Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 14

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I got to my feet and reached for the miserable creature; but another more competent than I was before me—a veritable giant of a black man, who materialized as suddenly and magically as though he’d popped from the ground like the Slave of the Lamp. It was the same enormous tooth-extractor who had watched me so amusedly in the hotel dining-room. He put his hand on my shoulder in an apologetic way, and I sank back into my chair as though pressed down by something elemental and irresistible. “With your permission,” he said, in a breathless small voice, “I wipe this man so he stay wiped. No sense white men hunting trouble in this place. They too much trouble without asking.”

He moved past me, gathered the slack of the waiter’s jacket in a ham-like hand, and lifted him a foot from the sidewalk. “My goo’ness me my,” this mountain of a man said in a faint, lackadaisical voice. “Luckiest nigra in whole world, that what you are! Anybody but me catch you kicking his wife’s nigra boy, you get your skull knocked outside in with cocomacaque. Me, I give you one little wipe.”

He set the waiter down on his heels with a jarring thump, removed a broad-brimmed hat of woven straw from his head, and tossed it on a table together with an enormous walking-stick; then, with a black forefinger the size of a cucumber, he delicately turned the waiter’s head to one side. The waiter, haughtily contemptuous, pushed petulantly at the black finger, whereupon the huge Negro’s upper body rolled a little to the left and his right fist came up against the waiter’s jaw almost gently, I thought. The waiter’s head jerked upward, his body leaned sharply like a sapling in a gale, and his feet performed an awkward backward-moving dance that carried him through the door of the café as if projected from a gun. From the dark interior came the sound of a heavy fall—breaking glass—then silence.

The wiper stooped over, lifted the little black boy from the sidewalk, gave him a slap on his rump, and made a commanding gesture with his hand—a fluttering, revolving gesture which said more plainly than words that the little boy was to pursue his six companions and bring them back to wait further orders.

He gave me a bashful smile, picked up his huge white hat, and adjusted it carefully on his head, which looked oddly small for his body, as a coconut might look if perched on the stump of a pine. “She’s not my habit to wipe folks,” he said, “but I very dark-minded about folks crueling little pickity boys. I think very barbarious. Also not my habit to interfere without being invited, but I know from how you start to wipe that you no Frenchman. This no time to altercate in Haiti. I hope you pardon my intrusion.”

“It never occurred to me you were intruding,” I said. “In fact, it was a great relief to see how neatly you—ah—wiped him. He certainly deserved wiping; and I’m grateful to you for taking it off my hands.”

It dawned upon me suddenly that this huge black man had been talking an elegant sort of American language. “Why,” I said, “I believe you’re an American, too. You don’t belong here—not with that manner of speech.”

He seemed immeasurably pleased: his head drooped on his shoulder and he giggled. “I King Dick,” he said. “General King Dick.”

“King?” I asked. “General? Are those names, or titles?”

Instead of answering, he looked down at the little black boy, who seemingly hadn’t moved since he’d been picked up and slapped on the rump. The boy’s face was contorted with despair and fear.

“What matter you, Alciatore?” King Dick asked. “I give odors you bring back those others.”

The boy, speechless, held up one package and burst into tears.

King Dick’s eyes rolled whitely. “My, my! Oh, my goo’ness me my! One gone! That one very uncomfable one, Alciatore. That my pearls!” He looked stricken. “You mean you look and look and they no sign of it?” He stooped over to peer under all the tables.

I went to the drain into which the waiter had kicked the package. There it was, elbow-deep in the opening; so I fumbled for it and handed it to King Dick.

At sight of it, the boy leaped in the air, made a squealing sound, then went bounding down the street like a small black monkey. King Dick subsided weakly into a chair, took from his pocket a green handkerchief the size of a pillow-slip, and mopped his brow.

“My goo’ness me my,” he exclaimed. “That a lesson to me! What I care about not being stylish! You know what in that package? Pearls! Nobody supposed carry his own bundles in Haiti, not even pearls; but not amusing when boys drop pearls in drain pipes. I rather carry my own bundles and stop being fashionable!”

“I don’t know what I’m expected to believe,” I said; “but isn’t it unusual to go shopping for pearls in Haiti, and aren’t kings something new in this part of the world?”

He looked at me intently; then went to the door of the café and stood there, shouting for coffee and rum in a sort of hog-French—an Anglicized French, slurred thickly into a soup-like speech that was scarcely recognizable. He was a surprising figure of a man, a good six and a half feet tall, with tremendous shoulders. There seemed to be substance to the blackness of his face, as though it would come off if rubbed. His mouth was as large as his head was small; and when he smiled, there seemed to be the fearful possibility that his face might be permanently separated into two parts by an expanse of innumerable glistening teeth. Against the blackness of his skin his eyeballs were so white and round that his usual look was one of innocent and benevolent surprise; whereas, when he smiled, his eyes were so narrowed by his all-embracing grin that he looked featureless—except for that vast exposure of teeth.

His clothes, as I have said, were of simple white linen, but the stick he carried was peculiar: a five-foot length of bamboo ending in a warty knob the size of a summer squash, which made it too unwieldy to be regarded as a cane. Yet, being bamboo, it must necessarily be too fragile for a weapon.

When he came back to the table, his manner toward me was offhand. I’d seen lawyers similarly offhand when trying to trap witnesses.

“That Alciatore very unfortunate if you not here,” he said. “If those pearls be lost, that unfortunate for me, too. My, my! Yes! Very costive.”

“That’s possible,” I said, “if you think you wouldn’t have looked in the drain yourself—and are sure they’re real pearls.”

He took the little parcel from his pocket, opened it and lifted a pad of black velvet. On a similar pad lay four shimmering globes of concentrated moonbeams, two the size of sparrow eggs, the other two the size of hummingbird eggs. He picked up one of the larger globes and turned it back and forth before my eyes. The colors in it put me in mind of a still ocean and the distant pale blue of the Maine coast on a hazy August morning.

“Beautiful!” I said. “Those must be worth a great deal.”

“I seen worse,” he said. “Pearls been cheap since French revoluted. Necks to wear ’em on been a litto scarce.” He held the glowing sphere close to his flat nose and stared at it with eyes that seemed about to pop from his head. “Ordinary times, pearl like this bring four thousand. Cost me two and a half.”

“Two and a half thousand!” I cried. “Two and a half thousand dollars?”

He nodded. “How much reward you think proper?”

“Reward?” I laughed, “I don’t want a reward! The box was there, and I picked it up. Sooner or later you’d have looked in the pipe yourself, even if I hadn’t been here.”

He put the pearls back into the box, tied it up and thrust it into his pocket, and stared at me impassively, much as a judge stares at a witness when making up his mind about his reliability.

The waiter, his skin several shades greener than when I’d first seen him, came cringingly to the table and placed upon it a pot of coffee and a squatty black bottle labeled “Miel de Jacmel.”

King Dick eyed him severely. “You been very malice,” he said in horrible French. “Imagine me to be Christophe, I would pull out your arms by the roots, take out your eyes with a spoon. Good thing I’m me, not Christophe! Remember that, case I ever need help.” He picked up his club and with its squash-like head dabbed at a fly on the table. It must, I thought, be feather-light, for so accurately did he wield it that the fly was audibly mashed.

The waiter backed away.

The seven little black boys, I saw, had returned and were standing round-eyed across the street, watching us. King Dick made a peremptory circling motion with his odd club, and all seven turned and faced the wall. He put the club on the table and gave me the portentous nod with which a man of large affairs expresses satisfaction at one of his own successful endeavors. “They trained young, where I live,” he said. “Around my place, they do what I say, and quick.”

I picked up his club, and almost dropped it, for it was as heavy as a bar of iron. “Why, what’s this?” I asked. “I thought it was bamboo.”

“That cocomacaque,” he said. “Male bamboo. Everybody in Haiti got a cocomacaque, but nobody got one like mine.”

His gaze wandered off across the Plaza to the oily blue water of the harbor. “Been some time,” he said absentmindedly, “since I run into anyone who didn’t want something, even when she hadn’t done nothing. My goo’ness me, they not anything you want?”

“Well,” I said, “if you happen to know the American Consul here, you might say a word to him for me. Do you know him?”

“Yarse.” I thought he eyed me furtively. “That Colonel Lear.”

“Lear!” I cried. “Not Tobias Lear! Is he a white-haired man who walks like a cat, softly, as if he walked on egg-shells?”

“Yarse.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Sick-sem months,” King Dick said.

“Well, by George,” I said, more to myself than to King Dick, “I believe Smith was right! I believe Lear had himself appointed to this place for a damned good reason, just as Smith suspected.”

“You already know that Colonel Lear?” King Dick asked.

“In a way,” I said. “I’ve met him, and I don’t like him, but I’ve got to see him because he’s the American Consul and the lady I’m hunting is an American.”

King Dick looked interested. “You hunting a lady? My goo’ness me my! That always pleasant work. Tell me some more; then we go see Colonel Lear.”

I told him my name and how I had been forced against my will to turn from farming to the law; how I had discovered the portrait of Lydia Bailey and been told she was dead, only to learn that the report of her death had been spread by an unscrupulous woman who wanted Lydia’s property.

King Dick’s eyes, while I was speaking, flicked across my face from time to time. When I had finished, he asked how long ago I had seen this lady. I replied I had seen only her portrait—never the lady herself.

He said cryptically that if I felt as I did about somebody I had never seen, I would probably feel considerably worse after I had seen her. Where, he wanted to know, did she live?

When I said that her enemy in the United States had destroyed all papers that might have indicated where she could be found, King Dick said softly, “My goo’ness me my! I guess you going to want more help than you thought you would! That Colonel Lear very polite, very educated, but not very experienced about black folks.”

He picked up the bottle the waiter had brought us, filled our glasses and ceremoniously raised his own to me. The golden liquor was pure nectar, and I said as much.

“They no ‘Nectar Brand’ rum made here,” King Dick said. “This ‘Honey of Jacmel,’ it not poison, but it not real good. They three real good rums—from Caves, Jérémie, and Anse-à-Veau! Oh, my goo’ness me my! Make this rum taste like slumgullion.”

Smacking his thick lips with the sound of a horse pulling a hoof from mud, he changed the subject abruptly. “What you do if that lady lives Jacmel or way south?”

“Go to Jacmel, of course. Wherever she lives, I’ll go.”

“You got plenty money to travel with?” he asked solicitously. “Travel pretty costive in Haiti.”

“I hope to have,” I said. “If I am obliged to travel far, I hope to finance myself by selling this.” I drew a length of gold braid from my pocket and showed it to him.

His eyes, as he stared at it, looked like teal-eggs. “My, my!” he whispered. “That better than Voodoo.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

King Dick smiled weakly and made a fluttering movement with a huge hand. “How much gold braid you got?”

“Six hundred feet,” I said. “I’m hoping to dispose of it at about three dollars a foot.”

His enormous mouth widened in a grin that seemed to split his head in two. “That very, very nice braid,” he said. “Enough for two hundred generals. That five dollars a foot.”

“No,” I said, “that’s too high. I couldn’t get that much for it.”

“Oh, my goo’ness, you got it already. That braid all mine!”

Ignoring my protests that my profit on the transaction would be too large, he poured himself another glass of rum, sipped it lingeringly; then rapped smartly on the table for the waiter, who hurried toward us, green-faced. With him he brought colored beans in a saucer to show the amount we owed.

King Dick picked up the saucer and poured the beans into the palm of his hand. He passed his other hand lightly over the palm, and closed his enormous fist on the beans. Then he blew on the fist, held it before the waiter, and opened it. The hand was empty. The beans had vanished. The waiter stepped backward and fell over a chair.

“No beans, no pay,” King Dick said coldly. He took me by the elbow and turned me toward the crowded Plaza. As we entered that congested square, he drew a green silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his coat. With it came a shower of colored beans. “My, my!” King Dick said in a faint whisper. “I better be careful where I carry that handkerchief.”