Only in this case the owners was out by the lake, one in Spanish Fort and one acrost the lake in Mandeville, so the men only went and paid 'em their take once a week. Steady men, they said. In fact their owners was more inclined to think their men had took sick of the fever. `My boy wouldn't run away,' they said."
"And did each of these men," asked January, "rent a place to sleep by himself?"
"Well, as it happens," said Shaw, "they did. They was good men, but not with any particular skill. And it's the slow season on the levee. They worked here and there, so nobody really missed 'em at a job for some several days. At least so far as I can tell, since it's sort of hard to find people who'll admit to rentin' sleeping room to some other man's slaves, let alone find them that sleep out to talk about the matter theirselves. And there's dozens dyin' every day."
"There are," agreed January quietly. It had begun to rain again. The two men paused under the wooden awning before the doors of a grimy barrelhouse scarcely larger than the shed 'Poly and Lu had shared.
Steam heat rose from the marshy street. Through the open doorway a slatternly woman was visible behind a plank set on a couple of kegs, dispensing what might charitably be termed whisky to a barefoot white man in the togs and tarred pigtail of a British sailor, a keelboatman whose clothing and body could be smelled from the door, and a couple of the weariest, grubbiest whores January had ever seen in his life. Even after growing up in the city it still mildly surprised him that such places, within a stone's throw of the cemeteries with their piles of corpses, could find customers willing to pay for anything within their walls.
"That's why whoever is doing this considers himself safe."
Shaw propped one bony shoulder against the porch post, chewing ruminatively. He made no comment about the discrepancy between those six, and January's earlier count of seven, and only spit a long stream of tobacco juice onto the boards of the porch.
"You didn't happen to get the name of this dead-cart man, did you?"
January shook his head. "Just that he was almost as big as me, and as dark. Heavy in the shoulders and arms. His head was shaved."
"I'll ask around amongst 'em," said the lieutenant. "I just come down here to inquire after a little amateur surgery over a faro game. I will never in my life understand a gamblin' man."
He shook his head marvelingly. "Bank's gonna foreclose, man's gonna lose his plantation, he comes into town with a draft for eight thousand dollars in his pocket to replace a grinder that'll keep his family's home for 'em and what's he do?" He jerked his head back in the direction of the Turkey-Buzzard. "He really think he's gonna win in a place like that? You understand it, Maestro?"
"I don't understand the fever." January stepped aside from the stream of water that had begun to drip down from the awning above. "I just see men dying of it every day."
Across the street a man in a formal black coat and tall hat emerged from a ramshackle conglomeration of buildings. He walked with the careful deliberation of a drunk, rain sluicing down his hat and off the shoulders of his coat, the dozen yards to the Jolly Boatman Saloon. Other than that the street was still, though a man's voice, harsh and flat with an American accent, roared out that he was a tiproarer from Salt River and wore a hornet's nest for a hat decorated with wolves' tails.
Shaw nodded across the street at the dirty, rambling warehouses from which the man had come. "I take it you done checked the clinics? Even places like that?"
The crudely lettered sign over the door proclaimed the place to be St. Gertrude's. God knew, thought January, the Swamp needed a clinic-most of the dying in Charity were Americans-but the existence of the place surprised him.
"If these people took sick in the street, or in a strange part of town, they might have been took anywhere," Shaw went on. "I'll ask around the Exchanges, and amongst the dealers, and at the steamboat offices. I don't doubt for a minute that any black man who goes to the new cotton lands runs the risk of bein' kidnapped, no matter what kind of proof he's got of his freedom