by Julie Smith
By the end of the evening he knew that the man who’d knifed Delly—and who’d been cut in return by Kentucky Williams—was Matthew Porter of St. Louis. St. Louis, January recalled, being the city from which Major-General Wilkinson had governed the Louisiana Territory in 1806.
Since January was a law-abiding soul, even when the laws included Black Codes that forbade him among other things to smoke cigars in public, the following morning he consulted the City Guard, in the person of his friend Lieutenant Abishag Shaw. He suspected it would do him no good and his suspicion was rapidly confirmed.
“Iff’n you want me to, I’ll speak to Captain Tremouille about it,” offered Lieutenant Shaw, scratching his verminous hair. “But I’ll tell you right now what he’ll say: that we got too few men—’specially now in Carnival season—to go chasin’ after a white man who’ll just say he never knifed no nigger gal in his life. No jury in town’s gonna convict him of it on the word of a Salt River man-eater like Kentucky Williams anyways.”
His due to law and order paid, January then took a long walk into the genuine swamp beyond the Swamp, the ciprière: the maze of small bayous, impenetrable tangles of palmetto and hackberry, tall silent groves of cypress and magnolia that lay between New Orleans and the lake. Few white men came here. Even now, in the winter with the ground mostly dry, it was easy to become lost, even for January who’d been raised with a slave-child’s awareness of the invisible geography of landmarks, paths, rendezvous points. In the summer it was a nightmarish jungle of standing water, gators, snakes, and mosquitoes that would swarm a man like a living brown blanket.
He wasn’t sure if there was still a runaway slave village somewhere west of Bayou St. John, but as he quartered the squishy ground he would occasionally see fish lines in the bayous, or red flannel juju-bags hanging from the trees. He was just beginning to wonder if he’d have to abandon his quest and return to town—he would be playing at a subscription ball at the Théâtre d’Orléans that night—when he turned his head and saw, standing in the deep oyster grass across a murky little bayou, the one man in New Orleans taller than his own 6'3" height: massive, African-black like himself, clothed in rags with only a muscular stump where his left arm had been.
Cut-Arm, king of the runaways of the ciprière.
“You not wanderin’ around out here lookin’ for anybody, Music-Master, are you?”
“It just so happens,” said January, “that I am.”
Cut-Arm’s dark eyes narrowed with fury when January spoke of what had happened to Delly, who like most freed slaves in town had some passing acquaintance with the runaways in the ciprière. When January spoke of how he intended to get his revenge, the big runaway’s teeth showed white in a savage grin. “That’s good,” he rumbled. “Maybe not so good as seein’ his blood, but it’ll take a lot longer, and I think he’ll suffer more.”
Thus it was that January was loitering on the brick banquette of Rue Chartres opposite the Strangers Hotel at 10:00 the next morning when a man who fit the description of Matthew Porter emerged from its doors: tallish, well-dressed, his brown Vandyke beard newly barbered, and his right arm in a sling. January’s guess was confirmed a few minutes later when, as Cut-Arm had promised, one of the hotel’s maids came across the street to him and whispered, “He just left. It’s all clear.”
January had taken the precaution of dressing that morning in the simple but respectable dark clothing that could have passed him as either a free workman or an upper servant. Nobody gave him a glance as the woman brought him to one of the smaller guest rooms on the second floor. He’d gambled that Porter would be too cautious of pickpockets to take the coded message—whatever it was—with him when he went out, and a few minutes’ search of the trunk yielded it, tucked of an almanac that was in turn nestled among Porter’s shirts.
It was, as January had suspected, the end leaf torn out of the back of Kentucky Williams’s Bible, covered with neatly inscribed numbers. In his own memorandum book he made a note of the number of lines (thirty-two), the approximate number of characters per line (between forty-seven and fifty-four), and the width of all margins. “Meet me tomorrow,” he said to the maid, handing her a dollar, “at the same place, at the same time as today, bringing me this paper.” He slipped it back into the almanac. “You make a note of what two pages it’s between when you take it out—he may move it, and I don’t want him to guess it’s been messed with. I’ll give you another piece of paper, just like it, to put back in its place. You think you can do that?”
“Shoot.” She grinned. “For two dollars I’d swap out the whole damn almanac one page at a time. Cheap bastard didn’t give me no tip, not even a dime, when I brought him up a bath last night, and pinched my tit into the bargain. You know how heavy it is, luggin’ all that hot water? What is it?” she asked hopefully. “You put a juju on the new piece of paper?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said January.
Returning to the room he rented from his widowed mother on Rue Dauphine, he carefully tore one of the front blank pages from Kentucky Williams’s Bible, meticulously matching the irregularities of the ragged remains of the torn page in the back. It took him a little experimentation with watering ink to achieve the faded hue of the original. While his various samples were drying, he set to work with the Bible to code a new message, using for good measure as many of the letters as had been in the original’s first three lines, which he’d taken the precaution of copying.
“My guess is, those are all that Porter read, if he even read that far,” he said to Hannibal that night, when he walked out to the Broadhorn to check on his two patients. “If anything sticks in a man’s mind out of a mass of numbers like that, it’ll only be the first few. Which is the reason, of course, for a code in the first place.”
“Did you figure out what them first lines said?” Delly asked, her brown eyes round in the grimy lamplight of her attic cubicle. “Does it say where the treasure’s hid?”
“It does.” January tied up the clean dressing, gently tugged the girl’s ragged nightdress back into place. “The first three lines—and, I suspect, the rest of the coded text—are names, clearly invented. Jack Falstaff is one; Montague Capulet is another. Beside each name is the name of a bank.”
Delly frowned at this prosaic anticlimax—she’d clearly expected paces counted from Death-Head Oak and Skull Rock.
But a slow grin spread over Hannibal’s thin face. “Where Uncle Water Buling cached whatever he could make off with under Wilkinson’s nose, in the confusion of Burr’s projected invasion. How many of those banks are still in operation, do you suppose? Private banks come and go like waterfront cafés.”
“Which would be why Uncle Walter spread the funds out among so many. The first on the list is the Bank of New York, and that’s still in operation. So Kentucky will get at least a little money out of it.”
“Which she’ll probably drink up within a week,” sighed Hannibal. “I would, anyway. It does seem a waste.”
Screams resounded from the yard below, followed by shots and the crash of a body being heaved out the Broadhorn’s back door. Both men and Delly tilted their heads toward the window to ascertain that it was only a fight between six or seven customers, clawing and gouging in the mud of the yard while Kentucky Williams roared curses at them from the porch.
“It does,” January agreed. “But if we do more than take a reasonable sum for services rendered, on the grounds that as upstanding citizens we deserve the money more than she does, how does that make us different from the man who slashed up Delly with a knife?”
The next morning, January took delivery of the code paper, and spent until early afternoon closeted up with the Bible, deciphering names. “I’d like to get this back to the saloon before it opens,” he said to Hannibal, who had put in an appearance—at a far earlier hour than was usual for him to be about—to assist. “The doctor I talked to said Porter’s wounds weren’t deep. He should be able to use his arm by this evening. It would be a sh
ame if the book isn’t there when he makes his next attempt.”
Right on schedule, that evening, while January was again changing Delly’s dressings, a tumult of shouting and two shots resounded from the saloon below, followed a moment later by Hannibal’s arrival at the top of the ladder.
“He’s downstairs,” gasped the fiddler, panting from just the climb. “Done up as a preacher in the most ridiculous wig and false whiskers you’ve ever seen.”
“Who got shot?” January asked, scrambling down the ladder after Hannibal, crossing to the porch at a run.
“Nobody—but Porter went down with what I assume to be chicken blood all over him like an Indian massacre.”
They sprang up the porch steps and peered through the Broadhorn’s back door in time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s dim lamplight.
“I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of God, is there a Bible in this house?”
As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal and January traded disbelieving glances. “I’ve seen better acting at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.
The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched the volume to his ensanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my daughter—”
And with a crash, the lights went out.
“Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly, as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms spring through the door between them and sprint away across the yard.
Inside the saloon, men were crashing around and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed, “Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”
“Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler, as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months, writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he doesn’t have right.”
“Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl—who’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life—deserves more than a little frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure map leading to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the south of Mexico; a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of them died. A land wrought by Satan, he said, to punish sinners.”
Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you think he’ll go?”
“He will if he wants the four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Spanish gold I said was buried there.”
“Considering the amount of money he’ll have to borrow to finance an expedition,” mused Hannibal, “and the time it will take, and the gnawing anxiety of knowing there’s a treasure just waiting for him …”
“If he’s willing to seek it,” said January gently. “Which we know, from his actions, that he is. Where your treasure is—wholly imaginary, in this case—there shall your heart be also … and for Mr. Porter, almost certainly his fever-ridden bones as well.”
Hannibal paused, his hand on the rungs of the ladder. “For such a thoroughly nice man, Ben, you can be a complete son of a bitch.”
“Thank you,” said January. “I have my moments. Now let’s start writing those letters to the banks, and see how much of the real treasure is left to collect.”
PART II
LIFE IN ATLANTIS
MUDDY POND
BY MAUREEN TAN
Village de l’Est
On the Wednesday after the levee failed and flooded New Orleans East, sixty-eight-year-old Sonny Vien waded into chest-deep water to rescue the Virgin Mary.
The two-foot-tall statue was at the far corner of the house, near where the front yard met the side yard. It was sheltered by a stone grotto that Sonny had built and surrounded by a garden that his wife, Tam, had planted. Climbing red roses framed the grotto and tiny white flowers formed a carpet at the Virgin’s feet. In a perfect blending of New Orleans tradition and Vietnamese-Catholic belief, they had positioned the grotto so that the Virgin’s back was to the house while her delicate Asian features and outstretched arms were directed toward the not-too-distant levee.
For thirty years, the blue paint of the statue’s gown had faded, the brass cross at the grotto’s peak had weathered, and the garden had flourished. For all that time, the sainted Virgin—not the statue, but the mother of Jesus it represented—had remained vigilant, holding back the dangerous water of the canal and protecting the snug white house on Calais Street.
And then the Virgin failed, Sonny thought bitterly as he navigated through the foul water toward the cross that was now the only thing marking the location of the grotto. She’d failed to protect Tam from the cancer that so unexpectedly took her life. Then she’d failed to protect the house—to protect Village de l’Est and, in fact, the whole of New Orleans—from the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina.
If it had been up to him, the statue would have remained where it was. Failed and submerged. But Tam would have judged that a sacrilege. And with her less than six months in the grave, Sonny’s actions were most often guided by what he thought she would have wanted. That was why he’d ignored Mayor Nagin’s evacuation order and ridden out the hurricane rather than leaving their three Siamese cats to fend for themselves. And that was why he had left behind the security of his windowless second-floor attic.
Wearing the same worn T-shirt and faded khaki shorts he’d had on when he’d first retreated from the flood, Sonny had gone back downstairs. He’d already ventured into the flooded first floor several times before, intent on retrieving a few more photos, gathering a little more food, fetching a couple more blankets. So as he’d waded once again through the knee-deep water, he averted his eyes from the sight of his favorite chair soaked beyond repair, looked quickly past the darkly stained wallpaper curling away from the walls, tried not to think about the rugs beneath his feet. But he couldn’t ignore the smell—the odor of rotting food, wet paper, decomposing wood, and mildew that the stagnant water seemed to bind together.
The smell had followed him as he pushed open the water-swollen side door, then stepped onto a tiny porch. As he made his way gingerly down a trio of steps linking the porch to the driveway, a Vietnamese proverb sprang, unbidden, into his mind. He spoke it aloud before leaving the last step, tipping his head as he listened to the way the flowing syllables of his native tongue echoed off the unnatural silence beyond his kitchen door. A silence that—at least today—had been unbroken except for birdsong and the occasional racket of low-flying helicopters.
“An co di truoc. Loi nuoc theo sau.” (“When having a party, go first. When walking in the water, go after.”)
Sonny had smiled—a tired, twisted smile—as he considered the uselessness of the proverb’s wisdom. Then he went first and alone into the tepid water, using his wiry 5'2" frame to estimate its depth. About four feet, Sonny decided, knowing that he was one of the lucky ones.
Though he hadn’t anticipated the flooding, he’d been cautious enough to follow a New Orleans maxim. As Katrina made landfall, he’d taken his old shotgun—rather than an axe—with him into his attic. He hadn’t needed it. But in the hours after storm-driven water overtopped the nearby levee, he’d heard shotgun fire echoing in the distance. And he feared that in the lower-lying areas surrounding Village de l’Est, people trapped by rising water in their windowless attics were blasting holes in their roofs to escape deathtraps.
Another helicopter flew overhead, its clatter magnified as the sound bounced off the s
wamped houses below. It was on its way, Sonny was certain, to pluck unfortunates from their rooftops. To rescue people whose lives were endangered. But because that did not describe Sonny’s situation, it didn’t occur to him to signal for help. He didn’t need rescuing. As others had evacuated, he’d prepared. He had food and water, the company of his cats, a battery-powered radio, and a dry attic. No matter if it took a week or two or even three, Sonny knew that eventually the water would recede. Then his neighbors would return.
Ta ve ta tam ao ta. Du trong du duc ao nha van hon. That’s what generations of Vietnamese had advised each other. (“Let’s go home and bathe in our own pond. Clear or muddy, it’s the water of our pond.”)
Now that proverb, Sonny thought, was appropriate to the present situation. War and governments might have compelled the immigrants of Village de l’Est to abandon their homeland. But a big storm? An unexpected flood? Sonny shook his head. That would not keep a Viet Kieu—a Vietnamese living in the land of golden landscapes—away from home for very long. He was certain that most would return to the muddy pond that was now Village de l’Est. And they would rebuild.
In the meantime, he would wait. And rescue the statue. For Tam.
The day was hot and humid, so Sonny moved slowly through the water, conserving his energy, using his sandaled feet to feel his way along the path that led to the statue. The flagstones paralleled the driveway for a dozen feet, then rounded a corner into the front yard. From there, the path curved outward until it reached the center of the yard, then curved back until ending at the grotto. No need for American efficiency in this route, Tam had insisted as Sonny laid the stones. And then she’d filled the shallow half-moon between path and house with delicate shrubs, colorful flowers, fragrant herbs, and interesting objects.
