“Please,” he said, and in his voice she heard the desperation that she’d heard in it that day she’d hidden in the closet while he talked to his father, the day he had lost the attraction of power.
Marion squinted at him, as though that would allow her to see something else in him. “You could just mail it or something.”
“But I trust you,” Clay said very quietly. “Which isn’t something I say to very many people.”
“Okay,” she answered.
He moved into her, his mouth close to her ear. “Can I make love to you before I go?”
To her surprise, she wanted to, if only for completion, a way to ravel her own loose end. Also to her surprise, what they did in her bedroom was more like lovemaking than anything they had done before. Clay was gentle, almost in the extreme. His sweat dripped on her face and chest, and his hips trembled when he was close to coming. When he finally did come, it was with a great shudder. After, they lay side by side, close but not touching, for a long time. The deep breath he took before sitting up to dress sounded like a gasp.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’ve got to go to work anyway.”
He shook his head. “No, sorry in a bigger way.”
“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s really okay.”
At the door, he kissed her on the mouth. She pointed to the bag. “I like her, by the way. I’ll make sure she gets it.”
“But not for two weeks.”
“But not for two weeks,” she repeated, smiling.
Johanna
For the first time since she had found her vocation, she could not work. Instead she walked, fast and for hours at a time, when it was not raining and when it rained hard. She couldn’t place her problem in a single location: the absence of the painting, the intrusion into her space itself, or the confusion represented by the short word Eli. Perhaps she was just sick from having the possibility of revenge presented and then yanked away after so many years of wanting. If she had the painting and the name — or perhaps even just one or the other — then a plan might still be made. But she had neither, and anyone who might help her would not. Whether their motives were to protect her or thwart her mattered little, if at all; it was what they did that mattered. The person most likely to be able to help her was also the least likely to want to, and if there was any element of protection in the motives of Gerard Fontenot, it was self-protection.
And so there was also this for Johanna: a loss of control and thus fear.
When a check arrived from the artist couple for her final work on the husband’s pieces, she experienced a vague disappointment. If he had stopped by with an envelope of cash, then she might have seduced him. An act of control and a small act of revenge against Clay, against Eli, against her situation. Would she have done that? Probably, but her destructive impulse was not strong enough to survive the additional step of calling the man and arranging an encounter. It would have needed to be easy. Peter across the street crossed her mind, but he had done nothing wrong. She felt compunction there that she would not have felt toward the unsavory married artist. There was also this: She was done with men she might actually like. They led nowhere happy, either.
So she channeled her anger into her feet and walked and walked and walked. After two days of walking, she felt considerably better, and her pace slowed a bit. She included more stops: a cup of coffee, a bottle of lemonade, a postcard that caught her eye. She lingered to watch some renovations in the 600 block of Chartres Street, at the carriage house where six-foot-tall Storyville brothel owner Rose Arnold had lived in the 1920s. History called her “Aunt Rose,” but Johanna doubted anyone in her line of work deserved a term of benign familiarity. If her girls called her “aunt,” it was probably out of fear or loathing, maybe jealousy — the desire to change places. Her stops lengthened: an hour in an exhibit on the Louisiana Purchase at the Cabildo, pre-Mass music at the Cathedral, lunch near the window of the newly reopened but mostly empty Muriel’s.
It felt in wisps as though the city remained vacated so she could tour its history. At other times it felt like an off-hours movie set, though Johanna knew full well that the world was not arranged for her. She had never allowed herself more than a minute of magical thinking. People are good or bad; the world does not care.
Walking behind the Cathedral, Johanna noticed a sign announcing the reopening of a bookstore famous, she knew, for the author who had once lived there. Damage to the outside of the building was still evident, and the walls inside were stained. Johanna walked through the tight cases and read the book titles that lined the walls.
“All new?” she asked the man behind the counter.
He shook his head. “We lost parapets and fixtures — and a lot of money by the end — but the books survived.”
Johanna’s vocation took over. “How on earth?”
“First, we were lucky. Then my wife took over. She’s her own force of nature.” His smile was gentle. “We found a contractor who was able to get in right away. He cleaned the air-conditioning ducts with bleach and got the air back on. Otherwise it would have been a tragedy of words and pages.”
Johanna asked him to recommend a book on French Quarter history, and he guided her by the elbow to a shelf. “You pick,” she said. “Three or so.”
Soon she was walking back down Decatur with her books, ready to take herself and her fictional history back inside, into the private space where she belonged. First, though, she stopped for a bottle of bleach, figuring that, if nothing else, the smell of it would help purify the place of her work, of her life. Then she would be ready to get back to that work, the work that was her life. A new client’s project would mark her return.
Eli
Though Eli had assumed the young man had intentionally avoided him at the auction, it was Gerard Fontenot’s son who had called him. Eli had picked up right away, without glancing at the incoming number, again assuming it was Johanna, who had not answered his calls all day. “Johanna,” he’d breathed into the phone, and the male voice on the other end had replied, “She’s safe.” It disconcerted Eli that this was almost how his last conversation with Detective Mouton had started.
“Don’t come here,” he’d said. “Let’s meet somewhere open.”
Clayton Fontenot had not seemed to mind his paranoia. “I hate the Hotel Richelieu anyway. Definitely won’t be going there again until they do something about the bar. And don’t even get me started on that thing they call the pool.” It seemed to Eli that Clay had gone out of his way to let him know he’d been to the hotel before, but he also knew from experience that there are as many false confessions as real ones. People will cop to all sorts of terrible deeds, but they hate to admit those sins they’ve actually committed.
Now they sat on a bench facing St. Louis Cathedral, between groups of pigeons and their human equivalents. A caricaturist working on the ground nearby occasionally hawked his goods to a passerby, but the skinny kids in hoodies walking by didn’t look like they had money to spare for a sketch. The other sounds were indistinct, and even those sources nearby sounded as though they were crossing a distance.
“I don’t really have time to determine whether you are a good guy or a bad guy,” Fontenot’s son said.