A Private Cathedral

Chapter Twenty-one

I couldn’t sleep that night. I thought about the late afternoon when I’d stood on the dock not far from the amusement pier and watched the waves swell in the sunset and boom on the beach and fill the air with a spray that was like the healing power of water from a baptismal font. Considering the present gravity of my situation, these were probably foolish thoughts to muse upon. But what recourse did I have in my dealings with either wicked men or unseen forces whose origins I didn’t want to think about?

Clete and I had the same problem. Telling others what we had seen or what we knew about the man named Gideon served only one purpose: Our listeners wanted to flee our presence. In effect, we were collaborating with the enemy and destroying ourselves. Somehow we had to turn our situation around.

Stonewall Jackson was an eccentric and improbable military figure, homely and unkempt, simplistic and doctrinaire. He paused to pray before an attack, giving the enemy more time to prepare, and galloped in battle with his right hand in the air because he believed there was an imbalance of blood in his body. He was also one of the greatest tacticians in the history of warfare. His most quoted tactical advice is “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.”

This was the opposite of everything Clete and I had done in our confrontations with the Shondell and Balangie families. It was not entirely our fault. The events I have described so far were frightening because they seemed born from a separate dimension and, more disturbing, they had no connection to the world as we know it or the physical sciences on which we daily rely to explain our origins. It was like waking up one day and speculating that the spirits haunting the massive forests of pre-Christian Europe were indeed real and the Druids who hung ornaments on trees to seek their favor were not superstitious after all.

I feared for Clete more than for myself. The pain of his childhood, his memories of an accidental killing in Vietnam, the loss of his career as a detective were the invisible crown of thorns that sat always on his forehead. He already had enough weight on his shoulders without having to hump my pack.

Tuesday morning I went into Carroll LeBlanc’s office and told him I was going to New Orleans.

“To do what?” he said.

“Investigate the dismemberment of the two guys in the barrel.”

“That’s Vermilion Parish’s case.”

“That’s where they were dumped,” I said. “The homicide started here.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Cut it out, Carroll. Mark Shondell had somebody put a meat saw to those poor bastards, and you know it.”

He had both feet on his desk. He picked up the yellow legal tablet from his blotter and stared at it. “I just got a call from Dana Magelli. He said Isolde Balangie showed up in a homeless shelter on Airline Highway, stoned out of her head.”

“Where is she now?”

“At her house. With Penelope and Adonis Balangie.”

I thought about the implications of that simple statement. LeBlanc caught it. “Yeah, exactly,” he said. “Mark Shondell just got his nose rubbed in it. You’re not going to New Orleans about the two guys in the barrel, are you?”

“No.”

“So why are you going?”

“A woman named Leslie Rosenberg.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“You know her?”

“She was a stripper on Bourbon,” he said. “I heard she hooked up with Adonis Balangie.”

“Past tense,” I said.

He let his feet drop to the floor. “What does Leslie Rosenberg have to do with anything?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” I said.

“Try.”

“Mark Shondell wants her disemboweled.”

He rubbed his face.

“What is it?” I said.

“That spot where you found the slave marbles? I heard that was part of a barracoon owned by the Shondell family. You know, one of those slave pens? I heard awful things got done there.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Probably coincidence?” he said, his face lowered, one hand twitching on his thigh.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Like hell,” he replied.

I checked out a cruiser, turned on the flasher, and drove straight to Adonis Balangie’s home on Lake Pontchartrain. Out on the lake, I saw the boat with black sails that I had seen on my last visit to the Balangie home. Its sails were swollen with wind, the nylon shiny and wet from the waves bursting on the bow. I rang the doorbell. When I looked back at the lake, the sailboat was gone.

Adonis pulled open the door. He was wearing brown dress trousers with a stripe in them and thin suspenders and a yellow shirt that looked as soft and smooth as butter. “What do you want, Robicheaux?”

“What’s with the sailboat that has black sails?” I replied.

“You’re here to ask about sailboats?”

“No, I want to see how your stepdaughter is.”

“None of your business.”

“You went to Clete Purcel’s apartment with a couple of your trained morons and made a threat against me. How about you step outside and repeat your threat to my face?”

He looked over his shoulder, probably to see where Penelope was, then looked back at me. He started to speak, but I cut him off. “I hear Leslie Rosenberg is trying to clean up her life. That means you stay away from her. You copy on that, you fucking greaseball?”

I guess until that point I hadn’t realized the degree of animus I bore Adonis. Maybe it was the pride he seemed to take when he inspired fear in others, or the way he posed as a family man while he kept a triad of mistresses, or the fact that he used his stepdaughter as human currency with Mark Shondell. Or maybe I didn’t like to visualize his trysts with Leslie Rosenberg. No, this wasn’t a time for self-mortification. Adonis was everything I said he was: a bully and a parasite and a narcissist who deserved a .45 hollow-point in the mouth.

Penelope Balangie came through the French doors, a cat as plump as a pumpkin in her arms. “Oh, hello, Mr. Robicheaux. Please come in.”

“I understand Isolde is back home,” I said. “I just wanted to see how she’s doing.”

Adonis bit his lip and stared into space. “Mr. Robicheaux is here to cause trouble in any way he can, Penelope. It’s time he had a history lesson.”

I saw the apprehension in her eyes. “No. Don’t do that, Adonis. Please.”

“Oh, Detective Robicheaux won’t object,” he said. “He has all the answers. Some of his friends put my father in Angola. A seventy-two-year-old man working in a soybean field. My father aged a decade in three years.”

“Could I speak to your daughter, Miss Penelope?”

“I’m going to show you some film footage,” Adonis said. “After we’re finished, I think you’ll want to be on your way. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you have no interest in Gideon Richetti.”

I wanted to believe he was mocking me, that his mouth would twist in a cruel or amused fashion, that in effect he would become a categorical persona I could define and dismiss. But his eyes had darkened with the same cast I had seen in the eyes of men who had witnessed events and deeds that will never leave their dreams.

I followed him and Penelope into a small theater at the back of the house. There was a big screen on one wall and a projector on a platform at the back of the room. The seats were made of deep, soft leather and arranged stadium-style.

“The footage you’re going to see has been digitized,” Adonis said. “But none of the images or the lighting have been altered.”

“So?” I said.

“You’ve seen Gideon, haven’t you?” he said.

“Why would you think that?”

“He broke the neck of a cabbie in the Quarter,” Adonis said. “He must have shown up on a security camera in the vicinity or at the guesthouse where he was staying. But I suspect he also came to see you. Am I correct?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to confirm anything he said and add to his show of superiority. He turned on the projector. “This footage was taken at a fascist rally in Naples in 1927,” he said. “That’s Mussolini in the jodhpurs and tasseled fez in the midst of his Black Shirts on the platform. Keep your eye on the right-hand side of the screen.”

There was no soundtrack, but it wasn’t needed to convey the essence of the man and the probable content of his speech. His fists were knotted and propped on his hips, his chin and nose in the air, his rubbery lips moving in a way that made me think of a spastic colon. The faces of his followers were filled with delight. Then I saw, at the edge of the crowd, a tall, lithe, and muscular man wearing a slug cap and a disheveled suit, his nose hardly a bump, a half-grin on his face.

“Look familiar, Mr. Robicheaux?” Adonis said.

“Detective Robicheaux, if you don’t mind,” I said.

He froze the image on the screen. “Do you know the man in civilian clothes or not?”

“He looks like the guy named Gideon,” I said.

“Looks like?”

“Maybe he’s a relative of our guy,” I said.

“Right, there’re lots of people around who resemble pythons,” Adonis said. “I’ve got another question for you. Why is Gideon the only man on the platform who seems unsure if he got on the right bus?”

Again I refused to agree with him. I guess that was a foolish way to be. But I sincerely believed he was an evil man and served no one’s interest except his own. “That’s the whole show?” I said.

He clicked the control button on the projector several times. “This next one is V-J Day 1945, on Bourbon Street. I wasn’t around then, but I hear it was a real blast.”

Yes, it was. On the day the Japanese surrendered, America was joyous from the East to the West Coast, and people in the Quarter poured into the streets, Dixieland bands blared on the balconies, and the dancers from the burlesque bars climbed on car tops and stripped off their clothes.

The footage on the screen had been taken at night not far from Tony Bacino’s gay joint at Bourbon and Toulouse. Maybe because of the late hour and the amount of alcohol consumed by the revelers, the faces in the crowd were grainy and stark, as though drawn with charcoal, their glee besotted and grotesque, more like a celebration of the fire-bombing of Dresden than the liberation of the earth. I don’t know why I felt this way. I know it seems unfair to the poor souls who were happy the war was over and that they or their family members would not have to die in it. All GIs who had seen the tenacity of the Japanese in the Pacific theater had ceased arguing with the doleful projection of “Golden Gate in ’48.” But the photos and newsreels that showed the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not easy to look at.

Adonis froze the frame again. “What do you see?”

“People getting loaded and having a fine time,” I said.

“Check the guy standing in the doorway at Tony Bacino’s.”

It was Gideon Richetti, if that indeed was his name. Except he had not aged from the 1927 newsreel; nor was he any older than the man I’d encountered at Henderson Swamp.

“How do you explain this, Mr. Robicheaux?” Adonis said.

“I can’t.”

“Look at his expression.”

“I don’t need to,” I said. “They’re all alike.”

“Who is?”

“Psychopaths. They’re unknowable. It’s a mistake to put yourself inside their head. If you do, you might not come back.”

“It looks as though the light is trembling on his face.”

“Yeah, I know. He looks like a ghoul.”

“But he’s bothered by something, isn’t he?”

“How would I know?” I lied.

“You don’t want to believe he’s a tormented spirit,” Penelope said.

“I’m signing off on this,” I said. “I’ve seen Confederate soldiers in the mist. Maybe they were born out of my imagination, or maybe they have a message for us. But both of you betrayed your daughter. That’s real. Playing around with voodoo in your home theater isn’t going to change that.”

“You’d better leave,” Adonis said.

“I want a word with you outside,” I said.

“Say it right here.”

“Stay away from Leslie Rosenberg,” I said. “She’s trying to live a decent life. Find another playground.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

His wife seemed in shock. She looked around as though she didn’t know where she was. “I put Tabby down,” she said. “Where did he go? It’s his feeding time.”

“I’m going to walk outside with you, Mr. Robicheaux,” Adonis said. “There’s a door behind the screen. Go through the door and into the yard. Do it now.”

“You were molested for years by a member of the Shondell family,” I said. “Your father had the molester tortured to death and buried in a bog on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. That means you couldn’t square the situation on your own, maybe not even as an adult. Maybe you dug it.”

Adonis pushed me in the chest. “Do that again and I’ll break your sticks from the bottom of your feet to your neck bones,” I said.

He hit me in the sternum with his fist, twisting the knuckles to ensure pain. I caught him on the nose, splattering blood across the projector, then I got him high on the cheekbone and on the jaw. He tried to get up and fight back, but in seconds the worst in me had its way, and I was stomping the side of his head, aiming for bone or cartilage whenever I could find it. Penelope was crying and beating my back with her fists.

When it was over, I tore the movie screen from the ceiling and went through the back door into the daylight, off balance, the sky and the statuary on the lawn and the lake spinning around me. All the way to the cruiser, I could hear Penelope Balangie weeping, not in a hysterical fashion, not with shock at the level of violence she had just witnessed, but instead in a sustained, repressed, and mournful way, like someone at Golgotha watching a condemned man drag the means of his execution to the crest of the hill.