Batist and I caught and gutted over a dozen gafftop, ripped out the stingers and peeled the skin with pliers, fileted the meat in long, pink strips, and laid them out in rows on the crushed ice in the cooler. Then we ate the po'-boy sandwiches we'd made with fried oysters, mayonnaise, sauce piquant, sliced tomatoes, and onions and wrapped in waxed paper that morning; then we headed back toward the coast as the afternoon cooled and the wind began to blow out of the west, smelling of distant rain and speckled trout spawning and beached shellfish and lines of seaweed drying where the tide had receded from the sand.

As the late red sun seemed to collapse and melt into a single burning ember on the horizon, you could see the neon glow of New Orleans gradually replace the daylight and spread across the darkening sky. The clouds were black-green and low over the city, dancing with veins of lightning, roiling from Barataria all the way out to Lake Pontchartrain, and you knew that in a short while torrents of rain would blow through the streets, thrash the palm trees on the esplanades, overrun the gutters in the Quarter, fill the tunnel of oak trees on St. Charles with a gray mist through which the old iron, green-painted streetcars would make their way along the tracks like emissaries from the year 1910.

New Orleans was a wonderful place to be on a late evening in August.

That's what I thought, anyway, until I called Hippo Bimstine to tell him that he'd have to hire somebody else to dive the wrecks of Nazi submarines.

'Where are you?' he said.

'We're having supper at Mandina's, out on Canal.'

'You still tight with Clete Purcel?'

'Sure.'

'You know where Calucci's Bar is by St. Charles and Carrollton?'