But Carnival was different.
"Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!" Froissart's gesture to heaven was worthy of Macbeth perishing in the final act.
"They sure don't, sir." If he's buying, I'll sell it to him.
"The Americans, they don't know how to behave! They don't know how to take mistresses. They think it's all a matter of money. For them, money is everything! Look at the houses they build, out along the Carrolton Road, in the LaFayette suburb and Saint Mary! I recall a time-not ten years ago it was!-that the whole of the city of Jefferson was the Avart and Delaplace plantations, and a half-dozen others, the best sugar land on the river. And what do they do now? They build a streetcar line, they tear up the fields, and the next thing you know, you have these dreadful American houses with their picket fences! Exactly that which that canaille Granger proposes to do along Bayou Saint John! Him, fight a duel? Pffui!"
He flung out his hands in indignation-evidently challenges to duels, like trouncings with canes or fistfights in the court downstairs, did not come under the same category as murder.
"Why, in my office this evening, the way he and those sordid friends of his behaved! A disgrace! They are not gentlemen! They have no concept! They cannot tell Rossini from 'Turkey in the Straw'!"
"You're right about that, sir," agreed January gravely. As he spoke he felt a deep annoyance at himself, to be playing along as he had played along during his childhood and adolescence, falling back into the old double role of manipulating a white man's illusions about what a man of color was and thought. Still, the role was there, script and inflections and bits of business, a weapon or tool with whose use he was familiar, though he felt dirtied by its touch. "In Paris, the Americans were the same way. Every ball I'd play at, you could tell right where the Americans were sitting."
"And that is why we cannot summon the police tonight," concluded Froissart, turning regretfully back to the beautiful, ruined woman lying between them. "They do not understand how to do these things quietly, discreetly. Of course, of course they must be summoned in the morning-after I have spoken to Monsieur Davis... Of course he will want to summon them..."He chewed his lip in an agony of uncertainty, and January remembered the mother of one of his friends in Paris, who would put aside bills "for a few days until I know I have the money" and then eventually burn them unread.
Angelique's body was a bill that would be burned unread. Not because she was an evil woman or because she had harmed every life she touched, but only because she was colored and a placee.
"Well, what would you?" sighed Froissart-January could almost see Mme. du Gagny sliding yet another dressmaker's dun into that nacre-and-rosewood secretaire. "It is how it is... Good heavens, how long have we been here? People will begin to ask... You must return to your piano and say nothing, nothing. Be assured that the matter will be taken care of in the morning."
January inclined his head and arose. "I'm sorry," he said humbly. "I was so shaken up by seeing her here like this, I... It took me a while to get my thoughts back. Thank you for your patience with me."
Froissart beamed patronizingly. "One understands," he said, as if he himself hadn't gone fishbelly green at the sight of the body-January guessed he was one of those who headed for Mandeville at the first of the summer heat and had never been through an epidemic at firsthand in his life. "Of course, the shock of it all. I hope you are better."
"Much," said January, wondering if he should fake a spell of dizziness with the shock and rejecting the idea- and his own consideration of it-with loathing. He made a show of looking around as if he'd forgotten something, playing for as much time as he could scrape. "Much better."
Froissart turned and left the jewelbox room with its grisly occupant, and January perforce followed. He glanced back at the crumpled body, the grasping and greedy woman who had assumed he was a slave because his skin was darker than hers. Still, she did not deserve to be forgotten like an unpaid bill. I did my best, he apologized. More, certainly, than he would ever have accorded her in life.
As he left he laid the four coins Froissart had given him gently on the table by the door.
"Romulus!" called Froissart. "Romulus, I..." They emerged from the hallway into the lobby in time to see a small party of blue-clothed city guardsmen arrive at the top of the stairs.
Froissart stopped, goggling, as if he hoped these were another group of revelers, like Robin Hood's Merry Men or the Ladies of the Harim.
But none of them were masked. And no Creole he knew, thought January, would have the wit to dress that much like an out-at-elbows upriver Kaintuck, with a shabby, flapping corduroy coat many years out of fashion and too short in the sleeves for his loose-jointed height. Minou slipped past them, startlingly invisible for someone so beautiful and brightly clad, and melted into the crowd in the ballroom like snow on the desert's dusty face. The tall officer stepped forward and laid a black-nailed hand on Froissart's arm.
"Mr. Froissart?" Interestingly, he got the pronunciation right. " 'Fore you and your boy head on back to the ballroom, we'd like to talk to you." His tone was polite but his backcountry dialect so thick that his English was barely comprehensible.
Two of the guards were heading into the ballroom. The music ceased. Silence, then a rising clamor. January could already hear that the tenor of the noise from the gaming rooms and the downstairs lobby had changed as well.
"What..." stammered Froissart. "What?...".
The tall man touched the brim of his low-crowned hat, and spit a stream of tobacco in the general direction of the sandbox. He was unshaven, noisome, and the sugar-brown hair hanging to his shoulders was stringy with grease. "Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans police, at your service, sir."
FIVE
"This is an outrage!" The plump Ivanhoe who'd been negotiating with Agnes Pellicot stationed himself foursquare in the central of the three ballroom doorways, ornamental sword drawn as if to reenact Roncevaux upon the threshold. Looking past him, January was interested to note that; the invisible barriers that had separated the American's-the Roman, Henry VIII, Richelieu-from the Creoles seemed momentarily to have dissolved. "None of us had the least thing to do with that cocotte's death, and I consider it an insult for you to say that we have!"
"Why, hell, sir, I know you got nuthin' to do with it." Police Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, though he replied in English, did not appear to have any trouble understanding the man's French. He folded his long arms, stepped closer to the doorway and lowered his voice as if to exclude the three constables grouped uncertainly be hind him, their eyes on the curtained passage to the Theatre next door. "But I also know men like yourselves don't miss much of what goes on around them, neither. Anything happen out of the ordinary-an' maybe you wouldn'ta knowed it was out of the ordinary at the time -you'd a seen it. That's what I'm countin' on to help me find this killer."
The Creoles muttered and whispered among themselves in French. January heard a man start to say in English, "She's only a..." The concluding words, nigger whore, remained unsaid, probably more because the speaker realized that saying them would damage his chances with the dead woman's fellow demimondaines than out of any consideration of good taste. Old Xavier Peralta turned his head. "She was a free woman of this city, sir," he said quietly. "She is entitled to this city's justice."
"I agree," said Ivanhoe. "But there is no need for us to unmask to tell you what we have seen tonight."
Shaw scratched his unshaven jaw. "Well," he said in his mild tenor voice, "in fact there is." And he aimed another long stream of tobacco juice into the nearest spittoon, missing by only inches-not bad at the distance, January thought.