We’d never pulled a job in any part of New Orleans—“You don’t shit where you eat” was Buck’s eloquent way of explaining it—and naturally we hadn’t talked about our business to anybody except those we had to deal with. But the Quarter was a compact world and word got around about everybody in it. The big guys—the Black Hands—left you alone as long as you didn’t try cutting in on any of their trade, but the place was full of smalltimers who’d rat you out in a minute if they thought they could gain by it. No telling who might catch sight of me and somehow or other know I was supposed to be in Angola and dash off to make a deal with the cops.
As I passed the Bon Temps restaurant I caught a glimpse of a wild-haired creature in ill-fitting pants and zany shirt and took a few steps more before turning back to have a better look at my reflection in the mirrored doors. The only image I’d seen of myself since Verte Rivage was in shaving mirrors the size of my hand. I regarded a rawboned frame and a dark whiskered face of sharp angles and hot-looking eyes. It was unlikely that anyone would know me without a real careful look. A pair of young girls brushed past in the heavy sidewalk traffic and I saw the pinch of their faces, their swap of horrified looks, their gawping stares back at me, the source of such foul odor.
As much as I wanted to avoid being spotted, what I wanted even more was a cold beer. The nearest speakeasy was in the backroom of the Anchor Café down the street and I made straight for it. I paused inside the door and peered about for familiar faces. When I didn’t spot any I went up to the bar and slapped down my quarter. I drank two beers in a row without taking the mug from my mouth each time till I’d drained it. Then let out a sequence of burps that burned my nose and made me wipe my eyes.
“Sometimes it’s like a fire we got to put out, ain’t it?” the barkeep said. It was hard to tell if he was joking. I got my nickel in change and bummed a cigarette from the guy beside me and went out again.
I headed for the south end of Toulouse, where Buck and Russell shared a two-bedroom apartment in a building called La Maison Dumas. A nice place but not showy. They could easily have afforded something more elegant but they didn’t want to live in any way that might raise too many questions about how they made their living.
“On the other hand,” Russell had said to me, “there’s no need to live in a dump like yours, neither.” Actually, I liked my little place on Esplanade precisely because it was a dump. I could abandon it in a heartbeat if I had to and I’d never miss it for a minute. I only hoped Buck or Russell had gone over there and picked up my clothes before the landlord confiscated my stuff and rented the place to somebody else.
I’d been thinking about what I’d say when they answered my knock and saw me standing there. “Got tired of waiting on you boys to bust me out so I took care of the matter myself.” Something like that.
But the guy who came to the door was a stranger in undershirt and suspenders. He said he and his wife had been living there for more than two months. I checked with the landlady, who kept the chain on her door as she peeked out and at first didn’t recognize me. I smelled gumbo simmering in her kitchen. My uncles had moved away in a hurry, she said. She had no idea where they might have gone. And then I was staring at a shut door.
So. Up Decatur and past the clamor of Jackson Square and the French Market and onto Ursuline. Halfway up the block was an ornate two-story apartment building with a lawn and a spiked wrought-iron fence and a locked front gate that only the residents had a key to. Some of the taller palms in the courtyard showed above the roof, their fronds lit up from below. I scaled the fence in the shadow of an oak and dropped onto the grass on the other side. The simple exertion made everything whirl for a moment and had me sucking for air and pouring sweat.
The courtyard was illuminated by high black-iron lamps and contained a lush garden still several weeks from full flower. A redbrick walkway took me past a large goldfish fountain shadowed by palms and schefflera. I went up the stairs to the second floor. Most of the window shutters were open and as I went along the gallery I caught sight of people at their supper, conversing, listening to radios, reading, staring at nothing. In one place all the mirrors were covered with bed-sheets, a common practice in homes where someone had recently died. I stopped at the corner apartment and stared in the window at a dimly lighted, nicely appointed living room with tall shelves of books and framed art works on every wall. A radio on a side table was softly playing. “East of the Moon, West of the Stars.”
I was about to rap on the sill when she came out of the bedroom with an empty wineglass in each hand. Barefoot, white terry robe loosely belted. She slung her black hair over her shoulder with a toss of her head and went into the kitchen and a minute later came out again with both glasses showing red wine. She set one glass down on the side table and turned up the volume on the radio. Then closed her eyes and swayed to the music. And then suddenly went still—and quickly turned and saw me. And dropped the other glass to bounce on the carpet and splash wine at her feet.
“Brenda, sugar?” A man’s voice from the bedroom. She stared at me, a hand at the open neck of her robe.
I felt the last of my strength draining away and I slumped against the window jamb. I tried to smile at her but couldn’t tell if I pulled it off.
“Sonny,” she said. And came for me as I went down.
We’d met a year earlier, at an art exhibition sponsored by the mother of one of my schoolmates. I was just a few days graduated from Gulliver Academy and I’d had my fill of everything that smacked of academics, but my buddy said there’d be free champagne and some finelooking women, so I went. I hadn’t been there twenty minutes when we were introduced. An hour after that we were in bed at my place on Esplanade.
Brenda Marie Matson. A year older than I, she had been managing the Fontaine Gallery on Dauphine Street since graduating from the Institute of the Magdalene, a ritzy Catholic girls’ school over near Loyola. She was smart as a whip and could’ve breezed through college, but like me she’d had enough of studies. The gallery belonged to a family friend who lived in Paris and let her run it as she saw fit. She certainly didn’t need the job—her father was founder of Matson Petroleum. He’d been a wildcatter who brought in one of the biggest gushers in Louisiana. Her mother was a woman of French Creole pedigree whose family never forgave her for marrying the son of ragamuffin Irish, his oil money be damned. Both her parents were four years dead, lost at sea when their chartered yacht sank off the Spanish coast.
She’d won various ballet competitions and could have danced professionally if she’d wanted to. Her toes were gnarled and callused and she didn’t like for me to look at them. She told me this one night when we were naked on her bed and I was massaging her feet. I said her toes were the hard proof of her talent and something to be proud of, like a soldier’s wounds or a fencing master’s scars.
“Oh God,” she said, “a romantic.”
I lightly bit her big toe and said gruffly, “You better believe it, tootsie”—and she laughed and snared me with her legs and pulled me to her.
She loved books and art and music, but her greatest pleasure was in sex. I knew plenty of girls who enjoyed it but not like Brenda Marie. She had no inhibitions at all in bed, was ready to try anything. I’d never had two girls at the same time until the night she introduced a blonde friend named Candace to our sporting. She called it a special treat for me—and it damn sure was—but they had as much fun as I did, and I suspected it wasn’t the first time they’d done such things with each other. I didn’t ask her about it, though. And I never asked if she spent time with other men.