She didn’t say a word. Just nodded. Good. Terreri had enough to worry about. They were going to go hard at bin Zari, and she was going to have to be involved. Whether she wanted to be or not.
“Thank you for your concern, Major. You are dismissed.”
14
Noemie Williams and her sons lived in a two-story house in Gentilly, the northeast corner of New Orleans, near Lake Pontchartrain. During Katrina, levees had failed on both sides of the neighborhood. The floodwaters had topped ten feet.
Even now, even at night, the scars from the storm were obvious. The house beside Noemie’s was vacant, plywood over its windows, a jagged crack slicing through the bricks on its front-right corner. A lot one block down was simply empty, no sign that a home had ever existed on it. On another, only a poured concrete foundation remained. Traffic was sparse and pedestrians nonexistent, though a few blocks south, toward the Ninth Ward, an open-air drug market was in full swing. The neighborhood made Wells think of a proud old man who’d had a heart attack and hadn’t decided yet whether to try to rehab or lie back and let nature take its course.
Noemie Williams was fighting, though. Her house had a fresh coat of white paint and what looked like a new porch, complete with a rocking horse painted red, black, and green. She had asked Wells to come at 10 p.m., saying she needed to put her sons to bed. He gave her a little extra time, knocked on her door at 10:15. She slid the dead bolt back immediately, and he realized too late that when Williams said ten, she meant ten.
The door pulled just an inch, a soft creak, chain still on the hook. Wells flipped open his wallet, showed her his identification.
“May I?” she said. Wells handed it through the crack in the door. She glanced at it, handed it back, opened up. She was tall and light-skinned, cornrows tight across her skull. She wore cropped black pants and a black T-shirt with “Forever New Orleans” stenciled in gold on the chest. The lines on her forehead said she was at least forty, though she had the legs of a woman a decade younger.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Sit.” She nodded to the living-room couch, protected by a plastic cover. In the reports of their interviews with her, the FBI agents wrote that Noemie Williams had been “calm and composed.” Wells agreed already.
“Get you anything?” Noemie said. She had the marbles-in-mouth south Louisiana accent: half Birmingham, one-third Boston, one-sixth Bugs Bunny.
“I’m fine.”
“Chicory coffee? Local specialty. Along with po’boys and heart attacks. Got a pot brewing.” Indeed, the sweet smell of chicory filled the house.
“If you’re having some, sure.”
Noemie disappeared, leaving Wells to examine the room, which was decorated — to a fault — in the motif of proud African American. On one wall, posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali shared space with family pictures. Another wall was given over to a framed poster of Barack Obama standing in front of the White House.
Noemie carried in a tray, two steaming mugs of coffee and a jug of milk, along with a plateful of cookies. “Come to Louisiana, you will get fed,” she said. The cookies were lemon and sugar and cinnamon, and fell into buttery pieces in Wells’s mouth. He had to make a conscious effort to stop after three of them. The coffee had a bite that pulled Wells back to Pakistan, tiny cups of sweet, strong coffee brewed in battered metal pots, half sugar and half crunchy grounds, the only antidote to the chill of winter in the North-West Frontier.
“So, you knew my husband.”
The past tense jumped at Wells. Jerry Williams was missing, not dead. Officially, anyway.
“We were friends. Trained as Rangers together.”
“That was a long time back. Before he met me.”
The windows were open, and a light breeze stirred the humid air through the curtains. But the city around them was anything but romantic. Police sirens screamed down Elysian Fields Avenue, four blocks away. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter buzzed.
“Lot of action,” Wells said.
“Bangers banging. This neighborhood’s not too bad, but the city’s so small you can’t get away from it. Unless you live in one of those mansions in the Garden District. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Soon enough, another ’cane will make our acquaintance and even us Louisiana lifers will have to admit this place isn’t meant to be. And that will be a shame.” She closed the window and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan.
“You and Jerry have three boys.”
“Asleep. Or pretending to be. Maybe reading comic books under the covers. Long as they’re reading.”
“What are their names?”
“Unfortunately, Jerry was a member of the George Foreman school of naming. The boys are named Jerry Jr., Johnny, and Jeffrey.”
Wells couldn’t think of any way to spin that.
“Every so often he’d have an S-A-N moment, and that was one.”
“S-A-N?”
“S for stupid, A for ass, and N for a word I don’t use around white people, no matter how well I know them. And I don’t know you too well.”
“You seem pretty calm about what’s happened.”
“The boys are used to Jerry being gone. He shows up tomorrow, they’ll think this was just another mission. No need to upset them just yet. Though we’re two months on. They’re wondering.”
“You don’t think he’s coming back.”
“You don’t shine it up before you spit it out, do you? No. I do not. Let me tell you why. We were having some troubles, no two ways about it. But Jerry Williams, Major Jeremiah Williams, he was very conscious that he was a man with three sons. A black man with three black sons. And everything that entails. Very conscious of all those boys whose daddies never even see them enter this world. You see those posters.” She nodded around the room. “My husband insisted on them. He would not have walked out on his boys. Whatever happened to him, he’s not with us anymore.”
Her voice had stayed even through this explanation. Now tears sprung from her eyes, slid down her cheeks. Wells put his hand on her shoulder.
“Mrs. Williams—”
But she shook him off and walked out of the room.
Wells shifted on the couch, listening to the fan rustling overhead, and tried to figure what he’d done. Someone else — Exley, say — could have asked the same questions without inciting such a ferocious response. But Wells seemed to have lost his sense for the give-and-take of human interaction.
Noemie stepped back in.
“I’m sorry,” Wells said. “I can come back.”
“Just ask your questions, Mr. Wells.”
“Let me start again, then. You were married in, what, ’99?”
“Correct. You knew Jerry before that?”
“In Ranger training. You know, I was gone awhile.”
“I know who you are.”
“But before I went to Afghanistan, I remember him saying he was getting married, his wife was ten times as beautiful as he deserved.”
Noemie gave him the tiniest of smiles.
“You’re from New Orleans?”
“No. Came here for college, got my degree in social work from Tulane. After I met Jerry, we jumped around base to base. But I always wanted to come back. Last year, when Jerry retired, I told him after all that time in North Carolina and Texas and what all, he owed me. He didn’t want to, but eventually he agreed.”
“But you are from Louisiana.”
“Grew up in Lafayette. Couple hours west of here on the Ten. Mom was black and dad was white, which accounts for this cracker accent. They were both from this swamp town, Morgan City, deep in the bayou. Back when they met, it wasn’t so safe for a white boy and a black girl to be in love down there. Though better that than the other way around. So, they moved to Lafayette. The metropolis. You know how to tell the size of a town in Louisiana?”