CHAPTER 20
THE FEDERAL MAN
POV: GIDEON
"I need the rest of my tools," she says. "From Saint Veronica's."
She's sitting on the edge of an iron bed in a room that used to belong to a priest.
I had the rectory fitted three years ago, when I understood that one day I might need a place with one door. Nothing gets in here that I don't open for.
She's been awake since five, looking at the bars on the window.
"No," I say.
"The bishop's altar isn't finished. I left the gilding half done on the side panels. The size will be ruined, and the gesso's open to the air, and if it rains through the transom again, three months of work—"
"Somebody put a ladder against my wall last night."
"Somebody put a ladder against your wall," she agrees. "And I cut his wrist to the bone, and you threw him on a fence." She stands up. "You own Saint Veronica's. Every door of it. You told me so in the car."
"Yes."
"Then there are cameras."
I don't say anything.
"There are cameras in every room," she says, watching my face. "Aren't there. You put them in after you bought it."
"Every room but the cells."
She doesn't flinch at that anymore. She just nods, like I've told her the weather.
"Then send me with ten men," she says. "And watch me the whole time. You'll like that."
***
Remy arrives at eleven with two cups of chicory coffee and a face full of concern.
"Christ, cousin." He comes up the aisle between the crates, looking around at the nave like he's never seen it before. "Ansel told me. A man on your roof? In the Garden District?" He hands me a coffee. "Is she all right?"
"She's fine."
"She's fine? Somebody tried to throw her off the—"
"She cut him first."
Remy stops.
For a moment, I see something go across his face. Surprise. And under the surprise, something else, quicker, that he puts away before I can name it.
"Well," he says. "Good for her." He sips his coffee. "Father's out of his mind about the ball. You know that. He's telling people you've gone the way your mother went. That's the phrase he's using. Gone the way of Hélène."
"Let him."
"I'm on your side here, cousin. You know that." He looks past me, toward the sacristy door and the covered walk beyond it. "Is that where you're keeping her? The rectory?"
"It's where she's staying."
"Smart. One way in." He nods, like he's admiring it. "Does she ever go out?"
"Why?"
"No reason." He smiles. "Just thinking she must go crazy in there. Four walls. She's used to a convent full of women." He sets his cup on a crate. "If she ever needs a ride anywhere, I'm around. Tell her. I'd be glad to."
At noon, she comes through the sacristy door in a grey coat, with her hair pinned and her kit bag over her shoulder, and two of Ansel's men behind her.
Remy turns and sees her and lights up like a man seeing an old friend.
"Noemi. I'm going right past Bywater. Let me drive you."
She looks at him.
Then she looks at me.
"No," I say.
Remy lifts his hands, smiling. "Just offering."
She walks past him without a word. At the side door, she stops, and looks back at me over her shoulder, the way she didn't look back on the Chef Menteur.
Then she's gone.
***
I watch her from the choir loft.
My hands are flat on the desk before I know it. I make them stay there. Then I let myself watch.
The Saint Veronica's cameras came online twelve days ago, the week the deed was signed. Thirty-four of them. The halls. The kitchen. The refectory. Mother Agathe's office. The side chapel where the scaffold is, from three angles. Every room but the cells.
She goes straight to the side chapel. She takes off her coat and climbs the scaffold, and I watch her kneel on the plank and look at the side panels of the bishop's altar, and touch the gesso, and shake her head.
She starts to work.
Sister Perpetua comes in and stands at the foot of the scaffold talking up at her with her hands clasped. Noemi answers without looking down. Perpetua laughs. Noemi smiles, just barely, at the gold.
I watch that smile for a long time.
Ansel comes up the stairs and stands behind my chair.
"The man from the roof was from Houston," he says. "Same crew as the wharf. Ambrose paid double this time."
"The boats."
"Still sitting at the locks. Six of them. The shrimp's been rotting a week. You can smell it from the Claiborne bridge."
"Burn them."
Ansel doesn't answer right away.
"All six?"
"All six. Tonight. Make sure the crews are ashore first. I don't want the men.
I want the boats." I don't look away from the screen, where she's laying a square of leaf on the bishop's altar, holding her breath.
"Ambrose sent a man to throw her off my roof.
I want him to stand on the levee tonight and watch his whole fleet go up and know exactly why. "
"Yes, boss."
"And the box on the corner of Prytania. The power."
"I pulled the footage from the house across the street. A man in a utility vest at six-ten. Cap pulled down. You can't see his face."
"How did he walk?"
Ansel is quiet a moment.
"Like a man who's never done a day's work in his life," he says.
I don't answer that.
***
At two-fifteen, Mother Agathe comes into the side chapel and speaks to Noemi from the foot of the scaffold.
Noemi climbs down. She wipes her hands on a rag. She follows Mother Agathe out, down the hall, into the office with the portrait of the foundress and the locked drawer.
There's a man in the office.
I lean forward.
He's standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. Forty, forty-five. Good grey suit, not expensive, cut well. Dark hair going silver at the temples. Reading glasses folded in his breast pocket. The kind of face women describe as kind.
"Miss Delacroix," he says, and turns, and smiles. "Thank you for seeing me. Mother Agathe, would you give us a few minutes?"
Mother Agathe goes out. She doesn't look at Noemi as she passes. She closes the door behind her.
I turn the audio up.
"Special Agent Cole Brandt." He takes a leather folder out of his inside pocket and opens it. A badge. A card. "FBI, New Orleans field office. Please. Sit."
Noemi doesn't sit.
"Mother Agathe called you," she says.
"Mother Agathe is worried about you. With good reason.
" He puts the badge away. "I know who you've been living with, Miss Delacroix.
I know about the shrimp plant on Paris Road.
I know about a man called Tee-Jean, and what was found at the altar rail of a church in the Marigny.
I know about Councilman Arceneaux, whatever the Times-Picayune says.
" He leans against the desk. His voice is gentle.
"I want you to understand that you're not in any trouble.
None of this is your fault. You're a victim. "
"I'm not a victim."
"That's what victims always say." He smiles again, sadly.
"I've seen it a hundred times. A powerful man.
A young woman with no one. He makes you feel chosen.
He makes you feel like the only person in the world who understands you.
And then one day you wake up in a locked room with bars on the windows. "
She says nothing.
On the screen, her hand has gone into the pocket of her cardigan.
"I can get you out," Brandt says. "Tonight, if you want. Witness protection. A new name, a new city. Anywhere you like. All you'd need to do is tell us what you've seen. That's all."
"And if I don't want to go?"
"Then you'll end up like his mother." He says it quietly, like a doctor giving a diagnosis. "You've heard about his mother."
Her face doesn't change.
"Sit down," Brandt says. "Please. You're shaking."
She isn't shaking. I can see her hands.
She sits anyway. In the hard chair in front of Mother Agathe's desk, the one she sat in seventeen days ago when she heard the word dollars for the first time.
Brandt pulls the other chair around. Close. He sits down facing her, knees almost touching hers.
"I want to help you," he says. "I want you to trust me."
He takes something out of his jacket. A cheap black phone. A burner, the kind you buy at a gas station.
He puts it in her hand. He closes her fingers around it with both of his.
"My number's the only one in there," he says. "Call me when you're alone. Day or night. I'll come get you myself."
He doesn't let go of her hands.
Then he does. And he puts one of his hands on her knee instead.
On her knee, over the grey wool.
And then above it.
"I look after my witnesses personally, Noemi," he says. "Protection is a relationship. It's based on trust. On closeness. You understand?"
His hand moves higher on her thigh.
She goes still.
The way she went still on the chancery bench under Wendell Price's hand.
The way she went still at the market. The way she stood on the shoulder of the Chef Menteur.
She sits in the hard chair with the burner in her fist and a federal agent's hand on her thigh, and she turns herself into something that can't be held, and she waits for him to stop.
I'm on my feet.
I don't remember standing. My chair is on its back on the floor of the loft. The rosary is biting into my wrist. I'm three steps toward the stairs.
"Boss."
Ansel. In front of me. His hand flat on my chest.
"Boss. He's a federal agent. In a convent. On a camera you own."
"Get out of my way."
"You kill a fed in Mother Agathe's office in broad daylight and it's over. All of it. Every judge, every cop, Broussard, the port, all of it. They'll put her in a room with bars that aren't yours." He doesn't move his hand. "Look at the screen. Look."
I look.
Brandt has taken his hand away. He's standing. He's buttoning his jacket, smiling down at her, saying something about how she's very brave.
She's still in the chair.
She's looking at the phone in her hand.
Then she puts it in her cardigan pocket. The same pocket. The one with the knife.
"She kept it," Ansel says quietly.
"Yes."
"You want me to get it off her tonight?"
I stand in the choir loft with my chair on the floor and my heart going like it went on the belvedere stairs, and I look at her on the screen. Sitting very straight in Mother Agathe's hard chair. Her hand flat on her pocket. Her face as blank as the girl walking down the highway in the rain.
I know that face now.
It's the face she makes right before she decides something.
"No," I say. "Let her keep it."
***
At four, after the men have brought her back through the sacristy and she's gone up to the rectory without a word to me, I call Saint Veronica's.
"Mother Agathe."
A silence on the line. She knows my voice. She knows I know.
"Mr. Valcourt."
"Your sister in Lafayette," I say. "How long do the doctors give her?"
"I— a few months. Perhaps less."
"She needs you."
"I have a community here. I have obligations—"
"You'll leave tonight," I tell her. "There's a car outside your gate.
Your bags are being packed. Sister Perpetua will lead the house until the order sends someone else, and when it does, the order will find that Saint Veronica's stands on my land, and has my roof, and has my boiler, and will keep all three for exactly as long as I'm happy with the woman who runs it. "
"Mr. Valcourt, I only called him because—"
"I know why you called him. You called him because you took my money for three years and you'd like to think you're the kind of woman who wouldn't." I watch Noemi on the rectory feed, sitting on the iron bed, turning the burner over and over in her hands.
"Go sit with your sister, Agathe. Hold her hand. Pray. You're good at that."
I hang up.
***
At eleven that night, on the lock camera at the Industrial Canal, six shrimp boats burn.
One after another, from the stern forward, as the fuel in their tanks catches.
The fire reflects in the black water so it looks like twelve boats burning, six up and six down.
Black smoke rolls up into the orange city sky.
The rotting shrimp in the holds goes up with it, and I imagine the smell drifting over the levee into Ambrose Boudreaux's neighborhood in Chalmette, into his windows, into his bedroom.
I don't watch it long.
My phone rings at 11:20.
I know the number. I've never had it ring before.
"You burned my boats." Ambrose's voice, soft, the funeral-director voice, but there's something underneath it tonight like a wire pulled too tight. "Six boats, Gideon. My grandfather's boats. The Marie-Therese was built in 1952."
"You sent a man to my roof."
"I sent a man to your roof," he agrees. "And your little nun opened him up like a letter. They found him on your fence with his wrist cut to the tendon and a slice out of his face. My men are saying things about her. Frightened things." A pause. "You know what they're calling her in Chalmette?"
"I don't care."
"La sainte au couteau. The saint with the knife." He laughs, very softly. "I'll admit I admire it."
"What do you want, Ambrose?"
"I want what I've always wanted. The port. Peace. Grandchildren." His voice goes very quiet. "Your father and I have been talking. He says you'll come to your senses by Christmas. He says the girl won't last. He says Valcourt women never do."
"Listen to me," I tell him. "Your daughter is safe from me.
She'll always be safe from me. She laughed at the right moment at the Beauregard, and I'm a sentimental man.
You aren't safe from me. Not tonight, not at Christmas, not in your grave.
Every man you send, I'll send back to you in pieces you can bury in a shoebox. "
A long silence on the line.
"You sound like him," Ambrose says. "Did you know that? When you talk like that. You sound exactly like Augustin."
He hangs up.
I sit very still for a moment with the phone in my hand.
Then I switch to the rectory.
She's asleep on the iron bed. On her left side, facing the door. Her cardigan is hung over the back of the chair, where she can reach it.
The pocket is heavy.
She hasn't called him. I'd know. Every call from every phone within two hundred yards of this church runs through a box in my basement, and that phone has been silent since she took it.
But she hasn't thrown it away either.
I sit in the choir loft with the fire of Ambrose's fleet on one screen and her sleeping face on the other, and I roll the loose onyx bead I kept back from the jeweler between my finger and thumb.
Let's see who she calls.