shrapnel could just as well have crashed through him. “The little French girl called me Lucky. Like a name.”
“Why’s that?”
“For getting here the day the Armistice was signed. For missing everything.”
“There’s worse nicknames,” the lieutenant said, walking over to where the other men were huddled in blankets, passing the huge jug.
Sam stared at the moonstruck wreckage around him that extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and beyond, understanding that Amelie’s lot was but one particle of the overall catastrophe, that mothers from Nebraska to Mesopotamia were setting tables for diminished families, and countless children were waiting for the sound of a door opening and the claiming voices of their blood. He wanted in the worst way to help the girl, but he was as carried along by the war’s events as she was and would be a hundred miles away by the next evening.
Robicheaux called out from his blanket spread along a fallen tree.
He walked toward the voice. “Let me have a pull on that jug if you haven’t dirtied it with your spit.”
“This brandy has a lot of fire,” Comeaux said. “You could disinfect a urinal with it.”
Sam drank until his eyes watered.
“I thought you give up speakin’ French,” Robicheaux said.
“This stuff’ll make you speak Chinese.” But he took another swallow, and after a few minutes, another, for a breeze had come up and the wind was ice. Comeaux told a joke, but no one laughed, and the lieutenant tried to explain what life was like in Indiana, but no one listened to him. After a long period of quiet someone said out of the dark, “I can’t believe they expected us to do any good.”
“Yes,” the lieutenant began, raising an arm toward the north, “think of all the millions of tons of stuff lying out there that didn’t explode.”
Sam’s gaze followed the gesture, and saddened by the day’s events, he said, “But think of every bit that did.”
Chapter Three
1921
SAM RETURNED from Europe with the notion that the surface appearance of things was not to be trusted, that the world was a more dangerous place than he’d thought. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he didn’t completely understand what he’d been through. Some of his friends came back shell-shocked, depressed, suspicious, and disoriented. Most got jobs and tried to work their way out of the war, and, in time, succeeded- artillerymen selling cars, machine gunners baking bread. Sam was thankful he hadn’t killed anybody, because the men he knew who had were having a rough time just walking down Canal Street, where a car might backfire and send them to the pavement.
For the past two years Sam had been the head floorwalker in Krine’s department store, four high-ceilinged floors of clothes for all genders and ages and budgets; shoes ranging from hand-sewn wingtips with waxy oxblood complexions to smelly rubber footgear that would come apart if the wearer stood on a heat register; a like spectrum of furniture, notions, and phonograph records; a lunch counter with both steak and thin soup. On an open mezzanine above the first floor was a lady’s parlor of no particular commercial purpose where a pipe organ was manned between ten and five by Maurice, the fourth and most musical son of Isaac Krine, the owner. Sam told his fellow employees to call him Lucky and repeated the Armistice story to everybody because it made them happy. He was glad to be in New Orleans and not on the farm, glad to be getting rid of his bayou accent, his sun- roasted skin, his army clothes, the explosions, and the horse droppings.
Krine’s was on Canal Street, not far from neighborhoods fallen on hard times, including the French Quarter, home, in Sam’s mind, to people of decayed wealth and logic. The store suffered the slings and arrows of shoplifting, a biannual armed robbery, usually at the jewelry counter, arson, and the occasional fistfight between whores in the foundations department.
Sam stepped out of the office, rolled his shoulders in his freshly pressed summer-wool suit, and checked the wide aisles. Each morning he slipped a fresh flower into his buttonhole, checked his nut-brown hair and square jaw in the jewelry-counter mirror, and began a constant route through the cavernous store, examining both the behavior of customers and the physical plant, including the many-bulbed light fixtures hanging twenty feet above the floor from huge plaster medallions. If Mr. Krine spotted a dead bulb before Sam did, his pay would be docked a nickel. On this particular Monday in late June he rolled down the aisle through women’s dresses wearing his rubber-heeled lace-ups and stepping easily so no one could hear his approach. He was uncomfortable about wearing such deceptively quiet shoes, but his job required them. The previous week he’d come upon a man wadding silk scarves into his pants pocket. Sam drifted up behind him like a cloud, inserting four fingers into his collar before the thief knew what was happening. He struggled and tried to run, but Sam pulled him down in the purse section, with a knee in his lower back, just as he’d learned in the army and in childhood scuffles with his cousins.
It was eleven o’clock and Maurice began playing “Down Among the Sugar Cane” with only the ocarina stop pulled out, a signal to the restaurant crew to gear up for lunch. The store was flush with customers, a hundred or more on the main floor, browsing and listening, from time to time glancing up at the pastel-painted organ pipes and Maurice’s animated backside bouncing on the bench. People were shopping with music in their feet, and the overall motion in the store was that of a dance floor as lips mouthed the song’s words, hands reached out for ties, and fingers tapped shirtfronts in the rhythm of selection. Everyone was convinced by the chandeliers, decorative plaster, and music that they were happy to spend their money.
Sam enjoyed his clean, snappy clothes and light duties. His wife, a seamstress, worked for a fine upholstery shop uptown, where they rented a cypress shotgun house and comfortably waited for another child to come along. He’d bought himself a decent secondhand Packard piano, and his wife purchased a Singer sewing machine that she could run like a small locomotive when rushed to complete a job. Their lives had found a happy, productive pattern. He now looked up at a store fixture and checked all the bulbs, keeping everything in control, all the nickels in his paycheck. Glancing around the morning-cool store at the pretty counter girls, he tapped a shiny shoe to the fluting pipe organ. He could work this job, he felt, for the rest of his life.
And then the young couple approached him, their faces worried, confused. “Excuse us,” the man said, “but we can’t find our little girl.” Sam looked at their clothes. The woman showed a nice sense of style that she’d put together on a budget. The man’s suit was sharp, but shiny with wear.
Sam remembered learning at his internship in Krine’s St. Louis store that it was common for a child to wander away from one parent engaged in the art of buying things, but when two lost track of a young one, something was wrong. Maybe the child had run off, or had fallen asleep in some under-counter bin, or was exploring the elevator machinery in the basement. Or worse.
He smiled easily at them, but it was a store-bought smile, and he immediately scanned the nearest doors leading to the street. “Where was she the last time you saw her?”
“It was over in men’s suits,” the man said.
Sam noticed that he was wearing a carefully ironed shirt, and the thought came to him that the man’s wife loved him.
She now pointed across the store. “We’ve looked for her for five minutes all over that side. We’ve been in the store a half hour, and honest, she was right around us all that time. She’s only three years old. A little blonde in a blue pinafore. Her name’s Lily.”
“Has she wandered off before? Does she like to play hide-and-seek?”
The mother, a blonde herself, her hair in a medium bob, shook her head.
Sam smiled at her. “Don’t worry. You two cross over to the south side of the store and look there. I’ll recheck men’s suits.” While the parents began to filter through the maze of counters, he walked over toward Lillian Clarksby in cosmetics and asked her to close her register and check the front of the store, especially the window displays on the street. Sometimes he’d found young children wandering among the mannequins as if comparing
