Die Upon a Kiss (5 page)

“And very wise of you, Madame,” Davis agreed gravely. “M’sieu Bontemps is a great friend of mine, you know.”

“I know.” She peered up at him from beneath the immense red-and-yellow mushroom of her bizarrely-fashioned tignon. “But I have to write him nevertheless. Until he writes me back, M’sieu Janvier, you have to speak to M’sieu Davis down at his office.”

“Of all the ridiculous things.” Knowing, evidently, that argument was pointless, Davis stepped amiably back down to the brick banquette, and gestured with the
Gazette
as January took an umbrella from beside the door. They made their way toward the corner through the lightly pattering rain, Madame Bontemps watching them from the step. By the way she’d kept her distance from Davis, January wondered whether she’d read the article also and seriously suspected his friend of hiring bravos to murder Belaggio after all. Except, of course, that her suspicions could as easily have stemmed from the color of Davis’s waistcoat—“You can’t trust a man who wears too much green,” she’d informed January darkly that very morning—or an objection to the hearts-spades-diamonds fobs that decorated his golden watch-chain.

“Lieutenant Shaw tells me you were responsible for saving Belaggio’s life last night,” Davis went on, hopping the brimming gutter of Rue Bourbon. “He says you may have seen the men—”

“I didn’t,” interrupted January. “Only heard one of them whisper. Have you been in that alley next to the American Theater? It’s like being locked in an ammunition box.”

“I’ve been there.” Davis paused when they reached the far side of the street, rested his hand on the iron support of a gallery.

It seemed to January—and he’d known John Davis since the first year he’d played piano professionally, at the age of sixteen, in the old United States Hotel that the man had owned down near the Navy yard—that since the death of his wife, Davis had aged. And he did not look well. The once-ruddy face was blotchy, and showed the marks of strain. Not surprising, January thought, considering the seven or eight lifetimes the little entrepreneur had packed into his sixty-two years of gambling, importing, dodging rebel slaves in Saint-Domingue and Cuba, and running two theaters, three gaming establishments, and several ballrooms in New Orleans. Ordinarily Davis was one of the liveliest men he knew, seeming to bustle even in repose. For the first time, January thought:
He’s
tired.

And then, seeing the grayish tinge of the round, heavy cheeks, the sweat that filmed so suddenly along the shoreline of that crisp gray hair:
He’s ill.

“Are you all right, sir?”

Davis looked up at him, like one caught in a lie. He gestured with the
Gazette
again—the rain had run the print—and made a business of unsnagging the fobs that depended from one of his watch-chains from the second, foppishly redundant chain that looped below. “No, no, I’m well. I’m fine. It’s just this . . . this farrago of lies . . .”

“You don’t think anyone’s actually going to believe it? Anyone who knows you . . .”

“I’d like to credit my friends with more brains than that, yes.” Davis sighed. “But the town isn’t what it was, Ben. You know that. I used to know everyone in this town. They’d come to the opera, or to the subscription balls. I’d see them at the Blue Ribbon Balls with their plaçées. . . .” He dug in his coat-pocket for a handkerchief of spotless linen, took off his hat to pass the cloth over his sunken face. Rain pattered in the gutter, stirring up the stench of garbage; a small brown frog hopped out and sat on the banquette, staring up at the men with black bright-sequin eyes.

“I know it’s every Creole’s lament that the Americans are at the bottom of his woes,” said Davis. “But they outnumber us a dozen to one these days. Most of them have come to town in the past five years. All they know about me is what they read in rags like this.”

“Even so,” said January, troubled more now by the older man’s weariness, by the slump of his shoulders and the sweat that beaded his face despite the chill, than by his words. Davis was one of his oldest friends in the town. The first man to hire him, he remembered, to play as a musician. When January had left for France, Davis had come down to the wharf—the only white man there save for St.-Denis Janvier himself and one of few people to come at all—and gave him thirty Spanish dollars:
You use
this to go to the opera when you get to Paris,
he’d said.
Man
doth not live by bread alone.

He was the only one who’d understood that.

“You have friends. . . .”

“And I have enemies.” The little man straightened his shoulders with an effort, and put his handkerchief away. “And more than that, I have debts. I took an opera company to New York last season and didn’t make a dollar—I owe this city over a hundred thousand dollars, in credit and loans, and Caldwell’s beating the pants off me at the American Theater.
And
hiring away my best musicians.” He cocked a playfully accusing eye up at January.

“Oh, I understand why you’re playing for his productions—including that damned
Muette
next week, damn him!—and not mine this season. He’s paying twice what I can. He’s got the American audiences. . . .”

“Vaudeville and melodrama.” January’s voice tingled with contempt.

Davis leaned close, and with a conjurer’s flourish pretended to pluck a Mexican silver dollar from behind January’s left ear. “You know who had this dollar before I did?” he asked.

January shook his head.

Davis twirled it in his fingers, tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. “Neither do I, my boy,” he said wisely. “Neither do I.” He sighed, and with the fading of his bright, quizzical look, his face grew old and sad.

“I can’t afford this, Ben. I’m trying to recoup where I can—my construction company has a bid in on that new steam railway-line out to the lake—but the Americans on the City Council are trying to force me out. This isn’t going to help. Mind you,” he added with a grin, “I probably shouldn’t have said
I’ll cut his heart out in a church
when I heard about his
Muette. . . .
They probably didn’t even recognize the quote.”

“Can you move your performance up?” Garish bills advertising Belaggio’s production of the Auber opera adorned the wall behind them: Vesuvius belching flame and the eponymous Mute Girl hurling herself into its crater. In fact, Belaggio’s first performance would be
Le
Nozze di Figaro,
but January couldn’t imagine what playbill would draw Americans into the theater to see that. Cherubino flinging himself three or four stories from the Almaviva balcony into a particularly savage rosebush?

Davis shook his head. “My tenor and my soprano don’t arrive until the twenty-ninth. And Caldwell’s bought up every firework and flare and bolt of red silk in town, damn him. So when Mount Vesuvius erupts, I’m going to have to ask the audience to use their imaginations—not that the Creoles have them. . . .”

“Oh, give me a muse of fire!”

Davis laughed, a bright, infectious sound in the quiet street. “Or at least tell me where to hire one for the night,” he said. “And you know, I suspect three-quarters of the Americans in this town actually believe that’s a perfectly reasonable excuse to kill another man? Idiots, all of ’em.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked January, and Davis clasped his hand gratefully. “Shaw’s already hinted he’d be glad if I kept my ears open. . . .”

“Oh, nothing more than that,” said Davis. “I’m certainly not requiring death-defying leaps or hand-to-hand encounters with tigers. And I daresay it’ll all blow over, as King Louis said to Marie Antoinette. But I’d feel better knowing you were keeping an eye on things.”

“That I’ll do, and gladly.” January folded up the umbrella as the rain softened and eased. On the other side of the street, two children clothed as prince and princess in anticipation of some Carnival festivity peeked from a carriageway between two shopfronts, and squealed as the last raindrops plinked into their small, extended hands. “I still can’t imagine anyone taking these accusations seriously.”

“Neither can I,” said Davis. “Unless these assassins— whoever hired them—succeed next time.”

THREE

“Who would murder Belaggio?” Madame Marguerite Scie rose from her plié and stood by the rehearsal-room barre with her thin arms folded, such morning sunlight as managed to trickle between the back of the theater and the wall of the Promenade Hotel’s stable yard picking out streaks of silver in her tightly-bound fair hair. “Anyone in the company, I should imagine, with the possible exception of the little d’Isola chit. He isn’t well liked.”

She flicked her long legs into fifth position, demipliéd twice, and sank, flat-backed and upright, into a deep grande, her long fingers barely touching the support. She’d been eleven years old, and a pupil of the best dancing-masters in Paris in preparation for her eventual Court presentation, when the Bastille had been stormed in 1789. She still moved like a girl.

January rested his chin on his folded arms on the back of the chair he straddled before the piano. “You behold me agog, Madame.”

She smiled sidelong, like an amused snake. “It’s no accident he was putting on a Christmas opera season in Havana, of all places.” The inflection of her deep, velvety voice made the Spanish colonial capital sound like a muddy hamlet on the Mississippi. “I think the only reason he’s still able to do seasons in Milan is because his brother is a Commissioner of Police there, and can get the Austrians to make trouble for his rivals. Look where he works.”

She sank, and rose, in a graceful port-de-corps, the muscles of her back like a fencer’s above the short-sleeved camisole, the abbreviated corset, and schoolgirl skirts. “Milan, Florence, the Veneto . . . and America, where people haven’t heard of him. Lorenzo has a reputation for not having his books balance. If the Carbonari ever do manage to run the Austrians out of the peninsula, he’ll be behind a barrow in a market-place the following morning, urging housewives to buy tomatoes.”

Before his encounter with the assassins in the alley-way, January had intended to dine Friday night with his dear friend Rose Vitrac, a young, former schoolmistress at the moment earning her living by correcting Greek, Latin, and science papers for several of the young gentlemen’s academies in town. By the time he’d returned from his talk with Davis, however, and had taught his day’s piano lessons, January’s injured arm ached as if hacked with a sword and he’d felt feverish and weak. “I’m ashamed of you, Benjamin,” Rose had said, peering at him severely through the thick lenses of her spectacles. “A mere cut on the arm sends you to ground? A brief pummeling by villains drives you to seek your bed? I’ll have you know that young Mr. Saltearth, the friend of the hero in
All for
Glory, or, A Patriot’s Triumph,
currently being presented at the American Theater, managed to drag himself fifty miles through the snow in the dead of winter despite being shot through both lungs by Tories, in order to warn General Washington of a prospective attack on Valley Forge.”

“You know a lot about it”—January shaded his eyes to squint up at her from the chair where he’d been resting on the gallery outside his tiny room—“for someone who considers even Dumas’s plays too silly to watch.” The patchy clouds had broken by then, sweeping the low pastel houses of this part of the French town with pale sheets of light, and Rose, perched on the gallery rail, had looked more than ever like a very young wading-bird, gawky-graceful and ready to fly away.

“I was given a complete account of this—er—epic by Marie-Philomène, who has the room next to mine behind Vroche’s Grocery,” she had retorted. In the end they’d compromised by going downstairs to Madame Bontemps’s kitchen and making sausage and rice under the landlady’s silently disapproving eye. Upon leaving, Rose had promised to make inquiries at the Fatted Calf and various other cafés in the vicinity of the American Theater about whether two young men answering the descriptions of Signori Cavallo and Ponte had been seen.

It was, January had reasoned, a starting-point. “They can’t have spent the entire time from the end of rehearsal at—what was it, eleven? eleven-thirty?—until past three cramped in that doorway,” Rose had said. “I can do a very passable imitation of a lady’s maid, searching for information on where Young Michie might have been at that hour and who he might have been with. It isn’t,” she’d added with grim wisdom, “like the waiters at the cafés have not heard such inquiries before.”

“I can’t see errors in bookkeeping being grounds for murder,” January said now, mentally comparing Rose’s slim, scholarly awkwardness with Marguerite Scie’s knife-blade poise. He had told the older woman of his love for Rose, and his hopes that she would one day marry him: one day when he made enough money to live somewhere other than in a rented room in Marie-Claire Bontemps’s garçonnière. One day when past wounds in Rose’s soul had sufficiently healed.

“It depends upon the size of the error,” returned the ballet mistress. “And the circumstances of the murder.” She pointed her toes in a couple of swift tendus, bowed forward again, arm precisely curved. “Paying bravos to slaughter a man in an alley, no. For one thing, I should imagine bravos come rather expensive, even in New Orleans.”

Past the rehearsal-room door, footfalls creaked the floor of the backstage—the scrape of something heavy being moved, the squeak of a pulley, suddenly brightening light, and a stink of burning gas. Caldwell’s American Theater was the largest in the city, and if rude by European standards was far more modern than the rival Théâtre d’Orleans. “A few days before everyone took ship from Havana, Signor Belaggio surprised Cavallo searching his office, and accused him of trying to rob the cash-box. Cavallo in turn accused Belaggio of keeping duplicate books. High words were exchanged.”

“It’s still a long way from high words,” countered January, “to a dagger in an alley in the night.”

The corps de ballet was coming in, in twos and threes, arms around one another’s waists or glancing daggers at rivals. Gossamer skirts, tight-brushed hair.
Did you
see him looking at you from the wings, chérie? I could see the
love in his eyes. . . .

“Little rats,” they were called in Paris. Some of the Sicilian girls were as dark as Rose was, the Milanese nearly as fair as Madame Scie. Many had been hired in Havana, and having failed to find wealthy protectors in Cuba had come to try their luck in New Orleans—Spanish girls, or octoroons fair enough to claim Spanish, with names like Columbina or Ignacita or Natividad. There were one or two French girls, and French Creole girls hired locally, and they looked at the Habañeros and said things like “chaca” and “catchoupine.”
I hate to be the one to tell you,
sweetest, but I’m your friend and someone has to. . . .

Among them, like a splendid flamingo among doves, moved the gorgeous flame-haired, long-limbed Oona Flaherty, whose admission to the corps had been the price James Caldwell was willing to pay to have Fitzhugh Trulove in the St. Mary Opera Society.

Darling, he treats me just like I was a princess! We had
ices at the Café Venise, and rode in his carriage along the
levee. Afterward . . .

January wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the choice of
La Muette de Portici
had had as much to do with Trulove’s passion for Oona as with Belaggio’s desire to steal a march on John Davis. In that passionate tale of Spanish domination, Neapolitan revolt, seduction, romance, and volcanic eruption, La Flaherty was dancing the part of the Mute Girl, a prospect to make anyone shudder.

“Were it not for the dagger you saw,” remarked Madame Scie, counting off the girls with a chill gray eye, “I would wonder if perhaps the intention was mayhem rather than murder. It is, in fact, common enough in the South”—she meant south of Rome—“for a nobleman, if annoyed by a plebeian, to have his lackeys chastise the offender for his presumption. It was done in France as well, of course, in my father’s time. But I agree,” she added, glancing at the bandaged lump under January’s left sleeve with the condescension of eleven generations of marquises de Vermandois, “that the knife came into use quickly.”

“Has that ever happened to Belaggio?” January turned around in the rush-bottomed chair and commenced warming up his hands with the simplified version of the “Rondo à la Turque” that he used for his students. In keeping with everything else in the American Theater, the piano was the best to be had, a massive iron-framed Babcock grand with the heavy action typical of English instruments.

Madame Scie shook her head. “For the simple reason that he worked with Incantobelli. His partner, you understand.” She walked to the barre again, and taking second position, sketched a couple of demi-pliés, which the more perceptive of the girls watched and imitated at once.

“A man not only talented, but brilliant. And charming—he had the dukes and princes of Naples, the senators of Venice, quarreling like schoolgirls over who would sit next to him at receptions. When I worked with the two of them at the San Carlos in Milan in ’twenty-seven, it was obvious Belaggio could barely endure it. He was never one to be outshone. Perhaps it was only that which finally caused the break between them. I don’t know. Girls!” She clapped her hands sharply. “Two demis and a grande, port-de-corps— So. First, second, fourth, fifth. Sixty-four bars, if you would, M’sieu Janvier.”

January played snippets of polonaises,
valses brilliantes,
and simplified rondos for the dancers to warm up, during which time he was conscious of a constant coming and going around the rehearsal-room door. Lions gazing at gazelles, it was called in Paris. Fitzhugh Trulove quite frankly brought in one of the chairs from the orchestra to watch his red-haired inamorata, hands clasped before his pink-flowered waistcoat and a smile of fatuous content on his round pink face. Jed Burton appeared shortly thereafter—January wondered what both of those planters had told their wives about where they were going this morning—and, a little while later, young Harry Fry, the steamboat owner, looking as always as if his collar were buttoned too tightly. It amused January to note how the girls took greater care in the pointing of their pink silk toes, with the men standing in the doorway watching, and how preoccupied they became with perfecting the curves of their arms. Once he caught Marguerite’s sardonic eye and almost laughed.

Did the girls know, he wondered, that these gentlemen who took them for ices and for rides along the river road, who watched from the wings “with love in their eyes,” all had plaçées? Free women of color for whom they had bought houses along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Burgundy, whom they had established as second wives?

Would it make a difference if they knew?

The St. Mary Opera Society,
he thought, and his eyes returned to the little group again as Marguerite explained a complicated ronde-de-jambe. The first ones to know that Belaggio intended to put on an opera of
Othello.
At least a few of them had been at Thursday night’s rehearsal, and had read the libretto. Who felt, or guessed, the power of the music. Which one, he wondered, might have taken it upon himself to “chastise” the Italian “for his presumption”?

Trulove? The man was reputed to be brainless, and in two and a half years of playing at the parties of the wealthy, January had not seen the smallest evidence to the contrary. But his wife was a cold, clever woman, ruthless and strong. And in any case, it didn’t take brains to desire or plan such a crime. Only hate.

Was there hate concealed behind Trulove’s bland pink countenance?

Stubby and brick-faced beside Trulove’s tall, silver-haired amiability, Jed Burton spit into the sandbox just outside the door and leaned down to whisper something to the Englishman, nodding as he did so toward the girls at the barre. Trulove flung back his head with a smile. January tried to remember what his mother, that fount of all gossip and scandal—French or American or free colored—had to say about Jed Burton, and could recall only that the man was a contractor, involved in a lawsuit of some kind about a plantation his first wife had inherited on Bayou des Familles. Burton had been a planter himself, and hadn’t made a go of it—January was well aware that men like Trulove, ostensibly so wealthy, lived in debt from year to year, borrowing money from their factors against crops only barely in the ground, dependent on the frost and the harvest and the resistance of their slaves to disease.

Burton had a wife now, named Ludmilla—his second—whose father was of the Virginia planter aristocracy, and it was undoubtedly she who actually wanted the box for the opera season. January had the impression Burton himself didn’t know Othello from Punchinello and didn’t care.

But Americans were full of surprises. He’d learned that much from Shaw.

Young Harry Fry was quite frankly gazing at a sweet-faced Cuban girl named Felina with his heart in his eyes. January recalled hearing someone—his mother? Uncle Bichet?—mention the young man’s interests in brokering sugar and cotton crops as well as transporting them; in buying furs from the trappers in the mountains of Mexican territory. Anything to turn a dollar. Son of a Boston banker, Fry had been sent here to claim a share of the enormous revenues pouring into the city. With the breakup of the old Spanish Empire, money and precious metals that had previously gone straight to Spain were up for grabs. Legally or illegally, they were coming through New Orleans from Mexico, from Cuba, from the new nations of New Grenada, and it was through New Orleans that guns and supplies had gone to Bolívar, Guerrero, Iturbide. January had seen young Fry at a dozen American parties and as many or more of the Blue Ribbon Balls—the quadroon balls—at the Salle d’Orleans, alternating his polite dancing or wholehearted pursuit of the free colored demimonde with serious-faced conversation among the businessmen of the town.

A young man eager to advance, thought January. At any cost, perhaps. He was negotiating with several friends of January’s mother for their daughters’ contracts of plaçage, but as far as January had heard hadn’t settled on a mistress yet.