flaring with fear and angst. She clenched his shoulder with her left hand and shook it. His skin was oily and hot, beaded with pinpoints of perspiration. He pulled the pillow from his head and looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes bleary. “What’s the haps?” he said.
“Are you in the bag again?”
“Yeah, bad night, bad day. I got to stop drinking,” he replied. He turned over on the couch and supported himself on one elbow. “What time is it?”
“Forget about the time.”
“What’s going on, Gretch? What’s that in your hand?”
She lifted the. 22 above the level of the mattress. “This is the piece I used to clip Bix Golightly. On my sixth birthday, he asked me to come into the kitchen and help him make lemonade. My mother had just left for the grocery to buy a cake. He unzipped his pants and pushed my face against his cock. He squeezed my head so tight, I thought he would crush my skull. He told me if I was a bad girl and told my mother what we’d done, that’s how he put it, what we’d done, he’d come back to Miami and bury me in my backyard. I never knew his full name or where he was from. Earlier this year he was at the track in Hialeah with some other gumballs. They told him I did button work for the Mob. He never made the connection between me and the little girl he sodomized. It took me a long time to catch up with him, but I did. What do you think of that, Clete?”
Clete fingered the sheet that covered his loins, his mouth gray, his lips dry-looking. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
“Popping a guy?”
“No, popping a guy who makes a little girl perform oral sex on him on her birthday and threatens to murder her. What are you going to do with that piece?”
“Use it.”
“On who?” he asked.
“The field is wide open.”
He sat up on the side of the couch. He took the. 22 from her hand. The magazine was not in the frame. He pulled back the receiver. The chamber was empty. “Did you take down Frankie Giacano or Waylon Grimes?”
“No, I didn’t. Golightly and Grimes and Giacano were all supposed to catch the bus. I did Golightly, but I didn’t take money for it. I don’t know who clipped the others.”
“Do you know who I am?” Clete asked.
“A guy who smells like he’s been drinking for twenty-four hours?”
He unscrewed the suppressor from the. 22 and handed both the gun and the suppressor back to her. “What else is in that hatbox?”
“A Beretta nine and a gun-cleaning kit and several extra magazines and boxes of ammo.”
“I’m your old man. That’s who I am,” he said.
“Meaning like my boyfriend?”
“I’m your father.”
She felt a sharp pain in her heart that spread through her chest and seemed to squeeze the air out of her lungs. Her brow twitched once, like a rubber band snapping, then something shut down the flow of light into her eyes. “Don’t play around with me.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“My father died in Desert Storm.”
“You went to juvie when you were fifteen, then to foster care. Your mother was in the Miami-Dade stockade. I had a blood test done on you. There was no doubt I was your dad. But you ran away from foster care before I could process the custody application. I tried to find you twice on my own, and later, I hired a PI in Lauderdale, but the trail stopped at the track in Hialeah. You were a hot walker there, right?”
“Yeah, and a groom and I worked at the concession stand,” she said.
“You feel like I’ve deceived you?”
“I don’t know what to call it. I can’t begin to describe what I feel right now,” she said.
“I saw you smoke Golightly. I called in the shots-fired, but I didn’t dime you. After you brought me my cigarette lighter, I figured you’d run away if I told you I was in Algiers the night Golightly and Grimes got it. If you ran away again, I knew I would never find you. You got a rotten break as a kid, Gretchen. In my view, you’re not responsible for any of the things you did. If anybody is responsible, it’s me. I was a drunk and a pill addict working Vice. I took juice from the Mob, and I took advantage of your mother. Candy was mainlining when she was nineteen, and instead of helping her, I made her pregnant. If you told me you didn’t want a son of a bitch like me for a father, I’d understand.”
“You’re not a son of a bitch. Don’t say that.”
He reached down on the floor and picked up his trousers, then stood up from the couch with his back to her and put them on. “Why are you crying?” he said.
“I’m not. I don’t ever cry.”
“Our supper is probably burned up. Let’s go to the Patio for some etouffee. A guy couldn’t have a better daughter than you. You have character and you’re not afraid. Anybody who says different is going to have to answer to me.”
Her hands were propped on her knees, and her head was bent forward so he could no longer see her face. She pushed the wetness out of her eyes with the back of her wrist. “There’s a hit on you. You and Dave Robicheaux and Alafair and maybe Mrs. Robicheaux. They’ve got my mother, Clete. I was offered the choice of doing the hit or letting my mother be tortured to death.”
“Who gave you the contract?” he asked.
“A guy named Marco. He’s not important. The contract can come from anywhere or anybody. It gets processed through Jersey or Miami or San Diego. The middle guys do business through drop boxes and electronic relays. Right now they’re shooting up my mother with some high-grade smack that could kill her.”
She waited for him to speak. Instead, he sat down on the couch and stared at the floor. “Where’d they grab Candy?”
“Probably at her house in Coconut Grove. Are you going to tell Dave Robicheaux and Alafair?” she asked. “I can’t stand the thought of that. Alafair stood up for me. She hit Varina Leboeuf in the face.”
He lifted his eyes to hers. There was a level of sadness in them that seemed to have no bottom.
At the department I had started my Internet search into the history of the cycle track in Paris in hopes of discovering a connection with the Nazi SS officer Karl Engels. Some of the search was easy, some of it elusive, some of it a dead end. The name of the racetrack in Paris was Vel’ d’Hiv, a place that had become infamous as the first stop for French Jews on their way to a camp at Drancy and the freight cars that would take them to Auschwitz. Many of the photos were horrific, the eyewitness accounts so gruesome and cruel that you wondered if there was not a demonic agent at work in human beings. There was nothing to link the name of Karl Engels with the cycle track in Paris or the camp at Drancy or the chimneys at Auschwitz.
When I got home that night, I continued the search on our home computer via a different avenue. I didn’t put in a search for Karl Engels but for the people he might have known or worked under. I brought up photos of Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich and the people in their entourage. I searched the lists of those who had been tried at Nuremberg and those who had escaped justice and fled to South America. I read seemingly endless accounts of their backgrounds. Most of them had come from middle-class homes and been raised by Lutheran or Catholic parents. Their previous lives, before their admission to the SS, had been characterized by mediocrity and failure. That they would pose before cameras in front of the barbed wire holding their victims was mind-numbing. That they would allow themselves to be photographed shooting unarmed people on their knees or a woman with a child in her arms would probably be incomprehensible to a sociopath. The world these men created might exist today only in cyberspace, but to visit it even as a virtual reality makes the stomach crawl.
By eleven P.M. my eyes were burning, and I was ready to give it up. Then I looked again at a photo I had not lingered on, possibly because of the way the individuals were dressed. The photo showed Heinrich Himmler and three other men talking, all of them wearing business suits. They looked like men who might have gathered at a piece of cleared land in anticipation of a shared business venture. They did not look evil or cunning or remarkable in any fashion. In the cutline, Himmler and two of the other men were named; the fourth man was not. His face was turned at an angle, his posture both confident and regal. There was a dimple in his chin, a pleasant smile on his
