Did he think I was going to play a tom-tom instead of a piano?

Now he moved his satchel carefully up onto one of the spare, graceful cypress tables that adorned the parlor, and folded his hands. In the impeccable Parisian French that he knew was several degrees more correct than Fourchet's Creole sloppiness, he said, "In other words, sir, what you want is a spy."

"Of course I want a spy!" Fourchet's eyes slitted and he looked like a rogue horse about to bite.

His harsh voice had the note of one who wondered how January could be so dense. "No question it's the blacks. I just need to know which ones, and if the Daubrays or someone else are behind it.

This Shaw fellow I spoke with yesterday said you'd be the man."

"I'm afraid the lieutenant mistook me, sir." January fought to keep his voice from shaking. "I'm a surgeon by training, and a musician. I've looked into things when friends of mine needed help.

But I'm not a spy."

"I'll pay you," said Fourchet. "Five hundred dollars. You can't tell me you'd make as much between now and the end of the harvest, playing at balls." He nodded toward the piano in the front parlor, where January gave lessons three mornings a week to a tiny coterie of free colored children, the sons and daughters of white men by their plac?es.

"I told Monsieur Fourchet that you certainly needed the money," put in Livia.

January opened his mouth, then closed it, fighting not to snap, You mean YOU want-not NEEDthe money. But his mother didn't even avert her gaze from his, evidently seeing nothing amiss in charging her son five Spanish dollars a month for the privilege of sleeping in the room he'd occupied as a child, nor in reminding him of the hundred dollars he owed her.

That debt had come about three weeks ago, when January had gone to play at a ball and, returning late, had encountered a gang of rowdies, Kentucky river-ruffians of the sort that came down on the keelboats. Coarse, dirty, largely uneducated, they were habitually heavily armed and drunk. He'd escaped with his life, and without serious injury, only by refusing to resist, putting his arms over his head and telling himself over and over that to put up a fight would escalate the situation to a killing rather than just "roughing up a nigger." It hadn't been easy.