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"Take a walk with me, breathe the night air, this place is like the inside of an ashtray. Some nights I think somebody poured battery acid in my lungs," he said.
I walked outside with him. The sidewalks were filled with tourists and revelers drinking beer out of deep paper cups. Jimmie looked up and down the street, blew air out his nose, smoothed his mustache with one knuckle.
"You're using the names of local personalities now," he said.
"It stays with me, Jimmie. Nobody'll know where it came from."
"Anything I might know about this certain man is already public knowledge, so it probably won't do no good for me to be commenting on the issue here."
"There's no action around here that doesn't get pieced off to Julie one way or another. Why should procuring be any different?"
"Wrong. There's fifteen-year-old kids in the projects dealing rock, girls, guns, Mexican brown, crank, you name it, the Italians won't fool with it, it's too uncontrollable. You looking for a guy who kills hookers? It ain't Feet, lieutenant. The guy's got sub-zero feelings about people. I saw him wipe up a barroom in Algiers with three guys from the Giacano family who thought they could come on like wise-asses in front of their broads. He didn't even break a sweat. He even stopped stomping on one guy just so he could blow a long fart."
"Thanks for your time, Jimmie. Get in touch if you hear anything, all right?"
"What do I know? We're living in sick times. You want my opinion? Open up some prison colonies at the North Pole, where those penguins live. Get rid of the dirt bags, bring back some decency, before the whole city becomes a toilet." He rocked on the balls of his feet. His lips looked purple in the neon glow from the bar, his face an electric red, as though it were flaming from sunburn.
I gave him my business card. When I was down the block, under the marquee of a pornographic theater, and looked back at him, he was picking his teeth with it.
I HIT TWO BIKER BARS ACROSS THE RIVER IN ALGIERS, WHERE a few of the mamas hooked so their old men would have the money they needed to deal guns or dope. Why they allowed themselves to be used on that level was anybody's guess. But with some regularity they were chain-whipped, gang-raped, nailed through their hands to trees, and they usually came back for more until sometimes they were murdered and dumped in a swamp. One form of their sad, ongoing victimization probably makes about as much sense as another.
The ones who would talk to me all had the same odor, like sweaty leather, the warm female scent of unwashed hair, reefer smoke and nicotine, and engine grease rubbed into denim. But they had little knowledge or interest about anything outside of their t
ribal and atavistic world.
I found a mulatto pimp off Magazine who also ran a shooting gallery that specialized in black-tar heroin, which was selling at twenty-five dollars a hit and was back in fashion with adult addicts who didn't want to join the army of psychotic meltdowns produced by crack in the projects.
His name was Camel; he had one dead eye, like a colorless marble, and he wore a diamond clipped in one nostril and his hair shaved in ridges and dagger points. He peeled back the shell on a hard-boiled egg with his thumb at the sandwich counter of an old dilapidated grocery and package store with wood-bladed fans on the ceiling. His skin had the bright copper shine of a newly minted penny.
After he had listened to me for a while, he set his egg on a paper napkin and folded his long fingers reflectively.
"This is my neighborhood, place where all my friends live, and don't nobody here hurt my ladies," he said.
"I didn't say they did, Camel. I just want you to tell me if you've heard about anybody who might be recruiting out in the parishes. Maybe a guy who's seriously out of control."
"I don't get out of the neighborhood much no mo'. Age creeping up on me, I guess."
"It's been a hot day, partner. My tolerance for bullshit is way down. You're dealing Mexican skag for Julie Balboni, and you know everything that's going on in this town."
"What's that name again?"
I looked into his face for a long moment. He scraped at a bit of crust on the comer of his dead eye with his fingernail.
"You're a smart man, Camel. Tell me honestly, do you think you're going to jerk me around and I'm just going to disappear?"
He unscrewed the cap on a Tabasco bottle and began dotting drops of hot sauce on his egg.
"I heard stories about a white guy, they say a strange guy reg'lar peoples in the bidness don't like to fool with," he said.
"All right—"
"You're looking in the wrong place."
"What do you mean?"
"The guy don't live around here. He sets the girls up on the Airline Highway, in Jefferson Parish, puts one in charge, then comes back to town once in a while to check everything out."
"I see, a new kind of honor system. What are you trying to feed me, Camel?"
