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Seems a good day for a stiff one, if you take my meaning.”
    “Yes,” Reynard said. “I think I do.”
    Escorted out of the courtyard, Reynard pressed through a knot of policemen and onlookers at the alley entrance, the usual crowd who seemed to materialize from nowhere. A reporter from the New Orleans Picayune attempted an intrusive question, but Reynard pressed past him. He had always been sensitive to subtleties others did not, or chose not, notice—but it required selectivity. Most men could filter the mundane; Reynard heard every voice as he passed from the throng, smelled every scent, knew which among them were drunkards or wife-beaters or lied in their daily prayers. He could feel their emotions like oil over his skin.
    Today he allowed himself to listen to the crowd, officers and gawkers alike. None could account for the brutal deaths of two ordinary men. Billfolds remained in the dead men’s pockets. Watches and keys, boots, wedding rings, pearl cufflinks on Bill, a gold tooth on the other—all untouched. He heard the whispered theories from those behind him:
    Animal.
    Dog.
    Rabid dog.
    Man-eaters!
    The image of the dead men’s smiling throats thickened the taste in his mouth. Why did that ghastly smell linger? What would Bill’s wife and daughter think? He could imagine the bleaching of their cheeks as grief made them weep, the trembling of lips, the fingers clutching handkerchiefs as he offered his condolences. Would he sit beside them and cry and hold their hands, or would he glance at his shoes and wish they would stop bawling?
    Bill Tourney is dead?
    He stopped listening. He buried his hands into the deep pockets of his wool ulster, crossed the street and strode down the block, blending into pedestrian traffic. He walked three blocks up Butler until rain splattered his pale hair and down the nape of his neck. When the horse and driver of a covered hansom slowed against the banquette, he signaled it with a wave and climbed aboard.
    “Parish constabulary,” he said. “Be quick.”
    Images of dirty brick walls and slack mouths crowded his mind as the hansom raced him along. They fought to gain his attention as he gave his full account to an officer at the police station, and persisted when he returned to his hansom and continued along the river to New Orleans. He passed warehouses and smokestacks, sawtooth storehouses full of rice and cotton. The air tasted of refining sugar from the Filter House and the morning breath of thousands of chimneys. Perhaps no one would smell the alley on his clothes. Soon more hansoms and carriages and carts and coach-and-fours, the city’s routine, swallowed him up.
    It was familiar territory. In the four years since returning to America, he struggled to restore order to his shattered life. The first stage renewed his late father’s business. Within two years he regained a measure of prosperity to LaCroix Brokerage. He expanded his influence as a commodities agent from river and Gulf shipping to the railroad, brokering trade with rail lines still months from completion. He soon bought out his partners and returned the business to complete family control. He did not consider himself the son of a carpetbagger; no, he was the promise of New Orleans made flesh, a French-born making good on the capitalist promise.
    Locals recognized provincial stock with his slender gait, his long, straight nose and pointed jaw. His family line came from both eastern Europe and a rarely-mentioned strain from North Africa (that business with his great-great grandmother, quietly hushed up), producing a ruddy, olive complexion with hair like wheat. He was a handsome man by all accounts, if not aquiline in his symmetry as the season kept him hunched, bundled in his heavy ulster, his high collar perpetually raised over his neck. In warmer climates his skin would catch the light, the picture of health; in Louisiana’s soggy autumn he was almost transparent.
    He pulled his hands from his pockets and