Chapter 24 Fosse
The address on Salas's paper was a house in Metairie.
Not a safe house, just a house. A beige ranch-style on a quiet street, the kind of neighborhood that had been built in the sixties and had stayed exactly itself ever since: same trees, same driveways, same distance between one life and the next.
Gerald Fosse had been living there under the name Gerald Fontenot for eleven years.
The mailbox said Fontenot. The car in the driveway was registered to Fontenot.
The retirement income that covered the mortgage came from a pension account belonging to Fontenot.
I had confirmed all of this in forty minutes that morning using tools that were technically within the bounds of my professional authorization and practically well outside anything I would have done six weeks ago.
I had confirmed it and not thought twice.
* * *
They went the next morning. Early, seven-fifteen, before the neighborhood was fully awake, before the calculation of the previous night could settle into something that changed their minds.
I had not slept well. Not badly either, I had lain in the dark in the specific state of a person who has run out of things to process and is waiting for the machinery to be ready again.
Dominic drove. He had tried, twice, to raise the question of whether I wanted him to come inside or wait. I had looked at him both times and he had dropped it both times, which was one of the things about him I had come to rely on without deciding to.
They parked in front of the house at seven-nineteen.
I knocked.
* * *
The man who opened the door was seventy-two and looked older.
Not in the way of someone who had lived hard, in the way of someone who had carried something heavy for a long time and it had compressed him.
He was gray, careful, wearing the kind of clothes that had no occasion.
He looked at me and then at Dominic and I watched the recognition move across his face: not of them specifically, but of the fact of them.
The thing he had been waiting for that had arrived as two people on his doorstep at seven in the morning.
"Mr. Fosse," I said.
He stepped back from the door.
* * *
The living room was neat in the way of someone with no one to be neat for, everything in its place and nothing out of its place, but the order of maintenance rather than life. He sat in an armchair that had the permanent impression of a single person. Dominic and I sat on the couch across from him.
He didn't offer coffee.
He didn't say anything. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me with the expression of someone who has long since finished rehearsing what he would say and is now just waiting to say it.
"You knew my mother," I said.
"Yes." His voice was rough, not from sleep, from age, from something that had settled in his throat and stayed.
"You signed my death report."
"Yes."
"You were on the federal task force when I was identified as a source."
"Yes." He paused. "I want to tell you that I didn't know, when I signed the report, that it was, that it wasn't, " He stopped.
Started again. "I knew I had been identified.
I knew I was a risk to the operation. Ramón Salas had, I was receiving payments.
It had started small. It doesn't start large, that's not how it works.
" He looked at his hands. "When the request came for my protection, I delayed it.
I told myself I was managing the timing.
I told myself it would be handled through other channels.
" He was quiet for a moment. "I died before I did anything. "
The room was very still.
"You delayed deliberately," I said.
"I delayed because I was afraid. Not the same thing, I know. But it's the truth." He looked up at me. "I have told myself every variation of that distinction for twenty-five years and it doesn't change what happened."
I looked at him, this old man with his permanent armchair and his assumed name and the weight of the thing he'd carried, and felt something that was not forgiveness and not rage but something more complicated than both: the specific exhaustion of understanding.
"My father," I said. "Daniel Callahan."
Something shifted in Fosse's expression. "He came to me," he said. "Four months before he disappeared."
"He knew about you."
"He'd found the financial records. The payments from Salas's estate." Fosse's hands tightened in his lap. "He wasn't, he didn't threaten me. He sat where you're sitting and told me what he had found and said he needed to know what happened to his wife." He paused. "I told him."
"Everything."
"Everything I knew." He paused. "Which was not everything.
I didn't know about Reyes. I didn't know what your mother had been doing for three years.
I knew only what I had done and what I had failed to do.
" His voice was very flat now, not emotionless, something past emotion, something that had been worn down to its base.
"He listened. He asked a few questions. Then he left. "
"And then he disappeared," Dominic said.
"Six weeks later." Fosse looked at him. "He called me first. Three days before.
He said Salas's people had started watching his apartment.
He said he was going to run, not to hide from them, but to draw them away from his daughter.
" He stopped. "He knew you were in New Orleans by then.
He'd been tracking the Salas operation for two years and he knew they'd set this up to get someone inside the Moreau household. "
I felt the air change in the room.
"He knew," I said slowly. "He knew what the debt arrangement was."
"He suspected. He didn't have confirmation." Fosse met my eyes. "He called because he wanted me to know where he was going. In case." He paused. "He said he trusted me to do right by it eventually. I don't know why. I hadn't earned it."
"Where is he," I said.
* * *
The name of the town was a town in northern Mississippi I had never heard of.
Fosse gave me an address, from memory, after twenty months of carrying it.
He gave me a phone number too, a pre-paid number that Daniel Callahan had been using, that he had called twice in twenty months to confirm was still active.
"The last time I called was three weeks ago," Fosse said. "He answered."
I looked at the number on the paper.
I had spent four years not knowing where my father was.
I had spent seven weeks in this city building the structure of something I thought I was doing for him and discovering that what I was doing was in fact for myself, and for my mother, and for a decision my mother had made before I was old enough to understand decisions.
I had thought, in the back of the part of my mind I didn't examine often, that I might be building toward a body.
Toward a grave. Toward the specific closure of a thing that could not be undone.
I was looking at a phone number that had been answered three weeks ago.
"Why didn't he contact me," I said.
Fosse was quiet for a moment. "He said, and I'm repeating this as he said it, I'm not offering it as justification, he said that you were safer not knowing where he was.
That you had built something on your own and he didn't want to be the thing that brought the risk back to you.
" He paused. "He also said you were the most capable person he'd ever known and that you would find it when you were ready. "
I looked at the number.
I thought: I'm going to have very significant things to say to you about this approach.
I thought: I'm also going to see you again.
I folded the paper carefully and put it in my pocket beside the earlier paper, beside the spot where the photograph of my mother had been before I gave it to Tran.
"Thank you," I said to Fosse.
He looked up. Surprised, I thought, by the word.
"I'm going to ask you to cooperate with the federal investigation," I said.
"Not as a condition of anything. As a, separate statement.
The documentation has already been handed over.
What you tell them will affect how they build the case, not whether they build it.
" I paused. "But you knew my mother. You knew what I was doing and why and you know what was done to me.
My name deserves to be in the record. The complete record. "
He held my gaze for a long time. His eyes were tired in the way of someone who has wanted permission for something for years without knowing it was permission they were waiting for.
"I'll cooperate," he said.
I nodded.
I stood. Dominic stood.
At the door I stopped.
"The report you signed," I said. "My death report. When you signed it, did you believe it was an accident?"
He was quiet.
"No," he said. "I knew it wasn't."
I nodded once.
"That's in the record too," I said. "I just wanted you to know I knew."
I walked out into the Metairie morning.
* * *
Dominic came out behind me. They walked to the car and I stood on the passenger side for a moment, the paper in my pocket, the number on the paper, the city somewhere behind them.
"He's alive," Dominic said.
"He's alive." I said it as fact, not surprise, I had been operating on that hypothesis since Fosse said the number was active three weeks ago, and saying it out loud was just closing the loop.
But something in my chest moved when I said it.
Something that had been braced against a different outcome for a long time.
I got in the car.
Dominic got in and did not start the engine immediately. He sat there with his hands on the wheel and looked at the street ahead.
"When you're ready," he said.
I understood he meant the call. Not call now and not don't call, just: when I was ready, it would be there.
"Not yet," I said. "I need, " I paused, finding the right architecture for it. "I need to be somewhere quiet. Before I talk to him I need, an hour."
"All right."
He started the engine.
I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the Metairie streets give way to the city, the familiar skyline assembling itself against the morning sky, and thought about my father in a town I had never heard of, keeping a phone charged, calling a number occasionally to confirm that the person who knew where he was was still alive.
He had been waiting.
I had been working.
They had both, in their separate ways, been doing the same thing.
The most capable person he'd ever known.
I would have words about the method. Significant words.
But I was going to let myself have, first, the version of this that was just, relief.
The version that didn't require analysis or management or structure.
The version that was simply my father being alive and my being twenty minutes away from calling him.
I let myself have it for the length of three blocks.
Then I put it away, carefully, somewhere I could find it again.
There was still work to do.
* * *