Fever Season (32 page)

He’d already observed that the building itself was large for the Swamp, though it held at most three rooms. The barroom occupied most of the floor space, orange light blearing through the shutters; table legs scraped on the floorboards, barely audible under the steady roar of the rain. A man’s voice rambled on, low and conspiratorial, about how a hundred Americans properly armed could
easily seize the harbor at Cartagena, march overland to Bogotá.…

January moved on. What he estimated to be a storeroom lay behind the bar, silent and dark but far too close to the scene of commerce to house kidnapped men and women. Not that the men who patronized the saloon would care if the Perrets, Robois Roque, Virgil and Cora and a hundred others were chained in a corner of the barroom weeping, he reflected with a queer cold detachment. But word would get out if someone thought there was a reward to be had. Next to the storeroom lay another chamber, dark also and probably also originally another storeroom, or perhaps the late barkeep’s boudoir. There was certainly a bed in there, anyway. He could hear the ropes creak rhythmically, and the knock knock-knock of the frame against the outer wall. The lovely Bridgit and the equally lovely Thalia? Roarke’s lady friend Mistress Trudi? There was no other sound.

So where the hell were they keeping them?

He couldn’t be wrong. He knew he couldn’t.

It was possible that the kidnappings had been planned with an eye to handing the victims straight to the brokers. January settled his wide shoulders into the corner where the Boatman’s rough kitchen thrust out toward the canal. But turning the victims over immediately would only raise problems for the brokers, the kinds of problems they looked to an outfit like Roarke’s to solve for them.

The heated tin of the lantern made a localized radiance against his thigh. He slipped the cover enough to show him where to tread. At the kitchen’s end, only feet from the choppy black of the turning basin, he widened the chink still farther and scanned the ground, though he didn’t expect to find much, after hours of hammering rain.

Keelboats rocked at the wharves of warehouses built
around the Basin, squat craft with low cargo boxes, long steering oars knocking in their locks. No wharf lay behind the Jolly Boatman itself. He’d half-expected there would be, given the difficulties of forcing men and women down a rope or ladder to a keelboat’s deck without a fuss.

Rain sluiced down his face. St. Gertrude’s loomed above him like a lightless mountain, but the stink of it flowed over him, even in the downpour.

Turning back, January studied the saloon again. The kitchen shed was barely taller than his own head at its lower side; though like most “quarters” buildings, its roof rose at an angle of more than forty-five degrees to the outside of the yard. Unlike most of the flat-roofed shacks thereabouts, the saloon itself was easily tall enough to accommodate an attic. The ceiling of the barroom, January recalled, was low.

There was a window up there, within easy reach of the kitchen roof.

Stepping back a few paces, January found that one of the lightless service wings of the clinic backed straight onto the rear of the kitchen, so closely that they shared a party wall. Its inner side was lower still. It was a quick scramble to the roof of the one, then up the steep slope and over the ridge to the roof of the other, and so along to the window under the Boatman’s eaves. From there it was an easy matter to flip the catch of the shutter with the back of a knife blade—the shutters fit sufficiently ill they would have admitted a finger. Slatternly light trickled through gapped floorboards and showed him a big room, low pitched, uninhabited, and ostensibly safe. He hoisted himself over the sill, closed the shutter, and flipped shut the catch again, lest the heavy wooden leaf bang in the wind.

Carefully he held the lantern up for a better look.

The room was hot and stank. Astonishingly, the roof
didn’t leak, like the plank floor another tribute to Roarke’s business acumen. Smoke rose through the ill-fitting boards as well as light, shifting wraiths that collected thick under the ridgepole. The stench of it and of tobacco spit rose, too, nauseating: filthy clothes, spilt liquor, dirty bodies, dirty hair. The sweetish, pissy odor of rats.

And none of it masked the all-encompassing sticky reek of opium.

Boxes of it were stacked on a couple of boards, laid across the floor joists above the ceiling’s more fragile planking. January edged out along the joists; the crates were marked
BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY
and heaped nearly to the rafters. Rats had gnawed one corner and lay dead or stuporous, surrounded by trails of ants.

Kaintucks as a rule preferred to pickle their brains in alcohol. It was January’s experience that flatboatmen so sodden with forty-rod that they could barely speak would still spit on an opium-eater with contempt.

But there was more opium here than he’d seen in the back room of Soublet’s clinic.

Soublet’s clinic.

Cautiously, January began to make his way toward the attic’s north wall. Away from the noisier plotting of the filibusters
(And what do they think the Spanish government’s going to be doing during all this? Or the French? Or the British Navy?)
other voices came clear, soft though they were, nearly under his feet. A grunting Kaintuck nasal. Roarke’s honeyed Liffey drawl. And a well-bred Creole accent, a mellow tenor that it took him a moment to place:

“…  watched the place all yesterday, but he never came near it.”

“Doesn’t the man ever sleep?” That was Roarke’s
voice, speaking, as Hèlier spoke, in French. “Gotch and Hog-Nose should have been back by this time.”

“I still say it’s a shame to make away with him. His size, he’d fetch eleven, twelve hundred.…”

January felt the hair of his nape prickle. They were talking about him. Roarke, and Hèlier Lapatie.

Is that you?
Hèlier had called out to him once, in English. It hadn’t occurred to him then to wonder to whom the water seller spoke.

“Not that kind, he wouldn’t,” said Roarke. “His English is too good and there’s too many as would miss him.…”

“And what would they do?” demanded Hèlier’s voice. “Go up to the Missouri Territory looking for the man?”

“Now, my friend, you know what they say about simplest plans being best.” Roarke’s voice, musical at any time, became purringly conciliatory. “And your first plan was the dandy. Only those as we know have nobody to go askin’ after ’em. That was the brilliance of your idea.”

“Well …” muttered Hèlier, sulky like a sulky child, eating up praise.

“You saw what happened when you were laid up, and Gotch and Hog-Nose got greedy and brought our big black bhoy-o askin’ after questions in the first place.”

“Hog-Nose is a cretin!” snapped Hèlier sharply. “I was very specific when I said
only
those I’d marked for capture.…”

Hèlier.

The cripple selling water in the streets.

The man who stopped to chat and gossip with every housewife, every other peddler. The man who knew everyone’s business almost as thoroughly as Marie Laveau.

January felt a rush of furious heat and crept silently on.

Mamzelle Marie wasn’t the only person in town to have her spies. Almost certainly she paid Hèlier for information, little guessing what the water seller made of the knowledge he collected himself or to whom else he sold it.

I should have guessed
. Their informant as to who was safe, who had family, whose neighbors were gone, would almost have to be black or colored. Servants wouldn’t gossip with a white man.

He was trembling with anger, though whether at Hèlier or at himself he did not know.

Why did that make it worse? Men are men and make their livings how best they can
.

He should have suspected Hèlier, with his spite against those whose lives were more comfortable than his own. He could hear it now in the water seller’s voice, and in Roarke’s as the Irishman coaxed and praised his accomplice: praise that might, January thought, be as treasured as the money. Even if Hèlier himself were ill or missing, those he worked for would still know the names and houses of those he’d chosen, like a farmer choosing lambs for the pot.

It was his pity for the man’s infirmity that had blinded him.
Pity?
he wondered. Or the assumption that as a cripple he was helpless—in itself the contempt Hèlier despised.

Along the attic’s swamp-side wall January found half a dozen cardboard boxes that scuttered at his approach with a stinking confusion of fleeing gray bodies. He crouched for a better look, and slipped back the lantern slide. The boxes contained nothing very remarkable. It was the implication of what he saw, rather than the objects themselves, that made his hair prickle with a renewed fever-wash of rage.

What they held were only rough trousers of osnaburg
cloth, new and stiff as boards, unworn, the kind made cheaply for laborers or slaves; and the cheapest calico dresses and headscarves available.

“Consarn!” exclaimed a voice in Kaintuck English almost directly beneath his feet. “I never seen sech a place for water! Ever’ damn buildin’ leakin’ like Noah’s flood!”

“Shut up.” Roarke’s voice, deadly soft. January felt their silence. Silence in which the thunder of the rain seemed overwhelming, but not loud enough to cover the slow drip of his soaked clothing on the ceiling boards.

He could almost feel them looking up, and froze like a deer:
It’s only a leak. It’s only a leak
. But the flimsy walls vibrated with even the stealthy opening of the door that led to the attic stairs, and at the first shudder of ascending feet, he bolted. His own thundering footfalls along the joist brought the men below pounding up the stairs with no further thought for surprise; January flung open the window shutter as someone yelled behind him; the crash of a gun filled the attic’s hollow as he dove through.

Rain streamed in his face, slicked the shakes of the kitchen roof as he scrabbled for his balance on the steep slant. A second shot barked. To his right and down he saw men in the yard, Roarke’s height and white coat and fair hair plastered straight, rendering the Irishman visible through the rainy murk and dark jostle of bodies. January flipped himself over the top of the roof-ridge and fell three or four feet to the slanted roof of the service wing on the other side, ran along it, keeping low, headed for the basin. A moment later Roarke’s voice roared, “There he goes, lads!” and another shot cracked. The ball sliced a burning track across the muscles of his thigh.

Roarke and three men were now on his left, behind St. Gertrude’s—
Cut through the kitchen
, thought January.
The two buildings are connected
.

He reached the end of the service wing, the men clamoring beneath him like possum hounds, a glister of eyes and teeth in the sudden flare of lightning. When he leapt up onto the kitchen building again he was skylighted against the rainy blackness, and another ball passed close enough over his head that he could hear it whistle. There were men on that side, how many he couldn’t tell.

From the end of the kitchen, if he remembered rightly, it was about four feet to the cutting of the basin’s bank. No wharf, no steps, no boat.

He reached the kitchen end two strides ahead of his pursuers. There was no time to think, almost none to feel fear, and in any case fear was beside the point. He knew he was a dead man. As he flung himself outward into blackness something passed across the flesh of his back like a red-hot whip—the thought went through his mind with weird leisureliness that many of the riverboatmen could shoot the eye out of a squirrel on a branch. Then he hit the water like Lucifer falling: blackness, suffocation, cold.

At the downstream end of the American faubourg of St. Mary, even the more respectable of the rooming houses jumbled among the brickyards, warehouses, and mercantile establishments along Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets didn’t have much over the buildings in the Swamp. They were slightly taller and rather sturdier, and fewer of them were devoted to the active pursuit of alcohol sales or prostitution, but that—January could almost hear his mother’s smoky voice saying the words—was about all that could be said.

The rain-swamped yard around the privy of the tall, raw-looking whitewashed building on Gravier Street smelled just as bad. And it was just as easy to scramble to
the top of the shed at the end of the kitchen building, up to the kitchen roof—two stories high, this time, with slave quarters above the kitchen—and along the high ridge to flip back the shutter of a rear window overlooking the odoriferous yard. January was making an educated guess about which of the boardinghouse rooms was the one he sought. It would probably be the farthest back in the building on the highest inhabited floor, with a grand view of the slave quarters and the kitchen with their attendant smells and heat.

He pulled the shutter open and snaked through fast. He’d lost the lantern—either in the turning basin or in the attic of the Jolly Boatman, he couldn’t remember—and was almost certain the lucifers in his pocket were too soaked to function. As soon as he stepped clear of the window’s problematical light he whispered, “Lieutenant Shaw?”

“Right behind you, friend,” replied a voice from nowhere near the likely location of the bed. “You got any especial reason for callin’ informally like this?”

“It’s Benjamin January.” He’d never seen Shaw anything but lazy and slouching and spitting tobacco with an appalling lack of accuracy, but he’d also never been fooled by the man. “I thought I might have been followed or they might be watching for me in the street out front.” All the way here through the lightless, foul warren of shacks and fences near the basin, and along the oozing lanes that paralleled Canal Street, he had dared not leave the shadows. The strain of listening behind him, of watching in every direction through the obscuring sheets of black rain, had left him as exhausted as if he’d run for miles.

Lightning flared outside. It showed him, as he’d suspected, the bed empty, mosquito-bar bundled carelessly to the side. The light was gone before he could turn or see
anything else, and the dark deeper than before. He heard not the slightest whisper of scuff or footfall. Nevertheless, the next moment a scratch of sulfurous matchlight holed the darkness beside the bed. The slow-widening glow showed him the Kaintuck lieutenant hunkered naked on the floor by the bedside chair—the room didn’t boast a table—holding lucifer to candlewick with one hand while the other kept a grip on the biggest skinning knife January had ever seen. Under a lank curtain of pale-brown hair Shaw’s gray eyes were like an animal’s, cold and watchful, ascertaining that his visitor was in fact alone.