I took out my handkerchief and wiped my knuckles with it.

"What went on?" he said.

"Nate Baxter had an accident."

"You punched out Nate Baxter? Jesus Christ, Dave, what are you doing?"

"Why'd you do it, Clete?"

"A lowlife is off the board. What do you care?"

"A bad cop would have used a throwaway. He would have just said Starkweather came up in his face with it and he had to smoke him. At least you didn't hide behind your badge."

"You once told me yesterday is a decaying memory. So I got no memory for yesterday. I don't care about it, either."

"Confront it or you'll never get rid of it, Clete."

"You think all this bulls.h.i.t is political and involves principles and national integrity or something. What you're talking about is a bunch of perverts and heroin mules. How you take them out is irrelevant. Bust 'em or smoke 'em, all anybody cares about is they're not around anymore. My uncle used to walk patrol in the Irish Channel back in the forties. When they caught some guys creeping a place, they broke their arms and legs with baseball bats and left one guy to drive the rest of them out of town. n.o.body complained then. n.o.body would complain if we did it now."

"These guys don't hire part-time help."

"Yeah? Well, I'll worry about that when I have the chance. Right now my home life is like living inside an Excedrin ad. I got a little heat rash and Lois thinks it's the gon."

"Don't you think you've been working that domestic scam a long time?"

"Sorry to tire you with it, Streak."

"I'm going to take those guys down. I hope you're not there when I do."

He flipped his cigarette off the back of a pa.s.sing truck. A sign showing a woman in a bathing suit was on the side.

"Why would I be?" he said. "I'm just the guy that carried you two flights down a fire escape while a kid tried to notch our ears with a .22 rifle."

"You can't win on the game you pitched last Sat.u.r.day."

"Yeah? Sounds like an AA meet. I'll see you around. Stay off the booze. I'll drink it for both of us. It's a lousy life."

He walked back toward his automobile, his sandals flopping on the pavement, a big, lumbering man whose boiled, st.i.tched face reminded me of a bleached melon about to explode in the sun.

I pretended to be a pragmatist, a cynic, a jaded war veteran, a vitriolic drunk, the last of the Louisiana bada.s.ses; but like most people I believed that justice would be done, things would work out, somebody would show up with the Const.i.tution in his hand. That afternoon I kept the phone on the deck table while I washed down the houseboat, polished the bra.s.s and windows, and sanded and revarnished the hatch. I put on flippers and goggles and cooled off in the lake, diving down into the yellow-green light, feeling the power in my lungs and chest that were now free of alcohol, bursting to the surface with a ringing in my ears that was never the telephone.

Finally, at six-thirty Captain Guidry called and said that the Nicaraguan remained in custody and that he would question him himself in the morning and also contact Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.

I invited Annie over for a late supper, and we cooked steaks outside on my hibachi and ate under the umbrella in the cooling evening. The western horizon was aflame with the sun's afterglow, then the clouds became pink and purple and then finally you could see the city light the night sky.

The next morning I did one hundred sit-ups, worked out with light barbells for an hour while I listened over and over to the old original recording of Iry LeJeune's "La Jolie Blonde," made out a grocery list, then asked a college kid who lived down the beach to listen for my phone while I went to a loan company and borrowed three thousand dollars on my houseboat.

The sun was straight up and white in the sky when I got back. Captain Guidry had called a half hour earlier. I dialed his extension at the First District and was told he was in a meeting and would not be out for two hours. Then I called Fitzpatrick's supervisor at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

"What did you expect me to tell you this morning?" he asked. I could almost see his hand clenched on the receiver.

"I thought by this time maybe you'd questioned the Nicaraguan."

"You must get up in the morning and brush your teeth in the toilet."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You finally nail one of them and you turn him over to the same people who're letting you twist in the wind. They put him upstairs in the tank. Last night a couple of strung-out blacks didn't like the way his breath smelled and they stuffed his head down a flooded floor drain and broke his neck."

TEN.

That afternoon I repaid Annie the one-thousand-dollar bail fee she had put up for me, then I searched in the Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Bernard parish courthouses for commercial property deeds with Whiplash Larry Wineburger's name on them. I discovered that he was a slumlord of large proportions; but if he owned a warehouse in one of those three parishes, it was deeded under another name.

I went to an AA meeting that evening and later took Annie to dinner at the track. It was hot that night, and I slept on the deck of my houseboat, possibly a careless thing to do, but I felt so discredited by this time that I doubted if my now often-repeated story was a threat to anyone. The wind blew across the lake all night, and I slept so soundly in my hammock that I didn't wake until the sun was hard in my eyes.

I went to an early-morning A A meeting in the Quarter, then bought beignets and coffee from the Cafe du Monde and sat on a bench in Jackson Square and watched the sidewalk artists paint and sketch the tourists. It was still cool in the shade, and the breeze blew off the river. It smelled of coffee and pastry, shrimp in bins of ice, the trees and flowers in the Square, damp stone, the water sprinklers knocking through the banana leaves that grew over the top of the iron piked fence enclosing the park. I went inside St. Louis Cathedral and bought a small book that narrated the history of the building and read it on the bench while a Negro street musician played a bottleneck guitar a few feet away from me.

I was ready to give up my pursuit. I knew I wasn't a coward or a quitter, but at some point reason had to reestablish itself in my life. I couldn't afford any more attrition. I had already had one slip, had progressed within minutes from one drink to a full-blown bender (as they say at the meetings, you pick it up where you left it off), and if I slipped again I wasn't sure I'd ever get back from it.

After I'd struck out at the courthouse, I'd even thought about creeping Wineburger's house or his law office. I knew people who would help me pull it off, too-thieves who worked in car washes, where they made impressions of the house keys on the automobile key ring; a very slick second-story man who ran a wrecker service and would pull the distributor cap off a car whose owner he wanted to burglarize, then tow the car around the block, cut duplicate keys on a machine he kept in the truck, return the car with a fraudulent bill for repairs, and clean out the house a week later.

But it wasn't worth it. Wineburger, the little Israeli, Philip Murphy, and the general were out there malfunctioning in society because others much more important and powerful than I allowed them to. When these guys ceased to fill a need for somebody else, they would be taken off the board. That sounds like a cynical conclusion for a man to arrive at while sitting on a shady stone bench on a cool morning under banana trees, but most honest, experienced cops will tell you the same thing. It's facile to blame the Supreme Court for the p.o.r.nographic bookstores and the live s.e.x shows. They usually exist because somebody on the zoning board is getting greased. Kids don't do dope because their parents and teachers are permissive. They do it because adults sell it to them. No psychological complexities, no sociological mysteries.

When people become tired of something, it will end. In the meantime, Dave Robicheaux isn't going to make much difference in the scheme of things. My brother Jimmie knew that. He didn't contend with the world; he dealt in electronic poker machines and off-track betting, and I suspected that he sold whiskey and rum that came in from the Islands without tax stamps. But he was always a gentleman and everybody liked him. Cops ate breakfast free in his restaurant; state legislators got pig-eyed drunk at his bar; judges introduced him to their wives with expansive courtesy. His transgressions had to do with licenses, not ethics, he used to tell me.

"The day these people don't want to gamble and drink, we'll both be out of jobs. In the meantime, go with the flow, bro."

"Sorry," I'd answer. "'Flow' somehow suggests 'effluent' to me. I guess I'm just imaginative."

"No, you just believe in the world that should be, rather than the one that exists. That's why you'll always be the driven guy you are, Dave."

"Is there any charge for that?"

"What do I know? I'm just a restaurateur. You're the guy that fought the wars."

As irony would have its way, my reverie was broken by a maroon Cadillac convertible with an immaculate white top that pulled to the curb twenty feet from my bench. Two of Didi Gee's hoods got out on each side. They were young, lithe, dressed in summer slacks and open-necked shirts with gold medallions around their necks. Their mirror sungla.s.ses and ta.s.seled Nettleton shoes were almost part of a uniform. What always struck me most about lower-level Mafia hoods were the insipid expressions, as though their faces had been glazed with tallow, and the lifeless speech patterns that they believed pa.s.sed for sophistication. The only political regime that ever dealt with them effectively was Mussolini's. The fascists tore out their hair and fingernails with pliers, shot them, or sent them to fight against the Greeks. The Mafia welcomed the Allied liberation in 1943 with great joy.

"Good morning, Lieutenant. Mr. Giacano would like to invite you out to his house for brunch," the driver said. "You can drive out with us if you want. The road's tore up by Chalmette."

"I'm not sure I place you with the sungla.s.ses on. Is it Joe Milazzo?" I said.

"That's right. I used to run my uncle's pizza place right across from your office."

But that wasn't why I remembered his name. He had been a runner for his uncle's book, and he used to lay off bets at the parimutuel when his uncle took on an overload. But I'd also heard a rumor a year ago that he and his uncle had doped a thoroughbred with a speedball that literally exploded the animal's heart on the far turn at the Fairgrounds.

"What's on Didi Gee's mind?" I said.

"He just said ask you out, Lieutenant."

"I'm kind of tied up today."

"He said if it's too far out for you to drive, he'd like to have you as his guest for lunch at Mama Lido's."

"Thank him for me just the same."

"I think it's about these people that's been giving you all this trouble. If you want, you can use the phone in the car to talk with him."

"I appreciate the help he tried to give me Sunday. But as he probably knows, it didn't do much good. In other words, take the Nicaraguans to the First District."

He looked away toward the Pontalba Apartments on the corner, his face quietly exasperated.

"I'm kind of in a hard spot, Lieutenant," he said. "Mr. Giacano is a nice guy to work for. He paid off my old man's hospital bills, he give my little boy a bicycle for Christmas, he don't let n.o.body pay for anything when we go to a club. A lot of guys would pay a lot to buy my job. But he don't like to hear words like 'maybe' or 'no' from a guy that waxes his cars and drives people around. If you ain't coming, I'd really appreciate you calling him up and telling him that."

"I'm afraid you'll have to live with it, podna."

"All right, I don't know from s.h.i.t about Mr. Giacano's business dealings. I'm not an ambitious person. I don't care about what don't concern me. But I got ears. I'm human. I can't turn into a potted plant just because people are talking around me. It's about some guy named Murphy. You're not interested, Lieutenant, that's okay. But I done my job."

I closed my book and took a bite of my beignet. I watched a woman sweeping out her storefront under the colonnade on the corner. Rolls of sausage and cheese were hung in the window, and a little black boy was spraying the boxes of grapes and plums along the front wall with a hose.

"Tell Didi Gee I'll meet him at Mama Lido's at noon," I said.

Joe Milazzo smiled behind his sungla.s.ses and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Joe. I'm just an impulsive guy. Next time save the shuck for a Fuller Brush route," I said.

His face went dead.

Didi Gee had reserved a private dining room at the back of the restaurant. It was hung with pink and lavender curtains that were tied back to give the illusion of windows on the walls, which were painted with wispy Venetian ca.n.a.l scenes, gondolas, boatmen in striped T-shirts with flat hats and mandolins. The baseboards and woodwork around the doors were painted with grapevines that wound their way up the corners to the ceiling, which was hung with cl.u.s.ters of green plastic grapes.

There must have been fifteen people at the long white table that was filled with bottles of red wine in wicker casks, bowls of spaghetti and meatb.a.l.l.s, lasagna, shrimp cooked in some kind of tomato sauce that made your eyes wince, loaves of Italian bread that people broke apart with their hands and ate loudly with a shower of crumbs on the tablecloth.

What a crew to be seen with, I thought. Some of them were aging soldiers who had survived any number of gang wars and jolts in Angola and Lewisburg since the 1950s, now thick-bodied and flatulent, with cigarette-and-whiskey throats and hair growing out of their ears and nostrils. Then there were the young ones like Joe Milazzo, who might have been raised in a vacant lot. There was always a hidden thought in their eyes that they couldn't quite conceal. They would hit anybody, even their own kind, just to earn a chair closer at the table to Didi Gee. They all ate like troglodytes, made the waitresses take the food back if it wasn't warm, complained about a chipped gla.s.s or a fork with dishwater spots on it. The hostess who wandered in every ten minutes to ask if everything was all right looked as though she had swallowed a mouthful of b.u.mblebees.

Didi Gee had saved the seat next to him for me. He wore a white suit and an orange-flowered shirt with the shirt lapels on the outside of his coat. A gold St. Christopher's medal rested on the black hair that grew up to his throat. His chest and stomach were so huge that he had to keep his chair pressed back almost to the wall.

"You want wine?" he asked.

"No, thanks."

"I heard you were drinking again. I say that only because it don't matter to me. Everybody's got a vice. It's what makes us human."

"I'm not drinking today. Put it that way."

"That's that one-day-at-a-time stuff, huh? I wish I could do that. I worry about stuff all the time I don't have control over."

It was amazing, I thought, how the true indicators of a sudden change in your social status worked. Didi Gee no longer used the deferential "Lieutenant" when he spoke to me, and his hoods were eating as though I were not there.

"I worry all the time about this operation I got to have," he said. "The longer I wait, the more they got to cut out of my hole. I just can't bring myself to face it. Maybe there're some things you're not suppose to accept. It ain't natural for a person to be leaking s.h.i.t into a bag strapped to his side. Look what I got to sit on now. That's bad enough."

He rose a little from his chair and exposed an inflated rubber cushion that was shaped like a toilet seat in a public restroom.

"I'm going over to Baylor Hospital in Houston and see what they say. All the best surgeons in New Orleans are Jews. A guy my size walks through the door and they start looking at my parts like they got meat prices stamped on them."

"Maybe they'll find another way to help you, Didi."

"That's right. Maybe I get the right doctors over there at Baylor and I'll just retire there. My brother died and left me an office building in San Antonio three blocks from this Alamo place. They got an amus.e.m.e.nt park there or something?"

"It's a historical-"

"Because even though I was born and grew up in New Orleans, I'm tired of people dumping on me, and nickel-and-dime legal farts trying to make a name by cutting off my c.o.c.k."

His voice had intensified suddenly, like heat building down in a furnace system, and the others at the table stopped talking and moved their knives and forks softly in their plates.

"I'm not sure what we're talking about," I said.

"I got subpoenaed by the grand jury. Me and some people I'm a.s.sociated with."

"I didn't know that."

"Businesses I run for thirty years somehow start bothering some people. Their little noses start twitching like there's a bad smell in the air. I'm talking about people that were at my children's baptisms, that always come around at election time for donations. Suddenly I'm like some kind of disease."

"You're a professional, Didi. It comes with the geography."

"They're serious this time. I got it straight from the prosecutor's office. They want me in Angola."

"Like you said, maybe it's time to retire."

"They're not cutting no deals on this one. That means I'm gonna have to break my own rules. I'm gonna have to do some stuff I don't like." His dark eyes were flecked with black electricity.

"I guess I'm not following you."

And I didn't want to follow him, either. The conversation had already grown old. I didn't care about his troubles with the grand jury, and his vague reference to violating his own ethical system seemed at the time like another manifestation of the self-inflated grandiosity that was characteristic of his kind.

"You're right. It's personal," he said. His glare went from me to the men around the table. They started eating and talking again. "You want this guy Philip Murphy?"