Die Upon a Kiss (36 page)

Peering through the judas in the door, he saw only what he had seen before. A bare room with a sort of shelf barely visible at the end. Straining his eyes, he thought he could make out a box on the shelf.

And that was all.

“That’s it,” said January when he and Hannibal were once more in the wagon, driving away from Les Roseaux. “Tillich is the man who swears he saw Davis at the City Hotel gambling-room. Marsan was definitely part of Belaggio’s connection to the Austrians. The slave-smuggling was part of it, the way to both pay Marsan— who as far as I know had no more politics than the average bull in a pasture—and to enlist the services of Captain Chamoflet in keeping a channel of communication open free of observation.”

“Leaving aside for a moment why they would think coshing Marguerite over the head, or locking you and Cavallo in a cellar, would prevent Belaggio’s affairs from being examined,” said Hannibal, “I can tell you what they were handing off to one another in that box. Those books in Marsan’s office—they’re marked.”

“Marked?” January drew rein, scanning the trees for sight of Shaw. The dark-green landscape had a still sameness in the thin light of early afternoon, a birdless quiet that seemed to hold its breath.

“With little ticks in pencil under the words. Not every page, and some pages more than others—I don’t think the ticks went down any page more than a paragraph or two—but always from the top of the page. As if someone were counting the words.”

January turned, regarding the musician with startled understanding; Hannibal was already digging in the pockets of his shabby coat. “There was a newspaper in the top drawer of the desk, with numbers scribbled in the margins, hundreds of them—always in pencil, like the ticks in the books. Ten/thirty. Forty-five/fifteen. Sixty-three/fifty. That kind of thing. And I helped myself to the blotting-paper. . . .”

January said, “It’s a book code.”

“Only, I might add, in the German or Italian books. Which leads me to wonder . . .”

January heard the crack of a rifle in the trees at almost the same instant that something hot flicked his face, burning, like a hornet’s sting. He dropped with a cry back down to the seat and heard another shot, a bullet burying itself in the side of the wagon, and he thought,
The
horse . . .

He grabbed the reins and lashed wildly at the animal, shouting as the frightened beast leapt forward and a third shot drew blood from its shoulder, sending it well and truly on its way. Hannibal, thrown nearly out of his seat by the lurch, grabbed the seat-back and ducked his head down— “Are they in the woods or across the bayou?” yelled January.

“Woods. At least that’s where the muzzle-flashes are. Nothing—damn it!” The horse stumbled, lurching from gallop to trot; January lashed with the reins again, but he saw the blood on the animal’s hide and knew it was wounded in earnest now.

“How close?”

“Can’t see anyone.” Hannibal turned in the seat, looked back at the shell road behind them. “Believe me, they’ll be along.”

January drew rein, sprang down, and dragged Hannibal after him. “Git!” He tore up a willow-sucker from the water’s edge, slapped the horse hard, sending it wildly away up the shell road, then turned and plunged across the water, the fiddler stumbling and panting at his heels.

“I certainly hope you know this part of Jefferson Parish like the back of your hand—”

“I certainly know what happens to people who fall foul of the smugglers and don’t get themselves out of the way and under cover,” retorted January, dragging the smaller man after him like a half-killed chicken. “They’ll search near the bayou, figuring we have to follow it back to the river. I think we’d do better, for the time being, if we took refuge in the swamp.”

The marshy lands that lay between the Bayou des Familles and the Little Barataria Bayou consisted of the usual mix of dry, narrow ridges, most no more than a few feet wide, where old bayous or legs of the river had once lain, and wetter expanses of cypress, palmetto, and smooth-skinned gray magnolias. The spring rise had not yet inundated these stretches, and they lay under a brown layer of last year’s leaves, or tangled with vast blankets of new-green elephant-ear, through which cypress-knees poked, like stalagmites displaced from a cave. It was early in the year for snakes, but January used the willow switch to probe ahead for them anyway. Early, too, for mosquitoes. Keeping to the dense belts of palmetto, like head-high forests between the larger trees, they could remain unseen even at a distance of a few feet.

In time they found an Indian shell-mound raised a few feet above the general level of the forest base and grown over with oaks. The spring floods would transform it into an islet—a chênière—and on it, tucked away between the trees, stood the remains of what had been either a trapper’s shack or the hideout of a runaway slave.

“Wait here,” said January as Hannibal sank down into a corner of this ramshackle structure. It was made of fragments of boards and packing-boxes, re-enforced with brush and moss—invisible at a few yards. “I can’t imagine them not killing Shaw if he was too badly wounded to flee, but I have to go back and check. If I’m not back in . . .” He pulled his silver watch from his pocket. “If I’m not back in two hours, there’s a landing and a woodlot at Belle Chasse, about ten miles east of here. You’ll be able to get a boat back to town. Shaw told them at the Cabildo where he was going. . . .”

“I doubt if, when they send out a posse tomorrow, it will do us much good.” Hannibal coughed, one arm wrapped tight around his thin ribs to still both the pain and the sound. “Circumstance may conspire to surprise us, however. We can only hope.”

January hesitated, torn with uncertainty. The likelihood that Shaw was alive, wounded, and in need of help was less than that of Hannibal being utterly unable to defend himself should Captain Chamoflet and his swamp-rats put in an appearance, but he knew he could not simply leave the area without at least making an attempt to find Shaw. It was two, he reflected, stepping cautiously from the shack and carefully re-orienting himself on the group of towering magnolias that dominated the chênière. The sun would set at around five, full darkness settling perhaps half an hour later. . . .

And then, he thought, unless they’d made their way to within a half-mile or so of Belle Chasse, they were doomed indeed.

He worked his way as close to Les Roseaux as he could, through the dense rustling mazes of the palmetto forests and, as he drew closer to the bayou, the old plantation fields choked with overgrown cane and new growths of sapling pine and weeds. The high ground along Bayou des Familles wasn’t more than a half-mile deep, barely enough to sustain a plantation. He could smell woodsmoke from somewhere, but heard no sound of the sawmill. Lying in the cane-brake, he caught the furtive rustle of a passing body, and a man called out in the rough archaic French of the Barataria, “Clo? Any sign?”

And a reply, so close to where he lay, January flinched. “No. Curse.”

“Keep an eye, eh? They might still try to come back to the house.”

“Curse,” said Clo again.

January buried his face in his arms and waited, barely breathing. A huge black ant walked across his arm, and a little later, a small cane-rat. He heard one of the men go, and for a long time strained his ears to detect some sound other than the occasional rain-like rush of wind through the trees. In the stillness a crow cawed. Frogs croaked, first a small tinny chirping, then, elsewhere, another chorus, a deeper and woodier bip-bip-bip: strophe and antistrophe like a Greek play, the sounds distinct as patches of different-colored wildflowers. After a time a rabbit hopped warily from between the dark stalks and sat up, pink nose wiggling, ears slanting one way and another, then scuttled cautiously in the direction from which Clo’s voice had come.

Thank you, Compair Lapin. If you think it’s safe, I’m
game to try it.

Carefully, carefully, January edged out of the cane. No shot rang out. Body bent double, he worked his way back through what had been the field, and into the thick palmettos once more. Listening for some sound. Scanning the ground for track or sign of blood. Then he retreated to the
cipriere
again, and made his way back to the chênière, getting lost twice in the process.

Hannibal was half-unconscious, curled like a ball of bones on the ground. He sat up with a start when January crawled into the shelter, reached for the knife January had left with him, then saw who it was and put a hand over his own lips to still the sound of another cough. He was shivering in the chill afternoon but raised his eyebrows inquiringly; January shook his head.

“Let’s go,” January breathed. “They’re in the woods still, searching, but if we don’t start now, we’ll be lucky to make Belle Chasse by dark.”

“Can these bones live?”
inquired Hannibal rhetorically, staggering as he straightened up. January caught his elbow and wondered how much success he’d have in locating Sam Pickney’s farm.

I’d have more luck finding the man if I just walked
down the road after dark, of course. . . .

Provided it was Pickney he met.

By the time they reached the river, Hannibal was barely on his feet. They stopped to rest half a dozen times, wherever they could find a deadfall to sit on, and more and more frequently as the afternoon drew on and the spots of brightness on the dark cypress leaves grew higher and brighter with the sinking of the sun. In the closed-in world of the
cipriere,
it was hard to navigate at the best of times, for there was no wind in its shadowy aisles, no movement of water, no rise and fall of land. Sometimes January heard voices far off, and then they stood still in the thick pea-green eternities of palmetto, straining their ears for something beyond the harsh rustling of the fan-like leaves. Once, distantly, he heard a shot.

With the last of the cypress trees’ shadows streaming out blue before them, they came into open ground, the bare fields of a sugar plantation, formless in the twilight. The family—relatives of the great Livaudais clan—were in town for Carnival, but the overseer clicked his tongue in shocked disapproval at Hannibal’s tale of slave-stealers and attempted murder: “The Army, they try a dozen times to get that Chamoflet,” said the fat little fair-haired man, shaking his head in the lamplight of the minuscule gallery before his cottage. “But he got friends in the
cipriere,
crackers, Kaintucks,
animaux—”

Meaning, January knew, American
animaux.

“You about a mile and a half down from English Turn. You lucky you didn’t get to Belle Chasse.” The overseer patted Hannibal’s bony shoulder, where the fiddler sat slumped on the bent-willow gallery chair. “Etienne that runs the woodlot there, he’s in with Chamoflet. I have the boys put out torches on the landing, there’s boats coming past all night.”

The
Heroine,
bound upriver from the Belize, didn’t dock at the plantation till around eleven. January gave one of the slave-children fifty cents to stand lookout on the levee for it, and spent the next four hours in the cabinet at the back of Michie Tabor’s cottage, drinking coffee and reading from the largest collection of old newspapers he’d seen outside Madame Bontemps’s attic. Michie Tabor stayed up to chat with Hannibal through supper, then, having ascertained that his guests truly wanted to get on the late boat rather than stay the night, he had a couple of the cane-hands bring a Hitchcock chair and a lamp out to the cabinet, where Hannibal could sit wrapped in blankets until the boat came.

“Winter evenings, there’s not a lot to do,” said the overseer, scratching the head of the enormous old black-and-white cat that was his chief companion in the cottage. “Sometimes I just go back and read the newspapers to see all these things that I got so angry about ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. And I think,
Well, I lived through
all that and I’m fine anyway.
Like watching the boats go by on the river.”

“Annihilating all that’s made,”
mused Hannibal as the overseer shut the door that led into the other cottage rooms,
“to a green thought in a green shade.
Look at this— Guerrero and the liberals take over Mexico. I remember my brother thought that was going to be the end of civilization.”

“And so it was,” murmured January, “for anyone who had ties with the Iturbide regime.” It was the first time he’d ever heard Hannibal mention a brother. “What year was that? ’Twenty-seven? About the time Vincent Marsan found himself able to slip slaves through from the Barataria largely unhindered by the Navy.”

Hannibal folded the newspaper to his chest and raised his eyebrows. Hot soup and a little bread-and-cheese with their host seemed to have revived him; though he still lay back in his chair like one exhausted, the ragged coughing had ceased, and his thin hands were still.

“Eight years ago,” said January softly, “the new Liberal constitution in Mexico—the breakup of newly freed Spanish and Portuguese states in the south—the continuing fighting in New Grenada . . . The Hapsburg government in Vienna gets nervous about who’s going to be making alliances with whom, and sends a man to New Orleans to look out for things. Not the first man it’s sent, and certainly not the only government to send one— I’m sure the French and the British have their men in town, too, maybe even the Tsar. But our new Hapsburg friend—let’s call him Tillich—makes arrangements to get information from across the Gulf, and, probably, to send money to whoever the Emperor thinks ought to be in charge in New Grenada and points south. And since, thanks to Mr. Jackson’s increased distrust of the European powers, the Navy is developing an unpleasant tendency to search foreign vessels, those arrangements include information coming in, not upriver past the forts at the Belize, but through Grand Isle and the marshes of the Barataria.”

“And since I’m sure Mr. Marsan wasn’t willing to commit treason against the United States government for the sake of Mr. Tillich’s pretty blue eyes,” said Hannibal, “the passage of information was linked to an increase in the smuggling of slaves. A better use of Marsan’s property than trying to grow sugar on it, if what I saw on Roseaux is any indication. . . . Bet me our friend Tillich speculated with some of his own money in that trade, too.”