Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  “Pouring oil onto the blaze for those who think Davis is being protected by ‘rich friends in high places.’ ”

  “For those Americans who have bids in on that lake-front railway, anyhow. Jed Burton got up and testified that he’d heard Davis threaten to murder Belaggio, and that Belaggio had ‘drawn back in alarm’ from him at some gala the other night. Belaggio apparently said on that occasion that Davis was hiring assassins. . . .”

  January rolled his eyes.

  “I’ve located Incantobelli, by the way. He’s staying at the Hotel Toulouse, on Rue Toulouse, under the name of Castorini. . . .”

  “Which probably is his actual name,” said January. “A lot of the castrati took stage names—not that they’re the only ones to do so,” he added, thinking of Lucy Schlegdt, alias Rutigliano, the company’s diminutive Swiss mezzo.

  “Surely Incantobelli would be able to testify that Belaggio was mixed up with things he shouldn’t have been, at least to the extent of ‘reasonable doubt.’ That’s all we need, really. Greenaway—he’s the prosecutor on this case—will say your friend Cavallo is Belaggio’s enemy because he thought he was stealing, but Incantobelli was his partner. . . .”

  “Whose opera he stole.”

  “Doesn’t the man have anyone who doesn’t hate him?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.” January leaned back in his chair, then had to lean forward again as LeMoyne vanished behind the dizzily piled papers and books. “But Incantobelli ran like a rabbit the moment I called his name. Since there’s nothing to connect me with the City Guards, I can only assume he’s jumping at shadows. Having spent the past week looking over my own shoulder, I can understand how he feels. I’ll take a note to his hotel and see if I can arrange a meeting in a private place, but my guess is, he won’t testify publicly.”

  “Maybe not.” The lawyer sighed, and picked a cup at random from among the several tucked like swallows’ nests in the insane jumble of papers. “But like the Gower boys, he may point us in a useful direction.” He took a sip, and made a face. In the front office a bell rang, and a moment later an emaciated and disapproving clerk appeared in the connecting doorway.

  “M’sieu La Ronde to see you, sir.”

  LeMoyne looked around for someplace to set the cup and finally wedged it between two deed-boxes on a shelf. “Thank you, M’sieu Janvier. The trial’s the second of March; needless to say, I couldn’t get bail. Dr. Ker testified as to Mr. Davis’s poor health and was pretty much shouted down by the Americans. A good deal depends on the jury, of course.” He walked January out through the scrupulously neat outer office. “But we need to come up with something. When you start mixing in the quarrel between the Americans and the French, mere innocence is not going to be enough.”

  Rehearsals for La Dame Blanche lasted until nearly five in the afternoon. In addition to the ghosts, hidden treasure, and missing heirs provided by Monsieur Boieldieu, Mr. Caldwell introduced a duel between the evil Gaveston and the noble George Brown in the third act (“To liven things up, you understand”), and added several choruses of “Bonny Dundee” to the baptism scene in the first. When January and the other musicians took their leave, in quest of supper before the Faubourg Tremé Militia and Burial Society Masked Ball, Belaggio was trying to convince Tiberio to find a way of making the White Lady appear out of a column of “unearthly flame.”

  “What’s this I hear about you taking the night off, Ben?” demanded Cochon as the group of them jostled onto the worn benches at the Buttonhole and Cora’s husband, Gervase, limped across from the kitchen with the first dishes of a feast of étouffé, grillades, oysters, and dirty rice. “Stealing away for a little walk on the levee while the rest of us sweat?” His wife, Susan, who’d come with several of the other wives and ladyfriends—including Rose—elbowed him sharply and Rose, sitting beside January, laughed and blushed.

  “Listening to Herr Smith every morning has left me feeling poorly,” January said gravely, which got more laughs.

  “Oh, I just know it’s to hear Herr Smith he takes those dance rehearsals,” joshed Cora, batting her eyelashes.

  In fact, it was the knowledge that the Militia and Burial Society was having its Carnival ball that night that had caused January, on his way from LeMoyne’s office to the American Theater that morning, to stop at a slop-shop on Race Street near the levee and expend fifty cents of Mr. Davis’s money on a much-worn sailor’s blouse of blue wool, and a pair of wide-legged canvas pants. Changing into these in the kitchen of the Buttonhole after supper, he wrote out a note asking Incantobelli to meet him and LeMoyne in the back room of the Café Venise the following morning. The other musicians had gone, but Rose remained, and they took coffee together in the corner, and talked of matters that had nothing to do with Davis, or opera, or Incantobelli. It was nearly dark by the time he made his way to the Hotel Toulouse.

  At this hour of the evening he had no expectation whatsoever of finding Incantobelli at his hotel, and in that he was not disappointed. When he handed the note to the clerk at the desk, however, the man glanced at the envelope and shook his head. “ ’Fraid he’s left.”

  “Left, sir?” January felt no surprise, only a kind of dismay. He couldn’t even feel anger. Not after the way he himself had watched the shadows of gathering twilight in the Buttonhole’s yard. Not after he’d found himself staying to the crowded streets, the busy parts of town.

  Incantobelli knew these people.

  “Cleared out Sunday night.” The young man leaned a companionable elbow on the wooden counter and shook his head knowingly. Being several shades lighter than January, he quite clearly assumed the roughly-garbed January to be someone’s slave, and addressed him as tu rather than vous. He may have been a slave himself. “Bill-collectors, if you ask me.”

  “You can spot ’em just like that?” The clerk had the air of one who thinks himself admired, so January put admiration into his voice.

  “Pshaw!” The clerk waved a kid-gloved hand. “After three years behind this counter, my friend, I can tell just about everything about a man the minute he walks through those front doors.” Though waiters and gamblers and men in various stages of Carnival dress came and went around the glass doors of the gentlemen’s parlor just off the lobby, the lobby itself was quiet. A white-jacketed waiter was turning up the gas-jets under their fancy glass shades. “Sunday afternoon we had a couple of men coming in to ask, did the Italian gentleman have a room here—not that I told them a word, that’s not my way— but I thought: all those fancy clothes and la-di-da airs, and who’s paying for it all?”

  “And you could tell these men were bill-collectors just lookin’ at them?”

  It was like scratching Voltaire the cat under his chin. The clerk almost purred. “ ’Course. The tall one had a notebook and a brief with him, wrapped up with string, but he was a tough. You could tell by the way he looked around. The short one with the winkers”—he touched his own spectacles self-consciously—“sort of looked past me to see which rooms had mail in their slots.” He imitated the action of a man trying not to appear too obvious about inspecting what wasn’t his business. “Only bill-collectors or lawyers do that, and these wasn’t lawyers, for all the one was a gentleman. A lawyer wouldn’t bring his clerk just to hold his brief for him. Got to be bill-collectors.”

  Short and tall, thought January, loafing out after another fifteen minutes of superfluous detail about Incantobelli’s hasty packing and departure, and about what a model of discretion the clerk had been in letting him know he’d been asked for, and how he’d made sure he got the singer’s bill paid in cash rather than a draft. Or one shorter than the other, and the shorter one maybe wore spectacles, though there were few forms of disguise simpler to assume. Since it was a French hotel, and the clerk had clearly, like January, been raised in the French Creole world, January guessed that the visitors had spoken French rather than English: as observant as the clerk was, and as proud of showing off his observations, he guessed as well that they’d spok
en Creole rather than European French, and had spoken it without accent.

  Brains and brawn.

  No mention of a woman.

  Were they trying to protect Belaggio? he wondered. Or themselves?

  Had they assured the impresario that no, no, he wasn’t a target, when in fact they were preparing to dispose of a man whose connection with a flagrant slave-smuggler was endangering their whole operation?

  I want him corpsed. Cut him up bad.

  Had in fact Marsan been the intended victim, as a warning to Belaggio? Or Belaggio, as a warning to Marsan?

  Just ’cause you keep soap in the kitchen . . .

  When January reached the Rue Esplanade, it was gaudy with floats and carriages, costumed maskers reeling along the torchlit banquette, and tinsel-bright music flowing out—in various degrees of quality—from town houses and saloons.

  As January had suspected, the Lalage servants—including the three he’d watched Lalage send off to work Tuesday morning—had been left with strict orders to remain at home and behave themselves. Naturally, then, the moment the family had disappeared for the Militia and Burial Society Ball, the cook had brought in a few friends for a game of dominoes in the kitchen, and the butler had made an assignation with a woman servant from three streets over. . . .

  “But he tell us not to make no trouble,” said the stevedore who came out to the yard when January opened the gate at the house’s side and came hesitantly through. “Can we help you?”

  “I hope so.” January glanced at the number of the house, which he’d written in large, unsteady figures on the note originally inscribed to Incantobelli. “This here the house of Michie Theodore Lalage? My name Gilles Blancheville. I’m a friend of Michie Lalage’s sister Mamzelle Sidonie. ’Least I was her friend ’fore I shipped out to serve on the Dorchester back in ’twenty-three. This the first I been back in town since I left, and I’m tryin’ to look up old friends. Woman at the market told me I could find Michie Theo here.”

  “He live here, all right,” said the slave. “Zerline?” He called back over his shoulder to the lighted kitchen. “Zerline, fella here say he lookin’ for Michie Lalage’s sister. . . . Michie Lalage have a sister?”

  The cook came out, a small, trim woman in her sixties, her face puckered with concern. January repeated his tale. “Oh, my dear sir,” she said, sympathy in her soft voice. “I am so sorry. Yes,” she added, glancing at the other slave, “Michie Lalage did have a sister—two sisters, in fact. Were you good friends with Mamzelle Sidonie?”

  January nodded. And because the cook was a friendly soul—and readily believed his veiled implication that he and Sidonie had been childhood sweethearts—and also because the domino game had had time to pall a little, he was treated to slightly bitter coffee (“M’am Lalage lock up the fresh beans, but these grounds only been run through once”) and bread-pudding fresh out of the oven, and everything he could possibly have wanted to know about the family.

  “I will say this for the other boys—Laurent and Jean—they didn’t turn their back on their mama and sisters the way Michie Theodore did,” said Zerline after she’d confirmed Olympe’s remarks about the lawyer’s disdain for his antecedents. “And where does Michie Theodore think his mama would have got the money for him to go to school, and to read for the law, if she hadn’t been friends with Michie Jean-Pierre Lalage the way she was? When Michie Theodore wanted to set up his own office, he was quick enough to go to Michie Jean-Pierre for a loan, for all he talk about his mama—his own mama!—not bein’ no better than she should be—and you tell me how a woman should be, when she’s got the chance to have a better life—and not speakin’ to Sidonie at Mass. Nor lettin’ poor little Delia cross his threshold until after her Michie Gesvres parted company from her, and she married Joseph Listolier and became respectable.”

  January exclaimed in shock and in grief, and the cook’s two friends—the laundress from the house next door, which belonged to a well-off house carpenter of color, and her sister, who was lady’s maid to a plaçée— clucked their tongues, and added tales from their own experience with the sons or cousins of plaçées who, upon attainment of position in the libre community, ceased inviting their sisters or cousins to dinner on the same days when they entertained their more legitimate friends.

  “And he wouldn’t have nothing to do with the trial, and him a lawyer?” January brought the conversation back with the air of a man who has been ruminating over some shocking fact for several minutes while the words of others flowed on around him. He looked from face to face of those around the kitchen’s worn pine table as if still numbed by shock, and felt obscurely guilty at the sympathy, friendliness, and pity he saw in their eyes.

  One of the three slave laborers sniffed, and said, “What you think she was, a member of his family or somethin’?” and the others laughed ironically.

  “Michie Jean—that was the oldest of Selene Lalage’s five children—asked him that.” Zerline shook her head with regret. “Spoke quiet, for Michie Jean’s a quiet-spoken man, but with a hardness in his voice that we could hear clear out here in the kitchen. He say, You a lawyer, Theo. You going to let him get free with what he did? He’s not a big man, Michie Jean—they’re none of that family very big—but he got a big anger in him. And Michie Theo says, It’s none of our look-out. We don’t know but what Sidonie asked for it. And anyway there’s nothing we can do.

  “And there isn’t,” added the cook sadly, going to the kettle of water that hung steaming on its hook above the fire. “That jury, they wouldn’t listen to a woman of color—who was, like that lawyer say, no better than she should be herself.” Though her voice had up to that time been gentle, the wormwood bitterness showed through on the phrase.

  She brought the bowl to the table and gathered the used coffee-cups to wash; her laundress friend got a clean towel to lay them on, and another to dry them with as they came out of the bowl. Like all the Lalage slaves, Zerline looked decently fed, and her simple calico clothing, though faded, was whole and clean, unlike her laundress friend, whose worn frock had been repeatedly patched.

  “Maybe I’m unjust,” Zerline went on after a moment. “Folks do what they have to do. And Jean went back to Natchez, where he has a cartin’ business, full of anger at his brother, and hasn’t spoke to him since. Nor has poor Michie Laurent that lost his leg in ’twenty-nine, cuttin’ cypress logs across the lake, and him and his family so poor now, it’d break your heart. And I do see Michie Theo’s point: Why get the men who hire you to do their legal papers for them mad at you, by stirrin’ up trouble against their cousin or their friend? But it’s just not the way I was taught you behaved to your own family.”

  Footsteps creaked on the outside stair and the cook said, “Oh, Lordy, here he comes,” and her friends got to their feet. The three male slaves headed for the door but weren’t nimble enough; a tubby man in a butler’s dark livery appeared in the kitchen door, a frown of permanent peevishness stamped between his brows.

  “Zerline,” he began, “I believe Michie Lalage has spoken to you before this on the subject of visitors. . . .”

  “We’d just stopped by to return the eggs Zerline borrowed last week when there wasn’t any at the market,” said the laundress with the adept promptness of one used since girlhood to improvisation. “My brother Gilles happened to be visiting us”—she gestured to January—“and he offered to walk us, the streets bein’ so noisy and all.”

  The butler glared at the little bowl of wash-water and the drying coffee-cups, but said nothing. Zerline said, “I’ll walk you to the gate, Lucy, Kitta—Gilles. . . .”

  Behind them as they crossed the yard they could hear the butler lecturing the three laborers. January guessed, from the silence of the men, that the words originated as much from Lalage as from his servant.

  “I thank you for telling me all this, m’am,” he said to the cook as she opened the gate for him and her friends. “I don’t know why, but it kind of rests me to hear how it came ab
out, an’ to know someone at least tried to get her justice. Poor Sidonie! I came by here last Thursday night, when first I came into port, but didn’t see no lights in the house. . . .”

  “They was home,” said Zerline doubtfully. “What time you come by?”

  January frowned a little, cogitating. “Close on to midnight, it must have been. Maybe they’d gone to bed already. We rotate the watch on board ship, so sometimes I’m up and don’t rightly remember how late it is.”

  “They’ll have just gone up to bed,” smiled the cook. “Thursday nights is when M’am Annette—that’s Michie Theodore’s wife—has her family over to dinner. They stay up in the parlor playin’ speculation sometimes, or listenin’ to young Miss Netta play the pianoforte with her cousins. What beautiful voices those girls have! I tiptoe over sometimes from the kitchen, after I’ve done with the washing-up, just to listen. You must have come by just after they put out the candles and went up to bed.”

  January walked back along the Esplanade, turning what he had learned over in his mind. Trying to sort what he had learned into some kind of logical order. Wondering why, with Cavallo’s certainty and Incantobelli’s fear, his own mind kept sliding back to the ghost of a woman ten years dead. A woman whose surviving relatives, moreover, were either in no mood or no position to make her cause their own.

  He supposed word could be sent to Natchez to inquire if Jean Lalage had left his business at its most thriving time of year on a rumor—transmitted how?—that Marsan was connected with an opera company whose members were being spectacularly threatened. . . .