shroud of trees provided a cover that daylight found hard to penetrate. The heat held the rain up, evaporated a good deal of it before it reached the ground, and the mist hung like a pall over everything. The sound of the engine was swallowed, and Verlaine – feeling for perhaps the first time the full weight of his present situation, its possibilities, its potential repercussions – sat uneasily in the driving seat. He slowed the car some and eased through the beginning of this shifting, ever-changing country like someone invading a private and personal territory. He was thankfully unfamiliar with this land, the rise and sweep of verdant plantations, the gaps between the solid ground where the earth would swallow you effortlessly in mud and filth and depthless suffocation. Walk out here with uncertain feet, and those feet would walk you quietly to your death. No-one was ever heard out here; however loud they screamed, that sound was snatched away and evaporated by the heat, the solidity, the thick atmosphere. People died out here like it was one moving, living cemetery, and there was no retrieval for burial or cremation. Once this land had you, well, it had you for keeps.
Verlaine’s mouth was bitter and dry. He thought of wharfside bars, of cool lemonade, of sweet Louisiana oranges from the French market along North Peters and Decatur.
He drove for close to an hour, and as he felt the beaten dirt road dip beneath the wheels of the car he also felt the intuitive awareness that something was close. He slowed the car, rolled it leftwards and stopped it beneath a deep overhang of head-height branches. But for close inspection – cover afforded by the mist, the trees themselves – the car was almost invisible. Verlaine thought for a moment about what he was doing, whether he would walk out there and never find his way back. As he exited the vehicle his heart hung in his chest like a fist of tense muscle, beating only because his brain dictated it. His pulse was shallow, his head tight and giddy, his hands shaking. He felt nauseous, a little overwhelmed. He felt watched.
From the dash he had taken his gun; he headed on foot the way he’d been driving, sticking to the boundary of the road, careful not to miss the verge and wander into the glades.
Verlaine heard the sound of voices before he saw the house. Imagery again, strange and anachronistic, as he turned through dense branches, through the grasping fingers of thorned and flowered trees. He stopped at the edge of a fence that ran as far as he could see in both directions. He stood there immobile, right within the heart of Feraud family territory, and his heart thudded noisily.
Approaching a turning in the road he found an unlocked gate and, passing through it, he started up the driveway towards the vast frontage of the wooden house. Painted yellow some eternity before, the woodwork had not so much surrendered its color to the heat as absorbed the quality of the environment into itself. It was shadowed and oppressive in some way, the gaudiness of its age-old decoration at variance with its soul. Here was the seat of jurisdiction for this territory; here was the Feraud family with all its many tentacles; here was Daddy Always, the head of this dynasty.
By the time he was twenty yards from the house he could see men standing along the veranda, could hear their voices more clearly, French dialects similar to those found in the wharfside bars, in the Creole gambling haunts, around the cockfight arenas in the harbor houses by Toulouse and Bienville. These men carried carbines, and handguns in belt holsters; they laughed like men with careless minds and careless trigger fingers, absent of compunction, remorse, reason, or responsibility to any law but their own. These men belonged to some bygone age. These men were not the impulsive gun-happy teenagers and gangbangers that Verlaine collided with in his usual line of work.
The hairs on Verlaine’s neck rose to attention, his stomach tightened, he felt pearls of sweat break from his hairline and start down his brow.
When the men saw him walking towards the house they fell silent. They stood motionless, almost to attention. They would know who he was. No-one but cops came down here in a shirt and tie. They knew well enough not to cause trouble unless it was started by someone else. They would think nothing of killing him, he knew that, but he would have to give them ample provocation first.
‘
Verlaine stopped walking.
A man appeared, armed much the same as those on the veranda. He ambled from the trees and came towards Verlaine as if he possessed all the time in the world.
‘
Verlaine nodded.
‘What is it you want here?’ the man asked, his accent thick, his tone threatening.
‘I came to see Mister Feraud,’ Verlaine said.
‘You did, eh?’ the man said, and smiled. He turned towards the veranda. His attention seemed to be held for a moment, and then he turned once again to Verlaine.
‘He asks you to come?’
Verlaine shook his head.
‘So he is not here
Verlaine shrugged. ‘If he’s not here I’ll come back another time.’
The man nodded and looked down. He appeared to be considering his options.
Verlaine opened his mouth to thank the man but he had already turned and started walking towards the house. Verlaine watched as he reached the veranda, shared some words with another man by the door, and then passed inside.
He seemed to be gone for an eternity while Verlaine stood on the driveway with a dozen eyes watching him intently. He wanted to turn and run.
Eventually the man returned. He again spoke to one of the men by the door, and then he raised his hand.
‘
Daddy Always Feraud was as Louisiana as they came. A lined and weathered face, creases like ravines running from his eyes, his mouth, the edge of each nostril. His eyes were like washed-out riverbed stones, almost transparent, piercing and haunted. He sat in a deep blue leather armchair, his legs crossed, in his right hand a cigarette. He wore a cream three-piece suit, and held in his left hand a panama hat which he waved every once in a while to cool himself. His hair was fine silver, combed neatly back, but for one unruly spike that protruded from the crown where he had leaned against the chair. He watched Verlaine as he walked towards him from the doorway of the room. His eyes were distant and yet possessive of an expression that said he’d seen too much for too long to let anything slide by. Bruised light filtered through ceiling-high windows graced with the finest organdy curtains. The old man did not speak, and at each shoulder stood two other men, as still as cigar-store Indians, men that could only have been his sons.
Verlaine stopped three or four yards from Feraud. He nodded his head somewhat deferentially. Feraud said a word that Verlaine did not hear and someone appeared with a chair. Verlaine sat without question, cleared his throat, and opened his mouth to speak.
Feraud raised his hand and Verlaine fell silent.
‘There is always a price to pay,’ the old man said, his voice ›rumbling from his throat and filling the room. ‘You have come to ask me for something, I imagine, but I must tell you that the principle of exchange holds court in my kingdom. If there is something you wish from me, then you must give me something in return.’
Verlaine nodded. He was aware of the rules.
‘Someone was found dead in the trunk of a car,’ Feraud said matter-of-factly. ‘You believe there is something I might know about this and you have come to ask me.’
Verlaine nodded once again. He did not question how Feraud knew who he was or why he had come.
‘And what makes you think that I might know something of such a thing?’ Feraud asked.
‘Because I know who you are, and because I know enough to realize there is nothing that escapes your attention,’ Verlaine said.
Feraud frowned, raised his right hand and took a draw from his cigarette. He did not exhale through his mouth but allowed the smoke to creep in thin tendrils from each nostril and obscure his face for a second. He wafted the brim of his panama hat and the smoke hurried away revealing his face once more.
‘I received a message,’ Verlaine said.
‘A message?’
‘It was simply one word: Always.’
The old man smiled. ‘Seems the whole world believes I have something to do with everything,’ he said.
