Good Man Friday (26 page)

At this hour, the saloons south of Pennsylvania Avenue were opening for business. Rough-clothed men loitered around the doors or lounged on the benches outside, chewing, smoking, and reading newspapers as they waited for the day-labor that the saloon-keepers brokered for them with carters and construction bosses. Whether one sought employment driving mules or copying Navy lists, finding it was largely a matter of who one knew.

Poe drew up the carriage a dozen feet short of the King's Head and dismounted the box, an anonymous figure in slouched hat, scarf, and high collar against the cloud-flash of the heatless sun. January walked to the saloon's door.

‘Mr Pease?' he called into the dark cavern – he knew better than to walk through the front door of any establishment that catered to white men. ‘Gennelmun here to see you, sir.' He saluted with his whip:
See, I'm an innocent coachman, and the gennelmun outside is wealthy enough to keep such a thing
.

Within, he observed, a solid wooden bar stretched the entire width of the room. A hall on the north side – there was a door to his left on the outside wall – probably communicated with the stairway that led to the lodgers' rooms. Another door from the barroom led into it, and a third, as he had observed the previous night, gave access from behind the bar into the hall and thence the storeroom, an arrangement that meant that whoever was behind the bar could keep the patrons away from the good liquor.

‘He'll come out when he's finished his goddam chores,' retorted Miss Drail's brazen voice. She stood behind the bar, washing glasses in a tin basin.

‘To hell with you, woman.' Wylie Pease threw the broom he wielded into a corner, kicked it when it bounced off the wall and fell in his path, and untied his apron as he strode to the door. ‘Who is it?'

‘Mr Wellesley, sir.' January named one of the surgeons they'd encountered on their rounds. ‘This way, sir.'

Evidently, going to speak to surgical gentlemen at their carriages was no new experience for Pease. He followed January without a blink.

Poe opened the brougham's door, and as Pease got near it, stepped neatly behind him and shoved a gun into his ribs under the cover of his many-caped coat.

‘Get in the carriage,' snarled Poe, ‘and you won't be hurt. We just want to talk to you.'

Pease blenched, tried to pull away, and January took his arm in a grip like an anaconda. He thrust him into the carriage and climbed in after him, pulled the door shut behind them. Poe swung to the box and started the team at once. Pease started to squeak, ‘What the hell—' and Henri raised his pistol.

‘Ten short minutes of your time is all we ask, Mr Pease. We mean you no harm.'

Masked, and in the gloom of the coach with all its shades drawn, Henri managed to look surprisingly sinister, a huge gray form with the gun in one plump white hand. ‘Ten short minutes, and a little information.'

He did indeed sound like Shylock.

‘You are Wylie Pease, the grave robber—'

‘Never! If it's that stinking liar Fowler that told you so—'

‘I haven't the pleasure of Mr Fowler's acquaintance – yet.' Henri cocked his head a little, just as if he actually saw the man sitting opposite him instead of an indistinct blur. ‘But you're either a grave robber or receive goods from one …'

Without varying the pistol's line in the slightest, with his free hand he produced the gold locket and one of the ivory portraits from his pocket. ‘I found these a few nights ago in your desk drawer—'

‘I don't know who put 'em in there, Mister! We got all kinds of bad customers coming through the tavern, and many's the time I've had to—'

‘What, through that storeroom and up your private staircase? That's a pity,' Henri went on smoothly. ‘My client has authorized me to pay twenty dollars for information which we were led to believe that you might possess.' He laid locket and portrait on one chubby knee, reached into the breast of his coat – a lifetime of short-sightedness had given the young planter a surprisingly sure touch with finding things – and brought out first a twenty-dollar gold piece, which he placed on the seat beside him, then Selwyn Singletary's silver reservoir-pen, card case, and spectacle case.

‘And don't pretend you've never seen them before.' He managed a surprisingly sinister sneer. ‘I haven't the slightest objection to your disgusting occupation. I'm not going to peach on you –' he tapped the ivory portrait with the end of the pen – ‘unless you insist upon making me do so. Why would Mr Fowler take the trouble to slander you, I wonder …? And him so popular with the constabulary of this city.'

‘Why d'you think?' demanded Pease sullenly. ‘He's beat me out of a dozen stiffs this year, him and his boys. He's a greedy bastard, wanting a piece of everything in this town – and a traitor in the bargain.'

‘But it was you who found these things, wasn't it? All I want to know is where.'

Pease hesitated – Henri still held the gun on him (‘If the gun really were loaded,' he confessed to January later, ‘I wouldn't have taken it off him for a second, would I?') – then picked up the pen.

‘Oh, this stuff.' He frowned, and his hard little eyes flickered from Henri's face to January. ‘If you'd offered me gelt in the graveyard, Sambo, 'stead of grabbin' me, Jimmy wouldn't a' slugged you. You ain't going to believe this, sir –' he turned back to Henri – ‘and God knows I got no way of provin' it, but I swear you it's true. I found it in the grave of the French minister's secretary.'

Henri looked nonplussed, as if Shylock had suddenly been given Macbeth's cue. January snapped his fingers like a man suddenly enlightened, cried, ‘Didn't you say to me, sir, how funny it was that a man'd be buried with his pen, 'stead of a locket like them others you found?'

‘Er – I did indeed.' Henri made a stab at sounding suave and villainous. He raised his pistol and Pease flinched. ‘Surely you aren't going to attempt to convince me that the French Minister's secretary picked Mr Singletary's pocket before he died?'

‘I dunno nuthin' about this Singletary jasper. But the stuff wasn't on the Frenchy. It was tied up in a handkerchief and buried a couple inches deep at one side of the grave, like somebody'd just scooped a little hole in the loose dirt after the grave was filled an' poked it in. They put the cut turves back over the soil when they close up the grave, but it's nuthin' to push one aside.'

Henri looked wildly at January, there being nothing that he could imagine a fat and oily spider in its web would say to this information.

January produced his notebook from his pocket and asked – as if it were his job to do so, which in fact it was – ‘When was this, sir?'

‘What, Frenchy's funeral? Last fall sometime.'

‘Was Congress still in session?'

Pease glanced at Henri as if protesting that he didn't owe a black man any answers to anything, and Henri – who appeared to have recovered his sangfroid – grated in a steely voice, ‘Answer the question, you wretch.'

The grave robber replied sullenly, ‘Musta been, 'cause there was a hell of a funeral. Old Van Buren himself spoke over him: this was a cousin of that Frog that married Old Hickory's niece, and every Democrat in Congress showed up to shed tears. They put a guard on the grave for a week, but there was a cold snap. I knew he'd be pretty fresh still. Only reason I got to him, too. Fowler doesn't know a thing about the business,' he added with a sneer. ‘Thinks after a week nobody'll take 'em. You might not get fifty for him, but there's them'll pay twenty-five.' He glanced at Henri again. ‘That's all I know, mister – sir. I swear it on my mother's grave.'

‘I expect that was the first one you robbed,' retorted Henri loftily.

‘Did you keep an eye on the grave yourself?' asked January. ‘Watch it to see how long the guards remained?'

‘With that rat-bastard Fowler hanging around ready to get in ahead of me? You bet I did, Sambo. I wouldn't put it past him to bribe the guards – pay 'em to help him dig, if I know Fowler.'

‘Did you see people visit the grave?'

‘There's always people will visit a grave, that first week or two.' Pease spread his hands. ‘Pomercy – and I didn't get but twenty dollars for him, on account of the delay, though he was fresher'n anybody had a right to expect … Pomercy was related to half the Frogs in the District. There was somebody coming every day to snivel over the dear departed. I'd look over the churchyard wall, couple times a day. The grave's about fifty yards from the church, but it's around the back and there's trees in between it and the gate, so you can't see it from the road.'

‘So anybody kneeling beside the grave could have moved a turf aside, scooped a hole with his hands, and shoved these things –' January gestured toward the artifacts – ‘down inside.' He sat silent for a moment while the carriage jogged through the rutted streets around the Capitol, trying to identify the feeling that tugged at the back of his mind. The feeling that he was missing something, looking in the wrong direction.

‘Easy as takin' candy from a baby, Sambo.'

You'd probably know
.

‘His Lordship's client –' January nodded at the startled Henri – ‘is seeking news of a large man – about His Lordship's stature – burly, bearded, graying, and last seen wearing English clothing.' He pretended to be reading this from the notebook. ‘He came to grief between the fourteenth of October and the sixteenth.' He picked the gold piece from the seat beside Henri and placed it in the grave robber's hand. ‘Has such a body been found, in any grave? Or in any unorthodox spot? The money is yours, whether you answer yes or no. We only seek the truth.'

Pease shoved the coin immediately into his waistcoat pocket. ‘God's honest truth, I ain't heard of any.' He continued to address Henri, as if it were inconceivable that the questions would originate in any brain but his. ‘Rusty McClain – works as a churchyard guard these days, but used to do a little resurrectin' – he's with Fowler now, but he'll come in and have a drink for old times' sake. I'd have heard it from him, if there'd been anything funny turn up. And if it's an Englishman you're lookin' for, Fowler would have told 'em at the Ministry.'

Henri merely looked puzzled, but January said, ‘That's Christian of him.'

‘Christian my arse.' A spasm of anger crossed the resurrection man's ferrety face. ‘Told you Fowler's a goddam traitor. He works for that Limey bastard Oldmixton. Collects information for him – any goddam thing. That stink-arsed sister of his runs three whorehouses down in Reservation C, and you can bet they send in a report to Oldmixton, about which Senators use the one that don't peddle girls. If a Congressman fires a secretary that's been readin' somebody else's love letters an' pokin' his nose in the dirty laundry, you bet that secretary knows Fowler'll pay him for whatever he's found.'

Pease sniffed. ‘Police in this rotten town get all over a poor man for turnin' an honest dollar – and Fowler's got them in his pocket, too! You bet he does! – and then shut their eyes when the likes of Fowler goes sellin' whatever information he can get to this slick Limey nancy. No wonder this country's going to the dogs.'

Henri paused in gathering up Singletary's modest grave-goods and returned to his character as Shylock as he regarded Pease. ‘And are you so poor, Mr Pease?'

Pease smiled, like the First Murderer from Macbeth. ‘I am that, sir.'

‘Well, we'll have to see what we can do about that.' Henri fished in his pocket and held up another gold piece. ‘I think two can play at Mr Oldmixton's game. Can I trust you to make enquiries – and I'll want the truth, now; my client only wishes to know where his friend lies buried – about this large gray-bearded gentleman who met with an untimely end sometime in October of last year? I shall send Ben here for word.'

He returned the coin to his pocket and gestured with the pistol. ‘And I trust you'll see to it that he returns to me safely.' He took up his cane and thumped the roof of the coach, and in a few minutes – January guessed they'd simply gone back and forth along Pennsylvania Avenue – the vehicle came to a stop, and the door opened.

January sprang out and let down the step – though remembering the coils of shorn-off hair in Pease's trunk the impulse was strong to trip Pease as he got down. They were in the market square near the canal. Beyond its smelly water, low-lying woodlands and swampy pasturage stretched for almost two miles from the river to the Capitol on its little hill, and, southward from the canal, those splendid, weed-grown, unpaved avenues extended amid woods and occasional farm-lots to the river and the hills of Maryland beyond.

Anywhere in that bucolic wilderness, he reflected despairingly as he swung himself up on to the footman's stand again, Henri and Chloë's wandering Englishman might be resting in a shallow grave …

Or not
, he thought as the carriage pulled into motion again.

Or not
.

‘Y
ou're a surgeon, Benjamin.' Henri pulled the satin mask from his face and for a moment appeared as Minou must often see him: fair, fine hair ruffled in a hundred directions, bovine brown eyes blinking myopically as he took a seat on the small parlor's sofa and fished his spectacles from his pocket. ‘How might a body have been disposed of, other than by burial or throwing it in the river?'

Dominique and Chloë cleared from the marquetry table the remains of the hat that the latter had been watching the former trim. From the dining room came the music of dishes being set out, as beyond the curtained windows Mandie, Kizzy, and Charmian raced to the chicken run to search for eggs.