Dead and Buried (8 page)

Would they slap their thighs with the humor of it, he wondered, his fingers skipping through the chorus of ‘Zip Coon’, if it was a new-bereaved
white
family that was wondering where the body of husband, brother, son lay that night?

Do they really think we’re THAT different from them?

Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Or would the joke have tickled equally for a white man, provided he wasn’t known to them personally – or known but not liked?

Probably
, thought January with an inner sigh.
Probably
.

And most of his friends at the back of town would have laughed as hard, had the funeral been a white man’s.

One thing about playing the piano at other people’s entertainments for nearly two-thirds of one’s life, it didn’t do much for one’s opinion of human nature.

The Countess Mazzini glided from one parlor to the other of the big, American-style house on Prytania Street, a beautiful Italian woman in her mid-thirties, like a full-blown rose in her tight-corseted crimson gown. She flirted with a steamboat owner here, a cotton broker there; twitted an American planter on his avuncular duties and winked at the youth he’d brought with him, a sixteen-year-old nephew from Virginia: ‘What is it you fancy,
amore mio
? Pretty lambs, or a lioness with thighs of gold?’ The Countess’s house was one of the few brothels in town entirely staffed by white girls: pink-cheeked English belles, dreamy French brunettes. A raven-tressed Irish colleen with tourmaline eyes and a complexion like a lily of the valley, and a couple of handsome Germans, one fragile and one buxom, who worked as a team and were supposed to be sisters. January was watching the fragile one, Trinchen.

Trinchen, when not required to be shyly smiling at masculine jokes, was watching the parlor archway that led in from the hall.

It was not entirely need for money at the tail end of a very bad season that had brought January to the Countess’s back door on the day after her German piano-player had broken three fingers in a street brawl. The other members of the Board of Directors of the Faubourg Tremé Free Colored Militia and Burial Society had asked January to apply for the position because word had reached them that young Martin Quennell – who, when he was not keeping the undertaker’s books, was a clerk at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank – had been seen at the establishment of the French Town milliner Geneviève Jumon, buying the extremely lovely Trinchen an extremely costly hat.

A hat that no bank clerk should have been able to afford.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have troubled anyone who didn’t have their money at the Mississippi and Balize Merchants’ Bank. But recently Beauvais Quennell, who for the past seven years had been the treasurer for the FTFCMBS, had, in fact, transferred the Society’s funds to that bank – on the grounds that the Mississippi and Balize was more fiscally sound than the bank that had previously held them. With the Presidential election coming up, and the Bank of the United States closing its doors, even rumor of financial unsteadiness in an institution was enough to warrant a transfer. Young Quennell had spoken with authority, and the other Directors had found no reason for alarm.

But as Mohammed LePas the blacksmith said, ‘There’s no dead cat out layin’ in the middle of the floor, but I sure don’t like the smell of the room.’

‘He come in here, didn’t he?’ January asked the Countess softly, when uncle and nephew had retired upstairs with their choices and the cotton broker departed. In the short time he’d been employed there, he’d discovered that at this season there were frequent stretches of the evening when the parlor was empty and the unwritten rule that the piano player be blind, deaf, and oblivious to all that took place around him relaxed. He spoke in the rough English of the flatboat crews, which he found would often win the confidence of those who wouldn’t trust an educated black. The Countess, who had paused beside the piano to take a quick puff on a Mexican cigarette, looked inquiring, and January elaborated. ‘That English feller that was stuck in the coffin at that funeral. Mr Derryhick.’

‘Mon Dieu!’ Her eyes widened. ‘That was Signor Derryhick? The Irishman?’

The other girls gathered around at once:

‘Are ye sure?’

‘How is it you know?’

‘Gott in Himmel . . .’

‘It wasn’t Blessinghurst what kilt ’im, was it?’ demanded gilt-haired Fanny. ‘E ’ad the most awful row with Lord Blessinghurst—’

‘Who’s Lord Blessinghurst?’ January’s big hands vamped chords, trills, fragments of melody, so that there would never be a time when music was not audible from the street.‘’Andsome bloke what always asks for Vennie?’

‘Oh, him!’ He mentally placed the tall Englishman as one who had been to the Countess’s twice in the preceding ten days.

‘He is a lord, with eight thousand a year,’ Marie-Venise assured him. ‘Look, he gave me these.’ A toothpick finger tapped one of her earrings: paste, but quite good paste.

‘’E called Mr Derryhick bastard bog-lander an’ Mr Derryhick drew a gun on ’im—’

‘I hope His Lordship has not come to harm!’

‘Where was this?’ asked January, well aware that Derryhick had only been in New Orleans since Monday.

The girls looked at each other, and then at Trinchen, who shook her head. ‘Martin did not say. Davis’s, I think, or perhaps Herr Lafrènniére’s . . . He was in two places or three last night.’

‘Last night?’ January’s hands checked on the keys, then instantly resumed. ‘This happened last night?’

The Countess stubbed her cigarette and the girls broke and scattered with a deceptively speedy languidness back to their red-plush couches and chairs, the flurry all but simultaneous with the sound of the door opening and the dusky little parlormaid’s happy greeting: ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Granville!’ January’s fingers elided into ‘Come Brothers, Sons of Jove’, and he meditated, as he played, upon the person of Lord Blessinghurst . . . whom he was almost certain had been the man whom young Lord Foxford had come so close to calling out at Trulove’s birthday ball.

If he hadn’t seen the other Englishman’s face on that occasion, he had a clear recollection of the color of his coat. That bottle-green velvet, now that he thought of it, would suit Lord Blessinghurst’s complexion admirably – the man he knew from other evenings at the Countess’s had hair the color of polished mahogany and emerald eyes – and he hadn’t seen His Lordship wear the same coat or waistcoat, twice. The man at Trulove’s party on Monday had had a deep voice, like Blessinghurst’s . . .

Last night
. Whether or not Derryhick had drawn a gun on Lord Blessinghurst – and he was sufficiently familiar with human nature not to trust anyone’s account of so dramatic an event – it was clear that there had been a quarrel of some kind. Was Derryhick the kind of man who would get himself into TWO violent altercations in a night?

Alcohol would do it.

So would rage, and or the stress of sudden emotion.

I will kill the bastard
 . . .

And if Martin Quennell – who had evidently seen the confrontation – had had the opportunity to tell the lovely Trinchen about it already, it must have taken place relatively early in the evening.

January was still turning over in his mind how he would ask Martin about the confrontation – it being almost literally unthinkable for a parlor-house musician to speak to a customer, even if January hadn’t been trying to remain unnoticed by that particular customer – when the young clerk himself walked in. Because the French Town and the American sector were very much separate worlds – January knew nearly everyone in the former and tended, like most Creoles, to keep his distance from anything to do with the latter – until last week he had never laid eyes on the undertaker’s half-brother. This morning, when the young white man had grudgingly assisted in the carrying away of palls and plumes so that Patrick Derryhick could be laid out in the chapel, was the first time he had been in a room with him that hadn’t been occupied by half a dozen chattering whores.

Martin Quennell, almost fifteen years younger than his half-brother, looked much like Beauvais Quennell would have done at that age, had the undertaker been white instead of octoroon: handsome in his way, brown curls carefully pomaded beneath a stylish high-crowned hat, with the same sharp features, the same round chin. He gave no sign of recognizing January, which was just as well and not surprising: at the undertaker’s that morning had been the first time January had not been sitting on a piano-bench in his presence, and few white men looked at black men anyway unless they had to.

Certainly not with Trinchen’s peach-like little breasts to ogle instead.

This morning at his half-brother’s, Martin had been dressed as befitted a middle-level clerk at a small private bank: a well-worn cutaway coat that was slightly shiny at the elbows, gray-checked trousers, and a turkey-red waistcoat. Now, entering the parlor with a couple of refulgently wealthy Americans, he had attired himself to match them: one of the new frock coats in a stylish snuff-brown, trousers with a gay scarlet stripe up the side, and no fewer than four silk waistcoats layered one atop the other – two in different shades of green, one scarlet, and one gold.

January’s first wife, Ayasha, whose death in Paris had precipitated his return to New Orleans four years ago, had been a dressmaker. January mentally priced the new coat, the silk of the waistcoats, the fine gloss of the beaver hat, and came up with a figure that no bank clerk had any business spending on something to put on his back.

Interesting.

The men were drunk and arguing politics with the ferocity of the semi-informed. ‘Country needs a strong bank,’ proclaimed their grizzle-haired leader. ‘Too many shanty Irish, thinkin’ they can set up as gentlemen. Too many Krauts, frogs, god-damn Freemasons, drivin’ up the prices of things every way you look. What’s this country comin’ to, Schurtz? I ask you?’

‘Confusion to ’em!’ The man addressed raised the bottle of the Countess’s champagne he was holding in his hand in a toast. He was tall and built flat, like a tabletop stood up on end, and had a square face with black hair that gleamed with pomade in the gaslight. Like Grizzle-Hair he wore an expensive coat and a number of gaudy waistcoats, hung across the belly with three watch chains and any number of gold and silver fobs.

Martin Quennell, who was taking some care, January observed, to keep at this man Schurtz’s side – to the point of turning his face away from Trinchen’s beckoning
poitrine
– brandished another bottle: ‘Confusion to ‘em all!’

This made the black-haired Schurtz bray with laughter, and he caught Quennell in a headlock of drunken friendliness and poured his own champagne over the smaller man’s head.

For one instant, January saw in Quennell’s flinch of horror, and aghast expression as he clutched at his wine-splashed silk vests, that the young man was not, in fact, as drunk as he seemed, and was perfectly well aware that he could not afford the ruin of his new clothing. But Schurtz only tightened his grip when Quennell struggled and broke into a drunken rendition of ‘Little Wat Ye Wha’s A-Comin’ – an anti-Jackson song from a previous election – of which January obligingly took up the tune.

‘Got to christen our new partner as a good Whig!’ declared Grizzle-Hair, a statement that made January – who would himself have voted Whig had he been considered a citizen in the country of his birth – cringe and wish he were a Democrat.

‘Hold still, Baby,’ trumpeted a fourth member of their party, a foxy little red-haired man with a diamond ring on one pinkie. ‘Got to let us christen you, partner! Confusion to Jackson and Van Buren!’

‘God damn Freemasons!’ added Grizzle-Hair, picking up another bottle of champagne.

And Quennell – January was fascinated to note – ceased resisting, whooped, ‘God damn Van Buren! God damn the Freemasons!’ and stretched out his arms, allowing the other three to pour champagne over clothing worth at least a year’s salary.

Partner? Interesting
.

And more interesting still, while Schurtz and Grizzle-Hair staggered, whooping with laughter, up the stairs with Fanny and Sybilla, both Foxy Red and young Mr Quennell elaborately denied any immediate interest in copulation and settled to smoke, drink, talk politics with the Countess, and keep a watchful eye on the stairs and on each other. Trinchen approached, ran an inviting hand along Quennell’s arm, and was brushed away.

So it isn’t just a question of staying in the running with his American friends
.

‘Oh, they’ll come to cutting one another, by and by,’ theorized the Countess, when at last the house cleared out, and January asked her what the hell was going on. ‘The red-haired one – Lloyd he is called, Dominic Lloyd – he courts Schurtz’s sister. So me, I think our Trinchen’s sweetheart has set his sight upon the same goal. She’ll bring money to the wedding bed, Miss Schurtz.’

The gas-lamps were extinguished, leaving only a prism-bedecked oil burner on the gilt marble table. Elspie the parlormaid and her brother Little J moved about in the shadows, clearing up forgotten glasses and moving the brass spittoons out on to the back porch for cleaning in the morning. Auntie Saba emerged from the back kitchen, a coffee cup full of rum for the Countess, a beer for January, and a couple of glasses of champagne for those girls who hadn’t yet gone up to their rooms to sleep: actual champagne, and not the thinned apple juice and soda water that the unknowing customers paid champagne prices for the girls to drink with them.