dark rose in color and sporting shutters painted blue. The house was dark and boarded shut, when Bronze John the dead-cart man dropped January off in front of it. "Look like nobody here." In the heat, beneath the swaying oil lamp's flare, he was no more than a sheathing of gold over blackness, and the gleam of eyes.
"Somebody's here," said January. "If you listen you can hear his violin."
The music, though stronger in the rear yard, was still muted and difficult to locate, as if, like the harps of faerie, the soft sad planxty issued from beneath the ground. Janu ary listened at the shutters of first one side of the house, then the other, but the sound grew no clearer. At length he walked backward until he could see the gables in the roof. From the soft bricks of the kitchen loggia he selected a suitable chip-in Paris there were always pebbles for tossing at windows, but Louisiana was founded on silt, and if there was a pebble in the length and breadth of New Orleans it had probably been imported from New York-and threw it at the blue shutters that overlooked the yard.
The violin did not stop. To do so would be an admission that there was a trespasser in the house.
Knowing the houses on both sides of the D?liers' were vacant, he called out softly, "Hannibal!"
He tossed another chip of brick, and called the fiddler's name again. This time the shutter opened. Long dark hair hanging down over his shoulders, the fiddler's face was a pale blur in the hot blackness. "But soft-What light through yonder window breaks? Or attempts to break... Bear you the essences of immortal grape or poppy flower? Good God, Benjamin," Hannibal added in a more normal voice, "what happened at that Hospital of yours? You smell like you've just come out of a common grave."
"I have," replied January somberly. "Come down and let me in. I'm not so comfortable, standing outside in the night."
He pulled off his coat and boots on the open loggia at the house's rear, and ran water from the rain cistern to wash his hands and face and hair. While he was doing this the shutters that led from the loggia into one of the cabinets opened, and Hannibal stood there, resplendent in his usual shabby white linen shirt-he disdained calico-and dark trousers that hung on his too-thin frame like laundry over a fence.
"Mind the bath," he said, holding aloft the cheap tallow candle he carried. It was typical of the fiddler, thought January, that he would purchase candles rather than use the household stores, just as he was sleeping in the attics rather than occupying his unwitting hosts' beds. The bath of which he spoke was an enormous one, copper and expensive, established in its own alcove under the stairs, with a cupboard for towels wedged in behind. "They store the extra chairs here, too, if you'd care to carry one up. We can return it later."
"I'll sit on the floor," said January. "You're right. I came out of a shallow grave tonight, and it's made me wonder about some things that have been happening, since the fever season began."
Hannibal had brought in a cot from the slave quarters across the yard and a table. Half a loaf of bread and some cheese occupied a tin box, beside a jug of water, his violin, and the inevitable stacks of books and newspapers. A bottle of whisky and another of Black Drop-triple-strength tincture of opium-stood, both corked, on a small packing box next to the cot, near a candleholder of pink-and-blue porcelain hung with Austrian glass lusters. He'd collected all the mosquito-bars in the house and rigged them as a sort of tent over the entire bed, including the packing box. At his gesture, both he and January crawled up under the clouds of white gauze, to sit on the worn, patched sheets while the insects hummed fitfully in the darkness outside. As January had suspected, there was a packet of tallow lights inside the packing box, with a Latin copy of Metamorphosis, a stack of old copies of the Bee and the Courier, and a couple of volumes of Goethe.
"When did the Perrets leave?" he asked the fiddler. "The folk next door?"
Hannibal thought about it a moment, not at all surprised by the question, counting back days in his mind.
"Must have been the night of the twenty-sixth. Thursday night. They were packing up on Thursday and sent