A Separate Country (13 page)

He was a thick man, as most people like him are, but he had a fine nose and delicate eyes, white teeth. Dark red, nearly brown hair. His hands were powerful and crushing, and he’d spread them out on the table in front of him as if he were making an inventory. His brow slumped inward in a nearly perpetual frown, topped by thick red eyebrows. He was wearing nothing at that moment. I chose not to notice anything unusual.

“Don’t think I need to dress in my own damn house if I don’t want to and when I’m not expecting guests, which,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I’m not.”

“If I had your physique, Rintrah, I might walk around as God intended also,” I said, making light of the situation with an utter lie.

“If you had a physique like mine, young Eli Griffin, you’d have been dead years ago. You don’t got the stomach for it.”

Which I didn’t. I sat. Rintrah shouted for some tea and sherry, and I heard one of the girls on the balcony flick her cigarette off and down onto the cobbles, where it sizzled and popped.

“As you can tell, I’m busy, Eli, and I’m not in a visiting mood. So why are you here?”

“Hood’s dead.”

It was quiet then. Rintrah leaned back in his chair and rubbed his brow thoughtfully. His lips moved, he was talking to himself, having an argument. The girl brought the tray of cold tea and sherry and biscuits, and Rintrah didn’t look up at her. When she was gone on silent slippered feet, Rintrah looked back at me.

“How?”

“Yellow jack.”

“Were you there?”

“I saw him dead, yeah.”

He plucked a fig from the limb above him and nearly swallowed it whole. He spit the stem across the table.

“Excuse my manners.”

He rubbed his mouth with his hand, and then rubbed his hand on his hairy chest to get the fig juice off, I suppose. He looked at me out one eye, looked away, and then squinted at me with the other eye.

“And now is the time for you to tell me why it happened that you were there. Was there anyone else?”

“Doctor Ardoin came later, right before he passed.”

“That sounds about right, useless git. Who else? Nurses? Maids? Footmen? Sergeants of the guard? The governor?”

He was snorting and frowning. He knew better than that and I told him so.

Rintrah stood up and came around the table. He stood square before me, daring me to look, and so I did. Dark bushy hair down there, sagging old balls and an unexpectedly normal cock that looked big on him.

“Had to look, didn’t you? Had to see what the little man’s got, hmm? Pikers like you always got to know who’s biggest, right? Who’s the big cock, right, lad?

“
I
know better than that? I know a lot of things you’d pray to forget, on your knees before the Holy Mother begging forgiveness for thinking them, even. Yet you reckon you’ll come on up in here and tell me what I should and should not know. Well,
I
got the big cock, you follow? So be a good boy.”

He walked back to the other side of the table and sat down, picking at a biscuit.

“You were there with Hood and no one else?” he said.

“For a little while.”

“You just decided to go out and pay the General a visit? Wash his face, sing him lullabies, right?”

“No, that’s not it.”

“What’d you steal? And believe me, whatever it was, you’re giving it back.”

“I didn’t steal anything! God no.”

Rintrah fumbled around above his head, looking for another fig, all the while keeping his eyes locked on mine. His hand came away without a fig, but his smile made me think he’d found something anyway.

“You took something, though, hmmm?”

“He gave me something. It’s why I was there, he sent for me.”

“To give you what? His empty purse? His official portrait? What would he have to give you?”

“No, nothing like that. It was a book.”

“You read?”

“Yes.”

“Surprising. Whose book? Have I read it?”

He turned his head up toward the balcony and called for his clothes. A few minutes later down they came, shirt, trouser, vest, stockings, braces, tumbling through the blue sky and into the opening between the ficus and banana trees. His shirt, tailored and monogrammed, hung up on an orange branch and I handed it to him. I thought he’d be angry and shout and curse the colored girls to Hell, his natural response to things unexpected, but he only smiled and dressed. The same colored girl who had brought us our drinks, green-eyed, tall, and freckled, now came into his sanctum with his shoes in her hand.

“Don’t want to trow dese,
non,
might hit de young friend, no?”

“You just don’t pay no attention to the young friend here. He’s just leaving.”

Rintrah turned back to me, sitting back down in his chair to slip on his oxfords, somehow smaller with his clothes on. “I want to know what it is. And you’re still taking it back unless you convince me otherwise. You get
nothing
out of that house. That was Hood’s house, but it was Anna Marie’s also, and I speak for her.”

I doubt he could have spoken for her, knowing what I know now, but I kept that to myself. I blew the air out my cheeks and finally threw down a cup of sherry for strength. What I was about to say might help me greatly or go very badly.

“It was his book. He wrote it.”

“The war book.”

“That’s what I thought, but no. Something different.”

“How?”

Now he was interested. He shoved the tray aside so he could see me better.

“It’s about the time after the war. About New Orleans. About him and Anna Marie. And Father Mike. And disease and killing and penance and salvation and love and every other damned thing you wouldn’t think he’d ever thought, let alone write down.”

“And me?”

I had been dreading this also.

“You’re mentioned, yes.”

“Give it to me.”

“Now, hold on, there’s more I got to say.”

Rintrah must keep a pistol stuck up under every godforsaken table in the Quarter, because now he had one pointed at my head.

“Give. Now. In that bag, I know it’s there because you don’t always think things through, like what would happen if I just decided to take the thing off you. It’s a weakness, young Eli, and one of your charms.”

Thank God he hadn’t asked for the whole bag. I went into it and pulled out Hood’s manuscript without disturbing Anna Marie’s ledgers. He didn’t need to know everything. I handed him the Hood manuscript, which he opened delicately while tossing me his pistol. Hammer rusted open, cylinder empty.

“Truly, son, I don’t know how you avoid being robbed every single day, what with your street sense,” Rintrah said. He began to page through the book. I sat quietly there for an hour while Rintrah read. He flipped through, pausing here and there, and spent a lot of time on the last few pages of the book before looking up.

“And you expect me to believe he gave this to
you
? Of all people?”

“Why would I steal it? What the hell would I want with it?”

“You? Big-ass hay-haired cracker idjit? Maybe you’d sell it, get you some shirts to fit them ape arms of yours, buy you a horse or two, or a lifetime of fatback. Who cares? Maybe you seen a way to embarrass a good family while you’re at it. Jealous bastard.”

“Now hold on.”

“And, anyway, I don’t believe for a second that Lydia would just up and let you waltz on out of there with her daddy’s things. She’s a smart girl, she’d have sent for me to sort things out. No, you snuck them out of there.”

I wanted to hurt him, really put the screw in him, but I knew if I beat him down a half-dozen men would be there to stick their knives in me before Rintrah even hit the ground. So.

“Lydia’s dead too.”

Silence.

“I had Doctor Ardoin arrange to have them both buried in Lafayette Cemetery yesterday. Next to Anna Marie. It’s done.”

At this he slumped in his chair and stared at me without blinking.

“Why didn’t…”

“She was dead when I got there.”

“Where?”

“In her bed. She looked peaceful.”

“You know damned well it was anything but, nothing peaceful about the fever.”

“I know. Even so, maybe she’s at peace now.”

“Oh, to hell with that.”

Lydia had been his special love, the first of Anna Marie’s children, his goddaughter. She laughed and screeched at his jokes and called him Mister King, respect nearly no one else bothered to extend. His thick shoulders flinched with every wave of tears.

I knew everything, I knew what had happened to them all, I knew what was in the hearts of Anna Marie and Hood up to their very last moments. I could guess what was running through Rintrah’s head at that moment: he was completely alone now.

What I couldn’t know, and couldn’t possibly begin to guess, is what would happen to
me,
carrier of the secrets.

“Rintrah.”

He flapped his hand at me as if he could bat me away.

“Rintrah, I need help.”

More silence.

“Hood gave me very specific instructions about that manuscript. I don’t know that I can follow them. I don’t think I can. I’m not
streetwise,
like you say.”

Now he looked up, wiped his face on his sleeve, and folded his hands on the table in front of him, one upon the other. There ain’t nothing better for grieving than to think there might could be something only you can do to help, and being streetwise was Rintrah’s whole life, his purpose. He could do that.

“What instructions?”

I told him everything: getting the war book from Beauregard, destroying it, finding the killer Sebastien Lemerle, and, at his direction, either publishing the other book or burning it too.

When I got to the bit about the man Sebastien Lemerle, he stopped me with a shout and a fist brought down hard on the table.

“You must have heard him wrong, Eli.”

“He said it a few times, Rintrah. He told me to watch out for him, that he was dangerous, but he was right clear about giving him the manuscript.”

“It can’t be.” He got up and chased the sparrows out, grabbing at them as if to crush them, as if to devour them. He shuddered.

“Sebastien Lemerle cannot have this book. He cannot touch it, breathe on it, look in it, and he certainly can’t decide its bloody fate, for chrissakes.” He shouted each word.

“I can’t abandon my word, I gave it in good faith.”

He stopped pacing. Again he looked at me queerly, first out of the side of one eye, and then out the other.

“First he picks you, the iceman, the man who, by the by, tried to
kill
him, he picks you to be the bearer of his great treasure. Then he decides that the fate of the thing will rest in the paws of the man I hate most on this earth, who Hood should have hated just as much. That is, if he weren’t lying to us all this time.”

He pondered that idea, that Hood was a liar. I
knew
Hood had been a liar, or at least that he hadn’t told the whole truth about certain things until he sat down to write them, but I was going to let Rintrah learn that for himself.

“Sebastien Lemerle is a monster and unredeemable, a man I will never forgive. If he’s alive, he’s only alive because he’s supposed to be dead.”

I watched him grab up the manuscript. I was nervous he would destroy it himself rather than allow it to confuse him, possibly humiliate him. Instead, he tied it up neatly and handed it to me.

“Take it. I will help you, but only so long as it takes for me to figure out what the hell is going on here. And, by God, I doubt very much that Sebastien will reach the end of this here story alive. I doubt it, yes I do.”

I packed the parcel into my bag and slung it over my shoulder. “Thank you, Rintrah.”

“Aye, boy, you don’t know what you thanking me for just yet. I still got to think on it. This conversation ain’t done. The next time we talk I will come to you. By then I’ll have a plan.”

I began to walk out.

“Right now you’re going to the church to pray for your bloody soul. If this deal ain’t square, you may find out you wish you had attended to it earlier.”

I drew myself up to my full height, which I’d quit counting years ago at six feet. I stretched my arms and blocked the last of the sun. Rintrah fell in my shadow.

“Always the fucking albatross, ain’t ya? Now flap on out of here.”

I walked with Rintrah down the path, around the courtyard beneath the balconies, and out onto the street through the carriageway. The lookouts, seeing the boss, jumped up from their naps. Rintrah glared but didn’t say anything to them. He turned to me, his hands on his waist.

“No cards until we settle this.”

“Yes sir.” I saluted.

“I ain’t joking. And no liquor. Or not much, leastwise.”

“I understand.”

“You protect that pile of paper with your life. Don’t show it to no one. Not a soul, not even that little Irish girl you’re buggering. Even if you’re in love, you don’t tell her a thing, hear? Especially if you’re in love.”

I nodded solemnly. I was getting the point, that I was deep into something that I needed to take serious. Rintrah patted me in the middle of my back, gently.

“Go on then.”

Yes, of course. I knew why Rintrah didn’t trust me around the Hoods, at least not about anything important. I had transformed from the man who would have knifed Hood to death, to the slightly older man who would never hurt Hood and who only wanted to read his books and play his cards and tend ice, but among the men Rintrah knew, such changes never happened. Vengeance might take years to flower in full, but it would flower without a doubt. Men did not change, they bided their time. Who was to say I wasn’t biding mine? I understood why he didn’t trust me. I had stained my hands forever once.

When I stepped off that boat four years ago and onto the wharf, I don’t remember thinking anything, I just looked and listened and stared gape-mouthed at the whole thing. There weren’t a thing in the world I knew of that weren’t sitting somewhere on that wharf, and plenty of things I’d never seen before in my life. But that wasn’t the thing. Hell, it weren’t even the perfume off the whores who rustled by me without even stopping or the sound of the wharf creaking under the weight of the men and the horses and the pounding of the barges and steamers tied too loose on their moorings. No, it was all of it, all together, the piles and piles of things that blocked my seeing the city and seemed to never end. There was so much, I couldn’t picture so many people in the world who could use it all. I could have started a grocery, fifty groceries even, just from the oranges and cans and ladies’ hats and little streams of molasses and all kind of other things that escaped their piles and hogsheads and went drifting down the wharf on the breeze jumping off the river.