Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

“His trophies are in there.”

“Which trophies?” Clete said.

“The locks of hair from his victims. They’re pressed between the pages of a travel diary.”

Clete balled up a handkerchief in his hand and smothered a cough. “I feel like something sharp is moving around inside me,” he said.

I WOULD LIKE to say that the events that were about to happen on the bayou were of a kind that assures us there is a semblance of justice in the world. I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain.

I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success.

William Faulkner was once asked what he thought of Christianity. He replied, in effect, that he thought it was a fine religion and perhaps we should try it sometime.

Were the events about to transpire on the bayou that night justified? I wish I could say. If I have found any peace of mind in this world, it lies in accepting that we know almost nothing and understand even less. A fanatical university student murders an archduke and starts a war that kills twenty million people. A man with a fifteen-dollar mail-order rifle fires from the sixth floor of a book depository and changes American history forever. And a flawed engineering system on a drilling rig kills eleven men and fouls an entire ecosystem and almost destroys a way of life. If a person had the power to retroactively undo any of these events, where would he start? The question itself suggests an alpha and an omega that numb the mind.

Clete Purcel had never thought of himself as a man of great historical significance. In my opinion, he was. He was not only the trickster of folklore, he was one of those who suffered for the rest of us. Many orthodox Jews believe in the legend of the thirteen just men. In their view, were it not for the presence of these thirteen just men who carry the weight of our sins, the world would be a far worse place than it is. Like the thirteen just men, Clete was not herculean. He was made of blood and bones and sinew like the rest of us. That’s the point. His courage and his nobility existed in direct measure to his acceptance of mortality.

Evil men feared and hated Clete Purcel because they knew he was unlike them. They feared him because they knew he put principle ahead of self-interest, and they feared him because he would lay down his life for his best friend. I think Ben Jonson would have liked and understood Clete and would not have been averse to saying that, like his friend William Shakespeare, Clete was not of an age but for all time.

I WENT INTO the study bent low, trying not to silhouette against the windows. I saw the shape of a tall figure by the French doors on the far side of the room. I raised the AK-47 in front of me and stood up in front of a bookcase lined with leather-bound reference books of some kind. I could hear Clete behind me. He coughed, choking, into his handkerchief. I saw the tall figure freeze, then seem to dissolve into the shadows.

“Most of your men are dead, Mr. Dupree,” I said. “You have the power to put an end to this. Give it up and take your chances with the court. Who’s going to put away a ninety-year-old man?”

“You’ll never leave this property, Mr. Robicheaux,” Alexis replied. “All your knowledge ends here. My wishes have nothing to do with it. The die has already been cast by people who are much more powerful than you and I.”

“Pop him,” Clete whispered.

I couldn’t see Dupree well enough to shoot. Also, he was probably the best hostage we could take; I wanted to see him exposed for the genocidal criminal that he was; and last, I wanted to expose all the people who had helped him create a fiefdom out of what once was a tropical paradise.

“Drop him, Dave,” Clete said.

I tried to push Clete back with one hand while I kept my eyes on Dupree or at least on the place where I thought he was standing.

“Do I have to do it?” Clete said, wheezing in the darkness.

I pushed Clete backward with one hand and moved quickly along the edge of the bookshelves, knocking into the back of Dupree’s swivel chair, tripping on a telephone wire and the connections to a computer. I lifted the AK-47 in front of me as Dupree went out the French doors, his travel diary held to his chest, his regal features as sharp-edged as tin in the starlight.

I fired once through the glass and heard the round hit something in the gazebo and whine away in the distance.

“We had a chance to cut the head off the snake, big mon,” Clete said. “You shouldn’t have shoved me like that.”

“He was no good to us dead,” I replied.

“Yeah? What if we don’t get out of here and he does? Did you think of that?”

Clete was on one side of the French doors, and I was on the other. The fog was white and thick and rolling on the surface of the bayou. The tide was coming in, and the pontoon plane moored to the Dupree dock was bobbing up and down in the chop. “I made the call I thought was right,” I said. I looked at the handkerchief balled in his hand. “How you doin’, partner?”

“I had a bad moment back there, but I’m okay now.”

“You’ve got to have my back, Cletus.”

“You saying you don’t want me on point?”

“Do you have my back or not?”

He glanced at me, then looked outside at the moss frozen in the live oaks and at the flooded bamboo that rattled in the wind and at a distant sugar mill lit as brightly as an aircraft carrier. “Hear it?” he said.

“Hear what?”