But she started her inventory small — another survival skill. First was the little dog. When she had called, the uptown artists had sworn that their pet was feline and not canine and that they had never seen a small black dog like the one Johanna described. Johanna broke the news to them: Their cat was gone. “Cats are strong,” she said. “It might be fine.” That was true — it might be fine — but it would never again be their cat. Despite her own feelings about cats, she could understand that this would cause them pain and worry.
There were things she could do about the problem of the dog, actions she could take. She could post “found dog” flyers in their neighborhood, call animal shelters, knock on doors. But she knew the score for pets after the storm. Many were lost, but many found went unclaimed. She would take the steps required to make sure she was not stealing someone’s beloved companion — the calls, the flyers — but in the end the dog would be hers. This was a responsibility she wanted to want but did not, even as fond as she was of the small body, the alert eyes and ears. On the other hand, she couldn’t very well condemn the creature, which had shown her nothing but trust and affection, to an overflowing animal shelter or mistreatment on the street or the bottom of the Mississippi. She looked at him now as he rested heavy in the crack formed by her crossed ankles and outstretched legs.
The girl’s visit was trickier to parse, but what Johanna came up with was straightforward enough: The girl reminded her of being younger, of the way her life had been turned by others, of the very bad route she had taken to arrive in the life she wanted to keep.
This brought her back around to the big thing: She wanted to keep her life. She wanted to keep her apartment, her studio, her work, her quotidian routines. She had paid for these comforts in advance. Even if she had needed Clay’s help to start, she had paid for that up front, too.
Ladislav’s picture in the paper and now this man, Elizam — she refused to think of him as an innocuous three-letter nickname — meant that everything she valued, every simple and perfect thing, was endangered. She tried to order it in her mind: Ladislav had been around the corner from her. Someone had killed him, and that someone might have been Clay or might have been someone else from during Belgium. Soon after, a stranger appeared looking for a painting, which had to be the painting she had kept close for more than a decade. This could not be a coincidence. Maybe the man, Elizam, was looking for Ladislav. Or maybe Ladislav had told him to look for her. If he knew where the painting came from and why she had it, he was both a bad person and the person who could lead her to the one person in the world she wanted to kill.
Clay thought she should have wanted to kill Ladislav, and maybe she should have, but it was the other man — the one who had paid him — whom she wanted to watch die slowly, knowing his demise was by her hand. A man she should never have had to remember but would always, even when she most believed in her place in the imagined history of a city far away from everything she had known before leaving Belgium. If she was going to lose everything, had she not earned at least that? Did not both she and the man deserve that?
She nudged the dog from her legs. He sprang awake and leaped down, watching her from the floor as she took out the painting, still wrapped in brown paper, and loosened the strings. As she looked at it, she decided she could part with it. In her mind, the girl who was its subject had crossed the ocean and made a new life. That girl’s ending was a happy one. Johanna knew this because she had cleaned her colors, renewed the red of her collar, cleared her eyes. She could let that girl go to some anonymous new home and trust that she would be all right. What Johanna could not bear, though, was the thought that the painting might be returned to the man Ladislav had stolen it from before she had stolen it from Ladislav. She would burn the painting before she let that happen.
That first time she had seen the painting, her head twisted, trying to find the human figures in the dirty brushstrokes, first wondering how a painting might be cleaned, its colors restored, her voice had been trapped stale in her mouth because the man who had paid for her virginity had paid a few Euros more for the wide strip of duct tape across her mouth.
Not all men who prefer the clarity of rape to the grayer territory of coerced or merely purchased consent want to hear the screams, Ladislav had told her later, when that territory was known to her in all its hues. This man, this first man, had paid extra for his silent joy. He paid most of all, of course, for her virginity. Every day for several years — but not in a long while — she had wondered why he had prized that above all. Perhaps he thought that the first violation would hold unique physical pleasure, or perhaps he merely wanted to guard against the possibility of unpleasant disease. It was months before she surmised a deeper motive: He wanted to be remembered. There were many other men she remembered in pieces: a beard here, a voice there, the fast thrusting of one, another’s grunting, the odd smell, whether rank or pleasant. Other than Clay, though, whom she remembered for other reasons, that first man was the only one from during Belgium that she remembered fully and to this day.
So he had got what he had paid for, and perhaps he could be made to wish that he had not.
She called Clay to ask directly whether he had killed Ladislav or knew who had. Usually he took her calls, often on the first or second ring, but this time he didn’t answer. She rewrapped the painting and took the dog for a walk, realizing that it would still be unwise to give it a name.
Eli
Though he held no faith in his approach, Eli decided to start on the list Felicia Pontalba had provided because he was being paid to do so. Many of those listed, including the Prejean whom Felicia had warned him to be careful with, had left the city and not yet returned. They could be followed up later, if necessary, though most had departed before the mysterious resident of the Hotel Richelieu had been killed, making them less likely suspects than someone who’d stuck out the storm.
The list included one couple who had refused to evacuate and had come through the hurricane just fine: Lafayette and Mignon Broussard. “Don’t call him Lafayette,” Felicia had instructed. “Call him Fatty.” Before he’d come to this city, he would have assumed their names were self-authored, or at least nicknames stuck to them by others. Now the names just made it sound like they fit in, like they were from here.
“Biggest pink house in the Marigny,” a man had told him when he’d inquired about the address, and now Eli saw that he was exactly right. It wasn’t just pink but all that pink implied, with strings of Mardi Gras beads festooning the balcony jutting out over the small side street near Frenchmen and a ridiculous number of concrete lawn ornaments populating the small square of front yard.
Ways of thinking groove deep, and Eli found himself casing the house like the person he used to be. It was a game, an approach to the world he’d taken even as a kid: plotting the secret moving or removal of objects. It had been a game before it had become something else; the game had led him to his illegal occupation. As a kid, he’d figured out how he might unburden a convenience store of an entire shelf of candy, but he’d never pocketed so much as a stick of gum or twist of caramel.