Dead and Buried (6 page)

‘Not to hear them tell it,’ said January. ‘I won’t know until I’ve talked to Hannibal.’ He got to his feet and stood for a moment, only breathing the cool benediction of the rain. On the back gallery of the house he could see his mother, still as slim and stylish as the young placées who made their appearance at the Blue Ribbon balls, deep in talk with her friends, most of them former placées like herself. Among them, Denise Glasson stood out like Mozart’s Queen of the Night, veiled to her heels and topped, like the hearse, with a funereal confection of black ostrich-plumes, an advertisement for the depth of her sorrow.

Hannibal will lose his two cents
. Not once had he seen his mother and Olympe in the same room.

In time, Rose said, ‘I should go in. M’sieu Passebon –’ she named the President of the FTFCMBS – ‘has offered to see poor Liselle back to her room: I think Iphigènie is staying with her tonight, to look after the boys. What a – what a
horror
. And yet . . . how much worse it would have been for her, if when the coffin fell and split open, it
had
been Rameses inside. Someone should thrash that brother of hers.’

‘Good heavens!’ January widened his eyes in dazzled enlightenment. ‘I didn’t realize a drunkard’s ways could be mended by thrashing,’ and Rose thwacked him on the biceps with the back of her hand. But her sigh acknowledged his truth, and she stood.

‘In any case, I’ll need to be on hand when the crowd thins out, to keep Madame Glasson from murdering, or being murdered by, Madame Ramilles . . .’

‘Olympe promised me she’d keep them apart,’ said January. ‘On the subject of drunkards, I think I need to see Hannibal before I’m due at the Countess Mazzini’s tonight. I suspect Liselle isn’t the only one who shouldn’t be alone this afternoon.’

Five more people asked January, as he edged through the dining room and parlor, what progress he and ‘that American animal’ (as the free colored community universally referred to Shaw) had made that morning toward finding poor Rameses’s body. After he’d thanked Olympe’s husband Paul for acting as host for the remainder of the night, clasped hands with Crowdie Passebon and Mohammed LePas in promise to join the morrow’s search, and located his umbrella, he encountered two more queries as he stepped out through the French door of his study and descended to Rue Esplanade.

But as he paced the brick banquette under the steady torrent of the rain, his mind returned not to that squirming infant he’d held in his arms thirty-four years ago, but to the blunt-featured Irish face lying slack in the cemetery mud, and to Hannibal’s hoarse light whisper: ‘We were at Oxford together.’ Sitting on the tomb at the dead man’s side, he’d begun to say, ‘I’d thought—’ and had stopped himself.

Thought what?

Thought we’d all live forever, when we were young?

He knew what he’d find when he reached the Swamp.

Born a slave, raised first on a sugar plantation and then – free – in New Orleans, January had adapted himself to the almost-unthinking habit of making constant small adjustments in his behavior depending on where he was and who he was with: sniffing for danger, listening for sounds. Even the strongest black men took, perforce, their example from Compair Lapin, that wise and wily trickster rabbit of childhood tales, rather than from the defiant warrior heroes of the whites. For a slave, defiance was suicide, and suicide was the desertion of your friends and family to their unprotected fate.

You did what you must – paid whatever it cost – to survive. He’d learned early that there were places that were never safe to tread – like his former master’s bedroom at Bellefleur Plantation. That was good for a beating whatever the circumstances. Then there were places that were usually safe, and places that were likelier to be safer at certain times or under certain conditions.

The case in point today was the Swamp, that nebulous district that lay where Girod and Perdidio Streets petered out into muddy trails among the elephant-ear and stagnant pools upriver of the cemetery. Saloons patched together from tent canvas and broken-up flat-boats strung along unpaved hog-wallow streets, offering games of chance, inexpensive coition and forty-rod whiskey for the benefit of ruffians, filibusters, and river-rats of all descriptions. At three o’clock in the afternoon, January knew most of the Swamp’s inhabitants would be awake and stirring, but the rain would keep them indoors for awhile yet.

He also knew – although the knowledge operated at the wordless level of instinct – that he’d be safer approaching the Broadhorn Saloon across the wooded lots from behind, rather than by the more direct route up Perdidio Street itself, always provided he didn’t trip over some drunk Kaintuck sleeping it off under a snaggle of hackberry bushes. If encountered singly, the worst a man of color usually got was threats and petty humiliation: piss stains and cigar burns. In groups, the encounter could be fatal. January moved with care.

The Broadhorn was a wooden house, a story and a half tall, L-shaped, unpainted, leaky, and squalid. Four dilapidated sheds at the edge of the trees behind it housed a collection of the most hardbitten women January had ever encountered in his life. It was a mystery to him how these two-legged she-wolves ever got customers, but they did. Two men were waiting, in the thinning rain, outside these ‘cribs’ when he emerged cautiously from the woods, and he stood out of sight for the five minutes it took for Fat Mary and the Glutton to finish previous bookings and admit them.

Once the yard was clear of possible observers, January climbed the rickety outside stair to the attic above the short end of the L.

The door at the top hung open in the spongy heat. Hannibal Sefton lay on the floor a foot or so back from the threshold, a square, brown whiskey-bottle empty on its side near his hand. A tin pitcher – the usual transport receptacle for the contents of the liquor barrel under the bar downstairs – lay empty, likewise, in a reeking pool of spilled brownish alcohol.

January checked his friend’s breathing, more out of habit than anything else. He’d had plenty of experience over the past three and a half years of Hannibal’s sprees. He’d brought a little powdered lobelia-root wrapped in a twist of clean paper, and this he mixed with water from one of the dozen tin catch-pans that stood about the attic beneath the ceiling leaks. He dragged his friend to a sitting position by the door and poured the mixture down his throat. Then he held Hannibal by the back of his coat and by his long hair while he vomited, and when he was finished, carried him to the bed.

Hannibal didn’t open his eyes. ‘You had to do that?’ he whispered.

‘I need you.’ January walked back to the door – there was a sort of porch rail across the bottom half of the opening, but no actual porch – and looked out, in time to see one of the whores emerge from her shed and cross the yard toward the saloon proper, barefoot, scratching under her uncorseted breasts. ‘Miss Margaret.’ January called out her real name, though every man from Vicksburg to the mouths of the Mississippi knew her as Railspike. She stopped, stood in the faint final patters of occasional rain as he descended the ladder-like steps and crossed to her with the air of apologetic subservience that was the only thing that would lower the chances of his getting the tar beat out of him should any of the Broadhorn’s customers emerge just then.

The honor of white womanhood must be protected at all costs
.

‘Miss Margaret, would you know if there’s coffee in the kitchen?’ He spoke English. This wasn’t the part of town where whites spoke French. ‘I’m afraid Hannibal’s poorly.’

‘What the hell happened?’ Genuine concern shone in Railspike’s usually hard eyes. January had seen her eviscerate a drunk sailor with a Bowie-knife and kick the dying man as she’d walked away, but she had a soft spot for Hannibal in whatever was left of her heart. ‘He ain’t got pukin’ drunk in the daytime since I known him. An’ he ain’t
never
got so drunk he’d ask for liquor outa the bar barrel.’

‘Friend of his died.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Ben, I am sorry,’ she said with complete sincerity and distress. ‘You go on up, stay with him. I’ll bring you up some coffee.’

‘Miss Margaret, you are an angel.’

Coming back into the slant-roofed chamber, January thought Hannibal had passed out again, but when he sat on the end of the cot, the fiddler murmured, ‘
Wine is as good as life to a man . . . What life is then to a man that is without wine?
’

‘
But a walking shadow
,’ replied January gravely. ‘
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
. But I need you sober.’

‘God’s teeth and toenails, Benjamin—’ Hannibal pulled himself gingerly up so that his back might rest against the wall behind him, then suddenly turned a ghastly color and reached for the slop jar. After an agonizing time, his head and one long-fingered hand hanging over the edge of the bed, he whispered, ‘Heaven pity the man who needs me sober.’

January went to fetch the dirty tin pot of coffee that Railspike had left on the floor just inside the door. He found a cup on one of the goods boxes that served Hannibal for shelves, filled it and held it out. ‘Was he your friend?’

Hannibal nodded. It was as if the conversation begun that morning, sitting on the crumbling brick bench-tomb in St Louis Cemetery, continued uninterrupted.

‘I take it you were part of his “merry band”?’

At the mention of that name the fiddler looked up, first sickened shock, then wariness fleeting across the back of his black-coffee eyes.

‘He came to town with his relatives,’ January went on, ‘purportedly in quest of cotton plantations in which to invest the money that
should
have gone to them. By the look of the hotel rooms, and the evidence of the witnesses, he appears to have been knifed by the twelfth Viscount Foxford, but there’s something about the business that makes my neck prickle. I wondered if you could tell me what that might be.’

FIVE

‘
T
he
twelfth
Viscount?’ said Hannibal after a moment.

‘Germanicus Stuart—’

‘He’s a child!’

‘He’s twenty-two,’ January pointed out and noted with interest the look of aghast grief that crossed his friend’s face. ‘I take it you met him . . . longer ago than either of us would like to contemplate.’

‘God.’ Hannibal shook his head and raised the coffee to his lips with a hand that trembled. ‘
Òu sont les neiges d’antan?
’

‘Did you know his father?’

‘Not well.’ He sighed. ‘I think only Patrick knew him really well.’

‘Then Derryhick didn’t cause his death?’

‘Patrick—!’ For a moment Hannibal stared at him, open-mouthed. Then, in a different voice, ‘Does the boy believe that?’

‘It’s what his uncle says.’ January sat again on the end of the broken-down pallet.

‘Uncle Diogenes? What’s he doing on this side of the world? The man’s been in Benares since Napoleon did his first rifle-drill. I understand he has a regular harem there that he’s in no hurry to leave—’

‘According to what Shaw learned while I was searching everyone’s hotel-rooms,’ said January, ‘Uncle Diogenes came to Foxford Priory this spring, to wrap up the affairs of his son – another of Derryhick’s “merry band”. The boy had broken his neck while hunting. He was drunk, everyone said – apparently his usual condition, which Derryhick encouraged.’

‘T’cha!’ Hannibal turned and fumbled beneath his pillow in search of something that evidently wasn’t there. ‘Patrick never encouraged anyone to drink in his life . . . Well, not very hard. He was as happy drunk in sober company as he was among the befuddled – and, you should know, no drunkard ever needs anybody’s “encouragement” to pick up a bottle.’

January fetched a second cup for himself, retrieving from the floor on his way back a square black bottle that had once – to judge by the smell of it and the two barely-conscious cockroaches lying near its mouth – contained laudanum. This he handed Hannibal, who turned it upside down over his own cup in an effort to extract a final drop. But the only thing that slid out was a third, extremely befuddled, roach, which drowned without a struggle.

‘
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
,’ the fiddler said, quoting the death of Ophelia in
Hamlet
, ‘
that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream . . . Her clothes spread wide, and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up
 . . .’ With a sigh, he set the cup and its victim on the floor beside the bed. ‘
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears
 . . . That’s why they think young Foxford killed him? Because Uncle Diogenes has been telling him for the past seventeen years that Patrick was responsible for his father’s death? And you said they came here to buy a
cotton plantation
? With what? The family couldn’t afford a parlor carpet.’

‘With the money that a wealthy aunt had left to Derryhick instead of to the Viscount.’