Dead and Buried Page 5

  January went to fetch the dirty tin pot of coffee that Railspike had left on the floor just inside the door. He found a cup on one of the goods boxes that served Hannibal for shelves, filled it and held it out. ‘Was he your friend?’

  Hannibal nodded. It was as if the conversation begun that morning, sitting on the crumbling brick bench-tomb in St Louis Cemetery, continued uninterrupted.

  ‘I take it you were part of his “merry band”?’

  At the mention of that name the fiddler looked up, first sickened shock, then wariness fleeting across the back of his black-coffee eyes.

  ‘He came to town with his relatives,’ January went on, ‘purportedly in quest of cotton plantations in which to invest the money that should have gone to them. By the look of the hotel rooms, and the evidence of the witnesses, he appears to have been knifed by the twelfth Viscount Foxford, but there’s something about the business that makes my neck prickle. I wondered if you could tell me what that might be.’

  FIVE

  ‘The twelfth Viscount?’ said Hannibal after a moment.

  ‘Germanicus Stuart—’

  ‘He’s a child!’

  ‘He’s twenty-two,’ January pointed out and noted with interest the look of aghast grief that crossed his friend’s face. ‘I take it you met him . . . longer ago than either of us would like to contemplate.’

  ‘God.’ Hannibal shook his head and raised the coffee to his lips with a hand that trembled. ‘Òu sont les neiges d’antan?’

  ‘Did you know his father?’

  ‘Not well.’ He sighed. ‘I think only Patrick knew him really well.’

  ‘Then Derryhick didn’t cause his death?’

  ‘Patrick—!’ For a moment Hannibal stared at him, open-mouthed. Then, in a different voice, ‘Does the boy believe that?’

  ‘It’s what his uncle says.’ January sat again on the end of the broken-down pallet.

  ‘Uncle Diogenes? What’s he doing on this side of the world? The man’s been in Benares since Napoleon did his first rifle-drill. I understand he has a regular harem there that he’s in no hurry to leave—’

  ‘According to what Shaw learned while I was searching everyone’s hotel-rooms,’ said January, ‘Uncle Diogenes came to Foxford Priory this spring, to wrap up the affairs of his son – another of Derryhick’s “merry band”. The boy had broken his neck while hunting. He was drunk, everyone said – apparently his usual condition, which Derryhick encouraged.’

  ‘T’cha!’ Hannibal turned and fumbled beneath his pillow in search of something that evidently wasn’t there. ‘Patrick never encouraged anyone to drink in his life . . . Well, not very hard. He was as happy drunk in sober company as he was among the befuddled – and, you should know, no drunkard ever needs anybody’s “encouragement” to pick up a bottle.’

  January fetched a second cup for himself, retrieving from the floor on his way back a square black bottle that had once – to judge by the smell of it and the two barely-conscious cockroaches lying near its mouth – contained laudanum. This he handed Hannibal, who turned it upside down over his own cup in an effort to extract a final drop. But the only thing that slid out was a third, extremely befuddled, roach, which drowned without a struggle.

  ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook,’ the fiddler said, quoting the death of Ophelia in Hamlet, ‘that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream . . . Her clothes spread wide, and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up . . .’ With a sigh, he set the cup and its victim on the floor beside the bed. ‘Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears . . . That’s why they think young Foxford killed him? Because Uncle Diogenes has been telling him for the past seventeen years that Patrick was responsible for his father’s death? And you said they came here to buy a cotton plantation? With what? The family couldn’t afford a parlor carpet.’

  ‘With the money that a wealthy aunt had left to Derryhick instead of to the Viscount.’

  Hannibal’s raised eyebrows carried a whole ladder of wrinkles up his forehead. ‘Not Aunt Elodie?’

  ‘You know the story?’

  ‘Lord yes; we all did. You can’t drink and gamble with five other good-for-nothings without hearing everyone’s life story, sometimes in several different versions . . . She left all her blunt to Patrick, did she? Good.’ He grinned. ‘Served the family right, for carrying on as if she’d married the village night-soil collector instead of a perfectly respectable India merchant. Patrick was the only one of the lot who treated her decently. I’m not saying he didn’t have his eye on her East India Company stocks the way everyone else did, but at least he wasn’t a hypocrite about it. Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty . . . And he did actually like her.’

  His smile faded again, and he sat for a time gazing at the harsh block of the open doorway’s light. With the rain’s end the suffocating heat of the afternoon had returned, as usual made more unbearable by the steamy dampness of the puddles. In all the trees of the Swamp the metallic, whirring rattle of cicadas had started up. Below in the yard, a man whooped drunkenly and shouted, ‘I am the first-cousin to the cholera, boys, an’ I killed more men than the smallpox! Let me at that nigger!’

  January flinched and glanced at the single other route of egress from the attic – a square hole in the building’s gable end into which no one had ever gotten around to putting a window sash – but the hooting male voices down below retreated, so he deduced that it was some other nigger they had in mind.

  ‘It isn’t just because Foxford’s father was a drunkard and the family believes Derryhick encouraged him,’ he said after a time, and he related what he had told Rose, of the bed sheets, the watch, and the young nobleman’s extremely long and surprisingly clean-footed ‘walk’ at the time of the murder. ‘If it was me, I’d have used the blooded bedding to lower the body from the window to Quennell’s stable roof, then packed it and the rug up to be shipped to general delivery in Natchez or Vicksburg, under another name: “left till called for”.’

  ‘I always thought you’d make a brilliant criminal if you weren’t so damned honest.’

  ‘Considering the average intelligence of the thugs you find hereabouts,’ returned January, ‘it’s not difficult to appear brilliant. Uncle Diogenes claims to have been out yesterday evening as well. Did you know his son? The one who broke his neck?’

  The fiddler shook his head. ‘Frankly, from all Patrick told me about his uncle – well, his first cousin once removed, but everyone in that family called him Uncle – I’m surprised he married at all, much less fathered a child.’

  January recalled the nature of some of the prints he’d found in Uncle Diogenes’s hotel room. ‘Shaw’s checking his story, but, personally, my guess would be that he was at La Sirène’s.’ He named the owner of an extremely discreet house on the Bayou Road, where well-off gentlemen might avail themselves of entertainment ‘of a specialized sort’.

  Hannibal was silent for a time, twisting his long hair back from his face and fixing it with a woman’s tortoiseshell comb into a knot on the back of his head. Then he said, ‘There is, of course, the chance that the boy was at La Sirène’s, or someplace like it. One doesn’t have to be a dribbling old lecher to have unorthodox preferences.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ January cast his mind back for the chance recollection that had eluded him earlier. ‘I think we’ve seen the Viscount – I knew there was something familiar about his face. I’m not certain, but I think he was the blond boy who nearly called that Englishman out at Trulove’s birthday ball Monday night.’

  That had been in Milneburgh. The bustling little port on the lakeshore, some five miles behind New Orleans, was the summer residence of whoever in the town could afford to escape the airless heat and risk of fever. Most of the wealthy French Creoles – and a number of American planters as well – owned summer houses built on pilings along Lake Pontchartrain’s swampy verges and would take up residence with their families in Milneburgh, or across the lake in Mandev
ille. Many bought or rented discreet little cottages in those towns for their mistresses as well, and for what the country Creoles sometimes referred to as their ‘vulture eggs’: children – like Dominique or Beauvais Quennell – acknowledged and looked after as part of the wider family. The balls and parties among those bucolic seekers after healthful air – white and sang mêlée alike – provided almost the only income that most musicians had in the summer season.

  In New Orleans itself, it was rare for the French and Spanish Creoles to mingle with the American planters and businessmen. The two communities despised one another, to the extent that the Americans – frustrated at being shut out of city government – had that spring finally succeeded in having New Orleans divided into three separate ‘municipalities’: the Old French Town and its swamp-side suburb of Tremé; the new American suburb of St Mary; and Marigny, the downriver suburb where the poorer free colored, and those French and Spanish Creoles who couldn’t afford the French town, lived side by side with immigrants from a Europe ravaged by twenty-five years of revolution and Napoleon.

  In New Orleans itself, French Creole doctors, lawyers, and newspaper editors routinely challenged their American counterparts to duels, and both City Council meetings and criminal trials were still conducted, stubbornly, in French. But in Milneburgh there was enough of an atmosphere of being all fugitives together – albeit comfortably-housed fugitives whose breakfasts were served on time – that nobody had turned down an invitation to the enormous ball that British planter Fitzhugh Trulove had hosted at the Washington Hotel in honor of his wife’s birthday at the beginning of that week. It went without saying, January realized, that the Englishman would have extended an invitation to an actual bona fide Viscount the moment he’d known the young man was in town.

  ‘A bawcock and a heart of gold,’ mused Hannibal. ‘If I’d known who was involved I’d have bet more than two cents on the boy.’

  As January recalled it – though owing to the crowd in the ballroom, and the fact that the whole incident took place in the middle of a lively quadrille, his view of the proceedings had been limited – young Foxford, impeccable in a London-tailored blue cutaway and fawn-hued inexpressibles, had taken exception to the attentions that a larger and gaudier English gentleman had been paying one of the small bevy of French Creole girls. Both men had been rendered argumentative by Mr Trulove’s excellent champagne, and such erudite sneers as ‘more childish valorous than manly wise’ and ‘one may smile and smile, and still be a villain’ had rapidly progressed to, ‘You are a scoundrel, sir!’ and, ‘Go back to your nursie before you get hurt . . .’

  Several of the musicians had wagered on the outcome of the duel that had seemed in the offing, but the quarrel had been broken up before seconds could be named. January had gotten a brief glimpse of Lord Foxford as he’d stormed out of the ballroom, but saw only his opponent’s back and nothing of the mortified girl.

  ‘The fact remains,’ mused January, ‘that either Diogenes or young Foxford could have killed him – or either of their servants, who would have had access to the suite, or the business-manager Droudge for that matter, or anyone else staying in the hotel . . . or anyone sufficiently well dressed to get through the lobby unremarked. Despite Stuart’s theory of a burglar, Derryhick clearly expected to meet someone in the suite when he returned to the hotel and clearly expected to have a quarrel with them. And whoever he did quarrel with, he didn’t expect enough danger to make him draw his pistol before he was stabbed. There were a number of weapons in the suite—’

  ‘What, those jeweled Indian daggers? Uncle Diogenes sent those to everyone – Patrick must have had at least five of them.’ Hannibal got to his feet and proceeded, rather unsteadily, to search among the piles of books – placed carefully between the ceiling-leaks – and the shabby goods boxes that contained his few possessions. ‘And what was the old boy doing in the expedition anyway? Even if Patrick wanted to saddle himself with his company – and he can be very good company, by the way – the man’s the laziest thing in shoe-leather. Even his vices are passive.’

  ‘According to Shaw, he’s one of the trustees of the estate – to which young Germanicus will not succeed for eight years, or until he marries with consent of his guardians.’

  Kneeling on a rafter just beyond where the floorboards ended, with only cracked lathes between himself and the gambling-room below, Hannibal paused in his search. ‘And who is the other trustee?’

  ‘Patrick Derryhick.’

  Hannibal opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it and reached between the floorboards and the lathe.‘What happens to Patrick’s body?’ he asked instead.

  ‘It’s at Quennell’s. Whatever actually happened to Viscount eleven-and-a-half – and to Uncle Diogenes’s son – Derryhick won’t be buried in a pauper’s grave.’

  Hannibal had straightened up, sitting on his heels with a grimy handkerchief in one hand.

  January went on: ‘Officially – as a representative of the Burial Society – I’m only trying to find out which of those two gentlemen is responsible for desecrating poor Rameses’s funeral and throwing his body out like a piece of trash . . . which would earn the culprit a slap on the wrist from any jury in town, and that only because he’s a rotten-souled Englishman whom our heroic President drove back into the sea etc. etc. – it would be as much as their jobs are worth to do otherwise, with the election coming up. But the man who did that also murdered a man, rotten-souled Englishman or not—’

  ‘Patrick would call you out for describing him as an Englishman,’ put in Hannibal. He got to his feet, crossed back to the cot. ‘I’d call you out on his behalf, except that I’d have to ask you to be my second, and you wouldn’t be willing to carry a challenge to yourself, would you?’

  ‘No,’ said January firmly. ‘And I’m not the one who’d say he was English. Americans don’t know the difference between English and Irish. But whoever it was who committed the greater crime, I won’t be sorry to see him swing.’

  ‘The boy didn’t do it,’ said Hannibal stubbornly. ‘It’s ridiculous to think he did. They’ll never bring it to court – solventur risu tabulae.’ He extended to January the handkerchief and its contents. ‘Whatever information a dollar and fifty-nine cents can purchase,’ he said, with grave and bitter irony, ‘bring to light – and keep the change.’

  ‘Get yourself some more medicine,’ said January gently. ‘Do you need me to keep it for you?’

  ‘I seem to be doing all right lately on a few spoonfuls a day.’ Hannibal looked around at the shambles of the room, and under his graying mustache a corner of his mouth hardened and turned down. ‘Today was different. So foul and fair a day I have not seen, at least not since I gave up living with that woman who ran a flogging parlor in Venice – but not many days have been so. I’ll be well, amicus meus. Will you be at the Countess Mazzini’s tonight?’ He squinted at the glaring light of the door again, the blinding yellow having mutated into slanted and violent gold.

  ‘If I can get clear of the Swamp before the local bravos start roaming the streets.’ By the sound of it, flat-boatmen, gamblers, and river-pirates had already escaped the dense heat of the Broadhorn for the moving air of the yard. Their desultory conversation gyred up to the open attic door, aimless and brutal: we beat the crap out ’n him . . . damn yellow-bellied Injuns . . . Lost two dollars on the damn dog . . .

  ‘Come to supper.’

  ‘They’ll all still be there.’ Hannibal sat on the edge of the cot again, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. ‘Wanting to talk about it. Another time – thank you.’ He repeated, ‘Non omnis moriar – I’ll be all right.’

  Though he flinched from the evening sunlight, Hannibal climbed down the rickety stairs with January and walked with him as far as the edge of the trees. None of the men in the yard so much as glanced at them, though the Glutton, sitting in the opening that served her dwelling as both window and door, waved to Hannibal and called out, ‘You feelin’ better, Profe
ssor?’

  ‘A very riband in the cap of youth, lady!’ He kissed his hand to her. ‘The sight of your beauty would raise a man’s spirit from the very ground.’

  From the edge of the trees, January watched him walk back toward the stair and saw him intercepted by a gambler and the Broadhorn’s cigar-puffing proprietress herself, and then hustled into the dark of the saloon.

  SIX

  By six o’clock – the hour at which Countess Leonella Mazzini opened the doors of her establishment for business – word had circulated among the whites in New Orleans about the hilarious contretemps that had befallen at a Sambo funeral that morning: ‘Dropped the coffin . . . out tumbles this English feller sombody’d knifed an’ switched into the box!’ Whoops of laughter all around. January wouldn’t have been surprised at these remarks from the customers of the Broadhorn: they’d probably have found the event equally risible had the vanished corpse been their own Pa or Uncle Ned. But the patrons of the Countess Mazzini’s bordello were what passed in New Orleans as gentlemen. Men who owned the hotels, cotton presses, construction companies, and shipping lines that centered the state’s wealth in the town.

  Would they slap their thighs with the humor of it, he wondered, his fingers skipping through the chorus of ‘Zip Coon’, if it was a new-bereaved white family that was wondering where the body of husband, brother, son lay that night?

  Do they really think we’re THAT different from them?

  Fed with the same food, hurt by the same weapons, subject to the same diseases? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

  Or would the joke have tickled equally for a white man, provided he wasn’t known to them personally – or known but not liked?