James Burke - A Morning for Flamingos

"I don't control everything here."

"He saved my life out on the salt. I didn't see any DEA guys out there."

"I'm sorry about it, Dave. I'm a federal employee. I'm one guy among several in this office. You need to understand that."

"I think it's a rotten fucking way to treat somebody."

"Maybe it is."

"I think that's a facile answer, too."

"I can't do anything about it."

"Tell your office mates Clete has more integrity in the parings of his fingernails than a lot of federal agents have in their whole careers."

"Drop by and tell them yourself. I'm not up to a harangue tonight. It's always easy to throw baboon shit through the fan when somebody else has to clean it up. We'll pick up the girl in the morning, and we'll get the tape recorder to you at your doctor's office. Good night, Dave."

He hung up the receiver, and I could hear the pinball machine pinging through the plywood wall of the phone booth. Outside the window, the mist and blowing rain looked like cotton candy in the pink glow of the neon bar sign.

The next morning was bright and clear, and I went to the doctor's office off Jefferson Avenue and had the stitches snipped out of my head and mouth. When I touched the scar tissue above my right eyebrow, the skin around my eye twitched involuntarily. I opened my mouth and worked my jaw several times, touching the rubbery stiffness where the stitches had been removed.

"How does it feel?" the doctor asked. He was a thick-bodied, good-natured man who wore his sleeves rolled up on his big arms.

"Good."

"You heal beautifully, Mr. Robicheaux. But it looks like you've acquired quite a bit of scar tissue over the years. Maybe you should consider giving it up for Lent."

"That's a good idea, Doctor."

"You were lucky on this one. I think if you'd spent another hour or so in the water, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"I think you're right. Well, thank you for your time."

"You bet. Stay out of hospitals."

I went outside into the sunlight and walked toward my truck, which was parked under an oak tree. A man in khaki clothes with a land surveyor's plumb bob on his belt was leaning against my fender, eating a sandwich out of a paper bag.

"How about a lift up to the park?" he asked.

"Who are you?"

"I have a little item here for you. Are you going to give me a ride?"

"Hop in," I said, and we drove up a side street toward Audubon Park and stopped in front of an enormous Victorian house with a wraparound gallery. Out in the park, under the heavy drift of leaves from the oaks, college kids from Tulane and Loyola were playing touch football. The man reached down into the bottom of his lunch sack and removed a miniaturized tape recorder inside a sealed plastic bag. He was thin and wore rimless glasses and work boots, and he had a deep tan and liver spots on his hands.

"It's light and it's flat," he said. He reached back in the sack and took out a roll of adhesive tape. "You can carry it in a coat pocket, or you can tape it anywhere on your body where it feels comfortable. It's quiet and dependable, and it activates with this little button here. Actually, it's a very nice little piece of engineering. When you wear it, try to be natural, try to forget it's on your person. Trust it. It'll pick up whatever it needs to. Don't feel that you have to 'point' it at somebody. That's when a guy invites problems."

"Okay."

"Each cassette has sixty minutes' recording time on it. If you run out of tape and your situation doesn't allow you to change cassettes, don't worry about it. Never overextend yourself, never feel that you have to record more than the situation will allow you. If they don't get dirty on the tape one time, it'll happen the next time. Don't think of yourself as a controller."

"You seem pretty good at this."

"It beats being a shoe salesman, I guess. You have any questions?"

"How many undercover people have been caught with one of these?"

"Believe it or not, it doesn't happen very often. We put taps on telephone lines, bugs in homes and offices, we wire up informants inside the mob, and they still hang themselves. They're not very smart people."

"Tony C. is."

"Yeah, but he's crazy, too."

"That's where you're wrong, partner. The only reason guys like us think he's crazy is because he doesn't behave like the others. Mistake."

"Maybe so. But you'd better talk to Minos. He got some stuff on Cardo from the V.A. this morning. Our man was locked up with the wet brains for a while."

"He's a speed freak."

"Yeah, maybe because of his last few months' service in Vietnam."

"What about it?"

"Talk to Minos," he said, got out of the truck, and looked back at me through the window. "Good luck on this. Remember what I said. Get what you can and let the devil take the rest."

Then he crossed the street and walked through the park toward St. Charles, his attention already focused on the college kids playing football by the lake. The streetcar clattered loudly down the tracks in front of the Tulane campus across the avenue. I went to a small grocery store a few blocks down St. Charles, where the owner provided tables inside for working people to eat their lunch at, and called Minos at his office to see if he had relocated Kim in a safe house. I also wanted to know what he had learned about Tony's history in Vietnam, besides the fact that as an addict Tony had been locked up in a psychiatric unit rather than treated for addiction.

Minos wasn't in. But in a few hours I was to learn Tony's story on my own, almost as though he had sawed a piece of forgotten memory out of my own experience and thrust it into my unwilling hands.

I took Bootsie to lunch at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant on Dauphine before I drove back out to Tony's. She looked wonderful in her white suit, black heels, and lavender blouse, and I think perhaps she had the best posture I had ever seen in a woman. She sat perfectly straight in her chair while she sipped from her wineglass or ate small bites of her seafood enchilada, her chin tilted slightly upward, her face composed and soft.

But it was too crowded for us to talk well, and I was beset with questions that I did not know how to frame or ask. I guess my biggest concern about Bootsie was a selfish one. I wanted her to be just as she had been in the summer of 1957. I didn't want to accept the fact that she had married into the Mafia, that she was business partners with the Giacano family, that financial concern was of such great importance in her life that she would not extricate herself from the Giacanos.

For some reason it was as though she had betrayed me, or betrayed the youth and innocence I'd unfairly demanded she be the vessel of. What an irony, I thought: I'd killed off a large portion of my adult life with alcohol, driven away my first wife, delivered my second wife, Annie, into a nightmare world of drugs and psychotic killers, and had become a professional Judas who was no longer sure himself to whom he owed his loyalties. But I was still willing to tie Bootsie to the moralist's rack.

"What's bothering you?" she asked.

"What if we just give it all up? Your vending machine business, your connection with those clowns, my fooling around with the lowlifes and the crazoids. We just eighty-six it all and go back to New Iberia."

"It's a thought, isn't it?"

"I mean it, Boots. You only get one time on the planet. Why spend any more of it confirming yesterday's mistakes?"

"I have to tell you something."

"What?"

"Not here. Can we be together later tonight?"

"Yeah, sure, but tell me what, Boots?"

"Later," she said. "Can you come for supper at the house?"

"I think I can."

"You think?"

"I'm trying to tie some things up."