Eli felt good about lying because he liked Felicia. “That’ll be the very first thing I do.”
Half an hour later, he relished the peculiar sensation of walking down the street with a missing European painting in the middle of the day. But no one on Decatur — which was as crowded as he’d seen it — gave him or what he was carrying a second look. He had a secret no one in this place cared about. The closer he got to where he was going, the faster he walked.
Johanna
Eli stayed with her for nearly a week, until they both felt sure that no one would be coming back to look for the painting. Sometimes she startled to a sound in the night, reached toward her phone or her pepper spray, but increasingly she trusted that Clay had taken care of things — had somehow got her the painting in such a way that no one knew she had it or that permission had been granted. Maybe he’d traded another five years of financial liberation. She’d called to ask him, but he never answered. Finally Eli called the policeman, just to feel him out, he said, just to be sure.
Johanna found that she didn’t mind having Eli around. She liked how he was compact in his movements, how everything he had with him fitted into one small and neat bag, how he always removed any traces of himself from a room before he left it. This meant they shared some essential quality, even if she was unable to explain or even name it.
When his employer called from Los Angeles, Johanna listened to one side of the conversation. “Yes, I know I was supposed to be back,” he said, and the conversation stretched long. At last Eli said, “Yes, I can do anything for two years.”
After he’d hung up, he told her he could visit her from Los Angeles but not from prison. He did not ask her to go there with him, but his eyes posed the question.
She stroked his hair. “I’ve merged my history with this city’s,” she said and then told him about the types of people she imagined, the dapper Frenchman who liked to attend the French Opera House and the people who’d preceded her in the Lower Quarter. “It’s like having roots, even if it’s not quite the same thing.”
Telling him this felt far more intimate and revealing to her than if she’d given him the details of her actual history, told him the kinds of things that people usually want to know about someone else, told him the secrets that are true but accidental, that were not of her choosing at all.
He said he understood. “I felt good here almost as soon as I landed. Like being at home, except better. I’d move here if I could.” He looked at her in a way she decided was hopeful. “But for now I’m stuck with the job I have — a parole of sorts, an extended confinement.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Two years is not so long.” She started to lean into him, but her words were clear enough.
“I’m probably going to have to do some things I won’t want to tell you about.”
“Thief,” she said, almost a laugh, but then she nodded more somberly. “I won’t ask you about them. We have other things we can talk about.”
“And right now we have two more days before I go,” he said, moving into her, his lips finding hers.
As he waved from the back of a taxi crawling up Decatur Street toward the interstate, toward Louis Armstrong Airport, she felt happy.
It was easy to sink back into the life she had made, working while listening to music, eating her lunch across the street, working some more, making her supper, and reading herself to sleep, most often with some history about the settlement of New Orleans or a novel written by a writer who’d lived in the city, usually in the Vieux Carré.
One day in the run-up to the city’s first Mardi Gras after the storm, she walked to the bookstore.
“Got a new history title you might like,” the bookseller told her. “Nice illustrations, too.”
She shook her head. “Actually, I was thinking of trying something new, maybe something about how the city is now, or maybe I will browse through your art section.” She looked down at her fingers, which were resting on a stack of paperback novels.
“Science fiction, local author,” the man said. “Kind of a dystopian future of Louisiana after it’s mostly underwater.”
“I guess some future is better than no future, right?” she said, and the bookseller laughed as she turned her head to read the spines of the books lining the wall.
Later that day a package arrived with European stamps, and she felt afraid until she realized the stamps were British, from a place where she knew no one at all. She opened her other mail first and then turned to it, using a box cutter to pierce the heavy tape.
The package contained a small bound journaclass="underline" pale in color, finely grained, softer than any leather she had touched before. She opened it, and tucked inside its thick ivory pages — all of them blank — was the obituary of a wealthy Belgian industrialist whose murder was still under investigation. Fatter and older than she remembered, now clean-shaven. But even the poor quality of the newspaper’s reproduction of his official photograph did not disguise his small, cruel eyes. Stuck to the obituary was a yellow Post-it note that read, “He knew it was from you. He knew it was for you.”
Johanna sat with the photo a while before tucking it back into the journal, which she placed in the file drawer that held her documents of identity and survival.
After a slow cup of coffee, she retrieved her toolbox from downstairs and located a new nail and the smaller of her two hammers. She removed from the closet her favorite object in the world and freed it from the layers of butcher paper protecting it.
She considered each of the walls in her flat before hanging the painting across from the sofa, where she could look at it whenever she wanted.
Acknowledgments
I am beholden to the great city of New Orleans and apologize for taking small liberties with its geography and post-Katrina chronology. Thanks to New Orleans photographer and writer Louis Maistros for permission to use the cover image. (More of Louie’s work can be viewed at www.louismaistros.com.)
This novel was written with the partial support of a University of South Carolina Provost’s Grant for Creative and Performing Arts, for which I am grateful. I also want to thank the College of Arts & Sciences and everyone who participates in The Open Book.
I am indebted to family (including various Blackwells and Bajos) as well as friends and colleagues (including those who are both friends and colleagues).
I would not have books in the world without help along the way from many writers. Some of them know who they are; others have helped me through their work alone.
Thanks to my editor, Fred Ramey, for being a better reader and person than a writer could invent; to my agent, Terra Chalberg, for her editorial insights and professionalism; and to everyone at Unbridled Books for their unwavering commitment to books.
My life would be much less rich without the amazing Esme Bajo, and I’m lucky to even know her. I am grateful to David Bajo for more than a quarter century of good literary company — and for helping me restore the thing most worth saving.