An older musician settled onto the cathedral steps with a battered case open beside him and a small stack of dollar bills held down by a brick. Fragments of trumpet melody drifted across the square as he started and stopped.
“Saints.” Unmistakable even in pieces.
“Here it starts as a funeral march,” Luca said. “The version everyone knows from bars, parades, and Saints games comes after. It initially moves at the pace of a procession. You play while heading for the grave.”
The musician found a phrase he liked and repeated it.
“The joy is in the second half. After you’ve done the hard thing, taken the body to its rest, the tempo lifts. You’ve earned it.” He paused as the trumpet player delivered a full chorus. “Grief comes first. The celebration is what you get on the way back.”
I thought about the arrangement left on the piano bench. Same melody and same intervals, but the harmony bent inward, never making the turn.
“He’s not corrupting it,” I said.
“No.” Luca turned toward me. “He’s amputating the second half. Cutting off at the grave.” He faced the trumpet player. “‘Saints’ in minor is grief with nowhere else to go.”
I turned to face Luca. “If it’s him, whatever he’s planning at the Orpheum isn’t chaos. He wants the ending to mean something precise.”
The trumpet player finished and lowered his instrument into his lap. The square was quiet.
“I need everything about what Henri actually did that night,” I said. “Not the institutional record. See if I can piece together the hour before Dominic arrived. Who he called, where he stood, and what the months after the video spread looked like from his side.”
“I know someone who was in the square. He’s a saxophone player. He went back to Lafayette after Katrina but returned eight months later. Dominic once said Henri was his benefactor.”
“Can you arrange a meeting?”
“I’ll do my best.”
Across Decatur, the muddy river moved slowly downstream, quietly present.
“He’ll try to feed you,” Luca said.
“Who.”
“The man from Lafayette. Jules. He’ll offer food before he offers anything useful, and the food is not optional. He makes boudin that will adjust your thinking about many things.”
“Warning or recommendation.”
“Both.”
I chuckled softly.
“We should go back,” Luca said.
He turned left on St. Ann Street. “Bourbon’s this way.”
“I thought we were going back.”
“We are. This is the way.”
It wasn’t the shortest way, and we both knew it. He strolled ahead, and I followed.
Bourbon Street announced itself before we arrived. Multiple layers of sound competed for our attention, bass from one bar sitting under the brass of another. Then the smell: spilled beer, bleach, and the aggressive sweetness of daiquiris dispensed from machines visible through every open window.
Luca turned right on Bourbon and the street slowly changed. The composition of the crowd shifted. We reached Café Lafitte in Exile.
Luca slowed his pace. “I used to come here,” he said. “The summer I was nineteen. After my first year at Tulane.”
I listened.
