“What do you think?” Pitt asked Giordino. “Now I know where old cockroaches go to die.”
“Just remember to smile and say 'sir' to any of these hulks who ask you the time.”
“This would be the last place I'd start a fight,” Giordino agreed.
“Good thing we're not dressed like tourists off a cruise ship,” said Pitt, reexamining the soiled and patched work clothes the crew of the Marine Denizen had scrounged together for them. “Though I doubt it makes any difference. They know we don't belong by the clean smell.”
“I knew it was a mistake to bathe last month,” Giordino said wryly.
Pitt bowed and gestured toward an empty table. “Shall we dine?”
“Yes, let's,” Giordino countered with a bow as he pulled back a chair and sat down.
After twenty minutes with no service, Giordino yawned and said, “It would appear our waiter has refined the professional technique of pretending not to notice our table.”
“He must have heard you,” Pitt said, grinning. “Here he comes.”
The waiter approached them, dressed only in cutoff jeans and wearing a T-shirt with a longhorn steer skiing down a hill of brown that said, IF GOD MEANT TEXANS TO SKI, HE'D HAVE MADE COWSHIT WHITE.
“Can I get you something from the kitchen?” he asked in a surprisingly high-pitched voice.
“How about a dozen oysters and a Dixie beer?” said Giordino.
“You got it,” answered the waiter. “And you?”
“A bowl of your famous gumbo.”
The waiter grunted. “I didn't know it was famous, but it is good-tastin'. Whatta you want to drink?”
“Got tequila behind the bar?”
“Sure, we get a lot of Central American fishermen in here.”
“Tequila on the rocks with a lime.”
The waiter turned and began walking toward the kitchen, but not before he looked at them and said, “I'll be back.”
“I hope he doesn't think he's Arnold Schwarzenegger and drives a car through the wall,” Giordino muttered.
“Relax,” said Pitt. “Enjoy the local color, the ambience, the smoke-filled environment.”
“I might as well take advantage of the stale atmosphere and add to it,” said Giordino, lighting up one of his exotic cigars.
Pitt surveyed the room, searching for an appropriate character to probe for information. He eliminated a group of oil riggers gathered round one end of the bar and who were playing pool. The dockyard workers were a good possibility, but they did not look like they took kindly to strangers. He began focusing on the fishermen. A number of them were sitting at community tables pulled together and playing poker. An older man, in what Pitt guessed was his mid-sixties, straddled a chair nearby but did not join in. He played the role of a loner, but there was a humorous and friendly gleam in his blue-green eyes. His hair was gray and matched a mustache that fell and met a beard around the chin. He watched the others as they tossed their money on the poker table as though he was a psychologist studying behavioral patterns of laboratory mice.
The waiter brought the drinks, no tray, a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. Pitt looked up and asked, “What brand of tequila did the bartender have?”
“I think it's called Pancho Villa.”
“If I know my tequilas, Pancho Villa comes in a plastic bottle.”
The waiter twisted his lips as if trying to dredge up a vision seen many years previously. Then his face lit up. “Yeah, you're right. It does come in a plastic bottle. Great medicine for what ails you.”
“Nothing ails me at the moment,” said Pitt.
Giordino came as close to a smirk as he could get. “How much residue lies on the bottom of the bottle, and how much does it cost?”
“I bought a bottle in the Sonoran Desert during the Inca Gold project for a dollar sixty-seven,” said Pitt.
“Is it safe to drink?”
Pitt held his glass up to the light before taking a healthy swallow. Then he jokingly crossed his eyes and said, “Any port in a storm.”
The waiter returned from the kitchen with Giordino's oysters along with Pitt's gumbo. They decided on a main course of jambalaya and catfish. The Gulf oysters were so large that Giordino had to cut them apart as he would a steak. Pitt's bowl of gumbo would have satisfied a hungry lion. After stuffing their stomachs with a heaping platter of jambalaya, then ordering another Dixie beer and Pancho Villa tequila, they sat at the table and loosened their belts.
All during dinner, Pitt had rarely taken his eyes off the old man observing the poker players. “Who's the old fellow over there straddling the chair?” he asked the waiter. “I know him but can't place where we met.”
The waiter swiveled his eyes around the bar, stopping them on the old man. "Oh, him. He owns a fleet of fishing boats.
Mostly trawls for crab and shrimp. Owns a big catfish farm, too. Wouldn't know it to look at him, but he's a wealthy man."
“Do you know if he charters boats?”
“Dunno. You'll have to ask him.”
Pitt looked at Giordino. “Why don't you work the bar and see if you can learn where Qin Shang Maritime's towboats dump their trash?”
“And you?”
“I'll ask about the dredging operations upriver.”
Giordino nodded silently and rose from the table. Soon he was laughing amid several fishermen, regaling them with inflated stories of his fishing days off California. Pitt moved over to the old fisherman and stood beside him.
“Excuse me, sir, but I wonder if I might have a word with you.”
The gray-bearded man's blue-green eyes slowly examined Pitt from his belt buckle to his black curly hair. Then he nodded slowly, rose from his chair and motioned Pitt to a booth in one corner of the bar. After he settled in and ordered another beer, the fisherman said, “What can I do for you Mr....”
“Pitt.”
“Mr. Pitt. You're not from around the bayou country.”
“No, I'm with the National Underwater and Marine Agency out of Washington.”
“You doing marine research?”
“Not this trip,” said Pitt. “My colleagues and I are cooperating with the Immigration Service in trying to stop the illegal smuggling of aliens.”
The old man pulled a cigar stub from the pocket of an old windbreaker and lit it. “How can I help?”
“I would like to charter a boat to investigate an excavation upriver—”
“The canal dug by Qin Shang Maritime for landfill at Sung-ari?” the fisherman interrupted knowledgeably.
“The same.”
“Not much to see,” said the fisherman. “Except a big ditch where the Mystic Bayou used to be. Folks call it the Mystic Canal now.”
“I can't believe it took that much fill to build the port,” said Pitt.
“What muck dredged from the canal that wasn't used for landfill was barged out to sea and dumped out in the Gulf,” answered the fisherman.
“Is there a nearby community?” asked Pitt.
“Used to be a town called Calzas that sat at the end of the bayou a short ways off the Mississippi River. But it's gone.”
“Calzas no longer exists?” asked Pitt.
“The Chinese spread the word that they was doing the townspeople a service by providing them with boating access to the Atchafalaya. The truth is, they bought out the landowners. Paid them three times what the property was worth. What's left standing is a ghost town. The rest was bulldozed into the marsh.”
Pitt was confused. “Then what was the purpose of excavating a dead-end canal when they could have just as easily dug fill anywhere in the Atchafalaya Valley?”
“Everybody up and down the river is curious about that, too,” said the fisherman. “The problem is that friends of mine who have fished that bayou for thirty years are no longer welcome. The Chinese have run a chain across their new canal and no longer give access to fishermen. Nor hunters either.”