"I didn't know where else to go," she said by way of greeting. "There's a chance it may already be too late."
Remo stood aside, then poked his head into the corridor and listened. It was empty and there were no suspicious sounds.
"What may be too late?" he asked, closing the door and flipping on the light.
Aurelia uttered a small "Oh!" and put her hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a cry of alarm. She stared directly into the vivid emerald eyes that resembled those of an intense child. But the head they were inside of was covered in yellowed, water-wrinkled parchment.
"I'm sorry," she apologized. "It's just that I've seen-"
"I understand, child," said the ancient Master. Remo caught the unexpected compassion in Chiun's voice and realized he hadn't exactly been quick on the uptake. Chiun had sensed that what had brought Aurelia there in the middle of the night wasn't just a sense of urgency. It wasn't even just an emergency.
"I've made a terrible mistake," she said. "There is not one loup-garou, but several. I've seen them."
"Excuse me?"
"They came to the camp," Aurelia said, and her eyes seemed to grow hollow. "They were killing us. Killing and killing. I don't know how many. The loups-garous were after me. The best thing I could do was get away."
And lead them here, thought Remo. But instead of saying it, he asked, "When did this happen?"
"Half an hour, maybe forty minutes. It took time for me to locate the hotel."
"And now you're telling me you actually saw these things?"
"Two of them," she replied. "One was transformed completely, while the other...I can't do it justice. It was manlike, walking upright in the shadows, but its face..."
Aurelia's voice trailed off. She met his eyes, then turned her gaze away, as if embarrassed. Why? Because she had run out on her companions, even with the best of motives?
Remo and Chiun knew she was telling the truth. They could read it in her breath and the pulse of her blood under the skin of her throat. Cuvier knew she was telling the truth because he had faith.
Faith in the existence of the loup-garou.
Remo thought of going back out to the camp to see it for himself, but quickly scrubbed the notion. If Aurelia had been followed-even if she hadn't-it was far more likely that the loup-garou would try for Cuvier at their hotel than wait around the Gypsy campsite for a little one-on-one with Remo.
They could hole up in the hotel, thought Remo, or he could approach the problem from another angle. He could do, in fact, what he probably should have done as soon as they were settled in New Orleans.
"You'll be safe here," he told Aurelia, wondering if it was true. Chiun could handle any man alive, but if their adversary wasn't human...
"Why?" Aurelia pinned his eyes with hers. "Where are you going?"
Remo hoped his smile was reassuring, but it didn't feel that way from where he stood. Still, he plastered on a smile. "Let's say I've got a hankering to see Mardi Gras."
MERLE BETTENCOURT was happiest when telling other people what to do. He loved the sense of power and authority that came with giving orders, telling his subordinates to jump and noting that they didn't even ask how high. The power of life and death especially excited him. It was better than sex.
At the moment, though, Merle Bettencourt was mired down in the bog of party politics. Venal politicians were a key part of the system, human cogs that kept the great machine moving forward, but that didn't mean he had to like them. Every time he was compelled to work with some asshole who styled himself a "statesman," it made Bettencourt feel he ought to take a long, hot bath. Given a choice, he would prefer the company of killers, pimps and pushers-they were at least honest about their motives and desires.
But here he was in an election year, and the primaries were unusually early, due to anticipated irregularities. Armand had to find it inside himself to finesse the oily bastards who were bent on suckling from the fat teats of the body politic. It seemed to Bettencourt that this year's candidates were worse than usual, and that was saying something in a state where politics and criminal behavior had been more or less synonymous since the days of Huey Long. The Kingfish was a pioneer of sorts; he set the tone for all that followed, teaching future generations of disciples how to realize their dreams, be all that they could be, and during his tenure graft had been refined to an elusive art form.
Still...
Gut instinct made him want to go with Elmo Breen. Breen was a lifelong veteran of gutter politics and had the morals of an alley cat, disguised by oily charm. He had started out with the Sicilians, in Marcello's pocket, but the changing times had prompted Breen to look for sponsorship among the nativeborn. For the past ten years or so he had been snuggling up to leaders of the Cajun outfit, kissing major ass at any given opportunity. He was a pro who asked no questions and provided value for the money he received, dodged nasty questions with the flexibility of a sidewinder and never let his patrons down.
Unless, of course, he saw the chance to cut himself a better deal.
It was an iron-clad rule of Armand Fortier's, with which Merle Bettencourt agreed, that you could never really know what the stupid voters might decide to do once they were shut up in the polling booth and confronted with a list of names. That being true, it only made good sense to have friends on both sides in any given contest, just in case. No matter how the dice came up, that way, the outfit couldn't lose.
Which brought him back to Reverend Rockwell. The TV preacher was a hopeless ego-tripper, like so many of his colleagues, with a penchant for insisting that his words were Jesus Christ's. Whether the Rock believed his own spew or not, Merle Bettencourt had no idea, nor did he give a damn. Old Rockhead was amusing in his way, but he could also be a liability in public office if his fire-and-brimstone calls for cleaning up the state were taken seriously. As it was, however, Bettencourt had learned enough about the pastor that he felt he could relax.
Rockwell was living, breathing proof of Romans chapter three, verse twenty-three, where it declared that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Not that the pastor was a womanizer, pedophile or any suchlike kinky specimen; in fact, there was no solid evidence that he engaged in sex of any kind, or ever had. He didn't drink or play around with drugs, as far as Bettencourt could tell, nor did he squander cash on games of chance. There were suspicions-at the FCC, the IRS and elsewhere-that he might be skimming more than his reported salary from JBN, and there was no real doubt that he had flouted campaign finance laws, but that was small potatoes when you got down to it, hardly worth the cost of an investigation, much less months or years in court to prosecute and maybe see him wriggle off the hook.
No, Bettencourt had finally decided, Reverend Rockwell's great sin was pride, a driving need to lord it over others with his stern self-righteousness and tell the whole damn world how it should live. His TV network was a vehicle for self-promotion, plain and simple, with the holy smoke screen dazzling Rockwell's simpleminded followers. The pastor spoke to them in tongues, which sounded more like bullshit baby talk to Bettencourt. He dubbed the ones who sent him money on a monthly basis "soul survivors." Stupid puns were something of a trademark with the Rock, in fact. He had been known to call the money sent in by his TV flock "hellfire insurance," and sufferers from terminal disease-who somehow lacked the faith required for Reverend Rockwell to heal them of their ailments-were harangued to "cram for finals" by enrolling in a cut-rate Bible correspondence course. At one point, early in his televangelism days, he had sold tiny bits of rock and concrete swept up from construction sites and advertised as chippings from the Rock of Ages.
Bettencourt admired that kind of gall, and it had been no great surprise when Rockwell's campaign put out discreet but urgent feelers to the Cajun Mafia. The pastor knew of Elmo Breen's connection to the mob, and while it suited him to blast his opposition as a crook and friend of crooks, Rockwell also knew that big-time money was required to win the statehouse. Even with the Jesus Broadcast Network pumping covert thousands into his campaign, he needed more, as much to fox the watchful Feds as to defray his costs. Of course, the Rock couldn't be seen with Bettencourt or any of his Cajuns, but that didn't stop his bagmen from soliciting, collecting and transporting better than a million dollars from the mob to Rockwell's primary campaign.
That kind of money came with certain obligations stamped into the greenbacks like a hidden watermark. In public, Rockwell continued to denounce corruption and the men behind it, promising a swift return to "ancient family values" if he was elected governor, but in the meantime he had reached an understanding with his covert benefactors. If he won-and there was still no guarantee, despite the extra million in his war chest-Rockwell would keep his campaign promises by going through the motions of a shake-up, mostly concentrated in Baton Rouge. There would be raids, investigations, show trials and convictions, but he promised to avoid disturbing his supporters any more than might be absolutely necessary. If the Cajun mob saw fit to offer scapegoats-say, perhaps, their leading competition in the drug trade and illegal gambling, loan shark and extortion rackets-Reverend Rockwell's investigators would accept the sacrificial goats and let it go at that. Come next election year, they could negotiate new terms.
But now, with the primary just a few weeks off, both candidates had started calling Bettencourt at crazy hours, whining that the money wouldn't stretch to cover all their needs, asking if maybe there was something Bettencourt could do about the no-good rotten bastard who obstructed the path to the governor's mansion. Bettencourt would have been tickled pink to smoke them both, but those techniques had mostly gone out with the Kingfish. For the moment, all that Merle could do was lend a sympathetic ear and keep on filling briefcases with cash.
Whoever won the race would be presented with a bill, detailed and itemized. If he contested it or tried to bluff his way out of the game, Merle Bettencourt had tapes-both audio and hidden-camera video-that would be guaranteed to change the rebel's mind in nothing flat.
So much for politics. It took a measure of finesse, but Bettencourt was getting there, remembering to watch his temper and keep stroking the gargantuan ego that every politician carried like a monkey on his back. Some months earlier, in private, he had started browsing through the dictionary and thesaurus, peppering his speech with new words, cutting back on the profanity when there were ladies-as opposed to whores and bitches-in the room. Merle had begun to think that maybe he could fill old Armand's Gucci loafers, after all.
But there was still one problem to be dealt with, and he couldn't let it slide now that the wheels were turning, even if he didn't really give a shit about Armand's new trial. The Cajun godfather still had his loyalists in the family, enough of them to stir up holy hell if Bettencourt appeared to give the liberation effort less than everything he had.
Which meant, in turn, that he couldn't afford to let the final witness get away, no matter where he went to hide. And he couldn't afford to let a freak like Leon Grosvenor take him for a ride.
He needed something in the nature of an update from the wolf man, and he needed it right now. The trouble was that Leon didn't have a telephone or mailing address, living on the bayou like some kind of half-assed sideshow freak, away from other men. Which meant that Merle would have to reach out to him personally, even though he hated the idea.
A damn loup-garou. What next?
REMO HADN'T EXACTLY memorized a lot of Dr. Smith's file on the Cajun Mafia. From what he gathered, they were little different from the traditional crime families that had controlled New Orleans since the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The new breed favored jambalaya over ravioli, and they leaned toward dogfights rather than the ponies, but they still touched all the bases of illicit enterprise. Their specialties were drugs, extortion, prostitution, gambling and a quirky sideline in the smuggling of endangered species for discriminating pet owners. The latter operation had apparently begun with Armand Fortier himself, who doted on exotic birds but now confined himself to watching sparrows in Atlanta when he was allowed outside to exercise.
Remo did have a slip of paper with some names and addresses. Not far from the hotel, on Jackson Avenue, was an operation that masqueraded as a pawnshop, but there was more to Ham's Hock Shop than met the eye. The registered proprietor, a Cajun named Etienne DuBois, was nicknamed "Ham" after his run-in with a wild boar on the bayou back in 1969. Etienne's first shot had failed to drop the monster, and it took him down, goring him repeatedly before he got it in a headlock, drew his twelve-inch bowie knife and cut its throat. Weakened by loss of blood, too badly wounded for the hike back to his skiff, DuBois was stranded for six days, subsisting on raw pork and boar's blood until he was strong enough to travel. He had been "Ham" ever since, to friends and enemies alike, and didn't seem to wind.
His injuries from the abortive hunting trip included some outlandish scarring, which he stubbornly refused to have corrected, and a hobbling walk that put Etienne on disability. The fact that he had never held an honest job before the hog attack didn't prevent the state from compensating him for "loss of wages due to work-related injuries." His patron, Gaetan Fortier, had pulled the necessary strings in Baton Rouge, and when old Gaetan went to his reward, Etienne went right on working for the son, Armand, to show his everlasting gratitude.
Not that Ham's Hock Shop was a terribly demanding gig. He dealt with drunks and losers, mostly, where the terms weren't synonymous. Some junkies, the occasional sneak thief if he had merchandise that Etienne could move with no risk to himself. He was a tightwad, and the shop made money on its own, but it existed equally to serve the Fortier crime family as an outpost in New Orleans, where intelligence could be collected from the streets and funneled to the proper ears. Sometimes, in boozy conversations with selected friends, Etienne compared himself to famous secret agents of the cinema. He had been known to introduce himself as "Bond, Ham Bond," his Cajun accent making Bond sound just enough like "bone" for it to draw obligatory smiles and anemic laughter.
Remo's maxim was that information, by its very nature, flowed both ways. Those who received could also share, if they were so inclined. He just had to incline them. Inclining people was one of the things he did best.
He plunged into the jostling crowd on Tchoupitoulas Street and made his slow way eastward, weaving through the crush of partiers toward Jackson Avenue.
Unlike the carnival in Rio, there were laws forbidding outright nudity at Mardi Gras, but the occasional police he spotted on his trek appeared to be more mellow than your average Southern cop. At Tchoupitoulas and Louisiana Avenue, he saw two spit-and-polish lawmen joshing with a trio of young women dressed in G-strings, fishnet stockings, pasties and stiletto heels. The women also wore headgear resembling fish bowls with antennae, while the cops were wearing leering smiles. Everywhere were women, and men, in painted-on clothing. You had to look closer to realize they were completely naked.
It took him a few brisk minutes of weaving among the revelers to reach the pawnshop. Ham's Hock Shop was open, more from force of habit than with any hope of drawing business from the crowd outside. Some of the revelers paused long enough to press their faces to the windows, ogling saxophones, trombones, guitars, a nice display of ersatz switchblade knives, but no one went inside. Remo was the exception, a cow bell clanking overhead as it was jostled by the swinging door.
"Help you?"