Castillo looked around, wondering where the hell the guys from China Post were—then saw one, a portly, graying black man in his fifties or sixties, come around the corner of the building, a CAR-4 at his side.
When he saw Castillo looking at him, he smiled faintly and gave him a very casual salute. Castillo waved back.
Another black man, this one very small, very black, and with closely cropped white hair, came out the front door of the main house. He was wearing what Castillo thought of as the “Gaucho Costume”—the lower legs of the Bombachas trousers stuffed inside soft black leather boots, a white, open-collared billowing shirt, and a flaming red kerchief tied around the neck.
He also held an enormous parrilla fork in one hand.
“You seem to have gone native, Mr. Ambassador,” Castillo greeted him.
“If you insist on calling me ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ Castillo, not only will I have no choice but to call you ‘Colonel’ but I will see that you get nothing to drink but Coca-Cola,” Ambassador (Retired) Philippe Lorimer said.
“It’s hard for me to call you ‘Philippe,’ sir.”
“Suit yourself, Colonel. Drink Coke.”
“I will call you ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ sir,” Colin Leverette said, “because I am bigger and meaner than you are.”
“Larger, perhaps,” Lorimer said, waving the parrilla fork.
“And I come bearing gifts, sir,” Leverette said.
“Good God, I hope you didn’t bring flowers!”
“No, sir. Bitters. Peychaud’s Bitters.”
He handed him a small bag.
Lorimer opened it and took out three small bottles; the bag obviously held more.
“You will be rewarded in heaven, Colin,” the ambassador said. “I’m out. And they’re not available here.”
“May I respectfully suggest, Mr. Ambassador, sir, that we put the essence of the Crescent City to the ultimate test to see if it has endured the rigors of travel?”
“Making Sazeracs is the best idea I’ve heard this week,” the ambassador said. “But not until I welcome this lovely lady to Shangri-La. How do you do, my dear? Welcome to Shangri-La.”
“Thank you,” Svetlana said.
“I now understand,” Lorimer said.
“Understand?”
“How you captured the heart of the colonel. You’re stunning.”
“You heard about that, did you?” Castillo asked.
“I hear everything, Colonel. I thought you knew that.”
“Okay, Philippe, I surrender.”
“It was inevitable,” Lorimer said. “Corporal Bradley, you are always welcome here.” He gave Bradley his hand and looked at Dick Miller. “And you, sir, are?”
“My name is Miller, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Oh. Charley’s Hudson High classmate. I’m Norwich, but I will not hold West Point against you. You probably didn’t know any better.”
Leverette laughed.
“Why don’t we go into the house—actually, through the house; the parrilla is in the interior garden—while Colin makes us one of his famous Sazeracs?” He looked at Svetlana. “We can watch as your brother, my dear, and my wife ruin some wonderful Uruguayan beef on the parrilla.”
He got the expected chuckles.
Lorimer turned to Castillo. “And then you can tell me what this is all about. I am old but not brain-dead, and therefore suspect that you didn’t just drop in because you were in the neighborhood.”
He switched the parrilla fork to his left hand, offered his right arm to Svetlana, and marched with her through the door. She towered at least a foot over him.
The portly black man who had come around the corner of the house holding the CAR-4 when they had arrived now walked into the interior patio as the ambassador was slicing an entire tenderloin of beef. He laid the weapon on the table, sat down, and reached for a silver cocktail shaker.
“Colin,” he said, “this better be what I think it is.”
“Have I ever failed you, DeWitt?” Leverette replied.
“Yes,” the man said. “I shudder recalling how many times, where, and how.” He picked up the cocktail shaker, poured himself a Sazerac, sipped it appreciatively, then announced, “This will do.”
Castillo chuckled.
The black man looked at Castillo and smiled. “You don’t remember me, do you, Colonel?”
“No,” Castillo confessed.
“All we black folk look alike, DeWitt,” Leverette said. “You know that.”
“Fuck you, Uncle Remus!” Castillo flared.
Leverette knows that was uncalled for.
And bullshit besides.
There are five “black” people here. The ambassador and his wife, Big Mouth Uncle Remus, Dick Miller, and this old guy, who I never saw before, and now that I think about it is older than I first thought. He’s at least sixty.
And the one thing they have in common is that they don’t look alike.
One’s uncommonly small (the ambassador), another’s uncommonly large (Uncle Fucking Remus), one’s trim (Miller), and one’s more than pleasingly plump (the China Post guy).
And the color of their skin ranges from as light as mine (Mrs. Lorimer) to the you-can’t-see-him-when-the-lights-are-out pigmentation of Leverette, who until just now I thought was one of my best friends.
“Easy, Charley,” Dick Miller said. “He didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Yeah, I did,” Leverette said.
“Well, then fuck you, too!” Miller said angrily. “You know better than that, Colin. Goddammit!”
Castillo glanced at the ambassador and saw concern on his face; his wife’s face looked even worse.
“Goddamn you, Colin!” Castillo flared. “How many of those Sazeracs have you had?”
“Just this one, Boss Man,” Leverette said in a thick accent, then raised the glass to Castillo.
Castillo, literally speechless, looked at him in shock. His eye caught the fat old man, who was holding his hands in the form of a T, signaling Time-out.
“We got him, Colin,” the black man said. “Enough’s enough.”
“DeWitt, we got both of them,” Leverette said, laughing. “As ye sow, Carlos, so shall ye reap! You might want to write that down.”
Castillo glanced at Dewitt.
DeWitt . . . DeWitt, he thought, then a faint bell tinkled in his memory banks.
“When I saw Colin,” the fat man was saying, “I said, ‘I just saw Hotshot Charley and he looked right through me.’”
“To which I replied,” Leverette picked up, “ ‘DeWitt, I hate to tell you this, but you are no longer the Green Beanie poster boy you were in The Desert.’ ”
“Master Sergeant DeWitt!” Castillo said, suddenly remembering.
“And then,” DeWitt said, “we said—simultaneously—‘Let’s pull his chain.’ Which we then proceeded to do, with what you’ll have to admit was conspicuous success.”
“I will now say something I didn’t have the courage to say in The Desert,” Castillo said. “Go fuck yourself, DeWitt!”
“It’s really good to see you, Charley,” DeWitt said. He spread his arms wide and a moment later they were embracing, pounding each other’s backs.
“Now that the show is over,” Delchamps said drily, “may I infer from that obscene display of affection that you have crossed paths on the road of life?”
“You know General McNab?” DeWitt asked.
Delchamps nodded.
“He was then a colonel,” DeWitt went on, “running special ops in The Desert. I was his intel sergeant. Right after it started, the colonel came to me and said he had a new chopper driver, a twenty-one-year-old, five-months-out-of-Hudson-High who he wanted to keep alive because he already had the DFC and a Purple Heart and somebody like that would probably be useful somewhere down the pike.