“Room 408.”
Chapter Five
The last time I’d been to the belright was on my honeymoon. We’d ordered chicken sandwiches “with extra chips” and they’d brought enough for a party. They’d also sent up champagne and a fruit basket. I guess we were pretty happy there for a little while. But it was the beginning, still, of a long decline.
The Belright back then had been pricey and plush. Declines were everywhere.
I pretended I belonged there, walked through the lobby and up the stairs, something I wouldn’t have gotten away with just a few years before. But now there wasn’t a porter or other service person in sight, only one youngish, half-bald guy behind the desk picking his nose with a ballpoint pen.
I heaved myself up the four flights and knocked on 408, waited, knocked again. Finally someone opened the door an inch or so and stuck his nose in the crack.
“Yeah.”
“You Bud Sanders?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Maybe I could introduce you.”
Inside the room someone, a man, said, “Who’s that?”
“Some wiseass nigger.”
“I interrupt something between you two fellows?” I said.
He opened the door wider and glared at me.
“Look, fellow,” he said. “We’re trying to get a little work done in here. Why don’t you just go away and let us get back to it.”
“Now let’s see. What kind of work would that be, in a hotel room with all those bright lights I see behind you there? PR film for the Belright, maybe? Hope your demographics are right.”
It was the other guy. A second later the door opened and he stood there by Sanders, sweaty and naked at half-mast. I kicked him in the kneecap, then the stomach, and went on in.
The woman on the bed wasn’t Cordelia. She wasn’t conscious, either.
I spun around and grabbed Sanders by the neck.
“Okay,” I said, “I had to see who you had in here. Now you listen to me. First, you get some help for this woman. Then you find Cordelia Clayson-shut up and listen-and you bring her to me at the fountain in Jackson Square by five o’clock tonight.” The other guy was starting to get up so I kicked him again. “Don’t make it so I have to come find you again. Be there.”
“Man, I don’t know where that girl is.”
“Find out.” I let go of him. “We’re through talking. You better wrap it up, he’s not gonna feel much like fucking anymore.”
I went out, down the stairs, through the lobby. Going back outside felt like walking into a forest fire. Sweat burst out of every pore I had.
There were piles of garbage in plastic bags in the alley alongside the hotel. You could hear flies buzzing inside them, their sound amplified by the taut, membranelike plastic.
Chapter Six
Walsh and I finally got together for lunch that afternoon at Felix’s. He was standing at the bar just inside the door when I got there, staring at an oyster.
“Somehow I always expect them to scream right before they go in. You know, suddenly grow a little mouth in there, and cute little round eyes, like in Disney cartoons.”
He shrugged and downed it, his last, and we grabbed a table being vacated by two fortyish guys wearing tiny old earrings, shorts and not much else.
Both of us ordered po’boys and beer.
At some point during the meal, and for no particular reason, I asked Don about his father. He shrugged.
“Didn’t really know him much. Left, or my mother threw him out, or he got put away, whatever, when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten, maybe. What I do remember’s not good. Lots of hollering and being stood in corners or sent to bed, a few beatings-more, toward the end. Usual happy American childhood, right?”
“Close, anyway. Seems like it.”
I bit off a plug of hard bread, shredded lettuce, hot sauce, oysters. Chewed.
“Mine never touched me. Never said much, but you could see the world going on back there behind his eyes. Had this kind of private smile, mostly. I didn’t know
A drunk stumbled up on the street outside and pressed his face close to the glass. The black man in livery shucking oysters behind the bar gently shooed him away.
“I remember one time I was nine maybe. I’d done something pretty terrible-stolen dimes from a jar of them my mother kept in the closet, I guess. They were standing in the doorway to the room where both of us kids slept, and they must have thought I was asleep. ‘You’ve got to lay hands on him this time, George,’ she was telling him. And after a while my father just said, very quietly, ‘I will not bring violence into my home, Louise. I’ve lived by it too long.’ The next few times he left, he stayed away longer, then one of those times he didn’t come back at all. After a while Momma moved us in with relatives.”
“Jesus, Lew.”
“-has nothing to do with it, as Mae West said.” I finished up my beer and signaled for two more. “Anyhow, I made all that up. Nothing mysterious or dangerous about him. He was just an ordinary man.”
Don looked at me a long time. “Sometimes I think you just may be as crazy as everyone says you are.”
“I am. Sometimes.”
We drank our beers.
“Ordinary,” Don said. “I used to be that, I guess.”
“Well, good buddy, whatever else happens, at least you’re still white.”
“Yeah, there’s that.” And putting down the empty glass: “You want to get some air?”
We walked down Decatur to the French Market and trudged over the levee. A cool breeze eased in off the water. Due south along the river’s curve lay the city’s bulky torso, flanked by the wharf with its growth of ships, tugs, barges. The Canal Street ferry was just pulling out of its slip heading at an angle toward Algiers.
That camel’s hump of land over there, directly opposite oldest New Orleans and now the city’s fifth ward, is central to its history. At various times called Point Antoine, Point Marigny and Slaughter House Point, in the last days of French rule it was the site both of the colony’s abattoir and powder magazine-and a depot for shipment after shipment of slaves newly arrived from Africa.
Dr. King had a dream. I at least had History.
Chapter Seven
I spent the rest of the day making phone calls and wondering. Maybe I should have stayed there at the Belright and called Vice. They wanted Sanders; maybe something in the scenario-whatever it turned out to be-
