Part 2 (1/2)
”Yore pal Sefton'll be along,” said Shaw rea.s.suringly. ”What do you know about Fourchet's son?”
”Not much.” January drew a deep breath, tried to convince his muscles to relax. ”He's a few years older than I. Esteban, his name is. I think his mother was the daughter of a Spanish wine- merchant here in town.”
”Juana Villardiga, accordin' to the records.” Shaw folded his hands over the papers, rumpling them as if they were yesterday's newspaper instead of the proofs that January would need, should his freedom be in jeopardy. The morning was chill, and through the arched doors at the inner side of the watchroom the Cabildo courtyard was dusky still. Two prisoners swabbed the flagstones under the watchful eye of a blue-uniformed City Guard.
January's eyes felt gritty. After spending most of the evening getting the doc.u.ments drawn up and finding musician friends to replace him in his engagements to play at this or that party until after the sugar harvest-not an easy matter, given the perennial paucity of good musicians in the town- he'd gone late to bed, and in the few hours that he had slept, had dreamed of being a child again, and a slave.
”In 1802 Fourchet married, again, a woman name of Camille Ba.s.sancourt who came here with her aunt from Paris. They had three sons and two daughters-”
”After my time.” January shook his head. ”We left Bellefleur in 1801. I only remember Esteban.”
Shaw used the corner of the top doc.u.ment to pick his teeth, brown with tobacco like a row of discolored tombstones. He was a lanky man who looked as if he'd been put together from random lengths of cane, close to January's height and homely as a mongrel dog. ”The girls an' one boy are still livin' . . .” He grubbed in a pocket and consulted a much-scribbled fragment of paper.
”Solange is at school with the Ursulines here in town. Robert-that's the boy-an' his wife just got back on the sixth from takin' Elvire, the older girl, to a boardin' school in Poitiers.”
Given the man's raspy, flatboat drawl, it always surprised January that Shaw p.r.o.nounced the names of French cities and individuals correctly.
”Accordin' to Fourchet's lawyer, Camille died in '28.” Shaw extracted a plug of tobacco from his trouser pocket, picked a knot of lint off it, and bit off a hunk the size of a Spanish dollar.
”Fourchet remarried this past April to a girl name of Marie-Noel Daubray-”
”Daubray?” interrupted January. ”Isn't that the name-”
”Of the fellas he thinks might be behind the mill fire an' all? It is.” He gestured with the fragment of paper-a bill from Berylmann, a gunsmith on Ca.n.a.l Street, January saw-and concentrated for a moment on reducing the brown chunk in the corner of his jaws to a manageable consistency.
”Their first cousin once removed, in fact. Granddaughter of their oldest brother, which is what the lawsuit's about. What's our boy Esteban like?” ”Stiff,” said January, the first description that came to his mind. ”I haven't seen him since he was twelve, remember, and I was only eight.” He leaned back in the chair beside Shaw's cluttered desk with half-closed eyes, summoning back the silent boy who'd stare with such repelled fascination at the naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the women in the fields. ”But he was stiff. He walked around with his shoulders up-” He demonstrated, bracing his whole body in imitation of that tight, silent, awkward boy, and was aware of Shaw's cool eyes flickering over him, reading what that imitation had to say.
”He didn't speak much to anyone. He was clumsy.
You expected him to fall over any minute. You know how there are people that it makes you uncomfortable to talk to? They stand wrong, or they stand too close; it takes them forever to say anything and when they do it's never quite what they mean. That's Esteban. Or it was,” he amended, ”a quarter century ago.”
”Well, Maestro-” Shaw uncoiled his slow height from his chair, dumped the papers on the desk, and glanced across at the wall clock someone had affixed behind the sergeant's high desk.
”People don't change that much, boy to man. Oh, you might not recognize who they are, exactly, but unless he works to do somethin' about it, a awkward boy's gonna grow to a awkward man.
Same as a girl who's cruel to her pets ain't anyone I'd want to be the mother of my children later on down the road. I don't know how much use any of this'll be to you. . . .”
”All of it's of use.” January followed him across the big dim stone-flagged room to the outer door.
”Any of it's of use. You have to understand what the pattern is, before you can see where it breaks.”
From the Cabildo's front doors they looked out past the cobalt shadows of the arcade and across the gutter to the bustling Place d'Armes. Mid-morning in autumn, and all the world was out enjoying the mild suns.h.i.+ne. The carriages of the wealthy jostled axles with carts of cabbages. A tall old man walked past with a basket of pink roses on his head, and a beggar-woman at her ease on the cathedral steps, her hair a white aurora of chaos, slowly devoured an orange and spit the seeds in great joyful leaping arcs into the gutter. January remembered the rainy gray of Paris in the winter and wanted to fling out his arms and laugh.
Whatever else could be said about it, New Orleans was New Orleans. There was no place like it in the world.
”If it had been clear who's doing the actual poisoning-making the actual voodoo-marks, cutting harnesses and sawing axles-Fourchet wouldn't have come to you. This isn't like coming into a tavern and seeing a weeping woman and a dead lover and a husband with a smoking pistol in his hand. With a hundred and fifty people involved it's not even likely that I'm going to find just one, or two, unaccounted for at any given time.”
Shaw's eyebrows lifted. ”I figured with slaves in the field you'd at least be able to keep track of where they was.”
”That's because you've never tried to do it.” There was wry pride in January's voice. ”That's what scares the h.e.l.l out of the whites, you know. Especially out on the plantations. You've got sixty, seventy, eighty grown men, fifty or sixty women-What are you going to do? Keep them in chains all the time? The drivers keep an eye on things and the overseer keeps an eye on things and you know d.a.m.n well that if somebody wants to sneak away badly enough-if they don't care about getting a beating if they get caught-they'll sneak away. That's what makes them crazy.
”It's a war,” he added softly. ”Whether or not some of them plan organized rebellion, it's war.
And you have to fight for every inch, a hundred times a day. That's why you have to look for a pattern.”
”Waffle man, waffle man, ” sang a strolling vendor. ”Wash his face in the fryin' pan . . . ” January felt for his watch again. ”I can work with the men, live among them enough to hear rumors, at least so that I can find out who was where when. If there is a conspiracy, a revolt being planned, I think it'll be pretty clear. But if it's just one man, I'm not sure I'll find our killer-almost certainly not before he kills Fourchet. So I need to know the pattern. Why is this happening now?
Why not last month or last year? What made the bearable unbearable? That's why you told Fourchet to speak to me, wasn't it?”
Shaw spit in the general direction of the gutter. His aim, as usual, was abysmal. ”That's why.”
Beyond the levee, the smokestacks of the steamboats poured sullen columns of soot into the dirty sky. At this season they lined the wharves three and four deep, and more tacked around out in the open river, keeping up their head of steam and their boiler-pumps working while waiting for a berth. January felt for his watch yet again, muttered an oath, and looked back over his shoulder at the watchroom clock, then turned back to scan the faces of the crowd.
”Boat ain't due to leave til ten,” Shaw remarked, as if he weren't following January's thoughts.
”And you know as well as I do they never do.”
”Wherever he is,” January responded gloomily, ”I'm going to strangle Hannibal Sefton.”
Fourchet's voice, braying out curses, caught his attention. Looking across the crowd to the levee, January saw the man on the deck of the small stern-wheeler on which January himself and his friend Hannibal Sefton had purchased tickets last night. One of the porters had dropped his valise; the boat's master lashed out with the whip he still held and caught the man a cut across the back. After the brutality he'd witnessed yesterday January had raised an objection to traveling on the Belle Dame, but Fourchet would have nothing to do with American boats, and Captain Ney was the only Creole master in town at the moment.
Fourchet's two servants hastily took up the luggage and carried it to the cargo hold. The taller servant took the bags inside. The shorter, given a moment's leisure, turned at the deck railing and gazed back across the square at the cathedral, like a man drinking in the sight.
Something in the way he stood made January remember the field hands yesterday evening on the Bonnets o' Blue.
Of course, he thought. Fourchet's butler had just been poisoned. In addition to finding a spy, Fourchet had come into town to look for a new butler.
Fourchet yelled, ”Baptiste, d.a.m.n you!” His voice carried like a crow's caw through the din. The new servant fled after his companion.
January's hand curled into a fist.
”You familiar with Mon Triomphe, Maestro?” Shaw asked. ”Ever been there?”
January shook his head. ”I was only seven when St.Denis Janvier bought my mother. I'd never been off Bellefleur. Mon Triomphe was very isolated in those days, but of course now the whole of the riverbank on both sides is in sugar as far as Baton Rouge.”
”Well, I got to jawin' some last night with this an' that pilot, after Mr. Fourchet told me as how you'd agreed to go.” Shaw spit again toward the cypress-lined gutter that divided the arcade from the open Place; the brown wad of expectorant missed its target by feet. ”It did kinda float through my mind as how we's askin' a lot of you, to go up there pretendin' as how you're a slave, and the only ones knowin' you're not is your pal Sefton and Fourchet himself. Now, we know somebody's out to kill Fourchet. And much as I like Sefton you do got to admit reliable ain't the word that springs most skeedaciously to mind when his name is mentioned. So I tell you what.”
He pointed across the square, to a woman selling bandannas among the fruit stands that cl.u.s.tered be neath the trees. The bright-colored wares were tacked to a crosspole and fluttered like some kind of exotic tree themselves. ”You go buy yourself seven bandannas: red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white.
Accordin' to the pilots, see, the riverbank at the north end of the plantation caved in 'bout three years ago, openin' a chute between it an' Catbird Point. Catbird Island, they calls it now. That changed the current, an' built up a bar just above the plantation landin'-blamed if that river ain't like a housewife with new furniture, always movin' things around. When Fourchet cleared an' cut for a new landin' they left an oak tree on the bank above it, that's big enough that the pilots all sight by it comin' down that stretch of the river.”
A woman darted through the levee crowds, a flash of cheap bright calicos between stacks of orange pumpkins and dusty cotton bales, skirts gathered up in her hands. On the deck of the Belle Dame Fourchet's new butler pushed his way between the laden porters to the gangway, to seize the woman's hands, to kiss her with a fervent desperation that told its own tale. She was a tall woman, plump and awkward in her ill-fitting simple dress, and as they clung to one another her face bent down to his.
”You be like that old Greek fella,” Shaw said, ”that was supposed to change the sail of his boat from black to white if'n the news he brung was good. You tie a different bandanna to that oak tree every day, just in the order I said 'em. Red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, an' white, white bein' for Sunday so's you can remember.”
”Don't tell me you've convinced riverboat pilots to remember the order as well.” Anger twisted again in January's heart as he watched the couple on the gangway. There was nothing he could do about their pain; Shaw's calm arrangements and placid voice grated at him. ”I never met a pilot who could take his mind off the river long enough to remember what color necktie he has on.”