Fever Season (34 page)

“To be sure they are. But my client is a businessman, with dealings among other members of the business community
here in this city. I don’t think I need emphasize that any breath of allegation of either of those heinous crimes—of which he is entirely innocent—will result, not only in civil action against you and your Chief, but in all probability in a spontaneous demonstration of support from other businessmen along the levee and Tchapitoulas Street. May I speak to my client, please?”

Shaw slouched a little farther against his desk, like a pole of beans improperly tied up, and looked down at the smaller man. “Come back at eight.”

Loudermilk’s mouth widened just a fraction at the corners, showing rotted teeth. “I’ll wait.”

From the arcade outside a woman entered, the breeze off the river curling her cloak about her, the seven points of her tignon like unholy sun around her dark, expressionless face. She paused for a moment, regarding January, and Shaw, and the lawyer Loudermilk with enigmatic serpent eyes, then passed, silent, to the desk.

“I’m here to see Mademoiselle Jouvert, Sergeant deMezieres.”

Ordinarily a request to visit a drunken Gallatin Street whore like Elsie Jouvert would have drawn a jocular remark from the sergeant, but the man only nodded. He was Creole, not the American who’d been here the night before last. “I’ll take you up, Mamzelle.”

“I’ll find my own way,” said Marie Laveau. “Thank you.” She glanced again at the group near Shaw’s desk, thoughtfully, and disappeared through the double-doorway that led through the courtyard, her cloak billowing gently, to show and then conceal the blue of her calico skirts.

Loudermilk rose to his feet and made to follow. Shaw interposed himself.

“Eight, I said.” The lieutenant had the tone in his
voice January recognized, of officialdom being obstructive because it could.

“You have one rule for Negroes, and another for white men?”

“Madame Laveau comes pretty regular to visit the prisoners,” said Shaw. “She nurses them that’s sick. Iff’n you’ve a mind to do the same, we got a couple jail-fever cases up on the higher gallery been pukin’ all night and need a little cleanin’ up.”

If looks could flay, thought January, Shaw’s hide would have been stretched on the Cabildo doors.

“I’ll wait.”

Cut, aching, limping, and a little queasy from the exertions of the night, January stepped from the Cabildo into the puddled morning in the Place d’Armes. A wagon rumbled away from the levee, laden with trunks, silverware, furniture; a gentleman in a dove-colored coat followed it, a woman leaning on his arm and two young boys dashing and shouting around them, delighted to be back home.

People were coming back to town.

January returned to the Rue Burgundy to find Hannibal gray-faced and deathly ill. He checked for fever, of which there was none, and fetched him coffee from the kitchen. “I suppose I’m lucky they didn’t kill me,” said the fiddler later, at intervals in vomiting. “It would have been cheaper than buying me drink after drink—if those friendly gentlemen were indeed dispatched by Mr. Roarke to make sure I wouldn’t come in and rescue or warn you at an awkward moment.”

He slumped back against the gallery wall, too exhausted to crawl back into Bella’s room to his bed. January wondered if there’d been more than liquor in those glasses,
though God knew the drink dispensed along Tchapitoulas Street was lethal enough.

“Maybe they just liked your music.”

After making sure that his friend was resting easier, January went to bed and slept. But in his dreams he was back on the keelboat, struggling with Roarke in the flooding cabin; and in his dreams there was someone he knew, someone he loved, trapped behind a bulkhead with the water pouring in. He woke in panic two or three times from this dream, and the last time, found that the sun was setting, and cooler air breathing in from the river across the town.

He and Hannibal were having supper outside the open doors of the kitchen when Shaw appeared in the passway and loafed across the yard to them, spitting tobacco as he came. “Not meanin’ to intrude, Maestro,” he said, and January shook his head and gestured to him, a little ironically, to take a chair and share the coffee and jambalaya.

“Not at all—sir.”

Shaw remained standing. “Thank you all the same. I just thought you ought to know, Maestro, they pulled Hèlier Lapatie’s body outen the Bayou this afternoon. We went through his rooms, too. He had a bankbook on the Louisiana State Bank for nigh onto four thousand dollars, but nuthin’ by way of records or notes.”

“He wouldn’t have,” said January softly. “He kept it all in his head. My mother does, too, and my sisters.” He could have added Mamzelle Marie’s name to that list. “It’s just things everyone knows.”

“Him havin’ no heirs, nor no family, nor nuthin’, I’m tryin’ to get that money released to the police force to pay for a search for those folks what disappeared, but it’s hard
goin’. That Loudermilk, Roarke’s lawyer, filed a plea at the arraignment to have the whole case throwed out.”

“Thrown out?” Hannibal set down his cup, disbelief scraping in his voice. “I know I was never cut out for a lawyer, but could you explain that piece of legal reasoning to me?”

“And does he have an explanation for why he was chopping a hole in the bottom of that keelboat?” demanded January. “Letting in a little fresh air? He didn’t know those three people were sodden-drunk on opium in the hold? It never occurred to him that if they drowned he’d get off without a stitch of evidence against him, thank you very much? Or doesn’t he think anyone else noticed?”

“Well now, Maestro, that’s another matter.” Shaw spit again on the bricks, and scratched absentmindedly. “Fact is, Roarke’s claimin’ he ran down to check on those poor unfortunates he was carryin’ out of the town for their own good, when you came crashin’ down into the hold, grabbed the ax, and started hackin’ through the floor of the boat. When he tried to stop you, you attacked him with a knife.”

Hannibal let out a yelp of laughter, instantly stifled behind his hand, “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.
There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark but he’s an arrant knave!”

“Shut up,” said January, cold and soft, and returned his eyes to Shaw. He kept his words level, almost conversational. “And what does Chief Tremouille say about this version of events?”

“Not anythin’ yet. ’Ceptin’ that the Chief called me on the carpet for lettin’ you have a weapon, which is a clear violation of the city’s code. Roarke’s countersuin’ you—and the City Guards—and havin’ me prosecuted personally for conspiracy to cause a slave uprisin’.”

For a moment January could only sit, openmouthed
with disbelief, while Shaw scratched under his shirt again. “Tremouille,” the policeman added, “is not real pleased.” The man’s long, almost lipless mouth was relaxed as if he spoke of the antics of somebody else’s rogue horse, but January could see the queer chilly light that burned far back in the gray eyes. “Whatever Tremouille thinks about Roarke’s storytellin’ abilities, the fact remains that when I came in it was to see
you
chargin’
him
with a knife, and the ax stuck in the wall. And there’s also the fact that we don’t know the names of most of the victims—and those whose names we do know of course Roarke’s claimin’ he couldn’t tell from Adam’s off-ox and they was never within a thousand yards of the Jolly Boatman or St. Gertrude’s Clinic or Mr. Liam Roarke, so there. We don’t have one flyspeck of evidence of any specific person bein’ there.”

Slow flame started in January’s belly. “What about the people on the boat?”

Shaw reached thoughtfully down to the table, to turn the blue porcelain bowl of jambalaya a quarter-turn. “They say they’d rather not testify.”

The flame condensed to a core, cold now, like a fist of lead under his breastbone. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” The gray eyes met his. Under the water-colored mildness he saw the distant, steely glint of anger to match his own. “I just come from seein’ ’em. There’s a good deal of feelin’ down along the levee—some was even talkin’ of marchin’ on the Cabildo an’ organizin’ a jail delivery. Not that Mr. Loudermilk had anything to do with that. He’s a Christian and he thought it’d be right Christian to buy all them filibusters free liquor. And I’m sure he had legitimate business earlier this afternoon up on Marais Street, where the Grilles live.… The Grilles bein’ the folk that can’t remember now whether they were
ever on that keelboat or not. Edouard and his brother, Robert, and their sister, Manon. A gal sellin’ berries off’n a tray saw him, she thinks.”

“And have you,” asked January, surprised a little at the cold conversational tone of his voice, “told Monsieur Tremouille about this yet?”

“No.” Shaw turned the bowl another quarter-turn. “No need for the Chief to know about it ’fore the trial. If there’s a trial.” He shrugged. “Seems Roarke’s feelin’ poorly, with all the to-do last night. I’m thinkin’ it might so be he needs to be bled.”

You could have dropped a picayune bit into the silence, thought January, and heard the splash it made in Paris. The stillness went on, as much of the heart as of the air. He was aware of Hannibal’s eyebrows going up, considering the idea; of the anger still alive in his breast, but cold now, like poison; of Shaw watching him beneath those straight colorless lashes, not speculative now, but only waiting.

Waiting for what he would say.

He didn’t know what he was going to say until the words came out. “I can’t.”

Shaw neither replied nor moved.

The words stuck in his throat, as if he were trying to dislodge individual lumps of broken stone with every syllable.

“I may make my living as a piano player, but I did take an oath. And that oath says, ‘Do no harm.’ I can’t.…” He paused, oddly aware of his own breath in his lungs: Gabriel and Zizi-Marie going to help the Perrets pack; the woman Nanié searching through the charity ward, night after night. Someone saying,
They just bought their freedom
.

Cora walking away into the darkness of Rue de l’Hôpital.

The weather was cooling; by the feel of the evening air there would be frost that night. Fever season was done. People would be coming back to town.

And there would be holes, in the fabric of people’s lives.

There were men and women, confused, terrified, somewhere in the frontier territories of Missouri or the west of Georgia, begging and insisting they were free to men who did not speak their language, whose reply to their clumsy pleas would be a laugh and a blow. Men and women who were going to spend the rest of their lives at backbreaking agricultural work.
The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate.… I don’t go up there no more
. Men and women who were going to die of pneumonia and malnutrition and exhaustion in thin-walled shacks like the one in which he’d slept at Spanish Bayou less than a week ago.

He closed his eyes.

Do no harm
.

The anger pounded in his head like the hammer of a migraine. “I can’t.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

Get Soublet
.

He closed his mouth hard on the words.
If you won’t do it, don’t tell him who will
. “Is Roarke really poorly?”

Shaw nodded. “Happens, in jail. Likely it’s the food. I’ll find someone.”

For some reason January remembered Mamzelle Marie, passing through the big downstairs room of the Cabildo, cloak flickering like a conjure of invisibility around her. Her eyes touching his.

She’d set the man up for this. Without knowing how he knew, he knew.

He rested his forehead on his fist, and listened to Shaw’s footfalls, barely audible, retreat across the yard and blend with the waking noises of the street.

Only one case of the cholera was brought into Charity Hospital that night. Soublet did not appear at all, and neither Emil Barnard nor Mamzelle Marie came in, nor were they needed. There was frost on the ground in the morning. At six, January made his way to St. Anthony’s Chapel, to make his confession and hear early Mass. He prayed for guidance, and for Rose Vitrac’s safety, wherever she was. When he came out the air was crisp, stinking of the usual city stink of sewage but unfouled by the smudges of the plague fires. Carriages jingled by, coachmen saluting with their whips to friends on the banquette, men and women within nodding or touching their hats. A child dodged around him, clutching her doll. Street-vendors cried gingerbread and umbrellas and chairs to mend.

The following Sunday, after Mass, he met Shaw by chance in the Place d’Armes. The policeman informed him laconically that Dr. Soublet had been called to the Cabildo. After being bled eight times in two days and dosed with “heroic” quantities of salts of mercury and turpentine, Liam Roarke had died in his cell.

Of those men and women who had been stolen from their homes, or dragged off the banquettes on their way to
their friends’ houses or to doctors’ late in the night, nothing further was ever heard.

Through October and November, and on into the fogs and bonfires of Christmastime, Abishag Shaw made inquiries, patiently writing to slave dealers in Natchez, in St. Louis, in Jackson, none of whom, of course, knew anything about the Perrets, Robois Roque, or any of the other dozen or half-dozen or score or however many it had been. Hog-Nose Billy, when he confessed to kidnapping people off the street as a sideline during Hèlier’s illness, didn’t know how many it was, as he’d been more or less drunk half the time. (
It serves me right
, Hèlier had said, giggling, gesturing around him at the opium-dazed patients of Soublet’s clinic—and indeed, thought January, it did.) Nor had the drunken Dr. Furness any better idea. “Hell, we didn’t keep track or nuthin’,” he said, when Shaw and January spoke to him in his jail cell. “Bring ’em in and get ’em out, that was Liam’s way, and didn’t we just have our hands full keepin’ ’em from gettin’ sick while they was there. I do recall as we lost two or three.” And he shrugged.