Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“I have strong reasons to believe that the bank's specie and note reserves were cleaned out by a man named Oliver Weems.” Granville's small hazel eyes were sunk in pouches of fat, their watchful expression like an intelligent pig's. “Weems was—is still, officially—the manager of the bank. He came to us with the highest recommendations. . . .”

“I expect Iago had them, too,” said January in a level voice. “Sir. And the reason you're not going to the City Guards is . . . ?”

“Good God, man!” The banker's square, heavy face puckered with alarm. “All that would do is bring the bank crashing down around our ears! Weems didn't take the silver reserves—about thirty thousand dollars. We can keep going for a few weeks on those, since it's the slow season of the year. But if the police get word of it, that word will spread like fire in a hayloft. If you—or anyone—demand their money in full, our doors will close and no one will get anything.”

You bastard. January felt the heat of rage sweep through him. You robbing, irresponsible bastard. . . .

The school was nowhere near self-supporting, and might not be for years. The gold they'd held out from paying for the house in full had been to support them until it could take hold. At this time of the year there wasn't even work as a musician, since anyone with the money to hire musicians for a party was using that money to rent quarters someplace other than New Orleans. His dozen or so piano students had left town, too, with their various parents. The money he'd saved from the winter's lessons, and the winter's work at subscription balls and Mardi Gras parties and the opera, had all been banked with Granville as well.

Because Granville was white and January black, January held his silence, and the scorching wave passed through him and away, leaving its throbbing glow behind. But looking down at the white man's face, he saw, behind the calculation in the piggy eyes, the wariness of a man who has to get himself through a painful and humiliating situation.

And, thought January, Granville was here, at ten o'clock on a Sunday evening. From what January knew of the man, he wasn't going around town informing every one of his clients that they were now as poor as the wretchedest of the derelicts on the levee.

He'd sought January for a reason.

January brought up a chair and sat—the gesture seemed to reassure the banker. Granville's massive shoulders relaxed in the expensive linen jacket, and when he spoke, his voice had lost some of its cautious hardness. “Your mother tells me you're good at finding things, and finding things out. You were the one who solved Simon Fourchet's murder the winter before last, weren't you?”

January nodded. He'd hated Simon Fourchet, the man who had once been his mother's master and his own. Only his mother's blackmail had sufficed to make him work to save the man's life and bring the murder home. “I take it that's what you're offering me three hundred dollars for?” he asked. “To find Weems?”

“To find the money,” said Granville. “I know where Weems is.”

The candles on the small table—one of the few pieces of furniture in that darkly cavernous room—began to gutter. Silently Rose took candle-scissors from the table's drawer and mended the drooping wick. The reviving glow flickered across plastered walls painted yellow, touched the keys of January's beloved Austrian piano, and warmed color from the faded upholstery of the chairs. The light creak of footfalls overhead marked where Cosette was getting ready for bed in her attic bedroom.

January wondered what she prayed, on this night before she was going back to a mother who held her in such contempt.

The oval lenses of Rose's spectacles picked up the candles' orange gleam. It had been January's idea to bank with Granville. Her silence now was like broken glass.

“And where,” January asked, “is Weems?”

“At his lodgings, recuperating from the shock of the theft,” said the banker grimly. “The day watchman went in this morning and found the night man unconscious—the man still hasn't woken up. God knows what happened to him. Sometime last night—Saturday night—all the strongboxes were opened and everything but the silver taken. When I broke the news to Weems this afternoon he collapsed; I could barely get any sense out of him. He couldn't accompany me to the night guard's lodgings, where I had a devil of a time keeping the doctor in attendance from suspecting anything. Afterwards I went for a cup of cocoa at Madame Metoyer's shop in the Place des Armes. . . .”

. . . Which belongs to your free colored mistress, January mentally added. Or one of your several ex-mistresses . . . He'd never been able to keep track of his mother's accounts of the banker's squadron of ladyfriends.

“. . . and Madame Metoyer happened to mention to me that she'd seen Weems only this morning in the steamboat office, making arrangements to leave town on the steamboat Silver Moon first thing tomorrow.”

“ Only this morning, ” repeated January thoughtfully. “Before he'd ‘heard' about the theft.”

“Exactly. And he told me straight out that he'd been in all morning.”

“So the trunk with the money in it—or trunks—will be on board by this time.”

“If he's smart, they will be,” agreed Granville. “And not marked with his name.”

“No.” January stared into the shadows for a time, while Rose got to her feet and slipped quietly through the gap in the sliding-doors to the dark cave of the dining-room, and the pantry that lay beyond.

Seeing in his mind the levee that lay at the foot of the Place des Armes, the bustling offices of the steamboat companies that crowded one side of it, the boxes and bales of goods that even at this slow season piled the waterfront: packets of skins from the mountains of the Mexican territories, bolts of cloth from England and New York. Corn and pumpkins from the river valley to the north, hay and fodder, squealing hogs and chickens in coops. Tools and machinery, plows and harness. Coming down-river or heading up. Quiet at this hour, probably, whereas during the business season, the winter season, the time when the river was high and the cotton and sugar crops coming in, men would be loading and unloading, dragging and rolling and cursing and sweating, throughout the torch-lit nights.

And among the noise and confusion, quiet lines of men and women would be loaded, the chains that linked them together clinking softly in the juddering glare. Slaves bound north for the markets in the new cotton lands of Missouri and Mississippi.

Even through the wooden shutters that closed most of the French doors of the big house, it seemed to January that he could hear the far-off sounds of the levee, the shouting of the gang-bosses, the clank of steamboat bells.

He had been to Europe, to London and Paris, but he had not been farther than St. John's Parish, thirty miles up-river from the city. Even that had scared him.

In New Orleans, he was known. If anything happened to destroy the “freedom papers” that he was required by law to show anyone who asked, there were prominent shopkeepers, merchants, even a lawyer or two who could point to him and say, That is Benjamin January, the piano teacher. He's a free man, and not a slave.

Once out of town, on the river, that would not be the case.

“And you want me to find the trunks with the money in them, and bring them back?” he asked at last. “Without letting anyone know what happened?”

“Yes,” said Granville. “I'll have a notarized letter of introduction to you by midnight, authorizing you to act as my agent in this matter and requesting the captain of the Silver Moon —and whatever law enforcement officials you need—to assist you. But I promise you, if you play that trump-card without having the money right under your hand, all you'll do is lose everything, destroy the bank, and ruin every depositor we have.”