Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

I was learning quickly that Alexis Dupree was as elusive as a butterfly floating on the wind stream. As I looked at him sitting behind his desk, I was overcome with a sensation that even today I cannot adequately explain. His stoicism was laudable. He was distinguished-looking, handsome for a man his age. But there was an aura about him that made words stick in my throat when I tried to speak to him in a normal voice. Maybe it was a combination of things that in themselves were superficial: the odor of Vick’s Vapo-Rub in his clothes, the discolorations like tiny purple carcinomas in his arms and high up on his chest, the dark luminosity of his eyes. For some reason, each moment I spent with him made me feel that I had been diminished.

Let me put it another way. Have you ever found yourself in the company of someone you are afraid to be compassionate toward? When you shake hands with him, his guile is like a smear on your skin. You find yourself unconsciously praying that he is a better person than you think he is. You actually fear the revelation he may make about himself, thereby forcing you to realize you have walked into his web. It’s not unlike picking up a hitchhiker who settles himself into the passenger seat and then gives you a look that turns your viscera to ice water.

Had Alexis Dupree seen the red glow of the gas ovens roaring at night and smelled the odor from the tall brick chimney atop the building where his friends and siblings and parents died? Had he lined up among the other skeletons in striped uniforms and caps, pinching color into his cheeks so he would make it through the selections? Had he watched an SS officer point a Luger to a child’s temple while the child wept and trembled and held his father’s head down in a barrel of water? Was indeed the inside of this man’s head a repository of images that would drive most of us mad?

“You have a peculiar expression on your face, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “I’d really like to see your grandson, sir, and then I can be on my way.”

“He’s heavily medicated. Another time, perhaps. Here, drink your tea.”

“Mr. Dupree, your grandson told me you survived Ravensbrück only because you were used in a medical experiment.”

“That’s not true. There were no medical experiments at Ravensbrück. This is the kind of drivel that was manufactured after the war.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Believe whom you will. I was there. Let me check on Pierre. He’ll see you if he can. In the meantime, please finish your tea.”

I had the feeling I was being both indulged and told to leave. He walked through the dining room and up a spiral staircase. While he was gone, I got up a

nd gazed through the French doors at the bayou and at the camellias blooming in the side yard. Then I noticed a thick gilt-edged book, bound in soft maroon leather, inserted horizontally on a shelf immediately below the Oxford dictionary on top of the podium. It was not the shelved book itself that was unusual. It was the wispy strands of hair protruding from the bottom pages that caught the eye.

I could hear Alexis Dupree speaking to someone upstairs. I picked up the book and set it on top of the dictionary and opened the cover. The pages were filled with a flowing calligraphy, written with a traditional fountain pen. Some of the entries were in French, some in Italian, a few in English and German. From what I could read of the content, most of the entries were observations on Nordic mythology and Florentine art and the Gypsies of Andalusia and the ethnicity of primitive people in the Balkans. I flipped to the back pages and discovered at least two dozen locks of hair, of every possible color and shade, either Scotch-taped to the paper or inserted in tiny plastic pouches. I felt my throat clotting and a burning sensation in my eyes and wondered if my imagination was running away with me. I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf below the dictionary, just as Alexis Dupree descended a spiral staircase at the far end of a hallway.

He reentered the study and shut the door behind him. “Pierre is just coming out of the shower. Give him a minute or two, and he’ll see you,” he said. “Be kind to him, Mr. Robicheaux. He’s had a rough go of it.”

“You mean the beating he didn’t report?”

“No, his career as a painter. His talent is ignored because he’s clearly influenced by the great painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The art world is controlled by a handful of people in New York. Most of them are idiots who think a screened-in piece of ham swarming with flies constitutes expression. There are many fraudulent aspects to American life, but the art world is probably the most egregious.”

Through the French doors, I saw a man with bobbed white hair, wearing a black suit and a lavender Roman collar, cutting across the lawn toward a huge blue SUV parked among the oak trees. I had seen him before but could not remember where. Alexis Dupree walked to the podium and rested his hand on the open dictionary. He smiled at me. “Were you looking up a word?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

He lowered his hand to the journal bound in maroon leather and straightened it so its cover was flush with the edge of the shelf. “I thought you might have used my dictionary and accidentally brushed against my travel diary.”

“Maybe I did. I’m clumsy that way.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re clumsy at all, Mr. Robicheaux. Why don’t you go upstairs and talk with Pierre, then I’m sure you’ll need to get back to your office and resume protecting and serving. That’s what you call it, don’t you, ‘protecting and serving’?”

“The man I saw cutting across the lawn, he’s a televangelical minister, isn’t he?”

“Could be. They’re busy little fellows in this area, scurrying here and there, saving people from themselves. You’re an observant and obviously educated man, Mr. Robicheaux. What I’d like to ask, if you wouldn’t mind, is how did you end up in a place like this, obsessing over issues that absolutely no one else cares about? It must be a very unpleasant way to live.”

“I’ll have to give that one some thought, sir. I’ll get back to you on it. I’d like to talk to you about your travel diary one day. I’ll bet you’ve picked up all kinds of things over the years.”

One of the few gifts of age is that, with impunity, you can treat an elderly son of a bitch for exactly what he is.

PIERRE DUPREE WAS propped up in a bed that had been pushed against the window so he could have a full view of the lawn and the camellias and the rosebushes and the oaks hung with Spanish moss and a tennis court whose canvas windscreens were stained with mold and whose clay surface was blown with dead leaves. Indian summer was still with us, but the tennis court seemed to have the marks of year-round winter, and I wondered if Pierre Dupree ever brooded upon concerns of this kind.

The blisters on his forehead and nose and chin were shiny with salve, his black hair thick with it in the places his scalp had been burned, the back of his neck yellow and purple with bruising. Through the window I could see the minister’s SUV at the end of the driveway, waiting to pull onto the state road.

“The last time I was here—” I began.

“I want to apologize for that,” Pierre interrupted. “I said some things I regret. I not only regret them, they were not true.”

“Calling me white trash?”