CHAPTER 23
THE COUSIN
POV: NOEMI
"Promise me," he says at six in the morning, at the steel door.
He's in his coat already. Ansel is waiting in the car in the alley with the engine running. The light is grey through the bars on the rectory window, and I'm standing on the bottom step of the stairs in one of his shirts with my kit bag over my shoulder, and he isn't letting me past.
"Promise you what?"
"That you don't get in a car with anyone but Ansel or me. Not the guards. Not the sisters. Not Father Duclos. Nobody."
"You've got four men at the chapel."
"Promise me."
I look at him. At the stitches I can see at the edge of his collar, healing now, pink. At the loose onyx bead he's been carrying in his coat pocket for three weeks and rolling between his fingers when he thinks I'm not watching.
"Why this morning?"
"Because Remy called me yesterday," he says, "and asked what days you go to the convent."
I go still on the step.
"Remy," I say.
He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to. I watch his face, and I understand that he knows something about his cousin that he isn't telling me, and I understand that he's not telling me because he's waiting, the way he waited for me to tell him about Brandt.
"I promise," I say.
He puts his hand on the back of my neck. Under my hair. The place he looked at for twenty-nine days.
"Nobody," he says again.
"Nobody."
He lets me go.
***
The bishop's altar has four saints on the side panels, and by Tuesday afternoon three of them have their halos back.
I'm on the last one. Saint Jude, patron of lost causes, with a face like a tired uncle and a crack running down his cheek from the hurricane that I filled with gesso on Saturday and sanded on Monday.
I'm laying the last quarter of his halo, holding my breath, when the chapel door bangs open so hard it hits the wall.
The leaf lifts off my brush and floats away.
I watch it go. A little square of gold, turning over and over in the air, down past the edge of the scaffold toward the tiles.
"Noemi."
Remy Valcourt is standing in the doorway of the side chapel.
His shirt is red.
The whole front of it. White cotton, soaked through from collar to belt, and his hands are red to the wrists, and his face is grey and wet with sweat. He's breathing like he ran here. The two men Gideon put at the chapel door have their guns out, both of them, pointed at his chest.
"Don't," Remy says to them. "Don't, for God's sake, I'm family. Put those down." He looks up at me. "Noemi. He's been shot."
The world stops.
"The warehouse on Tchoupitoulas," Remy says.
"Somebody set it on fire an hour ago. He went down there with Ansel and they were waiting for him.
Three of them." He holds up his red hands.
"I held him in the car. I held him all the way to the clinic.
He's in surgery. He's asking for you. He keeps saying your name. "
"Call him," I say to the guard nearest me. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Call Mr. Valcourt. Now."
The guard takes out his phone with one hand, his gun still up with the other. He dials. We all stand there, listening to it ring.
Voicemail.
"Ansel," I say. "Call Ansel."
He dials. It rings and rings.
Nothing.
"They're in surgery," Remy says. "Phones off.
It's a private clinic on Carondelet. Doctor who does work for the family.
He can't have his name on a hospital register, you understand that, the police would—" He stops.
He puts one red hand over his eyes. "Please.
He told me to bring you. Ansel said to bring you and leave the guards here in case they come for the convent too. "
"Mr. Valcourt said nobody moves her," the guard says. "Nobody. That's the order."
"Mr. Valcourt is bleeding," Remy says. "He's got a hole in his chest you could put your fist in. You want to be the one who tells him she didn't come?"
The guard looks at me.
I'm already climbing down.
***
I know.
Part of me knows it on the scaffold. Part of me knows it on the ladder going down, and on the chapel tiles with the square of gold leaf lying face down by my foot.
The steel door opens for two thumbs. His and Ansel's.
Remy isn't one of them.
He asked about the convent. He offered you a ride. Twice.
You promised him. Six o'clock this morning, on the stairs. Nobody.
I know it the way I knew about the brakes before Gideon told me. The way you know water's cold before you step into it.
And I go anyway.
Because the other part of me is looking at the blood on Remy's shirt and seeing Gideon's side, the long red line I stitched, thirteen black knots. Seeing it opened. Seeing him on a table somewhere on Carondelet Street saying my name to a doctor who doesn't know what it means.
If I'm wrong and I stay, he dies saying my name to a stranger.
If I'm right and I go—
I don't finish the thought.
"I'm coming with her," the guard says. The older one. He has a grey mustache. He's the one who stood at the chapel door on Saturday and never once looked at me while I worked. "Mr. Valcourt said nobody takes her anywhere alone."
"Fine," Remy says. "Fine, yes, good, come. Just hurry."
***
Remy's car isn't the silver Porsche.
It's a black SUV, idling on Dauphine with the rear door open.
There's a man at the wheel I don't know.
Remy opens the back door for me. The guard with the grey mustache gets in first, to check it, and sits down on the far side with his gun in his lap, and I get in after him, and Remy gets in the front.
The doors lock.
All four of them, together. A small heavy sound.
We pull away from Saint Veronica's. Down Dauphine, left, toward the river.
Not toward Carondelet.
The guard sees it at the same moment I do. He leans forward.
"This isn't the way to—"
Remy turns around in the front seat and shoots him in the face.
It's so loud in the closed car that I don't hear it. I feel it. In my teeth and in my chest and in the glass of the window beside my head, which goes pink and then red. The guard's head hits the window. His gun slides out of his lap onto the floor between us.
I go for it.
I don't think. My hand just goes. My fingers touch the grip.
Remy's hand comes down on my wrist over the seat and twists, and the gun goes out of my reach under the driver's seat, and I'm looking up into Gideon's cousin's face, three inches from mine, and he's smiling.
He isn't grey anymore. He isn't sweating. The fear's gone from him like a coat taken off.
"There she is," he says softly. "La sainte au couteau. They told me about you."
My other hand is in my cardigan pocket.
I cut him.
Across the back of the hand on my wrist. Quick and deep.
He yells and lets go, and I slash at his face and miss and cut the headrest instead, and the man driving reaches back without looking and catches my arm, and Remy grabs a fistful of my hair and slams my head against the window where the guard's blood is.
The world goes white.
When it comes back, the knife is gone. Remy has it. He's holding it up in his bleeding hand, looking at it with interest, like a man looking at a bug.
"This?" he says. "This is what you cut Ambrose's man with? On the roof?" He laughs. "It's barely a knife. It's a letter opener."
"It opened you," I say.
My voice is thick. There's blood running into my left eye from my scalp.
He stops laughing.
He puts my knife in his breast pocket, behind his red-soaked shirt. Then he takes a handkerchief out of the other pocket and wraps his cut hand in it, carefully, looking at me the whole time.
"The blood on my shirt is pig's blood," he says. "From a butcher on Magazine Street. Forty dollars a gallon. Did you know you can buy it by the gallon?"
"Where's Gideon?"
"At the warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, I'd imagine.
Watching it burn. It really is on fire; I didn't lie about that.
It'll keep him and Ansel busy for an hour, and there's a man with a jammer in a van across the street, so neither of their phones will work until someone thinks to look for him.
" He settles back in the front seat. "Which Ansel will.
Eventually. He's not stupid, just slow."
"He'll kill you."
"Probably." Remy looks out the windshield at the river going by. "But not today."
"You're his cousin."
He's quiet for a moment.
"I'm his cousin," he agrees. "I've been his cousin for thirty-four years.
I stood in a doorway and watched him take the belt out of his father's hand when we were fifteen, and I thought, that's the one.
That's the one to stand behind." He turns his head and looks at me.
"Do you know what Gideon was going to be, before you?
The next Augustin. The whole river. And I was going to be the man at his right hand, the way Ansel is now, only with a name. A Valcourt."
"And now?"
"And now he's burning the family down for a nun who let her father drown."
I stop breathing.
Remy smiles.
"Oh, yes," he says. "Uncle Augustin knows. He's always known. There's very little that happens on the Chef Menteur that Augustin Valcourt doesn't know about." He turns back around. "He wants to meet you. He's been very patient."
***
The house on River Road is white.
Enormous and white, with columns all the way across the front like the teeth of a comb, at the end of an avenue of oaks so old their branches meet over the drive. The kind of house they put on postcards. The kind of house where people used to be sold.
They take me in through the kitchen.
Nobody in the kitchen looks at me. A woman at the stove, a man polishing silver. My head is bleeding and there's a dead man's blood all down the side of my dress and my hands are zip-tied in front of me, and nobody in the kitchen of Augustin Valcourt's house turns around.
The library is at the back, facing the river.
Books to the ceiling. A fire in the grate even though it isn't cold. Windows open, so you can hear the tugs on the water. And behind a desk the size of an altar, in a leather chair, an old man with silver hair and a woman's wedding ring on his little finger.
"Mademoiselle Delacroix." Augustin rises. "Please. Sit. Remy, for God's sake, a towel. She's bleeding on my rug."
Remy brings a towel. I don't take it. He puts it on the arm of the chair in front of the desk.
I don't sit.
"No?" Augustin sits back down. "As you like."
He looks at me for a long time. At my face. At the blood. At the zip tie on my wrists, and the ring on my left hand above it, the halo, still shining.
"He had that made three years ago," Augustin says. "Did he tell you? I heard about it at the time. A halo. From a photograph of a plaster saint. I thought it was a joke." He turns the little gold ring on his finger. Hélène's ring. "I didn't understand yet what he was."
"What is he?"
"My son." Augustin smiles. "Which is to say, a monster. I made him one. I'm the only man alive who knows exactly how." He folds his hands on the desk. "And now you've come along and made him forget that he's supposed to be my monster. So here we are."
"He's not yours."
"Oh, my dear." He looks almost sorry for me. "Everything on this river is mine. The port, the police, the Archbishop, your little convent's roof before Gideon bought it out from under me. He's only ever been borrowing it."
"What do you want?"
"I want my son back." He says it simply.
"I want him married to Clémence Boudreaux by Easter.
I want Ambrose's port joined to ours. I want the Valcourt name to go on.
" He spreads his hands. "And for that, I need you gone.
I tried to buy you. You refused. I tried to have you frightened off a roof.
You cut the man instead." His eyes go to Remy's wrapped hand, and something like amusement moves in them. "You do cut people, don't you."
"When they touch me."
"Yes. I've heard." He leans back. "So now we'll try it the old-fashioned way. Gideon will come here tonight. He'll come for you, the way he came for you on Paris Road, because he can't help it. And when he does, I'll give him a choice."
"He won't choose you."
"No," Augustin agrees. "He won't. That's what I'm counting on." He stands and comes around the desk and stops in front of me, close. He smells like cigars and bay rum and the river. "Do you know how my wife died, Mademoiselle?"
"You locked her in a room until she stopped eating."
"She locked herself in," he says softly.
"I only held the key. She loved God more than she loved me, so I gave her a room with nothing in it but God.
And at the end, do you know what she did?
She stopped fighting. She sat by the window and looked at the river and she waited for her son to open the door.
" He smiles. "He didn't. He walked past. Every day for a year. "
"I know."
"Of course you know. He tells you everything.
He's so proud of it, his honesty. He thinks it makes him different from me.
" Augustin reaches out and touches the bite on my throat, very lightly, with one dry fingertip.
I don't move. "It doesn't. He's building you a room too, my dear.
A better one. With silk on the walls and a door that locks from his side.
And one day, you'll sit by the window and wait for him. "
I look at him.
At his pale eyes, which are Gideon's eyes, left too long in a window.
"He came through the door," I say. "The day I was taken. He came through the door on Paris Road with blood to his elbows. He'll come through yours."
"Yes," Augustin says. "I'm counting on that too."
He takes his finger off my throat. He nods to Remy.
"Take her upstairs," he says. "To the blue room. She should see it." He turns back to the window and the river and the tugs going by in the dusk. "She should see what's waiting for her."
Remy takes my arm.
At the library door, Augustin speaks again, without turning around.
"My son loves the way his mother did," he says. "To the grave."