Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (17 page)

And that, thought January with a wry sting of anger, is exactly what the police will say.

“In any case, M'sieu Quennel,” he said. “When you come to prepare young M'sieu St. Chinian for burial, if you should find anything out of the ordinary, anything-how ever small-worthy of note, please take note of it, and let me know.”

“Of course,” murmured Quennel in exactly the soothing voice that he must use with all the distraught families, reflected January. The agreement that means nothing, that is just a sound one makes to get the mourner to cease crying.

He knew it well. When he'd worked at the night clinic in the Hotel Dieu in Paris, he'd used it himself more times than he cared to count.

The undertaker signed to the attendant and laid out his stretcher on the table beside Artois, and January thought, It is time to say good-by, my friend.

Grief shut around his throat like a choking hand.

So full of promise.
What a hackneyed cliche, he thought, looking down into the young face, waxen and yellow in its tangled frame of wet amber curls. A thousand promises-for love, and sex, and family, for sons unborn and books unwritten-on which life had just reneged. Oh, my friend, I will avenge you all of this.

And that assurance rang hollow into the more certain knowledge that Artois was never going to find out, now, the riddle of the old lady's doubloon that had so fascinated him. January bent and kissed the boy's forehead.

And the undertaker bore Artois away.

“I've written his mother,” said Rose when January came into Veryl St. Chinian's library a few hours later. “James had her address in Boston.” Her voice was neutral again. So were her eyes. The afternoon rain drummed in the courtyard, chill breaths of air rushing through the open windows and about the mouldering old town house like children's ghosts.

“I've sent to Brancas' Printing for handbills for the funeral. They have a man there who'll post them all around the town. Not that there are many people in town to see. I expect that between them Aunt Marie-Agnes and Theodosia St. Chinian-your Henri's new mother-in-law-will veto burial in the family vault, so I've contacted Pere Eugenius at the Cathedral about a wall-vault until Veryl can make some arrangement.”

Rose had lit the candles on Veryl's book-cluttered desk, and in the molten light her hands rested on the sheets of cold-pressed paper like a little Dutch still-life: wax, taper, pen-knife, wiper, all laid out across that half-written first line, Dominique-Something terrible has happened... “James tells me Chloe St. Chinian barely had anything to do with her half-brother, but she should be informed at least,” Rose went on. “I understand she and Henri are downriver at Bois d'Argent. And I found this.” From among the writing-things she brought out a few broken fragments of virulent pink, cracked fragments of what had been a sealing wafer. “They were on the floor of Artois' room. James remembered that the note was sealed with a couple of pink wafers. My guess is there was an address given on it, and Artois simply took it with him so as not to forget.”

“Directions to a place, more like.” January remembered the boy's facility with numbers. “But yes, he would have put it in his pocket. All his pockets were cleaned out, by the way, not just the jacket. Burkitt, and whoever was working with him, must have searched him-”

He had meant to go on to say looking for that very thing. But his throat closed again, and he stood mute, looking down at her, and she, silent, up at him. Then he saw tears track slowly from her eyes, and she turned her face away.

And sat, breathing hard to steady herself, like a statue that knows that it will fly into pieces if once it starts to feel. January thought, I can't go to her. If this solitude is what she needs in her pain, how can I break her strength with my own need?

How can I ever?

She has fought hard for that strength, and it is her victory.

And for a moment, through his grief, he felt a keener pain, as if he saw Rose sitting in the stern of a barge like a young queen of legend, sailing out into a stream and away from him.

Then she held up her hand, reaching out behind her for him, while the tears flowed faster down her face. And January took her hand, and knelt beside her chair, and she turned where she sat and pressed her face to his shoulder, the corner of her spectacles digging into his cheek, her body shuddering with sobs.

Mackinaw Sal proved to be a mammoth-breasted blond slut in a blue Mother Hubbard, sitting at a rough table in the back of her “place” on Gallatin Street, smoking a cigar and having what appeared to be grits and beer for breakfast. The yard stank in the steamy heat of early afternoon, and in the street a man was shouting in German, “You're all pimps in this stinking city! Every shit-eating one of you!” for reasons best known to himself. The grimy building was hemmed in on both sides with the high brick walls of warehouses and shipping offices. In the rear corner of the yard, near the privies, a Chickasaw Indian lay, unconscious or merely asleep; January walked over to make sure he wasn't dead before going to the back door.

“'Scuse me, m'am.”
He took off his sorry felt hat and averted his eyes from Mackinaw Sal's heavy thighs, exposed where she'd pulled up the Mother Hubbard to catch the open door's breeze. “I'm lookin' for M'am Mackinaw Sal?” At least she wore shoes and stockings, and a corset under her dress. Her ditchwater hair was curled and smelled of perfume applied over a general undercoat of cigar-smoke and dirt, and she'd taken the trouble to paint her face. She was probably Dominique's age and looked fifty.

“You found her, Sambo.” With one knee she kicked her dress down. She offered no invitation to come in, and January guessed, from her eyes, that he'd better not step across the unswept threshold.

“The folks at the city morgue, they tell me you was the lady who found my boy dead,” he said. “I come to thank you, m'am, for callin' the Guards the way you done.”

“Well, shit, I wasn't gonna leave him to stink up the street.” She took a drag on her cigar, regarded him with hard blue eyes ringed in kohl. “I got customers come in that way.”

“Yes, m'am,” said January. “'Course not, m'am. You didn't happen to see-that is ... You see, m'am, my boy was runnin' with my brother, and my brother's a bad man, m'am. Gettin' money from who knows where and tellin' my boy all kinds of things.... Now my brother says him and my boy, they was together up till about midnight-this was down on the levee-and then my boy left to walk home. We live up on Rue Claiborne, up in Treme.. . .”

“You know, I'm glad you told me that, 'cause I was just fixin' to ask so's I could come callin' on you with a blancmange.” Her eyes were red and her voice slurry. Not drunk, thought January, but in the grip of a moderately fatal hangover. He hoped she would die of liver failure.

That they all would die.

“Your brother's a liar, Sambo, 'cause the kid was layin' in that gutter when I throwed Suzy Broadhorn outa here at midnight, the dirty cow. Him lyin' there was the only reason I didn't pitch her in the gutter. What's your brother's name?”

“Clarence Horatio, m'am,” replied January promptly. “Only he go by a dozen other names, Slick and Red Dog and I don't know how many others. You didn't happen to see-?”

The woman raised her head as footfalls thumped on the floor of the barroom. Without so much as an “Excuse me,” she got to her feet, slurped a last spoonful of the grits, said “Shit,” and walked away through the door behind her and into the barroom that led, January could see, to the space behind the bar itself. “Well, howdy, stranger,” he heard her say as friendly and cheerful as if she'd just risen from luncheon after a brisk walk. “You been in these parts long?”

January put his cap on again, and crossed through the dirty yard and out the passway to the street.

Midnight, he thought, looking back at the mean little house. By daylight Gallatin Street looked even worse than it did after dark, swimming with mud from the rain. Planks bridged the gutter before Sal's front door and a dozen others. The gutters here, like those everywhere in the French town, were substantial canals, two feet wide and lined with cypress. Like those everywhere in the French town, they were offensive with garbage, sewage, and deceased animals in an advanced stage of decomposition, overflowing now and running into the street.

At this time of year, of course, most of the City Council were in their cool, pleasant cottages in Mandeville or Milneburgh, eating Italian ices and listening to the breezes whisper in the trees.

A few dozen yards away, at the end of the street, the masts of schooners jutted against the tumble of clouds and daylight. Smoke poured from the stacks of the steam packets. Liverpool and Le Havre, St. Petersburg and Cadiz and vera Cruz-all the wide world, where whites wouldn't automatically address him as Sambo or Coffee if they spoke English, or as “tu,” like a dog or a child, if they spoke French....

But where a poor woman could still be murdered in her home, he reminded himself, without the police caring who did it. It would have been the same, for someone like Hesione LeGros, in Paris or Berlin or Peking. Men had been dying on the barricades-or on crosses-for thousands of years trying to make it otherwise, and hadn't succeeded yet.

And if a young man without money or influence were found dead in a gutter, soaked with forty-rod, nobody would go about Paris or Rome or Constantinople asking if he habitually drank, or what he might have been doing in a part of town where he would not ordinarily go.

Boys of that age...

What was he doing in this part of town? reflected January, and looked around him once again.

M'sieu St. Chinian, please come to the Dead Nigger Tavern on Gallatin Street so that my colleagues and I can talk to you about your missing vacuum pump.

Boys of sixteen did idiotic things, of course-at the age of sixteen January had thought himself as invulnerable as Hercules. And it was true that he, January, had been out of town when Artois had gotten Mulm's message. But Artois, he thought, at least would have had the sense to ask someone for advice if this was where he'd been instructed to come.

So where would the purported finder of the missing pump have set up a meeting where Artois would feel safe? “Stinkin' yellow pups, the lot of you,” screamed a furious voice. “You'd steal the chaw out of a man's mouth if he yawned!” A black woman stumbled from one of the saloons, followed by the curses and laughter of the Oak Cudgel Boys, the gang that ran thievery and violence down at this end of the wharves. In the hot, steamy sunlight she shouted at them, half-drunk and arms akimbo....

Ask her? wondered January.

Or ask the gray-haired sailor, snoring with his back to the wall of the building across the street from Sal's?

He remembered the darkness of the streets here near the market, after the sun went down. No lamps swung above the intersections and few saloonkeepers wasted more on candles than was absolutely necessary to permit their patrons to locate their own drinks. A dray of wine-barrels lurched up the street from the river, one man driving and two others sitting guard on the tailgate, rifles on their arms-the Oak Cudgel Boys made obscene gestures after them, flung horse-shit, and cursed.

Which of them would even have noticed who dumped a beardless boy here to lie in the gutter?

He went home, and saw beside his bed the book Tamerlane and Other Poems, all its pages neatly cut and waiting for him.

Then he cried.

“That poor kid dead?” Cut-Nose Chighizolas scarred face twisted still further into a gargoyle mask of sorrow and disgust. “And for what? Just what was in his pockets, eh?”

“I think so, yes.” January leaned an elbow on the stacked boxes of oranges, the shallow crates of tomatoes and aubergines in the market's blue shade. Passers-by on the Rue du Levee seemed, from here, to be crossing a lighted stage: market-women with baskets on their tignoned heads, sallying forth for one last try at the streets before packing up and going home to their families. Servants with their own baskets hurrying to make up some last-minute deficiency in the dinner menu, impoverished housewives out to bargain for vegetables no longer fresh. The baskets of shrimp had begun to smell strongly fishy. Under the peaked tile roof, flies roared in inky clouds.

“Did you see who he met?”

“Oh, yeah.”
Chighizola hadn't changed a great deal from the night of General Humbert's ill-fated banquet twenty-three years before. His hair was gray, but he still looked like if you hit him with a cypress beam, the beam would break. When January had come up on him today, the old pirate had been recounting, to three awestruck British midshipmen and an open-mouthed ten-year-old boy, the horrific single-handed battle against Turkish corsairs in defense of the honor of a British countess, that had resulted in the loss of his nose. The mesmerized midshipmen had paid three times the going price for a pineapple before moving on.

“Yeah, I saw your boy.” Chighizola nodded toward the coffee-stand between the arcade's square brick pillars. “Right over there at La Violette's. Five or six o'clock yester day it must have been, I was just wrapping up. You lucky you caught me, I'm hauling my crust back to Grand Isle tonight. Not much of a moon, but the weather's clearing, and this time of year you got to take the weather as she come. Lot of water in Bayou Segnette, I can go straight down to the bay, like a fish swim in the ocean. With that Frank Mulm, the boy was.”

“Mulm?”
January wondered if Artois had seen the saloonkeeper by chance here, and decided on the spur of the moment to make inquiries of his own about Hesione LeGros. Then he remembered the girl in the dirty green gown behind the Nantucket Saloon, Sancho Sangre's buying these days. . . . Runnin' guns to the rebels in New Grenada ...

But why kill over something that, January was fairly certain, Mulm wouldn't be prosecuted for anyway? There was no law that said a saloonkeeper couldn't buy as many rifles as he chose and sell them to whomever he chose. The only ones who'd get in trouble were those who tried to smuggle them into Venezuela past the navies of those who currently ruled there, and Artois was certainly in no position to get word to anyone who would endanger the smugglers.