Barbara Hambly - Dead water

And he thought: I'm going to kill my mother.

Granville was an old crony of his mother's. It was on her urging—as well as because January himself had known the banker for three years—that he'd put the money left after the initial payment on the house into the Bank of Louisiana.

He took a deep breath while Granville tried to find a way to say Your money is gone. For months January had been reading about bank failures in the newspapers, the messy aftermath of President Jackson's fiscal policies. All over New Orleans, merchants consulted Bank Note Reporters before any major purchase, to learn how much the notes of any particular bank were being discounted that month, and Bank Note Detectors, in a vain effort to learn if the notes they were being offered were counterfeit. There was no way of telling when any of the state-chartered—or frankly private—banks would collapse, leaving depositors with handfuls of worthless paper.

All this went through January's mind in the seconds between his question and the banker's reply.

“I'm empowered to offer you three hundred dollars.”

“Considering we have over four thousand in your bank,” said January, remembering to add—because he was addressing a white man—“. . . sir. Or we did.”

“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.”

“Ourselves included.” The incomparable smell of coffee filled the quiet gloom as Rose returned with a tray. The coffee would have been warming in the pantry, awaiting his return from Congo Square—it seemed like another lifetime. Rose made excellent coffee, though she was an otherwise execrable cook. It crossed January's mind that without the assistance of the hired freedwoman Abigail and Abigail's daughter, Rose would be quickly swallowed up by the drudgery of cleaning, cooking, and endless sewing that occupied the time of most women who kept house.

Until, of course, the house itself was foreclosed.

His hand shook a little as he took the coffee cup she offered. One bite told him that the sweet biscuits that accompanied it had been made by Abigail, not Rose.

“How much money are we talking about?” Rose seated herself again. “And in what form? How many trunks are we looking for?”

“Three or four at least,” said Granville, turning a little to speak to her. “Maybe as many as ten.” Having set up four of his former free colored mistresses in business, reflected January, at least Granville didn't suffer from the common white man's delusion that women of color—or women in general—were slightly incompetent. “He stole nearly four million dollars, of which about a hundred thousand was in gold.”

Rose's eyebrows shot up. “That's a lot of gold.”

“About six hundred pounds of it,” Granville replied. “The rest is in notes and drafts on other banks—including the Bank of Pennsylvania, which as you know received a great deal of the Federal gold—and the Bank of England. There are also sight-drafts on a number of the plantations hereabouts against next winter's crop. Any single trunk containing the gold would be too heavy to lift, so it has to be spread out among several, padded up with the paper.”

“You say Weems came to you with the highest recommendations,” said January. “From whom? What do you know about the man? Where is he from?”

“Philadelphia,” said Granville like a New Yorker: Philadelphier, a trick of speech that made January wonder whether there was a still-more-brotherly town of Philadelphiest somewhere even farther north. “He was a clerk when I was vice-president of the Broadway Bank and Trust, and worked his way up after I was sent down here. Everyone spoke highly of his abilities.”

Granville scowled, as if everyone had conspired to lie and would, if he had anything to say in the matter, suffer the consequences.

“It probably paid him to have abilities when the whole country's economic system wasn't being run by wildcat private banks,” remarked January dryly. Granville opened his mouth to protest—the Bank of Louisiana, though private, had been chartered by the State—and January asked, “Drink?”

Granville's square face darkened, and he looked as if he were about to demand what the hell business it was of January's. Then he subsided a little, like porridge coming off the boil, and sipped his coffee. “I've seen Weems look down his nose at drunkards on the street,” he answered. “I've never seen him go into a public house. But I don't keep company with the man, so in fact I don't know whether he drinks or not.”

“Women?”

Again Granville's beady eyes flashed at the suggestion that an employee of his bank would chase trollops up and down Gallatin Street, but since that employee had almost certainly walked off with large sums of the bank's money, there wasn't a great deal he could be self-righteous about. “He was engaged to the daughter of the President of the Jersey Trust Bank,” he said slowly. “She married someone else. That's when he came here. He looks down upon women as he looks down upon drunkards. Looks down on a great many things, for a man who's only five feet five inches tall himself.” Granville gave out a bearlike rumbling guffaw. “Nor does he gamble, beyond a hand or two of whist. He often said how he despised waste and wastrels.”

“Which must have made it easier,” remarked Rose, “for him to walk off with the money—if he gave the matter a second thought at all. I'm sure he considers he has better uses for the money than its legal owners.” She folded her long-fingered hands on her knee, a tall, angular woman who moved as if she were perpetually about to trip. She had the light medium-brown hair of her white father and grandfather, worn in a neat chignon as long as she was out of sight of the laws that required her to cover it in a slave's headcloth. Behind the gold reflections of candle-light on her spectacles, her eyes were gray-green. “What does he look like? How will we know him?”

Granville raised his eyebrows a bit at the “we,” but January—though he experienced his usual sense of protesting shock at the thought of Rose sharing his danger—felt no surprise. A spinster into her late twenties and a woman who had operated her own school for several years, Rose was not one to watch knight-errantry from the dull safety of a bower window.

He knew, too, that there were things a woman could learn in conversation with other women, that would be hidden from a man.

But he felt sick inside at the thought of her taking the steamboat north into territory where she'd fetch seven or eight hundred dollars on the auction-block, if she happened to lose her freedom papers or have them taken from her.

“I'll take you to the wharf when you get your tickets, and point him out as he gets on board,” promised the banker.

“The Silver Moon's an American boat, isn't it?” asked January. “Will they even hire a stateroom to a man and woman of color? Or are we going to have to take deck-passage? In which case,” he added, “we're not going to be in much of a position to observe whatever Weems is doing.”

“You'll do it, then?” The hope gleaming in Granville's eyes, and the lightening of his voice, made him seem younger, like a child suddenly relieved of terrible fear. January realized then that the man must have been as sick with dread as he was himself.