It was nearly five in the morning when January was conducted by a guardsman down the rear stairway-out of consideration to those still in the gambling rooms- and into Froissart's office.

The place smelled overwhelmingly of burnt tallow and expectorated tobacco. "I'd have started with the mothers, myself," sighed Lt. Shaw, pinching off the long brownish winding sheet from one of the branch of kitchen candles guttering on the desk. In his shirtsleeves the resemblance to a poorly made scarecrow was increased, his leather galluses cutting across the cheap calico of his shirt like wheel ruts, his long arms hanging knobby and cat scratched out of the rolled-up sleeves. Windrows of yellow paper heaped the desk's surface, and a smaller pile on the side table next to a graceful Empire chair marked where the clerk had sat. January wondered how accurate the notes on the costumes were.

He was a little surprised when Shaw motioned him to a chair. Most Americans-in fact most whites-would have let a man of color stand.

"You're right about that, sir," he said. "They're the ones who would have seen anything worth seeing."

Coffee cups stood in a neat cluster in one corner of the desk-presumably brought in by the men when they were questioned. Even at this hour, voices clamored drunkenly in the street, though the general tenor had lowered to a masculine bass. The brass band, wherever it was, was still going strong, on its fifth or sixth iteration of the same ten tunes. On the way from the back stairs to the office January had heard the noise from the gambling rooms, as strong now as it had been at seven-thirty the previous evening.

"Now, there's a fact." Shaw stretched his long arms, uncricking his back in a series of audible pops. "I sure wouldn't want to go bargainin' with one of them old bissoms, and I don't care what her daughter looked like. I seen warmer Christian charity at Maspero's Slave Exchange than I seen in the eyes of that harpy in yellow... Leastwise this way the daughter gets the good of it, and not some rich man who's got a plantation already. You know Miss Crozat?"

"By reputation," said January. "I met her once or twice when she was little, but her mama kept her pretty close. She was only seven when I left for Paris in 1817, and she wasn't a student of mine. I taught piano back then, too," he explained. "I expect I'd have met her sooner or later, now I'm back. Her mother and mine are friends."

"But your sister says you say you talked to her tonight."

January nodded. "I'd been charged by a friend to arrange a meeting with her at my mother's house, tomorrow afternoon... this afternoon. I haven't had time to talk to my mother about it yet. I've lived with my mother since I came back from Paris in November. It's on Rue Burgundy."

Shaw made a note. "Any idea what the meetin' was about? And could I get the name of your friend?"

"I have no idea about the meeting. If it's all the same to you... sir," he remembered to add, "... I'd

rather keep my friend's name out of this. The message was given in confidence."

It was his experience that white men frequently expected blacks or colored to do things as a matter of course that would have been a dueling matter for a white, but Shaw only nodded. The rain-colored eyes, lazy and set very deep, rested thoughtfully on him for a time, shadowed in the rusty glare that fell through the fanlight, as Madame Trepagier's had been shadowed. "Fair enough for now. I might have to ask you again later, if'n it looks like it has some bearin' on who took the girl's life. Tell me about your talk with her."

"It wasn't much of a talk," said January slowly, sifting, picking through his recollections, trying to excise everything that would indicate that the one who sent the message was white, Creole, a woman, a widow... connected to Angelique... present in the building...

With his dirty, dead-leaf hair and lantern-jawed face, Abishag Shaw gave the impression of an upriver hayseed recendy escaped from a plow tail, but in those sleepy gray eyes January could glimpse a woodsman's cold intelligence. This man was an American and held power, for all his ungrammatical filthiness. As Froissart had said, there was a world of matters the Americans did not understand, and chief among them the worlds of difference that separated colored society from the African blacks.

"She refused to meet with my friend. She said she'd received notes before from... my friend, that she had nothing to say to... them." He changed the last word quickly from her, but had the strong suspicion that Shaw guessed anyway. "She said her father was an important man, and that my friend had best not try any... little tricks."

"What kind o' little tricks?" asked Shaw mildly. "You mean like brick dust on the back step? Or accusin' her of being uppity an' gettin' her thrashed at the jail-house?"

"One or the other," said January, wondering if he'd let the answer go at that.

Shaw nodded again. "She say anythin' to you? About you?"

Genuinely startled, January said, "No. Not that I remember."

"Insult you? Make you mad? Phlosine'..." He checked a note. "Gal named Phlosine Seurat says she heard the door slam."

"It was Galen Peralta who slammed the door," said January. "He came in-"

"Galen Peralta? Xavier Peralta's boy? One she had the tiff with earlier?" Shaw sat up and took his boots off the desk, and spat in the general direction of the office sandbox.

January regarded him with reciprocal surprise. "Didn't anyone else tell you?"

The policeman shook his head. "When was this? Last anybody saw of the boy was when he tore that fairy wing o' hers in the lobby, an' she went flouncin' off into that little parlor in a snit. Last anybody saw o' her, for that matter. This Seurat gal-an' the two or three others who was up in the upstairs lobby-say the boy stormed off down the stairs, and somebody says they seen him in the court, but they don't remember if that was before or after or when."

"There's a way in from the court to the passage outside this office," said January. "He could have changed his mind, had what they call 1'esprit d'escalier..."

"Bad case of the I-shoulda-said," agreed Shaw mildly, sitting back again. Outside, men's voices rose in furious altercation; there was the monumental thud of a body hitting the wall that made the building shake.

"I dunno how many sweethearts come to grief from one or the other of 'em comin' up with just the right coup de grace halfway down the front walk. Go on."

"If he came up the back stairs nobody in the lobby downstairs, or upstairs, would have seen him. Because he did come in, as I think she knew he would. She thought I was him, when I first came into the room, before she turned around, and she had her lines all ready for him. The boy had a temper. And there isn't a seventeen-year-old in the world with the sense to just walk away."

"God knows I didn't," said Shaw, getting up and stretching his back. "Near got me killed half a dozen times, when I came up with just the right thing to say to my pa when he was likkered. And you left then?"

January nodded. "Yes, sir. There was no reason for me to stay, and the boy would have ordered me out in any case. My sister and Marie-Anne Pellicot were hunting for Mademoiselle Crozat for the rest of the night. Galen's father, too. I thought at the time the two of them went off somewhere to have their fight in more privacy, but it may be that he left fairly soon-during the jig and reel we started up to distract everyone from Bouille and Granger-and that she was still in the room fixing her wing when the murderer came on her."

The colorless eyebrows quirked. "Now, where you get that from?"

"Here." January got to his feet, Shaw following in his wake. They climbed the dark of the back stairs, turned right at the top, to where a sleepy constable still guarded the parlor door. A cup and a half-eaten pastry lay on the floor beside his chair. He got to his feet and saluted.