The club was overflowing, strung with Christmas lights, the dance floor packed with young people. Johnny and Isolde were on the stage and having a love affair with the crowd. She looked like a mermaid in her white strapless dress plated with sequins, a nimbus surrounding her hair, her mouth small and red, her tattooed bouquet dry and cool and pale on her shoulder. Johnny was equally radiant, without a line in his face. Who would believe he had recently been in rehab, doubling over with cramps during withdrawal and thinking of life in terms of one minute at a time?
Clete and I had to stand against the back wall. He went to the bar and brought back a whiskey sour for himself and a Dr Pepper with cherries and ice for me. “Do I feel old,” he said.
“That’s because we’re old,” I said.
He sipped from his drink, his brow furrowed, and I knew something other than our age was on his mind.
“Guess who’s over there in the corner,” he said.
I looked through the crowd but couldn’t see anyone I knew.
“Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo,” Clete said. “I need to get Firpo alone.”
“Bad idea.”
“Firpo set me up with Richetti in Key West,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for Johnny, I would have died in a fire an inch at a time. I still have nightmares.”
“What’s Firpo going to tell you?”
“Maybe we’ll get the gen on Richetti,” he said.
“I think you know what Richetti is. You just won’t accept what your mind tells you.”
“So what is he?” Clete said.
“Maybe he’s like a hologram. Maybe all of us are.”
“Dave, that’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.”
He was probably right. But I could already see the lights of regret and pity in his eyes. “Hey, what do I know?” he said. “That’s why I don’t argue. Remember what Dale Carnegie said? The only argument you win is the one you don’t have.”
“You know who else said that?”
“No.”
“Charlie Manson.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was one of his come-on lines.”
“There goes my whole evening,” he said.
I took a drink from my Dr Pepper. It felt cold and bright inside my mouth, the cherries sliding sweet down my throat. But the fact that it tasted good wasn’t enough. I could smell the alcohol in the drinks of other people, and feel it reach out and lay its old claim on my soul, as though all the pain I had gone through and all the meetings I had attended meant nothing. But the mysterious and glorious elixir-like smell of alcohol, and the transformative effect it had on my nervous system, and the near-erotic relationship I had with it, were not my only problems. Three men had just come in the side door and taken a table in back. Two of them were not taller than five-six and had the determined, vaguely irritable faces of South European peasants and wore suits that had a shine like Vaseline. I was surprised at how good the third man looked in spite of the beating I had given him in his home theater. He was dressed in a tailored gray suit with thin stripes and a crimson handkerchief folded in the breast pocket and an open-necked purple shirt. He looked straight at me as though I were the only person in the club. I felt my heart drop. It was not out of fear. My guilt about Penelope was like a hot coal in my stomach.
“You sick?” Clete said.
“You and I weren’t meant for this kind of life,” I said.
“When did you decide that?” he said.
“Just now.”
He followed my eyes. “Is that Adonis?” he said.
“In the flesh. Who are the guys with him?”
“I don’t know. He imports his hitters. I think we ought to leave.”
“No.”
“Are you trying to commit suicide?”
“I have to get on the square about this stuff,” I said.
“And tell him you bagged his old lady?”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I said.
“You know what I’d do if I got hooked up with a woman that beautiful and with that amount of class?”
“No, what?”
“I don’t know. I never had the chance.”
Which wasn’t true. But Clete was Clete, always humble, always protecting my feelings. He took another sip from his whiskey sour, holding it in his mouth so he could savor the taste and let it slide slowly down his throat. I could smell the lemon juice and Jack Daniel’s and syrup and maraschino cherry and orange slices on his breath, like a warm gift from the heavens. I felt I was two seconds from ordering one. I coughed slightly and cleared my throat. Before I could speak, Clete said, “Check it out.”
Father Julian Hebert was in the midst of the line dancers, his arms spread on the shoulders of two fat women. But I could not keep my eyes off the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar.
“You got that look, Dave,” Clete said.
“What look?”
“The one that means you should go to a meeting. I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked at the remainder of his whiskey sour and called the bartender over. “I’m done with this. Give me a glass of milk, will you? My ulcers are on fire.”
The band took a break, and I caught Father Julian at the bar. “What are you doing here, partner?” I said.
“What I always do,” he said. “Dance.”
“Have you seen a few people we’ve crossed paths with?”
A bartender squirted Coca-Cola in a cup full of ice and handed it to him. Julian waited until the bartender was gone. “You mean Mark Shondell?”
“Yeah. And Adonis Balangie. With his hired help.”
“I didn’t see Adonis. Is Penelope with him?”
“She’s staying at a hotel in New Iberia, out by the four-lane,” I said. I felt my heart swelling, my collar shrinking on my throat. “I’ve gotten involved with her.”
Julian looked out at the dance floor, his egg-shaped face composed, every hair on his head in place. He was wearing jeans and loafers and a long-sleeve workout shirt. I tried not to think about the loneliness and the longings that must live inside him.
“Marcel LaForchette took his life in your living room,” he said. “I know the kind of man you are, Dave. You blame yourself for what others do. But this time maybe you reached out to the wrong party.”
“You said Penelope was a good woman.”
“Some historians say Lucrezia Borgia was charitable to a fault.”
“That just sent a shudder through me,” I said.
But I had lost his attention. He was staring at Mark Shondell’s table.
“What is it?” I said.
“Shondell bothers me. The people he brings to New Iberia bother me. What he has probably done bothers me.” His face looked as though the oxygen and the netlike reflections of the disco ball had been sucked from the room.
“What has Shondell done?” I asked.
His jaw flexed. “I don’t have the evidence. It involves the very innocent. I’ve already said more than I should. I don’t have my glasses. Who’s that man with him?”
“Eddy Firpo. He’s Johnny Shondell’s manager.”
“He’s a lawyer?’
“How’d you know?” I said.
“I’ve seen him in New Orleans. He’s an anti-Semite. He also represents child porn vendors.”
“Mark Shondell is a child molester?”
“I don’t know what he is. I’d hate to find out.”
“I need your help, Julian. Everybody in Iberia Parish is afraid of Mark Shondell, no matter what they pretend. Tell me what you know.”
The expression on his mouth was bitter. “Get away from the Balangie family. Spend time with your daughter. Isn’t she coming home for Christmas?”
“She’s on a school trip to Paris.”
“Join her,” he said.
Johnny and Isolde had gone back onstage. Julian was staring across the dance floor at Mark Shondell and Eddy Firpo’s table, his eyelids fluttering.