to his arsenal was because the lock had been drenched in the puddles of his mother's yard, and there was no time to dry it. The weapon and its attendant powder-bottle now reposed under his mattress.
Ten, maybe eleven buildings backed up against the turning basin-it was difficult to tell where St.
Gertrude's Clinic started and ended. January memorized rooflines as well as he could against the pitchy dark of the sky, then moved along the wall through the weeds and muck. Listening. Listening.
"Hell with 'er, I ain't goin' out in this," said a man's voice, so close January nearly jumped. Jaundiced lanternlight sprayed the rain around a door in the shack on the Boatman's riverward side. Forms jostled in the opening. By daylight January would have been visible. He doubted he was so now, even had the two men emerging into the weedy yard been sober.
They weren't, however. A narrow strip of yard backed the shack, and the grimy waters of the canal lay beyond, the view broken by a small and mangy outhouse.
Both men turned their backs on the canal, and urinated against the wall of the house. Rain running down his hair and under the collar band of his calico shirt, January had to agree with their sentiments.
When the men had gone in again he continued his wary circuit of the building. He'd brought a small bull'seye lantern, and with the slide closed nearly completely and the dark side of the lantern turned toward the building, he doubted he could be seen even had anyone next door taken his attention from his cards long enough to look. The Jolly Boatman ran down almost to the waters of the canal, separated only by a sodden yard that quite obviously doubled as a general privy.
He'd already observed that the building itself was large for the Swamp, though it held at most three rooms. The barroom occupied most of the floor space, orange light blearing through the shutters; table legs scraped on the floorboards, barely audible under the steady roar of the rain. A man's voice rambled on, low and conspiratorial, about how a hundred Americans properly armed could easily seize the harbor at Cartagena, march overland to Bogota...
January moved on. What he estimated to be a storeroom lay behind the bar, silent and dark but far too close to the scene of commerce to house kidnapped men and women. Not that the men who patronized the saloon would care if the Perrets, Robois Roque, Virgil and Cora and a hundred others were chained in a corner of the barroom weeping, he reflected with a queer cold detachment. But word would get out if someone thought there was a reward to be had. Next to the storeroom lay another chamber, dark also and probably also originally another storeroom, or perhaps the late barkeep's boudoir. There was certainly a bed in there, anyway. He could hear the ropes creak rhythmically, and the knock-knock-knock of the frame against the outer wall. The lovely Bridgit and the equally lovely Thalia?
Roarke's lady friend Mistress Trudi? There was no other sound.
So where the hell were they keeping them? He couldn't be wrong. He knew he couldn't.
It was possible that the kidnappings had been planned with an eye to handing the victims straight to the brokers. January settled his wide shoulders into the corner where the Boatman's rough kitchen thrust out toward the canal. But turning the victims over immediately would only raise problems for the brokers, the kinds of problems they looked to an outfit like Roarke's to solve for them.
The heated tin of the lantern made a localized radiance against his thigh. He slipped the cover enough to show him where to tread. At the kitchen's end, only feet from the choppy black of the turning basin, he widened the chink still farther and scanned the ground, though he didn't expect to find much, after hours of hammering rain. Keelboats rocked at the wharves of warehouses built around the Basin, squat craft with low cargo boxes, long steering oars knocking in their locks. No wharf lay behind the Jolly Boatman itself. He'd half-expected there would be, given the difficulties of forcing men and women down a rope or ladder to a keelboat's deck without a fuss.
Rain sluiced down his face. St. Gertrude's loomed above him like a lightless mountain, but the stink of it flowed over him, even in the downpour.
Turning back, January studied the saloon again. The kitchen shed was barely taller than his own