03 Graveyard Dust bj-3

by Barbara Hambly

  Rose

  ELEVEN

  "I hope you don't think I'll be of any use to you if your mother's place is stormed by armed bravos." Hannibal looked vaguely around the attic, coughed, and picked up the nearest bottlethey dotted every horizontal surface, in various stages of depletion. "Persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade." He coughed again, and sat down on the bed, while January found the fiddle case, wrapped the time-stained and ancient instrument in its usual swaddling of half a dozen frayed silk scarves, and began to assemble from the various corners of the long, mildew-smelling space some books, shaving tackle, and a couple of threadbare linen shirts. "Still, what stronger breastplate than a heart untainted?"

  "At the moment you're in'betrer fighting shape than I am," January replied. Through the open door drifted men's shouts, cursing and laying wagers, and beneath them the savage snarling of dogs. "And it's mostly your presence I need, so there'll be less chance of me being taken unawares."

  Hannibal drained the bottle and set it with great care back on the rafter from which he'd taken it.

  "The watchdog's voice that bayed the whisp'ring wind, " he quoted, "And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind-and you'll be getting both together for the same price."

  There was tired bitterness in his voice, to which January had no reply. With his mother's departure for Milneburgh that morning he had betaken himself immediately and by the most circuitous possible route to Perdido Street, to inquire of Hannibal if he'd like to spend the summer in Bella's room instead of in the attic of Kentucky Williams's saloon. The fiddler's breathing was labored, and two or three plates of congris and grits, uneaten but carefully covered to thwart the local rodent population, attested to a resurgence of his illness.

  "You'll be all right," said January finally, and Hannibal turned, drug-bright eyes glittering.

  "It's kind of you to lie to me," he said, "but in point of fact I am not going to be all right. I am going to die. If not of this bout, of the next, or the next. That's why I left Dublin, and that's why I came here. I'll try not to be a burden to you but I undoubtedly will be; you could more profitably purchase a watchdog for fifty cents." He was trembling, his face ghost-white, like a skull in the dark straggling frame of his hair, and there was anger and a savage contempt in every tone and word. He must have heard it, for he looked away, biting his lip. January saw the cuffs of his sleeve were spattered with blood.

  "I know I could." He walked over and laid a hand on the fiddler's shoulder. "But at the moment I don't have fifty cents." And he felt the stabbing bones under the patched linen shake suddenly with a breath of wry laughter.

  "Don't look at me to loan it to you." Hannibal stood, steadying himself on his friend's arm, and checked the books January had boxed up. "That should do- Athene has more of them over at her place." Athene was his name, in jest, for Rose Vitrac. "You might consider finding Mr. Nash's employer and offering to murder yourself for two hundred dollars-I gather that was the fee agreed upon. Can you carry those? Not that I'll be able to help you in that, either..."

  "Two hundred?" remarked January, as they descended the outside stair. Coming into the open made him flinch, and brought his breath quick with panic, a situation not improved by the presence of some fifty men in the muddy yard behind the saloon, watching a dogfight. "I'm flattered."

  The smaller of the two dogs, a lean yellow wolfish animal, had been wounded badly, bleeding and snarling as it tried to defend itself against a heavy-boned brindle mastiff with the torn ears and scarred face of a longtime champion. The stink of blood mixed with that of churned mud, spit tobacco, and piss: slouch-hatted gambling men, keelboat ruffians in greasy plaid shirts, filibusters with knives at their belts and in their boots. January glimpsed the blue boiled wool of a trade-goods shirt and shuddered, but the man wearing it, although a trapper, was short and dark in buckskin leggins; kneeling on the edge of the crowd screaming "Tear him! Tear him, Duff!" "Surprising what a little cocaine hydrochloride will do for a dog's spirits," remarked Hannibal, leading the way down the steps with a certain amount of care. Though his speech wasn't slurred January knew that he had to be very drunk, or very drugged, to speak of Dublin, or of anything touching on his life before coming to New Orleans; he paused at the bottom of the steps, his own shoulders screaming at even the weight of a dozen books, for the fiddler to get his breath. "Billy must have killed four of the poor brutes before he got the dosage right. This one's lasted better than most. "

  He skirted the outside of the crowd, where pickpockets skirmished discreetly, like wolves around the fringes of a herd. Kentucky Williams slouched in the rear door of the saloon, angling her head as if by doing so she could see what was going on in the ring of jostling backs. She wore a soiled Mother Hubbard, and quite clearly nothing under it except a pair of men's boots. "Kentuckilla my pearl." Hannibal bowed deeply, and kissed her grimy hand. "What is it that you were telling me about the gentleman who hired Mr. Nash to assassinate my friend?" Williams took the cigar out of her mouth and blew a cloud of smoke. "This's just what I heard from Kraut Nan down to the Salt River Saloon. Say, wasn't you the nigger got his back hurt? Set them books down," she ordered January. "You boys want a drink?" It wasn't ten in the morning but she'd clearly had two or eight herself. January shook his head. Even Hannibal avoided the potations dished from the barrel behind Williams's plank bar. "All I heard was it was a white man," she informed January. "A toff Slick tailed coat, plug hat-big bastard, Kraut Nan says. Walked in, handed the man the money, walked out. No word said. Didn't even buy a drink, but Ned came straight over and bought one, so she knew it was money he give him." "Did Mamzelle Nan say whether he was dark-haired or fair?" January remembered Mathurin Jumon's powerful height, Hubert Granville's broad shoulders and heavy neck. The saloonkeeper thought about it a moment. Then she shook her head, and scratched under one massive breast for fleas. "Just he was big."

  "Big is all Kraut Nan sees in a man anyways," remarked Railspike, sauntering back from the crowd. She added a physically impossible speculation concerning Kraut Nan's amorous capacity and added, "You the nigger askin' about that boy Isaak over to the TurkeyBuzzard? Gimme a drink, fiddler."

  Hannibal produced a bottle from his pocket and handed it to her; she didn't even bother to check whether it contained laudanum or whisky, just drained it, and threw it against the side of the rude plank shack. Unlike Williams she was a handsome woman, if one found a square chin and a strong cast of feature handsome. Her eyes were pale, cruel in a face lined with dissipation and smeared heavily with rice powder and rouge.

  "Great big feller come in, black as the ace of spades," she said, in her coarse upriver English. "I forget what day this was. Ace of Spades asks if they had a boy name of Isaak workin' there. Well, I'd already figured Isaak for a runaway. He was a sweet kid, told me all about his wife and wouldn't have nuthin' to do with the girls that worked the back room there. But Ace of Spades didn't look like a slave-catcher, so I said we did, though he wasn't in. Then Ace of Spades give me this note for him-a map, it looked like, drawn on a square piece of paper about so big." Her large, coarse hands sketched the shape of a quarto book page. "Was it anywhere you know?"

  She made a wry little mouth with her scarred lips, and shook her head. "Hell, I don't get out of town much-who wants to go tromping around the mud? There was kind of a square with crosses down at the bottom, and a couple of lines that might have been canals or bayous. I remember there was a tree on it, with a twisty limb, like that"-she scrunched and maneuvered her arm momentarily into a sideways V-"I give this to Isaak when he came in, and he looked at it and stuck it away in his pocket, but I seen him take it out and look at it two, three more times during the day. So he musta knew where it was."

  January nodded-he knew where it was, too. "Do you remember anything else about the man who came with the note, M'am?"

  Railspike shook her head, lank curls swinging. Behind her the noise redoubled. Men howled, shrieking, as a single yowl of pai
n ripped the air. Then the crowd seethed, reconformed itself, men paying off and demanding money, while the little trapper and a friend dragged Duff back, bloody foam dribbling from his jaws, and a big fair man in a plaid shirt savagely kicked the defeated yellow hound, dying already in a great soak of gore.

  "You stupid cur! Rotten whoreson shit-eater! " Near the fence two men were shoving each other and shouting already about whether the defeat did or did not constitute a fair loss; January wondered if one of them had been dosed with cocaine, to turn him into a fighter, or whether the doglike ferocity was just the result of booze.

  "Oh, yeah," remembered Railspike, "he had just one arm. 'Cause he reached acrost himself like this"-she demonstrated-"to get the note out of his pocket. Big ugly bastard."

  "Thank you, M'am," said January softly. "You've both been most helpful."

  "Here, now! " Williams gestured with her cigar as he hent to pick up Hannibal's books. "Don't you go hurtin' your back again with those! I'll get somebody to haul 'em over to the French town for you. You just give us the direction..."

  January started to decline-the fight by the fence had blossomed into full-scale hostilities and men were arriving by the score; it would be only a matter of time until Killdevil Nash appeared. But rather to his surprise Hannibal said, "Thank you," and gave her the number of Livia Levesque's house.

  "Are you insane?" demanded January as they left the yard. "You think any of those boys is going to actually deliver books instead of selling them?"

  "You obviously haven't tried to sell books in this town." Hannibal cradled his violin and his remaining bottle of opium. "They're as safe as if they were common dirt. Now let's find a grocerwith your mother out of the way we can ask Rose to lunch and learn how she breached Forteresse G?rard and got in touch with Madame C?lie."

  "You're going to ruin my reputation yet." Rose Vitrac competently brushed aside the pile of onion pieces from the chopping board and went to work on a pepper.

  "I thought Madame Lalaurie did that last year."

  "So she did." The former schoolmistress nudged her spectacles more firmly up onto her nose with the back of her wrist, blinking with the vapors of the onion. "But I have dreadful premonitions of being forced to go to Hannibal every six or seven months for a new set of papers, to establish a new identity..."

  "You don't think there's people in this town who do just that?" Hannibal emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on one of Bella's linen towels. "How do you think I get opium money, when I'm too under the weather to play?" He turned his face aside, and coughed again.

  "Admittedly I'm not one of the best, but still... I always knew those years of penmanship exercises at Eton would come to something."

  "I'm sure your masters are very proud of you." Rose turned back to January. "Which reminds meMonsieur Landreaux, who has a bookshop on Canal Street, has asked me if I'd translate four plays for him: Helen in Egypt, The Heracleidae, Plums, and The Knights. He's preparing a special edition for boys-he's arranged a printer in New York-but he needs the translations by the end of July. I was wondering if you'd like to do two? It isn't much-ten dollars apiece-but I know it's hard to find work in the summers. Are you interested?"

  "Mademoiselle Vitrac," said January, inclining his head, "that sound you hear is me sharpening my pens. Thank you."

  "The Knights is a little racy." She swept the peppers into a bowl. "So you'll have to edit as well."

  "To the pure all things are pure." January collected up the various little dishes of spices and vegetables, and carried them into the roaring heat of the kitchen. "And I think that as an older, wiser, and more experienced man I should be the one to translate the Aristophanes..."

  "You mean Aristophanes is more fun to translate than Euripides."

  "That, too," agreed January. "Now tell me about Madame C?lie and the ruin of your reputation."

  A very small quantity of sausage grilled in a pan set on a spider over the hearth coals, with the crawfish and redfish that had been all the three friends' pooled re sources could obtain from the market. While January made a roux and Hannibal checked on the rice bubbling slowly in its cauldron, Rose related how she'd observed the coffee merchant's house for most of Sunday morning and the pretext by which she'd spoken to his daughter after she'd discreetly trailed them to Mass.

  "As I'm about the same complexion as Monsieur Nogent, it wasn't difficult to pass myself off as his sister," said Rose. "I slipped a note to Madame C?lie as we spoke, so that she could assure her father later that yes, she did recall Monsieur Nogent speaking of a sister in Mandeville. When I went to the shop this morning and left a note for her-perfectly aboveboard and saying only that Monsieur Nogent is ill and misses her terribly-her father seemed to find no difficulty in my chaperoning her to Nogent's house tomorrow. What he'll think if the truth is revealed I daren't speculate."

  "Cannot a plain man live and do no harm, But that his simple truth must be abused By silken, sly, insinuating jacks?" Hannibal inquired. He perched on the edge of the table where there was at least a stirring of air from the open doors. The thick smell of sausage and garlic was insufficient to cover that of red pepper and turpentine, painted along the base of the walls to discourage ants.

  Outside in the little yard, the sun beat mercilessly on the open ground, and cicadas had begun to drum in the palmetto and banana shrubs that grew to the sides of the gar?onni?re.

  "By the way, has anyone considered that Madame C?lie father has just as much to gain by Isaak's death as either Mathurin or Granville, provided he can keep his daughter out of quod? She's underage, after all, and five thousand dollars can turn a lot of interest in five years. He'd have to get rid of Olympe, and a note from him would have fetched Isaak just as smartly as one from Mathurin."

  "It was a white man who hired Nash," pointed out January.

  "You're saying a black man couldn't use a white one as a cat's-paw?"

  "And Monsieur G?rard could not have kept Madame C?lie from knowing Isaak was in the house," added Rose. She scraped onions, peppers, celery, and garlic into the roux and, while January stirred, added water from the jar beside the stove. "The shop on Rue Royale has only a tiny storeroom, and their house is like this one..." She nodded across the yard at the pink stucco cottage: four small rooms, comfortable but not elegant and certainly impossible to conceal a prisoner in even had been capable of bringing Isaak there Monsieur G?rard unnoticed.

  "Have it your way." Hannibal poured himself out another cup of chicory-laced coffee. "Just don't assume that because G?rard loves his daughter that he wouldn't try to rid himself of her husband-or of your sister, Ben. When's the funeral, by the way?"

  "This afternoon," said January. "Though I had to find that out from Shaw; it isn't posted anywhere. Shall we go buy an immortelle and pretend to lay it on a fictional uncle's grave?" The funeral of Isaak Jumon was an extremely small affair. Sitting on the low slab of a tomb in the New Cemetery, already three-quarters sunken into the earth, January watched the black-clothed forms as they came through the gate from Rue Bienville: pallbearers maneuvering a rather plain pine coffin down the narrow aisle, a priest January's confessor Pere Eugenius, in fact-Antoine Jumon in an even more dandified absurdity of mourning with plumes as well as a scarf on his hat and a candle the size of a child's leg in a cut-paper holder. Madame Genevi?ve followed, a crepe-black specter veiled to her knees, leaning on the arm of Hubert Granville. There was a sizable space between the mourners and the catafalque: from where he and his friends sat, January could smell the corpse.

  "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination, " murmured Hannibal, pressing a handkerchief to his nose. "Are you sure you want to go in for a closer look?" But he stood when January stood, and followed him and Rose quietly as they moved from tomb to tomb, working their way closer to the churchyard wall. Because of the height and closeness of the sepulchers, some barely a yard apart along the weed-grown brick paths, it was possible to come quite near to the cortege"-fortunate he belon
ged to a burial society," Bernadette Metoyer was saying, holding a musk-scented handkerchief to her nose and taking advantage of her distance behind the reeking coffin to chat with her sisters-January recognized them from the Blue Ribbon Balls-and their friends. She nodded toward their destination, a tall square tomb with TRAVAILLEURS DE ST. JACQUES carved on its pediment. Marble slabs, simply inscribed, blocked the mouths of nine of its ten compartments. "At fifty cents a month it's more than she ever laid out." "Not that I wish to be morbid," said Marie-Eulalie Figes, plump and pretty in a frock of tobacco-colored mousseline de laine, "but that's the kind of improvidence that's going to get poor Genevi?ve buried in potter's field. That dreary little wheelbarrow of a hearse-pish! And he her eldest son and the only one worth the powder to blow him to hell, in my opinion. And these gloves!" She held up her hand. "Cotton. Cotton! And only a little rag of crepe for an armband, and a penny dip candle..."

  "It was Mathurin Jumon we have to thank that there are gloves and crepe and candles at all," said Agnes Pellicot, a formidable plac?e who had invested her money wisely and was Livia Levesque's closest friend. "Had he not given Genevi?ve money I don't think she'd even have paid for a hearse. Antoine isn't best pleased."

  "By the smell of him," commented Virginie Metoyer, resplendent against all city laws in a mourning bonnet that reminded January forcibly of Plutarch's accounts of Alexander the Great's funeral car, "Antoine will be fortunate to get to and from the tomb without falling down." January left on the nearest tomb the wreath of zinc ivy he'd brought, and edged from behind a square brick edifice to watch them walk away among the carven trophies of mortality. He'd glimpsed Basile Nogent as one of those who bore the casket, and wondered how many of the elderly sculptor's works surrounded them, each whispering, You, too, someday. Yet there were other words, darker words, whispered by those crowding houses for the dead of stucco, marble, and brick. On a low benchlike grave, barely large enough to shelter a coffin, he saw a cheap plate bearing a slice of pound cake and the glint of silver dimes and reales thrust into the cracks of the bricks. Someone there who had had Power in life. Someone-root doctor or voodooienne-who like the loa might be able to come back and help those still struggling in the mortal world. Other tombs were marked, white chalk or red brick dust, or dribbled with wax where candles had been burned. Plates of rice or congris. Scraps of lace. Cigarettes.