"You seem pretty good at this."
"It beats being a shoe salesman, I guess. You have any questions?"
"How many undercover people have been caught with one of these?"
"Believe it or not, it doesn't happen very often. We put taps on telephone lines, bugs in homes and offices, we wire up informants inside the mob, and they still hang themselves. They're not very smart people."
"Tony C. is."
"Yeah, but he's crazy, too."
"That's where you're wrong, partner. The only reason guys like us think he's crazy is because he doesn't behave like the others. Mistake."
"Maybe so. But you'd better talk to Minos. He got some stuff on Cardo from the V.A. this morning. Our man was locked up with the wet brains for a while."
"He's a speed freak."
"Yeah, maybe because of his last few months' service in Vietnam."
"What about it?"
"Talk to Minos," he said, got out of the truck, and looked back at me through the window. "Good luck on this. Remember what I said. Get what you can and let the devil take the rest."
Then he crossed the street and walked through the park toward St. Charles, his attention already focused on the college kids playing football by the lake. The streetcar clattered loudly down the tracks in front of the Tulane campus across the avenue. I went to a small grocery store a few blocks down St. Charles, where the owner provided tables inside for working people to eat their lunch at, and called Minos at his office to see if he had relocated Kim in a safe house. I also wanted to know what he had learned about Tony's history in Vietnam, besides the fact that as an addict Tony had been locked up in a psychiatric unit rather than treated for addiction.
Minos wasn't in. But in a few hours I was to learn Tony's story on my own, almost as though he had sawed a piece of forgotten memory out of my own experience and thrust it into my unwilling hands.
I took Bootsie to lunch at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant on Dauphine before I drove back out to Tony's. She looked wonderful in her white suit, black heels, and lavender blouse, and I think perhaps she had the best posture I had ever seen in a woman. She sat perfectly straight in her chair while she sipped from her wineglass or ate small bites of her seafood enchilada, her chin tilted slightly upward, her face composed and soft.
But it was too crowded for us to talk well, and I was beset with questions that I did not know how to frame or ask. I guess my biggest concern about Bootsie was a selfish one. I wanted her to be just as she had been in the summer of 1957. I didn't want to accept the fact that she had married into the Mafia, that she was business partners with the Giacano family, that financial concern was of such great importance in her life that she would not extricate herself from the Giacanos.
For some reason it was as though she had betrayed me, or betrayed the youth and innocence I'd unfairly demanded she be the vessel of. What an irony, I thought: I'd killed off a large portion of my adult life with alcohol, driven away my first wife, delivered my second wife, Annie, into a nightmare world of drugs and psychotic killers, and had become a professional Judas who was no longer sure himself to whom he owed his loyalties. But I was still willing to tie Bootsie to the moralist's rack.
"What's bothering you?" she asked.
"What if we just give it all up? Your vending machine business, your connection with those clowns, my fooling around with the lowlifes and the crazoids. We just eighty-six it all and go back to New Iberia."
"It's a thought, isn't it?"
"I mean it, Boots. You only get one time on the planet. Why spend any more of it confirming yesterday's mistakes?"
"I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"Not here. Can we be together later tonight?"
"Yeah, sure, but tell me what, Boots?"
"Later," she said. "Can you come for supper at the house?"
"I think I can."
"You think?"
"I'm trying to tie some things up."
"Would you rather another night?" She looked at a distant spot in the restaurant.
"No, I'll do everything I can to be there."
"You'll do everything?"
"What time? I'll be there. I promise."
"They're not easy people to deal with, are they? You don't always get to set your own schedule, do you? You don't have control over everything when you lock into Tony Cardo's world, do you?"
"All right, Bootsie, I was hard on you."
"No, you were hard on both of us. When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself. I loved you so much that summer I thought we had one skin wrapped around us."
I looked back at her helplessly.
"Six-thirty," she said.
"All right," I said. Then I said it again. "And if anything goes wrong, I'll call. That's the best I can do. But I know I'll be there."
And I was the one who'd just suggested we eighty-six it all and go back to Bayou Teche.
Her dark eyes were unreadable in the light of the candle burning inside the little red chimney on the table.
When I got back to Tony's house, I hid the tape recorder in my closet. The house was empty, so quiet that I could hear clocks ticking. I put on my gym shorts and running shoes, jogged for thirty minutes through the neighborhood and along Lakeshore Drive, then tried to do ten push-ups out on the lawn. But the network of muscles in my left shoulder was still weak from the gunshot wound, and after three push-ups I collapsed on my elbow.
I showered, put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved sports shirt, and walked out by the pool with a magazine just as Tony and Jess came through the front gate in the Lincoln, with the white limo behind them.
Tony slammed the car door and walked toward me, pulling off his coat and tie.
"Come inside with me. I got to get a drink," he said. He kept pulling off his clothes as he went deeper into the house, kicking his shoes through a bedroom door, flinging his shirt and trousers into a bathroom, until he stood at the bar in his Jockey undershorts. His body was hard, knotted with muscle, and beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He poured four inches of bourbon into a tumbler with ice and took a big swallow. Then he took another one, his eyes widening above the upended glass.
"I think I'm heading into the screaming meemies," he said. "I feel like somebody's pulling my skin off with pliers."
"What is it?"
"I'm a fucking junkie, that's what it is." He poured from the decanter into his glass again.
"Better ease up on the fluids."
"This stuff's like Kool-Aid compared to what my system's used to. What you're looking at, Dave, is a piece of cracked ceramic. Those guys are weirding me out, too. We're in my real estate office out by Chalmette, and I'm talking to my salespeople at a meet while the guys are milling around out there by the front desks. These salespeople are mostly middle-class broads who pretend they don't know what other kinds of businesses I'm in. So we end the meet and walk out to the front door and everybody is bouncy and laughing until they see the guys comparing different kinds of rubbers they bought at some sex shop. It's like my life is part of a Marx Brothers comedy. Except it ain't funny."
He put his head down on the bar. "Oh man, I ain't fucking gonna make it."
"Yeah, you will."
"Have you ever seen a set-brain ward at the V.A.? They wear Pampers, they drool on themselves, they eat mush with their hands. I've been there, man, and this is worse."
"I've had dead people call me up long-distance. Do you think it gets any worse than that?" I said.
"You think that's a big deal? I'll tell you about a smell-" He stopped and drank out of his glass. The ice clinked against the sides. His eyes were dilated. "Come inside, I want to show you something."
He picked up the decanter and walked out the side door onto the lawn. Jess looked up from dipping leaves out of the pool.