Creole Belle

by James Lee Burke

  “I’ll catch y’all later,” I said.

  Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child’s. “You don’t know how mad you can make people,” she said. “I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you’re a shit, Dave Robicheaux.”

  I got in the cruiser and drove down the two-lane toward Croix du Sud Plantation. In the rearview mirror, I saw Varina drop the flat tire in the trunk and throw the jack on top of it and slam the hatch, then stare down the road in my direction. If she and her father were acting, their performance had reached Oscar-level standards.

  A BLACK MAID wearing a gray uniform and a frilled white apron let me in and went to fetch Alexis Dupree while I stood in the foyer. When he emerged from the back of the house, he was squinting, as though he didn’t quite recognize me.

  “I’m Dave Robicheaux from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied. “How could I forget? Are you here about my grandson?”

  “Yes, sir, I understand he was assaulted in a restaurant in New Orleans. He left the scene without giving any information to the New Orleans police.”

  “If I recall, your last visit here wasn’t a very pleasant one, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t always remember things with great clarity. What was the issue?”

  “I called my daughter a pet name. You thought I used the word ‘Waffen.’”

  “Pierre left the restaurant in New Orleans to get medical care. In regard to his not reporting the matter, any involvement with the New Orleans Police Department is a complete waste of time.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “He’s sleeping. He was beaten badly.”

  I waited for Alexis Dupree to ask me to leave, but he didn’t. This was my third encounter with him. On each occasion I had felt as though I were speaking to a different individual. He was the patrician and the veteran of the French Resistance whose mind hovered on the edges of senility; the irascible victim of the Holocaust; the avuncular patriarch whose bones were weightless as a bird’s. Or perhaps the problem lay in my perception. Perhaps Alexis Dupree was just old, and I should not have been surprised by his mercurial behavior.

  “I’m having a glass of lemon and tea in the library. Sit with me,” he said.

  Without waiting, he walked into an oak-paneled study furnished with a big wood desk and tan leather chairs and a liquor cabinet. Against the far wall, by the French doors, was a stand with a large Oxford dictionary on it. On the walls was a collection of photographs that had been taken all over the world: an indoor-cycling racetrack in Paris, the canals of Venice at night, the Great Wall of China, a decayed Crusader castle on the edges of a desert, Italian soldiers marching through a destroyed village, ostrich plumes stuck in the bands of their campaign hats. One photograph in particular caught my eye. In it, a dozen men and women who looked like partisans were facing the camera. They wore trousers and berets and bandoliers stuffed with large brass cartridges. Their weapons seemed to be a mix of Mausers and Lee-Enfields and Lewis guns. Behind them was a chalklike bluff, grooved by erosion, and on top of it, buildings pocked from shellfire. The photograph was inscribed “To Alexis” and signed by Robert Capa.

  “You knew Capa?” I asked.

  “We were friends,” Dupree said. “That photo was taken in the front lines outside Madrid, just before the city fell. But I met Robert much later, after World War Two. I worked for both British and American intelligence. Robert stepped on a mine in Indochina in 1954.” He gestured for me to sit down. “It was a grand time to be around, actually. Our ideological choices were clearly defined. We never had any doubt about who was right in the struggle.”

  “You were in the Resistance?”

  “We called it le maquis. The underbrush.”

  “You were also in Ravensbrück?”

  “Why do you ask of these things?”

  “Because I was in Vietnam. I saw the tiger cages and some other things on a prison island both the French and the Imperial Japanese once used. I had no experiences like yours, but I saw a bit of what Orwell called ‘the bloody hand’ of an empire at work.”

  “I believe you have the wrong idea about my experience. I don’t look upon myself as a victim. I survived in the camp because I worked. I did as I was told. I didn’t show disrespect. Each day I imposed a soldier’s discipline upon myself and never complained about my situation or my physical state. Nor did I beg. I would die before I begged. I learned that begging always breeds contempt and ensures one’s victimization.”

  “I see,” I said. But his account did not square with a detail Pierre Dupree had mentioned. I tried not to let the discrepancy register in my face. “Was Capa a Communist?”

  “Because I admired and respected Robert, I never asked him.”

  “The Italian troops with plumes in their hats? That photo was taken in Ethiopia, wasn’t it?”

  “It could have been. I wanted to be a photojournalist, but the war intervened,” he said. “I hope my own unfulfilled aspirations have a second and more successful outcome in my grandson’s life.”

  “Jean-Paul Sartre was in the Resistance. Did you know him?”

  “No, Mr. Sartre was not in the Resistance. He was a writer who resisted. He was not a resister who wrote. Do you know who said that? His friend Albert Camus.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I replied.

  I was learning quickly that Alexis Dupree was as elusive as a butterfly floating on the wind stream. As I looked at him sitting behind his desk, I was overcome with a sensation that even today I cannot adequately explain. His stoicism was laudable. He was distinguished-looking, handsome for a man his age. But there was an aura about him that made words stick in my throat when I tried to speak to him in a normal voice. Maybe it was a combination of things that in themselves were superficial: the odor of Vick’s Vapo-Rub in his clothes, the discolorations like tiny purple carcinomas in his arms and high up on his chest, the dark luminosity of his eyes. For some reason, each moment I spent with him made me feel that I had been diminished.

  Let me put it another way. Have you ever found yourself in the company of someone you are afraid to be compassionate toward? When you shake hands with him, his guile is like a smear on your skin. You find yourself unconsciously praying that he is a better person than you think he is. You actually fear the revelation he may make about himself, thereby forcing you to realize you have walked into his web. It’s not unlike picking up a hitchhiker who settles himself into the passenger seat and then gives you a look that turns your viscera to ice water.

  Had Alexis Dupree seen the red glow of the gas ovens roaring at night and smelled the odor from the tall brick chimney atop the building where his friends and siblings and parents died? Had he lined up among the other skeletons in striped uniforms and caps, pinching color into his cheeks so he would make it through the selections? Had he watched an SS officer point a Luger to a child’s temple while the child wept and trembled and held his father’s head down in a barrel of water? Was indeed the inside of this man’s head a repository of images that would drive most of us mad?

  “You have a peculiar expression on your face, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “I’d really like to see your grandson, sir, and then I can be on my way.”

  “He’s heavily medicated. Another time, perhaps. Here, drink your tea.”

  “Mr. Dupree, your grandson told me you survived Ravensbrück only because you were used in a medical experiment.”

  “That’s not true. There were no medical experiments at Ravensbrück. This is the kind of drivel that was manufactured after the war.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Believe whom you will. I was there. Let me check on Pierre. He’ll see you if he can. In the meantime, please finish your tea.”

  I had the feeling I was being both indulged and told to leave. He walked through the dining room and up a spiral staircase. While he was gone, I got up a
nd gazed through the French doors at the bayou and at the camellias blooming in the side yard. Then I noticed a thick gilt-edged book, bound in soft maroon leather, inserted horizontally on a shelf immediately below the Oxford dictionary on top of the podium. It was not the shelved book itself that was unusual. It was the wispy strands of hair protruding from the bottom pages that caught the eye.

  I could hear Alexis Dupree speaking to someone upstairs. I picked up the book and set it on top of the dictionary and opened the cover. The pages were filled with a flowing calligraphy, written with a traditional fountain pen. Some of the entries were in French, some in Italian, a few in English and German. From what I could read of the content, most of the entries were observations on Nordic mythology and Florentine art and the Gypsies of Andalusia and the ethnicity of primitive people in the Balkans. I flipped to the back pages and discovered at least two dozen locks of hair, of every possible color and shade, either Scotch-taped to the paper or inserted in tiny plastic pouches. I felt my throat clotting and a burning sensation in my eyes and wondered if my imagination was running away with me. I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf below the dictionary, just as Alexis Dupree descended a spiral staircase at the far end of a hallway.

  He reentered the study and shut the door behind him. “Pierre is just coming out of the shower. Give him a minute or two, and he’ll see you,” he said. “Be kind to him, Mr. Robicheaux. He’s had a rough go of it.”

  “You mean the beating he didn’t report?”

  “No, his career as a painter. His talent is ignored because he’s clearly influenced by the great painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The art world is controlled by a handful of people in New York. Most of them are idiots who think a screened-in piece of ham swarming with flies constitutes expression. There are many fraudulent aspects to American life, but the art world is probably the most egregious.”

  Through the French doors, I saw a man with bobbed white hair, wearing a black suit and a lavender Roman collar, cutting across the lawn toward a huge blue SUV parked among the oak trees. I had seen him before but could not remember where. Alexis Dupree walked to the podium and rested his hand on the open dictionary. He smiled at me. “Were you looking up a word?” he asked.

  “No,” I replied.

  He lowered his hand to the journal bound in maroon leather and straightened it so its cover was flush with the edge of the shelf. “I thought you might have used my dictionary and accidentally brushed against my travel diary.”

  “Maybe I did. I’m clumsy that way.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you’re clumsy at all, Mr. Robicheaux. Why don’t you go upstairs and talk with Pierre, then I’m sure you’ll need to get back to your office and resume protecting and serving. That’s what you call it, don’t you, ‘protecting and serving’?”

  “The man I saw cutting across the lawn, he’s a televangelical minister, isn’t he?”

  “Could be. They’re busy little fellows in this area, scurrying here and there, saving people from themselves. You’re an observant and obviously educated man, Mr. Robicheaux. What I’d like to ask, if you wouldn’t mind, is how did you end up in a place like this, obsessing over issues that absolutely no one else cares about? It must be a very unpleasant way to live.”

  “I’ll have to give that one some thought, sir. I’ll get back to you on it. I’d like to talk to you about your travel diary one day. I’ll bet you’ve picked up all kinds of things over the years.”

  One of the few gifts of age is that, with impunity, you can treat an elderly son of a bitch for exactly what he is.

  PIERRE DUPREE WAS propped up in a bed that had been pushed against the window so he could have a full view of the lawn and the camellias and the rosebushes and the oaks hung with Spanish moss and a tennis court whose canvas windscreens were stained with mold and whose clay surface was blown with dead leaves. Indian summer was still with us, but the tennis court seemed to have the marks of year-round winter, and I wondered if Pierre Dupree ever brooded upon concerns of this kind.

  The blisters on his forehead and nose and chin were shiny with salve, his black hair thick with it in the places his scalp had been burned, the back of his neck yellow and purple with bruising. Through the window I could see the minister’s SUV at the end of the driveway, waiting to pull onto the state road.

  “The last time I was here—” I began.

  “I want to apologize for that,” Pierre interrupted. “I said some things I regret. I not only regret them, they were not true.”

  “Calling me white trash?”

  “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Robicheaux. That’s an unforgivable thing to say to someone.”

  “A detective at NOPD called me about the assault on you and your friends in the restaurant. Your grandfather says you don’t have much confidence in the system, so you didn’t report it and apparently wrote it off. That’s an extremely forgiving attitude, don’t you think?”

  “Do you know what the media would do with that story? Three grown men beaten into pulp by one young woman? I have a hard time explaining it to myself.”

  “What do you think provoked her?”

  “She said she was from the Guggenheim in New York. Then she went crazy.”

  “She didn’t like your paintings?”

  “Did you come here to bait me?”

  “A minister just left your home. That was Amidee Broussard, wasn’t it? I’ve seen his television broadcast several times. He knows how to deliver the vote,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Abortion, gay marriage, that sort of thing, it works every time.”

  Pierre removed a pill from a bottle on his nightstand and put it on his tongue. He flinched when he shifted himself in bed, and I realized he had probably been hit in places that would hurt for a long time. “Would you pour me a glass of mineral water, please?”

  I filled a glass from a green bottle on the nightstand and handed it to him. His show of dependence and his desire to make me into a caretaker seemed more thespian than real, and I wondered if anything in the Dupree manor went deeper than the cheap facade on a stage set. He turned his head on the pillow and gazed wistfully out the window, like a caricature of royalty in exile. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t.

  “Why not come clean on this stuff and put it behind you?” I said.

  He nodded slightly, as though ending a philosophic debate with himself. “I insulted her. That’s why she attacked me. I called her a kike.”

  “Even though your grandfather is a holocaust survivor?”

  “That’s why I did it. I get tired of hearing Gran’père’s constant replay of his ordeal. Did you know my mother?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “She was a suicide. She jumped from a passenger liner off the Canary Islands.”

  This time it was I who didn’t speak. I didn’t want to hear about the fortunes or misfortunes of his family. For a lifetime, I had witnessed the damage the Duprees and their relatives and their corporate partners had done to the poor and the powerless. Worse, their arrogance and imperious behavior had always existed in inverse proportion to the defenselessness of the working people they exploited and injured.

  “Do you know who my father is?” he asked.

  “No, I never knew him.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “You know my father. He’s still alive. You were just talking with him downstairs. Alexis Dupree is both my grandfather and my father. My mother was his daughter.”

  I searched his face, his eyes, his body language, looking for the blink, the tic in the cheek, the stiffness in the lips, the twitch in the hand that signals a lie. I saw none of those things.

  “Maybe you should be telling these things to a clinician,” I said. “I’m here for only one reason. Dana Magelli, my friend at NOPD, called to find out why somebody of your background would allow himself and his friends to be assaulted and not call 911. I don
’t think you’ve provided an adequate answer. What are the names of the two men who were with you at the restaurant?”

  “Ask them when you find them. I’m not interested in talking about this anymore.”

  “This kind of doodah isn’t working for you, podna,” I said, my anger growing. “I think you were in business with Bix Golightly and Frankie Giacano and Waylon Grimes. It had something to do with stolen or fraudulent paintings. You’re also involved in something far bigger and more important. Bix and Frankie and Waylon are worm food now, but in reality, they were never players. What are you and your wife and your father-in-law and that televangelical huckster up to, Pierre? The bunch of you always give me the feeling you have Vitalis oozing out your pores.”

  As I laughed openly at him, I saw his face cloud and his eyes darken, as though the needle of a phonograph he’d been playing had jumped off the record. Then he bit his bottom lip, refocusing. “I hurt her fingers,” he said.

  “Whose?”

  “You asked me what provoked the woman. I clutched her fingers in mine and squeezed until I thought they would break. I made fun of her while I did it. I also enjoyed it. Ask yourself what kind of man would do that to a woman. That’s why I didn’t call the police.”

  “Then you had a conversion while you were lying in sick bay?”

  “I just told you the dirtiest secrets in the history of my family. You think I do it to extract sympathy? I told all this to Reverend Broussard. My grandfather stole my childhood and destroyed my mother. All these years I’ve defended him. You know why? He’s the only family I had.”

  A good liar always threads an element of truth inside his deception. I didn’t know if that was the case with Pierre Dupree. His hands seemed unnaturally large on top of the sheet. They were broad and thick and not the hands of an artist or a musician or a sculptor who worked with clay. They were the hands of a man who had almost broken a woman’s fingers. I did not believe that Pierre Dupree told lies simply to deceive others. I believed he told lies to deceive himself as well. I believed he was a genetic nightmare and a validation of Hitler and Himmler’s belief that pure evil could be passed on through the loins.