Benjamin January 6 - Wet Grave (18 page)

Somebody must have panicked.

Or Artois did in fact meet Mulm only by chance. “That's a bad man, Mulm.” Cut-Nose shook his head, unconsciously echoing Marie Laveau. “Have an apple. I grow 'em myself down on Grand Isle. Jean's due in tomorrow with more. These, I give 'em to the Sisters of Charity to make pies for the orphans.” He gestured at the dozen fat yellow fruits remaining in the straw-filled boxes.

“He looks like a toff, eh? With them little spectacles and the silver watch and the waistcoat like a Philadelphia undertaker. But you got to watch out for the millipede as well as the serpent and the scorpion. Frank Mulm got the striped eye, like they say, the bad eye. Me, I'd rather have a bad man who carries a cutlass and spits on the police-not that I spit on police myself these days-than a bad man who goes around with a ledger-book under his arm and is all the time waiting for you to turn around so he can knife you in the back with his little pen-knife. Me, I know bad men, eh? I been a bad man myself, though I'm all reformed now, praise the Virgin.” He crossed himself.

“When you say with him, you mean they had coffee together? Mulm and the boy?”

“No, no, that's what I'm tellin' you.” Cut-Nose looked up at January with earnest black eyes like cut jet. “That boy, he shoulda stayed away from him. He woulda if Mulm looked on the outside as rotten as he is in his heart. But he looks like God's uncle, you know? With that soft little voice, and no cussin', and his clean hands.” He began to tidy the fruit away into its boxes again, sorting the bruised from the good and stacking the crates preparatory, presumably, to transport to the Sisters of Charity and their orphans.

“I seen him waiting there, drinking coffee by himself, and I think that's a little strange, you know? For one thing, Frank Mulm don't ever drink his coffee here. He buys cheap beans and has a woman make it for him back at the Nantucket. La Violette,”-he gestured to the proprietress of the coffee-stand-“she buy good coffee, Havana green, and she got to charge for it. For another, if a man like Mulm gonna drink coffee, he gonna drink it indoors, where he can watch his back. The Cafe des Exiles is straight across the street. Every time I look over at him, he's lookin' all around him, never sittin' quiet, and whenever a cart come by on the street, it splash his shoes with mud, an' he get out a handkerchief and wipe up the stains and look pissy about it, like a cat under a leak. But he don't move. Just stayed there with his cloak folded up across his lap . . .”

“His cloak?”
January blinked. “Yesterday? It must have been hot enough to bake bread in here. What was he doing with a cloak?”

“Now you mention it, that was funny.” The former pirate scratched the scarred stump of his nose. “Bad enough the man was wearing a coat, like an idiot. My daughter, she's always telling me, `Papa, wear your coat when you go up to town, people gonna think you're some kind of paisano.” Chighizola laughed. Like many of the Americans the Kaintuck keelboatmen, and the farmers who came south with flatboats full of pumpkins, hogs, and corn-he stood behind his table in shirt-sleeves, and in the faded homespun stripes of pink and blue he did in fact look like a peasant. January was familiar with the adjuration not to go about the town half-dressed. He'd heard it from his mother all his life.

“Well, that's what he had, anyway,” said Chighizola. “He got up and walked a few feet to meet this young man, this kid in the light-blue coat, when he come down the banquette. They stand together talkin' right there, between those pillars but outside, next to the street. Then somebody ask me somethin' about my aubergines, an' when I turn around back, they's both gone.”

Mulm had a gun. The thought emerged full-grown and obvious, mostly because it was a snatch common in Paris, in the rough districts near the customs barrier. A girl would come in from the country, either for the day or looking for employment in the city shops. A pleasant, harmless-looking man, or more usually a middle-aged woman, would go up to her, sometimes with a shopping basket on her arm, or a big shawl. “There's a gun beneath the shawl, dearie, so get in the carriage....” And a carriage would be there, as if it had dropped from the sky. The victim was usually too confused and shocked to cry out. “We just want to talk to you and you won't be hurt......”

And of course the girl would end up in a brothel. January had never fathomed why, with all the prostitutes there were in Paris, more had to be recruited by force, but apparently that was the case. He'd heard it was ten times worse in London, where men paid premiums to deflower virgins.

But why?
he thought. When he'd told Artois to get rid of the guns, to emphasize that he'd never seen them, it had been in his mind only to prevent the boy from a roughing up by whoever was bringing them in-even if Artois had gone straight to the City Guards and enabled them to trace the smugglers, nothing very much would have been done on either side. Inconvenience to the smugglers, a hitch-up passing them on to Sancho Sangre or whoever was acting for the rebels in whatever southern jungle they were destined for ...

It didn't make sense.

It wasn't a killing matter, not of a boy who clearly had a wealthy family-be it ever so illegitimate-behind him. Mulm was an American, but he had lived in New Orleans for several years and he wasn't stupid. He did enough business with the French Creoles to know that the murder of a young man of color connected with one of their families wouldn't be simply shrugged over and forgotten. He would know how close the ties were that bound the shadow-children to their white relatives. Obviously he knew, if he'd taken pains to provide another explanation for the boy's death.

“Yes, you give me a good bad man, an honest bad man,” Cut-Nose was saying. “Lafitte, may he rest in peace......” He crossed himself again. “Yes, he stole a little here and there, though he never did sink that American ship like they said he did, that made so much trouble. He wasn't no fool, him. But you know, he treated everyone good. If a man was in trouble, or was ill, he'd support that man's wife and children. If a man died in his service, he'd pay for them to be buried. None of your little wood box stuck in the ground, neither. Candles, and gloves for everybody, and a big spread of food and wine afterward so everyone would remember their friend. There aren't men like Lafitte around anymore.”

Given the number of men and women Lafitte had stolen from Spanish slave-ships bound for Cuba and then smuggled into Louisiana to sell to the sugar-planters, that was probably just as well.

Across the street, lamps were lit in the Cafe des Exiles. Men moved their tables out onto the banquette, to sip their coffee and play dominoes, old men who'd been planters or brokers in Saint-Domingue, before the slaves there rose up in revolt. Men who'd spent their lives telling themselves that it was only a matter of time before the situation there was “cleared up” and they could go back to being the masters.

No white men had slept quite so peacefully since Christophe, and Toussaint Louverture, had led the slaves to revolt. Every few years now, slaves in this land of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tried to lay claim to the rights promised by its founders, and every few years were beaten down, with greater and greater brutality. Since the last big revolt on the eastern seaboard four years ago, even freedmen and libres-people of color who had been free for generations-were regarded with deep suspicion.

Cafe des Exiles, thought January with a bitter inward smile as servants of the owner came out with flambeaux of gunpowder, cow-hooves, and lemon-grass, to drive the mosquitoes away. As if my mother's mother, and my father, and all those others brought from Africa were not themselves exiles.

“Did you hear Hesione LeGros was dead?” he asked, blinking hard against the first gust of harsh smoke as it fluffed across the street.

“No ... Hessy?”
The old pirate's busy hands paused. “Hellfire Hessy, we used to call her. . . . That's a damn shame. What happened?”

“Someone came into her place about three weeks ago and slashed her to death,” said January quietly. “Someone she knew, I think- And, of course, the Guards are doing nothing.”

“T'cha!” Chighizola shook his head, and tucked wisps of straw more firmly around the yellow fruit. “God, what a bobcat that little blackbird was! I remember me the time, down on Grand Terre that was, when she went after old Gambi with a pewter tankard, right in Lafitte's house, when she heard Gambi'd started makin' sheep's eyes at one of the girls we took off a Spanish slaver. Damn near brained him, chasin' him around the room-I nearly fell in the fire, I was laughing so hard. Poor Gambi was givin' Hessy necklaces and earrings for a month, tryin' to get her to forgive him. You'd never think it, a little thing like that.”

No, thought January, remembering the crumpled, dirty form dead on the floor among the ants. You'd never think it.

“Did she have children, back in the Barataria? Or any family?” he asked.

“Oh, sure.
Three daughters, that was raised by the Borgas family over on Grand Isle, and all of 'em married now with kids of their own-what the hell was their names? Somethin' pretty-Marie-Epiphanie works for me, one of the daughters, sweetest little lady you'd care to meet--what the hell was her sisters' names? She had a son, Hessy did, that the Borgases also raised-she loved 'em all but she wasn't much of a mother, and she knew it. But he died of snakebite five, six years ago.” He sighed noisily. “She was a spitfire, no mistake. But she hadn't no malice in her, you know. None. She didn't hold no grudges, and didn't make trouble for nobody, once she got over her mad. She'd stab you with that stiletto she kept in her hair one day, wash up your dishes for you the next. She made sure her children went to good families, that didn't mistreat 'em, which is more than some of those bitches did, once Lafitte and his boys moved on.”

“And you wouldn't know any reason Mulm would want to harm Hesione? Or have someone harm her? Does he have a man named Tom Burkitt working for him?” he added when Chighizola shook his head again. “Big man, six feet or so, American? Or chews tobacco like an American, anyway?”

“Burkitt?
Not that I've heard. There's a fellow Burke that hangs around the Nantucket, Tyrone Burke. Supposed to be a drover, but me, I wouldn't let him touch no horse flesh of mine. Come south on the keelboats, I hear, and got into debt to Mulm. Works thievin' on the docks a little, an' does this an' that for Mulm, keeps order in the place. He's about six feet an' chews. Black hair, light eyes, greeny-brown like dirty water. Black brows that meet in the middle, like my grandma always said was the sign of malòcchio.” And he made a quick gesture of aversion with his hand. “That your man?”

“Maybe.”
January helped Cut-Nose carry his crates through the shining cobalt darkness to the levee, where his pirogue bobbed at the end of an empty wharf. Afterward he returned to the market, where the last of the women were packing to go by the yellow flare of cressets. La Violette confirmed both what Cut-Nose had said and what January suspected. She didn't particularly recall that Mulm-whom she knew by sight and rumor, and detested, having a cousin who worked mopping up at the Nantucket-had had a cloak with him, but she recalled him going over to that young octoroon boy. Standing next to the boy, right up close. She remembered because she'd longed to call out Step back, son, or he'll pick your pocket. . . .

Young boys came to Mulm all the time, of course. The saloonkeeper was known to run whorehouses-known, too, for finding out things that young men would pay him not to let their fathers know. Yes, they both got into a carriage. It drew right up where there was a plank across the gutter and didn't pause but a moment. Some gentlemen would have their carriage stop here while they got out and got a cup of coffee, with all the carriages and carts and drays all scrooching around every which way in the street, and she'd seen mules break their legs, being pushed into the gutter and losing their footing.

Not in summer, of course. You could put your carriage sideways right across Rue du Levee today and not inconvenience a soul....

As he left the market, January passed the blackbordered notice pasted to one of the brick pillars of the arcade.

FUNERAL WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19

ARTOIS ST CHINIAN

 CHAPEL OF ST ANTHONY,

NEW CEMETERY

He thought of Uncle Veryl, alone in that empty town house. Of Rose, packing up her student's workroom in the gathering dark.

Lieutenant Shaw wasn't at the Cabildo. He was back in town, DeMezieres said, and would be in later tonight or tomorrow for certain. The note January had left him con cerning the guns-and Artois' death-still lay on Shaw's surprisingly tidy desk, still sealed, reminding January of the fragments of pink wafer that Rose had found on the floor of Artois' room.

I'll wait for you at the coffee-stand opposite the Cafe des Exiles... I'll be there between five and six. . .. Easy to get a boy of sixteen to slip quietly out of the house without wait ing for his guardian, or speaking to his guardian's overworked valet. I have a gun.... Get in the carriage, you won't be hurt. . . .

January knew how long it took a man to drown. He'd talked to the rough boys, the thieves and housebreakers of Paris, when they'd end up at the night clinic in the Hotel Dieu. He knew it took a good deal longer to suffocate in water than most people thought.

My boy.
His heart ached as he walked back along the hot, gluey silence of Rue Bourbon with the waning moon just lifting above the black line of the house-tops, as if the boy had in fact been the son he'd lied about to Mackinaw Sal. More than the pain of knowing he was dead, was missing him. Wanting to talk to him again. To hear his reactions, his opinions- He would, January thought, have been absolutely tickled to participate in the investigation of his own death. He'd have his own theories, his own ideas to check.

Oh, my boy.

The funeral would be the following morning. Dominique had come in that afternoon on the steam-train, with Therese and her cook, and opened her house for the wake. January was surprised at how many of the plaçees, who'd taken cottages or boarding-house rooms in Milneburgh, came that night, bearing blancmanges and cakes, gumbos and etouffes in their finest dishes of French or Prussian porcelain, to lay on the tables in Dominique's front parlor.