Elysian Fields

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The scariest sound in New Orleans’ French Quarter is silence.

Even at four a.m. on a damp November Sunday morning, there should have been a few horns blaring, one or two belligerent drunks staggering around, a street hawker trying to solicit one more customer into a nightclub making its last call, the final trill of a trumpet.

All I heard as I followed Jake Warin along lower Dauphine Street were the falls of our footsteps on the concrete sidewalk. It was as if the thick mist that shrouded the gas streetlamps in golden balls of light had absorbed everything else and corralled the sounds from Bourbon Street into the confines of the street itself.

Just in case slipping into a gory police crime scene wasn’t eerie enough.

We turned the corner at Ursulines and found our contact standing against the side of a generic sedan that had been parked across a gated driveway. He wore a New Orleans Saints cap, but his nylon windbreaker had NOPD stamped across the back in gold block letters that glittered in the misty light. It, plus the gun on his hip, offered a warning to anyone who might take a notion to rob him: don’t.

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