"Go feed the ducks," she said. "We'll leave in a minute."

"Feed ducks?"

"Yes."

"Feed ducks now?"

"That's right."

"Dave viene al parque?"

"Sure, he's coming," Annie said.

Alafair grinned at me and went out the back screen to the pond. The sunlight through the trees made patterns on her brown legs.

"I'll tell you one thing, Dave. No matter what those people from Immigration do, they're not going to take her away. She's ours, just as if we had conceived her."

"I didn't tell you the rest of the story about Dock Stratton. After he finished blowing out his wiring with synthetic wine and wasn't any good to anybody, they shipped him off to the asylum at Mandeville."

"So what does this mean? Are you going to become the knight-errant, tilting with the U.S. government?"

"No."

"Do you still want to go to the park?"

"That's the reason I came home, kiddo."

"I wonder. I really do," she said.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd explain that."

"Don't you see it, Dave? It's like you want to taint every moment in our lives with this conspiratorial vision of yours. It's become an obsession. We don't talk about anything else. Either that or you stare into space. How do you think I feel?"

"I'll try to be different."

"I know."

"I really will."

Her eyes were wet. She sat down across the table from me.

"We haven't been able to have our own child. Now one's been given to us," she said. "That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn't happened yet. Our conversation at home is filled with the names of people who shouldn't have anything to do with our lives. It's like deliberately inviting an obscene presence into your home. Dave, you say at AA they teach you to give it all up to your Higher Power. Can't you try that? Just give it up, cut it out of your life? There's not a problem in the world that time can't help in some way."

"That's like saying a black tumor on your brain will get better if you don't think about it."

The kitchen was silent. I could hear the blue jays in the mimosa tree and the wings of the ducks beating across the pond as Alafair showered bread crumbs down on their heads. Annie turned away, finished wrapping the fried chicken, closed the picnic hamper, and walked out to the pond. The screen door banged on the jamb after her.

That evening there was a big crowd in the park for the baseball game, and the firemen were having a crawfish boil in the open-air pavilion. The twilight sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and the wind was cool out of the south with the promise of rain. We ate our picnic supper on a wooden table under the oak trees and watched the American Legion game and the groups of high school and college kids who drifted back and forth between the bleachers and the tailgates of pickup trucks where they kept beer in washtubs of ice. Out on the bayou the paddle-wheel pleasure boat with its lighted decks slid by against the dark outline of cypress and the antebellum homes on the far bank. The trees were full of barbecue smoke, and you could smell the crawfish from the pavilion and the hot boudin that a Negro sold from a handcart. Then I heard a French string band play "Jolie Blonde" in the pavilion, and I felt as though once again I were looking through a hole in the dimension at the south Louisiana in which I had grown up.

Jolie blonde, gardez done e'est t'as fait.

Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,

Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.

Jolie blonde, pretty girl,

Flower of my heart,

I'll love you forever

My jolie blonde.

But seldom did Annie and I speak directly to each other. Instead we talked brightly to Alafair, walked her to the swing sets and seesaws, bought snowcones, and avoided one another's eyes. That night in the almost anonymous darkness of our bedroom we made love. We did it in need, with our eyes closed, without words, with a kiss only at the end. As I lay on my back, arms across my eyes, I felt her fingers leave the top of my hand, felt her turn on her side toward the opposite wall, and I wondered if her heart was as heavy as mine.

I woke up a half hour later. The room was cool from the wind sucked through the window by the attic fan, but my skin was hot as though I had a sunburn, the stitches in my scalp itched, my palms were damp on my thighs when I sat on the side of the bed.

Without waking Annie, I washed my face, put on a pair of khakis and an old Hawaiian shirt, and went down to the bait shop. The moon was up, and the willows along the bank of the bayou looked silver in the light. I sat in the darkness at the counter and stared out the window at the water and the outboard boats and pirogues knocking gently against the posts on my dock. Then I got up, opened the beer cooler, and took out a handful of partly melted ice and rubbed it on my face and neck. The amber necks of the beer bottles glinted in the moon's glow. The smooth aluminum caps, the wet and shining labels, the brassy beads inside the bottles were like an illuminated nocturnal still life. I closed the box, turned on the lightbulb over the counter, and called Lafayette information for Minos P. Dautrieve's home number.

A moment later I had him on the phone. I looked at the clock. It was midnight.

"What's happening, Dunkenstein?" I said.

"Oh boy," he said.

"Sorry about the hour."

"What do you want, Robicheaux?"

"Where are these clubs that Eddie Keats owns?"

"You called me up to ask me that?"

I didn't answer, and I heard him take a breath.

"The last time we talked, you hung up the phone in my ear," he said. "I didn't appreciate that. I think you have a problem with manners."

"All right, I apologise. Will you tell me where these clubs are?"

"I'll be frank about something else, too. Are you drinking?"

"No. How about the clubs?"

"I guess things never work fast enough for you, do they? So you're going to cowboy our Brooklyn friend?"

"Give me some credit."

"I try to. Believe me," he said.

"There are a dozen people I can call in Lafayette who'll give me the same information."

"Yeah, which makes me wonder why you had to wake me up."

"You ought to know the answer to that."

"I don't. I'm really at a loss. You're truly a mystery to us. You don't hear what you're told, you make up your own rules, you think your past experience as a police officer allows you to mess around in federal business."

"I'm talking to you because you're the only guy around here with the brains and juice to put these people away," I said.

"I'm not flattered."

"So it's no dice, huh?"

He paused.

"Look, Robicheaux, I think you have a cinder block for a head, but basically you're a decent guy," he said. "That means we don't want you hurt anymore. Stay out of it. Have some faith in us. I don't know why you went out to Bubba Rocque's house this afternoon, but I don't think it was smart. You don't-"

"How'd you know I was out there?"

"We have somebody who writes down licence tags for us. You don't flush these guys by flipping lighted matches at them. If you do, they pick the time and the place and you lose. Anyway, go to bed and forget Eddie Keats, at least for tonight."

"Does he have a family?"

"No, he's a gash-hound."

"Thanks, Minos. I'm sorry I woke you up."

"It's all right. By the way, how'd you like Bubba Rocque's wife?"

"I suspect she's ambitious more than anything else."

"What a romantic. She's a switch-hitter, podna. Five years ago she did a three-spot for shanking another dyke. That Bubba can really pick them, can't he?"