Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Really?” he said.

She turned on her side and looked up at him. “See, The Godfather is not about the Mob. It’s about Elizabethan tragedy. Have you ever met anybody in the Mob?”

“I don’t recall anyone introducing himself to me that way. Do they hand out business cards?”

She ignored his joke. “Most of them are dumb and smell like hair oil and garlic. My mother used to be the house prostitute in three hotels on Miami Beach. She did the Arabs for a while, then went back to screwing the greaseballs. On balance, I think the greaseballs were the bigger challenge. I think that’s why she got out of the life.”

Albert stared at her as though the floor were tilting under his feet.

“Did I say something wrong?” she asked.

“No, not at all.”

“Did you watch The Sopranos?”

“A little bit.”

“That’s what the Mob is really like. The only honest work they can do is recycling garbage. Here’s the deal about that series. It’s not tragedy. The Godfather is. You know why people kept watching The Sopranos?”

“No.”

“They wanted to see Tony Soprano find redemption. Too bad. Tony murdered his nephew and turned out to be a dumb shit who didn’t want redemption. I think the creators of The Sopranos did a number on their audience. Do you know what John Huston always told his people? ‘Respect your audience.’ ”

“Your ideas are interesting,” Albert said.

“That’s what people say when they’re grossed out and don’t know how to exit a social situation.”

He sat down, his hands propped on his knees, and looked at the frozen image on the television screen of Pope Alexander VI burning his archenemy alive. “You know what the hard road in Florida was?”

“A chain gang?”

“I spent a half year on one. I also did some time in a parish prison in Louisiana. Of all the boys I knew inside, I’d say only two or three of them were sociopaths. The rest of them could have led good lives if somebody had cared about them.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“No reason. I think you’re an artist. I think you have a great future ahead of you.”

“How much of my history are you aware of, Mr. Hollister?”

“I don’t care about your past or anyone else’s. The past is nothing more than a decaying memory. Clete and Dave and his family think highly of you. That’s good enough for me. You tried to help Wyatt Dixon when he was tormented by that detective. That’s your history, that’s the woman you are. Don’t ever let other people tell you different. If they do, it’s for one reason only.”

“What?” she said, looking at him in a different way.

“They want you to lose.”

“I appreciate that,” she said.

“Advice is cheap,” he said. He climbed back up the stairs, silhouetted against the kitchen light, one hand on the rail, his shoulders and back as round and hard-looking as a stone arch.

She turned off the television and went outside into the twilight to check an infrared trail camera she had strapped to a tree trunk behind the house. The camera had a camouflaged housing that could be left for days or weeks or even months to capture images of wildlife passing through a stand of timber. The only technological downside was its inability to distinguish the movement of animals from the wind blowing through the trees and underbrush, causing the lens to click every fifteen seconds, until both the batteries and the space on the memory card were used up.

Gretchen loosened the canvas strap on the tree trunk and slid the camera out and used the viewing screen to click through the images on the memory card. She saw an elk with one eye pushed against the lens, a skunk, a flock of wild turkeys dropping from a tree, a cougar cub, and a black bear. Then a man.

Or what she thought was a man. The figure was erect, moving uphill, the head twisted away from the lens as though the figure had just heard a sound down below. The next photo had been taken fifteen seconds later. In it, the figure was deep inside the second growth and the black shade that fell on the mountain immediately after sunset, its dimensions impossible to estimate. She looked at the date and time the two frames had been taken. The figure had passed in front of the camera ten minutes earlier.

She showed no reaction. She slid the camera back inside its housing and notched the strap into the tree bark and walked downhill to the cabin. The temperature seemed to drop without warning or transition, and she tried to remember if there had been mention of a cold front on the weather report. She removed a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, took her Airweight .38 from under her mattress, and put on a coat and a shapeless cowboy hat. When she returned to the hillside, the light had gone from the sky, the moon was rising, and she could barely make out the abandoned logging road that ran beneath the cave where Asa Surrette might have camped.

She held the flashlight at eye level with her left hand, the Airweight in her right, and stepped onto the logging road. The air was dense and smelled of woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney. Down below she could see the lights inside Albert’s house and the shadows of the lilac bushes moving on the lawn. The wind shifted and began blowing out of the north, puffing the metal roof on the barn, scattering pine needles on the forest floor, filling the air with the cool smell of oxygen and humus and stone and lichen and toadstools that never see sunlight. She moved the flashlight beam through the trees that grew above the road and the cave. Where were the turkeys? Every night at sunset the entire flock, fifteen or so, went down to the creek in the north pasture and drank, then went back up the hill and roosted in tree limbs or around the trunks.