Wet Grave, page 14
“Clarence Horatio, m'am,” replied January promptly. “Only he go by a dozen other names, Slick and Red Dog and I don't know how many others. You didn't happen to see—”
The woman raised her head as footfalls thumped on the floor of the barroom. Without so much as an “Excuse me,” she got to her feet, slurped a last spoonful of the grits, said “Shit,” and walked away through the door behind her and into the barroom that led, January could see, to the space behind the bar itself. “Well, howdy, stranger,” he heard her say as friendly and cheerful as if she'd just risen from luncheon after a brisk walk. “You been in these parts long?”
January put his cap on again, and crossed through the dirty yard and out the passway to the street.
Midnight, he thought, looking back at the mean little house. By daylight Gallatin Street looked even worse than it did after dark, swimming with mud from the rain. Planks bridged the gutter before Sal's front door and a dozen others. The gutters here, like those everywhere in the French town, were substantial canals, two feet wide and lined with cypress. Like those everywhere in the French town, they were offensive with garbage, sewage, and deceased animals in an advanced stage of decomposition, overflowing now and running into the street.
At this time of year, of course, most of the City Council were in their cool, pleasant cottages in Mandeville or Milneburgh, eating Italian ices and listening to the breezes whisper in the trees.
A few dozen yards away, at the end of the street, the masts of schooners jutted against the tumble of clouds and daylight. Smoke poured from the stacks of the steam-packets. Liverpool and Le Havre, St. Petersburg and Cádiz and Vera Cruz—all the wide world, where whites wouldn't automatically address him as Sambo or Cuffee if they spoke English, or as “tu,” like a dog or a child, if they spoke French. . . .
But where a poor woman could still be murdered in her home, he reminded himself, without the police caring who did it. It would have been the same, for someone like Hesione LeGros, in Paris or Berlin or Peking. Men had been dying on the barricades—or on crosses—for thousands of years trying to make it otherwise, and hadn't succeeded yet.
And if a young man without money or influence were found dead in a gutter, soaked with forty-rod, nobody would go about Paris or Rome or Constantinople asking if he habitually drank, or what he might have been doing in a part of town where he would not ordinarily go.
Boys of that age . . .
What was he doing in this part of town? reflected January, and looked around him once again.
M'sieu St. Chinian, please come to the Dead Nigger Tavern on Gallatin Street so that my colleagues and I can talk to you about your missing vacuum-pump.
Boys of sixteen did idiotic things, of course—at the age of sixteen January had thought himself as invulnerable as Hercules. And it was true that he, January, had been out of town when Artois had gotten Mulm's message. But Artois, he thought, at least would have had the sense to ask someone for advice if this was where he'd been instructed to come.
So where would the purported finder of the missing pump have set up a meeting where Artois would feel safe?
“Stinkin' yellow pups, the lot of you,” screamed a furious voice. “You'd steal the chaw out of a man's mouth if he yawned!” A black woman stumbled from one of the saloons, followed by the curses and laughter of the Oak Cudgel Boys, the gang that ran thievery and violence down at this end of the wharves. In the hot, steamy sunlight she shouted at them, half-drunk and arms akimbo. . . .
Ask her? wondered January.
Or ask the gray-haired sailor, snoring with his back to the wall of the building across the street from Sal's?
He remembered the darkness of the streets here near the market, after the sun went down. No lamps swung above the intersections and few saloonkeepers wasted more on candles than was absolutely necessary to permit their patrons to locate their own drinks. A dray of wine-barrels lurched up the street from the river, one man driving and two others sitting guard on the tailgate, rifles on their arms—the Oak Cudgel Boys made obscene gestures after them, flung horse-shit, and cursed.
Which of them would even have noticed who dumped a beardless boy here to lie in the gutter?
He went home, and saw beside his bed the book Tamerlane and Other Poems, all its pages neatly cut and waiting for him.
Then he cried.
TEN
“That poor kid dead?” Cut-Nose Chighizola's scarred face twisted still further into a gargoyle mask of sorrow and disgust. “And for what? Just what was in his pockets, eh?”
“I think so, yes.” January leaned an elbow on the stacked boxes of oranges, the shallow crates of tomatoes and aubergines in the market's blue shade. Passers-by on the Rue du Levee seemed, from here, to be crossing a lighted stage: market-women with baskets on their tignoned heads, sallying forth for one last try at the streets before packing up and going home to their families. Servants with their own baskets hurrying to make up some last-minute deficiency in the dinner menu, impoverished housewives out to bargain for vegetables no longer fresh. The baskets of shrimp had begun to smell strongly fishy. Under the peaked tile roof, flies roared in inky clouds.
“Did you see who he met?”
“Oh, yeah.” Chighizola hadn't changed a great deal from the night of General Humbert's ill-fated banquet twenty-three years before. His hair was gray, but he still looked like if you hit him with a cypress beam, the beam would break. When January had come up on him today, the old pirate had been recounting, to three awestruck British midshipmen and an open-mouthed ten-year-old boy, the horrific single-handed battle against Turkish corsairs in defense of the honor of a British countess, that had resulted in the loss of his nose. The mesmerized midshipmen had paid three times the going price for a pineapple before moving on.
“Yeah, I saw your boy.” Chighizola nodded toward the coffee-stand between the arcade's square brick pillars. “Right over there at La Violette's. Five or six o'clock yesterday it must have been, I was just wrapping up. You lucky you caught me, I'm hauling my crust back to Grand Isle tonight. Not much of a moon, but the weather's clearing, and this time of year you got to take the weather as she come. Lot of water in Bayou Segnette, I can go straight down to the bay, like a fish swim in the ocean. With that Frank Mulm, the boy was.”
“Mulm?” January wondered if Artois had seen the saloonkeeper by chance here, and decided on the spur of the moment to make inquiries of his own about Hesione LeGros. Then he remembered the girl in the dirty green gown behind the Nantucket Saloon, Sancho Sangre's buying these days. . . . Runnin' guns to the rebels in New Grenada . . .
But why kill over something that, January was fairly certain, Mulm wouldn't be prosecuted for anyway? There was no law that said a saloonkeeper couldn't buy as many rifles as he chose and sell them to whomever he chose. The only ones who'd get in trouble were those who tried to smuggle them into Venezuela past the navies of those who currently ruled there, and Artois was certainly in no position to get word to anyone who would endanger the smugglers.
Somebody must have panicked.
Or Artois did in fact meet Mulm only by chance.
“That's a bad man, Mulm.” Cut-Nose shook his head, unconsciously echoing Marie Laveau. “Have an apple. I grow 'em myself down on Grand Isle. Jean's due in tomorrow with more. These, I give 'em to the Sisters of Charity to make pies for the orphans.” He gestured at the dozen fat yellow fruits remaining in the straw-filled boxes.
“He looks like a toff, eh? With them little spectacles and the silver watch and the waistcoat like a Philadelphia undertaker. But you got to watch out for the millipede as well as the serpent and the scorpion. Frank Mulm got the striped eye, like they say, the bad eye. Me, I'd rather have a bad man who carries a cutlass and spits on the police—not that I spit on police myself these days—than a bad man who goes around with a ledger-book under his arm and is all the time waiting for you to turn around so he can knife you in the back with his little pen-knife. Me, I know bad men, eh? I been a bad man myself, though I'm all reformed now, praise the Virgin.” He crossed himself.
“When you say with him, you mean they had coffee together? Mulm and the boy?”
“No, no, that's what I'm tellin' you.” Cut-Nose looked up at January with earnest black eyes like cut jet. “That boy, he shoulda stayed away from him. He woulda if Mulm looked on the outside as rotten as he is in his heart. But he looks like God's uncle, you know? With that soft little voice, and no cussin', and his clean hands.” He began to tidy the fruit away into its boxes again, sorting the bruised from the good and stacking the crates preparatory, presumably, to transport to the Sisters of Charity and their orphans.
“I seen him waiting there, drinking coffee by himself, and I think that's a little strange, you know? For one thing, Frank Mulm don't ever drink his coffee here. He buys cheap beans and has a woman make it for him back at the Nantucket. La Violette”—he gestured to the proprietress of the coffee-stand—“she buy good coffee, Havana green, and she got to charge for it. For another, if a man like Mulm gonna drink coffee, he gonna drink it indoors, where he can watch his back. The Café des Exiles is straight across the street. Every time I look over at him, he's lookin' all around him, never sittin' quiet, and whenever a cart come by on the street, it splash his shoes with mud, an' he get out a handkerchief and wipe up the stains and look pissy about it, like a cat under a leak. But he don't move. Just stayed there with his cloak folded up across his lap . . .”
“His cloak?” January blinked. “Yesterday? It must have been hot enough to bake bread in here. What was he doing with a cloak?”
“Now you mention it, that was funny.” The former pirate scratched the scarred stump of his nose. “Bad enough the man was wearing a coat, like an idiot. My daughter, she's always telling me, ‘Papa, wear your coat when you go up to town, people gonna think you're some kind of paisano.' ” Chighizola laughed. Like many of the Americans—the Kaintuck keelboatmen, and the farmers who came south with flatboats full of pumpkins, hogs, and corn—he stood behind his table in shirt-sleeves, and in the faded homespun stripes of pink and blue he did in fact look like a peasant. January was familiar with the adjuration not to go about the town half-dressed. He'd heard it from his mother all his life.
“Well, that's what he had, anyway,” said Chighizola. “He got up and walked a few feet to meet this young man, this kid in the light-blue coat, when he come down the banquette. They stand together talkin' right there, between those pillars but outside, next to the street. Then somebody ask me somethin' about my aubergines, an' when I turn around back, they's both gone.”
Mulm had a gun. The thought emerged full-grown and obvious, mostly because it was a snatch common in Paris, in the rough districts near the customs barrier. A girl would come in from the country, either for the day or looking for employment in the city shops. A pleasant, harmless-looking man, or more usually a middle-aged woman, would go up to her, sometimes with a shopping basket on her arm, or a big shawl. “There's a gun beneath the shawl, dearie, so get in the carriage. . . .” And a carriage would be there, as if it had dropped from the sky. The victim was usually too confused and shocked to cry out. “We just want to talk to you and you won't be hurt. . . .”
And of course the girl would end up in a brothel. January had never fathomed why, with all the prostitutes there were in Paris, more had to be recruited by force, but apparently that was the case. He'd heard it was ten times worse in London, where men paid premiums to deflower virgins.
But why? he thought. When he'd told Artois to get rid of the guns, to emphasize that he'd never seen them, it had been in his mind only to prevent the boy from a roughing-up by whoever was bringing them in—even if Artois had gone straight to the City Guards and enabled them to trace the smugglers, nothing very much would have been done on either side. Inconvenience to the smugglers, a hitch-up passing them on to Sancho Sangre or whoever was acting for the rebels in whatever southern jungle they were destined for . . .
It didn't make sense.
It wasn't a killing matter, not of a boy who clearly had a wealthy family—be it ever so illegitimate—behind him.
Mulm was an American, but he had lived in New Orleans for several years and he wasn't stupid. He did enough business with the French Creoles to know that the murder of a young man of color connected with one of their families wouldn't be simply shrugged over and forgotten. He would know how close the ties were that bound the shadow-children to their white relatives. Obviously he knew, if he'd taken pains to provide another explanation for the boy's death.
“Yes, you give me a good bad man, an honest bad man,” Cut-Nose was saying. “Lafitte, may he rest in peace. . . .” He crossed himself again. “Yes, he stole a little here and there, though he never did sink that American ship like they said he did, that made so much trouble. He wasn't no fool, him. But you know, he treated everyone good. If a man was in trouble, or was ill, he'd support that man's wife and children. If a man died in his service, he'd pay for them to be buried. None of your little wood box stuck in the ground, neither. Candles, and gloves for everybody, and a big spread of food and wine afterward so everyone would remember their friend. There aren't men like Lafitte around anymore.”
Given the number of men and women Lafitte had stolen from Spanish slave-ships bound for Cuba and then smuggled into Louisiana to sell to the sugar-planters, that was probably just as well.
Across the street, lamps were lit in the Café des Exiles. Men moved their tables out onto the banquette, to sip their coffee and play dominoes, old men who'd been planters or brokers in Saint-Domingue, before the slaves there rose up in revolt. Men who'd spent their lives telling themselves that it was only a matter of time before the situation there was “cleared up” and they could go back to being the masters.
No white men had slept quite so peacefully since Christophe, and Toussaint Louverture, had led the slaves to revolt. Every few years now, slaves in this land of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness tried to lay claim to the rights promised by its founders, and every few years were beaten down, with greater and greater brutality. Since the last big revolt on the eastern seaboard four years ago, even freedmen and libres—people of color who had been free for generations—were regarded with deep suspicion.
Café des Exiles, thought January with a bitter inward smile as servants of the owner came out with flambeaux of gunpowder, cow-hooves, and lemon-grass, to drive the mosquitoes away. As if my mother's mother, and my father, and all those others brought from Africa were not themselves exiles.
“Did you hear Hesione LeGros was dead?” he asked, blinking hard against the first gust of harsh smoke as it fluffed across the street.
“No . . . Hessy?” The old pirate's busy hands paused. “Hellfire Hessy, we used to call her. . . . That's a damn shame. What happened?”
“Someone came into her place about three weeks ago and slashed her to death,” said January quietly. “Someone she knew, I think— And, of course, the Guards are doing nothing.”
“T'cha!” Chighizola shook his head, and tucked wisps of straw more firmly around the yellow fruit. “God, what a bobcat that little blackbird was! I remember me the time, down on Grand Terre that was, when she went after old Gambi with a pewter tankard, right in Lafitte's house, when she heard Gambi'd started makin' sheep's eyes at one of the girls we took off a Spanish slaver. Damn near brained him, chasin' him around the room—I nearly fell in the fire, I was laughing so hard. Poor Gambi was givin' Hessy necklaces and earrings for a month, tryin' to get her to forgive him. You'd never think it, a little thing like that.”
No, thought January, remembering the crumpled, dirty form dead on the floor among the ants. You'd never think it.
“Did she have children, back in the Barataria? Or any family?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. Three daughters, that was raised by the Borgas family over on Grand Isle, and all of 'em married now with kids of their own—what the hell was their names? Somethin' pretty—Marie-Epiphanié works for me, one of the daughters, sweetest little lady you'd care to meet—what the hell was her sisters' names? She had a son, Hessy did, that the Borgases also raised—she loved 'em all but she wasn't much of a mother, and she knew it. But he died of snakebite five, six years ago.” He sighed noisily. “She was a spitfire, no mistake. But she hadn't no malice in her, you know. None. She didn't hold no grudges, and didn't make trouble for nobody, once she got over her mad. She'd stab you with that stiletto she kept in her hair one day, wash up your dishes for you the next. She made sure her children went to good families, that didn't mistreat 'em, which is more than some of those bitches did, once Lafitte and his boys moved on.”
“And you wouldn't know any reason Mulm would want to harm Hesione? Or have someone harm her? Does he have a man named Tom Burkitt working for him?” he added when Chighizola shook his head again. “Big man, six feet or so, American? Or chews tobacco like an American, anyway?”
“Burkitt? Not that I've heard. There's a fellow Burke that hangs around the Nantucket, Tyrone Burke. Supposed to be a drover, but me, I wouldn't let him touch no horseflesh of mine. Come south on the keelboats, I hear, and got into debt to Mulm. Works thievin' on the docks a little, an' does this an' that for Mulm, keeps order in the place. He's about six feet an' chews. Black hair, light eyes, greeny-brown like dirty water. Black brows that meet in the middle, like my grandma always said was the sign of malòcchio.” And he made a quick gesture of aversion with his hand. “That your man?”
“Maybe.” January helped Cut-Nose carry his crates through the shining cobalt darkness to the levee, where his pirogue bobbed at the end of an empty wharf. Afterward he returned to the market, where the last of the women were packing to go by the yellow flare of cressets. La Violette confirmed both what Cut-Nose had said and what January suspected. She didn't particularly recall that Mulm—whom she knew by sight and rumor, and detested, having a cousin who worked mopping up at the Nantucket—had had a cloak with him, but she recalled him going over to that young octoroon boy. Standing next to the boy, right up close. She remembered because she'd longed to call out Step back, son, or he'll pick your pocket. . . .
