Chapter 2 - The House on Prytania
The car was a vintage Daimler, heavy as a bank vault and gliding over the cracked asphalt of St. Charles Avenue with the eerie silence of an owl in flight.
Marin sat in the rear leather seat, her fingers lightly trailing along the seam of her trousers. Beside her, August did not fidget. Normal passengers shifted, adjusted their ties, checked their pocket watches, cleared their throats. August Rail sat like a granite monument carved into the corner of the chassis. Yet Marin could read the tiny atmospheric changes around him: the slight hitch in his diaphragm whenever the car took a left turn, the faint scent of nitroglycerin tablets dissolved beneath the tongue, masked poorly by peppermint oil.
"Who drives for you?" she asked into the darkness.
"His name is Noah," August replied. "He was with me in Naples. He doesn't have a tongue. A souvenir from an encounter with the Moretti syndicate twelve years ago."
"Convenient for a man with secrets."
"Essential for a man who wishes to live long enough to bury his enemies."
The car turned through tall iron gates. Marin heard the heavy scrape of iron hinges, the crunch of crushed oyster shells under thick whitewall tires, and then the sudden muffling of sound as the vehicle entered a covered porte-cochère.
The house on Prytania Street was old—she could tell by the heavy, velvet-muffled acoustics the moment Noah opened the car door and offered her a thick, calloused forearm for balance. She did not take it. Unfolding her white cane with a sharp flick of her wrist, Marin stepped down onto the stones.
"Twenty steps to the front entrance," August’s voice drifted from her right. "A double riser at the threshold. Inside, the foyer is seventy feet long with marble tiles. Watch the echoes; they distort near the rotunda."
Marin tapped her cane once, twice. The high-pitched *clack* bounced back from massive, soaring ceilings. "Greek Revival," she noted aloud. "Sixteen-foot ceilings. Cypress baseboards. You have tapestries on the north wall to drown out the river breeze."
August stopped beside her on the marble. "You can tell that from a stick hitting stone?"
"Your house is an amplifier, Mr. Rail. Everything you try to lock away inside it is screaming against the walls."
He did not answer. He led her down a wide corridor where the air grew noticeably cooler and smelled of wet fern and polished rosewood.
"The conservatory," he announced.
Marin stepped past him. The space was enormous, curved at the perimeter, lined with floor-to-ceiling glass panes that rattled faintly in the evening humidity. In the exact dead center of this glass cage sat the instrument.
She walked straight toward it without using her cane, drawn by the invisible gravitational pull of wood and iron. Her fingers reached out and found the glossy rim of the Bösendorfer. She ran her fingertips along the fallboard, down to the key slip, and finally rested both palms upon the ivory keys.
She depressed three keys simultaneously: C-sharp, G, and the low octave F.
The chord rolled through the glass room, deep, melancholic, and subtly sour.
"The bridge shifted slightly during the haul," she said without turning around. "The pins in the lower register lost a quarter-turn. But that isn't why it sounded wrong to you."
August remained standing near the arched entryway, his hands clasped behind his back. "Go on."
"You struck middle C with anger," she said simply, unbuckling her satchel and laying out her tuning lever, her felt mutes, and her brass wedge. "A piano is an acoustic mirror. If your shoulder is locked because your heart is starving for oxygen, your fingers slam into the keybed instead of depressing it. You blamed the instrument for the tremor in your own wrist."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Marin felt rather than heard him cross the room. His footsteps were light, but the displacement of air was undeniable. Suddenly, his presence was right behind her shoulder. She could feel the radiating warmth of his broad chest, the suppressed, ragged cadence of his blood.
"You have a reckless mouth, Marin Callaway."
"I am blind, Mr. Rail. When you lose the luxury of watching people's faces lie to you, you stop wasting time pretending you can't hear what their bodies are telling you."
"Do you know what people usually do when they realize who I am?" he asked, his voice a dangerous, velvet purr right near the shell of her ear. "They weep. They sign deeds over to my shell corporations. They run out of the state."
Marin turned on the piano bench. She didn't shrink back; she tilted her face up toward his invisible countenance.
"Do you want me to weep, August?" she challenged softly. "Will that make your heart beat in four-four time again?"
He froze. His breathing caught.
May you like
Then, unexpectedly, violently, a sharp gasp tore from his lips. August stumbled backward, his hand flying to his left lapel. His knees buckled, and his shoulder slammed into the curved wooden casing of the grand piano, sending a discordant shriek vibrating through the exposed strings.
***
