Dixie City Jam

and Agent Orange.

But my cynicism was cheap, born out of the same impotence in trying to deal with evil that had caused the sheriff to make me a present of his Colt Industries urban-Americana meatcutter.

My desk was covered with fax sheets from the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and photocopied files from NOPD that had been sent to me by Ben Motley. The people in those combined pages could have been players in almost any city in the United States. They were uniquely American, ingrained in our economy, constantly threading their way in and out of lives, always floating about on the periphery of our vision. But nothing that we've attempted so far has been successful in dealing with them. In fact, I'm not even sure how to define them.

1. Max and Bobo Calucci: In popular literature their kind are portrayed as twentieth-century Chaucerian buffoons, venial and humorous con men whose greatest moral offense is their mismatched wardrobe, or charismatic representatives of wealthy New York crime families whose palatial compounds are always alive with wedding receptions and garden parties. The familial code of the last group is sawed out of medieval romance, their dalliance with evil of Faustian and tragic proportions.

Maybe they are indeed these things. But the ones I have known, with one or two exceptions, all possessed a single common characteristic that is unforgettable. Their eyes are dead. No, that's not quite correct. There's a light there, like a wet lucifer match flaring behind black glass, but no matter how hard you try to interpret the thought working behind it, you cannot be sure if the person is thinking about taking your life or having his car washed.

I once spent three hours interviewing a celebrity mafioso who lives today in the federal witness protection program. Two-thirds of his stomach had been surgically removed because of ulcers, and his flesh was like wrinkled putty on his bones, his breath rancid from the saliva-soaked cigar that rarely left his mouth. But his recall of his five decades inside the Outfit was encyclopedic. As he endlessly recounted conversations with other members of the mob, the subject was always the same-money: how much had been made from a score, how much had been pieced off to whom, how much laundered, how much delivered in a suitcase for a labor official's life.

Thirty years ago, in the living room of a friend, he had wrapped piano wire around the throat of an informer and pulled until he virtually razored the man's head off his shoulders.

Then I said something that my situation or job did not require.

'The man you killed, he had once been your friend, hadn't he?'

'Yeah, that's right.'

'Did that bother you?'

'It's just one of them things. What're you gonna do?' He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows as though an impossible situation had been arbitrarily imposed upon him.

Then I posed one more question to him, one that elicited a nonresponse that has always stayed with me.

'You've told the feds everything about your life, Vince. Did you ever feel like indicating to God you regret some of this bullshit, that you'd like it out of your life?'

His eyes cut sideways at me for only a moment. Through the cigar smoke they looked made from splinters of green and black glass, watery, red-rimmed as a lizard's, lighted with an old secret, or perhaps fear, that would never shake loose from his throat.

I clicked off my recorder, said good-bye, and walked out of the room. Later, he told an FBI agent that he never wanted me, in his presence again.

2. Tommy Bobalouba: Like Max and Bobo, he operated on the edges of the respectable world and constantly tried to identify himself with an ethnic heritage that somehow was supposed to give his illegal enterprises the mantle of cultural and moral legitimacy. The reality was that Tommy and the Caluccis both represented a mind- numbing level of public vulgarity that sickened and embarrassed most other Irish and Italians in New Orleans.

Tommy had been kicked out of his yacht club for copulating in the swimming pool at 4:00 A.M. with a cocktail waitress. At the Rex Ball during Mardi Gras he told the mayor's wife that his radiation treatments for prostate cancer caused his phallus to glow in the dark. After wheedling an invitation to a dinner for the New Orleans Historical Association, he politely refused the asparagus by saying to the hostess, 'Thank you, anyway, ma'am, but it always makes my urine smell.'

3. We'll call the third player Malcolm, a composite of any number of black male kids raised in New Orleans's welfare projects. Caseworkers and sociologists have written reams on Malcolm. Racist demagogues love Malcolm because he's the means by which they inculcate fear into the electorate. Liberals are far more compassionate and ascribe his problems to his environment. They're probably correct in their assessment. The problem, however, is that Malcolm is dangerous. He's often immensely unlikable, too.

A full-blown crack addict has the future of a lighted candle affixed to the surface of a woodstove. Within a short period of time he will be consumed by the unbanked fires burning inside him or those that lick daily at his skin from the outside. In the meantime he drifts into a world of moral psychosis where shooting a British tourist in the face for her purse or accidentally killing a neighborhood child has the significance of biting off a hangnail.

I knew a kid from New Iberia whose name was Malcolm. He had an arm like a black whip and could field a ball in deep center and fire it on one hop into home plate with the mean, flat trajectory of a BB. At age seventeen he moved with Iris mother into the Desire Project in New Orleans, a complex of welfare apartments where the steady din is unrelieved, like the twenty-four-hour noise in a city prison-toilets flushing, plumbing pipes vibrating in walls, irrational people yelling at each other, radios and television sets blaring behind broken windows. The laws of ordinary society seem the stuff of comic books. Instead, what amounts to the failure of all charity, joy, and decency becomes the surrogate for normalcy: gang rape, child molestation, incest, terrorization of the elderly, beatings and knifings that turn the victims into bloody facsimiles of human beings, fourteen-year-old girls who'll wink at you and proudly say, 'I be sellin' out of my pants, baby,' or perhaps a high school sophomore who clicks his MAC-10 on up to heavy-metal rock 'n' roll and shreds his peers into dog food.

In a year's time Malcolm smoked, hyped, snorted, bonged, dropped, or huffed the whole street dealer's menu-bazooka, Afghan skunk, rock, crank, brown scag, and angel dust. His mother brought him back to New Iberia for a Christmas visit. Malcolm borrowed a car and went to a convenience store for some eggnog. Then he changed his mind and decided he didn't need any eggnog. Instead, he sodomized and executed the eighteen- year-old college girl who ran the night register. He maintained at his trial that he was loaded on speed and angel dust and had no memory of even entering the convenience store. I was a witness at his electrocution, and I'm convinced to this day that even while they strapped and buckled his arms and legs to the oak chair, fitted the leather gag across his mouth, and dropped the black cloth over his face, even up to the moment the electrician closed the circuits and arched a bolt of lightning through his body that cooked his brains and exploded his insides, Malcolm did not believe these people, whom he had never seen before or harmed in any way, would actually take his life for a crime which he believed himself incapable of committing.

That evening I sat at the kitchen table with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast spread out before me.

Through the open bedroom door I heard Bootsie turn on the shower water. Recently she had made a regular habit of taking long showers in the afternoon, washing the cigarette smoke from a lounge out of her hair, holding her face in the spray until her skin was ruddy and the appearance of clarity came back into her eyes. I had not spoken to her yet about the DWI she had almost received the previous day.

I flattened and smoothed the nautical chart with my hand and penciled X's at the locations where I had sighted the German U-boat when I was in college and on my boat with Batist. Then I made a third X where Hippo Bimstine's friend, the charter-boat skipper, had pinged it with his sonar. The three X's were all within two miles of each other, on a rough southwest-northeastwardly drift line that could coincide with the influences of both the tide and the currents of the Mississippi's alluvial fan. If there was a trench along that line, tilting downward with the bevel of the continental shelf, then the movements of the sub had a certain degree of predictability.

But I couldn't concentrate on the chart. I stared out the back window at the tractor shed by the edge of the coulee. The door yawned open, and the late sun's red light shone like streaks of fire through the cracks in the far wall. I called Clete at his apartment in New Orleans and told him about the break-in of last night, the linen-covered butcher block, the offering of bourbon, the crystal goblet half-filled with burgundy and rimmed with lipstick and moonlight.

'So?' he said when I had finished.