brown stretch of the Carondolet Canal.
The area around the basin was known, quite descriptively, as the Swamp. Even the City Guards didn't go there often. This time of the afternoon it was getting lively, and January moved with silent circumspection among the rough-built shacks and sheds that housed the bordellos, saloons, and gambling dens that made up nine-tenths of the businesses thereabouts. Once, he was stopped by a trio of hairy and verminous keelboatmen who demanded his business-it took all the diplomacy of self-abasement he could muster to get out of the confrontation with no more than tobacco on his shirt-and as he passed the two-room plank shed owned and operated by a woman known as Kentucky Williams, that harridan and the ladies of her employ, sitting uncorseted in their shabby petticoats on the sills of their open French doors, rained him with orange-peels, cigar-butts, and some of the most scatalogical language he had ever heard in his life.
"Sure makes me proud to be 'an American," remarked Lieutenant Shaw, slouching down the single log that served as a step before an establishment called the Turkey Buzzard, then wading over to January through the ankledeep swill of the street. The gutters that surrounded every square of buildings in the French town and gave them the name of "islands" did not extend across Rue des Ramparts, nor had the municipality bothered to lay down stepping-stones across the streets in this district. And why should they? thought January dryly. No wealthy cousins of the largely Creole City Council are likely to cross these streets.
"Not your part of town, Maestro."
"Nor yours, sir," observed January, falling into step with Shaw. Out of long habit he kept to the outside, as men of color were expected to, leaving the higher, margin ally drier weeds along the buildings for his chromatic better. "If I may say so."
"You may," replied Shaw gravely. "You may indeed." Behind them Miss Williams, a strapping harpy with a long snaggle of ditchwater blond hair and a pockmarked face like the sole of somebody's boot, screamed a final insult and flung half a brick. It hit Shaw's shoulder with the force of a cannon-shot, but he caught his balance and walked on, merely rubbing the place with one bony hand. "And they say women ain't strong enough to go into the army. You know, if you're despondent and all that an' really want to die, Maestro, probably settin' out all night and lettin' the fever get you would be more comfortable than comin' down here. Not that these folks ain't dyin' like flies in every attic an' back room an' alley," he added somberly.
A corpse, puff-bellied already in the heat, lay just outside the door of the Tom and Jerry saloon on the other side of the street. January wondered whether that was Bronze John or a statement of management policy concerning winners at the gaming tables.
"I've been out all night already," he replied quietly. "And I must say it nearly worked." And he recounted to Shaw the events of last night, and what he had found in the houses of Nicole Perret, and 'Poly and Lu.
"Over the past week or ten days, people have been coming into the clinic, or coming to my sister Olympe, or to others, and asking us to look through the fever wards for people who have disappeared, but don't seem to have come down with fever. Always people of color or blacks."
The lieutenant stopped, his slantindicular glance suddenly sharp and hard.
"Always people without families, people whose neighbors have left town or been taken sick themselves,"
January continued. "Always people no one would miss for days. I don't know how long this has been going on. Longer than ten days, I think. The man who drives the dead-cart says he's seen men moving through the streets, i n the slack-end of the night. They've taken seven I know about. Maybe more.
Maybe a lot more."
Shaw scratched his head thoughtfully. "Now, it's funny you should mention that, Maestro." Sleeplessness and overwork had thinned his already narrow face; his long jaw wore stubble like a brownish mold.
January thought suddenly of all those houses standing locked and empty, and of the fear that fueled drinking, and the drinking that fueled violence in an already violent town. "We had two queries so far about runaways that don't listen right, men that worked the cotton press or the levee, men that slept out, and only went to their owners every night with what they made.