“You know we love having her, Easy,” Jewelle said. “And her friend sounds like she should know a man like Jackson.”

“Take her if you want her, but she will empty your refrigerator and your cupboards. That girl and her friends are bottomless pits.”

“Daddy, stop.”

“Okay then,” Jewelle said. That was code. Maybe she didn’t know it, but whenever she said Okay then, that meant there was trouble on the horizon.

“What’s up, girl?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh yeah, it’s sumthin’ all right.”

“Um . . . well. I have been having this little problem since I bought an empty lot on Flower downtown. Jackson says that it’s a perfect place to start a research center.”

“Researchin’ what?”

“You know, computer stuff. He says that because of the mechanics of computers they need to keep the memory cold so that it won’t catch on fire or melt. And there’s what he calls a stone substratum under that property that would be perfect for the refrigeration units and also pretty much earthquake-proof.”

Grinning, I remembered a time when Jackson and a friend of his named Toto would burglarize liquor stores for spare change and cheap wine.

“That all sounds aboveboard,” I said.

“It should be, but there’s this white man named Oliver Shellbourne. He owns a lotta the land down around there. He likes to see himself as a tough guy and so doesn’t want some black chick getting in the way of his future sweatshops and shopping malls.”

“He’s blocking the sale?”

“No. I bought the land from a friend of Jean-Pierre. Shellbourne couldn’t go up against the head of P9, but now he’s getting somebody to make threatening calls to my office. I don’t want to tell Jackson because he’ll go to either JP or somebody like Mouse, and you know what’ll happen then.”

While in the French Resistance, Jean-Paul Villard once executed a Nazi sympathizer. He left the man’s corpse, detached penis in mouth, in the town square. Mouse was somewhat north of that.

“He doesn’t call himself?” I asked.

“No. It’s just some other rude white man.”

“What’s he say?”

“I can’t repeat it.”

“Oliver Shellbourne?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll take care of it,” I said. “I can’t tell right when, but soon.”

“Thank you, baby,” she said, and that was all I needed to smile.

I traveled with Feather down to the base of our mountain and saw her off with Matteo on her busy adolescent life. After they had driven off I stood there for a while girding myself for the transition from domestic bliss to wartime.