Chapter 6 Thiago #2
“The man from Lafayette. Jules. He’ll offer food before he offers anything useful, and the food is not optional. He makes boudin that will adjust your thinking about many things.”
“Warning or recommendation.”
“Both.”
I chuckled softly.
“We should go back,” Luca said.
He turned left on St. Ann Street. “Bourbon’s this way.”
“I thought we were going back.”
“We are. This is the way.”
It wasn’t the shortest way, and we both knew it. He strolled ahead, and I followed.
Bourbon Street announced itself before we arrived. Multiple layers of sound competed for our attention, bass from one bar sitting under the brass of another. Then the smell: spilled beer, bleach, and the aggressive sweetness of daiquiris dispensed from machines visible through every open window.
Luca turned right on Bourbon and the street slowly changed. The composition of the crowd shifted. We reached Café Lafitte in Exile.
Luca slowed his pace. “I used to come here,” he said. “The summer I was nineteen. After my first year at Tulane.”
I listened.
“There was a man. Forty-five, fifty, maybe. Good suit. Same stool every night, always with one hand around his glass, watching the room.” He glanced at the door as we passed. “I spent most of July finding reasons to be near that end of the bar without actually going in.”
“What happened when you ran out of reasons?”
“I climbed onto his lap.”
“And?”
“He laughed and bought me a drink. We talked about architectural preservation for two hours. Then we stopped talking, and I went home at three in the morning.
He was quiet for half a block. Then, “I was nineteen and very pleased with myself, so I probably learned less than I thought I did at the time.”
“You learned that you could go in.”
“I could go in.” He looked ahead. “He moved to Savannah, eventually. Some preservation project. We’d run into each other around the neighborhood a few times before that, and he always nodded.
” Luca stopped walking and turned toward me.
“I still think about something he said. About how the walls that actually matter are the ones you can’t see. You can work around the visible ones.”
He turned back toward the other end of Bourbon. “I think he was still talking about architecture,” he said.
It wasn’t a comment about architecture, and Luca knew that I knew that, but neither of us said so.
At the corner of St. Ann he stopped and pulled out his phone. He tapped a few times.
“Uber,” he said. “Six minutes.”
We waited, and the street moved around us.
Someone passed by with a frozen daiquiri in a yard-long cup shaped like a guitar.
A couple argued quietly in French outside a restaurant.
On the balcony above the corner bar, two men leaned on the railing shoulder to shoulder.
They turned toward each other and shared a kiss.
The Uber arrived. It was a gray Camry. The driver was a woman in her sixties with a rosary hanging from the rearview mirror.
The car was cold inside. The air conditioning operated at full blast, and I shivered.
Luca noticed. We both sat in the back at close quarters in someone else’s car at night. The city swept past the windows, its noise muffled behind the glass.
We didn’t talk. The ride was a short one. The driver turned onto St. Charles, and the live oaks closed overhead.
When she pulled to the curb, we got out, and the heat wrapped around us immediately.
The house was empty and aggressively quiet. Dominic hadn’t returned yet. An annotated score lay open on the piano rack. Ceiling fans turned in every room.
I did a quick sweep of the ground floor—parlor, salon, kitchen, back hallway. Luca was standing in the kitchen when I finished. He’d already poured a mug of coffee for each of us.
I took mine from him and leaned against the opposite counter. “The attack will happen at the concert,” I said.
Luca turned.
“That’s not news. You’ve been certain of that since you arrived.”
“I’m confirming it.”
“All of that evidence you’ve been working from.” Luca set his mug down. “The bullet, baton, and the Orpheum sightlines.”
“Yes.”
“They all point outward.” He crossed his arms. “You’re watching the walls.”
“What should I be watching?”
“The people inside them.” He looked at me. “You’re mapping access points. I pay attention to other things. We might not get the same answer.”
“Until the answers diverge, which they haven’t—“
“The baton didn’t come through a door you were watching, and the watch didn’t either. The threat is already inside. You see that, don’t you?”
The question was rhetorical.
Luca continued. “Someone who knows how you read rooms is likely performing exactly what they think you’d expect to see.”
We were both quiet. The amateur was working on informing the professional.
“And now we—“
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “When we find it, it won’t announce itself. I think it’s someone I’ve known for years. Maybe someone Dominic has known for decades.” He held my gaze. “It won’t be obvious from any list you’ve built.”
I thought about the photographer’s flash. Every head went up toward the gallery while the light sat two feet off the ground. I’d committed that moment to memory. I hadn’t asked what it meant.
“Sometimes the person closest to you is the most dangerous,” Luca said.
“And sometimes closeness keeps people from seeing clearly.”
“Fair,” he said after a moment. “That’s fair, but you create distance and call it professionalism.”
I looked at him, and my breath caught.
Somehow the distance between us changed. I wasn’t sure how it happened. We were close, and the courtyard light caught one side of his face while casting the other into shadow. His arms hung loosely at his sides.
I turned to leave before the conversation went somewhere it shouldn’t.
Luca reached out and caught my wrist. Not hard. Just enough to stop me.
I kissed him.
His mouth was warm, and he tasted faintly of coffee. He didn’t pull back. He reached out for my jaw with his palm open.
Luca exhaled slowly through his nose. Then his hand tightened just slightly on my wrist, and he kissed me back. Everything around us faded—the hum of the ceiling fans and the gurgle of the fountain.
When I pulled back, his eyes opened slowly. He rubbed my stubble with his fingertips.
“That’s going to complicate things,” I said. The statement came out flatter than I intended, but it was honest.
“I’ve watched you examine every exit in every room you’ve walked into since you arrived. Complicate isn’t the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
“I haven’t decided.” He lowered his hand. “Get back to me when you’ve figured out what you’re afraid of. Then we can have the conversation properly.”
He picked up his coffee mug and turned toward the French doors, looking out at the courtyard.
I had nothing useful to add. Then I pulled my tablet from the counter and opened the Fontenot file.
Two minutes later, the front gate opened.
I heard footsteps, Dominic coming up the front walk. He walked through the parlor and appeared in the kitchen doorway still in his jacket, hat in hand, with a satisfied expression on his face.
He read the room immediately.
“Productive evening,” he said.
“The investigation required some fieldwork,” I said.
“Mm.” He moved to the counter and poured a glass of Armagnac. He capped the bottle, picked up the glass, and turned toward the hallway. At the doorway, he paused.
“Luca.” He didn’t turn around. “The lemon trees will want water in the morning. The heat has been considerable.”
“Yes,” Luca said. “I’ll see to them.”
“Goodnight.”