James Burke - Crusader's Cross

She walked ahead of me into the bedroom and let down the blinds, a look of determination on her face, as though she had set aside the counsel of others for reasons she would probably never share with anyone. Then she did something I had never seen a woman do in my life – she made the sign of the cross on my person, as though I were incapable of doing it myself, touching my forehead, my breastbone, and each of my shoulders. Then she undressed with her back to me, lay down on the bed, and waited.

The hail clattered on the roof and in the trees, and the attic fan drew the breeze across the sheets and rattled the metal blinds. I heard the phone ring and lightning crash in City Park and someone blowing a car horn in the rain, but I could not think about anything except Molly Boyle's hair spread out like points of fire on the pillow, and the rise and fall of her breasts, and the grace and invitation of her thighs, and the heated whisper of my name, over and over, in my own ear.

Clete had not been doing well since the shooting death of Bob Cobb. He blamed himself and his own reckless attitudes for bringing Bad Texas Bob back to the fishing camp, putting both of us in harm's way and ultimately causing me to take on the burden of Bob Cobb's exit from the world.

But Clete was not at fault. Cobb was evil and long ago should have been rejected by the system for the pathological creature he was. I told Clete these things, but they seemed to do him no good. He tried to get out of his melancholy mood by smacking the heavy bag at Red Lorille's Gym in Lafayette, clanking iron, and staying in the steam room until he looked like a boiled crab.

Sometimes I believed an incident in the present acted as a catalyst that took him back to Vietnam. But I never could be sure. Clete seldom spoke of Vietnam, even with me, dismissing his experience there as an aberration not worth resurrecting. I knew better, though. Even when we were patrolmen together, he'd fall into the thousand-yard stare, then snap out of it and tell me he couldn't sleep because his wife was hooking up with an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder, Colorado, and was probably going to dump him for love beads and Rocky Mountain weed.

Clete felt he had let me down. I tried to dissuade him by telling him his own attitude was arrogant, that he wasn't the controller and centerpiece of other people's lives. His reply was, "Leave the church-basement psychobabble at home, Streak." Clete had many faults, but a lack of devotion to his friends was not among them.

So on Saturday morning I took my troubles to my best friend at his cottage at the motor court and told him about everything that had happened in the last week – particularly my encounter at the television studio with Val Chalons and my experience with Molly Boyle the previous evening. The rain had stopped in the predawn hours, and the morning was bright and cool, the trees dripping behind the cottage. Clete sat outside in a metal chair, dressed in a strap undershirt and oversized scarlet boxing trunks, shining a bagful of shoes. I thought he would react histrionically to the story I told him, but he kept his attention fixed on the shoes he was softly brushing, his face never changing expression.

When I finished, he set down the shoes and looked at them. "You got it on with a nun?"

"I wouldn't put it in those terms," I replied.

His eyes lifted into mine. "But you were in the sack with a Catholic nun?"

"She never took vows."

"People don't make those kinds of distinctions, big mon."

"I was going to get loaded. She knew it. So she got in my way."

His eyes were unblinking, the scar through one eyebrow and across the top of his nose like a flattened pink worm. "You want advice?"

"I don't know. What is it?"

"Get a lot of gone between you and this situation."

"Maybe I don't want to."

"I'm stunned," he said. And for first time that morning he grinned.

He went into the cottage and showered and changed clothes. Out on the Teche a barge heaped with glistening piles of mud dredged from the middle of the bayou was being towed downstream, then a speedboat passed, towing water-skiers who sent waves up into the trees along the bank. Clete came back outside combing his hair, dressed in sharkskin slacks, oxblood loafers with tassels, and a starched sports shirt printed with flowers, the sleeves folded up in one neat turn on each of his huge biceps.

"Let's talk about this guy Lou Kale. You told Chalons it was Kale who called your house and tried to warn you off the Ida Durbin disappearance?"

"More or less."

"How'd you know it was Kale?"

"The guy who called me talked like a pimp. But I wasn't sure it was Kale until I saw Val Chalons's reaction to the name."

"And you got the feeling Ida Durbin was alive?"

"Yep."

"This is the way I see it. Somebody hired Bad Texas Bob to leave both of us dead in my fish camp. That's known as a violation of the Eleventh Commandment, which is, don't screw with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Time to get back on the full-tilt boogie, noble mon. Y'all got a fix on Kale's cell phone?"

"It bounced off a tower down in the Keys."

"Hmmm," Clete said. "One way or another, all this stuff is connected to organized prostitution. Doing anything today?"

Jackson Square, across from the Café du Monde, is a fine place to be on Saturday afternoon, as is the rest of the French Quarter. It's a transitional time of day, caught between the tropical freshness of morning when families are exiting St. Louis Cathedral and sidewalk artists are setting up their easels, and the coming of twilight and the tourists and revelers on Bourbon Street, who in their mind's eye probably see themselves as aloof visitors at the Baths of Caracalla – in control, faintly amused by its pernicious influences.

The truth is that during times of high pedestrian traffic the Quarter is a safe place, its vice illusory, designed to titillate conventioneers from Omaha. The Quarter has always been a cash cow the city is not about to give over to jackrollers, crack dealers, Murphy artists, and indiscreet hookers. But after two in the morning, the glad-at-heart are gone, the nightclub and sidewalk bands have packed up, and the streetlamps seem coated with an iniquitous chemical vapor.

If you're really swacked, and without friends to care for you, you will in all probability have experiences you will not want to take with you into the daylight hours. A black pimp may step out of an alley and catch you by the sleeve, his face split with a lascivious grin, his breath as rife as a garbage can. A cabbie with a hooker in the back of his vehicle may pull to the curb and ask if he can help you find a motel room out on Airline Highway. A gang of kids coming out of Louis Armstrong Park may make you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

Before leaving New Iberia I tried to reach Molly, but her machine had been turned off. When Clete and I got to New Orleans, I called again and this time she answered. I told her I would probably not be back home until late Sunday afternoon.

"Where are you now?" she said.

"In Jackson Square, trying to get a lead on the man I had to shoot," I replied.

The line was quiet and I could tell Molly's mind was on something else. "Do you feel any regret about last night?" she said.

"Are you serious?" I said.

"Sometimes people think differently in the morning than they do at night."

"Can I see you tomorrow evening?" I said.

"Yes," she replied. Then she said it again. "Yes, we'll go somewhere. We'll take a boat ride maybe. We'll do something good together, won't we? I really want to see you, Dave."

After I closed my cell phone, I sat down on a bench in the square and listened to a street band knock out "The Yellow Dog Blues" while a juggler tossed wood balls in the air and an old man clutching a black umbrella peddled a unicycle in a circle. But the real song I heard were Molly Boyle's words through the cell phone, like an urgent whisper in the ear.