03 Graveyard Dust

SIX

Since the Widow Puy would in all probability not appreciate being waked to answer questions about a boarder whom she barely remembered, January repaired for an hour to number 8 All?e d'Echange. There under the ruthless tutelage of Augustus Mayerling he worked his injured arms and back against scale weights and beams of various sizes until he felt the limbs in question were about to fall off and he'd have to carry them home in a basket in his teeth. "Good." The Prussian fencing master handed him a towel to wipe his face. The long upstairs room, despite its row of windows thrown open to the narrow gallery, was stiflingly hot. "It means the muscles are healing satisfactorily."

Trembling with fatigue, January reflected that it was good to know someone was satisfied with the progress of the day so far.

The Widow Puy told him little that Ti Jon had not already related. Yes, a young man of Isaak Jumon's description had stayed there last week. She didn't remember when he'd first arrived. It could have been Thursday. January had the impression that it could also have been Monday or Saturday or last Easter for all she knew or cared.

She shrugged, a heavyset woman in a sweat-stained green calico dress and a tignon to match. She sat behind the plank counter of her grocery like a snapping turtle in a hole in a bank; on the shelf behind her, jammed in between bottles of opium and papers of pins, he saw a green glass bottle stoppered with red wax, which contained a root or bundle of some kind, surrounded by a few silver and copper bits, cigars, and fancy-cut paper. "Long as they pays me my money I don't care who they are or where they from."

Past bins of flour and rice, barrels of onions, kegs of molasses, and stacks of yellowing newspaper on every level surface in the big dim room, doors opened into the yard, harsh squares of light. Men's voices came beyond, dimly, the rhythm of those with nothing much to do. "You remember anyone coming to see him here?" January asked her. "Or him getting any messages from anyone?"

She shook her head. She probably didn't recall that many details about her last four husbandsanyway the man measuring out half a penny's worth of crowder peas for a little girl with a market basket certainly wasn't the man who'd been here eighteen months ago.

"You remember when he left?"

"Saturday."

"You sure?"

Her eyes went flat. "No," she said, in the voice of one who has all her life used contrariness to punish those who questioned her veracity.

"Thank you, M'am," said January, telling himself never again to antagonize a potential source of later information. "You've been very helpful." He bought three linen handkerchiefs for more than they were worth and took his departure, circling the building to join the group in the back.

It was late enough in the morning that the men who hadn't found work had returned, to while the remainder of the day away in talk of women or of work yet to be found. One man had the deep, wet cough of the later stages of consumption; another, big and young with a slave's tin badge on his faded shirt, moved and breathed like a man who has strained his heart. January shivered, rubbed his own aching shoulders, and wondered how long it would be before the owners of these men sold them off for what they could get. There were worse things, he realized, than torn and dislocated muscles that would eventually heal.

The men remembered Isaak, but he had told none of them more than he had told Ti Jon, and most of them less. They'd guessed him for a runaway, but it was none of their business. Several of them were, January guessed, runaways themselves, making a fair living at casual labor and having no intention of leaving New Orleans. All said Isaak'd left Saturday morning. All referred him to Ti Jon.

"He had this note when he came back here Friday night," said the man with the bad heart. "I saw it, but I Can't read. I wisht I could, or figure."

"Do you know who it was from?"

The man shook his head. "Maybe his wife. Or his sweetheart. He said he had a wife."

"He didn't touch it like it was from his wife," said a man with the sores of scrofula on his face. "A man with a paper from his wife, he'll hold it between his hands like this, even when he's not reading it, or lay it up by his face, or keep it in his breast pocket near his heart. This he read, two, three times, by the moonlight sittin' out on the steps"-he nodded up at the shallow platform outside the door that let into the attic where the men slept, at the top of a rickety flight of steps"but he just shove it in his pants pocket and sat lookin' up at the moon."

It was after ten in the morning when January left Puy's, and clouding up, the dense heat smelling of rain. If the banks closed at one, ten was the proper time to see if Hannibal was awake. It might take an hour or so to sober him up. But at this hour, thought January, wading through the weeds that grew thick along the sides of the undrained muck-hole streets, Hannibal wasn't the only one who'd be awake in the Swamp.

When first January had come to New Orleans as a child, the old town walls had still stood, and pastures had stretched beyond them toward the swamp and the lake. Upstream a few Americans had begun to build their houses and shops along Canal Street-named for a waterway that had never been dug-but for the most part everything beyond the walls was a wilderness of cypresses and cattails, silt and saltgrass, and ferns.

He had had no fear to walk there or anywhere else outside the walls.

The walls were gone now. But in his heart and his imagination they remained, a bastion against the upriver Americans, human garbage of the flatboat and keelboat trade, river rats, and filibusters whose numbers had doubled and tripled and then waxed ten- and twenty- and fifty-fold with the passing years. Foul-mouthed dirty men whose cold eyes saw no difference between slave blacks who could be bought and sold and the free colored man or woman whose ancestors had founded the town. Slick scheming men who would buy anything or sell anything or do anything to anyone as long as it could turn a profit, and the coarse whorish women who followed them for gain.

The Swamp had streets, but that was about all that could be said of the place. No one had bothered to pave them, or run the gutters essential to keeping the marshy town drained. The slots between the crude plank buildings, the tents and shanties that housed brothels and barrel houses and cheap lodging places, were themselves gutters, ankle-deep in reeking ooze that steamed faintly under the morning's pounding heat. Untended privies competed with the stench of dead dogs, rotting garbage, expectorated tobacco, and fermenting alcohol in a putrid tttiusma that veiled the whole district; even at this hour of the morning January could see into the open sheds to games of poker and faro still in progress from the previous night or the previous week. Outside the TurkeyBuzzard a man lay in the muck. Flies swarmed around a gaping wound in his chest.

Even from across the street luouary could see he wasn't breathing.

He walked swiftly, his eyes on the ground, keeping to tlvr sloppy runnel in the middle of the way lest he enmuunter any who considered it their right as white men to liuve the drier ground along the walls. There were a lot of runaway slaves living in the Swamp; slaves, too, like Ti Jon, who "slept out," finding lodging in its back rooms, it ttios, and sheds. These, January knew, could be insulted, shoved in the mud, beaten, or killed with impunity. The City Guards did not come here.

When whores called out to him from shanties barely wider than the beds they contained, he did not raise his eyes.

Hannibal lived above Kentucky Williams's saloon in Perdido Street these days. He had only to make it that far.

"Michie January?"

He halted, surprised. A child stood at his side, panting as from a run; one of those hundreds of ragged urchins who darted around the Swamp and Girod Street and the Basin District like flies above a gutter on a hot June day. The boy held out a folded sheet of paper. "Are you Mi chie Ben January?"

"I'm Ben January."

"This for you, then."

Puzzled, he handed the child a picayune, and the boy pelted away, trying to outrun the crowd of larger boys who emerged from nowhere to try to take the coin.

January unfolded the paper, his mind going back to the chicken foot on his bed.

The paper was blank. He turned it over. Blank.

The hair prickled on the nape of his neck as he realized what the paper was.

He looked around him, fast, but the man who'd paid the child to get him to identify himself in the open street had already stepped from under the awning of a run down saloon, a knife in his hand.

January had an impression of a sun-bleached mouse-brown beard and long braids wrapped in buckskin and red rags, a shirt sewn from the blue wool goods traded by the British posts to Indians in the Oregon Territories. A fur trapper, a mountain man, calm and businesslike as if he were going after a lamed deer.

January ran. Even if the law would permit him to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense-which it didn't-he knew that every Kaintuck river rat and keelboat ruffian in the district would be on him like wolves if he did so. In any case he knew his arms, his back, his body were not up to a fight. He was taller than the trapper and probably fifty pounds heavier, and he ran like a jackrabbit: down Jackson Street, through empty ground rank with waist-high weeds and splashing with oozy water, around the side of a coarse-built barrel-house-cum-bordello where the whores shrieked "He's gettin' away from you, Ned!" and someone yelled "Two dollars an the nigger! " as he and his pursuer pounded past, behind him he heard the man yell "Stop him! " in English. "You, boy, stop!" And he raised the knife, flashing in the clouded sunlight.

Men poured, whooping, out of the Ripsnorter Saloon; it was a slack hot morning in the slow season, and the light promised diversion-and formed a barrier between the buildings, heading January off in a weed-ridden soggy field, There were two pistols and a rifle among them, and January tried to veer away. The mountain man swerved at his heels, lunged, and struck; January's feet skidded in the muck beneath the weeds. He tried to catch the knife hand and twist it aside: it was like a child trying to avert the blow of a man. His arm crumpled like soaked panteboard in a wash of breathless pain, and he ducked out of the way as the blade scored his flesh.

They fell, hard, the white man on top, January's arm collapsing under him as he tried to catch himself. He rolled from under the knife and mud splashed on him with the force of it stabbing into the ground. Rolled again, trying to bring up his arm through a red haze of pain, sobbing with shock and despair and sheer terror, and then someone grabbed the trapper from behind and hauled him back like a housewife uprooting a carrot.

It was a black man, huge January's own formidable height and as heavily built, head shaved, scarred eyes, and a mouth like an ax cut in an ugly face. He whirled the trapper with astonishing neatness and head-butted him, hard: January saw his rescuer had only one arm, his right, the left a stub not quite down to the elbow. The trapper staggered and the cut-armed man let him go, and in a single move elbowed him across the face, then back-fisted him with a blow like a hammer's. The trapper staggered, lunged again with his knife, and a man from the crowd leapt out and tried to pull him back. January glimpsed Hannibal's frayed black coat and long hair as the trapper whirled and walloped the fiddler aside with the back of his hand, with force sufficient to knock him down. The cut-armed man dragged January to his feet, the crowd churning into a melee, grabbing at January, grabbing at the cut-armed man. The trapper flung Hannibal off him a second time but never got a chance to make another lunge at January, for out of the confusion barreled three women, harpies, a six-foot Amazon named Kentucky Williams and her equally fearsome partners, Railspike and Kate the Gouger-all of whom, January knew, had a soft spot for Hannibal in what passed in them for hearts.

"Three dollars on Kentucky!" somebody yelled as the cut-armed man shoved January by main strength through the mob, and the sky split with a roar of thunder and rain sluiced down. The downpour was short, but it effectively discouraged pursuit. When January and Cut-Arm ducked into a ramshackle shed behind a store on St. John Street-a store that seemed to sell nothing much besides liquor and some of the most slatternly women January had ever seen-most of their pursuit had already fallen aside. The few who ran on past seemed more interested in finding shelter themselves than picking up the trail. "You know him?" panted Cut-Arm, and January shook his head.

"He had a boy come out and give me a note, blank, so he could see me say I was Ben January. So he didn't know who I was, either."

Cut Arm sniffed, and his dark eyes gleamed in the shadows as he listened for the sound of further pursuit. "You got someplace to go?"

January nodded, and touched the shirt-pocket where he kept one copy of his papers. "I'm free," he said. His mother-and many others among the free coloredwould have been careful to specify that they were free colored, dreading lest they be taken for freedmen, freed blacks, emancipated by a white master out of generosity or in payment for faithful service. Though of course, he reflected, that was exactly what he was, and what his mother was, deny it though she certainly would. "I came over here to find my friend Hannibal the fiddler, the one who tried to help you in the fight." He felt a small pang of shame at having abandoned Hannibal to his own devices-the fiddler could never have survived an all-out attempt on his life-but knew Hannibal would be the first person to say "For God's sake run for it!" At least Hannibal wouldn't be clubbed to death merely for striking a white man. And with Kentucky Williams and her girls on the scene, Hannibal's chances of getting clean away were good.

"No white man had to help me," said Cut-Arm softly, his voice deep, the growl of a bear. "And you'd be best if you stop calling any white man friend. Not the one who freed you, not the one who mixed himself in the fight. None of'em. When it comes to a choice they'll all betray you. Where's this white man of yours live?"

Cut-Arm went with him as far as the foot of the rattletrap ladder that ascended the back of Kentucky Williams's house. The two men moved quietly in the slanting rain through the weedy lots, the stands of cypress, and loblolly pine. In two of the saloons they passed, other fights had already started up, women shrieking and men cursing, furniture smashing against rickety plank walls. Few came out in the rain who might have seen them go by, but once, near the corner of an alley, January saw a dark shape signal Cut-Arm that all was clear.

Hannibal had already returned, and sat in the gray light of the doorway of his attic room, reading Topography of Thebes, when January climbed the ladder through the thinning drizzle. "So what was your quarrel with Mr. Nash?" the fiddler inquired, and coughed heavily. His long dark hair was soaked and he'd shed his wet coat in favor of a blanket around his thin shoulders. "Don't tell me you dared imply that the college he attended has a second-rate rowing-team?" "That was it." January glanced back down into the flooded yard. No trace of Cut-Arm was to be seen. "I should have known better than to say a thing like that to a Harvard man. Thank you." Hannibal had a small cut over one eye, but other than that he seemed little the worse for leaping into the fray, save for the drawn exhaustion of his face and the way he slumped against the doorframe.

Behind him the roof leaked noisily. Peering through into the attic's sepia gloom, January saw a mattress and a drapery of frayed mosquito-bar. A dozen stacks of books were all arranged on planks laid down between the rafters above the thin ceiling of the room below, placed so that the leaks dripped between them. "You know the man?"

Hannibal coughed again and withdrew a bottle of opium from under the blanket's folds. "Edward Nash, hight Killdevil among the mountain men for his affection for that particular tipple: If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I should teach them would be, to forswear thin potations. Damn," he added, taking a swig, and held the bottle up to the light. "Speaking of thin potations... They swear to me they don't steal it, but they do. They think I don't notice when they water it." He coughed again, the deep racking shudder of tuberculosis, and leaned against the frame of the door, jaw tight with sudden pain.

"God knows what those girls want with opium," he went on after a moment in his hoarse, light voice, "considering the poison they peddle by the gallon downstairs. I don't know what I'd have done if they hadn't shown up. I left the lovely Kentucky in charge of the situation. Ungallant, but I thought it best." His eyes slipped closed; in the rainy light, his face looked deathly. "Still..." And the dark eyes flicked open again, (symbols unavailable) as the maggot said to the King of France. Our Mr. Nash came to town in May with four years' worth of fox and beaver pelts, his own and those of his partners back in Mexico. He sold the lot for close to three thousand dollars and started drinking. And gambling. He did some of both here, but mostly over at the Flesh and Blood on Tchoupitoulas Street. I've never seen one man get so drunk so quickly and stay sitting up so long after he should charitably have been put to bed. Charitably at least for the local Paphians, who would have access to the inner pockets that the gamblers missed. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders' books... In any case he's been hanging around town ever since, trying to raise sufficient funds to get back to Santa Fe and face his associates with some semblance of honor."

January was silent. He saw again the chicken foot, the graveyard dust. The child holding out to him the folded note in the street. "I gather," he said at last in a mild voice, "that someone suggested to Mr. Nash a means by which he could redeem himself." And he related the incident of the boy and the blank note. "Olympe's husband is leaving town today-he has to feed his family and go when work is offered. Anyone would have known that. And seen me stand up in the court yesterday morning."

"That's crazy." Hannibal took another sip of opium and worked the cork back into the bottle. "Who'd want to have your sister hanged? I mean, if you're going to go after a voodooienne, why not tackle Mamzelle Marie? Who'd want to see the death of what appears to be a perfectly innocent sixteen-year-old girl?"

"I don't know," said January grimly. "But somebody does. Do you suppose the lovely Miss Williams and her equally lovely friends might be able to ascertain more details of Mr. Nash's current employment?"

"I don't see why not. I doubt he'll be in much of a mood to talk to the Fair Maid of Lexington herself-when last I saw them together Kentucky had bitten a sizable chunk from his left ear and was hammering him over the head with a slungshot-but the thing about the Swamp is, that everyone knows someone who knows someone. Rather like Oxford University in that sense...

But that can't have been the reason you came here, surely?"

"No." January rubbed his short-cropped hair to shake some of the rainwater out of it. "Though I was on my way to see you. Which brings me to the favor," he went on, "that I wanted to ask of you."

The Bank of Louisiana stood on Rue Royale, a massive structure of Doric pillars and imposing facade set back from the street, within a few steps of the Merchants' Bank, the United States Bank, and the Louisiana State Bank. Grouchet's, a small eating house that catered to the better-off among the free colored, stood next to the Merchants' Bank across the street. Slightly more expensive than could be afforded by junior clerks at any of the. banks, at a quarter to one on a Saturday afternoon it was not crowded. From its front windows, January had a splendid view of the front doors of the Bank of Louisiana and of Hannibal Sefton, loitering before the windows of The Sign of the Magnolia pretending to admire boots.

Hubert Granville emerged from the bank's bronze doors. His corpulent bulk was surprisingly natty in a coat of snuff brown superfine, his red-blond hair carefully pomaded and combed. He extended a thick hand from beneath the shelter of the porch and, finding that the rain had ceased, stepped out, but did not don his hat, for a woman followed immediately behind him. She would have been tall even without the pattens that protected her shoes from the mud, and though January couldn't see her face clearly at the distance, she carried herself like a woman of beauty. Her gown of black mourning crepe showed off a ripe, matronly figure; her tignon matched the dress in hue and trimmings and even at that distance seemed to him one of the most elaborately decorated he'd ever seen on a woman of color.

No veil. Full crepe, no veil usually meant a child or a parent recently deceased, not a husband-no widow in her senses would swelter in the crepe of first mourning past the moment when she could dispense with veils...

The woman glanced back at the bank, asking a question. Whatever Granville replied, it was reassuring. The banker held out his arm, the woman took it, and together they proceeded down Rue Royale in the direction of the Magasin de Commerce.

Shortly thereafter, as the Cathedral clock sounded one, the clerks of the bank emerged. Young men with flourishing side-whiskers and elderly gentlemen in steel rimmed spectacles, dressed-as January had taken care to dress upon his return from the Swamp-in the tailed coats, embroidered waistcoats, and high-crowned chimney-pot hats that were as wildly inappropriate for New Orleans in the summertime as crepe mourning. January counted them off with his eye: several white men of assorted ages, a free colored far too dark to share parents with the fair-skinned Isaak Jumon, a much-lighter skinned man of thirty at least...

And there he was. The youngest clerk, looking every day of seventeen and every Caucasian atom of a quadroon, arrayed in a nip-waisted black frock coat of the boldest cut and three black silk waistcoats, one over the other, jet buttons gleaming at a hundred feet away... And there was Hannibal, strolling over to him, casual and polite, coat brushed, long hair braided in an oldfashioned queue, and new gloves of black kid on his hands. January could see when the fiddler handed Antoine the card of one Quentin Rafferty-Hannibal had a collection of cards, neatly separated into those that specified an occupation and those that did not-and the most recent copy of the New York Herald he'd had in his attic, pointing out two or three articles he claimed to have written under various pseudonyms. And he could see, by the boy's tilted head and the angle of his shoulders, that Antoine Jumon was buying every ounce of that particular load of goods. Hannibal could be astonishingly convincing when he tried.

"... wouldn't be printed in New Orleans, so there's no worry about that," the fiddler was saying a few moments later, as he and Antoine Jumon entered Grouchet's. "In fact it's standard policy for our paper to change all the names of a story of this kind. It's the story itself that's the thing, my friend, the... the piquancy, the bizarrerie that characterizes the streets of any city, that particularly Gothic strangeness that makes true human experience so much more curious than the borrowed effusions of mere art. Don't you agree?"

"It's true," said Antoine earnestly. January had moved his seat from the window to a table farther in and so had to admire the adroit way in which Hannibal steered the boy to a chair from which January could watch his face while he spoke. "You know, I've often thought that true experience, seen through a mind attuned and sensitized, is far more satisfying than anything one could read or see. But I never thought"-he turned his face away a little, his brow suddenly twisting in grief-"my brother..."

"Tell me about it," urged Hannibal, and nudged the boy's crepe-scarved top hat-which Antoine had set on the table, where it blocked the view of his restless hands-out of January's line of sight. Antoine had been reading in his own room-a gar?onniere-above the household offices-at his mother's house on Rue des Ramparts, on the night of Monday, the twenty-third of June. It was very late, and raining heavily, when he heard knocking on his door. "There was a woman there, sir, a woman of color, masked and wearing a hooded cloak. She asked me if my name was Antoine Jumon, and I said yes; she asked if I had a brother named Isaak, and I said yes. She asked, where was my mother? I said I didn't know. I thought she must be in the house asleep. The woman said, 'If you love your brother, come with me. Hurry, there is no time to lose.'" "Did she speak French or English?" asked Hannibal, and the boy looked up, surprised. "French, of course." It didn't seem to occur to him to wonder why the purported Mr. Rafferty, of a New York newspaper, would have been carrying on the entire conversation in French. Antoine had gone into the main house, but his mother was not in her bed. His guide would not be stayed, however, and urged him into a fiacre waiting in the street. "I did not see the coachman's face, M'sieu, because of the rain. We drove-hours it seemed-in the darkness, before she ordered the coach to halt and led me out. I had only confused impressions of a great, dark house looming over us with a single candle burning in one upper window, watching us like some malignant eye. She took me through a dark antechamber, to a small, bare room where my brother lay dying on a rude mattress laid on the floor beside the fire."

"Did you know he was dying?" asked Hannibal gently, looking up from the notebook in which he was jotting. The boy's mouth trembled with distress.

"His face-ah, God! He was in terrible pain, white and ghastly; he vomited and... and could not contain his bowels, though the servant woman there had cleaned him, and there was not much more in him to void. Hehe said, I have been poisoned, Antoine, in a terrible voice, as if his throat were scraped and raw."

His eyes squeezed shut, and his black-gloved hands began to shake in earnest. "Please excuse me," muttered Antoine after a moment. "I-I am not well. My constitution is weak.

"Perhaps this will help a little?" Hannibal held out to him the square black bottle from his pocket.

"I am myself not of strong constitution."

Antoine's eye fell on the bottle, and January could see that the boy recognized the shape of it at once: Kendal Black Drop, triple-strength tincture of the best Turkish opium, brewed by a Quaker family named Braithwaite at eleven shillings the bottle. And he could see the gratefitl, gentle light in Antoine Jumon's eyes. "Thank you," said the boy. "Thank you very much, sir."

And took a slug that would have felled a horse. "There isn't that much more to tell," said Antoine, after a moment. "I was-I was much affected, so much so that I could barely speak. I clung to my brother's hand and wept. He tried to speak to me, tried to tell me something, over and over, I don't know how long I was there.

Time seemed to stand still, to stretch and to shrink. There was a fire in the grate; sometimes all that I could hear was the rain, and the hissing of the coals, and all I could do was stare at the goldwork patterns in the red velvet of the pillow beneath my brother's head, and the way the firelight made jewels of the sweat on his brow. The woman servant there brought me water in a pitcher of fantastic make, like a-like a lettuce, with serpents and insects peering and slipping among the dark leaves. Evil! Horrible! I poured the water out when she turned away. My brother whispered again, I have been poisoned Then he said, Mother, and Tell her, and Celie... Celie was my brother's wife, M'sieu, married only a month. And then-and then he died."

He looked aside again, covering his mouth with his hand. Hannibal signaled the young woman in the kitchen door to bring them coffee, and waited while Antoine took a sip.

"I'm sorry," said Antoine after a moment, and drew a deep breath. "Isaak fell limp in my arms, M'sieu. After a little time the woman servant helped me to my feet, led me from the room. I-I was led out, led by the hand into a-a waiting fiacre... It was still pouring rain, M'sieu, and the carriage-the carriage stopped, I knew not where, and the coachman bade me get down. After that I wandered long, long through the rain, hours it seemed; turning corners here and there among dark houses and still darker stands of trees. At long last I saw lights before me, and made my way to them. They were the riding lights on the masts of ships in the river, and so at length I was able to find my way home. It was dawn, and my mother was awake and waiting for me. And I told her that my brother was dead."

To which Genevi?ve doubtless responded, thought January dourly, with a discreetly stifled whoop of joy.

"But this is shocking." Hannibal added a dollop of opium to the boy's coffee. "Astonishing! Do you-forgive me for asking-do you have any idea who might have poisoned him? Had he enemies?"

Antoine's voice sank to a whisper. "He was surrounded by them." January had to strain to hear.

"Our grandmother-you understand, M'sieu," he added selfconsciously, "that my brother and I are-I am, he was, M'sieu-men of color, but our father was a wealthy white man of this city. He left my brother considerable property, but owing to... owing to a division in the family, nothing was left to my mother or me. But his mother, M'sieu, our father's mother-she is a terrible woman! She tried to have my brother's inheritance taken away from him before he got it. Yes, and also tried to take that which my father left to his estranged wife, Noemie, who lives in ParisNoemie who hated this country, hated my brother and my mother and me! And the father of the woman that my brother married, he, too, hated my brother. He would have liked to see his daughter a widow, and himself in control of the property she would inherit. And my uncle, my father's brother..."

Sudden, ugly rage flashed across the boy's gentle eyes. Very softly, Antoine said, "My uncle Mathurin is a consummately evil man, M'sieu. My brother-would not see it. Isaak was-very good, my brother. He forgave, even those who had no business being forgiven. Because Mathurin showed him kindness, he thought that he was kind, and I assure you, M'sieu, that this is not the case. My uncle is a powerful man in this city, M'sieu. He has powerful friends. If my brother died, eventually the property would have gone to him. Had I to name one who would have harmed my brother, M'sieu, I would say that it was he."

"Antoine."

The boy whirled, face flooding with guilt. Framed in the doorway of Grouchet's stood the mourning woman January had seen leaving the bank with Hubert Granville.

At closer range he saw that she had, indeed, been a beauty once. Even if-his mind leapt to the realization as Antoine rose to his feet and stammered, "Mama"-even if she'd started out life as one of Antoine Allard's cane hands.

January had seen the look in her eyes a thousand times before, at the Hotel-Dieu, at the Charity Hospital-the look as she turned her son's face to the light of the windows, and warily studied his eyes. She did not even try, as the wives of drunks and addicts so frequently do, to pretend she was doing something else. January wondered if Kentucky Williams and the Perdido Street harpies had watered Hannibal's Black Drop to a degree that it wouldn't contract the pupils of Antoine's eyes.

"I was concerned when you didn't come home," said Genevi?ve Jumon, with false and steady cheerfulness. "You know that I don't like you wandering about the town without letting me know where you'll be." She glanced past her son at Hannibal, who had tucked pad, pencil, and opium bottle out of sight.

"Mama, this is M'sieu Rafferry, of New York," said Antoine quickly, and just as quickly, Hannibal very slightly shook his head. "He is the-the owner of an art gallery in that city. I sent him some of my sketches and paintings, and he was kind enough to look for me when he came to New Orleans."

"And very beautiful they are, M'am." Hannibal rose to his feet and bowed gracefully over Madame Jumon's hand. "Your son has a great deal of talent. Unformed, of course, and undirected, but technique is easy to acquire when the heart, the fire, is there..."

January folded up his newspaper and casually strolled from the cafe.

"What did you think?" he asked ten minutes later, when Hannibal joined him at the coffee stand in the market arcade where he'd supped with Rose last night.

"You mean other than the fact that our boy is obviously an addict and was just as obviously taking advantage of Mama's absence on the night in question by dosing himself to the verge of insensibility with Smyrna nepenthe? St. John's Eve is just about the shortest night of the year. If he'd driven 'hours' to this mysterious house and wandered around for 'hours' afterward-not to speak of the 'hours' spent staring at snakes in the water pitcher-it would have been noon by the time he got home."

"There is that," agreed January, who signaled one of the pralinneres with a gesture of his finger.

Hannibal paid for both pralines-a brown and a white-and handed the remainder of the money back to January. Coffee and soup at Grouchet's, though not overwhelmingly costly, had cut deeply into January's slender resources, and there was still his mother to pay for room and board.

"Did you notice that it was a woman servant who brought him there, and a woman who attended Isaak-the same woman, maybe? Even at that hour of the night it wouldn't be impossible to hire a hack."

"A pity Mama put in an appearance before we could get a description out of him." Hannibal checked his notes. "I observe that in addition to Celie's name Isaak also mentioned their mother'sinteresting, given the reason he was in hiding in the first place. And Mama, of course, was absent from home that night. "

"And evidently hadn't told Antoine where she was going, or when she'd be back," mused January.

"Curious.

Though if she was behind it and didn't want to be placed on the scene of the death itself, I don't imagine she'll be difficult to trace. In fact, she'll be cudgeling her brain for some way to mention casually the thirty-seven people who saw her in the hours before her son's death."

"Did they?"

"I don't know," said January. "I can only assume she did to Shaw, since he made no attempt to arrest her as well. But I'm certainly going to find out."

Saturday, 28 June

M. Mathurin Jumon

Rue St. Louis

New Orleans

Dear M. Jumon:

In my investigation of the horrible accusation that has been leveled against Madame Celie Jumon, your name was mentioned as a possible source of information about your nephew Isaak Jumon, of whom, I have been told, you were quite fond. I understand that you have probably already spoken to Madame Jumon's attorney, a M. Vilhardouin, but it is my understanding that M.

Vilhardouin is carrying on his investigation only insofar as concerns Madame Jumon and not the woman who is accused along with her, a Madame Corbier. By investigating on behalf of both, I hope to gain a clearer insight into the circumstances of your nephew's death.

Might I trouble you for an hour of your time, at your convenience, in order that I may learn further particulars about your nephew that might point out some direction for further investigation?

Please let me know a time and venue most convenient for a meeting.

Many thanks for your help and consideration in this matter.

Your obedient servant, Benjamin January, fine.