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“You got class, Joe.”

Joe was proud. Actually, Sbisa was a bit over his budget, but his cousin Tony worked here. All his cousins were waiters. In New Orleans the waiting profession was hereditary. Tony had done some time for spousal abuse, but the sentence had been drastically reduced when fifty waiters had shown up in court to testify to his good character.

“Like a bird,” he repeated, looking with regret at the shrimp diablo à deux.

“Actually, birds eat all the time. Who were those naked men, anyway?” She sipped some more champagne. “The preacher isn't here. You can tell me the rest of it.”

“They gave the names Fabricius something and Cleo something. Just cruising for a good time, and bam. There's a lot of that these days. We pick 'em up stuck in daisy chains, with bottles up … excuse me. This is not dinner chat.”

“Gay bashing,” said Felicity.

Joe had no sympathy with political correctness. “We call 'em queers where I come from. They go fishing with worms, they catch gators sometimes.”

“Surely you don't think homosexuality is unnatural,” she teased.

“Afraid I do. Men and women were built for something specific.”

“Yeah. Consuming shrimp diablo à deux.”

“This Kashmir Birani case … is it a good-paying job?” Joe enquired, changing the subject.

Felicity sensed again that there was a deeply serious man behind the surface of pretty-boy cop. “Not really. I think my uncle hired me out of pity. I've been doing nothing but domestic bullshit since I hung up my shingle.”

Joe was watching her mouth. No shrimp had yet passed that plump red lower lip. The upper quivered slightly. A kiss, thought Joe, will make it stop.

“You follow people, right?” he said.

“Sometimes they follow me.” She lifted a forkful of diablo, then set it back down. Her tongue briefly probed her upper lip. The crease above was narrow but distinct. Miles used to say, “The angel that put his finger there was one skinny motherfucker.”

“I'd follow you,” said Joe, with an expression of greedy interest.

“What if I told you I was gay?”

“I would say, no way.”

“You think it's curable?”

“Don't believe in it. Two holes don't make a whole, if you'll pardon me.”

“So what do you call lesbians, Joe?”

“Doughnut slappers.” He grinned.

“I'll have to remember that one,” Felicity said acidly. “What if I told you that I was black?”

Her compulsive honesty again. Felicity wondered if relentless honesty was a disease. Perhaps she ought to avail herself again of one of the many kinds of pills that had adjusted her not so long ago. But they hadn't been specific enough. What she needed was a pill to curb honesty. A pill to make a date go smoothly. A pill to make her hungry. A pill to make her ignore blatant unfairness.

Joe looked her over carefully.

“I'd say my interest is doubled.”

“You don't believe in same-sex love but you're all for interracial dating.”

“Something like that.”

Felicity would have liked to dislike Joe, but she couldn't. She was ashamed for having accepted this date only because she wanted the Kashmir Birani file. It was dishonest. Not only was she compulsively honest; dishonesty made her ill. She decided to level with Joe.

“Joe, I only came on this date to get the Birani file. I'm telling you this so that you can hate me now, instead of later. I've been having a tough time lately.”

To her surprise, Joe was not upset. He reached over and touched her hand. It was a warm, friendly gesture. “Everybody's having a tough time these days. Something is going on in this city. You can tell me whatever you want. I don't have any evil designs.… Well, maybe one.”

Felicity laughed but felt like crying. She found herself telling Joe the story of Miles, her boyfriend, killed by the mean city.

Joe listened very carefully. He'd worked Vice undercover and was familiar with a lot of characters. The musicians' milieu was well known to him. He'd listened to some great music in the city's clubs while stalking one dealer or another. When Felicity finished describing the horrible night after they'd come home from Tipitina's and Miles had taken his final shot, Joe reached across the table and took Felicity's hand again.

“I used to work Vice. I know the dealers. You want me to find the scumbag who sold him the shit?”

Oh, no, thought Felicity, liking the feel of his wide, rough palm over her fingers; I hope he doesn't tell me. She had decided not to pursue the likely purveyors of Miles's bad heroin—she was afraid that a lot of good musicians might be implicated. What was the use? They made beautiful music, but they had sad hearts and made mistakes as large as their lives.

“You worked Vice undercover? Then how come you're a patrolman, Joe? Did you fuck up?”

Joe didn't smile. He had been assigned to undercover on a trial basis and had done an excellent job. Then he'd found out that in Vice he was expected to keep his mouth shut and protect some very bad people. But he couldn't do it. If he did, he could never look at his mother again, or face his parish priest. So he'd gone back to patrol. It meant that he probably couldn't afford someone like Felicity. So be it.

“Do you know a guy named Bamajan?” Felicity asked, hoping to change the subject back to Kashmir.

“Dealer to musicians. A trumpet player. Did your boyfriend know him?”

“They were buddies.”

“Maybe that's your man. He sold him a hot shot.”

Now I have another fucking job. Thanks a lot, Felicity thought unhappily. Was Miles's pal the same Bamajan involved in the disappearance of the Indian TV star? If Bamajan really meant “announcer of God,” she suspected that it was a generic name for adepts of yet another weird cult. New Orleans was full of them. Some cults were just covers for drug dealing. She knew that Miles's Bamajan was now a street musician, playing for tourists on the riverfront. This Bamajan was just a junky, one of a million pulsing veins in the night.

“I don't think I want to know,” she said softly. “It doesn't change anything.”

Joe patted her hand. “I think I understand. If it was me, though, the motherfucker would be dog food. The city is full of scum like that.”

“And you'd like to clean it up, right? Remember the law, Joe?”

Joe grinned. Asking a New Orleans cop to remember the law was like asking a nun to give head. Joe wasn't dirty himself, but he knew his colleagues were less than clean. New Orleans cops had been busted for murder, rape, drug dealing, battery, insurance scams, shakedowns, and myriad smaller offenses. The department was a sea of lawlessness.

Felicity got even more depressed thinking that this nice guy, this regular Joe, might be dirtier than the floor at the Acme Oyster House, where they threw the shells at their feet.

“Do you ever read them their rights before you blow them away, Joe?”

“I'm a religious man, sister. I read them the last rites in every case.”

It was a joke, but she wasn't amused. She suspected that if she had to choose, she'd feel safer with the Bamajans than the NOPD. It was a screwy city in a screwy country in a screwy time, and dangerous as shit. Felicity had once counted up her dead or dysfunctional friends. Seventeen dead, six of those gunshot victims, eight suicides, and three had crashed drunk in their cars. That left out those who'd tried starving themselves to death, had killed one or both their parents, or who were permanently addicted to one thing or another.

“What's the matter? Did I offend you?”

“I don't know, Joe. Let me ask you a silly question. You ever think about America? I don't mean, like, do you vote, or do we have the best of everything, or any of that. I mean, honestly, up from the street. What do you think goes on?”

Even as she said these things, Felicity blushed for their banality. But Joe was not put off. Quite the contrary. He often thought about things like that.

“It's Rome,” he said, “in the last days. Our society is falling apart from the inside because we've lost our faith in God. It's a battle between good and evil, and all the prophecies are going to come true.”

“Jeezus, Joe. You don't really believe that crap.”

“Crap?” Joe was offended. “You some kind of secular humanist?”

“You could say so. One time in college I went to hear a lecture about America's great destiny, or some such. The speaker was this racist from something called the Identity Church. ‘America,' he screamed, ‘is waiting for the white Jesus!' Then he raised one arm in a Hitler salute and crossed himself with the other. Ever since, whenever anyone says that they are waiting for Jesus or the End Times or something, I see this weasely motherfucker with the
‘Sieg heil'
and the cross. In fact, whenever someone says, ‘I'm waiting for someone,' even if it's just the plumber, I picture this ‘someone' as a fucking Nazi. You follow me, Joe?”

Joe did. He'd refused to be part of groups like that, though he'd been invited many times. Everyone from the KKK to the American Nazi Party to Amway had tried to recruit him. He'd turned them down, not necessarily because he disagreed with some of their points but because he was an old-fashioned Christian. His mother had taught him not to boast about his faith. Humility was a virtue. Joe was embarrassed by the shouters and the screamers. But how to explain this to Felicity?

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“More bubbles, please.” She couldn't seem to get drunk.

What the hell was wrong with her, anyway? She couldn't even enjoy an uncomplicated date without being turned off by something that offended her sense of right and wrong. Joe was a good guy. She remembered something her friend Ben Redman had said years before when she said she believed that most people were good.

“‘Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, honorable men,'” Ben quoted Shakespeare in response. Ben was the only human being on the planet with whom she could discuss matters of principle. They had also discussed the minutiae of their psyches and the changes wrought on them by the drugs they were being prescribed; they cautioned and urged each other at the approach of delusions; they questioned reality, never leaving well enough alone.

“Let's talk about movies.” Joe had watched the darkening of her mood and was beginning to doubt the success of the evening.

“Haven't seen any lately. But the world's pretty bad. Wonder who directed it,” said Felicity. Her own life seemed like a movie just then. She was watching, but not very well. There was something provisional about her life, as if she had borrowed it from someone else. It allowed her to do anything and everything, but from a distance, like a movie.

Felicity asked him to take her home.

Chapter Ten

Wherein we hear stories told by the guest scholars at Saint Hildegard Hospice

“Turtle needed a job,” said Lama Cohen. “He had been lying around hibernating all winter, then spring came and he was starving. He went up to an old hermit who had lived in a cave without any food or water for about sixty years, and asked him if he had a job for him.

“‘Why,' said the hermit, ‘I have a job sitting. I don't eat or drink, and I never talk. Now you come up here, ask me for a job, and have me say all these words, which are going to exhaust me.' And the hermit got so depleted from speaking that he died.

“The turtle was astonished. I just killed a man, he thought; maybe I should be a soldier. So he went to a rich raja who had a palace with towers that reached the clouds.

“‘I want to be a soldier,' he said. ‘I have endurance, and my shell is very hard.'

“The raja said, ‘These are peaceful times and I don't need any soldiers, but I have another job for you. I heard that holy men all over the mountains have been dying in their caves. One after another, after not eating, drinking, or speaking for many years, they suddenly fall over and die. It is well known that these hermits have treasures hidden in their caves. Your job is to go to the caves of the dead hermits, find their treasures, and carry them back to me on your strong, hard back.'

“So Turtle went to all the caves, and crawled over the dead hermits who turned to dust as soon as he touched them, and looked for treasure. He didn't find any. But the spirits of the dead hermits, who had been watching him search, were laughing. So when Turtle went back, they jumped on his back and rode with him to the raja's palace.

“And so it came to pass that the raja's palace became filled with the spirits of holy men. The raja himself died eventually, but because he was no holy man he became a servant spirit, who fetched food for the hermit spirits. Turtle remained alive because turtles live a long time, but also because the spirits needed him to carry them to a meeting of Great Minds. The word in the spirit world was that a Meeting of Minds that was going to decide the fate of the visible world was going to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States of America. They all wanted to go there, mostly for the meeting, but also for the local music, of which the spirits had heard great things.”

“A fox,” Professor Li began, “was caught in a trap by the great Confucius. She knew that Confucius would not kill her before they had a good philosophical discussion, so the fox stayed awake all night thinking of clever things to tell the great man. But in the morning Confucius didn't feel very well, so he told the fox that she was free to go, provided that she returned the next day for a philosophical discussion.

“The fox was very smart, and normally she would have taken off for the woods never to return, but the thought of a conversation with Confucius was just too irresistible.

“The next day she returned, and Confucius told her: ‘I am going to die in three days. One thousand years from now my spirit will be summoned to a great meeting. Please tell your children to tell their children to tell their children about this. After a thousand years have passed, one of your heirs will ferry my soul to the meeting. Until then, I have a piece of advice for you. Don't wait around for philosophical discussions. Choose freedom every time. Otherwise, as you can see, all you'll get is a job.'”