Dead and Buried (35 page)

Shaw’s gray glance passed from one to the other of them, as if weighing up what he suspected against what could actually be taken into court. ‘You know damn-all about it,’ he observed mildly at last. ‘An’ what you say could go just as well for Uncle Diogenes.’

‘It could, yes.’

‘You happen to got even one teeny-tiny spit of evidence of any of this?’

‘Not one teeny-tiny spit,’ said Hannibal. ‘But give us time.’

‘If’n I could give time,’ returned Shaw with a sigh, ‘to all them as needed it in this world, I’d never have no rest, for people beggin’ a day here, an’ a year there, to get done what they shoulda, myself included. Trial’s on the fifth. That enough?’

‘It’s enough if we’re lucky,’ said January. ‘But if we don’t find Stubbs tonight, I suspect Louis Verron will have by Thursday.’

Rose and the girls were readying themselves for Mass when January and Hannibal returned to the house. Rose, a pagan or the next thing to it, regarded regular church attendance as part of what the parents of her pupils paid her for, and she dressed for it as if it mattered to God what worshippers wore. ‘Our newest pupil, Mademoiselle Alice Truxton, is upstairs,’ Rose informed him. ‘She is from Mobile, and she is a Protestant. She assured us she will pray for our souls to be delivered from Papism and Hell. There should be hot water in the kitchen boiler, if you want a bath. Is the Foxford boy all right?’

‘So far,’ said January. ‘However, the man who stole most of the food sent to him by his uncle and his business manager is dying of arsenic poison. Hannibal and I have a bet on whose idea that was,’ he added, as Rose’s eyes widened. ‘Do you know the Fatted Calf, across from the Camp Street Theater? Do they keep open on Sundays?’

Rose frowned, but Cosette Gardinier, tucking a late bronze chrysanthemum into the folds of her simple tignon, said, ‘They do, M’sieu. At least they did last winter, when Granmere told me we couldn’t get ices there because it was a café for
les blankittes
.’

‘When next we play for the opera at the Theater,’ promised Hannibal, ‘I shall go in and obtain ices for the lot of you, and I’ll bring them out to the street for you to consume, to the envy of all your friends. Will you wager on the murderer, Owl-Eyed Athene?’

‘Oh, Droudge,’ said Rose promptly. Evidently, in her mind a man who spent half his income on manuscripts in antique Persian couldn’t be all bad.

Bathed, shaved, freshly clothed, and comforted as he always was by the Mass, January made his way late that afternoon across Canal Street and down to the American Theater. He stood on the brick sidewalk for a time, looking about him as if seeking an address while he watched the shuttered front of the café.

In time the owner unlocked the street door, went back inside; a black youth of fourteen or fifteen emerged and unfolded the shutters of the French windows that formed most of the front of the building, went back inside, and came out again with a broom and a bucket of water to wash down the mud from the sidewalk. The owner came back out, demanded, ‘You deaf or just stupid, boy?’ and cuffed the youth on the ear.

‘Reckon I’s just stupid, sir.’

This got him another cuff and a shove inside. A woman emerged and took up the youth’s chore of rinsing and sweeping down the bricks. When she’d finished, she retreated within, and January gave her a few minutes then crossed the street and went down the narrow passway at the side of the building and through to the yard.

As he’d hoped, she was pumping another bucket full of water. January said, ‘Here, let me help you with that, m’am,’ and hurried across to her; she barely came up to his shoulder and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet.

To her smile of tired thanks, he said, ‘Fact is, m’am, you can help me out, if you would.’ And he produced two Spanish silver dollars from his pocket, showed them to her in his palm. ‘I’m lookin’ for an English feller, comes in here to pick up messages? Bit shorter than me . . .’

The smile was replaced by an odd look: a stillness, like a very angry cat getting ready to slash. ‘Preston,’ she said.

January slipped the coins into her hand. ‘One whose whore brings him in money? Skinny girl? French?’

‘That’s him.’ She nodded for him to follow her into the passway, where they couldn’t be seen from the back door. ‘You the man who’s lookin’ for him?’ She sounded like she really hoped he was. He remembered Stubbs’s attempt to kiss Elspie. ‘He said the man after him was white, a Frenchman.’

January wondered if someone had told the actor, or if Louis Verron had already made an attempt and failed. ‘I’m
one
of the men lookin’ for him. He be in tonight?’

She nodded. ‘He sent off a letter to that hotel yesterday – whining for money again, I’ll bet, as if that gal of his wasn’t sendin’ it to him every other day.’

‘The Iberville?’

‘That’s it.’

‘You wouldn’t know the name of the man who sends the messages to him, would you?’ He handed her another dollar.

‘It’s D something,’ she said. ‘I know that much.’ Of course, she wouldn’t read. ‘Somebody gonna kill him, is that why he’s hidin’ out?’

‘Less you know,’ responded January, with a finger to his lips, ‘less you can tell. He got a letter from them tonight?’

She shook her head. ‘But he’ll be in. He’s always, “Why ain’t nobody send me what I need?” an’, “How long they expect me to stay hangin’ around this town?” Yesterday, somebody told him that Frenchman was after him, an’ you’d think he was Jesus Christ about to go up on the Cross with the whole world pickin’ on him an’ him innocent as a newborn baby lamb. Huh.’ She sniffed. ‘Anythin’ I can do to help you? Keep him here longer, get him out quicker? Mr Newman –’ she threw a glance back at the yard behind them – ‘says I got to let him ease his griefs, but I can pretend I’m sick if you need him out of here.’

From the yard, a man bellowed, ‘Nina! Nina you lazy bitch—’

‘Don’t get yourself in trouble,’ said January. ‘We’ll be outside.’

She smiled again, different than before. She said, ‘Good,’ and fleeted back around the corner of the passway to the yard.

As a man sows
, reflected January,
so shall he also reap
.

Now let’s just hope it isn’t Louis Verron who’ll be in on the harvest before tonight
.

TWENTY-SEVEN

J
anuary had played at the American Theater often enough to be welcome backstage, and the information that he was there to keep an unobtrusive eye on the Fatted Calf across the street because one of its habitués had injured a young lady friend of his didn’t hurt his cause. As was his habit, when a hand was needed with ropes or props for the matinee in progress, January lent a hand, and nobody blinked when Preacher or Four-Eyes or one of their many friends came to the stage door and signed to him:
nuthin’ yet
.

With five hundred dollars at his disposal, January had found, invisible observation became a simple matter.

It wasn’t until the bells were sounding nine o’clock in the Cathedral tower, an hour after he’d taken up the observation post himself in the alleyway between the Theater and Parnell’s cotton press, that he saw a man tall enough and broad enough in the shoulder to be his quarry hurry along the brick sidewalk and duck into the doorway.

In the café window, one of the candles that stood on the tables within moved back and forth, back and forth: Hannibal’s signal that it was indeed Stubbs. A few minutes later the candle was moved again:
he’s coming out
.

January wondered if the expected message from his employer had arrived, and if it had contained the funds requested.

Like the late Martin Quennell, “Montague Blessinghurst” had made his home as far as he could manage from the French Town – as if he had dwelled in New Orleans just long enough to understand how seldom the haughty French and Spanish Creoles deigned to cross Canal Street. From the muted ruckus of Camp Street, where theatergoers were packing wives and daughters into carriages with mendacious promises of, ‘Just going to have a chat and a smoke with Robinson here, won’t be half an hour . . .’ January trailed Stubbs across the tree-shrouded stillness of Lafayette Place and up Girod Street, which descended from the inexpensively modest to the baldly sordid in the space of two blocks. The remains of old cane fields were broken here and there by heaps of lumber and brick, or more frequently by slatternly constructions thrown together from dismembered flat boats. Dirty lantern-light smudged the night; men’s voices cursed or laughed. Like most whites, Stubbs stayed on the unpaved streets, visible for blocks by the lantern he carried. He was easier to follow thus, January reflected, than he would have been by daylight.

Autumn wind breathed from the river; the leathery leaves of the magnolias rattled, like the wings of Halloween bats. Rameses Ramilles, at least, would have no cause tomorrow night to walk abroad. He slept among his friends at last. On Tuesday, Liselle would go with the other ladies of the FTFCMBS – Rose among them – to serve out food and lemonade to the men and children whitewashing the Society’s tomb: renewing its plaster against another winter of frost, digging out the encroaching resurrection-fern from the cracks, polishing the brass till it glinted. January’s mother always went, to lay out her little picnic of meat pies and jambalaya and to pay her respects to the widow of St-Denis Janvier, to his white children, and to his brother’s family – with whom she was partner in a cotton press and two hotels – though she hadn’t a single relative of her own in the cemetery . . .

And yet, after ten days of panic, violence, flight, and the threat of hanging, January found himself looking forward to an afternoon of physical labor, visiting friends and family, and putting up with his mother’s sarcastic complaints.

And Dante probably thought the foot slopes of Mount Purgatory pretty handsome, once he crawled out of the Pit with brimstone in his hair
.

The ‘residential hotel’ where Stubbs – or Eliot Preston, as he was apparently calling himself these days – had taken a room was one of those large, shabby dwellings in the quarter of the town that catered to the flood of Americans who came every year to New Orleans to make money from the booming markets in cotton, slaves, and gunrunning to the decaying Spanish Empire. It was considerably shabbier than McPhearson’s Hotel a few streets away, where Martin Quennell had boasted his residence; the owners lived off the premises and hired a ‘caretaker’ to sleep in the office there in case a tenant died, went insane, or was attacked by vengeful French Creoles in the night. January’s feet squished in the mud of the trash-strewn yard as he closed the distance between himself and Stubbs, and even the night’s hard chill did little to mitigate the stinks of uncleaned cowshed and chicken-run.

Stubbs whirled on the threshold, key in one hand and the lantern upraised in the other. ‘Who’s there?’ He was unshaven and unclean, and by the pong of liquor on his clothing as January got close, not entirely sober. ‘I warn you, I have a gun.’ He dropped his key and fumbled in a pocket.

January stepped from the darkness, caught his wrist in an iron grip, and said, ‘So do my friends out in the yard.’ He nodded behind him at the abyssal darkness. ‘I mean you no harm. Give me the gun, and you won’t be hurt.’

Stubbs hesitated, then reached resignedly for his pocket.

‘Left hand,’ January reminded him.

The Englishman complied, fishing forth by its business end a long-barreled dueling-pistol of which January promptly relieved him, putting the weapon into his own pocket and opening his hand to show it empty. ‘Shall we go inside?’

He turned briefly back to the darkness – which contained no one but, presumably, Hannibal, who had had instructions to follow Stubbs separately in case of evasion or accident – and made signs suggestive of telling an army of bravoes to rest upon their swords. For a man who made his living by fraud, Stubbs was a shockingly gullible subject. He gulped and stammered, ‘Listen, I have money, I can get you five hundred dollars tomorrow . . .’ as he tremblingly unlocked the door, and January followed him inside and up the narrow service-stair. ‘I swear I was only writing what I was told to write. It wasn’t my idea – they’re holding my wife and children hostage . . .’

The actor’s room was at the end of a hallway that reeked of greasy cooking, spit tobacco, and chamber pots. ‘I beg of you, tell Mr Verron I’m leaving New Orleans tomorrow, the arrangements are all made, he need never be troubled with me again . . .’ He fumbled the key in the door lock, pushed the door open, lantern held high . . .

‘
You?!?
’ he cried.

Oh, Christ
. By his tone of voice, whoever was in there, it wasn’t good.

January stepped swiftly through the door at his heels, and in the lantern light – even at that moment added to by the yellowish gleam of a second dark-lantern uncovered – beheld the slender form of Marie-Venise, with the Countess’s Prussian needle-gun in her hand.

In almost a single move, January snatched Stubbs’s lantern from his hand and shoved the actor sideways into the darkness, setting the lantern down and dodging in the other direction. Marie-Venise wavered, caught by surprise. By the sound of it, Stubbs tripped over something – beyond the glimmer of the two yellow lantern beams the room was like a coal sack – and she swung the barrel in that direction, giving January the chance to lunge across the room, seize her wrist, twist the pistol from her hand, drop it, and put his hand over her mouth before she could scream ‘rape’ and
really
get him in trouble.