Die Upon a Kiss by Barbara Hambly

time, January thought:
He’s
tired.
    And then, seeing the grayish tinge of the round, heavy cheeks, the sweat that filmed so suddenly along the shoreline of that crisp gray hair:
He’s ill.
    “Are you all right, sir?”
    Davis looked up at him, like one caught in a lie. He gestured with the
Gazette
again—the rain had run the print—and made a business of unsnagging the fobs that depended from one of his watch-chains from the second, foppishly redundant chain that looped below. “No, no, I’m well. I’m fine. It’s just this . . . this farrago of lies . . .”
    “You don’t think anyone’s actually going to believe it? Anyone who knows you . . .”
    “I’d like to credit my friends with more brains than that, yes.” Davis sighed. “But the town isn’t what it was, Ben. You know that. I used to know everyone in this town. They’d come to the opera, or to the subscription balls. I’d see them at the Blue Ribbon Balls with their plaçées. . . .” He dug in his coat-pocket for a handkerchief of spotless linen, took off his hat to pass the cloth over his sunken face. Rain pattered in the gutter, stirring up the stench of garbage; a small brown frog hopped out and sat on the banquette, staring up at the men with black bright-sequin eyes.
    “I know it’s every Creole’s lament that the Americans are at the bottom of his woes,” said Davis. “But they outnumber us a dozen to one these days. Most of them have come to town in the past five years. All they know about me is what they read in rags like this.”
    “Even so,” said January, troubled more now by the older man’s weariness, by the slump of his shoulders and the sweat that beaded his face despite the chill, than by his words. Davis was one of his oldest friends in the town. The first man to hire him, he remembered, to play as a musician. When January had left for France, Davis had come down to the wharf—the only white man there save for St.-Denis Janvier himself and one of few people to come at all—and gave him thirty Spanish dollars:
You use
this to go to the opera when you get to Paris,
he’d said.
Man
doth not live by bread alone.
    He was the only one who’d understood that.
    “You have friends. . . .”
    “And I have enemies.” The little man straightened his shoulders with an effort, and put his handkerchief away. “And more than that, I have debts. I took an opera company to New York last season and didn’t make a dollar—I owe this city over a hundred thousand dollars, in credit and loans, and Caldwell’s beating the pants off me at the American Theater.
And
hiring away my best musicians.” He cocked a playfully accusing eye up at January.
    “Oh, I understand why you’re playing for his productions—including that damned
Muette
next week, damn him!—and not mine this season. He’s paying twice what I can. He’s got the American audiences. . . .”
    “Vaudeville and melodrama.” January’s voice tingled with contempt.
    Davis leaned close, and with a conjurer’s flourish pretended to pluck a Mexican silver dollar from behind January’s left ear. “You know who had this dollar before I did?” he asked.
    January shook his head.
    Davis twirled it in his fingers, tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. “Neither do I, my boy,” he said wisely. “Neither do I.” He sighed, and with the fading of his bright, quizzical look, his face grew old and sad.
    “I can’t afford this, Ben. I’m trying to recoup where I can—my construction company has a bid in on that new steam railway-line out to the lake—but the Americans on the City Council are trying to force me out. This isn’t going to help. Mind you,” he added with a grin, “I probably shouldn’t have said
I’ll cut his heart out in a church
when I heard about his
Muette. . . .
They probably didn’t even recognize the quote.”
    “Can you move your performance up?” Garish bills advertising Belaggio’s production of the Auber opera adorned the wall behind