Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Luca
The tomatoes were wrong.
Not bad. Just wrong.
The man behind the produce stand had arranged them in two shallow wooden crates beneath a canvas awning that did a reasonable job of cutting the direct sun.
I lifted one from the nearest crate and turned it in my hand.
The skin was smooth and bright, but when I pressed gently near the stem end, the flesh gave a little too easily.
“You’re looking for the Creole ones,” the vendor said. “These are Arkansas pinks. They look better than they cook.”
“That’s useful to know,” I said.
He leaned forward across the table and selected a tomato from a different crate. “This is what you want if you’re actually planning to eat them.”
The one he handed me had a deeper color and faint green shoulders around the stem. I pressed it gently. Firm. When I lifted it close, the smell that rose was clean and slightly sharp.
“Creole,” he said. “Came in from Plaquemines Parish this morning.”
“How long will they hold?”
“You’ll want to eat them in two days, maybe three.”
“I’m cooking tonight.”
“Then you’re fine.”
My father would have approved.
He believed that you could solve most food problems with patience and olive oil.
His salvage work had trained him to trust materials, and he approached ingredients the same way he approached a beam pulled from a condemned building: respect the structure and let the thing reveal what it wants to become.
I had learned early that good tomatoes punished impatience.
“You’re pressing too hard,” a voice said behind me.
I turned.
Bridget Marchand stood at the end of the stall with a canvas bag looped over one shoulder. She stepped up beside me and confidently reached into the tomato crate.
“This one,” she said.
She pressed the skin lightly with her thumb, then placed it into my basket. “You need three, and this one will hold together when you cook it.”
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning.”
The vendor looked at the two of us. “You two know each other?”
“We work together,” Bridget said.
He nodded, satisfied, and moved down the aisle toward a woman examining peaches. Bridget picked up another tomato, studied it, and set it aside.
“You’re cooking tonight?”
“Yes.”
“For Dominic?”
“Yes.”
“How is he pacing himself this week?”
“Predictably. He considers rest a form of moral weakness.”
She laughed. Then she asked whether Dominic had stayed late after rehearsal the previous afternoon, and whether he was still planning to arrive through the backstage entrance on Saturday.
“Yes, he is.”
“That’s what I thought.” She adjusted the bag on her shoulder. “Tell him I’ll see him tomorrow.”
Before leaving, she touched my arm lightly as she stepped past me.
I finished paying the vendor. He counted back change and said something about the basil going fast. I thanked him and walked toward the herb stand.
The questions sounded casual enough, but they were about Dominic’s movements, timing, and entry points.
I bought the last bunch of basil. The woman wrapped the stems in damp paper and tied them with twine. I thanked her and headed toward home.
By the time I turned off Magazine Street, I’d settled on my assessment of Bridget. She knew what she was doing, and the knowledge was slowly altering how she carried herself.
The kitchen was bright when I returned, with the long windows above the sink catching the mid-morning light. Thiago was at the table with his tablet open beside a mug of coffee. He looked up when I set the market basket on the counter.
“You walked,” he said.
“Yes, fresh air and exercise. I feel virtuous.”
I unpacked the tomatoes and set them on the cutting board. The basil followed, still damp through the paper. Then garlic. Thiago watched without speaking, and his tablet went dark.
I reached for the knife and cut the first tomato cleanly through its center. Juice spread across the board. The smell that rose was clean and bright. Perfection.
“I know who it is on the inside,” I said.
I sliced into the second tomato, and Thiago didn’t move.
“I think I’ve known for several days.” I cut the tomato into thick slices. “But I kept looking for reasons I was wrong.”
“Bridget?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I kept working.
“What did you see?”
“Nothing dramatic. She asked about timing.” I pulled out the third tomato. “Whether Dominic stayed late after rehearsal, and how he would enter the day of the concert.”
“Staging questions.”
“Delivered as ordinary conversation.”
He was quiet for a moment. The ceiling fan turned above us, pulling the warm air in a slow, patient circuit.
“She knows,” I said.
“Knows what.”
“What she’s doing. The weight of it. Her posture shows something heavy on her shoulders.”
“We don’t move on her yet. If we move on her, we lose Henri.”
“Yes.” I set the knife flat against the board and looked at him. “I’m not moving on her.”
My messenger bag was hanging on the hook by the door, where I’d left it the night before. The letter from the regional orchestra board was in the outer pocket, tucked inside a folder I had not opened since the archive room. I had thought about it each morning since, but I still hadn’t shared it.
What I thought Bridget had done and what Dominic had done were different failures, and they did not belong in the same breath. Dominic’s couldn’t cause the end of anyone’s life.
“I will pass your insight on to Eamon,” Thiago said.
***
Dominic came downstairs in the late afternoon wearing a dark jacket and a white linen shirt, open at the collar.
“I’m told I’m performing tonight,” he said.
“Celeste wants a monument,” I replied. “Not a maestro.”
“Yes. Understood.”
He adjusted one cuff and then studied me briefly. “You’re going somewhere.”
“Dinner.”
“With Mr. Reyes?” He lifted his hat from the sideboard and settled it.
I nodded.
“Good.”
The restaurant in the Marigny had six tables, a chalkboard menu that had been partially erased and rewritten twice that day, and forty years of cooking aromas that seeped into the walls. Odette, the chef-owner, seated us herself.
She was a small woman in her early seventies, with close-cropped silver hair. She had known my mother since before I was born, and she had seen me through the Tulane years with a combination of free meals and unsolicited advice.
“You’ve got gray,” she said.
“It’s not gray. It’s the light in here.”
“The light in here is what it’s always been.” She reached up and touched the hair at my right temple with two fingers. “It’s distinguished.”
“I’m thirty-two. Too early for gray,” I said.
“Yes, I know how old you are.” She looked at Thiago. “You’re with him?”
“I’m with him.”
“You’ll eat then. Both of you.”
She poured wine before we had ordered or asked for it, set bread on the table, and returned to the kitchen.
“Distinguished,” Thiago said.
“She’s been saying what she thinks since I met her. I learned not to take it personally.”
“I didn’t say it was a problem.”
Odette returned twenty minutes later with the first course and a brief story about the evening I had arrived at her door during my second year at Tulane carrying a terrible bottle of wine.
I had failed a midterm in Arts Administration Theory, and I needed to discuss it with someone sympathetic before sharing the news with my parents.
“He sat in that chair,” she said, gesturing toward the next table, “and he told me he was reconsidering his entire academic program. I told him to eat something first.”
“That’s sound advice,” Thiago said.
“He ate two plates of red beans and then stayed in school.” She set down a bowl of chilled shrimp with rémoulade, a crudo dressed with citrus and a thin oil, and a small board with country paté, house-pickled okra, and a dark mustard. “The discipline saved him, and the cooking helped.”
“What cooking?” I asked.
“You came here and watched me cook for two years. You didn’t think I noticed?”
She disappeared.
The shrimp were cold and cleanly sweet against the bites of rémoulade. Thiago tried one, then another, and he reached across the table for the crudo.
“She’s not wrong,” he said.
Odette cranked the restaurant windows open as darkness descended. A bar across the street had its doors open, and a live brass section filtered out. It was traditional New Orleans jazz with a melancholy edge.
We ate slowly.
The main course arrived in two wide bowls: a broth of roasted tomatoes and white beans with short ribs braised until yielding to a spoon. Odette finished the dish with herbs and a drizzle of good olive oil.
We ate. The broth was rich without being heavy, and the ribs separated cleanly from the bones.
The music next door shifted to something slower. A brushed snare entered under the trumpet, settling into a rhythm of late evenings and open windows.
I set my spoon down.
The memory of meeting Bridget that morning at the market came back to me. I repeated the quiet precision of her questions in my mind.
Thiago watched me for a moment.
“I know you’ve been with Dominic for seven years, but I don’t know how it happened.”
“What happened?”
“Your hiring.”
I refilled my glass from the wine bottle.
“I corrected him,” I said.
“Corrected him?”
“At a donor reception. I was twenty-five and working temporary admin for the orchestra office. Dominic made a comment about Stravinsky’s rehearsal letters that was slightly wrong.”
“You told him?”
“Yes.”
“In public?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It was.”
I drank some of the wine.
“He asked me three questions afterwards. Then he told me to report to the house the next morning and bring a notebook.”
I watched Thiago as he slurped some of the broth from his spoon.
“Santiago Rafael Reyes,” I said.
He looked up from his bowl.
“You gave me the surface version on Magazine Street,” I said. “Tell me the rest.”
He refilled his wineglass before answering.
“The surface version was accurate,” he said.
“I know it was. I’m asking for what lies beneath it.”
“My mother used to say Santiago sounded like a man going somewhere,” he said finally. “She meant it as a good thing. She was very literal about language. Names were life instructions.”
“And your father?”
“My father chose Rafael because an uncle and a grandfather were both named that. He wasn’t interested in a name sounding poetic.”
“So you were both things?”
“For about three weeks,” he said. “Then a teacher decided two names were unnecessary. Next, a kid in kindergarten couldn’t manage the entire length of Santiago, and it became Tiago. That became Thiago with an “h” somewhere in a school office where nobody was paying close enough attention.”
“And you kept it.”
“I didn’t correct it.”
“Why not?”
He considered the question.
“Because by the time I noticed, it had become accurate. I was becoming Thiago.”
“What about Santiago?”
“My mother calls me Santiago when she’s serious,” he said. “My father calls me Rafael when he’s disappointed. Everyone else knows me as Thiago.”
“Which one is real?”
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he might not answer.
“Thiago is who I am in the world,” he said.
“And Santiago?”
“Santiago is who I am in the dark.”
I smiled across the table. “I like Santiago.”
“He doesn’t come out very often.”
“I’m patient.”
Odette reappeared to clear our plates. “Dessert,” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
She brought praline ice cream in small white bowls with a disk of dark chocolate pressed into the surface of each, along with coffee. Thiago devoured half of his bowl and then slowed down to polish off the rest.
We walked back through the Marigny. The streets held their warmth long after dark, with the asphalt radiating the day’s accumulated heat through the soles of my shoes. Windows were open. Music drifted through the air from houses, bars, and passing cars.
Thiago’s phone vibrated. He glanced at it and turned the screen toward me.
Eamon: Board dinner running long. Your man is performing magnificently. No concerns.
I handed it back.
“He has two speeds,” I said. “Maestro and monument.”
“Which is tonight?”
“Monument.”
“You never explained what that meant.”
“It means no one expects Dominic to conduct tonight,” I said. “He’s expected to appear.”
“Appear?”
“Smile at donors. Let others take photographs with him. Stand near the orchestra so people remember whose orchestra it is.”
Thiago considered that. “So the music isn’t the point?”
“The music is always the point,” I said. “Tonight he’s the architecture around it. He’ll want the Armagnac when he gets home, and he’ll likely come in through the back door instead of the front.”
Thiago looked at me.
“How do you know?”
“He comes through the front when the evening was good.”