tiger tooth combing the sweat worming through his chest. He felt naked in his muggy clothes. As per airline regulations, his weapon resided in the baggage compartment, unloaded; the ammunition packed separately in a shaving kit bag under the eye of the Detroit Airport Police.
A few minutes later, slick with sweat, he stood at the baggage conveyer and grimaced when he spotted his AWOL bag trundle down the line, shaving kit attached. The floppy, blaze orange, steal-me tag brayed: FIREARM ENCLOSED.
In a men’s room, past the metal detectors, he slipped in a toilet stall, unpacked the bag, and put on the shoulder rig. With the.45 slung like an overdeveloped steel muscle in leather tendons under his left armpit, he felt better.
He smiled, despite his thumb and the close heat, and savored his independence as he strolled through baggage into the southern afternoon. The Louisiana air was wet gauze tented on spiked palms. In three seconds he was mummy-wrapped in the temperature of jaded blood. The barrier of his skin dissolved in a bath of sweat, and Broker, a lonely white corpuscle, floated into the gaudy fever stream of New Orleans.
On the street travelers cued up for cabs and a black woman in an airport uniform directed him to the next available car. The driver was a black man in his sixties with a neck and shoulders like a pliant fireplug. He turned in his seat with tourist maps in his hand and a relaxed smile on his broad lips.
His eyes assumed a familiarity, warm and alive and immediate, that would shock people up north. They sized up Broker’s shoulders, the ponytail, the bandaged hand. They noted the sag under the lapel of his light sports coat. The cabby laughed. A patois of gristly inflection that rode a high-pitched chuckle. “Po-leese. Where from?”
“Minnesota.”
“Get you a baggy shirt to cover all that iron. You gonna die wearing that jacket down here.”
Beads dangled from the rear-view mirror, family pictures and some pendants of suspicious origin twined with a cameo of the Virgin Mary.
Broker laughed and gave the cabby LaPorte’s address.
“Uh-huh. Gen. Cyrus LaPorte lives in that big house on St. Charles in the Garden District. The Tourrine Mansion. Now that belonged originally to a Confederate general. The LaPorte family acquired it back in 1909. He pretty big too, get his picture in the paper a lot.”
Broker rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. “It always this hot?”
“Ain’t hot. Hot come out at night.”
They rode a freeway, turned off and passed acres of white ramshackle tombs. “Cemetery,” said the cabby. “Above ground. This whole fallin’-down motherfucker built in a swamp.”
Broker, from bedrock country, nodded. It was a pushed-around moraine and delta city built on debris the glaciers had kicked down the length of North America. Then they were on St. Charles, and there were mule-drawn carriages and a green street car. But Broker noticed the fences. Friendly people but lots of tall iron fences.
“You going to the wedding?” asked the cabby.
“What?”
“You my second airport ride to the Tourrine. Wedding this afternoon. They rent it out for weddings.”
“Why’s a rich guy like LaPorte rent his house out for weddings?”
“Rich man never quit findin’ ways to make money. Why he rich,” said the cabby. “That’s it, that white monster on the right, takes most of the block.”
The three-story house wore a crisp petticoat of new white paint, but it was Mansard-gabled, gargoyled and turreted with enough sinister energy to inspire Edgar Allan Poe. The seven-foot fence that surrounded the grounds was stylized black wrought iron. Curved spears articulated as thickly clustered blooming lilacs.
A uniformed New Orleans cop lounged at the entrance. Banquet tables were being set up on the broad lawn by black men in short-waisted white coats and dark slacks who sleepwalked in the drowsy heat.
“Drive around the block and up the alley,” said Broker.
The cabby chuckled. “You planning to rob the place, huh, you casing it now.”
Absolutely, thought Broker. The back of the house was walled off from the rest of the lawn and the alley by thick hedges. A second-story balcony ran the length of the back of the house and was supported by grillwork and hung with showers of geraniums and impatiens. An oak tree, draped in Spanish moss, grew conveniently close to a corner.
“What’s behind the hedges?” asked Broker.
“Swimming pool.”
“Okay. Now take me here.” He handed the cabby the address of the hotel Larson had squeezed him into.
The cabby nodded. “Doniat. On Chartiers. That’s a nice place, too.”
Broker missed the romance of the French Quarter. He keyed on the cramped passageways gated with more spear-tipped wrought iron. The iron was topped with tangles of barbed wire. The wire was pulled serpentine in a tangle-foot pattern that he associated with Developing World wars. A billboard poster emblazoned with the astronomical New Orleans homicide statistics shouted on a store window. MORE THAN BOSTON, MORE THAN DETROIT. Letters large enough for Broker to read from a passing car.
The cabby demanded his attention. “Now listen up, Minnesota. This here’s Rampart Street we crossin’ now, just don’t be wandering round north of here drunk with money hanging out of your pocket and you just might make it.”
Broker thanked him, tipped him generously with Nina’s money and checked into the Doniat. He took a bottle of mineral water from the honor bar and let a young porter carry his small athletic bag up the stairs and to a room at the end of the hall with windows that opened on a gallery that overlooked the street.
After tipping the kid for his exertion he called Nina’s.
“I’m two hours from meeting the great man. How’s your end?”
“I’ll be at the bank tomorrow morning as soon as it opens. Watch yourself, Broker.”
“You too.”
Broker tucked the Xerox copy of LaPorte’s map and the sonar graphic in the inner lapel pocket of his jacket, called a cab, and went to the Civic Center to visit the main library. He spent an hour and a half skimming every reference to the LaPorte family that a harried librarian could locate. Then he grabbed another cab and headed for the Garden District. This time he drew a short, bald white firecracker for a driver.
“Guadalcanal, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo. I made all those goddamn landings. And now I’m seventy-two years old and I have to take shit from these fucking trash-talking jungle bunnies in my own hometown. Threw three of the shitbirds out of my cab just the other day.”
The man’s neck was the color of angina, veins ridged his cranium.
“Damn niggers are taking over the goddamn streets. Hell if I’m going to ride any more those sonsabitches-”
“Hey, man, just drive the fuckin’ car, okay?”
Finally the apoplectic cabby dropped him off. He didn’t get a tip. Broker stood on the street and watched men in suits and women in formal dresses roam the lawn with plastic glasses of champagne. Maybe no one could afford to live in a house like this anymore, even in Louisiana, where you didn’t have to foot the heating bill. So even Cyrus LaPorte had to accommodate and peddle his living space.
Broker went through the stockade of iron lilacs and the uniform was alert enough in the heat to come out of his lounging posture in the shade and challenge the tall, serious-moving man in the ponytail. Broker flashed his badge. The cop nodded and stepped back. Broker went in.
The lower level was a gleam of varnished wood floors and intricately carved antebellum woodwork. Servants glided with silver trays or arranged platters of finger food. The gay mountains of floral arrangements smelled damp…like funerals. He asked one of the waiters where to find Mr. LaPorte.
The waiter rolled his eyes to a spiral oak staircase. At the top a snake-boned young man with strawberry hair, who nobody would want at their wedding, leaned against a railing. His feral handsome face and hot hazel eyes suggested that he and Bevode Fret had hatched out of the same stagnant malarial pool and had grown up fighting the gators for their supper. But his anemic complexion and the sniffles suggested that he was on a Colombian diet. Broker mounted the stairs and said, “Phillip Broker. I have a three o’clock appointment with LaPorte.”
“That’s General LaPorte. What you got under the coat?” The punk assumed a blocking stance. Broker showed his badge again. “Give me the badge, your ID, and the piece,” said the guy.
