City of Sins. Daniel Blake

he wasn’t telling.

      Patrese had been in New Orleans only a few months, but that was plenty enough to realize Varden was everywhere and nowhere. The logo of his eponymous company sprouted across the city like mushrooms after rain; his name bubbled up in quotidian conversations, an eternal presence in the ether. But he appeared in public only once a year, at the company’s AGM, and if you wanted a photo of him, it was the corporate brochure or nothing.

      In contrast, his son – St John Varden Jnr, universally known as Junior – was working the guests with practiced ease. In another era, he could have been a matinee idol, all brooding hazel eyes, jet-black hair and olive skin. As it was, he’d been a proper war hero. Purple Heart in Desert Storm, Silver Star in Bosnia, and finally the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan; the first living recipient of the award since Vietnam. He’d left the army and announced his intention to go into politics. Eighteen months ago, he’d become Governor of Louisiana at his first attempt. Massachusetts had the Kennedys, Texas the Bushes: Louisiana had the Vardens.

      ‘Here,’ Phelps said, ‘let me introduce you to a few people.’

      Phelps’ wife had filed for divorce earlier in the year and gone to live with her new lover in Mobile, so Patrese was his plus one today. There were plenty of other people Phelps could have brought – hell, half of Patrese’s new colleagues at the FBI’s New Orleans field office would have killed for the chance – but Phelps, lord of that office, had chosen to ask Patrese, the outsider.

      There’d been protests; whispered and civilized, perhaps, but protests nonetheless. Patrese wasn’t a southerner. Worse, he hadn’t even been a Bureau man until a few months ago.

      All the more reason to show him how we do things down here, Phelps had said; and that had been that.

      Patrese shook hands and repeated people’s names back to them when they were introduced, the better to remember who was who. He already recognized Marc Alper, the assistant DA who’d prosecuted Marie Laveau and was now putting a brave face on the verdict: ‘You can never predict juries.’ Here was a chief justice, here someone high up in City Hall, here a golfing store magnate, all full of backslapping bonhomie, safe and smug in the knowledge that, if you were in here, you counted for something.

      All men, Patrese noticed, and all white. The absolute top jobs – mayor, DA, police chief, pretty much everyone bar Phelps himself – might have had black incumbents, but to Patrese the dark crust seemed very thin, like a pint of Guinness in negative.

      ‘And this,’ said Phelps, his voice rising slightly as though in anticipation of a drum roll, ‘is Cindy Rojciewicz.’

      Patrese knew she’d be a knockout even before she turned, just from the reactions of everyone around them. It was like something from the Discovery Channel: the males puffing their chests out, the females bristling and snarling with affront.

      ‘Hiii,’ said Cindy, in a voice which suggested she’d spent more time than was healthy smoking filterless cigarettes and watching Marlene Dietrich films. ‘Wyndham’s told me a whole heap about you.’ She winked. ‘All good, of course.’

      Such an obvious lie, Patrese thought. Why then was he so flattered?

      Raven hair, cobalt eyes and a dress which straddled demonstrative and slutty might have had something to do with it, he conceded.

      With every wife in a five-yard radius practically dragging their husbands away by the hair, and Phelps excusing himself with a pat on Patrese’s shoulder – he could hardly have made it more obvious if he’d winked and given a thumbs-up – Patrese suddenly found himself alone with Cindy.

      She nodded toward his shirt. ‘Spill something?’

      ‘Sort of.’

      ‘You wanna come inside and freshen up?’

      ‘Come inside? You live here?’

      She laughed. ‘I wish. I’m Mr Varden’s PA. I know my way around.’

      ‘And he won’t mind?’

      ‘Jeez, Franco; it’s a house, not a darn museum.’ Houshe, musheum; she was drunk, Patrese realized.

      Drunk, sexy as hell, and inviting him inside. A good Catholic boy might have made his excuses. A lapsed Catholic, never.

      ‘Then let’s go,’ he said.

      She walked a pace in front of him. He kept his eyes above her waist for at least a second. A triumph of willpower, in the circumstances.

      They dodged a couple of waiters and went in through a pair of French doors. It was much darker now they were out of the sun, and Patrese blinked twice as his eyes adjusted. Cooler, too. He gave a little shiver as the sweat began to dry.

      Cindy was holding a door open. ‘Over here.’

      He caught a tendril of her scent as he walked past. It was a library, air heavy with leather and walls paneled with wood the color of toast.

      She closed the door behind her.

      ‘You can freshen up in a second, Franco. But first, I want to …’

      He was already moving for the kiss as he turned back to her.

      ‘…say there’s something terrible going on,’ she blurted.

      Their lips had almost touched before he realized what she’d said. He pulled back and looked at her, almost too startled to be embarrassed.

      ‘I need to tell someone about it,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you.’

      ‘But you’ve never even met me.’

      ‘Exactly. Exactly. Everyone here knows everyone. Tell one of them, you tell the whole lot. Might as well take out a personal in the Times-Picayune, you know? But not you. You don’t know anyone here, not properly. Not yet. You’re not –’ she grabbed for the word, missed, found it with a snap – ‘tainted.’

      Cindy was talking fast but coherently; the strange lucidity of the drunk whose brain can only focus on one thing at a time, but does so with the precision of a laser.

      ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Then tell me. What is it?’

      ‘Too big to tell you now. Too complicated.’

      ‘Just give me an idea.’

      ‘Oh, God … Sacrifice.’

      ‘Sacrifice?’

      ‘Sacrificing people.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I’ve got documents. Evidence. I need you alone, not with’ – she waved an arm vaguely toward the window – ‘all that boo-yah going on out there. And I need to trust you. Maybe I won’t, next time. Maybe I’ll have got you all wrong.’

      ‘But you’ve just told me …’

      ‘I’ve told you nothing. Not yet.’

      A shadow fell across the strip of light at the bottom of the door. Patrese and Cindy watched it pause a moment, then disappear.

      ‘So,’ she said, ‘you interested?’

      ‘I told you already. Yes.’

      ‘Good. Can’t meet tomorrow – we’re out of town all day.’

      ‘We?’

      ‘Mr Varden and me. Wherever he goes, I go. You free Wednesday? After work?’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘You know Checkpoint Charlie’s?’

      ‘Esplanade and Decatur, right?’

      ‘A man who knows his bars. Always a good sign. Eight o’clock? Don’t get out of work much earlier, I’m afraid.’

      ‘Eight’s fine.’

      ‘Good. See you then.’

      She opened