Drunken laughter floated in from the Rue Ste.-Ann through the single tall window that nearly filled one side of the room. The brass band still played in the street. Shouts of mirth, a woman's shrill squeak of not entirely displeased protest. Men cursed in French, German, slangy riverboat English, and there was a heavy splash as someone fell into the gutter, followed by whoops of drunken laughter.

January glanced at the window, not daring to break Froissart's self-centered oblivion by walking over to check whether there were marks on the sill. The killer could have stepped out one of the ballroom windows and walked along the gallery, he supposed. But with the heat of the ballroom, other revelers had taken refuge on the gallery, and such an escape would not have gone unseen. Carnival rioted below, thick in these narrow streets of the old French town, drowning the sounds of the ballroom itself. In the growing upriver suburbs, in their tall brick American houses on the new streets along the tracks of the

horse-drawn streetcars, Protestants would be shaking their heads about the goings-on. Though perhaps, reflected January, a number of those Protestant wives wondered-or tried not to wonder-where their husbands were tonight.

Last summer everyone in the ballroom-everyone in the streets-everyone in the city-had been through the horrors of a double epidemic: yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, worse than any that had gone before. They had survived it, mostly by clearing out of town if they could afford to, taking refuge in the lakeside hotels of Mande-ville and Milneburgh or on plantations. Typical of the Creoles, they celebrated the victory rather than mourned the loss. But there was no guarantee that in five months it wouldn't return.

He remembered Ayasha and crossed himself again. There was no guarantee about anything.

"They simply do not understand." Froissart's voice brought him back to the present. The man was now well worked into his theme. January kept an expression of fascinated interest in his face, but barely heard him. It was only a few hundred feet to the Cabildo, and ordinarily a woman-even a beautiful one-was quite safe walking about the streets alone, provided she kept out of certain well-defined districts: the waterfront or the bars along Rue du Levee; the Swamp or the Irish Channel.

But Carnival was different.

"Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!" Froissart's gesture to heaven was worthy of Macbeth perishing in the final act.

"They sure don't, sir." If he's buying, I'll sell it to him.

"The Americans, they don't know how to behave! They don't know how to take mistresses. They think it's all a matter of money. For them, money is everything! Look at the houses they build, out along the Carrolton Road, in the LaFayette suburb and Saint Mary! I recall a time-not ten years ago it was!-that the whole of the city of Jefferson was the Avart and Delaplace plantations, and a half-dozen others, the best sugar land on the river. And what do they do now? They build a streetcar line, they tear up the fields, and the next thing you know, you have these dreadful American houses with their picket fences! Exactly that which that canaille Granger proposes to do along Bayou Saint John! Him, fight a duel? Pffui!"

He flung out his hands in indignation-evidently challenges to duels, like trouncings with canes or fistfights in the court downstairs, did not come under the same category as murder.

"Why, in my office this evening, the way he and those sordid friends of his behaved! A disgrace! They are not gentlemen! They have no concept! They cannot tell Rossini from 'Turkey in the Straw'!"

"You're right about that, sir," agreed January gravely. As he spoke he felt a deep annoyance at himself, to be playing along as he had played along during his childhood and adolescence, falling back into the old double role of manipulating a white man's illusions about what a man of color was and thought. Still, the role was there, script and inflections and bits of business, a weapon or tool with whose use he was familiar, though he felt dirtied by its touch. "In Paris, the Americans were the same way. Every ball I'd play at, you could tell right where the Americans were sitting."

"And that is why we cannot summon the police tonight," concluded Froissart, turning regretfully back to the beautiful, ruined woman lying between them. "They do not understand how to do these things quietly, discreetly. Of course, of course they must be summoned in the morning-after I have spoken to Monsieur Davis... Of course he will want to summon them..."He chewed his lip in an agony of uncertainty, and January remembered the mother of one of his friends in Paris, who would put aside bills "for a few days until I know I have the money" and then eventually burn them unread.

Angelique's body was a bill that would be burned unread. Not because she was an evil woman or because she had harmed every life she touched, but only because she was colored and a placee.

"Well, what would you?" sighed Froissart-January could almost see Mme. du Gagny sliding yet another dressmaker's dun into that nacre-and-rosewood secretaire. "It is how it is... Good heavens, how long have we been here? People will begin to ask... You must return to your piano and say nothing, nothing. Be assured that the matter will be taken care of in the morning."

January inclined his head and arose. "I'm sorry," he said humbly. "I was so shaken up by seeing her here like this, I... It took me a while to get my thoughts back. Thank you for your patience with me."

Froissart beamed patronizingly. "One understands," he said, as if he himself hadn't gone fishbelly green at the sight of the body-January guessed he was one of those who headed for Mandeville at the first of the summer heat and had never been through an epidemic at firsthand in his life. "Of course, the shock of it all. I hope you are better."

"Much," said January, wondering if he should fake a spell of dizziness with the shock and rejecting the idea- and his own consideration of it-with loathing. He made a show of looking around as if he'd forgotten something, playing for as much time as he could scrape. "Much better."

Froissart turned and left the jewelbox room with its grisly occupant, and January perforce followed. He glanced back at the crumpled body, the grasping and greedy woman who had assumed he was a slave because his skin was darker than hers. Still, she did not deserve to be forgotten like an unpaid bill. I did my best, he apologized. More, certainly, than he would ever have accorded her in life.

As he left he laid the four coins Froissart had given him gently on the table by the door.

"Romulus!" called Froissart. "Romulus, I..." They emerged from the hallway into the lobby in time to see a small party of blue-clothed city guardsmen arrive at the top of the stairs.

Froissart stopped, goggling, as if he hoped these were another group of revelers, like Robin Hood's Merry Men or the Ladies of the Harim.

But none of them were masked. And no Creole he knew, thought January, would have the wit to dress that much like an out-at-elbows upriver Kaintuck, with a shabby, flapping corduroy coat many years out of fashion and too short in the sleeves for his loose-jointed height. Minou slipped past them, startlingly invisible for someone so beautiful and brightly clad, and melted into the crowd in the ballroom like snow on the desert's dusty face. The tall officer stepped forward and laid a black-nailed hand on Froissart's arm.

"Mr. Froissart?" Interestingly, he got the pronunciation right. " 'Fore you and your boy head on back to the ballroom, we'd like to talk to you." His tone was polite but his backcountry dialect so thick that his English was barely comprehensible.

Two of the guards were heading into the ballroom. The music ceased. Silence, then a rising clamor. January could already hear that the tenor of the noise from the gaming rooms and the downstairs lobby had changed as well.