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“Seriously, what is that smell?” she asks me.

“Probably a dead dog, maybe a person,” I tell her.

“It’s really bad. It’s a lot worse than I thought,” she says.

“Will the smell be a problem for buyers?” I ask.

“We’re just going to have to take one case at a time,” she tells me, not blinking an eye. “Everybody has a different need right now. It’s very emotional. It’s very traumatic.”

In the past few weeks, Farris estimates, Century 21 has sold some 1,500 homes in Baton Rouge, a big rise from what the agency would normally sell—and prices are moving up. Farris is not sure what will happen in New Orleans, but she’s positioned herself to benefit either way.

“I hope it’s going to be great,” she says, flashing the smile that’s helped her sell many properties over the years. “President Bush says he’s rebuilding New Orleans. We think it’s going to be great. We’re looking forward to it.”

Brandy Farris is nothing if not optimistic.

IT’S TWO AND a half weeks since the storm, and at the daiquiri bar the music is pumping. Outkast sings “Hey Ya.” The bar is not very crowded, and for the first time I notice that white police officers sit on one side, African American officers on the other.

One of the cops I’m sitting with is angry at CNN. We aired a story about some police who were allegedly looting after the storm. He’s not disputing that it happened, but he wishes we’d done more to point out that it was only a handful of cops.

The police officer has just had two days off. He drove out of state to visit his kids. He went in a police cruiser, which New Orleans cops are allowed to use on their days off. Every couple of hours, however, he was stopped by state police, who thought he was a deserter.

“The first cop who stopped me gave me a card with his name on it and his phone number, in case I got stopped again. But the next time it happened, they just ignored the card. They’d stop me and make me go through the whole explanation each time.” Even their own seem to have turned on them.

Another cop, who’s been on the force more than a dozen years, says he plans to leave. A few years ago he’d been offered a job with a small-town police force in the midwest, but turned them down. Now he says he’s going to call them back. “I’ll work anywhere. I don’t care. I just want out.”

“With 9/11 they treated it like a crime scene,” he says, holding his beer by the neck. “With 9/11 they sifted through the wreckage, every piece. Here, they’re simply going to bulldoze some of those buildings, which still have people in them. Months from now, people are going to be sitting around and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, whatever happened to old Joe. Where’d he go?’ And no one will know. People will simply disappear.”

His neighbor was dead for two weeks before anyone realized she was missing. “I went and found her body,” he says, his voice clipped. “I took a forensics class a couple months ago, and they told us, in a situation like this, to always look for the flies. I actually found my neighbor by listening to the beating wings of flies.”

Drinking with these police officers, I can’t help but feel they’re the only ones who’ll really remember what happened here. I saw pieces of the horror; they saw it all—who was here, who wasn’t. They know who the real heroes are.

A cop says, “You can tell, it’s the people who do this”—with one hand he mimicks someone talking—“the people who are talking big, they are the ones who ran.”

When the storm hit, his fiancée told him to leave. “‘Fuck them,’ she tells me, ‘fuck the police,’” he says clutching a beer. There are nearly a dozen more on the table. “I told her, ‘I was a cop before I met you, and I’ll be a cop after you leave. Fuck you.’”

Like a lot of cops, he tried to look after family members while still doing his job. He used a wave runner to help rescue his partner’s mom. As he took her out, he realized how many more people still needed help.

“We turned a corner, and there were just dozens of people on roofs, and they were all crying out.