Chapter 3 - The Linen and the Knife
The small dining room on the garden side of the mansion was warmer than the great banquet hall. It had a low ceiling of pressed tin painted cream, a single fireplace of dark Italian slate, and a circular table that seated four.
Nell Fontaine did not wear her gray maid’s uniform.
At seven-thirty, Odette had arrived at the servants' quarters over the carriage house with a navy wool dress that had belonged to Carmine’s late sister—a simple garment with long sleeves, a high collar of dark velvet, and pearl buttons running from throat to waist.
"Put it on," Odette had commanded, setting a pair of leather shoes on the rug.
"I have two loads of towels in the dryer," Nell had replied, her voice flat.
"The towels can rot," Odette snapped. "The Don does not ask twice. Put the dress on, wash the bleach off your forearms, and do not make me drag you down the back stairs by your ears."
Now, sitting on a velvet-padded chair opposite Carmine Orsini, Nell felt colder than she had on the concrete floor of the laundry. The fireplace crackled, sending orange sparks against the iron screen, but her hands remained pressed between her knees beneath the tablecloth.
A single server—an older man named Giancarlo who had been Carmine’s father’s driver—laid two white bowls of seafood gumbo between them and vanished through the mahogany swinging doors.
Carmine did not pick up his spoon.
He sat with his elbows on the armrests of his leather chair, his fingers laced together beneath his chin, watching her with that unblinking, predatory patience that had earned him the title of Don before he had gray hair.
"Your father is at the St. Jude Rest Home in Kenner," Carmine said.
Nell’s breath stopped.
The name hit the room like a cold stone dropped into deep water. Her chin snapped up, her dark eyes flashing with a sudden, violent terror that stripped away three years of calculated gray invisibility.
"What did you do to him?" she whispered, her hands coming up onto the table, her knuckles white. "If you touched him—"
"I didn't touch him, Eleanor."
She flinched at her true name.
"He has a private room," Carmine continued, his voice steady as an iron keel. "He has an orderly who reads him the sports section at ten in the morning and a nurse who changes his oxygen cannula every four hours. The bill is fourteen hundred dollars a month. It’s paid in cash on the first of every month by an attorney named Peter Ruiz on Carondelet Street."
Nell’s chest heaved beneath the navy wool. "Ruiz doesn't know who pays him."
"Ruiz knows that if he opens his mouth to anyone who doesn't carry an Orsini check, he’ll spend the rest of his life swimming across the bayou with concrete around his heels," Carmine said. "He told Benny this morning. You give him nine hundred dollars from your housekeeping wages, and you clean his office on Sunday nights to cover the remaining five hundred."
"It’s honest money," she spat, her voice trembling with five years of held-in rage.
"It’s slavery," Carmine corrected. "You're scrubbing toilets for seventy hours a week to keep a man breathing who doesn't even recognize your face when you visit him on Tuesdays."
A terrible sound came from Nell’s throat—half a gasp, half a dry, strangled sob. "He knows my voice! He knows when I bring him the almond bread! He worked forty years on Magazine Street so I wouldn't have to carry slop buckets for men like you!"
Carmine didn't blink. He didn't raise his hand.
"Men like me?" he asked quietly.
"Men who take whatever they want because they have three hundred soldiers with pistols in their waistbands!" Nell stood up, her chair legs screeching against the parquet. "You think I don't know who you are? You think because I wear an apron and keep my head down I don't read the papers? You're Carmine Orsini! You own the river wharves! You own the trucking lines! You're no different than Marcus Vance!"
The name fell between them like a drawn blade.
Carmine picked up his linen napkin. He unfolded it with slow, deliberate precision and laid it across his lap.
"Marcus Vance," Carmine said, his voice dropping into that subterranean register that made men on the wharves check their exits, "is a thief who hides behind a municipal zoning board. He used a four-by-four timber to burn your father's life out from under him because he wanted to build a coffee house for Tulane freshmen."
Nell went completely still.
Her hands, resting on the mahogany edge of the table, began to tremble violently. "How... how do you know about the timber?"
"Dennis Vidor told me three hours ago."
"Vidor is dead," she whispered. "The papers said he died of liver failure in Florida."
"Vidor is currently eating fried catfish in Slidell with an Orsini guard sitting in his kitchen," Carmine said. "He told me Vance paid him twenty thousand dollars in municipal bonds to sign off on the faulty gas valve. He told me Vance’s nephew, Julian, drove the pickup that delivered the wood to your alley."
Nell slowly sank back into her chair.
The navy wool dress looked too large for her suddenly; she looked small, exhausted, like a girl who had spent three years running through a dark forest only to discover that the trees had been cut down while she was sleeping.
"Why do you care?" she asked, her voice barely louder than the hum of the gas lamps. "What does an old bakery fire on Magazine Street have to do with the Orsini family?"
May you like
Carmine picked up his silver spoon. He dipped it into the dark, rich gumbo, stirred it once, and looked across the table at the woman who had spent four years hiding in his basement.
"Because my mother used to buy your grandfather’s brioche every Sunday after Mass at St. Louis Cathedral," Carmine said. "And because nobody burns a bakery in this city without asking my permission first."
