CHAPTER 6
THE TITHE COLLECTED
POV: GIDEON
The chapel feed.
Scaffold. Work lamp on its side on the floor. A pot of gold size tipped over, bleeding a slow yellow tongue across the tiles.
No Noemi.
No Noemi.
I play it back.
11:02 p.m. The Dauphine door opens with a key.
Three men. Tee-Jean in front, smiling. She's up on the scaffold in a smock and a man's cardigan, barefoot, a square of leaf on the end of her brush.
She doesn't scream. She throws the size.
She goes over the rail. A hand on her mouth, and she bites it, and the man jerks away with his blood on her lips. Pillowcase. Zip tie. Out the door.
Ninety-one seconds.
I play it again.
Her mouth. His blood on her mouth.
Again.
"Boss." Ansel, on the phone against my ear. I don't know how long he's been talking. "Boss, the men at the front gate didn't see anything. They came through the side. They had a key."
I'm standing on the Esplanade wharf in the dark. A tug captain who shorted me four hundred dollars last month is on his knees on the planks in front of me, holding his nose with both hands, blood running through his fingers. I don't remember breaking it.
I look down at him.
He was the reason I wasn't watching.
"Get out of my sight," I tell him.
He runs.
"Boss?"
"Saint Casimir's," I say. "Everyone."
***
By midnight, the nave is full of men and none of them are talking.
Ansel. Six of mine who've killed for me before and will do it again without asking why. And Remy, leaning on a stack of shipping crates in a cashmere coat, looking like he's been called away from a party, which he has.
"Somebody had a key to the Dauphine door," Ansel says. "Somebody knew the front was covered and the side wasn't."
"Somebody," I repeat.
Later. There will be a later for that. There isn't one now.
"Gideon." Remy pushes off the crates. "Listen to me. Ambrose wants money. That's all Ambrose ever wants. Pay him. Send a number tonight and have her back by breakfast."
"No."
"You'd rather start a war with the Boudreaux? Over a novice?" He spreads his hands. "Father will lose his mind. She's a girl in a veil, cousin. She's not worth—"
I'm in front of him.
I don't touch him. I don't need to. He stops talking because my face is four inches from his, and he's seen my face this close exactly once before, the night we were sixteen, and he's never forgotten it.
"Say not worth about her again," I tell him quietly, "and you'll be the war."
Remy swallows. Then he smiles, and raises both palms, and steps back.
"Understood."
Ansel comes back from the side door with something in his hand.
"The boys went through her cell," he says. "Looking for anything that might tell us where. This was under the mattress."
A notebook. Cheap black cover, a broken spine held together with a strip of tape.
I know what it is. I've watched her write in it every night for a month, bent over her knees with the pen in her fist like a child. I've never seen the pages. The lens is in the crucifix over her head, and she always writes with her back to it, and I've always let her.
I take it.
"Leave me," I say, and they go to the other end of the nave, even Remy, and I sit down on the altar step under the empty tabernacle with a candle and open her notebook.
The first entries are what Mother Agathe wants. Impatience with Sister Perpetua. Pride in my work. Took an extra roll at supper. Small, careful, dutiful sins.
Then, a month ago:
There's a man in the last pew who doesn't take communion.
After that, there's only me.
He was there again. I felt him at the Confiteor. I struck my chest and thought about his hands. I don't know what his hands look like.
I didn't turn around today either. I'm afraid if I turn around he'll stop.
Is it a sin to want to be looked at? It must be. It feels like one.
I turn the pages slowly. I don't skip any. She's written me into every night for a month, in handwriting that gets worse the more she wants, and I read it the way other men read scripture, with my thumb on the line so I don't lose my place.
Tuesday night.
Your sins are mine, you wrote.
Then take them.
Wednesday.
If I go to your house, you'll touch me. If I don't go, Boudreaux will.
And under it, pressed so hard the pen went through the paper:
I'm not going for the money.
I close the book.
I sit for a moment with it on my knee, under a tabernacle with nothing in it, in a church I bought for the price of a truck, and I understand that I have been wrong about one thing for three years.
I thought I was the one waiting.
I put the notebook inside my coat, over my heart, and stand up.
The side door of the nave bangs open.
Two of Ansel's men drag in a skinny kid in a Saints jersey, nose already bleeding. He's crying before they even get him to the front of the church.
"Tee-Jean's cousin," Ansel says. "He drives for them. Found him at a bar in Arabi telling a girl he was about to be rich."
"Bring him to the font."
***
The baptismal font at Saint Casimir's is marble, waist-high, and it has never been drained. The roof over it leaks. Every time it rains, the font fills a little more.
It rained on Thursday.
"Where is she," I say.
"I don't know, man, I just drive, I swear to God I just—"
I take the back of his neck and put his face in the water.
He thrashes. The jersey soaks black. His hands slap the marble, the floor, my arm. I count, the way she counts. At twenty, I pull him up.
He comes up screaming and choking.
"Where."
"I don't—"
Down.
Twenty-five.
Up.
"Paris Road!" It comes out of him with half the font. "The old shrimp plant, Paris Road, by the canal, Mr. Boudreaux's got her in the cold room, I swear, I swear to God—"
"How many men?"
"Six. Seven. Mr. Boudreaux was there, but he left, I think he left—"
"Has anyone touched her?"
"No! No, man, nobody, she bit Lonnie to the bone, Lonnie's got his hand in a rag—"
"Lonnie."
"He's the one watching her. Lonnie. He's real mad."
I let go of his neck.
He slides down the side of the font onto the tiles and curls up there, dripping, coughing water onto the floor of my church.
"Keep him," I tell Ansel. "I'll decide later."
"And Lonnie?"
"Lonnie's mine."
***
I call the bishop from the car.
It rings nine times. When he answers, his voice is thick with sleep and something else, the particular fear of a man whose phone rings at half past midnight and whose bank has his name on a mortgage.
"Mr. Valcourt. Is something wrong?"
"Sell me Saint Veronica's."
Silence. Then: "I— I'm sorry?"
"The convent. The building, the chapel, the land. Sell it to me. Tonight."
"It's the middle of the night. It's diocesan property. There are procedures, there's a board—"
"You owe my bank four million dollars on a house you don't need, Your Excellency." The Suburban takes the bridge over the Industrial Canal. Below us, the water is black and moving. "I'm offering to forgive one of them. Sign it over. My lawyer will be at your door at seven with the papers."
"And the sisters?"
"Stay. I'm buying walls, not nuns."
A long breath down the line. I listen to him add it up: the mortgage, the auditors, the diocesan lawyer who drove off on Tuesday and was never coming back.
"Seven o'clock," he says finally.
"Go back to sleep."
I hang up.
Ansel is driving. He doesn't look at me.
"You just bought a convent," he says.
"She lives there."
He doesn't ask anything else.
***
My left wrist is bare.
My mother's rosary is in a velvet box at a jeweler on Magazine Street, waiting to be picked up Monday. For three days, I've felt its absence like a missing tooth.
Tonight I don't feel it.
Tonight there's nothing on my wrist and nothing in my chest but one word, and the word is her name, and it doesn't have any room around it for anything else.
***
The shrimp plant sits at the end of a gravel road along the canal, a long corrugated shed with one security light and a loading dock. Two men at the dock, smoking. A third walking the fence. A flat-bottomed boat tied at the water's edge behind the building, engine ticking as it cools.
We leave the cars a quarter mile back and go in through the marsh grass.
The man on the fence dies first. Ansel does it. He doesn't make a sound, and neither does the man.
The two at the dock are sharing a lighter when I come up the steps. The first one sees me and opens his mouth to shout, and I put a round through it with the suppressor, and he folds up on the concrete. The second one drops the lighter. He goes for the pistol in his waistband.
He's slow.
I take the pistol out of his hand before he gets it clear, and I put him against the steel door so hard it booms like a church bell, and I hold him there with my forearm across his throat.
"The cold room," I say.
His eyes roll toward the building. Toward the back.
"Is she alive?"
He nods. He can't talk. My arm is on his windpipe.
"Is Lonnie with her?"
His eyes go wide. That's a yes.
I break his neck and let him down.
Behind me, Ansel's men fan out along the building, quiet as water. Somewhere inside, a radio is playing zydeco. Somebody laughs at something. They don't know yet.
They have perhaps a minute left of not knowing.
I stand in front of the steel door with a dead man's pistol in one hand and my own in the other, and I think of her on a crate in a cold room with her bare feet on the tile and a man named Lonnie watching her with his hand in a rag.
My mother taught me to knock before I enter a house.
I don't knock.