The very first thing he had ever stolen had been a painting. Every object he had ever stolen had been a painting or drawing. The last thing he’d ever stolen had been a painting. A painting by his own hand, hung in a small museum in Brooklyn. Like the others, it was meant to be returned to a person or a place, most often Puerto Rico.
He was good at his work; he’d never been caught in the act. Yet, that last time, he’d underestimated the exposure of motive. Some smart young detective had thought carefully about what had been taken and what had not been taken and sought to make sense of it when it didn’t make sense at a glance. In the absence of proof, though, or at least a greater accumulation of circumstantial evidence, Eli would have stayed out of jail. What did him in was something that he thought of for many years as chivalry, but the simple truth was that he had been incapacitatingly infatuated. The woman whose portrait he had painted before he had stolen it went unscathed despite her additional roles in the crime, such as it was. With his confession, he might have been brushed rather than slammed by the law in another context, but a couple of nationalists were playing at a more violent game, and the government was not smiling benevolently on their antics. At the plea table — a literal table, which had been a long oval of compressed wood stained to look like red maple — the prosecutors had chosen to interpret the knife Eli had used as a tool as an intended weapon should he have been interrupted, as though Eli hadn’t done his research and wasn’t sure the marijuana-addicted minimum-wage security guard wasn’t at his girlfriend’s flat. And so there had been jail, a lot of it, and would have been even more if Ted hadn’t heard about him and seen an opportunity.
That his ongoing freedom was substantially up to Ted’s discretion was something Eli understood but preferred not to dwell on. He used his fist to knock rather than touching the enormous mermaid knocker whose large breasts sat right at eye level.
“You’re just exactly on time,” Fatty Broussard told him as he pulled him into the house. “Any later and your ice would have melted.”
Fatty was a rotund man wearing a safari getup, minus the hat. His wife was an even greater spectacle: an enormous woman in a floor-length garment whose floral print was dominated by large red roses. Her face was powdered white, and she’d drawn sharp eyebrows and a scarlet mouth onto that canvas. Eli figured the pair to be in their sixties, but it was possible they were significantly younger or older.
“Have a seat, have a seat,” Fatty said, but a long-haired cat seemed to occupy each piece of furniture intended for sitting. Mignon displaced a pair of them from a sofa that nearly matched her dress or robe or whatever it might be called, and Eli sat, accepting the sweating glass her husband offered.
“Eleven o’clock,” Fatty said, “means old-fashioned time in this household.”
Eli thanked him and assessed the room as quickly as he could given its incredible clutter. Surprisingly, everything was clean, save for the cat hair on the furniture, and Eli couldn’t imagine how much they would have to pay someone to dust the place. Every surface was studded by small statues and pieces of pottery and knickknacks, ranging in value, as best as Eli could tell, from none to quite a bit. The walls were equally obscured, nearly floor to ceiling, with prints and paintings in a mix-and-matched assortment of frames. Again, they ranged in value from high-print-run lithographs by popular mediocre artists to paintings worth thousands if they were originals, which at first glance they seemed to be. What struck Eli most, though, was the complete lack of discrimination not only in worth but in style or subject matter. So often when he saw a cluttered, price-variable collection — as he had done several times on both sides of his art game — it was the hoard of someone attached to a theme, usually some particular animal, most often a domesticated one — a pet or farm animal.
“You’re looking at our collection,” Mignon said, her voice beaded, presumably from the household’s manner of observing the passage of late morning or perhaps from a former history of smoking. “As you might have guessed from looking at us, we’re gourmands as well as gourmets.”
Not smoking, Eli decided, since the house did not smell like cigarettes and Mignon did not strike him as a woman who would ever give up a bad habit once acquired. He sipped the bitters-heavy cocktail, which, surprisingly, exactly matched the time of day as promised.
“That’s right,” Fatty picked up from her. “I’ll eat and enjoy the hell out of a fast-food hamburger, but I also have a taste for ortolan.”
“Ortolan?”
Fatty, having made very fast work of his old-fashioned, was mixing another small pitcher of them on a small cart that had been wheeled into the living room.
“The little French songbird. It’s illegal to eat them now, but for enough money you can buy anything you want.” Fatty smiled and traded Eli’s half-full drink for a fresh replacement.
“You might have read about it,” Mignon said, “in the press accounts of François Mitterrand’s last meal.”
“Also a gourmand as well as a gourmet,” Fatty said. “The key is to pop the whole bird in your mouth at once and bite down. Blood, bones, like the best consommé you’ve ever tasted, except, you know, not soup.”
Continuing their conversational pattern of trading interjections, Mignon spoke up: “But you’re supposed to eat it with a napkin over your head. So that God won’t see you, because it’s a sin to eat a songbird.”
Fatty laughed, spraying whiskey. “Now, dear, that’s just a good story. The truth of the matter is that you tent your head so you can get the most of the aroma. God can see through cloth.”
“But you, my dear man,” Mignon said, turning toward Eli as a cat leaped onto her enormous lap, “you wanted to ask us some questions, Miss Felicia told me.”
Eli gave them the short version: He was inquiring into a misplaced painting — it had been Felicia’s idea to use the word misplaced with the lower echelons of the local art aristocracy — that had apparently been seen in New Orleans shortly before the storm. He offered a few identifying details and said he’d appreciate it mightily if they happened to remember seeing it, or hearing it mentioned, as well as if they would keep an eye and ear open in the future if they had not.
“Prior to this very moment,” Mignon said, “we’d neither seen nor heard of it. But now that we’ve shared a drink, we’ll be lifelong friends, and so of course — of course! — we’ll be listening closely and calling you with any news whatsoever.”
“Indeed!” Fatty concurred in his deepest bass. “Indeed.”
Shortly thereafter, Eli stood on Frenchmen Street, drunk half an hour before what anyone would call lunchtime.
Marion
Marion had been going uptown twice a week since that first time, each time looking forward to it, thinking only two more days, eighteen hours, four hours, time to check the air in the bike tires. Some days she went uptown seeking physical pain to be given only embarrassment. Some days she readied for petty humiliations and experienced true fear. One night, home alone, she dreamed she was staked to a bed while a venomous snake crawled the room. She understood, in the logic of the dream, that it would finally sense the heat of her body and make its way to her. This was not a variation that was in the actual mix, though it felt like it almost could have been.
Her mind knew to wake up just as the snake approached. Her brother had once told her that you always wake up before you hit the ground when you dream you’re falling from the sky but that you’ll die if you don’t. She had no idea whether this was true — her brother had always spouted an unpredictable mix of truth and lie — but she wondered now what would have happened to her real body if she hadn’t wakened before the snake had reached her, if she would have felt its fangs sink into her skin, been made ill by its venom, experienced a slow death creep through her veins.