Dead water

“Well, they can't very well board again before daybreak without drawing attention to themselves.” January shrugged his rough jacket straight: the sorry garment he'd gotten from Levi Christmas could pass him as either slave or a laboring freedman. He felt in his pocket again for the pass Hannibal had written him. “If they check into a hotel, I'm guessing the night porter will just store the trunk somewhere until more staff arrives in the morning. It may be another ruse, but we can't afford to assume that it is. There they go.” Turning, he clasped Rose hard in his arms. As he kissed her he seemed to hear a whispering voice hiss in his ear: Marinette-of-the-Dry- Arms will tear your woman from your arms. . . . “Whatever you do, stay on the boat. We'll get you word as soon as we can.”

As at Natchez, it was no difficult matter to follow Weems's cab up the hill. Clay Street was nearly as steep as Natchez's bluff, and the hill, though set a little farther back from the river, was just as high, one of the long line of bluffs that rose like a wall on the east side of the river. Once away from the torchlight and clamor of the red-light district along the landing, Vicksburg, in its darkness and silence, seemed a much more American town than Natchez. Though the town was only twenty years old, it already had showy houses, pillared like Greek temples in the style favored by Americans: cotton-planters whose lands lay across the river on the flat, fertile, and smotheringly hot delta plain.

The Majestic Hotel was of this style, new and freshly-painted, with very young elm-trees planted on either side of its door. The night porter who opened for Weems and Mrs. Fischer had a gimcrack and brightly-painted air to him, too, fresh-faced and busy. From the darkness beneath the oak-trees across the street, January left Hannibal to watch the front door and followed the cab around to the rear yard. There Sophie got down, saw to it that the trunks were put in a locked shed, tipped the porter, and went inside, carrying her own modest bundle of clean apron and fresh petticoat.

There was no gate on the yard. January stepped back out of sight as the cab passed him—the single lantern above the hotel's rear door threw about as much light as a tallow candle—then slipped around back to Adams Street, where Hannibal waited under the oaks of the vacant lot.

“They've taken a room.” The fiddler pointed to a curtained window now glowing with the illumination of lamplight within. “Goodness knows what name they gave. The merchant, to secure his treasure / Conveys it in a borrowed name. . . . Though they may in fact just spend the night playing backgammon, as they cannot, as you pointed out, get back on the boat without drawing attention to themselves until morning. Are the trunks back there?”

“In a padlocked shed.”

“Two massy keys he bore of metals twain / The golden opes, the iron shuts amain. I shall return 'ere the leviathan can swim a league. . . . though I wonder now whether that's in low water or high. For some must watch, while some must sleep / So runs the world away. . . .” He darted across the street and vanished like a wayward elf into the darkness.

The lamp upstairs was still burning when Hannibal re-materialized at his side.

“Stand, and unfold yourself,” whispered his voice from the shadows, and quite properly January gave back the next line from the opening of Hamlet,

“Long live the king. You come most carefully upon your hour.”

“Wretched newfangled patent Yankee locks on the trunks.” Hannibal flexed his long fingers, and shivered, though the night was gluily warm. “But worth the effort. They're full of old books, Bible tracts and collections of sermons . . . perhaps we should reclaim them and make a present of them to Mr. Quince.”

“They'll be heading back to the boat as soon as they think they're unobserved, then,” said January. He glanced up at the moon, trying to gauge how many hours had passed. “Would you do me a favor? Go back to the boat and see what they've done with the engines? See whether they've let the steam down—which will mean the boat's here until noon at least—or just banked the furnaces so they can get up steam in a few minutes. You don't need to rush coming back,” he added, taking a second look, by the reflected glow of the single door-lantern across the street, at his friend's rather drawn face.

“Will ye reach there by moonlight / If your horse be good and your spurs be bright,” said Hannibal, saluting. “I will be bloody, bold, and resolute. You be bloody, bold, and resolute as well, amicus meus, and watch your back. We may be away from the waterfront, but personally, I wouldn't trust myself anywhere in this town—or anywhere around our precious friends up in that hotel-room.”

With that he departed, and January didn't begin to worry about him until cock-crow. The light burned steadily in the window until almost dawn; by four, first light began to flush the sky above the tangled morasses of cow- pastures, swamps, and willow-choked ravines that stretched out behind the town. Despite the high, breezy situation of the town and the oil of citrus January had smeared on his face and hands, mosquitoes whined around him. Hannibal, he guessed, had rested when he returned to the Silver Moon—it was a long walk up and down a steep hill, and though the fiddler had lost the hoarse, wet cough of consumption last year, one never really recovered from the disease.

But when the shapes of trees and houses began to emerge from the blackness of night—when, as Ayasha quoted the blessed Koran, “a white thread could be told from a black one”—January began to wonder whether his friend had made it through the noisome alleys of the district Under-The-Hill in safety. They'd passed through a little after midnight coming here, but they'd been two men together, Hannibal's whiteness protecting January from molestation and January's size protecting Hannibal. Though Hannibal wasn't visibly wealthy, January was well aware that the men who haunted such dockside establishments would kill a man for his watch and boots.

Even worse, the thought crossed his mind that Rose might have come on Hannibal resting on deck and said, “I'll go instead. . . .”

The thought brought him out in a cold sweat. Had she tried to come up here sometime during the small hours? Tried to pass through those filthy alleyways that were darker than the inside of a black cow?

He looked back at the nearest house. Servants were waking up. At certain times of the day a black man could idle unremarked, but early dawn wasn't one of them, not across the street from the best hotel in town. He moved off to loiter behind the corner of a closed-up wine-merchant's store halfway down the block.

A porter came out of the hotel and began sweeping the steps. A cab drew up, depositing the stumpy black forms of Mr. Rosenfeld and Mr. Goldblatt from the Silver Moon, with more luggage than January could have imagined possible. He wondered how much of their money Byrne the gambler had managed to lift.

All over town, cocks shrilled the coming morning, above a rising, insistent twitter of lesser birds. Wagons passed on the street, heading to the wharves. A burly-bearded gentleman emerged from the hotel, nearly dragging his dainty wife into the waiting cab.