too, green or orange or brown banknotes, gold American cartwheels and eagles, silver Spanish dollars. Folded papers-deeds to houses, papers for slaves, letters of credit for crops or cargoes. Men who had only their six-reale daily wage to gamble away didn't come to Davis's.
The croupiers-fair-haired Germans, quick, small Frenchmen or Mexicans, mustachioed Italians-scooped up cards and money impassively, deft and expert. Did they realize that newcomeis to the city were the first to die in the epidemics?
Maybe the management didn't beat up greenhorns or rob winners the minute they cleared the door, as was the procedure in the hells of the Swamp or Gallatin Street, but the net result was usually the same.
As Shaw had asked, did those men around the tables think they were actually going to win money here?
Did they think the fever, or the cholera, would not get them, if they remained long enough in this town?
The rear door to the service wing stood open. A waiter in shirtsleeves was washing glasses in the tiny kitchen, his crimson coat hung on a peg on the wall behind him. An other arranged oysters on a tray. No gaslight burned in these rear purlieux; the gluey heat of the evening curdled with the smells of the tallow candles, with the tang of spicy sauce and the garbage in the gutters outside. The man in shirtsleeves saw January and grinned. "How you keepin' yourself, Maestro?"
One of his mother's greatest objections to January's musical calling was that it put him on the same standing with servants.
"Getting by." January accepted the lemonade that the man poured out for him. In the heat, after the hours spent caring for the sick girls on Rue St. Claude, the liquid was mouth-wringingly sweet. "Yourself?"
"Can't complain. We're stayin' well, is all that counts." Like January, the man was sufficiently dark to stand a fighting chance against the fever. His mother denied there was a difference, of course. But January suspected his mother would cheerfully succumb to the fever if by doing so it would prove her to be more white than her neighbors.
"Would you mind taking this in to Monsieur Davis?" January fished one of his cards from the breast pocket of his black wool coat. On the back he'd already written his request for a few minutes of the entrepreneur's time. Though he couldn't really afford it, he held out, along with the card, a two-reale bit as well. The waiter straightened his sleeves, resumed his coat, and returned a few minutes later to lead January up a narrow flight of service stairs to a smother-box of an office on the upper floor.
"Ben." John Davis rose from his desk, held out his hand.
"M'sieu Davis."
"Get Ben some champagne, would you, Placide? Unless you'd like something a little stronger?"
"Only lemonade, if that's all right, sir," answered January. "I'm going straight on to Charity Hospital tonight. To tell you the truth I've been so short of rest that if I had anything stronger you'd probably have to carry me out of here."
Davis shook his head with a chuckle. "Don't have enough men for that, Ben." With a gesture he invited January to sit, then peered at him closely in the candle light. "You don't look well, and that's a fact."
January reflected that the entrepreneur didn't look any too well himself stouter than when he'd seen him last and with far more white in the grizzle of his hair.
"Well, it can't last-it never does." Davis's French carried an echo of the Caribbean islands, after all these years. "I'll have something for you come November, when people start coming back to town. What can I do for you?"
"I'm not sure how to put this, sir." January turned in his hands the cool glass of lemonade the waiter Placide had brought him. "I know you have the confidence of your clients here, and I wouldn't ask you to violate it. I'm only asking if you feel you can help me."
He paused for a moment, as if marshaling his thoughts, though in fact he'd rehearsed his story with Hannibal several times. "A friend of my mother's was robbed of three thousand dollars," he said at last.
"We have no idea who took it-the house was broken into while the woman was visiting her daughter. I know that most of those who gamble here are, of course, not the men who would do such a thing, sir, but if a petty criminal should suddenly find himself possessed of that sum of money-particularly unexpectedly-he might