02 Fever Season

Nine

January was careful, upon approaching the Lalaurie house later that afternoon, to stay on the downstream side of Rue de l'H?pital, crossing over only when directly opposite the gate rather than risk another encounter with Monsieur Montreuil. The rust-colored town house seemed shabby and sordid to him, and he imagined, as he studied it through the thin-falling rain, that the curtains in the upper-floor windows were half-parted, to afford a view of whoever might be passing in the street. The Montreuil house and the Lalaurie shared a parry wall. There was no way that he could perceive for anyone in the Montreuil house to see if Madame Lalaurie hurled a dozen slaves from her own roof.

The bony servant entered with the inevitable glass of lemonade for Mademoiselle Blanque in the stifling heat, and vanished in well-trained silence. If nothing else, thought January, Jean Blanque's widow would have far too accurate a knowledge of what men and women cost to indulge in that kind of waste. When the lesson was over he asked one of the market-women selling berries in the street outside if she had seen or heard of anyone leaving the Lalaurie house the previous Friday night, but the woman only crossed herself quickly, and hurried on her way. January put up his oiled-silk umbrella and made his way riverward to the cafes that sheltered under the market's tileroofed arcade.

Most of the market-women were gone, and the shadowy bays empty to the coming twilight. The air smelled thick of sewage, coffee, tobacco, and rain. A few crews still worked in the downpour, unloading cargoes from the steamboats at the levee. Others sheltered on the benches under the arcades, black and white and colored, joking among themselves and laughing. At the little tables set up on the brick flooring, brokers and pilots and supercargoes sipped coffee and dickered over the prices of flour and firewood, corn and pipes of wine. At other tables, upriver flatboatmen or the crews of the keelboats that still plied the river's jungly shores muttered in their barely comprehensible English; and under the arches on the river side a stocky, curly haired man in a somber black coat argued prices with the broker Dutillet over a little coflie of slaves standing, manacled, in the rain.

As he passed them January heard Dutillet say in English, "Nine-fifty is as high as I'll go; take it or leave it, sir." And the man protested, "Nine-fifty! Why, a good field hand's going for over eleven hundred in the Missouri Territory!"

January paused, recognizing the melodic organ-bass of the voice.

"Then take 'em up to Missouri and sell 'em there, by all means, Reverend," retorted the broker. "And considering what you paid that poor widow for 'em, you ought to take shame to yourself."

January realized the man in the black coat, whose face was vaguely familiar to him, was the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in whose honor Emily Redfern had gone to battle with the entire Creole community over the matter of musicians.

He passed on, shaking his head. A market-woman pointed out the man he sought, sitting alone at a table with a cup of coffee and beignets before him. January approached him, held out his hand: "Natchez Jim?"

"I was last time I looked." The boatman smiled, and clasped January's fingers in a grip like articulated oak logs. "You're the musician, Mamzelle Snakebones's brother."

"Last time I looked," replied January, and Natchez Jim gestured him to the other chair. The boatman was bearded, his hair a mass of braids like a pickaninny's, done up in string. His clothing had all started out different colors shortly after Noah's flood but had weathered to the hue of the river on a bleak day. He smelled of pipe tobacco and badly cured fur, but his French, except for an occasional Creole pronunciation, was the flawless French of Paris. "My sister told me you'd be willing to take someone upriver to Ohio."

"She told you that, did she?" Jim gestured, asking if January wanted some coffee, and January shook his head. He propped the dripping umbrella against the side of his chair; rain still thundered on the tiles overhead and veiled the cathedral, away across the Place d'Armes, in opaline curtains of moving gray. "It might so be. I owe her many favors, your sister."

He fished from the front of his shirt a grimy ribbon that had once been red, with a flannel juju bag on the end of it. "This has saved my life, not once but time and again. He's an angry man, the river. Sometimes all you can do is stay close in to the bank, that he see you not. Yes, I told her I'd take a passenger. Four days, five days it must have been. She spoke then as if it would be soon. Is your friend ready to travel?"

January shook his head. "She's disappeared. We can'tfind her. I sought you out to see if you had taken her already, Friday night."

"Not me." The boatman replaced his juju bag in his breast. "Have you checked the fever hospitals? The cholera wards? It takes one fast, the cholera."

"I work at Charity," said January. "I haven't seen her there, or at the Ursulines."

"There's a place that's opened near the turning basin, up in the Swamp where the keelboatmen stay: St.

Gertrude's, I think. If she's a runaway she may be there."

"I'll check," said January. "But if this girl tried to leave the city another way-on a steamboat, perhaps-how carefully are they looking at people's papers?"

"People like us?" A glint of anger appeared in the boatman's eye. "People of color? Very closely indeed.

People who might not have papers to prove they're truly peo ple in the eyes of the law? A runaway is money out of someone's pocket. And maybe money in someone else's as well."

He sipped his coffee. His dark eyes moved to Dunk, deep in conversation now with stout Mr. Granville of the Bank of Louisiana, and to the men and women standing nearby, chained and dripping in the shelter of the eaves. "There's not much by way of law up there," Jim continued. "I've been taken twice, up in Missouri, with not a sheriff or a lawman who'll even ask if I was or wasn't free in the eyes of the law.

What's the use of having records here in Louisiana that you're a free man, if you're chained on some farm out in the territories? The second man who kidnapped me was the local magistrate. I was a week hiding in the bushes and the streams like an animal, until I reached the river again."

Natchez Jim shook his head. "I don't go up there anymore," he said softly. "Even here where there's law, they don't let many slip past."

No, thought January, looking back at the tall black masts of the steamboats, spewing slow rivers of smoke into the nigrous sky. They don't let many slip past.

From a woman selling bright-colored kerchiefs-and wearing one so brilliant and so elaborately tied as to put all of her stock to shame-he found out the direction of the place he wanted next to seek. "He's still abed, I hear, poor man," she told him. "For shame, those doctors turning him out of their clinic before his cure was done, because now, of course, he's more crooked than ever. You'd think if they'd started they'd have finished, and made him straight, wouldn't you?"

"They'd never have made him straight," said January, startled at this reading of the event.

"Silly! Of course they would," retorted the marketwoman. "Rich people go to them all the time, they must know what they're doing. Here." She stepped over to her neighbor, who was just clearing up the last of her okra, her grapes, and her aubergines from her table. "Philom?ne, have you got something our friend here can take to poor H?lier? And what do you think? This fellow says Dr. Soublet doesn't cure people after all with those machines of his."

"That a fact? But I hear he fixed this lady's clubfoot so she can dance just like a little girl. It was in the newspaper..."

Carrying the basket of vegetables, January made his way down Gallatin Street, an unspeakable waterfront alley leading from the markets whose every rough wooden shack and grimy cottage seemed to house either a taproom or a bordello, though they all smelled like privies. Rain splashed in gutters that brimmed with raw sewage, and glimmered like fire in the dull orange bars of light issuing from shuttered windows and open doors. A dark-haired woman in a dress that had to have been bought from a fever victim-overly fashionable and too new to have been sold from a servant's ragbag-called out to him from a doorway, but he walked on.

Just why he was doing this, he could not have said. He would be late to the Hospital, and with almost no sleep, he had risen earlier than his habit, to walk to Mademoi selle Vitrac's school to see how her girls did and to tell her what he had found. Though he would never have mentioned it to Mademoiselle Vitrac, he still considered it a very real possibility that Cora Chouteau had poisoned Otis Redfern. He had encountered nothing yet that proved she hadn't.

Because of his father, he thought. Because of a halfrecalled dream of hounds baying in the swamp.

Because of the little boy sitting on the gallery, waiting for someone to come who cared for him, who would tell him that he wasn't alone.

Maybe because he knew that Rose Vitrac would be doing what he was doing, did she not have the girls who were her charge. Because she had once been alone and desperate, and Cora had stood by her.

Amid the darkness and the fever-heat and the stinks of death, everyone needed friends.

Even if those friends still called you "Monsieur Janvier."

H?lier Lapatie lived in a bare little one-room shed in the rear yard behind what was officially termed a "grocery" but was in fact a groghouse, owned by a man who'd been manumitted years ago by one of the Lafr?nni?re family. The place was a sort of gathering-place or clubhouse-illegal, of course-for the free colored stevedores of the levee and the slaves who "slept out." The crowd in the groghouse whistled and called out comments when January came in, for he still wore the black long-tailed coat and sober waistcoat of a music teacher and carried an umbrella, but the owner behind his plank bar asked good-naturedly, "Get you somethin', sir?" and directed him out the back to H?lier's little shack.

As he went through the door January thought he recognized by lantern-light the woman Nani?, sitting on a flour-barrel talking earnestly with another woman and a man-light-skinned, so he could not have been the Virgil whom she'd sought through the fever wards. But in the flickering gloom he could not be sure.

Had Nani? found her man or was this his replacement?

He found H?lier out of bed, stubbornly dragging himself back and forth across the dirty boards of the shed's floor with the aid of two sticks. The water seller turned his head sharply as January came up the few plank steps: "Is that you?" he called out in English.

"It's me," replied January in French. "Benjamin January." He wanted to add, the big black nigger, but didn't, knowing the man had been under opium when he'd said it. Long dealings with Hannibal Sefton had taught him to let what was said under the influence of the drug slide like water off his back.

"Ah." H?lier dragged himself to the door of the shed. The young man's face was bathed in sweat, his blue eyes sunk in new webs of pain. "The surgeon no one will hire. I'm sorry," he added quickly, stepping back to let January into the shack. "It's the pain-and the opium, a little." He was very much more bent than he had been before, the spinal muscles that had been stretched and torn contracting, hunching him further, the damaged ligaments restricting the movement of his right shoulder and leg.

"Wonderful stuff, opium. Twenty-five drops for a penny, old Lafr?nni?re charges, which is fine if you've got a penny. My father would be proud."

"Your father?"

"Giles Lapatie, of Beau Rivage plantation. A gentleman of the belief that children should be neither seen nor heard nor acknowledged, if they're not as comely as they might be. Educated, yes. Given promises, yes-promises are cheap. Provided for, no. But I'm sure you're familiar with the type. What's that?"

"Philom?ne, at the vegetable market, sent them along."

"Leavings from my betters? Wrap them up for the helpless? How very kind of her." H?lier knocked the basket aside with his stick. For a moment there was no sound but the mice-feet of the rain. "And what about yourself? Come with a few pennies for opium? Maybe make a little music to cheer up the sufferer, since music after all is free?" His voice slurred just a little; January guessed he'd been dosing himself on whatever he could come by.

In a different tone, he went on, "I seem to remember it was you that unlatched me from that hell pit.

Thank you. Soublet seemed to think if they unjointed every bone of my body they could straighten me out, the fool. Lalaurie just stood by rubbing his hands, watching like a schoolgirl when they put the stallion to the mare."

"One of my pupils in Paris had her hands crippled by a 'patented finger-stretcher' her parents were convinced would improve her playing," said January. "It's the fashion, these days."

"Oh, well, I'm so glad to be in fashion." The darkness in the shed was almost complete, but January saw the twisted man's mouth quirk into an ironic grin. "I suppose the priests would say I deserved it. And maybe I did. What can I do for you, my friend?"

"I'm looking for information," said January. "You know everyone in town; hear everything. A friend of mine disappeared off the street last Friday night. It was while you were in Soublet's, but since then you might have heard something."

H?lier tilted his head a little, peering up at January like a turtle under the weight of its shell. His back was to the fluttering rush-dips; impossible to read either his face or his voice. "Disappeared, did she? What sort of friend?"

"A young girl, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Very thin, dark but not Congo black. I think she was wearing a red dress and red-and-black shoes. She would have been coming along Rue de l'Hopital, sometime around midnight."

Helier considered for a time, then shook his head, or made a motion that had once been a headshake but now involved his shoulders and upper back as well. "Have you checked in the Swamp? Along the levee?

She might have met a personable gentleman-maybe even a wealthy white man who promised to look after her and her son."

"She had no son," said January, aware that the last remark did not concern any event of Friday night.

"And she was just coming away from seeing a lover for whom she had made considerable sacrifice."

"The sacrifices of women, pah. They're like cats. They'll park their bottoms on the warmest chair."

January wondered what had been the reaction of H?lier's mother, when Giles Lapatie had refused further support of their son because of his deformity.

"What about Marie Laveau?" he asked. "To what length would she go, if she thought someone were a threat to her; if she thought someone knew something about her? Had seen her, perhaps, where she wasn't supposed to be?" She was waiting on the porch, in the twilight... The water seller giggled. "The whore-bitch poisoner who blackmails half the town? Mustn't say anything against her." He put a finger to his lips in owlish malice. "You'll wake up one morning to find a cross of salt on your back step and no one in the town willing to talk to you, for fear of her. If your friend ran foul of that heathen bawd she'd best cover her tracks; Laveau's hand is everywhere."

Had it been Mamzelle Marie whom Cora had met that night on the street?

He watched her that night, through a lead-tinged curtain of exhaustion: sponging off the bodies of the sick, holding the hands or heads of the dying. Her face was impassive as she bent down to listen to the broken ravings of a young Irishman-gathering secrets? Not much of importance in this place, January reflected bitterly. Charity Hospital was the final refuge of the poor, those without families to care for them, with only their hopes of making a fortune in Louisiana. And most would leave their bones in its soggy, heaving earth.

She saw me, stopped to watch me pass...

And he saw again how the voodooienne's head had turned, dark eyes taking in every detail of the street.

Marie Laveau at Black Oak. Of course Emily Redfern couldn't come into town without occasioning comment. January closed his eyes, his head throbbing like a drum.

By three in the morning he knew himself to be too exhausted to continue. He'd helped Barnard carry a woman down to the courtyard for the dead-cart and climbed back up the gallery stairs, but instead of going in again, only stood outside the door, leaning his heac against the doorframe, feeling as if he were slowly sinking into the earth. A wonderful feeling, he thought. Maybe he could fall asleep like this and not have to go to the trouble of walking home and lying down.

"You had a tiring day, M'sieu," the soft soot-and-honey voice said at his side. Turning his head he wondered how Mamzelle Marie knew this. She stood at his elbow and even the bottom edge of that fantastic seven-pointed tignon was dark with wet in the oil lamp's dirty glare "Best for all maybe that you go on home."

She fetched him his hat and coat, and walked with him to the courtyard gate, standing in the torchlight for a time, watching him as he went.

He made his way along Rue Villere, in the district of the vast, stinking charnel-houses of the two cemeteries toward Rue Douane, which would lead him back to thc relative safety of the French town. At this hour the towr was silent, save for the scuttling of rats in the alleyway: leading toward the burial grounds, the incessant whine of mosquitoes, and the roaring of the great reddish roaches and palmetto bugs around the iron lamps suspended above the intersections of the streets.

From the direction of Rue Royale and Canal Streei drifted the fat-off jingle of piano and coronet, where the lamps burned bright in gambling parlors. Insensible of mortality, Hannibal had quoted... What was the rest of it: Careless, reckless, fearless of what's past, present, or to come...

Boccacio's revelers-or was the story in Chaucer?-stumbling over the rotting corpses of the plague's dead. In the windows of the pharmacy across the street huge ornamental retorts glowed like rubies with the candles set behind them, all red, a warning to travelers of what the newspapers still denied. The day's rain had left the streets mucky, breathing with the stinks of wet and decay. Everything had a glitter to it, like the sheen of sweat on a dying man's brow.

In the silence it was easy to believe the disease roved the streets like the angel of death. Easy to half-expect the skeletal white shape of Baron Cemetery, the voodoo lord of the dead, coming around a corner in his top hat and his spectacles.

What was disease, anyway? The cholera that had squeezed the life out of Ayasha like a wet doll, the yellow fever that left him every day wondering if Olympe, or Gabriel, or Hannibal would vanish the way the Perrets or Robois Roque had vanished, struck down in their tracks so swiftly that they could not call for help.

The hair prickled on his neck. He was being followed.

This time by more than one person.

He quickened his pace, hopped over the gutter, and waded down the dragging muck in the middle of Rue Douane, keeping clear of the rough shacks and stucco cottages on either side.

Behind him nothing moved. Only a fleeting impression of something in the already wavering darkness away from the hanging lamps. His first superstitious dread-of the dark stalker Bronze John, the softly clattering bones of the bespectacled Baron-switched immediately to the more real dread of those bearded, whiskered Kaintucks, river pirates and killers who roved the streets looking for drink, or a woman, or a black man to beat up.

Ahead of him a man stepped out of the shadows. Then another, sticks in their hands. Every house between the Rue Marais behind him and the Rue Tr?m? before was locked, empty, their inhabitants enjoying the breezes of the lake in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. January doubled on his tracks and bolted for the dark mouth of the Rue Marais. As he did so, another man appeared in the street behind him, running toward him, as all of them were running now.

It was like flight in a dream, the horrible slow movement with the primordial ooze gripping his feet. Grimly he wondered where the City Guards were, who were sup posed to be enforcing a curfew against colored and slaves. He reached the corner of the Rue Marais moments before they did and slithered into the long pass-through which led between two houses to the yard behind. It was a dead end, a cul-de-sac, knee-deep in garbage and night soil, and this house, unlike Agnes Pellicot's, had no convenient window to force. But one of the few advantages January had ever found in looking like a field hand was that he was tremendously strong.

He drove his foot through the jalousies that covered one of the rickety doors, plunged through in a tangle of curtain, in the dark stumbling into and knocking over unseen articles of furniture. He crashed and thrust his way into the front parlor, hearing the men behind him as they broke through into the rear, groped along the wall. He forced himself to slow down, to move carefully, to feel his way until he touched the door that led into the front bedroom.

He shut it behind him, big fingers shaking as they found the key that such rooms nearly always had, turned it in the lock with a click that made him wince. His pursuers were making far too much noise tripping over furniture themselves to hear. "The curse of Cromwell be after ye, ya stupid pillock!"

"Where the Sam Hill'd he go?"

"Ye got no more sense than to leave the lantern in the alley..." Silent, silent, desperately silent he followed the wall around the room, thrust open the casement window that looked onto the pass-through to the next house and opened the shutters, the reddish reflections of lamplight falling through to show him the door into the rear bedroom, the rough, battered-looking chifforobe with its broken mirror, and the big wooden bed, the mosquito-bar tied neatly back above it.

He slithered through, pulling shut the casements and pushing closed the shutters behind him. As he'd suspected, there was another man waiting in the street, but he was watching the front of the house.

January slipped along the pass-through to the rear of the next house. He used one of the scalpels from his bag to slip the latches on the jalousies, then ducked inside.

It didn't buy him much time, but enough to move through that house, and the next, cursing every time he fell over a chair or a table, knowing they could hear, they would follow. Thank God it was, on the whole, too dark for them to trace his foot tracks of garbage and muck. He came out a final window on Rue Bienville, and moved along the walls, his heart in his throat, toward the high stucco wall at the end of the street, behind which sulfurous yellow light flared like the glare of hell.

He heard them running behind him, the slop and suck of mud under their boots, and the slither and splosh as one of them fell. Four men, he saw, glancing back again, three of them with clubs, one with what looked like a rope. Bearded faces half-unseen under slouch hats, but their hands were white. He had half the length of the street on them now and was of a height to reach the top of the wall with his hands at a jump, dragging himself up and over.

The stench of the place was like liquid muck in his lungs, but at this point he cared nothing about that. The cemetery of St. Louis lay before him, a horror of gaping pits and standing water. The little white houses of marble and stucco and stone clustered beyond the darkness, like the huts in a village of the dead.

The dead lay along the wall, wrapped roughly in sheets of cheap osnaburg or canvas, the fabric moving with rats. January dropped down onto the piled corpses, send ing forth the rats in a shrieking horde, and fled, stumbling, sickened, across the pitted ooze and into the black-and-white jumble of shadow that was the tombs.

The disease isn't contagious, he told himself, slipping from tomb to tomb. He dodged behind one, then another, working his way through the dense-packed mazes. I've worked among the dying for three months now and I haven't contracted it yet.

He was gasping, shaking in every limb, nauseated with horror and disgust. Roaches the length of his finger crept through the cracks of marble boxes. A rat perched on the head of a bricked-up sepulcher marked DESLORMES; eating something, January couldn't see what. In a spot of open ground, water had worked and thrust arms and hands and legs and shards of coffin wood up through the earth, as if Bronze John's victims were trying to climb back out of the ground again, and the surfaces of the pools crept and shivered with feeding crawfish.

There were lights by the graveyard gate, and men moving around, slinging sheeted forms, or emaciated and livid bodies picked off the streets, into piles along the wall. Torches stuck in the ground added their grimy light to the glare of pots of burning hide and hair and gunpowder. The men swung around, startled, when January emerged from among the tombs.

"Where you come from, brother?" called out one, and the other grinned and said, "Hey, Joseph, look like we bury this one alive by mistake. We begs your pardon, sir." They bowed mockingly, cheerful themselves to be wielding the shovels instead of waiting for them.

But their leader, standing naked to the waist on the carload of corpses, like Bronze John himself with the torchlight reflected in his eyes, asked, "Where you come from, sir?"

"Over the wall." January gestured back behind him. "I was coming back from the Hospital. I was followed by a gang of white men with clubs."

"I seen them," said the man on the dead-cart. "Pickin' up the dead, I sometimes seen them. Three men, sometimes four, just shapes in the darkness, but they're carryin' clubs. Never stop me, though." And he smiled. "Can I take you somewheres, friend?"

January started to say, "Take me to the Rue Burgundy," but another thought came to his mind. He thought of his brother-in-law, asking him to look out for a friend's missing husband; of a woman in a ragged yellow dress, searching through the charity ward for her man. Of his niece and nephew saying,

"We packed 'em up..."

"Take me over to Rue St. Philippe, if you would." He had no stomach for moving about the dark streets of the French town alone.

The man on the dead-cart smiled again. "Hop right on," he said.