“Say them again?”
She repeated them slowly. Though she had written down the words phonetically, if I was correct in my perception, they weren’t far off the mark. The words Jesse had probably spoken were “J’aime mon ’tit ange.”
“What do the words mean, Dave?”
“‘I love my little angel,’” I replied.
The moon broke from behind the clouds, and suddenly the lawn was printed with shadows and shapes that had not been there seconds ago. The leaves of the water oaks were scattered on the grass, each leaf dry and crisp and limned with silver, sculpted like a tiny ship. I removed the phone from my ear and looked at Varina. “Qui t’a pres faire, ’tit ange?” I said.
“What did you say?” she asked.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘What are you up to, little angel?’ You don’t speak French, Varina? You didn’t learn it from your father? You didn’t study it at LSU?”
“You think you’ve figured it all out, huh?” she said.
I put the phone back to my ear, then felt someone screw the muzzle of a revolver into the back of my neck. “Whoa, hoss,” said the man holding the gun. He reached out with his other hand and pulled my cell phone from my palm and closed it. His hair was thick with grease and combed straight back. There was a purple bump on his nose, and his eyes were wide-set and misaligned, as if he possessed two optical systems instead of one.
He was not alone. Four other men came out of the shadows, all of them armed, one with a Taser. One of them was a fleshy man we had seen once before, in the company of the man whose eyes looked like they had been cut out of paper and glued haphazardly on his face.
The man with the Taser pulled Clete’s. 38 from its holster and threw it into a wall of bamboo that bordered the driveway. Then he pushed Clete against the side of the Caddy and told him to spread his legs.
“He has a gun strapped on his right ankle,” Varina said.
“She’d be the one to know. I porked her once,” Clete said. “While I was drunk.”
“You and Dave brought this on yourselves,” Varina said. “And you’re foolish if you think anyone cares.”
The man with the Taser ran his free hand under Clete’s armpits and down his sides. Then he felt Clete’s crotch and inside his thighs and pulled up Clete’s right trouser leg and unstrapped the hideaway. 25-caliber auto.
“You put your hand on my dick again, I’m going to break your nose, Taser or no Taser,” Clete said.
The man straightened his back and smiled. “You’re not my type,” he said.
The man with the greased hair crushed my cell phone under his foot and removed my. 45 from my clip-on holster, then told me to spread myself against the side of the car.
“I’m clean,” I said.
“I believe you. But you know the drill. We’re all pros here, man. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be.” His breath made the side of my face wrinkle as he moved his hands down my sides. “You don’t like garlic shrimp with tomato sauce? That makes two of us. Remind me never to eat around here again.”
“Where’s my daughter?” I said to Varina.
“Out of my hands,” she replied.
“Don’t lie.”
“Dave, do you think you’re going to change anything?” she said. “There are billions of dollars at stake, and you and your rhinoceros of a friend who keeps his brains stuffed in his penis come along and fuck up everything for everyone. I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Yeah, we’re pretty stupid, all right, because neither Clete nor I had any idea what we stumbled into. Is my daughter alive?”
“Maybe. But I haven’t been downstairs, so I can’t say,” she replied.
“Downstairs?” I said.
“You asked for this. It’s all on you. Just the same, I feel sorry for y’all and your daughters,” she said.
“You think you can make us all disappear?” I said. “That nobody is going to know we came here?”
“Do you know how many convicts are buried in this yard?” she replied. “You see any monuments to them? Have you ever read any news accounts about their deaths?”
“Those men died over a hundred years ago,” I said.
“How about the eleven who died in the blowout? How about all the soldiers blown apart by IEDs so people can have cheap gas? You see a lot of national hand-wringing about them?” she said.
On the edge of my vision, I saw an erect figure walk out of the shadows. He was wearing a velvet smoking jacket and a Tyrolean hat and an immaculate white shirt. “Oh, welcome, welcome, welcome to our egalitarian heroes,” Alexis Dupree said. “I hope you’ll enjoy the rest of your evening. Do you want to chat with your little friend Tee Jolie, Mr. Robicheaux? I know she’ll be happy to see you. Your daughter will be, too.”
“Get finished with this,” Varina said. She hugged her arms around herself. “I’m cold.”
The man with greased hair pushed the muzzle of his revolver into my ear. In the distance, I heard a freight train blowing down the line and thought I felt the heavy rumble of the freight and tanker cars through the earth. That was not what I felt at all. A ten-by-eight-foot square of lawn was lifting from the ground by the gazebo, like a doorway to a subterranean kingdom that even Dante could not imagine.
The substructure of the plantation home had been entirely reengineered. The ceiling was high and beamed with oak, the floor done with terrazzo and spread with throw rugs with Mediterranean colors and designs. But the walls were not walls; they were giant plasma screens that showed tropical sunsets and beaches dotted with palm trees and waves sliding onto beaches as white as granulated sugar. The main room contained conventional burgundy leather chairs and couches and a bar and a glass-topped table. There were other rooms in back, some with doors, some without. “Is my daughter back there?” I said.
“Perhaps,” Alexis said. “How do you like our visual display? Here, look in this side room. You seemed to admire my collection of wartime photography. Would you like to see some movie footage from the last century?”
He pushed open a door that gave onto an office. There were four separate screens on two walls, all of them showing black-and-white images of German troops razing a village, Stukas dive-bombing a city, Jewish shops being destroyed during Kristallnacht, families climbing down from boxcars, the children terrified, all of them being herded through a barbed-wire corridor into a prison camp.
“People know where we are,” I said.
“No, they don’t,” a voice said behind me.
Pierre Dupree had come out of a room in back and was combing his hair as he walked. “Friends of ours are within two feet of your wife,” he said. “One of them stole the cell phone out of her purse. You didn’t call her, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Where’s Gretchen?” Clete said.
“Preparing herself,” Dupree said.
“For what?” Clete said.
“An excursion into the Middle Ages. We’re going to find out how much you know, Mr. Purcel, and the names of the people to whom you passed on information that isn’t your business. Believe me, before this is over, you’ll beg to give us information.”
“Get on with it, Pierre,” Varina said.
“I’ll make it easy for you. What do you want to know?” Clete said.
“Where are your files? Who have you told?” Pierre said.
“Told what?” Clete said.
“Unfortunately, that’s exactly the reaction we expected from you,” Pierre said. “Maybe you’re even telling the truth. But we have to be sure, and that’s not good news for Gretchen and Alafair.”
“You plan to kill them anyway, you motherfucker,” Clete said.
“Not necessarily. Things haven’t been that bad for Tee Jolie. Do you want to see her?” Pierre said.
“No, we don’t,” I said.
“That’s strange,” he said. “I found the cell phone she was using to call you. I thought you two were quite close. Come on, Mr. Robicheaux. Say hello. I’m not taunting you or being cruel. I think she’s quite happy with the way things are. At first she was a little resistant about the abortion, but that’s all past history.”
