Benjamin January 1 - A Free Man Of Color (8 page)

January could see where that was going. The custom of the country ... So could Dominique; she gestured toward the door with her eyes, and January bent down closer to the body, his motion deliberately drawing Froissart's attention. “You see how her neck's marked?” The man would have had to be an idiot not to note the massive bar of bruise circling the white throat like a noose, but Froissart knelt at his side, leaned attentively, fascinated by the gruesome melding of beauty and death. Dominique slipped from the room with barely a rustle of silk petticoat.

“She was strangled with a cloth or a scarf, like a Spanish garrote. A woman could have done it as easily as a man. She was wearing a necklace of pearls and emeralds earlier- -see where the pressure drove the fixings into her skin?” His light fingers brushed the ring of tiny cuts. “They took it off her afterward. So it's a thief. . . . Which means they might strike here again.”

“Again!” gasped Froissart in horror.

January nodded, remaining on his knees in spite of an overwhelming desire to thrust the nattering fool aside and fetch Romulus Valle. Romulus could organize an unobtrusive cordon around both the ballroom and the Theatre while he himself could have enough time alone to examine the body and see if Angelique had been raped as well as robbed.

But such a cordon—such an examination—would never be permitted.

“Of course none of the gentlemen in the ballroom would have done this—why would they have needed to steal? But one of them may have seen something. And there's nothing says they have to take off their masks or give their right names when the police ask them questions.”

And if you believe that,
he thought, watching the groping quest for guidance in the manager's eyes, I have the crown jewels of France right here in my pocket, and I'll let you have them cheap at two thousand dollars American. . . .

“But . . . But how will it look?” stammered Froissart. “I depend on the goodwill of the ladies and gende-men. ... Of course, there must be a discreet investigation of some sort, conducted quietly, but can it not wait until morning?” He dug in his waistcoat pocket, took January's hand, and slapped four gold ten-dollar pieces into his palm. “Here, my boy. I'll send for Romulus, and the two of you can get her to one of the attics. Romulus can have the room tidied up in no time, and there'll be another four of these if you hold your tongue.”

He started to rise, looking around him—possibly for Dominique—and January touched his arm, drawing his attention again. “You know, sir,” he said gravely, “I think you may be right about a private investigation. Myself, I wouldn't trust the police now diat they have so many . . . Well, maybe I shouldn't say it about white men, sir, but I think you know, and I know, that some of these Kentuckians and riffraff they have coming down the river nowadays . . . And putting them on the police force, too!”

“Exactly!” cried Froissart, with a jab of his stubby, bejeweled finger. January saw all recollection of Dominique's presence in the room evaporate from Froissart's face and felt a mild astonishment that he'd remembered, out of all his mother's crazy quilt of gossip, that Froissart had been furious with chagrin over the construction by Americans of the new St. Louis Hotel Ballroom on Baronne Street.

But as if January had rubbed a magic talisman he'd found in the street, Froissart launched into an extended recital of the insults and indignities he had suffered, not only at the hands of the Americans on the police force but of the Kentucky riverboat men, American traders, upstart planters and every newcomer who had flooded into New Orleans since Napoleon's perfidious betrayal of the city into United States hands.

During the recital January continued to kneel beside Angelique's body, touching it as little as possible—she was, after all, a white man's woman—but observing what he could.

Lace crushed and broken at the back of her collar, knotted with the gaudy tangle of real and artificial cheve-lure. In the dim light of the candles it was hard to tell, but he didn't think there were threads caught in it, though there might be some in her dark hair. Fluffs of swansdown from her torn sleeve were scattered across the gorgeous Turkey carpet, thickest just to the left of the low chair. A cluster of work candles stood on the small table immediately to the chair's right, draped with huge, uneven winding-sheets of drippings. They'd been there when he'd come in. She'd been fixing her wings, he remembered, by their light. In France it would have been an oil lamp, but mostly in New Orleans they used candles. The drippings were distorted from repeated draughts—people had been in and out of the parlor all evening, fixing their ruffles or looking for her. Froissart was lucky the table hadn't been kicked over in the struggle. The whole building could have gone up.

Swansdown wasn't the only thing on the carpet. A peacock eye near the chair told him that Sultana girl in the blue lustring had been here. A dozen calibers of imitation pearls were trodden into the carpet: Marie-Anne had had large ones on her mask and bodice, and the drop-shaped ones he'd seen on the sleeves of the American Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn. Mardi Gras costumes were never made as well as street clothes, and ribbons, glass gems, and silk roses dotted the floor among thread ends of every color of the rainbow. In the padded arm of the velvet chair a needle caught the light like a splinter of glass.

Drunken laughter floated in from the Rue Ste.-Ann through the single tall window that nearly filled one side of the room. The brass band still played in the street. Shouts of mirth, a woman's shrill squeak of not entirely displeased protest. Men cursed in French, German, slangy riverboat English, and there was a heavy splash as someone fell into the gutter, followed by whoops of drunken laughter.

January glanced at the window, not daring to break Froissart's self-centered oblivion by walking over to check whether there were marks on the sill. The killer could have stepped out one of the ballroom windows and walked along the gallery, he supposed. But with the heat of the ballroom, other revelers had taken refuge on the gallery, and such an escape would not have gone unseen. Carnival rioted below, thick in these narrow streets of the old French town, drowning the sounds of the ballroom itself. In the growing upriver suburbs, in their tall brick American houses on the new streets along the tracks of the horse-drawn streetcars, Protestants would be shaking their heads about the goings-on. Though perhaps, reflected January, a number of those Protestant wives wondered—or tried not to wonder—where their husbands were tonight.

Last summer everyone in the ballroom—everyone in the streets—everyone in the city—had been through the horrors of a double epidemic: yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, worse than any that had gone before. They had survived it, mostly by clearing out of town if they could afford to, taking refuge in the lakeside hotels of Mande-ville and Milneburgh or on plantations. Typical of the Creoles, they celebrated the victory rather than mourned the loss. But there was no guarantee that in five months it wouldn't return.

He remembered Ayasha and crossed himself again. There was no guarantee about anything.

“They simply do not understand.” Froissart's voice brought him back to the present. The man was now well worked into his theme. January kept an expression of fascinated interest in his face, but barely heard him. It was only a few hundred feet to the Cabildo, and ordinarily a woman—even a beautiful one—was quite safe walking about the streets alone, provided she kept out of certain well-defined districts: the waterfront or the bars along Rue du Levee; the Swamp or the Irish Channel.

But Carnival was different.

“Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!” Froissart's gesture to heaven was worthy of Macbeth perishing in the final act.

“They sure don't, sir.” If he's buying, I'll sell it to him.

“The Americans, they don't know how to behave! They don't know how to take mistresses. They think it's all a matter of money. For them, money is everything! Look at the houses they build, out along the Carrolton Road, in the LaFayette suburb and Saint Mary! I recall a time—not ten years ago it was!—that the whole of the city of Jefferson was the Avart and Delaplace plantations, and a half-dozen others, the best sugar land on the river. And what do they do now? They build a streetcar line, they tear up the fields, and the next thing you know, you have these dreadful American houses with their picket fences! Exactly that which that canaille Granger proposes to do along Bayou Saint John! Him, fight a duel? Pffui!”

He flung out his hands in indignation—evidently challenges to duels, like trouncings with canes or fistfights in the court downstairs, did not come under the same category as murder.

“Why, in my office this evening, the way he and those sordid friends of his behaved! A disgrace! They are not gentlemen! They have no concept! They cannot tell Rossini from 'Turkey in the Straw'!”

“You're right about that, sir,” agreed January gravely. As he spoke he felt a deep annoyance at himself, to be playing along as he had played along during his childhood and adolescence, falling back into the old double role of manipulating a white man's illusions about what a man of color was and thought. Still, the role was there, script and inflections and bits of business, a weapon or tool with whose use he was familiar, though he felt dirtied by its touch. “In Paris, the Americans were the same way. Every ball I'd play at, you could tell right where the Americans were sitting.”

“And that is why we cannot summon the police tonight,” concluded Froissart, turning regretfully back to the beautiful, ruined woman lying between them. “They do not understand how to do these things quietly, discreetly. Of course, of course they must be summoned in the morning—after I have spoken to Monsieur Davis. ... Of course he will want to summon them. . . .”He chewed his lip in an agony of uncertainty, and January remembered the mother of one of his friends in Paris, who would put aside bills “for a few days until I know I have the money” and then eventually burn them unread.

Angelique's body was a bill that would be burned unread. Not because she was an evil woman or because she had harmed every life she touched, but only because she was colored and a placee.

“Well, what would you?” sighed Froissart—January could almost see Mme. du Gagny sliding yet another dressmaker's dun into that nacre-and-rosewood secretaire. “It is how it is. ... Good heavens, how long have we been here? People will begin to ask. . . . You must return to your piano and say nothing, nothing. Be assured that the matter will be taken care of in the morning.”

January inclined his head and arose. “I'm sorry,” he said humbly. “I was so shaken up by seeing her here like this, I ... It took me a while to get my thoughts back. Thank you for your patience with me.”

Froissart beamed patronizingly. “One understands,” he said, as if he himself hadn't gone fishbelly green at the sight of the body—January guessed he was one of those who headed for Mandeville at the first of the summer heat and had never been through an epidemic at firsthand in his life. “Of course, the shock of it all. I hope you are better.”

“Much,” said January, wondering if he should fake a spell of dizziness with the shock and rejecting the idea— and his own consideration of it—with loathing. He made a show of looking around as if he'd forgotten something, playing for as much time as he could scrape. “Much better.”

Froissart turned and left the jewelbox room with its grisly occupant, and January perforce followed. He glanced back at the crumpled body, the grasping and greedy woman who had assumed he was a slave because his skin was darker than hers. Still, she did not deserve to be forgotten like an unpaid bill. I did my best, he apologized. More, certainly, than he would ever have accorded her in life.

As he left he laid the four coins Froissart had given him gently on the table by the door.

“Romulus!” called Froissart. “Romulus, I ...” They emerged from the hallway into the lobby in time to see a small party of blue-clothed city guardsmen arrive at the top of the stairs.

Froissart stopped, goggling, as if he hoped these were another group of revelers, like Robin Hood's Merry Men or the Ladies of the Harim.

But none of them were masked. And no Creole he knew, thought January, would have the wit to dress that much like an out-at-elbows upriver Kaintuck, with a shabby, flapping corduroy coat many years out of fashion and too short in the sleeves for his loose-jointed height. Minou slipped past them, startlingly invisible for someone so beautiful and brightly clad, and melted into the crowd in the ballroom like snow on the desert's dusty face. The tall officer stepped forward and laid a black-nailed hand on Froissart's arm.

“Mr. Froissart?” Interestingly, he got the pronunciation right. “ 'Fore you and your boy head on back to the ballroom, we'd like to talk to you.” His tone was polite but his backcountry dialect so thick that his English was barely comprehensible.

Two of the guards were heading into the ballroom. The music ceased. Silence, then a rising clamor. January could already hear that the tenor of the noise from the gaming rooms and the downstairs lobby had changed as well.

“What . . .” stammered Froissart. “What? . . .”.

The tall man touched the brim of his low-crowned hat, and spit a stream of tobacco in the general direction of the sandbox. He was unshaven, noisome, and the sugar-brown hair hanging to his shoulders was stringy with grease. “Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans police, at your service, sir.”

“This is an outrage!” The plump Ivanhoe who'd been negotiating with Agnes Pellicot stationed himself foursquare in the central of the three ballroom doorways, ornamental sword drawn as if to reenact Roncevaux upon the threshold. Looking past him, January was interested to note that; the invisible barriers that had separated the American's—-the Roman, Henry VIII, Richelieu—from the Creoles seemed momentarily to have dissolved. “None of us had the least thing to do with that cocotte's death, and I consider it an insult for you to say that we have!”

“Why, hell, sir, I know you got nuthin' to do with it.” Police Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, though he replied in English, did not appear to have any trouble understanding the man's French. He folded his long arms, stepped closer to the doorway and lowered his voice as if to exclude the three constables grouped uncertainly be hind him, their eyes on the curtained passage to the Theatre next door. “But I also know men like yourselves don't miss much of what goes on around them, neither. Anything happen out of the ordinary—an' maybe you wouldn'ta knowed it was out of the ordinary at the time —you'd a seen it. That's what I'm countin' on to help me find this killer.”