CHAPTER 79

TOM WASN’T SLEEPING but floating in a fog of oxycodone and Ativan. His limbs felt no contact with the bedclothes, and only the pulsing memory of his shoulder wound kept him from sinking into oblivion. A few minutes ago his mind had cleared enough for him to see Walt sleeping beside him on a cot, as he had half a century ago in Korea. But Tom’s mind had now turned inward, slipping beneath the surface, into a layer of awareness where time had no meaning.

In this place all things happened at once. Caitlin was as dead as the young GIs who had perished in the ambulance after running the Gauntlet south of Chosin Reservoir, and Tom was as responsible for one death as for the others. In truth, he was more responsible for what had happened to Caitlin, because if he had made different choices, he might have prevented that. The boys in the ambulance would have died anyway. Caitlin lingered in his mind because he had lied to her. The night she’d come to him at Quentin’s house, she’d asked him many questions. One was about the Kennedy assassination, and Tom had claimed he knew nothing.

That was a lie.

It hadn’t bothered him to tell it at the time, because he’d told himself he was doing it for Caitlin’s good, as he had so many other times on behalf of others. That was how it went with lies of omission: you could always rationalize staying silent when to speak would cause pain or injury. But now that Caitlin was dead, Tom would never be able to tell her the truth.

Perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing, said a voice he knew too well.

It was the voice of self-preservation. He had made friends with that voice over the decades. The last time he had resisted it was 1990, the year he’d last seen Carlos Marcello. Tom had nearly fainted when the Mafia boss summoned him. He’d had no direct contact with Marcello for at least twenty years and had not even treated any of his soldiers for a decade.

The summons had been delivered by Ray Presley, of course, the former Natchez police detective who’d once worked as a New Orleans cop on the Marcello payroll. Ray had stopped by the office late one Friday, as he sometimes did, and told Tom that “the Little Man” wanted to see him at his Metairie home. So much time had passed since the bad old days that Tom had actually tried to beg off, but Presley had only laughed and said he would pick Tom up on Sunday morning.

During the drive down to New Orleans, Ray explained that the don had not been doing well since his release from a Rochester, Minnesota, prison hospital the previous year. While in the maximum-security prison in Texarkana, Marcello had suffered a series of strokes, and “someone” had arranged for his BRILAB conviction to be overturned, allowing him to return home. Originally, many had assumed that the “strokes” were simply a scam to spring the don from prison, but Ray had heard that Marcello’s health was truly declining. Now Carlos himself had apparently asked to see the “jail doc” from the parish prison, and someone close to him had remembered the doctor from Natchez.

Tom tried to hide his anxiety during the drive, but Ray Presley had the predator’s instinct for weakness, and he sensed Tom’s discomfiture. Over the years Tom had come to an uncomfortable truce with his conscience over his relationship with Marcello. In a perfect world, he would have had nothing to do with the Mafia kingpin. But when that kingpin provided the umbrella of protection that kept Viola Turner alive, Tom had little choice but to bow to his wishes.

The hardest thing to grasp was how tiny turns of fate resulted in inextricably complex relationships. Tom had entered his externship at the Orleans Parish Prison with the dewy eyes of a schoolboy. Still only a medical student, he’d done his best every day, treating cops and criminals alike with equal courtesy. Tom had always been that way: he’d treat a black sharecropper just as he would have treated the Prince of Wales. But in the Orleans Parish Prison, his attitude marked him as different. His dedication was noticed by guards and cons alike, the difference being that cons—or the men behind them—came from a culture that believed strongly in rewarding good turns. It was this informal system, which in Louisiana had been a way of life for centuries, that resulted in Tom being sold a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Ford for three hundred dollars cash.

A bookie named Cookie Pistolet had been serving a thirty-day stretch in the Orleans Parish Prison for beating his wife. Tom had been treating Cookie’s gout. Pistolet was apparently a man of some stature in the Marcello organization, because he received daily deliveries of food and liquor, not to mention a regular envelope filled with various papers and receipts, which he worked on far into the night—with police assistance when necessary. Tom had never seen anything like this, but it was the way of the world in New Orleans, so he turned a blind eye.

Twenty days into Cookie’s sentence, the godfather himself had showed up to visit his subordinate. Marcello had apparently been suffering from a wracking cough that had prevented him from sleeping for nearly a month. His doctors had diagnosed bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics, but they hadn’t helped. When Cookie discovered this, he praised Tom to the skies and sent a guard in search of the “jail doctor.” Tom soon found himself being led before the real ruler of the State of Louisiana, where he was asked to “take a look at” the don’s chest.

After examining the short but powerfully built Marcello, Tom had questioned the don about his symptoms. Half a dozen questions convinced Tom that the godfather was suffering an acid-reflux cough, a condition likely exacerbated by Marcello’s late-night consumption of acidic Italian-Creole cuisine. The don had brushed off Tom’s diagnosis as “old-women’s talk” and departed the prison. But one week later, a smiling stranger had shown up and handed Tom a set of keys to the prettiest 1957 Ford Fairlane he’d ever seen. Apparently Marcello had grown so frustrated at losing sleep to his cough that he’d tried Tom’s advice and avoided eating sauces and spices after 8 P.M. After five days of this discipline, the cough had subsided.

Naturally, Marcello had wanted to thank the man who’d relieved his discomfort. Through the prison grapevine, Carlos discovered that Tom and Peggy had no working vehicle: their twelve-year-old truck had been sitting dead in front of their apartment for the past three months. The don’s answer to this problem was the Fairlane, which could be Tom’s for a little more than one-tenth of the sticker price. Tom had tried to resist the gift, but one older cop whom he trusted had advised him that refusing gifts from the godfather of New Orleans was the surest road to ill health that a man could take. So Tom had withdrawn most of his nest egg from savings, paid the three hundred dollars, and accepted a bill of sale from a grinning young Italian who was surely a Mafia foot soldier. Then he’d concocted a story for Peggy that his wife, thankfully, had never analyzed too closely. After all, her daily grind involved trudging through torrents of French Quarter rain to ride the ferry over to the West Bank to teach English to immigrant grade-school kids. The car literally transformed her life for the better.

From this humble beginning had grown an unwanted relationship that ultimately provided Tom with the godlike power of saving Viola Turner’s life nine years later, when the worst Ku Klux Klan offshoot in the South wanted her dead. Carlos had been all too happy to accommodate the doctor who had cured his cough, especially when the favor was as trivial as safeguarding the life of a colored woman in Chicago. Of course, Carlos had not accommodated Tom gratis. Since he was doing a favor, he required a favor in return, and that favor turned out to be covert medical treatment for his men during any emergencies that might occur “in Tom’s neighborhood.” Tom had been in no position to refuse these terms. And both he and Carlos had lived up to their word for the next twenty-five years, though thankfully the burden had lessened for them both as time passed.