said he would. Widow Puy, what own the shed in back of her place that he slept in, rented it out yesterday to somebody else."
"And there was no sign that he'd been taken sick at his shed?" January asked.
"No, sir." The `sir' was a tribute to his well-bred French and black coat.
January was silent, thinking. The woman was raggedly dressed, but the colors of her thirdhand gown were sufficiently bright, coupled with the overabundance of cheap glass jewelry, to indicate her trade.
She wasn't wearing a tignon, either, her pecan-colored hair wound up in elaborate ringlets and cupid knots on her head; she was stout, and shopworn, and not very clean.
At last he said, "Has this happened to anyone else you know? Someone who lived alone, and had no family, that disappeared out of where they live? Or off the street?"
She nodded immediately. "Stephan Gaulois's pal 'Poly and his wife. They didn't live alone-I mean they live with each other-but their neighbors been took with the fever, both sides, and they ain't been on St.
Louis Street long enough that anybody know 'em. Stephan say he thought the fever took them, too, so he broke in their house to find 'em, but they gone. 'Poly's wife, Lu, just got her freedom, and they took that house not seven months ago."
January said softly, "Show me."
There was not that much to see. Poly and Lu had occupied a two-room shack in the sloppy gaggle of buildings that backed the canal and the turning basin, close behind the St. Louis Cemetery. It was a neighborhood, like the Swamp and Gallatin Street, given over largely to Kaintuck keelboatmen, cheapjack gamblers, purveyors of nameless cirinkables, and bravos and whores of assorted hues and nationalities. The lot on one side was still vacant, kneedeep in hackberry and weeds, where pigs rooted among stagnant ponds. On the other side stood a house and a sort of shed. Both were boarded tight.
They entered through the back door, whose bolt had been broken off in the socket. "That was done when I got here," explained Nani?'s friend Stephan, who joined the party on the way up from Gallatin Street. He was the light-skinned man who'd been at the table with her last night.
"Was there mud on the floor here when you came in?" The man frowned, trying to think back. The mud tracked from the door to the bed. The mosquito-bar, untied, was thrown sloppily aside. Half a dozen of the insects clung like the brown grains of wild rice to the exposed inner surface of the gauze.
"I don't remember," he said, and January nodded. It was pretty clear which tracks were Stephan's. They led from the door through to the front room, the outlines of his bare feet in all places overlying the muddle of bootprints that had been there before. He was barefoot still, like most workers on the levee, and his feet even shod would have been broader and longer than any others represented by the pale ghost shapes on the bare plank floor.
"Only one pair of shoes here," remarked Hannibal, kneeling to look under the bed.
January brushed his fingers over the dried mud of the tracks. Two or three days old, at a guess. It had rained daily for weeks.
"Lu only had the one pair," provided Nani?, twisting her necklace of cheap red beads around her fingers.
"Lu only just bought her freedom, over to Mobile, and come to town; 'Poly got his papers not so many months back. They didn't have much, and that's a fact."
"What happened to them?" Stephan, who had gone to look in the front room again, now returned, his face troubled and angry. "I thought they might have been took by the fever when they was away from home, but now you show me them tracks. Who'd come in here and take 'em away? And where'd they take 'em?"
"At a guess," said Hannibal quietly, "to the Missouri Territory, to pick cotton."
January and Hannibal parted in the weedy little yard before Lu and 'Poly's humble shack, Hannibal to make his way back to Mademoiselle Vitrac's school to offer what assistance he could and perhaps to cadge a meal. January intended to return to Gallatin Street and ask H?lier what he knew about 'Poly, Lu, and Nanie's Virgil, but something else Natchez Jim had said to him came back to mind. So, instead, with a certain amount of misgivings, he made his way upstream to where the turning basin lay at the end of the