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Mesopotamia were setting tables for diminished families, and countless children were waiting for the sound of a door opening and the claiming voices of their blood. He wanted in the worst way to help the girl, but he was as carried along by the war’s events as she was and would be a hundred miles away by the next evening.
    Robicheaux called out from his blanket spread along a fallen tree. “Simoneaux, viens ici, petit boogalee.”
    He walked toward the voice. “Let me have a pull on that jug if you haven’t dirtied it with your spit.”
    “This brandy has a lot of fire,” Comeaux said. “You could disinfect a urinal with it.”
    Sam drank until his eyes watered. “Maudit fils d’putain!” he exclaimed.
    “I thought you give up speakin’ French,” Robicheaux said.
    “This stuff’ll make you speak Chinese.” But he took another swallow, and after a few minutes, another, for a breeze had come up and the wind was ice. Comeaux told a joke, but no one laughed, and the lieutenant tried to explain what life was like in Indiana, but no one listened to him. After a long period of quiet someone said out of the dark, “I can’t believe they expected us to do any good.”
    “Yes,” the lieutenant began, raising an arm toward the north, “think of all the millions of tons of stuff lying out there that didn’t explode.”
    Sam’s gaze followed the gesture, and saddened by the day’s events, he said, “But think of every bit that did.”

The Missing

Chapter Three
    1921
    SAM RETURNED from Europe with the notion that the surface appearance of things was not to be trusted, that the world was a more dangerous place than he’d thought. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he didn’t completely understand what he’d been through. Some of his friends came back shell-shocked, depressed, suspicious, and disoriented. Most got jobs and tried to work their way out of the war, and, in time, succeeded—artillerymen selling cars, machine gunners baking bread. Sam was thankful he hadn’t killed anybody, because the men he knew who had were having a rough time just walking down Canal Street, where a car might backfire and send them to the pavement.
    For the past two years Sam had been the head floorwalker in Krine’s department store, four high-ceilinged floors of clothes for all genders and ages and budgets; shoes ranging from hand-sewn wingtips with waxy oxblood complexions to smelly rubber footgear that would come apart if the wearer stood on a heat register; a like spectrum of furniture, notions, and phonograph records; a lunch counter with both steak and thin soup. On an open mezzanine above the first floor was a lady’s parlor of no particular commercial purpose where a pipe organ was manned between ten and five by Maurice, the fourth and most musical son of Isaac Krine, the owner. Sam told his fellow employees to call him Lucky and repeated the Armistice story to everybody because it made them happy. He was glad to be in New Orleans and not on the farm, glad to be getting rid of his bayou accent, his sun-roasted skin, his army clothes, the explosions, and the horse droppings.
    Krine’s was on Canal Street, not far from neighborhoods fallen on hard times, including the French Quarter, home, in Sam’s mind, to people of decayed wealth and logic. The store suffered the slings and arrows of shoplifting, a biannual armed robbery, usually at the jewelry counter, arson, and the occasional fistfight between whores in the foundations department.
    Sam stepped out of the office, rolled his shoulders in his freshly pressed summer-wool suit, and checked the wide aisles. Each morning he slipped a fresh flower into his buttonhole, checked his nut-brown hair and square jaw in the jewelry-counter mirror, and began a constant route through the cavernous store, examining both the behavior of customers and the physical plant, including the many-bulbed light fixtures hanging twenty feet above the floor from huge plaster medallions. If Mr.