First Adventure, The Case of the Missing Merchant, Session 011
Saving Face
This is an emergent narrative; this story is the retrospective recounting of a TTRPG Session that involved emergent play in an open world.
Opening Narration
There is a great deal more to a man’s face than the nose and mouth he was issued at birth. A fellow may have but one countenance in the looking glass, yet by the time he is forty he will have worn a dozen in public. There is the face he carries to church, the one he presents to a creditor, the one he puts on when an acquaintance asks after his wife’s health, and another, considerably more animated, which appears when that acquaintance has departed and the door is safely shut. A prudent man learns the changes early. A statesman makes a profession of them. An aristocrat is sometimes born believing the changes are unnecessary, and then discovers, with profound indignation, that the rest of the world has been performing them upon her behalf.
In New Orleans the preservation of appearances is a branch of industry almost as important as cotton, and it does not depend nearly so much upon a successful harvest. The gentleman who has lost his plantation may retain a perfectly excellent bow. A merchant whose accounts would alarm a respectable bookkeeper can still order the finest Madeira in town, provided his waiter has not heard from the bank. A civil officer may assure the public that a matter is receiving the most scrupulous attention when his principal exertion has been to ensure it receives none. The city possesses an extraordinary talent for keeping its features composed while its affairs slide into the river. It is one of the reasons its funerals are so handsome.
The late war has furnished the country with an abundance of gentlemen who are determined to be looked upon in the proper light. Every department has its badges, its seals, its orderly desks, and its solemn proclamations, by which one might suppose that public business proceeds from beginning to end in a state of military readiness. The truth is somewhat kinder to our common humanity. A general has to dress himself before he can command an army. A provost marshal must occasionally set aside his papers in order to eat his breakfast. And even the most formidable officer in the service is obliged to shave, unless he desires to go about resembling a neglected hedgerow. The republic may demand his full devotion, but his whiskers generally make their own arrangements.
Now, I do not say this to lessen the dignity of public office. Quite the contrary. There is something encouraging in the thought that a man entrusted with the movements of soldiers and the peace of a conquered city can still be surprised in the company of a washbasin. It is proof that the government is conducted by men and not by marble statues, though the government takes pains to encourage the contrary belief. The trouble begins when the work of saving a face becomes more important than the work that face was appointed to perform. A nation will move troops to defend its reputation; a diplomat will spend a month declining to answer a question; and a wounded family may discover that the grandest title in Europe is of no use at all against a courteous official who has decided to know nothing.
Our French friends have occasion to be mindful of this. Across the Gulf, the Emperor Napoleon’s Mexican adventure has become a matter upon which gentlemen in Paris and Washington hold very different opinions, each fortified by the conviction that history is sure to applaud his own. Here at the mouth of the Mississippi, ships must be insured, cargoes accounted for, consuls treated politely, and the United States Army persuaded that no one is using an American wharf for enterprises which the American government might find disagreeable. It requires a remarkable degree of good manners to maintain so many inconvenient understandings at once. Fortunately, good manners are among the few commodities that can be manufactured without anyone declaring them on a customs manifest.
But there are limits even to this admirable system. A man may preserve his own reputation by keeping silent, yet discover that another person’s silence has become intolerable. A lady may approach a great official in grief and be received with every courtesy, then emerge with no more knowledge than she possessed before. Sooner or later someone is liable to ask a plain question in a room where plain questions have not been customary. At that point the face must either change, or the man behind it must find some useful work to do. Neither is a comfortable prospect for a gentleman who had counted upon passing a quiet morning.
It was Monday, the fifth of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-six, and a chilly daylight was spreading across the roofs of New Orleans. The St. Charles Hotel stood ready to receive another day of bankers, officers, foreign grandees, and people who wished to be mistaken for one or another of these. Breakfast was being served; the corridors were busy; and in certain rooms the morning toilet had not yet been completed. Elsewhere in the building, a French noblewoman waited for men who had promised to find her missing husband. Before noon, several distinguished persons would have occasion to consider just what was to be done with their faces.
7:30 AM, Monday, February 5, 1866 – A Most Uncomfortable Report (Lars, Henry Allworth)
Lars Heinrich Prittwitz reached the St. Charles Hotel in the cold morning light with the wear of the preceding night still upon him. What he had done on the opposite bank of the Mississippi was not the sort of undertaking for which an insurance adjuster ordinarily sought congratulations from his superiors. He and Caleb Grayson had entered the Wilmington Lady after dark, removed the captain’s cabin door from its hinges, discovered a concealed strongbox, and conveyed the sixty-pound article across the river. Its contents had produced evidence of a clandestine trade with Mexico—and the awkward discovery of seven thousand dollars in French gold. The safe itself was now on the third floor of Lars’s office at No. 18 Carondelet Street. Neither the ship’s captain nor any proper owner of the property had sanctioned its removal.
The cipher sent by street messenger in the small hours had asked Henry Allworth for an urgent appointment at half past seven. The chief Pinkerton operative in New Orleans had received the summons. Lars was shown into Allworth’s rooms, a place whose expensive fittings and orderly business arrangements made a sharp contrast with the disorder of the salvage yard through which he had crawled the night before.
Allworth received the account without any visible desire for ornament. The Pinkerton chief was a man accustomed to hearing explanations from operatives who had employed methods they preferred not to put into ordinary correspondence. He let Lars begin at the beginning: the suspicious weight of the Wilmington Lady’s cargo, the insurance claim, Captain Atwood’s unconvincing story of shifted dry goods, and the hidden spaces aboard the vessel. Lars then took him through the nocturnal expedition and the documents in the strongbox.
The secret logbook had recorded coastal landings in Mexico reaching back into 1864. On September 27, 1865, it placed Adrien-Luc de Saint-Cyran aboard the steamer as supercargo, meeting a French colonel called Valogne at a secluded cove south of Veracruz. Later entries described the vessel’s January voyage, its grounding near Cabo Rojo, and arrangements for another run. The contents also included receipts, correspondence, and funds unmistakably connected with the ship’s concealed commercial activity. Lars explained that he and Caleb had copied what they needed and restored the papers and money to their original order. No coin or document had been retained.
“And the box?” Allworth asked.
“Still in my office,” Lars replied. “We had the locks attended to, but it must go back aboard without anyone discovering it was away.”
Allworth listened until the account was complete. He neither congratulated Lars on his ingenuity nor made a theatrical display of disapproval over the burglary. He rose, brought the interview to a close, and directed the investigator to accompany him. The information was no longer a matter for two detectives and an insurance claim. There was someone else in the hotel who needed to hear it.
Monday Morning – A Change of Breakfast Tables (Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, Dr. Alphonse Mercier)
While Lars was occupied with Allworth, his companions gathered for breakfast at a new establishment, Franklin’s Coffee Rooms, on the opposite side of the St. Charles Hotel from the place that had previously served as their habitual morning rendezvous. It was an American-style coffee house, more concerned with getting hot food before working men than with the ceremony of a French dining room. Cups struck saucers; newspapers snapped open; and the smell of roasting chicory and breakfast grease rose above the low commercial murmur of gentlemen attending to their Monday affairs.
Caleb Grayson joined Madeleine Mercier, Leopold Schuyler, and Madeleine’s father, Dr. Alphonse Mercier. The doctor remained as attentive as ever to the niceties of dress and position, presenting the appearance of a gentleman who regarded the properly conducted breakfast as a modest social event. Caleb’s substantial presence provided an effective counterweight to such refinements. Madeleine and Leopold, meanwhile, had an entirely practical purpose in mind for the afternoon: they meant to return to the Ursuline Academy Archives, which had been securely closed against their efforts on Sunday.
“Lars will meet us at the St. Charles,” Caleb told the others. “He has business to attend to this morning. We are still expected upstairs at ten.”
The group had learned enough over the preceding days to form opinions, though precious little to settle them. Adrien-Luc de Saint-Cyran had disappeared after a baffling decline in his habits. His commercial affairs concealed serious irregularities; accounts of his conduct among the gambling houses and river wards were far from those expected of a distinguished French gentleman. And the increasingly strange incidents surrounding the search resisted any tidy explanation that could be offered across a breakfast table.
There was no cheerful theory that the missing merchant was presently taking the waters at a pleasant resort, unaware of his wife’s alarm. Caleb and his companions regarded death as an increasingly likely conclusion. Perhaps Adrien-Luc’s own indulgences had destroyed him; perhaps his questionable associations had caught up with him. Yet a conviction is not a corpse, and they had neither a body nor an account of his final hours. The melancholy possibility remained that they might never learn precisely what had become of him.
Madeleine and Leopold intended to pursue the archival questions that had been interrupted the previous afternoon. They also had reason to anticipate the return of Étienne ‘Tinny’ Boudreaux by train later that day, and Leopold’s increasingly consequential antiquarian business could not wait indefinitely. Caleb had no equally definite errand of his own for the afternoon; he expected to work with Lars. He believed the hostile surveillance previously directed at him had ceased, and conducted himself accordingly. They would finish breakfast and make their way to the hotel for the appointed audience.
Later That Morning – Half a Shave (Lars, Henry Allworth, Major Gideon Caldwell)
Allworth led Lars through the St. Charles corridors toward the room occupied by Major Gideon Caldwell, the United States Provost Marshal. The hotel was sufficiently important to accommodate officers who could alter the daily conduct of the city with a written instruction, but importance did not provide every occupant with a private palace. Caldwell was staying in an ordinary guest room rather than one of the grand suites reserved for the most exalted visitors.
They arrived at an inconvenient moment. The major was shaving.
A washbasin and the implements of the morning toilet occupied him, and his face was still partly covered in white lather. There is no graceful way for an officer to receive unexpected official business with half his chin scraped clean and the other half awaiting the razor. Caldwell nevertheless admitted the visitors, and Allworth wasted no time on the ceremonial obligations of the hour.
“Major, I want you to hear this from Prittwitz himself,” the Pinkerton chief said. “Tell him what you told me.”
Lars delivered the account again. He described the steamer under repair across the river, the concealed compartments, the irregular cargo business, and the captain’s private strongbox. He reviewed the voyages to Mexico, the French names recorded in the log, the extraordinary payments, and the ship’s apparent intention of returning to those waters. The matter had begun with an insurance survey, but none of the documentary evidence now looked much like an innocent dispute over a bent screw shaft.
Caldwell heard him out without trying to recover the undisturbed calm of his morning. He set aside the razor and took a cloth to his face, wiping away the unfinished lather with the brisk irritation of a man obliged to exchange one pressing duty for another. The effect left his shave incomplete and his attention entirely upon the report.
“Confederate munitions?” Allworth asked.
“Quite possibly,” Caldwell answered.
Neither man had discovered a Confederate arsenal by uttering the phrase. It was a possibility arising from the unexplained weight of the cargo and the irregularity of the French trade, and a possibility with obvious consequences for the authorities responsible for New Orleans in the aftermath of the war. Caldwell did not propose to leave the question in an insurance file. The major made it clear that they must take the matter to Major General Edward R. S. Canby without delay.
Lars accompanied the two men out of the room. Caldwell’s interrupted shave remained where they had left it; the business of the Wilmington Lady had acquired an urgency that ordinary personal grooming could not compete with.
Monday Morning – The General’s Mirror (Lars, Henry Allworth, Major Caldwell, Major General Canby)
They went down to the suite occupied by Major General Canby. Here the distinction between an ordinary officer’s lodgings and the quarters of a commanding general was readily apparent. Soldiers were posted outside; a lieutenant supervised admission; and the visitors’ entry was not a matter of walking down the corridor and turning a doorknob. The guards satisfied themselves that Caldwell and his companions were properly expected before allowing them through.
Within, Caldwell asked at once for privacy. Canby’s adjutant was dismissed, and the Provost Marshal closed the door after him. The room settled into the uncomfortable quiet that accompanies a matter too important for the people ordinarily employed to take notes about it.
Canby, like Caldwell before him, had been shaving.
The coincidence gave the gathering a curious air. In the space of one morning, the same young investigator had taken his story from a Pinkerton chief to a Provost Marshal and now to a general, interrupting the toilet of the United States Army’s senior men as efficiently as if he had been dispatched to inspect their razors. Canby looked from Caldwell to the stranger who had accompanied him.
Caldwell explained that Allworth had received information bearing upon the French business along the river. He indicated Lars as the operative who had obtained it and asked the investigator to give the general the account in his own words. Lars did so, for the third time that morning.
He repeated the essential particulars. The Wilmington Lady was under repair at McLellan Dry Dock in Algiers Point. Her captain’s official explanation for the damage did not fit the declared cargo. The ship contained concealed cargo spaces, and its private documents connected it with voyages to Mexico and with French officers and payments. The records suggested a clandestine traffic that might be exposed if the ship could be observed and dealt with at the proper moment. There was also a practical difficulty: the strongbox carrying much of this evidence had been removed from the ship. If its disappearance were discovered, those behind the traffic might know they had been compromised.
Canby stopped shaving. He wiped the remaining lather from his face, giving the report the kind of complete attention that had proved too costly for either officer’s razor. He looked toward Caldwell.
“How can we catch them?” he asked.
The question altered the nature of the conference. The men were no longer merely considering whether an insurance fraud concealed an unlawful voyage. They were considering how to preserve the opportunity to establish the offense without warning the captain and his associates before their next move.
Caldwell offered a practical solution. Troops could secure the vicinity of the McLellan Dry Dock, excluding ordinary visitors and controlling traffic while the necessary work was undertaken. The public explanation would be that a secret Confederate munitions depot had been discovered and required safe disposal. In a city still recovering from war, such a report would provide a comprehensible military reason for restricting access to the waterfront. It would also avoid explaining the actual object of the operation to every curious drayman and dock laborer who happened to be passing.
Canby accepted the proposal. He took up a sheet of paper, wrote his authorization, and handed it to the Provost Marshal. There was no lengthy speech about the destiny of nations and no declaration to the gentlemen waiting outside. A short written instruction, placed in the proper hands, was sufficient to set official machinery in motion.
“I’ll be in touch,” Caldwell told Allworth.
The conference was over. The major departed to attend to the matter, while Allworth and Lars withdrew from the general’s rooms. The Wilmington Lady had become a concern of the military authorities, though no smuggling voyage had yet been intercepted and no captain arrested.
Before 10:00 AM – The Matter of a Missing Box (Lars, Henry Allworth)
Allworth brought Lars back to his own rooms. Away from Caldwell and Canby, the Pinkerton chief returned to the immediate embarrassment that official enthusiasm could not make disappear by itself: the captain’s strongbox was still in a building belonging to the investigator who had taken it.
“Where is it now?” Allworth asked. “Precisely.”
“Third floor of my office at No. 18 Carondelet,” Lars answered. “Everything is back inside, in the order we found it. Papers and gold. We took no originals.”
Allworth continued with questions about the condition of the locks and the manner in which the box had been left. Lars reported the broken fastening that had secured it beneath Atwood’s cabin floor and explained that the damaged padlock had been placed on top of the safe. The combination lid had been opened by Jeremiah ‘Jem’ Hanning, the professional safecracker summoned in the dead of night, and had deliberately been left unlocked at the man’s express warning. The physical state of the evidence could not simply be wished away; it had to be dealt with carefully if the captain was to remain ignorant of the inspection.
Allworth considered the account, then gave Lars a direct instruction: he was not to return to his Carondelet Street office until the afternoon.
“You’ve done excellent work, Prittwitz,” the chief told him. “But you’re not finished. We still need you on this case.”
The point was not to surprise Captain Atwood with the discovery that someone had read his papers. The Pinkertons wanted the Wilmington Lady caught in the act of carrying prohibited cargo to Veracruz. For that they needed her master and those directing him to proceed with their business, unaware of how closely the vessel had come under scrutiny. A premature alarm could send the entire enterprise scattering before a single decisive interception took place.
Lars was to remain close to the investigation and avoid an unnecessary disclosure or a move that might spoil it. The arrangement was not a command to abandon the hunt for Adrien-Luc; it was recognition that the merchant’s disappearance and the clandestine trade aboard the steamer had become closely intertwined. The larger objective remained ahead. Nothing said in Allworth’s rooms established that an arrest had occurred or that the planned voyage had already taken place.
The conversation ended. Lars left the suite and made his way downstairs, where the noise of the grand hotel was gathering toward its usual morning crescendo.
Approaching 10:00 AM – The Threads Rejoin (Lars, Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, Dr. Alphonse Mercier)
Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, and Dr. Alphonse Mercier had finished their breakfast and were arriving at the St. Charles for the ten o’clock audience. Lars came down into the lobby as they entered. After a morning in which three separate rooms had heard his confidential report, he was once more among the familiar collection of investigators whose own concerns extended from riverfront gambling dens to the antiquities of Spanish Louisiana.
The hotel offered its customary assemblage of polished boots, diplomatic accents, costly coats, and servants moving unobtrusively through the traffic. A Union officer could pass a wealthy Frenchman without either being obliged to acknowledge that their respective governments had strong opinions about one another. A domestic servant could carry a tray past four people who knew something of a missing merchant and still hear nothing that would make sense in a police report. The great establishment continued to provide the appearance of easy civilization for guests whose actual affairs were anything but easy.
The group had already spent several days attempting to reconcile Adrien-Luc’s professional respectability with the testimony of clerks, gamblers, merchants, and witnesses to his deterioration. Now they were obliged to report to the woman whose money supported much of the inquiry, and whose concern was not the profitability of a ship or the correctness of an insurance claim. She wanted her husband found. The investigators went up to her rooms for the appointed meeting.
10:00 AM and Later – A Gentleman’s Reputation (Lars, Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, Dr. Alphonse Mercier, Comtesse Élodie)
The Comtesse Élodie de Valois-Bormes received the investigators at the St. Charles Hotel. Her suite retained the ceremonious appointments of a noble household, with heavy draperies, soft upholstery, and the sort of carefully ordered furniture intended to make even a difficult audience appear civilized. But no arrangement of chairs or curtains could make the purpose of the visit less difficult. Her husband had been missing for two months. The detectives had found troubling facts about the businesses and associates connected with him, but they had not brought him home.
They delivered a substantial report on the progress of the inquiry. The conversation ranged over the leads being pursued, the irregularities in Adrien-Luc’s mercantile affairs, and the increasingly uncertain prospect of locating the man himself. There were subjects the investigators deliberately kept out of the account. The strange impressions and visions that Madeleine had experienced, and other matters they could not explain by ordinary means, were not laid before the Comtesse as evidence. Neither did Lars turn the consultation into a report of his private morning meetings with Allworth and the officers of the United States Army.
It was a difficult balance to maintain. They wished to offer a woman in distress something more substantial than reassurance, but a candid description of everything they suspected might destroy the remaining comforts she took in her husband’s character. Lars, in speaking about the agency’s questionable affairs, allowed the discussion to move farther than he had intended.
“Madame,” he said, “we have found indications that your husband’s commercial business was not entirely what it appeared to be. There are dealings that require explanation. He may have become involved in activities which were not altogether proper.”
The Comtesse stiffened. It was not the description of her husband she had expected to hear from a man retained to find him. Lars continued, attempting to put his observation into a larger context. Adrien-Luc had once served the French Foreign Ministry. It was possible, he suggested, that some portion of his later work remained connected with the French government, even if his outward occupation was that of a merchant. Lars offered the possibility as a theory, not as a disclosure of secret military evidence.
“You speak of my husband as though he were some common criminal,” Élodie answered, the restraint in her voice drawing tight. “You were engaged to find Adrien-Luc, monsieur. To find him—not to assemble accusations in his absence.”
The other investigators tried to recover the exchange before it collapsed into open hostility. Their patron was not merely a source of money and introductions. She was a woman whose last certainty about her missing husband was being subjected to one ugly suggestion after another. But the more Lars’s remarks were qualified, the more difficult it became to disguise the fact that they had raised a possibility none of them could establish conclusively.
“I am not asking you to pronounce judgment upon him,” Élodie continued. “I am asking you to bring him back to me.”
Her composure was failing. She had endured polite denials from the officials of her own nation, indifference from authorities in New Orleans, and disturbing reports from men who seemed to know more about her husband’s associates than about his fate. Now the investigators themselves were discussing the possibility that he had behaved disgracefully. She was angry, distressed, and increasingly unwilling to accept another explanation in place of an answer.
Late Morning – The Polite Denial (Lars, Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, Dr. Alphonse Mercier, Comtesse Élodie)
The investigators managed to keep the discussion from ending in immediate rejection, but they did not restore the Comtesse’s calm. They redirected her attention toward a contradiction that had troubled the case since its beginning. If Adrien-Luc had continued, however indirectly, to serve French official interests, how could the French Consulate be so completely ignorant of his movements? The consul and his subordinates had repeatedly insisted they knew nothing useful. It was difficult to reconcile that posture with the possibility that the missing merchant’s business had a governmental purpose.
Élodie seized upon the contradiction with a ferocity that the other occupants of the room could neither encourage safely nor suppress. The suggestion that Adrien-Luc might have been acting for France did not console her. It made the consul’s evasions seem an even more intolerable insult. If her husband’s former colleagues knew something, why had they left his wife to beg for scraps of information from strangers? And if they knew nothing, what good were their titles, their offices, and their elaborate assurances that the matter was receiving attention?
“They will receive me and tell me nothing,” she said, her voice trembling with anger. “They will extend every courtesy and leave me no wiser. Is that how the servants of France treat a woman whose husband has vanished?”
Madeleine intervened. She had reason to suspect that the forces surrounding the disappearance might not be confined to corrupt merchants or official secrecy, but she and her companions had agreed not to recount those extraordinary matters to their patron. She tried to express the warning without unveiling the experiences from which it arose.
“Madame la Comtesse,” Madeleine said carefully, “I fear that there may be forces at work here beyond any one person’s control. I am concerned for your safety. Please do not place yourself in danger because others have refused to satisfy you.”
The warning was sincerely given, but it failed to quiet Élodie. Other voices attempted to reason with her and turn the conversation toward practical steps, yet the anger in the room only gathered force. Her distress had changed its object. She was no longer principally defending her husband against Lars’s unfortunate implication; she was preparing to hold the representatives of her own government responsible for having left her without an answer.
At last she declared what she meant to do. On Wednesday, February 7, the Labat family would hold its Bal de la Lueur d’Hiver, a fashionable gathering at which Consul General Gaston de Montreuil was expected to be present. She would confront him there, in public, and she expected the investigators to accompany her with whatever evidence they had obtained.
“I shall ask him myself,” Élodie said. “Not in another private office, not behind another door where a gentleman can tell me to be patient. At the Labats’ ball, before everyone. I shall ask him what he knows of my husband, and I expect you to stand with me.”
There was no longer any possibility of pretending she meant only another discreet diplomatic call. Élodie spoke as a French noblewoman determined to force an answer out of a government whose local representatives had exhausted her patience. She promised the investigators additional compensation for their continued work and for their presence, though she named no new amount. None of those in attendance succeeded in talking her out of the confrontation.
The threat of public embarrassment was now as real as the prospect of a criminal revelation. Yet the scheduled ball was still two days away. The consul had not been confronted, no official statement had been extracted, and nothing about the Wednesday evening had been settled beyond Élodie’s own declared intention.
Her anger finally gave way to grief. Whatever had become of Adrien-Luc, she repeated the one request upon which all her explanations and arguments had foundered. If he were dead, they must find him nonetheless and bring his body home. She could endure terrible knowledge more readily than an unending absence.
“If he is gone,” she said, her voice failing her, “then bring him home. At least let me bring him home.”
Overwhelmed and weeping, the Comtesse excused herself. The audience ended without the comfort she had wanted and without a definitive answer to the mystery that had brought the investigators together. Lars, Caleb, Madeleine, Leopold, and Dr. Mercier were left with their unfinished inquiries and their patron’s increasingly public determination. Outside the heavy draperies, the ordinary traffic of the St. Charles continued, as if nothing at all had occurred behind the door.
The morning’s events had changed the scale of the affair without resolving it. Lars had carried his findings to officers with the power to act upon them; the others had continued piecing together the missing man’s last known associations; and a grieving wife had resolved to confront the country whose representatives had politely failed her. Her declaration was a promise for a future evening, not the outcome of one already played. For the moment, she had done the only thing left to a woman who could no longer maintain the mask of patience: she had put it aside.