Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

Clete pulled up the anchor and let the boat drift south of the Dupree property before he fired up his engine. He worked his way upstream toward New Iberia, the running lights off, keeping to the far side of the bayou so he would not be seen from the Dupree home.

He rounded a bend and angled his boat toward a spot at the extreme end of the Dupree property, then cut the gas feed and tilted the propeller out of the water. His bow slid up on the mudflat between two cypress trees, and he stepped into the shallows and pulled the boat’s hull farther up the bank. Through the trees, he could see the lights in the Dupree kitchen and a porch light that someone had turned on. He lifted the five-gallon gasoline containers out of his boat and set them on the mudflat, then retrieved his E-tool and dug a loamy hole on the edge of a wild blackberry bush spiked with thorns. He wrapped the containers and the road flares inside a plastic tarp and buried them in the hole, sweating inside his clothes, his breath coming hard in his chest. He spat in his palm and looked at it, then rubbed his palm clean on his pants and tried not to think about the pink tinge in his saliva.

He stared through the darkness at the house, his head as light as a helium balloon. “Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that or maybe a month down the road, I’m going to get you,” he said.

To whom was he speaking? The Duprees and their hired gumballs? Or the men who would probably try to kill Gretchen? No, Clete’s real enemy had been with him much longer. He had seen him the first time he lay in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, dehydrated from blood expander, his face white from the concussion of a grenade, his neck beaded with dirt rings, his utilities fouled by his own urine. A corpsman had closed off an artery with his thumb, and suddenly the light had come back into Clete’s eyes and air had flowed into his lungs, as cool as if it were blowing across open water. That was when he saw the cloaked and hooded figure with the white face and thin lips and sunken cheeks. The figure smiled and leaned over and pressed his mouth to Clete’s ear, as though no one else were in the tent. His breath smelled like nightshade and lichen on damp stone and ponded water gone sour in a forest whose canopy seldom admits light. I can wait, the hooded figure whispered. But no matter where you go, you’re mine.

IF YOU HAVE met the very rich, and by the very rich, I mean those who own and live in several palatial homes and have amounts of money that people of average means cannot conceive of, you have probably come away from the experience feeling that you have been taken, somehow diminished and cheapened in terms of self-worth. It’s not unlike getting too close to theatrical people or celebrity ministers or politicians who have convinced us that it is their mandate to lead us away from ourselves.

If you are around the very rich for very long, you quickly learn that in spite of their money, many of them are dull-witted and boring. Their tastes are often superficial, their interests vain and self-centered. Most of them do not like movies or read books of substance, and they have little or no curiosity about anything that doesn’t directly affect their lives. Their conversations are pedestrian and deal with the minutiae of their daily existence. Those who wait on them and polish and chauffeur their automobiles and tend their lawns and gardens are abstractions with no last names or histories worth ta

king note of. The toil and sweat and suffering of the great masses are the stuff of a benighted time that belongs in the books of Charles Dickens and has nothing to do with our own era. In the world of the very rich, obtuseness may not quite rise to the level of a virtue, but it’s often the norm.

What is most remarkable about many of those who have great wealth is the basic assumption on which they predicate their lives: They believe that others have the same insatiable desire for money that they have, and that others will do anything for it. Inside their culture, manners and morality and money not only begin with the same letter of the alphabet but are indistinguishable. The marble floors and the spiral staircases of the homes owned by the very rich and the chandeliers that ring with light in their entranceways usually have little to do with physical comfort. These things are iconic and votive in nature and, ultimately, a vulgarized tribute to a deity who is arguably an extension of themselves.

The British oil entrepreneur Hubert Donnelly could be called an emissary for the very rich, but he could not be called a hypocrite. He came in person to my office at nine A.M. on Thursday. If he was a lawbreaker, and I suspected he was, I had to grant him his brass. He came without a lawyer into the belly of the beast and laid his proposal on my desk. “I want you and Mr. Purcel to work for us,” he said. “You’ll have to travel, but you’ll fly first-class or on private jets and stay at the best hotels. Here’s the starting figure.”

He placed a slip of paper on my desk blotter. The number 215,000 was written on it.

“That’s for the probationary period,” he said. “After six months or so, you’ll get a significant bump.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“You’ll earn it.”

“A guy like me would be a fool to pass it up.”

“Talk it over with your family. Take your time.”

He wore a dark blue suit and a shirt as bright as tin. His grooming was immaculate. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the pits in his cheeks and the way his skin sagged under his jaw.

“You already know this is a waste of time, don’t you?” I said.

“Probably.”

“You’re here anyway.”

“One toggles from place to place and carries out his little duties. I’m sure you do the same.”

“Have you chatted up Lamont Woolsey of late?”

“He and I are not close.”

“I hear somebody stomped his face in.”

“Woolsey has a way of provoking people.”

“Ever hear of a guy by the name of Ozone Eddy Mouton?”

“No, I can’t say that I have.”

“A couple of people were found incinerated inside a car trunk in St. Bernard Parish. I hear even their teeth were melted by the heat.”

He didn’t blink. I watched his eyes. They had a translucence about them that was almost ethereal. They were free of guilt or worry or concern of any kind. They made me think of blue water on a sunny day or the eyes of door-to-door proselytizers who tell you they were recently reborn.

“If you worked for us, you would be free of all these things,” he said. “Why not give it a try? You seem to have the benefits of a classical education. As a soldier, you walked in the footprints of the French and the British, and you know how it’s all going to play out. Do you always want to be a beggar of scraps at the table of the rich? Do you enjoy being part of a system that instills a vice like gambling in its citizenry and placates the poor with bread and circuses?”

“The guys who died on that rig are going to find you one day, Mr. Donnelly.”