“Luca.” He didn’t turn around. “The lemon trees will want water in the morning. The heat has been considerable.”
“Yes,” Luca said. “I’ll see to them.”
“Goodnight.”
Chapter seven
Luca
“You’ve looked at him three times in the last four minutes,” Thiago said.
He stood beside me near the east wall, sipping sweet tea.
“I’m allowed to look at people.”
“Yes, you’re allowed to look at people, but this is more than that.”
I shifted my attention back to Dominic, twenty feet away in conversation with two board members from the arts council. He held a wine glass, gesturing occasionally with it.
The Tremé Cultural Preservation Society held its donor reception every August in a hall next to St. Augustine’s. It was a high-ceilinged room with exposed brick and low-hung chandeliers. They threw pale gold light across the assembled faces.
About sixty people attended, and I recognized most of them: musicians, arts administrators, and board members. I knew which donors gave reliably and which required their names to be placed on things. I knew whose marriages had dissolved quietlyand which musicians along the far wall had spent three years angling for a seat in Dominic’s orchestra without making the cut.
“Who let the cellist in with a full case?” I asked.
Thiago glanced toward the entrance. “Now you’re thinking like me. He’s on the manifest. Note says he has a second gig nearby. No flags in the background check.”
Without intending to, I’d added my own tactical scans as I read the room. Across the room, Henri Fontenot stood near the windows on the far side of the hall.
“He’s been in the same position for twenty minutes.”
“I know. He hasn’t moved toward Dominic.”
“He hasn’t needed to. He can see him from there.”
Thiago turned his head a fraction, following my sightline.
Henri Fontenot conversed with two longtime contributors to the society. He wore a dark jacket over a pale rose shirt. He was thinner than I remembered and pale in the light cast by the chandeliers. I watched as he raised a handkerchief, covering a cough.
“He’s ill,” I said.
“How can you tell?”
“He’s trying too hard to look well.”
Henri held court for the next ten minutes. I discreetly moved closer and caught fragments of the conversation:…organized the response…working the informal networks…don’t appear anywhere in the official…belongs to the man the camera found.”
There was no bitterness in his tone. He sounded like a historian describing events in a dry monotone. Nothing in his voice rose or fell. That unsettled me.
I turned away before he could feel my attention.
Thiago had moved to another part of the room while I watched Henri. He entered into a conversation with Gerald Tureaud, thevenue’s facilities manager, a compact man in his fifties who’d managed the hall for the past three decades.
A suit we’d purchased on Magazine Street helped Thiago blend into the atmosphere. He’d only brought three shirts to New Orleans for his leave and no formal jackets. That wouldn’t work across ten days of events.
At the shop, I handed him a charcoal jacket without comment. He put it on without asking why. We both looked at the result for a moment, and then I pulled a tie from a rack, deep rust, almost the color of old brick in the rain.
Gerald was telling him something that required gesturing at the ceiling, and Thiago tracked the movement. He caught the attention of a woman across the room. It was not a surprise. Unfamiliar handsome newcomers were a rarity in this crowd.
