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for business, yet he felt a childish disappointment at having his irrational wish denied. His fallback had been to break in and search until he found a ball of the sticky black tar opium, perhaps scraping residue from the insides of Yu’s pipes to get enough to smoke. The sentries made that impossible, even though Peregrine knew that logically there was little chance that pipes or opium would still be found on the premises.
    A woman in a hooded cape entered the street from the opposite end of the block, stopped as Peregrine had, and stared at the sentries. The soldiers noticed her immediately. The woman hesitated, twisting the long cords of her purse in her hands as she looked toward Yu’s house. She stepped backward and was gone so quickly that she seemed to simply disappear.
    Peregrine spun on his heel and hurried back the way he had come, turning at the first cross street and breaking into a run. When he came around the corner of the house at the end of the street, he saw her ahead of him in the middle of the next block, a small woman in a long cape with a hem shiny from the wet street even though the rain had stopped.
    Peregrine waited until she was a block ahead of him and fell into step behind her, careful to maintain a safe distance. With a little luck, she would lead him to another opium den. It had been a mistake to confine his patronage to Yu. He knew that now, his supplier dead, his joints aching, and nowhere to turn for relief but the wretched laudanum.
    At first the woman headed back toward the center of the Quarter, but then she took a seemingly random course up and down the streets. Still, she kept moving swiftly along, as if she knew exactly where she was going, a destination in mind despite her wandering. Perhaps there was some reason to delay her arrival by taking an indirect route.
    Or maybe, Peregrine thought, it was to avoid being followed.
    No sooner had this idea occurred to Peregrine than the woman stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him.
    Peregrine nearly flung himself through the open door of a working-class tavern before their eyes could meet. There were only two customers standing at the bar, a thick man with battered ears and a flattened nose, and a broad-shouldered character in a patched coat with a zigzag scar bisecting his head, the thick welt of white tissue standing out against the pink skin of his bald skull. The bartender was the most reputable-looking member of the low crew, even with one milky blind eye and thin, bony elbows sticking out at angles from his body, as if he were about to dance a jig.
    The three of them stopped talking the moment Peregrine entered. They scrutinized him carefully, as if estimating the amount of money he might have upon his person. Peregrine turned and nearly collided with a woman who must have been sitting or standing beside the door when he came in.
    “Good evening, monsieur,” she said, her words slurred. He took her in with a single glance—the teeth bad, the face painted garishly in a failed attempt to disguise the ravages of age.
    “Would monsieur care to buy a lady a drink?”
    But Peregrine was already past her. He expected the whore and the toughs to follow him onto the street, but they must have decided he was not worth the trouble it would take to rob him, at least not at that early hour of the night. Peregrine normally put a pistol in his pocket before going out on the street at night, for New Orleans was dangerous after dark, but when he patted the jacket beneath his cape, all he found was the outline of a glass bottle.
    Peregrine’s woman was nearly two blocks away now, walking quickly into the crowd surging out of St. Louis Cathedral at the end of evening Mass. Peregrine tried to hurry, but his progress was blocked by exiting worshipers chattering happily to find the rain had ended.
    He stopped and raised himself up on his toes to see over the hats and bonnets, despairing to be denied a glimpse of his quarry’s receding figure. He