experienced enough to judge when a boat’s hull had been strained, and this was soft yielding mud he had hit, and the engineers had been prompt to put their reversing bars over, and already she was striving to free herself. He changed his mind about disturbing Drew, remembering the news he had received tonight. Instead he signaled the texas tender and sent him to rout out Fernand. A council of war was obviously required.
Even before the Atchafalaya was floating free again, however, the fog had folded around her like a shroud enveloping a corpse. Just here the channel was narrower than her immense length, which made things worse. Tyburn shuddered to think what could have happened had he been coming down the river, not ascending it. The force of the current on her stern might well have swung her broadside, and left her wedged. In the old days there had been means to get a steamer out of even the worst shallows; for instance there was the technique called grasshoppering, where long poles were erected either side, ropes were passed under the middle of the hull, and the power of the engines was used—very gingerly—to lift the boat as it were by sheerlegs and haul her over a mudbank into the deep water beyond.