Johanna
Every emotional hue but the strong one she could not name washed off her like sand when Elizam walked through her door. The light outside was bright but diffuse, and his face loomed dark before her, his features vivid and deep despite the backlighting. With her eyes she could recall the feel of his hair, which looked wiry but to the touch was thick and soft. She took in his eyes, his lips, his badly swollen nose.
She whispered the one ugly syllable: “Thief.”
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “I didn’t take your painting.”
What happened next surprised her: She believed him. “Why not?” she asked. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because I would never do anything to hurt you.”
“But what if you thought it was in my best interest to have the painting gone?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t make decisions for you. If I had believed you would be better off giving up the painting, I would have tried to talk you into it. I wouldn’t have just made it happen.” He bracketed her shoulders, moved his head to find direct eye contact.
“What if I was suicidal and asked you for a knife? Would you give that to me?”
“But you aren’t.”
She waited for him to say more, nodded in agreement when he did not. “But I need that painting. You are a thief. You can get it for me.”
Elizam was shaking his head before she finished. “I can’t.”
“You will not. You want to avoid prison and save me from myself and live happily ever after.”
He reached for her hair, but she pulled back.
“Repeat that to yourself, Johanna, and ask yourself if that’s a bad thing to want. But even so, I would do anything for you anyway. I would go to prison for you, right this moment. The thing is that I don’t think I can steal it. A matter of ability. To have a chance, I’d have to know exactly where it was. I would have to hire people, probably from out of town given that the connections seem to run deep and unpredictable around here.”
He went on talking, but she stopped following the details. After catching the brunt of his message, she was doing what he’d asked: repeating to herself the happy ending she had accused him of wanting. He was right: It was not such a bad thing to want.
They were interrupted by Marion and a man she’d seen on the block quite a bit lately. After Marion caught her breath, she told her story, which was as surprising to Johanna as anything that had happened since the storm: Clayton Fontenot had given her something to hold on to and then give to Johanna, but her junkie brother had fenced it before remembering that he was in recovery. He had repented too late.
“I’m really sorry, but Clay said it was important that I hold on to the painting for two weeks, that I wasn’t to give it to you right away. All that my fucked-up brother knows is that he sold it to some fence who said he had clients in the Marigny.”
Eli straightened, seemed brighter or lighter than before. “The Marigny — are you sure? I thought it was in an alarmed safe uptown.”
His voice stirred something in Johanna, which she only slowly recognized as hope.
Marion looked sideways and cocked her head before straightening it. “I’m not sure that it’s right, but I’m sure that’s what he said.”
“What day is it?” Eli asked no one in particular.
“What do you mean?” Marion asked. “You mean what day did he sell it?”
“What day is it today?” Eli asked and then answered his own question. “It’s Thursday.” He turned back to Johanna, a smile now small but growing on his beautiful lips. “I think I can help after all. I think I can actually help.”
It took her a long time to tabulate what had happened, and after she had managed that, she still did not know what it meant. A day earlier, even an hour earlier, she would have welcomed this moment as a herald of revenge. Now she believed that Eli’s misunderstanding had been instead a deeper understanding: What she really wanted was not a name on a piece of paper or a canvas that would be a means to an end but rather the return of the painting itself.
Eli
While it might have horrified him only a week ago to think that he’d return to his old profession, Eli felt free and light as he rounded the pink house and pried open the window next to the back porch — the easiest entry he had ever encountered, which somehow made sense for a house containing such a reckless collection.
The odds were against it, of course, but not by so very much. The Marigny was not a large neighborhood, and surely the Broussard house accounted for at least three-quarters of its art. Its collection, too, was a hodgepodge and likely sloppily sourced.
Johanna had not wanted to leave her place unguarded, and Eli was unwilling to leave her alone in it overnight. She resisted his staying over, at first. “I’m not equipped for guests,” she said, and finally told him that no one but she had ever slept in her apartment, with the exception of the small dog she had taken in temporarily. Eli had told her he didn’t mind sleeping on the sofa, but she said that wasn’t the problem.
“Gerard Fontenot will realize that the painting is gone, and then he will look for it,” Eli told her. “The chances of him looking for it here are very high.”
“Clay said two weeks, and his fault has never been stupidity,” Johanna said, but Eli’s argument was still persuasive. She showed him the drawer with her knives, her can of pepper spray. They asked Peter to call the police if he saw the man with the suit. That this man probably was the police made this a faulty backup plan, Eli knew, and so he hoped that a backup plan was all it was. He weighed the risks, though, and knew that he could never get the painting back if it wound up in one of Gerard Fontenot’s safes somewhere in the world, unless perhaps he made it his life’s work at the Lost Art Register.
Johanna’s bed was small and their situation unsettled, but he found it surprisingly easy to fall asleep. He woke very early, though how early he wasn’t sure because his watch and phone were across the room and Johanna didn’t seem to have a clock.
Lying as still as possible so he wouldn’t wake her, he watched her sleep and thought through his plan, such as it was. Her nostrils flared slightly with each inhale, but she was silent and otherwise motionless in her sleep.
Eli was glad he knew the Broussards, or at least had conversed with them twice. If they surprised him, he might even be able to talk his way out of it, particularly if they were guilty of buying stolen goods. Cats, he remembered, and was glad that there had been no sign of dogs. He had not seen any evidence of an alarm system, but neither had he conclusively determined the absence of one. His former self would have been disappointed; he had become an amateur.
He made love to Johanna again after she woke up, holding her waist and looking down at her, again failing to understand his great good luck that she would have anything to do with him at all. That his status with her might be temporary hurt, but he would accept whatever was given to him and on any terms.
Afterward, while she made coffee, she asked him about the painting. “If Clay had the painting, then that means his father stole it from here.”
Eli nodded and said that he thought so. He waited for her next question, but it did not come. He answered it for her: “Detective Mouton.”
She paused and looked at him. “I hate it that he was in my flat, that there are molecules of him in the air.”