The Price of Blood (15 page)

B
ROKER TOOK A SHOWER, CHANGED THE DRESSING on his thumb, and swallowed two Tylenol. Leery of using too many antibiotics, he’d left them behind in Minnesota.

The rain had stopped and now a sweet, warm June breeze teased in through the open windows and balcony door. Nina’d laid out sheets for him on the couch so he draped a sheet toga-fashion around his waist and shoulders and scanned her one-bedroom digs.

The refrigerator held a barky-looking bottle of V-8 juice, some yogurt with expired labels, and three cans of Vernor’s ginger ale. He opened one of the cans and roamed her space. The books on her desk had titles that suggested she had been taking graduate studies in business administration. No television set. No stereo. No magazines and no houseplants. Like she hung herself in the closet like a bat.

A scalloped, varnished wooden edge that protruded from between two textbooks caught his eye. He pulled it out. A plaque. A trophy statuette holding a pistol was affixed in gilt relief. And the inscription:

Captain Nina Pryce, U.S. Army
45 Caliber Pistol, Second Place,
50 Yard Slow Fire
National Inter-Service Match
1992. Camp Perry, Ohio.

Reverently, Broker, who barely kept his police qualification at twenty-five yards with his Beretta, tucked the award back between the books. Outshoot her with a rifle, he told himself.

The only personal touch on her desk were two framed photos. One was of her mother, father, and herself standing in what looked like Georgia pines when she was about seven. The other showed Ray Pryce and Broker himself, sitting on some baked paddy dike wearing olive drab that was busted out with sweat fade. And that foreign red dirt.

Broker picked up the picture and scanned the husky freckled man with the bluff features and sandy red hair. The guy who did everything by the book—
I put twenty years of insulation between us, Ray
. He lit a cigarette and studied Ray Pryce’s face through what seemed like twenty feet of plate glass.

They had not been friends in the strict sense. Too much of an age difference.

Nina came out of her bedroom in an extra-large olive drab T-shirt with black jump wings stenciled on it. The hem swept her thighs like a Spartan chiton. She opened the windows wider and turned on a fan. “The smoke, sorry.”

“What happened to your brother?” he asked, returning the picture to the desk.

“Yuppie puke lawyer in Atlanta.”

Broker hitched up his sheet and took the rest of his butt out on the small balcony. Nina fished another Vernor’s from the icebox and joined him.

The wind combed through her short hair as she pushed off the railing and turned to him. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Shoot.”

“You have any gremlins that will make going back to Vietnam a problem?”

Broker laughed. But he lit another cigarette off the smoldering butt of the one he had going. “You see
Platoon
?”

“Everybody did, and
Apocalypse Now
and
Full Metal Jacket
.”

“You see me in any of them?”

“What’s your point?”

“Your ideas about Nam come from Hollywood. Hell, my ideas about Desert Storm come from CNN. Anyway, I missed the rock-and-roll drug opera. I had pure Greek tragedy at the end.”

“Let me put it another way. You thought pretty highly of LaPorte once; and my dad, Tuna, Trin. The way you talked about them, that summer I stayed with you…it’s like you still couldn’t believe what happened.”

“No hang-ups, Nina. Nothing that will get in the way,” Broker said emphatically.

Tenacity and tact debated in her eyes and she proposed carefully, “Maybe we should both go to New Orleans.”

Broker shook his head. “We have too much ground to cover.”

Seeing that he was adamant, she switched the subject. “What about the gold maybe buried out in the jungle? You get any interesting vibes off that? Like it coming between us and you maybe slitting my throat?”

“Do you?”

She hugged herself. “Scares me. Excites me. But I don’t think so.”

“What about ‘Tempts you’?” he asked.

“Not my style, Broker. And I never figured you for the money type.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right.” She touched his cheek lightly. “And we’re not the stay at home, cozy type either. The soaps weren’t invented for us. Or diapers. No patience for the little things. Sound familiar…” Her voice trailed a hint of sadness.

She moved behind him and the immediate silence balanced precariously and became charged. Through the budding trees Broker watched traffic curl on a freeway. Her fingers trolled his bare shoulders. Gently kneaded the muscle.

“We’re fixers,” she said. “We sit around waiting for something bad to happen so we can jump in.” Her warm breath was scented with Colgate and trailed softly across his neck. “Doesn’t mean we don’t get lonely.”

The moment reared, strong enough to topple them off the balcony and into each other’s arms.

“Nina, when I met you, you were wearing braces.”

“I’m not your little sister. I’m probably the only woman who could put up with you. Better than that bitch you married.”

Broker stood up and propped himself against the railing a safe distance away. He looked up. Ann Arbor made a glitter dome of freeway traffic. Rows of fast-food signs stole the heavens.

He changed the subject. “LaPorte was one of the great ones out there, like John Vann and Tim Randall.”

In a flat voice, she said, “People change.”

“And you’re right. I still have trouble believing he made a wrong turn. Or your dad.”

She turned away. “Their whole generation did, yours too.” She faced him and stood up straight and her voice chiseled away her fugue of hormones. “Now it’s up to my generation to square it.”

She wasn’t talking about generations. She was talking about herself. Broker flipped his cigarette past her in an arc of sparks that briefly scouted her profile. Was it a warrior-virgin he saw in those taut, pure features? Could that be the source of her strength?

An hour later he was asleep on the couch and awoke suddenly to find her sitting over him, watching him. She turned on the lamp and he saw a stealthy shadow of intimacy peek from behind her crinkled eyes.

She leaned over and kissed him on the lips, a chaste kiss on the surface, but a little way down he felt the jolt of quiet longing.

“You’re not like a lot of guys, but you really don’t know anything about women, do you?” She winced fondly and rose and went away without finishing the thought.

B
ROKER HAS STEPPED ACROSS THE ORIGIN OF
Mississippi where it trickles out of Lake Itasca and now, from five thousand feet, he sees the other end of the river drape a sluggish coil around Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans squeezes between the lake and the river like a dark sponge soaking up the downhill poison of a continent. Farther out, the Gulf horizon stews in a muddy ultramarine haze that nurses the energy of sharks and hurricanes
.

A place where it never freezes can never be clean
.

The Northwest flight bumped down its flaps and the wheels jerked for terra firma. Broker sat back and gripped the armrests. Getting older, he had discovered, meant worrying that the Rodneys of the world were overrepresented in the machinist union that serviced jet engines.

While the other passengers deplaned he took some Tylenol. The infection in his thumb smacked festered lips, anticipating the heat and a bumper crop of germs.

He had a thousand dollars in his pocket, room reservations for the night in a French Quarter hotel, and a gold 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.

“Fuck you,” said Broker. He eyed the cocaine pathology squirming in the punk’s sinuses and in his dilated pupils. The current American nightmare—armed, popcorn tough, ready to blow at a moment’s notice, and not much underneath to back it up after he’d touched off a magazine of nine millimeter. “Go announce me.”

He stared the punk down. The punk went.

Broker looked around. He didn’t know much about real money. So he didn’t really register the magnitude of the furnishings and art objects and the Persian carpets strewn all around him. He knew that the air became smoother, taking a subtle bounce along the pigment of paintings and the scarred volcanic faces of pre-Columbian art. He rubbed the sweaty stubble on his chin and felt like a Goth who’d slipped into Rome. And planned to be back with a lot of his pals.

The punk returned wearing an obsequious sneer and yanked his head for Broker to follow him. He was admitted to a spacious room with high ceilings and walls festooned with trophies and mementos. The room took up the right rear corner of the house. The foliage from the oak tree on the lawn shaded the windows that over-looked the wedding party.

The general would be with him in a moment and would he like a refreshment.

Broker ran his eyes over the decor and said, “Rum.” Then he eased into an upholstered leather chair that faced a heavy carved teak desk elevated on a two-step dais so that the man sitting behind the desk could look down on his visitors.

An elderly black man in a shiny black suitcoat and trousers, with a bulbous hearing aid growing in his left ear and his back bent by scoliosis, or the pressure of place, shuffled in. Eyes downcast, he carried a tray on which sat a bottle of rum, a glass, and a decanter of ice cubes. His tempo was geared to the listlessly turning ceiling fans, which slowly stirred the languid air. Time definitely slowed down here. Broker wondered if there was a plan to turn it back.

He poured a shot of rum and lit a Spirit and squirmed slightly in the studded leather upholstery. His thumb throbbed and sweat itched on his chin. The room made his bones glow like an X-ray machine.

It had never occurred to him that he could
have
things. He’d accepted the fact that the most he could hope for was to
do
things.

Three of the walls held the bric-a-brac of the stillborn greatness of LaPorte’s life. Broker perused the athletic, academic, and military mementos. There was the glass case with eight rows of combat decorations, including two Distinguished Service Crosses and five Silver Stars. There were pictures of LaPorte with William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams.

Another wall was an abattoir of trophy antlers and skulls mounted in the European style. The configuration of the horns was exotic to Broker’s Northwoods eyes. Things that died in Africa and Asia.

The last wall was a true museum, hung with plantation implements arranged in an almost votive pattern around an imposing, larger-than-life, full-length portrait.

Broker recognized the set of that intense furrowed brow and gimlet eyes staring down from the oil. The thin slash mouth and the stingy lips projected a cold Creole profile of power.

Royale LaPorte, a hero of the Battle of New Orleans, was portrayed in a gentleman’s ruffled shirt and a brocaded greatcoat. His left sleeve was empty and pinned to the shoulder. His right hand was inserted in his lapel, Napoleon fashion, and the buckled shoe on his stockinged right foot rested on a globe of the world.

Broker raised his glass to the painting and drank his shot of rum. He set the glass aside and continued his inspection. Directly underneath the painting a shiny braided bullwhip coiled on a wooden peg. Below the whip, its filigree all but melted by time from the steel, squatted a square antique safe. The safe took a key. The keyhole was nicked and bright from use.

French doors made up the fourth wall and opened out onto the gallery that overlooked the swimming pool. Broker’s eyes drifted back to the desk. Not one cubic inch of off-white computer plastic in the whole damn place. The phone was a 1940s ashtray style, obstinate black ceramic and heavy enough to crack a coconut. So LaPorte, like Broker, was still a wood-and-steel kind of guy.

An energetic beam of minty aftershave cut the bouillabaisse air.

“Broker. It’s been a long time, son.”

The voice was a generous muddy baritone, vigorous and amused. Broker turned his head and his skin prickled. Gen. Cyrus LaPorte ambled into the room with the alien grace and vigor of a six-foot-tall, two-legged spider.