The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, three days after the office conversation.
A text from a number I didn't have saved -- polite, brief, the syntax of someone who had learned English in a context where formality was default. Ms. Callahan. I hope you'll forgive the direct contact. I find myself in the Garden District Thursday afternoon and wondered if you might join me for lunch. Cafe Amelie, one o'clock. No agenda -- merely an opportunity to become better acquainted. Victor Salas.
I read it twice. Then showed it to Dominic.
He read it without expression. Then said: "Your call."
I had already decided before I showed him.
* * *
I went because not going was a message, and I wasn't ready to send that message yet. I went because I wanted to see him in full light, without a ballroom around them and the buffer of two hundred people.
Salas was already seated when I arrived. He stood when I approached -- old manners, practiced -- and waited until I had sat before resuming his own chair.
He was a compact man, perhaps sixty-five, with the kind of face that had probably been handsome at forty and had since become something more useful: a face that communicatedtrustworthiness without requiring you to verify it. His clothes were expensive in the way that didn't announce itself. His hands, folded on the table, were still.
He asked about my work. He asked about my adjustment to New Orleans. He asked, with the casual precision of someone who already knew the answer, how I found the Moreau household.
I answered all of it with the calibrated truthfulness of someone being careful.
He ordered for them both -- not overbearingly, with a question first, the kind of man who understood that the gesture of ordering was a test and who wanted me to know he knew that. When the food arrived he did not eat immediately. He looked at me.
"You're not what I expected," he said.
"What did you expect?"
"Someone softer." He said it with what might have been approval. "Dominic has a type. They are usually easier to read."
I held his gaze without comment.
"You read him, though," Salas said. "That's the interesting part. Most people can't." He picked up his fork. "He lets you."
I thought: he is telling me something. I thought: he wants me to know he's been watching us longer than the ballroom.
I ate. I kept my voice even. I left at two fifteen with nothing I hadn't come with, except the absolute certainty that Salas had wanted to know exactly one thing: how much Dominic Moreau cared about me.
And that he now had his answer.
* * *
I told Dominic everything in the car on the way home.
He listened without interrupting. His face was the controlled one -- not blank, but managed, the expression hewore when the thing he was actually thinking was not available for general viewing.
When I finished, he said: "He asked about your work."
"Yes."
"Specifically about the acquisition report."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. They were crossing the Garden District now, the afternoon light going gold between the oaks, the city doing its unhurried thing.
"He's triangulating," Dominic said. "He knows you have access to the Holdings structure. He wants to know if you've found what's in it."
"I've found what's in it."