WITH REGULARITY POLITICIANS TALK about what they call the war against drugs. I have the sense few of them know anything about it. But the person who suffers the attrition for the drug trade is real, with the same soft marmalade-like system of lungs and heart and viscera inherited from a fish as the rest of us.

In this case her name was Ruby Gravano and she lived in a low-rent hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, between Lee Circle and Canal, not far from the French Quarter. The narrow front entrance was framed by bare lightbulbs, like the entrance to a 1920s movie theater. But quaint similarities ended there. The interior was superheated and breathless, unlighted except for the glare from the airshaft at the end of the hallways. For some reason the walls had been painted firehouse red with black trim, and now, in the semi-darkness, they had the dirty glow of a dying furnace.

Ruby Gravano sat in a stuffed chair surrounded by the litter of her life: splayed tabloid magazines, pizza cartons, used Kleenex, a coffee cup with a dead roach inside, a half-constructed model of a spaceship that had been stuck back in the box and stepped on.

Ruby Gravano's hair was long and black and made her thin face and body look fuller than they were. She wore shorts that were too big for her and exposed her underwear, and foundation on her thighs and forearms, and false fingernails and false eyelashes and a bruise like a fresh tattoo on her left cheek.

"Dave won't jam you up on this, Ruby. We just want a string that'll lead back to these two guys. They're bad dudes, not the kind you want in your life, not the kind you want other girls to get mixed up with. You can help a lot of people here," Clete said.

"We did them in a motel on Airline Highway. They had a pickup truck with a shell on it. Full of guns and camping gear and shit. They smelled like mosquito repellent. They always wore their hats. I've seen hogs eat with better table manners. They're Johns. What else you want to know?" she said.

"Why'd you think they might be cops?" I asked.

"Who else carries mug shots around?"

"Beg your pardon?" I said.

"The guy I did, he was undressing and he finds these two mug shots in his shirt pocket. So he burns them in an ashtray and that's when his friend says something about capping two brothers."

"Wait a minute. You were all in the same room?" Clete said.

"They didn't want to pay for two rooms. Besides, they wanted to trade off. Connie does splits, but I wouldn't go along. One of those creeps is sickening enough. Why don't you bug Connie about this stuff?"

"Because she blew town," Clete said.

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her wrist. "Look, I'm not feeling too good. Y'all got what you need?" she said.

"Did they use a credit card to pay for the room?" I asked.

"It's a trick pad. My manager pays the owner. Look, believe it or not, I got another life besides this shit. How about it?"

She tried to look boldly into my face, but her eyes broke and she picked up the crushed model of a spaceship from its box on the floor and held it in her lap and studied it resentfully.

"Who hit you, Ruby?" I asked.

"A guy."

"You have a kid?"

"A little boy. He's nine. I bought him this, but it got rough in here last night."

"These cops, duffers, whatever they were, they had to have names," I said.

"Not real ones."

"What do you mean?"

"The one who burned the pictures, the other guy called him Harpo. I go, 'Like that guy in old TV movies who's a dummy and is always honking a horn?' The guy called Harpo goes, 'That's right, darlin', and right now I'm gonna honk your horn.'"

She tried to fit the plastic parts of the model back together. Her right cheek was pinched while she tried to focus, and the bruise on it knotted together like a cluster of blue grapes. "I can't fix this. I should have put it up in the closet. He's coming over with my aunt," she said. She pushed hard on a plastic part and it slid sharply across the back of her hand.

"How old a man was Harpo?" I asked.

"Like sixty, when they start acting like they're your father and Robert Redford at the same time. He has hair all over his back… I got to go to the bathroom. I'm gonna be in there a while. Look, you want to stay, maybe you can fix this. It's been a deeply fucked-up day."

"Where'd you buy it?" I asked.

"K amp;B's. Or maybe at the Jackson Brewery, you know, that mall that used to be the Jax brewery… No, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Brewery." She bit a hangnail.

Clete and I drove to a K amp;B drugstore up St. Charles. It was raining, and the wind blew the mist out of the trees that arched over the streetcar tracks. The green-and-purple neon on the drugstore looked like scrolled candy in the rain.

"Harpo was the name of the cop who took Cool Breeze Broussard's wife away from him," I said.

"That was twenty years ago. It can't be the same guy, can it?"

"No, it's unlikely."

"I think all these people deserve each other, Streak."

"So why are we buying a toy for Ruby Gravano's son?"

"I seldom take my own advice. Sound like anybody else you know, big mon?"

ON WEDNESDAY I DROVE a cruiser down the old bayou road toward Jeanerette and Lila Terrebonne's home. As I neared the enormous lawn and the oak-lined driveway, I saw the production crew at work on the set that had been constructed to look like the quarters on a corporation farm, and I kept driving south, toward Franklin and the place where my father and I had discovered a crucifixion.

Why?

Maybe because the past is never really dead, at least not as long as you deny its existence. Maybe because I knew that somehow the death of Cisco and Megan Flynn's father was about to come back into our lives.

The barn was still there, two hundred yards from the Teche, hemmed in by banana trees and blackberry bushes. The roof was cratered with a huge hole, the walls leaning in on themselves, the red paint nothing more than thin strips that hadn't yet been weathered away by wind and sun.

I walked through the blackberry bushes to the north side of the barn. The nail holes were sealed over with dust from the cane fields and water expansion in the wood, but I could still feel their edges with the tips of my fingers and, in my mind's eye, see the outline of the man whose tormented face and broken body and blood-creased brow greeted my father and me on that fiery dawn in 1956.

No grass grew around the area where Jack Flynn died. (But there was no sunlight there, I told myself, only green flies buzzing in the shade, and the earth was hardpan and probably poisoned by herbicides that had been spilled on the ground.) Wild rain trees, bursting with bloodred flowers, stood in the field, and the blackberries on the bushes were fat and moist with their own juices when I touched them. I wondered at the degree of innocence that allowed us to think of Golgotha as an incident trapped inside history. I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief and unbuttoned my shirt and stepped out of the shade into the wind, but it brought no relief from the heat.

I drove back up the bayou to the Terrebonne home and turned into the brick drive and parked by the carriage house. Lila was ebullient, her milky green eyes free of any remorse or memory of pulling a gun in a bar and being handcuffed to a bed in Iberia General Hospital. But like all people who are driven by a self-centered fear, she talked constantly, controlling the environment around her with words, filling in any silent space that might allow someone to ask the wrong question.

Her father, Archer Terrebonne, was another matter. He had the same eyes as his daughter, and the same white-gold hair, but there was no lack of confidence in either his laconic speech or the way he folded his arms across his narrow chest while he held a glass of shaved ice and bourbon and sliced oranges. In fact, his money gave him the kind of confidence that overrode any unpleasant reflection he might see in a mirror or the eyes of others. When you dealt with Archer Terrebonne, you simply accepted the fact that his gaze was too direct and personal, his skin too pale for the season, his mouth too red, his presence too close, as though there were a chemical defect in his physiology that he wore as an ornament and imposed upon others.