Die Upon a Kiss (31 page)

“Don’t you lie to me, boy!”

“Thievin’ nigger . . .”

“Put him in the stocks. . . .”

It wasn’t until they dragged him into the Cabildo and thrust him before the sergeant at the desk that January was able to say, “Sir, look in your pocket, sir. Your watch is still there, sir,” and be heard.

The man brought out his watch—flashy Dutch-gold that probably cost a quarter of what January’s had—and reddened. “Got you before you brought it off!” he trumpeted, his white sidewhiskers fairly bristling with fury.

January didn’t dare roll his eyes. “Sir, you’re very lucky you were the one he picked to shove,” he replied, wondering if DeMezières—the desk sergeant—would recognize him as a friend of Shaw’s, or whether he was going to spend the night comparing notes about
La Muette
de Portici
with John Davis. “It’s an old game, sir. One man starts a fight that way between two completely innocent strangers, and during the scuffle his accomplices go around and pick the pockets of everyone who stops to watch.”

He glanced around him. Of course Shaw was absent, on a Sunday.

“You know damn-all about it,” growled the white-whiskered man.

“I should,” said January in his best English, and manufactured a rueful grin. “I got taken that way about six months ago, stopping to watch an affray just like it on the levee. It cost me a silk handkerchief and a week’s pay.”

And if the three rescuers start to laugh at him for being
taken in,
he thought,
I’m doomed.

But one of them—a ginger-haired man in coarse tweed—only remarked, “Deuced clever,” and the steamboat pilot spit in a contemplative fashion on the floor.

“You were right to react the way you did,” added January, not mentioning that if the white-whiskered gentleman had gone after another white man with his cane on so little provocation, he’d have ended up taking an unexpected bath in the nearest municipal gutter. “And very quick, too.” He wondered the next moment if that was a little too fulsome, but the man only made a harrumphing noise, like a dog brought to heel and consenting to be patted.

But of course he and his three rescuers and newfound friends had to recount the whole affair to Sergeant DeMezières from beginning to end, and minutely examine January’s papers. When the Sergeant identified January as a well-known and respectable musician—“as honest as the day is long”—the third man, a stringy Westerner of the kind January had seen picking through the New Exchange for bargains, demanded, “And how do we know that?”—not of DeMezières, but of the other three. “Goddamn Frenchmen stand behind their friends no matter what they do.”

The Sergeant stiffened. “You’re talking of the law in this city, my friend. . . .”

“I’m no friend of no Frenchman and I’m talkin’ about the dam’ police, not the law.” The Westerner’s pale eyes blazed. “And I know dam’ well you’d let a man pick pockets right here in this here dam’ room if he give you a cut, because that’s what the banks in this damn Frenchified town do. . . .”

Altogether, it was some hours before January emerged from the Cabildo, nursing the half-dozen fresh bruises from the white-whiskered gentleman’s cane and wondering what the hell had caused that expression of utter, panicky terror he’d glimpsed in Incantobelli’s eyes.

NINETEEN

“I had no idea you were so formidable, Benjamin.” Hannibal worked the yellow chunk of rosin along his bow-string, touching it now and then with a finger to judge the texture. “I see I need to give myself greater credit for daring to be in your company.”

“A daring that Incantobelli clearly doesn’t share,” replied January. “Since I cannot imagine an operatic soprano of forty years’ standing being seized with such shyness, I can only guess he was afraid of who might see him talking to me.”

Hannibal ran a sinister trill of descending minor notes on his violin, to test the bow, and glanced at January under raised brows. “The gentleman who tried to strangle Marguerite? One can scarcely blame him. When it comes to protecting themselves the people who shoved Davis into the arms of the police the way Incantobelli shoved your friend with the white whiskers into yours yesterday don’t seem to know what scruples are. If Incantobelli hadn’t been wearing that—er—unmistakable garb in a public place the night of Marsan’s murder, they’d have found someone who saw
him
masked and cloaked and wearing a small-sword at the City Hotel, instead of Davis. Remind me to purchase a crimson coat with gold braid on the sleeves or something equally memorable. . . .
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy. . . .”

“Rich, not gaudy,”
agreed January, and he bit into the juicy sweetness of an apple taken from his music-satchel.

Deeper in the bowels of the cavern, Tiberio muttered in Sicilian, “More flame, he says. Let us have the show.” He adjusted the red glass filters that would color and magnify the eerie, flickering gas-jet’s light. “They will do
Barber of Seville
and have Figaro make his entrance through a trap-door in a blaze of fire. . . .”

“Did you see Davis?” Hannibal asked.

“I was lucky I didn’t spend the night with him.” January pitched the apple-core into the nearest sandbox. “I spoke with LeMoyne and offered to cancel my pupils this morning to testify at the arraignment as to the state of Davis’s health, but LeMoyne said it wasn’t necessary. They got Ker from the hospital,” he added, trying not to let the annoyance he felt carry into his voice. It was childish— and, his confessor would have said, prideful: Dr. Ker had been asked because he was the head of Charity Hospital, not because he was white and January was black. Moreover, January knew it.

He shook his head at himself. Hannibal had been right when he’d said there was a miasma in this land of slavery, like the red light of illusion, that tainted all things.

“LeMoyne says Davis is holding up—he’s been running a faro-bank in his cell since Friday. . . .”

“Sounds like him.” Hannibal poked with his bow at one of the theater cats who’d leapt up to investigate the uneaten dish of jambalaya he’d bought from one of the street vendors for lunch. All around them, chorus-boys and musicians were filtering in, joking and calling to one another; Caldwell rapped at the door of Belaggio’s office, then rapped again. It occurred to January that he’d seen little of the impresario in the three days since Marsan’s murder. He’d kept to his office as much as he could during rehearsals Friday and Saturday, arriving late and departing early.

And, January realized, never alone.

Had Belaggio, too, seen the Devil with a knife, waiting on a banquette in the dark?

“. . . assumed Drusilla would go to the Young Italians of her acquaintance when she found the note,” Hannibal was saying—January pulled his attention back with an effort—“but not that she’d invite you to the picnic. Certainly not that she’d have the bottom to rent a gig herself. Were the horses ever found, by the way?”

“Oddly enough, yes. Desdunes from the livery returned my deposit money to me yesterday, and told me that white-stockinged bay I rented had been found about a mile from Big Temple—on Bayou des Familles—” he added, seeing his friend’s eyebrows lift at this curious piece of nomenclature, “and brought back to town by Sam Pickney. And just now Cavallo said that Thunderbolt and the two horses he and Bruno rented were found grazing by the river near English Turn.”

“Meaning whoever took them didn’t want to be seen with them in town.” Hannibal drew up his feet to let Mr. Rowe, the theater manager, pass, frantically giving instructions to Paddy about bringing up the flats for tonight’s performance of
The Soldier’s Daughter.
“Has it occurred to you, by the way, that if Incantobelli’s a soprano, and slight of build, he could easily have passed himself off as a woman. . . .”

“Theoretically,” agreed January. “Have you had a close look at our Neapolitan nightingale? His nose is on the botanical order—somewhere between a large yam and a cypress-knee—and he has more lines on his face than a linen shirt straight out of the mangle. Unless that veil was thicker than a trade-goods blanket, even so unobservant a witness as Bart Gower must have commented that their employer was the ugliest woman he’d ever seen.”

“Hmn.” Hannibal shifted again as Claud Cepovan edged closer to watch Tiberio place his firepots. He had a measuring-stick with him, of the kind undertakers used to mark the height of corpses: the cave-mouth was narrow and he’d be lucky, January thought, to make his entrance into Act Three without igniting his own cloak. “And I take it Monsieur LeMoyne didn’t think much of your tale of clandestine interviews with vanishing assassins in the wilds of the
cipriere
by night?”

“He appreciated the information that he may be looking for a woman,” said January. Belaggio emerged from his office and cast a nervous glance around the backstage before emerging from beneath the gallery; when Herr Smith herded the giggling, chattering corps de ballet abruptly from the rehearsal-room, he shied as if at a gunshot.

“He may subpoena Harry Shotwell from the Blackleg to testify to the woman’s conference with Person or Persons Unknown on the day before the original assault, which would be more useful than attempting to catch up with the Gower boys on the Natchez Trace—they’d only refuse to testify. As would Incantobelli, I suppose.” He sighed. “Danton, Robespierre, and Mirabeau did the world a great disservice—maybe Franklin and Jefferson before them. They made an ideal—be it the Restoration of Proper Order or the Rights of Man—justification for killing another human being. So we have now not only to worry about protecting ourselves from evil men, but also from good ones.”

“Man, proud man,”
sighed Hannibal, rising from his chair as the rest of the orchestra filed past toward the stage.
“Drest in a little brief authority . . . like an angry ape
/ Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the
angels weep.”

“This is ridiculous!” Consuela stormed past, brandishing her copy of the score. Behind her, a hollow-eyed d’Isola nodded, smiling agreement to Belaggio’s account of which songs she must sing at the reception at the town house of Senator Soames tonight. “What do you mean, you can’t find the muskets?” wailed Mr. Rowe. “We can’t have
The Soldier’s Daughter
without muskets!” “Melodrama!” sneered Tiberio, and d’Isola tried not to shed a tear as the impresario kissed her hands.

Navita de ventis,
January recalled the words of the Roman Propertius:
The seaman tells stories of winds, the
ploughman of bulls. . . .
And the soprano of the indignities of being prima or the injustices of not.

He wondered whether there would be time between the end of rehearsal and that reception—which he was also playing at—to go to the Cabildo and speak to Davis, or to LeMoyne’s office, or to Olympe’s to see how Marguerite did.

“Even in that,” pursued Hannibal as they took their places behind the drape of the pit, “Peter the Hermit and St. Augustine—and Mohammed, of course—are there before you. It’s one thing to die for the Rights of Man, and quite another to be hanged because someone doesn’t want the police asking questions about what Lorenzo Belaggio might have been doing at ten-thirty Thursday night. One wonders,” he added as Belaggio gave La d’Isola one final wet kiss and stepped to the podium as if he expected it to drop from beneath him like a scaffold trap, “just what the Austrians thought Marguerite knew, and might have passed along to you.”

According to Olympe—who like most voodoos made it her business to know everything about everyone in town—Theodore Lalage, although an attorney-at-law, had refused to have anything to do with the prosecution of his sister’s murder in 1825. He had concentrated instead on the purchase of two male slaves whom he rented out by the week to the various cotton-presses in the American section of town, and the acquisition and rental of a number of houses in the Faubourg Tremé. In the ten years since the trial, this course of action had proven so profitable that Lalage had been able to sell the cottage that had belonged to their mother on Rampart Street and buy a roomier dwelling on the fashionable Rue Esplanade.

“Which he should have taken shame on himself for doing,” declared Olympe as she cleared away the supper dishes by the light of several branches of tallow candles on the sideboards of the rear parlor. It had been a quiet meal, though January suspected ordinary conversation wouldn’t have waked Marguerite through the back bedroom’s shut door. When he’d arrived for supper, she’d greeted him drowsily, eating with good grace the blancmange and soup Gabriel had made for her, and asking about the rehearsal. She’d fallen asleep soon after, and January guessed she wouldn’t recall the conversation at all when—if—she woke.

He followed Olympe across the darkening yard to the kitchen, carrying dishes. “He cheated his brothers and sister out of the price of the house, which Laurent, the youngest, could have stayed in after their mama’s death. The boy’s a common laborer, without the brains to make his way like the older boys. These days I’m told Theo Lalage pretends his mother wasn’t plaçée, nor his sisters, either. He tells his daughters they were dressmakers.”

January nodded, and tried to look as if the matter were only of casual interest. His sister had her own views of justice, and would not have brought Sidonie’s brother to the notice of the white police, only to save a white man’s skin.

Still, he had learned what he needed to know. The following morning, before his pupils arrived, he dressed in his roughest trousers and his red-and-blue calico shirt and loitered among the trees along Rue Esplanade until he saw Theo Lalage send off his slaves to their hired work. He took note of how the sturdy, gray-haired gentleman stood, in his blue coat and high-crowned beaver hat, when he talked to his bondsmen in a cold, clipped matter-of-fact voice:
Don’t linger in the market on the way
home. Don’t let me come past Camp Street this afternoon
and see you chatting to the orange-sellers. Your labor reflects
on me.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

The man himself January recognized, as he was coming to recognize most of the prominent men of the free colored community, from playing at the balls of the Faubourg Tremé Militia and Burial Society. Not a man, January guessed, who after ten years would avenge a sister he had winced to acknowledge in her life. He went home, conscious of how he now watched all the shadows of the trees behind him, and took a circuitous route. It was going to be a busy day.

There was a final dress rehearsal for
Robert le Diable
at noon, added for the benefit of the dancers. Since Princess Isabella was essentially Princess Elvira in a houppelande instead of a farthingale, La d’Isola had only her usual problems with the role and Consuela Montero was well content with a role that would allow her to display her own formidable coloratura. The eponymous Robert’s agonies concerning salvation and damnation were not notably different from Masaniello’s agonies concerning honor and liberty. The cavortings of the ghostly Abbess before the tomb of Ste. Rosalie were highly reminiscent of the cavortings of Fenella on the Portici beach. Claud Cepovan shied like a spooked virgin every time he had to spring out of the demonic cave in his seven or eight yards of flowing demonic cloak.

And well he should, thought January. Belaggio fairly chortled over the amount of flame and smoke the cavern would generate, but January remembered the blood-soaked papers in the drawer, and the veiled woman who had said
I want him corpsed.
Despite Cavallo’s assurances, there was something more here than Austrian politics.

January felt it in his bones.

In the event, the opera went well. La d’Isola sang “Look Out Upon the Stars, My Love” and “Softly Fall the Dews of Night” as badly as she would have sung anything Monsieur Meyerbeer ever penned. During these English interludes, Madame Montero moved casually around upstage, taking the combs out of her dark hair, wrapping herself in the Princess’s shawl, and, finally, lifting her skirts to adjust a garter on her knee in a way that completely distracted d’Isola, to say nothing of its effect on the Kaintucks in the pit. Half the time the prima soprano’s back was to the audience as she sang. In Act Five the smoke-bombs misfired and instead of vanishing in a cloud of infernal fumes, the Devil Bertram was clearly seen to drop through a trap-door, which snapped closed on a corner of his cloak, leaving eighteen inches of unexplained fabric at the feet of the united lovers during their final duet.

But at least nobody dropped dead on-stage, thought January. No one’s cloak or skirts caught fire. No wires were crossed to strangle the ghost of the dancing Abbess mid-pirouette, and no one took a shot at anyone from the gallery.

Only at the end of the performance did January groan, when Belaggio stood on-stage and announced that “Friday’s performance of the mystical Hibernian opera,
La Dame Blanche,
will be conducted by the newest member of our opera season, Monsieur Arnaud Bucher.”

Arnaud Bucher was—or had been—John Davis’s conductor.
Just what Davis needs,
thought January.
Yet another reason to have murdered Lorenzo Belaggio in an alley.
I wonder when that was arranged, and if the State Prosecutor will bring it up at the trial.
After the near-donnybrook in the prison watchroom two days previously, he’d lost what little hope he had ever had of any jury trying a Frenchman without politics entering in.