Chapter 13 Victor Salas
Dominic left at nine in the morning.
Henri mentioned it in the way Henri mentioned everything, factually, without elaboration, in passing.
Mr. Moreau had meetings in the CBD and would return by four.
He didn't quite leave after saying it. He stood for a half-beat longer than the information required, in the way of someone who had more to say and had decided not to.
Then he went. I thought about calling after him.
I didn't. I went upstairs to work on the contract law assignment Arceneaux had set on Friday, which was due Thursday and which I had been finding legitimately interesting in the way that work was interesting when it had unexpected relevance to your actual life.
The question was about consideration in unconscionable contracts, whether the adequacy of consideration could be assessed after the fact, and by whom, and under what circumstances a court might set aside an otherwise valid exchange on the grounds that the bargaining positions of the parties had been so unequal as to render the agreement void of genuine consent.
I worked on it for two hours. Filled four pages. Decided I was probably going to submit something that would either impress Arceneaux or alarm him, and wasn't sure which outcome I preferred.
At eleven, the front doorbell rang.
I heard it distantly, my room was at the back of the house, the bell was old-fashioned, a real bell rather than an electronic chime, and then I heard Henri's footsteps in the front hall, and then voices, too low and brief to make out, and then Henri's footsteps again, ascending.
He knocked twice.
"Miss Callahan. There is a Mr. Salas at the door. He says he was in the neighborhood and hoped to pay his respects."
I set my pen down.
In the neighborhood. The Garden District was the kind of neighborhood people were specifically in, never incidentally. You came here on purpose or you didn't come.
"Tell him I'll be down in a moment," I said.
I looked at my notes for exactly three seconds. Put the legal pad in the desk drawer, face-down. Checked my reflection in the bathroom mirror without vanity, just assessment, the way you checked your posture before entering a room where your posture mattered. Then I went downstairs.
* * *
He was in the sitting room rather than the study, which was either a deliberate choice or Henri's, the sitting room was the front-of-house room, the one used for guests who hadn't yet been granted the further access of the interior.
It had good light, floral upholstery, a fireplace that was decorative in November.
It was, I understood as I walked in, the room designed to make guests feel welcomed without making them feel admitted.
Victor Salas stood when I entered.
He was exactly as I'd seen him twice now, the gray suit, the lean stillness, the quality of composure that suggested not the absence of feeling but the complete governance of it. He smiled when I appeared, and the smile was entirely convincing.
That was the first thing I caught. The smile reached the right places. A lesser performance would have stopped at the mouth.
"Miss Callahan." He extended his hand. "I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. I had business nearby and I realized I'd never had the opportunity to properly introduce myself. The Vauclain dinner was hardly the place for conversation."
I shook his hand. Firm, brief, neither aggressive nor deferential. "Mr. Salas."
"Please sit." He gestured toward the chairs by the fireplace as though it were his room, which it was not, and then caught himself with a small laugh that was also entirely convincing. "Forgive me, this is your home. I should be asking you."
"Sit," I said, and took the chair nearest the door.
He sat across from me. Crossed one knee over the other. Looked at me with the easy attention of someone who had all the time available and intended to use it for something specific that he would not be naming directly.
"Dominic speaks highly of you," he said.
"Does he."
"He doesn't say much, of course. He never does. But the fact that he says anything at all..." A small shrug. "I've known him since he was seventeen. The absence of complaint, from Dominic, is essentially an endorsement."
I had nothing to add to this, so I said nothing. He seemed to find this neither uncomfortable nor telling, which meant he was accustomed to people who understood that silence wasn't an obligation to fill.
"Your family is from the northeast," he said. "Originally."
"Yes."
"I spent some time there, years ago. Business." A pause that contained something. "I knew of your grandfather. Francis Deveraux, he had a certain reputation in certain circles. A man who kept his own counsel."
The sitting room was warm. The light through the front windows was the light of late morning in November, clear and without warmth. I was very aware of the distance between my chair and the door, which I had positioned to be manageable.
"He was a private person," I said.
"Yes." The word carried something underneath it that I couldn't immediately identify, not quite sympathy, not quite assessment.
The particular weight of a man who knew more than he was showing and wanted me to sense the weight without being able to locate its source.
"His death was a loss. I was sorry to hear of it. "
"Thank you."
"How long ago was it? Two years, perhaps?"
"Three."
"Ah." He looked at his hands briefly, a gesture that might have been genuine reflection or might have been a beat inserted to control the pace of the conversation, the same way a skilled negotiator inserted silences. "And you came to New Orleans after that. Eventually."
"I came to New Orleans because of the arrangement with the Moreau family," I said. Flat, factual, giving him nothing to work with beyond what he already knew. "You're aware of the arrangement."
"Of course." Another smile. "I hope it's been, workable. These situations can be difficult. A great deal of adjustment required."
"It's been fine."
He looked at me for a moment. Something moved in his expression, something that wanted to be impressed and redirected itself before it arrived fully. I kept it.
"You're studying here," he said. "At Harlow."
"Economics."
"Practical." A pause. "Your grandfather had a head for systems. The way things worked underneath the visible structure." He tilted his head slightly. "You have that quality too, I think. The way you look at a room."
I said nothing.
"It's a compliment," he said pleasantly. "Though I understand it might not feel like one, being noticed that way."
"I don't mind being noticed," I said. "I mind being misread."
He was quiet for a moment. The quality of the quiet shifted, not by much, not enough that you'd catch it if you weren't already tracking the register of everything he said and didn't say. But it shifted. The ease became fractionally more deliberate.
"Of course," he said. "That's a reasonable preference.
" He recrossed his knee. "I won't take too much of your time.
I only wanted to introduce myself properly.
We'll likely see each other again, there are various occasions where our paths will overlap, and I prefer to know the people I encounter in this particular world. "
"It's a small world."
"Smaller than it looks." He stood, which meant I stood, and I was at the door before he'd finished straightening his jacket. He smiled again. "Thank you for receiving me."
"Of course."
Henri appeared at exactly the right moment, he had been listening, I was certain, in the way of someone who understood that the household's management sometimes required information, and showed Salas to the front door. I stayed in the sitting room doorway and watched.
At the threshold, Salas paused. Reached into his breast pocket. Produced a card, plain, cream-colored, just an address printed on it in simple type, nothing else.
He held it out to Henri, who brought it to me.
"In case you find yourself wanting a different perspective," Salas said pleasantly, from the doorway. "On anything. New Orleans can be a difficult city to read from the inside. Sometimes an outside view is useful."
The door closed.
I looked at the card.
An address in the Warehouse District. Nothing else.
* * *
Dominic came home at three forty-five. I heard the front door, then Henri's voice, brief, and then footsteps to the study rather than upstairs, which meant he'd stopped somewhere in a state that required the study rather than the rest of the house.
I went down.
He was standing at the window behind his desk, not seated, looking at the garden with the look of someone watching something that wasn't there. He looked over when I came in.
"Henri told me," he said.
"Then you know he was here."
"Yes."
I sat in the chair across from the desk. Put the card on the desk between us. He looked at it without picking it up.
"He said he was in the neighborhood," I said.
"He wasn't."
"I know." I watched him. "He mentioned my grandfather. By name. Said he was sorry for the loss."
Something moved through Dominic's face. Not quite anger, anger would have been too legible, too close to the surface.
Something colder and more considered. The reaction of a man doing a rapid calculation about what the mention of a specific name in a specific context meant, and not finding the answer comfortable.
"What else," he said.
"A card with an address. 'A different perspective,' he said. On anything." I paused. "On New Orleans. He was careful not to specify."
Dominic picked up the card. Looked at it. Set it back down with the deliberate placement of something he intended to deal with separately.
"Tell me who he is," I said. "Actually."
He looked at me for a moment, the deciding pause, the one I'd learned to distinguish from the thinking pause. Then he moved from the window and sat down, and I understood from the quality of it that this was going to be more than the deflection he'd given me in the car.
"Victor Salas has been trying to establish a permanent foothold in New Orleans for three years," he said.
"Port access, distribution networks, the legal infrastructure that makes those things sustainable.
What he has in Houston, he wants here." He was choosing words with the care of someone who had agreed to tell the truth and was determining what truth was relevant.
"The obstacle has always been the Moreau family's existing relationships, with the port authority, with the city's legal and political structure, with the networks that would need to accommodate him. "
"He can't move in without your agreement."
"Or without removing the need for it."
I held his gaze. "And the meetings you've been having with him."
"Negotiation." The word landed clean. "I've been trying to determine whether there's a version of his entry into this market that doesn't require a war to accomplish."
"Is there?"
A pause. "That's what I'm trying to determine."
I thought about Thomas Reyes. About Cleo's grandmother's theory, which I had not shared with Dominic, which I was not ready to share until I understood more of the structure. About the payment record in my grandfather's files that may or may not have been what it appeared to be.
"There's something else," I said. "About why he wants this specifically. What's driving the timeline."
Dominic looked at me steadily.
"The Nardini family," he said.
The name landed in the room and sat there.
"Victor Salas has been positioning himself for two years as the bridge between New Orleans and the Nardini organization in New York," he said.
"The largest single crime network on the East Coast. If he can deliver them a Southern port, stable, established, with existing infrastructure, the alliance he gets in return is worth more than anything he currently has in Houston.
" He paused. "If Salas controls New Orleans, the Nardinis control the coast. The pressure that creates on every other organization operating in this region is, significant. "
I looked at the card on the desk.
A different perspective. He had come here not to introduce himself. He had come here to see what I knew and what I was, and to leave me a door in case I decided I wanted to use it.
"He thinks I'm leverage," I said.
"You are leverage." Dominic said it without apology, which I'd requested, and without comfort, which I hadn't. "You've always been leverage. The question is in which direction."
I looked at him across the desk, across the maps with their marked routes, across the nine years of organized truth on my shelf upstairs.
"Then we should probably," I said carefully, "make sure it's the right one."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. "We should."
* * *