EQMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  That it was Nicholas Saverne on his heels, January had never had a doubt. Casmalia's yardman Tommy might have told the young lawyer that Marie-Zulieka was being hunted by the big piano player, or the maid might have given that information, for fifty cents or just because they sympathized with any girl who'd flee from an “arrangement” with Jules Dutuille: It didn't matter. As Saverne passed through the ravelly blotch of lantern light that had illuminated Country Ned's sweeping, January identified the blink of expensive watch fobs, the sharp cut of M'sieu Bourdet's tailoring, and the varnished shine of Parisian boots. He'd meant to wait till Saverne's footfalls died away into the distance before himself emerging from his hiding place and circling around in the opposite direction, but at a guess Country Ned stopped too soon.

  While January was still waiting in the carriageway, he heard Saverne stop, then come striding back, fast. He turned to duck down the carriageway and into the dark yard but the yellow light veered and jerked as the lantern was snatched up from the pavement where it had rested, and a voice called out, “You, boy, stop!"

  Since Saverne almost certainly knew who he was anyway, January halted, stood waiting in the high brick arch for the white man to stride up to him, Country Ned's lantern in hand. “Are you Janvier?” He used the familiar address tu—as most white Frenchmen did to children, pets, or slaves. One day January supposed he'd get used to being called that again.

  "I am."

  "Have you found her?"

  January folded his hands, replied, “No, sir, I have not."

  "You're lying.” A white man would have called another white man out for the words—a custom January had always regarded as perfectly insane. “Where'd you be going at this hour, if not to her?"

  "I guess I'm going home, sir."

  Saverne's cane came up, the instinctive gesture of a man who doesn't take even respectfully phrased impudence from Negroes; January steeled himself to take the blow rather than risk escalating the violence by warding it off. But when he didn't flinch, Nicholas Saverne stopped, as if the idiocy of assaulting the one man who might possibly help him penetrated his shapely skull and golden hair. He stood for an instant, his mouth hard with frustrated anger, struggling with the idea that there were things a black man—or any man—could not be forced to do.

  The rage died out of his eyes. The cane came down. “You know where she is?” Though he still used tu, his tone had changed, as if he spoke to a fellow man, of whom one must ask, rather than casually command. “Where she might be?"

  He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fished coins from it that flickered gold in the oily orange light. January remained standing with his hands folded, and neither reached for nor looked at the proffered money.

  Saverne lowered his hand. “Don't tell me you agree with that harpy mother of hers, that'd turn her over to a—a boar-pig like Dutuille. Talk about pearls to swine! What do you want, then, to take me to her?"

  "Her word that it's what she wants."

  For one instant, January thought the young man was going to snap, Girls don't know what they want! There was certainly something of the kind on his lips as he drew in breath, then let it out again.

  January said nothing.

  After a moment, slowly, the young man said, “Girls—sometimes they let themselves be pushed, by their families and their friends. Make no mistake, Janvier: I love that girl. And she loves me, I know she does. I will treat her like a princess, like a queen; I'm not a rich man now, but I will be one day soon. She will never have cause to regret it if she comes back to Mobile with me. I swear that to you. I swear that to her, if you speak to her."

  "If I speak to her,” said January, “I'll tell her."

  Saverne stepped closer, pleading in his pale eyes. “Tell her not to worry about her father. I'll keep him away from her, no matter what he tries or says. In Mobile he can't get to her."

  It wasn't a black man's place to ask whether Saverne had considered what Louis Rochier might do to the rest of the family, and he doubted whether the man would consider it if reminded how completely in Rochier's power Casmalia and Lucie and the several brothers were.

  "I love her,” Saverne repeated softly. “Make her understand."

  * * * *

  The sun had risen, turning the fog to milk, by the time January reached Rue Marigny. He loitered outside Number 53, smelling the smoke of kitchen fires all up and down that quiet street of tiny wooden cottages, until he saw the white-haired Alois Vouziers emerge, resplendent in a rusty black coat, and totter off down the street, a satchel of books on his back. Not long after that a stout young woman came out the same door, ushering four blond boys of stair-step ages, from about thirteen by the look of him down to about eight, dressed as boys would be who are apprenticed to craftsmen or clerks. Not so very different, thought January, from Marie-Zulieka's brothers, except that these boys didn't have to worry about being kidnapped on their way to and from work, and sold up to the newly opening cotton territories in Missouri. Though the neighborhood was one of poor French and poor Germans, the refugees from the continuing turmoils in Europe that had followed Napoleon's downfall, the woman called after the boys in the pure French of the educated Parisians not to be late for their grand-père's lessons that night.

  When the younger children came out to play January crossed to the oldest of them, a little girl of six or so, and said, “Would you take in a note for me, to the young lady who is staying with your grand-père?"

  "Señorita Maria?” asked the girl, and January nodded.

  "Señorita Maria would be her name."

  * * * *

  "She's passing herself off as a Spaniard, then?” inquired Hannibal, when January met him later in the day, at one of the coffee stands at the downstream end of the market. From the rickety table where they sat between the market's square brick pillars, January could see the wharves, piled with cargo and milling with stevedores, sailors, and whores. Down at this end of the market where the river turned around Algiers Point, they were crowded with ocean-going ships: the Constellation and the Tribune, the Waccamaw and the Martha, bound for Baltimore, Vera Cruz, Liverpool, New York.

  Paris, thought January, feeling the stabbing pinch of regret. As if he'd inadvertantly put weight on an unhealed break in his leg, he drew back from the thought that he one day might return to the city where he had truly been free.

  He lived in New Orleans now, despite all things, because it was the home of the only family he had. But he remembered what it had been like, to know that one's family wasn't enough.

  "I thought she would be,” he continued. “I knew from what Casmalia said—and from the color of her dresses and her jewels—that Marie-Zulieka was fair enough to pass. And she'd clearly planned her escape. The only reason she would have worn evening jewels to the market was because she planned to sell them and flee."

  "The rubies were worth more,” pointed out the fiddler.

  "If she was the kind of girl who'd take jewels from one suitor to hand to another, she might have.” January picked apart the little screw of newspaper the coffee woman had sold him for a penny, fished forth a broken lump of strong-tasting muscovado sugar. “She could have stuffed them into her marketing basket, along with the worming medicine that she used to poison Marie-Therese."

  Behind and around them, market women, porters, slaves with shopping baskets came and went among the stalls with their bright heaps of vegetables, their silver cascades of fish; a thousand elbows and basket rims brushed his shoulders from behind, like the leaves of a gently moving tree. “But their disappearance would announce her intentions more quickly. It's just possible that Nicholas Saverne would know the voodoos in town, and where to find poison like that to slip into Marie-Therese's coffee; if he was disguised he could probably have done it undetected. But if Zozo didn't expect to disappear, why would she have worn any jewels? No,” he said softly. “She planned it herself. And she wanted no fortune to hand to an indebted lover; nothing that came from her family, or the protector she was le
aving behind. That much was clear. She took only what her grandmother had given her—and her gris-gris. Even if she were fleeing New Orleans, taking another life and another name, she would not leave that behind."

  "Is that what she did? What she's doing?"

  January nodded. Behind Hannibal's shoulder, he caught a brief glimpse of a thin, stooped, scholarly old man in a rusty black coat, leading a young woman along the wharves toward the gangplank of the Mary, bound for Boston, according to the chalked board outside the shipping office. A lovely eighteen-year-old with dark curls escaping from beneath her bonnet, and the gray eyes that told nothing of her heritage.

  I will not be what my mother was, he heard her voice again in his mind, the words she had spoken to him that morning in old M'sieu Vouziers's little house. I will not take a kind protector, only to save me from an unkind one. It is the world that I must flee, and not only one man.

  The crowd closed around them and they were gone.

  "I knew she spoke Spanish from the copy of Don Quixote I saw in her room—well, half the people in New Orleans do. And since the only family she has are under the thumb of her father, I guessed she'd go to her tutor, for advice at least. If old M'sieu Vouziers trusted her enough to lend her books that he'd owned for years—books he'd brought with him from Paris—that argued a bond beyond what her family would comprehend or even be aware of. I'll have to get the books back from her mother, by the way, and return them to the old man. I'll do that sometime after I slip this under the door, early tomorrow morning."

  He held up the note she'd given him. A single pale spot on one edge of the wafer marked where her tear had fallen as she'd sealed it up.

  Hannibal coughed, the racking wheeze of a consumptive that shook his whole thin frame. “You'll have to be quick about it, before she sells them.” He fished in his pocket for his laudanum bottle as January tucked the note back into his jacket. “She won't have an easy time, you know."

  "She knows that. It's infinitely harder for a woman to leave a man not for another man but for herself,” he went on softly. “And harder for a woman of color than for a white woman; a woman of color moreover whose family can conceive of no other position for a woman, if she's fair-skinned and pretty, than the plaçee of a white. Not only her family, but her friends—literally every other person she knows."

  "I suppose King Solomon's family thought him insane when he chose wisdom over riches—not that, as King of Israel, Solomon was ever in a position of having to wonder whether he'd eat on any given day. At least in Boston she'll be allowed to hold a position in a girls’ school somewhere. Louis Rochier won't really cast the whole family off because Zozo put a spoke in his wheel with his business partner, will he?"

  "I hope not. I don't think so, since she's disappearing from town. She meant to literally disappear, you know, without a trace, for that very reason. I convinced her to write to her mother, at least. Casmalia can let Rochier know, or not."

  "Care to take a small wager on what she'll decide to do?"

  January sniffed with bitter laughter. “Not a chance."

  "I didn't think you would.” Hannibal poured another dollop of laudanum into his coffee, raised the cup in a toast. “To Marie-Zulieka, then—or whatever name she'll take in her new life. Macte nova virtute, puella, sic itur ad astra, as Virgil said. Blessings on your youngcourage; that's the way to the stars. Though we had best pray she succeeds. I doubt Casmalia will welcome her, if she ever comes back."

  "No.” January watched, above the milling crowd on the wharves, as the Mary's white sails half unfurled, and the current took the ship from the dock. A dark small form still stood at the rail, watching the water widen between herself and all the world as she had known it. “No, she won't be back."

  Copyright © 2006 Barbara Hambly

  * * * *

  A Word From the Editor

  When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans she devastated not only a place belonging to the real landscape of America, but a resource for the creative imagination. For what city presented to the mind more possibilities for romance, drama, mystery, and intrigue than the Big Easy before Katrina?

  Will the New Orleans that emerges after Katrina be as inspiring to musicians, artists, and writers as NOLA before the storm? Much will depend on how many of its people return to reconstitute the mix of cultures that gave rise to New Orleans’ verve.

  The fiction in this issue, devoted entirely to NOLA, is a tribute to its unique weave of traditions and ethnicities. We've chosen chronological order for the 11 stories, which portray the city in various phases of its history—from before the Civil War to the early and middle 20th century, and finally to the days just before and after Katrina. It is our hope that the inspiration the writers found in their material will communicate itself to readers as a desire to participate in New Orleans’ rebuilding.

  Scores of churches and relief organizations, big and small, are hard at work in the Big Easy. Those whose advertisements appear in this issue offer services that include temporary and permanent housing; aid to children and adolescents in crisis; counseling for those displaced; restitution of libraries; and support for individual creative artists and cultural institutions. Donations to the participating charities can be made through EQMM's web site: www.themysteryplace.com.

  ©2006 by Barbara Hambly

  THE SUGAR TRAIN by Edward D. Hoch

  EQMM's regular contributor Edward D. Hoch took his fans to New Orleans once before, with the sames series character he employs here, the turn of the last century's Ben Snow. Alas, the story did not appear in this magazine but in the now-defunct The Saint Magazine (12/63). See “The Ripper of Storyville,” reprinted in The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales.

  Ben Snow concluded his business in New Orleans on Ash Wednesday, which in that year, 1901, fell on February twentieth. The frivolity and music of Mardi Gras had ended, and he had every intention of heading back to Texas the following morning. The Southern Pacific Railroad had a relatively new route that extended from New Orleans across Texas to El Paso and beyond, but when he reached the downtown terminal there was a surprise awaiting him.

  "Ben Snow!” a familiar voice called out, and he turned to see Detective Inspector Withers striding toward him along the platform. That English accent, with a trace of the South in it, was unmistakable.

  "I thought we were done with each other yesterday,” Ben said with half a smile. “You come to arrest me?"

  "Not hardly, Mr. Snow. You helped me out a lot with this Ripper case and I wanted to get your assistance on something else."

  "My train leaves in thirty minutes,” Ben told him.

  "Do you have to go right back? Could you spare me another few days?"

  Ben was in no hurry to deliver some sad news to his client back in Texas. “I suppose I could do that,” he agreed. “What's your problem?"

  "Ever heard tell of the Sugar Belt Railroad? A plantation owner named Colonel Grandpere built it about six years ago and pur—chased a steam locomotive to haul sugarcane north from his plantation to the refinery, a distance of some twenty miles. Horseshoe Plantation is located in the area between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and the railroad passes through several parishes on its way to the refinery. Lately someone has been trying to sabotage it, blowing up tracks at night. I'm short-handed right now and the colonel will pay someone to patrol the area, maybe catch whoever's responsible."

  "You have any ideas about that?"

  The detective shrugged. “Rival plantation owners, maybe. The sugar crops can be big business around here. You might be able to catch them at it in one or two nights."

  "I'll have to return to my hotel. And I'll need a horse to cover twenty miles of track. I retired my own to stud back in Texas a few months ago. Didn't think I'd be needing him, heading east."

  "I can get you a horse. That's no problem. I've got a carriage waiting. We can ride out and see Colonel Grandpere now if you'd like."

  "Why me?” Ben asked.
>
  "He asked if I knew any gunfighters."

  * * * *

  Horseshoe Plantation, just a few miles from the city's center, was a collection of sugarcane fields grouped around a great old plantation house with white pillars framing the front entrance. A black servant met them at the door and ushered them into a parlor that seemed to have been furnished by a woman. When Colonel Grandpere en-tered, walking with an ivory-handled cane and smoking a thick Cuban cigar, he seemed completely out of place in his surroundings.

  "You are the man who'll be protecting my railroad?” he asked, making no effort to shake hands.

  "Correct, sir. Ben Snow's the name."

  The colonel's eyes dropped to Ben's holstered pistol. “Gunfighter, are you?"

  "I have been, when necessary."

  The colonel seated himself with some difficulty, favoring his right leg. He patted it with the cane and said, “Got that right here in New Orleans when the Union army captured the city back in ‘sixty-two. It was the end of the war for me. I was thirty-two years old and a colonel without an army."

  A quick calculation told Ben he'd be seventy-one sometime that year. “That's when you got into the sugar business?"

  "After the war. This house was my family home and with the abolition of slavery some of the adjoining plantation owners were only too willing to sell to me. I realized the same men who'd been our slaves would continue working the plantations as free men. I've built this into one of the largest plantations in the state. We have all the modern conveniences here, including a telephone line to our neighbors."

  "And your own railroad, from what I hear."

  He nodded, obviously proud of his accomplishment. “About ten years ago I started building a little tram to transport sugarcane to the refinery. We used strips of iron attached to heavy pieces of wood for the crossties. As the cane was harvested, the sections of track could be moved from field to field. At first the cars of cane were pulled by mule teams, but in ‘ninety-five I bought a steam locomotive and made it into a real railroad. That sugar train is worth a fortune to me."