I SLEPT BADLY that night, wound up by my conversation with Woolrich and troubled by dreams of dark water. The next morning, I had breakfast alone after tracking down what seemed to be the only copy of the New York Times in Orleans Parish, over at Riverside News, by the Jax Brewery. Later, I met Rachel at Café du Monde and we walked through the French Market, wandering between the stalls of T-shirts and CDs and cheap wallets, and on to the fresh produce at the Farmers’ Market. There were pecans like dark eyes, pale, shrunken heads of garlic, melons with dark red flesh that held the gaze like a wound. White-eyed fish lay packed in ice beside crawfish tails; headless shrimp rested by racks of “’gator on a stick” and murky tanks in which baby alligators lay on display. There were stalls loaded with eggplants and militones, sweet onions and elephant toe garlic, fresh Roma tomatoes and ripe avocadoes.
Over a century before, this had been a two-block stretch of Gallatin Street on the riverfront docks between Barracks and Ursuline. Outside of maybe Shanghai and the Bowery, it was one of the toughest places in the world, a strip of brothels and lowlife gin mills where hard-faced men mixed with harder women and anyone without a weapon had taken a wrong turning somewhere that he was bound to regret.
Gallatin is gone now, erased from the map, and instead tourists mix with Cajun fishermen from Lafayette and beyond, come to sell their wares surrounded by the thick, heady smell of the Mississippi. The city was like that, it seemed: streets disappeared; bars opened and, a century later, were gone; buildings were torn down or burned to the ground and others rose to take their place. There was change, but the spirit of the city remained the same. On this muggy summer morning, it seemed to brood beneath the clouds, feeling the people as a passing infection that it would cleanse from itself with rain.
The door of my room was slightly ajar when we returned through the courtyard. I motioned Rachel against the wall and drew my Smith amp; Wesson, keeping to the sides of the wooden stairway so that the steps wouldn’t creak. The noise of Ricky’s Steyr sending bullets raking past my ear had stayed with me.
I listened at the door but no sounds came from inside. If it had been the maid in my room, she’d have been whistling and bumping, maybe listening to a blues station on her tinny portable radio. If there was a maid in my room now, she was either asleep or levitating.
I hit the door hard with my shoulder and entered fast, my gun at arm’s length, scanning the room with the sight. It came to rest on the figure of Leon sitting in a chair by the balcony, flicking through a copy of
“When you’re finished, there are hairs in the shower and the closet door sticks,” I said.
“Room falls down around your ears, I could give a fuck,” he replied. That Leon, what a kidder.
He threw the magazine on the floor and looked past me to Rachel, who had followed me into the room. His eyes didn’t register any interest there either. Maybe Leon was dead and no one had worked up the guts to tell him.
“She’s with me,” I said. Leon looked like he could have keeled over from apathy.
“Ten tonight, at the nine-sixty-six junction at Starhill. You et ton ami noir. Anyone else, Lionel cornhole you both with a shotgun.”
He stood to leave. As I moved aside to let him pass, I made a pistol of my finger and thumb and fired it at him. There was a flash of steel in each of his hands and two barb-edged knives appeared inches from each of my eyes. I could see the tops of the spring loaders in his sleeves. That explained why Leon didn’t seem to feel the need to carry a gun.
“Impressive,” I said, “but it’s only funny until someone loses an eye.” Leon ’s dead right eye seemed to gaze into my soul, as if to rot it and turn it to dust, then he left. I couldn’t hear his footsteps as he walked down the gallery.
“A friend of yours?” asked Rachel.
I walked out of the room and looked down at the already empty courtyard. “If he is, I’m lonelier than I thought.”
When Louis and Angel returned from a late breakfast, I went to their door and knocked. A couple of seconds went by before there was a response.
“Yeah?” shouted Angel.
“It’s Bird. You two decent?”
“Jeez, I hope not. C’mon in.”
Louis sat upright in bed, reading the Times-Picayune. Angel sat beside him outside the sheets, naked but for a towel across his lap.
“The towel for my benefit?”
“I’m afraid you might become confused about your sexuality.”
“Might take away what little I have.”
