Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (15 page)

“I see.” Artois looked down at the crate again. “So what do we do?”

“Advertise,” said January promptly. “Say that you got a crate full of dishes by mistake, and would the real owner et cetera et cetera. When the real owner shows up, you make damn certain to slip into the conversation that you nailed the crate back shut at the sight of the first tea-cup. They know who you are anyway. Or they will the moment they track down the carrier.”

“There are times,” sighed Rose, wiping her dusty hands on her apron, “when I want to go in and murder those imbeciles at the freight offices.”

“I quite agree.” Uncle Veryl jabbed his glass in Rose's direction. “In May of 1830 I ordered a set of Legendre's mathematical works from Lampson et fils in Paris and they still haven't arrived. I'm quite certain the men at the shipping office stole them.”

January was silent, contemplating the picture of the illiterate louts at the wharves falling upon a set of mathematical textbooks with cries of greedy delight. In his own way Uncle Veryl was as daft as Madame Bontemps. Then he said, “Let's get these packed up again. Rearrange them so that all the dishes are on top and everything incriminating is buried deep. While we're doing that, Rose, could you compose an advertisement?”

“Be sure to mention the vacuum-pump,” insisted Uncle Veryl. “Whoever ordered those guns must have it, and goodness knows what damage they'll do to it.”

Perhaps it wasn't the best solution to the problem, January decided, as he and Artois repacked the crate with Uncle veryl's interested assistance, and Rose perched on a corner of the laboratory table repairing a quill. The crate had been at the St. Chinian town house overnight, worse luck. Were the men who'd smuggled these guns-wherever and for whomever they were ultimately destined-still arguing with the shipping office about their lost crate?

“Who are they smuggling the guns to, do you think? Mexico?” Artois glanced over his shoulder as if expecting a ravening pack of Gallatin Street filibusters to come storming through the carriageway bent on murder-not that anyone could storm through that junk-choked passage without killing themselves. But the courtyard lay motionless in the smothering August heat. From the street the sliuttered-up town house had a deserted air, with the paint peeling from its door. Dragonflies hung above the morass of broken bricks and resurrection fern in the yard, thick as burnished fish on a pond.

“I think Santa Anna's got the country pretty well in hand by this time,” January answered. “South of the Rio Grande, anyway. These guns may be for Texas. Or for New Grenada. There's still war there in the back-country. Any band of Americans who wants to can go across and try to take those countries for the United States and incidentally get huge land-grants that they can then turn around and sell to other Americans.”

“So much for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” remarked Rose, and pushed up her spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose as she bent over her notepaper. “Delivered by mistake or Received by mistake, do you think?”

“Is that always what it's for?” Artois sounded as disappointed as he'd been at the prospect of Jean Lafitte dying tamely of fever in the Yucatan. “Just money and land?”

January started to say Generally, then didn't. He had been in Paris in the summer of 1830, when men whispered vo one another of the freedom their fathers had died for. Remembered his friends making bullets in cellars, slipping messages to one another under beer-mugs, running through the streets under the stinging snap of rifle-fire... dying in the gutters of the Rue de la Chanvrerie. And all to trade one branch of the old Kings for another in the end. Had that been foolishness?

He recalled, too, the black fog along the Mississippi River, the weight of a rifle in his hands and the ghostly shape of Andrew Jackson's horse passing close by in the fog, the clip of hooves so sharp in the silence one moment, then blending with the first clamor of the oncoming British voices.

And he did not know how to reply.

They stowed the nailed-up crate in the carriageway. A man named Tom Burkitt came for it two mornings later, within hours of Rose's advertisement appearing in the New Orleans Bee and the Louisiana Gazette. “His address is down on Magazine Street,” Artois reported to January. “I thought I should ask him to show me some kind of identification, so it wouldn't look like I thought there was a reason to get rid of the crate as soon as possible.” He sat tailor-fashion on the end of January's bed, slitting apart the pages of January's still-unread copy of Tamerlane and Other Poems while January transcribed a simple march for the three little Saulier girls. “It's as you said, M'sieu Janvier. Mister Burkitt didn't look much like the kind of man who'd spend a fortune on a scale-blue Bow dinner service, but he looked very much like one who'd be smuggling guns.”

“Did you make sure to say you hadn't seen anything but dishes?”

“I got it right in off the scratch,” said the boy, pleased with himself. “I was in the laboratory when he came-it's cooler than my room, and I was down there reading-so I saw him across the court when he came through the carriageway. He bent over and examined the box, and I went out at once to talk to him. I was afraid Uncle Veryl would come out and spoil the whole show.. . . That is, Uncle veryl is a brilliant, brilliant man, but...” Loyalty to his uncle struggled in his face with loving exasperation. To the last the old scholar hadn't understood why the guns weren't to be mentioned to whoever came for the crate, or why anyone would ship something as fragile as Bow china in the same box with gun-barrels.

“But there's things he doesn't understand,” finished January with a grin, and Artois, relieved to be spared disloyalty, grinned back, and whipped the paper-knife through another pair of pages. January's room-the garçonniere of former times obligatory for white protectors who did not want to sleep beneath the same roof as young gentlemen of color, even their own free colored sons-was reasonably warm in wintertime from being over the laundry, but in the summer, with Madame Bontemps doing daily laundry for her tenants and a number of the surrounding families, it could be suffocating.

In the houses of the whites, of course, garqonniçres served a different purpose: there, whatever experimentation the growing sons of the family cared to undertake with the servant-girls wouldn't pass under the white mothers' horrified eyes. It was a mark of how lax Veryl St. Chinian had become, that he gave his grand-nephew a room in the nearly-empty town house itself rather than relegating him to the cobwebbed and leaky quarters out back.

“Anyway,” Artois went on, “Mister Burkitt asked if I was Mr. St. Chinian and I said yes; he asked was I the one who'd put the advertisement in the paper and I said yes. He spoke English,” he added, “with the most awful accent and he spit tobacco all over the carriageway. I'll have to help James wash it down when I get back, but it'll take hours to move all those chairs and the old chaise-wheels and things like that.... I said I was expecting an air-pump and vacuum-bottles, and the labels must have got switched, because when I pried off the lid I saw dishes, and I was afraid I'd break some if I tried to unpack them, so I immediately nailed it up again.”

“Very good.”

“He had two other men with him, and a cart,” Artois went on. “They tossed the crate up into the cart and I could hear the dishes breaking; Uncle Veryl had just come downstairs and I had to push him into the house again so he wouldn't go out and take them to task about the pump or the dishes. He's still horrified about the dishes. I left him composing a letter to the shipping company about the pump. I'd probably better get back before he sends it, but I thought you'd want to know.” Artois shook his head, trying not to smile.

“Thank you.” January gathered up the music-sheets, wiped his pen, and mended the tip before putting it back in the tortoise-shell pencil-box on his desk. His “desk” was in fact a length of plank wedged between the end of his bed and the whitewashed plaster of the wall, with barely room for a chair. Narrow shelves held his books, sheet-music neatly arranged, a small sewing-kit and two candlesticks; an armoire that occupied most of the rest of the available space held his clothes. For some time he'd stored in the bottom drawer of that armoire-along with a box of candles and a japanned tin of coffee-beans-the brass-and-camel bone box that held a gold thimble and thread-scissors, a gold brooch and two or three neatly-bound bunches of feathers, aigrettes that Ayasha had kept to pin in her hats. There was also one gold earring that had belonged to Ayasha's mother.

The gold ring he'd given Ayasha on their wedding day had gone to her grave with her, wherever that grave was. Victims of the cholera had been buried wherever there was space for them, that summer of 1832.

Since his dream of speaking to her on the bridge, he'd brought the box out and set it on a corner of the desk. He'd thought it would hurt him to look at it-especially since his disloyalty in loving Rose-but he found instead that he took a good deal of comfort in seeing it there.

“With any luck, that's .the end of it,” he sighed after the conversation had ranged around the chances of recovering the pump, the chances of the pump being unbroken, why Artois and Rose wanted to heat wires of various metals to red- and white-heat in a vacuum-bottle in the first place, and how they proposed to do it if they ever got the proper equipment. “Half the city knows guns are run through here to the rebels against Paez-Shaw knows it, the Guards know it, every banker in town knows it, and the Spanish consulate knows it, and nobody except the Spanish consul really cares. The identification Burkitt showed you was probably someone else's.... What address did he give?”

“Nineteen hundred Magazine Street,” said the boy promptly.

“I'm willing to bet that was fake as well.”

Artois laughed, and triumphantly riffled the pages of the completed book. “Here you are, all ready... and of course, Mamzelle Vitrac left your copy of Mithradates in the laboratory, and like an idiot I left it there, too. . . .”

“I'll get it on my way to the Cabildo,” said January. “Not that I think Shaw has found a single thing about Hesione's murderer, if he's even in town. And the number of men who are about six feet tall and probably American in this town-or even in the Swamp-who've had some contact with Hesione LeGros makes me think that we may have to go down to Grand Terre to find out anything more. But it doesn't hurt to check.”

“All we can do is try,” reasoned Artois. “If we find it out, and nobody does anything about it ... well, we did our part.” He was practically the only person January knew who didn't add And what do you hear about the Avocet murder ... ?

And January smiled as he walked the boy to the door. “That's true,” he told Artois. “And the rest, as my confessor would certainly tell me, is up to God.”

By the time January had finished his transcribing, clouds were moving in from the Gulf again, and warm electric winds raced up and down the city's streets. Thunder grumbled, far-off and angry, as January paced along Rue Bourbon; he'd be lucky if he collected his book, talked to Shaw, and got back to his rooms before he got a soaking.

“Michie Artois out at the market,” reported Martine as January emerged from the carriageway into the courtyard. She was making up more smudges against the ever-present mosquitoes. “He be back soon, you want to wait.”

“I just need to pick up a book.” January found it on a corner of the laboratory table-as usual, the old laundryroom's three French windows weren't locked-and as he came out again he noted that the morning's crushing heat had evidently discouraged Artois and James from washing down the carriageway after all. It was still splotched everywhere with expectorated tobacco, and criss-crossed with muddy tracks. Artois' narrow boots, Martine's bare feet ...

January stopped abruptly, looking down at the heaved, uneven surface of the brick underfoot. The carriageway was already in gloom, but enough light came in from the feverish afternoon sun to illuminate the tracks.

And one of the men who'd been in to pick up the crate definitely had a gouge taken out of the heel of his right boot.

Naturally Shaw wasn't at the Cabildo. “He gone down to Plaquemines Parish again,” reported Sergeant DeMezieres, who had come to know January over the past two years: a big jolly Spanish Creole with a ferocious black mustache that he waxed into fanglike points. “Why it ain't clear to him it was that brother Bertrand killed Guifford Avocet I'm damned if I know. It was his shirt they found in the woods, all bloody like he stuck a pig. What time the clock in the parlor stopped or what was in the rag-bag in the house that Shaw been askin' about got nothing to do with it all, and so I told Shaw. Blood is blood.”

He jabbed at January with an admonishing finger. “If that overseer of theirs disappeared, I'd be askin' questions of the field-hands, not searchin' the parish. That man was a hard one and I'm told the new American fellas worse. Well, stands to reason, them two women needin' a man on the place and takin' on the first one to present himself.”

He shook his head, and fished a flint and striker from the drawer of his desk, for beyond the arcade outside the big double-doors the sky had come over black with storm. “Just askin' for trouble, hirin' an American.” January wasn't sure whether the sergeant was lamenting the Avocet women's new employee, or Captain Tremouille's decision to hire Abishag Shaw in the first place.

“Thank you,” January said, and held out the note he'd come prepared with-he'd half-expected Shaw to be down in Plaquemines. “If he should return this evening, sir, please give him this note for me.”

It stormed all night, and in the morning-having heard nothing from Shaw January walked while it was still cool across the French town and along Magazine Street to number nineteen hundred, which turned out to be the Episcopal Home for Orphaned and Indigent Boys. The servant January spoke to there-he'd taken the precaution of dressing like a servant himself, in a rough calico shirt and shabby trousers-had never heard of a Tom Burkitt. “He kind of a tall white man,” explained January, holding out a vague hand to indicate someone around six feet in height and waving, in the other hand, a note addressed to T. Burkitt on the subject of a fictitious sister and her baby. “Chews tobacco.”