By this time the gumballs and the topless suntanners were racing for the street. Clete bounced out onto the backyard, strips of fabric flying from the stack and the driver's cage like medieval streamers. He lit a cigarette with his Zippo, fitted his porkpie hat down on his brow, then demolished the garages and the garden shed, dropped the bucket squarely on top of a new Chrysler, ripped a long slice out of the greenhouse, and plowed trenches bristling with severed pink roots where hedges had been.

The Romans at Carthage couldn't have done a more thorough job.

Then he got down from the machine and strolled across the flattened fence at the back of the property toward his automobile, his hands in his pockets, gazing at the white chop out on the lake. Geysers of water from broken pipes in the yard were fountaining in the sunlight, glistening on the grass, blowing in the cool air like an unloosed rainbow.

After I heard from both Ben Motley and Lucinda Bergeron, I got an unexpected call.

'What do you want, Nate?' I said.

'Guess.'

'You got me.'

'You'd better tell that crazy sonofabitch to come in.'

'Tell him yourself.'

'Great suggestion. Except when we showed up at his apartment with a warrant last night, he climbed out the window and went across the rooftops. You're mixed up in this, Robicheaux. Don't pretend you're not.'

'I'm not.'

'You know how I can always tell when a drunk is lying? His lips are moving.'

'What else can I do for you this morning?'

'Tell that fat fuck you call a friend that he comes in or he gets no guarantees out on the street. You got my drift?'

'This must bother you, Nate.'

'What?' he said.

'Turning on your own people, taking it on your knees from the mob, doing grunt work for Max Calucci after he tried to have you whacked out.'

I could hear him breathing in the receiver, could almost smell the heat and nicotine coming through the perforations.

'Listen to me very carefully,' he said. 'The insurance adjuster estimates that Fuckhead did around a half million dollars' damage to that house. State Farm is not the Mafia, Robicheaux. They're corporate citizens, and they get seriously pissed and make lots of trouble when they have to pay out five hundred thousand large because a lunatic thinks he can wipe his shit on the furniture.'

'I'll pass on your remarks. Thanks for calling.'

'You never listen, do you? If I learn you have contact with Purcel and you don't report it, I'm charging you with aiding and abetting and being an accomplice after the fact.'

'Your problem isn't with me or Clete, Nate. When you took juice from the wise guys, you mortgaged your butt all the way to the grave,' I said, and hung up.

I went to the rest room and rinsed my face. I let the water run a long time. I even rinsed my ear where I had held the telephone receiver. Then I cupped a handful of water on the back of my neck and dried my skin with a handful of paper towels.

'You run the four-minute mile or something?' another detective said.

'That's right,' I said, and looked at him in the mirror.

'Who kicked on your burner?' he said.

Ten minutes later, my phone rang again.

'The wrong kind of people are looking for you,' I said. Through the receiver I could hear seagulls squeaking in the background.

'You heard about it?' Clete said.

'What do you think?'

'It'll cool down. It always does.'

'Baxter's got no bottom. He'll take you out, Clete.'

'You shouldn't try to cut deals with the greasebags on behalf of your old podjo.'

'Do you have a death wish? Is that the problem?'

'You want to go fishing? If the wind drops, I'm going after some specs in a couple of hours.'

'Fishing?'

'Yeah.'

I propped my forehead on my fingers and stared into space.

'You need any money?' I said.

'Not right now.'

'Why'd you do it, Clete? Baxter says the insurance company wants to hang you out to dry.'

'Who cares? They shouldn't do business with a bucket of shit like Max Calucci. You've had your shield too long, Streak. You're starting to think like an administrator.'

'What's that mean?'

'You think you or Motley or Lucinda Bergeron were ever going to get a search warrant on Max and Bobo? With Nate Baxter on their pad?'

'You were tossing the place with an earthmover?'

'So it was a little heavy-handed. But dig this. Just before I gutted Max's den, I emptied everything out of his desk into a garbage bag. I also took his Rolodex and all the videocassettes off the shelves. One of these videos is a documentary about this primitive Indian tribe down in South America. Before the missionaries got to them, these guys were known as the worst human beings on earth. They shrank heads and sawed people into parts; sometimes they'd boil them alive. They'd even kill their own children.'

'Go on.'

'They'd also cut the hearts out of their victims. What's Max doing with a tape like that? The mob's into anthropology?'

'You've queered it as evidence.'

'Nobody else cares, Dave. Except for you and Motley and Lucinda, everybody in New Orleans is happy these black pukes could find new roles as organ donors. History lesson, big mon. When they talk law and order, they mean Wyatt Earp leaving hair on the walls.'

Across the street, a black kid was flying a blood red kite high against a shimmering blue sky.

The information requests that I had made about a possible suspect named Schwert were answered, at first, in a trickle, in increments, unspecifically, as though we were pursuing a shadow that had cast itself over other cases and files without ever becoming a solid presence.

Then the computer printouts, the faxes, and the phone calls began to increase in volume, from the FBI, the NCIC, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and finally Interpol.

The sheriff looked down at the clutter of paper on my desk.

'Where'd you get your filing system? It looks like Fibber McGee's closet,' he said. He glanced up at my face. 'Sorry, that's one of those generational jokes, I guess.'

'The first time the name William Schwert shows up is in some phone taps the FBI and ATF had on some neo-Nazis in Idaho during the mideighties,' I said. 'Then ATF found it in the pocket of a guy who blew his face off while he was building a bomb in his basement in Portland.'

'Yeah, I think I remember that. He and some other guys were going to dynamite a synagogue?'

'That's right.'

'Schwert was involved?'

'No one's sure.'

The sheriff tilted his head quizzically.

'In a half dozen cases it's like he's standing just on the edge of the picture but he doesn't leave footprints,' I said.

The sheriff sniffed and blew his nose in a Kleenex.

'It doesn't sound like this is helping us a lot,' he said.

'It gets more interesting. The guy named Schwert seems to spend a lot of time overseas. Interpol has been tracking him for fifteen years. Berlin, London, Madrid, any place there're skinheads, Nazis, or Falangists.'

The light in the sheriff's eyes sharpened. He began poking in the papers on my desk.

'Where is it?' he said.

'What?'

'The Interpol jacket. The mug shots.'

'There aren't any. Nobody's nailed him.'

'This isn't taking us anywhere, Dave. It looks like what you've got here is more smoke. We don't even know if Schwert is Buchalter.'

'Interpol says a guy named Willie Schwert broke out of an asylum for the criminally insane in Melbourne, Australia, seventeen years ago. He tore the window bars out of a maximum security unit with his bare hands.'

'Then where's the sheet?'