CHAPTER 21
THE BURNER
POV: NOEMI
The phone is the size of a holy card.
I hold it under the blanket at five in the morning with the screen turned down against my palm so the light won't show through the bars on the window. Cheap black plastic. A crack already across one corner. It weighs almost nothing.
It's heavier than the key.
I turn it over. One message, sent at 4:12 a.m.
Thinking of you. Call when you're alone. —C
I read it four times.
Then I get out of bed without waking him, and I take my missal off the chair, and I open the loose spine where my thirty-seven dollars lived for three years, and I slide the phone in where the money used to be.
It fits. Just.
I put the missal back on the chair and get into bed again, on my left side, and I lie there looking at the door.
One door. Steel behind the wood.
He's asleep behind me with his arm over my waist. He sleeps heavier here than on Prytania. He says it's the walls. Eighteen inches of brick. Nothing gets in.
Nothing gets out, either.
***
I let myself imagine it.
I lie in the grey dark and I imagine calling the number.
Whispering. I'm alone. A car at the side door of the church at three in the morning, when Ansel's men change shifts.
A motel off I-10 with a federal agent in the next room.
A new name. I've always liked the name Clare.
Clare Martin, in Tucson, in a room over a laundromat, gilding picture frames for tourists.
Free.
I lie there and I make myself imagine all of it.
And then I imagine Agent Brandt's hand.
On my knee, and then above it. His kind voice. Protection is a relationship, Noemi. His thumb moving.
Clare Martin in Tucson, with a door that locks from the outside, and one key, on Cole Brandt's ring.
You'd be trading one man's cage for another man's hand.
And the other man's hand would never throw anyone off a roof for you.
I stop imagining.
I lie very still and feel Gideon breathing against the back of my neck, slow and heavy, and his arm across me, and the knot of the stitches I fixed on Thursday pressed against my spine.
I'm not going anywhere.
I knew it before I opened the missal. I think I knew it in Mother Agathe's office with that hand on my thigh.
But I'm not throwing the phone away, either.
***
He takes me up to the choir loft after breakfast, because I ask.
I want to see what he sees. I've seen the wall. I've never seen him sit in the chair.
He sits in the chair. I stand behind it, the way Ansel does, with my hands on the leather.
Twelve screens. Saint Veronica's side chapel, empty, the bishop's altar half gilded, waiting for me. The Prytania house, dark, Madame Odile in the kitchen alone with the radio. The Dauphine gate. The front gate. The market.
And on the screen at the end, the television news, muted, from a station in Metairie.
Black water. Fire.
Six boats burning on the Industrial Canal in the dark, one after another, their reflections burning upside down underneath them. The crawl along the bottom: SIX SHRIMP BOATS DESTROYED IN OVERNIGHT FIRE — ARSON SUSPECTED — NO INJURIES.
I watch it for a long time.
"Ambrose's," I say.
"Yes."
"Because of the roof."
"Because of you."
The fire rolls up the side of the last boat. A man on the levee in the footage is standing with his hands on his head.
He burned a fleet because a man touched your arm on a roof.
I stand behind his chair and watch Ambrose Boudreaux's boats burn, and what I feel isn't horror.
It's warm. It's in my chest and my stomach and lower. And it's got a name I didn't use to know, and now I do.
Pride.
I put my hand on his shoulder, on the bite I gave him on Wednesday night, under his shirt.
He puts his hand over mine.
Neither of us says anything.
***
In the afternoon, Gideon goes to the port, and Ansel stays.
He stays in the nave, sitting on a crate by the font with a newspaper, the way you'd stay with a child who can't be left alone. I come down from the rectory through the covered walk and the sacristy, and he looks up and folds the paper, and doesn't say anything.
I sit down on the crate across from him.
The font is between us. Marble, waist-high, full of dark rainwater with a skin of dust on it. I've been told what happened in it. Madame Odile heard it from somebody's cousin.
"Ansel," I say. "How long have you worked for him?"
"Nine years."
"Why?"
He looks at me for a long moment. He has a flat, broad face, like a boxer's, and his nose has been broken more than once, and his eyes are grey and much gentler than the rest of him.
"My sister died when I was twenty-two," he says.
"Overdose, in a motel on Airline Highway.
I didn't have the money to bury her. The parish was going to put her in the county ground with a number.
" He folds the paper again, smaller. "I was fighting in a warehouse in Kenner for three hundred a night.
He came to one of the fights. I lost. He came back to the locker room after and asked me what I needed the money for.
I told him. The next day, she was at Lafourcade's with a mahogany casket and a priest and a stone with her name on it. "
"What did he want for it?"
"He didn't say." Ansel shrugs. "He still hasn't."
I look at the water in the font.
"Clémence Boudreaux asked your name," I say.
His hands stop on the newspaper.
"At the ball," I say. "She said Gideon never once looked at her face. She said you did."
Ansel doesn't say anything. But something goes across his flat broken face that I've never seen there. He looks at the font. At the rainwater. At nothing.
"She's Ambrose's daughter," he says finally.
"I know."
"She's going to marry whoever her father tells her to marry."
"She laughed," I say, "when Gideon said no. She laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth."
Ansel is quiet for a long time.
"I heard her," he says.
He unfolds the paper and holds it up in front of his face, and doesn't turn the page for the next twenty minutes.
***
At dinner, he asks.
The rectory has a small dining room with a table for four and a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. Ansel brought food from a restaurant on Frenchmen Street. Gumbo. Bread. A satsuma on my plate, peeled.
He waits until I've eaten half.
"Did anyone give you anything," he says, "at Saint Veronica's?"
I keep eating.
"Like what?"
"Anything."
"Sister Perpetua gave me a holy card of Saint Veronica. It's in my bag." I tear the bread. "She said I looked thin."
"Anything else?"
"No."
He looks at me across the table.
His face doesn't change. It never changes. But he waits. He lets the no sit on the tablecloth between us, and look at itself, and I keep eating and don't look up.
"Mother Agathe has gone to Lafayette," he says.
My spoon stops.
"Her sister's dying. She left last night." He turns his glass a quarter turn. "She made a phone call she shouldn't have made."
I look up at him.
He knows.
Of course he knows. There are cameras in every room but the cells. He sat in his leather chair in the choir loft and watched Agent Brandt put his hand on my thigh. He watched me put the phone in my pocket.
And he isn't asking me about it.
He's asking me to tell him.
"Is there anything you want to tell me, novice?"
He hasn't called me that in a week.
I put down my spoon.
"No," I say.
"Nothing at all."
"Nothing at all."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he picks up his fork and goes back to eating, like I've told him the weather.
***
He takes me to bed at ten.
The priest's room has an iron bed and a crucifix and a window with bars that look like vines. He undresses me in the lamplight slowly, like he's opening a letter he already knows the contents of, and lays me down on the white sheet, and doesn't take his own clothes off.
He kneels on the floor at the edge of the bed.
He puts his mouth on me.
I've never had this. Not once. Not even from him.
I grab the iron rails over my head and my back comes up off the mattress, and he holds my hips down with his hands and doesn't stop, doesn't hurry, doesn't let me move.
He does it the way he does everything. Like he has all the time in the world, and knows exactly where I'll break.
I get close.
I get so close I can feel it coming up through me like water through the floor of a boat.
He stops.
He lifts his head.
"Tell me," he says.
I stare down at him, gasping.
"Tell me what?"
"You know what."
"No."
He looks at me. He puts his mouth back on me.
It comes back faster the second time. I'm already there. I'm saying his name, I'm pulling on the iron rails so hard the bed shakes, and I'm right at the edge of it—
He stops.
"Tell me."
"No."
"Noemi."
"Don't stop. God, please, don't—"
"Then tell me."
I look down the length of my body at him. At his dark eyes and his wet mouth and his hands on my hips. At the man who's watched me for three years and knows every single thing about me except this one.
I want him to finish so badly I'm shaking.
I want to keep this more.
"No," I say.
Something moves in his face. Not anger. I know what his anger looks like; I saw it through the glass of the belvedere. This is something else. Something almost like the look he gave the girl on the ladder at the top of the wall.
He stands up.
"Then I'll finish," he says, "when you tell me."
"You can't just— you can't leave me like this—"
"I can."
"I'll finish myself."
"Not in my bed."
I sit up. I'm naked and flushed and shaking, and I'm so angry I could throw the lamp at him.
"I'll go in the bathroom."
"And I'll stand outside the door and listen." He takes his watch off. His cufflinks. He lays them on the dresser in a neat row. "You've got a secret, novice. So have I. Mine is that I can wait longer than you can."
He takes off his shirt. His trousers. He gets into bed beside me like nothing's happened and turns off the lamp.
I lie in the dark with my heart going and my whole body aching and furious.
I think about getting up. I think about the bathroom. I think about the phone in the spine of my missal on the chair four feet away.
I don't get up.
I roll onto my side, away from him. Then, after a minute, back toward him.
"Then wake me up," I say into the dark, "when you've decided to finish."
He's quiet for a long time.
"Wake you?"
"You heard me." My voice is shaking, and I don't care. "You want me in the night, take me. Whenever you want. I'll wake up." I put my hand flat on his chest. "I always wake up for you. I woke up for you for twenty-nine days before I ever saw your face."
He doesn't answer.
But his heart jumps under my hand, once, hard.
***
At three in the morning, I get up.
He's asleep. He sleeps like a dead man in this house. I take the missal off the chair and go into the bathroom and close the door and sit on the edge of the tub in the dark and open the spine.
The phone lights up blue in my hands.
Thinking of you. Call when you're alone. —C
I look at it for a long time.
I think about Wendell Price's thumb on the back of my neck at the chancery. I think about Philippe Arceneaux's pink hand going lower with every turn of the waltz. I think about Agent Cole Brandt's hand going up my thigh in Mother Agathe's office while he told me I was a victim.
Gideon killed the first two.
He can't kill this one. Nobody has to tell me. A federal agent, in a convent, on a camera he owns. If Gideon touched him, it would be over. All of it.
He can't kill this one.
I type with my thumb, one letter at a time. I've never texted anyone in my life. It takes me a long time.
Not yet. He watches everything. Soon. I'll find a way.
I read it back.
It sounds frightened. It sounds like a girl in a locked room with bars on the windows, begging to be saved.
It sounds exactly like what he wants to hear.
I press send.
Then I turn the phone off and slide it back into the spine of my missal, where my thirty-seven dollars used to be, and I close the cover, and I sit on the edge of the tub in the dark with the missal in my lap.
Agent Brandt wanted me to trust him.
He wanted me alone.
I know exactly what to do with Agent Brandt.