either on him or back here in town.
But in the town itself-it's different. Iff'n these folks is kidnappin' people of color, they gotta be movin' 'em out of town somehow. Even quiet as things are on the levee these days, I'd feel right conscientious, myself, tryin' to get a coflle of folks that didn't want to go acrost the wharf and onto a boat."
"You think any of those folks wants to go?"
January met Shaw's eyes, aware of the anger in his own. There was silence between them for a time.
Then Shaw said quietly, "You know what I mean, Maestro."
"I know what you mean. Sir."
It was Shaw who turned his eyes away. "We'll find 'em." He spit out into the brown lake of the rain-pocked street. "I warn you, even if we do, it'll be hard to prove. There been too many slaves smuggled in and out of this town since the African trade was outlawed for folks to want to admit somethin' like this is goin' on. But they'll slip up somewheres, and we'll be waiting for 'em when they do.
Coming?"
The rain was letting up. It was tempting to simply walk with the Lieutenant back to the relative safety of the French town. There, if he was regarded as something less than a man, he was at least not in peril of life and limb. January shook his head. "There's something I have to take care of," he replied.
"Suit yourself. Mind how you go, though." Shaw touched his hat-something not many white men would have done in the circumstances-and made his way down the sodden slop of the street in the direction of the French town and the Cabildo, shoulders hunched, like a soaked scarecrow in the rain.
January took a deep breath, glanced around him for further warning of trouble, then mucked his way across the street to the shabby walls of St. Gertrude's.
Chapter Eleven
St. Gertrude's Clinic was completely unattended. A ramshackle building or collection of buildings that had once been a warehouse, it was nearly windowless, its roof leaked in a dozen places, and the smell would have nauseated Satan. As his eyes struggled to adapt to the grimy light admitted by a few high-up squares of oiled linen, January heard the scuttle and swish of rats in the darkness around the walls, and the hard whirring flight of a palmetto bug. Somewhere a man sobbed. When his eyes did adjust, he saw some twenty men and women lying on the floor on straw mattresses, tossing and shuddering with fever.
None of them was anyone that he knew. Seven were dead, three clearly dying. Along the wall two corpses, wrapped roughly for the dead-cart man, were already the target of long ribbons of ants. January steeled himself to pull the sheets from their faces.
Both were naked, and had been harvested of their teeth, the white man of his hair. The other, either a slave mulatto or a man of color, was far older than any of the men who had disappeared. January would have scrupulously avoided most of the sick men in the clinic had he encountered them on the streets: sailors, vagrants, upriver Kaintucks or Irish laborers, bewhiskered, gasping obscenities in barely comprehensible English.
But seeing them lying in a thin soup of rainwater and their own filth, January felt a blaze of anger go through him. Even Saublet's hellish premises didn't enrage him like this. At least the man had a dedication, and kept the place reasonably clean. People might be objects to Soublet, but he had the decency not to relieve them of their teeth when they died.
He left the clinic, and sloshed through the mire to the doors of the Jolly Boatman.
The black-coated, top-hatted man who'd emerged from the Clinic sat on one of the rude benches that flanked both sides of the big room, consuming a plate of crawfish and rice with a brown bottle of whisky at his side. Rather unusually for the district the place had a floor, wrought of used flatboat planks like the walls. With every other saloon in the Swamp awash in seepage the investrnent must pay off on rainy days.
Two tables stood in the center of the room, under soot-blackened lamps suspended from the low ceiling; at one of them a broad-shouldered, fair-haired man in a tobacco-colored coat played solitaire. Behind a plank bar another man, heavily mustachioed and with one pale blue eye bearing all the signs of an old gouging-it tended out, the torn muscles having never recovered-dipped