A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “You ain’t going to ask me who they were?” he said, sounding tired.

  “No. All I care about is getting to Rintrah’s safe.”

  “You got more cares than that, young one. And if you even come close to completing Hood’s strange little mission, you will have those men to thank.”

  “Doubt it.”

  He laughed.

  We rode straight up to Rintrah’s house. There were no lookouts on the corners, no sentinels at the tops of the house. The gate was wide open. We rode straight through the porte cochere and into the courtyard, where we dismounted and tied up. There were no lights in the windows, no sounds except for the sound of water dripping to the pavement from the palms.

  I looked up at the room I knew to be Rintrah’s bedroom and when I looked back down I’d lost Sebastien. He had evaporated, taken up in the dark. I peered into the dark beneath the loggia but I saw nothing. I walked up against the wall and nearly broke my nose on his chin.

  He didn’t speak. I saw his eyes for a second in the starlight, and they were sickeningly wide, moving fast, taking in everything. His body was still, and in his hands he grasped two knives, one short and one long. He moved down the covered walk along the edge of the courtyard and made no sound, touching nothing. He opened a window and it made no sound. It should have squeaked, it should have rattled, but it was silent. I am a brave man, I think, but I will tell you that he scared me. He seemed more animal than man, and I wasn’t sure he recognized me until he climbed through the window and, looking back, nodded at me to climb through after him.

  We were in one of Rintrah’s storage rooms. This one contained gunpowder stolen from Federal armories and corn liquor made upcountry. He walked between the barrels and the crates as if he’d been there before and knew it blind. I cracked my shins twice and nearly cried out before I remembered the knives. Holy Mother, pray I will get my ass out of here safe. It was my first spontaneous Catholic prayer. A mighty strange place for it, but there it is. Pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death in the room packed to the ceiling with liquor and killing powder. Amen.

  The next few minutes went quick, and I only remember little things flashing by in the dark. Lines of wall sconces snuffed out in the hallways. Broken bottles in the corners. On the wall next to the stairs leading up to the second floor, the word L’Monstre drawn in wax with a woman’s hand. Everywhere the air reeked of overripe fruits and broken jars of pickled onions and of meat left out in the air. I opened my mouth to speak, to tell Sebastien I thought the place had been abandoned, that something bad had happened, but just then he looked back and frowned and I knew to keep my mouth shut. I palmed the pistol in my pocket and brought it out. We went up the stairs, past the old curio cabinets on the landing, and farther up to the floor where Rintrah, Hood, and Father Mike had once kept the dying.

  Down the hallway to the left, at the very end, there was a light that snuck under a door, and from behind that door I could hear a fiddle. It was the only door that was closed. The rest, half a dozen doors, were open and shaking in the breeze that rushed and groaned from the open windows in each of the empty rooms. The wind talked, I was certain, but I didn’t understand. That’s what I remember, I ain’t trying to explain it.

  I knew the rooms were empty because Sebastien cautiously surveyed each of them, stepping in ready for a fight, looking around at the perfectly clean and empty rooms, every one of them freshly swept and mopped. I smelled ammonia.

  We came to the last door, and now I could hear the fiddle and the sound of a man singing the words to that old gospel tune, the one about the wayfaring stranger. The voice was strained, low and then cracking high. Sebastien looked back at me like he was going to ask a question, and I just nodded. Yeah, that’s Rintrah.

  The door came open quick and silent and then I lost track of Sebastien. There was one candle and it got knocked over and snuffed out. I stood near the door, not knowing what to do. I should have stepped in and gotten some licks in for Rintrah, but I couldn’t see them real good and, anyway, I was scared of those knives. Rintrah cursed and laughed, and soon the struggling was over. He was dead.

  He was not dead. He said, “Boyo, how about you light that candle right there, some of these others, if you’re just going to sit there like you shat your pants. Get some light on this here thing.”

  A box of matches hit me square on the chest, and I got about lighting the tapers. When the lights had glowed up and the room was filled with the orange flicker, I could see that Sebastien was sitting on a liquor crate behind Rintrah, and had his knife casually placed against the side of Rintrah’s neck. Rintrah sat on the floor. In his right hand he held his fiddle, which had come apart at the neck and was only held together by the strings. Off to the side, near the little door to the attic, I saw a mop and a bucket and smelled the ammonia again. This room had also been scrubbed clean of everything except Rintrah, the crate, and that fiddle.

  I saw Sebastien whispering fast and hard into Rintrah’s ear, what, I don’t know. It made Rintrah slump even farther to the floor, but it also seemed to cheer him, whatever it was. Finally Sebastien let him go.

  I’d have thought that Rintrah’s business would be with Sebastien, but he turned on me first.

  “What the hell took you so damned long? I been waiting here for two days. Fuck, Griffin, you’d take a week to put your pants on if you had your druthers. This is life-and-goddamn-death business, boy, you should have been quicker about it. It’s almost too late now.”

  I wanted to sit down, I was so road tired, but I reckoned I might have to be ready to run so I stayed swaying on my feet. I remembered the pistol in my hand and made a show of putting it in my belt. Rintrah snorted and turned to Sebastien.

  “That one’s empty, right?”

  “Of course.” Sebastien grinned at me and kept his big knife pointed at Rintrah. He stuck the short knife in his sock.

  “I could still beat your ass with it, little man,” I said. Angry and embarrassed.

  “Ah, you could try, but we got other business here.”

  He turned to Sebastien.

  “You got the floor.”

  Sebastien leaned forward, always with the tip of that knife waving in the general vicinity of Rintrah’s neck. Rintrah sat on the floor to his left.

  “Where your men?”

  “Gone. Been losing business, I ain’t been paying, and then they got sick of looking for you all the time. Thought I’d gone crazy, losing control. They can go to Hell, I don’t care. But the women left, too, and I take that sore hard.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Ever since young Eli here went and got himself a horse and went riding down into the wilderness near two days ago.”

  I must have looked shocked and outraged, because Rintrah held up his hand to me, as if to calm me.

  “Now, boy, you ain’t hard to follow, and it weren’t hard to figure where you were going. You ain’t the only one who been to the Cabildo to find out where this one had gone off to. But I couldn’t get a single damned man to take off after you.”

  He turned to Sebastien.

  “They thought I was out of my mind, and also, you might be happy to know, they were right scared of you. You’ve got a reputation, I’m sure you know. You ain’t a human as far as they’re concerned. They drew the line, they said they weren’t going nowhere, and that’s when I told them to get the hell out. So they’re gone now. And the women, they were just frightened of me, I reckon. Frightened of you, too, Lemerle, and angry that I’d sent a young man like Eli off to die. They left, though they might come back if I change my ways.” He spit on the floor, got up, walked to the mop, and cleaned it up before sitting back down again.

  Off to die. That was news to me. Before I could get up and pistol-whip the bastard, Sebastien spoke up.

  “How did you know I would come, that I would come here? Why did you send the boy?”

  “He didn’t send me. I ain’t a boy.”

  Rintrah ignored me,
kept his attention on Sebastien.

  “If I hadn’t suffered this mutiny, you wouldn’t have come here. You’d be catfish feed right now,” Rintrah said.

  “Why send the boy at all?”

  “He didn’t…” They wouldn’t listen to me.

  “I respected the wishes of the General, that he wanted you to read that thing of his, and you wouldn’t have done it if you thought you were going to get strung up afterward. But Eli’s harmless. You read it, right?”

  I sat down on the floor, ready to keep being humiliated. Fuckers.

  “Yes, I read it.”

  “I reckoned that afterward you might get it into your head to come settle up with me, especially when you realized that the only reason you were still alive was because Hood had lied for you. You would have seen that I was going to get you now, and that there wasn’t anything to stop me.”

  “Except mutiny.”

  “Except that.”

  “Now what?” Sebastien let his knife swing between his fingers like a pendulum on a fancy clock.

  “I guess you end this, right now.” Rintrah opened his arms wide, like a bird cooling itself, exposing his chest and his neck to Sebastien’s knives. “I got nothing. I can’t kill you with this here fiddle. I depended on the love of money for my strength, which I bought off a dozen big and stupid men who knew how to shoot and fight. They liked my money. Now I got none of either, no money and no power. So…”

  “So why would I kill you now?”

  This question flustered Rintrah, broke his thinking up. His mouth was moving but he had nothing to say. Sebastien continued.

  “You can’t hunt me down anymore, so why waste my time? Enough. No more talk of killing each other. I didn’t come here to settle up with you, as you say, Monsieur Rintrah. I came here for another purpose, and you must help.”

  “Hell I will.”

  Sebastien’s eyes fired up.

  “You would leave Eli Griffin to his task alone?”

  “To hell with his task. I don’t give one shit about it. Stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.” He looked straight at me. “You ain’t never gone to get that book from Beauregard, I know because I had men who heard him talking about it. Hell, he’s looking for you. He already found your rooms up there at Levi’s, he’s already got in and took him some other book. And some pile of pages I now hear you been writing. Since when, while I’m thinking about it, did you care one bit about books? And now you got them spilling out of your pockets and your rooms and your saddlebags. Shit. You’re hopeless, son. If I ever thought I’d take you on permanent in my crew, that’s over. Guess you a scholar now.”

  My face went red, and I didn’t know whether to kick Rintrah in the throat or go running for my rooms right then. I got to my feet and sat back down and got back up again. I think Rintrah took pity on me, sorry he’d said what he’d said.

  “She’s fine, Eli. M. wasn’t there. She’s a smart, smart girl. Don’t know where she is now, she disappeared into the street when she saw ’em coming. She’s good at that, you know, looking like everybody in a crowd. She can take care of herself, don’t worry about that.”

  I sat back down. I was despondent. Beauregard had made off with Anna Marie’s ledgers, the thing she wanted Lydia, and now, I suppose, her children, to see. Another thing I’d screwed bad. I’d never get that back and, worse, they now knew all that I knew. I shouldn’t have written a damned thing down.

  Sebastien was surprised and confounded for the first time I could recall.

  “What are these books? What do they know now?”

  Rintrah looked at me and jerked his head toward Sebastien. “How the hell should I know?” he said. “The boy never told me about these other documents.”

  Now I had to do the explaining to the man with the knife.

  “There’s nothing of use to them in there, except that they know that I was looking for you, and that I know that it was Father Mike who was killed at the lottery. They know, most of all, that we’re gone to try to get that war book from Beauregard, and that it’s what Hood wanted. Beauregard didn’t know that before. Shit.”

  Rintrah went over to the mop, wrung it out, and began to mop distractedly. Sebastien watched him close, and pulled out his second knife, the small one, which I assumed he could throw.

  It was quiet in the room for a few minutes, just the sound of Sebastien tapping his knee with the flat of the big knife and Rintrah dragging his mop across the floor, shhhhh shhhhhh shhhhhh thump shhhhh.

  I reckoned it was over, that Beauregard would have taken the war book and hid it away. I could see no reason for us going on anymore, though Sebastien didn’t seem at all put out by the news. He stood up, which made Rintrah flinch a little, but all he did was pace. He paced from the crate to the window and back. Finally he stopped and addressed us like we were in his squad.

  “I would have liked to have helped Mr. Griffin on his mission, but this might be difficult now. Difficult, but maybe not impossible. When did they go through his rooms?”

  “This afternoon. I had a man watching Eli’s home.”

  “For what?” I nearly shouted.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sebastien said. “This is good news. They have not had much time to make a plan. Maybe the book is still there. I would guess that the book is not what worries them the most right now.”

  “Oh, and what then?” Rintrah mumbled, swirling his mop in the bucket.

  “They realize that you, Eli, are one of the few people who understand that Father Mike was murdered, and that you have gone to talk to the only person who knows who murdered him. They will be uncertain about me, they were likely confused when I never showed up to kill Father Mike myself.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, goddammit? You were in on that too? Good God.” Rintrah had dropped his mop and looked ready to leap on Sebastien, the knives be damned. “Why do you kill the only people I give a damn about?”

  “I didn’t kill Father Mike, as Eli will tell you. I have a debt to Father Mike that now, now that I realize what has happened, must be paid in blood. I would not have killed him, but I will kill for him.”

  “What is that rot?”

  Sebastien cinched up his belt and pulled his coat around him. “We have many reasons to go to the Beauregard house, and we must do it tonight. Now. Eli has his mission, and I have mine.”

  “I have none.” Rintrah, stubborn, tears in his eyes.

  “You have one too.”

  “What?”

  “I think it will become apparent to you if all goes well. And dammit, Rintrah, you’re the only man in New Orleans I was ever afraid of crossing, quit your whining like a woman. You’ve got interests here. Hood was your friend. He was not my friend. Father Mike was not my friend, either, but he was yours. And Paschal would have been outraged to see you like this.”

  “The hell you say. You got no right to talk about Paschal like you knew him.”

  “I did know him. Now get the hell up and let’s get some real pistols. Do you still know how to get in a second story? You were a burglar once, no? Your money didn’t appear out of nowhere. You can break in?”

  “I can.” Rintrah looked at me sideways, checking to see if I’d caught the mention of his previous occupation. I made a face at him.

  “Then bring your ropes.”

  Sebastien walked out of the room and down the hallway. I followed behind Rintrah, who never stopped clenching his fists but marched on anyway.

  * * *

  We got into the house easy enough. At the back entrance, behind the courtyard, the gate had been left open. Inside, in the portico, two men lay bound, gagged, and tied to each other. One was unconscious, the other was starting to stir. They’d been gagged hard with twisted pieces of burlap. Blood ran down their heads and into their ears. Sebastien didn’t barely look at them. Rintrah looked down and whistled appreciatively.

  Later I would be on the roof, among the gables and dormers, slipping on the slate tiles. From there I would see
three sets of bound and trussed men, the two men we’d seen on the way in, and a pair each at the two front entrances, all of them pulled into the shadows. These were big men, big white Creole men, and it was amusing to watch them roll around on the ground like potato bugs. They’d been tied up good. In fact, the whole house had been prepared for our arrival. Lights in the courtyard had been doused, the servants’ quarters cleared out. In an empty cistern in the back corner of the courtyard lay two long pistols.

  “This one is for you,” Sebastien had said to Rintrah. Rintrah had looked at him in surprise, but nodded his head.

  “And this one, for Mr. Eli Griffin,” Sebastien said, handing me the other. “It’s loaded this time.”

  “Well, thank you for that, mister.”

  “Don’t shoot yourself.”

  “Go to Hell.”

  Later, from my perch on the roof, I saw three men in the distance, slipping in and out of the shadows on street corners surrounding the block. They stopped people walking down the street and told them to move on. White and black, man and woman. No one got past them, and no one challenged them either. Now I knew why we’d stopped to see the three negroes. One of the men, the old man, looked up at me and saluted.

  It was Rintrah who had sent me up onto the roof as a lookout. I’d climbed the waterspouts in the corner, tied a rope around one of the chimneys, and thrown it back down to Rintrah and Sebastien on the ground. Sebastien climbed using every ledge and uneven brick and crack in the masonry to ascend, only rarely putting his weight on the rope. I had the pistol in my pants so I could hold on to the roof with both hands. Rintrah struggled with a long thin wire and tried to flip the inside latch on the window. Finally he got in and stuck his head back out to signal Sebastien up.