CHAPTER 2
THE CHOIR LOFT
POV: GIDEON
She comes with my card against her mouth.
I watch it happen on the third screen from the left, fed by a lens the size of a pinhead set into the brass body of the crucifix over her bed.
The picture is grey and grainy and perfect.
I can see the card. I can see her teeth on the edge of it.
I can see the moment her heels push into that thin mattress and her whole body lifts off it like something has called her up.
She doesn't say a name. She doesn't know mine yet.
She will.
My mother's rosary is wrapped around my left wrist, and by the time Noemi goes still, the beads have left a row of small red moons in my skin. I don't touch myself. I don't need to. I've never taken anything from Noemi Delacroix that she hasn't handed me first, and tonight she handed me this.
I can wait for the rest.
***
The choir loft of Saint Casimir's is the only place in New Orleans where I sit with my back to a door.
Nobody climbs those stairs unless I let them.
The archdiocese closed this church when it ran out of money and parishioners, and I bought it for the price of a used truck.
They think I wanted the land. The pews are gone.
The nave is stacked with shipping manifests and gun cases.
Up here, where the organ used to be, there are twelve screens.
Saint Veronica's front gate. The back gate on Dauphine, where a Boudreaux errand boy named Tee-Jean likes to lean. The third-floor corridor. The side chapel and her scaffold. The chancery lobby downtown, courtesy of a security contract my company won last spring. Earl Guidry's stall. Cell nine.
Every call Mother Agathe makes from the convent office runs through a server in the basement below me.
I know what she orders for groceries. I know her sister in Lafayette is dying slowly and expensively.
I know the eleven hundred dollars that shows up in her desk drawer every month in a plain envelope has never been reported to the bishop.
It comes from me.
So did the new roof. So does the note on the bishop's residence, held by Valcourt Savings & Trust at a rate a saint would call generous. So did the lock on cell nine, installed this evening during compline by a man who owes me more than his life.
On paper, Saint Veronica's belongs to God.
In every way that matters, it belongs to me.
The men on the docks call me the Deacon, because I collect the tithe. Ten percent of everything that moves through the Port of New Orleans without a manifest. I've never corrected them. It's the closest I've come to a vocation.
On the screen, Noemi rolls onto her left side. Facing the door. The key is in her fist. The chain is around her neck.
She didn't take it off.
***
Footsteps on the loft stairs. Ansel's. He's the only man who climbs them without calling up first, and even he stops two steps from the top.
"It's done," he says.
"Which hand?"
"The one he touched her with." He flexes his own, split across the second knuckle. "He's right-handed, so he got lucky. He'll still be selling fruit next week. He'll just be doing it slow."
"Did he ask why?"
"Didn't have to. He worked it out around the third finger."
That's all Earl Guidry was ever going to get from me. Another man, I'd have left bleeding behind his own crates. But she told him God sees him, and I've decided to let him live long enough to wonder if she was right.
Ansel doesn't leave.
"Speak," I say.
"You won't like it."
"I don't like anything. Speak."
He takes the last two steps and holds out his phone.
On the screen is a letter on the letterhead of the Office of Diocesan Counsel, filed with the chancery on Monday.
The diocesan archives are in disarray. Counsel requests that a novice with restoration experience be assigned to reside at his private home in Uptown for six months to catalog two centuries of sacramental records.
A specific novice is recommended by name.
Delacroix, Noemi.
Signed, Wendell A. Price.
"Price," I say.
"Forty-eight. Married. Wife spends the fall in Destin. Three girls at his firm quit inside a year, all of them young." Ansel swipes. "And there's this."
The chancery lobby. Monday, 2:14 p.m.
Noemi on a wooden bench, waiting for Mother Agathe, a folder of gilding invoices on her knees. Price comes out of an office. Stops beside her. Says something I can't hear. She answers without lifting her head.
He puts his hand on the back of her neck.
Right below the veil. Where I look.
He leaves it there for four seconds. His thumb moves.
She doesn't flinch. She goes still in the particular way she does when a man reaches across a crate at her, the way she went still at nineteen on the shoulder of a highway, as if she can turn herself into something that can't be held.
I play it again.
Four seconds.
"Boss."
"Where's the request now?"
"On the bishop's desk. He hasn't signed. He'll sign. Price is the one who keeps him out of court."
I stand. I take my coat off the back of the chair and pull on my gloves.
"Where is he tonight?"
"His office on St. Charles. Working late, because your secretary called at six to set an urgent meeting about the diocese's mortgage."
I look at him.
"You set that up before you came up the stairs."
"You were going to ask." He follows me down. "You want it clean?"
"I want it quiet. And I want his wedding ring."
***
Wendell Price has a corner office over the streetcar line, a bottle of Blanton's on the credenza, and a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with the Archbishop.
He stands when I walk in. Men like Price always stand for me. It's the only thing about them I respect.
"Mr. Valcourt." He comes around the desk with his hand out. "I have to say, I was surprised by your call. If this is about refinancing the bishop's residence, I assure you—"
"Sit down."
He hesitates, hand still in the air.
Then he sits. They always sit.
I stay on my feet by the window, back to him, and watch a streetcar go by, lit up and empty.
"You filed a request on Monday," I say. "For a live-in archivist."
"Yes. The diocesan records are a disgrace. Two hundred years of registers rotting in water-damaged boxes. It's a practical—"
"You asked for her by name."
In the reflection, I watch him wet his lips.
"Sister Noemi's work on the Saint Veronica altar is remarkable," he says. "And frankly, the girl has no one. No family, no prospects. A structured household, some mentorship. It would be a kindness. She'd have her own room."
"Next to yours?"
"I beg your pardon?"
I turn around.
"Monday, at two-fourteen," I say, "you put your hand on the back of her neck."
He goes a very specific color. I've seen it on a hundred men. It's the color of a man calculating how much you know.
"I don't know what you've been told—"
"I wasn't told. I watched." I take off my left glove. Then the right. I lay them on his desk, side by side, beside the Archbishop. "Four seconds. You moved your thumb."
"It was a fatherly gesture. She seemed upset—"
"She wasn't upset. She was waiting for you to stop."
"Mr. Valcourt, I'm not sure what your interest is in a novice—"
"She isn't a novice," I say. "She's mine. She has been for three years. The Church has been keeping her for me, and you walked into the room where I keep her and put your hand on her."
He lunges for the desk phone.
I catch his wrist, turn it, and put his face down into his own desk. The framed photograph goes over. The glass breaks under his cheek, and he screams into the blotter.
"Do you know what I did to the man who touched her at the market today?" I ask. "I let him keep his life. Do you know why?"
He's sobbing something. Please. My wife. Please.
"Because she told him God sees him. And I thought it was only fair to give God a chance to look." I lean down to his ear. "You don't get a warning, Wendell. You already had your four seconds."
I pull his tie loose from his collar.
Navy silk, printed with tiny fleurs-de-lis. The kind of thing a man buys so he'll look like he belongs at the Archbishop's table. I wrap it twice around my bare hand, loop it over his head, and lift.
It takes longer than people think. It always does.
His heels drum the carpet. His nails rake my forearms and catch in the rosary, and a bead snaps loose and rolls away under the credenza. I make a note of where it goes. It was my mother's. I don't leave pieces of her behind.
He stops moving at 11:51.
I hold on until 11:53, to be sure.
Then I lower him onto the blotter, face in the broken glass, and work the gold band off his finger. It sticks at the knuckle. I twist until it gives.
I find the bead under the credenza. It goes into my coat pocket with the ring.
Then I pick up his desk phone and dial a number I know by heart.
Six rings.
"Saint Veronica's." Thick with sleep. Wary. "This is Mother Agathe. It's nearly midnight. Who is this?"
"You know who it is."
A silence. Then, carefully: "Mr. Valcourt."
"Wendell Price won't be requesting your novice."
A longer silence. I can hear her deciding not to ask.
"The bishop will want to know—"
"The bishop will want to know that his legal counsel has been skimming the cemetery fund, which is true, and that he's left town, which will be true enough by morning.
" I pull my gloves back on with the phone pinned against my shoulder.
"After lauds tomorrow, you'll tell her a benefactor has offered a commission.
A private chapel in a house on Prytania Street.
Water damage to the retable, gilding to restore.
Four thousand dollars, paid to her, not to you.
She stays at the house on weekdays until the work is done. "
"Four thousand— Mr. Valcourt, she's in formation. She's made promises to this community. It isn't appropriate for a young woman to reside in a single man's—"
"She's twenty-two," I say. "She's made promises, not vows. And you've been cashing my envelopes for three years, Agathe. Let's not discuss what's appropriate."
I hear her breathe.
"You'll tell her it's providence," I say. "You're good at that."
I hang up.
***
Downstairs, Ansel is leaning on the car.
"Quiet?"
I drop the ring into his palm.
"Saint Veronica's," I say. "The poor box by the side chapel. Sunday, before six o'clock mass."
He tilts the band toward the streetlight to read the engraving inside, and snorts. "Forever, Diane."
"Forever was shorter than Diane thought."
***
It's after two when I climb back to the loft.
On the third screen, she's asleep. Left side. Facing the door. Her fist is closed around the key and pressed over her heart, the way the sisters taught her to hold a crucifix when she's afraid.
She isn't holding the crucifix.
I sit without taking my coat off. The rosary is lighter by one bead, and I roll the loose one between my finger and thumb, and I watch her breathe.
Price had four seconds. I've had three years. I've spent every one of them like this, in the dark, learning her. Paying for the walls around her so no one else could get in.
Three years of patience.
It ends tonight.
I touch the screen once, where her mouth is.
"Tomorrow," I tell her, "the Church hands you to me. It's already been paid for."