BONUS SCENE
THE FIRST SIN
POV: GIDEON
Three years before
The man who shot me is named Duplantier, and he's a worse shot than he thinks.
The bullet takes a strip of skin off the side of my head above my left ear and goes on into the wall of his own bait shop, and by the time I've put him on the floor of it with Ansel's knee in his back, the blood has run down into my collar and ruined a shirt I liked.
"He owes eleven thousand," Ansel says. He's twenty-eight. He's worked for me for six years. He still says he owes instead of he owed, because he's never once been able to guess which men I'm going to let live. "He says he'll have it Friday."
"He said that last Friday."
"He says he means it this time."
Duplantier, on the floor, says a great deal of things through the linoleum. None of them are eleven thousand dollars.
I press my handkerchief to my head. It comes away red.
Outside the bait shop, a brass band starts to play.
***
It's the twenty-second of April. The Blessing of the Fleet at Delacroix. I've never been. My father thinks the Blessing is for poor people and priests. I only came because Duplantier runs his boats out of here and thought that a crowd of four hundred on a Saturday morning would make me think twice.
It didn't.
I step out of the bait shop onto the dock with the handkerchief against my head and blood on my collar, and the whole town is there.
Shrimp boats. Flags. Children running. A priest in a white stole throwing water at the bows.
Old men on folding chairs. The smell of salt and diesel and boiling crawfish.
Everyone laughing and shouting and pushing, and the band so loud on its flatbed truck that I can feel the trombone in my back teeth.
I don't care about any of it. I'm thirty-one years old and I've already stopped caring about most things.
I walk toward the road, toward my car, and the crowd moves around me.
And beside the dock, on a pedestal wrapped in white lace, there's a plaster saint with a ladder against him, and on the ladder, there's a girl.
***
She's on the ninth rung. Barefoot. Paint-stained jeans rolled to the knee and a man's shirt, too big for her, with the sleeves pushed up. Her hair is black and pulled back in a knot with a pencil stuck through it. She has a squirrel-hair brush between her teeth.
On the tip of her finger, there's a square of gold.
She's holding her breath.
I can see it from here. The stillness in her shoulders. The way her whole body has gone quiet, like the moment in a church after the bell stops.
The wind is up. It's always up on the bayou. It lifts the flags and the priest's stole and the corners of the paper plates on the folding tables, and it wants the gold on her fingertip. I can see it wanting it.
She waits.
The band plays. A child screams with laughter. The priest's voice carries off the water. A dog barks. Four hundred people push and shout around the foot of her ladder.
She doesn't hear any of it.
I know she doesn't. I can see it in her face. She's so far inside that square of gold that the whole world has gone away, and there's nothing left of it but the leaf and the saint and her own held breath.
The wind drops.
She lays it.
She lays it on the saint's halo the way you'd put a coin in a dead man's hand. Gently. Finally. Like it's the last thing she'll ever be asked to do and she wants to do it right.
Then she takes the brush out of her teeth and tamps it down, and sits back on the rung, and looks at it.
And she smiles.
Just a little. Just at the corner of her mouth. At the saint. Like the two of them have a secret, and nobody else on this dock is allowed to know it.
***
I stand there for twenty minutes.
I know it's twenty minutes, because Ansel comes out of the bait shop and stands beside me and says "Boss" three times, and I don't answer, and finally he looks at his watch and then at me and then at the ladder, and doesn't say anything else.
I don't know what's happening to me.
I've had women. I've wanted things. I've never once in my life stood still in a crowd with blood running into my collar and forgotten the name of the man I came to collect from.
I forget his name.
I forget my father's name. I forget the port, and the tithe, and the house on Prytania with its locked third-floor door, and the belt, and the river.
I forget everything I am. For twenty minutes, standing at the back of a crowd by the second telephone pole from the bend in the road, the noise in my head that has never once stopped since I was nine years old goes completely quiet.
As quiet as hers.
She lays the last square. She climbs down.
At the bottom of the ladder, an old man with twisted hands takes her by the shoulders and says something to her, and she laughs.
She laughs with her whole face, and then she looks down, like she's ashamed of it, and picks up her kit, and walks away along the dock through the crowd, and doesn't look back.
She never looks back. I'll learn that about her.
I watch until she's gone.
***
"Who is she?"
The old man with the twisted hands is folding up the ladder. He looks at me. At the blood on my collar, the handkerchief, the suit. He knows who I am. Everybody on the river knows who I am, even then.
"Thibodeaux," he says. "I do the gilding."
"Not you. Her."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks away down the dock, where she went.
"Luc Delacroix's girl," he says. "Noemi. Nineteen. She sweeps my shop. Best hands I've seen in forty years." He puts the ladder over his shoulder. "Her daddy's going to ruin her."
"How?"
"Cards," Thib says. "Bourré. Every night at the Anchor on Paris Road. He's into Ambrose Boudreaux for more than he's worth, and he's got nothing left to sell." He looks at me, and his old eyes are very sharp. "Nothing but her."
He walks away with the ladder on his shoulder.
I stand on the dock.
The band is still playing. The priest is still throwing water. The saint stands on his pedestal in his lace with a new halo shining on his head, gold, perfect, laid by a nineteen-year-old girl who didn't hear any of it.
"Boss," Ansel says. "Duplantier."
"Let him keep the eleven thousand."
He stares at me.
"Tell him he owes me something else instead," I say. "Tell him I want to know everything that happens at the Anchor on Paris Road. Every night. Who drinks there. Who plays bourré. Who they owe." I look down the dock. "Especially a man named Luc Delacroix."
Ansel looks at me for a long time.
Then he goes back into the bait shop.
***
When I walk to the car, there's something on the dock at the foot of the pedestal.
It's small. The wind is moving it along the planks, a little at a time, toward the edge, toward the water.
A square of gold leaf.
She must have dropped it. The wind must have taken it off her cushion while she worked, and she didn't notice, because she didn't notice anything.
I bend down and pick it up.
It's so thin I can barely feel it. It crumples at the corner under my fingertip, and the gold comes off on my skin, a bright smear, like pollen.
I stand there on the dock at Delacroix with a stranger's gold on my fingers and my own blood on my collar, and I understand something I will spend the next three years, five months, and twenty-five days proving.
I take out my wallet.
I fold the square of gold leaf into a clean white card, carefully, the way I've never done anything carefully in my life, and I put it inside, behind my license, where I'll feel it against my chest every day.
Three years from now, it'll be the first thing in a velvet box in the bottom drawer of a desk on Prytania Street.
Before the satsuma peel. Before the button. Before the notebook, and the veil, and her.
It's the first thing of hers I ever kept.