"Each cassette has sixty minutes' recording time on it. If you run out of tape and your situation doesn't allow you to change cassettes, don't worry about it. Never overextend yourself, never feel that you have to record more than the situation will allow you. If they don't get dirty on the tape one time, it'll happen the next time. Don't think
of yourself as a controller."
"You seem pretty good at this."
"It beats being a shoe salesman, I guess. You have any questions?"
"How many undercover people have been caught with one of these?"
"Believe it or not, it doesn't happen very often. We put taps on telephone lines, bugs in homes and offices, we wire up informants inside the mob, and they still hang themselves. They're not very smart people."
"Tony C. is."
"Yeah, but he's crazy, too."
"That's where you're wrong, partner. The only reason guys like us think he's crazy is because he doesn't behave like the others. Mistake."
"Maybe so. But you'd better talk to Minos. He got some stuff on Cardo from the V.A. this morning. Our man was locked up with the wet brains for a while."
"He's a speed freak."
"Yeah, maybe because of his last few months' service in Vietnam."
"What about it?"
"Talk to Minos," he said, got out of the truck, and looked back at me through the window. "Good luck on this. Remember what I said. Get what you can and let the devil take the rest."
Then he crossed the street and walked through the park toward St. Charles, his attention already focused on the college kids playing football by the lake. The streetcar clattered loudly down the tracks in front of the Tulane campus across the avenue. I went to a small grocery store a few blocks down St. Charles, where the owner provided tables inside for working people to eat their lunch at, and called Minos at his office to see if he had relocated Kim in a safe house. I also wanted to know what he had learned about Tony's history in Vietnam, besides the fact that as an addict Tony had been locked up in a psychiatric unit rather than treated for addiction.
Minos wasn't in. But in a few hours I was to learn Tony's story on my own, almost as though he had sawed a piece of forgotten memory out of my own experience and thrust it into my unwilling hands.
I took Bootsie to lunch at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant on Dauphine before I drove back out to Tony's. She looked wonderful in her white suit, black heels, and lavender blouse, and I think perhaps she had the best posture I had ever seen in a woman. She sat perfectly straight in her chair while she sipped from her wineglass or ate small bites of her seafood enchilada, her chin tilted slightly upward, her face composed and soft.
But it was too crowded for us to talk well, and I was beset with questions that I did not know how to frame or ask. I guess my biggest concern about Bootsie was a selfish one. I wanted her to be just as she had been in the summer of 1957. I didn't want to accept the fact that she had married into the Mafia, that she was business partners with the Giacano family, that financial concern was of such great importance in her life that she would not extricate herself from the Giacanos.
For some reason it was as though she had betrayed me, or betrayed the youth and innocence I'd unfairly demanded she be the vessel of. What an irony, I thought: I'd killed off a large portion of my adult life with alcohol, driven away my first wife, delivered my second wife, Annie, into a nightmare world of drugs and psychotic killers, and had become a professional Judas who was no longer sure himself to whom he owed his loyalties. But I was still willing to tie Bootsie to the moralist's rack.
"What's bothering you?" she asked.
"What if we just give it all up? Your vending machine business, your connection with those clowns, my fooling around with the lowlifes and the crazoids. We just eighty-six it all and go back to New Iberia."
"It's a thought, isn't it?"
"I mean it, Boots. You only get one time on the planet. Why spend any more of it confirming yesterday's mistakes?"
"I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"Not here. Can we be together later tonight?"
"Yeah, sure, but tell me what, Boots?"
"Later," she said. "Can you come for supper at the house?"
"I think I can."
"You think?"