“I’ll check,” said January. “But if this girl tried to leave the city another way—on a steamboat, perhaps—how carefully are they looking at people’s papers?”
“People like us?” A glint of anger appeared in the boatman’s eye. “People of color? Very closely indeed. People who might not have papers to prove they’re truly people in the eyes of the law? A runaway is money out of someone’s pocket. And maybe money
in
someone else’s as well.”
He sipped his coffee. His dark eyes moved to Dunk, deep in conversation now with stout Mr. Granville of the Bank of Louisiana, and to the men and women standing nearby, chained and dripping in the shelter of the eaves.
“There’s not much by way of law up there,” Jim continued. “I’ve been taken twice, up in Missouri, with not a sheriff or a lawman who’ll even ask if I was or wasn’t free in the eyes of the law. What’s the use of having records here in Louisiana that you’re a free man, if you’re chained on some farm out in the territories? The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate. I was a week hiding in the bushes and the streams like an animal, until I reached the river again.”
Natchez Jim shook his head. “I don’t go up there
anymore,” he said softly. “Even here where there’s law, they don’t let many slip past.”
No
, thought January, looking back at the tall black masts of the steamboats, spewing slow rivers of smoke into the nigrous sky.
They don’t let many slip past
.
From a woman selling bright-colored kerchiefs—and wearing one so brilliant and so elaborately tied as to put all of her stock to shame—he found out the direction of the place he wanted next to seek. “He’s still abed, I hear, poor man,” she told him. “For shame, those doctors turning him out of their clinic before his cure was done, because now, of course, he’s more crooked than ever. You’d think if they’d started they’d have finished, and made him straight, wouldn’t you?”
“They’d never have made him straight,” said January, startled at this reading of the event.
“Silly! Of course they would,” retorted the market-woman. “Rich people go to them all the time, they must know what they’re doing. Here.” She stepped over to her neighbor, who was just clearing up the last of her okra, her grapes, and her aubergines from her table. “Philomène, have you got something our friend here can take to poor Hèlier? And what do you think? This fellow says Dr. Soublet doesn’t cure people after all with those machines of his.”
“That a fact? But I hear he fixed this lady’s clubfoot so she can dance just like a little girl. It was in the newspaper.…”
Carrying the basket of vegetables, January made his way down Gallatin Street, an unspeakable waterfront alley leading from the markets whose every rough wooden shack and grimy cottage seemed to house either a taproom or a bordello, though they all smelled like privies. Rain splashed in gutters that brimmed with raw sewage, and
glimmered like fire in the dull orange bars of light issuing from shuttered windows and open doors. A dark-haired woman in a dress that had to have been bought from a fever victim—overly fashionable and too new to have been sold from a servant’s ragbag—called out to him from a doorway, but he walked on.
Just why he was doing this, he could not have said. He would be late to the Hospital, and with almost no sleep—he had risen earlier than his habit, to walk to Mademoiselle Vitrac’s school to see how her girls did and to tell her what he had found. Though he would never have mentioned it to Mademoiselle Vitrac, he still considered it a very real possibility that Cora Chouteau
had
poisoned Otis Redfern. He had encountered nothing yet that proved she hadn’t.
Because of his father, he thought. Because of a half-recalled dream of hounds baying in the swamp. Because of the little boy sitting on the gallery, waiting for someone to come who cared for him, who would tell him that he wasn’t alone.
Maybe because he knew that Rose Vitrac would be doing what he was doing, did she not have the girls who were her charge. Because she had once been alone and desperate, and Cora had stood by her.
Amid the darkness and the fever-heat and the stinks of death, everyone needed friends.
Even if those friends still called you “Monsieur Janvier.”
Hèlier Lapatie lived in a bare little one-room shed in the rear yard behind what was officially termed a “grocery” but was in fact a groghouse, owned by a man who’d been manumitted years ago by one of the Lafrènniére family. The place was a sort of gathering-place or clubhouse—illegal, of course—for the free colored stevedores of the
levee and the slaves who “slept out.” The crowd in the groghouse whistled and called out comments when January came in, for he still wore the black long-tailed coat and sober waistcoat of a music teacher and carried an umbrella, but the owner behind his plank bar asked good-naturedly, “Get you somethin’, sir?” and directed him out the back to Hèlier’s little shack.
As he went through the door January thought he recognized by lantern-light the woman Nanié, sitting on a flour-barrel talking earnestly with another woman and a man—light-skinned, so he could not have been the Virgil whom she’d sought through the fever wards. But in the flickering gloom he could not be sure. Had Nanié found her man or was this his replacement?
He found Hèlier out of bed, stubbornly dragging himself back and forth across the dirty boards of the shed’s floor with the aid of two sticks. The water seller turned his head sharply as January came up the few plank steps: “Is that you?” he called out in English.
“It’s me,” replied January in French. “Benjamin January.” He wanted to add,
the big black nigger
, but didn’t, knowing the man had been under opium when he’d said it. Long dealings with Hannibal Sefton had taught him to let what was said under the influence of the drug slide like water off his back.
“Ah.” Hèlier dragged himself to the door of the shed. The young man’s face was bathed in sweat, his blue eyes sunk in new webs of pain. “The surgeon no one will hire. I’m sorry,” he added quickly, stepping back to let January into the shack. “It’s the pain—and the opium, a little.” He was very much more bent than he had been before, the spinal muscles that had been stretched and torn contracting, hunching him further, the damaged ligaments restricting the movement of his right shoulder and leg.
“Wonderful stuff, opium. Twenty-five drops for a penny, old Lafrènniére charges, which is fine if you’ve got a penny. My father would be proud.”
“Your father?”
“Giles Lapatie, of Beau Rivage plantation. A gentleman of the belief that children should be neither seen nor heard nor acknowledged, if they’re not as comely as they might be. Educated, yes. Given promises, yes—promises are cheap. Provided for, no. But I’m sure you’re familiar with the type. What’s that?”
“Philomène, at the vegetable market, sent them along.”
“Leavings from my betters? Wrap them up for the helpless? How very kind of her.” Hèlier knocked the basket aside with his stick. For a moment there was no sound but the mice-feet of the rain. “And what about yourself? Come with a few pennies for opium? Maybe make a little music to cheer up the sufferer, since music after all is free?” His voice slurred just a little; January guessed he’d been dosing himself on whatever he could come by.
In a different tone, he went on, “I seem to remember it was you that unlatched me from that hell pit. Thank you. Soublet seemed to think if they unjointed every bone of my body they could straighten me out, the fool. Lalaurie just stood by rubbing his hands, watching like a schoolgirl when they put the stallion to the mare.”
“One of my pupils in Paris had her hands crippled by a ‘patented finger-stretcher’ her parents were convinced would improve her playing,” said January. “It’s the fashion, these days.”
“Oh, well, I’m so glad to be in fashion.” The darkness in the shed was almost complete, but January saw the twisted man’s mouth quirk into an ironic grin. “I suppose
the priests would say I deserved it. And maybe I did. What can I do for you, my friend?”
“I’m looking for information,” said January. “You know everyone in town; hear everything. A friend of mine disappeared off the street last Friday night. It was while you were in Soublet’s, but since then you might have heard something.”
Hèlier tilted his head a little, peering up at January like a turtle under the weight of its shell. His back was to the fluttering rush-dips; impossible to read either his face or his voice. “Disappeared, did she? What sort of friend?”
“A young girl, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Very thin, dark but not Congo black. I think she was wearing a red dress and red-and-black shoes. She would have been coming along Rue de l’Hôpital, sometime around midnight.”
Hèlier considered for a time, then shook his head, or made a motion that had once been a headshake but now involved his shoulders and upper back as well. “Have you checked in the Swamp? Along the levee? She might have met a personable gentleman—maybe even a wealthy white man who promised to look after her and her son.”
“She had no son,” said January, aware that the last remark did not concern any event of Friday night. “And she was just coming away from seeing a lover for whom she had made considerable sacrifice.”
“The sacrifices of women, pah. They’re like cats. They’ll park their bottoms on the warmest chair.”
January wondered what had been the reaction of Hèlier’s mother, when Giles Lapatie had refused further support of their son because of his deformity.
“What about Marie Laveau?” he asked. “To what length would she go, if she thought someone were a threat
to her; if she thought someone knew something about her? Had seen her, perhaps, where she wasn’t supposed to be?”
She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight.…
The water seller giggled. “The whore-bitch poisoner who blackmails half the town? Mustn’t say anything against
her.”
He put a finger to his lips in owlish malice. “You’ll wake up one morning to find a cross of salt on your back step and no one in the town willing to talk to you, for fear of her. If your friend ran foul of that heathen bawd she’d best cover her tracks; Laveau’s hand is everywhere.”
Had it been Mamzelle Marie whom Cora had met that night on the street?
He watched her that night, through a lead-tinged curtain of exhaustion: sponging off the bodies of the sick, holding the hands or heads of the dying. Her face was impassive as she bent down to listen to the broken ravings of a young Irishman—gathering secrets?
Not much of importance in this place
, January reflected bitterly. Charity Hospital was the final refuge of the poor, those without families to care for them, with only their hopes of making a fortune in Louisiana. And most would leave their bones in its soggy, heaving earth.
She saw me, stopped to watch me pass.…
And he saw again how the voodooienne’s head had turned, dark eyes taking in every detail of the street.
Marie Laveau at Black Oak. Of course Emily Redfern couldn’t come into town without occasioning comment.
January closed his eyes, his head throbbing like a drum.
By three in the morning he knew himself to be too exhausted to continue. He’d helped Barnard carry a woman down to the courtyard for the dead-cart and climbed back up the gallery stairs, but instead of going in
again, only stood outside the door, leaning his head against the doorframe, feeling as if he were slowly sinking into the earth. A wonderful feeling, he thought. Maybe he could fall asleep like this and not have to go to the trouble of walking home and lying down.
“You had a tiring day, M’sieu,” the soft soot-and-honey voice said at his side. Turning his head he wondered how Mamzelle Marie knew this. She stood at his elbow, and even the bottom edge of that fantastic seven-pointed tignon was dark with wet in the oil lamp’s dirty glare. “Best for all maybe that you go on home.”
She fetched him his hat and coat, and walked with him to the courtyard gate, standing in the torchlight for a time, watching him as he went.
He made his way along Rue Villere, in the district of the vast, stinking charnel-houses of the two cemeteries, toward Rue Douane, which would lead him back to the relative safety of the French town. At this hour the town was silent, save for the scuttling of rats in the alleyways leading toward the burial grounds, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, and the roaring of the great reddish roaches and palmetto bugs around the iron lamps suspended above the intersections of the streets.
From the direction of Rue Royale and Canal Street drifted the far-off jingle of piano and coronet, where the lamps burned bright in gambling parlors.
Insensible of mortality
, Hannibal had quoted.… What was the rest of it?
Careless, reckless, fearless of what’s past, present, or to come.…
Boccacio’s revelers—or was the story in Chaucer?—stumbling over the rotting corpses of the plague’s dead.
In the windows of the pharmacy across the street, huge ornamental retorts glowed like rubies with the candles set behind them, all red, a warning to travelers of what
the newspapers still denied. The day’s rain had left the streets mucky, breathing with the stinks of wet and decay. Everything had a glitter to it, like the sheen of sweat on a dying man’s brow.
In the silence it was easy to believe the disease roved the streets like the angel of death. Easy to half-expect the skeletal white shape of Baron Cemetery, the voodoo lord of the dead, coming around a corner in his top hat and his spectacles.
What
was
disease, anyway? The cholera that had squeezed the life out of Ayasha like a wet doll, the yellow fever that left him every day wondering if Olympe, or Gabriel, or Hannibal would vanish the way the Perrets or Robois Roque had vanished, struck down in their tracks so swiftly that they could not call for help.…
The hair prickled on his neck.
He was being followed.
This time by more than one person.
He quickened his pace, hopped over the gutter, and waded down the dragging muck in the middle of Rue Douane, keeping clear of the rough shacks and stucco cottages on either side.