Gretchen heard the sound of someone fastening his grip around the phone, scraping it against a hard surface. “That wasn’t a smart move,” Marco said.
“No, it’s you who made the dumb move. I haven’t seen my mother in over a year. You think I’m going to clip three people for someone I never want to see again?”
“Good try, kid. You want me to describe what’s happening right now? Mommy is going in the bedroom with a dwarf who has a black satchel. He’s gonna turn Mommy’s head into a pinball machine. He’s also a degenerate. Don’t get the wrong idea. We keep an eye on him. But the client doesn’t have parameters, Gretchen. If you don’t come across for us, Mommy is going inside a big waffle iron. Or maybe they’ll turn her into wood chips, feet-first. They’ll send you a video. Want to call me an asshole now? You’ve got ten days, bitch.”
He broke the connection. When she closed her phone, she felt dead inside, her face numb, as though it had been stung by bumblebees. She stared through the blinds into the darkness. The dog across the bayou was no longer running back and forth. Then she realized why. It had broken its neck running against its own chain.
BY SUNRISE, THE rain had stopped and the sky was filled with white clouds and the trees were dripping on the sidewalks and dimpling the puddles in the gutters, and I decided to walk to work and to think in a calmer and more reasonable way about all the problems that seemed to beset me. At eleven-fifteen I saw Clete’s maroon convertible coming up the long driveway past the city library and the grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. When I went outside, all his windows were down and he was smiling at me from behind the wheel, his eyes clear, his face pink and unlined. A long-stemmed lavender rose rested on his dashboard. “How about an early lunch at Victor’s Cafeteria?” he said.
“You brought me a rose?”
“No, the gal I was with last night brought me a rose. In fact, her name was Rose.”
I got in on the passenger side and sat back in the deep leather comfort of the seat. “You look good,” I said.
“Maybe if I could go three days without booze, I’d rejoin the human race. I got the gen on that Luger I took off of Frankie Gee. It belonged to a guy in the SS by the name of Karl Engels. He was in Paris in 1943, then he dropped off the screen.” He waited for my response. When I didn’t speak, he said, “Say what you’re thinking.”
“It’s a start.”
“That’s it, a start?”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“No, that’s not it at all. You can’t wait to rain on the parade.”
Once again I was using all my energies to avoid hurting his feelings and doing a poor job of it. There were few times when Clete was genuinely happy. The irreverent and sardonic humor and outrageous behavior that characterized his life were surrogates for happiness, ephemeral ones at that, and I would have given anything in the world if I could have waved a wand over him and cast out the gremlins constantly sawing at the underpinnings of his life. Then I realized I had not only fallen prey to my old arrogance and hubris—namely, that I could fix other human beings—but I had been so concentrated on protecting Clete’s feelings that I had failed to make the connection between the provenance of the Luger and a detail inside the home office of Alexis Dupree.
“Jesus, Clete,” I said.
“What is it?”
I rubbed my forehead like a man who has had a flashbulb popped in his face. “Dupree has a stunning collection of framed photographs on the walls of his den. One shows Italian troops marching through a bombed-out village in Ethiopia. Another one shows a Crusader castle in the desert. There’s one of the Great Wall in China and one of the Venetian canals. But I kept concentrating on a photo of the defenders of Madrid that Robert Capa supposedly inscribed to Dupree. The photo I ignored was of an indoor cycle track in Paris.”
“Like a racetrack for bicycles?”
“Yeah, there was one in Paris that was used as a holding area for Jews rounded up by the SS and the French police. I don’t remember all the details. I think Alexis Dupree’s photographs are a tribute to the Axis attempt to conquer the world.”
Clete opened a packet of turkey jerky and stuck a piece in his mouth and started chewing. This was the first time I could remember his reaching for something other than a drink or a cigarette when he was agitated. “I can’t believe a guy like that has been sitting under our noses all this time. He’s breathing the same air we do. That’s a disgusting thought. We ought to bulldoze that mausoleum of his into the bayou.”
“Why blame the house for the occupant?” I said.
“Places like that are monuments to everything that’s wrong in Louisiana’s history. Slavery, rental convict labor, the White League, corporate plantations, the Knights of the White Camellia, elitist shit-heads figuring out new ways to pay working people as little as they can. Why not put a match to all of it?”
“Then we’d be stuck with ourselves.”
“That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard anyone say. You should get together with Gretchen.”
“What’s the deal with Gretchen?”
“You got me. She woke up looking like she’d been hit by a wrecking ball. I can’t figure her, Dave. One minute she’s a sweet girl, the next she’s the contract hitter who snuffed Bix Golightly’s wick. By the way, Dana Magelli thinks two different shooters capped Waylon Grimes and Frankie Gee.”
“I don’t need to know about this.”
“Out of sight, out of mind? That’s smart.”
“Cut off the head of the snake,” I said.
“Alexis Dupree?”