Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (16 page)

The servant woman sniffed. “Got no one like that here,” she declared in the rough English of the eastern seaboard states. “Father Muldoon tall, but he don't get around much-his rheumatics, you know. And bein' a priest, he don't hold with no tobacco.”

This conversation took place in the kitchen doorway, which lay behind the main block of the orphanage. Past the woman's shoulder January could glimpse no sign of gold rimmed dishes or the smallest trace of packing-straw, which didn't surprise him. It would have been more surprising had Burkitt-or whatever his name was-actually given a correct address.

A likelier avenue of information would be the shipping company. It was early yet to seek out Uncle \1ery1-the old man stayed up reading into the small hours under a tent of mosquito-netting, according to his grand-nephew, and didn't emerge from his room until nearly noon. In any case, reflected January as he made his way back along Magazine Street through the cheap taverns, the distilleries and brickyards and clapboard cottages and boarding-houses of the German and Irish canal-workers, he wasn't entirely sure Uncle Veryl could be trusted to keep his mouth shut about the guns.

Having no students that day, January had contracted to tune the piano in the Milneburgh boarding-house where his mother had her rooms. He'd planned a day of it, arranging to perform the same service for two of his mother's plaçee friends and to take Dominique out for a walk for Italian ices; he returned to town only in time to buy two cents' worth of sausage and a couple of crabs, with an onion thrown in for lagniappe, all of which he and Rose cooked in her stuffy kitchen.

It was a good evening, as most of those long, lazy summer evenings were good. Ti-Louis had acquired half a dozen mangoes at the market, and Marie-Philomone who had the room next to Rose was stewing eggplant; there was talk and a little music and sharing sausage and mangoes and dirty rice around before the mosquitoes drove everyone indoors. But as he walked back home, January felt sadness, and when he slept, he dreamed again of Ayasha.

Ayasha at eighteen, when first theyd met.
When first he'd walked her back to her shop and they'd flown together like tinder and flame in the tiny room behind it that had been kitchen and store-room and bedroom all in one. Dreamed of the sandalwood scent of her hair, and her hands, so much older than her face or her body, workroughened and yet so delicate of touch. He dreamed of waking, and hearing her voice, and going out into the courtyard behind the building where all the bannes femmes of that poor district gathered around the fountain to gossip with their pails of water while their children raced about in play.

There was a peddler there that morning in his dream, a wrinkled old man in long robes, wearing a turban-that wasn't so odd, because it was Paris after all, which had little enclaves of Turks and Greeks and Russians and even Chinese tucked away among its knotted streets. Nobody was giving the old man money, but he kept taking things out of his pockets and handing them to people: to one woman he gave a book, that she stared at in astonishment before bursting into tears; to a young man he gave a girl's blue hair-ribbon; to a boy a sack of money: “Don't lose it,” he said.

To Dominique he gave a red rose (what's Minou doing here in Paris?). To Artois, a marigold.

“It's Allah,” said Ayasha happily as the old man handed her the gold thimble and scissors that now resided in the camelbone box on January's desk. “He's come with presents for us all.”

And the old man turned to January, and regarded him with bright, wise black eyes, not at all the way January had expected Allah to look. “Do you want a present, p'tit?” he asked in a voice like the dark behind the stars. He had something in his work-twisted old hand-Of course his hand is deformed with work, he made every animal with it, that would be enough to give anyone arthritis. . . . Held it out to January, hidden in his fist.

“What is it?” January asked, and Allah smiled. “You won't know till you accept.”

January felt a pang of terrible fear about what would be in Allah's pocket for him, in Allah's palm; nevertheless, he held out his hand.

“Benjamin?” Rose's voice.

The rattle of her feet on the gallery.

January rolled out from under the mosquito-bar barely half-awake, caught up his shirt and trousers.

Another woman would have stepped forward when he opened the shutters, would have put her head on his shoulder, clung to him.... Another woman's eyes would have borne the marks of tears. Rose had only a kind of tense, small tremor in her hands, as if flailing against fate. “Artois is dead,” she said.

“He was found in the gutter on Gallatin Street this morning.” The morgue attendant opened the door into the long brick-floored room, and stepped aside to let January and Rose pass ahead. Despite truly heroic efforts on the part of the hospital servants, the stink was like a circle of Dante's inferno. Human waste and human blood still clung to the garments dumped on the floor along one wall, where two men and a woman were picking through them. In this heat even the fresh corpses-last night's harvest from the Swamp's tavern-brawls and the drink-fueled arguments of the Gallatin Street gaming-houses-were beginning to go off, and anything riper-like the horrible thing someone had pulled out of the turning-basin yesterday evening-would be unspeakable by noon.

“The woman who sent for the Guards when she came out to close up her place this morning said she saw him there when she went out earlier in the night. Said she thought he was drunk then, and let him lie. Aye, and so he was, poor lad.”

From the door January could see Uncle Veryl, standing by one of the line of cheap pine tables that ran down the center of the big room. His sobs made intermittent echoes in the rafters, like a gecko's chirp in the stillness. James stood behind him, arms wrapped around his master's thin shoulders. The valet held and rocked him as he would have held a child, his own head bowed.

“Did the Guards tell you this?” January asked softly. Rose walked ahead of him, her own arms folded tight as if defending her heart from feeling anything, her face like carven wood.

“Oh, aye.”
The attendant was a little Englishman with a Merseyside accent and a nose like a bottle-gourd. “One of 'em come in with the body, and the ambulance man, to sign it over. I asked did he want to stay for the strippin' and cleanin-'cause lots of times you'll find stuff that'll tell you who mighta done for 'em, when you strip 'em. But he said no, he had another body to go fetch along Tchoupitoulas by the wharves, and it was damn clear what had happened to your lad. And so it was.” The man shrugged. “You could still smell the whiskey in his clothes. Must've passed right out, poor lad, and him not used to it. It's a bad business, goin' down drinkin' alone.”

They'd almost reached the table; January hung back, and lowered his voice still further. “Do you know the woman's name?”

“Mackinaw Sal.”
The man half-grinned. “Like to every man in the town knows Mackinaw Sal-and pays for the privilege. Her place is between Hospital an' Barracks streets, near the Water Works. I don't think it has a name.”

January checked his watch as the attendant passed ahead of him to Uncle Veryl's side. Barely eight.

How could Artois be dead? Half of him expected that when he and Rose left this place, it would be to return to the St. Chinian town house on Rue Bourbon, to find the boy perched on his high-legged stool in the old laundryroom, full of speculation about whom in New Orleans Jean Lafitte had been disguised as for fourteen years.

How could he be dead?

“It never occurred to me he would go to a place like that,” whispered Veri clinging to his valet's arms. “He was never interested in gaming, except to calculate the odds on hands of cards. He should have come to me if he wanted to go adventuring. Should have asked me....”

Artois' light-blue coat was in Rose's hands. The stench of cheap raw whiskey worked through that of piss and rotted weeds. “Nothing left in the pockets.”

Like Rose, thought January, to check the pockets. To look for small clues, small signs. To keep her head. She might have been talking about a rifled sewing-basket.

“Artois didn't drink. Yes,” she added, to the attendant. “We do identify this young man as Artois St. Chinian. What arrangements need to be made to have an undertaker come for him? James, maybe Monsieur St. Chinian would be more comfortable outside now.”

“Yes, Mamzelle Vitrac.” Gently, the valet started to sease his master toward the door. Uncle Veryl clung to his sleeves as if struck blind.

January stepped to the valet's side. “Did you take up a note to him yesterday, or a letter?” he asked, keeping his voice low. He doubted the old man even heard.

James looked surprised that he would have known. “Yes, sir. From the carrier company that delivered that pump he ordered. At least that's what the boy said, who brought it to the door.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday afternoon , sir, after Michie Veryl went out.”

I was in Milneburgh, having ices with Minou. Oh, Artois ...

While Rose signed The papers the attendant gave her-in the name of Veryl St. Chinian-January turned to the body on the table. Death had relaxed the boy's features, and he'd been taken from the water before the crayfish that swarmed in every gutter and pool in town had had time to do damage.

How can that be Artois? Artois can't be dead. I saw him only the day before yesterday. We were going to go up on the roof tomorrow night with his telescope, to search for comets and see the rings of Saturn.

Looking down into the slack, wet face, he knew he should feel something, but didn't. Automatically he crossed himself, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. . . . Pray for us sinners.

The attendant had draped a towel over the boy's groin out of respect for Rose's modesty. From some of the questions Artois had asked, January had been fairly certain his young friend was a virgin. He realized he'd been looking forward with friendly amusement to Artois' initiation into the wonders of sex, the marvels of loving-wanting to hear what he'd have to say about them. How he'd see them at first view, with those clever, delighted eyes.

He tried to raise the boy's right arm, and could barely move it. Like Hesione, he was growing stiff. Not as stiff as she, which meant he'd died sometime between nine and midnight, if the big muscles were only now growing hard. The waxen yellow flesh of the wrist was bruised, and the back of the upper arm, bruised so close to the moment of death as to be barely visible. He lifted Artois' body and saw that the back of the neck, too, was bruised.

Pigs, he thought, laying him down again-observing despite himself that head and neck were already rigid. His whole body felt cold. Bastard fucking pigs.

You held him by the wrists, held his head under water, soaked him down with whiskey so the police would only say, with the morgue attendant, “It's a bad business, goin' down drinkin' alone.”

Especially if you were sixteen years old, free colored, and purblind stupid enough to wander down to Gallatin Street.
The cold in his heart was replaced by a rush of heat so intense, he wondered that it did not reduce him to ash.

“I'll wait here with him for the undertaker's men,” said January to Rose. “Can you go back to Uncle Veryl's house with him, make sure he's all right? Search Artois' room for that note, if you would.”

“You think that will do any good?” Behind her spectacle lenses, Rose's hazel-green eyes burned with the cold, bitter rage of one who has long ago lost the last of her trust. “Obviously the City Guards have already made up their minds about how he died.”

“The Guards officer didn't know that Artois had come across a box of contraband guns.” January was a little surprised at how even his voice sounded. Why wasn't he shouting, cursing, kicking the walls? He wanted to grab the attendant by the back of his neck and drown him in the nearest gutter, to see how he liked it, only because he was white.

“I think even Captain Tremouille will admit that the affairs of la famille Avocet should take a back seat to smuggling if it's accompanied by murder. Now, Mister Burkitt-or whatever his name is-may simply be a bully for hire, working for someone else. That still doesn't answer the question of why someone would hire him to murder a completely harmless woman out by the Swamp ... much less talk to her for fifteen minutes, and give her a doubloon, first. I'll be along to Uncle Veryl's as soon as I can.”

When they were gone, January stood in silence beside the table, his hand resting on the cold curve of the dead boy's shoulder. He should, he knew, do something. Wrap up Artois' clothing. Speak to the attendant. Go out into the streets and tear down the city, brick by brick, that would dare do such a thing to such a boy. . . .

Instead, he fished in his pocket for the much-battered blue glass rosary that never left him, though at the moment God's name was only a word, and the beads only beads.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee... pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.

Did you pray for Artois when they held his head underwater until his lungs couldn't endure the strain any further? And him knowing all those awful minutes that he'd have to inhale at the last?

Couldn't you have prayed just a little harder?

By the time January had wrapped up Artois' clothing in several layers of brown paper, the undertaker had arrived. He shook his head over Artois: “A terrible thing,” he said. “A terrible thing.
So full of promise.”

“Listen,” said January. “When you prepare young M'sieu St. Chinian for burial, would you take note if there is any evidence of liquor in his stomach? I'm told that in spite of the whiskey soaking his clothing, he did not drink....”

“Ah, M'sieu,” sighed the undertaker, “boys of that age...”

“I understand that some boys of that age make experiments. And I might even think Artois had been so foolish, were it not for these.” And he showed the man the bruises on Artois' wrists, arms, and neck. “Would you say that those were consistent with having been held while his head was forced underwater?”

The man closed his eyes, his mouth tightening in pain. “I would, M'sieu. Believe me, I have seen a great deal of such, in my trade. Maybe I'm growing old. The scum-the American animals, coming into this town ... I cannot believe some of the things that they do.” He looked sadly up into January's face. “Particularly to men of our color, M'sieu, to men of our race.”