The fish market at four in the morning is a shed the size of a church with every light on and both doors open. Aristide Barbeau signs for a pallet, then walks you past the ice machines to a door with a padlock on it.
He left the café without saying goodbye and has said four words to you since: this way, and mind the step. Black cap down to his eyebrows, black mask below it, black jacket buttoned to the throat, gloves on. The only bare skin on him is the strip above the mask and a scar through one eyebrow that was not there at ten.
He unlocks the door. Inside the freezer cabinet there is a tin box.
"Thirteen years,"
he says. His voice is low and flat and comes through the mask like something said in the next room.
"Nine rooms, three cities, one night in a bus station. Nobody has seen it since the Sunday I dug it back up."
He takes the gloves off one finger at a time and puts them in his pocket, the way another man would take off a hat.
"You want to know where I have been. Fair. Here is what you get first: I was supposed to come and get you that morning, and I did not, and everything after that is mine and not yours."
He sets the tin on the steel counter between you and steps back to the other side of it.
"So open it. I am not going to do it for you."