“When she comes back, would you tell her I have to see her? Whenever that is, whatever the time. Tell her it’s urgent, desperate.”
“I’ll tell her, sir.” No inquiry, no shift of expression, but a kind of calculation behind the cold dark eyes, adding things together. January had the strange sensation that this young woman already knew what had happened in the Court. He was, he realized, talking to the woman who would be the city’s next Voodoo Queen.
He returned home, through sullen gluey darkness and smoke of burning. So far the sickness was not as bad as it had been last year, nowhere near what it had been the year before. His heart shrank up inside him nevertheless. There was Bronze John, and there was Monsieur le Choléra, and the memory returned to him as he made his way down the passway to his mother’s yard, of climbing the stair in that tall narrow building in Paris, of opening the door.…
The smell of sickness struck him like a blow.
Hannibal.…
He reached the second door along the gallery in three strides. It stood ajar. His friend had managed to get it open in his attempt to crawl out onto the gallery, but had collapsed just inside. One thin white hand lay over the threshold, fingers reaching.
January touched it. It was deathly cold. The smell from the room was overpowering.
Cholera.
His heart seemed to stop within him.
Then Hannibal whispered, “Water,” from within the room and began to retch. January rolled him over in the darkness and held him so that he didn’t choke, his mind stalling, chasing: Is this when I catch it? If he didn’t have it already. And, At least Bouille can’t have me run out of town. And, That chicken foot seems to have finally come home to roost.
As he clattered down the stairs a few minutes later to the kitchen a wave of nausea gripped him, an agony in his belly and the big muscles of his thighs, and he remembered his sickness at the courthouse. Dear God, no! Sweat came out all over him as he gripped the stair rail, trembling, retching himself now—
Please God!
The epidemic in Paris. Last summer’s cases here in New Orleans. The explosive indecencies of the sickness, the dried pinched faces, the agonies of cramp and vomiting and purging.
… please God …
He stumbled into the kitchen, cracked his shins on a bench, groped in his pocket for lucifers and struck one on the scratch-paper. By its light he found a pitcher on the table by the wall, next to the emptied bowl Gabriel had brought last night. The match had burned down to his fingers and nearly out when he saw the rat.
He lit another lucifer, as a second spasm of nausea seized him. He fought it down, and looked again.
The rat lay close to the corner of the table, its back bent in a spasm of agony, its tail still thrashing in pain.
The lucifer went out. January cursed and scratched another, and looked around this time for a candle. The smell of tallow acrid in his nostrils, he walked around for a closer look at the rat. It lay beside the blue pottery bowl that had contained the beans and rice. The spoon he’d used to wolf down the leftovers before going to the trial was licked clean nearby. Bella would wear him out with a broom handle for that kind of untidiness. Another wave of nausea hit him and he clutched at the edge of the table, dread and cold and enlightenment all exploding in his mind at once as he thought,
Not cholera. Poison.
Dr. Yellowjack coming toward him through the dancers, congris and lemonade in his hands. He’d waited for a long time for January to slip up and eat something that had stood unwatched in the house. And in the end he had done so.
How long?
When he could stand again January filled one pocket with candles, the rest with whatever eggs Bella had left behind in the egg basket and staggered into the yard. Filling the largest bucket he could find from the cistern he hauled it up the stairs with an effort that made him weak. He stuck candles in every crack and on every level surface in Hannibal’s room, then wobbled into his own for his medical bag and ipecac, iodine, medicinal salts, anything.… In the midst of administering as much of a stomach lavage as he could to his friend he was sick twice more, but didn’t dare stop. There was no telling how much earlier Hannibal had eaten the poisoned food, how much of a margin he had.
Laboring in the heat, in growing pain and fear, racing to overtake a goal that was itself hidden in darkness, he was conscious of how very silent the night was. How isolated the garçonnière, tucked away back from the Rue Burgundy behind his mother’s house. How isolated he was himself. If he cried out, would anyone hear? If he shouted, “I am dying—there’s a dying man here!” would anyone come down the dark passway from the street? Or would they say, as he had, Cholera? And flee?
He mixed water with egg whites—throwing the yolks and shells on the floor in his fumbling haste, his vision starting to play tricks on him in the wavering candlelight—and gulped them down, heroic quantities. He gagged, then induced vomiting and purging, as he had done for Hannibal. The fiddler lay stretched now on a blanket on the floor, like a drowned elf dredged from a gutter, wet with sweat and spilled water and slime. In the jittering dimness January thought for a moment that he saw, not the bones staring through the skin, but the man’s skeleton itself, a nest of snakes creeping in the cage of the ribs.…
He blinked, and jerked his head, and found himself lying on the floor with spilled saline solution and nastiness everywhere about him. Doggedly he prepared another draught for himself, fighting the pains in his belly, his thighs, his arms where they’d been twisted nearly from their sockets last spring.… Had old Mambo Jeanne at Bellefleur been right, all those years ago, about certain poisons making snakes and lizards grow under your skin? He looked down at his arms and found that the old woman had indeed spoken true: His skin was moving with them, bulging out or twisting in long tracks. He forgot the draught, stared fascinated, horrified.…
And then he was in Paris. It was late, past two, the dead slack leaden hour of exhaustion, and stars burned, opium-crazed diamonds in a sky black with the velvet abysses of infinity. Summer heat like boiling glue, and the stenches of Paris in the summer; and every light was quenched, in mansion, flat, attic, and hovel. Where he was coming from he didn’t know—the Marais Quarter across the river, he thought. Someone’s Christmas Ball. And he saw Death, skipping and dancing down the street. Death looking just like He should, with his black cloak draped over a raggedy mess of stained wool shroud, and bony feet clattering a little on the slippery cobbles. Death messier than engravings portrayed, Death the way January was familiar with him from years at the Hôtel-Dieu, shreddy flesh dribbling gobbets of black fluid and maggots.
Death with his attendant skeletons—revolting in their stained shroudless nakedness. They knocked on doors, climbed through windows where no one would open, came out of alleyways, dragging men and women by the wrists or arms or hair. Fat butchers and slender milkmaids, a nightshirted child clutching a carved wooden horse, stockbrokers digging through their pockets looking for coin to pay off those grinning Guédé.… The coins fell through the bony fingers and clattered ringing on the stones. Some people came dancing, skipping: Ayasha tossing her scented hair. A woman leaned out a garret window and called her son’s name, frantic with weeping. The boy didn’t hear.
Carts rolled behind them, heaped with bones. Baron Cemetery was driving one of them, tipped his hat to January, and winked behind his spectacles. “Care to come?” His voice was creaky, shrill and hoarse. “Free ride. Good to see an old friend from home.”
“I can’t.” January’s words came out harsh and whispery as the skeleton god’s. “I have to find Olympe.”
The boy who was dancing beside the cart turned, waved to January, and held out his hand. January saw it was Gabriel.
“Gabriel, come back!” He stepped off the curbstone, something he knew he should have known better than to do. His feet sank ankle-deep in the black mud of Paris. “Gabriel, don’t go!”
Gabriel only waved again, with one hand. The other gripped the han
d of a young man, dancing, too, a slim light-skinned youth with a black trace of mustache, whom January knew was Isaak Jumon. January tried to follow but the ooze held him fast. “Gabriel.…”
“He’ll be all right,” said Mamzelle Marie.
January shook his head. “The Baron,” he tried to explain.
He climbed the stairs in the Paris house, put his hand on the doorknob.…
“Who?” asked Hannibal’s voice.
“The Baron,” explained Mamzelle Marie. January opened the door, and saw Ayasha sitting on the bed, sharing a glass of wine with the Baron Cemetery, who had one bony arm around her waist.
“Don’t look at me,” said the Baron. “I haven’t got him in my pocket.” And he dug in his pocket with one hand to prove it, coming up only with some shards of broken crockery, such as the slaves at Bellefleur had stuck around graves. Then he laughed and dragged Ayasha down onto the bed, lying on top of her while she giggled and squirmed, pulling up her skirts, her long hair trailing onto the floor.
“Baron Cemetery,” explained Marie Laveau, unnecessarily, January thought. “The lord of the spirits of the dead.” (You don’t have to tell me that!) She touched January’s hand.
He was lying in his own bed, he thought, and felt as if he were coming off a ten-month drunk.
Cholera?
The image returned to him, of a rat dying by candlelight on a table.
“I have snakes in my arms,” he said.
He opened his eyes. The light in the room was gray. Mamzelle Marie sat on the edge of his bed, a damp sponge in her hand. Behind her stood Rose with a basin, and Hannibal, like a handful of fence pickets rolled in an undertaker’s coat, slouched in the chair by the desk.
“I took them out,” said Mamzelle Marie.
“Thank you.” January drew in his breath, and let it out. His whole insides seemed to be raw and there was a curious quality to the room and to everything he saw: Mamzelle, Rose, Hannibal, the books piled on the desk. As if without warning they could mutate into other forms, or prophesy unknown events.
“Dr. Yellowjack kidnapped Gabriel,” he said, as if he’d read it all in a book and needed only to relate it to these people for them to understand. “He got word to Olympe that unless she confessed the murder—and implicated Célie, I think—he’ll kill him.”
“If he hasn’t done so already,” said Rose. She still wore the neat dress of pink faille she’d had on in the courtroom, the sleeves rolled back over her arms and dark with wet.
“No,” said Marie Laveau. “He wouldn’t. Not unless he has to. Not until Olympe is hanged. She’s a mother, and she has the Power. Olympe would know.”
January sat up. The room darkened, then shivered with a kind of aerial fire, and it seemed for a moment that he saw two chicken feet gripping the end of his bed, as if an invisible chicken sat there. He rubbed his eyes, and they vanished.
“Where would they be?”
They looked at one another: Mamzelle, Hannibal, and Rose.
It was Mamzelle who replied. “The house by the bayou.” She turned to Rose. “That policeman wasn’t there yet?”
Rose shook her head. “He wasn’t there two hours ago,” she answered. “I’ll go again.”
“Two hours?” January blinked at the room around him. By the light it was only an hour or so after dawn.
“It’s close to six.” Hannibal’s voice was the whisper of scar tissue. And, when January’s brows pulled together, trying to calculate sunrise and time, “Six in the evening. You’ve been off your head for most of the day.”
“Moon won’t rise till near midnight,” said Mamzelle Marie. “There’s a mist in the air. It’ll be bad later, by the bayou. Best we go now while there’s some light. Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
Rose modestly turned away and stepped through the door onto the gallery while January got up; Mamzelle merely handed him his shirt. As his mind cleared a little January realized it was indeed evening, but the equivocal light left him confused. He felt weak, and caught himself on the back of Hannibal’s chair. On the narrow desk lay a newspaper, open to the second page. SENSATION IN THE COURT, announced the header at the top of the column. And, smaller, VOODOO CONFESSES HEINOUS CRIME.
“What was it?” He made a mental note to buy serious gris-gris from Mamzelle, if she hadn’t already put a fix on Burton Blodgett. “In the food, I mean?”
“The world’s full of things it could have been.” Marie Laveau set his boots down in front of him. The room, he saw, had been cleared and cleaned. It smelled of burned herbs now, and soap. “Maybe two or three together. Fricasee, they call it in Haiti, or akee. It was one of those they brought over from Africa. It takes time to act, so there’d be none to point and say, ‘This man was poisoned.’ They’d only say it was the cholera, and run away.” She brought a cup over from the desk, and held it out to him. Sweetness and salt, soothing as it went down. Some of the strangeness seemed to go out of the room, as if a necessary ballast had been added to his brain.
“If I’d eaten as much of the stuff as you had, I’d probably have been dead when you got back,” said Hannibal in his thread of a voice. “I still don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at beans and rice again, which is a pity, since some weeks that’s all I live on. and I suppose Socrates ought to know. Are you sure our friend didn’t put a hex on Bella’s room as well as yours?”
“Rose,” said Mamzelle, as January dug under the mattress for the pistols and the powder flasks he’d taken from the corpse of Killdevil Ned. While he was checking the loads he heard her go on, “If you can’t find this Shaw at the Cabildo, go to M’sieu Tremouille’s house …”
January’s hands shook as he thrust pistols and flasks through his belt, slung the spares around his neck on their long piratical ribbons.
“… a child been kidnapped, held at Dr. Yellowjack’s house on the bayou. Tell him Yellowjack will kill the boy …”
A skinning-knife in his boot and another in his belt. He’d be hanged, he reflected bitterly, if he was seen with this much weaponry on him. He could hear Cut-Arm’s laughter now.
“Tremouille’s a smart man, and he’s no coward.” Looking around, January saw that Mamzelle Marie had kilted her bright skirt high, as she had the previous afternoon to trek through the ciprière. “If this Shaw isn’t there, Tremouille’s the best we can do.”
If Shaw wasn’t there, thought January, the chances that any of the other Guardsmen would be bright enough—or have sufficient woodcraft—to rescue Gabriel before the wangateur killed him were slim.
The voodooienne turned back from the door as Rose’s shoe heels clattered away down the steps. Her long coppery fingers curled around the crucifix at her breast. “Virgin Mary, Mother of God,” she said softly, “take us there safely.” Then she snapped her fingers and made a sign with her hands, and spit into the corner. “Papa Legba, who has the keys to all doors, we need your help, too.”
TWENTY - THREE
Mamzelle Marie took him by a different route into the ciprière this time. They passed through the Protestant cemetery where the smudge fires burned sullen in the dusk against the rising of the night miasma from the swamps, across the marshy verge of shacks and sheds and poverty-stricken immigrants, and straight into the trees. The failing light lent a weird cast to the gloom beneath the canopy of oaks and pines: Cypress trunks took on the appearance of men in that queer twilight, beards of moss the semblance of tree trunks or stands of laurel, water the look of solid land. The air felt close and thick in the lungs here, and mosquitoes swirled in stinging clouds.
“Judge Canonge spoke to your sister after the court was cleared, trying to get her to explain.” Marie Laveau paused to get her bearings, then pressed through a stand of hackberry that hid a thread of game trail, pale in the dusk. “Even he smelled rotten fish. She said only she’d repented of her deed and of the lies she’d told.”
“January whispered, Damn.” He could see Olympe sitting there, with a face like a mechan
ical doll’s, repeating over and over again, I poisoned him. I poisoned him.
“There’s ways of getting messages into the jail, even though none from the outside are allowed in. It wouldn’t have been hard.”
“It wouldn’t have been hard, either, to poison Célie in the jail,” said January. “She has—we have—her father to thank there, for keeping her so close. And of course if Olympe had died in jail—Olympe the voodoo, Olympe the idolater—there would have been less of an outcry at the trial. Célie might have gotten off, and if Isaak had passed word to her somehow, spoken of what she’d heard.”
From the edge of the trees to the island in the bayou it was only a mile or so, and the night was a still one. Mamzelle Marie led the way cautiously, and January flinched at each sound. While it was true that Dr. Yellowjack would hang on to his hostage as long as he could, it was also true that in kidnapping the boy he had provided a clinching witness to the existence of Lucinda Coughlin’s plot, and to his own part in helping her.
They came on the house over the rear of the island, following the low ground, the wet ground, where they could. Mosquitoes and gnats swarmed around their ears and nostrils, but once Mamzelle touched January’s arm, and pointed out to him a cluster of tin pans and tubs, dangling together in a spiderweb of fishing line, half-hidden among the beards of Spanish moss. January followed her gesture down, and saw where the line was stretched among the root ridges of the higher ground, where the insects were less. Between the creeper and fern, and the gathering mists, it would have been impossible to avoid giving the alarm.
“He has spells, too, that keep the snakes angry hereabouts,” murmured Mamzelle Marie. “He says they’ll call out to him, and tell him who’s coming. But they won’t speak of me. Or of you, if you’re with me. Still it’s best we be careful.”
Graveyard Dust Page 33
