“Snowy,” said Johanna, who had learned the birds’ names in English right away and always seemed to remember them. “You can tell it is a snowy egret because of the black legs and yellow feet — very at odds with the pretty white feathers.”
They fell silent again, and again he was surprised when it was Johanna who spoke first.
“What do you know about Ladislav?” she asked.
His carotid artery throbbed hard, and a salt taste moved from his throat to the front of his mouth. “I know that he’s a dirtbag.”
Johanna turned her face toward him now, and he interpreted her look as accusatory.
“And yes,” he said, knowing he had to give her something, “I saw the paper.”
“Did you know he was in New Orleans before the storm? Did you see him?”
The detachment was gone; her voice was urgent. There was fear in the urgency, and he remembered the smell of her that day in Belgium — the day he’d committed himself to getting her from one life to another, taking her on as a responsibility because she was his responsibility after what he had done to her.
He shook his head. “Not until I saw his picture and read that he was dead.”
“Promise it. What do you say? Swear to God that you did not know he was here.”
“I swear to God,” Clay said, and it felt like truth in his mouth. After all, he hadn’t known in advance that Ladislav was coming to New Orleans. He had been as surprised to hear the Czech’s voice on the phone as Johanna must have been to see his face in the paper — probably more since it was possible that Johanna woke every day of her life wondering if it would be the day she saw him again. “I swear on my mother’s grave. That’s another thing we say.”
She pulled her legs into her chest and wrapped her arms around them, tightening into an egg. “A man came to my studio yesterday, and he acted like he might be a potential client, but it didn’t feel right.”
“And that’s why you agreed to see me again at last?”
“Why would Ladislav have been here unless it was connected to me? But then, if it was, why did he not contact me?”
“Maybe he was afraid you’d kill him, which of course is what you should have done if you saw him.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and leaned back on them, hyperextending his elbows. “But maybe it’s a coincidence and he was here for the reasons people usually come to New Orleans. The world isn’t that big a place. You can run into someone you know on a street in Shanghai — happens all the time.”
She looked at him and said no.
“Then I don’t know, Johanna, and if the paper’s right we can’t ask him. But I can ask around.” He watched another snowy egret arrive, wings spread, yellow feet stretching for the low branch it landed on.
Johanna nodded twice, very slowly, and described the man who had visited her studio. “I thought he was a Realtor, and then a customer, but I’m pretty sure he is something else than that. He had an accent, too — not from here.”
“Belgian?” Clay asked.
Johanna’s hair shimmied as she shook her head. “I don’t think so, not Czech, either, but maybe Europe somewhere. He had a deliberate way of speaking, kind of distanced or practiced, which made it hard to tell.” She turned her legs to the side and pushed off the ground, rising to her glorious full height. “I have to go now,” she said. “I’m taking care of a dog.”
Johanna fascinated Clay, but she rarely surprised him. Today she was full of surprises.
“A dog?”
“Long story. Another thing you say.”
“You should have brought it to the park. Dogs like parks.”
She nodded very slowly. “Yes, you’re right, but this is not my dog, and I don’t want to be responsible for losing him or him getting hurt in a fight. He is a very small dog.”
Before the storm, Johanna had always ridden the streetcar up St. Charles, but now Clay walked her to her van. Once she was in, she rolled down her window. “You said I should have killed him. How do you know I didn’t?”
“It’s not in your nature, Johanna.”
“You don’t know that,” she said and rolled up the window as he tried to tell her that he did. Then she lowered it and gave him just more than her profile. “You could call the boy in your new book Romulus.”
After she drove off, he crossed St. Charles and walked the very short walk home, relieved that Johanna hadn’t asked him the obvious question. Now he was keen to troll.
Two hours later, he had flagged and removed self-promotional text for two graphic novelists who had obviously written their own Wikipedia pages, inserted the title of his second book into a list of graphic novels that experiment with form, and added a rape accusation to the comments section of the page of a local restaurant owner who’d refused Clay an additional bottle of wine and asked him to leave, even though he knew full well what his last name was. Though the incident had occurred before the storm, Clay had waited until now, when the restaurant had just announced its reopening. Feeling better, perhaps the release a cutter feels when she draws a line of blood from her arm, Clay typed “Romulus and Remus” into a search engine. Maybe Johanna’s comment would lead to something more: archetypes at his disposal and an underlying myth for his new book.
Against his better judgment, he swiveled from the computer when the rarely used landline rang.
His father’s voice through the receiver: “I arrive a week from Friday. Prepare the house.”
Their conversation was even shorter than usual but left Clay feeling wobbly. The near-constant small pain in his left lower back, a result of his small but defining affliction, felt sharper after he hung up. If Johanna was right about the man who had visited, then his father’s visit was likely not a coincidence any more than Ladislav’s. But it was natural for Johanna to be suspicious; maybe the man she had seen signified nothing. His father had yet to visit the house since the storm, and it was only natural that he would check in eventually, if only to enumerate faults in how Clay had handled the situation.
Clay picked up the phone again and called the housecleaner and the yard guy he had not phoned in weeks. The housecleaner seemed glad enough for the work and agreed to come the next day, but the yard guy’s number was disconnected. For all Clay knew, the guy had been killed in the storm. He would have to get another recommendation from a neighbor, which was easy enough to do but would require him to speak to one of them.
Marion
After her shift behind the bar, Marion walked her bike the block to the tattoo shop and relocked it. The guy had painted the door with a thick, dark green paint and put up a dark green screen between the store’s entryway and main room, creating a reception area that hid the actual tattoo parlor. This struck Marion as a throwback to a time when getting a tattoo was more private act than public performance. She approved.
The man came around the screen when she entered and smiled upon recognizing her.
“I didn’t have to ask you your name,” she told him. “It’s Eddie.”
He was wearing what seemed to be his uniform: subtly plaid pants, black boots, white sleeveless T-shirt. If someone else were wearing it, Marion might have accused him of trying to look like a badass or a cholo — of posing of some kind — but on him they were just clothes. His movements were natural inside them, his face intelligent above them. She connected the mole by his eye with its geometric partner.
“Small neighborhood,” he said.
“Smaller than it used to be, apparently. Show me around?”
The main room surprised her, too. She’d expected it to be cluttered with tools and ink bottles and cartoon images, she supposed, not spare and serene. There was little by way of visual distraction, and most everything in the room was black, white, gray, or green. The music playing was quiet and nondescript.