Bandits

15

ONE IN THE AFTERNOON, Jack and Lucy were in the Quarter walking along Toulouse toward the river, stepping around groups of tourists, Jack trying to explain Jerry Boylan to her. “I didn’t know what to do with him. We had to get out of there, so I took him to Roy’s bar.”

“For a second opinion,” Lucy said.

“Yesterday was Roy’s last day. I was suppose to meet him anyway, after I did the colonel’s room… I saw Cullen this morning, gave him all the figures.”

“He said he was going to meet you. Something about checking the bank accounts.”

“Yeah, make a ten-buck deposit, see if they’re still active. Or whatever else he can find out. Cullen was a little nervous, after twenty-seven years. He give you any trouble?”

“He spends most of his time in the kitchen, with Dolores. He hasn’t had a decent meal in all those years.”

“That isn’t the only thing he hasn’t had. Tell Dolores, he makes a move, hit him with a skillet.”

“I like him. I think he’s nice.”

“You like everybody.” He smiled at her.

But she was looking at a stained plaster Mother and Child, Mary with her foot on the snake, the Sacred Heart, statues filmed with dust in a dim store window. Walking past she said, “All that made it easier to believe, didn’t it? They wrapped you in ritual, solemnity.”

He said, “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

And now saw her smile: composed, Sister Lucy this afternoon in a simple blue-cotton blouse and khaki skirt, to meet Jerry Boylan as a nun from Nicaragua and not distract him with another story. He had told Jack he was in Managua last month. Lucy would see.

“So I took Boylan to the International-you know it’s a nude showbar. Exotic dancers from around the world, Shreveport and East Texas. We walked in, Roy was with Jimmy Linahan, the guy that owns the place. Roy’s drinking, Jimmy’s pouring, trying to get him to stay. He’s offering him more money, a cut of the bar business… We came over to the table, Jimmy’s telling Roy he was made in heaven for this kind of work. He said God had given him a special gift to deal with tourists and drunks.”

“When am I going to meet him?”

“Later on, probably this evening. So we sit down. You could see Boylan and Jimmy Linahan were gonna get along. Linahan is kind of a professional Irishman anyway, you know, and here was the real thing. He hung on every word Boylan said, ate it up. Boylan started telling about the world-famous pubs of Dublin and Roy would interrupt him. ‘Famous for what? The drunks?’ Here’s Roy half in the bag, mean look in his eyes. Boylan says, ‘What else you go there for but to get fluthered.’ He mentioned Mulligan’s, I remember, and the Bailey, pubs he said were world-famous because of Joyce. Roy might know who James Joyce is, I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t matter. You mention books to Roy and he thinks you’re trying to act superior. As soon as Boylan started talking you could see Roy was gonna go after him. Roy looks at me, he says, ‘I’m getting out of here before I catch that new kind of AIDS.’ Boylan says, ‘What kind is that?’ Roy says, ‘Hearing AIDS. You get it from listening to assholes.’ ”

Lucy said, “Right in front of him?”

“Right to him. Then he looks at me. ‘Where’d you find this guy?’ I said, ‘Roy, you won’t believe it when I tell you.’ Roy goes, ‘I don’t believe anything about him now, including that bullshit brogue he’s putting on for us.’ ”

“What did Boylan say?”

“Boylan rolls with stuff like that. He tells you about pubs in Dublin, believe it. But anything else, I don’t know, maybe you can cut in half. Except when he tells you he’s done time. I knew that as soon as I looked at him.”

“How?”

“It’s something you know if you’ve been there.” They were approaching the entrance to Ralph & Kacoo’s. Jack paused, taking Lucy’s arm. “He doesn’t know what we’re doing, but he’ll slip around on you trying to find out.”

“I’ll be sweet and innocent,” Lucy said.

“The question is, can we use him? See what you think.”

Jerry Boylan ate his oysters with lemon; he’d loosen the meat, then raise the shell to his mouth, let the oyster slide in, and as he began to chew, shove a hushpuppie into his mouth and take a sip of beer. Jack and Lucy watched, finished with oysters and crab cakes, Lucy stirring her iced tea, both of them fascinated by the man’s ritual: through two dozen oysters, chewing, sipping, talking, tongue moving around in his mouth… He said to Lucy, “Sister, you’re testing me, aren’t you? Wanting to know why I went to Nicaragua but timid to ask. There was a cousin of mine entered the nunnery and took the name Virginella. I said to her”-Boylan frowning-” ‘Why on earth would you want to be known as a little virgin? Girl,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to be a virgin think of yourself as a big one, a world-class virgin.’ But do you see the paradox, Sister? One vow is an impediment to the other. Humility prevents her proclaiming her virginity.” French bread with a pat of butter resting on it disappeared into his mouth.

Jack said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Please.”

“What were you doing in Managua?”

“Come right to it, uh, Jack? Sure, I’ll tell you.” Boylan sat back with his glass mug of beer. “It was on Easter Sunday, barely a month past, I was at Milltown Cemetery. On the Falls Road out of Belfast toward Antrim, is where it is.” He looked from Jack to Lucy. “I’m there for the seventieth anniversary observance of the 1916 Rising. There in the biting cold and rain to honor our dead…”

Jack said, “And that’s what you were doing in Managua?”

“Ask what you like, you don’t have a pistol in your hand this time,” Boylan said, and smiled. “Oh, you’re a cute hoor, Jack, but ridden with flaws and impatience, if I judge you right. Don’t know what to make of me or the present turn of events, so you bring this lovely sister to have a look, uh? But then your insecurity causes you to interrupt, just as I’m about to tell how I met the Nicaraguans.” He turned to Lucy again. “It may appear, Sister, I’m coming round about, fond of rhetoric, which is often the mark of a revolutionary; but I’ll spare you catchphrases. What you’re waiting to learn is what Sandinistas were doing in Ireland on a cold Easter Sunday.”

“Or at any time,” Lucy said.

“If you hear we deal with terrorists, it’s a lie. This group from Nicaragua are musicians that go by the name Heroes and Martyrs: revolutionaries who’d fought their battles and won and came to tell us about it in song, in their ballads. Well, a man fighting for his own cause is going to be moved, inspired. I wanted to know more. So I arranged to travel back with the Heroes and Martyrs to Nicaragua. It would give me the chance, also, to visit an older brother I hadn’t laid eyes on in nearly ten years. A humble Jesuit priest who serves his flock in the village of León.”

Jack stared at Boylan sipping his beer, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. There was no way to stay ahead of this guy. He could come at you from any direction. First with a cousin who was a nun, now a brother who was a priest.

But then Lucy said, “I wouldn’t exactly call León a village.”

Jack jumped in. “And I’ve never met a Jesuit who was especially humble.”

It was brief satisfaction. Boylan, unmoved, said, “Everything is relative. Towns, the clergy, even revolutionaries, depending from where you view them. Now the contras are the rebels and I think to myself, Isn’t that a lovely name for the gougers, bloody killers of innocent people? Then I learn that people who live in comfort are paying for their atrocities.”

He was wearing the same shapeless herringbone jacket, the same red-and-gray patterned tie, probably the same shirt… looking at Jack now, his slicked-back hair shining in the restaurant’s overhead lights.

“Have you seen innocent people murdered, Jack, as the sister and I have? Do you know what it’s like?” Boylan eased back again as he turned to Lucy. “The first time, Sister, it will be twelve years ago next month. I was sitting in Mulligan’s having a pint when I heard the bomb explode, that hard terrible irredeemable bang… I remember it today as I remember, too vividly, what I saw in Talbot Street as I turned the corner and heard the screams in the smoke that hung like a bloody fog.”

Jack’s gaze edged past Boylan’s grave expression. His eyes returned as the man continued, then moved off again… and held.

“There was something else, too, the smell of it, now implanted in my nostrils forever. Not the smell of death you hear spoken of, but the stench of people’s insides lying on the pavement. I saw a woman sitting against a lamppost staring at me, or at nothing, both her legs blown off.”

Jack got up from the table.

“Haven’t the stomach for it, uh, Jack?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“You have to see it. Like me and the sister here… Isn’t that right, Sister?”

Jack followed an aisle toward the rear of this big roomful of people busy with lunch, nodding to waiters he knew as he came to a table against the far wall.

Helene sat with a cup of coffee, dishes cleared, her head bent over an open book, frizz-permed red hair jutting out to both sides.

“What’re you reading?”

Her brown eyes came up reflecting light and there was the nose that fascinated him, the tender, delicate nostrils. Helene closed the book with one finger in it and glanced at the cover before looking up again, now with a different expression, almost sly, a girl with a secret.

“Self-Love and Sexuality.”

“Is it any good?”

“Not bad. It says if you don’t like yourself you won’t have fun in bed. Or you have to like yourself first, before you can love anybody else.”

“If you don’t like yourself… Why wouldn’t you? I mean since you’re all you have.”

“I don’t know, Jack. There must be some people who don’t.”

“You think people that are assholes realize it? No, they think they’re fine. But even if it’s possible not to like yourself, you go to bed with somebody-what’re you doing in there, analyzing yourself?”

“I’m glad you straightened me out on that,” Helene said. “What’re you up to?”

“I’m not working at the funeral home anymore.” Helene waited and he said, “I’ll find something.”

Her eyes held on him, still waiting. In the open top of her blouse he could see freckles he used to trace with a finger, making up constellations, getting down to her twin suns and from there to the center of her universe. Something between two people who liked themselves and maybe had loved each other and were remembering it now-both of them, if he could believe her eyes.

“That’s a pretty girl you’re with.”

“I didn’t think you saw us.”

“When I came in.”

“She used to be a nun.”

“Really? What is she now?”

“She’s looking.”

“I guess everybody is. I spend half my life being interviewed. I end up typing memos for some weenie, I’m not even sure what he does. Offices are full of people doing things that, if they didn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference. Or the company’s making some dumb thing nobody needs and they act like they’re serving humanity, the higher-ups.” She said, “I’ve been thinking about you, Jack, since we ran into each other. Well, even before that… I miss you.”

It was something the way she could get different looks in those brown eyes, from sparkly to sad to a kind of soulful light, one right after another, her eyes working him over, softening him up.

“But you still blame me, don’t you?”

“I never did. It was that showboat lawyer you worked for.”

“That’s what you say. No matter what else, Jack, you’re polite.” She kept the soulful light burning low as she said, “Would you call me sometime?”

He smiled. It was all right to let himself be softened up as long as-there, telling him by her smile-she realized he knew what she was doing. Helene was fun. He said, yes, he’d call her.

And walked back to the table.

Lucy looked up. Boylan was still talking, telling her there was more to revolution than storming the palace, putting your boots up on the king’s table, drinking his wine. He paused, glancing at Jack as he sat down. “You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Then turned to Lucy again, saying, “That’s the glory part. Then comes the work of changing attitudes steeped in tatty, worn-out traditions. With your permission, Sister, consider a people raised to believe it’s all right with just cause to blow a woman’s legs off, but a mortal sin to spread them.”

Lucy said, “You haven’t stormed the palace yet.”

Boylan sat back and, for the first time, seemed tired. “It will come.”

“You’ll keep trying.”

“It’s become a ritualized game, Sister. I play it or what?… Sweep rubbish and empty bins.” For several moments he stared at the table in silence, finally looked up and said, “Jack, I’ll visit the lavat’ry if you’ll point the direction.”

“By the front entrance.”

He watched Boylan push up with an effort and walk off. Then turned to Lucy, her quiet expression. She was staring at him and it surprised him.

“Well, what do you think?”

“You had a gun last night. Boylan said, ‘You don’t have a pistol in your hand this time.’ ”

“Yeah, I had to find out who he was.”

“You carried a gun with you?”

“No, it was the colonel’s. I put it back.” Jack paused. “But when we do it, we’re not just gonna ask the guy for his money and he hands it to us. You understand, we’ll have to have guns. There’s no other way to do it.”

She seemed to think about it before saying, very quietly, “No, there isn’t, is there?”

Franklin de Dios, standing inside the entrance of the restaurant, watched Boylan push through the door to the Men’s room.

He had followed Boylan here from the hotel, watched him sit down at a table, and watched the man and woman he remembered from the funeral coach at the gasoline station in St. Gabriel come in and sit with him at the table. The man in the dark suit he remembered well, talking to him in the funeral place, the man offering him beer. He had wondered if this was the same man that night, one of the police, who put them in the trunk of the car and left them until two more police in uniforms let them out, listened with patience to Crispin and then told him to have a nice evening. But how could this one be a police the same night? No-except he had a feeling he was one of those first two police, who were like the police of Miami, Florida. Or, as Crispin now believed, those first two weren’t police at all. Then the one could be the man from the funeral place. He had said to Crispin he didn’t understand any of this, who was who. Crispin had said to him, “You don’t have to think or know everything. Do what you’re told.”

Okay. But he would continue to think.

Franklin de Dios unbuttoned his jacket as he walked toward the Men’s room in Ralph & Kacoo’s.

Lucy was hunched over the table. She said, “When you robbed hotel rooms, did you carry a gun?”

Jack was about to get up, his hands on the edge of the table. “Never, ever. Somebody happened to wake up, you don’t think I was gonna shoot ’em.”

She was nodding, thoughtful. “But this is different. We’ll need guns.”

“It’s a much higher-class criminal offense, armed robbery. If you want to look at it that way. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom.”

He saw her startled expression as he got up.

She said, “We’re not planning a robbery, Jack.” Sounding honestly surprised.

“What do you call it?”

“We’re not bandits.”

“Tell me what we are. When I come back.”

Franklin de Dios walked up behind Jerry Boylan standing at the urinal. He extended the Beretta to place the muzzle in the center of the gray herringbone tweed, pushed it in to feel the man’s spine, the man’s head turning to look over his shoulder, the man saying, “What?…” and shot him. As the man’s body jerked and then became loose and began to sag against the urinal, Franklin de Dios raised the pistol to the base of the man’s skull, placed the muzzle in that hollow spot, and shot him again and stepped away now, turning away, with no desire to look at the wall smeared red or the man falling dead to the floor.

Franklin de Dios worked the Beretta into the waist of his pants close to his left hip, buttoned his jacket and pulled it down straight. He could hear a ringing in his ears but no sounds from beyond the door, in the restaurant. In the war they searched the ones they killed, if there was time; find a few cordobas if they were lucky. This one could have money or not, it was hard to tell from his appearance; but there wasn’t time to see. Crispin had said to kill him because “He wants to steal money that’s for your people, the contras.” Franklin de Dios had said, “They’re not my people.” And Crispin had said, “Do it or we’ll send you back.” There was no way to leave the war.

He said to himself, Now walk.

He pulled open the door. He stepped out of the Men’s room. He saw the man in the dark suit from the funeral home coming toward him, the man’s eyes on him. So he touched the front of his jacket to unbutton it and the man from the funeral home stopped, two strides from him.

Franklin de Dios said, “How you doing?” The man didn’t answer him or move. So Franklin de Dios walked away from the man, out of the restaurant to join the tourists on their way to see Jackson Square and the Cabildo and the St. Louis Cathedral.