“Is that you, Dave?” Penelope said.
Her voice had an effect on me I wasn’t expecting. You remember what it was like after you had a fling or a romance or even a marriage and you thought it was over, that it was better for both of you to part, that after a kiss or a handshake or even a last go-round in the sack you’d say goodbye and remain friends, then you’d see her or him walking down a street or getting on the elevator unexpectedly with you, and your heart would drop and your mouth would go dry and you knew that in fifteen minutes you were going to be out of breath and pawing at her or his clothes as well as yours, knowing you were back on the dirty boogie and about to get it on in serious fashion.
“How you doin’, Pen?” I said.
“Not bad. How about you?”
“We’ve had a few troubles over here,” I said. “Somebody shot at Mark Shondell this morning. That means he’s going to go full out in his war against us.”
“Who is ‘us’?”
“That depends. I’m wondering if Adonis might help Shondell by parking one between my shoulder blades.”
“Adonis wouldn’t do that.”
“Yeah? Johnny Shondell said you bear me ill will.”
“That isn’t true. Do you know where Johnny is?” she said.
“He said he and Isolde were going to Nashville to cut a Hank Williams tribute record.”
“They left Nashville on a rented plane. Johnny has a pilot’s license. No one knows where they are. I’m very worried. Mark Shondell won’t rest until he ruins Isolde’s life.”
“Why did you ever turn her over to him?” I asked.
“Because I was a fool,” she said.
“Maybe she’ll call. She and Johnny are kids. They don’t know what parental worry is like.”
There was a silence. Then she said, “There’s still a chance for us, Dave.”
I had to get out of my discussion with her. She was beautiful and educated and smelled like the ocean or perhaps a mermaid and a garden full of flowers when she made love. “Is Mark Shondell mixed up with white supremacists?”
“He’s an elitist. He looks down on them.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.
“He uses them.”
“Gideon saved the life of Father Julian.”
“What?”
I told her what had happened at Julian’s house.
“I’m glad he helped Father Hebert, but that will not free Gideon of his burden,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“To reclaim his soul, he has to be forgiven by someone he has injured. Gideon has the intellect of a peasant. He’s dull-witted and heavy-handed, and he often hurts rather than helps people. That’s why he’s so dangerous. He hurt your friend Mr. Purcel. If I were you, I would be protective of my friend.”
“Are you trying to mess me up, Penelope?”
“I don’t think this conversation is serving any purpose.”
“Put Adonis on,” I said.
“I loved you,” she said. “I thought you were the one.”
She hung up slowly, so the receiver would rattle in the phone cradle.
Clete called me on my cell that night. I had just spread newspaper on the floor and fed my cats and my pet raccoon Tripod. One of the cats believed Tripod was hogging the food and bit him in the tail. “Where are you?” I said to Clete, trying to distribute a can of sardines with one hand.
“In Texas. My receptionist says you were looking for me.”
“Big surprise?”
“Johnny and Isolde might have gotten abducted in Nashville. I think I got a lead on them.”
“Did you finally embalm your brain?”
“Do you want to know what I found out about Johnny and Isolde or not?”
“No, I don’t. You shot off an El Salvadoran general’s finger. You just missed blowing one of Mark Shondell’s kidneys out of his side.”
“Says who?”
“There’s only one person I know who’s that crazy.”
“Gee, I’m really story to hear that a pair of great guys like Shondell and the greaser had their breakfast disturbed,” he said.
“I didn’t say it happened at breakfast.”
He didn’t reply.
“I talked with Penelope Balangie today,” I said. “Gideon Richetti can’t redeem himself until he’s forgiven by someone he has hurt. She thinks he may unintentionally do harm to you.”
“You called Penelope Balangie?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m the guy with bad judgment? Tell me who’s sticking his dork in the light socket.” He waited. “You there?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t blame you,” he said. “That broad is every guy’s wet dream. She might even be on the square. Look, I’ve been checking out some ties Mark Shondell has in Miami and Jersey, Fat Tony Salerno’s crowd, mostly. There’s this rich-boy gutter rat that’s about to make some political moves. The gutter rat is also mixed up with the Russian mafia.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But Shondell is a big player. This is how one guy close to the gutter rat put it: Working-class people think liberals look down on them, and they think the black people and Hispanics want to take away everything they’ve worked for. Shondell thinks the gutter rat is headed for the White House.”
“Are you in the slop chute?”
“One other thing. Remember when we saw a boat with black sails out on Lake Pontchartrain, in front of the Balangie compound? I saw one yesterday.”
“Talk to you later, Clete.”
“Don’t hang up on me. This Gideon stuff is tearing me apart. I see that guy in my sleep. I see the fire he was building under my head.”
“You know how I feel when you say that?”
“No.”
“I wish you’d parked one in Shondell’s face.”
But sympathizing with Clete’s irrational behavior brought me no solace. I woke each day with the sense that time was ending. This was a phenomenon I had carried with me since childhood, when an evil man named Mack seduced my mother and made her a whore and destroyed our family. After Mack came into our lives, I had nightmares about the sun turning black in the sky and dipping over the edge of the earth, never to return.
The dream followed me to the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the bars of Saigon and Hong Kong and Manila and the drunk tank in the New Orleans French Quarter. But now the dream was no longer a dream. The feeling of loss didn’t end with the dawn; I carried it throughout the day. The season did not follow its own rules. At the end of the day, the moon was orange and low in the sky, the dust rising like ash from the fields, as though autumn were upon us rather than the end of winter and the advent of spring.
I felt as though I had stepped inside a place that was outside time, a place where reason and the laws of cause and effect held no sway, where the fears we inherit from our simian forebears flare in the unconscious and lead us back to the monsters we thought we had left behind.
Helen Soileau assigned Carroll LeBlanc and me to the assault on Father Julian and what she called the “hit-and-run.” One of the first people we questioned was Leslie Rosenberg. In my case the reason was not entirely professional, either. I had the same inclinations toward her as I did Penelope Balangie. This does not speak well for me. A psychiatrist would probably say the loss of my mother at an early age was responsible for my absorption with women, but I cannot imagine any man not being absorbed with them. If you live long enough, you eventually learn that almost every aspect of the universe is a mystery, no more understandable by the scientist than by the metaphysician. And the greatest mystery in creation is the spiritual and healing transformation of a woman when she gives herself to you. It’s a gift you cannot repay, a memory that never dies. That was the way I felt about Leslie. She had another quality, one possessed by almost every badass biker girl. They may pop chewing gum and have a pout on their face and eyes that say “Wanna fuck,” but I’ve yet to see one who wasn’t a closet flower child.