Evil is afoot in Burke’s bayou country
Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel, James Lee Burke’s fearless and foolhardy “Bobbsey Twins from homicide,” would follow each other through the gates of hell. This time hell meets them halfway. In their nearly 35 years of bending rules and busting heads, Dave and Clete have faced practically anything the Louisiana underworld can throw at them. But their adversaries are usually mortal. That changes in “A Private Cathedral,” the two-time Edgar winner’s 23rd Robicheaux installment and 40th book overall. (A tribute video on his website features famous fans Stephen King, Attica Locke and Lee Child, among others, toasting Burke’s accomplishment.)
Dave, who debuted in 1987’s “The Neon Rain,” is getting up there in years, so this time out Burke rewinds the clock to around the turn of the millennium. Puzzling over his cellphone, he sees “humankind’s latest attempt to control our lives and our fate. But I didn’t feel any control at all.” At this point, Dave is a recovering alcoholic and a widower twice over, whose adopted daughter is away at college. He was recently suspended from the Iberia Parish Sheriff ’s Department.
Not that that’s ever stopped him. “Cathedral” opens with Dave visiting Huntsville prison, pumping a former hit man for information. He and Clete — a rhinoceros in a porkpie hat, capable of almost symphonic levels of violence — are quickly drawn into a centuries-old feud between two of Louisiana’s wealthiest families, their coffers swollen from generations of ill-gotten gains. The former New Orleans Police Department partners must figure out why teenage rock ’n’ roll singer Johnny Shondell has just delivered Isolde Balangie, stepdaughter of a notorious New Orleans mob boss, as a sex slave to Johnny’s refined, reclusive uncle.
The story takes a turn, and takes on a tinge of “Romeo and Juliet” (the Baz Luhrmann version) when Johnny and Isolde fall in love and start a band together. The two strike a chord with the soulful, spiritually conflicted Dave, who is as capable of quoting swamppop greats Warren Storm and Guitar Slim as John Donne and William Blake.
While investigating Isolde’s disappearance, Dave also manages to get intimate with both the wife and mistress of Isolde’s powerful stepfather. Clete, always a fountain of quotable material, tells him, “My Jolly Roger never gets out of control either.”
Stalking the pages while all this plays out is one of Burke’s most memorable creations, a mysterious, reptilian assassin known as Gideon. Describing himself as a “revelator,” Gideon appears to travel in an ancient galleon powered by men chained to the oars. He first appears coming after Clete, hanging him upside down and attempting to burn him alive — the same way a distant relative of Isolde’s was killed centuries earlier.
Gideon’s prey isn’t quite as lucky later on, but as the story progresses, the assassin’s agenda seems to change.
Once again, “Cathedral” is laden with two of Burke’s primary talents: poetic ruminations on the nature of evil, and a rare talent for detailing what Clete calls “the bottom of the septic tank.” A hit man sent after Dave’s priest friend is instead dispatched with such ferocity that Dave’s sheriff boss tells him to write it up as a hit-and-run, “probably by a big truck.”
Burke, now 83, uses his usual splendid accounts of the lush Louisiana landscape to bring the dark forces at play into sharp relief. Johnny and Isolde’s producer is tied in with neoNazis. Clete carries a photo in his wallet of a woman and her children on the way to the Auschwitz gas chamber so he can keep in mind the sort of people who staff such places: “I’d like to get my hands on some guys like that.” The specter of the
Civil War refuses to go away.
“In Louisiana we don’t have Confederates in the attic,” Dave says. “We have them everywhere.”
Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man is familiar territory for Burke, who has an uncanny knack for explaining how easily otherwise decent people can be seduced into serving sinister forces. That goes double should they get a whiff of power.
Dave puts it this way: “How is it we can do so much harm to one another as long as we are provided sanction? How is it we make marionettes of ourselves and give all power to those who have never heard a shot fired in anger or had even a glimpse of life at the bottom of the food chain?”
In “Cathedral,” Dave and Clete struggle in vain to come up with answers to those questions that might help them sleep better at night. Their ability to balance the scales by taking a few players off the board, as they might say, pales in the cold light of the evil that permeates Burke’s beautiful bayou country.