Murder in July Read online

  Oldmixton laughed, and threw up one hand. ‘There! Serves me right for offering what you’re worth. I suppose I couldn’t interest you for twenty-five dollars … I didn’t think so.’ His smile vanished, and his tourmaline eyes turned hard. ‘There’s something about the situation that troubles me as well,’ he went on. ‘Brooke’s body had begun to stiffen when he was taken out of the water – Brooke was his name, Henry Brooke. So he’d been dead for some hours when he was thrown in. And, as I said, he was dressed in morning-wear. He and I were to meet Saturday evening, an appointment he never kept. He’d never have visited the neighborhood around the turning basin in bottle-green superfine and a silk vest, let alone a top hat – which was retrieved this morning from a local mudlark. And I suspect that were he shot in that neighborhood, it would have been with something more formidable than a muff pistol.’

  ‘A muff pistol?’

  Oldmixton must have heard the sudden sharpness of January’s voice, because he looked at him curiously. But when January said nothing more, he explained, ‘The way the ball deformed, it looked like it came from one of those old screw-barrel kinds … Do you know them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said January softly. ‘Yes, I know them.’

  ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said January, ‘now.’

  TWO

  Nine years.

  It felt like another lifetime.

  In the sweltering heat, with the whole house smelling of plaster, January lay awake in the darkness and listened to the grumble of thunder, far off across the lake. Rose lay beside him, brown curls – silky, like a white woman’s – scattered on the pillow, her belly a smooth white mountain in the thin stripes of moonlight through the jalousies. The faintly musky perfume of her flesh was comfort, a joy to him in the darkness most nights.

  But there was no comfort for him anywhere tonight.

  A screw-barrel muff pistol.

  He could almost feel the weight of it on his palm, as real to him as the remembered smell of the French countryside that had drifted on the chill dawn breeze, and how it had yielded to the reek of Paris when the breeze failed. As real as the recollection of the clammy gloom of the Saint-Lazare Prison. As real as new-risen light on the guillotine’s blade, against gray autumn sky.

  What had happened to that pistol?

  He had never learned.

  1830

  Another lifetime.

  Summer was the slack season for musicians, whether in New Orleans or Paris. The summer of 1830 had been worse than most. In the dry heat the wealthy left Paris early. Aristocratic families who’d returned to France in the wake of the Bourbon King when the Allied armies had put him back on his dead brother’s throne. New-rich aristocrats as well, promoted to noble estate by Napoleon in his fourteen-year reign, or businessmen who’d grown fat on twenty-five years of war. When Benjamin January had arrived in France in 1817 it had been with the goal of studying to become a surgeon, a career he’d pursued even after he realized that few whites, even in the homeland of The Declaration of the Rights of Man, were going to let a huge black man come anywhere near them with a scalpel in his hand. Only with his marriage to the beautiful Berber dressmaker Ayasha had he turned to music – the other great passion of his life – to earn his living. Though like every other musician in Paris he counted his pennies with great care in the summers, in the winter season of Christmas and Carnival he earned far more than he had as a junior surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu.

  But in that summer of 1830, three years of bankruptcies in high places, of runs on banks, of workshops closed for lack of credit, had left thousands of the working people of Paris in the street. When the Chamber of Deputies had refused to pass yet another law tightening censorship of the press, King Charles had dissolved that representative body, then delayed the election of a new chamber for over two months. In the back rooms of cafés and the garrets of newspaper offices, groups of students, journalists and workingmen had read and argued and labored over schemes to canvass support, with one ear cocked for the White Terror, the king’s secret police. Even the splendor of the French army, as it had gathered to invade Algiers back in May, hadn’t impressed the people of Paris. When the new king had ridden out from beneath the triumphal arch of the Tuileries gate to review his departing troops, they had greeted him with stony silence.

  Most of those troops were still in Africa when, on the twenty-sixth of July, the conservative newspapers had published the king’s proclamation, dissolving the Chamber of Deputies yet again (since the delayed elections had gone overwhelmingly to those who opposed him). The same ordinance suspended freedom of the press, and announced that businessmen and the owners of factories no longer had the right to participate in elections or to run for office. The government of France, said the king (from the comfort of his summer palace at St-Cloud), would henceforth be by royal ordinance alone.

  That had been a Monday.

  Both January and Ayasha went down to the offices of The National – the foremost of the newspapers that had been ordered to close for not agreeing with the king – late in the afternoon to cheer and support the journalists who met there to sign a protest. Crowds of printers surrounded the offices, men who’d been put out of work by the ordinance, by the prohibitively high tariffs set on other printed matter, and by the king’s new laws of censorship. It was the same at every newspaper in the city. January had expected to find hundreds gathered in the Rue St-Marc, despite the blistering heat of the afternoon.

  Instead, they found thousands.

  ‘The workingmen of Paris have had their fill of the Bourbons!’ cried a young artist named Aristide Carnot – a member of the political (and illegal) reading group that January belonged to, the Société Brutus. ‘We had a Republic once! We will stand no more, of the king’s idiot friends making rules for their own profit …’

  ‘They are trying to turn back the clock!’ yelled someone else, closer to the looming soot-stained wall of the building where the crowd was almost impassable. ‘To put us under the scarlet heel of the aristos again!’

  ‘Well, actually, it’s on account of the Bourse.’ Daniel Ben-Gideon, another friend from the Société Brutus, shouldered gently through the press, in his coat of antique lilac brocade looking like a monstrous peony in a basket of turnips. The black silk of its collar set off a pale, plump oval face upon which sweat made long tracks in his rouge. ‘The businessmen and bankers—’ he nodded down the street towards the Parthenon-like bulk of the Paris stock exchange – ‘declared this morning that since they’re permitted no participation in government, they shall henceforth loan nobody any money nor sell stock nor finance anybody’s endeavors, with the result that most banks and half the businesses in Paris are closed. Hence—’ he gestured at the shouting crowd – ‘we find a great many more workingmen of all stripes on the streets this afternoon with not much to do. And no surety that there’ll be anything for them to do for some time to come. Not the best time to have one’s army in Africa.’

  In his frogged and nip-waisted coat, his luxuriantly-dressed brown curls wilting in the heat, and exuding the delicate scent of patchouli, Daniel had all the appearance of one whose intellectual horizons were confined to the season’s newest dictates in the cut of waistcoats. In fact, though such great questions did comprise much of the man’s usual conversation, January had always found him – as the son of one of Paris’s wealthiest bankers – to be a shrewd observer of both politics and humanity.

  ‘Imbeciles!’ Ayasha clinched her arm around January’s waist. Her face, like dark ivory against the white of her linen bonnet, sparkled with a kind of fierce exasperation. She never could abide stupidity.

  ‘Precisely my opinion, madame.’ Daniel’s latest sweetheart, the devastatingly handsome and (as far as January had ever been able to tell) comprehensively wooden-headed heir of the Comte de Belvoire, dabbed at his sleeve with a spotless linen handkerchief. Something – probably a thrown dog-turd – had left a little smear of brown on the immacul
ate cream-colored wool of his coat, and this seemed to preoccupy the young man to the exclusion of any larger issues of political catastrophe or personal danger. ‘Why should businessmen want to poke their noses into affairs of state anyway? And in the summer, of all the absurd times, when everyone is out of town?’ He cast a reproachful glance at Daniel. ‘Or should be out of town …’

  ‘My dearest Philippe.’ Daniel put a genial arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘I vow to you, we shall make our way to more agreeable climes just as soon as I’ve ascertained what’s actually going to come of all this. God knows the only entertainment in town, if one can call it that, is the French opera—’

  Philippe de la Marche shuddered elaborately.

  ‘—unless of course one regards rioting as a form of sport.’ And Ben-Gideon nodded toward Carnot, now haranguing a group of shouting men about the king’s friends.

  Quietly, January asked, ‘Do you think this is all a form of sport, then?’ His eyes met Daniel’s, nearly on the level with his own: Daniel was within an inch of January’s six-foot, three-inch height, and the Vicomte de la Marche – who had gone back to dabbing worriedly at his coatsleeve – was not much shorter.

  ‘Dearest Benjamin, do you think that for one man – or woman – out of three here, that it isn’t?’ Daniel raised his manicured brows. ‘Do you think that there’s really any chance of France returning to a republic, just because the people of Paris break some windows and loot some shops? I suspect that all of this—’ he waved toward Carnot, and beyond him to the open windows of the National – ‘has a good deal more to do with the fact that a man can only aspire to membership in the cream of society by election to the Chamber of Deputies, than any real desire to abolish that society.’

  ‘And the rights of the people?’ asked January, with the quiet anger of a man who has grown up having no rights. ‘Are we to pretend those don’t exist?’

  Ayasha added something extremely rude in her native Arabic.

  ‘I do assure you, my Mauritanian gazelle, the king’s party would like nothing more than to exclude jumped-up businessmen like my father and his cronies from all voice in the government. They can see very well that it’s the factory owners who’ll be ruling England openly inside of five years. Who do you think owns the National? Certainly not the working people.’

  ‘If the Lafitte brothers—’ January named the owners of the largest banking firm in France, who financed the embattled newspaper – ‘hope to increase their power – or their place in society – by scaring the king, they’d better watch out what they’re doing. These people are angry. Not just at the king, but at kings. A lot of them served with Bonaparte’s armies, and armed force doesn’t impress them. The businessmen may have a bigger storm on their hands than the one they whistled for.’

  Shouting redoubled at the edge of the crowd. ‘Precisely the reason,’ said Philippe, taking Daniel by the arm, ‘that we should get ourselves out of town until things— Now see here!’ he cried, genuinely roused, as a spoiled peach struck him juicily in the back. ‘This is impossible! I only got this coat from my tailor yesterday, and already it’s ruined! Honestly, Daniel, there’s nothing you can do in this town about all this—’

  Someone yelled that royal troops were coming to shut down the newspapers, and the crowd began to scatter into the surrounding streets. Carnot sprang down from the box where he’d been standing and caught January’s arm. ‘We’re not going to let them get away with this!’ he cried.

  And Maurice Pleyard, another of the Société, called to them in passing, ‘Are you with us, Benjamin? We have guns – and we will be free!’

  Twilight was approaching. January guessed that the royal troops weren’t going to try anything with night drawing on. At the end of the Rue St-Marc he saw the city’s frock-coated lamplighters come around the corner and hesitate, with their keys and staffs, flints and jars of oil. Someone flung a paving-stone at them; someone else hurled a half a brick at the lamp that hung over the street nearest the National’s offices, shattering it and showering those below with broken glass.

  A sensible precaution, January reflected, as the lamplighters fled and people began smashing the wall-boxes that guarded the ends of the chains which held up the lamps above the streets. If the king’s troops were on the way – ‘Such of them as aren’t in Algeria,’ scoffed Pleyard, as he dove back into the crowd – it made sense to destroy any lights that might have helped them, once darkness gathered in the narrow Paris streets.

  As January and Ayasha walked home in the long northern twilight, he heard more glass break along the darkening streets. Windows, it sounded like. Knots of men gathered outside cafés along their route, and by the lamplight from within those windows January saw men he knew from the Société, or from other groups like it, gesticulating and shouting. Cries of ‘Down with the Bourbons!’ and ‘Long live the Charter!’ cracked from street corner orators – as if the Bourbon king hadn’t already twisted the charter of the peoples’ liberties to support his own intentions on a number of occasions.

  ‘I hope Anne has the sense to stay out of this,’ remarked Ayasha, as January led the way toward the river.

  Anne was Daniel Ben-Gideon’s wife.

  ‘Or at least that she’ll take someone with her,’ returned January, ‘if she doesn’t.’

  ‘Who’s her lover, these days?’

  ‘That Irish fencing master of her brother’s, the last I heard.’ Though Daniel had little practical use for a wife, it still vexed January that the girl his friend’s family had forced him to marry the previous year betrayed him so publicly. They kept separate establishments – the funds that old Moses Ben-Gideon had settled on Anne de la Roche-St-Ouen’s ancient but impoverished family made that easily possible – and Daniel spoke of the flamboyant seventeen-year-old with avuncular fondness. Now January wondered whether it was concern for Anne, as well as the urge to gather information about the slow-boiling rage in the city, which had drawn his friend to the offices of the National.

  They crossed the bridge to the Ile de la Cité, and Ayasha flattened against the wall of a line of ancient houses along the Rue de la Juiverie, as a group of rough-clothed men streamed past them in the direction of the Palais de Justice. ‘Is he a revolutionary, too, this fencing master?’

  ‘I don’t know about his politics.’ January glanced before them and behind. The Rue de la Juiverie, like most of those on the Ile de la Cité, was barely a dozen feet wide and hemmed on both sides by high old houses of timber or brick. ‘Though I can’t imagine the Comte de la Roche-St-Ouen hiring a genuine troublemaker to school his boy.’

  ‘I can’t imagine a genuine troublemaker admitting what he is to someone like the comte,’ returned Ayasha with a shrug. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘They’d know you for a genuine troublemaker, my nightingale,’ said January, wrapping one powerful arm around her waist, ‘no matter what you said you were.’

  ‘Majnun.’

  Few street lamps hung above these narrow ways at the best of times, and of these, all save one had been broken. The survivor’s feeble rays glinted on the shattered glass underfoot. A dim slot of yellow glow ahead marked the Petit Pont and the river, and between, in the absolute blackness, January could hear men’s voices still shouting, ‘Down with the Bourbons!’

  His friends – the artist Carnot, and Maurice Pleyard from the Société Brutus, and his fellow musician Jeannot Charbonnière – along with any number of his fellow medical students during his years at the Hôtel Dieu – were enthusiastic participants in the riots that periodically swept Paris. They’d cheerfully rain roof-tiles or cobblestones on royal troops, or help to erect barricades across the narrow streets. Raised on a sugar plantation and witness, before the age of seven, to the killings of two men he knew for being ‘uppity’, January had a healthy respect for armed authority and his senses prickled at the tension palpable in the sweltering night.

  ‘In any case, Daniel’s the only one she’ll ever listen to,’ he added. ‘And
not always, to him.’

  Which was curious, given what he knew of Anne Ben-Gideon’s ardent nature. Having been forced into the marriage for the financial and social benefit of their respective families, Daniel had spent his wedding night chastely playing backgammon with his bride before going out to breakfast with the eromenos who had preceded Philippe. Daniel had a mistress as well, hired several years previously for the purpose of convincing his parents that his tastes in the bedroom were orthodox. January wondered if he’d kept her on after the wedding, for good measure.

  January encountered Anne Ben-Gideon early the next morning at the Palais Royale, that great emporium of the fashionable and clearing house of news. The Société Brutus met in the basement of one of its cafés, whose proprietor concealed guns for them in the rafters of the building’s garret. At a guess some of its members, at least, would be there.

  Leaving the tall house near the river where he and Ayasha had rooms, January hoped guns wouldn’t be needed. By the light of day, last night’s apprehensions seemed exaggerated. Though the streets still teemed with unemployed, angry workingmen – clustering in cafés and around the offices of newspapers (which seemed to be operating as usual despite the king’s ordinance) – there were also the usual number of women coming and going from the market. Small shops were open, knife-grinders plied their trade. Barbers shaved customers on the street corners, and in the Rue de la Monnaie every imaginable variety of camelot was engaged in hawking everything from rabbit pelts to lemon juice.

  Yet the tension remained. As he walked, January found himself remembering the king’s notorious stubbornness, and he listened all the way for the crack of gunfire, and the unmistakable, elemental noise of a mob.

  The Palais Royale, when he reached it, was jammed with men and women, four or five times as many as yesterday. Students had joined the working people. More seemed to be arriving all the time, and many of them, he observed grimly, were openly armed. Even at this early hour, orators were shouting in the cafés.