"Can I come upstairs and look?" she asked January when he went to her. "I'm lookin' for a man name of Virgil, big man, but not so big as you?" She put an inflection of query in her voice. By her clothing she was either a slave or one of the dirt-poor freedwomen trying to make a living in the shanties at the ends of Girod or Perdido Streets, maybe a prostitute or maybe just a laundress. "Virgil, he slave to Michie Bringier over by Rue Bourbon, but he sleep out and work the levee. He pay Michie Bringier his cost, pay him good. He didn't come to the shed he rent behind Puy's Grocery, not night before last, not last night ..."

She nodded down at the dead around her feet. "These folks all white."

Though Bronze John's hand touched everyone, white, black, and colored, it was mostly the whites who died of it and, of them, more often the whites who'd flocked into New Orleans from the United States-the rest of the United States, January corrected himself-or from Europe. In Europe, January had known dozens of men whose aim was to come here and make fortunes impossible to find in the overtaxed, overcrowded, politically watchful lands of Germany, Italy, and France. They'd meet and read The Last of the Mohicans together or New York newspapers a year old. And there were fortunes to be made, in sugar, in trade, in the new, phenomenally profitable cotton.

But there was a price.

And with the coming of the cholera, even the blacks and the colored found no immunity, no recovery, no hope.

January led the woman up to the ward, as he had led so many since June. The arrival of the ambulances called him away: those who had been found, as this woman feared her friend had been found, in the shacks or attics or on street corners where they had fallen. One of those carried in was H?ier the water seller, who raised a shaky hand and whispered, "Hey, piano teacher," as he was borne past. In a different voice he murmured, "Mamzelle Marie," to the woman who had cleaned the floor. And, "Hey, Nanie," to the ragged woman... Even in extremis, the man knew everyone in town.