Get thee behind me, Satan! he thought, when he realized the direction his mental processes were taking him. That sort of thing is in your past. You are no longer free to nail any female you can entice into a horizontal position. Your watchword, like that of the goddamn U.S. Marine Crotch itself is now Semper Fidelis, always faithful.
He drained his glass, and felt the alcohol warm his veins. He picked up his change, shouldered his way back out of the Cafe Lafitte onto Bourbon Street, and headed toward Canal Street, where, he thought, with a little bit of luck he would find a taxi.
[TWO]
3470 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, Louisiana
1905 5 April 1943
The taxi dropped Major Cletus Howell Frade off at the curb before a very large, very white, turn-of-the-century ornate, three-story frame mansion on St. Charles Avenue, the tree-lined main boundary of the section of New Orleans known as the Garden District.
He crossed the sidewalk, opened a gate in the cast-
iron fence that separated an immaculate lawn from the street, and walked up the brick path onto the porch, fishing for keys in his pocket. Before he could put them in the lock, the leaded-window door swung inward.
A silver-haired, very light-skinned Negro butler wearing a gray linen jacket smiled at him.
"What were you doing, Jean-Jacques? Peeking through the curtains, wait-ing for me?"
"I just happened to be looking out the window, Mr. Cletus," Jean-Jacques replied. "Miss Martha's here, Mr. Cletus."
"Miss Martha," the former Martha Reed Williamson, was Clete's aunt and the widow of the late James Fitzhugh Howell. Her husband had died instanta-neously of a cerebral hemorrhage en route from the bar to the men's room of the Midland Petroleum Club shortly after Clete had flown his Wildcat off the escort carrier USS Long Island onto Guadalcanal's Henderson Field.
"She is?" Clete asked, surprised. He had said goodbye to Martha in Mid-land three days before. "The girls?"
The girls were his cousins, Elizabeth (Beth), who was twenty-one and about to graduate from Rice, and Marjorie, who was nineteen and in her sopho-more year at that institution. Miss Martha became pregnant with Beth shortly after she took into her bride's home the two-year old-son of her husband's sis-ter, Eleanor Patricia Frade, deceased. She raised Clete as her own, and her daughters and her nephew always thought of themselves as brother and sisters.
Jean-Jacques shook his head, "no." Clete was disappointed. Marjorie and Beth seemed to be less a royal pain in the ass recently than earlier on.
"Miss Martha drove up from Houston," Jean-Jacques said. '"Got here just after you went to town. Must have gotten up in the middle of the night to start out."
He pointed at a Kraft paper bag in Clete's hand. "You want me to put that in your room for you? They're in the library, and I know he and Miss Martha have been peeking out the curtains looking for you."
"He" was Cletus Marcus Howell, master of the house, Chairman of the Board of Howell Petroleum, and Clete's grandfather.
"No, thanks, I want another look at it."
"Anything I can get for you?"
"No, thanks," Clete replied, and then changed his mind. "Yeah, there is. I just had a god-awful Sazerac, and I'd like a good one."
"My pleasure," Jean-Jacques said. "One Jean-Jacques Jouvier world-famous Sazerac coming right up."
Clete crossed the wide foyer and entered the library.
A tall, pale, slender, sharp-featured, silver-haired man glowered at him. He was wearing a superbly tailored dark blue, faintly pin-striped three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain looped across his stomach.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," the Old Man said. "Ran out of rotgut in the Vieux Carre, did they?"
"Grandfather," Clete said, and walked to his aunt Martha, a tanned, stocky, short-haired blond woman, and kissed her cheek.
"He had no way of knowing I was coming," she said, defending him.
"What brings you here?" Clete asked.
"What do you think? I wanted to see you before you left" Martha said.