Die Upon a Kiss (33 page)

The cook came out, a small, trim woman in her sixties, her face puckered with concern. January repeated his tale. “Oh, my dear sir,” she said, sympathy in her soft voice. “I am so sorry. Yes,” she added, glancing at the other slave, “Michie Lalage did have a sister—two sisters, in fact. Were you good friends with Mamzelle Sidonie?”

January nodded. And because the cook was a friendly soul—and readily believed his veiled implication that he and Sidonie had been childhood sweethearts—and also because the domino game had had time to pall a little, he was treated to slightly bitter coffee (“M’am Lalage lock up the fresh beans, but these grounds only been run through once”) and bread-pudding fresh out of the oven, and everything he could possibly have wanted to know about the family.

“I will say this for the other boys—Laurent and Jean—they didn’t turn their back on their mama and sisters the way Michie Theodore did,” said Zerline after she’d confirmed Olympe’s remarks about the lawyer’s disdain for his antecedents. “And where does Michie Theodore think his mama would have got the money for him to go to school, and to read for the law, if she hadn’t been friends with Michie Jean-Pierre Lalage the way she was? When Michie Theodore wanted to set up his own office, he was quick enough to go to Michie Jean-Pierre for a loan, for all he talk about his mama—his own mama!—not bein’
no better than she should be—
and you tell me how a woman
should
be, when she’s got the chance to have a better life—and not speakin’ to Sidonie at Mass. Nor lettin’ poor little Delia cross his threshold until after her Michie Gesvres parted company from her, and she married Joseph Listolier and became respectable.”

January exclaimed in shock and in grief, and the cook’s two friends—the laundress from the house next door, which belonged to a well-off house carpenter of color, and her sister, who was lady’s maid to a plaçée— clucked their tongues, and added tales from their own experience with the sons or cousins of plaçées who, upon attainment of position in the
libre
community, ceased inviting their sisters or cousins to dinner on the same days when they entertained their more legitimate friends.

“And he wouldn’t have nothing to do with the trial, and him a lawyer?” January brought the conversation back with the air of a man who has been ruminating over some shocking fact for several minutes while the words of others flowed on around him. He looked from face to face of those around the kitchen’s worn pine table as if still numbed by shock, and felt obscurely guilty at the sympathy, friendliness, and pity he saw in their eyes.

One of the three slave laborers sniffed, and said, “What you think she was, a member of his family or somethin’?” and the others laughed ironically.

“Michie Jean—that was the oldest of Selene Lalage’s five children—asked him that.” Zerline shook her head with regret. “Spoke quiet, for Michie Jean’s a quiet-spoken man, but with a hardness in his voice that we could hear clear out here in the kitchen. He say,
You a
lawyer, Theo. You going to let him get free with what he did?
He’s not a big man, Michie Jean—they’re none of that family very big—but he got a big anger in him. And Michie Theo says,
It’s none of our look-out. We don’t know
but what Sidonie asked for it. And anyway there’s nothing we
can do.

“And there isn’t,” added the cook sadly, going to the kettle of water that hung steaming on its hook above the fire. “That jury, they wouldn’t listen to a woman of color—who was, like that lawyer say,
no better than she
should be
herself.” Though her voice had up to that time been gentle, the wormwood bitterness showed through on the phrase.

She brought the bowl to the table and gathered the used coffee-cups to wash; her laundress friend got a clean towel to lay them on, and another to dry them with as they came out of the bowl. Like all the Lalage slaves, Zerline looked decently fed, and her simple calico clothing, though faded, was whole and clean, unlike her laundress friend, whose worn frock had been repeatedly patched.

“Maybe I’m unjust,” Zerline went on after a moment. “Folks do what they have to do. And Jean went back to Natchez, where he has a cartin’ business, full of anger at his brother, and hasn’t spoke to him since. Nor has poor Michie Laurent that lost his leg in ’twenty-nine, cuttin’ cypress logs across the lake, and him and his family so poor now, it’d break your heart. And I do see Michie Theo’s point: Why get the men who hire you to do their legal papers for them mad at you, by stirrin’ up trouble against their cousin or their friend? But it’s just not the way I was taught you behaved to your own family.”

Footsteps creaked on the outside stair and the cook said, “Oh, Lordy, here he comes,” and her friends got to their feet. The three male slaves headed for the door but weren’t nimble enough; a tubby man in a butler’s dark livery appeared in the kitchen door, a frown of permanent peevishness stamped between his brows.

“Zerline,” he began, “I believe Michie Lalage has spoken to you before this on the subject of visitors. . . .”

“We’d just stopped by to return the eggs Zerline borrowed last week when there wasn’t any at the market,” said the laundress with the adept promptness of one used since girlhood to improvisation. “My brother Gilles happened to be visiting us”—she gestured to January—“and he offered to walk us, the streets bein’ so noisy and all.”

The butler glared at the little bowl of wash-water and the drying coffee-cups, but said nothing. Zerline said, “I’ll walk you to the gate, Lucy, Kitta—Gilles. . . .”

Behind them as they crossed the yard they could hear the butler lecturing the three laborers. January guessed, from the silence of the men, that the words originated as much from Lalage as from his servant.

“I thank you for telling me all this, m’am,” he said to the cook as she opened the gate for him and her friends. “I don’t know why, but it kind of rests me to hear how it came about, an’ to know someone at least tried to get her justice. Poor Sidonie! I came by here last Thursday night, when first I came into port, but didn’t see no lights in the house. . . .”

“They was home,” said Zerline doubtfully. “What time you come by?”

January frowned a little, cogitating. “Close on to midnight, it must have been. Maybe they’d gone to bed already. We rotate the watch on board ship, so sometimes I’m up and don’t rightly remember how late it is.”

“They’ll have just gone up to bed,” smiled the cook. “Thursday nights is when M’am Annette—that’s Michie Theodore’s wife—has her family over to dinner. They stay up in the parlor playin’ speculation sometimes, or listenin’ to young Miss Netta play the pianoforte with her cousins. What beautiful voices those girls have! I tiptoe over sometimes from the kitchen, after I’ve done with the washing-up, just to listen. You must have come by just after they put out the candles and went up to bed.”

January walked back along the Esplanade, turning what he had learned over in his mind. Trying to sort what he had learned into some kind of logical order. Wondering why, with Cavallo’s certainty and Incantobelli’s fear, his own mind kept sliding back to the ghost of a woman ten years dead. A woman whose surviving relatives, moreover, were either in no mood or no position to make her cause their own.

He supposed word could be sent to Natchez to inquire if Jean Lalage had left his business at its most thriving time of year on a rumor—transmitted how?—that Marsan was connected with an opera company whose members were being spectacularly threatened. . . .

Was his growing conviction that Marsan was the target simply his disgust with the man? His desire that he be punished for Sidonie’s murder, for the baracoon behind the trees, for the look in his wife’s eyes and the bruises on his daughter’s arm? Marsan was smuggling slaves, acting as the contact-point between the rogue Chamoflet down in the Barataria and his own circle of friends in New Orleans. He’d gotten in touch with Belaggio about selling his Cuban slaves pretty early, if Belaggio had arrived Tuesday and by Saturday night had arranged the sale of Pedro, Louis, and Nina.

Whoever Belaggio’s Austrian contact was—presumably the maybe-bespectacled Mr. Tillich—he must have been livid when he heard his messenger was hooked up with a slave-smuggler under the very noses of the City Guards.

I want him corpsed. Cut him up bad.

And yet, thought January . . . and yet. Something someone had said, amid that smoky confusion of plots and banditti and adventures out in Bayou des Familles . . . Maybe just the way the servants on Les Roseaux had looked at one another when they’d heard Vincent Marsan was dead.

He stopped on the corner of Rue Dauphin, where it turned upriver from the Esplanade. This was a part of the French town only recently divided up into lots when the Ursulines sold it before moving their convent downriver. A quiet district, where town lots still stood empty, filled with darkness, timber, and bricks. No streetlamps burned here as of yet, and the yellow glow of windows was few.

You’re acting like a child,
he chided himself, looking down the empty street into darkness. Somewhere a late-walking vendor sang “Ha’angerchiffs, red-blue-yellow-green ha’angerchiffs . . .” with as much flourish and delight in the climb and fall of the notes as any prima donna showing off her coloratura on the La Scala stage.

But the street’s blackness was nearly impenetrable. The waxing moon slipped from sight behind a smother of sooty cloud.
You can’t spend your life running away from
someone who might or might not be there.

A big man and a little man,
he heard the clerk of the Hotel Toulouse say. A tough.
Brains and brawn.
A man big enough to be mistaken for him in the inky confusion of a blacked-out kitchen in Tremé?

He had a knife. . . .

January felt the hair prickle on his scalp.
If I go on,
he thought,
and am attacked, there’s a chance I can overpower
him. Find out who he is, and who sent him and why.

And what makes you think he’s alone?
whispered a voice in the back of his mind.
What makes you think a
knife is all he has?

In the darkness of the passway from Rue des Ursulines back to the garçonnière behind Madame Bontemps’s cottage, a man wouldn’t have to be much of a marksman to kill, even in the dark.

Maybe the same voice whispered that to him that kept tugging him to ask questions about Sidonie Lalage. Olympe would have said it was the spirit that lived in the cowrie-shell that hung around her neck on a red ribbon, or the one in the black-painted bottle she kept on a shelf in her parlor. Maybe it was gray-eyed Athène, who came down to the beach at Ithaca in the shape of a child and plucked at Odysseus’s ragged tunic. In either case, January retraced his steps along the Esplanade to Rue des Ramparts, and made his way through the crowds of maskers there upriver to Rue Douane, where he begged a bed for the night in the crowded cabinet-room with Gabriel, Chouchou, and little Ti-Paul.

He never found out whether anyone was waiting for him in the dark street near Madame Bontemps’s house that night or not.

Two nights later, during the performance of
La Dame
Blanche,
Lorenzo Belaggio slipped away in secret and took ship for Havana.

TWENTY-ONE

“City Hotel
New Orleans
6 febbraio 1835

Signor Caldwell,

Travel arrangements having failed for the
additional cast members necessary to make the
final performance of the season the true and
breathtaking spectacle that the people of this city
have come to expect of Lorenzo Belaggio and the
American Theater—”

“What additional cast members?” Caldwell turned plaintively to the Truloves and the Widow Redfern, standing beside him in the door of the green room with heaping plates of Westphalian ham in hand. “I knew nothing of additional cast members! I knew nothing of this at all!”

“Let me see that.” Trulove was far too polite to snatch the page from Caldwell’s hand, but edged himself around to read over the theater owner’s shoulder. The crowd of singers, musicians, chorus-men, and little rats maneuvered closer, glancing at one another in the unsteady crystalline pallor of the gas-jets overhead, and January, sitting on a Gothic bench of plaster and wood, glanced sideways at Arnaud Bucher. The new conductor, bald and paunchy in his carefully-cut black evening costume, looked as shocked and baffled as anyone.

“—people of this city . . . Belaggio and the American
Theater”—
Trulove took up the reading in the plummy upper-class accents that thirty years in America had not erased
—“I have been obliged to return to Havana and see to
matters myself.”

“Skipped!” Jed Burton just stopped himself from spitting. “I tell you, it’s that Frenchman Davis’s doing! He has powerful friends in this city. I’ve said it all along! The police may have jailed him good, but that don’t mean a man who’s crossed him is safe from the French that run things around here.”

“Good heavens, man,” protested Hubert Granville, “a Creole will challenge a man to a duel if he’s angry at him, not pay bullies to beat him up in an alley!”

“It’s how it’s done in Europe,” attested young Harry Fry, who’d never been to Europe in his life. He poured another glass of champagne for his dusky-skinned Felina, and January fought back the ludicrous mental image of the buxom Madame Viellard creeping, veiled and stealthy, into the Blackleg Saloon to hire the Gower boys on Davis’s behalf.

“Under the
ancien régime,
perhaps.” Trulove held up a hand to still further discussion and continued.
“Rest assured that by the terms of our contract, neither the American
Theater nor the St. Mary Opera Society is liable for the unexpected or additional costs of such cast or their travel. I
apologize for the inconvenience which my absence will incur,
though I have taken what steps I can. . . .”

“Like hiring away Davis’s conductor?” inquired Hannibal, but January’s gaze had gone from Bucher to La d’Isola, standing just beyond him, still clothed in Lady Anna’s old-fashioned, ghostly shroud, her dark hair cascading thickly over her shoulders. Her red mouth rounded into a startled little O, and her eyes were wide with shock.

She hadn’t known.

Beside Hannibal, Madame Montero smiled with a kind of blazing triumph, one small, round hand bunched into a fist. And January, with an inward sigh, made a mental note to ask Hannibal to do what he could to make sure that in the absence of her protector, the younger woman would at least not come to any physical harm.

“. . . trust that the result will be a spectacle such
as your fair city has never before witnessed upon its
stages, well worth whatever small inconvenience
my absence will cause.

Yours sincerely,
Lorenzo Belaggio.”

“Extraordinary,” marveled Caldwell as Trulove lowered the note. “Most unexpected. This is the first I’ve heard of additional cast for
Orfeo
. And surely whatever supernumeraries were needed could have been hired here. Mr. Knight, you’re familiar with the opera. . . .”

“I agree that this is an opera that demands spectacle. . . .” The little business agent, pleased to have his expertise recognized, pondered deeply. “But how many ladies of the chorus can the man need?”

“I admit I shall be pleased to see the work done properly,” put in Herr Smith. “I recall when the opera was presented in Dresden for the French consul’s visit, they had a hundred and thirty dancers to personate the Blessed Spirits, forty of them descending on ropes from the clouds, and over a hundred in the Devils’ Chorus. Truly a veritable army of Hell . . .”

“He left nothing in his office that might indicate trouble.” Cavallo emerged from the little cubbyhole beneath the upstairs gallery, an expression on his face of mild righteousness. As if, thought January, he had every right to search his employer’s office at the first unguarded moment. “No money seems to be missing. Yet why should he leave in this fashion, without a word to anyone?”

January collected pound-cake and a praline from the musicians’ buffet, and with the plate in hand threaded through the shadowy maze of flats and curtains to the stage. The gaslights were still up in the house, for the cleaners who moved among the benches of the pit, sweeping up soiled sawdust and a rubbish of hulls and stubs. A man’s slouch hat had been left on the front-row bench, a woman’s green glove lay like a battle-casualty in the aisle. The air smelled of spilt beer and lemonade. January shaded his eyes against the glare of the gasolier. “Lieutenant Shaw?”

A gangly shadow disengaged itself from the blackness at the back of the Viellard box, signed to him to remain where he was. Though January had seen little of Shaw, owing to the doubled and quadrupled lawlessness of New Orleans during the Carnival season, the Guardsman had continued to patrol the American Theater during the performances of
Robert
and
Dame.
Sometimes before the performance January had glimpsed him at the rear of the slaves’ gallery up under the stamped-copper garlands of the ceiling, sometimes during the entr’actes on the catwalk above the stage among the flies. Public Prosecutor Greenaway, an American, might believe in John Davis’s guilt, but Shaw did not. He’d listened to January’s account of his attempted interview with Incantobelli and its sequel at the Hotel Toulouse as he’d listened to the earlier possibility that the attack had been connected with
Othello:
quietly weighing up the likelihood of each, comparing the evidence in his mind.

The Guardsman emerged a few moments later from the lobby door at the back of the pit and loafed up the aisle, hands in pockets, greasy hair hanging down over his shoulders like dirty weeds. “Belaggio’s gone,” said January when Shaw sprang up onto the stage. “Havana, he says.” And he related what the letter had said, that Caldwell had discovered posted prominently in the middle of Anne Trulove’s silver epergne among the hothouse fruits and confits of the green-room table.

“Not that there’s any guarantee that he’s actually gone to Havana,” he finished. “The clerk at the Hotel Toulouse said Incantobelli decamped Sunday night, after two men came inquiring for him Sunday afternoon. According to Bucher, Belaggio came to him Monday with an offer of work. Eight dollars a performance for the remainder of the season, whether he conducts or not—he claimed the reason was his health.”

“His
health?”
Fingers and chin-stubble full of crumbling yellow cake, Shaw raised his brows.

“He may have meant it,” said January grimly. “Belaggio’s running scared. What interests me is that he doesn’t seem to have helped himself to the exchequer in departing. Yet he chose
La Cenerentola
pretty much so they could use the same sets from
Robert
and
La Dame
Blanche.
I’m a little surprised he had fifty dollars to hire Bucher, much less these ‘additional cast members’ he talks about.”

“If
he actually paid him.” Shaw licked the last crumbs from his fingers, then dug in his coat pocket for a twist of lint-flecked tobacco.

“He did,” said January. “Eight dollars for tonight— Belaggio was here during the first act and said he’d watch from backstage, but I don’t recall seeing him after that— and eight apiece for
Cenerentola
and
Norma
next week. Whether—and with what—he means to hire ‘additional cast members’ in Havana—or go to Havana at all—and whether or when he’ll be back, I don’t know. Meanwhile, Incantobelli takes fright and flees Sunday; Belaggio hires a substitute Monday afternoon, and vanishes Friday night.”

“An’ Incantobelli dies sometime Monday, close as we can reckon it.” Shaw bit off a hunk of tobacco with strong, brown-stained teeth. “Couple stevedores haulin’ moss to town along the canal found his body this afternoon.”

The New Orleans City Morgue was a long room at the back of Charity Hospital on Common Street, whitewashed and reeking of decay and the turpentine they brushed along the base of the walls to discourage ants. The plank-walled barrelhouses and tent-roofed bordellos of the Swamp lay not many streets away. Convenient, one might say. Many of the men and women occupying the line of tables down the center of the room had met their ends there—knifed, shot, drowned drunk in the puddles of the unpaved streets. Coming in behind Shaw the following morning, January glanced down at the corpse of a girl no more than fifteen, her braided, nappy hair and open mouth filled with mud.

Incantobelli lay on the next table. His throat had been cut.

Like every other body of water in southern Louisiana, Bayou St. John teemed with crawfish. After nearly a week’s immersion, the soprano was identifiable chiefly by his long white hair, and, naked on the morgue table, by the scars where his manhood had been taken away fifty years before, for the sake of that throat, when such voices were the fashion. January remembered going with Marguerite to the Théâtre des Italiens to hear Velluti in L’In
coronazione di Poppea:
remembered the eerie beauty of those sweet alto voices. Chillingly bodiless, like angels might sound, cold and perfect and nothing like the voices of women, or of children, to which those who had never heard them invariably compared them. Like the stars, which Plato contended were of an element that did not exist on earth.

His clothing lay in the line of little heaps along the upstream wall of the room. January could imagine the jokes of the morgue attendants when they’d stripped him. It was the same nondescript twill coat, the waistcoats of cream and gray, that he’d worn to church. In the buttonhole clung the stems of the violets he’d bought from the girl on the steps.

“Little bruisin’ on the upper arms,” said Shaw laconically. “Some on the back of the head an’ shoulders. Looks like someone might have grabbed him an’ slung him back against a wall someplace, cut his throat ’fore he knew what was happenin’.”

At a table farther down the room, a man cried out in disgust and rage: the body of the woman he’d come to claim had had her hair cut off almost to the scalp by some attendant or other in the night. He was lucky, reflected January. Sometimes they took the teeth as well—there was a dentist on the Rue St. Louis who paid cash for them, no questions asked.

“They’s bloodstains all down the front of his clothes, though they’s pretty much washed out. They musta tipped him into the canal right as soon as it was done.”

“Tidy of them.”

The man who’d written
Othello.
Who’d woven that music from who knew what love, what bitterness? What knowledge of what it was like, to be jeered at and denied love not for who he was, but for what he was.

January wished with all his heart that he could have spoken to him. And not about John Davis or Lorenzo Belaggio.

“Tell the Coroner I’ll claim the body,” he told Shaw. “Tell him the musicians, and the singers, of the opera will arrange for burial. I’ll speak to them about it at rehearsal, which is where I’m going now. He isn’t to lie in a pauper’s grave.”

“Did he have family?” asked Rose late that night when rehearsal was done and they sat together beside Marguerite’s bed. Across the yard, the firelight from the kitchen made a sort of friendly Hell-mouth. The damp air magnified the smells of wet yard-bricks and mud, and intensified the dim clamor of maskers in the street.

“I’m gratified every time I wake to hear it,” Marguerite had confessed earlier. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll wake and be told I’ve slept like Rip Van Winkle, on into the next century.”

The children had gone to bed already in the cabinet behind the bedroom; Paul was moving about the parlor, ready to walk January back to Rue des Ursulines. Rose had spent the evening at Olympe’s, nursing Marguerite or reading to her between translating Anacreon for a book-seller on Rue Royale.

“Consuela says no,” said January. “People in the theater make their own families, you know. His friends in Naples and Palermo and Rome, they’ll be glad to hear that he was properly buried. That friends came to put flowers on his grave.”

He shivered as he said the words, looking down at Marguerite.

She slept now, the sudden, heavy sleep that would fall on her sometimes between one word and the next. She’d always been full of laughter and mockery at her family: this uncle had claimed that daily thrashing made his peasants more intelligent (“I should introduce him to M’sieu Burton”), and that aunt had put so many children out to nurse in the villages of her estate that she lost track of two or three. . . . But Rose had told him that in her sleep, the dancing-mistress still sometimes called her father’s name.

“It was good of you to see to it, Ben,” said Rose, and she poured out a cup of tepid tea for him from the pot that shared the bedside table with an invalid’s cup, three books, a branch of yellow candles burned nearly to the sockets, and a French watch marked in those bizarre hundred-minute hours that the Committees for Public Safety had tried to impose during the Revolution. Packets of medicines crowded the top of the small cypress dresser between the bed—usually Zizi-Marie’s—and Chouchou’s smaller cot; the light burning there under the china veilleuse added its distorted shadows to the candles’ wobbling glow. “With your lessons and rehearsals . . .”