Fever Season (22 page)

The lieutenant stopped, his slantindicular glance suddenly sharp and hard.

“Always people without families, people whose neighbors have left town or been taken sick themselves,” January continued. “Always people no one would miss for days. I don’t know how long this has been going on. Longer than ten days, I think. The man who drives the dead-cart says he’s seen men moving through the streets, in the slack-end of the night. They’ve taken seven I know about. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more.”

Shaw scratched his head thoughtfully. “Now, it’s funny you should mention that, Maestro.” Sleeplessness and overwork had thinned his already narrow face; his long jaw wore stubble like a brownish mold. January thought suddenly of all those houses standing locked and empty, and of the fear that fueled drinking, and the drinking that fueled violence in an already violent town. “We had two queries so far about runaways that don’t listen right, men that worked the cotton press or the levee, men that slept out, and only went to their owners every night with what they made. Only in this case the owners was out by the lake, one in Spanish Fort and one acrost the lake in
Mandeville, so the men only went and paid ’em their take once a week. Steady men, they said. In fact their owners was more inclined to think their men had took sick of the fever. ‘My boy wouldn’t run away,’ they said.”

“And did each of these men,” asked January, “rent a place to sleep by himself?”

“Well, as it happens,” said Shaw, “they did. They was good men, but not with any particular skill. And it’s the slow season on the levee. They worked here and there, so nobody really missed ’em at a job for some several days. At least so far as I can tell, since it’s sort of hard to find people who’ll admit to rentin’ sleeping room to some other man’s slaves, let alone find them that sleep out to talk about the matter theirselves. And there’s dozens dyin’ every day.”

“There are,” agreed January quietly, It had begun to rain again. The two men paused under the wooden awning before the doors of a grimy barrelhouse scarcely larger than the shed ’Poly and Lu had shared. Steam heat rose from the marshy street. Through the open doorway a slatternly woman was visible behind a plank set on a couple of kegs, dispensing what might charitably be termed whisky to a barefoot white man in the togs and tarred pigtail of a British sailor, a keelboatman whose clothing and body could be smelled from the door, and a couple of the weariest, grubbiest whores January had ever seen in his life. Even after growing up in the city it still mildly surprised him that such places, within a stone’s throw of the cemeteries with their piles of corpses, could find customers willing to pay for anything within their walls.

“That’s why whoever is doing this considers himself safe.”

Shaw propped one bony shoulder against the porch post, chewing ruminatively. He made no comment about the discrepancy between those six, and January’s earlier
count of seven, and only spit a long stream of tobacco juice onto the boards of the porch.

“You didn’t happen to get the name of this dead-cart man, did you?”

January shook his head. “Just that he was almost as big as me, and as dark. Heavy in the shoulders and arms. His head was shaved.”

“I’ll ask around amongst ’em,” said the lieutenant. “I just come down here to inquire after a little amateur surgery over a faro game. I will never in my life understand a gamblin’ man.”

He shook his head marvelingly. “Bank’s gonna foreclose, man’s gonna lose his plantation, he comes into town with a draft for eight thousand dollars in his pocket to replace a grinder that’ll keep his family’s home for ’em and what’s he do?” He jerked his head back in the direction of the Turkey-Buzzard. “He really think he’s gonna
win
in a place like that? You understand it, Maestro?”

“I don’t understand the fever.” January stepped aside from the stream of water that had begun to drip down from the awning above. “I just see men dying of it every day.”

Across the street a man in a formal black coat and tall hat emerged from a ramshackle conglomeration of buildings. He walked with the careful deliberation of a drunk, rain sluicing down his hat and off the shoulders of his coat, the dozen yards to the Jolly Boatman Saloon. Other than that the street was still, though a man’s voice, harsh and flat with an American accent, roared out that he was a riproarer from Salt River and wore a hornet’s nest for a hat decorated with wolves’ tails.

Shaw nodded across the street at the dirty, rambling warehouses from which the man had come. “I take it you done checked the clinics? Even places like that?”

The crudely lettered sign over the door proclaimed the place to be St. Gertrude’s. God knew, thought January, the Swamp needed a clinic—most of the dying in Charity were Americans—but the existence of the place surprised him.

“If these people took sick in the street, or in a strange part of town, they might have been took anywhere,” Shaw went on. “I’ll ask around the Exchanges, and amongst the dealers, and at the steamboat offices. I don’t doubt for a minute that any black man who goes to the new cotton lands runs the risk of bein’ kidnapped, no matter what kind of proof he’s got of his freedom either on him or back here in town. But in the town itself—it’s different. Iff’n these folks is kidnappin’ people of color, they gotta be movin’ ’em out of town somehow. Even quiet as things are on the levee these days, I’d feel right conscientious, myself, tryin’ to get a coffle of folks that didn’t want to go acrost the wharf and onto a boat.”

“You think any of those folks wants to go?”

January met Shaw’s eyes, aware of the anger in his own. There was silence between them for a time.

Then Shaw said quietly, “You know what I mean, Maestro.”

“I know what you mean. Sir.”

It was Shaw who turned his eyes away. “We’ll find ’em.” He spit out into the brown lake of the rain-pocked street. “I warn you, even if we do, it’ll be hard to prove. There been too many slaves smuggled in and out of this town since the African trade was outlawed for folks to want to admit somethin’ like this is goin’ on. But they’ll slip up somewheres, and we’ll be waiting for ’em when they do. Coming?”

The rain was letting up. It was tempting to simply walk with the Lieutenant back to the relative safety of the
French town. There, if he was regarded as something less than a man, he was at least not in peril of life and limb.

January shook his head. “There’s something I have to take care of,” he replied.

“Suit yourself. Mind how you go, though.” Shaw touched his hat—something not many white men would have done in the circumstances—and made his way down the sodden slop of the street in the direction of the French town and the Cabildo, shoulders hunched, like a soaked scarecrow in the rain.

January took a deep breath, glanced around him for further warning of trouble, then mucked his way across the street to the shabby walls of St. Gertrude’s.

St. Gertrude’s Clinic was completely unattended. A ramshackle building or collection of buildings that had once been a warehouse, it was nearly windowless, its roof leaked in a dozen places, and the smell would have nauseated Satan. As his eyes struggled to adapt to the grimy light admitted by a few high-up squares of oiled linen, January heard the scuttle and swish of rats in the darkness around the walls, and the hard whirring flight of a palmetto bug. Somewhere a man sobbed. When his eyes did adjust, he saw some twenty men and women lying on the floor on straw mattresses, tossing and shuddering with fever.

None of them was anyone that he knew. Seven were dead, three clearly dying. Along the wall two corpses, wrapped roughly for the dead-cart man, were already the target of long ribbons of ants. January steeled himself to pull the sheets from their faces.

Both were naked, and had been harvested of their teeth, the white man of his hair. The other, either a slave mulatto or a man of color, was far older than any of the men who had disappeared. January would have scrupulously avoided most of the sick men in the clinic had he encountered them on the streets: sailors, vagrants, upriver
Kaintucks or Irish laborers, bewhiskered, gasping obscenities in barely comprehensible English.

But seeing them lying in a thin soup of rainwater and their own filth, January felt a blaze of anger go through him. Even Soublet’s hellish premises didn’t enrage him like this. At least the man had a dedication, and kept the place reasonably clean. People might be objects to Soublet, but he had the decency not to relieve them of their teeth when they died.

He left the clinic, and sloshed through the mire to the doors of the Jolly Boatman.

The black-coated, top-hatted man who’d emerged from the Clinic sat on one of the rude benches that flanked both sides of the big room, consuming a plate of crawfish and rice with a brown bottle of whisky at his side. Rather unusually for the district the place had a floor, wrought of used flatboat planks like the walls. With every other saloon in the Swamp awash in seepage the investment must pay off on rainy days.

Two tables stood in the center of the room, under soot-blackened lamps suspended from the low ceiling; at one of them a broad-shouldered, fair-haired man in a tobacco-colored coat played solitaire. Behind a plank bar another man, heavily mustachioed and with one pale blue eye bearing all the signs of an old gouging—it tended out, the torn muscles having never recovered—dipped a brownish liquor from a barrel on the floor beside him into a tin funnel, refilling the bottles of his stock. Past him two doors sported tattered curtains. A couple of men leaned on the bar itself, hard-bitten roughnecks of the sort who frequently ended up joining the crack-brained military adventures launched from New Orleans from time to time against the Spanish or the French. It was one of them who looked up as January’s shadow darkened the door.

“Don’t you know better than to come in here, boy?” He shoved himself away from the bar and crossed to January, rapidly, to block his way.

“Is there something you’re after, my friend?” The card-player rose from the table with no appearance of hurry, but he was between them with surprising quickness nevertheless.

January recognized him as the fair-haired Irishman who’d searched through the ward of the Charity Hospital the night Mademoiselle Vitrac had come to ask his help for her girls.

“I’m looking for the man in charge of St. Gertrude’s Clinic.” It was an effort to keep his voice steady, let alone affect the soft-spoken subservience white men expected of those darker than themselves. January had no clear idea of what he was going to say, or how he would phrase it. His one desire was to drive his fist into the jaw of the man who slouched on the bench, sucking his bottle when men wept and pleaded for water next door.

“Furness,” the gambler called out gently. And, to the mercenary beside him, “That’ll do, Hog-Nose, thank’ee.” The black-coated man took another pull on his whisky, and sulkily came to the door, bottle still in hand. “This bhoy has a word for you.”

“What you want, boy?” Close up, Dr. Furness’s face was unshaven, mouth embedded in a brown smear of tobacco stains, nose and eyes alike red veined. His breath was a lifetime of alcohol and uncleanness.

“I just wanted to let you know you’ve got about seven dead in your clinic, sir, and water coming in through the roof so they’re lying in puddles on the floor.”

The doctor stared at him open-mouthed. “Who the hell you think you are, boy, coming here telling me how to
run my business? You get the hell outa here! Goddamn uppity …”

January inclined his head and stepped back, trembling with rage. Everything he would have said to the man had he been in France—
How dare you set yourself up as a healer, you incompetent drunkard? Who put you in charge of a clinic, even in times such as these?
died in his mouth, with the knowledge that to speak—even to raise his eyes—would only earn him a beating from the military filibusters and maybe the gambler as well. But he was so angry that all he could see were the toes of his own boots, and the tips of Dr. Furness’s, mud-soaked and dripping on the dirty boards of the floor.

Thus he didn’t even see the blow Furness aimed at him, until the gambler moved and caught the drunken man’s arm. January looked up and saw the cane in the doctor’s hand.

“Leave it,” warned the gambler softly. Furness made an effort to jerk his arm free for another strike. The cane was teak with a head of brass, and by the way Furness handled it, he’d used it as a weapon before.

“Boy got no goddamn business telling me how to run my hospital!” he screamed, angry-drunk. He wrenched his arm again but the gambler’s grip was strong.

“The bhoy has a point, Gerald.” The mellow voice was as mild as that of a governess. But in the tanned face the blue eyes were pale steel. “ ’Tis true ye’ve no business bein’ away from the place, and anyone walkin’ in off the street. I think it best ye’d be gettin’ back.”

“I’m not going back because no buck nigger comes here all high and mighty and tells me—”

“You’re not. You’re goin’ because Liam Roarke’s tellin’ you.”

Furness’s jaw jutted so far he seemed in danger of
dislocating it, but his bloodshot gaze couldn’t endure the cold pale blue. He yanked his arm a third time, and this time the gambler released him, making him stagger.