"Send someone for the police," said January. "God have mercy on her." He crossed himself and offered an inward prayer, then turned the lace-mitted hand over in his. There was blood under all her nails; two of them had been pulled almost clear of their beds in the struggle, and dabs of red stood on her skirt and sleeves like the fallen petals of a wilting rose.

He was thinking fast: about the passageway from the ballroom to the Theatre, about the courtyard with its teeming, masked fantasies. About the Coleridge dreams ascending and descending the double stair to the lobby, and the double doors opening from lobby to gaming rooms, and from gaming rooms to the street.

"Now, immediately, as soon as possible. Keep anyone from entering or leaving the building and send someone over to the Theatre and tell them to do the same. If anyone tries to leave tell them we've found a large sum of money and we have to identify the owner. But mostly just tell Hannibal and the others to play that Beethoven contradanse. It should keep everybody happy," he added, turning to see the look of horror that swept Froissart's face.

Belatedly, he remembered he was no longer in Paris, shifted his eyes quickly from the white man's eyes and modified the tone of command from his voice. "You know the police are going to want to talk to everyone."

"Police?" Froissart stared at him in horror. "We can't send for the police!"

January looked up, startled into meeting his eyes. Froissart was a Frenchman of France, without the American's automatic contempt for persons of color, but he'd been in the country for years. Still, an

American wouldn't have flushed or have turned his glance away in shame.

"Some... some of the most prominent men in the city are here tonight!" There was pleading in his voice.

The most prominent men in the city and their colored mistresses, thought January. Any one of whom can be headed out the side door this minute, masked and disguised as who-knows-what.

And French or not, Froissart was white. January looked down again and made his tone still more conciliating, like the wise old uncle common to so many of the plantations. "Believe me, Monsieur Froissart, if I had a choice between what your guests'11 say about your calling the police, and what the police'll say if you don't call-if it was me, I'd call."

Froissart said nothing, staring in fascinated horror down at the dead woman's face. The beautiful light skin of which she had been so vain was suffused with dark blood, the delicate features-indistinguishable from a white woman's-contorted almost beyond recognition.

"I could be dismissed," he whispered in a wan little voice. "M'sieu Davis wants no trouble in this house, not in the gaming rooms, not in the Theatre..." He swallowed hard. "And bien sur, she is only a placee..."

January could see where that was going. The custom of the country... So could Dominique; she gestured toward the door with her eyes, and January bent down closer to the body, his motion deliberately drawing Froissart's attention. "You see how her neck's marked?" The man would have had to be an idiot not to note the massive bar of bruise circling the white throat like a noose, but Froissart knelt at his side, leaned attentively, fascinated by the gruesome melding of beauty and death. Dominique slipped from the room with barely a rustle of silk petticoat.

"She was strangled with a cloth or a scarf, like a Spanish garrote. A woman could have done it as easily as a man. She was wearing a necklace of pearls and emeralds earlier- -see where the pressure drove the fixings into her skin?" His light fingers brushed the ring of tiny cuts. "They took it off her afterward. So it's a thief... Which means they might strike here again."

"Again!" gasped Froissart in horror.

January nodded, remaining on his knees in spite of an overwhelming desire to thrust the nattering fool aside and fetch Romulus Valle. Romulus could organize an unobtrusive cordon around both the ballroom and the Theatre while he himself could have enough time alone to examine the body and see if Angelique had been raped as well as robbed.

But such a cordon-such an examination-would never be permitted.

"Of course none of the gentlemen in the ballroom would have done this-why would they have needed to steal? But one of them may have seen something. And there's nothing says they have to take off their masks or give their right names when the police ask them questions."

And if you believe that, he thought, watching the groping quest for guidance in the manager's eyes, I have the crown jewels of France right here in my pocket, and I'll let you have them cheap at two thousand dollars American...

"But... But how will it look?" stammered Froissart. "I depend on the goodwill of the ladies and gende-men... Of course, there must be a discreet investigation of some sort, conducted quietly, but can it not wait until morning?" He dug in his waistcoat pocket, took January's hand, and slapped four gold ten-dollar pieces into his palm. "Here, my boy. I'll send for Romulus, and the two of you can get her to

one of the attics. Romulus can have the room tidied up in no time, and there'll be another four of these if you hold your tongue."

He started to rise, looking around him-possibly for Dominique-and January touched his arm, drawing his attention again. "You know, sir," he said gravely, "I think you may be right about a private investigation. Myself, I wouldn't trust the police now diat they have so many... Well, maybe I shouldn't say it about white men, sir, but I think you know, and I know, that some of these Kentuckians and riffraff they have coming down the river nowadays... And putting them on the police force, too!"

"Exactly!" cried Froissart, with a jab of his stubby, bejeweled finger. January saw all recollection of Dominique's presence in the room evaporate from Froissart's face and felt a mild astonishment that he'd remembered, out of all his mother's crazy quilt of gossip, that Froissart had been furious with chagrin over the construction by Americans of the new St. Louis Hotel Ballroom on Baronne Street.

But as if January had rubbed a magic talisman he'd found in the street, Froissart launched into an extended recital of the insults and indignities he had suffered, not only at the hands of the Americans on the police force but of the Kentucky riverboat men, American traders, upstart planters and every newcomer who had flooded into New Orleans since Napoleon's perfidious betrayal of the city into United States hands.

During the recital January continued to kneel beside Angelique's body, touching it as little as possible-she was, after all, a white man's woman-but observing what he could.

Lace crushed and broken at the back of her collar, knotted with the gaudy tangle of real and artificial cheve-lure. In the dim light of the candles it was hard to tell, but he didn't think there were threads caught in it, though there might be some in her dark hair. Fluffs of swansdown from her torn sleeve were scattered across the gorgeous Turkey carpet, thickest just to the left of the low chair. A cluster of work candles stood on the small table immediately to the chair's right, draped with huge, uneven winding-sheets of drippings. They'd been there when he'd come in. She'd been fixing her wings, he remembered, by their light. In France it would have been an oil lamp, but mostly in New Orleans they used candles. The drippings were distorted from repeated draughts-people had been in and out of the parlor all evening, fixing their ruffles or looking for her. Froissart was lucky the table hadn't been kicked over in the struggle. The whole building could have gone up.

Swansdown wasn't the only thing on the carpet. A peacock eye near the chair told him that Sultana girl in the blue lustring had been here. A dozen calibers of imitation pearls were trodden into the carpet: Marie-Anne had had large ones on her mask and bodice, and the drop-shaped ones he'd seen on the sleeves of the American Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn. Mardi Gras costumes were never made as well as street clothes, and ribbons, glass gems, and silk roses dotted the floor among thread ends of every color of the rainbow. In the padded arm of the velvet chair a needle caught the light like a splinter of glass.