James Sallis - Moth

“Okay. Thanks, guy. You see him again, and remember to, you call me?” I laid a ten-dollar bill and a business card on the table.

He picked up the bill, leaving the card. “I already got one of those from last time.”

I stood to leave, Doo-Wop to move back to the bar.

“Ask the Greek,” he said. “Guy did some work for him. Heard that, anyway.”

I got a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to him. He stuck it down in his shoe with the other bill.

“You come have a drink with me sometime when it ain’t business. I’ll buy,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

The Greek wasn’t Greek, but Puerto Rican. He was from a foreign country-New York-and wore the sort of bushy, untrimmed mustache often seen on Mediterranean males. His name was Salas, which upon his arrival in New Orleans had sounded to someone enough like the Greek surname Salus to earn the sobriquet he’d had ever since. He’d worked as maitre d’ for years at restaurants from Kolb’s to Upperline before a heart attack dropped him flat into a client’s swordfish steak with bearnaise at age twenty-nine. Coming out of the hospital, he’s simplified his life: got rid of most of what he owned, bought this place, a decaying, abandoned corner grocery store on Magazine with Spartan apartment above, and turned it into a neighborhood bar, a remarkably laid-back, low-key one, even for New Orleans. He served some of the best gumbo and sandwiches in town, if you didn’t mind waiting a while.

The weekend after papers were signed, an army of uncles, brothers and cousins had appeared from nowhere and set about shoring the place up. It was as though they converged on a derelict grocery store, swarmed briefly and stepped back from a bar; and not much had changed since. The beams and supports they’d fashioned from two-by-twos, still bare wood but now gone green with mildew and mold, still propped up corners and ceiling. Cracks in the plaster troweled over with little or no effort to match the color of new plaster to old now looked like skin grafts long since rejected.

Living in a third-floor apartment across the street at the time, with nothing much to do on weekends till seven o’clock rolled over and I allowed myself to begin the night’s drinking, I’d watched the whole thing. The Greek’s was on my parade route, the place I started and more often than not ended my nights. It was also one of the few bars in the city I’d never been thrown out of. There had been a name on the window at one point, but no one ever paid any attention to it, and when the name faded away, it was never replaced.

Carlos was sitting on a footstool behind the bar, one hand gently swirling ice around the bottom of what remained of a glass of lemonade, the other holding open a paperback book. I might have been gone twenty minutes, instead of twenty years.

Carlos wanted to know about me, so I gave him a two-minute version. I asked the same in return, and he shrugged and moved his head to indicate the bar.

“Get you a drink?”

“Not today, Carlos, I’m in a hurry. Let me come back when I have more time.”

He smiled and nodded, waiting for me to say what I’d come for.

I showed him the snapshot of Treadwell’s son. “He been around?”

“Last I heard, you’d quit doing detective work.”

“I have. This is more like a favor. You know him?”

“Teaching, I heard. Always thought that was something I’d be good at, if things had turned out a lot different.”

“The picture, Carlos.”

“He in trouble?”

“Not yet.”

“But he’s planning something.”

“I don’t know if he’s planning it or not, but he’s about to break an old man’s heart.”

“Old man?”

“His father.”

Carlos shook his head. “That’s bad. What can I tell you?”

“Where he’s staying would be a good start.”

“Couple weeks ago, he was staying with a guy named Tito, over on Baronne a block off Louisiana. I don’t know if he’s still there. Or the address, but it’s this huge blue monster, textured plaster, at the edge of an open lot. Tito’s place is upstairs on the left. There’s a separate staircase up to it.”

“This Tito a salesman?”

“So they say.”

“And a relative of yours, by any chance?”

“A cousin, as it happens. Tito’s never there in the afternoon. That would be a good time for you to drop by.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do.”

I thanked him and said I’d see him soon, looking at the clock over the bar as I left. Almost five. My seminar students had walked long since. But it was still afternoon, at least.

I caught a cab at Jackson Avenue, had the driver take me up St. Charles to Louisiana and got out there. Walked two blocks to Baronne. I saw the building as soon as I turned.

It was a shade of blue not found in the natural world. The texturing on its plaster sides reminded me of Maori masks. Two cars and a pickup truck were stacked up in the driveway alongside like planes waiting for takeoff clearance, but they’d been waiting a long time.

The railing at the top of the stairs was hung with towels and a washcloth, an orange cotton rug, a shirt on a hanger. I knocked at the screen door, waited a moment, then opened it and knocked on the glass of the door inside. When there was still no response, either from within or from curious neighbors, I pulled out an old plastic ID card I keep for this very purpose and slipped the lock.

The door opened directly into the kitchen. A quarter inch of leftover coffee baked to black tar on the bottom of its carafe. Grease half filled the gutters around the stove’s burners. The whole apartment smelled of cat, equal parts musk and pee, with the heady, sweet reek of marijuana beneath. Furnishings were minimal, cast-off clothes in abundance.

I found some Baggies of grass and crack stashed among provisions-mostly unopened jars of spices, sacks of flour, sugar and baking soda, and canned goods like corned-beef hash and stew-and put them back. I found a.38 under the cushion of one of the chairs in the living room and put that back too.

Off to one side was a windowless, odd-shaped little room of the sort often seen in these huge old places that have been chopped into apartments again and again. A mattress had been crammed into it. One corner was bent back like a dog-eared page where the room took a sudden turn; an edge lapped over the baseboard. A nylon athletic bag lying on the mattress had been used as a pillow. I opened it and found in a manila envelope stuffed with scraps and folds of paper an expired Washington driver’s license issued to Marcus Treadwell. Most of the rest was people’s names and addresses, with notations in a tiny, precise script, in what I presumed to be a code.

I stepped back into the living room and discovered that the.38 was no longer under the cushion. It was now in someone’s hand, and pointed at me.

“You must be Tito.”

He nodded.

“I’m a friend of Carlos.”

“Carlos don’t live here, man.”

“I know. I was just down at the bar talking to him. He thought you might be able to help me.”

“What you need help with?”

“I’m looking for something.”

“Just something for yourself? You don’t look like a user, man. And I don’t do wholesale, know what I mean?”

I shook my head. “Not drugs.”

“I’m willing to believe that.”

“The guy who’s been sleeping here.”

“What you want with that pile of shit?”

“Just to talk.”

“Yeah? Well, you find him, I want to talk to him too, but I won’t be talking long.”

“Guess you guys didn’t hit it off.”

“Hey, I thought he was okay, you know? Till I come home yesterday morning and find him with the back of the crapper off, going after my stash. I’d already moved it, but that don’t matter. But I guess he heard me coming, ‘cause he was out the window and gone in about half a second. Wouldn’t have thought the boy could move that fast.”