Die Upon a Kiss (13 page)

For the next two hours they concentrated on the Count Almaviva’s efforts to exercise
le droit du seigneur
on his barber’s bride, Susanna’s efforts to elude him, the Countess’s struggle to win back her husband’s love, and the page Cherubino’s double dilemma of achieving puberty and evading conscription. Only when January was handing the soprano into a hack at the end of the rehearsal was he able to return to the subject of Incantobelli. It was just after noon by then, and he had been hard put to keep his mind on the music, wondering whether he would find Marguerite conscious or even alive when he returned to Olympe’s.
If anything had happened, they’d
have sent for me,
he told himself.

But his heart felt sick.

It came back to his mind that in the dark of the alley, his fist had connected with a chin not very much lower than his own; he remembered the bulk and weight of his attacker, throwing him against the wall. As he led Madame Montero through the French door to the Rue des Ursulines, he asked, “You say Incantobelli made threats against Belaggio for stealing his opera and passing it off as his own? Threats of murder?”

“Of a certainty.” She tilted her head to look up at him through the dusky cloud of her mantilla. Draped over a comb nearly a foot high, it rose above the mountain of love-knots, bows, gems, and ringlets on her head. “I myself heard him.”

“So it might very well have been Incantobelli who hired the men who attacked Belaggio.” Many castrati, January knew, grew to be enormously tall—which did not seem to be the case with Incantobelli, so far as he’d been able to glimpse him last night—but it was no eunuch whose beard had scraped his knuckles in the dark.

“Never.” Montero shook her head decidedly. “He may have taken a warm bath in his youth, Incantobelli. . . .” She switched casually to Italian with the old phrase that described the operation by which boys were castrated. “But he is a Neapolitan, when all is said. Hire louts to administer a beating for such a thing? Pah! It is not like the seduction of a man’s wife, who after all is but a wife. It is the rape of his daughter, his child. One does not delegate chastisement for such a deed. Ah! Behold the fine
caballero—
I trust you will not speak of seeing me here?” She extended a round little hand for Hannibal to kiss as the fiddler came up the banquette. “That back-alley drabtail d’Isola carries tales enough to Lorenzo as it is. All we need is that she should say I am plotting against her, that it is my doing if greenstuff is thrown at her after she sings Tuesday night.”

“If she sings.” Hannibal removed his shabby high-crowned beaver and saluted the hand as if it were a holy relic. “If there’s a performance at all. I took the liberty of calling on Mr. Caldwell to tell him he needs to find a new ballet mistress and the man’s in near hysterics, sending messages to Belaggio at his hotel and Marsan at his town house—though neither of them, apparently, can be reached. I thought Caldwell would give birth. He’s procured the services of Herr Smith, by the way. . . .”

“Smith?” January groaned. Madame Montero, whose hand remained in Hannibal’s, raised an eyebrow. “Smith—who was certainly called something else in Dresden, before he left for I think political reasons—is probably one of the finest instructors and arrangers of opera ballet that the reign of Louis the Fourteenth ever produced. Unfortunately, Louis the Fourteenth has been dead for about a hundred and twenty years and we do things a little differently these days.”

“If you want a strict regulation of passepieds in every opera prologue, musettes in the first act, and tambourins in the second, with every dancer doing his or her specialty turn no matter how it fits into the story,” explained Hannibal, “Smith’s your man. Though he’ll fight like a maddened butterfly to get more allegorical costumes for the rats.”

Montero paused in the door of the fiacre. “Allegorical—as what? The spirits of Love and Duty in
Figaro?
Of Hearth and Home?”

“If he can manage,” said January, “he’ll do it.”

“Smith was at liberty.” Hannibal shrugged. “What more need I say?
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti
se puero. . . .
I overheard Knight complaining that Davis raised the pay of his own dance-master rather than let Caldwell hire him away—about half the Opera Society was at Caldwell’s, running around like the fourth act of a bad opéra bouffe trying to figure out a way to stop the duel over cakes and tea, not that they offered me so much as a bite. Kentucky Williams tells me Kate the Gouger may know something about Belaggio’s friends in the alley, by the way,” he added as they shut the fiacre door and the jarvey whipped up his horse. “Kate runs a bath-house on Tchoupitoulas Street near the cattle-market. Occasionally one can even get a bath there. The lovely Mistress Williams remembers there was a pair of brothers renting a room from her, spending money she’s pretty sure they shouldn’t have had.”

“Were they indeed?” The thought of dealing with any friend of Kentucky Williams—a cigar-smoking harpy who ran a combination grog-shop and bordello on Perdidio Street in the part of town referred to by one and all as the Swamp—made January wince. The prospect was not sweetened by contemplation of the swinish rabble of filibusters, gun-runners, mercenaries, and river-rats native to Tchoupitoulas Street, which skirted the levee upriver like a dirty rampart of cotton-presses and baracoons. Under ordinary circumstances January would cheerfully have consigned Belaggio to Hell and his stolen opera with him, no matter how beautiful its music, rather than venture into territory so perilous.

But the circumstances were not ordinary. So after a brief and frustrating visit to Olympe’s house, long enough to ascertain that Marguerite had neither wakened nor stirred in the night, January and Hannibal made their way across Canal Street in the sharp, heatless brightness of noon, and as far as they could along Magazine, which was at least in daylight hours marginally more genteel. Here among the white-painted board houses, the brick shops and liveries of the American section of town, an approximation of Sabbath quiet could be detected: a number of stores were closed and slaves weren’t lined up on the wooden sidewalks outside the salesrooms as they were on other days of the week. But winter was the time when business got done in New Orleans. It was the end of the
roulaison—
the sugar-grinding season—and the beginning of the cotton harvest. Factors, planters, brokers, steamboat companies, all made their money in the months between November and March; and on their coattails, the owners of refineries and cotton-presses, livery stables, salesrooms, bordellos, saloons. To lose one day in seven was more than ridiculous. It was impossible, irresponsible, absurd.

You can sleep during Lent.

More than buying and selling was going on, too. Men strolled from barroom to barroom along the mud street, whiskery savages who came down from Kentucky and Tennessee with the keelboats, in their homespun shirts and heavy boots, pistols and knives at their belts. River traders, some of them—or the thieves and pirates who adopted that name—indistinguishable from the ruffians who made up the occasional wildcat military expeditions organized to help South American guerrilleros or dictators in the rebellion-torn nations of the south for a price. Slave-smugglers, some of them, bringing in Africans against the laws of the United States and the vows of the British Royal Navy, and trappers from the wild lands of northern Mexico, in their buckskin shirts and leggins with their squaws walking silent at their heels. Here and there Indians from those lands could be seen as well, black-haired and watchful-eyed, or staggering drunk and debased; Mexicans with silver conchos on their low-crowned hats. Every second building along Tchoupitoulas Street seemed to be a tavern, doors and windows gaping and the sickish-sweet stink of tobacco—smoked or spit— vying with the smoke of the steamboats, the stench of untended privies, the fetor of spilled or vomited whiskey and beer.

As January and Hannibal proceeded upriver, the reek of the cattle-market and the slaughterhouses overwhelmed these other smells, and black buzzards hunched watchfully on eaves or fenceposts. “I wish they wouldn’t look at me that way,” complained Hannibal, and coughed. “Like creditors, or one’s family after someone’s blabbed about the contents of one’s will. At least one can disinherit one’s family.”

“I’m not sure,” said January, and pointed to a big bald-headed bird on the limb of an oak—the buildings hereabouts were thinning, and becoming progressively more rude as they left the town behind. “That one looks like a lawyer to me.”

“Tu as veritas, amicus meus.”
The fiddler bent to pick an empty bottle from the sedge-choked ditch and flung it at the bird, which swayed back a little on its perch, wings spread like a witch’s cloak. Then hopped from its place and pecked at the black glass. “Now that you mention it, he does indeed bear a startling resemblance to my father’s solicitor—Droudge, his name was. If he swallows the bottle, I’ll know for sure he’s the very man, garbed in a clever disguise.”

To their right, inland from the river, a man shouted. January had been aware for some minutes of the sullen rumble of voices, the occasional hoarse oath. The vacant lots here had blurred into stretches of marshy woodland, and it was hard to see exactly what was taking place, but January guessed. He felt he’d been born knowing, and his stomach clenched. He’d been aware, too, that he and Hannibal were not the only pair of men—one white, one black—to be making its way into this seedy neighborhood. At least two or three other couples of like composition waded through the weeds along the edges of the muddy streets, and in every case the black member of the pair was younger, taller, and fitter than his companion.

The sound of yelling spiked, with wild howls of encouragement.

January knew exactly what was going on.

Neither Kate the Gouger nor any of her boarders were at the filthy collection of sheds that comprised her establishment. Hannibal poked his head through the door of the ramshackle bath-house—which more resembled a woodshed, with a couple of crusted tin tubs on the bare earth and an open firepit in a shed at the back—then re-emerged with a shrug. Behind the main building a sort of cabinet did duty as Kate’s bedroom, with a kitchen, a privy, a huge pile of cut wood, a murky-looking cistern, and another long dormitory shed grouped a few yards off. Nothing moved except a skinny cat sneaking along the roof of the dormitory, her purposeful air boding ill for any who might nourish hopes for a rodent-free night. Since the mob gathered around the fight was only a hundred yards or so up a nameless muddy street, in a clearing past a line of tupelo trees, it was obvious where everybody was.

January felt as if everything in him had shrunk to a cold knot of iron.

In Paris, during the tumults that had led up to the expulsion of the last Bourbon king, his friends used to say,
It’s only a riot,
and they’d joke at his unwillingness to go along and see the fun.

The snarling anger of mobs always made him shiver, like the scent of smoke on the wind. If you were raised black in New Orleans, it was second nature to turn around and walk the other way. Fast.

The fights were being held under the auspices of the Eagle of Victory saloon, one of the last buildings of the town on this side. One of the first, indeed, to be built on what had been the fields of a sugar plantation: through the stringers of cypress and loblolly pine, where other lots had been cleared, January could see piles of lumber or stacks of bricks marking someone’s good intentions. This section of the Faubourg St. Mary was a wasteland of old fields cut across and across with new streets—sodden tracks for the most part—and overgrown with elephant-ear and the skinny remnants of degenerate cane. Just past the Eagle of Victory’s unpainted walls, men shoved each other for a view, a solid wall of backs: greasy buckskin sewn with porcupine-quills, blue or gray or black broad-cloth and superfine. Slouch hats, fur hats, tall hats of silk or fine beaver. Most of the yelling was in English, with the hoarse inflection of Americans. “Kill him! Kill him, goddammit!” “Get up, you black fool!”

Against the saloon’s rear wall a man lay on a blanket on the ground. Bruises stood out even against the dark mahogany of his skin. A barechested and shivering boy in his early teens knelt beside him, sponging away blood from chest, arms, thighs with his own shirt. As January and Hannibal passed the boy looked around desperately, as if seeking help or advice or merely the permission to seek it, and January walked over and knelt beside him. “May I?”

The boy nodded, offered him the shirt, and smeared the tears from his face.

The man’s eye had been gouged nearly out of its socket, his left ear bitten half away. His breath was shallow; when January pinched his fingernail, the nailbed stayed pale.

“He be all right?” the boy asked, watching fearfully as January gently massaged and kneaded the engorged flesh of the eye back to something resembling its proper position. “He got blood in his piss.” He handed January a gore-smudged bandanna when he held out his hand; January made a pad of Hannibal’s handkerchief and tied it over the eye.

“Much?”

The boy shook his head. “Michie Marsan’s Lou kicked him in the nuts. Kicked him like a mule.” He looked around as someone roared with rage in the thick of the crowd. A moment later a savage storm-gust of cheering made January’s skin creep. The boy said, “He done as best as he could. Just Big Lou was bigger. Lots bigger.”

And probably didn’t want to end up lying on the ground
leaking blood any more than this man did.
January carefully manipulated the bruised and swollen genitals, ascertained that the swelling was minimal, that there didn’t seem to be hematomas deeper in the groin. The downed man was clearly a fighter, with scars on his cheeks and belly-muscles like a double row of fry-pans.

“Get him under a blanket.” He fished in the pocket of his shabby corduroy jacket for a half-dollar. “One of the whores should have one to sell you. He needs to be kept warm. Get rum or brandy to clean that ear. Get him out of here as soon as you can.”