"Good morning, Lieutenant. Mr. Giacano would like to invite you out to his house for brunch," the driver said. "You can drive out with us if you want. The road's tore up by Chalmette."

"I'm not sure I place you with the sunglasses on. Is it Joe Milazzo?" I said.

"That's right. I used to run my uncle's pizza place right across from your office."

But that wasn't why I remembered his name. He had been a runner for his uncle's book, and he used to lay off bets at the parimutuel when his uncle took on an overload. But I'd also heard a rumor a year ago that he and his uncle had doped a thoroughbred with a speedball that literally exploded the animal's heart on the far turn at the Fairgrounds.

"What's on Didi Gee's mind?" I said.

"He just said ask you out, Lieutenant."

"I'm kind of tied up today."

"He said if it's too far out for you to drive, he'd like to have you as his guest for lunch at Mama Lido's."

"Thank him for me just the same."

"I think it's about these people that's been giving you all this trouble. If you want, you can use the phone in the car to talk with him."

"I appreciate the help he tried to give me Sunday. But as he probably knows, it didn't do much good. In other words, take the Nicaraguans to the First District."

He looked away toward the Pontalba Apartments on the corner, his face quietly exasperated.

"I'm kind of in a hard spot, Lieutenant," he said. "Mr. Giacano is a nice guy to work for. He paid off my old man's hospital bills, he give my little boy a bicycle for Christmas, he don't let nobody pay for anything when we go to a club. A lot of guys would pay a lot to buy my job. But he don't like to hear words like 'maybe' or 'no' from a guy that waxes his cars and drives people around. If you ain't coming, I'd really appreciate you calling him up and telling him that."

"I'm afraid you'll have to live with it, podna."

"All right, I don't know from shit about Mr. Giacano's business dealings. I'm not an ambitious person. I don't care about what don't concern me. But I got ears. I'm human. I can't turn into a potted plant just because people are talking around me. It's about some guy named Murphy. You're not interested, Lieutenant, that's okay. But I done my job."

I closed my book and took a bite of my beignet. I watched a woman sweeping out her storefront under the colonnade on the corner. Rolls of sausage and cheese were hung in the window, and a little black boy was spraying the boxes of grapes and plums along the front wall with a hose.

"Tell Didi Gee I'll meet him at Mama Lido's at noon," I said.

Joe Milazzo smiled behind his sunglasses and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Joe. I'm just an impulsive guy. Next time save the shuck for a Fuller Brush route," I said.

His face went dead.

Didi Gee had reserved a private dining room at the back of the restaurant. It was hung with pink and lavender curtains that were tied back to give the illusion of windows on the walls, which were painted with wispy Venetian canal scenes, gondolas, boatmen in striped T-shirts with flat hats and mandolins. The baseboards and woodwork around the doors were painted with grapevines that wound their way up the corners to the ceiling, which was hung with clusters of green plastic grapes.

There must have been fifteen people at the long white table that was filled with bottles of red wine in wicker casks, bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, shrimp cooked in some kind of tomato sauce that made your eyes wince, loaves of Italian bread that people broke apart with their hands and ate loudly with a shower of crumbs on the tablecloth.

What a crew to be seen with, I thought. Some of them were aging soldiers who had survived any number of gang wars and jolts in Angola and Lewisburg since the 1950s, now thick-bodied and flatulent, with cigarette-and-whiskey throats and hair growing out of their ears and nostrils. Then there were the young ones like Joe Milazzo, who might have been raised in a vacant lot. There was always a hidden thought in their eyes that they couldn't quite conceal. They would hit anybody, even their own kind, just to earn a chair closer at the table to Didi Gee. They all ate like troglodytes, made the waitresses take the food back if it wasn't warm, complained about a chipped glass or a fork with dishwater spots on it. The hostess who wandered in every ten minutes to ask if everything was all right looked as though she had swallowed a mouthful of bumblebees.

Didi Gee had saved the seat next to him for me. He wore a white suit and an orange-flowered shirt with the shirt lapels on the outside of his coat. A gold St. Christopher's medal rested on the black hair that grew up to his throat. His chest and stomach were so huge that he had to keep his chair pressed back almost to the wall.

"You want wine?" he asked.

"No, thanks."

"I heard you were drinking again. I say that only because it don't matter to me. Everybody's got a vice. It's what makes us human."

"I'm not drinking today. Put it that way."

"That's that one-day-at-a-time stuff, huh? I wish I could do that. I worry about stuff all the time I don't have control over."

It was amazing, I thought, how the true indicators of a sudden change in your social status worked. Didi Gee no longer used the deferential "Lieutenant" when he spoke to me, and his hoods were eating as though I were not there.

"I worry all the time about this operation I got to have," he said. "The longer I wait, the more they got to cut out of my hole. I just can't bring myself to face it. Maybe there're some things you're not suppose to accept. It ain't natural for a person to be leaking shit into a bag strapped to his side. Look what I got to sit on now. That's bad enough."

He rose a little from his chair and exposed an inflated rubber cushion that was shaped like a toilet seat in a public restroom.

"I'm going over to Baylor Hospital in Houston and see what they say. All the best surgeons in New Orleans are Jews. A guy my size walks through the door and they start looking at my parts like they got meat prices stamped on them."

"Maybe they'll find another way to help you, Didi."

"That's right. Maybe I get the right doctors over there at Baylor and I'll just retire there. My brother died and left me an office building in San Antonio three blocks from this Alamo place. They got an amusement park there or something?"

"It's a historical-"

"Because even though I was born and grew up in New Orleans, I'm tired of people dumping on me, and nickel-and-dime legal farts trying to make a name by cutting off my cock."

His voice had intensified suddenly, like heat building down in a furnace system, and the others at the table stopped talking and moved their knives and forks softly in their plates.

"I'm not sure what we're talking about," I said.

"I got subpoenaed by the grand jury. Me and some people I'm associated with."

"I didn't know that."

"Businesses I run for thirty years somehow start bothering some people. Their little noses start twitching like there's a bad smell in the air. I'm talking about people that were at my children's baptisms, that always come around at election time for donations. Suddenly I'm like some kind of disease."

"You're a professional, Didi. It comes with the geography."

"They're serious this time. I got it straight from the prosecutor's office. They want me in Angola."

"Like you said, maybe it's time to retire."

"They're not cutting no deals on this one. That means I'm gonna have to break my own rules. I'm gonna have to do some stuff I don't like." His dark eyes were flecked with black electricity.

"I guess I'm not following you."

And I didn't want to follow him, either. The conversation had already grown old. I didn't care about his troubles with the grand jury, and his vague reference to violating his own ethical system seemed at the time like another manifestation of the self-inflated grandiosity that was characteristic of his kind.