Dead water - Barbara Hambly [16]
He stopped, looking around the seedy darkness of the room, with weeds growing up through the cracks in the board floor and roaches spotting the wall behind the candle flame. Looking at Hannibal's face, thin with a lifetime of illness and pain, and at the long, sensitive hands in the frayed cuffs.
The fiddler's grin was wry under his graying mustache. “To save you and Athene from the life I daily live, amicus meus, I will gladly play the despot and spend my days in the company of tobacco-spitting Americans in a steamboat saloon—particularly at the Bank of Louisiana's expense. I think I have a shirt in here somewhere that will not violate the personation of a man with enough money to own a slave.”
On the other side of the thin partition wall, January heard a man curse in English, followed by a woman's protesting drawl, “Just gimme a minute. . . .” Bedropes creaked mightily.
“The fight must be over,” January opined.
A huge and comprehensively drunk boatman loomed suddenly in the doorway. “Look out, beautiful, 'cause here comes the very child that coined the name of Thunder! Cock-a-doodle-do!” He let fall his trousers, at which Hannibal promptly began to applaud.
The boatman retreated in confusion.
“Happens every week,” sighed the fiddler, pulling his valise from under the bed. “I've tried chalking NO GIRLS HERE on the door, but that doesn't seem to work either . . . and it doesn't help that occasionally one of the girls will entertain a customer here while I'm playing up front. . . .”
Shouts of laughter outside. “You done already, Kyle? I got me a pet jack-rabbit takes more time than that!”
“A man can live in this fashion for a time.” Hannibal sighed, fishing in yet another goods-box for his few shirts of threadbare linen. “A long time, in my case. And a strong woman can endure it for a few years. But as the playwright says, Money is the sinews of love, as of war. Poverty can break a marriage, and I love you and Rose too much to want to see you turn on each other, as the poor so often do, and your happiness vanish for want of hope.”
He tossed in his shaving tackle and three half-empty bottles of opium and sherry. “So it remains only to arm myself, like Prince Achilles before the walls of Troy. The silver cuishes first his thighs infold; Then o'er his breast was braced the hollow gold. . . .”
Hannibal held up a much-frayed and slightly too large silk waistcoat, which must have been expensive when it was new, with a triple-notched collar some twenty years out of style. “The brazen sword a various baldric tied / That, starred with gems, hung glittering at his side. . . . Should I bring along a brazen sword, amicus meus?” He snapped shut his valise. “Or the great paternal spear the poet speaks of? How dangerous is Weems?”
“I have no idea.” January pinched out the candle, which Hannibal slipped into his pocket as the two men stood listening beside the door, waiting for the customers at the other cribs to go inside. “Nor who his accomplices are, if he has any, or how many of them there are.”
The flimsy walls shuddered with the slamming of a door. A woman's voice purred, “Well, hello, handsome,” from the next room, and January and Hannibal stepped out into the muggy heat of the June night.
Hannibal pulled shut the door behind him, and gestured extravagantly with his free hand.
“So let it be!
Portents and prodigies are lost on me.
I know my fate: to die, to see no more
My much-loved parents and my native shore—
Enough—when Heaven ordains, I sink in night:
“Now perish Troy!” he said, and rushed to fight.”
Even in summer's doldrums, the levee at New Orleans