stifling heat, and vanished in well-trained silence. If nothing else, thought January, Jean Blanque's widow would have far too accurate a knowledge of what men and women cost to indulge in that kind of waste. When the lesson was over he asked one of the market-women selling berries in the street outside if she had seen or heard of anyone leaving the Lalaurie house the previous Friday night, but the woman only crossed herself quickly, and hurried on her way. January put up his oiled-silk umbrella and made his way riverward to the cafes that sheltered under the market's tileroofed arcade.
Most of the market-women were gone, and the shadowy bays empty to the coming twilight. The air smelled thick of sewage, coffee, tobacco, and rain. A few crews still worked in the downpour, unloading cargoes from the steamboats at the levee. Others sheltered on the benches under the arcades, black and white and colored, joking among themselves and laughing. At the little tables set up on the brick flooring, brokers and pilots and supercargoes sipped coffee and dickered over the prices of flour and firewood, corn and pipes of wine. At other tables, upriver flatboatmen or the crews of the keelboats that still plied the river's jungly shores muttered in their barely comprehensible English; and under the arches on the river side a stocky, curly haired man in a somber black coat argued prices with the broker Dutillet over a little coflie of slaves standing, manacled, in the rain.
As he passed them January heard Dutillet say in English, "Nine-fifty is as high as I'll go; take it or leave it, sir." And the man protested, "Nine-fifty! Why, a good field hand's going for over eleven hundred in the Missouri Territory!"
January paused, recognizing the melodic organ-bass of the voice.
"Then take 'em up to Missouri and sell 'em there, by all means, Reverend," retorted the broker. "And considering what you paid that poor widow for 'em, you ought to take shame to yourself."
January realized the man in the black coat, whose face was vaguely familiar to him, was the Reverend Micajah Dunk, in whose honor Emily Redfern had gone to battle with the entire Creole community over the matter of musicians.
He passed on, shaking his head. A market-woman pointed out the man he sought, sitting alone at a table with a cup of coffee and beignets before him. January approached him, held out his hand: "Natchez Jim?"
"I was last time I looked." The boatman smiled, and clasped January's fingers in a grip like articulated oak logs. "You're the musician, Mamzelle Snakebones's brother."
"Last time I looked," replied January, and Natchez Jim gestured him to the other chair. The boatman was bearded, his hair a mass of braids like a pickaninny's, done up in string. His clothing had all started out different colors shortly after Noah's flood but had weathered to the hue of the river on a bleak day. He smelled of pipe tobacco and badly cured fur, but his French, except for an occasional Creole pronunciation, was the flawless French of Paris. "My sister told me you'd be willing to take someone upriver to Ohio."
"She told you that, did she?" Jim gestured, asking if January wanted some coffee, and January shook his head. He propped the dripping umbrella against the side of his chair; rain still thundered on the tiles overhead and veiled the cathedral, away across the Place d'Armes, in opaline curtains of moving gray. "It might so be. I owe her many favors, your sister."
He fished from the front of his shirt a grimy ribbon that had once been red, with a flannel juju bag on the end of it. "This has saved my life, not once but time and again. He's an angry man, the river. Sometimes all you can do is stay close in to the bank, that he see you not. Yes, I told her I'd take a passenger. Four days, five days it must have been. She spoke then as if it would be soon. Is your friend ready to travel?"
January shook his head. "She's disappeared. We can'tfind her. I sought you out to see if you had taken her already, Friday night."
"Not me." The boatman replaced his juju bag in his breast. "Have you checked the fever hospitals? The cholera wards? It takes one fast, the cholera."
"I work at Charity," said January. "I haven't seen her there, or at the Ursulines."
"There's a place that's opened near the turning basin, up in the Swamp where the