CHAPTER 9
THE COUNCIL
POV: GIDEON
"Open your mouth," I tell Tee-Jean.
He's kneeling at the altar rail of Saint Casimir's, where people used to kneel for communion, his wrists zip-tied to the brass. Ansel's men found him at six this morning in a motel on Chef Menteur, asleep in his clothes, with a bag packed for Houston.
Even now, he smiles.
He can't help it. It's what his face does.
"Mr. Valcourt." The gold tooth catches the light from the rose window. "This is a misunderstanding, I promise you. I was doing a job. Mr. Boudreaux sends me to a gate, I go to a gate. Nothing personal. I never laid a finger on her."
"You told her she had something else to trade."
The smile falters.
"That's just talk. That's just how I talk, man, ask anybody—"
"You tipped your head back." I crouch in front of him so we're eye to eye. "You counted up the windows. Cell nine, ain't it? Over the kitchen?" I watch him remember. "You wanted her to know you knew where she slept."
"I didn't—"
"Open your mouth."
He doesn't.
Ansel puts the pliers in my hand.
Tee-Jean starts talking very fast then, about Houston and his mother and how he'll leave the state tonight, never come back, never say her name. I let him talk until he runs out of breath. When he gasps in the next one, his mouth is open.
The gold tooth comes out on the second pull.
The sound he makes goes up into the vaults of the nave and comes back down. Blood runs off his chin and onto the altar rail, and I hold the tooth up to the rose window and turn it.
It's heavier than it looks.
"Ansel. A box."
He has one ready. Cardboard, the size of a bread loaf, and full to the top with dimes. Ten thousand of them. A thousand dollars in dimes.
I set the tooth on top, gold on silver, like a cherry on a cake.
"Mr. Boudreaux told her a story on Sunday night," I say to Tee-Jean. "About a man they found hanging off the Industrial Canal bridge with his pockets full of dimes. Did you hear it?"
He nods. He's crying now.
"It was true," I tell him.
I stand up and put one round into his forehead, and he sags forward against the altar rail and hangs there by his wrists, kneeling, like a man who's finally found religion.
"The cousin," I say.
Ansel's already bringing him. The skinny kid in the Saints jersey, still damp from the font three nights ago. He sees Tee-Jean at the rail and folds at the knees, and Ansel's man has to hold him up.
"You're going home," I tell him.
He doesn't believe it. He looks at me like a dog that's been kicked too many times to trust an open hand.
I put the box of dimes in his arms.
"Take this to Ambrose. Tell him it's the tithe. Ten percent of what he owes me for Sunday night." I close the kid's fingers around the edges of the box. "Tell him the other ninety percent comes out of his family, one tooth at a time, the next time anyone with his name comes within a mile of her."
"Yes, sir."
"Say it back."
He says it back. All of it. His voice breaks on tooth.
"Go."
He goes. He runs, holding the box against his chest, dimes clinking with every step, out the side door into the grey morning.
***
On the drive to River Road, I watch her on my phone.
The Prytania house has thirty-one cameras. I put in every one of them myself, three years ago, the week I took this house away from my father. None of them are in her bedroom. That room I keep for my own eyes.
The rest of the house, I keep for these.
She's been testing it all morning.
At 9:14, the front door. She touched the knob, saw the panel beside it with its steady red light, and took her hand away.
At 10:02, the kitchen. She stood by the service door and watched Madame Odile put the key ring back on its hook by the stove. She didn't take it. She looked at it for eleven seconds.
At 11:30, the garden. She walked the whole length of the back wall, running her hand along the bricks. Ten feet, topped with iron spikes my grandfather put there in 1931 to keep out the men who wanted to kill him. She stopped at the side gate. Looked at the keypad.
She doesn't know the code.
Remy does.
"Ansel," I say. "The side gate on Prytania. Change the code."
"To what?"
I think about it for a second.
"Four, twenty-two, twenty-three."
Ansel doesn't ask. He was standing beside me on April twenty-second, three years ago.
It's the date of the Blessing of the Fleet.
***
My father's library smells like cigar smoke and furniture polish and the river. He keeps the windows open even in October so he can hear the tugs.
He's sixty-seven. He sits behind his desk like it's a throne he built with his own hands, which in a way it is.
He's still tall, still straight in the back, silver-haired and handsome in the way that makes women at charity dinners touch his arm.
His eyes are mine, only paler. Like somebody left them out in the sun.
On the little finger of his left hand, he wears my mother's wedding ring.
He's worn it since the day he buried her. He tells people it's grief.
Around the table: Remy, lounging. Two of the harbor captains, who say nothing at council unless they're asked.
Ansel, standing behind my chair, as he always does.
And Philippe Arceneaux, who owns the parish council and half the harbor police, and has a wet red mouth, and has never once in his life been told no by a woman he didn't later punish for it.
"Seven of Ambrose's men," my father says. "On a Sunday. And this morning, Tee-Jean at your altar rail, and a box of dimes delivered to Ambrose's door by a boy who wet himself on the porch."
"He took something of mine."
"He took collateral that her father signed over to him. Legally, if we're speaking of legality."
"We're not."
"No." My father smiles. "We rarely are."
"Ambrose has asked for a sit-down," Arceneaux says. He leans back, lacing his fingers over his stomach. "He'll take blood money for the seven. Reasonable figure. And he wants his girl back."
"No."
"Now, Gideon." Arceneaux chuckles. "Surely a little novice can't be worth a war with the Boudreaux. I hear she's a pretty thing under the veil, though. Maybe we should all get a look at her before she costs us the port."
I look at him.
I don't say anything. I look at his wet mouth, and I look at his fat pink hands laced over his stomach, and I put his name somewhere I keep names.
He stops chuckling.
"There's a simpler solution," my father says, into the silence.
"Ambrose has a daughter. Clémence. Twenty-four, educated in Paris, very beautiful, by all accounts.
Marry her. The port and the parish, joined.
Ambrose forgets his seven men for the sake of his grandchildren.
" He turns my mother's ring on his finger.
"And your novice goes to the Ursulines in Cork.
Very quiet. Very safe. She can pray for you. "
"It's elegant, cousin," Remy says. "You have to admit."
"No."
"You say that word a great deal lately," my father says.
"It's the only word you need from me."
He studies me across the desk. He has always studied me like this, even when I was a child: the way a man looks at a horse he's not sure he should have bought.
"Your mother had a chapel too," he says softly. "She prayed in it every day. Do you remember how that ended?"
I remember.
I remember a locked door, and a tray left outside it, and a woman who stopped eating in the spring and stopped praying in the summer and stopped breathing in the fall, and a man who wore her ring on his little finger at the funeral and told everyone it was grief.
I don't let any of it reach my face.
"I remember," I say.
"Good. Then understand me." My father leans back in his chair. "The diocese holds its charity ball Tuesday next. Everyone will be there. I'll announce your engagement to Clémence Boudreaux in front of the Archbishop and half the city, and it will be very good for the family to be seen in harmony."
"Announce whatever you like, Father."
I stand.
Ansel steps back to give me room.
"Gideon," my father says, as I reach the door. "The girl. Where is she keeping herself?"
"In Mother's room."
For just a moment, his hand goes still on my mother's ring.
Then I leave.
***
In the car, Remy's voice is still in my ear. It's elegant, cousin. He said it the way he says everything, like a man admiring a painting he intends to steal.
I pull up the feeds again.
2:41 p.m. She's in the garden. She's found the old magnolia by the east wall, the one with the low branch that bends toward the bricks, and she's standing under it with her head tipped back, measuring it. The branch. The wall. The spikes.
She's wearing one of the grey dresses. Her own veil. Barefoot in the grass.
She puts her hand on the branch. Tests it.
"She's looking for a way out," Ansel says, glancing at the screen.
The magnolia would hold her. The spikes wouldn't stop her if she was careful, and she is very careful. She'd get over the wall onto Prytania with nothing but scratches, and then she'd have to decide which way to run.
I know which way she'll run. I've known for three years.
I put the phone face down on my knee.
"Let her try."