“There,” said January, and flipped the pages at random in four or five places till he found what he sought.
Hannibal leaned around his shoulder and read: And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold... He glanced at January inquiringly.
“Not at the words. Under them.”
Hannibal leaned close to the page, squinting in the strong morning sunlight. They’d carried the book out to the porch and rested it on the rail. Around them, in sheds and shanties and tents, the Swamp was waking up, as usual with a hangover. “Are those pencil dots?” asked Hannibal after a moment. “Under each letter?”
“Not just pencil dots.” January took a magnifying lens from his instrument case and held it above the page. “That page has been marked two or three times — sometimes in pencil, once with a pin. Look back in Genesis, you’ll see some of the pages have been marked that way four and six times, sometimes for as much as a dozen lines down the column. Always starting at the top of the page...”
Hannibal’s mobile eyebrows shot up in enlightenment. “Someone was using it for a book code.”
“That’s right. And instead of doing the sensible thing one would do with a Bible — citing book, chapter, verse, and then letter-count — our code-makers simply treated it as an ordinary book, starting at the top of the page: 101st letter, or whatever it was. Which meant that both the sender and the receiver had to have the same edition of the Bible, which would have been easy if they’d originally bought them together in the same shop in Philadelphia. What did you say your uncle’s name was, Mrs. Williams?”
“Walter.” The proprietress scratched under one uncorseted breast. “Walter Buling. My daddy had a farm below Natchez. Uncle Walter came there in 1825, sick as a horse with the consumption. That’s where he died.”
“Walter Buling.” January nodded slowly, and turned to the back of the book. Where pages are sometimes inserted to make up odd-numbered signatures, only a single, ragged, yellowed edge remained. “When I was eleven years old,” he said, “in 1806, New Orleans was clapped under martial law for a number of weeks by the governor of the Louisiana Territory, a gentleman named Major-General James Wilkinson.”
“Wilkinson!” exclaimed Williams. “Gentleman my arse — wasn’t he the skunk who swindled all them folks out of Texas land grants about ten years ago?”
“He was indeed,” January replied. “He’d earlier been twice court-martialed for botching invasions of Canada and Spanish Florida during the war with England in 1812, and died in disgrace in Mexico shortly after the Texas debacle. But in 1806, while governor of the Territory, he teamed up with former Vice President Aaron Burr, allegedly to conquer Mexico, to separate the Southern states from the North, to loot all the banks in New Orleans in the confusion, and to form an empire that Burr would then rule from New Orleans, presumably with the help of Wilkinson’s American troops.
“Now, my mother still swears that Wilkinson was playing a double game and taking money from the Spanish viceroy of Mexico — then as now, she knew everyone in town. In any case, Wilkinson sold Burr out, testified against him in court, and was protected by Thomas Jefferson for the rest of his life as a result. Who was paying whom how much back in 1806 I have no idea, but I do remember that Walter Buling of Natchez was one of Wilkinson’s lieutenants.”
“So you think Buling lifted some money in the confusion?” Hannibal thumbed the onion-skin pages, peering through the glass at the lines of pinpricks and dots, the occasional notes in the margin: e-45, t-67, a-103... “Either a Spanish payoff or from one of the New Orleans banks...?”
“In partnership with a Confederate who either died or was taken out of the game somehow. The Confederate’s coded directions to the money is probably what’s in our friend’s hands — and I’d guess our friend has only recently learned that the books containing the key were Bibles owned by Buling and the Confederate.”
“How would he find out?”
“Probably the same way you did,” said Hannibal. “The Confederate may very well have been our friend’s uncle or father, the same way Buling was related to you.”
January nodded. “However he found it out, he did find it out. But since Buling counted the letters as if the Bible were an ordinary book — from the top of the page, rather than by chapter and verse — our friend needs to have the identical edition to decode them. Obviously he doesn’t: his relative’s Bible having disappeared in the intervening years, leaving only the coded message itself. So all he could do was trace Buling’s.”
Williams scowled, and she rubbed gingerly at the bandages January had put on her arm. “That means he’ll be back, don’t it?”
“If he’s come this far, I think it definitely means he’ll be back.”
Her eyes narrowed, cold as a wild pig’s. “Thinks he can go cuttin’ up Delly an’ whoever gets in his way... I’ll be ready for him when he comes back...”
“It will probably be with Confederates of his own,” pointed out Hannibal. “Bella, horrida bella, et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno...”
“Oh, I think we can deal with our friend without causing the river to run red with blood.” January picked up the Bible and thumbed again to the torn-out page at the back. “And if we’re lucky, compensate poor Delly for her injuries as well.”
It didn’t take January long to locate the culprit. It was all a question of knowing who to ask. The Carnival season was in full swing, and he and Hannibal were playing that night at a ball in one of the great American mansions that lined St. Charles Avenue, upriver from the old French town. In between sets of marches and quadrilles, waltzes and schottisches, January made it his business to nod smiling greetings to every one of the dozen or so physicians who attended, men with whom he’d worked at the Charity Hospital during the summer epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. These greetings led to soft-voiced chats and a little friendly joshing about his “winter job” from white men who hadn’t the slightest idea what it was like to be denied work because of the color of their skin. From this, January deftly steered the conversation to inquiries about a thin-faced white man with a Vandyke beard, probably at a hotel, who’d called in a physician’s services that morning for knife wounds...
By the end of the evening he knew that the man who’d knifed Delly — and who’d been cut in return by Kentucky Williams — was Matthew Porter of St. Louis. St. Louis, January recalled, being the city from which Major-General Wilkinson had governed the Louisiana Territory in 1806.
Since January was a law-abiding soul, even when the laws included Black Codes that forbade him among other things to smoke cigars in public, the following morning he consulted the City Guard, in the person of his friend Lieutenant Abishag Shaw. He suspected it would do him no good and his suspicion was rapidly confirmed.
“Iff’n you want me to, I’ll speak to Captain Tremouille about it,” offered Lieutenant Shaw, scratching his verminous hair. “But I’ll tell you right now what he’ll say: that we got too few men — ’specially now in Carnival season — to go chasin’ after a white man who’ll just say he never knifed no nigger gal in his life. No jury in town’s gonna convict him of it on the word of a Salt River man-eater like Kentucky Williams anyways.”
His due to law and order paid, January then took a long walk into the genuine swamp beyond the Swamp, the ciprière: the maze of small bayous, impenetrable tangles of palmetto and hackberry, tall silent groves of cypress and magnolia that lay between New Orleans and the lake. Few white men came here. Even now, in the winter with the ground mostly dry, it was easy to become lost, even for January who’d been raised with a slave-child’s awareness of the invisible geography of landmarks, paths, rendezvous points. In the summer it was a nightmarish jungle of standing water, gators, snakes, and mosquitoes that would swarm a man like a living brown blanket.