Dead and Buried (14 page)

It was nearly noon when he crossed Canal Street and regained the only portion of New Orleans, now, where he felt more or less safe. He could hear the raucous jangle of a brass band down on Rue du Levee, where the local Democrats had got up a parade in honor of Martin Van Buren’s candidacy, but the colonnaded building that he sought on Rue d’Orleans was quiet. He slipped around the corner and through its garden door.

Even in the dead heat of noon, John Davis’s gambling casino stirred with voices and the clink of coin. Half a dozen French doors stood open to the street, to draw in what breeze there was from the river; an equal number opened to the garden. Through them January glimpsed the establishment’s regulars: French Creole gentlemen who lived in the Old Town, had cottages in Milneburgh, but preferred to come in on the steam train to meet their friends there. At one table a couple of steamboat pilots played a desultory game of cribbage, but for the most part the big, square room, with its high ceiling and crystal chandeliers, seemed half-asleep, waiting for the evening. Flies roared everywhere. John Davis himself – a Frenchman to his fingertips, despite the name of a Scots ancestor – stood near the bar that stretched across one end of the room, talking city politics with a French planter.

January positioned himself in one of the garden doorways, where he knew that in time he would catch Davis’s eye. Davis saw him – there was no detail of the gaming room that the man’s glance didn’t touch – and gave him a slight nod, though he continued his chat with M’sieu Destrehan. It would never do for a white man to conclude a conversation with another white man and then be seen to go and speak to a black one – even a black one who’d gotten him off a murder charge a few years before. The insult would be intolerable and would possibly result in a duel. But, in time, Destrehan made his way to one of the tables to speak to another acquaintance – catching January’s eye in passing and nodding a greeting, having himself hired January on any number of occasions to play at his house – and Davis moved toward the windows.

‘Ben,’ said Davis with a grin as they both stepped out into the garden. ‘We’re starting rehearsals for Donizetti’s
Elixir of Love
next month: I hope you’re not intending to make your change of career permanent at this stage.’ Of course, Davis had heard he was playing at the Countess’s, though as a French Creole he would not, naturally, frequent an Uptown whorehouse. ‘We’re counting on you.’

‘Oh, sir.’ January wrung his hands in bogus sorrow. ‘Sir, I beg your forgiveness, but it would tear me up inside to have to go back to Donizetti, after playing “Old Zip Coon” seven times a night for drunk Americans . . .’

Davis threw back his head and laughed. He had aged, January thought, and not just since the death of his wife a few years ago. The scandal and murder at the opera, the winter before last, had left its mark: on the man’s lined face and in the wider streaks of white in his hair.

‘What can I do for you, Ben?’ He offered January a cigar – something only John Davis had the social standing to do for a black man and get away with it – and January shook his head in mute thanks.

‘Just looking for information, sir.’

‘You, too? I told Shaw, Friday, that Stuart fellow wasn’t in here.’

‘What about a gentleman named Blessinghurst? Lord Montague Blessinghurst?’

‘Not him, either.’

‘But there was a set-to here Thursday night?’ January nodded back toward the dim cavern behind them.

‘Half a dozen.’

‘This one would have involved a gun and the words “bog-Irish bastard”—’

‘Oh, good Lord!’ The tired look vanished from Davis’s eyes like dew in the sunshine, and he burst into laughter. ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst, eh? Tall fellow, good-looking, green coat?’

‘That’s the man.’

‘That fellow, my dear Benjamin –’ the impresario put a hand on his arm and drew him conspiratorially behind a pepper-tree – ‘is no Lordship, but rather a gentleman named Frank Stubbs, whom I had the ill fortune to see play Malcolm to Charles Kemble’s Macbeth a few seasons ago in New York. All the ladies in the audience were swooning, God help them—’

‘An
actor
?’

‘Benjamin, please!’ Davis recoiled in mock affront. ‘Calling Frank Stubbs an actor is a slur on the whole of a noble profession! He’s been on stage and been paid for it. Let’s leave it at that.’

No wonder ‘Lord Blessinghurst’ wanted to silence me,
thought January,
when he heard I was asking questions about him.
He had only to phrase the thought to discard it. Murder? There was something else. Something deeper . . . ‘What’s he doing in New Orleans, sir? You’re sure it was he?’

‘Oh, absolutely.’ Davis chuckled again. ‘I never mistake a voice, and his is remarkable. I’ll give him that.’

As the owner of New Orleans’s largest theater, and the head of her original opera company, voices were John Davis’s business. And he wasn’t likely to be mistaken about a man he’d seen on a stage.

‘As to what he’s doing in town . . . Well, I don’t know the man, but by the look of things on Thursday night, I’d say he was trying to build a small amount of money into a large one.’

‘You don’t happen to know what the fight was about?’

‘Not an inkling.’ Davis shook his head again, and added, as if to himself, ‘Lord Montague Blessinghurst indeed! What a name! Straight out of a three-volume novel! The good Lieutenant needs to stop taking these scoundrels at their word about who and what they say they are.’

‘Did Derryhick come in with him?’

‘Derryhick?’ Davis frowned. ‘You mean that was the gentleman whose corpse ended up . . .? Good Lord.’ He stood silent for a moment, evidently putting pieces together in his mind. Rameses Ramilles had played regularly for the balls that Davis hosted in the room upstairs and for the opera; the impresario had, January knew, subscribed generously to the small trust fund that the FTFCMBS was setting up for Liselle and her children.

Davis went on, ‘Stubbs was playing that night with Fitz Trulove and a couple of Americans. I was keeping an eye on the table by that time, because Stubbs –
Blessinghurst!
– was winning with suspicious steadiness. Of course, Trulove wouldn’t notice if one of the other players reached over, stuck his hand in his pocket and helped himself, which is precisely what I think Stubbs was doing. But the game broke up, and Trulove and one of the Americans – Schurtz, I think his name is, just come to town this past spring and is staying out at the lake somewhere – went off to talk banking and left the other American and Stubbs to play cribbage in that corner.’ He nodded in the direction of one of the smaller tables, where the regulars would go to play dominoes in the afternoon. On even a moderately busy evening, January guessed that the view of it would be frequently blocked to a man standing – as Davis was wont to do – at the wall end of the mahogany bar.

‘Derryhick came in from the street and went straight to them, but I didn’t think much of it, you know. My place is well enough known that if men want to meet, they often do so here.’

January nodded. It was the same with the coffee stands under the market arcade. ‘So you couldn’t tell if they knew each other?’

Davis shook his head. January noted again that during the whole of their conversation, the older man had been watching the room through the wide windows. He would have bet money, had he had any to spare, that Davis could have identified every man who had come in and gone out through the French doors into Rue d’Orleans, named three-quarters of them, and – like a good Creole – attached to at least two-thirds of them an account of family history, relative wealth (both actual and putative), and a catalogue of recent scandals.

‘I was back by the bar talking about the election with Blodgett from the
Bee
. What a mess the Whigs are making of it, eh? Next thing I knew, I heard a chair go clattering over, where the American playing with Stubbs had sprung up and backed to the wall. The Irishman had Stubbs by the shirt collar, for all he was a hand-span shorter, and I couldn’t swear it – that corner’s a chasm at night – but I thought he had a gun in his other hand. I was starting over to them when the Irishman all but threw Stubbs away from him against the table, said, “The curse of Cromwell on the pair of ye’s!” and went striding out into the street again. The American didn’t move from where he stood, but Stubbs ran out to look after him up the street. But he was gone.’

‘In what direction did Stubbs look?’

Davis thought about it for a moment, then nodded in the direction up Rue Orleans and away from the river . . . The direction of the Iberville Hotel.

‘The pair of you,’ January repeated. ‘Did he mean the American that Stubbs – Blessinghurst – was with, sir, do you think?’

‘He could have.’ The entrepreneur frowned. ‘I didn’t have that impression, but, of course, I could be wrong. Though, now that I think of it, I’m not entirely sure the other man was an American. There was something about the way he dressed that said French Creole, but you’ll seldom find a Creole keeping company with our Northern brethren.’

‘Our Northern brother Schurtz has a sister with a large dowry.’

‘Does he?’ Davis beamed. Added to his Creole fascination for information, like most saloon and theater owners he had an appetite for gossip that would have made a maiden aunt blush. ‘Does he indeed? Well, well . . . No wonder the other man hung about the way he did, waiting for Schurtz to finish his chat with Trulove. What’s his name, this would-be suitor? I haven’t seen him in here before, and I know most of the French Creoles.’

‘Martin Quennell. He clerks for Gardiner at the Mississippi and Balize—’

‘What, in those waistcoats?’

January put a finger to his lips. ‘I need to ask for your discretion, if I may, sir. And so far I’ve found nothing,’ he added, seeing Davis’s bright blue eyes suddenly narrow, ‘that indicates there’s any question about stability of the bank. We think he’s getting his money elsewhere. The bank keeps a close eye on its accounts—’

‘It had better,’ said Davis grimly. ‘What I’m hearing about the credit market isn’t good. I think the Democrats will be able to keep the lid on things until after the election, but I tell you, Benjamin, I’m moving my funds into a state bank.’

‘Not having any funds to move,’ replied January, ‘I feel perfectly indifferent to the outcome of the contest. I shall decide for whom to vote,’ he added grandly, ‘by the toss of a coin.’

Davis laughed again – the idea of a black man voting for anyone being a subject of humor anywhere in the United States – and clapped January on the shoulder. ‘That’s the spirit! Quennell – not Robert Quennell, of Quennell and LaRouche back before the crash of ’19? Never one of the big ones, but perfectly respectable in their day. Banking must be in the blood.’

‘Having a father who knows to send you to school, rather,’ commented January. ‘It must be galling to work as a bank clerk when you can remember better days – not to mention doing the books for the son of your father’s placée. My mother tells me Quennell put Madame Corette aside – his placée, that is – when he married one of old Jules Charlevoix’s daughters, but young Martin seems to have cast in his lot pretty firmly with the Americans.’

‘Well, if he’s planning on impressing anyone with supposed wealth and fancy waistcoats,’ said Davis, with a glance back into his gambling rooms, ‘he’d best not play cards with Frank Stubbs.
 bientôt
, my dear Benjamin – I see M’sieu Soniat approaching the bar, and I promised Madame Soniat on the soul of my mother I would water any drink he attempted to buy.’

‘You are a worker for the good of the world, sir.’

Davis laughed and disappeared back into the shadows of his chosen realm.

The pair of you
, January reflected, as he made his way – with a certain amount of caution – back toward Rue Esplanade and, he hoped, a quiet dinner with Rose. With luck the afternoon thunderstorm, slowly grumbling its way in from the Gulf, would hold off until he reached the Countess’s. The fact that Davis hadn’t greeted him with, ‘Good God, Benjamin, don’t you know the City Guards are after you?’ provided a certain amount of comfort, but still, he approached his own house almost as warily as he’d entered the casino.

The pair of you.

The Curse of Cromwell
– the worst malediction an Irishman could hurl –
on the pair of you
 . . .

Lord Montague Blessinghurst – or, rather, Frank Stubbs – and who else?

Someone Patrick Derryhick had expected to meet at the Hotel?

Someone, possibly, who was meeting Uncle Diogenes – or the Viscount himself – there?

Or someone else?

The Rue Esplanade lay deserted under the brazen weight of noon. January slipped around the corner, strode as inconspicuously as it was possible for a six-foot three-inch man to stride up the steps to the gallery, and ducked into the shadows of the seldom-used ‘gentleman’s room’ – traditionally the bedroom of the master of the house, which he employed as a study. As a child, it had always puzzled him why neither he nor anyone else was permitted to step through the French doors directly into the parlor, but instead had to go through one or the other of the bedrooms on either side, but, ‘Only American animals –’ his mother had informed him with an explanatory slap on the ear – ‘did that.’