Barbara Hambly - Dead water
“Benjamin.”
January turned, to see Colonel Davis coming down the stern steps. The young planter wore a look of rather grim puzzlement, and the glint in his pale eyes told January instantly that there was trouble.
“Would you mind coming back with me to the Saloon? There are a few questions I need to ask you about where you were last night.”
The Saloon was hot and dim, and nearly empty, now that the rain had stopped and there was activity on shore worth staring at. As he followed Davis up the steps, January saw the deck-hands, and both coffles of male slaves, spreading out along the soaked muddy banks of the chute, shoving with their poles at the sides of the boat in an attempt to back her out before the water sank too far. In the engine-room they'd be drawing the fires out of the furnaces yet again.
Why no one had ever thought to disconnect the water-pumps from the engines and arrange for them to operate independently, January couldn't imagine. He'd suggested it to Rose, and she'd said, “My guess is the owners won't pay for a second engine. You have no idea how cheaply steamboats are built.”
Which, to January, sounded exactly like the sort of logic the blankittes lived by.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Molloy was pacing the Saloon like a caged tiger, a whiskey-glass in hand and face crimson with anger and impatience. “Where was he?” he demanded as Davis and January came out of the hallway into the Saloon. “Down with his yellow bitch? Any money she'll tell you he was with her last night.”
January opened his mouth to say, My wife isn't in the habit of lying, then closed it again, and made himself look at the floor.
There was something about, she'll tell you he was with her last night that brought the hair up on his nape.
As opposed to where?
He glanced across at Hannibal, still sitting at the card-table, and he saw the fiddler was both angry and scared.
Davis said, “Earlier today you told me you were in your master's stateroom all last night, sleeping, except that you woke once when you heard someone trying to force the door. Is that the truth?”
“Yes, sir.” January tried to keep the anger out of his own voice. “Maybe I should have gone after the man, but I didn't. It was pitch dark on the promenade and I was dead tired.”
“Yet you said you saw him when he opened the door.”
“He had a dark lantern, sir, shuttered. I could see there was someone there, but nothing of his face.”
“According to Mr. Molloy,” said Davis slowly, “when he returned to his stateroom at twelve-thirty, he saw that the door of Mr. Sefton's was ajar. Opening it—concerned lest there be a robbery in progress—he struck a match and found the room empty, though he says he saw your blankets on the floor.”
January opened his mouth, and closed it, fury rising like slow combustion through his chest to scald his face. Molloy lounged back against the bar, eyes on January's face, daring him to speak. Daring him to call a white man a liar in the presence of other white men.
Carefully, January said, “I don't know what to say to that, sir. I was in the room, and I was asleep. It wasn't you I saw unless you were out of the pilot-house at eleven, because I heard the leadsmen calling. In any case, the man I saw was small. He didn't fill the door, as you would, sir. Beyond that . . .”
“You telling me that ain't what I saw,” asked Molloy, with deadly softness, “boy?”
January took a deep breath and remained silent.
Hannibal said quietly, “Since my bondsman has better manners and more sense than to contradict a white man in this benighted country, I am telling you that wasn't what you saw, sir.”
Like a pouncing lion, Molloy crossed the distance between the bar and the card-table, dragged Hannibal from his chair by the front of his coat, and drove his fist hard into the fiddler's stomach. Davis was taken by surprise at this sudden violence, so it was January who caught Molloy first, the enraged pilot flinging Hannibal to the floor like a rag and whirling to smash January in the jaw. January staggered—Molloy was nearly his own height and twenty pounds heavier—and checked his own returning blow, braced himself as a second blow took him in the stomach.
Then Davis was pulling Molloy back, and January, gasping a little and with blood trickling from his nose, went to Hannibal's side.
“You're a lyin' goddam Orangeman and a whoremaster!” yelled Molloy, yanking against Davis's grip. “And no nigger lays a hand on me or on any white man while I'm in the room. You tell me I'm not a liar, Sefton, or before God I'll—”
“Mr. Molloy!” shouted Davis with the command in his voice that men achieve when they've governed troops in war. “This is not a barroom, nor is this a question of anyone's honor. This is an investigation of the facts leading to a man's death.”
“You know damn-all about it, you pusillanimous little pup! As a son of Ireland I'm not going to sit still for it when a nigger and a pimp of an Orangeman tell the world I didn't see what I saw!” bawled Molloy. “And if there's another word for that besides liar, I'd like to hear what it is.”
“Mistaken, I believe is the word I was groping for.” Hannibal struggled to sit up, clinging to January's sleeve and cutting off Davis's furious rejoinder. “I apologize to you profoundly for the anger of the moment in which I spoke. It was my own mistake and I most humbly beg your forgiveness.”
Molloy hadn't expected this, and his eyes narrowed with suspicion, but in the face of an apology there wasn't really much he could say.
“In fact,” Hannibal went on as January helped him to his feet, “in the near-absolute darkness of the promenade, it isn't surprising you might have made an error in which door you saw ajar. I believe Mr. Cain's stateroom lies next to mine, or Mr. Quince's. . . .”
“Are you after telling me I don't know every foot of my own boat?” Molloy bristled again, like a boar hog about to gore. “It's my goddam business to know every goddam foot of this river by heart, every point and bar and chute of her, and I know which door is which—”
“Of course you would, sir,” interrupted Hannibal smoothly, “and without the smallest error, on a vessel you had piloted for more than a single week. All men are liable to error, as the philosopher Locke quite reasonably points out; no man's knowledge may go beyond his experience. But since someone appears to have been trying to force their way into various staterooms along that side of the vessel last night . . .”
“That's your story,” retorted Molloy, and turned to Davis. “Sir, you need to remember—and so I'll tell the sheriff at Mayersville—that this man had instructions from his banking board to stop Weems, by whatever means he could, before he could reach the land office in Louisville. Now, I'm not saying they deliberately set out to murder him, but like Mr. Sefton says”—his voice twisted sarcastically over the words—“men are liable to error, specially if you get a big brute like Sefton's boy takin' hold of a runty little specimen like poor Weems.”
“I agree absolutely,” said Hannibal with such earnestness that Molloy blinked. “Spurius es, blennus, vervexque et pila foeda.” He turned from the pilot to Davis, who was slack-jawed with shock at what the fiddler had just called Molloy to his face. “It seems to me that matters hinge on Weems's own intentions. It was his story, after all, that I was sent by the Bank to stop him from reaching Louisville, and I fear that if Weems was a thief, he may also have been a shameless deceiver, hoodwinking even so intelligent and honest a woman as his loyal fiancée into believing his story.”
January smiled inwardly—Hannibal seldom missed a stitch in his fabrications. Molloy was turning red with genuine annoyance—as opposed to the manufactured rage by which he'd clearly been trying to provoke Hannibal into challenging him to a duel—but Davis was listening as the fiddler went on.
“Perhaps the best thing to do would be to establish, once and for all, who Mr. Weems was and what he was doing on this vessel. For that, I would suggest that all the trunks on board, regardless of their putative ownership, be examined. If one is found to contain a large quantity of assorted specie, we will at least have advanced our knowledge to that degree.”
The enterprise of removing all the trunks and crates to the bow-deck had to wait until the Silver Moon had been backed from Hitchins' Chute. This lengthy procedure occupied the whole of the noon and early afternoon, so that the deck-hands—tired already from shoving and poking the steamboat out of the narrow and sinking watercourse—went directly from that to bringing on deck every trunk and crate in the hold.
In this enterprise January, Jim, and the other valets were pressed into service, while the deck-passengers stood around and gaped at the possessions of their betters, the white men grumbled and snarled, and Mrs. Tredgold protested vociferously that no one was going to violate the sanctity of her baggage. Hannibal—the only white man to actually assist with moving the luggage—explained to them that it was believed that Weems might have abstracted something from one of the pieces of luggage on board, and Davis—who seemed to have taken over the investigation by sheer force of will—ended the discussion by announcing, “Justice must be served.”
A man definitely destined for politics, thought January.
Molloy, clearly baffled at how his attempt to rid the boat of both Hannibal and January had failed, kept to the pilot-house during the proceedings.
Mrs. Fischer did not even emerge from her stateroom.
January was one of the men working the crane at the bow hatch, so he was able to watch the little clumps of passengers along the upper-deck railing, as well as the lantern-lit square of the dark hold below. Thucydides coordinated the shifting of the trunks in the hold, as deck-hands brought them to the crane, lifted them out to be checked, then lowered them to be replaced; he was assisted by 'Rodus and two other slaves of Cain's coffle, Marcus and Guy. On the deck itself, Mr. Tredgold was in charge. Davis chalked a line and appointed Nick the barkeep to make sure nobody crossed it except the owner of the trunk—it was Sophie who brought Mrs. Fischer's luggage keys.
“The specie was taken out of the trunks, all right,” murmured January as he, Hannibal, and Jim paused to lean on the still-netted load of the Roberson trunks. “All of it, apparently.”
“It must have been scattered among dozens, you know,” panted the fiddler. “We haven't seen an empty trunk yet. Yes, Molloy had time to get at the luggage while it was being off-loaded at Horsehead Bar—when all the men were out of the way—but he'd have to have known exactly which trunks to open, and even at that would have to have worked very fast.”
“If he had an accomplice—or more than one—it would have gone quicker,” responded January thoughtfully. “But that theory brings its own problems.” He nodded back up toward the pilot-house, visible above the arcade that shaded the wide upper-deck apron at the top of the stairs. “However Molloy managed it, he isn't worried about the trunks. He's worried about us—about trying to get us off the boat. But not the trunks. And as you notice, Mrs. Fischer isn't, either.”
“And that worries me.” Hannibal yanked the netting back, helped January and Jim skid two green canvas trunks with brass corners, an old wooden trunk with iron strapping, and a crate that proved to contain dishes onto the deck, where Mr. Roberson waited with the keys. “Do we need to concern ourselves with a second gang under Molloy's command as well as Christmas's boys, or is there something here we're not seeing?”
January only shook his head. Down in the hold, he saw Thu and 'Rodus pause in their work and trade a low-voiced joke, and laugh; then Thu went back to his notebook and his list. From the upper deck, Mrs. Roberson called down, “Mr. Roberson, you need not trouble yourself with that and with mounting guard, too. I can deal with the keys.”
Roberson shaded his eyes against the afternoon sun and called back up, “It's quite all right, Mrs. Roberson,” and handed his rifle to Davis—Lockhart, Byrne, Dodd (who was likelier to accidentally shoot one of the deck-hands than an attacking river-pirate), and Cain stood with rifles, surveying the green, silent bank. Considering the startling cache of pornographic prints that Davis unearthed from Roberson's trunk a moment later, the Kentucky planter's attitude was understandable.
Davis's mouth thinned to a needle-scratch of disapproval, and his tic twitched the side of his face a number of times, but he said nothing. Tucked among the shirts, coats, and stockings were also a number of packets of cheap glass jewelry so garish that it could not possibly be intended for the subdued and elegant Mrs. Roberson: some of the housemaids on Mimosa Plantation, January reflected cynically, were going to get new earbobs when Marse got home.
Turning to say as much to Jim, January thought he glimpsed—but wasn't sure—the movement of a skirt down in the shadows of the hold. It was only on the edge of the darkness, and gone like the flicker one sometimes sees at the corner of one's eye. . . .
January thought, She's there.
Queen Régine.
And what did SHE see last night? What does she know?
As January had guessed, Mrs. Fischer's numerous trunks contained nothing but clothes and jewelry—extremely opulent, vividly colorful, and completely at odds with her ladylike and withdrawn exterior—and a number of books printed in Paris or Amsterdam, with titles like The Flogging-Block, Confessions of a Lady of Leisure, and The Lustful Turk. None of the trunks bearing her name seemed disordered or incompletely packed. Sophie turned her shoulder away from Hannibal when he spoke to her, and as she returned up the stair hesitated to greet Rose. . . .
“God knows what La Pécheresse has been telling her about the three of us,” remarked Hannibal under his breath. “Or told her cronies in the Parlor, for that matter. Look how La Tredgold has been watching every move I make.”
Sophie and Rose stepped aside as Molloy swaggered down the stair and over to Davis. “When the hell you going to be done playing about here and let me get my deck-hands back to their work? We can't stay here keepin' the fires drawn for all the night!”
“We shall remain,” retorted Davis, glaring coldly down his nose at the pilot, “as long as it takes to ascertain once and for all who is lying and who is speaking the truth.”
“What is truth, asked Pilate, and washed his hands.” Hannibal went forward to start hauling the trunks back to be lowered into the hold again, and replaced by others. “I have my pick-locks on hand for those items addressed to people not on the boat, though I'm sure that will clinch what remains of my reputation. All I can say is, we'd better find something in one of these trunks, or I suspect we're both going to hear about it from the sheriff at Mayersville.”
