up.”
“Hired help.”
“Maybe just that. Hitchhikers, pilot fish. Or could be shared interests, whatever they might be. Alliances, coalitions, all those gentrified, uptown words for gangs. Doyle’s still poking at the anthill.”
They were at the car now. The door hadn’t fit right or worked well since the set-to with the Chevy Caprice and Toyota out by Globe. Driver kept meaning to fix it. He’d done the essential engine and suspension resets but let the body work hang. When he pulled the door open, it made a sound like swords coming out of scabbards in bad fantasy movies.
“Nice,” Felix said. “Distinctive.” He ran his hand along the door’s edge. “Interesting thing about this Dunaway is how he came into the money, the bulk of it anyway. Doyle has a friend, a service buddy, who works in the sheriff’s office over in Jefferson Parish. Says Dunaway’s one of those who lived uptown, stuck it out through Katrina. And afterwards, right after, he made a fortune or three selling food and water to the un- and re-located. No one knows where the food and water came from for sure, but rumors have them as diverted relief and humanitarian goods. After that, he started buying up huge sections of the city for pennies-all of this paper-legal, of course.”
“Sounds like carpetbaggers.”
“What I said. Doyle claims that New Orleans grows its own, always has. No need to bus them in.”
“This Dunaway married? Family? Children?”
“Wife died in 1998, accidental death according to official reports, suicide according to some unofficial ones. No one else we can tag.”
“He’s a native?”
“In the city since 1988. Brooklyn before that. Like I said, Doyle’s still tapping at it. And he taps good.”
“It’s in our nature-in our bones, our spleen, our amygdyla, or wherever we’ve gone to locating the ineffable this year-to try to connect the dots,” Manny said. “Just as it is to go rummaging around in the dark for that one idea that explains everything. Economics. Religion. Conspiracy. String theory.”
Driver had punched in the number fitfully, a backwash of sadness finding him as he did so. It was a feeling he had experienced before, this sense of doing something for the last time. You never knew its source.
“Things happen. They don’t have to add up to more. Hang on.”
Not that one, Driver heard him say. The bottle shaped like a fencepost, with the fake knotholes.
“Got a producer here. Grand plans and a budget to match. All he needs is a script. We’re dipping into the good stuff I save for special occasions.”
“The good stuff is in a bottle with knotholes?”
“Okay, they’re aesthetically challenged. But at what they do…”
Driver heard Manny take a sip, imagining palate and mood slowly changing color, rust to peach to pink, like that. Then he was back.
“Let’s run it down. Storyboard it. First you have this guy in NoLa. Dunaway. No doubt about what he’s in it for, you say.”
“Right.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“Again.”
“Different music, different lighting, late night with rain maybe, this Beil character turns up. Has a guardian angel or two sicced on you. And tries his best to press-gang you onto his ship. To fight for the common good, common bad, whatever. Next, a couple more get dropped in, these troopers that Beil’s men were shadowing. The guy at the mall, too? No idea where they hang hats. Makes for a thick soup, my friend. Any others in the cooker?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Only if you live long enough.”
Manny took another sip. Driver could hear the producer talking there at the other end, wondered whether Manny was ignoring him or managing to carry on both conversations.
“Do the dots connect? Could be all random. Separate storms. And in the long run what does it matter? The question’s always the same: What do you do? How do you act? Hold on, I’m going out to the patio.”
Moments later, against a faint backdrop of traffic sounds, Driver heard “And are you acting?”
Driver said nothing.
“Because from here it starts to look like you’re hanging back. You remember when we first talked about this? I asked what it was you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“Same thing then. If you don’t want to carry through, you can go away again. Be missing.”
Manny waited, then said: “Grand ideas is what we’re taught. That mankind moves forward by grand ideas. You get older, you understand that nations aren’t formed or wars fought for grand ideas, they happen because people don’t want things to change.”
The thwack-thwack of a helicopter came over the line. Sounded like a weed cutter one yard over.
“Think about it. I gotta go in and make nice for the money man, do the greasy smile and all-there’s your creativity. Maybe we’ll discuss how in the last twenty years the top one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s wealth double while their tax burden shrank by a third. Or not. Talk to you soon.”
At the time, both of them believed that.
The treatment Manny sketched out that day for the producer as barometric Scotch fell to the knothole and well below, riffing and spinning the story from whole cloth as he spoke, was about a man who drove, that was all he did, and about how he came to his end early one morning in a Tijuana bar. A hero for our time, the last frontiersman, Manny said. He almost said “a man exempt” but thought that would confuse things. And while the producer wrote him a check on the spot, the movie, like so many others, never got made.
Years later, blurry-eyed and clang-headed one intolerably bright morning, Manny found his draft of the script, which he’d long forgotten. By early afternoon he had a revision. By midnight he had it with his agent at APA.
“It is good to see you again. You’ve given what I said due consideration?”
Radically unlike the last time, the restaurant was at capacity, tables moved in close together to accommodate. Driver thought of New York, how you couldn’t get up without jostling the neighbor’s table. Back here, of course, there was space.
“A single malt, perhaps? An espresso? Are you hungry?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Nothing. Yet you are here.”
Beil looked toward the doors and immediately a server appeared. “Would you bring a small antipasto plate please, Mauro? And a glass of my Pinot Noir?”
The antipasto appeared within moments, as though lurking in the wings awaiting its turn onstage. Perhaps, but Driver found it hard to think of Beil as being that predictable. A separate server brought the wine. Crystal glass, silver tray, linen napkin.
“I came for a name.”
“I see.” Beil chewed at an olive, swallowed. “An agreement is in place?”
“For the moment.”
“Ah. Then we have what politicians, ever wary of pinning themselves too close to the rose, might call a binding resolution.” He sipped wine. “Surely you have a name by now.”
“I know who’s sitting across the board. Not the other players.”
“The one you know is not only out of the picture-”
“For the moment.”
“-he is also of no interest to me. To anyone, actually.” Beil selected a divot of salami, then a chunk of ancient parmesan that looked like yellow stone. “You’re certain you’ll not have a drink?”
Driver nodded.
“Those you seek are wolves. Wolves do not wish to be found, they are themselves the hunters, slipping between trees, out of eyesight, close to the ground. They survive, they thrive, on their cunning.” Beil bit off half an
