New Orleans Noir

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.
    He wasn’t sure if there was still a runaway slave village somewhere west of Bayou St. John, but as he quartered the squishy ground he would occasionally see fish lines in the bayous, or red flannel juju-bags hanging from the trees. He was just beginning to wonder if he’d have to abandon his quest and return to town—he would be playing at a subscription ball at the Théâtre d’Orléans that night—when he turned his head and saw, standing in the deep oyster grass across a murky little bayou, the one man in New Orleans taller than his own 6'3" height: massive, African-black like himself, clothed in rags with only a muscular stump where his left arm had been.
    Cut-Arm, king of the runaways of the ciprière.
    “You not wanderin’ around out here lookin’ for anybody,