The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  This barroom, together with the furnished rooms above it, was what was known as the Hamburg Mill to the uninitiated. This designation was correct only insofar as the barroom and the other rooms were part of the infamous Mill.

  At about the same moment those in the little house on Washington Avenue were gathered lovingly and compassionately together holding their wake at the bed of the deceased Celestine, a man in his middle years sat at one of the small tables in the grand salon of the Hamburg Mill. Quietly and without showing any distress, this man had just finished bandaging a significant wound on his foot. Now he supported himself on the table with his left arm, propping his cheek on his palm. His face, framed by pitch-black hair, had been turned into a veritable marble bust by the glare of a camphene lamp, which set his skin against the darkness of his hair and beard, as well as his large, wide-open eyes. He had taken off his coat and vest, even untied and put aside his light cravat. His long but full neck, as well as his hairy chest, were just as pale as his face. He was starting to get up to light a cigar when he heard someone mounting the hidden staircase. He let the hand holding the cigar sink and called out in a shrill tone, “Who’s there?”

  “Death and Merlina!” replied an anxious voice, coming from a man of middling height who was entering the salon.

  “Hell and the devil, Gabor! Death or Merlina! If you say it wrong once more, I’ll break your neck!”

  “Calm down, Lajos, I tell you, it will still do,” the new arrival responded shyly.

  “Calm, Gabor? One does not get disturbed by such a dog—I just tell you that so you will be prepared if Merlina continues to permit you to visit us.”

  “How so, Lajos? Did you tell her stories about me?”

  “Shut up, Gabor!”

  “Sure, sure, Lajos—give me the card.”

  “You don’t need one.”

  “Why not, Lajos?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Gabor took a couple steps back and bowed almost to the floor.

  Merlina, who always entered the salon to present the card after the password had been given, had made her appearance. Today, as always, she wore her long, waistless dress of blinding white, and she had combed her long, black, woolly hair straight back, set in the middle with a golden claw. Her solid, projecting forehead lay rumbling like that of an irked tiger-cat above her eyes, and she displayed what Lajos, in his demonic obsession, had called her “nice nasty stare.” Agitation had colored her pure cinnamon skin dark violet, a change of coloration apparent on her forehead, her whole neck, and all the way down to her loose breasts. Her lurking eyes spat like a Roman candle, sending sparks and stars in every direction. Despite the animalistic formation of her face, this female zambo negresse could still be called beautiful. It is not just symmetry of members, or pure harmony of facial features, but also the violent bestiality of a predator which is beautiful—even if only animalistically beautiful, or devilishly beautiful! Even cold, emotionless Lajos’s feet trembled when she settled on his lap to stroke his luxuriant forest of hair away from his face. Lajos was the only one whose wishes and orders she followed. She had become the custodian of his most secret thoughts. No plan was carried out without him, no crime set in motion—in short, he was the factotum of the Hamburg Mill. And how Merlina guarded herself in his presence! She may have sat on his lap, combed and stroked his hair, but at the least sign of flirtation, she sprang up and with one jump was out of the salon and shut up in her room. She knew that if Lajos ever won favors from her, he would leave her, and in doing so he would not hesitate to stick a dagger in the heart where he had sought comfort only moments before.

  She turned to Gabor, speaking in French, bearing him down with her tiger-eyes.

  “Sir, you will have no card today, for you have become redundant to the mill. We cannot trust you—you are ready enough to join every undertaking, but you are too cowardly to carry it out, and you abandon your friends when you should protect them or at least lend them a hand. Don’t let us see you in the mill again, and beware of spying or betraying us.”

  “Gabor will not do that,” Lajos joined in, “he knows I will kill him—Death or Merlina!”

  At these words, Gabor trembled like an ash leaf.

  Lajos approached nearer to him, turned up one leg of his trousers to the knee, and said sarcastically as he pulled back a bandage and displayed a large burn: “There, you dog, look! I got that from the fire on Julia Street because you ran away even before the fire hoses got there. Look here, dog! I had to fend for myself, and I could have died in the flames. ‘Death or Merlina!’ Do you know the motto? Do you understand its meaning? Merlina for valor and unshrinking action—and death? Death for the dogs who are unfaithful to their masters. Now, unfaithful dog, do you understand the motto now?”

  “You cannot kill me, Lajos—such a poor man who doesn’t even know where he will rest his head come evening—I will certainly follow your lead in the future and be a good little doggy,” Gabor groveled and pleaded, wishing he were anywhere else but here.

  “Out of the mill, dog!” Lajos thundered at him with a look that caused the shocked man to flee.

  As Gabor hurtled down the stairs, he jostled past an old man coming up who seemed not to notice in his own haste.

  Lajos’s shrill voice sounded from the salon: “Who’s there?”

  “Death or Merlina!” the new arrival panted as he went to Merlina and Lajos, pressing Lajos’s hand.

  “Wasn’t that Gabor running away? Did he have something pressing to do?”

  “There was something he should have done,” Lajos responded, “and the future will tell us whether we will ever have anything to do with him again.”

  “If he plays informant against us …” Merlina said, seating herself at the large round table with the marble top.

  “How so?” the new arrival asked. “Did Gabor pull some sort of trick? I would hardly be surprised. I never really trusted the boy.”

  “He didn’t pull any tricks,” Lajos responded, “and that’s why we’ve dumped him. But the dog did do me a bad turn.”

  “What did he do?” the other asked with concern.

  “He abandoned me at a fire.”

  “So you set a fire for nothing?”

  “No—Merlina has the money—but I got a bad leg out of this affair,” Lajos responded.

  “As you did that time before?” the other asked.

  “You mean like that one half a year ago, when I took the fifteen thousand dollars from the woman with the big picture in her arms? Well, that was my fault then. That stupid old wound still hurts as much as the one I got today, especially when the weather changes.”

  “You’re a true bad-luck bird, selected by heaven to pour out your blood for a sinful humanity, poor, poor lamb of God! But the Lord shall bestow grace on His children when the hour of accounting arrives, and you, Lajos, will earn at least the crown of the seraphim. Two burns, one on each leg, and a monstrous scar on your cheek—ha, ha, first-rate marks of Cain—Cain, Cain! Lajos, Lajos! ‘Where is your brother Abel? The blood of thy smitten brother cries unto me for vengeance!’ Ha, ha, ha!”

  “Cain? Yes! As you like it—it doesn’t really matter whether one kills a brother or a usurious Jew,” Lajos responded in a tone of bitter coldness, lighting his cigar on one of the camphene lamps, lifting the cylinder with a sure hand.

  “Smoking makes the head heavy and stimulates sin,” the new arrival remarked.

  “You are wrong, abbé—I think easier and quicker with a cigar in my mouth. On top of that, it is something you can put between the teeth to work off your rage when this dog of a world drives you mad and there are no human victims to be had. And if smoking stimulates one to sin, then please acquaint me with this sin, abbé. If it is a sin that pleases me, I will never again be without a cigar in my mouth, save while I am committing that sin.”

  “Now Lajos, you are already well practiced with this fine sin. By St. Anthony of Padua, what splendid sarcasm! Ha! Ha! Lajos, it is a shame that y
ou cannot love!” the abbé proclaimed. By now my lady readers have surely already recognized Monsieur Dubreuil.

  “Do you mean that, abbé?” Lajos asked harshly, as if it irritated him that the abbé would launch such a hypothesis in Merlina’s presence.

  “I wash my hands clean of the blood my disciple has spilled,” Dubreuil responded in an arrogant tone to Lajos, who figured the abbé had beaten him this time.

  “You are in good form today, abbé,” Lajos commented to Dubreuil indifferently.

  “I have no cause to be so today—everything is going wrong—Death or Merlina!”

  “Death or Merlina,” Merlina called out to the abbé as she leafed through a valise, appearing to do accounts.

  The motto also found an echo with Lajos.

  He then asked the abbé: “Did you suffer a setback with Mistress Evans’s beautiful daughter?”

  “There can be no setback yet, since I have not even tried my luck.”

  “If you are able to bring the girl down, Merlina will pay you …”

  “How much?” the abbé interrupted, looking rakishly at Merlina.

  “How much, abbé? What entitles you to ask how much? As for me, with what?”

  “Well then, with what?”

  “With nothing!” Merlina responded curtly, rising from her chair, “When sin has its own reward, it would be silly to give further rewards. But you seem to be avoiding your obligation, abbé—Death or Merlina!—what is your plan?”

  “Lady Merlina—until now I have done what was within my powers. In a few weeks you will be able to claim the result for the Hamburg Mill fund,” Dubreuil responded.

  “You are certain that the old Scotswoman will grant you that much money following her daughter’s death?”

  “I am absolutely certain, Lady Merlina—you know that she long ago promised me the sum of fifty thousand dollars for the supposed construction of a Catholic church among the heathens of Africa, restrained only by the thought that she would be doing an injustice to her daughter, her only child. She told me that Mistress Dudley might accuse her after her death if her fortunes are not as fine as she would have liked. So I have developed a very clever plan: I will bring that mooncalf saint Mistress Dudley Evans to the confessional in the church on Rue des Ramparts, at a time when no one else is there. I will paint the joys awaiting her in heaven with such splendors that she will be utterly charmed and fall into my arms of her own accord. Oh, it will be an easy matter, believe me, Lady Merlina; believe me, Lajos!”

  “I certainly envy your bringing the angel down, abbé, but the rest makes no sense,” the Hungarian remarked. “But to the devil with it!” he cried out. “Even though you’ve brought the angel down, she is far from being dead, abbé. You’ll not get away with a simpleminded allegory—where is ‘Death or Merlina’ in this matter?”

  “I will not permit you to scold me, Lajos. Listen a bit more: Once I have brought the angel down—which is not strictly necessary, but I am of course doing it because I want to enjoy something a little better than oysters and turtle soup for once—as I said, once I have made the moonstruck lamb into a fallen angel, I will strangle her with little trouble.”

  “Hell and the devil, abbé,” Lajos interrupted, “You are a greater Satan than I had thought you to be—but ask yourself whether this isn’t a bad idea. What point is there for you, and in the end for the mill as well, that you have strangled the angel? Her mother knows that you went with her to the church—on whom will suspicion fall other than yourself? And if you should see the sacristan, the custodian, or some other person? A church is not such a secure place. What do you think of that, abbé Dubreuil?”

  “You do me a great honor to place my bagatelle higher than Satan himself, and yet you do not have confidence that Satan can also get out of tight places. I tell you, Lajos, that you are a much greater Satan than I am. Otherwise you would not have commented so cunningly, since you certainly have an idea what has to be done to turn the tragedy of the House of Evans into a comedy for the Hamburg Mill.”

  “So tell me, get started and bring the matter to a conclusion—you can see, Lady Merlina and I are waiting in the greatest suspense,” Lajos pressed.

  Dubreuil continued: “As I said, I strangle her, leave her lying, and depart the church. When I do this, there is not a soul in the church—that will be between three and four o’clock. At about 4:30 a Negro comes into the church to clean it for the following Sunday. The Negro has hardly set foot in the church—I am of course biding my time in a place where no one can see me—and I enter right after the Negro. There is the Negro, the seduced and throttled Dudley Evans, and who other than the nigger could have done it? Or do you really believe that the slightest suspicion would ever fall on me? God forbid! Even if someone caught abbé Dubreuil committing the act, no one would believe it. Look, my Lady Merlina, look, my Satan Lajos—a priest has an advantage. The nigger will be lynched, of course—and even if he isn’t, how could a nigger dare even open his mouth against such a pious man? You see, you see! Then the result and lesson of the whole fable: the unhappy mother will grant me all my wishes in her first moments of sorrow over the dead lamb. She will transfer fifty thousand dollars, she will make over her entire fortune to charitable foundations for building churches for the heathens and camels in the Sahara—oh, it will all turn out for the best—they will need a mess of masses as well.”

  “I shall be on your heels from this day on, abbé, so that when you’ve really finished her off, you will not be tempted to give the mill too little of the treasures you have harvested—abbé Dubreuil, you know the motto?”

  “Death or Merlina!” he answered to the Hungarian’s weighty question.

  But to himself he said, “These louts are all ill at ease and distrusting. Oh well, I shall see.”

  Merlina’s face, which had been covered with purple at Gabor’s cowardice, had begun to recover its natural coloration, and she swung in lusty turns from the Hungarian’s death’s-head to the sickly pallor of the abbé. She lifted her long, waistless white dress to her thighs, as was her practice when she was in a good mood, jumping on Lajos and pressing her tiger’s forehead like a bacchante on his naked, hairy chest.

  The Hungarian at first took no heed of her, but a flame suddenly flashed in his eyes, only to vanish just as quickly behind his dark lashes.

  “Death or Merlina?” Merlina called out questioningly, rubbing her forehead on the Hungarian’s hairy chest.

  “Death or Merlina!” he replied, blowing a thick cloud from his cigar down Merlina’s back, so deep that it reappeared out the skirt of her dress. It looked for an instant as if she were floating on a cloud. A second, sharper puff made the illusion perfect.

  “Semele and Jupiter!” the abbé called out as he rubbed his nose on his coat-sleeve.

  “An unfortunate attempt to be witty, Dubreuil—you would have done better to say, ‘The devil and his cat’—to hell with Jupiter and Ma’m’sell Semele—Death or Merlina!”

  “Death or Merlina!” the abbé repeated, taking a respectable pose once more.

  Merlina parted from the Hungarian and resumed her seat at the large round table. The golden claw that held her long, woolly hair in the middle had been pushed aside by her embrace with the Hungarian and threatened to fall off.

  Lajos, who noticed this, approached Merlina and arranged her disturbed coiffeur, carefully placing the golden claw to run against the natural wave.

  Then he sat down opposite Merlina in an armchair and said to the abbé: “What did you mean, Monsieur Dubreuil, when you said that everything was going wrong for you—did you try some other infamy elsewhere?”

  “I will tell you right out, Lajos, if it pleases you and does not bore Lady Merlina—but first I want to collect laurels for my well-planned devilry concerning the moonstruck girl.”

  “Laurels, Dubreuil? Before you have earned them? If you had a less ugly nose, abbé, I would bite it off to compensate Lady Merlina for your premature pretensions.”

 
; “I would do even more, abbé, if you were not so old and ugly,” Merlina declared, extending the tip of her tongue and showing both rows of her teeth.

  Dubreuil remarked, “The laurels would have been earned already, as soon as I rejected your first plan. You see that my new plan is superior to poisoning, a method that always has unpleasant results. My own maneuver is also better than martyring the angel to death though fasts, penances, and hair shirts—saints of that sort are astonishingly tough.”

  “As tough as you are, abbé.” the Hungarian said coldly. “If you committed any offence against your duties as a member of the mill, your toughness would not help you.”

  “Lajos, I do not deserve such distrust—I appeal to Lady Merlina’s sense of justice,” Dubreuil responded, drawing nearer to the round table.

  “Monsieur Dubreuil, receive your card. You are henceforth a member of the 99th degree,” Merlina said to the abbé as she presented him with the identification proper to his new rank.

  Dubreuil now sat down in an armchair at the large table, a station that had never been allowed him in his earlier rank as a member of the 98th degree. Now he was even permitted to sit right next to the zambo negresse and look at her directly, should a friendly glance from Lady Merlina invite him to do so.

  “You have not yet explained your reversal, Dubreuil. You certainly are in a strange mood today,” the Hungarian remarked, sending a long cloud of smoke in the abbé’s direction.

  Smiling, he waved the cigar smoke from his eyes with his hands and turned his scrawny neck in Merlina’s direction: “You have already heard something from the prince of Württemberg, Lady Merlina?”

  “I have not only heard from him, I have seen him many times,” she responded.

  “Where and when did you have that pleasure?” abbé Dubreuil asked with a bold gaze, inspecting the zambo negresse carefully.

  She did not notice the ambiguous leer and seemed to be studying the copies in her valise.