the flesh of his back like a red-hot whip-the thought went through his mind with weird leisureliness that many of the riverboatmen could shoot the eye out of a squirrel on a branch. Then he hit the water like Lucifer falling: blackness, suffocation, cold.
At the downstream end of the American faubourg of St. Mary, even the more respectable of the rooming houses jumbled among the brickyards, warehouses, and mercantile establishments along Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets didn't have much over the buildings in the Swamp. They were slightly taller and rather sturdier, and fewer of them were devoted to the active pursuit of alcohol sales or prostitution, but that January could almost hear his mother's smoky voice saying the words-was about all that could be said.
The rain-swamped yard around the privy of the tall, raw-looking whitewashed building on Gravier Street smelled just as bad. And it was just as easy to scramble to the top of the shed at the end of the kitchen building, up to the kitchen roof-two stories high, this time, with slave quarters above the kitchen-and along the high ridge to flip back the shutter of a rear window overlooking the odoriferous yard. January was making an educated guess about which of the boardinghouse rooms was the one he sought. It would probably be the farthest back in the building on the highest inhabited floor, with a grand view of the slave quarters and the kitchen with their attendant smells and heat.
He pulled the shutter open and snaked through fast. He'd lost the lantern-either in the turning basin or in the attic of the Jolly Boatman, he couldn't remember-and was almost certain the lucifers in his pocket were too soaked to function. As soon as he stepped clear of the window's problematical light he whispered, "Lieutenant Shaw?"
"Right behind you, friend," replied a voice from nowhere near the likely location of the bed. "You got any especial reason for callin' informally like this?"
"It's Benjamin January." He'd never seen Shaw anything but lazy and slouching and spitting tobacco with an appalling lack of accuracy, but he'd also never been fooled by the man. "I thought I might have been followed or they might be watching for me in the street out front." All the way here through the lightless, foul warren of shacks and fences near the basin, and along the oozing lanes that paralleled Canal Street, he had dared not leave the shadows. The strain of listening behind him, of watching in every direction through the obscuring sheets of black rain, had left him as exhausted as if he'd run for miles.
Lightning flared outside. It showed him, as he'd suspected, the bed empty, mosquito-bar bundled carelessly to the side. The light was gone before he could turn or see anything else, and the dark deeper than before. He heard not the slightest whisper of scuff or footfall. Nevertheless, the next moment a scratch of sulfurous matchlight holed the darkness beside the bed. The slow-widening glow showed him the Kaintuck lieutenant hunkered naked on the floor by the bedside chair-the room didn't boast a table-holding lucifer to candlewick with one hand while the other kept a grip on the biggest skinning knife January had ever seen. Under a lank curtain of pale-brown hair Shaw's gray eyes were like an animal's, cold and watchful, ascertaining that his visitor was in fact alone.
Only after he'd satisfied himself of this did he stand, knobby as an old horse and scarred across pelvis, ribs, and arms with the ragged pale gouges of old wounds, and reach for his pants, hung neatly over the back of the chair. "I take it you found the fellas who's been kidnappin' yore sister's friends?"
One never needed to explain much to Shaw. "Roarke," answered January. "The Jolly Boatman's connected at the back with St. Gertrude's Clinic. The attic's full of opium to keep them quiet, and clothes to put on them when they take them out of there on keelboats up to the bayou and out across the lake."
"You see this?"
"I saw the opium and the clothes, and the connection between the clinic and the Boatman's kitchen."
"They see you?"
"I had to swim for it."
"You're lucky." Shaw was dressing while he spoke: trousers, boots, shirt, and coat, moving with the silent speed of a snake. "They'll be clearin' 'em out. Boechter and LaBranche-two of my men-sleep in the attic here. You shuck whatever weaponry you're packin' whilst I fetch 'em down." He caught the room's single threadbare towel from