CHAPTER 27
THE WIRE
POV: NOEMI
I text Agent Brandt from the bathtub on Friday afternoon, with Gideon sitting on the closed lid of the toilet watching me do it.
He's gone to Houston. His cousin's business. Two days. I'm alone at Saint Casimir's. There's a side door by the font. Midnight. Please come alone. Please.
I read it out loud.
"Two pleases," Gideon says.
"He likes it when I'm frightened."
"And you know that how?"
"Because he told me I was shaking," I say, "when I wasn't."
I press send. I set the phone on the edge of the tub, on the white enamel, and lie back in the water, and look at the ceiling of the priest's bathroom with its brown stain shaped like Florida.
Three days since River Road.
The Times-Picayune says Augustin Valcourt died in an electrical fire in his historic family home, a tragic loss to the city and the Archdiocese, which he served for forty years.
It says his nephew Remy Valcourt was killed the same night when his car stalled on the Public Belt tracks near the Crescent City Connection.
It calls it a family tragedy. It doesn't call it anything else.
Superintendent Broussard gave a statement.
Yesterday, in the rain, I stood in the Metairie cemetery beside Gideon while two men with crowbars opened the Valcourt tomb.
He went in alone.
When he came out, his hands were empty, and he stood under my umbrella with rain running off his hair and didn't say anything for a long time.
"Is it on her finger?" I asked.
"Yes."
That was all.
He didn't cry. I don't think he knows how. But in the car on the way home, he held my hand so hard the halo left a mark on the inside of his fingers that was still there this morning.
***
The phone buzzes on the edge of the tub.
I'll be there. Alone. You're so brave, Noemi. Hold on. —C
I show it to him.
He reads it. He looks at me in the bathwater, and I watch him wait.
He's been waiting since Monday night. Since I told him in the dark, finish first and I'll tell you when it's done.
He hasn't asked once. Not after the roof, not after the car, not after River Road.
He's watched every text in and out of that phone go through the box in his basement, and he hasn't asked.
It's the hardest thing I've ever seen him do.
"All right," I say. "I'll tell you now."
He goes very still on the edge of the toilet.
"It isn't done yet," I say. "But I can't do it without you. So I'll tell you how."
***
I tell him the way he tells Ansel things. Step by step. I've been listening.
"He'll come alone," I say. "He won't bring anyone. He said I look after my witnesses personally. He wants me for himself, and he wants the arrest for himself. If he brings his supervisor, his supervisor takes the credit. He won't share either."
"He'll be wired."
"Yes. He'll want my voice on tape. Saying your name.
Saying Arceneaux. Saying Paris Road." I trail my fingers through the water.
"So I'll take him up to the choir loft. I'll tell him everything's up there.
The recordings. Every camera. Arceneaux's kitchen, Tee-Jean at the rail.
He'll want to see. He'll follow me up forty stone steps in the dark because he thinks he's won. "
"And in the loft?"
"I'll take his wire off him," I say. "Myself."
He doesn't say anything.
"You'll be behind the organ wall. With Ansel. When I take it off him, you come out."
"And then?"
I sit up in the bath. The water runs off my shoulders.
"Then Agent Brandt disappears," I say. "His car turns up in the parking garage of the Beau Rivage in Biloxi.
His credit cards get used at the blackjack tables for two days.
His phone gets turned off somewhere on I-10.
And an envelope goes to the Office of Professional Responsibility at the FBI in Washington, with no name on it, and inside there's a recording from Mother Agathe's office of Special Agent Cole Brandt putting his hand up the skirt of a witness he was supposed to protect.
And another one, from tonight, of Special Agent Cole Brandt walking into a church at midnight, alone, off the books, to meet the same witness.
" I lean back against the tub. "A dirty agent with a gambling problem who went after a girl and then ran.
Nobody will look very hard for him. And nobody will ever touch anything he started. "
Gideon looks at me for a very long time.
"When did you think of this?" he says quietly.
"In Mother Agathe's office. With his hand on my leg."
He stands up. He comes over and kneels on the bathmat beside the tub, and puts his arms on the edge of it, and looks at me from a foot away.
"And Brandt?" he says. "Himself?"
"He wanted me on my knees," I say. "Put him on his."
***
At eleven fifty-eight, the side door by the font opens.
I'm standing in the middle of the nave between the crates in a grey wool dress with the high collar undone and my hair down my back.
I've been standing here for twenty minutes.
The only light is a work lamp on a crate by the stairs to the loft, and the red glow of the city coming through the rose window.
He comes in fast and shuts the door behind him.
He's in a dark jacket, no tie. He looks around the nave, quick, the way Gideon looks around a room. Exits. Men. Hands. Then he sees me, and his face changes. It goes soft and bright at the same time.
"Noemi."
"You came."
"Of course I came." He crosses the nave to me between the crates and takes both my hands. His are warm and damp. "Are you all right? Are you hurt? Has he hurt you?"
"He's in Houston."
"I know. I checked." He squeezes my hands. "I have a car outside. We can go right now. You don't have to bring anything. I'll take care of everything."
"Not yet."
He frowns. "Noemi—"
"Everything he's ever done is upstairs." I look toward the stairs.
"In the choir loft. He has cameras everywhere.
He records everything. He keeps it all up there.
Tee-Jean. The shrimp plant. Arceneaux in the kitchen.
" I let my voice shake. "If I'm going, I want you to have it.
I want you to have all of it. So he can never come after me. "
I watch it go into him.
I watch the greed come up behind his eyes like light coming up behind a window. The whole case. Not just a frightened girl's word. Every camera the Deacon ever owned.
"Show me," he says.
I take his hand and lead him up.
***
Forty stone steps. Worn hollow in the middle. I go first, holding his hand behind me, and I can feel his breath getting faster on the back of my neck with every step.
At the top, the screens are glowing.
All twelve. I turned them on before he came. Saint Veronica's. The Prytania house, dark. The nave below us, and the side door, and the font. And on the end screen, frozen, a still from Mother Agathe's office. A man in a grey suit sitting knee to knee with a girl in a hard chair.
His hand on her thigh.
He sees it. He stops.
He looks at it for a long moment, and then he looks at me, and something complicated happens in his face.
"He had a camera in there," he says.
"He has cameras everywhere."
"Then he saw—"
"Everything."
Brandt licks his lips. He looks at the screens, all twelve of them. Then he looks past them, at the wall.
At three years of me.
He walks toward it slowly, like a man in a dream. The photographs, floor to ceiling. Me at the gate. Me on the scaffold. Me asleep. My hands. My shoes. The girl on the ladder at the very top.
"Jesus Christ," he whispers. "Jesus Christ, he's sick. He's—"
"A monster," I say.
"Yes." He turns around. His face is shining. "Yes, Noemi, this is— with this, with all of this, we can put him away for the rest of his life. You'll never have to see him again. You'll be free."
"Free."
"Free." He comes toward me. He takes my face in his hands. His thumbs on my cheekbones. "You're safe now. I've got you. I'm going to take care of you."
He bends his head to kiss me.
I put my hands on his chest.
He smiles against my mouth, and I undo the second button of his shirt, and the third.
"Noemi," he breathes.
I slide my hand inside his shirt.
It's right where I knew it would be. Taped flat against his skin under the left side of his ribs. A small black box, a wire running up from it to his collar. Warm from his body.
I close my fingers on it.
I rip it off.
The tape takes skin with it. He yelps and jerks back and grabs at his chest, and I hold the little box up in front of his face between my thumb and forefinger, trailing its wire, and I look him in the eyes.
"Say hello, Special Agent," I say.
Behind him, a man steps out from behind the organ wall.
***
Brandt spins around. His hand goes inside his jacket, fast. He's trained for this. He's fast.
Ansel is faster. He comes out from the other side of the wall and takes Brandt's wrist and turns it, and the gun hits the floor of the loft and skids under the desk, and Brandt is on his knees with his arm up behind his back before he's finished drawing breath.
Gideon doesn't move.
He stands in front of the wall of photographs with his hands in his pockets, and he doesn't say anything. He's looking at me.
Brandt is looking at me too.
"You—" His face has gone the color of the plaster. "You set me up. You— you bitch, you set me up—"
"Yes."
"I'm a federal agent. Do you understand that? A federal agent. You can't— there are people who know where I am—"
"No, there aren't," I say. "You told me yourself. You came alone. You wanted me all to yourself."
He stares at me.
I crouch down in front of him, so we're eye to eye, the way Gideon crouched in front of Tee-Jean at the rail. I set his little black box on the floor between us.
"You put your hand on my knee," I tell him. "In Mother Agathe's office. And then above it. You told me I was a victim. You told me I was shaking. You told me you look after your witnesses personally."
"I was trying to help you—"
"You were trying to buy me," I say. "With a new name. The way my father tried to sell me with an old one." I tilt my head. "I've been sold before, Agent Brandt. I know what it looks like when a man's counting what he's getting."
He doesn't say anything.
I stand up.
I look at Gideon.
"Take him to the river," I say.
Gideon looks at me for a long moment across the loft.
"Your hand or mine?" he asks.
It's a real question. I can see it in his face. He'll give it to me. If I say mine, he'll put a gun in my hand and show me the safety and stand behind me while I do it.
"Yours," I say. "I want to watch you do it for me."
Something happens in his face that I've never seen before. It comes up from somewhere very deep, and it isn't soft, there's nothing soft in it, but it's the closest thing to worship I've ever seen on a man's face, and I've spent three years looking at men's faces while they looked at God.
"Ansel," he says. "Take him down. I'll be there in a minute."
Ansel pulls Brandt to his feet. Brandt's crying now. Begging. He's saying my name, over and over, Noemi, Noemi, please, the way my father said it in the ditch.
At the top of the stairs, I stop him with one hand on his chest.
"God sees you, Agent Brandt," I say.
Ansel takes him down.
***
Gideon doesn't follow right away.
He's still standing in front of the wall. The screens are glowing on his face. I look at him, and he looks at me, and the whole loft is quiet except for Brandt's voice going away down forty stone steps and out the side door into the night.
"You thought of all of it," he says. "The car. The casino. The envelope."
"Yes."
"In Mother Agathe's office. With his hand on you."
"Yes."
He crosses the loft. He stops in front of me. He doesn't touch me.
"I've spent three years," he says, "watching you. I thought I knew everything about you. I thought there wasn't one thing you could do that I hadn't already seen on a screen." His voice is very low. "I didn't know you could do this."
"Neither did I."
"You're not a saint."
"No."
"You never were."
"No."
He looks at me for a long time.
"My queen," he says.
He says it the way I used to say Amen. Like something he believes.
I put my hand flat on his chest and push him back, one step, two, until the backs of his legs hit his own leather chair in front of the screens. I push again. He sits.
I climb into his lap.
In front of the twelve screens. In front of three years of me on the wall.
In front of the frozen still of a man's hand on my thigh in Mother Agathe's office.
I pull my dress up and straddle him in the chair where he sat every night of those three years, watching, and I open his belt with my own hands.
"The river," he says against my mouth. "Ansel's waiting."
"Let him wait."
He's hard under me. He's been hard since I ripped the wire off. I know it. I felt it.
I take him inside me slowly, looking at his face in the light of the screens.
His hands grip my hips. His head falls back against the leather.
And I ride him in the Deacon's chair, slow and then not slow, with his eyes on me and my eyes on him and three years of myself watching from the wall, and when he starts to move under me, I put my hand on his throat, lightly, the way he put his on mine at the mirror.
"Don't," I tell him. "Let me."
He stops. He lets me.
He's never let anyone.
I take what I want. I take it for a long time. When he's shaking under me, when his hands are white on my hips and his breath is coming ragged and he's saying my name like a man in a fever, I lean down and put my mouth against his ear.
"Say it," I tell him.
He knows what I mean. He's said it to me ten thousand times in his head. He made me say it, once, on my knees.
"Say amen, Gideon."
And he does.