He assumed it would be her face he saw as his vision darkened and permanent sleep seeped slowly in, but he knew that the last face he imagined might well belong to the second defendant whose death he had made literal.
Everything in Belgium had gone as planned, as he had imagined it on the plane, right down to the ready rental car with its accurate navigation system. The bachelor had even answered his own door, a door his ancestors had walked freely in and out of for several hundred years. He wasn’t imposing, nor was he a once-strong man declined to old and frail. Perhaps because he had watched too many movies in his life, these were the two alternatives Clay expected. Instead he was very nearly ordinary, though a first impression of kindliness cleared quickly to an obvious smallness evident in the overly tidy haircut. A puniness of character or mind or self — Clay didn’t worry about the terminology for the thing that a person is, the thing he intended to take from this man and render nonexistent.
“Monsieur Fontenot the Younger, I assume?” Even his voice was smaller than it should have been, the words pinched off, leaving too much space between them.
His eyes, though, while small were deep. They were dark and mean, and Clay wanted to cut them out of his face.
Clay nodded in response to the man’s question and just that easily entered the mansion with the architect’s bag containing an unpainted canvas and a recently acquired hunting knife.
Eli
He stood, and Felicia Pontalba sat cross-armed at her desk.
“Was it for a finder’s fee?” he asked.
To her credit, she made no show of feigned ignorance, uttered no denial. “Once, at a lunch when I thought something might bloom between us, I told you the secret to my profession.”
“Having something others want.” Eli sat on the chair she had pointed to.
She lifted her breasts with her hands, squeezed them together to deepen her cleavage. “I suppose I was hoping you’d want this.”
“I can’t deny the aesthetic value,” Eli said, cautious.
“Not the area you collect in, though.”
“Not anymore, though my younger self is ready to punch me in face just about now.”
“Thing is,” Felicia said, “that what you do want, other people also want.”
Eli scanned the room as inconspicuously as possible, noting two possible locations for a hidden safe large enough to hold the painting even as he realized it wasn’t especially likely that she’d have it here.
“But I have it on good authority,” she continued, “that at least one of them thinks it’s no longer missing. Which is to say there’s no reason everyone can’t be happy.” Cleavage subsided back into her gray wool dress, Felicia again looked all business. “And I want to be happy.”
“You seem pretty happy.”
She squinted at him. “Maybe I want to be happier.”
“And what would make you really happy?” Eli asked. “More money?”
“Curiosity can torment, at least a person like me. When I was little, I would find every last one of my hidden Christmas presents, open them, fondle the merchandise, and then rewrap and retape everything so well that no one ever knew.”
“Or else they just let you think you got away with it.”
“Maybe, but the point is that I’m unhappy with you because you left my curiosity unsatisfied.”
Eli resisted the urge to draw back, and he held his tongue while maintaining the eye contact that was making him want to run.
“Never fear,” she said. “It’s not that big a deal, and I can get laid by good-looking men for free. No need to resort to blackmail for that.”
Eli remembered one thing he’d learned from his family: the importance of preserving female pride. Anyone’s pride, really, but it was particularly tricky when it involved a woman’s sexual allure, at least according to his father. “Men are used to being turned down. Accuracy through numbers,” his father had advised.
“No fear there,” Eli said, “or at least only the best kind of fear.”
Felicia had already moved on. “I suppose you could call what I’m proposing a more modern transaction. You may recall I mentioned a Mr. Prejean? He and your boss had a bit of a squabble a few years back?”
Eli nodded.
“Well, a painting was loaned to Mr. Prejean for an exhibition but has never been returned. I think he’s hoping all was forgotten with the storm and all.”
“I don’t have the skills or the crew to get into a museum,” Eli said. “The technology has changed, and I don’t have the contacts here.” He continued when she said nothing, “Seriously, I cannot do it, and I really don’t want to go back to prison. It’s pretty awful, you know, maybe even worse than you imagine.”
“I can imagine that it is pretty awful, but you’re in luck, because what I’m looking to reacquire is not in a museum. It’s in a storage unit. Prejean is not so much as a thief as a hoarder. Sad, really, but his diagnosis is not really our concern here.”
“It’s still a crime. You could report it.”
“The police in New Orleans are busy.”
“One of them manages to make time for me.” Eli touched his nose involuntarily but quickly returned his hand to his knee.
“You may find that he’s recently lost interest. Anyway, this isn’t a matter for the authorities but a small situation — an in-family kind of thing.”
“But my job here is done. Ted’ll be wanting me back in Los Angeles.”
Felicia smiled wide, and he saw that the trick to her trademark was stretching out a mouth that was more square than it was any other shape. “Let’s just say you’ll be doing Ted a favor, too.”
“If you’re so tight with Ted, why aren’t you telling him about what you recently bought from the Broussards?”
“As far as I’m concerned, a painting no one thinks is missing isn’t missing. One key to being part of something bigger than you is just to remember the simple fact that you are. If and when that particular item reenters the category of ‘missing,’ I won’t know where it is anymore, and no one will know I ever did. Meanwhile, I’ll have taken care of another matter, and people will be all the more impressed because they won’t know how on earth I’ve done it. ‘And so quietly,’ they’ll say.”
For the second time in a week, Eli found himself a recidivist and a thief, and once again he found that the city wasn’t nearly locked up enough to keep its valuables safe. Though storage locker was a misnomer for the elaborate, climate-controlled facility where affluent New Orleanians kept the art and wine and fur they didn’t have room for at home, it wasn’t hard to sweet-talk the woman at the front desk, who was clearly beleaguered after several months of hysterical and often berating phone calls from those same affluent New Orleanians wanting to know the condition of those canvases and bottles and coats housed in a suburb that had seen extended and repeated power outages. Kindness and a simple lock pick were the only tools Eli really needed for this job, which made him think it was a good thing his determination to make a life as a nonthief was strong.
The next day he was back in Felicia’s office, trading one canvas for another.
The photograph he’d seen of the Van Mieghem had not done the colors of the painting justice. Even in the awkward fluorescent light, the red of the young woman’s dress glowed like embers, and the colors of her skin managed to convey that she was cold as she looked out over the Atlantic.
Felicia interrupted the art appreciation. “If the other collection you’re starting doesn’t work out, maybe you’ll stop by sometime and cure my curiosity.”