head at its lower side; though like most "quarters" buildings, its roof rose at an angle of more than forty-five degrees to the outside of the yard. Unlike most of the flat-roofed shacks thereabouts, the saloon itself was easily tall enough to accommodate an attic. The ceiling of the barroom, January recalled, was low.
There was a window up there, within easy reach of the kitchen roof.
Stepping back a few paces, January found that one of the lightless service wings of the clinic backed straight onto the rear of the kitchen, so closely that they shared a party wall. Its inner side was lower still.
It was a quick scramble to the roof of the one, then up the steep slope and over the ridge to the roof of the other, and so along to the window under the Boatman's eaves. From there it was an easy matter to flip the catch of the shutter with the back of a knife blade-the shutters fit sufficiently ill they would have admitted a finger. Slatternly light trickled through gapped floorboards and showed him a big room, low pitched, uninhabited, and ostensibly safe. He hoisted himself over the sill, closed the shutter, and flipped shut the catch again, lest the heavy wooden leaf bang in the wind. Carefully he held the lantern up for a better look. The room was hot and stank. Astonishingly, the roof didn't leak, like the plank floor another tribute to Roarke's business acumen. Smoke rose through the ill-fitting boards as well as light, shifting wraiths that collected thick under the ridgepole. The stench of it and of tobacco spit rose, too, nauseating: filthy clothes, spilt liquor, dirty bodies, dirty hair. The sweetish, pissy odor of rats.
And none of it masked the all-encompassing sticky reek of opium.
Boxes of it were stacked on a couple of boards, laid across the floor joists above the ceiling's more fragile planking. January edged out along the joists; the crates were marked BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY and heaped nearly to the rafters. Rats had gnawed one corner, and lay dead or stuporous, surrounded by trails of ants.
Kaintucks as a rule preferred to pickle their brains in alcohol. It was January's experience that flatboatmen so sodden with forty-rod that they could barely speak would still spit on an opium-eater with contempt.
But there was more opium here than he'd seen in the back room of Soublet's clinic.
Soublet's clinic.
Cautiously, January began to make his way toward the attic's north wall. Away from the noisier plotting of the filibusters (And what do they think the Spanish government's going to be doing during all this? Or the French? Or the British Navy?) other voices came clear, soft though they were, nearly under his feet.
A grunting Kaintuck nasal. Roarke's honeyed Liffey drawl. And a well-bred Creole accent, a mellow tenor that it took him a moment to place:
"... watched the place all yesterday, but he never came near it."
"Doesn't the man ever sleep?" That was Roarke's voice, speaking, as H?lier spoke, in French. "Gotch and Hog-Nose should have been back by this time."
"I still say it's a shame to make away with him. His size, he'd fetch eleven, twelve hundred..."
January felt the hair of his nape prickle. They were talking about him. Roarke, and H?lier Lapatie.
Is that you? Helier had called out to him once, in English. It hadn't occurred to him then to wonder to whom the water seller spoke.
"Not that kind, he wouldn't," said Roarke. "His English is too good and there's too many as would miss him..."
"And what would they do?" demanded H?lier's voice. "Go up to the Missouri Territory looking for the man?"
"Now, my friend, you know what they say about simplest plans being best." Roarke's voice, musical at any time, became purringly conciliatory. "And your first plan was the dandy. Only those as we know have nobody to go askin' after 'em. That was the brilliance of your idea."
"Well..." muttered H?lier, sulky like a sulky child, eating up praise.
"You saw what happened when you were laid up, and Gotch and Hog-Nose got greedy and brought our big black bhoy-o askin' after questions in the first place."
"Hog-Nose is a cretin!" snapped H?lier sharply. "I was very specific when I said only those I'd marked for capture..." H?lier. The cripple selling water in the streets.
The man who stopped to chat and gossip with every housewife, every other peddler. The man who knew everyone's business almost as thoroughly as Marie Laveau. January felt a rush of furious heat and crept