He picked up his coffee and nodded once.
I laid out my proposals: immediate alarm code rotation, restricted access, essential personnel only through the concert date, and nonessential visits suspended. There would be a secondary lock on the courtyard gate and daily confirmation of the baton case’s position.
Dominic listened without interrupting. When I finished, he was quiet for a moment, and then, “No.”
He didn’t sound irritated or defensive. “The alarm rotation, yes. The gate lock, yes.” He sipped from his coffee mug. “The rest, no.”
“The access restrictions are the most effective single measure—“
“I will not live inside a bunker.” He leaned slightly forward, his blue eyes focusing on me. “Protection without captivity. That was my condition when Celeste made the call. I assumed you understood.”
“I will work within your parameters,” I said. “Not that your parameters are optimal.”
He turned the word over. “Optimal.” As though examining an instrument he hadn’t encountered before. “I have been moving through this city for fifty years, Mr. Reyes. Through the AIDS years. Through Katrina, and through the suicide of a beloved board member. I managed none of it from inside a bunker, and I don’t intend to begin now.”
We were all silent for a moment.
I had worked for clients who pushed back on security measures out of inconvenience or disbelief in threat levels. Dominic was a different situation. He was telling me that who he was and how he had survived were not separable things; aprotection strategy that required him to become someone else was not actually protection.
He was protecting his identity, not his ego.
“I will implement security that is invisible,” I said. “Layered. Nothing that announces itself.”
“That is the agreement.”
“I still require advance notice of every commitment and every deviation from routine. If I ask you to change something, I want you to listen to my reasons before you decline.”
He studied me. “Agreed.”
He stood, picked up his coffee, and walked toward the salon. At the doorway, he stopped without turning.
“The baton.”
“Being examined today.”
I heard him settle back into the room, with the creak of the chair and the soft rustling of score pages. The replacement baton lay on the counter between Luca and me.
Dominic was done looking at it.
“He’ll fire you if you try to cage him,” Luca said.
“I don’t intend to cage him. I intend to find out who put a bullet in his house.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Your employer is unusually resistant to being kept alive.”
I tapped my notebook. “I need to understand his professional circle. History, not only current access. Long relationships. Anyone with a grievance connected to the concert or that night in Jackson Square.”
“That’s a different list,” he said.
Luca leaned back, coffee cup in both hands. “The 2006 moment changed how the city saw Dominic. He became more myth than man. Myths turn people into symbols. Some people never adjusted to the new version of him.”
“Someone specific?”
“Not yet.”
“When you have a name,” I said, “I need it immediately. The moment it comes to you.”
It was quiet enough to hear the light bubbling of the beans on the stove.
I began typing on my tablet.
