"That was a long time ago, Burgess."

"Don' matter. All I'm doin is actin like you raise me up to act."

Delzora spoke to him testily. "I never raise you up to be no dope dealer, Burgess." She poured water over the tea bag and set the cup on the table. She sat down.

Burgess did not sit down. He stood there, still holding the greens. "I ain sayin that. I'm sayin you never raise me up to be like every other dumb f.u.c.k in the project neither-stupid 'cause I'm so poor, mean 'cause I ain goin nowhere." He put one hand down on the table, leaning toward her, clutching the greens with the other hand. "I done some good in the Convent, Mama, fixin things up, makin sure ever'body's got what they got to have."

Delzora was about to tell him he better watch his mouth but she got sidetracked, suddenly picturing, as clear as any photograph, Burgess as a little boy, the way he'd been full of spirit, headstrong, refusing to be squashed by the burden of life in the Convent. Now she saw his spirit, his exuberance for the project as an affront to her, his being headstrong as stubbornness, a refusal to see that he had become part of all the bad things she'd tried to warn him against, get him away from, that he'd taken everything she'd taught him about living in a Christian way and turned it all inside out, so he didn't know anymore what was right and what was wrong.

"Tell me, Mama," he was saying. "How could I do all that without no money?"

"You think 'cause you do good with all that money, it don't matter anymore where it come from." She tilted her head back, looking at him through the bottom of her gla.s.ses. "Why all of a sudden you worried 'bout doin good, Burgess?"

Burgess stood up straight again. He laughed a soft, low laugh. "Maybe I want to see if I can get away with it."

"It jus be another way for you to be Mr. Big, Burgess, to make everybody think you walk on water, that's what."

His jaw muscles were aching again. "I got what I got the only way I was ever gon get it. I ain livin like no millionaire. I ain livin like they ain no tomorrow." He was talking like Janine now, using her words. Janine, who believed he could do no wrong. But this was his mother he was talking to, and she didn't believe that, not at all. He told her truthfully, "The way I see it, they wasn't much of a tomorrow any other way."

"You wrong about that, Burgess," Delzora said. "They's always tomorrow, and they's the day after that, and the day after that."

He stood there a minute longer and then he said, "You want these greens?"

She didn't answer for so long that he was about to walk away. Then she said, "Yeah, gimme them greens." She held her hands out and took them, not looking at his face but at his shirt, wet and clinging to his skin where he'd held the bundle of dewy leaves up against him.

Burgess turned away from her without ever telling her what he'd come to say. He walked into the hallway and was startled to see Thea standing there. The look on her face told him she'd heard it all, or enough. He hesitated, then went past her, his body turned slightly sideways even though there was plenty of room, as if he understood she wouldn't want to touch him. Thea waited until he closed the door behind him before she went into the kitchen. She sat at the table with Delzora, in front of Burgess' untouched tea. The two women looked at each other in silence.

Delzora finally got up, removed the two cups from the table, and began washing the greens.

24.

It didn't take Thea long to put it all together. Since she'd come back to town there had been an article in the newspaper every week about the city's housing projects, several of them focusing on the Convent. There had been speculation about where the money had come from to finance the turnaround in the Convent. Most of the residents said they thought the city had supplied it. No one said they thought it was drug money. No one believed there was any such person as the Bishop of Convent Street. Thea remembered reading that someone had said if there was any such person, then he was just a step or two below Jesus Christ. From what Zora had said to Burgess about walking on water, Thea thought she must have read that too.

Zora stood at the sink, still working on the greens. Thea spoke to her back. "I heard-I couldn't help but hear . . ." She broke off. She wanted to say something but realized that she didn't know what it was. "I'm sorry Zora," she said finally. "I truly am sorry."

But Zora, her voice raised above the running water, said harshly, "Don't you be feelin sorry, I don't want no one feelin sorry for me."

It was as if Zora, for pride's sake, had dropped a wall of gla.s.s between herself and Thea. Thea felt the separation acutely, as if her knowledge of Burgess now alienated her from Zora. The thought of any kind of change in her relationship with Zora, any sort of permanent alienation, made her feel sick and slightly panicky. She forced herself to leave the kitchen and went upstairs to talk to Bobby.

He was just waking up. She sat on the bed. He put his hand out to her and tried to pull her down, but she said, "No, not now."

"Burgess was just here," she began in as neutral a voice as possible, not wanting to sensationalize what was already sensational enough. "When I went downstairs, I heard him and Zora talking-actually, I eavesdropped. Zora's been angry with Burgess for a long time, and I wanted to know why."

She paused; Bobby was rubbing his eyes. He yawned. She went on: "You know all the work being done in the Convent? You know this person who doesn't really exist, the one the media like to call the Bishop of Convent Street?"

Bobby nodded.

"It's Burgess," she told him.

"What did he and Zora say?" Bobby sounded curious, not surprised. Thea repeated what she had heard.

Bobby had told Thea about going to the Convent with Burgess, but he had told it as a lark, describing only surfaces, mainly telling an anecdote about the chandelier. Now he said, "I knew it when we were in the Convent the other day. People are scared enough of him that he could have gone into that apartment and taken that chandelier." He stopped, as if deciding whether to say more. Then, "And that guy I told you offered us crack? Well, Burgess told him to tell somebody-he said, 'Tell him I'm not dead yet.' He deliberately hurt that guy even though the guy was so wasted from drugs. He wanted to let him know."

Thea frowned. "Let him know what?"

"That he could hurt him bad if he wanted to, I guess. That he could hurt whoever he was sending the message to. I got the impression there's some sort of power play going on."

"You didn't ask Burgess about it?"

"h.e.l.l, no. I don't want to know that s.h.i.t."

"Whether we like it or not, Bobby, we do know that s.h.i.t."

Bobby sat up. "It's none of our business," he said. "Whatever Burgess does in the Convent, whoever he is, it's none of our business."

"But it is!" Thea protested. "I don't mean we have to tell anyone what we know. We don't have to decide whether we're turning Burgess in or not, nothing like that, but it is our business. We know about it, so it is."

"Okay." Bobby held his hands palms up. "So what do we do about it?"

"I don't know. I mean, it's not that we have to do anything about it." She flipped a hand in exasperation. "I don't know what I mean. It's not our business exactly, except it is, because we're involved with Burgess."

"Maybe we should get uninvolved, get rid of him."

"That's probably what he's thinking we're going to do. Is that what you want to do?"

Bobby shrugged.

"Do you feel threatened?" Thea asked him.

"Sure. It turns out he could shoot out a wall of the apartment house as quick as the next guy. The question is, do you feel threatened?"

"I don't know," Thea said slowly. "I really don't know. Maybe we should talk to him."

"And say what?"

Thea didn't answer.

"Well, all I know right now," Bobby said, "is he's your contractor and he's my tenant." He glanced at the clock. "Christ, I'm running late. I'm supposed to meet Jared at the apartment house, and I need to go by the hospital first." His mother had been at Touro for several days with a bad case of bronchitis. He got out of bed and started dressing.

Thea said, "Maybe we should ask him if he's afraid of us."

Bobby laughed.

Thea stayed sitting on the bed until he left. She had kept her feelings about Burgess veiled, a shadow of disbelief here-except she did believe it-a shade of disappointment there, and something else flickered behind the veil, a spark she was keeping tamped down for fear it would catch and consume her. But consume her with what?

Who could think with all the noise in the house? Mr. Robert and the other workers had arrived. Thea retreated to the third floor. She went with a well-worn copy of The Stranger, thinking she was going to read. But she was really going to commune with Aunt Althea's ghost.

The ghost lay low for a while, waiting for Thea to become distracted from her book. After reading the same paragraph three times without comprehension, Thea finally put the book face down on her lap. She was stretched out on an old chaise longue that had been in her aunt's bedroom. Next to her, a floor lamp with a fringed shade lit the corner of the slope-ceilinged room. She used an old trunk as a table, her cup and saucer sitting on it, the coffee left in the cup cold. Around the room were pieces of furniture covered with sheets that stirred now and again in the brisk breeze that came through an open window, as if the ghost fluttered from one to another, restless and impatient to a.s.sert its will and the guilt of a long and intolerant past.

The ghost let Thea drift back through her memories for a while, recent ones first, a picture of Burgess and Janine on the porch, a thrill of s.e.xual excitement triggered by the image and by the idea of Janine's being pregnant. Seeing them together had led Thea into bed with Bobby, and for that she was not sorry. She and Bobby had been friends for a long time, and Thea had loved him as a friend first. That was good; she believed that would make their s.e.xual relationship strong and deep and lasting. And when they were making love, her eyes closed so she could only hear and touch and taste and smell, then she could imagine for a time he was that dark, shadowy man who had been in her dreams for many years, dark because she always thought he would be an Italian like her father, shadowy not so much because she could never see his face clearly but because a part of him was menacing, dangerous. Exciting.

Lying there on the chaise, she closed her eyes, willing this dream man to come to her, and what came to her instead was the man in the hallway in her dream about Lyle and the burglar alarm. She quickly opened her eyes: she didn't want him to be quite that menacing or that dangerous.

She drifted back again, to the night that she and Burgess sat out in the gazebo together. The ghost was poised now and very still; this was where it wanted Thea to be. Thea remembered the warmth of the air on her skin, the feeling of comfort in the uncomfortable gazebo. Her eyes closed again and she smelled the night-blooming jasmine and heard the soft rustle of nocturnal life in the banana trees. As long as they were in the gazebo, she had been in control, she was dominant: it was her gazebo, the jasmine and the banana trees were in her yard, Burgess had entered her life. And then there was the intrusion of Sonny Johnson. But no, it had started before that, the subtle shift had started when she began thinking about his life, the scar on his arm, what the rest of his body looked like. Then it was his black life and her white life, and after Sonny Johnson she was no longer in control because of the outer trappings of her life, no longer in control because from the street his life had entered hers and with it came her danger, his power, and the possibility of death. And from the darkness of that possibility came the dominance of the male and the female over the black and the white.

The spark she had kept tamped flared, and that's when the ghost made its move. The ghost shamed her for her attraction to this dangerous, powerful man. The ghost told her she had been used, duped. And, yes, disappointed too: the ghost spoke to her of generosity and caring and told her that goodness in others was expected as a result of those acts. The ghost made her think that all her feelings for Burgess had been negated because she had found out who he was. And then the ghost sat back triumphantly, its work done, expecting Thea to run with these notions.

Right then Thea understood that her parents' death and her aunt's intolerance had left within her a place of doubt and confusion, and that her befriending Burgess had been an attempt to find this place of confusion and to confront it and eradicate it. Instead, she found herself wanting to turn her back on Burgess because that is what her aunt would have done, what her parents probably would have done too.

She wished she'd never found out about Burgess, and it occurred to her that Burgess probably wished she'd never found out either, the way he'd pa.s.sed her this morning, removing himself from her. She wished she never had to see Burgess again, and the moment she thought that there came the pain of loss, and this loss was not just about Burgess, it was not about the male and the female, it was about the loss of humanity.

A sudden gust from the window caused the bottoms of the sheets to dance along the floor, and the ghost of Aunt Althea had a small, ineffectual fit of rage.

Sandy rushed up the walkway to Thea's house, catching one of her expensive high heels between two bricks. It snapped off like a dead twig.

She limped into the foyer carrying the heel, nails sticking up out of it. "Absolutely nothing is going right," she said, her fury carrying her voice above the scream of Mr. Robert's saw.

Thea led her to the back den and closed the door. Sandy sat on the sofa and tried to stick her heel back on her shoe. "What's wrong?" Thea asked.

"That son of a b.i.t.c.h," Sandy said hitting the side of the shoe on the sofa cushion next to her for emphasis. "He's taken a week's vacation from the bank. I had no idea until I called this morning to remind him we had parent conferences at school today." She put the shoe on her foot and stomped on it a couple of times. As soon as she put the slightest pressure on it from the side, the heel came right off. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He didn't come home at all night before last. He got in at two this morning and when I asked him where he'd been, he practically bit my head off, told me to go back to sleep, then he was gone before I woke up."

"What do you think's going on?"

Sandy looked at Thea with disgust. "Do you have to ask? It would be better if he was obsessed with some woman. At least I'd know how to fight." She paused, fighting anger. "I had to go to school alone today. Evan has started biting the other kids. The teacher wanted to know if there were any problems at home." Her lower lip trembled. She stood up quickly, wanting to pace away her helplessness and fury, but there was a sound of material ripping where the heel of her good shoe caught on the bottom of her silk skirt. "s.h.i.t!" she cried and sat down to inspect the damage. She flung the skirt hem away from her. It fluttered to the floor again.

"Let me see," Thea said reaching for it.

Sandy motioned her off with one hand and let her tense body fall back against the sofa. She breathed deeply and turned to Thea. "You know, there was something about the way that teacher asked me if there were problems at home that made me think Lyle Hindermann is the talk of uptown New Orleans."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know, Lyle Hinderman, the great protector of the elite. Their own personal blue-blood cop. And behind his back I'll bet they call him crazy and racist. They're a bunch of hypocrites."

"People seem to like what Lyle does, Sandy. He makes them feel safe."

And he made them feel justified. Yet Thea did not doubt that what Sandy said was true. She had seen them at parties talking to Lyle, asking him questions, listening to his answers with great interest, and she could believe that they took Lyle's seriousness and used it to fuel their gossip. But if they wanted to carry a gun, they talked to Lyle; if anything bad happened, if their houses were broken into, if they were robbed or mugged, they called Lyle. She had done it herself the night Bobby was attacked.

She heard Zora calling for her and went to the door. "Mr. Robert's done gone," Zora said, "and them other two boys too. They said they be back sometime tomorrow to finish cleanin up." She was in her street clothes, getting ready to go herself. Thea walked with her to the front of the house and watched her go out to the Cadillac where Dexter waited, dressed in the new outfit he'd showed up in yesterday, all black leather, a column of gleaming onyx studded with silver, the jacket zipped because he had no shirt on underneath.

Sandy came up behind her. "Well, I guess I can die now: I've seen everything."

Thea was so used to Dexter and the Cadillac that for a moment she didn't know what Sandy meant. "Oh," she said, "Burgess' car. He sends it for his mother every day."

"But that's not Burgess?"

"No, that's someone who works for him."

"He must certainly do well for himself."

"Yes," said Thea, "that's what I thought too."

As they watched Zora leave, Thea imagined that Zora, too old, too tired, and too afraid to turn down comfort, convenience, and safety, must nevertheless find her ride in the Cadillac every day rather distasteful.

Thea was glad when Sandy left so she could indulge her empathy with Zora and, while she was at it, indulge her disappointment too. She could be angry at Burgess for his mother's sake, for the one person who had ever told her it was all right to be angry over her parents' death. But she had not been angry in those days; she'd been too bereaved, too frightened over her own fate. And whatever anger there might have been had ebbed away into sadness, a sadness she now imagined was not unlike Zora's.

She went into the living room to cover the birdcage for the night, but her own face stopped her as she pa.s.sed the rosewood mirror. She would have expected to see sadness there, but what she saw was fear. She did not like this fear; it seemed to her a vile thing. Was she afraid of Burgess, or was she afraid for him? Or was she afraid for them all, for their collective fate? For she was quite certain that such a thing did exist, bigger than any one person's fate, or even one race's fate, bigger than them all.

25.

On the night of Dexter's parade, Lyle sat over a couple of beers with his partner and friend B.T. in a bar frequented by off-duty policemen. B.T. told Lyle about the parade and how it had all gone down, and about the soul brother who'd headed it up. He acted out, not once but twice, the fit Dexter threw over his car being impounded. "I ain never gon see my Cadillac again," B.T. wailed in the barroom, and all the cops in the place yelled like Dexter too. B.T. described the car in great detail, the red velour interior, the tinted windows, state-of-the-art sound system, the gleaming chrome, and the way Dexter was dressed, his bright-blue leather outfit, expensive glove-soft leather split down the back as he resisted arrest.

"Threw a fit over the clothes too," B.T. said. "Said they was ruined and what we gon do 'bout it?" B.T. imitated Dexter's agitated, belligerent state, taut muscles, tough, hostile face.

"Was he on drugs?" Lyle wanted to know.

"Clean," B.T. said. "Car too. Clean as a whistle."

"Interesting," Lyle said.

"Yeah," B.T. agreed. They mused on it and drank some more beer. Then B.T. said, "Saw your friend Buchanan over there. Thought I should cut the n.i.g.g.e.r some slack just because he picks up his girlfriend's maid every day."

Lyle probably would have said it was just cop's intuition. At the same time, he didn't want to mention it to B.T. quite yet, afraid the pro might laugh it off as amateur hour. Lyle's idea was that the white Cadillac was exactly the kind of car that the Bishop of Convent Street would drive. So instead of going home that night, he headed down to Central Lockup. He went over the Cadillac inch by inch even though B.T. had already seen to that. He found nothing in it to indicate anything about its owner, the car itself seeming to make enough of a statement.

He got a look at Dexter, but he didn't want Dexter to see him. He found the officers who had questioned Dexter earlier, found out Dexter had been questioned after the cop had been killed in the Convent, and learned that Dexter's only alibi for that night was his girlfriend.

Lyle ended up spending the entire night at Central Lockup. Before the sun rose he had decided to take a week's vacation from the bank.

The next morning he watched a flashy young woman wearing a wide-brimmed black hat pay Dexter's fines from a roll of money and go with him to get his car out of the pound. Then he watched Dexter go over every inch of the Cadillac.

Dexter drove the Cadillac back to the Convent. He parked behind one of the Convent apartments. He and the woman got out of the car. They were having quite an argument, though Lyle was too far away to hear what it was about. They spoke angrily to each other over the top of the car before the woman began walking up the pavement to the back steps. Dexter walked behind her. Abruptly the woman turned around, one hand on her hip, and said something that must have been rather scathing to Dexter. As if she'd hit his funny bone, his arm jerked up and he slapped her hard across the face. The blow knocked the hat off her head. She picked it up and said something else, and he took off his ripped blue-leather vest, threw it down on the concrete and stomped on it. The woman, holding the hat with one hand, the side of her face with the other, turned and went on inside. Dexter kicked the vest off the sidewalk and followed. After a while he came out dressed in a pair of jeans with studs down the sides of the legs and a white shirt. He got in the Cadillac and drove back downtown to Rubenstein Brothers, an expensive men's store, where he bought himself another leather outfit, black this time, with a bomber jacket instead of a vest. He wore it out of the store.

Dexter returned to Convent Street and went to the lounge across the street from the project, the Solar Club. He left the lounge at four-thirty and drove into the affluent neighborhood off Convent Street, where he picked up three women at three different houses. Two of the houses had been burgled within the last six months. Dexter drove the women into the Convent and dropped them off there. He went back to the affluent neighborhood to Thea Tamborella's house, where he picked up Thea's maid. He stood at the door of the Cadillac like a sentry, formidable in his black leather. He drove her to an apartment house right off Convent Street a few blocks beyond the project.

From there Dexter drove back to the Convent, to the apartment where he lived with the woman. Nearly three hours pa.s.sed with no action. At approximately seven forty-five, two men arrived at the apartment. They stayed for about fifteen minutes. Between eight and nine o'clock three more men came to the apartment, two together, one alone. None stayed more than five minutes. Lyle a.s.sumed Dexter was dealing drugs from the Convent apartment.

At two o'clock in the morning, Lyle called it a night. He went home and got into bed next to Sandy, who lifted her head to say his name with a question mark behind it and ask him where he had been. He told her to go back to sleep.