Elise Blackwell - The Lower Quarter

Clay turned the eyes he knew to be cold onto his father, stared at him. “Is that why you killed Ladislav?”

His father actually laughed, coughing around his cigar and taking a moment to regain his breath. “Come now, we both know that was your handiwork, you little turd, you lying little piece of shit.”

His father’s tone was friendly, almost amused, though Clay knew that was an affectation masking genuine disgust. Clay pursed his lips, gladdened to know he could produce such a strong response in a man who rarely resorted to profanity as a rhetorical strategy.

“I gave you a chance to come clean, and you did not take it. Yet I have kept you out of trouble nevertheless. Lucky for you, I knew you were lying to me even as you sat there and swore on your poor homely mother’s grave. In exchange, you are going to put things right. You are going to take something to Belgium, and you are going to bring something home.”

Clay pressed himself to remain calm at the realization that his father, after all the gamesmanship, might simply hand over the final means for Clay’s revenge.

“Don’t fret,” his father continued as Clay held his expression still so as not to reveal his glee. “I’m not entrusting you with the money for the latter. That’s what wires are for.”

Clay was careful not to agree too readily. He wanted his father to believe he was bullying him into the plan. “This is the last time,” he said, turning his voice slightly adolescent for effect.

“I am well aware of when your birthday is,” his father said. “Believe it or not, I was there the day you were born. Sometimes I let myself fantasize about the old days, when during a difficult birth the father was given the choice of whether to save the mother’s life or the child’s.”

“I think you got that from television,” Clay said, still feigning petulance to cover his victory.

His father puffed harder on the cigar, surely for effect. “For what it’s worth, I would have chosen yours.”

Clay decided he might as well beat him to the punch line. “But I’m guessing that’s not the choice you would have made then if you knew then what you know now.”

“I don’t think that’s true, Clayton. I would have been happy to have rid myself of your mother sooner than I in fact did.” He smiled affably, as though he was discussing sports with a friend.

“How ’bout them Saints?” Clay spit out.

“Who dat?” His father winked at him, his smile now looking more malicious. “You’ll leave in about a week. I’ll even arrange you an upgrade, and God knows you could use an upgrade, even if you don’t need the extra leg room on both sides.”

Clay nodded to acknowledge the insult. “But I’m guessing from the prelude to this conversation that you don’t even have the thing I’m supposed to take.”

“I will soon; I guarantee you that.”

Clay’s gladness was short-lived, and he left his father outside when he realized the prerequisite on which his father’s plan depended. He climbed the stairs as fast as his uneven gait would allow. He pressed the key that speed-dialed Johanna, but she did not pick up.

Johanna

She put on a dress and stained her lips a dark pink with the only tube of makeup she still owned. This felt at once like putting on a uniform and going undercover. Of course Gerard Fontenot knew exactly who she was, in biographical outline if not detail, but there was also this: She was beautiful in a way that men notice and react to.

She’d refused his invitation to the Fontenot home but agreed to meet him at the Crescent Club, which, owing to the fact that most of its members lived uptown, was located not terribly far from Audubon Place. She felt like she was going into enemy territory. Whether this was silly or not, she couldn’t be sure. Clay’s father had helped her, or at least had helped Clay help her. Holed up in a small Brussels hotel, knowing that the passport she kept under her pillow while she slept was not enough to start the new life she wanted, she had been saved not only deportation but trips to consulates and embassies. Papers had appeared, tickets had been purchased, paths had been smoothed.

Clay believed he had bought these things for her by giving up five years of financial freedom — that his father cared enough about keeping him under his thumb that he would go to such lengths. But the cynical have their blind spots, too, which often have the same source as everyone’s: an unsupportably large sense of self-importance. Johanna had never believed the father’s claim to altruism or the son’s version. If Gerard Fontenot had helped her, it was because it had been in his interest to do so. She had not interrogated his motives at first because she needed what he offered. She could also admit now, from her stronger vantage, that she had been in a traumatized state — not making much sense of anything but just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to move forward. As she thought about it months later, she surmised that the father was trying to protect the son from the likes of Ladislav and so himself from scandal. Now it struck her that there was probably much more to it than that. Perhaps he had been protecting himself from blackmail. Perhaps that was why Ladislav was dead. Perhaps she was worth killing, too. Perhaps that was why Eli was here. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Gerard Fontenot might well be able to give her the name she wanted, but to ask for it would be to imperil herself. This she understood as she applied another coat of the lip stain.

Twenty minutes later she was sitting in a nook of the Crescent Club. She sat on the edge of a huge leather armchair that would swallow her if she scooted back even a couple of inches. There was no door in the doorwaylike opening into the main room of the club, yet the angle of the little room made it private. She could hear the sounds of glassware but not the voices of the few people she had passed on her way in. She could hear the pianist’s hands producing a particularly innocuous “Moonlight Sonata,” but she could not see the black baby grand being played.

Clay’s father’s suit looked chosen to match the gray in his hair. His face was smooth with fine pores, his hands manicured yet not feminine. She requested a mineral water, but he ordered them both a gin and tonic, naming a brand of gin she had never heard of. His smile covered his teeth as he nodded to the bow-tied server and waited for him to leave after he delivered the drinks.

He turned sharply toward her, his tone sinking deep. “You have something that does not belong to you.”

Holding the very full drink level with two hands, Johanna stared straight at his eyes and shook her head very slowly.

“Are you saying that you don’t have it, or are you saying that it belongs to you?” He stirred his drink and then removed the thin straw to drink directly from the glass.

“I’m saying that I don’t know what you are talking about.” Johanna shifted so she could set the drink down. She knew she should taste it, at least pretend to have a few sips, but she couldn’t bring herself to. The room was kept at a temperature comfortable for men in suits but too cold for the bare-shouldered women they brought with them. Holding the drink was making her shiver.

“A man you know — or, better, let’s say knew. A man you knew died about a block away from you. He should have been in possession of three … three items. Instead he was in possession of two. Add to this information the fact that this man whom you know, whom you knew, is someone you very likely wanted dead.”

Again Johanna shook her head. “Your son thought I should want him dead, but he is not the man I want dead.”

Fontenot studied her. “I think I see; you’re the sort of economist to focus more on demand than supply.”