A moment later I closed my office door behind us. His hair was as fine as white cornsilk, his lined mouth and purple lips like those of an old woman. When he sat down in front of my desk his attention seemed to become preoccupied with two black trusties mowing the lawn.

"Yes, sir?" I said.

"I've interposed myself in your situation. I hope you won't take offense," he said.

"Are we talking about the LaRoses?" I tried to smile when I said it.

"She's contrite about her behavior, even though I think she needs her rear end paddled. In lieu of that, however, I'm passing on an apology for her." The accent was soft, deep in the throat, west Texas perhaps. Then I remembered the biographical sketches, the pioneer family background, the inherited oil fortune, the academic scandals that he carried with him like tattered black flags.

"Karyn lied, Dr. Mason. With forethought and malicious intent. You don't get absolution by sending a surrogate to confession."

"That's damn well put. Will you walk with me into the parking lot?"

"No."

"Your feelings are your feelings, sir. I wouldn't intrude upon them." His gaze went out the window. He flipped the back of his hand at the air. "It never really changes, does it?"

"Sir?"

"The black men in prison clothes. Still working off their indenture to the white race."

"One of those guys molested his niece. The other one cut his wife's face with a string knife."

"Then they're a rough pair and probably got what's coming to them," he said, and rose from his chair by holding on to the edge of my desk.

I walked him to the back door of the building. When I opened the door the air was cool, and dust and paper were blowing in the parking lot. Karyn looked at us through the windshield of her car, her features muted inside her scarf and dark glasses. Clay Mason waved his Stetson at the clouds, the leaves spinning in the wind.

"Listen to it rumble, by God. It's a magic land. There's a thunder of calvary in every electric storm," he said.

I asked a deputy to walk Clay Mason the rest of the way.

"Don't be too hard on the LaRoses," Mason said as the deputy took his arm. "They put me in mind of Eurydice and Orpheus trying to flee the kingdom of the dead. Believe me, son, they could use a little compassion."

Keep your eye on this one, I thought.

Karyn leaned forward and started her car engine, wetting her mouth as she might a ripe cherry.

Helen Soileau walked into my office that afternoon, anger in her eyes.

"Pick up on my extension," she said.

"What's going on?"

"Mingo Bloomberg. Wally put him through to me by mistake."

I punched the lighted button and placed the receiver to my ear. "Where are you, Mingo?" I said.

"You got Short Boy Jerry to jam me up," he said.

"Wrong."

"Don't tell me that. The bondsman pulled my bail. I got that material witness beef in my face again." A streetcar clanged in the background, vibrated and squealed on the tracks.

"What do you want?" I said.

"Something to come in."

"Sorry."

"I don't like being made everybody's fuck."

"You let that girl drown. You're calling the wrong people for sympathy."

"She wanted some ribs. I went inside this colored joint in St. Martinville. I come back out and the car's gone."

I could hear him breathing in the silence.

"I delivered money to Buford LaRose's house," he said.

"How much?"

"How do I know? It was locked in a satchel. It was heavy, like it was full of phone books."

"If that's all you're offering, you're up Shit's Creek."

"The guy gonna be governor is taking juice from Jerry Ace, that don't make your berries tingle?"

"We don't monitor campaign contributions, Mingo. Call us when you're serious. Right now I'm busy," I said. I eased the receiver down in the cradle and looked at Helen, who was sitting with one haunch on the corner of my desk.

"You going to leave him out there?" she said.

"It's us or City Prison in New Orleans. I think he'll turn himself in to us, then try to get to our witnesses."

"I hope so. Yes, indeedy."

"What'd he say to you?"

"Oh, he and I will have a talk about it sometime." She opened a book that was on my desk. "Why you reading Greek mythology?"

"That fellow Clay Mason compared the LaRoses to Orpheus and Eurydice… They're characters out of Greek legend," I said. She flipped through several pages in the book, then looked at me again.

"Orpheus went down into the Underworld to free his dead wife. But he couldn't pull it off. Hades got both of them."

"Interesting stuff," she said. She popped the book closed, stood up, and tucked her short-sleeve white shirt into her gunbelt with her thumbs. "Bloomberg goes down for manslaughter, Dave, leaving the scene of a fatal accident, abduction, anything we can hang on him. No deals, no slack. He gets max time on this one."

"Why would it be otherwise?"

She leaned on the desk and stared directly into my face. Her upper arms were round and hard against the cuffs of her sleeves.

"Because you've got a board up your ass about Karyn LaRose," she said.

That night, in my dreams, Victor Charles crawled his way once again through a moonlit rice field, his black pajamas glued to his body, his triangular face as bony and hard as a serpent's. But even though he himself was covered with mud and human feces from the water, the lenses on the scope of his French rifle were capped and dry, the bolt action and breech oiled and wiped clean, the muzzle of the barrel wrapped with a condom taken off a dead GI. He was a very old soldier who had fought the Japanese, the British, German-speaking French Legionnaires, and now a new and improbable breed of neo-colonials, blue-collar kids drafted out of slums and rural shitholes that Victor Charles would not be able to identify with his conception of America.

He knew how to turn into a stick when flares popped over his head, snip through wire hung with tin cans that rang like cowbells, position himself deep in foliage to hide the muzzle flash, count the voices inside the stacked sandbags, wait for either the black or white face that flared wetly in a cigarette lighter's flame.

With luck he would always get at least two, perhaps three, before he withdrew backward into the brush, back along the same watery route that had brought him into our midst, like the serpent constricting its body back into its hole while its enemies thundered past it.

That's the way it went down, too. Victor Charles punched our ticket and disappeared across the rice field, which was now sliced by tracers and geysered by grenades. But in the morning we found his scoped, bolt-action rifle, with leather sling and cloth bandoliers, propped in the wire like a monument to his own denouement.

Even in my sleep I knew the dream was not about Vietnam.

The next day I called Angola and talked to an assistant warden. Aaron Crown was in an isolation unit, under twenty-three-hour lockdown. He had just been arraigned on two counts of murder.

"You're talking about first-degree murder? The man was attacked," I said.

"Stuffing somebody upside down in a barrel full of oil and clamping down the top isn't exactly the system's idea of self-defense," he replied.

I called Buford LaRose's campaign office in New Iberia and was told he was giving a speech to a convention of land developers in Baton Rouge at noon.

I took the four-lane into Lafayette, then caught I-10 across the Atchafalaya swamp. The cypress and willows were thick and pale green on each side of the elevated highway, the bays wrinkled with wind in the sunlight. Then the highway crossed through meadowland and woods full of palmettos, and up ahead I saw the Mississippi bridge and the outline of the capitol building and the adjacent hotel where Buford was speaking.