Daniel Blake - City of Sins

From the dining room upstairs came voices, giddy and shrill with relief. Patrese climbed slime-slippery steps and looked around the room. Two dozen people, he reckoned: the quick ones, the lucky ones.

Katie wasn’t among them.

It could have been very romantic. Private room in one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, hard on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Just the two of them: him handsome in a swarthy, weathered way, not quite yet ruined by the years; she with skin the color of barely milked coffee under an orange-and-black madras headdress. They wouldn’t have been young lovers, that was for sure, but it was anyone’s guess as to exactly how old they were: they weren’t the kind of people to keep their original birth certificates. The best estimates put her somewhere in her late fifties and him half a decade older. Whatever the truth, they weren’t saying.

It could have been very romantic, were it not for the four men who stood outside the private room – two of them hers, two his, all of them armed – and were it not also for the FBI surveillance van which sat at the far end of the parking lot, listening in through the microphone attached to the underside of the wine bucket. The Bureau had guessed the room would be swept for listening devices before the diners arrived, but not after that. They’d guessed right. Now all the listeners needed was something incriminating; something they could hear and, even better, something they could record. These were two big fish, and the Bureau desperately wanted to net them.

The male fish was Balthazar Ortiz, a senior member of Mexico’s Los Zetas drug syndicate. Los Zetas were somewhere between a faction of the Gulf Cartel and a private army of their own. The organization was full of former Mexican special forces soldiers like Ortiz, and they were ruthlessly good at what they did. Los Zetas had sprung two dozen of their comrades from jail somewhere in Mexico a couple of months back; they’d killed the new police chief of Nuevo Laredo six hours after he’d taken office.

And she was Marie Laveau, one of the kingpins – queen-pins? – of the New Orleans underworld. In particular, she was Queen of the Lower Ninth, a hardscrabble district perched at the corner where the Mississippi met the Industrial Canal. The Lower Ninth, uneasy by day and terrifying by night, reeked of poverty and drugs. It was overwhelmingly black, of course; that went without saying, that was just the way it was in this city.

The original Marie Laveau had lived in New Orleans in the nineteenth century, and had styled herself the Voodoo Queen. A hairdresser by trade, she’d also claimed to be an oracle, an exorcist, a priestess, and much more. For every known fact about her life, there were a hundred myths. So too with this one, the current Marie Laveau. She claimed to be not just a descendant of the original but the very reincarnation of her. She also styled herself the Voodoo Queen, but with the proviso that the spirit of the Voodoo Queen was immortal; she was only the temporary guardian of it.

Marie gestured across the shimmering darkness of the water. In the distance, headlights slid along the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the twin-span interstate bridge which connected the city to the north side of the lake.

‘The second Marie Laveau – daughter of the original – she was conducting a ceremony on the lake when a storm came up. Swept her out into the middle of the lake. She stayed in the water five days. When they found her, she didn’t even have exposure.’

Ortiz nodded. ‘Shall we get to business?’

Marie sighed, as if his lack of interest in small talk was somehow discourteous. ‘If you like.’

‘Now, I don’t know how you did it before, with my, er, predecessor …’

‘Just like we’re doing it now.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘Round about this time, every year. See how the arrangement’s gone the past twelve months, see how we want it to go for the next twelve.’

‘OK. And the arrangement; how is it for you?’

‘The arrangement’s not the problem.’

‘Then what is the problem?’

‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘You. You’re the problem.’

The folds of Marie’s green kaftan seemed to shift and rearrange themselves, and suddenly she was holding a Magnum Baby Eagle pistol with an extended barrel to accommodate the suppressor on its end.

Ortiz just about had time to look astonished before Marie shot him straight through the heart.

Patrese stayed in Khao Lak for three weeks after the tsunami. Every day of those three weeks, from before dawn to after dark, he worked with a frenzy born of knowing one sure thing: that once he stopped, he’d never start again.

He helped carry corpses – one of them Katie’s – to warehouses stacked to the ceiling with coffins, body bags and cadavers. He helped dig through rubble with his bare hands, dragging bodies out into the open and off for whatever dignified burial their families could give them. He helped pin photographs of the lost and missing on walls; he listened to the impotent bewilderments of each newly arrived wave of relatives. He helped pile debris into trucks, and helped drive those trucks to landfill sites. He helped aid workers hand out food, helped doctors distribute medicines, helped hammer up walls and roofs for makeshift shelters.

He helped everyone but himself, knowing that he could wait.

And at the end of those three weeks, he suddenly knew it was time to go. There were more people helping with the reconstruction than were strictly needed, and they were beginning to get in each other’s way. Hardened professional aid workers were scorning fresh-faced Western volunteers as ‘disaster tourists’; locals were chafing at soldiers who ordered them around.

The night before Patrese left, he was taken to see Panupong Wattana. Wattana was five foot two on a good day, always immaculately turned out in what seemed an endless rota of lightweight suits, and he’d been around Khao Lak pretty much every day since the tsunami: giving interviews to the world’s media, glad-handing those unfortunate souls who’d lost everything, and generally strutting around like some latter-day Napoleon. As far as Patrese could make out, Wattana was a hybrid of politician and businessman. Clearly, the two roles were seen as complementary, even indivisible. Equally clearly, the concept of a conflict of interest was a very remote one round these parts.

‘The great Stakhanovite!’ Wattana exclaimed, clasping Patrese’s hand in both of his own. ‘I have heard much about you; the American who works like a Soviet!’

Patrese mumbled something noncommittal about just doing his bit.

‘Come, come, Mr Patrese. You are too modest, and we all know it. I just want to thank you on behalf of the people of Khao Lak, of Takua Pa district, of Phang Nga province, of Thailand itself …’

Patrese half-wondered whether Wattana was going to keep on, rather as Patrese himself had addressed envelopes when a child: name, street, city, country, earth, galaxy, universe.

‘…and to tell you that if you ever need anything in America, three of my sons are there, and I’ve instructed them specifically to do anything you ask.’

‘Where are they based?’ Patrese asked, more out of politeness than a genuine desire to know.

‘Johnny’s in Baltimore. Tony, New Orleans. Mikey, San Diego.’

Johnny, Tony, Mikey – damn, Patrese thought, they sound more Italian than I do.

‘Well, I’m in Pittsburgh, but if I ever go visit any of those places, I’ll be sure to look them up.’

The Bureau might not have caught Marie discussing anything concrete about her drugs business – the ‘arrangement’ she’d spoken about could have meant anything – but they’d got something better: audio evidence of a murder. The cough of the suppressed pistol hadn’t been loud enough to carry outside the room, so neither Marie’s bodyguards nor Ortiz’ had heard; but it was clearly audible on the surveillance tape.