Chapter 7

Reinhardt crossed the floor in eight steps and put his hand flat on the phone console, as if the light might come back if he covered it.

"Line four is a client of this house," he said. "He's holding."

"He hung up," Hollis said.

"He doesn't hang up."

"He hung up."

Reinhardt turned around, and the polish was gone now, and what was under it was thirty-eight years old and frightened and very angry.

"You." He pointed at Wil. "You did this. You came in here and you made a scene and you cost this house a client."

"I didn't touch your phone."

"You made a scene."

"I asked to see a card."

Reinhardt's voice came up. "NOPD is two blocks away on Royal. I can have a trespass citation written and signed before the next lot goes. You'll be in a cell on South White tonight, arraigned Tuesday, and you'll pay a fine, and nobody - nobody in this room - will remember your name."

The room heard all of it. That was the point. He wanted it heard, delivered politely enough to be deniable.

Dupree's hand came off Wil's arm.

Wil stood there in his wet shoes and let it land. He had been talked to like this before - at a bank counter in 1994 when his right hand wouldn't close around a pen, at a parts counter in Kenner, by a contractor in Marrero who called him "the old man" for six months. It rolled off him the way weather rolls off a shed.

What did not roll off him was the room.

Two hundred people, all of them looking at him now, all of them about to know who he was. Somebody would clap. Somebody would want to shake his hand. Somebody would call the newspaper. Cleo Baptiste would want to say thank you, and Father Nazaire would want to say thank you at Mass, and it would be a thing that happened to him every week for the rest of his life - and he would be a man who had been thanked, which is a different man than the one who had been sitting in the back pew all those years.

Wil put his right hand inside his jacket, folded the receipts one-handed, and put them away.

He walked to the door. Dupree stepped aside for him. The rain had started again and the sidewalk on Royal was shining.

He got one foot onto the mat.

Then he stopped.

He had the envelope in his left breast pocket - four thousand dollars, drawn out of the credit union on General Meyer in twenties, and a note to Father Nazaire he had written four times and never mailed, folded inside it.

He had come here to hand that over and go home.

The console behind him was still going to sell at the reserve to a man in Houston, and St. Cecilia's was still going to be short of a roof, and the choir was still going to be singing under a tarp.

Wil turned around.

"Read the memo field," he said. "Out loud. I wrote the two words that are on it."

Reinhardt stared at him. "You're nobody. You can't -"

"Then read it," Wil said, "and we'll all find out."