Chapter 10 Thiago
Chapter ten
Thiago
Michael called at six forty-two, while I still had Henri Fontenot’s financial records open on my tablet. When the intelligence warranted, he skipped texting and went straight to voice.
“Eight months,” he said, in place of a greeting. “Spaced and deliberate. Eight hundred dollars monthly, never sent to the same account twice. They’re routed through three shell entities. The pattern’s clean. I’m not sure yet of the destination or purpose.”
I’d been sipping cold coffee from the night before and set it down.
“What caught my attention was the interval. This isn’t someone hiding money. The spacing is too consistent, thirty to thirty-two days, every time, in the same amount. It’s almost ceremonial.”
“Like a recurring contract.”
“Like he’s honoring an obligation. Yes.”
He hung up.
Outside, the St. Charles streetcar bell sounded, and I thought about Henri Fontenot at the Tremé reception. The handkerchief Luca pointed out. The angle of his body, keeping Dominic in his sightline without appearing to look.
Eight hundred dollars. Thirty-day intervals. He’d been doing it for eight months, which put the first payment in December, well before the public announcement of the anniversary concert.
Someone had known early. They had access to Dominic’s plans. Someone Henri trusted.
I smelled the aroma of coffee rising from downstairs, accompanied by citrus. It was the lemon trees or Luca’s preferred dish soap. He was setting the morning in motion, making coffee before anyone asked.
I closed the Fontenot file to go downstairs and join him.
***
The café on Magazine Street had six tables and a chalkboard list of specials that changed daily. Luca described it as a favorite that opened ten years before Katrina.
We left the house on foot at twelve-fifteen. Luca suggested I drive, keeping Dominic out of the oppressive heat, but Dominic wouldn’t accept that.
“I want to return,” Dominic said, “to the matter of the drive-thru coffee.”
“You said acceptable,” Luca reminded him.
“I said acceptable in a vehicle, under duress, in the absence of alternatives. I want that context preserved.”
Luca glanced at me over the silver of Dominic’s hair. I kept my face still.
The café‘s owner met Luca at the door by name and put us at a table by the window. The front door was open to the street, sending the blended scents of diesel and sweet olive past us. A group of tourists in the back shared something fried and photographed each other while eating it.
We selected three drinks first. Dominic ordered a small carafe of red wine. Luca’s drink was a Pimm’s Cup, tall and iced, with cucumber and mint bright against the glass. Conscious of being on the job, I ordered sweet tea.
Dominic examined the chalkboard. “They’re offering cassoulet.”
“Excellent choice,” Luca said. “They make the base the night before so the fat has time to settle.”
“In August?”
“They close up the building and run the air conditioning hard until the next morning.”
Dominic weighed the options. “I have opinions about cassoulet in August.”
“You’re going to order it, regardless.”
“I may.”
Our food arrived without ceremony. A wide white bowl was set in front of Dominic, the cassoulet dark and glossy beneath a crust of browned crumbs, with white beans barely visible under duck and sausage. Steam rose from it despite the heat pressing through the open door.
My plate held grilled redfish laid over a bright tangle of shaved fennel and citrus. Luca had ordered a po’boy—roast beef, dressed.
Dominic smiled at his cassoulet, briefly and with clear satisfaction. He glanced out the window where someone in a Saints shirt strolled past.
“Explain something to me,” he said to Luca.
“This should be good.”
“Why do people shout at the television during Saints games as if the players can hear them?”
Luca said, “Because they might.”
I added, “That’s not the strangest theory I’ve heard about Saints fans.”
Dominic sat with that. “It explains the volume.”
Suddenly, a dog bolted through the open front door. The leash was still attached, but the person wasn’t.
It was large and cream-colored; the breed was unclear. It assessed the space in under two seconds: tourists in the back, a tote bag beside the bar, and a man in a Tulane shirt whose left foot became the destination. The dog sat on the man’s foot and panted.
A young woman in a green dress entered the café. “Gravy—“
A voice from the kitchen doorway said, “Gravy, not again—“
The man in the Tulane shirt looked down. Gravy looked up at him with a serene, uncomplicated gaze.
The woman in the green dress began apologizing to the room. Gravy accepted a chunk of bread from the man’s plate. Multiple phones snapped photos.
I looked at Dominic.
He watched the dog with a furrowed brow and a set jaw. He was too well-bred to voice any of his opinions about the situation.
Luca pressed his lips together tightly, barely containing himself.
“Dominic,” he managed.
“I have nothing to say.”
Gravy was eventually coaxed out of the café with a treat produced from the owner’s jacket pocket. A round of applause erupted.
Dominic picked up his fork. “What were we discussing about football?” he asked with full dignity.
I almost missed the most important person.
It was a woman on the sidewalk outside the window. She stopped briefly and raised her phone, but she didn’t point the camera at the dog as it left the building.
Instead, she angled the phone toward the window where we sat. I looked at her directly, but she was already leaving. Not in a hurry. Deliberate steps down the sidewalk.
She stood out by wearing a dark jacket in the August heat. I committed her profile plus the cut and color of her hair to memory. I didn’t see her face clearly enough.
“Everything okay?” Luca asked.
“Yes,” I said. “The dog’s gone.”
***
Eamon called at four. “It’s getting complicated,” he said.
“I have it contained.”
“Contained isn’t the same as managed. Those are different words for a reason. I’m coming down.”
“Understood.”
I was in the guest room, with the shutters angled against the afternoon light. Michael’s preliminary report was open on my laptop screen beside the Fontenot financials.
“Are you sleeping? Eating?” Eamon asked.
“There’s a man in this house who cooks for us.”
His pause lasted a little longer than would be natural. “I arrive at six tomorrow. Send a car.” He hung up.
The financial picture and the woman on Magazine Street. Two data points, and when I held them against each other, the shape they made was not the picture I’d been building.
I’d been studying the Orpheum: access points, balcony sightlines, credential lists, and how the mechanics of a threat there would unfold.
The woman with the camera wasn’t interested in the building. She was interested in who sat beside Dominic at lunch on an ordinary Friday.
I went back to the Fontenot file. The financial pattern was obvious. The contractor—not yet confirmed, but Michael would get there—was clear.
What wasn’t clear was the mechanism inside Dominic’s world.
I went to find Luca. He was down the hall in his room.
His door was open. I paused in the doorway. He was at his desk with his back to me, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, staring at his laptop screen. The window above the desk framed the side garden. He sensed my presence and turned.
“No more latches to check?”
“Not until later. Mind if I join you?”
He turned his chair to face the room and gestured at his bed.
Luca had not arranged his room the way I’d expected. I wouldn’t call it disordered, but he layered the decorating in a way that the rest of the house, shaped by Dominic’s minimalist aesthetic, wasn’t. He’d packed shelves on two walls tight with books. Some spines were turned the wrong way.
A 45 lay on the nightstand in its sleeve. “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups. The paper had gone soft at the corners from being handled.
On the wall above the desk, framed in plain black, was the original 1994 theatrical release poster for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It hung at eye level where Luca sat every day.
I pointed at it. “1994,” I said.
Luca glanced over his shoulder. “I didn’t see it when it was first released. I was too young, but my mother took me to see it in a theater when I was nine. She told my father we were going to a nature documentary.”
“Did he believe her?”
“No, he brought it up for years.” A pause. “Fondly.”
I looked at the poster again. I thought about a nine-year-old in a theater in New Orleans, watching those three figures cross the Australian desert, his mother beside him, who had already decided what he needed to see and wasn’t afraid to take him.
“And ‘Iko Iko?’”
“The Dixie Cups. Found it at an estate sale in Metairie. Box lot.”
“You listen to it?”
“We do.” He smiled. “Dominic has an old record player he refuses to replace. Says music should have a little friction in it. He likes when I put it on.”
“He loves you.”
Luca looked at me.
“He loves me,” he agreed.
We were quiet for a moment.
“The dog’s name was Gravy,” Luca said.
I rubbed a sweaty palm on my jeans. “I’m aware.”
“Not Biscuit, Gravy.“ He was fighting back an instinct. “Just—and then he sat on a stranger’s foot.”
“Gravy, not again—“ I delivered my best imitation of the voice from the kitchen, and Luca laughed, full and unguarded, filling the room.
Through final, choking laughs, he said, “Dominic’s jaw during the bread transaction—“
“He was assembling a statement.”
“Seven years,” Luca said, leaning back in his chair. “He still finds new occasions to be exquisitely appalled.”
Our laughter gradually faded, and I looked at my hands. “There was a woman on the sidewalk,” I said. “During the dog.”
Luca leaned forward.
“Her phone was up, but the framing was wrong. She didn’t focus on the dog.”
He placed his hands on his knees.
“Profile only. Dark jacket. She was moving before I could stand—“
“Green tote bag on her left shoulder,” Luca said. “She stopped for nineteen, twenty seconds. She had the angle on Dominic before she had it on you.”
Luca looked at me.
“You said nothing.”
“Right.”
“At the table.”
“Dominic was there.” A pause. “And I wanted to see if you’d catch it.”
“I did.”
“She was mapping who surrounded him,” he said.
He moved his chair toward me, reached across and set his hand over mine where it rested on the bedspread.
Eamon would arrive tomorrow.
The gas lamps on St. Charles came on one by one through the oaks, amber and steady. After a moment, Luca stood, walked to the window, and watched the garden for a few seconds as if checking that the evening had settled properly. Then he came back and sat beside me on the edge of the bed.
Close, but not touching.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” he said.
“About the woman?”
“No.” He glanced down at his hands. “About me.”
I waited.
“For the first few days you were here,” he said, “I kept thinking you reminded me of someone.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“I wasn’t sure yet.” A small smile. “It took me a while to place it.”
He leaned back on his hands and looked up at the ceiling.
“When I was thirteen,” he said, “my mother took me to hear Dominic conduct for the first time.”
I turned slightly toward him.
“She’d worked with him before. Small things. Copy work and rehearsal logistics. That sort of thing. She told me I could sit in the back if I stayed quiet.”
He paused.
“I’d seen nothing like it. Not the orchestra or the control.”
He lifted one hand and made a small circling motion in the air.
“Hundreds of people in that room watched him breathe.”
“And you liked that.”
“I loved it.” A beat. “Not because I wanted to be him.”
“What then?”
“Because I realized there were other ways to build a life besides what my father had in mind. You make me think beyond Dominic.”
The room remained quiet around us. Outside, a car rolled slowly past on St. Charles, and the streetcar bell sounded once in the distance.
“My mother knew before I did,” Luca said. “About most things.”
“And your father?”
“He knew too.” Luca smiled faintly. “He just chose not to acknowledge it.”
I watched him for a moment.
“You’ve been wanting to tell me that?”
“For a few days.” He turned his head slightly toward me. “I’m not sure I explained it well, but you ask questions like someone who expects genuine answers.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“In my experience, yes.”
He lowered his head onto my shoulder and exhaled.