Good Man Friday (3 page)

And he remembered the fighter Gun's face, when he'd gone walking among the white men to a fight he knew he wouldn't survive.

Abishag Shaw, Lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guard, agreed to keep his ear to the ground for unofficial work, when January finally ran him to earth late the following afternoon. ‘Dang little around,' he added, and spat tobacco in the general direction of the sandbox in the corner of the Cabildo's watchroom. His aim was far worse than Norcum's, and the worn granite of the watchroom floor was fouled with brown dollops – like vaguely sweet bird-droppings – for yards. ‘Carnival ain't a time when folks plot murder in the dark, bein' mostly too drunk to work out the details—'

Two sturdy Guards entered the watchroom from the Place des Armes outside, dragging a gaggle of flatboat ruffians and two black prostitutes, all shouting at one another at the top of their lungs: ‘Sure as I stand here as an American, I will not be cheated by the likes of you—'

‘You lyin' sheep-stealer! I shit better Americans ever' time I pull down my pants …'

‘I'll listen around.' Shaw unfolded his slow height from behind his desk, like the improbable love-child of a scarecrow and a gargoyle. ‘Won't be anyone who owes Eph Norcum money, though. 'Scuse me, Maestro …'

Two river-rats had broken free of their captors and – ignoring a clear path to the Cabildo's outer doors – had thrown themselves upon one another like rabid dogs.

January stood back by the desk and watched as Shaw knocked heads together, tossed the largest man effortlessly into a corner and assisted the other Guards in subduing the rest. The whores added their mite to the fray by leaping on to the backs of the peacemakers, shrieking like harpies. When blood started to flow, January made a wide circuit of the confusion to reach the corner of the sergeant's desk and collect a confiscated bottle of rum.

‘That little one got a fine set of teeth,' remarked Shaw, returning after a few strenuous moments holding a bloody wrist. He already sported a cut above his left eyebrow and a bandage on one hand – by this point in the carnival season, most of the Guards were looking pretty shopworn. ‘An' I would warn you,' he added as January mopped the tart-bite with rum and bound it up with a clean bandanna from his pocket, ‘that most of them that would seek to hire you, the job would turn out to be you goin' to some deserted bayou in the middle of the night an' gettin' slugged over the head, an' wakin' up on the auction block someplace in the territories.'

January gritted his teeth, knowing the Kentuckian was right. Slaves were the one thing that hadn't gone down in price, and nobody much cared where they came from or if they insisted they were actually free men who'd been kidnapped …

After letting his words sink in, Shaw added, ‘You know Norcum tried to swear out a warrant on you for murder.'

‘That's ridiculous! Sir,' he remembered to add, as the desk sergeant – returning through the courtyard door nursing a cut lip – gave him a frosty glare. Shaw was, after all, white, though January's mother wouldn't have had him in her house.

‘Well, he lost a sight of money on that fight.' Shaw flexed his bandaged wrist. ‘Thank you, Maestro … An' you needn't worry none. Captain Tremouille's brother-in-law had money on the other fella.'

‘That sound you hear,' said January grimly, ‘is my heart singing with joy.' Only three dollars remained in the household cache behind the bricks in the cellar, and he was getting desperate. The next stop would be the wharves, or the cigar-rolling shops on Tchapitoulas Street.

‘Thought you'd like to know.' Shaw spat again. ‘It'll blow over. Most things do.'

This January knew to be true.

‘But it's damn little comfort,' he said to Hannibal Sefton, when he encountered his friend the fiddler two evenings later among the brick pillars of the market, ‘to think that as a trained surgeon, and a trained musician, the only thing I'm really valued for is the twelve hundred dollars I'd fetch as a cotton hand.'

‘
Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina
–' Hannibal handed him the cup of coffee he'd fetched from old La Violette's coffee-stand – ‘
praemia digna ferant
… No,
amicus meus
,' he added, and pushed back the nickel January laid on the table, ‘permit me to expunge the guilt that overwhelms me every time I play for Norcum or his sycophantic friends.'

He carried also three pink pralines on a square of clean newspaper, which he set before January. ‘It's the least I can do … And believe me, I will always do the least I can.'

‘Far be it from me to let a man welter in his guilt.' January inclined his head magisterially. Hannibal, January's oldest friend in New Orleans, was the only white man in town who would be seen publicly eating and drinking with blacks, for which the white population regarded him as rather degenerate.

Sugar-grinding season was over, the fields burnt. Farther upriver, the cotton was all picked. In curing-houses upriver and down, rack after rack of wooden molds dripped slow threads of molasses for the edification of armies of cockroaches. In slave quarters, men and women repaired garments and fingers sliced by sharp-cut cane-ends, or torn by the stickers of the cotton plants, and marveled at the wonder of being able to rest with fall of night.

The planters came to town to bargain with factors over this single, massive pay-day of the year; to settle up the year's accumulated debts. To meet other planters, relatives, friends; to attend the theater and hear music other than the field-hollers of their slaves and the amateur recitals of their neighbors' daughters. To see something other than endless fields of whatever crop they depended on: dark-green sugar, or brownish-red cotton starred with white. To enjoy newspapers less than a week old, or books that hadn't been read threadbare over the course of the year.

New Orleans stirred to life. Mardi Gras parties spilled masked revelers out on to the brick banquettes, improbably clad as French aristocrats or Turkish warriors. Both opera houses presented Auber and Mozart and spectacles more vulgar –
The Castle Spectre
and
All For America
! – to bring in Kaintucks' money.

The wives of planters cried out that they didn't care that cotton was down to fourteen cents a pound – it had been thirty-two the year before last … if they were to convince people their credit was good, they couldn't do so in dresses three years out of date. If they were to find suitable husbands for their daughters, young Marie-Celeste or Marie-Anne or Marie-Thèrése would
have
to appear in the latest style …

Looking out from the shadows of the market to the line of barn-like white steamboats beyond the levee, smokestacks dark against the twilight sky, January reflected that had he not recalled what the wharves looked like in flush times, he could have been seduced into thinking that times were getting better. Slave gangs chanted the old hollers, in language they'd learned by ear from their parents, as they hauled on the cranes or manhandled the crates of purchased goods – cheap shoes, coarse cloth for slave-clothes, all the salt and cheese and cane knives and blankets that those isolated kingdoms would get for the next year.

In the winter of 1836–7, each wharf had been four-deep in steamboats, stacked with dirty-white bales to their roofs: cotton, which had sold for over twice what it brought these days. In the winter of 1836–7, captains and supercargoes had cursed their way along the bustling wharves in search of stevedores, instead of the work gangs loitering in the hopes of a cargo. In addition to the regular gangs – smaller than they had been, because the men who rented their slaves to the dock gangs had often sold a man or two – there were men January knew as bricklayers, drovers, clerks even, hanging around or going from gang to gang:
Can you use another man? I'll work for a nickel a day
…

A nickel would get you beans and rice, with maybe an onion thrown in for lagniappe.

‘At least you have the comfort of knowing that your carcass is worth money,' added Hannibal, and coughed. He seemed in better health than he had earlier in the winter, though skeletally thin; he had acquired a new waistcoat, and had put up his long hair in a pair of tortoiseshell combs, by which January deduced that he had a new girlfriend somewhere.

‘A reflection I signally lack,' the fiddler went on with a sigh. ‘It used to be, I could get work grading students' Greek compositions for d'Avezac's “College” for boys – not to mention earning a dollar or two writing those same compositions for the more enterprising scholars. Now every boys' school that's still open, the master has a brother or a cousin who does the same work for food. Hence my willingness to betray you by making music in Norcum's tobacco-boltered halls—'

‘I depend upon you to wreak what petty revenge you can beneath his roof.'

‘I presented both his nephews with penny-whistles,' mused Hannibal. ‘They're seven and eight years old, and will be living in his house for the next three months. For good measure I left the advertisement for that shockingly expensive shipment of lace that's just come into Broussard's where his wife can find it. But, I must say, like an ancient Greek hero his own actions have called vengeance upon his head:
Se ludice nemo nocens absolvitur
. This late in the season, the only pianist he – or any of his friends – has been able to find to replace you is that German fellow Hatch who plays at the Blackleg Saloon. Last week Hatch made an attempt upon the virtue of Arabella Fry – I can only assume he was drunk – and arrived at last night's bridal musicale so incapacitated he couldn't make it through the Moonlight Sonata; not that he's ever had much success with it sober, mind you. But even in the worst of my drinking days –' Hannibal coughed again, and pressed his hand to his side – ‘there wasn't enough alcohol in the
world
to induce me to kiss Arabella Fry.'

January laughed, though the thought of being replaced by Hatch made him seethe. ‘I'll find something.' He tried to sound as if he believed it. ‘If nothing else, I suppose I can apply to fill Mr Hatch's place at the Blackleg—'

‘Shotwell pays him in drinks.' Hannibal shook his head. ‘Which I assure you does nothing for the quality of his performance as the evening progresses. I think a season of his – I cannot precisely call it
music
– is all the inducement Norcum's friends will need to re-hire you come fall.'

January suspected this as well. When the fiddler left him to proceed to his evening's work, January made his way home through the chilly twilight along the Rue Esplanade. The street's double width made it a popular promenade for flower-decked carriages filled with maskers, all banging tin pans and blowing flour into one another's faces, their festivity jarringly alien to his mood. From the open French doors of a dozen little cottages, music and laughter and the smells of burned sugar drifted into the night.

Lamps glowed softly behind the closed shutters of the old Spanish house on Rue Esplanade. As always, merely seeing the place made his heart lift: his house, Rose's house, ramshackle as it was. He climbed the steps to the gallery – it was built high off the street, the ground floor serving no purpose but as a cellar – and found, to his surprise, the parlor occupied not only by Rose, but also by an enormously stout white gentleman only inches shorter than himself, and a tiny fair-haired lady, like a bespectacled mermaid wrought of blown Venetian glass.

‘M'sieu Janvier …' The gentleman rose from his chair and held out a hand like a pudgy flipper; January grasped it cordially. ‘I'm glad we didn't miss you.'

‘M'sieu Viellard.' January turned to bow deeply over the little lady's delicate gloved fingers. ‘Madame. I'm glad also.'

And although he didn't say so, bemused and surprised as well. Henri Viellard owned half a dozen sugar plantations and one of the largest private libraries in the state – and was the lover of January's youngest sister Dominique. Henri's wife, the cold-faced little lady clothed, like Henri, in the stiff satins of the French Court eighty years ago, blinked at January from behind enormously thick lenses and said, ‘The pleasure is ours, M'sieu. Rose was just now telling us that if we were to put a proposition to you for employment for the next three months, you probably wouldn't turn us down.'

January bowed again. ‘Whom do I have to kill, m'am?'

‘Oh dear, nothing of the kind!' Henri Viellard looked up in shocked consternation from the platter of Gabriel's best petit fours that Zizi-Marie had just brought in, warm from the kitchen.

Chloë Viellard's prim mouth tucked into a very tiny smile as she picked up her coffee cup again.

‘I'm not sure at the moment,' she said. Her husband's eyes – mild and brown behind his own thick spectacles – flared further in alarm, and he appeared momentarily so horrified at the suggestion that he couldn't even select a pastry. ‘And I very much fear, in fact, that the man we wish to locate may already be dead. We don't know about that, either.'

‘Rose—' January turned to his wife. ‘When I get ready to accompany M'sieu and Madame, please be sure to pack my shovel. When you speak of employing me for a few months,' he went on, ‘do you mean here in town, or down at Bois d'Argent—?'

‘Neither,' said the young Madame Viellard. ‘I'm afraid our dear friend Mr Singletary disappeared in Washington City, and it's there that we need to go, to pick up his trail again.'

‘It should be perfectly safe,' Henri Viellard hastened to assure him, and wiped powdered sugar from the gateau off his fingers with finicking care. ‘I am told that last summer you undertook a rather dangerous expedition to the Rocky Mountains, but this is nothing of that sort. I'm sure there must be some simple explanation for Mr Singletary's disappearance. He is a rather absent-minded soul. Ah!' Bliss transformed his face as Zizi-Marie returned, with a platter of pralines this time: coconut-white and cochineal-pink as well as the traditional golden. ‘Exquisite! But as for our search—' His attention returned to January. ‘How much peril could one encounter in our nation's capital?'