The telephone woke me at four a.m. I answered it in the kitchen and closed the door to the hall so as not to wake the rest of the house. The moon was still up, and a soft ivory light fell on the mimosa tree and redwood picnic table in the backyard.
"I found a bar with an honest-to-God zydeco band," Minos said. "You remember Clifton Chenier? These guys play just like Clifton Chenier used to."
I could hear a jukebox, then the record stopped and I could hear bottles clinking.
"Where are you?"
"I told you. In a bar in Opelousas."
"It's pretty late for zydeco, Minos."
"I've got a story for you. Hell, I've got a bunch of them. Did you know I was in army intelligence in Vietnam?"
"No."
"Well, it's no big deal. But sometimes we had problems that fell outside the rulebook. There was this French civilian who gave us a lot of trouble."
"Do you have your car?"
"Sure."
"Leave it in the parking lot. Take a cab to a motel. Don't drive back to Lafayette. You understand?"
"Listen, this French civilian was hooked in with the VC in Saigon. He had whores and some people on our bases reporting to him, and maybe he helped torture one of our agents to death. But we couldn't prove it, and because he had a frog passport, he was a touchy item to deal with."
"I'm not interested in talking with you about Vietnam."
"In the meantime the major is looking like a dumb shit that can't handle the action. So we call in a sergeant who did little jobs for us from time to time, like crawl into a ville at night and slit somebody's throat from ear to ear with a barber's razor. He was going to get the frog with a night scope, nail him from fifty yards out and be back at the NCO club for beers before they could blot the guy's brains off the wallpaper. But guess what? He got the wrong fucking house. A Dutch businessman was eating snails with his chopsticks, and our good sergeant blew his face all over his wife's blouse."
"I've got some advice for you, Minos. Fuck Vietnam. Get it the hell out of your life."
"I'm not talking about Vietnam. I'm talking about you and me, podna. It's like something F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. We serve a vast, vulgar, meretricious enterprise."
"Look, get something to eat and I'll come up there."
"There's some government people who want to cut a deal with Romero."
"What?"
"He's got a lot of shit on a lot of people. He's valuable to us. Or at least to somebody."
I felt my hand clench on the telephone receiver. The wooden chair I sat on felt hard against my bare thighs and back.
"Is this straight?" I said. "Your people are talking with Romero? They know where he is?"
"Don't say 'my people.' He got word to some other federal agents in New Orleans. They don't know where he is, but he says he'll come in for the right deal. You know what I told them?"
I could hear my breath against the holes in the telephone.
"I told them, 'Cut all the fucking deals you want. Robicheaux ain't going to play,'" he said. "I have to say that made me feel kind of good."
"Which bar are you in?"
"Forget about me. I was right, though, wasn't I? You're not going to bargain?"
"I want to talk with you tomorrow."
"Hell, no. What you hear now is all you get. Now I want you to tell me something fair and square. You don't have to admit anything. Just tell me I'm wrong. You found the Toyota, you rounded up Keats, you took him out to the levee and put that.45 of yours between his ribs and blew his lungs out his mouth, Right?"
"Wrong."
"Come on, Robicheaux. You showed up at the Haitian's in New Orleans right after the cops did. What are the odds of you just blundering into a situation like that? Then another guy you truly hate, somebody whose nose you crushed into marmalade with a pool cue, shows up dead by the Henderson levee. Keats was from Brooklyn. He didn't know anything about that area. Neither does Romero. But you've been fishing that swamp all your life. If anybody else but a bunch of coonass cops were handling this case, you'd be in jail."
"Take two vitamin B's and four aspirins before you go to bed," I said. "You won't run the four-minute mile tomorrow, but at least the snakes won't be crawling."
"I'm all wet, huh?"
"You've got it. I'm going to sign off now. I hope they don't put you through the wringer. For a government man, you're a pretty good guy, Dunkenstein."
He was still talking when I eased the phone receiver back into the cradle. Outside, I could hear night birds calling to each other in the fields.
After work that day, I took Robin and Alafair down to Cypremort Point for dinner. We ate boiled shrimp and blue-point crabs in a ramshackle, screened-in restaurant by the bay, and in the mauve twilight the water looked flat and gray, rippled in places by a slight breeze, like wrinkles in a skim of paint, and in the west the distant islands of sawgrass were edged with the sun's last red glow on the horizon. Behind us I could see the long, two-lane road that led down through the Point, the dead cypress trees that were covered with shadows now, the fishing shacks built up on stilts above the flooded woods, the pirogues tied to the cabin pilings, the carpet of blooming lily pads on the canals, the herons that lifted on extended wings into the lavender sky like a whispered poem.
The big electric fans in the restaurant vibrated with their own energy; the wood tables were littered with crab shells; bugs beat against the screen as the light went out of the sky; and somebody played " La Jolie Blonde " on the jukebox. Robin's dark hair moved in the breeze, and her eyes were bright and happy, and there was a smear of sauce piquante on the corner of her mouth. With all her hard mileage, she was a good girl inside and she took hold of my affections in a funny way. You fall in love with women for different reasons, I guess. Sometimes they are simply beautiful and you have no more control over your desire for them than you do in choosing your nocturnal dreams. Then there are others who earn their way into your soul, who are kind and loyal and loving in the way that your mother was or should have been. Then there's that strange girl who walks unexpectedly off a side street into the middle of your life, the one who is nothing like the indistinct and warm presence who has lived with you for so long on the soft edge of sleep. Instead, her clothes are all wrong, her lipstick mismatched, her handbag clutched like a shield, her eyes wide and bright, as though the Greek Furies were calling to her from the stage wings.
Robin and I made an agreement. I would discharge the baby-sitter, and she would help me take care of Alafair and work at the bait shop. She promised me she was off the booze and the dope, and I believed her, although I didn't know how long her resolution would last. I don't understand alcoholism, and I cannot tell you for sure what an alcoholic is. I've known some people who quit on their own, then became white-knucklers who boiled with a metabolic and psychological misery that finally caused them to blow out their doors and come into AA on their kneecaps. I've known others who simply stopped drinking one day and lived out their lives in a gray, neutral area like people who had clipped all the sharp edges off their souls until they seemed to be operating on the spiritual energies of a moth. The only absolute conclusion I ever made about alcoholics was that I was one of them. What others did with booze had no application to my life, as long as they didn't press it on Dave Robicheaux, who was altogether too willing a victim.