his message machine for his dedicated phone-and-fax line. The first message was from his wife, Esther: “We’re at the mall. I let you sleep. We have to talk. Did you go out in the middle of the night? What the hell is wrong with you?”

The other messages were from the restaurant and the club:

“Cheyenne says she’s not going on the pole the same time as Farina. I can’t deal with these bitches, Nick. Are you coming in?”

“Uncle Charley’s Meats just delivered us seventy pounds of spoiled chicken. That’s the second time this week. They say the problem is ours. They off-loaded on the dock, and we didn’t carry it in. I can’t put it in the box, and it’s smelling up the whole kitchen.”

“Me again. They were pulling each other’s hair in the dressing room.”

“The code guy was here. He says we have to put a third sink in. He says he found a dead mouse in the dishwasher drain, too.”

“Nick, there were a couple of guys in here last night I had trouble with. One guy had navy tats and a beard like a fire alarm. He said he was gonna be working for us. I kicked them out, but they said they’d be back. I thought maybe you needed a heads-up. Who is this asshole?”

“Hey, it’s me. There’s some flake on top of the toilet tank in the women’s can. I had Rabbit clean the shitters spotless early this morning. Farina was in there ten minutes ago. When she came out, she looked like she’d packed dry ice up her nose. Nick, babysitting crazy whores is not in my curriculum vitae. She wants your home number. You want me to give it to her? I can’t process these kinds of problems.”

Nick held down the delete button and erased every message on the machine, played and unplayed alike.

It was seventeen minutes to one o’clock. Hugo’s driver would be at the house at three P.M. to pick up the signed documents that would make Hugo Cistranos his business partner. The 25 percent ownership ceded to Hugo would of course be only the first step in the cannibalization of everything Nick owned. Nick sat in the darkness, his ears filled with a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

He had never confessed to anyone the fear he had felt in the schoolyard in the Ninth Ward. The black kids who took his lunch money from him, who shoved him down on the asphalt, seemed to target him and no one else as though they recognized both difference and weakness in him that they exorcised in themselves by degrading and forcing him to go hungry through the lunch hour and the rest of the afternoon, somehow freeing themselves of their own burden.

But why Nick? Because he was a Jew? Because his grandfather had adopted an Irish name? Because his parents took him to temple in a neighborhood full of simpletons who would later believe The Passion of the Christ was solid evidence that his people were guilty of deicide?

Maybe.

Or maybe they smelled fear on his skin the way a barracuda smells blood issuing from a wounded grouper.

Fear, the acronym for “fuck everything and run,” he thought sadly. That had been the history of his young life. And still was.

He punched his wife’s cell phone number into the console on his desk.

“Nick?” her voice said through the speakerphone.

“Where are you?” he said.

“Still at the mall. We’re about to have lunch.”

“Drop the kids at the country club and come home. We’ll pick them up later.”

“What is it? Don’t lie to me, either.”

“I need to show you where some things are.”

“What things? What are you talking about?”

“Come home, Esther.”

After he hung up, he wondered if his need was as naked as it sounded. He sat in a deep, stuffed leather chair and rested his forehead on his fingertips. It had been raining the night he met Esther twenty-three years ago. She was waiting for the streetcar under the steel colonnade at the corner of Canal and St. Charles Avenue, in front of the Pearl, where she worked as a night cashier after studying all day in the practical nursing program at UNO. There were raindrops in her hair, and in the neon glow of the restaurant’s windows, she made him think of a multicolored star in a constellation.

“There’s a storm blowing off Lake Pontchartrain. You shouldn’t be out here,” he had said to her.

“Who are you?” she replied.

“I’m Nick Dolan. You heard of me?”

“Yeah, you’re