“When did it appear?”
Luca looked toward the salon.
“I don’t know specifically.”
Luca reached for his laptop at the end of the counter. He opened it and rotated the screen toward me.
“You should understand what the piece means here.”
A phone video filled the screen.
The camera moved through Jackson Square. I recognized it from the three spires. Brass instruments sounded first, trumpetsand trombones cutting through the crowd noise. A drummer picked up the rhythm.
People on the sidewalk clapped along.
“A year after Katrina,” Luca said quietly. “The street musicians started it, and then it spread.”
The melody emerged, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The camera pushed deeper into the crowd. More players stepped forward from the sidewalks as though they’d been waiting for their cue. A clarinet joined the brass. Someone began singing.
I watched as voices layered over the instruments until the entire square echoed the tune. Then the camera tilted upward. Dominic stepped into the middle of the crowd, climbing onto a crate.
He looked younger in the video, his hair darker, but the posture was unmistakable. He raised one hand, not theatrically, just enough to gather the sound.
The musicians saw him, and everyone leaned forward to watch.
Dominic executed a small downward motion with his wrist, and the music surged, with brighter brass and snappier drums.
The camera shook as the crowd pushed closer.
“He didn’t organize it,” Luca said. “He just walked into it.”
On the screen, Dominic guided the music for another thirty seconds, shaping it with small gestures until the tune reached its final refrain. When the last note faded, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
The video cut off.
I let the video resonate. I’d read about the 2006 video in the file Eamon sent while the SUV idled at the curb. Watching it was different. The crowd hadn’t been organized. It accumulated, and Dominic walked into the middle of it and did the one thing he knew how to do.
Before the silence in the kitchen could settle, piano notes sounded from the salon.
The melody was unmistakable, but the harmony beneath it had changed.
Dominic was playing the same tune from the video, only slower now, with the bright chords turned inward. The familiar march had become something darker, as the melody bent into minor tones.
Luca closed the laptop. “He’s done that multiple times this morning,” he said.
A streetcar bell chimed in the distance. The fountain gurgled, and a wet brick smell drifted through the open doors with the morning air.
I set my mug on the counter and thought about what I knew.
Someone had walked into this house as though they had a right to be in it, had placed a piece of music on the correct bench in the correct room at the correct hour, and had walked back out without the house knowing they’d been there.
Eleven days.
And the threat was already inside.
Chapter three
