Fever Season (33 page)

Only after he’d satisfied himself of this did he stand, knobby as an old horse and scarred across pelvis, ribs, and arms with the ragged pale gouges of old wounds, and reach for his pants, hung neatly over the back of the chair. “I take it you found the fellas who’s been kidnappin’ yore sister’s friends?”

One never needed to explain much to Shaw.

“Roarke,” answered January. “The Jolly Boatman’s connected at the back with St. Gertrude’s Clinic. The attic’s full of opium to keep them quiet, and clothes to put on them when they take them out of there on keelboats up to the bayou and out across the lake.”

“You see this?”

“I saw the opium and the clothes, and the connection between the clinic and the Boatman’s kitchen.”

“They see you?”

“I had to swim for it.”

“You’re lucky.” Shaw was dressing while he spoke: trousers, boots, shirt, and coat, moving with the silent speed of a snake. “They’ll be clearin’ ’em out. Boechter and LaBranche—two of my men—sleep in the attic here. You shuck whatever weaponry you’re packin’ whilst I fetch ’em down.” He caught the room’s single threadbare towel
from the bar on the back of the door as he passed it, flung it back to January out of the hall’s blackness. He didn’t take the candle. January guessed Abishag Shaw was the kind of man who would have found the kitchen knife-drawer in the dark.

Shaw was back in minutes, accompanied by Constable Boechter, a swart little Bavarian still rubbing sleep from his eyes. January had toweled dry his hair and face—not that it would make a particle of difference in ten minutes—and had set the slungshot and one of the two knives on top of the neat, shoulder-high arrangement of packing-cases that occupied the whole of the room’s riverward wall. The cases held an assortment of tidily folded calico shirts, another pair of clean but sorry trousers, and a dozen or more books. The tops of them were strewn with weapons—pistols, knives, brass powder-flasks and sacks of balls; a braided leather sap, an iron knuckle-duster. A six-and-a-half-foot-long rifle with a dozen crosses cut neatly in its stock hung on pegs above the bed. When Shaw and Boechter returned to the room Shaw began gathering these weapons and distributing them about his angular person—he’d acquired another plug of tobacco from somewhere as well—and January felt a flash of anger, that by the law of the state he could only follow this man like an unarmed valet.

“LaBranche went for reinforcements,” the Kaintuck remarked as he checked the pistols’ loads. “We been watchin’ Roarke some little time, over one thing and another. Not havin’ a fancy to break my neck or drown’d, I’d say we got no choice but to follow up the shell road on foot. With luck we’ll catch ’em ’fore they make the lake—God knows, in rain like this they won’t be makin’ much time. You got any idea how many are in it, Maestro?”

January shook his head. “Five, maybe ten.”

“We’ll catch ’em, then.” Shaw spat on the floor. The whole place was stained and sticky with old expectorations, the smell of the tobacco a faint, sweet queasiness in the heat. “Even haulin’ on the canal they won’t be making but a few rods an hour, an’ when they hit the Bayou it’ll get worse. Roarke’ll never make it across the lake in this weather, but he’s got a place up along the shore just over the border into Jefferson Parish. If so be he reaches it, we’re in for some trouble.”

It wasn’t likely, after all this time, that they’d be there, January thought, as he strode through the darkness along Canal Street, head down in the sheeting rain. Not Cora.

Rose?

His heart beat hard and heavy. She’d been missing only three days. Three days since she’d walked away from the Cabildo into the gathering dusk, with nowhere to go and no one to know if she vanished.

No one except Hèlier Lapatie.

How long did they keep them before shipping them out?

They skirted the shacks and slums that lay between Rampart Street and Basin, passed the dark trees of Congo Square, silent in the rain. The smell of the burying-grounds hung thick on the gluey night, and January wondered if the dark form he saw under those trees was Bronze John himself, or just one of the dead-cart men taking refuge from the storm. His clothes stuck to his body in the wet, and the exertions of the night whispered to him from exhausted muscles; but he moved on, following Shaw’s scraggy pale form and followed in turn by Boechter—hustling hard to keep up with the two taller men—fueled by the fury in his heart.

Under the shallow embankment of mud and tree roots, the canal rattled with the rain, a hollow roaring, like
tons of deer-shot being emptied into the sea. What scattered lights there were—here and there lanterns in sheds and bordellos—gave place to the shapeless dark of the city pastures, then the thunder of rain in the trees of the night-drowned swamps. Lightning flashed faroff over the lake now and then, and showed up the fidgeting trees, the desolation that the French called the “desert.” After each purple glare the dark was like blindness, through which the shell road shone like a bone, and the sound of water running off the back of Shaw’s hat-brim was a constant, a localized spatter in a world of deluge.

After almost half an hour they reached the Bayou, turned right along it and crossed over Judge Martin’s stone bridge. The road ran a little wider along the murky watercourse. Somewhere to their left lay the oak trees that constituted the favorite dueling ground outside the city, and the dark buildings of Monsieur Allard’s plantation beyond those. Across the Bayou, January thought he could make out the glistening track of the towpath, hugging the water’s edge and slippery with rain.

Shaw was right. They wouldn’t be making much time. Even with well over an hour’s start, they’d be skidding and falling in the mud, unable to get a footing against the weight of the keelboat, blind with the hammering water. It said a great deal for Roarke’s command over his men that they hadn’t abandoned their task thus far.

“There.” January pointed.

“I see ’em.” Shaw squinted through the flooded darkness at the firefly twinkle of lights. “Though where the hell LaBranche and his boys got to—”

Under the rain the snap of a shot sounded like a breaking twig, then another and a third.

“Damnation!” Shaw started to run, startlingly graceful and astonishingly fast. “I told that idjit not to brace ’em!”

January ran, too, knowing what Roarke was bound to do if attacked.

Hooded lanterns bobbed under the dripping canopy of overhanging trees. LaBranche and his reinforcements ranged along the Bayou Road, firing down at the keelboat in the narrow confines of the channel. By the single light fixed on the boat’s prow January glimpsed two or three forms moving back and forth along the towpath on the other side, though now and then a belch of flame showed up a gun muzzle in the blackness. Over the rain he thought he heard a ball tear into the tupelo thickets between the shell road and the water’s edge. One such flare from the top of the keelboat showed him Hèlier’s face, and the red splash like blood that was his shirt; by the lantern light January saw the water seller throw down his pistol, unable to reload, and tug another from his belt. Men ran back and forth along the catwalks of the gunnels, dodging and shooting; January saw the jitter and sway of lantern light in the cargo box below and heard a muffled voice yell, “Hold ’em off, boys!”

January plunged down from the road, hearing the tear and whistle of bullets but knowing himself nearly invisible in the rain. Shaw was somewhere to his right. The Bayou was deep hereabouts, twelve feet or more. He flung himself in, black water and the black loom of the boat above him, and men in the lantern light, firing down.

Someone grappled him as he scrambled up onto the gunwale catwalk and they rocked and struggled, a hand digging at his forehead and eyes. He seized the man’s wrist and wrenched it over, driving his whole weight against the arm—heard the man scream. He flung him into the canal, then plunged and fought his way toward the doorway of the cabin, hearing as he did so the sodden crack of an ax.

Someone grabbed him, dragging at him. He wrenched
and twisted, knowing there had to be a knife in play and saw by the flare of the lantern light the crippled Hèlier’s handsome, boyish face. He pulled the knife free of Hèlier’s hand—the man had no more strength to his grip than a young lad—and pushed him aside. Later he thought he should have held him. But he knew what Roarke was doing in the cabin and knew, too, that he had to get there first.

One of the City Guards made a grab for the water seller. Hèlier sprang, scrambling, staggering, to the catwalk at the nose of the boat. Afterward January didn’t know whether the sheer weight of struggling men on the keelboat was responsible, jerking and bobbing the vessel so that the cripple could not keep his balance, or whether Hèlier flung himself into the water with some notion of swimming ashore.

If the latter, he should have known better. If the former, he never had a chance. January saw one arm thrash wildly above the surface of the water as Hèlier tried to bring his twisted body around to some position that would permit swimming, but it was hopeless.

Below him, January heard again the strike of an ax on wood.

In panic fury he kicked his way through the cabin door and ducked as Roarke swung around on him, ax in hand. Had Roarke dropped the weapon and gone for the pistol in his belt then he’d have had January cold. As it was his hands were both full and the cabin, with its two tiny bunks occupied by the slumped bodies of three naked, mumbling men and women in the lantern’s jerking light, pinned his big body, smothering his stroke. January dodged the first ax blow, which buried the weapon’s head in the doorjamb beside his shoulder. He ripped with the
skinning knife, a deliberate blow, meaning to gut, meaning to kill.

Roarke seized his arm, thrust him off. Water splashed up through the split bottom of the keelboat, around their knees and rising. January came at him fast, and Roarke fumbled in his belt, belatedly pulled out the pistol; January flinched aside and slapped water, hard, hurling it into the man’s eyes. The shot went wild, like the clap of doom in the tiny cabin, and then Shaw said, “That’ll be enough of that, Mr. Roarke,” quietly, as if reprimanding a not-very-obstreperous drunk.

He was aiming a pistol; another was in his belt.

Roarke flung himself at Shaw, dodging aside as the pistol roared, and bearing him down, his own knife leaping to his hand. January dragged him back and with a single hard blow to the jaw sent him spinning against the bulkhead. The last expression in Roarke’s eyes, before he slumped unconscious, was furious, indignant surprise.

“Send for my lawyer,” was all that Roarke would say.

Gray light leaked through the breaking clouds outside as the little party returned to the Cabildo. For the first time in what seemed like years cool air breathed through the open double-doors onto the Place d’Armes.

While Roarke was led out to the courtyard and up to the cells, the two elderly men and their middle-aged sister, whom January had barely been able to drag out of the sinking keelboat, were taken into a rear room, to be wrapped in blankets and plied with coffee. “They’ll live,” said January, drawing back the older man’s eyelids and holding a candle close to the contracted pupil, then pressing the man’s nails, and listening to his breath. “Barring pneumonia, they should take no hurt from it. Is there anything to tell us who they are?”

Shaw, who had come in behind him drying his hair, shook his head. “Couple of the boys went and had a look at St. Gertrude’s, whilst we was fishin’ in the Bayou. We been, as I said, interested in Mr. Roarkes’ doin’s for some little while, though slave stealin’s a new lay for him. Since most of them poor folk that disappeared was taken out of their houses in their nightshirts there wasn’t much to find
—not even the nightshirts, mostly, and sure enough not a pin or a shoe or a piece of jewelry.”

“Manon?” mumbled one of the men they’d rescued. “Manon?”

“Manon’s here,” said January reassuringly. “She’s safe.” He looked over at the woman. Her features were so similar to those of both men: emaciated, exhausted, her skin ashy gray with cold and fatigue. “Lousy, probably,” he added, remembering conditions at St. Gertrude’s, “but safe.”

“Well,” said Shaw, and spit into the corner. “They’s worse things than lice.”

January was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Did your men find a red dress at St. Gertrude’s? Or a pair of black-and-red shoes with white laces?”

Shaw shook his head.

“And nothing of … nothing of the dress that Mademoiselle Vitrac had on when she left here Sunday evening?”

“Nuthin’.” There was a curious gentleness in the policeman’s voice as he added, “We’re lookin’.”

They came out to find a thin, black-mustachioed little man with coal-dark eyes waiting by Shaw’s desk; Shaw stopped in his tracks, as a man does who sees a snake in his path. “And what you doin’ here this hour of the mornin’, Loudermilk? All the debtors you chase asleep?”

“I understand you have my client illegally detained in your cells.” The dark eyes flicked from Shaw to January, calculating.

“I don’t know about that illegally,” replied Shaw, and spit a few inches from the man’s foot. “Kidnappin’ or slave stealin’, they’s both crimes in this state.”