CHAPTER 22
SLEEP
POV: GIDEON
I read it at six, in the choir loft, with coffee.
Not yet. He watches everything. Soon. I'll find a way.
I read it again.
I read it the way I read her notebook on the altar step at Saint Casimir's, with my thumb on the line so I don't lose my place.
He watches everything.
It's true. It's the truest thing she's ever said about me. And she wrote it to him, in the dark, in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub while I slept four feet away with my arm across the place where she'd been.
I put the coffee down.
For one minute, sitting in my chair above the empty nave, I let myself think it.
That she's going.
That she's lying on her left side in my bed every night facing my door and counting the days. That the girl who walked past my car on the Chef Menteur without looking has found another shoulder of another highway, and this time I'm the one in the ditch, calling her name.
My hands are flat on the desk.
I make them stay there.
Then I pull up the recording from Mother Agathe's office and watch it again. Brandt's hand on her knee. Brandt's hand above it. Her face.
I stop it on her face.
It isn't the face of a girl who wants to be saved. I know that face. I've seen it on a hundred women in a hundred rooms. This isn't it.
This is the face on the Chef Menteur.
It's the face she makes right before she walks away from a man and doesn't look back.
And she's not making it at me.
***
She wants to go back to Saint Veronica's to finish the bishop's altar.
I let her.
Four men this time. Two in the chapel, two at the gates.
Ansel drives her himself. I watch from the loft as she climbs the scaffold and takes off her coat and kneels on the plank in a grey dress with her hair pinned up and the bite dark on her throat, and lays gold on the side panel of the bishop's altar.
She works for six hours. She doesn't take out the phone once.
At noon, it buzzes in the box in my basement. Incoming.
Tomorrow? I could be at the Dauphine gate at six. Just walk out. I'll be waiting. —C
She doesn't answer it. She doesn't even take it out of her bag. On the screen, she's holding her breath over a square of leaf.
At half past twelve, Sister Perpetua comes into the side chapel with a plate of sandwiches and climbs the first two rungs of the scaffold, which she's never done in her life, and sits there with the plate on her knees.
I turn the audio up.
"You have to eat," Perpetua says. "You're thin as a rail. Mother Agathe always said you ate like a bird."
"Mother Agathe's in Lafayette."
"I know." Perpetua looks down at the plate. "They say her sister won't see Christmas. They say—" She stops. "Sister Marie-Claude says Mr. Valcourt sent her away. Is that true?"
Noemi lays a square of leaf. She doesn't answer until it's down.
"She made a phone call she shouldn't have," she says.
Perpetua is quiet. She holds up a sandwich. Noemi takes it and eats it on the plank, gold on her fingers, gold on the bread.
"Noemi." Perpetua's voice is very small. "Are you happy?"
Noemi stops chewing.
On my screen, she looks down at the old woman on the second rung. She looks at her for a long time. Then she looks at the bishop's altar, at the gold coming up bright under her brush, at the saint with half a face.
"I don't know what that word is for," she says. "I never did. Mother used to say it was for heaven."
"But—"
"I'm not afraid anymore," Noemi says. "Of anything. Not of God, not of Mother, not of men with gold teeth. I used to be afraid every minute of every day, Sister. I used to be afraid in my sleep." She wipes her fingers on her smock. "I'm not now."
Perpetua looks up at her.
"Is that him?" she whispers. "Did he do that?"
Noemi picks up her brush.
"He's the reason," she says. "I did it myself."
I sit in the choir loft with my hand flat on the desk and listen to the rest of it, Perpetua telling her about the new boiler and Father Duclos's cough, Noemi laughing once at something I don't catch, the sound of it coming up through the speaker small and clear, like a coin dropped on stone.
I don't move until she's back up on her knees with the brush.
At one, Remy calls me.
"Cousin." Warm. Concerned. "How's she holding up?"
"Fine."
"Is she at the convent today? I thought I might stop in. Bring her lunch. She must be going out of her mind with you and your guards and those bars."
"She's working."
"Every day this week?"
I look at the screen. At her, on the scaffold. At the two men in the side chapel doorway, and the two at the gates.
"Why, Remy?"
A small pause. So small no one else would hear it.
"No reason," he says. "Just want to be a good cousin. Father's making things hard for everyone. I thought she could use a friend." Another pause. "Tell her I asked about her."
"I'll tell her."
He hangs up.
I sit in the loft with the phone in my hand and look at the screen where she's working, and I think about a man in a utility vest at a power box on Prytania, who walked like he'd never done a day's work in his life.
***
She's asleep by eleven.
She fell asleep angry. I watched her do it. She came in from the convent with gold on her fingers and didn't speak to me, ate her dinner, went up to the priest's room and undressed with her back to me and lay down on her left side facing the door, like a woman going to sleep in a cell.
I sat in the chair by the barred window and watched her breathing go slow and even.
It's two now.
The lamp is off. The streetlight comes through the iron bars on the window and lies across the bed in stripes, pale orange and dark. She's in one of the stripes. Her shoulder bare. Her hair spread on the pillow. One hand under her cheek.
She sleeps with her mouth a little open. I knew that. I've known it for three years.
On a screen.
It's different from four feet away.
I've watched her sleep more nights than I've slept myself.
I know how she breathes when she's dreaming and how she breathes when she isn't. I know she talks sometimes, in Latin, pieces of the Salve Regina.
I know she moves her hand in her sleep like she's laying leaf.
I know the sound she makes when she wakes from the dream about the scaffold, because I've listened to it eleven times.
I've never once touched her while she slept.
You want me in the night, take me. I'll wake up.
I always wake up for you.
I get up out of the chair.
I kneel on the bed behind her. The springs give, and she doesn't wake. I lie down along her back, not touching, an inch between us, and I put my mouth against the back of her neck, below her hair, the place I looked at from the last pew for twenty-nine days.
I breathe there.
She sighs in her sleep. Shifts. Settles back an inch, into me, without waking. Her body knows mine now. It moves toward it the way a compass needle moves north.
I put my hand on her hip.
Slowly. Over the sheet. Then under it, on her bare skin, and she's warm from sleep, soft everywhere, and I slide my palm down over her hip and across her stomach and lower.
She makes a sound. Not awake. Not asleep.
I touch her the way I touched her on the altar step. Slow. Patient. Leaf being laid. I feel her breathing change against my arm. I feel her go wet under my fingers before she's awake enough to know it.
Her hand comes up out of sleep and closes on my wrist.
Not to stop me.
To hold it there.
"Gideon," she says. Thick. Blurred. Half dreaming.
"You said wake you."
"Mm." Her head tips back against my shoulder. Her eyes are still closed. "Is this you deciding to finish?"
"Yes."
"Good."
She pushes back against me. All of her. Her back to my chest, her hips to mine, her hand pressing my fingers harder where they are. Awake now. Her breath coming faster.
"You texted him," I say into her hair.
Her body goes still for one second against me.
Then she pushes back again.
"Yes," she says.
"Are you leaving me?"
"No."
"Then why—"
"Finish first."
I stop moving my hand.
She makes an angry sound and grabs my wrist with both hands. "No. No, don't you dare, not again—"
"Tell me why."
"Finish first," she says through her teeth, "and I swear to God, Gideon, I will tell you when it's done."
"When what's done?"
She turns her head on the pillow. Her eyes are open now. In the barred light, they're dark, and wide, and completely awake.
"When I've done it," she says. "Not before. You'll see. You watch everything. You'll see."
I look at her.
At the face from the Chef Menteur. At the face from Mother Agathe's office.
And I understand.
It goes through me like a current. Not relief. Something hotter than relief. Something with teeth.
She's not running from me.
She's hunting him.
"Then I'll wait," I tell her.
"Don't wait. Not for this—"
I push into her from behind, and she cries out into the pillow.
It's slow. It's slow because I want it to be, because I've watched her sleep for three years and I want to remember every second of her waking under me.
I hold her against me with my arm across her chest and my hand over her heart, and I move in her, and she moves back, finding the rhythm with me, half asleep and then all the way awake, saying my name to the dark.
"You were asleep," I tell her. "You were asleep and you were already wet for me."
"I told you." She's gasping. "I told you I always wake up for you."
"Say it again."
"I always wake up for you. Every morning. At the Confiteor. Before I knew your name—"
I put my hand over her mouth, gently, and she bites my palm, and comes, shaking against me in the stripes of orange light, and I bury my face in the back of her neck where I've looked for three years, and I follow her.
***
She falls asleep again almost at once. The way she fell asleep on the altar step. All at once, heavily, like the weight's been taken off her.
I don't.
I lie with her against me and my hand still over her heart and I listen to it slow down.
You'll see. You watch everything.
She's going to do something to Cole Brandt.
I don't know what. I don't know when. She's going to do it with her own hands, and she's going to do it in front of my cameras, because she knows I'll be watching, and she wants me to.
I've never wanted anything in my life the way I want to see it.
***
At 3:40, someone knocks on the steel door.
Three knocks, a pause, one more. Ansel.
I get up without waking her. I pull on trousers and go down and open the door, and he's standing on the step in the cold with a folder under his arm and his face grey.
"You need to see this," he says. "Tonight. Not in the morning."
I take him into the sacristy and turn on the light.
He opens the folder on the vestment table. Phone records. Three pages, highlighted in yellow.
"The Beaumont cousin," Ansel says. "The one Ambrose paid for the Houston crew. I pulled his calls." He puts his finger on a line. "Sunday the eleventh. Ten forty-one p.m. Twenty minutes before Tee-Jean opened the Dauphine door."
The number calling in is a number I know by heart. I've called it a thousand times. Birthdays. Christmas. Funerals.
"Thursday the fifteenth," Ansel says. His finger moves. "Eight p.m. Three hours before the wharf."
Same number.
"Friday. Six-oh-five p.m. Nine minutes before the power box on Prytania."
Same number.
He takes out a still from the camera across the street from my house. Grainy. A man in a utility vest with a cap pulled low, bending over the power box on the corner.
Ansel puts his finger on the man's feet.
Italian shoes. Oxblood. Tasseled. Four hundred dollars a pair. The kind of shoes a man wears because he wants to be photographed.
I look at them for a long time.
Your side gate code is Tante Hélène's birthday. You should change that.
Front gate. Two men. I'll tell Father you're being careful.
Is she at the convent today? If she ever needs a ride anywhere, I'm around.
"He knew about the backup battery," Ansel says quietly. "He was there, the week you put in the system. He brought you lunch. He asked a lot of questions."
"I remember."
"And the Dauphine door," Ansel says. "The man who fitted the lock on cell nine had a key cut so he could get in during compline. Remy went to see him the Saturday before they took her. Told him you'd sent him for it."
I don't say anything.
"You want me to bring him in?"
I don't answer right away.
My cousin. Thirty-four years. We learned to swim in the same pool. We were beaten by the same belt, some years. When I was fifteen and took the belt out of my father's hand, Remy was the one standing in the doorway, watching. He never said a word. I thought it was loyalty.
I think now it was attention. He was learning which one of us to stand behind.
"No," I say.
"Boss—"
"Not yet. My father's using him. Remy doesn't have the stomach to do this alone. He's a messenger." I close the folder. "I want to know where my father sends him next. And I want him to think he's getting away with it until the moment he isn't."
"And her?"
"Double the men. Everywhere she goes. Nobody opens that steel door but you or me."
"Yes, boss."
He goes.
I stand in the sacristy under the bare bulb with the folder in my hands.
Then I go back up to the loft and sit down in my chair and pull up the feed from the camera I put on my father's gatepost on River Road, three years ago, the week I took his house.
The drive is dark. The gates are closed. The porch light is on.
At 3:52 a.m., a pair of headlights turns off River Road.
A silver Porsche. Remy's. It pulls up to my father's gate, and the gate opens for it without anyone getting out, and it goes up the long drive under the oaks toward the house, where a light has just come on in the library window.
I watch the taillights all the way to the door.
I let them go.