Page 40 of Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'What are you talking about gift and sword? Listen, you know why Tommy Lonighan wants that sub? Because I bother him. Everything I do bothers him. You know why I bother him? Because he's got a guilty conscience, like a big, black tumor always eating on his brain.'

'Over what?'

'He killed my little brother.'

'He did what?'

'He didn't bother to tell you that, huh? We grew up across the street from each other in the Channel. We were all playing in a homemade cart, you know, made out of crates and planks with some roller skates nailed on the bottom. Tommy wheeled my little brother out from behind a car right into an ice truck. To this day, that sonofabitch has never said he was sorry.'

'I didn't know that, Hippo.'

'Maybe there's some other stuff you don't know, either, Dave. Come in my office.'

'What for?'

'Because you don't like the way me and my friends do business. Because you think these shitheads should have their day in court. Indulge me, blow five minutes of your day.'

We went inside the stucco cottage he used as an office. He began clattering through a box of videocassette tapes. He took one out and read the taped label on it.

'Some friends of mine got this off a bunch of guys who were watching it for entertainment,' he said. 'In a cinder-block house, up in a piney woods, just north of Pascagoula. When my friends got finished with them, they weren't interested in watching old newsreels anymore. So they really didn't mind giving up their cassette.'

'Who are your friends?'

'Some guys who could be great baseball players, you know what I mean? Terrific guys with a bat.'

'You think it's a victory to become like the other side?'

'Dave, you're a laugh a minute. That's why I like you. You already ate lunch, didn't you? Because this film seems to fuck up people's appetite for some reason.'

He started the tape in the VCR under his television set. The video was composed of a series of newsreels, Nazi propaganda footage, and still photographs spliced together in a collage that was almost like watching distilled evil: the profiles of Jews being superimposed upon those of rats, Heinrich Himmler reviewing concentration camp inmates in striped uniforms behind barbed wire, columns of children with bundles, their faces distorted with terror, marching between rows of black-helmeted SS; and finally a scene that was the most cruel I had ever seen on film—nude Polish women, deep in a forest, their arms gathered over their breasts and pubic hair, lining up to be shot in the back of the neck and flung into an open trench.

'On your worst day in Vietnam, you ever see anything like that, Dave?'

'No.'

'It's back. On an international level. You don't buy it, do you?'

'Maybe. But it doesn't change anything with us, Hippo. I think my family and I are swimming into somebody else's field of fire. I think you're responsible, too.'

He looked down at his hands, which were folded between his thighs. He looked at them a long time.

'Hippo?'

His sleek, football-shaped face was morose when he looked back up at me.

'Who can plan how things turn out?' he said. 'What I do or don't do no longer matters. There're people, I'm talking about cretins like that pervert at your house, who believe you can find that sub. It's what they believe that counts, Dave.'

'Why's it important to them?'

'Why does a tumblebug like to roll in shit?'

'Cut the Little Orphan Annie routine, Hippo. I'm getting tired of it.'

'They like shrines.'

'Not good enough.'

'I don't want you killed. Forget about the sub. I'll find it on my own or I won't. Don't come around here anymore. I'm going to put out the word that you're a waste of time, you couldn't find your butt with both hands. Maybe they'll believe it.'

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