"Why would I be?" he said. "I'm just the guy that carried you two flights down a fire escape while a kid tried to notch our ears with a.22 rifle."

"You can't win on the game you pitched last Saturday."

"Yeah? Sounds like an AA meet. I'll see you around. Stay off the booze. I'll drink it for both of us. It's a lousy life."

He walked back toward his automobile, his sandals flopping on the pavement, a big, lumbering man whose boiled, stitched face reminded me of a bleached melon about to explode in the sun.

I pretended to be a pragmatist, a cynic, a jaded war veteran, a vitriolic drunk, the last of the Louisiana badasses; but like most people I believed that justice would be done, things would work out, somebody would show up with the Constitution in his hand. That afternoon I kept the phone on the deck table while I washed down the houseboat, polished the brass and windows, and sanded and revarnished the hatch. I put on flippers and goggles and cooled off in the lake, diving down into the yellow-green light, feeling the power in my lungs and chest that were now free of alcohol, bursting to the surface with a ringing in my ears that was never the telephone.

Finally, at six-thirty Captain Guidry called and said that the Nicaraguan remained in custody and that he would question him himself in the morning and also contact Fitzpatrick's supervisor at the Federal Building.

I invited Annie over for a late supper, and we cooked steaks outside on my hibachi and ate under the umbrella in the cooling evening. The western horizon was aflame with the sun's afterglow, then the clouds became pink and purple and then finally you could see the city light the night sky.

The next morning I did one hundred sit-ups, worked out with light barbells for an hour while I listened over and over to the old original recording of Iry LeJeune's " La Jolie Blonde," made out a grocery list, then asked a college kid who lived down the beach to listen for my phone while I went to a loan company and borrowed three thousand dollars on my houseboat.

The sun was straight up and white in the sky when I got back. Captain Guidry had called a half hour earlier. I dialed his extension at the First District and was told he was in a meeting and would not be out for two hours. Then I called Fitzpatrick's supervisor at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

"What did you expect me to tell you this morning?" he asked. I could almost see his hand clenched on the receiver.

"I thought by this time maybe you'd questioned the Nicaraguan."

"You must get up in the morning and brush your teeth in the toilet."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You finally nail one of them and you turn him over to the same people who're letting you twist in the wind. They put him upstairs in the tank. Last night a couple of strung-out blacks didn't like the way his breath smelled and they stuffed his head down a flooded floor drain and broke his neck."

TEN

That afternoon I repaid Annie the one-thousand-dollar bail fee she had put up for me, then I searched in the Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Bernard parish courthouses for commercial property deeds with Whiplash Larry Wineburger's name on them. I discovered that he was a slumlord of large proportions; but if he owned a warehouse in one of those three parishes, it was deeded under another name.

I went to an AA meeting that evening and later took Annie to dinner at the track. It was hot that night, and I slept on the deck of my houseboat, possibly a careless thing to do, but I felt so discredited by this time that I doubted if my now often-repeated story was a threat to anyone. The wind blew across the lake all night, and I slept so soundly in my hammock that I didn't wake until the sun was hard in my eyes.

I went to an early-morning A A meeting in the Quarter, then bought beignets and coffee from the Café du Monde and sat on a bench in Jackson Square and watched the sidewalk artists paint and sketch the tourists. It was still cool in the shade, and the breeze blew off the river. It smelled of coffee and pastry, shrimp in bins of ice, the trees and flowers in the Square, damp stone, the water sprinklers knocking through the banana leaves that grew over the top of the iron piked fence enclosing the park. I went inside St. Louis Cathedral and bought a small book that narrated the history of the building and read it on the bench while a Negro street musician played a bottleneck guitar a few feet away from me.

I was ready to give up my pursuit. I knew I wasn't a coward or a quitter, but at some point reason had to reestablish itself in my life. I couldn't afford any more attrition. I had already had one slip, had progressed within minutes from one drink to a full-blown bender (as they say at the meetings, you pick it up where you left it off), and if I slipped again I wasn't sure I'd ever get back from it.

After I'd struck out at the courthouse, I'd even thought about creeping Wineburger's house or his law office. I knew people who would help me pull it off, too-thieves who worked in car washes, where they made impressions of the house keys on the automobile key ring; a very slick second-story man who ran a wrecker service and would pull the distributor cap off a car whose owner he wanted to burglarize, then tow the car around the block, cut duplicate keys on a machine he kept in the truck, return the car with a fraudulent bill for repairs, and clean out the house a week later.

But it wasn't worth it. Wineburger, the little Israeli, Philip Murphy, and the general were out there malfunctioning in society because others much more important and powerful than I allowed them to. When these guys ceased to fill a need for somebody else, they would be taken off the board. That sounds like a cynical conclusion for a man to arrive at while sitting on a shady stone bench on a cool morning under banana trees, but most honest, experienced cops will tell you the same thing. It's facile to blame the Supreme Court for the pornographic bookstores and the live sex shows. They usually exist because somebody on the zoning board is getting greased. Kids don't do dope because their parents and teachers are permissive. They do it because adults sell it to them. No psychological complexities, no sociological mysteries.

When people become tired of something, it will end. In the meantime, Dave Robicheaux isn't going to make much difference in the scheme of things. My brother Jimmie knew that. He didn't contend with the world; he dealt in electronic poker machines and off-track betting, and I suspected that he sold whiskey and rum that came in from the Islands without tax stamps. But he was always a gentleman and everybody liked him. Cops ate breakfast free in his restaurant; state legislators got pig-eyed drunk at his bar; judges introduced him to their wives with expansive courtesy. His transgressions had to do with licenses, not ethics, he used to tell me.

"The day these people don't want to gamble and drink, we'll both be out of jobs. In the meantime, go with the flow, bro."

"Sorry," I'd answer. "'Flow' somehow suggests 'effluent' to me. I guess I'm just imaginative."

"No, you just believe in the world that should be, rather than the one that exists. That's why you'll always be the driven guy you are, Dave."

"Is there any charge for that?"

"What do I know? I'm just a restaurateur. You're the guy that fought the wars."

As irony would have its way, my reverie was broken by a maroon Cadillac convertible with an immaculate white top that pulled to the curb twenty feet from my bench. Two of Didi Gee's hoods got out on each side. They were young, lithe, dressed in summer slacks and open-necked shirts with gold medallions around their necks. Their mirror sunglasses and tasseled Nettleton shoes were almost part of a uniform. What always struck me most about lower-level Mafia hoods were the insipid expressions, as though their faces had been glazed with tallow, and the lifeless speech patterns that they believed passed for sophistication. The only political regime that ever dealt with them effectively was Mussolini's. The fascists tore out their hair and fingernails with pliers, shot them, or sent them to fight against the Greeks. The Mafia welcomed the Allied liberation in 1943 with great joy.