The rest were gone, dispersed, sent up or down the river on one steamer or another by Julian’s command, searching for money, safety, a new place to gather. Damon Julian had finally stirred.
The moonlight was soft and bright as butter upon the river. The stars were out. Along the levee, dozens of steamers crowded in next to the sailing ships with their high, proud masts and furled canvas sails. Niggers moved cotton and sugar and flour from one sort of boat to the other. The air was humid and fragrant, the streets crowded.
They found a table that gave them a good view of the bustle, and ordered café au lait and the fried sugar pastries the stall was famous for. Sour Billy bit into one and got sugar powder all over his vest and sleeves. He cussed loudly.
Damon Julian laughed, his laughter as sweet as the moonlight. “Ah, Billy. How amusing you are.”
Sour Billy hated being laughed at worse than he hated anything, but he looked up at Julian’s dark eyes and forced a grin. “Yes, sir,” he said with a rueful shake of his head.
Julian ate his own pastry neatly, so no sugar whitened the rich dark gray of his suit, or the sheen of his scarlet tie. When he was done, he sipped at his café au lait while his gaze swept over the levee and wandered among the passersby on the street. “There,” he said shortly, “the woman beneath the cypress.” The others looked. “Is she not striking?”
She was a Creole lady, escorted by two dangerous-looking gentlemen. Damon Julian stared at her like a love-struck youth, his pale face unlined and serene, his hair a mass of fine dark curls, his eyes large and melancholy. But even across the table, Sour Billy could feel the heat in those eyes, and he was afraid.
“She is exquisite,” Cynthia said.
“She has Valerie’s hair,” Armand added.
Kurt smiled. “Will you take her, Damon?”
The woman and her companions were going away from them, walking in front of an ornate wrought-iron fence. Damon Julian watched them thoughtfully. “No,” he said at last, turning back to the table and sipping his café au lait. “The night is too young, the streets are too crowded, and I am weary. Let us sit.”
Armand looked downcast and anxious. Julian smiled at him briefly, then leaned forward and laid a hand on Armand’s sleeve. “We will drink before the dawn comes,” he said. “You have my word.”
“I know a place,” Sour Billy added conspiratorially, “a real fancy house, with a bar, red velvet chairs, good drinks. The girls are all beautiful, you’ll see. You can get one all night for a twenty-dollar gold piece. In the morning, well, well.” He chuckled. “But we’ll be gone when they find what they find, and it’s cheaper than buyin’ fancy girls. Yes, sir.”
Damon Julian’s black eyes were amused. “Billy makes me niggardly,” he said to the others, “but whatever would we do without him?” He looked about again, bored. “I should come into the city more often. When one is sated, one loses sight of all the other pleasures.” He sighed. “Can you feel it? The air is rank with it, Billy!”
“What?” said Sour Billy.
“Life, Billy.” Julian’s smile mocked him, but Billy made himself smile back. “Life and love and lust, rich food and rich wine, rich dreams and hope, Billy. All of it here around us. Possibilities.” His eyes glittered. “Why should I pursue that beauty who went by us, when there are so many others, so many possibilities? Can you answer?”
“I—Mister Julian, I don’t—”
“No, Billy, you don’t, do you?” Julian laughed. “My whims are life and death to these cattle, Billy. If you are ever to be one of us, you must understand that. I am pleasure, Billy. I am power. And the essence of what I am, of pleasure and power, lies in possibility. My own possibilities are vast, and have no limit, as our years have no limit. But I am the limit to these cattle, I am the end of all their hopes, of all their possibilities. Do you begin to understand? To slake the red thirst, that is nothing, any old darkie on his deathbed will do for that. Yet how much finer to drink of the young, the rich, the beautiful, those whose lives stretch out ahead of them, whose days and nights glitter and shine with promise! Blood is but blood, any animal can sip at it, any of them.” He gestured languidly, at the steamboatmen on the levee, the niggers toting their hogsheads, and all the richly dressed folk of the Vieux Carré. “It is not the blood that ennobles, that makes one a master. It is the life, Billy. Drink of their lives and yours becomes longer. Eat of their flesh and yours grows stronger. Feast on beauty and wax more beautiful.”
Sour Billy Tipton listened eagerly; he had seldom seen Julian in so expansive a mood. Sitting in the darkness of the library, Julian tended to be brusque and frightening. Beyond it, out in the world again, he glittered, reminding Sour Billy of the way he had been when he first arrived with Charles Garoux at the plantation where Billy was overseer. He said as much.
Julian nodded. “Yes,” he said, “the plantation is safe, but in safety and satiety is danger.” His teeth were white when he smiled. “Charles Garoux,” he mused. “Ah, the possibilities of that youth! He was beautiful in his way, strong, healthy. A firebrand, beloved by all the ladies, admired by other men. Even the darkies loved Master Charles. He would have had a grand life! His nature was so open as well, it was easy to befriend him, to win his undying trust by saving him from poor Kurt here.” Julian interrupted himself with a laugh. “Then, once I had been welcomed into his house, easier still to come to him every night, and drain him, little by little, so he seemed to sicken and die. Once he woke when I was in his room, and thought I had come to comfort him. I leaned over his bed, and he reached up and clasped me to him, and I drank. Ah, the sweetness of Charles, all the strength and beauty of him!”
“The old man was damn upset when he up and died,” Sour Billy put in. Personally, he’d been delighted. Charles Garoux had always been telling his father that Billy was too hard on the niggers, and trying to get him dismissed. As if you could get any work from a nigger by being soft.
“Yes, Garoux was distraught,” said Julian. “How fortunate that I was there to comfort him in his grief. His son’s best friend. How often he told me, afterward, that I had become like a fourth son to him as we mourned.”
Sour Billy remembered it well. Julian had handled it real good. The younger sons had let down the old man; Jean-Pierre was a drunken lout, and Philip a weakling who wept like a woman at his brother’s funeral, but Damon Julian had been a tower of manly strength. They had buried Charles out back of the plantation, in the family cemetery. The ground being so damp in these parts, he’d been laid to rest in a big marble mausoleum with a winged victory on top of it. It stayed nice and cool in there, even in the heat of August. Sour Billy had gone into the tomb many a time in the years since, to drink and piss on Charles’s coffin. Once he’d dragged a nigger wench in there with him, slapped her around a little and had her three-four times, just so old Charles’s ghost could see the proper way to handle niggers.
Charles had only been the beginning, Sour Billy recalled. Six months later Jean-Pierre rode off to do some whoring and gambling in the city, and he never did ride back, and it wasn’t long after that when poor timid Philip got himself all ripped up by some kind of animal in the woods. Old Garoux was real sick at heart by then, but Damon Julian was by his side through all of it, helping. Finally Garoux adopted him, and wrote a new will leaving him just about everything.
There was a night not too long after that Sour Billy would never forget, when Damon Julian had demonstrated how thoroughly old René Garoux was in his power. It was up in the old man’s bedroom. Valerie was there, and Adrienne and Alain as well, they’d all been living in the big house, since any friend of Julian’s was welcome in the Garoux home. They watched with Sour Billy while Damon Julian stood at the side of the great canopied bed and pierced the old man through with his black eyes and his easy smile and told him the truth, all the truth about what had happened to Charles and Jean-Pierre and Philip. Julian was wearing Charles’s signet ring, and Valerie had its twin on a chain about her neck. Hers had onc
e belonged to the missing Jean-Pierre. She had not wanted to wear it. The thirst was on her, but she wanted to finish old Garoux quickly, without talk. But Damon Julian stilled her protests with soft words and cold eyes, so she wore the ring and stood meekly and listened.
When Julian had finished his story, Garoux had been shaking, his rheumy eyes full of tears and pain and hate. And then, astoundingly, Damon Julian had told Sour Billy to hand the old man his knife. “He ain’t dead yet, Mister Julian,” Billy had protested. “He’ll cut your guts out.”
But Julian only glanced at him and smiled, so Sour Billy reached back and produced the knife and put it into Garoux’s wrinkled, liver-spotted grasp. The old man’s hands shook so bad that Billy had been afraid he was going to drop the damn thing, but somehow he hung on to it. Damon Julian sat on the edge of the bed. “René,” he said, “my friends are thirsty.” His voice was so quiet, so liquid.
That was all he had to say. Alain produced a glass, a fine crystal etched with the family crest, and old René Garoux carefully cut open the vein in his wrist and filled the glass with his own steaming red blood, crying and trembling all the while. Valerie and Alain and Adrienne passed the glass from hand to hand, but it was left to Damon Julian to finish it off, while Garoux bled to death in his bed.
“Garoux gave us some good years,” Kurt was saying. His words drew Sour Billy out of his memories. “Rich and safe, off by ourselves, the city here whenever we wanted it. Food and drink and niggers to wait on us, a fancy girl every month.”
“Yet it ended,” Julian said, a trifle wistfully. “All things must end, Kurt. Do you mourn it?”
“Things aren’t the same,” Kurt admitted. “Dust everywhere, the house rotting, rats. I’m not anxious to move again, Damon. Out in the world, we are never secure. After a hunt, there is always the fear, the hiding, the running. I do not want that again.”
Julian smiled sardonically. “Inconvenient, true, but not without spice. You are young, Kurt. Remember, however they may hound you, you are the master. You will see them dead, and their children, and their children’s children. The Garoux home falls into ruin. It is nothing. All these things the cattle make fall into ruin. I have seen Rome itself turn to dust. Only we go on.” He shrugged. “And we may yet find another like René Garoux.”
“So long as we are with you,” Cynthia said anxiously. She was a slight, pretty woman with brown eyes, and she had become Julian’s favorite since he had dismissed Valerie, but even Sour Billy could tell that she was insecure about her position. “It is worse when we are alone.”
“So you do not wish to leave me?” Damon Julian asked her, smiling.
“No,” she said. “Please.” Kurt and Armand were looking at him as well. Julian had begun sending away his companions a month ago, very suddenly. Valerie was exiled first, as she had begged, though he sent her upriver not with the troublesome Jean, but with dark handsome Raymond, who was cruel and strong and—some said—Julian’s own son. Raymond would be sure to keep her safe, Julian said mockingly as Valerie knelt before him that night. Jean was given his leave the next night, and went off alone, and Sour Billy thought that would be the end of it. He was wrong. Damon Julian had some new thought in his head, and so Jorge was sent away a week later, and then Cara and Vincent, and then the others, alone or in pairs. Now those who remained knew that none of them were safe.
“Ah,” Julian said to Cynthia, amused. “Well, there are only five of us now. If we are careful, and we make each fancy girl last for, oh, a month or two, sipping slowly as it were—why then, I believe we can last until winter. By then one of the others will have sent word, perhaps. We shall see. Until then, you may stay, darling. And Michelle as well, and you, Kurt.”
Armand looked stricken. “And me?” he blurted. “Damon, please.”
“Is it the thirst, Armand? Is that why you tremble? Control yourself. Will you rip and tear when we reach these friends of Billy’s? You know how I frown on that.” His eyes narrowed. “I am still thinking about you, Armand.”
Armand looked down at his empty cup.
“I’ll stay,” Sour Billy announced.
“Ah,” said Damon Julian. “Of course. Why, Billy, what would we do without you?” Sour Billy Tipton didn’t much like the smile Julian wore then, but there wasn’t nothing to be done about it.
A short time later, they set off to the place Billy had promised to show them. The house was outside the Vieux Carré, in the American section of New Orleans, but within walking distance. Damon Julian went in front, walking through the narrow gaslit streets arm in arm with Cynthia, wearing a private ghost of a smile as he regarded the iron balconies, the gates opening on courtyards with their flambeaux and their fountains, the gas lamps atop iron poles. Sour Billy directed them. Soon they were in a darker, rawer part of town, where the buildings were wood or crumbling tabby-brick, made of ground oyster shells and sand. Even the gas lines had not extended this far, though the city had had its gas works for more than twenty years. At the corners, oil lamps swung from heavy iron chains hung diagonally across the streets and supported by great hooks driven into the sides of buildings. They burned with a sensual smoky light. Julian and Cynthia passed from pools of light into shadow, back into light, then again into shadow. Sour Billy and the others followed.
A party of three men stepped out from an alley and crossed their path. Julian ignored them, but one of the men glimpsed Sour Billy as he passed beneath a light. “You!” he said.
Sour Billy turned his stare on them, saying nothing. They were young Creoles, half-drunk and therefore dangerous.
“I know you, monsieur,”the man said. He stepped up to Sour Billy, his dark face flushed with drink and anger. “Have you forgotten me? I was with Georges Montreuil the day you affronted him in the French Exchange.”
Sour Billy recognized him. “Well, well,” he said.
“Monsieur Montreuil vanished one June night, after an evening of gaming at the St. Louis,” the man said stiffly.
“I’m real grieved,” Sour Billy said. “I guess he must of won too much, and got robbed for his trouble.”
“He lost, monsieur. He had been losing steadily for some weeks. He had nothing worth stealing. No, I do not think it was robbery. I think it was you, Mister Tipton. He had been asking about you. He meant to deal with you like the trash you are. You are no gentleman, monsieur, or I would call you out. If you dare show your face in the Vieux Carré again, however, you have my word that I shall whip you through the streets like a nigger. Do you hear me?”
“I hear,” said Sour Billy. He spat on the man’s boot.
The Creole swore and his face paled with rage. He took a step forward and reached out for Sour Billy, but Damon Julian stepped between them, and stopped the man with a hand against his chest. “Monsieur,” Julian said, in a voice like wine and honey. The man halted, confused. “I can assure you that Mister Tipton did no harm to your friend, sir.”
“Who are you?” Even half-drunk, the Creole clearly recognized that Julian was a different sort of person than Sour Billy; his fine clothes, cool features, cultured voice, all marked him a gentleman. Julian’s eyes glittered dangerously in the lamplight.
“I am Mister Tipton’s employer,” Julian said. “May we discuss this affair somewhere other than the public street? I know a place farther on where we can sit beneath the moon and sip drinks while we talk. Will you let me buy your friends and you a refreshment?”
One of the other Creoles stepped up beside his friend. “Let us hear him out, Richard.”
Grudgingly, the man consented. “Billy,” Damon Julian said, “do show us the way.” Sour Billy Tipton suppressed a smile, nodded, and led them off. A block away they turned into an alley, and followed it back into a dark court. Sour Billy sat down on the edge of a scum-covered pool. The water soaked through the seat of his pants, but he didn’t care.
“What is this place?” demanded Montreuil’s friend. “This is no tavern!”
“Well,” said Sour Billy Tip
ton. “Well. I must have turned wrong.” The other Creoles had entered the court, followed by the rest of Julian’s party. Kurt and Cynthia stood by the mouth of the alley. Armand moved closer to the fountain.
“I do not like this,” one of the men said.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“Meaning?” asked Damon Julian. “Ah. A dark court, the moonlight, a pool. Your friend Montreuil died in just such a place, monsieur. Not in this place, but one very much like it. No, do not look at Billy. He bears no blame. If you have a quarrel, take it up with me.”
“You?” said Montreuil’s friend. “As you will. Permit me to retire a moment. My companions will act as my seconds.”
“Certainly,” said Julian. The man moved away, conferred briefly with his two companions. One of them stepped forward. Sour Billy rose from the pool’s edge and met him.
“I’m Mister Julian’s second,” Sour Billy said. “You want to talk terms?”
“You are no proper second,” the man began. He had a long, pretty face and dark brown hair.
“Terms,” Sour Billy repeated. His hand went behind his back. “Me, I’d favor knives.”
The man gave a small grunt and staggered backward. He looked down in terror. Sour Billy’s knife was buried hilt-deep in his gut, and a slow red stain was spreading across his vest. “God,” the man whimpered.
“That’s only me, though,” Sour Billy continued. “And I’m not a gentleman, no sir, not a proper second. Knives ain’t no proper weapon neither.” The man dropped to his knees, and his friends suddenly noticed and started forward in alarm. “Mister Julian now, he’s got different ideas. His weapon,” Billy smiled, “is teeth.”
Julian took Montreuil’s friend, the one called Richard. The other turned to run. Cynthia embraced him by the alley, and gave him a lingering wet kiss. He thrashed and struggled but could not break free of her embrace. Her pale hands brushed the back of his neck, and long nails sharp and thin as razors slid across his veins. Her mouth and tongue swallowed his scream.