New Orleans Noir

invasion. How many of those banks are still in operation, do you suppose? Private banks come and go like waterfront cafés.”
    “Which would be why Uncle Walter spread the funds out among so many. The first on the list is the Bank of New York, and that’s still in operation. So Kentucky will get at least a little money out of it.”
    “Which she’ll probably drink up within a week,” sighed Hannibal. “I would, anyway. It does seem a waste.”
    Screams resounded from the yard below, followed by shots and the crash of a body being heaved out the Broadhorn’s back door. Both men and Delly tilted their heads toward the window to ascertain that it was only a fight between six or seven customers, clawing and gouging in the mud of the yard while Kentucky Williams roared curses at them from the porch.
    “It does,” January agreed. “But if we do more than take a reasonable sum for services rendered, on the grounds that as upstanding citizens we deserve the money more than she does, how does that make us different from the man who slashed up Delly with a knife?”
    The next morning, January took delivery of the code paper, and spent until early afternoon closeted up with the Bible, deciphering names. “I’d like to get this back to the saloon before it opens,” he said to Hannibal, who had put in an appearance—at a far earlier hour than was usual for him to be about—to assist. “The doctor I talked to said Porter’s wounds weren’t deep. He should be able to use his arm by this evening. It would be a shame if the book isn’t there when he makes his next attempt.”
    Right on schedule, that evening, while January was again changing Delly’s dressings, a tumult of shouting and two shots resounded from the saloon below, followed a moment later by Hannibal’s arrival at the top of the ladder.
    “He’s downstairs,” gasped the fiddler, panting from just the climb. “Done up as a preacher in the most ridiculous wig and false whiskers you’ve ever seen.”
    “Who got shot?” January asked, scrambling down the ladder after Hannibal, crossing to the porch at a run.
    “Nobody—but Porter went down with what I assume to be chicken blood all over him like an Indian massacre.”
    They sprang up the porch steps and peered through the Broadhorn’s back door in time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s dim lamplight.
    “I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of God, is there a Bible in this house?”
    As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal and January traded disbelieving glances. “I’ve seen better acting at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.
    The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched the volume to his ensanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my daughter—”
    And with a crash, the lights went out.
    “Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly, as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms spring through the door between them and sprint away across the yard.
    Inside the saloon, men were crashing around and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed, “Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”
    “Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler, as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months, writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he doesn’t have right.”
    “Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl—who’s going to be scarred for the rest of her life—deserves more than a little frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure map leading to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the south of Mexico; a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of them died. A land wrought by Satan, he said, to punish