Chapter 7 Luca
Chapter seven
Luca
“You’ve looked at him three times in the last four minutes,” Thiago said.
He stood beside me near the east wall, sipping sweet tea.
“I’m allowed to look at people.”
“Yes, you’re allowed to look at people, but this is more than that.”
I shifted my attention back to Dominic, twenty feet away in conversation with two board members from the arts council. He held a wine glass, gesturing occasionally with it.
The Tremé Cultural Preservation Society held its donor reception every August in a hall next to St. Augustine’s. It was a high-ceilinged room with exposed brick and low-hung chandeliers. They threw pale gold light across the assembled faces.
About sixty people attended, and I recognized most of them: musicians, arts administrators, and board members.
I knew which donors gave reliably and which required their names to be placed on things.
I knew whose marriages had dissolved quietly and which musicians along the far wall had spent three years angling for a seat in Dominic’s orchestra without making the cut.
“Who let the cellist in with a full case?” I asked.
Thiago glanced toward the entrance. “Now you’re thinking like me. He’s on the manifest. Note says he has a second gig nearby. No flags in the background check.”
Without intending to, I’d added my own tactical scans as I read the room. Across the room, Henri Fontenot stood near the windows on the far side of the hall.
“He’s been in the same position for twenty minutes.”
“I know. He hasn’t moved toward Dominic.”
“He hasn’t needed to. He can see him from there.”
Thiago turned his head a fraction, following my sightline.
Henri Fontenot conversed with two longtime contributors to the society. He wore a dark jacket over a pale rose shirt. He was thinner than I remembered and pale in the light cast by the chandeliers. I watched as he raised a handkerchief, covering a cough.
“He’s ill,” I said.
“How can you tell?”
“He’s trying too hard to look well.”
Henri held court for the next ten minutes. I discreetly moved closer and caught fragments of the conversation: …organized the response…working the informal networks…don’t appear anywhere in the official…belongs to the man the camera found.”
There was no bitterness in his tone. He sounded like a historian describing events in a dry monotone. Nothing in his voice rose or fell. That unsettled me.
I turned away before he could feel my attention.
Thiago had moved to another part of the room while I watched Henri. He entered into a conversation with Gerald Tureaud, the venue’s facilities manager, a compact man in his fifties who’d managed the hall for the past three decades.
A suit we’d purchased on Magazine Street helped Thiago blend into the atmosphere. He’d only brought three shirts to New Orleans for his leave and no formal jackets. That wouldn’t work across ten days of events.
At the shop, I handed him a charcoal jacket without comment. He put it on without asking why. We both looked at the result for a moment, and then I pulled a tie from a rack, deep rust, almost the color of old brick in the rain.
Gerald was telling him something that required gesturing at the ceiling, and Thiago tracked the movement. He caught the attention of a woman across the room. It was not a surprise. Unfamiliar handsome newcomers were a rarity in this crowd.
Thiago finished with Gerald and turned toward me. He read something in my expression and lifted one eyebrow a fraction.
I shook my head. Nothing.\
Movement in my peripheral vision drew my attention. I saw my mother before she saw me.
She stood near the refreshment table with my father, a champagne flute in hand. My father was talking with his hands, likely sketching out the details of the latest building he had salvaged.
I crossed toward them, and Thiago joined me, falling into step at my side.
“My parents,” I whispered as we approached.
“I see the resemblance.”
“My mother will read you in thirty seconds. Don’t perform.”
A beat. “What does that mean?”
“It means be yourself. She’ll uncover anything you try to hide.”
Jean-Paul Moreau, my father, was a big man, wide through the shoulders, and increasingly thick in the middle. He had hands that had handled forty years of iron, cypress, and brick. He folded me into a hug that compressed my spine and then extended a hand to Thiago, asking where he was from.
When Thiago said New York City, my father nodded and immediately offered him boudin from the back table. I said he’d eat later. My father said that the man could speak for himself. Thiago said he’d find it. My father approved of that answer.
While Thiago engaged my father about his current salvage project, a double-gallery Creole cottage, my mother moved to stand by me. Solange Baptiste Moreau was short and slight, with dark eyes sharpened by thirty years of handling the logistics of grief. She hugged me tightly and kissed my cheek.
“He works for Dominic,” she said.
“Security.”
She sipped the champagne. “There was something on the news. A neighborhood disturbance. That must have been you.”
“We’re managing it.”
She placed a hand around my waist. “He’s watching the door behind your father’s left shoulder while they talk. He’s careful with people he doesn’t know yet. That’s different from being cold. I like that.”
She studied my face for a moment longer. “You trust him already,” she said quietly.
“He’s a professional.”
She glanced at me. “Is Dominic safe? Are you?”
“We’re working on it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
My father completed his conversation with Thiago and squeezed my shoulder with one large hand. “Good one,” he said, tilting his head toward Thiago, who had stepped back to check his phone.
“He works for Dominic, Papa.”
“So do you.” My father headed for the boudin table with the urgency of a man who had been patient for long enough.
Thiago returned to my side. “Your mother looked at me as if she were reading a report.”
“She was.”
“What did it say?”
“She didn’t share her findings, but I know they both like you.”
“They didn’t say that.”
“They didn’t say the opposite. That’s important.”
Henri found us. I didn’t expect that.
“Luca,” he smiled. “You’re looking well.”
“Henri.” I shook his hand.
His grip had been firm in the past. Now, the strength behind it was gone.
We exchanged the standard pleasantries. He shared observations about the reception and the committee. He said he’d been retained in an advisory role by the Preservation Board and joked that he was too old for planning meetings that ran past nine. Then he spoke about his true purpose in finding me.
“I wanted to say—and I realize this is an odd thing to say at a cocktail reception—that whatever the city makes of Dominic’s anniversary, the work behind the moment matters, even if it doesn’t make it into the record.”
I waited for more.
“Those people deserve acknowledgment,” he said. “I believe that sincerely.”
“Most everyone here would agree with you.”
“Yes, in principle, and that is a comfortable stance. It requires no investment.”
He touched my arm once, lightly. “Give my best to Dominic.”
Henri moved away.
The conversation was heavier than it appeared. It explained his composure. He’d settled into a cold, deliberate understanding of the upcoming celebration concert. I thought about the handwriting on the funeral march. Unhurried. Technically accomplished.
Thiago stepped up to my left shoulder. I shared the details of the conversation, including the weakness in Henri’s grip.
“He knows someone in your household is paying attention.”
Thiago looked toward Henri, who had rejoined the cluster near the windows.
“He’s done with agreeing in principle,” Thiago said.
“Yes.”
A late afternoon storm arrived without warning, which was not unusual for the latter days of summer. The first thunderclap sounded directly overhead, rattling the windows and causing the chandeliers to sway slightly. Full sheets of rain followed within seconds.
I was in motion before I understood that the sharp report was only weather. Thiago also responded, and we rushed through the room to Dominic’s side.
He turned and looked at both of us. “Thunder,” he said.
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Are we all in agreement that it was, in fact, thunder?”
“Yes,” Thiago added.
“Then perhaps we can resume the festivities.” He lifted his wineglass and turned back toward his friend, Alden Prejean, who had watched the three of us with open curiosity.
“I didn’t know you brought security, Dominic.”
“Thiago works with me.“ Dominic moved on in his conversation. “You were saying something about the endowment committee.”
The rain was audible over the room’s ambient noise now. Lightning flashed, occasionally throwing the courtyard into sharp relief. The quartet continued to play.
Thiago spoke quietly. “Two seconds.”
“What?”
“Between when you started moving and when I did. You were faster.”
I looked at him. He was watching the room with a neutral expression.
“I’ll work on pacing myself,” I said.
He almost smiled.
Dominic found me twenty minutes later. “You’re going to tell me something.”
I was ahead of him. “Henri sought me out.”
He lifted his wineglass and turned it slowly while I gave him the same account I’d given Thiago—the same words with the same emphasis.
“Henri said it to you,” he noted. “Not to me.”
“Perhaps I was the safer destination.”
“He’s not speaking to me yet. He talks adjacent to me, letting the words arrive by alternative routes.” Dominic exhaled. “Henri always preferred counterpoint to direct statements. Two lines moving simultaneously. The meaning lives in the interval between them.”
He wasn’t discussing musical composition. Not entirely.
“You need to tell Thiago what you know about 2006,” I said. “Not the published version.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And if it reflects poorly?”
“Then it does. Thiago is discreet.”
Dominic glanced around the room and then spoke, barely above a whisper.
“You know most of this, but I was not the first person in Jackson Square that night. I found something already assembled. Someone had made calls I didn’t make, reaching musicians outside of my network, and understood what the moment needed before it existed.
” He paused. “Henri. I stepped into something he built, and the cameras found me. I’ve known this for twenty years. I haven’t said it publicly or to him.”
He straightened his cuffs. “I’ll tell Thiago in the morning. Now, I’d like to finish my wine.”
He moved back toward the musicians near the entrance. I watched him go.
I scanned the room and found Henri at the far end of the hall. He was watching Dominic. He turned slightly, and for one beat, his gaze landed on me. Then he moved on.
Thiago joined me. “The three of us need to talk tonight,” I said.
“Dominic told you something.”
“Enough.” I kept my eyes on Henri, who had turned back toward the window, his profile to the room, watching the last of the storm move east across the city. “The threat isn’t coming from outside the circle. It’s moving inward. Through people Dominic trusts.”
“I know,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I’ve known since the watch. I’ve been waiting for the picture to complete itself. It’s almost there. We have work to do.”