All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell Page A

knew them and would make the introduction, but Captain Maillart seemed to have another course in mind. Quickly, he drew the doctor out of the building.
    Outside it was certainly cooler, the night air almost chill. They overtook the other officers of their party in the promenade du gouvernement . A tall young rake with great mustachios, whose name the doctor had not caught, had drawn the woman called Chloe into a niche and was kissing her and pinching her haunches with great freedom, while she giggled and feigned to push his hands away. All along the promenade were other couples similarly engaged, but the doctor and Maillart came face to face with Nanon and Jasmine, who were for the moment unattached.
    “Oh Nanon,” Captain Maillart pronounced in an artificially lisping tone, “ Je te présente mon grand ami, Antoine .”
    The woman smiled, revealing a top row of small, white, perfect teeth. Her lips were heavy, blade-shaped and blood-red. The doctor bowed slightly from the waist, keeping his eyes on hers, which were large and almond-shaped and looked black to him in the indistinct light, which turned her skin the color of old ivory. Her dress was tightly fitted and clung to her thighs, with the bodice cut low, almost to the nipple, a star of multicolored orchids resting on her mostly naked bosom. She offered her hand to the doctor; it floated toward him along a graceful liquid arc. Her palm was cool and dry when it met his, long yellowy fingers creeping round his wrist, a nail turned in to catch his pulse between the tendons.
    “Oh, isn’t she lovely,” Maillart breathed into his ear, but audibly enough to carry. “She’s made for love—and yours for the asking.”
    The doctor’s heart slammed rubbery against his ribs. The chafed swaths along his inner thighs began to blaze. To hold a woman’s hand and look her in the eye and hear a proposition such as this—he did not know what his feeling was, but it was strong enough, for an instant, to paralyze him. Nanon breathed; the orchids rose on her breast, and from the skin beneath them lifted a cloud of drunken scent which sealed him in its sphere. She stroked her top lip with the tip of her tongue, a cat’s gesture; her whole head had the catlike beauty he knew he must have seen somewhere before.
    “I beg your pardon,” Doctor Hébert said in his most formal manner. “ Je vous en prie —I’ll hope that we may meet again, but on some other footing.”
    He pressed her hand between his two, once firmly, and released it. With her fingertips she caught her skirt and gave him a half curtsy, an opaque movement, uninterpretable. She was gone; both women had retreated.
    Captain Maillart seemed a little glum, going back into the theater. They took their seats in silence. The hall looked empty, quieter than before; about half their party had not returned when the curtain rose on the second act. The doctor crushed a mosquito on the back of his neck and brushed away the broken bits of it. Grimly, he concentrated on the sluggish movement of the play. Maillart sighed and draped a hand across the doctor’s shoulder and began to rearrange and fondle his lapel.
    “You mustn’t be shocked,” he said in a tender voice. “It’s what they’re good for. After all, they’re not white women.”
    The doctor looked around the seats. Only Jasmine and Fleur had returned to the box above them. But Captain Baudin had cork-screwed around in his chair and was blowing kisses and talking moonily enough for a dozen.
    “ Ah, tes fesses, Jasmine ,” he rhapsodized. “ Tes jolies fesses, comme j’aimerais les baiser encore une seule fois .”
    “Never mind,” Maillart went on meanwhile, still whispering to the doctor. “You’ve only got to learn our ways.”
    “Perhaps you’re right,” the doctor said, and snorted out a sort of laugh. “After all, it seems there’s a better comedy in the back rows than there is on the stage.”

Chapter Five
    B EFORE DAWN the baby woke and cried a