the rest of its contents back into the barrel. "You a pal of his?"
"I'm Ben January. He might have spoken of me."
She smiled, her pockmarked face transforming, like a good-natured bulldog. "You're Ben? Pleased to meet you." She held out a dripping hand. "There's some fandango tonight, they're payin' him to play at.
Don't he play a treat, though? Last night, with that little thing he playsda-da-deeee-da"-she made a stab at getting the tune known as "The Beggar Boy"-"he made old Railspike cry."
Railspike kicked her suitor-a bearded Irish bargee-bloody-mouthed into the street. She began picking up teeth from the dirt floor and pitching them after him, screaming curses all the while.
"Hannibal's the best fiddler I've ever heard," said January truthfully. "Paris, Italy, anyplace. You happen to know where he might be playing?"
"Some bunch of rich stinkards." She spit into a corner. "Pigs, all of 'em. Sure you don't want a drink?
You can have one free, 'cause you're his friend."
"Thank you, m'am," said January, "but I need to find him fast, and I got no head for liquor, not even a tiny bit. Another time."
She winked. "Another time, then."
Blue shadows, and the day's heat dense and stinking around the makeshift buildings. Another corpse-or maybe it was only a drunk-had materialized on the ground outside the Tom and Jerry. January stopped back by the Cabildo, but Shaw was still gone.
Did he really, he wondered as he walked up Rue St. Peter, think that Delphine Lalaurie had Rose locked in an attic someplace, waiting for dark to turn her over to the slave brokers? For a moment he felt as he had back in September, when he'd realized he was ready to bolt for the swamp at the shadow of Henri Viellard's groom. Rose on the Lalaurie doorstep saying, I know you sold Cora Chouteau into slavery.
And then what? "Oh, Bastien, could you please come in here and knock this girl over the head and lock her in the attic?"
Ridiculous. The woman who held the dying against her breast with that look of holy ecstasy in her face?
The woman who'd reacted with such embarrassed horror at what Dr. Barnard had written? Who'd held out her hand with a twinkling smile?
And yet, January thought, wasn't that her entire detcnse? That "a woman like her wouldn't do such a thing"? A woman like her wouldn't force her daughters to go dh rough that scene at the piano, either-and he remembcred, again, the look of terror in Pauline's eye.
Why terror?
Jean Montalban came back to his mind, professor of law and pillar of his Paris neighborhood. Hannibal's voice saying, One's always hearing about domestic tyrants... No one in the family dares speak of it... . And Rose: I don't want a woman I've looked up to, as I've looked up to her, to be vindictive. But I don't know.
And he could not help remembering that Delphine Lalaurie's house was closed in, a walled enclave-a fortress, he remembered thinking. No word of anything that happened there would ever get out.
Absurd, he thought. Absurd. But it was the memory of Pauline's fear, as well as of the book on the table, that turned his steps back to his mother's house.
Once there, January carried a pottery jar from the kitchen up to his room, and from beneath the mattress took the powder-bottle he'd acquired from the late Mr. Gotch. He emptied its contents in the bottom of the jar, ran a fuse into it, packed the rest tight with hair and feathers from Bella's store of fever smudges, then added as much sawdust as he could gather-Rose had mentioned it made for a more impressive explosion-from the bottom of the kindling bin. With this under his arm, he made his way down Rue St.
Peter again, and along the levee to the market.
"You men want to earn half a dollar?"
It was nearly the last of his meager savings. The two carters sitting by their mule conferred, and accepted.
January spent another five cents on an empty packing crate labeled TREVELYAN BROTHERS-ST.
LOUIS, scooped it full of dockside garbage to give it weight, and pounded shut the nails on it again.
"When the man comes to the gate, you keep him talking," instructed January. "Ask for money. Tell him this was ordered for that address, but say you don't know who at that address."
The men exchanged a glance, and one of them bit the fifty-cent piece he'd given them. If they had any concern about the possible legal repercussions of what they were being asked to