CHAPTER 32
THE ABDICATION
POV: LUCIEN
The table on the upper deck of the Magdalene seats twelve.
On Friday afternoon there are fourteen people in the room and one empty chair.
The chair is at the head. Black walnut, carved arms, a seat worn smooth by a hundred years of Delacroix. My great-grandfather sat in it. My grandfather. My father, for forty years. I sat in it on Wednesday night for one meeting, because someone had to.
No one is sitting in it now.
The windows on the river side are new; the glaziers finished Thursday. The smoke is almost out of the walnut. Almost.
Marchand is at my left. The four who run the wharves and the tugs and the trucks sit down the table.
Two lawyers from Baronne Street with briefcases full of paper.
Bastien in the doorway, one arm in a sling, his color back.
Odile at the far end of the table in her Sunday black, because I asked her to be here and she didn’t ask why.
My wife is at my right.
She’s wearing the green silk. Her hair is down. A small gold key on a chain lies in my breast pocket, over my heart, where it has lived since the jeweler in Antwerp put it in my hand in September.
“Gulf Crescent Maritime,” the older lawyer says, sliding the first sheaf across. “One hundred percent of the voting shares held by Lucien Augustin Delacroix, to Noelle Claire Delacroix.”
I sign.
“The Magdalene, her berth, and the Esplanade dock.”
I sign.
“The real property on Prytania Street. The real property on Third Street. The camp in St. Martin Parish.”
I sign.
“The Arceneaux Fund at St. Clement’s, including the endowment.” The lawyer hesitates. “Mr. Delacroix, this one is unusual. The fund names a sole beneficiary and a sole trustee.”
“Claire Arceneaux,” I say. “And her daughter.”
I sign.
There are eleven more. Accounts in the Caymans and in Zurich.
Two tugs, a fleet of trucks, a warehouse on the Industrial Canal that is still a black skeleton smelling of burned sugar.
A share of a casino in Biloxi. A slip at South Shore Harbor, where a forty-foot Hatteras named for my mother is waiting to be sold.
I sign all of them. The pen doesn’t skip.
When it’s done, the older lawyer squares the papers and looks at me over his glasses.
“That’s everything, Mr. Delacroix,” he says. “Everything in your name.”
“Not everything.”
I stand.
I walk to the head of the table.
I pull out the empty chair.
I look at her.
She’s already looking at me. She’s been looking at me since the first signature. She knew. She’s known since the camp, since Friday, you’ll see. But she hasn’t moved.
“Madame,” I say.
The room is silent.
She rises. She walks the length of the table in the green silk with every man at it watching her, and she doesn’t hurry, and she doesn’t look at any of them. She stops beside the chair. She looks at it. At the carved arms, the worn seat. At me.
She sits.
Marchand stands first.
Then the four. Then the lawyers, a beat late, fumbling their briefcases. Then Bastien in the doorway, straightening off the frame. Odile doesn’t stand; she’s already standing. She’s crying, very quietly, with her hands folded over her apron.
I stand beside the chair with my hand on its carved back.
“Everything I own is in her name,” I tell the table. “The boat. The houses. The docks. The river. Every man at this table answers to her now.” I look down at her. “Including me.”
“Madame,” Marchand says. He clears his throat. “There’s a matter.”
She looks at him.
“The man you cut,” Marchand says. “At the house. The one with the face.” He glances at me. I don’t move. “We’ve had him since Pier Nine. He’s asking for a doctor. He’s asking to go home.” He turns his hat in his hands. “And Cormac has sent word.”
“What word?”
Marchand takes an envelope from his inside pocket and lays it on the table in front of her. Heavy card. Gold edge. The harp.
She opens it.
She reads it without any expression at all, then turns it around so I can see.
Tomorrow. The Magdalene. The reopening. Under a flag. Let’s talk like grown men about what’s left.
“He wants a truce,” she says.
“He wants a room with us in it,” I say.
She lays the card down.
“Let him come,” she says.
Marchand looks at me. I don’t look back. I look at her.
“And the man with the face?” Marchand asks.
She considers. She turns her ring on her finger, once, the way I turn mine. I’ve never seen her do that before.
“Get him a doctor,” she says. “Stitch him up. Then let him go home to Cormac.” She looks at Marchand. “Let him carry my face back across the canal. Let Cormac look at it tonight and think about tomorrow.”
Marchand is quiet a moment.
Then he dips his head.
“Yes, madame.”
***
That night, in the study on Prytania Street, she stands at the wall.
Three hundred and forty-one portraits from the square.
Her mother in ballpoint. Ray Tibbs at the bottom of the stairs.
And, pinned beside them this afternoon by her own hand, a page cut cleanly from the back of a green cloth ledger: a man’s face behind iron bars, water across his chin, his mouth open around a word. Dated in the corner.
I come up behind her. I don’t touch her.
I take the key out of my breast pocket.
It’s very small. Gold, its bit no longer than a grain of rice, on a fine gold chain. It has been warm against my heart for two months. I hold it out over her shoulder, dangling, turning slowly in the blue light of the screens.
She looks at it.
“You said after your father,” she says.
“It’s after my father.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know,” I say. “You don’t have to anymore. I’m not giving it to you because you asked. I’m giving it to you because it’s yours. Everything is.”
She takes it.
She holds it in her palm and looks at it without a word. Then she looks at the lock at her throat, reflected in the dark glass of a screen. The dented gold. The tiny keyhole.
I wait for her to open it.
She doesn’t.
She unclasps the fine gold chain and loops it around her own neck, under her hair, and fastens it, so the key hangs just below the reliquary, a quarter inch from the lock it opens. Gold against gold. Key against keyhole. Touching every time she breathes.
She turns around and looks at me.
“There,” she says.
I look at her throat. At the lock. At the key she won’t use.
She wears the key on her own chain.
She doesn’t open the lock.