She scratched Mistigris's chin, and the big torn, evidently forgetting his usual custom of biting anyone who touched him, closed ecstatic eyes.

"Isaak was nineteen." Lightning flashed in the tarblack sky, then a long slow grumble of thunder.

"He worked with Basile Nogent the marble carver, and had just married C?lie G?rard, the coffee seller's daughter, back at the end of May. They lived behind Nogent's shop. Isaak hadn't had anything to do with his mother in many years."

"Did they say why she killed him?" asked January. "I assume they're saying someone paid her to doit."

"No one paid her." Paul glanced swiftly at his son. "She wouldn't kill for pay, not a colored man, not a white man, nobody! "

There was silence.

Corbier turned to Mamzelle, his face working with concern and fear. "Can you help us?" he asked. "Do anything? Learn anything? Or you, Ben? You have friends in the Guards." Paul was a man of deep goodness, but without Olympe's brilliance. Not a man, thought January, to know how to fight the law.

"I know one man in the Guards," January corrected him quietly. "And if he was the one who came and arrested Olympe, it's because he thinks she's guilty. But I'll find out what I can."

"I also." Mamzelle Marie got to her feet, a movement both languid and filled with energy, like a cat's. Or a snake's. "But the ink bowl can only tell me so much. And I won't learn anything faster than morning, when you'll be able to go to the Cabildo and ask her things yourself." Thunder sounded again, hard on the heels of the flash this time. January said, "If we're to get to our homes dry we'd best leave now. May I escort you to your door, Mamzelle?"