"There's nothing I can do about what happened out on the salt."
"Yeah? How about the guys who lose their money? Are they cool?"
"They're oil people. They're not in the business. They're not going to do anything about it."
"You must know a different class of people than me, then. Because the people I've known will do anything because of money. But you're telling me these guys are different?"
"It's just something I'll have to handle myself, Tony."
"Yeah, if I was you, I'd handle it. I'd really handle it." He lowered his racket and looked at me, a dark light in his eyes. A ball whizzed past him and bounced off the windscreen behind him. He removed his sweater, wiped the sweat off his face with it, and threw it to the side of the court.
Then a strange transformation took place in him. The tautness of his face, the hard, black shine in his eyes, the rigidity of the muscles in his body, suddenly left him like air rushing out of a balloon. His skin grew ashen, sweat ran out of his hair, he began swallowing deep in his throat, and his lungs labored for air.
"What is it, partner?" I said.
"Nothing."
I took him by the arm and walked him to the bench. His arm felt flaccid and weak in my hand. He propped the racket on the clay and leaned his head down on it. Sweat dripped off the lobes of his tiny ears.
"You want me to take you to a doctor?" I said.
"No."
"You want me to get your wife?"
"No. It's going to pass."
I picked up his sweater and blotted his hair and the back of his neck with it, then draped it over his shoulders. He began to breathe more regularly; then he pinched the bridge of his nose and held his head back in the cool air as though he had a nosebleed.
"I think you need to talk to somebody," I said. "I think you're dealing with something that's going to eat your lunch."
He folded his arm on top of his perpendicular racket and rested his head on his arm.
"What are you gonna do, a kid needs a mother. It's all a pile of shit, man," he said. "All of it."
When I went back to my room, which gave onto a side yard that contained a swing set and a solitary moss-hung oak tree, my clothes from my apartment were laid out neatly on the tester bed. Even my.45, with the spare clip and a box of shells, lay on top of a folded flannel shirt. I went to look for Tony, but he was in the shower. I walked out the front door and down the long, tree-lined drive to the front gate, where Jess sat in a chair, wearing a blue jumpsuit. It was zippered only halfway up his chest, and I could see the leather straps of his shoulder holster against his T-shirt.
"Where's the closest drugstore?" I said.
"What do you need?"
"Some razor blades."
"It's five blocks, down by the lake. We'll send a car."
"I need the walk. I still feel like I've got rapture of the deep."
"What?"
"How about opening up?" I said.
He unlocked the chain and slid back the gate wide enough so that I could step out on the street. I walked past the rows of banked lawns and oleander-lined piked fences to a thoroughfare and a tan stucco and red-tiled shopping center that looked as if it had been torn out of the ground in southern California and dropped in the middle of New Orleans. I used a pay phone outside a drugstore to call Minos.
"You pulled it off, Dave. You're across the moat and inside the castle," he said before I explained.
"How'd you know where I was?"
"Everybody who goes in that gate is on videotape. How do you like it with the spaghetti-and-meatball crowd?"
"I'm not sure."
"I told you, didn't I, Cardo's head was in the blender too long."
"Minos, you guys are all turning the screws on this guy, and, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure why."
"What are you talking about?"
"He's just one guy. What about these guys in Miami and Houston who've got a contract out on him? The odds are Tony's going to lose."
"Let us worry about Houston and Miami. You want in or out, Dave?"
"I haven't made up my mind."
"You'd damn well better."
"I want Boggs."
"You're in the right place, then. He'll be back. He's not a guy who leaves loose ends. Besides, we hear it's an open contract. It's the perfect opportunity for him."
"Did you find out who dropped the dime on the buy?"
"Baxter said he couldn't compromise his informant."
"He's not going to share a bust with a federal agency."
"Forget about that guy. Look, Washington called yesterday with some information about Cardo's military record. He got a Silver Star for going after a point man who stepped on a mine."
"He didn't tell me that."
"After he was wounded, he got moved back to Chu Lai for the last four months of his tour."
"Why was he moved back to Chu Lai?"
"How should I know?"
"There's something not right. The Marines were real hard-nosed about keeping a guy in his platoon until he had a million-dollar wound or two Purple Hearts."
"Maybe he had some pull. Listen, Dave, don't get involved with the guy's psychology. Eventually we're going to punch his ticket. You'll probably be there when it happens. Or you'll be in court testifying against him. All this semper fi bullshit won't have anything to do with it. You want a lesson from Vietnam? Don't think about the guy who's in your sights."
"You always cut right to the bone, Minos."
"I didn't invent the rules. By the way, we have that house under twenty-four-hour surveillance. If it turns to shit inside, throw a lamp or a chair through a window. In the meantime, think about how far you want to take it. Nobody'll blame you if you decide to go back to New Iberia."
It was cool under the stucco colonnade, and red leaves were blowing out of a heavily wooded lot across the street.
"Dave, are you still there?" he asked.
"Yeah… I'll try to call you back tonight or tomorrow. Talk to you later, Minos."
I hung up the phone and wondered if Minos would tell the lion tamer that he could put down his whip and chair and walk out of the lions' cage whenever he wished. I went inside the drugstore, bought a package of razor blades, and came out just as Tony and Jess pulled to the curb in the maroon Lincoln convertible.
CHAPTER 10
Tony was in the passenger's seat. He reached over the backseat and popped open the back door for me. He had changed into loafers, a rust-colored sports shirt, pleated tan slacks, a cardigan, and a yellow Panama hat.
"You could have taken the car, Dave. You didn't have to walk," he said.
"It's a good day for it."
"How do you like my hat?"
"It looks sharp."
"I got a collection of them. Hey, Jess, go inside and get me a copy of Harper's," he said.
"What?" Jess said.
"Get me a copy of Life."
"Sure, Tony," Jess said, cut the engine, and went inside the drugstore.
Tony smiled at me across the back of the seat. The Lincoln had a rolled leather interior, a fold-out bar, a wooden dashboard with black instrument panels.
"Jess has an IQ of minus eight, but he'd eat thumbtacks with a spoon if I told him to," he said. Then the smile went out of his face. "I'm sorry you had to hear that stuff between me and Clara. In particular I'm sorry you had to hear that about me being a war hero. Because I never told anybody I was a hero. I knew some guys who were, but I wasn't one of them."
"Who was, Tony? Did you ever read a story by Ernest Hemingway called 'A Soldier's Home'? It's about a World War I Marine who comes back home and discovers that people only want to hear stories about German women chained to machine guns. The truth is that he was afraid all the time he was over there and it took everything in him just to get by. However, he learns that's not a story anyone is interested in."