by John Farrow
“One species.”
“Yes.”
“Nay. One individual within a species. One ego, perhaps. One jerk. Or one inspired and enlightened soul, who knows? But one specimen in that great global petri dish, decided, all on his own, or should I say, on its own, I mean we’re not talking people here—my god we’re probably talking faecal matter or what swam in and chewed on the faecal matter of the planet—”
“A fine meal. What else was there?”
“Gentlemen,” Sandra chastised them both.
Rand looked at him to ascertain Émile’s level of seriousness.
“Go on,” Émile encouraged.
“One specimen—perhaps thoughtful slime, but check that, the scientists would disagree—one primordial slug, say, put an end to this beautiful mucky orgy of life, and declared that he—sorry, it—was keeping its DNA and cells to itself, and henceforth—”
“Henceforth?” Émile egged him on when Dreher paused unexpectedly. Sandra could keep it in no longer, her giggles erupting into laughter at the two of them in concert.
“Henceforth, yes, henceforth—”
“This is the thing.”
“It is the thing. Henceforth that specimen, and consequently, that species, was keeping its—”
“You said that. Go on, Rand.”
“I said that? Okay. Henceforth, he—it, whatever—would only share it’s cell structure through copulation, that is, consequently, through procreation. I’ve got nothing against procreation, the way we do it, but once that selfishness, shall we say—shall we say that? Once that selfishness was observed, all the other species of the world cottoned on and they all, henceforth, kept their DNA to themselves and moved it along only to their offspring. All other species could suck lemons. That is, if they left themselves a mouth to suck lemons with when all their trading of orifices was completed, when their game of musical limbs came to a fast close.”
“Assuming they found a lemon,” Cinq-Mars added, and Dreher, confused for only a moment, concurred.
Émile poured but the bottle was dry.
“Dessert is still to come,” Sandra mentioned, “but first, I’ll get a new bottle.”
“I can go!” Cinq-Mars intoned.
“Sit. I’m already up.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” chirped Cinq-Mars.
“Don’t mean to impose,” Dreher lamented.
“Rand, I may be living on a cop’s pension, but it’s not so bad, and anyway, my wine cellar is all but bottomless.”
“Émile,” Sandra chastised him. To hear him boasting sounded strange. She slipped free from her chair and the table, beckoned to Merlin, and went through to open the front door to let him romp outside. Then she headed for the basement door. The men observed her go, then gazed back drunkenly at each other.
“She’s right,” Cinq-Mars agreed, apropos nothing whatsoever. “I’m a rooster’s fetid ass. Rand, you’ve been drinking. You must stay the night.”
Dreher resisted the idea, but added, “Here’s the thing.” He whispered for emphasis, “this is the thing!”
He was working toward a point he wished to convey, although he still had to muddle through significant mental flotsam to find its articulation. Finally, he broached his principal concern. “Before the dawn of our time, Émile, the worst and the best of swamp-dwellers commingled and exchanged their cells, their very DNA. After eons, millions of years, someone or something decided that that was a bad idea, or at least that he had enough. Perhaps he simply wanted to keep his own nose, even though no one else could comprehend why. Back then, we couldn’t talk about the best and the worst of things, because really we were all one thick soup. Interchanging our body parts and not necessarily trading up either. Just—everything goes. And that’s what’s persisted, it’s my belief. More evident in some than in others. That the best and worst of surviving cell material was passed along to us all. We’re a mishmash, Émile. And now, it’s becoming possible to take human embryos, different embryos, and mix them up in a petri dish. In a way, it’s going to be just like the old days, Émile. One big stew, except that it’s all being cooked in a lab instead of simmering out there in the orgy swamp. We’ll exchange DNA and cells and we’ll have no need to procreate. Why risk it? And this is my point, Émile.”
He seemed to be drawn to a serious moment, even a teary-eyed one.
“What’s your point, Rand?”
“Who will we reproduce? And who won’t we? The money people will have their preferences, which they may be able to bully through. Politicians will have their say, and let’s not forget the mad scientist, who might artfully trick us all. In the old days, the best and the worst commingled and thought nothing of it. I wonder what beasts such an impossible treaty will engender now, when people—people, that wretched tribe of mongoose—presume to think about it.”
“I know you’re drunk,” Émile stated. “So am I.” He paused to gather the gist of his unease. “But what is it that worries you, Rand?”
Dreher elected to mull it over awhile. “What happens,” he pondered at last, “to all the wonderful bad guys in this brave new world? What happens to us when there are no more of them? Does it not seem to you, Émile, a man of your intellectual pursuits and investigations, a man of your acumen and genius, that all of human life has been about striving and achieving amid a myriad of accidents and conflicts? We’re all about discovering. Awakening. Carrying on. And what are we to do when we mix our progeny up in a dish in a lab? Will we not pursue mediocrity with a passion? Here’s the thing. Rule out the bad guys, the villains, and without them, will we not rule out our better selves at the same time? For whose finger will be on the pulse? It’s all going to hell—may I resort to cliché, Émile? Will you allow me this one?”
His host gave him a nod of compliance.
“Émile, it’s all going to hell in a handbasket.”
They clinked glasses, before they realized again that they were still empty.
In the silence, they waited, forgetting for whom or why, perhaps. Then Émile asked, “What the hell is a handbasket anyway and why is it always hell-bound?”
Sergeant Pascal Dupree called ahead, putting on a professionally friendly voice over the phone to book an appointment with Everardo Flores when the man had an hour free. He waited for him at the taxi stand in front of the Hilton, half sitting on the rear bumper of his cruiser with his porkpie hat pushed back and small beads of perspiration spotting his brow in the warmth of the evening. Earlier, a cool rain tramped through New Orleans. Lamplights were reflected in the puddles left behind. Palm fronds caught by the breezes sashayed and rattled, then went limp once more, dormant before repeating the dance. Dupree desired a drink. He considered that he should have met the man on a barstool inside and, if it turned out that Flores could run up a bill on the Hilton’s tab, cadged a whiskey. But the spry man appeared in the front entrance patting the shoulder of a doorman who possessed the appropriate regal bearing for the task. Spotting Dupree, he jogged down the steps to greet him. Flores wore a quirky grin, as if any chance to talk cop business gave him such a thrill. Dupree felt himself weakening. He needed to boost his own resolve in order to take the man down a peg.
“Get in,” he ordered, a partial growl. “We’re going for a ride.”
“Cool,” Flores consented.
“Think that way,” Dupree warned him, “see what good it does you.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Me?” Dupree asked him. “Something’s wrong with me now? If something’s wrong with anybody around here it’s totally with you.”
“I didn’t meant to—What’s going on, Dupree?”
“More questions out of your shit canal. But I want answers. Just get in.”
Less fond of the meeting now, Flores succumbed and got in the car.
Dupree still wanted that drink and wondered where he might go. His eyes scanned his passenger—the gelled hair, the mauve silk tie, the suit cut to a perfection that Dupree’s own slumping, big-b
ellied body would never permit—and hit upon the ideal spot. He had taken Cinq-Mars there for a different reason. Such a spiffy man wouldn’t feel at ease inside Sinners Too where only the tawdry and the smelly lamented their shabby lives. In there, Dupree would have him at a disadvantage, while the additional benefit of easy proximity to the back alley, what he liked to call triage, remained at his disposal.
“Don’t tell me that y’all don’t drink on duty,” Dupree warned him, “or I’ll pound the living crap out of your bones right now, squeeze whatever mush you got left in your hanging balls to secrete out your ears.”
Flores was silent as he leaned his body into a turn, then straightened up again. “Christ,” he murmured under his breath. “Get a grip, will you?”
“Me?” Dupree challenged him again. “Me get a grip?”
Flores wanted the man to be both civil and reasonable, but gathered that any such desire was not realistic tonight. He yielded to a burning premonition that matters were not destined to go well.
The worry redoubled as they entered Sinners Too at the same moment that a local drunk fell into a psychotic episode. Kicking, flailing, and bellowing straight out of his diaphragm, so rambunctious and out-of-whack was the tall, thin man’s behavior that his companion dipsomaniacs chipped in to help subdue him, assisting the bartender by grabbing an arm or an ankle, a fury that closed out only when Sergeant Pascal Dupree lent his significant bulk to the fray. This would seem to be a case for an ambulance, but the cops had already been summoned and they arrived first, surprised to find a top-drawer detective sitting on the afflicted man.
“We got this,” an officer told him, in one sense a complaint.
“Take him away,” Dupree allowed, and they did, although with difficulty and some violence.
The detective then nonchalantly settled into his favorite seat.
Adjusting his tie, not the least pinch out of place, skimming back the sides of his hair, which lay perfectly flat to his scalp, and pulling back the lapels of his suit jacket, which did not require attention either, Everardo Flores examined the seat presented to him to ascertain that no cockroach or chameleon had pitched a tent upon it first and built a nest, that no crusty aged puke preceded him.
Finally, tentatively, he sat.
Dupree leaned in to release his initial volley, even as he simultaneously raised a finger to signal the Irish barman over. “We’ve got a private patio out back where we lay the drunks down to sleep it off. Sometimes, Everardo, we lay them down out there to their eternal rest.”
“Why are you talking to me like this, Dupree? What did I do wrong?”
Despite his evident flaws, Flores demonstrated backbone.
“Because I have a mind to speak to y’all this way, Everardo. That’s why. It’s the only reason I require. I don’t need a good excuse. Anyway, you’re to blame. You’re the one who put me into this frame of mind.”
“What did I do?” That he did anything to disturb his alliance with Dupree seemed preposterous to him.
First, Dupree addressed the Irishman. “Bourbon and my usual chaser, times two.”
“I am supposed to be working again tonight,” Flores protested. The comfort of work was appealing to him at the moment.
“Why did I tell y’all before? Don’t you listen?”
“Don’t get your damn back up,” Flores conceded.
“It’s up.”
“I got that part. Why?”
“First, I want y’all to understand the evening, how it’s going to go.”
“What evening?”
Dupree nodded, slowly, emphatically. “I intend to sit here and enjoy my bourbon and my beer after a torturous day. It’s not my wish to be disturbed. If y’all disturb me, with lies, with falsehoods, with untruths, with innuendo, with ripe dog shit in this heat, I will be furious, Everardo Flores. Maybe I’ll take y’all into the back alley to be introduced to my volatile temper. Though I like to keep it a secret, y’all will discover that side of my nature. It ain’t noble. I’m advising y’all as a friend right now, to spare the surprise to your small body later on. I will leave my badge with the bartender, but not necessarily my gun, while I go whale on y’all in a haphazard fashion. It’ll be impossible to predict, but most likely I will bruise your fine bones. Am I being understood? Let me know if at any time y’all require an interpreter.”
Flores gazed back into the intent eyes of Pascal Dupree and did not doubt his fury. Finally, he said, swallowing once in mid-sentence, “I don’t need any interpretation, Dupree, but—no offense—I sure could use an explanation.”
The detective slid a hand up from under the table and gripped a single lapel of the man’s spiffy jacket and crushed the fabric, drawing Flores’s head down closer to him and to the tabletop. “On the night that Mrs. Cinq-Mars was kidnapped, y’all claimed to be heading home. But the good ol’ boys in the FBI, they have their methods, they have their fancy electronic toys to play with. They say that Everardo Flores never left the vicinity. The hotel, maybe. The vicinity, not at all. That he did not go home. That he did not even head home. So answer me this, are we going to have a polite conversation here so I can enjoy my drinks, or do I pass the bartender my badge for safekeeping so we can go out to the alley and talk this over like a couple of white-assed Neanderthals? Flores? It’s been a long time since I seen myself this pissed off with somebody. That last guy is still recovering. Mind, he has the time to do so. First we made him wobbly on his feet, then we put him away for a good long stretch.”
Flores thought it over. Dupree let him. He was serious about wanting to do this in as polite a manner as possible.
“Some things about me you don’t know,” Flores said, and Dupree let him go.
He sat back in his chair as their drinks arrived. He took a sip of the bourbon and enjoyed it and the barman departed. “I’m listening,” the policeman said.
“I’m gay,” Flores said.
Dupree’s eyes went sideways once, then back upon the hotel security man. “So?” he said.
“I’m also married,” Flores said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“So I was at my boyfriend’s place. We were having sex. All right? I can be more specific, but I doubt you want to hear it. Why would you?”
“I’ll have to talk to him.”
“Just don’t hit him. And don’t talk to my wife about this, that’s what I’m asking for and that’s all.”
Dupree kept his gaze on the man, but he already believed him. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, huh?”
The question, he supposed, was an invitation to discuss all this, but Flores didn’t bite. “I wasn’t so gay in the military.”
“So gay? What the hell is that?”
“I’m just saying. It is what it is now. I didn’t think it would be this way when I got older and got married and started having kids. But I work long nights. Things happen. I got to understand some things about myself. For the record, since you’re asking, I’m bi, but I used to be less gay. That’s just how I talk. What I used to need less of once upon a time I need more of now for some reason. I don’t know why.”
“I see.”
“I’m not asking you to understand it. You think I do? I’m just saying, I had nothing to do with the kidnapping. But I was in no position to explain my whereabouts.”
“I’ll make sure of all this—”
“Up yours, all right?”
“Hear me out, you little shit. I’ll investigate what you say, but just between y’all and me, for now, I believe you.”
That seemed to mollify Everardo Flores, and he sat back, then took his bourbon as a shot, wiped his mouth, grabbed his beer bottle, and poured it into a glass. A regular, Dupree had never been delivered a glass and took a good long swig from his bottle.
“Holy shit,” Dupree said, and wiped his mouth.
“What else do you want to know?” Flores asked him.
“Is this why nobody’s letting y’all be a real cop?”
Flores had ne
ver considered that before, but as the seconds ticked by the possibility took hold. “Crap,” he agreed. “Did the cat get out of that bag?”
“Yeah,” Dupree said. “Maybe. But this helps. At least it’s not because y’all got flat feet or no big flaw like that.”
Sandra Cinq-Mars had hesitated selecting a wine in the basement. Her hand rested first on a bottle that she thought they might enjoy, but then she remembered the price, which was high, and questioned whether the evening might not be too far along, and the men too inebriated, to appreciate it. She mulled through a number of cheaper bottles, which had their place, but none appealed. Then she noticed a pair of bottles tucked away in a corner that weren’t so cheap, but she didn’t like them very much and this might be the occasion to get rid of one. She doubted that either man would notice. She might not be able to distinguish flavors either, and anyway she wasn’t planning on imbibing for much longer. She chose one. She had recently discovered a number of decent Ontario wines from Prince Edward County—this was not one of them, but came from there. Now would be as good a time as any to put it out of its misery.
She hesitated again departing the makeshift room they used as a wine cellar. Émile had been working down there lately, adding data to his flip chart. Perhaps her own level of inebriation caused her to take a moment, reading absently what was written on the facing page, heedless of the time. After further study, she began to flip pages. Soon though, she was feeling quite sober and returned upstairs with her head abuzz from what she learned.
Vira noticed him long before he ever laid eyes on her. She hadn’t been looking around and was just starting her dinner, when she spotted him. The gentleman was eating alone, his back to her, yet somehow, in some mysterious way, she liked the cut of his jib. Oh damn, I’m projecting again. The usual indicators: broad of shoulder, nice threads, well-groomed hair and a healthy crop, too. Between courses, and he was ahead of her in this regard, he put his cloth napkin down and pushed himself up from the table to use the washroom. An assessment in a glance: muscle-tone unexceptional, yet he passed muster with a standard-issue paunch, nothing egregious, no facial hair, a lined brow, a decent jaw and a favorable overall look to him. An apparent pleasantness and a measure of confidence. He might have had fifteen years on her, or twelve, but that was not a road she hadn’t traveled numerous times.