CHAPTER 16
THE MAN WHO LOOKED
POV: GIDEON
"Then it dies, Father," I say.
I say it at the same volume he did. The first four tables hear it. By morning, the whole city will have heard it.
My father looks at me across the white orchids for a long moment. Then he inclines his head, like a man conceding a point at cards, and turns and walks back up the steps to the stage. He picks up his glass. He smiles at the room.
"Well," he says into the microphone. "Young men. Please, everyone, enjoy the dessert."
Nervous laughter. The quartet starts again, badly.
I don't watch him. I'm watching a door.
The service door behind the bar, the one with the swinging panel and the round porthole window. It's still moving. It's been moving since the moment I lifted her hand, because the moment I lifted her hand, Philippe Arceneaux put down his napkin and walked very quickly through it.
"Ansel."
He's at my shoulder. He's always at my shoulder.
"Take her home."
"Yes, boss."
Noemi turns to me. She's still standing where I left her, her left hand still half raised, the halo still throwing sparks. Her face is white. Not with fear. I know her fear. This is something else.
"Where are you going?" she asks.
"To finish a dance."
She looks at me.
She knows. I watch her know it. The same way she knew about Price in the car, and Tee-Jean from Madame Odile, and every other thing I've done for her since Tuesday. I watch her decide whether to ask me not to.
She doesn't ask.
She puts her hand, the one with my ring on it, flat against my chest, over my heart.
"It was his right hand," she says.
***
The kitchen of the Beauregard is a long steel corridor that runs behind the ballroom, hot and loud and full of men in white jackets who stop talking when I come through the swinging door.
I don't look at any of them.
"Out," I say.
They go. Plates left on counters. A pan still hissing on a burner. The last one out is a boy of about nineteen with a tray of champagne flutes, and he looks at my face and puts the tray down very carefully on the steel before he runs.
At the far end, past the dish station, a door with a push bar and a sign. SERVICE EXIT — GARAGE.
Arceneaux is at it. He's pushing on the bar with both hands and it isn't opening. Somebody chained it from the outside. Somebody who works for me and saw him leave the table.
He turns around.
He's sweating through his collar. His face is grey under the pink. He puts his back against the door and holds up both hands, like a man in a Western.
"Gideon. Now, Gideon. Listen to me."
I keep walking.
"It was a dance. It was a dance. I didn't know she was— your father said—"
"What did my father say?"
He stops.
His eyes go to the side, to the swinging door behind me, like my father might come through it.
"Philippe," I say. "What did my father say."
"He said—" He swallows. "He said to see if she'd let me.
He said she was a nobody, a whore Luc Delacroix sold for a card debt, and if she'd let me put a hand on her in front of the whole city, then you'd see what she was, and you'd— you'd come to your senses.
He said it'd be doing you a favor. He said it'd be doing the family a favor. "
He's talking fast now. Like Tee-Jean at the rail.
"I didn't mean anything by it, I swear to God, it was your father, it was all Augustin—"
"You put your hand on her hip," I say.
"It was—"
"Then you moved it lower."
He doesn't say anything.
"Then you told her what you'd been wondering about. What they keep under the habits." I'm very close now. I can smell the oysters on his breath and the fear coming off his skin. "Then you told her she'd be available after Christmas. And you'd put in a bid."
His mouth opens and closes.
"She told you to take your hand off her," I say, "or I'd kill you. And you laughed."
"Gideon—"
I take his right hand.
I take it by the wrist and I turn it over, palm up, and he screams before I've done anything at all. I walk him three steps sideways to the walk-in cooler, a steel door as thick as a vault, and I put his hand in the frame, and I shut the door on it.
The sound is like a bag of walnuts under a boot.
He screams. He goes to his knees. His hand is still in the door and I open it and shut it again, and the second sound is wetter than the first.
I open the door.
He falls away from it, clutching his wrist against his chest, sobbing. His hand isn't a hand anymore.
On the steel counter by the dish station, there's a champagne sabre.
They used it at the start of the evening, for the display, one of those tricks for rich people.
A sommelier in a white jacket, a bottle of Krug held out at arm's length, the heavy curved blade run up the seam of the bottle until the neck flies off with the cork still in it and everyone applauds.
It's still lying there on a white napkin. Two feet of dull, heavy steel with a brass guard.
It's not sharp. It doesn't need to be.
I pick it up.
Arceneaux sees it and tries to crawl.
"She's mine," I tell him, and put him against the wall by his collar with my left hand, and put the sabre through him with my right.
It goes in under the ribs, the way the knife went into me on the wharf. It goes in hard, because it isn't sharp, and I have to lean on it, and he looks at me the whole time. It goes through him and into the plaster behind him, and stops.
He hangs there on the wall of the Beauregard's kitchen, pinned like a butterfly in a case.
He doesn't die right away.
I stand in front of him and watch him do it. I watch his wet red mouth open and close. I watch his eyes go from me to the sabre to the swinging door and back to me. His good hand comes up and fumbles at the brass guard and falls away.
"You had your hand on her," I tell him, "for one waltz."
He stops.
I let go of his collar. He stays where he is.
***
There's blood on my cuffs.
I notice it in the garage, under the fluorescent lights, when I reach for the car door. Two neat red bands, soaked into the white cotton at the wrist, just below the cufflinks. Arceneaux's. Some of it's on the rosary. Some of it is under my fingernails.
I don't wipe it off.
I sit in the car in the concrete dark with my hands on the wheel and I think about my father.
See if she'll let him. Then you'll see what she is.
I think about a locked door on the third floor of the Prytania house, ten years ago. A tray left outside it. My mother's voice through the wood, saying my name, once, the last spring, when I was twenty-four and still did what my father told me, and he had told me to walk past.
I walked past.
I think about my father at a microphone, smiling, raising his glass.
Then I start the car.
I call Ansel on the ramp.
"She's home," he says before I ask. "In your room. She wouldn't take off the dress. Madame Odile tried."
"Did she say anything?"
"In the car?" A pause. "She asked me if it would be quick."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her it depended how he'd touched her." Another pause. "She said, Then it won't be."
I drive up out of the garage onto Canal Street. The neon is running in the wet asphalt, red and gold.
"Call Broussard," I tell Ansel. "Tell him there was a robbery at the Beauregard tonight. Kitchen office. The safe. Councilman Arceneaux walked in on it. Tragic. By morning."
"And the sabre?"
"The sabre was a weapon of opportunity. Robbers are desperate men."
"Yes, boss."
I hang up. Superintendent Broussard has two daughters at Sacred Heart and a lake house in Mandeville that my bank carries at two percent. By the time the sun comes up over the river, Philippe Arceneaux will have died a hero, interrupting thieves.
My phone buzzes on the seat beside me.
A text. From my father.
You've made your choice.
I look at it at the red light on Canal and St. Charles. Four words. He's never sent me a text message in his life. He doesn't believe in them. He believes in things said to your face across a desk, where he can watch them land.
He wanted me to have this one in writing.
I don't answer.
The light goes green.
***
She's waiting for me.
Not in her room. In mine. Sitting on the edge of my bed in the red dress with the wrap still around her shoulders and the halo on her hand, like she came up the stairs and sat down and didn't move again. The lamp is on. The door in the wall is open.
She looks up when I come in.
She looks at my face. Then at my hands. Then at my cuffs.
"Is he dead?"
"Yes."
"Which hand?"
"You said the right."
"I did." She stands up. The wrap slides off her shoulders onto the floor and she doesn't pick it up. "Did you start with that one?"
"I started with that one."
She comes to me.
She takes my right wrist in both her hands and lifts it to the lamp and looks at the cuff.
The blood has dried brown at the edges and is still red in the middle.
She looks at it for a long time. Then she takes out the cufflink, carefully, the way she'd lift a square of leaf off the cushion, and drops it on the rug, and folds the cuff back.
There's blood on my wrist. Under the rosary.
"You should be afraid of me," I tell her.
"I know."
"Are you?"
She looks up at me. The mark on her throat is dark red in the lamplight, fresh, mine. The halo is on her hand, holding my wrist.
"I was afraid in that ballroom," she says. "When his hand was on me. When your father was talking. Four hundred people, and every one of them looking at me like I was something he'd bought." Her fingers tighten on my wrist. "Then you walked down the stairs."
She doesn't say anything else.
She reaches up and takes my tie apart.
***
She undresses me. She does it the way she did in the shower, slowly, her eyes on what she's doing. The tie. The studs. The shirt, which she drops on the floor with the red cuffs showing. She finds the stitches on my side and puts her palm flat beside them, the way she did on the altar step.
I let her.
Then I turn her around and undo the fourteen thousand dollars of red silk, button by button, all the way down her spine, and push it off her shoulders, and it falls around her feet like something spilled.
I put her on my bed.
She pulls me down. She wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my hips and she says, into my mouth, before I've even touched her, "Now."
"Not yet."
"Now, Gideon."
It's an order.
She's never given me an order in her life.
I push into her, and she's ready, but the first stretch steals her breath. I stop with my forehead against hers, not pulling away, not moving.
"Don't stop," she says. "I said now."
So I move. Not gentle. Not careless. Exactly as hard as she asks for. Her nails are in my back and her heels are in my thighs and she's saying my name against my throat like she's angry at it.
"Say it," I tell her.
"I'm yours."
"Again."
"I'm yours. I'm yours—" Her voice breaks. "I was yours on the ladder. I was yours before I knew your name."
I stop.
I hold still inside her, braced over her, and look down at her face. Flushed. Wet-eyed. Furious with me and with herself and with whatever she just heard come out of her own mouth.
"Say that again."
She looks up at me.
"I was yours," she says, "before I knew your name."
I kiss her so hard our teeth touch.
After that there's nothing careful left.
The headboard hits the wall. She comes with her mouth open against my shoulder and her whole body locked around me, and I follow her down into it with her name in my throat and my blood-stained hand in her hair, and somewhere in the middle of it I understand that I've never once in my life been this far from my father.
***
Afterward, she lies on her side with her head on my arm and her fingers tracing the stitches.
The lamp is still on. I don't turn it off. I want to look at her.
She lifts my right hand. Turns it over. The blood has dried in a thin brown line around my wrist, just under the rosary, where the cuff was.
She looks at it.
Then she puts her mouth on it.
Her tongue moves over my wrist, slowly, over the dried blood, over the pulse under it. I watch her do it. I don't breathe. She tastes it the way I tasted hers in the cold room, with her eyes on mine.
She lifts her head.
"Communion," she says quietly.
She lays her cheek back down on my arm and closes her eyes.
I lie awake a long time in the lamplight, with her asleep against me and the taste of her mouth still on my skin, and think that of all the things I've taken from her, of all the habits and veils and notebooks, this is the first one she's given me back.