Dead water bj-8 Read online

  Seeing in his mind the levee that lay at the foot of the Place des Armes, the bustling offices of the steamboat companies that crowded one side of it, the boxes and bales of goods that even at this slow season piled the waterfront: packets of skins from the mountains of the Mexican territories, bolts of cloth from England and New York. Corn and pumpkins from the river valley to the north, hay and fodder, squealing hogs and chickens in coops. Tools and machinery, plows and harness. Coming down-river or heading up. Quiet at this hour, probably, whereas during the business season, the winter season, the time when the river was high and the cotton and sugar crops coming in, men would be loading and unloading, dragging and rolling and cursing and sweating, throughout the torch-lit nights.

  And among the noise and confusion, quiet lines of men and women would be loaded, the chains that linked them together clinking softly in the juddering glare. Slaves bound north for the markets in the new cotton lands of Missouri and Mississippi.

  Even through the wooden shutters that closed most of the French doors of the big house, it seemed to January that he could hear the far-off sounds of the levee, the shouting of the gang-bosses, the clank of steamboat bells.

  He had been to Europe, to London and Paris, but he had not been farther than St. John's Parish, thirty miles up-river from the city. Even that had scared him.

  In New Orleans, he was known. If anything happened to destroy the “freedom papers” that he was required by law to show anyone who asked, there were prominent shopkeepers, merchants, even a lawyer or two who could point to him and say, That is Benjamin January, the piano teacher. He's a free man, and not a slave.

  Once out of town, on the river, that would not be the case.

  “And you want me to find the trunks with the money in them, and bring them back?” he asked at last. “Without letting anyone know what happened?”

  “Yes,” said Granville. “I'll have a notarized letter of introduction to you by midnight, authorizing you to act as my agent in this matter and requesting the captain of the Silver Moon—and whatever law enforcement officials you need—to assist you. But I promise you, if you play that trump-card without having the money right under your hand, all you'll do is lose everything, destroy the bank, and ruin every depositor we have.”

  “Ourselves included.” The incomparable smell of coffee filled the quiet gloom as Rose returned with a tray. The coffee would have been warming in the pantry, awaiting his return from Congo Square—it seemed like another lifetime. Rose made excellent coffee, though she was an otherwise execrable cook. It crossed January's mind that without the assistance of the hired freedwoman Abigail and Abigail's daughter, Rose would be quickly swallowed up by the drudgery of cleaning, cooking, and endless sewing that occupied the time of most women who kept house.

  Until, of course, the house itself was foreclosed.

  His hand shook a little as he took the coffee cup she offered. One bite told him that the sweet biscuits that accompanied it had been made by Abigail, not Rose.

  “How much money are we talking about?” Rose seated herself again. “And in what form? How many trunks are we looking for?”

  “Three or four at least,” said Granville, turning a little to speak to her. “Maybe as many as ten.” Having set up four of his former free colored mistresses in business, reflected January, at least Granville didn't suffer from the common white man's delusion that women of color—or women in general—were slightly incompetent. “He stole nearly four million dollars, of which about a hundred thousand was in gold.”

  Rose's eyebrows shot up. “That's a lot of gold.”

  “About six hundred pounds of it,” Granville replied. “The rest is in notes and drafts on other banks—including the Bank of Pennsylvania, which as you know received a great deal of the Federal gold—and the Bank of England. There are also sight-drafts on a number of the plantations hereabouts against next winter's crop. Any single trunk containing the gold would be too heavy to lift, so it has to be spread out among several, padded up with the paper.”

  “You say Weems came to you with the highest recommendations,” said January. “From whom? What do you know about the man? Where is he from?”

  “Philadelphia,” said Granville like a New Yorker: Philadelphier, a trick of speech that made January wonder whether there was a still-more-brotherly town of Philadelphiest somewhere even farther north. “He was a clerk when I was vice-president of the Broadway Bank and Trust, and worked his way up after I was sent down here. Everyone spoke highly of his abilities.”

  Granville scowled, as if everyone had conspired to lie and would, if he had anything to say in the matter, suffer the consequences.

  “It probably paid him to have abilities when the whole country's economic system wasn't being run by wildcat private banks,” remarked January dryly. Granville opened his mouth to protest—the Bank of Louisiana, though private, had been chartered by the State—and January asked, “Drink?”

  Granville's square face darkened, and he looked as if he were about to demand what the hell business it was of January's. Then he subsided a little, like porridge coming off the boil, and sipped his coffee. “I've seen Weems look down his nose at drunkards on the street,” he answered. “I've never seen him go into a public house. But I don't keep company with the man, so in fact I don't know whether he drinks or not.”

  “Women?”

  Again Granville's beady eyes flashed at the suggestion that an employee of his bank would chase trollops up and down Gallatin Street, but since that employee had almost certainly walked off with large sums of the bank's money, there wasn't a great deal he could be self-righteous about. “He was engaged to the daughter of the President of the Jersey Trust Bank,” he said slowly. “She married someone else. That's when he came here. He looks down upon women as he looks down upon drunkards. Looks down on a great many things, for a man who's only five feet five inches tall himself.” Granville gave out a bearlike rumbling guffaw. “Nor does he gamble, beyond a hand or two of whist. He often said how he despised waste and wastrels.”

  “Which must have made it easier,” remarked Rose, “for him to walk off with the money—if he gave the matter a second thought at all. I'm sure he considers he has better uses for the money than its legal owners.” She folded her long-fingered hands on her knee, a tall, angular woman who moved as if she were perpetually about to trip. She had the light medium-brown hair of her white father and grandfather, worn in a neat chignon as long as she was out of sight of the laws that required her to cover it in a slave's headcloth. Behind the gold reflections of candle-light on her spectacles, her eyes were gray-green. “What does he look like? How will we know him?”

  Granville raised his eyebrows a bit at the “we,” but January—though he experienced his usual sense of protesting shock at the thought of Rose sharing his danger—felt no surprise. A spinster into her late twenties and a woman who had operated her own school for several years, Rose was not one to watch knight-errantry from the dull safety of a bower window.

  He knew, too, that there were things a woman could learn in conversation with other women, that would be hidden from a man.

  But he felt sick inside at the thought of her taking the steamboat north into territory where she'd fetch seven or eight hundred dollars on the auction-block, if she happened to lose her freedom papers or have them taken from her.

  “I'll take you to the wharf when you get your tickets, and point him out as he gets on board,” promised the banker.

  “The Silver Moon's an American boat, isn't it?” asked January. “Will they even hire a stateroom to a man and woman of color? Or are we going to have to take deck-passage? In which case,” he added, “we're not going to be in much of a position to observe whatever Weems is doing.”

  “You'll do it, then?” The hope gleaming in Granville's eyes, and the lightening of his voice, made him seem younger, like a child suddenly relieved of terrible fear. January realized then that the man must have been as sick with dread as he was hi
mself.

  “I'll do it for five hundred,” replied January. “In advance, whether we succeed or fail—plus the expenses of the journey. And I want your word as a gentleman”—he tried to keep the irony out of his voice—“that if either of us gets into trouble, you'll get us out of it.”

  The banker's sandy-red brows pulled together in momentary puzzlement. Of course a white man wouldn't understand, thought January. Certainly not a New Yorker, coming from a town that had a thriving free black population that didn't live looking over their shoulders, worrying about whether they'd be kidnapped into slavery.

  “We'll be traveling through cotton territory,” January illuminated for him grimly. “We'll be in country where nobody's even heard that there are free colored people or that there can be black people who aren't somebody's property. Where nobody's going to look too closely at a black man's ownership papers if he turns up on some auction-block for cheap, and where no local sheriff is going to go against one of his constituents if that constituent has a newly-bought slave who claims he's a kidnapped freeman.

  “If we get in trouble,” January concluded, “I'm trusting you to buy us free. Just as you're trusting me not to breathe a word about your bank having eight million banknotes in circulation backed up by the change in your pockets. Sir.”

  He didn't even mention the problems he would face, in the event of “trouble,” in getting word back to Granville that he or Rose needed help. In the low water of summer, it could take nearly a week for a letter to get to New Orleans from Vicksburg, two weeks from Memphis—longer, if the boat got tangled up on a bar or tore out its paddle on a snag. A week in the hands of slave-dealers or professional kidnappers could be an eternity, and once in the deep heartland of Missouri or Tennessee, it was almost unbelievably difficult for a black who didn't know the area to travel.

  But he said nothing about that. Only watched Granville's eyes, counting the seconds of silence before the banker replied. An immediate Of course, that goes without saying! would have been his signal to renege at once and to get Hubert Granville the hell out of his parlor as quickly as he could. A reply that unthinking meant that Granville had no intention of laying out so much as ten cents to purchase his freedom, much less the fourteen hundred dollars a prime cotton-hand, six feet three inches tall and massively built, would fetch on the open market.

  But Granville thought about it, asking himself—January could see the infinitesimal movement of his kid-gloved fingers as he toted up estimates—if it was something he could actually afford. “How much danger is there of that?” he asked finally.

  “Some,” said January. “We'll be safer on the boat than ashore. But if Weems off-loads those trunks somewhere along the way, we'll have to follow. I won't know how much danger there'll be until we see what we're faced with on board. Some of it depends on how desperate Weems is, or will become if he realizes he's being dogged. We need to know that you'll stand by us.”

  Granville rose, massive and only inches shorter than January himself, and held out his hand. “I'll stand by you,” he pledged. “And in addition to the thanks of the bank officers—most of whom don't know and won't know that there's a problem—you have my personal thanks. I won't let you down.”

  “And if you believe that,” remarked Rose, standing on the front gallery minutes later as they watched the banker disappear down the darkness of Rue Esplanade, “as your sister Olympe would say, you and I both deserve to spend the rest of our lives picking cotton in Tennessee.”

  Her voice was light, but he could tell she was still furiously angry, and he knew he could not say to her, I won't let you come.

  Behind those words, if only in their hearts, lurked the reply: It's your fault we're in this mess.

  Besides, he knew he'd need all the help he could get.

  Far off, thunder rumbled in the tar-black darkness and flashes of heat-lightning flickered over the lake. Here beyond the range of the French town's iron street-lanterns, the blackness was absolute. Across Rue Esplanade, where the small houses of Faubourg Marigny lay hidden among the trees, the roar of cicadas beat like a metallic sea.

  January took a deep breath. “Rose, I'm sorry.”

  “You're sorry that you disregarded me when I pointed a pistol at your head and said, Put it in the Commerce Bank or I'll shoot? We both made the decision, Ben.” She sighed, and put her arm around his waist. “It will, however, be some time before I can bring myself to be polite to your mother again.”

  Soft laughter shook him, and he cupped her face in his hands, kissed her gratefully, then again with slow, deep enjoyment of her lips. In the darkness she had an animal sensuality completely at odds with her daylight persona of a schoolmistress and scholar.

  A mosquito whined in his ear, and they parted while he slapped at it. “Will you do me a favor, Rose?” he asked as they retreated into their bedroom from the gallery and so through to the parlor. One of the candles had gone out, and the other was guttering again. Rose fetched the candle-scissors and January cracked his shins against Cosette's small trunk, waiting by the door.

  “Write to Dominique.” He named his sweet-natured younger sister who was so often in and out of the house. “Ask her if she'll take Cosette for a few days. You know they get along well, and that maid of Dominique's has her hands full with the new baby. Then write to Cosette's grandmother, Serafine Poucet, in Spanish Fort.”

  Taking the candle, he walked through to the dining-room and into the pantry, where a supper of cold chicken and bread waited for him in covered dishes. He ate a few hasty bites standing, knowing that it was nearly midnight already, and the later it got, the less safe he'd be in accomplishing his next mission that night.

  Safe being, of course, a completely relative term when applied to a black man venturing into the rough dives and grubby gin-palaces that straggled out into the swamp at the back of town.

  “Tell her Cosette hasn't been well, and hint—without saying anything so vulgar—that you don't think she'll get particularly good care spending the summer at her mother's house.”

  “What, that awful old lady Poucet is Cosette's grandmother?” Rose leaned her shoulder in the pantry doorway. The daughter of a plaçée herself, she knew just about everyone in the free colored demimonde, by reputation if not by actual acquaintance.

  “Yes, and according to Dominique, Poucet hates Cosette's mother.”

  Rose began to chuckle, and followed January back out to the parlor again, where he collected his jacket, the disreputable old cap he'd worn to Congo Square, and a tin lantern. “God help the voodoo who tries to trespass on old lady Serafine's yard. She'll take Cosette in just to show up her daughter, won't she?”

  “It's what I'm hoping.” He bent again to kiss her lips, standing in the dark of the bedroom, whose French door was the only one in the house unshuttered, and entertained a momentary question about how much time it would take to fling Rose down on the bed before he proceeded with his next task. . . . “I should be back in two hours.”

  Rose nodded, not needing him to explain where he was going, or whom he was seeking, or why. That was one of the things he most loved about Rose. She knew already that they'd need a third member of the party if they were going on board the Silver Moon, and knew exactly who that had to be.

  “Go carefully,” she told him, although she was perfectly well aware that the City Guards who enforced the ten o'clock curfew on blacks never went anywhere near the Swamp.

  I've already had the roof torn away from my head, reflected January as he descended the steps, and the gold dissolve from my hand, and the curse hasn't been on me two hours yet. What further could go wrong tonight?

  He looked around him, right and left in the darkness. But the lantern he held gave no more than the dimmest flicker, barely enough to keep him from falling into the gutter as he set off along Rue des Ramparts. If anyone followed him, they were cloaked utterly in the night.

  THREE

  If a stranger to New Orleans were to follow the street called Perdidi
o back from the handsome American mansions of St. Charles Avenue, he would be struck, almost certainly, by the rapidity with which those imposing houses gave way to the humbler dwellings of shopkeepers and artisans, to red-brick boardinghouses and then to brickyards, cotton-presses, livery stables. The gaps between buildings grew wider, yielding to undeveloped lots of rank weeds or stands of trees that had seen the Houmas and the Natchez Indians camp beneath them. The pavement failed, the roadbed narrowed to a path which in turn became a slot of gumbo-thick mud. Among the trees, the buildings dwindled to shacks and sheds, nailed together from the planks of the flatboats that came down-river filled with Ohio corn, Indiana hogs, lowa pumpkins, and illiterate Kentucky ruffians in Conestoga boots, spitting tobacco in all directions. At night, cicada-roaring darkness lay between the trees like God's curse upon Egypt, broken only by the feeblest splodges of lantern-light from makeshift taverns that bore names like The Rough and Ready and The Nantucket Virgin. From those dim doorways hoarse shouts and curses resounded, the crash of breaking benches punctuating the tinny laughter of whores.

  This was the part of town called the Swamp. It was here that the half-savage Kaintuck keelboat crews took refuge, and the gamblers, publicans, and harlots who fleeced them. It was here that the runaway slaves hid out, in sheds and tents far back in the trees; here that gaggles of snarly-haired prostitutes hunted, giving themselves to forty men a night in rooms barely wider than the beds they contained or on shuck mattresses on the floors of tents; here that the poorest of the city's poor squatted in squalid cabins among the marshy pools.

  The hypothetical visiting stranger would have, by this time, learned how Perdidio Street acquired its name: attenuated to a mucky track, it finally lost itself—elle se perdre, the French would say—in the soggy ground.

  That is, if the hypothetical visiting stranger even made it this far, and hadn't been knocked on the head in the dark beneath the trees and relieved of his watch, his purse, his boots, and possibly his clothes as well.