James Burke: Heaven’s Prisoners

It was hot and bright the next morning when I cut the engine off Southwest Pass and splashed the anchor overboard. The waves slapped under the bow as I put on my flippers and air tank, which I had refilled earlier in the morning. I hitched on a weight belt, went over the side, and swam down in a stream of bubbles to the wreck, which still lay upside down on the sloping edge of the trench. The water was a cloudy green from the rains, but I could see detail within a foot of my face mask. I came down on the tail section and worked my way forward toward the cabin. The hole that had gushed black smoke across the sky was jagged and sharp under my hands. The metal was twisted outward, in the same way that an artillery round would exit from iron plate.

All the doors were open forward, and the cabin was picked clean. At least almost. The torn pink shirt of the tattooed man undulated gently against the floor in the groundswell. One of the cloth loops was caught in the floor fastening for the safety strap harness. I jerked the shirt loose, wadded it into a tight ball, and swam back up to the yellow-green light on the surface.

I had long ago learned to be thankful for small favors. I had also learned not to be impetuous or careless with their use. I laid the shirt out on the deck and weighted the sleeves and collar and tails with fishing sinkers. It didn't take long for the shirt to dry in the wind and against the hot boards of the deck; the cloth was stiff and salty to the touch.

I found a plastic minnow bag in my tackle box, took the shirt back to the pilothouse out of the wind, and began cutting away the pockets with my single-blade Puma knife, which had the edge of a barber's razor. I picked out a pencil stub, tobacco grains, sodden kitchen matches, a small comb, strings of lint, and finally a swizzle stick.

A wooden swizzle stick in a tiny sanitary wrapper. A swizzle stick that I knew had letters printed on it because the purple ink had run into the paper wrapper like a smeared kiss.

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON the next day when I parked my pickup truck on Decatur Street by Jackson Square in New Orleans. I had coffee and beignets in the Café du Monde, then walked on into the square and sat on an iron bench under the banana trees not far from St. Louis Cathedral. It was still a little early to find the girl who I hoped would be in Smiling Jack's, so I sat in the warm shade and watched the Negro street musicians playing their bottleneck guitars in the lee of the church, and the sidewalk artists sketching portraits of tourists in Pirates Alley. I had always loved the French Quarter. Many people in New Orleans complained that it was filled with winos, burnt-out dopers, hookers, black street hustlers, and sexual degenerates. What they said was true, but I didn't care. The Quarter had always been like that. Jean Lafitte and his gang of cutthroats had operated out of old New Orleans and so had James Bowie, who was an illegal slave trader when he wasn't slicing people apart with his murderous knife. Actually, I thought the hookers and drunks, the thieves and pimps probably had more precedent and claim to the Quarter than the rest of us did.

The old Creole buildings and narrow streets never changed. Palm fronds and banana trees hung over the stone walls and iron gates of the courtyards; it was always shady under the scrolled colonnades that extended over the sidewalks, and the small grocery stores with their wood-bladed fans always smelled of cheese, sausage, ground coffee, and crates of peaches and plums. The brick of the buildings was worn and cool and smooth to the touch, the flagstones in the alleys troughed and etched from the rainwater that sluiced off the roofs and balconies overhead. Sometimes you looked through the scrolled iron door of a brick walkway and saw a courtyard in the interior of a building ablaze with sunlight and purple wisteria and climbing yellow roses, and when the wind was right you could smell the river, the damp brick walls, a fountain dripping into a stagnant well, the sour odor of spilled wine, the ivy that rooted in the mortar like the claws of a lizard, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, and a green garden of spearmint erupting against a sunlit stucco wall.

The shadows were growing longer in Jackson Square. I looked again at the swizzle stick I had found in the dead man's shirt pocket. The smears of purple dye on it did not look like much now, but that morning a friend of mine at the university in Lafayette had put it under an infrared microscope that was a technological miracle. It could lighten and darken both the wood and the dye, and as my friend shifted the grain in and out of focus we could identify eight of twelve letters printed on the stick: SM LI G J KS.

Why would people who went to the trouble of removing a body from a submerged plane and lying about it to the press (successfully, too) be so careless as to leave behind the dead man's shirt for a bait salesman to find? Easy answer. People who lie, run games, manipulate, and steal usually do so because they don't have the brains and forethought to pull it off otherwise. The Watergate burglars were not nickel-and-dime second-story creeps. These were guys who had worked for the CIA and FBI. They got nailed because they taped back the spring lock on an office door by wrapping the tape horizontally around the lock rather than vertically. A minimum-wage security guard saw the tape and removed it but didn't report it. One of the burglars came back and taped the door open a second time. The security guard made his rounds again and saw the fresh tape and called the D.C. police. The burglars were still in the building when the police arrived.

I walked through the cooling streets to Bourbon, which was now starting to fill with tourists. Families from Grand Rapids looked through the half-opened doors of the strip joints and the bars that advertised female wrestling and French orgies, their faces scrubbed and smiling and iridescent in the late-afternoon light. They were as innocent in their oblique fascination with the lascivious as the crowds of college boys with their paper beer cups who laughed at the burlesque spielers and street crazies and knew that they themselves would never be subject to time and death; or maybe they were even as innocent as the businessman from Meridian, who walked with grinning detachment and ease past the flashes of thighs and breasts through those opened doors, but who would wake trembling and sick tomorrow in a motel off the old Airline Highway, his empty wallet floating in the toilet, his nocturnal memories a tangle of vipers that made sweat pop out on his forehead.

Smiling Jack's was on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse. If Robin Gaddis was still stripping there, and still feeding all the dragons that had lived inside her since she was a little girl, she'd be at the bar for her first vodka collins by six o'clock, do some whites on the half-shell at six-thirty, and an hour later get serious with some black speed and shift up to the full-tilt boogie. I had taken her to a couple of AA meetings with me, but she'd said it wasn't for her. I guessed she was one of those who had no bottom. In the years I had known her she had been jailed dozens of times by vice, stabbed through the thigh by a John, and had her jaw broken with an ice mallet by one of her husbands. One time when I was over at the social welfare agency I pulled her family file, a three-generation case history that was a study in institutional failure and human inadequacy. She had grown up in the public housing project by St. Louis Cemetery, the daughter of a half-wit mother and an alcoholic father who used to wrap the urine soaked sheets around her head when she wet the bed. Now, in her adulthood, she had managed to move a half-mile away from the place of her birth.

But she wasn't at the bar. In fact, Smiling Jack's was almost empty. The mirrored runway behind the bar was darkened; the musical instruments of the three-piece band sat unattended in the small pit at the end of the runway; and in the empty gloom a turning strobe light overhead made a revolving shotgun pattern of darkness and light that could be equaled only by seasickness. I asked the bartender if she would be in. He was perhaps thirty and wore hillbilly sideburns, a black fedora, and a black T-shirt with the faces of the Three Stooges embossed whitely on the front.