Restoration (33 page)

Still nothing.

Like any wise man presented with the dilemma of having two servings of ice cream and only one mouth to consume them, I ate my cup, then hers, before driving back to the Guild’s studio.

I parked on the boulevard across from the old firehouse. I considered taking her to the garçonnière and putting her up in my spare room, but there was no bed in that room. The only bed was in my room, and it likely would’ve made for trouble to bring her there. What a perfect beauty Rhys was. Even her silent, sleeping form let off a sexual power that made me crazy. I studied the slow pace of her breathing, the golden down on her thinly muscled forearms, the shadows created by the angles of her cheekbones. Sometimes it was hard to be a man. I also studied the shape of her lips and wondered if I should just go ahead and kiss her and see what happened. I wished I knew
how to paint. I would’ve painted her mouth, on a large, perfectly shaped canvas. That would’ve been my masterpiece.

I looked over at the firehouse and tracked backward to the few minutes when Rhys had closed the building before we left for dinner. She’d turned out the lights and locked both doors. I’d watched her takes these steps, and yet lights clearly shone now in the windows upstairs. How was that? I wondered.

I nudged her with the heel of my hand. “Rhys? Rhys, wake up, sweetheart.”

She recoiled in her seat and stared at me past fluttering lids.

“Do you have timers set on the lights upstairs in the studio?”

Confused, she gave no answer. She waved a hand in front of her face, either to get rid of me or to dismiss the possibility that someone had let himself in the building. “Do I have… what did you say?”

“Do you have timers set on the lights upstairs?”

She bent forward and peered up at the building, then in an instant she was out of the car and running across the boulevard. I caught up to her at the entrance, where she fumbled for keys even though both doors were unlocked and partially opened. She let out a groan, then unloaded with a string of obscenities. I stepped around her and led the way inside, pulling her by an arm. “Does Joe Butler have the keys?” I whispered.

“It isn’t Joe.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Joe had to go out of town. It isn’t him. Trust me.”

“What about the others?”

“No. Joe and me, we’re the only ones who have keys.” She still wasn’t fully awake. I crossed the floor and stopped at the foot of the stairs. When she joined me she said, “And I’m the only one with a key to
that
door.” She pointed to the one on the second-floor landing. It was standing open, with a block of light shining through.

“Let me get something to hit him with,” I said, searching the floor for a brick or a piece of wood. Where was my Pete Rose when I needed it?

Rhys grabbed two fistfuls of my shirt and pulled me close against her. “The painting has been damaged enough,” she said.

“I know that.”

“You will not be throwing things or hitting anyone. Do you hear me?”

“Not even Tommy Smallwood? Can’t I hit him? Because that’s who it is, Rhys. I would bet anything that’s who’s up there.”

She raced up the stairs making noise and I followed her into the studio where Smallwood stood at the foot of the tables holding the panels. He shot a look in our direction, smiled at Rhys, then ran his hands over his face and made a blubbering sound with his lips. “Nice to see you again, Miss Goudeau,” he said.

“Mr. Smallwood?” Rhys’s voice was calm. “Mr. Smallwood, you shouldn’t be here. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Levette really liked his coloreds, didn’t he? God, there must be fifty of them here.” He turned back to Rhys. “You think there’s a signature in a corner somewhere, under the house paint? I like an autograph on my pictures.”

“Mr. Smallwood?”

“Y’all count the blacks yet?”

Rhys walked to within a few feet of where he was standing. “Mr. Smallwood, you’re giving me no choice but to call the police.”

Smallwood’s laughter dissipated to a slow, steady rumble and he moved back from the painting. “Now why would you want to go and do that?”

“You’re trespassing. You broke and entered without permission.”

“I broke and entered?” An injured look came to his face as he dug in a pocket and removed a ring of keys. He placed them in the palm of his hand and held them out for Rhys to inspect. “This is my property, Miss Goudeau. I own this building.”

“You don’t own it.”

“I’ve owned it since 1992. Bought it at public auction. Stood outside in the cold and the rain and raised my hand and
fetched
that sonofabitch.”

“But I have a lease with a real estate company, sir.”

“Yes, you do and you’ve been a good tenant,” Smallwood said. “That company takes care of all my rental properties. And that lease, if you care to read it sometime, stipulates that the lessor—that’s me—has the right to enter the premises for inspection at any reasonable hour, provided the lessor—me again—doesn’t interfere with the tenant’s business. In other words, Miss Goudeau, I can come in here any time I feel like it, so long as I don’t make a nuisance of myself.” He raised an arm and consulted the diamond-encrusted dial of his Rolex. “It’s almost ten o’clock at night. You closed shop hours ago. How am I bothering you?”

“That painting—”

“That painting doesn’t belong to you.” Smallwood was having fun now, and even from a distance of ten feet away I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “Is that what you were going to say? That you are in possession of stolen government property? Looting the American taxpayer, are we, Miss Goudeau?” He pointed a finger at her. “Maybe I’m the one who should be calling the police.”

Rhys leaned back against one of the worktables and crossed her arms at her chest. “What do you want?”

“What do I want? I’m the one who should be asking what you want. You want a check? A bank draft?
Cash?
Tell me what it’s going to take, Miss Goudeau.”

“I need you to leave now.”

“You’re going to agree to sell me this painting first.”

“I won’t do that.”

“The way I see it, you don’t have much choice but to place it with a private individual such as myself. So sell it to me.”

“You’ll have your chance, Mr. Smallwood. But you’ll have to outbid the others.”

“Are you telling me you’re planning an auction?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Oh, I do love an auction.” He clapped his hands, then fell into a dance that sent him shuffling backward.

“I’m dialing 911,” Rhys said, and held up a portable telephone.

“She’s calling 911,” Smallwood said to me, his compatriot, with a throaty roar.

Rhys punched numbers and brought the receiver to her ear. “Hello, Operator? Operator, this is Rhys Goudeau, calling from the studio of the Crescent City Conservation Guild. Yes, ma’am. Martin Luther King and Carondelet… You got it.” She winked at Smallwood. “Well, yes, we do have a problem, a big problem. I just came by to check my office and the doors were open. Someone broke into the building, I’m afraid. Could you send officers right away? Yes, ma’am… Thank you.”

Smallwood stood looking at her for a time. He laughed. He ran both hands through his hair, then he stepped over to the foot of the tables and surveyed the painting again. Against the banks of fluorescent light overhead his florid face shone purple. “My, God, it’s beautiful,” he said.

“She said it would only be a few minutes,” Rhys told him.

“It is some kind of beautiful.” He shook his head and started for the stairs, and as he moved past me I thought I saw a glint of tears in his eyes. “I remember you,” he said.

“Jack Charbonnet.”

“What’s the name again?”

“Charbonnet.”

“You think you saved my life, don’t you?”

“All I saved was the door at the auction house. You were about to fall through it.”

“Miss Goudeau, will I be hearing from you? About the auction?”

“Yes, you will, Mr. Smallwood.”

“Fine,” he said, seeming satisfied.

We followed him downstairs and out to the boulevard. A police cruiser was pulling up at the curb. The cops got out of the car and Rhys walked up to greet them. “False alarm,” she said. “Maybe I left the door unlocked by mistake when I went out earlier for dinner.”

The officers had a look around inside, anyway. They walked the
length of both floors and peered into closets shelving supplies. They checked the rear patio and the alleys that ran on either side of the building. Neither commented on the mural or seemed to notice it, for that matter. Each of them had coffee on his breath and carried an attitude of extreme boredom. I was standing downstairs in the framing gallery when one of them said to Rhys, “Do you usually work this late?”

“Not usually.”

“I would recommend a big dog, maybe like a Doberman?”

After they were gone, Rhys and I trudged back upstairs. She stood at the tables studying the mural for any evidence that Smallwood had tampered with it. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and my legs splayed in front of me. I was nervous and I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. “Let me ask you a question,” I said. “How did you know Smallwood would leave if you called the cops? How did you know that? I mean, that painting really does belong to the government. And he was in his rights to be here, if it’s true he owns the building.”

“I think you know the answer,” she said. She walked over and sat next to me. “Smallwood tells the police about the mural and he threatens to forfeit any chance to own it himself. He can’t let them know it’s here. The government surely would claim ownership, and he would be without his precious Asmore, the one great southern artist who’s eluded him.”

“And the cops walked right by it?”

“That can’t surprise you either.”

“Smallwood had tears in his eyes as he left. He actually had tears.”

“That’s not all he had,” she said.

I revisited the image of Smallwood moving past me, headed for the stairs. And something about it did strike me as being unusual. What were the names of the neurotransmitters that made a collector a slave to desire? I saw the asymmetrical knot of his necktie, the wide lapels of his suit coat, the combative expression. But I also saw details particular to the lower half of his body. When it came to Asmore, the man had it bad.

I don’t think I’ve ever left Rhys’s company without her initiating my departure, and I certainly would’ve stayed with her longer had she not suddenly announced it was time for me to leave. She got up off the floor and went into her office and started brewing a pot of coffee. I stood in the doorway and looked in at the little sleeping cot shoved against one of the vitrines crowded with pottery. On the floor under the cot was a Ken Follett paperback, titled
The Modigliani Scandal
, open to the page where she’d left off. “Aren’t you going home?” I said.

She shook her head. “Too risky. Besides, I feel like working.”

“I’ll stay here the night, if you’re worried about Smallwood coming back.”

“No, but thank you, Jack. It’s kind of you to offer. I don’t think I’ll be leaving the studio again until I finish bringing the mural back. Obviously he’s been watching the building, waiting for a chance to come in, and I wouldn’t rest if I went home now.”

She walked with me downstairs and stood just outside the entrance on the sidewalk with her arms loosely folded at her chest. “Come here,” she said.

I moved toward her and she kissed the side of my face, then wiped the spot, I supposed to remove a lipstick smudge. “Jack, you’re wonderful,” she said. And then she kissed me again and wiped me off again.

I headed back to Moss Street under assault from my own private store of neurotransmitters. At one of the traffic lights there was a streetlamp burning bright and illuminating the interior of the car and I checked in the rearview mirror to see if any of her lipstick was still on me. I touched the spot on my face where she’d kissed me. “Serotonin and something else,” I said out loud, still trying to remember.

After coffee at the shop on Esplanade I walked home, covered in a slicker to keep dry. I paused to look at the black curving plain of the bayou dimpled with rain, ducks paddling along the bank, an abandoned
toy boat floating upside down near the bridge. It was an ugly morning, and almost too humid to endure. The weather was a perfect reflection of how I was feeling today. Last night when I got home, still reeling from Rhys’s kiss, I encountered a for-sale sign on the front gate. High Life Realty was offering the property, and phone numbers for Patrick Marion were provided. I also encountered a note torn from a memo pad taped to my door. “Call me,” it said in a simple, straightforward hand. “The ghost faces immediate eviction. Please let’s celebrate soon around the Chambers.”

Sally answered my knock and brought her face up close to the screen. “What kind of fool but Jack Charbonnet goes walking in the rain?”

“May I come in, Sally?”

“You have to ask me that? You know you can’t come in. Even if you could come in I wouldn’t let you in all wet like that.”

“Please give him a message, in that case, if you wouldn’t mind. Tell him Levette’s mural—”