Frog Music (34 page)

She swigs a palmful of water from the tap.
I was out of my right mind yesterday
, she rehearses.
I was in such a state of hysteria when I spoke to Mr. Cartwright and Mr. Bohen, I’m afraid I plucked two names out of the air. There’s been some bad blood between myself and my compatriots Messieurs Deneve and Girard …
Blanche shudders. Will she have to tell the court about her lost baby to explain the bad blood? But the story reflects poorly on Blanche, as if she’s the kind of crib girl who, cockeyed with laudanum, squats in an alley to give birth and then staggers away, so addled that she doesn’t know dream from real …

No, she must keep silent about P’tit, hold him in her mind like a candle on the verge of being snuffed out. His life—
if
he’s alive, Blanche reminds herself,
if
she read Ernest’s tone right,
if
this is not some elaborate trick—his life may be in her hands as much as it was when she snatched him out of the weeklies room on Folsom Street less than a month ago.

I admit I bore a grudge against Monsieur Deneve
, she practices.
I realize now that he could have had no way of knowing that the deceased—that Jenny and I were in San Miguel Station. Unbeknownst to me, he had already gone abroad, besides. I wish to express my deepest regret for having accused him falsely
. The formal lines ring hollow. If Blanche is going to do this—betray Jenny for the merest possibility of seeing P’tit—then she should at least deliver a convincing performance.

Ernest ought to have told her exactly what to say when he barked out his orders in the empty apartment yesterday, should have set her lines to learn by heart. It occurs to Blanche now, bending over the sink, that perhaps he’s expecting her to make up some brilliant new theory that’ll send the detectives off in another direction. Should she mention the stolen bicycle and cast aspersions on the McNamaras? Or posit a madman roaming through the City’s hinterlands? Blanche would be more than willing if only she could think of a halfway plausible story.

She needs the toilet again. Runs for it.

Elbows on her knees, Blanche feels a cold worm of doubt.
You’ll never see the kid again
, Ernest threatened yesterday, and somehow she’s puffed that up into a promise that if she does this right, she’ll get P’tit back. What, does she really believe that Ernest, having tried to kill Blanche and ended up blowing Jenny to pieces, will read the report on the inquest in this evening’s papers and decide that Blanche is a good girl after all? Will he wander Chinatown with P’tit on his fashionable hip, carrying a stack of clean diapers, until he finds her and hands her baby over?

It’s flimflam, the notion that she’s entered into some kind of unspoken contract with a murderer! Ernest has more than a few reasons to hate Blanche, and she has no basis for trusting him. What if she goes into that courtroom now, swears on the Good Book and clears Arthur’s name, walks out onto Dupont Street—and never hears from either of the men again? Ernest will leave town tonight, she guesses. Blanche will have betrayed her friend’s cause for nothing. And she’ll never know what’s become of her baby. Blanche was aware of all this already, but she’s been trying not to think about it. Whatever she tells the coroner, whichever way she twists, one thing’s pretty much sure: she’s lost P’tit.

Weak-legged, Blanche emerges from the lavatory. She reels in the sunlight as she walks out of the undertaker’s.
City Health Officer Orders Fumigation of Every Building in Chinatown
, a headline thunders.

Yeah, yeah
, she remembers Jenny kidding,
when the next quake comes they’ll probably blame that on the Chinese too
.

A busker with a sweat-soaked shirt and the staring eyes of the blind is chirping away merrily, accompanying himself on two pairs of bones:

Some folks get gray hairs
,

Some folks do, some folks do
;

Brooding o’er their cares—

But that’s not me nor you
.

Jenny would have stopped to listen to him, swapped a verse or two. Jenny would have told Ernest where he could shove his threats. Jenny was sometimes blue, maybe, but never scared.

And it’s as if the ripples have cleared from Blanche’s mind. She sees that she has nothing to gain by lying. No matter what she says in court today, no matter how eloquently she blames the McNamaras or some mysterious hoodlum, Ernest is not going to hand P’tit back to her. It’s such an obvious bluff, a halfwit could have seen through it. In all likelihood, her baby’s stashed someplace worse than Folsom Street, all paid up. Or floating in a sewage tank.

Blanche presses her hand over her mouth, hard.

What do you reckon, Jenny? Should I march in there and tell the truth, never mind the consequences?

Then her mind changes back again, with a sickening lurch of gears. If there’s the slimmest chance … Whether this works or not, in years to come Blanche has to be able to tell herself that she tried, bet everything, for P’tit’s sake. This is what mothers do for their babies: they bite their tongues and let the world ride them into the ground. So Blanche is going to walk back into that inquest and make a liar of herself for the merest hope in hell that P’tit will be spared—just as she was so strangely spared two nights ago, when the bullets whizzed over her head instead of through it.

“Miss Beunon!”

She spins around.

It’s Cartwright, lifting his blue glasses to wipe his shiny nose. “Didn’t you hear them call your name? Better hustle before Swan finds you in contempt.”

She doesn’t know what that means but it sounds bad.
Putain
, all this fretting over what to say, and she may miss her chance to say anything!

Cartwright trots along beside her, into the building. “Did you hear Girard was arrested?”

Blanche wheels around, stares at him.

“Last night,” he adds.

She hurries on in confusion, heels clickety-clacking down the corridor.

This changes everything. If Ernest is in jail being interrogated right this minute, then surely the detectives will crack the truth out of him? They’ll find some fragment of evidence that he went out to San Miguel Station on Thursday and shot Jenny. In which case, this inquest is Blanche’s best—her only—chance to speak up loud and clear, with the world listening, and nail the sons of bitches.

“Miss Beunon, I presume?” asks Swan sourly as she scuttles up the aisle formed by the crowd.

Blanche is too breathless to speak, almost. And suddenly wonders if she’s committing a crime by not using her paper name. (That equestrienne, Adèle Beunon, whose idea of danger was slipping off a horse—how far away she seems to Blanche, how ignorant.)

She steps up on the little platform. From this position she can see the crowd so much better. She slaps her hand on the Bible and says “I do” almost before the clerk has finished the question. Like a wedding, she thinks. Then:
Concentrate
. No more faltering. Arthur’s left town and Ernest is locked up. The tide of power has turned.

“How long have you known the deceased?”

“A month. Not quite,” Blanche admits. That sounds bad, somehow, shallow.

“At what point did you become aware that she was a female like yourself?”

A female, but not like myself
, Blanche corrects him in her head. “I was never under that misapprehension,” she says coldly. “When the occasional fool read her wrong at twenty yards, that wasn’t Jenny’s lookout, was it? If somebody takes me for the queen of England, am I to be had up for impersonation?”

Gales of laughter—and Blanche wasn’t even trying to be entertaining.

Swan casts a repressive look in all directions, like a circling whip. “Was it you or she who suggested meeting at San Miguel Station on Tuesday last?”

“No, but—” The story’s racing too far ahead, and Blanche has to get a grip on it. “I’d left Arthur, you see, and he was eaten up with spite—”

“This would be Arthur Deneve?” Swan fingers his notes. “Your, your
mac
, I believe your compatriots say?”

“My lover,” she says flatly. But why is she calling Arthur that, Arthur who’s destroyed everything?
Lover?
Blanche could laugh, she could puke with the absurdity of it all. At the very moment when she stands up to testify against him and Ernest, she’s invoking love?

“When did the connection end?”

She blinks at Swan. “Ah, a week—ten days ago, perhaps—” How to pick one moment and say that’s when love ended, or when it was found to never have been there at all? “He formed a vicious grudge against Jenny.”
Against me, really
, she wants to say. Because it was Blanche who shamed him by refusing to service the American he brought home, and before that, because she wouldn’t go near him during his smallpox, and before that, because she carried the baby home from Folsom Street, and because, because—there’s always another layer to the onion. But saying any of that will lead to Blanche having to explain her conviction that it was her, not Jenny, the gun was aimed at, and that strikes her as an unnecessary complication for a jury whose members are looking more than a little bewildered already.

“A grudge of what nature?”

“He—” Blanche fumbles for words. How to simplify enough that the jurors get the main point, which is that Arthur’s the murderer? “He was furious with Jenny because—I was going about with her a bit this summer, and he thought it was she who put it into my head to break with him.”

“Was it?”

“No! I left him because—I couldn’t bring myself to—” No, Blanche mustn’t tell the story of the
micheton
Arthur and Ernest brought back to the apartment, because that’ll just fix her in every listener’s mind as a harlot.

“Miss Beunon?” Wearily.

“He took my baby!” It comes out of her in a wail.

“There’s no reference here to any baby,” says Swan, flicking through his notes.

“Our little boy, one year old,” Blanche adds. Does she sound sad enough? Her sorrow is real, Christ knows, but it’s hard to display it on demand. “He—Arthur and Ernest, they stole him away from me.”

“This would be …” The coroner scans the pages. “Ernest Girard. Where is this child now?”

“I don’t—” Her voice is shaking too much for her to finish.

Swan asks no more. Makes a note.

Blanche closes her eyes. If P’tit is dead already, then she’s doing the right thing by denouncing the bastards who did it. And if by any chance he isn’t—

She sees herself visiting Ernest in jail tonight and crisply demanding to know her child’s whereabouts. If P’tit’s alive, why wouldn’t Ernest give him back to her at this point? She might even be able to make him fork over some of her stolen money. Anything’s possible, now Ernest’s under lock and key.

So she spills out more and more, eager to make the jury understand before Swan can interrupt her. “The two men stayed in my apartment—the building I owned, the whole building, number eight fifteen Sacramento Street—and then, I learned just yesterday that they sold it out from under me for eighteen hundred dollars. Arthur stole two or three hundred more in cash from me besides that, and took it all away overseas. Left me with only the clothes I have on.” Does all this sound too mercenary? “But my child,” she cries, “all that matters is—”

Swan interrupts with a question. “Did this Deneve make actual threats against the deceased?”

Blanche hesitates. “Yes.” Ernest did, on Waverly Place, and he must have had Arthur’s approval, because Arthur was the master in that pair. “He and Girard … They tried to have Jenny arrested.” That’s a mistake; why bring up Jenny’s criminal record? Hurry on. “They said they’d fix her, throw vitriol in her face.” Blanche is embellishing, but only a little. “Oh, and another time, I forgot to say, Arthur begged me to return to him, he went down on his knees—” If she’s going to beef this up she might as well make it a good full-blooded scene, and after all, she’s not lying, exactly, just filling in the gaps, the times when she wasn’t there. For all Arthur’s bravado, there must have been moments when the scarred man wept for the loss of Blanche, mustn’t there? “And Ernest cried out, ‘Don’t fret, Arthur, I’ll avenge you, I’ll blow out the brains of these two infernal whores!’”

That last expression raises a satisfied hiss from the crowd.

There. It’s done. Blanche takes a long breath.

Swan’s expression is dubious.

Blanche is barely paying attention as he takes her through the events at San Miguel Station (which sound so petty—rides and meals, as if she and Jenny were on a pleasure jaunt to a seaside resort). But when he asks about the black eyes, she blinks. “Yes, Jenny fell off a horse against a tree.” Plausible? But if you fell off a horse, surely what you’d hit would be the ground. “I mean, she rode smack into a low-hanging branch, and then she fell down,” Blanche adds.
Chut
, don’t overcomplicate it.

“Was she drunk?” asks Swan.

Blanche doesn’t want the jurymen to think of Jenny as a no-account dipso, because then they won’t care who killed her, but she must make the accident credible. “She … had some taken.”

“Mr. McNamara has testified that Bonnet drank all Thursday evening,” says Swan, “and that you prevented her from going back to the City.”

“I reasoned with her,” Blanche corrects him, “for her own safety.”
Safety?
Dead an hour later. Guilt turns Blanche’s tongue to stone in her mouth.

“Now, the deceased got into bed before you, yes?”

Blanche nods. “I sat—I was sitting on the edge.”

“What were her last words?”

She won’t cry, not here in front of all these gaping strangers. As if a person’s last words matter so much more than all the others. “She didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

Qu’est-ce
, that’s all Blanche remembers hearing after the gunfire, which could have been the start of
Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?
or
Qu’est-ce qui m’est arrivé?
But maybe it was an English word after all, it occurs to her now, that choking guttural, then a final hiss in the dark:
kiss
, is that what she heard? Could Jenny have been asking for a kiss before all the life spurted out of her? But Jenny had never asked Blanche for any favors—not a shirt, not a dollar, and certainly not a kiss.