Barbara Hambly - Dead water

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.