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

Music gusted over the alley's rear gate. That led to the stable yard of the Promenade Hotel, and would
be locked, too, at this hour, though the gaming-rooms were still running full-cock. Even in the slack days
of summer, when yellow fever stalked the town's fetid streets, the gamblingrooms were open, and it was
Carnival season now-January couldn't imagine what it would take to close them down.
Another carriage rattled by up Camp Street, its occupants blowing horns and banging tin pans. The hell
with this. January pulled off his gloves, shifted his music satchel to his left hand, and balled his right into a
fist the size of a cannonball. I can always tell the judge I couldn't tell if they were white or black, in the
dark. He took off his hat, and that annoyed him, too: if it came to fighting, he'd probably lose it, and it
was new. The old one had been demolished by a gang of drunk upriver Kentucky ruffians who'd
cornered him one night last October on his way back from playing at a ball. Hat and satchel in his left
hand, right hand freed and ready, heart hammering in his breast, January put his right shoulder to the
theater wall and moved forward again.
He'd seen no forms silhouetted against the street's dim glow. Only one niche broke the hundred feet of
brick theater wall between him and the alley mouth-the door from which stairs ascended to the slaves'
section of the gallery, and the half-tier of boxes reserved for the free colored. He cursed himself Why
couldn't he remember if there were two or three doorways in the wall of Chaney's cotton yard on the
other side, or where they were, after all the times he'd been up and down this alley?
Cursed himself, too, for coming back to New Orleans at all-to a town where he could be beaten up by
white men with impunity.
Wondered, for the thousandth time since coming back thirty months ago, why he hadn't stayed in Paris.
Going insane from grief couldn't be that unpleasant, could it?
The creak of boot-leather, in touching-distance of his own long arm. Stale sweat, stale liquor, dribbled
tobaccospit, and long-abiding dirt ...
Beside him in the dark. Behind him in the dark. Nothing.
To turn and look, much less to break into a run, would invite attack. His breath sounded like a bellows in
his own ears and his heart like a bamboula drum. Nothing.
The dim radiance from the street strengthened before him. Still no squish of striding boots in the
horse-shitsmelling black stillness at his back. Not even a spit-warm wad of tobacco juice on the back of
his neck. He slid out into the flame-dotted murk of Camp Street and turned immediately right, taking
shelter behind one of the marble piers that flanked the American Theater's front stairs.
At that point, he reflected later, he should simply have crossed the street and made his way back to his
lodgings in the old French town on the other side of Canal Street like a good, uninquiring nigger should.
Then he would have been able to say, with perfect truth, I know nothing of murder, I know nothing of
blood, I know nothing of why anyone would crush skulls or burn buildings or try to kill me and my friends
in the dark. . . .
But the circumstance of not being attacked-not even spit on-by at least two drunk river-rats at three in
the morning in a back alley was so unusual that January set his hat and music-satchel safely out of the
way on the marble steps, settled himself farther back into the pier's inky shadow, and waited to see who
they were after.
And in doing so, almost certainly saved Lorenzo Belaggio's life.
The eight gas-lamps that so brilliantly illuminated the theater's fa├зade earlier in the night-its owner, James
Caldwell, was also part owner of the new municipal gasworks-were quenched. Now and then a carriage
rattled by, driven full-speed by improbably costumed Mohicans or Musketeers on their way to one last
drink, one last round of faro or vingt-et-un after whatever party or ball had occupied their evening, but no
one gave him a glance. A blue-uniformed representative of the City Guards, January supposed, would be
along shortly to demand an account of his business so long after curfew and a look at the papers that
proved him a free man.
But before that could happen, he heard a man shout "Dio mio!" and then, `Nierdones!Assassini!" and
recognized the Milanese voice of the impresario who'd spent the evening taking orchestra and company
through the first rehearsal of his new opera, Othello. January lunged to his feet, down the alley, hearing