Die Upon a Kiss (27 page)

“But if he didn’t for some reason, he wouldn’t know?”

She shook her head.

She had three acts yet to get through, thought January as he resumed his playing and she slipped away. And after that, Belaggio’s amorous demands. And she could not even weep.

Foolish or not, as Olympe would say, she did have the bristles.

It struck him, not for the first time, how desperately unfair the life of the demimonde was to the women who led it. To be always beautiful, to be always cheerful, to be always ready to leap into bed and perform. Or to risk that soured comparison,
You’re just like my wife. . . .

And if the man was rich, there were always women younger and less worn-down waiting to tell him how delighted they were, to be at the beck and call of a man as handsome and virile as he.

Oh, Dominique,
thought January again as the corps de ballet—those little apprentice demimondaines—scampered back to the wings and the principals took their places on the dim stage. He saw her again in his mind as she whispered,
I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Princess Elvira confronted Alfonso in anger, then fell into his arms. The ballet displayed bosom and ankle in the market-place of Naples, followed by a rush of armed supernumeraries who began the rebellion with such spirit that a number of them emerged with bloodied noses and bruised arms when the field was won. Masaniello repented in horror of the much greater quantity of stage blood that had been shed, helped Elvira and Alfonso escape, went mad, and perished in a rousing chorus of “Courons à la vengeance,” after which Fenella, with a good deal of twirling and spinning that threatened to hopelessly entangle her in her own supporting wires, flung herself from the balcony into the flaming stream of Mount Vesuvius’s red silk lava.

One more chorus of “Amour sacré de la patrie” and
The End,
the volcano belching mightily center stage and La Flaherty huddling gamely behind the balustrade that hid her from view while yards of scarlet and yellow silk writhed on the gleaming wet sides of the mountain and gas-jets flared and dimmed and bathed the stage in fiery light. Roman candles and pots of colored flame burst and spurted from the main crater and a dozen lesser caldera, and smoke poured from the volcano’s every orifice, stinking to heaven of sulfur and coal.

This was what everyone had come to the theater to see, and the applause was roof-rattling. Every Kaintuck in the pit sprang to his feet, stamped, hollered approval, and contributed wolf-like howls to the general din. Belaggio, exalted, wildly signaled for more finale, so orchestra and chorus vamped passages from “Amour sacré de la patrie” for another five minutes and Tiberio continued to roar on the thunder-drums and Mr. Russell to work the gas-jets full-cock, with Paddy and Liam surreptitiously dumping water on everything they could reach without being seen from the front. To the last, January was convinced that the whole theater would ignite, disproving, perhaps, Shaw’s theory that Davis was behind all the murder and mayhem—the man was still there in his box—but at rather high cost.

Only when the curtain finally closed—and he heard the reassuring hiss of vast quantities of steam—did he relax. The lights went up. The orchestra rose to go. As he did so, remembering Davis’s look of drawn exhaustion, January craned his neck for a last look into Box Twenty-six to make sure the man did get up to go, in time to see the gangly shadow of Abishag Shaw step into the light, and lay a hand on John Davis’s shoulder.

Rose was waiting for him backstage, with Gabriel, bearing a note from Olympe.

It said,
Your friend is awake.

SIXTEEN

“Your sister asked me already.” Madame Scie stretched a hand to touch January’s, then sank back into the worn clean linen of the pillows. “I suppose she feared I was going to be like one of those tiresome women in novels who open their eyes, gasp ‘It was . . . It was . . . the black periwinkle . . .’ and die leaving the hero to scratch his head for another four hundred pages. And I shall disappoint you, Ben, as I disappointed her. The last thing I remember is Nina lacing me up in my gold silk, which it would be too much to hope survived an assault on my person. . . .”

“It survived,” said Olympe with her tight, close-mouthed grin, and Madame Scie sighed.

“A spar salvaged from the wreck of an evening. Will I regret the memories I’ve lost?”

“I fear so,” said Hannibal, who had insisted on accompanying January to Olympe’s house in spite of the fact that the performance had left him chalky and shivering. “It was opera itself. Belaggio challenged Marsan to a duel in a scatological cabaletta that rivaled Villon. Trulove had a secret assignation with the mute dancer. Lots of chorus work, lots of gorgeous supernumeraries, and one very lovely aria. You know there’s been murder done.”

She murmured, “I know.”

“Well, comfort yourself with the fact that you probably haven’t lost anything.” January pulled a chair up to the side of Zizi-Marie’s bed and held the bedside candle a few inches from Marguerite’s face. The pupils of her eyes were still of unequal size; she blinked and pulled away. “Most people lose memories when they suffer a concussion, and mostly they come back. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I’m trying to decide how many
hands
you’re holding up.”

“Does your head hurt?”

“Like sin.” She coughed, and tried to clear her throat, as if puzzled that it should be sore. The marks there were still livid, yellow and green around the edges as they healed. They would be a long time fading. “Though in most cases I’ve found it has been virtue that’s given me the real headaches.”

January took the spouted cup of water Olympe handed him and held it to Marguerite’s lips. She sighed and seemed to sink deeper into the bed linen, bruised eyelids sinking shut.

“Can we get you anything,” asked Rose from the other side of the bed, “before you sleep? Benjamin brought your bags from the hotel.”

“Yes, I see.” Her thin fingers moved again on the worn lace of her night-dress. “Thank you. I cannot repay you, Benjamin, or your kind sister. . . .”

“Mr. Caldwell’s taken care of that.” January knew that a lifetime of living hand-to-mouth had given Marguerite a horror of being in debt. “Is there anyone we should write to? Anyone who should know of this?”

He thought of those she had told him of: the airy, scholarly dilettante father, the pretty stepmother she’d adored. The brothers: Clovis, Claude, Octave . . . All swept away in the Terror, and with them sister, uncles, cousins, aunts. Some publicly beheaded while the unemployed scum of the Paris streets spit on their faces, a number cut to pieces alive in one of the hysterical massacres when the Paris mob was swept by rumors that the prisoners awaiting trial were in communication with “enemies of the Republic.” For as long as he’d known Marguerite, she’d lived in two rooms in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie, had walked to the Odéon for rehearsals, performances, instruction of the little rats who were the whole of her life, and to Les Halles for bread and vegetables and scrap meat for her cats. Nothing that the Terror had taken away had she replaced: not family, not possessions, not wealth. Who Monsieur Scie had been, and when he had crossed her path, she had never said. Her rooms had been spare and clean as a nun’s cell.

She’d lived on air and light, and the laughter of her friends.

Looking down, he saw she was asleep again.

“I’ll sit with her,” said Olympe. “Paul will walk you home if you’d like.”

“Thank you. They’ve arrested John Davis, of all people. . . .”

“T’cha!”

“Have you heard anything? Or has Mamzelle Marie?” Most secrets, January knew, came to Marie Laveau in the end. The voodooienne was the queen of secrets, the center of a web of information, rumor, and blackmail that stretched far up and down the river, a web that touched the slaves who cleaned the gutters and the planters who bought and sold those slaves.

Like his mother—like Olympe, or any woman of color—Mamzelle Marie kept her ears open for gossip and tales and speculation. But what for others was entertainment, she pursued as a vocation and a livelihood. She fit pieces together that others merely noted in passing, assembled facts with the patience of one of those Florentine artists who form mosaics so intricate, they cannot be distinguished from paintings. People said she could look in your eyes and read your dreams.

Sometimes January thought she could.

Other times, he guessed that all she really needed was to have your housemaid owe her a favor.

“I’ll go to her tomorrow,” Olympe told him, “and see what she has heard. There’s always someone who knows something.” She shrugged. “But it’s like waiting for a branch to come down-stream. It sometimes takes a while.”

January leaned down and kissed Marguerite’s lips. They felt cold under his own, like silk left outside on a dry winter night.

Rehearsals for
Robert le Diable
began the following day at noon.

Since the little rats would assemble at ten—to receive Herr Smith’s instructions in transforming themselves into the mad ghosts of dancing nuns—January rose early, and reached the Cabildo before eight. As he walked through the chill gray of dawn, he noticed that the city official in charge of such matters had stripped all posters of
La
Muette de Portici,
Davis’s as well as Caldwell’s, though Davis’s production of the opera was to take place that night. Posters for
Robert
were already pasted to every wall and corner in town.

In the big stone-floored watchroom of the Cabildo, Shaw slouched at his desk, explaining something to a little man who looked as Irish as a pot of bubble-and-squeak: “This here’s Mr. LeMoyne,” the policeman introduced them as January hung back, and gestured for January to join them. “Mr. Davis’s lawyer.”

“Pleased.” The lawyer held out his hand. “I know you. You’re the piano master, Mr. Davis spoke of you.” LeMoyne spoke French with the accent of Normandy and called January
vous,
not
tu.
“I’ve been telling this—this American”—he might just as well have said
sbirro—
“that it’s not only ridiculous to hold Mr. Davis here on these absurd charges, but it’s clearly detrimental to his health. He’s not a well man.”

“That’s true, sir,” agreed January, looking at Shaw. “He’s sixty-two years old and his heart isn’t strong. You know yourself that jail is a pest-hole. . . .”

“I know that,” replied Shaw. The patience in his voice let January know that the overcrowded cells with their stink of filth and disease—with convicted thieves and murderers cheek-by-jowl beside suspects awaiting trial, drunks sobering up, runaway slaves being held for their Masters’ arrival, and madmen with whom nobody quite knew what to do—had already been a topic of discussion between himself and the attorney. “An’ as I told Mr. LeMoyne here, in cases of murder, there ain’t no provision to let the culprit go walkin’ around the public streets on bail.”

“Any number of men in this town,” said January dryly, “can reassure you as to the unlikelihood that Mr. Davis, if released, will run wildly through the streets, stabbing strangers at random. Sir.”

“They’s welcome to come to the arraignment Monday an’ do so.” Shaw folded his big, clumsy hands, the knuckles of which were as swollen and bruised as January’s own. Carnival was not a good time, thought January, looking down at them, then up at the Kaintuck’s black eye and cut cheek, to be responsible for peace and good order in New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” January said. “That was rude of me. But you know John Davis.”

“I do,” said Shaw. At the watch sergeant’s desk an extremely inebriated Texian in soiled buckskins expostulated at length on how his scheme to send a force of armed American warriors to aid the rebels in New Grenada had necessitated a shooting-match in the middle of Gallatin Street at four in the morning.

“An’ I know Mr. Davis ain’t likely to go around killin’ nobody else—nor probably that he won’t high-tail it, neither. But there’s folks in this town that have sort of remarked as to how them that’s friends of the Prieurs an’ the de McCartys an’ the Bringiers an’ all them other old French families don’t spend near so much time under hatches as Americans do, an’ have made kind of a issue of it in the last City Council meetin’. An’ I must say, they do got a point.”

“A point,” said LeMoyne, “seems hardly grounds on which to keep a sick man locked in a cell where he’ll be lucky if he has a cot to sleep on. It’s the strongest who get them up there, not the sick.
As
you know.”

Shaw’s lips tightened. It couldn’t be easy, thought January, for him to maintain his position, since he guessed Shaw agreed with LeMoyne. He guessed, too, that someone on the City Council had spoken to Shaw—and to Shaw’s superior—about the need to administer justice even to the friends of the Creole planters whose money ran the town.

“Problem is”—Shaw focused his attention on trapping a flea on his frayed calico shirt-cuff and crushed it beneath a thumb-nail—“that at quarter to one, when Mr. Davis claims he was home in bed, he was seen in the barroom of the City Hotel, which, as you know, is across the street from where Marsan’s body was found. He was masked an’ armed with a small-sword an’ a knife, an’ the witness said as how he appeared to be keepin’ a watch out on the street, like as if he was waitin’ for someone to come past.”

“What?” LeMoyne jerked to his feet and smote the corner of the desk with his palm. “Mr. Davis was home in bed . . . !”

“What witness?” asked January more mildly. “How do they know it was Mr. Davis if he was masked?”

“Feller name of Tillich.” Shaw consulted a rumpled wad of illegible notes. “Described him pretty good: short an’ gray-haired with a round chin, wearin’ a dark-blue waistcoat—which folks at the gamblin’ parlor at the Salle d’Orleans say Davis was wearin’ earlier that evenin’—an’ two watch-chains acrost it, one with fobs of hearts, diamonds, an’ spades. It does sound like Davis.”

“It does not,” said LeMoyne stubbornly, “sound like anything Mr. Davis would do. There are other fobs of card-pips—I’ve seen them—or Mr. Davis’s could have been stolen—”

“But they wasn’t,” said Shaw. “They was on his watch-chain when he was arrested. An’ you can’t deny Mr. Davis has been in duels.” Shaw spit—inaccurately—toward the sandbox in the corner. “I understand there was a shootin’-match in ’twenty-nine, with an American feller name of Burstin. . . .”

“Mr. Davis is the proprietor of a gaming establishment,” said LeMoyne. “On that occasion the American had not only been cheating, but impugned the honesty of the house. Mr. Davis had no choice, under the circumstances, but to issue a challenge.”

“Oh, I understand.” Shaw folded his notes together and stuffed them under the pile of newspapers, summonses, legal notices, and dog-eared ledgers that heaped the corners of his battered desk. “What I’m sayin’ is, the law has to take all this into account. Now, far as I could find out just askin’ around yesterday, this Mr. Tillich don’t know John Davis from Davy Crockett, ’ceptin’ as he’s played in his gamblin’-rooms now an’ then. He ain’t a personal enemy an’ has nuthin’ to gain through lyin’. An’ even if he was an’ did, we’d still have to indict on the strength of it, an’ the threats Mr. Davis made, in public, the day he heard about this opera they’s both puttin’ on. An’ the day the law starts pickin’ an’ choosin’ who it’s gonna jail,” he added, raising his eyes to January’s face, “is the day I’d say we’s all in trouble.”

There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence.

“What about Incantobelli?” asked January. “If anyone would have murdered Belaggio . . .”

“If’n anyone woulda murdered Belaggio,” said Shaw, and spit again, “it woulda been Marsan. I’d’a picked Incantobelli to come in second myself, but Incantobelli
was
in Mr. Davis’s gamblin’-rooms, till close on to four in the mornin’, got up like a Roman emperor in this sort of purple-an’-gold tablecloth with about a peck of gold-painted spinach on his head. A hundred people saw him. You couldn’t hardly not. An’, I might add, no matter how dark that alley was, I’d have thought Incantobelli knowed Belaggio well enough to know that wasn’t him.”

“Damn this town,” muttered LeMoyne as he and January made their way out into the flagstoned arcade that ran across the Cabildo’s stuccoed face. Morning had stirred the Place d’Armes into full life before them: sellers of fruit and chocolate cried their wares beneath the plane-trees, a bright fringe around the confusion of market and levee, cotton-bales and hogsheads of sugar, carriages and market women and pigs. “It would only need that if the Americans on the City Council take it into their thick heads to push for a conviction just because of Mr. Davis’s connections with so many of the French.”

“Would they?” January glanced uneasily down at the little man. “What business is it of theirs . . . ?”

“What business?” LeMoyne’s hazel eyes glinted cynically. “You talk like a damned Englishman, sir! What business is it of anyone’s if a man is French or Creole or American or Chinese, for that matter? Except that most of the Americans in this town have tried to borrow money from French-owned banks—and have been turned down—and every Frenchman will tell you how the Americans are upstarts and have to be kept out of any positions that matter before they marry everyone’s daughters.” He shrugged. “What I’m afraid of—other than Mr. Davis suffering a stroke in that Bastille back there—is that if the case comes to trial, Mr. Davis will get caught in a political crossfire that’s none of his doing. That he will be tried, not for his own crime, but for his jury’s grievances against his friends. And don’t think it doesn’t happen all the time.”