"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 5 - Die Upon A Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Benjamin January
Book 5
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Die Upon A Kiss

?
Barbara Hambly
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For Adrian


Special thanks, as always, are due to Pamela Areeneaux and the Staff of the Historic New Orleans
Collection; to Paul, Bill, Sand, and Norman at Le Monde Creole; to Emily Clark; to Rebecca Witjas; to
Kate Miciak; to Laurie Perry; to Stephanie Hall; to Bob Moraski for all his time and knowledge; to Jill
and Charles for helping me through much awfulness; and to George.
? One

". . . nigger," muttered a man's voice, hoarse in the dark of the alley but very clear.
Benjamin January froze in his tracks. Would this, he wondered, be the occasion on which he'd be hauled
into court and hanged-or, more informally, beaten to death on the public street-for the crime of defending
himself against a white man's assault?
The gas-jet above the American Theater's stage door was out. A misty glimmer beyond the alley's
narrow mouth showed him that the gambling-parlor at the City Hotel on the other side of Camp Street
was still in operation, and above the wet plop of hooves, the creak of harness, a man's voice sang jerkily
in English about Ireland's em'rald hills. It was past three and bitterly cold. Even in Carnival season, New
Orleans had to sleep sometime.
January considered turning immediately back to the stage door and retreating through the theater and out
to the street by one of the side-doors that admitted patrons to its galleries or pit. He was a big man-six
feet three-and built on what the slave-dealers at the baracoons along Baronne Street liked to call
"Herculean" lines; he could have taken most assailants without trouble. But he was also forty-two years
old and had learned not to take on anybody in a pitch-dark alley less than five feet wide, especially when
he didn't know if they were a) armed b) white or c) alone. Words had been uttered: that implied one
auditor at least.
But Marguerite Scie, ballet mistress of the Theater's new Opera company, had locked the alley door
behind him. By this time, she'd have ascended from the prop room on the ground floor to the backstage
regions immediately above. She and January had been catching up on seven years worth of old times
since rehearsal had ended at eleven, and January wasn't sure there was anyone else in the building to hear
him pound the door and shout.
And he'd learned that when white men got drunk enough to go around looking for black ones to beat up,
flight was effective only if you were damn sure you'd get away. It was like escaping from a pack of wild
dogs. If you acted like prey, you'd become it.
For a time he stood listening in the darkness.
Anger smoldered in him that he'd even contemplate flight. In Paris, where he'd lived for sixteen years,
he'd been assaulted once or twice, coming home late from night surgery at the H6tel Dieu. Later, after his
marriage, he'd played piano until the small hours at society balls, at the Opera or the ballet jobs that paid
more than a junior surgeon ever earned-and had walked through darker streets than this. But even in the
Halles district, or the St. Antoine, few of the local orgues were dim-witted enough to take on someone
who bore that close a resemblance to an oak tree.
In New Orleans a white man would do it-and expect to get away with it-if his victim was black.