“We’ll run your filter more,” Eli said. “I’ll vacuum and scrub. I’ll wipe everything down over and over.”
They drank their coffee in silence for a while, and then Johanna told him about the zoo in Audubon Park, which was scheduled to reopen soon. She described the tigers in greatest detail, and next the birds in a rookery in the park outside the zoo. She told him of a dream she’d had in which the birds had disappeared one night, and the next day when everyone noticed, no one knew why they were gone. In other words, this was the best morning of his life.
Fifteen minutes before the porcelain auction was scheduled to begin, Eli was walking down Decatur wondering why Clay had let him believe Gerard Fontenot still had the painting. Apparently he’d trusted Eli’s goodness but not his patience. He hooked a left up Frenchmen Street and then a short right before climbing through the window he pried open.
He figured he had at least an hour and probably two before there was any chance of Fatty or Mignon Broussard returning from the auction gallery, but it only took him about ten minutes to eyeball every painting in the house and another fifteen to ascertain that the house had no safe. If there was stolen art there, it was on plain display, which made sense to him, having met the Broussards.
He sat down at the computer stuffed into a nook off the large, busy kitchen, but he didn’t even need to turn it on. Sitting right next to it, under an ugly paperweight containing a replica of a Degas ballerina distorted by the convex curve, was an Art Auction Gallery business card and a four-figure check bearing not the name of the auction house but the personal account information of Felicia Pontalba.
Marion
That your fellow?” her newly returned neighbor asked as Marion gave her the new garbage pickup schedule.
Marion looked up to see Eddie climbing out of a large, dark brown Pontiac half a block down the street. “Maybe.”
“He ain’t half bad,” the woman told her. Once again Marion had forgotten to introduce herself in the proper window of time, and now it felt too late to just ask the woman her name. Of course the woman hadn’t asked for hers, either.
“Not even half bad,” Marion said.
As Eddie and Marion drove across the smear of Slidell toward what she had heard childhood neighbors call the real Gulf Coast, Marion told him she hadn’t known he had a car but that if she had, she would have guessed it looked just like this.
“I guess my low-rider days still show. I figure I’ll get rid of it soon, but I wanted to make sure things worked out here first, that I wouldn’t need to be driving out again.”
“I’m glad they worked out,” she said, and he squeezed her hand on the vinyl seat.
She was unprepared to see the coast, plot after plot either empty or a pile of rubble that used to be a house she envied. Miles and miles of destruction. She tried to find some pleasure in the fact that for once the wealthy had fared worse than the poorer people who couldn’t afford to live on the water, but the effort failed. It was all carnage.
“Once in college I brought a guy home,” she told Eddie, “and he said this was the most boring place he’d ever been to.”
“Then he was an idiot,” Eddie said. “For one thing, no place is boring, least of all this one.”
“Now this place is just gone.”
They parked in the new casino’s half-full lot and walked along the beach, which had been cleaned to immaculate for maybe half a mile.
“What about where you’re from, what’s interesting about it? What about your family?” Marion asked as they took sand-slowed steps.
“As for my family — not boring. That I can say. I got a dealt a raw hand there, and part of that meant living in a lot of different places. But at a certain age, you’re responsible for yourself, and maybe you get to pick your own family. That’s why I came to New Orleans. Seemed to me like a place that’s starting over is a good place to start yourself over. What I mean isn’t just that it’s easier or puts you in a lot of company but that it makes you part of something bigger than yourself, so it’s not just about you. Intentional community, or something.”
“I read somewhere that New Orleans used to be called the accidental city.”
“Some people make the most of bad happenstance.”
The line was obvious and nearly straight: fine, pale sand on one side and rubbish tangled in kelp on the other, as far as they could see. Here and there a gull sat atop a heap, a pelican on a precariously perched toilet seat or window unit. It was like the opposite of a still life, with the animals representing not decay but life and the inanimate representing not the static but the transitory, the destructive passage of time. She felt like she had found it: a way to start painting about New Orleans that was new. It surprised her that she looked forward to the work itself rather than to anywhere it might lead in life, which was probably nowhere.
And maybe the art growing across her back would inspire what she put to canvas. She imagined herself alone in a room, painting something darker and more stylized than she had done before. She saw a long, multicolored alligator swimming in brown water, dark, jagged birds making the sky over the river near her house marvelous with their terrible numbers. She would need a large canvas for that.
She startled when she noticed Eddie staring at her.
“This is a date, right?” he asked, his voice muted by the soft wind coming off the water.
“Not exactly dinner and a movie,” Marion said, but she let him move in to kiss her.
The Pontiac overheated when they were almost back to Slidell. As Marion sat in the car with Eddie hidden behind the opened hood, she felt happy — actually happy for the first time that she could remember.
Clay
Clay assumed that his first encounter — the first of the two deaths — would be difficult and the second easy, but they were reversed. The man he met in Luxembourg was both fastidious and nervous despite his thuggish appearance. He was particular about the wire transfer, the details of what was more or less a last will and testament, the preparations for the death itself.
“It must be a suicide and not a homicide — not even an assisted suicide,” the man instructed in perfect but heavily accented English. “This is not The Netherlands.”
Clay smirked, not quite sure if the added bit was an attempt at levity or not.
“But it is crucial that you proceed correctly so as not to damage the material.” He nodded, perhaps confirming that they both knew material was one hell of a euphemism. “We make beautiful products, and this situation, while out of the ordinary, will be no exception. I’m sure that’s the way you want it.”
As he nodded his agreement, Clay imagined Johanna’s long fingers, her short, clean nails.
There were papers to get to his publisher and addresses to verify: Johanna’s, of course, and his father’s, and Marion’s. He had not forgotten about dear Marion. Because he knew Johanna would not touch his money, would feel besmirched by it and angry to have it presented to her, Marion was going to be a very wealthy young woman. It fitted their relationship, which, after all, had begun as a monetary exchange.
Maybe she would do some good with the money — Clay sensed in her an unrecognized affection for New Orleans and, he assumed, for wounded things of various kinds — or maybe she’d blow it on tattoos and Jell-O shots and absurd jewelry. He really didn’t care. The point of giving her the money was letting her do with it whatever she wanted.
It all took several days more than expected, so he was glad he had told Marion to hang on to the painting for a full two weeks. Even though Johanna was no longer in danger, it felt right that the whole affair be settled in its details and then completed posthumously.