Rebels of Babylon Read online

  REBELS OF

  BABYLON

  Owen Parry

  [Ralph Peters]

  STACKPOLE

  BOOKS

  Books by Ralph Peters

  Nonfiction

  Lines of Fire

  Endless War

  Looking for Trouble

  Wars of Blood and Faith

  New Glory

  Never Quit the Fight

  Beyond Baghdad

  Beyond Terror

  Fighting for the Future

  Fiction

  Cain at Gettysburg

  The Officer’s Club

  The War After Armageddon

  Traitor

  The Devil’s Garden

  Twilight of Heroes

  The Perfect Soldier

  Flames of Heaven

  The War in 2020

  Red Army

  Bravo Romeo

  Writing as Owen Parry

  Faded Coat of Blue

  Shadows of Glory

  Call Each River Jordan

  Honor’s Kingdom

  Bold Sons of Erin

  Our Simple Gifts

  Strike the Harp

  Copyright © 2005 by Owen Parry

  Published by

  STACKPOLE BOOKS

  5067 Ritter Road

  Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

  www.stackpolebooks.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover photo courtesy of New Orleans Scenes: Mugnier Negatives and Prints, Mss. 1089, 1522, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baron Rouge, LA

  Cover design by Tessa Sweigert

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parry, Owen.

  Rebels of Babylon / Owen Parry.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-1141-8 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-8117-1141-2 (pbk.)

  1. Jones, Abel (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 3. Government investigators—Fiction. 4. New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. 5. Irish Americans—Fiction. 6. Welsh Americans—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A7637R53 2012

  813'.54—dc23

  2012003814

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8117-4888-9

  To my sister, Annie,

  who turned up unexpectedly on the levee,

  waiting for the Robert E. Lee

  The spirit of the master is abating,

  that of the slave rising from the dust… .

  —Thomas Jefferson

  ONE

  I CHASED THE NEGRESS WITH THE SNAKE THROUGH the door of the Ursuline convent. We plunged into the courtyard and the cold, accompanied by the shrieks of girls and young women. Nuns converged from distant parts, fluttering and furious, calling upon the Lord and a host of angels. Their outrage called to mind the Afghanee disturbed at his depredations, and I hoped they understood that the negress, not myself, had committed trespass against them.

  The place was Bedlam, pure.

  I should have thought nuns fearful of a serpent, but every one showed plucky as a mongoose. They hiked up their skirts and rushed toward the two of us, baring their teeth.

  Perhaps they sought revenge for all that apple business.

  Well, if the snake failed to frighten the nuns, I must say it worried me. Hissing over the shoulder of the negress, it feinted and jabbed, bead eyes fixed on my face. A veritable accomplice, that serpent was, yellow and brown and anxious to keep me off.

  I hoped it was not poisonous.

  Had I been able to close the distance between myself and the negress—not two yards as we ran—I would have given that snake a whack with my cane.

  Abundant of girth and short of leg, the woman barely eluded me. But my bothered bones do not let me go as fast as a fellow likes.

  Girls in demure uniforms fled our path, screaming with such abandon that I began to suspect at least a few were enjoying themselves. Nuns charged, with crosses swinging over their bosoms. A large dog added his barking to the confusion, but stood unsure of which leg deserved his bite.

  Just ahead of the negress and myself, a black fellow old as Methusaleh stood with his hand on the gate. He looked thrice as befuddled as the dog.

  “Shut the gate!” I called in a tone I had used in my sergeanting days. “Shut the bloody gate, man!”

  The negress waved a stubby arm, making some queer sign. The old fellow looked as frightened as a child.

  “Shut the gate!” I pleaded.

  I fear my own figure was not as imposing as that of my corpulent quarry.

  A nun placed herself astride the snake-woman’s path, clutching her cross and beads as she extended a delicate hand to interdict us.

  The collision did not even slow the pace of the negress. The nun flew into the gatekeeper’s arms, as if she had been struck by a runaway omnibus.

  I nearly grasped the fugitive, just before she burst into the street.

  “Halt!” I shouted. “Stop in the name of the federal government, you!”

  She did not heed me. Or give a backward glance. She was all forward motion, like a locomotive got up to speed along its tracks.

  Now, Chartres Street is not the city’s busiest, at least not at the end where the convent sits, but traffic enough there was in that dirty lane. Along the walks, women in vast crinolines formed moving ramparts courtesy dared not breach.

  The snake undid them.

  A tumult erupted the likes of which have seldom been seen or heard upon this earth. The uproar may have been equaled at Babel, or, perhaps, at Jericho, when Joshua’s clarion notes collapsed the walls. The cries surpassed those heard in our sack of Delhi.

  But let that bide. The damage done to New Orleans that noontide threatened to surpass a cannonade. You might have thought the devil himself, and not a snake-charming negress, come plowing through the throng.

  Women fumbled and tumbled, bellowed and wailed, swinging their nicety bags until they battered each other to swooning. Market baskets flew skyward, defying Mr. Newton, and bottles and sacks of every sort fell underfoot. The marchandes, as they call the negresses who peddle goods from baskets perched on their heads, were most of them quick to secure their wares and fade into a courtyard. But one poor coffee-colored lass, who balanced a great pyramid of popped-corn balls, was struck from behind and flattened. A swarm of boys and beggars—of both there was a plenty, in every hue—scrambled to snatch her treats, cramming them into their snouts without remorse. In the midst of it all, one grizzled pilgrim found himself run over by a dog cart.

  A navvy leapt to intercept a tender young lady’s faint, harboring her in his burly embrace in a manner I thought suspect. As if surrounded by robbers, an elderly gentleman thrashed about with his walking stick. And a barber rushed out, armed with a razor and towel.

  Not one of them managed to slow the she-devil’s progress.

  Cold it was, although I had ever been told that New Orleans burns torrid. Bitter and raw, with smoke creeping down, not upward, from the chimneys, it might have been a January in Wales. Yet, I was in a sweat, that I will tell you.

  “Stop her!” I bellowed at the wide world, in all its embarrassed confusion. “Stop that woman!” But the wide world paid no attention.

  When a witless troop of damsels threatened to block her flight, the negress lofted the serpent fr
om her shoulder, unraveled it from her neck, and dangled its startling length in front of herself. The snake curled and whipped, sweeping womankind before it.

  Ladies and their lessers fled into the mucky street, clawing and clambering over each other, treading on hems and tearing at seams, while slapping their slower sisters out of the way. Those who were not cursing and spitting like veteran fusiliers, wailed as we must believe their Sabine sisters did at fortune’s ebb.

  Horses reared and carts collided, wheels interlocked and harnesses got in a tangle. A buckboard of fish on slabs and oysters in barrels embraced a lamp-post, feeding the street with slime. Two drivers went at each other with their fists, encouraged by men and ladies alike, and a rough-looking lad swung a board at the warring pair. I regret to say harsh language was employed.

  The negress carried all the field before her. Pumping along on short, determined legs, she threw off so much sweat it seemed to be raining.

  I spotted a pair of our Union boys ahead of us, guarding a doorway with bayonets fixed and ready.

  “Stop that woman, stop her!” I commanded. “You there, private! Stop her!”

  As she approached, the negress howled at the soldiers, offering them a generous hint of snake. One of the lads leapt back with so much vigor he drove his comrade through a milliner’s window.

  “Stop her! Stop her!”

  Queer it was. No man was man enough to interfere with her. And ladies were unlikely to be enlisted in my support. The negress might have been Leviathan, the way she split the waves of mankind before her.

  They all seemed oddly afraid, not just surprised. As if there were more dangerous matters at hand than just a snake.

  A pair of grimy sailors—ever worthless sorts—leaned at a corner and watched us. As my quarry rushed past, trailed by my Christian self, one of the tars remarked, “Now don’t that just beat all, great God Almighty?”

  The negress dashed between converging vehicles, a fancy brougham and a wagon piled with cotton bales. How she did it I cannot say, but the creature confounded the teams and their harnesses, blocking my path with a wall of horseflesh and leather.

  Bales began to spill into the thoroughfare.

  “Stop … that … woman!” I shouted, although I could not even see her now, with the vehicles barring me like a stockade wall.

  I rushed behind the lacquered brougham, which to my wonderment bore a couple whose race looked as suspect as their riding-out garments were elegant. Searching for the broad back of the negress amid the chaos, I slipped on a pile of equine slop and nearly took a pratfall for my trouble.

  I fear intemperate words escaped my lips.

  Just as I righted myself from my stumble, I glimpsed the woman a pistol shot ahead.

  The nature of the street began to change as we charged along, with ever more shops in evidence beneath the curlicued galleries. The crowds on the sidewalks thickened, Frenchy-looking the lot of them, with a sort of dandified shabbiness to the men and a gadabout air to the ladies. If ladies they were. Negroes mingled freely among the fair, along with others of origin indeterminate. Boys whistled and dogs pestered.

  The fugitive’s progress transformed the scene. Man and beast flew out of the woman’s way.

  A sensible man might have quit the chase, considering the damage already done. But Abel Jones is not a quitting man.

  The negress plunged through the multitude. I followed as swiftly as my thankless leg allowed, struggling to hurry along in her wake before it closed up again.

  Frenchy protestations let me know that I was far less welcome than the snake. “Creoles” do not care for Union blue, see. And we had neared the ramshackle heart of their quarter, an ancient town around which the city had grown.

  Perhaps they would have respected a Punjab cobra, a nice twelve-footer.

  Little boys made fun of me as I went. Although most were more intrigued by the disquiet of the horses and the inventive curses of teamsters yanking on reins.

  A gussied-up fellow gave me a wicked look, brushing off his dove-gray topper after it paid a visit to the gutter. He jabbed a finger toward me as I passed, complaining about a “shappo” or some such matter.

  I saw the woman turn from the pavings and flee beneath an archway. With her serpent back on her shoulder, on the look-out. I hastened along, certain that I had marked her course precisely.

  She had fled down a narrow passageway, a corridor of brick walls beneath low vaulting. It stank of convenient usage by the multitude.

  I tapped and crabbed my way along, avoiding the clots of waste as best I could. The tunnel was so narrow I could hardly imagine my quarry, who was a woman of some abundance, fitting herself through it. Twas so close overhead even I had to crouch as I went.

  The passage opened into a barren rectangle about the size of our parlor back in Pottsville. The new, larger parlor, I mean. In Mr. Evans’s house, which had come down to us.

  And I found myself flummoxed.

  The negress and her snake could not be seen.

  Yet, there wasn’t a single door.

  Nor a window. Nor a stairway.

  Not a ladder and not a rope.

  Not even a cellar chute.

  I marked where openings once had been. All were filled up with brick so old it crumbled.

  There wasn’t so much as a drain in that little yard.

  Now, women do not simply disappear. Not even negresses intimate with snakes. And well I recalled the hidden doors of the Maharanee’s palace, behind which Jimmy Molloy played peek-a-boo until he nearly fell in a pit of spikes.

  I tested the walls for hidden levers or catches, but nothing gave or moved. Next, I rapped along the bricks with the hilt of my new sword-cane, listening for cavities. When that failed to produce any hint of a gap, I tapped at every flagstone in the courtyard.

  Twas queer as a barking cow, her simply vanishing.

  Look you. I am not often wrong about such matters. And certain I was that the negress had fled down that particular passage. I will admit to suffering a toothache. But that does not affect a fellow’s eyes.

  It made me short-tempered, though.

  I looked up yet again, in anger and frustration. The height of the yard was two stories at the rear and three on each of the other sides, with the outline of a cistern visible over the lip of a pediment. Had I spotted so much as a piece of string, you might have convinced me, at that point, that the woman had climbed it assisted by her serpent—before making her escape by dancing over the rooftops. But all I could see were parapets of brick, a few trails of smoke, and the gray clouds overhead.

  It made no sense, not the woman’s disappearance nor the purpose of a courtyard without so much as a kitchen door or a window. The place was as blank as the deserts of Baloochistan.

  Half an hour before, I had possessed no inkling that the negress and her serpent were part of this world. Events had converged with great suddenness. I had applied for an interview with the senior officer of the Ursulines, who I believe is called the “mother superior,” in response to a note slipped under my hotel door. Encouraged I was to visit the convent to ask about a servant who disappeared. Now, the provost marshal had reports in plenty of negroes unaccounted for. Twas almost an epidemic. The judgement of the authorities was that most had simply absconded, for the colored races are most of them unsteady. But the note submitted to me tied the missing servant girl to Miss Susan Peabody, late of Albany, New York, whose murder had provoked my trip to New Orleans.

  I had been admitted, grudgingly, to the little room at the front of the convent that serves as a receiving room for gentleman. The mother superior’s greeting had lacked enthusiasm as decidedly as her English lacked vocabulary. I was sitting there and trying to make out her meaning, prodding my rebellious tooth with my tongue and doing no harm to man nor beast nor Catholic, when I heard a great rumpus behind me.

  Those nuns talk French, which I do not. But when I heard that screeching and shrieking rolling through the halls, I knew things were not s
quare in any tongue. It sounded like Mr. Milton’s Pandaemonium. If not worse.

  Just as I rose to investigate matters—relying rather more on my cane than I liked—the negress rushed past the open door, a one-woman swarm, trailing an imposing length of snake.

  “La femme diabolique! Marie Venin!” the old nun gasped, lifting both sleeves Heavenward and revealing withered forearms. She shouted that I should “arrety” the intruder.

  Well, I did not understand her Frenchy jabber, and the English with which she had greeted me was quits. But plain enough things seemed. The trespasser was a thief, or something worse. So off I went, knocking over a chair and a coat-rack, leaving my greatcoat and cap behind, chasing a black woman wider than she was tall, who was garbed as an African gypsy and wielding a snake.

  The commotion inspired thereafter would require an explanation to our authorities.

  All my bother had gained me was that courtyard, bleak and featureless, with one way in and out. The snake-charming negress had disappeared like a wraith.

  I gave up all hope of solving the riddle immediately. Covered in sweat I was, yet chilled to shivering, and nagged again by toothache. And the courtyard reeked to a puking, forgive my frankness.

  Never one to shilly-shally, I turned back to the passageway to leave. And heard metal slam against masonry.

  I wheeled about, expecting to see a ghostly door yawn before me. But nothing had changed in the yard.

  Twas then I got the old shiver down my spine. The one that warns of danger before it strikes.

  I realized what had happened, of course.

  Still, I had to look.

  At the streetward end of the passageway, someone had shut a solid metal door. I did not need to test it to understand that I had been locked in the courtyard.

  I was now the quarry, not the hunter.

  I DID NOT know that I had foes in New Orleans, yet in hardly a week of residence I had excited enemies in plenty. As I would learn. It is a town where nothing is as it seems, where smiles devour.

  I spent an hour alternately banging on the metal door, bellowing for my release by any passerby, and stamping about in the courtyard, hugging my sodden shirt and tunic against me. It took that long for my enemies to gather, see.