Ran Away (6 page)

The narrow shoe with the mended heel had trodden deeply in the soft soil at the top of the ditch that separated the wall from the road. January leaped across and knelt again. ‘Here.’

Ayasha followed, skirts caught up like a schoolgirl.

‘Two-wheeled chaise.’ January studied the ruts and hoof prints where the edge of the roadway was soft. ‘Here, she’s jumped across the ditch and slipped.’

‘And here is your answer,’ added Ayasha. The mark of a man’s boot was dim, owing to the hardness of the roadbed. It was about four feet back from the rear hoof-print: where a man would stand to help a woman into the chaise. ‘Look,’ she added, pointing into the weedy ditch, ‘she’s left her lantern behind  . . .’

And indeed, half-submerged in the stagnant brown water, January found a small brass candle-lantern – untarnished – whose intricate latticework could only have come from the East. He turned it over, dripping, in his hands and pictured the scene in his mind’s eye: last night’s foggy darkness, the creak of harness buckles as the chaise came down the narrow road. The walls of the next house – grounds and garden, and the tops of trees – shut off the view toward the Étoile. An English phaeton passed across the end of the road where it debouched into the Rue St-Honoré, amid a great clattering of hooves and the cracking of the driver’s whip, and a moment later a slower coach, with a sprinkle of Sunday excursionists even in this raw autumn weather, trundled along in the same direction.

RAN AWAY. Reward
.

‘And so ends the tale.’ Satisfaction rang in Ayasha’s voice. ‘She left with a man.’

‘If she was merely a discontented wife –’ January straightened up – ‘deceiving a jealous shopkeeper, that would be one thing. But if Hüseyin Pasha pursues her – as he will, if she is carrying his only son – it will go badly for her if she’s caught. And worse,’ he added, ‘if this enemy of his – this Sabid – is the one who finds her. I doubt the Lady Jamilla will want to leave the matter at that.’

FOUR

T
rue to its heritage – for decades its name had been synonymous with libertinage in Paris – the Palais Royale on a Sunday night was lit up like a fairground and twice as crowded. Light from thousands of lamps filled the elegant colonnade that surrounded its enormous central garden, where shoppers for lingerie, silver, watches and gloves swirled past the tables of a myriad of cafés. From the stairways that led up to the upper chambers – gambling rooms, naughty theaters, expensive bordellos – dark-clothed gentlemen ascended and descended, like the angels in Jacob’s dream, impervious to the confusion on the lower level through which they passed. In the colonnade clerks, journalists, students, and police spies jostled shoulders with artists, models, actresses from the Comedie, and the artisans whose skills had for centuries made Paris famous. Little grisettes and hat makers hung on each other’s arms and chattered like bright-hued birds; young journeymen gaped at the prostitutes who beckoned from the bare gardens. Music drifted from doorways – January could sometimes identify a particular trick of playing: he’d accompanied Jeannot Charbonnière at enough balls to recognize at once the erratic lilt of his flute, had only yesterday morning at ballet rehearsal worked his piano around the lively fiddle of Fructidor Dumay.

His hand clasped in Ayasha’s, he nodded to friends and acquaintances at the cafés, stopped to exchange opinions while Ayasha greeted dressmakers, actresses, artists – ‘Benjamin, if your wife does not consent to pose for me I shall cut my throat – I promise you I will! – and throw myself into the Seine!’ Someone immediately proffered the painter a knife from somebody’s dinner, and the artist made a huge show of stabbing himself repeatedly with theatrical stage-blows, like Romeo on hashish, to wild applause from all sides.

Ayasha stood with arms folded and her nose in the air. ‘That is the best you can do, Carnot? I’ve seen better deaths at the pantomime!’

‘He lit himself on fire for
me
,’ added a flaxen-haired hat-maker, ‘only last Tuesday  . . .’

January left Ayasha to flirt outrageously with young M’sieu Carnot and his friends, and stepped into the gloom of the White Cat.

His eyes met those of Bourrèges behind the bar. The little hunchback made no further acknowledgement of acquaintance, but when, in time, January picked his way among the close-set tables to the back of the room, he found the cellar stairs unlocked.

The reek of pipe smoke and the murmur of voices rose to meet him as he descended the narrow twist of steps toward the dim blur of a few candles, bright against the utter blackness of the stair.

‘Soon, we’re not going to be able to feed our families at all,’ a man’s voice was saying, urgent against the background mutter. ‘Does the King care? No more than his fat brother did.’

‘We need more than talk, Maurice,’ said someone else. ‘Votes are what we need! And those fat Ducs and Marquises would sooner sell their mothers than open up the Chamber of Deputies to anyone who isn’t their brother or their cousin.’

‘We must have education—’

‘It’s useless to talk of education if it is only for men!’ chimed in a thin, dark young man in a corner. ‘The whole system must be reformed! Women, too, must be educated—’

‘Education won’t do us a damn bit of good until we have the vote!’

‘The vote won’t get us a fart in hell until the king makes it possible for wheat to be brought into Paris at a cost that poor men can afford to pay!’

Heads turned as January appeared in the dark of the doorway. Someone started to shove a stack of pamphlets out of sight behind a bench, then recognized him – by his height more than anything else, the only thing discernible in the tobacco fog. The speaker at the center table, a tall fair man like a denatured Viking, nodded a greeting and immediately went back to his harangue on the price of potatoes. After a short pause to let his own eyes grow accustomed, January saw the man he sought at a table near the stairs. Round-faced, smooth-haired, and genially epicene, he seemed as out of place among the working men and journalists around him as a
pêche glacée
in a soup kitchen. The rough shirt and short corduroy jacket that hugged those plump shoulders had more the air of a disguise than of garments in which actual work had ever been done.

January had helped break in that jacket when it was new, lest those who habitually gathered at the White Cat to defy the royal statutes against discussing politics should mistake its wearer for a police spy, and an incompetent one at that.

‘Benjamin!’ Daniel ben-Gideon held up one moist, plump hand to shake. Though suitably dirty, it was soft as a maiden aunt’s.

‘You’re never going to convince anyone you’re poor until you grow some calluses.’ January clasped the ladylike fingers in greeting. ‘And lose some weight.’

‘My dear Benjamin, not a soul in this room – saving your excellent self – has ever spared me so much as a glance from the speaker, the newspapers –’ the plump man gestured to the enormous pile of journals and pamphlets heaped on the table before him – ‘and whoever it is he’s arguing with. I could come in here in a court coat and knee breeches and no one would look up. Besides –’ ben-Gideon moved his chair aside as January leaned closer to hear over the sudden flurry of shouting around the speaker – ‘I tell anyone who asks the truth: I am the proverbial Rich Man’s Son. My heart has been captured by the writings of M’sieu le duc de St-Simon, and my father has hired detectives to keep me away from the cause of the working man.’

‘That’s what you call the truth?’

‘Well, it’s true that I am a rich man’s son, anyway. Shall we go upstairs? Once Maurice gets started on internal tariffs not a great deal else gets “discussed”.’

They reascended, bought a bottle of wine from Bourrèges, and settled in the darkest and least noisy corner of the White Cat. It was marginally less black than the cellar – mostly owing to the lamps out in the colonnade – and the air marginally more breathable, and, January reflected, if the place got raided by the secret police there was a far better chance of getting out. Bourrèges paid a substantial bribe to the local Prefect of Police every week to make sure that the insurgents of the ‘Political Reading Club’ could talk sedition in his cellar in peace, but with increasing unrest throughout the city, this was no real guarantee.

‘I’m looking for a girl,’ said January.

‘In the Palais Royale? Benjamin, I’m shocked.’

January mimed boxing his companion’s ears – something that would have gotten him arrested in his home city of New Orleans, one reason that he had no intention of ever returning to New Orleans again as long as he lived, secret police or no secret police. ‘If a Jewess from the East – her family comes from Cairo, I gather – were to find herself in need of help in Paris, where would she go?’

‘To her family,’ replied ben-Gideon promptly.

‘I’m not sure she has one in Paris.’

‘Benjamin, my mother spends eleven and a half hours out of twenty-four going from sister to sister, from aunt to aunt, from the houses of her sisters-in-law and second-cousins to the grandparents of my father’s old business-partners, lugging my sisters along with her, and what do you think they all talk about? Family.’ Ben-Gideon ticked off subjects with his fingers. ‘Who’s marrying whom. Who shouldn’t have married whom and why not. Who’s expecting a child and who isn’t bringing their children up properly.
Oh, was she the one who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-Yakov and is now operating that import business in Prague?  . . .  No, no, that was the OTHER Cousin Rachel who married Avram ben-Hurri ben-Moishe ben-CHAIM and THEY’RE in Warsaw, where THEIR son is a rabbi
 . . .  Every rabbi from Portugal to Persia will tell you that women’s minds are incapable of the concentration required for study of the Torah, yet I guarantee you that not a single word of this lore is forgotten. You can drop any Jew over the age of seven naked in the dark out of a balloon anywhere in Europe, and he or she will locate family in time for breakfast. Who is this girl you’re looking for?’

‘Her name is Shamira,’ said January. Any one of his Aunties back on Bellefleur Plantation, for their part, could tell him where their brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, former husbands and parents and parents of former husbands, had been sold to, and no traveler came up or down the river but that his valet and groom made their way out to the quarters with word from Cousin Rasmus in Ascension Parish or Aunt Felice in Mobile. ‘Her family hails from Cairo, but her father had business connections with Constantinople. I think they dealt in wheat.’

Shamira had spoken little of her family, Ra’eesa had said. Certainly, she had never given her father’s name, out of shame at what had become of his daughter.

‘Her father died last year, and Shamira went into the household of Hüseyin Pasha—’

Ben-Gideon’s brown eyes opened wide at the mention of the Plenipotentiary’s First Deputy.

‘—and that is
not
for mention abroad. The girl has fled his household. If she’s retaken, I don’t believe the King will stop the Pasha from taking fairly serious revenge.’

‘And for whom are you working?’ Ben-Gideon’s round face – smeared artistically with a little lampblack, to counterfeit, in the low light, the stubble that would be out of the question in his daytime incarnation in his father’s banking house – lost its childlike quality behind a watchful mask.

‘The girl herself.’

The black eyebrows quirked in polite disbelief. ‘She hired you to find her after running away? What an original approach to escape.’

In few words, January outlined the attempt at poisoning and the circumstances of the girl’s flight. ‘It’s hard to see how the girl could have genuinely fled with a lover,’ he concluded. ‘She hasn’t been out of the grounds. According to the Lady Jamilla, the Pasha’s first wife, the concubines are permitted outside only in the garden under a guard of eunuchs. She has neither seen nor spoken to anyone not of the household since her arrival.’

‘Yet the escape sounds extremely well planned.’

‘Exactly. So it must either have been set up by someone in her family, or someone whom she
thinks
is in her family. And there lives in Paris an enemy of Hüseyin Pasha’s, a man named Sabid al-Muzaffar, whom Hüseyin caused to be exiled. I – and the Lady Jamilla – would like to satisfy ourselves that the girl is in fact out of harm’s way before the Pasha himself returns on Friday. But I have no intention of informing anyone of the girl’s whereabouts until I’ve spoken with the girl herself.’

Ben-Gideon considered the matter, turning the cheap pottery wine-cup in his fingers. Snatches of song from the music hall next door came through the wall. Men passed among the crowded tables, and now and then someone would emerge from the cellar and glance watchfully around before gliding out the rear door into the grimy little yard, and so away over the wall in the direction of the Halles. Raised on accounts of the
liberté, egalité
, and
fraternité
won by France, January had been vexed – but not surprised – to find on his arrival that far from being liberated, the country was once more under the control of a King and of nobles who appeared to have learned nothing from the events of 1789.

And King or no King,
fraternité
or no
fraternité
, nobody in France was any more likely than they were in the United States to hire a black man to come anywhere near them with a scalpel.

But it was something at least to be able to smoke a cigar in public, or carry a knife in his boot if he happened to be passing through an unwholesome part of town. The ferocious censorship clamped by the King on newspapers and journals was no worse than the systematic attempts of the American whites to prevent blacks from learning to read. At least here, the whites could get a taste of what it was like – those that cared, and a great many simply didn’t. And there were always places like
La Chatte Blanche
where banned journals and seditious pamphlets could be read and talked about with men – and a few women – who still cherished the liberties of which neither Napoleon nor the present King had approved.