Elise Blackwell - The Lower Quarter

“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.”

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.”