CHAPTER 24
BLOOD OF MY BLOOD
POV: GIDEON
Gone.
The side chapel feed. The scaffold. Saint Jude with three quarters of a halo. A square of gold leaf face down on the tiles.
Gone.
I play it back.
1:52 p.m. Remy in the doorway. Red to the elbows. His mouth moving. He's been shot. Her face on the scaffold, the color leaving it. The guard dialing. The guard dialing again. Her hands on the ladder.
She climbed down.
She knew. I watched her know it, on the ladder, halfway down. Her hand stopped on the rung. One second. Two.
She climbed down anyway.
For me.
Because a man with pig's blood on his shirt said my name.
I'm standing in the street on Tchoupitoulas with my warehouse burning behind me and my phone in my hand, and the phone has been dead for fifty-one minutes, and it has only just come back, because Ansel found a van across the street with a man in it and a box on the seat, and Ansel put the man through the van's windshield and the box under his boot.
Fifty-one minutes.
Twenty-three missed calls.
The last one is from Delmar. The guard with the grey mustache. The one who's been at the chapel door every day for a week and never once looked at her. He called at 1:56.
Nobody answered.
"Boss."
Ansel. At my elbow. His knuckles bloody from the windshield.
"The convent's calling," he says. "The other guard. They found Delmar's body on the levee by the Press Street tracks. In a ditch. Shot in the face." He stops. "She's not with him."
I don't say anything.
I can't find anything to say. The words are there, and they won't go in a line. They come apart in my hands like wet paper.
Remy.
Her.
The door.
Red.
Her hand on the ladder. One second. Two.
Gone.
"Boss. Gideon."
He never says my name. In nine years he hasn't said my name.
"Where's Remy's phone," I say.
***
Remy's phone is at a condominium in the Warehouse District, eighth floor, with a view of the bridge.
He's back in the city by five. Of course he is.
He's a Valcourt; he knows the first thing you do after a thing like this is make sure a hundred people see you somewhere else.
He's showered. He's changed his shirt. He's sitting at a table in the window of the bar downstairs from his building with a gin and tonic and his right hand wrapped in a clean white bandage, laughing with the bartender.
He sees me come in.
He stops laughing.
He doesn't run. I'll give him that. He sits very still with his drink in his bandaged hand and watches me cross the bar, and when I get to his table, he sets the glass down and says, quite calmly, "Cousin."
I take him by the back of the neck.
The bartender picks up the phone. Ansel says something to him, quietly, and he puts it down again.
I walk Remy out the front door with my hand on his neck like a dog on a leash, and nobody in the bar says anything, and I put him in the back of my car, and Ansel drives.
***
The Public Belt runs along the river behind the warehouses on Tchoupitoulas. Freight trains. Two a night, coming down from the Huey Long to the docks, long and slow and heavy, and they don't stop for anything.
Ansel parks his car on the tracks.
Remy's Porsche is already there. Ansel's men brought it. Silver, pulled across the rails at an angle with the driver's door open and the keys in it, a little ghost in the dark.
I pull Remy out of my car and walk him to his.
"Gideon." He's talking now. Fast. "Gideon, listen, it was your father, it was all your father, I was a messenger, that's all, you know me, you know I don't have the stomach—"
"You shot Delmar in the face."
"He was going for the gun—"
"He had a wife in Gretna. Two girls. He'd been at that chapel door every day for a week because I asked him to be." I put him in the driver's seat of the Porsche. "You told her I'd been shot."
"That was your father's idea—"
"You held her by the hair."
He stops.
"How do you know—"
I reach into his breast pocket and take out her knife.
The gilder's knife. The thin one. There's blood dried on the blade, and it's Remy's, from the back of his hand, and some of it's on the handle, and I know what that means.
I know she cut him in the car. I know she fought him with a blade the length of my little finger while a dead man bled against the window beside her.
I hold it up in front of his face.
"She cut you," I say.
"Yes."
"Good." I put the knife in my own pocket, carefully, over my heart. "Where is she?"
He tells me.
He tells me everything. It pours out of him the way it poured out of Tee-Jean at the rail and the cousin at the font. River Road. My father. A room on the second floor at the back of the house, facing the water. The blue room.
I know the blue room.
"He kept her things," Remy says. "Tante Hélène's things.
After she died. He took everything out of the Prytania house and put it in the blue room at River Road.
Her dresses. Her books. Her prie-dieu. Her hairbrush, with her hair still in it.
" His voice cracks. "He goes in there at night and sits.
I've seen him. He sits in her chair and turns that ring on his finger. "
I think of a velvet box in the bottom drawer of my desk. A satsuma peel. A button. A folded veil.
I don't let it reach my face.
"How many men?"
"Twelve. Fourteen. Most of them on the front, on the oaks. He thinks you'll come up the drive." Remy's gasping now. "He wants you to come up the drive. He wants you to walk up it with everyone watching, the way you came down the stairs at the Beauregard, and then he'll give you a choice."
"What choice?"
"Her or the family." Remy stares at me. "He'll put a gun to her head in the library and tell you to marry Clémence Boudreaux or watch her die. He thinks you'll choose her. He thinks you'll give him everything, the port, the bank, the whole river, for her. He thinks that's how he gets you back."
"He's right," I say. "I would."
Remy's face goes slack.
"I'd give him everything I own for her," I tell him.
"I'd kneel on his rug and kiss his ring.
And then I'd kill him with my hands before she'd finished breathing out.
" I lean down into the car. "He's never understood that.
That's the difference between me and him.
He only ever wanted to keep things. I want to keep her. "
Far off, up the river, a train horn sounds.
Remy's head snaps toward it.
"Gideon. Gideon. We're family. We learned to swim in the same pool. I held your coat at your mother's funeral—"
"You stood in the doorway," I say, "when I took the belt out of his hand."
"I—"
"You watched him use it on me for six years. You never once stood in front of it." I straighten up. "You were deciding which one of us to stand behind. You decided."
I take out my gun and shoot him in the right knee. Then the left.
He screams.
It goes out over the river and nobody hears it but Ansel and me and the train.
I shut the car door on him. I lock it with his own key and throw the key into the dark toward the water. He's pounding on the glass with his bandaged hand, screaming my name, his face white in the dashboard light.
The horn sounds again. Closer. The rails are beginning to sing.
"You're a monster," Remy screams through the glass. "You're a monster, you're him, you're exactly him—"
"Yes," I say.
I walk back to my car and get in.
Ansel pulls off the tracks and onto Tchoupitoulas and stops at the light. In the rearview mirror, the headlight of the train comes around the curve under the bridge, one white eye, huge, and fills the mirror.
I don't watch the rest.
I hear it.
***
"River Road," Ansel says, when the light goes green.
"Not the drive."
He glances at me.
"He's got fourteen men on the oaks," I say. "He thinks we'll come up the avenue with lights, like a wedding. So we come from the river." I take out my phone. "Your cousin still has the crab boat at Harahan?"
"Yes."
"We go down the river from Harahan in the dark, no lights, and come up the batture behind the house. The levee's thirty feet high there. The house can't see over it. There's a gate in the back wall by the old kitchen garden. It's been rusted shut since I was a boy. Bring bolt cutters."
"How many of ours?"
"Eight. The best. The rest go to the front and sit at the end of the avenue with their headlights on and their engines running, and they wait. They don't go in. They just sit there so every man on those oaks is looking up the drive."
"And us?"
"We go in through the kitchen." I think of it.
The long old kitchen, the stone floor, the back stair that goes up from beside the pantry to the second floor without passing the library.
"The back stair comes up at the end of the hall.
The blue room is the second door. We get her first. Before anything. Before him."
"And your father?"
I look out the window at the river going by, black, under the lights of the bridge.
"She should be there for that," I say.
Ansel doesn't answer. He takes out his phone and calls Harahan.
***
The crab boat is twenty-six feet of dented aluminum with an outboard that smells like diesel and bait, and at ten o'clock it's pulling away from a dock in Harahan into the black middle of the Mississippi with nine men in it and no lights.
Ansel's cousin steers. He's an old Cajun with no teeth who doesn't ask questions and hasn't been asked any. The rest of us sit low on the benches with our guns across our knees.
The river is enormous at night. You forget.
You drive over it on the bridges every day and it's just a brown road with barges on it.
Down here, in the middle of it, in the dark, it's a living thing.
It pulls at the boat. It pushes. It's a mile wide and a hundred feet deep and it doesn't care about any of us.
My mother used to stand on the belvedere and look at it.
I sit in the bow and watch the east bank go by.
The refineries lit up like cities. The batture, the wild strip between the water and the levee, full of willows and driftwood.
Somewhere down there, around the next bend, is a white house with columns and an avenue of oaks, and a blue room on the second floor at the back, facing the water.
Facing me.
She might be at the window right now.
I don't know. I can't see her. It's been eight hours since I've seen her on a screen, the longest since I watched her walk into the chancery at six in the morning three years ago.
Eight hours.
Her hand on the ladder. One second. Two.
The blood on the glass of Remy's car.
My hands are on the gun across my knees. They're steady. I look at them in the dark to make sure.
"Boss," Ansel says, low, beside me.
"What."
"Delmar's wife called. The convent gave her my number." He's looking at the water. "I told her he died protecting somebody. She asked who. I told her the woman the Deacon's going to marry."
I don't say anything.
"She said good," Ansel says. "She said, then it was worth it. She said Delmar told her about her. The girl on the scaffold who holds her breath. He said he'd never seen anybody work like that."
"His girls," I say.
"I know."
"School. College. The house in Gretna, paid off. Whatever they want, for the rest of their lives."
"I already told her."
I look at him. His flat broken face in the dark. Nine years.
"Thank you," I say.
He looks back at the water. He doesn't answer. In nine years I don't think I've ever said it to him before.
Around the bend, the levee rises black against the orange sky, and above it, through the oaks, I can see the lights of my father's house.
I take out my phone. Out here, in the middle of the river, the signal is one bar.
I call River Road.
It rings once.
"Gideon." My father's voice. Warm. Pleased. The voice he used at the microphone. "I wondered when you'd call. I heard about your warehouse. Terrible thing."
"Is she alive?"
"Of course she's alive. What do you take me for?
" I hear him settle back in his chair. I hear the fire in the grate, and behind it, through the open windows, the river.
"She's upstairs, in the blue room. Looking at your mother's things.
I thought she ought to see them. I thought she ought to know what she's getting into. "
"If you touch her—"
"I did touch her, as a matter of fact. Only her throat. Where you marked her." A pause. "She didn't flinch. I'll give her that. She's got more spine than Hélène ever had. Hélène cried."
I close my eyes.
"Where's Remy?" my father asks. "He was supposed to call."
"Remy won't be calling."
A silence on the line. Very short.
Then my father laughs. Softly. The way you laugh at a good hand of cards played against you.
"Blood of my blood," he says. "Well. Come up the drive, then. I'll leave the porch light on."
"I'm coming home, Father."