She had offered me her help. Here was a problem that might yield to wealth and contacts. If she really had them. And where else was I likely to find a solution?

“… I need a favor.”

Dana let the smoke out of her lungs and watched me through it. “Anything I can do?”

I suffered a rush of doubt — had I ever been out of balance with Dana, on the owing side of the Deal with her? Always too many debts. I pushed the corners of my mouth away from each other and hoped it looked like a smile. “I have to dispose of a corpse.”

From her face, I might have just shed my skin. She whispered something and spit left. Her eyes slid away from me, then back. “I guess you better come in.”

I followed the swirl of her hem off the porch and, sunblind, into the building’s front hall. The smell of last night’s lamp oil hung around my head as I climbed the stairs. Very old marble ones; each tread was scooped out and shallow in the middle, as if the stairs had been a watercourse. The second-floor windows were shuttered, but on the third-floor landing, light fell on us like a malediction in shafts of dust. It was very hot in the hall.

Dana pushed open a door and sauntered in. I had never been in a place Dana called home. This one was so much hers that I found myself shying on the sill like an animal at an outstretched hand.

We were in a lavishly cluttered, languorous room, where the light filtered through slatted blinds and folds of lace. The unmade bed beneath one window looked right and proper, as if the linens weren’t woven to lie flat, but would always form those shadowed valleys, that textile refuge. There were rugs on rugs, so that even Dana’s heeled slippers were soundless. The chairs were strewn with things: clothes, magazines, single shoes, embroidered towels, gloves, strands of beads, and a box spilling tissue and printed with a shop logo rarely seen in the Night Fair. On the kitchen table was a bowl of full-blown roses, and I smelled rose incense, very fresh. The room was sleepily warm, and all its colors were indistinct.

Dana swept a robe and a cedar box off a kitchen chair and onto a footstool. “Have a seat,” she said. “D’you want some tea?”

I wanted, in fact, to leave. “No,” I said, and sat down in a cloud of disorientation. “I want to move a corpse.”

“Well, if it’s already a corpse, then there’s no hurry.”

“In this heat?” I wanted to break this slow, hypnotic atmosphere with something crude. But the imagined stink of decay couldn’t hold out against the incense. I looked around and found it still burning on a wicker table half curtained with lace. There was a figurine there, too, draped with veiling, surrounded by an oval mirror, a shell comb, and nine pink candles. Maitresse Erzulie, the queen of love. At the foot of the statue was an apple, cut apart and fastened back together with straight pins. The skin at the cut marks was just starting to pucker. I thought of Cassidy the night before, suffering in silence. What was Dana asking for, so early in the day? What lay under Erzulle’s dominion that Dana didn’t have?