Chapter 9 Luca
Chapter nine
Luca
“Are you certain this is necessary?” Dominic asked from the passenger seat.
Thiago checked his mirror, signaled, and moved the SUV into the left lane with the unhurried ease of someone who had driven in considerably worse conditions than St. Charles Avenue on a Friday morning. “Yes,” he said.
I sat in the back with my tablet, reviewing a list of archive materials.
Over seven years of managing Dominic’s world, I’d created a reliable internal filing system.
He wanted Bridget’s early performance assessments, the press clippings from her first two seasons, and I knew which box they were in and approximately where inside the box.
I needed twenty uninterrupted minutes at the Orpheum archive to retrieve them.
Dominic examined the interior of the SUV, lightly touching both the door handle and the dashboard.
“This vehicle belongs to The Guardians?”
“Yes,” replied Thiago.
“It’s excessive.”
“Someone shot at your house. We can’t continue using your regular cars and drivers or walk along the street. This is your safest form of transport.”
Dominic dismissed the comment with a small wave. I returned to my tablet.
We turned onto Canal Street, and Thiago slowed for a red light. The city had been up for hours already. A woman sold pralines from a folding table outside the Walgreens, and the first tourists of the morning clustered at the corner, photographing the streetcar tracks.
Thiago pulled into a drive-thru for coffee.
Dominic sat forward. “We are not doing this.”
“It might surprise you.”
“I have never once been surprised by coffee served through a window.”
Thiago pulled up to the speaker. He ordered Dominic a café au lait. Next, he ordered himself a black coffee and glanced at me in the mirror.
“Double shot,” I said. “Iced.”
The barista greeted Thiago by name through the speaker.
He had introduced himself on a previous visit, which meant he had conducted reconnaissance at a drive-thru coffee window, either admirably thorough or slightly alarming, maybe both.
While we waited, he scanned the side mirror, the street ahead, and the delivery entrance of the building across the lot.
The barista passed the cups through the window, and he handed one to Dominic without comment.
Dominic looked at the cup. He sipped and said nothing.
I looked out the window and let the silence speak for itself.
Thiago parked in the stage access lot behind the Orpheum and walked around to Dominic’s door before Dominic could open it himself.
The lot bordered a service alley connecting University Place on one end and a loading corridor on the other.
Thiago wanted to be present when Dominic exited the vehicle.
Dominic understood and allowed it. Progress.
Someone had propped the stage door open with a sandbag. Inside, work lights illuminated the pine deck with long, yellow rays. Two stagehands moved a riser dolly through the upstage area, with the iron wheels squeaking and echoing throughout the space.
Thiago walked in and examined all the angles: wing entrances, fly grid, balcony curve, and the two stairwells flanking the house. Dominic subtly relaxed the moment the stage door closed behind us.
A stagehand near the wing nodded as we passed. “Mr. St. Clair.”
“Raymond,” Dominic paused. “How’s the knee?”
“Better. Surgery was in June.”
Thiago dropped a half-step behind us. His phone was out, thumb moving—Michael, probably, or Eamon. He’d been in contact with both since early morning.
“The coffee was acceptable,” Dominic said.
Thiago looked up from his phone. “High praise.”
“I didn’t say it was good. I said that it was acceptable.”
I kept walking and said nothing. The corridor smelled slightly of sawdust. Every theater has its own smell. Since the renovation, the Orpheum reminded me of something almost-finished, in the process of becoming what it was going to be.
The archive room was at the end of the corridor, past the greenroom and the instrument storage bay, where padded cases stood upright in rows. Dominic produced his key and opened the door.
The room was climate-controlled and smelled distinctly neutral.
Dominic had insisted on the environmental system five years ago, over the objections of two board members who felt the budget was better spent on instrument maintenance.
He had been correct as usual. The earliest programs in the collection, some dating to the theater’s 1921 opening season, were still legible.
“You do what we came to do, Luca. I’ll be walking around the building.” He turned slightly toward Thiago. “With him.”
I pulled the box containing Bridget’s file without checking the label and set it on the reference table. The room was quiet except for the ventilation hum.
I was about ten minutes in when I found a letter.
It was a single page on regional orchestra letterhead, addressed to Dominic, dated March 2016. He’d handwritten comments down the right edge in pencil, using the same precise script he used on scores. One phrase stood out.
Commercial viability; see enclosed.
I read from the top.
It was a response letter from a regional orchestra’s board, thanking Dominic for his recommendation in the final round of their music director search. It quoted him. The language was specific, and Dominic had written it about Bridget Marchand.
”…while Ms. Marchand’s musicianship is not in question, the long-term market viability of her leadership remains uncertain given the current donor landscape and subscription trends in comparable mid-size markets.”
I set it face down on the table and stood. I turned the letter over and read it again.
Market viability.
The original endorsement he’d written was missing from the box. Only the board’s response remained, quoting him. No plausible reason came to mind.
Bridget Marchand was Dominic’s concertmaster.
She’d spent the last four years translating his intentions to the surrounding musicians, holding the ensemble together from the inside.
Despite that, he had steered a board away from her leadership.
At every rehearsal, he accepted her leadership inside his orchestra, but he rejected her qualifications for taking one more step forward.
He created a ceiling for her in a letter she was never meant to read.
Over seven years, I’d grown to trust Dominic’s judgment implicitly. Now—
I separated the letter and the board’s response from the archive materials Dominic wanted, sliding them into separate pockets of my messenger bag.
I heard footsteps outside the room. Dominic’s voice carried as he commented on the weather. I had four seconds to compose myself before they opened the door.
“I think I have everything we need,” I said.
We got home a little after one.
Dominic went directly to his study and closed the door. I sorted the archive materials at the kitchen table, organized them by date, and left the stack outside the study with a brief note. I didn’t include the letter. It remained in my messenger bag, which I hung on the hook inside my bedroom door.
I made lunch and delivered plates to both Dominic and Thiago. They remained absorbed in their work.
I ate at the kitchen counter, looking out at the courtyard. The lemon trees needed water again after the week’s relentless heat. I was washing my plate when Celeste called.
“Tell me you’re somewhere comfortable,” she said.
“Kitchen.”
“Good enough.” I heard the creak of a leather chair on her end. “I had lunch yesterday with a woman on the Louisiana Philharmonic’s development committee. We were discussing the fall gala, and then the usual assortment of institutional gossip.” She paused and took a breath. “She mentioned Henri.”
I set my dish towel down.
“He’s been making inquiries. Discreet ones. He contacted the Orpheum and asked about the production calendar—load-in schedules, technical crew rotations, and the credentialing procedures for visiting production staff.”
“When?”
“Three months ago. Before the public announcement of the ‘Saints’ production.”
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
“He didn’t ask about the production specifically,” Celeste continued. “Nothing pointed. He couched it all in casual questions.”
“But it could mean something.”
“Context is everything, mon cher.” I heard her set down a cup. “The committee woman thought nothing of it at the time. She mentioned it as an aside, a footnote to a longer story about Henri’s emeritus role with the Preservation Alliance. I doubt she’ll remember saying it in another week.”
Dominic’s footsteps moved somewhere above me.
“Why would a semi-retired conductor be curious about the Orpheum’s load-in schedule for an event he wasn’t part of?” she asked.
“You probably have a theory.”
“I have seventeen theories,” Celeste said. “I’ll keep them to myself until one becomes a fact.”
“Don’t reject any until then.”
“Tell Dominic. Tell Mr. Reyes. And Luca, keep your eyes on the people who’ve been close for the longest. The threat isn’t coming from someone needing directions to find you.”
She hung up.
Dominic appeared in the kitchen doorway. He’d come down the back stairs.
I reported the details in the same order Celeste gave them to me. He listened without sitting down, one hand resting on the doorframe.
When I finished, he said: “Three months ago.”
“Before the announcement.”
Thiago appeared behind Dominic and stepped around him to enter the kitchen. “Celeste?”
“Yes.”
I repeated the details. Thiago listened with his arms at his sides and his expression neutral.
When I finished, he nodded and asked two clarifying questions: the committee woman’s name, which I didn’t have, and the framing of Henri’s inquiries, which I reconstructed as closely as I could. He excused himself to make a call.
Dominic watched him go and then picked up the kettle and filled it at the sink. He set it on the stove and stood looking at it.
“Celeste has seventeen theories,” he said.
“Yes, I remember that precisely.”
The kettle hissed.
“She’s been theorizing for fifty years,” I said.
“Longer.” He reached for two cups without asking whether I wanted tea. He had been doing that for seven years. “She was very good at it when I met her.”
We stood at the counter and drank. He didn’t ask what I was thinking. He never did when he knew I was working through something.
We returned to the Orpheum for a full rehearsal at seven.
I took a seat in the second row, house left, with my tablet on my knee. I watched Dominic’s face as he turned toward the strings; Bridget sat in the first chair.
Thiago stood at the back of the house, in the dark beyond the work lights. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.
The oboe gave the A, and Dominic let the tuning run its full course. He never cut it short. He believed it was the beginning of the performance. I’d watched him explain this to a young conductor at a masterclass once. Dominic said, “The difficulty is resisting the impulse to begin.”
The tuning resolved, and he raised his baton.
I took notes on my tablet. A section lead in the violas was still rushing the third measure. The second trumpet had been compensating for a breath issue all week. The choir director, seated in the wings, conducted in micro-movements visible from the second row.
I’d give my notes to Dominic later, in the kitchen, after he’d had twenty minutes with his Armagnac.
Then Dominic took them into the climactic section of the “Saints” arrangement. The approach to the final chorus was the emotional climax of the entire concert. The passage was almost there.
Dominic stopped them at the approach and made them run it again. He did it three times, and then let it go.
The music built. The strings took the phrase up, the brass answered, and the entire room leaned into it. Goosebumps rose on the back of my neck.
Dominic turned toward the strings at the top of the phrase. He nodded once at Bridget. I had watched him give her that nod for seven years. Tonight it landed differently.
And then I heard it. Bridget’s bow came down a quarter-beat early.
Small enough that most of the room wouldn’t register it as an error, but it was wrong, and I knew it the way you know when a sound you’ve heard a thousand times is suddenly off. She corrected within the measure, seamlessly, and I wasn’t sure Dominic caught it.
She had been somewhere else for that fraction of a phrase. Her playing was impeccable for the rest of the evening.
Once was enough.
I didn’t connect it to the letter. Not yet.
We got home at ten-fifteen.
Dominic went upstairs. I made myself useful in the kitchen, putting away the dishes from the drying rack and wiping the counters.
I found a note from Thiago on the counter by the coffee machine.
He’d folded it and printed my name on the outside. Inside, I found ten numbered questions about Dominic’s schedule for the following week. He arranged them in operational order rather than chronological. I read through them, found a pen, and answered one through nine in the spaces he provided.
Below the last question I added:
You left your coffee mug on the piano again.
I folded it and left it where I’d found it.
I opened a bottle of white wine, poured a glass, sitting at the kitchen table with the courtyard doors cracked open two inches. I heard Thiago’s steps in the hallway.
He appeared and looked at me. “Something happened today.”
“Several things.” I wrapped both hands around the wine glass without lifting it. “I need to sleep on them.”
He crossed to the counter and picked up the folded note, reading it. He found a pen, wrote, and left the paper where it was. Then he opened the refrigerator, took out the iced tea, and leaned against the counter, giving me room.
After a moment, I unfolded the note.
Thiago’s response below mine: That was Dominic.
He watched me from the counter. His gaze softened, and a quiet smile touched his mouth, the kind meant for one person and no one else.
“The rehearsal,” he said. “Anything I should know?”
“Bridget missed a cue in the climactic sequence. Small. She corrected immediately.” I sipped from my glass. “You might not have noticed from the back of the house.”
“But you did.”
“Yes.”
“Connected to anything?”
“I don’t know yet.”