Chapter 8 #2
"It's a lot of money."
"It's a lot of money."
"I'm going to say no."
There was a pause on the line about two seconds long.
"Then say no," Cade said.
That's it. That's the whole vote. Four words, on a phone, from a man in Arizona who has never once made a decision slowly when a fast one was correct.
I turned back.
"Here's what happens," I said. "That box goes to a conservation lab at eight tomorrow morning.
Delphine's already got it booked. It gets opened by people in coats with cameras running, and every page gets photographed as it comes apart, and the images go up in a single release — the state archive, the university, and the descendants' association, at the same minute, all three, no embargo, no exclusive, no license.
Free. Forever. It'll be on four servers by lunch and forty by Friday. "
"Mr. Thibodeaux, you are talking about the deliberate destruction of—"
"I'm talking about a receipt," I said. "You bought people and you wrote it down and you paid my family for a hundred and fifty-one years to hold on to the writing.
That's the whole thing. You want me to believe you're protecting somebody's privacy, and the only privacy in that box is yours, and it stopped being available to you the minute you burned that woman's house. "
"No one authorized a fire."
And that's when I knew the day was over, because he said it too fast, and one of the lawyers looked at the deck.
"I'm sure that's true," I said. "I'm sure it was a contractor and I'm sure you were appalled and I'm sure there's a memo. Y'all always have a memo."
"There will be litigation," he said.
"I know."
"There will be a great deal of it, and you will lose some, and it will take four years, and you do not have four years of money."
"That's true."
"Then what exactly is your plan, Mr. Thibodeaux?"
"To make the litigation pointless," I said.
"That's the whole plan. You can sue a museum for four years.
You can't sue forty servers in eleven countries.
Every hour that book is a secret is an hour you can buy it.
The second it's everywhere, all you've got left is lawyers, and lawyers can only take my money, and I don't have any. "
He looked at me for a while.
"That's not a legal strategy."
"No sir. It's a salvage strategy." I put my hand back on the tarp. "You get a thing off the bottom and you get it public before anybody can decide who it belongs to. That's the whole trade. That's what I do for a living."
He tried three more things. I'll give him credit; he was good, and the third one was aimed at Delphine and it was aimed well — it involved the word legacy and a named professorship — and she listened to the whole thing with her head tilted and then said, "No, thank you," in the voice she uses on the phone with donors, and I have never in my life been prouder to stand next to anybody.
Then the boats left. That's it. There was no shooting.
I know how that reads. But those men had lawyers with them, and lawyers don't get on a boat where anything is going to happen, and the truth about the Gallery is that they almost never do the violent thing themselves, they just live downstream of it and act surprised.
We ran back to the landing with the box strapped to the deck and a tarp over it and Amos sitting on the cooler next to it the whole way like a man guarding a body.
Halfway back he said, "Bishop."
"Yeah."
"What was that number again?"
"Don't."
"I just want to hear it one more time. Just to hurt myself."
I said it.
Amos looked out at the water for a while. Sixty-one years old, glazed with sweat, in a hat with a neck flap, eleven hundred miles from a dry heat.
"Yeah, no," he said. "That's the right answer."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure." He pulled the tarp straighter over the box. "My granddaddy sharecropped in Wilcox County. Somebody wrote him down too, somewhere, and I ain't never gonna get to read it." He sat back. "So no. They can keep their money and I'll keep the hat."
Nobody said anything for a while after that except the dog, who had opinions about the pelican that would not quit.
We got the box to Belle Chasse by three, into a climate-stable container by four, and into a conservation lab in New Orleans by six in the evening, and Delphine sat in the passenger seat the entire drive with one hand on the strap, not talking, doing something behind her eyes.
Reyes drove the second truck and Marisol rode with him and neither of them spoke for forty miles, which for those two is a form of prayer.
Bishop called Cade again at Belle Chasse.
"It's up," he said. "It's intact. It's in a container."
"Good."
"Cade—"
"Bishop."
"That was a lot of money."
"It was," Cade said. "I've been sitting here for six hours doing the arithmetic on what it would've bought and I want you to know I got all the way to a new roof on the shop and Amos's knee surgery before I made myself stop.
" A pause on the line, long-distance and dry.
"I'm going to tell the boys tonight. All of it.
The number, the whole thing. Because in about nine months one of them's going to be broke and hear about it secondhand and it'll rot in him, and I'd rather he heard it from me at a table where he can yell. "
"That's fair."
"It's not fair. It's just correct." Another pause. "Bishop. You alright?"
"No."
"Alright," Cade said, and hung up, and that was the most love I've ever received over a telephone.
At a red light on Broad she said, "Nine thousand."
"What?"
"That's my estimate. If the numbering runs the way the 1821 schedule suggests and the volume's the size it feels like." She was still looking straight ahead. "Nine thousand names. Give or take."
The light went green.
"Then let's go read them," I said.