CHAPTER 4
THE BENEFACTOR
POV: GIDEON
My cousin is in my kitchen at six in the morning, eating off my plate.
"Remy."
"Cousin." Remy Valcourt lifts a slice of my toast in salute. He dresses like a man who wants to be photographed, and he has my father's smile, which is to say he has a smile the way a knife has an edge. "Your housekeeper wouldn't make me eggs. I had to take yours."
"How did you get in?"
"I'm family." He chews. "Also, your side gate code is Tante Hélène's birthday. You should change that."
I make a note to change it. I make a second note that Remy knows it.
"What do you want?"
"Father wants you at council on Wednesday." He dusts crumbs off his fingers. "And Father hears the diocese's lawyer took a very long drive Tuesday night."
"Father hears a lot."
"Father wonders whether it has anything to do with your little nun."
"She isn't a nun."
"Novice, then." The smile widens. "Father says you're getting sentimental. Like Tante Hélène."
The coffee cup stops an inch from my mouth.
Remy sees it. Remy always sees it. It's the only talent he has.
Ansel fills the doorway behind him before I can answer. He takes one look at my cousin and says nothing, which is the most insulting thing Ansel knows how to do.
"Tee-Jean," Ansel says to me.
"I saw."
I did. Wednesday, 3:40 p.m., the Dauphine gate feed. Tee-Jean's ring on the bars. His head tipping back to count windows. Cell nine, ain't it?
"He wants her at the gate Sunday," Ansel says. "After mass."
"She won't be at the gate Sunday."
"And if Boudreaux gets tired of asking?"
"Two men on Saint Veronica's all weekend. Front gate." I drink my coffee. "If Tee-Jean touches those bars again, bring me the hand he touches them with."
Remy whistles softly. "All this for a girl in a veil."
"You're still here."
"Leaving." He lifts both hands, smiling. "Front gate. Two men. I'll tell Father you're being careful."
He goes, taking the last of my toast.
I don't think about him again for three days.
It's the only mistake I make this week.
***
Since compline on Wednesday night, the third screen in the choir loft has shown me nothing but plaster.
She turned Him to the wall.
I could have sent a man up the back stairs to turn Him around while she was at lauds. I didn't. She took one thing back from me this week, and she doesn't know yet that it's the last thing she'll ever take back, so I let her keep it.
Besides, the microphone is in the base, not the face.
I heard the pen. I heard her breathing change at 3:12. I heard the sound she made when she woke.
I've played that sound eleven times.
My mother's rosary is at a jeweler on Magazine Street having its cord restrung. My left wrist has been bare for three days. It feels like walking out of the house without a gun.
At 6:58, a black car turns off Prytania and through my gates.
***
I watch from the upstairs window as the driver opens her door.
A cardboard suitcase comes out first, held shut with a man's belt. Then her. Grey habit. Grey veil. Cheap black shoes she's polished until they shine at the toes and crack at the sides. She stands on my gravel and looks up at the house the way people look at a wave.
She doesn't look at the upstairs window.
She knows exactly which one I'm in. She's refusing.
Good.
The housekeeper leads her across the courtyard, past the fountain my mother used to sit beside, to the chapel. I take the back stairs down and come through the sacristy.
It was my mother's chapel. My father closed it the week she was buried and let the roof go the next spring, because he wanted God to know exactly what he thought of Him. Ten years of rain. The saints on the altarpiece have water stains running down their faces like they've been crying rust.
Noemi stands in the aisle with her head tipped back so far the veil hangs straight down her spine. Her suitcase is at her feet. She hasn't sat. She hasn't touched anything.
I come out of the sacristy without a sound. I've spent my whole life learning to cross a room without a sound.
She knows anyway.
Her shoulders change. Not a flinch. A settling. Like a bird on a wire that has felt the wire move.
"Venetian leaf," she says, without turning around. "Twenty-three karat, laid on red bole. Somebody put it there two hundred years ago. And somebody let the roof leak on it for ten."
"My father."
She turns.
In daylight, with nothing between us but twenty feet of my mother's chapel, she's smaller than she is on a screen.
Five foot four in those cracked shoes. The habit hangs off her shoulders.
A strand of black hair has escaped the veil at her temple, and she hasn't noticed.
There's a white scar on her chin, a short hooked line like a comma.
I know where she got it. She doesn't know I know.
Her eyes are green. Not pretty green. The flat, deep green of bayou water under cypress, where you can't see the bottom and shouldn't try.
They go to the scar through my eyebrow. Then to my gloves. Then back to my face.
"You're the benefactor," she says.
"I'm the man in the last pew."
"I know." Her chin comes up a quarter of an inch. "You were in my room."
"Yes."
"You put a lock on my door."
"You didn't have one."
"You kept a key."
"I kept a key."
"Why?"
"Because the lock is for everyone else."
She takes that in. I watch her decide not to be afraid of it, and fail, and decide again.
"Mother Agathe wouldn't tell me your name," she says. "I heard it anyway. Through her door. Yes, Mr. Valcourt. God bless you."
"Then you only heard half."
"Which half is missing?"
"Gideon."
She knows the other half. Everyone below Canal Street knows it. I watch the whole of it land now: the port, the river, the name her father would have said with his hat in his hands.
"They say you own the river," she says.
I come down the aisle toward her.
She doesn't take one step back.
"I own the scaffold you're going to stand on.
I own the roof over your cell, and the lock on your door, and your Mother Superior's silence.
I hold the note on the bishop's house. The car that brought you here is mine, and so is the man who drove it, and so is every street he took.
" I stop an arm's length from her. "Sooner or later, novice, I'll own the rest."
"I'm not for sale."
"No," I agree. "You were sold. Three years ago. You just never found out who paid."
The color goes out of her face all at once, the way it does when she's frightened. Then it comes back, high on her cheekbones.
That isn't fear.
"You turned Him to the wall," I say.
It takes her a moment.
Then it arrives, and I watch it travel through her. The crucifix. The notebook. Wednesday night. Tuesday night, and what she did on Tuesday night with my card between her teeth.
"You—" Her voice breaks in half. "You watched—"
"Everything."
Her hand goes to her throat. To the collar of her habit, where my chain sits underneath.
She hasn't taken it off. Not even now.
"Say it," I tell her. "Whatever you were going to call me. Say it out loud."
Her lips press shut.
"No?"
"You don't get to hear me say anything else," she whispers. "You've heard enough."
"I've heard you sleep for a month. I haven't heard you say my name."
She stares at me. Her pulse is going in the side of her throat, visible, quick as a bird's.
"Tee-Jean wants you at the Dauphine gate on Sunday," I say.
Her eyes flick. "How do you—" She stops. "Of course you do."
"You won't go."
"It's my father's debt."
"It's my problem."
"You don't get to decide that."
"I decided three years ago." I lean in until she has to tip her head back to hold my eyes. "You don't walk out of any gate I haven't opened. Not on Sunday. Not ever."
***
Her tools are laid out in the sacristy on the long vestment chest, on black velvet I had cut for them.
Squirrel-hair gilder's tips. A leather cushion and a knife with a blade thin as a fingernail. Four agate burnishers, the stones polished to the color of weak tea. Twenty books of leaf, double-beaten, twenty-three karat.
She stops in the doorway.
"That's four hundred dollars of leaf," she says.
"Six."
She crosses to the chest like she's walking up to the altar rail. She doesn't touch the leaf. She picks up the smallest burnisher and turns it in her fingers, and her thumb moves over the stone the way other women touch pearls.
"The one at the convent is cracked," she says, to the burnisher. "I've been using it for two years. It scratches."
"I know."
She sets it down, very carefully, and turns around.
I'm closer than she expected. The vestment chest is against the backs of her thighs. There's nowhere to go, and she doesn't try.
I don't touch her with my hands.
I lift one, slowly, so she can watch it come, and I lay the pad of my gloved thumb against her lower lip.
She stops breathing.
Leather against the softest part of her. I press, just enough, and drag down, and her mouth opens under it the way a door opens when you finally find the right key.
"Say my name."
"Mr. Valcourt."
"Try again."
Her lip moves against my thumb. I feel the shape of it before I hear it.
"Gideon."
Something in my chest pulls tight and holds, like a rope taking a load.
Three years. Three years of her voice through a microphone the size of a grain of rice. Her prayers, her humming, the sounds she makes in her sleep. None of it was this. None of it was my name, made by her mouth, against my hand.
I take my thumb away.
It costs me more than anything I've done this week, and I killed a man on Tuesday.
"Your room is on the second floor," I say. "End of the hall. The door locks from the inside."
"Do you have that key too?"
"No."
She doesn't believe me. Good. It will make it better when she finds out it's true.
"That one," I tell her, "you'll open yourself."
I walk out of the sacristy and leave her in my mother's chapel with gold on the velvet behind her and my name still wet on her mouth.