"Just give me some money and get me to a train station or airport," she said.

"You're not hearing me. It takes guts to be a whore or a pimp. I'm proud of what I am. We were born on the hard road, Ida. Them cops out there couldn't hack it. I'm not gonna let them push us around. I got us a way out."

"How?" she said.

"I called this big plantation man over in Louisiana. I used to chop bait on his old man's boat when I was a kid. He's got money with the Giacanos, but he's not like the Giacanos. His name is Raphael Chalons. He's a classy guy and those Vice roaches know it. One thing, though?"

"What?"

"The Giacanos got long memories. As long as we stay under Mr. Raphael's protection, we're gonna be okay. But you owe money and so do I. In the life, that's the dog collar around your neck. It don't go away easy."

"You?" she said.

"I owe every sports book in Houston and New Orleans. People like us all got some kind of Jones. That how come we're pimps and whores. Who wants to be normal, anyway? It's a drag."

He thought he had both reassured her and lightened her mood.

"Lou?"

"What?"

"You're not gonna try to hurt Jimmie Robicheaux, are you?"

He stood up from the bed, screwing his fingers into his temples, a squealing sound leaking from his teeth.

During the next hour, Lou paced the floor, hyperventilating, drinking ice water, blowing out his breath as though he had pulled a freight car up a grade.

"Stop climbing the walls," she said.

"If this don't work, bucketloads of shit are going through the fan."

"Maybe we end here. Maybe our names are written in water and one day the water just dries up," she said.

"Don't say stuff like that. We're not living inside a country-and-western song."

"Come on, sit down," she said. She took him by the arm and guided him to the wood chair by the window. His arm was as hard as a log in her hands. He was chewing gum rapidly in one jaw, snapping it loudly, his throat cording with blue veins.

"I got a confession to make. I was gonna let them hang you out to dry," he said.

"But you didn't."

She pushed her fingers deep into his shoulders. His eyes closed briefly, then he surged to his feet, like a man who believed the Furies awaited him in his sleep.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Coming apart. I ain't up to this." He jammed a chair under the doorknob and shot himself up with enough heroin to blow the heart out of a draft horse, his mouth rictal when the rush took him.

That afternoon Ida heard the strangest conversation she had ever heard in her life, one that would always remain with her as a testimony to the efficacy of fear.

Another rainfront had swept across the wetlands, smudging out the woods and the fleet of mothballed ships rusting in the bay. She heard the engine of a powerful car coming up the road, then a black Cadillac driven by a Negro chauffeur turned into the yard, the hood steaming in the rain. A tall man got out of the back and walked quickly under an umbrella into the house, lifting his shined shoes out of the puddles like a stork. It was obvious the men drinking beer in the living room had not been expecting him. The rhythm of their conversation faltered, the loud laughter fading, then trailing into total silence. Through a space in the door, she saw them all rise as one from their chairs while the tall man folded his umbrella and hung the crook on a hat rack.

The tall man's cheeks were lean, his hair freshly clipped and as black as India ink, the press in his suit impeccable. He removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and read silently from it, then replaced it in his pocket. Lou Kale watched from the kitchen door, the China white he'd shot up singing in his blood, his face incapable of forming a definable expression. Oddly, Lou was the only person in the room the tall man acknowledged.

Then he said, "I understand there's a woman here by the name of Ida Durbin."

"Yes, sir, she's back yonder," the voice of Bob Cobb said.

"Why are you keeping her here?" the tall man said.

"She's just visiting, helping clean and such, Mr. Chalons," Cobb said.

"That's not my understanding," Raphael Chalons replied.

"I was gonna fix her lunch, but she didn't want -" Dale Bordelon began.

"Would you ask her to come out here, please?" Chalons said.

Ida heard a chair creak, then footsteps approaching the bedroom. She stepped back from the door just as Bordelon opened it. A smile was carved on his face, like a crooked gash in a muskmelon. "Mr. Chalons wants to know if everything is okay," he said. "We was telling him you can leave anytime you want."

He tried to hold her with his eyes and to force her to make his words hers. But she walked past him into the living room as though he were not there. The men who only moments earlier had been relaxed and confident about their place in the world were still standing, afraid to sit down without permission.

"You're Miss Ida?" Chalons asked.

"My name is Ida Durbin, yes, sir. It's nice to meet you," she replied.

"What happened to your face?" he asked.

She knew the most injurious response she could make would be none at all. She lowered her eyes and folded her arms on her chest. Inside the boom of thunder and the slap of rain against the window, she became a replica of the medieval martyr, abused and bound and waiting for the bundled twigs to be set ablaze at her feet.

"Do any of you gentlemen care to tell me what happened here?" Chalons said.

"Somebody got carried away. There's no good hat to put on it," Bob Cobb said.

"I won't abide this."

"Sir?" Bob Cobb said.

"I won't have a young woman held in captivity or beaten on my property," Chalons said, his eyes lighting in a way that made Bob Cobb blink. He mentioned the name of an infamous Cosa Nostra figure in New Orleans, a man who was literally given the state of Louisiana by Frank Costello and United States Senator Huey P. Long. "This woman and Lou Kale are going to leave with me today. You gentlemen can use the house through tonight. But by ten in the morning you'll be gone. I have no hard feelings against any of you. But you will not have use of this property again. Thank you for your courtesy in listening to me."

An hour later, Lou Kale and Ida Durbin were aboard Raphael Chalons's cabin cruiser, headed southwest through a squall toward the Florida coast, the waves bursting into ropes of foam on the bow. The cabin in which she slept that night vibrated with the reassuring throb of the engines, and when she woke in the early hours, unsure of where she was, she looked through a porthole and saw the sleek, steel-skin bodies of porpoises sliding through the water next to the boat. Their steadiness of purpose, the hardness of their bodies inside the waves, the fact they were on the same course as she, filled her with a sense of harmony and confidence and power.

Lou Kale slept in the bunk across from her. His sheet had fallen down over his hip, and his exposed arm and naked back and boylike face gave him an aura of vulnerability that she had never associated with the Lou Kale she had known on Post Office Street. She rose from her bunk and lifted the sheet carefully so as not to wake him and replaced it on his back, then looked again at the immensity and mystery of the night.

The Gulf was green and black, domed by a sky bursting with stars, so cold in their configurations they seemed to smoke like dry ice. She saw coconuts tumbling out of a wave, and an enormous sea turtle, its shell encrusted with barnacles, bobbing in a swell. A waterspout, its belly swollen with light, wobbled on the southern horizon, sucking thousands of gallons and hundreds of fish out of the waves into the clouds. She opened the porthole glass and felt the salt on her tongue, like the taste of iodine, and she knew she would not sleep again that night. She longed for the sunrise, to be up on deck, to eat breakfast in a breeze that contained the green heaviness of the ocean and the hint of islands banked with coconut palms. She longed to be a young girl and to fall in love with the world again.