The Girl in Jackson Square
Delphine
The lawyer paid for my drink before I sat down, which told me two things. He wanted me to feel bought. And he already knew what I drank.
“Bourbon, neat,” he said, and slid the glass across the little marble table. “Miss Marchand. Thank you for coming.”
The hotel bar on Royal Street was the kind of place where the ceiling fans turned slowly enough to look expensive. It was August, and New Orleans was a wet mouth breathing on everything. My denim jacket stuck to my back. His gray suit didn’t have a single crease. He was maybe sixty, thin as a heron, with rimless glasses and a gold pen he kept turning between two fingers.
He had called himself Mr. Lisin on the phone. He had not said who he worked for.
“You come recommended,” he said. “You found the bail jumper in Gretna when the police could not. You found the accountant who hid in Biloxi under his dead brother’s name.”
“I find people,” I said. “That’s the whole job.”
“Good.” He opened a thin leather folder and turned it toward me. “Then find this one.”
There was a single sheet of paper inside. A typed name, a date, the name of a hospital.
Helena Calloway. Charity ward. Deceased.
Below that, one line in blue ink. Daughter. Born in this city twenty-three years ago. Father not listed.
“The mother is dead,” I said.
“Yes. The mother is not the job.” He tapped the blue line with the gold pen. “The daughter is. My client wants photographs. A current address. Her daily routine. Where she works, who she sees, when she sleeps.”
“And then?”
“And then you are paid forty thousand dollars, and you forget her name.”
Forty thousand dollars. I owed three months on the office above the laundromat on St. Claude Avenue. My car had a cracked radiator and a prayer holding the bumper on. My license renewal sat on my kitchen counter with a late fee stamped across it in red.
Forty thousand dollars was a whole new life.
“Who’s the client?” I asked.
Mr. Lisin smiled. His teeth were very small and very even. “A man who remembers Helena fondly.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“It is all the name you need.” He closed the folder and stood. “Do not approach her. Do not speak to her. Email me when you have something. Ten thousand now, the rest on delivery.”
He left an envelope next to my bourbon. It was thick. I didn’t touch it until his gray suit had disappeared through the revolving door.
Then I sat with my hand flat on top of it, feeling the old cold thing move in my chest.
Two years ago, a man named Paul Dupree had paid me to find his wife. He said she had run off with their savings. He cried in my office. He showed me photos of their wedding. I found Noelle Dupree in a motel outside Lafayette in four days, and I gave him the room number, and he thanked me, and I bought myself a new camera lens with his money.
Three days later, she was in intensive care with a broken jaw and two broken arms.
Since then, I had rules. I never wrote the last name down. I kept it in my head and nowhere else. And I never, ever delivered until I knew exactly who was buying.
I picked up the envelope. I told myself the rules would protect us both.
It took me two days.
The Calloway file at the charity hospital was thin, but files are like rivers. They always lead somewhere. Helena Calloway, dead at twenty-six. Two children placed with the state. A boy. A girl.
The girl’s name was Vesper.
I said it out loud in my car, parked outside the records office with the engine running for the air conditioning. It sounded like a bell rung somewhere far away.
The foster records were sealed, but people who work in records offices are tired, and tired people talk to anyone who brings them iced coffee and listens. By the end of the second day I had six foster homes, an old address in the Ninth Ward, and a brother named Leo who had a gambling problem and a talent for owing money to the wrong people.
And I had a newer address. A single room in Mid-City, with a tin roof and a landlord who complained about the smell of paint.
“She’s an artist,” the landlord told me on the phone, as if confessing his tenant had a disease. “Sells her stuff to tourists. Down at the square.”
So on Wednesday morning, I went to the square.
Jackson Square at ten o’clock in August is a frying pan with a cathedral in it. The white towers of St. Louis Cathedral glowed against a sky the color of dishwater. A man painted silver stood perfectly still on a crate while children tried to make him blink. And along the iron fence, the artists hung their work.
Bright paintings of jazz players. Paintings of streetcars. Paintings of the cathedral in a hundred shades of sunset.
And at the far end, half in the shade of a magnolia tree, a girl sat on a folding stool with a sketchbook on her knees.
I knew her before I saw her face.
She was too thin. That was the first thing. She wore a huge charcoal sweater in ninety-five degrees of wet heat, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and her collarbones showed sharp at the neck of it. Her hair was dyed a hard platinum blonde, the kind that comes from a box and a bad night. Her fingers were stained blue to the second knuckle.
Then she lifted her head to look at the light, and I forgot to breathe.
Her eyes were violet. Not blue. Not gray. Violet, like the sky right before a storm breaks.
There was nothing in the file about those eyes. Not one word. But I knew, the way you know a song from its first note, that someone had been looking for them for a long time.
I bought an iced coffee from the cart on the corner and pretended to study the paintings on the fence. I took photographs with the small camera I keep in my jacket pocket, the one that looks like a cheap phone. Tourists walked past her. A few stopped. One woman bought a little painting of a streetcar and paid in cash, and the girl folded the bills very small and pushed them deep into her sock.
I knew that trick. I’d learned it in my own bad years. You keep the money where a thief won’t look.
I should have left then. I had the face, the address, the routine. I had everything Mr. Lisin wanted.
Instead, I walked over to her.
Do not approach her. I heard his dry voice and ignored it.
Her paintings hung from clothespins on a string between the fence and the tree. They were not like the others. The others were sunsets. Hers were storms. The cathedral under a bruised purple sky. The river at night, black and silver. And one small square of canvas, no bigger than a book, that showed the square itself in the rain, everything gray and soft, except for one violent slash of deep blue straight down the middle.
“That blue,” I said. “What’s it called?”
She looked up. Up close, her face was all bones and shadows and those impossible eyes. She looked at me the way people look at you when they have been hurt by strangers before. Measuring the distance to the exit.
“Prussian Blue,” she said. Her voice was low and a little rough. “It’s the darkest blue you can buy without it turning black.”
“Why only one line of it?”
She shrugged, one sharp shoulder lifting under the sweater. “Because that’s what a storm feels like. Everything gray. And then one thing you can’t look away from.”
I bought it for twenty dollars. She wrapped it in newspaper with careful, stained fingers and didn’t smile once. When she handed it to me, our fingers touched, and hers were cold, even in that heat.
“You should eat something,” I heard myself say.
Those violet eyes narrowed. “You should mind your business.”
She was right. I walked away with a painting under my arm and a name burning a hole in my head, and I did not look back, because looking back is how people notice you.
I emailed Mr. Lisin that night from the office above the laundromat.
I have a lead. Confirming details. Will deliver in person when I’m sure.
That was all. No name. No address. A promise and a delay.
The washing machines downstairs thumped and sighed. The neon sign in the laundromat window buzzed red through my blinds. I propped the little painting against my desk lamp and looked at the blue slash until my eyes ached.
Then I went into my apartment, through the door behind the office, and turned on the light.
Nothing happened.
I flicked the switch again. Darkness. The streetlight outside threw one long orange stripe across the floor, across the old couch, across my kitchen table.
Across the man sitting at my kitchen table.
He was enormous. That was my first stupid thought. He took up the whole chair and half the table, a mountain in a black rubber raincoat, though it hadn’t rained all day. His hands were folded on the table in front of him. On his left wrist, a heavy steel watch caught the streetlight.
“Delphine Marchand,” he said.
His voice was gravel grinding on glass. Flat. No question in it at all.
I didn’t scream. My hand went to my jacket pocket, where my phone was.
“Leave it,” he said. “Sit down.”
“Get out of my apartment.”
“Sit down, Miss Marchand. I have fifty-eight minutes before the men your client sent tonight arrive. I would rather not use all of them explaining.”
My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. “My client didn’t send anyone. My client doesn’t even know where I live.”
“Your client knows where you were born, what you drink, and what you owe on this room.” He didn’t move. “You emailed his lawyer from this building twenty-two minutes ago. They read your email. So did we.”
We.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Dane Kessler,” he said. “I work for Malachi Vane.”
The floor tipped under me. In New Orleans, you didn’t say that name out loud. You whispered it, if you said it at all. The Vane Syndicate owned the docks, the judges, the police, the air.
“And your client,” Dane Kessler went on, in that same flat voice, “is Olek Volkov.”
I knew that name too. Everyone did. The Russian. The guns. The bodies that turned up in the bayou with their hands tied behind them.
I sat down. Not because he told me to. Because my knees stopped working.
“Why,” I whispered, “would Olek Volkov want a girl who paints storms in Jackson Square?”
For the first time, something moved in his face. Not much. A tightening at the jaw.
“So you found her,” he said quietly.
I said nothing. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on his. I never write the last name down.
He studied me. His eyes were gray, almost colorless in the orange light. His nose had been broken at least once. He looked like a man who had never been surprised by anything in his life.
“Volkov does not pay invoices, Miss Marchand,” he said. “He takes what you know. Then he cleans up. His men are coming to take your notebook, your camera, your computer and you. In that order.”
“You’re lying.”
He turned his left wrist and looked at the steel watch. “Fifty-one minutes,” he said. “We can argue about it in my car.”
Outside, on St. Claude Avenue, a car door slammed. Then another. Then another.
Dane Kessler was on his feet before the third door closed. He moved like a glacier deciding to fall, huge and slow and then suddenly everywhere. He crossed the room and looked through the blinds without touching them.
“Early,” he said. “They are never early.”
“What do I do?” My voice cracked.
“You do exactly what I say.” He held out one huge hand. “Back stairs. Now.”
I looked at his hand. I thought of Noelle Dupree’s broken arms. I thought of violet eyes and cold fingers and a slash of blue down the middle of a gray world.
“The painting,” I said. “In the office. I’m not leaving it.”
He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Downstairs, glass broke. Something heavy hit the laundromat door.
Then he went into my office, took the little canvas off my desk, and put it inside his raincoat, against his chest.
“Now,” he said.
We went down the back stairs in the dark, my hand fisted in the cold rubber of his coat. Behind us, boots hit the front stairs, and a man shouted something in Russian. In the alley, a long black car waited with its engine running and its lights off. A tall shape sat behind the wheel, perfectly still.
Dane shoved me into the back seat and folded himself in after me. The car was moving before the door shut.
Behind us, every window of my office lit up orange. Then the glass blew out into the street in a long, bright breath of fire.
I twisted around in the seat to watch my whole life burn.
“Don’t,” said the man driving. It was the only word he spoke. His eyes met mine in the mirror, dark and calm and sad.
Dane Kessler checked his watch.
“Forty-nine minutes early,” he said to nobody. “Volkov must want her very badly.”
What the Bayou Keeps
Dane
The woman did not cry.
Dane noted it the way he noted everything: weather, exits, the weight of the gun under his left arm, the number of minutes between one problem and the next. Most people cried when they watched their home burn. Delphine Marchand sat in the back seat with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them and watched the orange glow shrink in the rear window until the city swallowed it.
Then she turned around, looked straight at him, and said, “Give me my painting.”
He took it out of his coat and handed it to her. She held it in her lap with both hands, newspaper and all, and didn’t speak again.
Bishop drove south.
The city lights fell away. The road narrowed. The air through the vents changed from asphalt and exhaust to salt and green rot and something sweet, like flowers dying in warm water. Soon there was only the black road and the black water on both sides, and the frogs screaming in the dark so loud they drowned the engine.
Dane had been born in the city. He had never liked this part. Too much space. Too many places for a body to go.
Bishop loved it. Bishop had grown up out here, in a camp on stilts his grandmother had built with her own hands. When Rook needed something hidden, a man or a crate or a truth, Bishop took it into the bayou, and the bayou kept it.
Tonight, Rook had loaned him to Dane. That was the order. Bishop, the camp, and the doctor, for as long as it took.
Malachi wants her quiet, Rook had said on the phone. Not dead. Not yet. Get her out before the Russians get her, and keep her out.
Not yet. Dane had heard the shape of those words. He heard them now, in the dark, with the woman’s knee an inch from his.
The road ended at a wooden dock with a single bulb burning over it, swarmed by moths. A flat-bottomed boat waited, tied to a post. Bishop cut the engine and got out without a word, and Delphine looked at the water and the boat and the dark, and finally, finally, her composure cracked.
“No,” she said. “No. I’m not getting in that.”
“You are,” Dane said.
“You’re going to drown me out there. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Nobody finds bodies out here.”
“If I wanted you dead,” Dane said, “I would have let the Russians do it. It would have been cheaper.”
She stared at him. Then she laughed. It was a cracked, terrible little sound, but it was a laugh.
“You’re a real comfort, Mr. Kessler.”
“I am not paid to be a comfort.”
“What are you paid to be?”
He thought about it, because she had asked honestly. “On time,” he said.
Bishop held out his hand to her from the boat. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Bishop had a face that animals trusted, long and brown and creased at the eyes, with gray just beginning at his temples. He stood there in the boat with his hand out and waited, patient as the river.
After a long moment, Delphine took it.
The camp sat on tall cypress legs above the water, forty minutes into the maze of channels, with no light anywhere around it but the stars. Bishop’s grandmother had painted it blue a long time ago, and the paint had faded to the color of an old vein. There was a wide porch on three sides, a tin roof, a generator that coughed itself awake when Bishop pulled the cord, and two yellow lamps that came on inside like eyes opening.
The doctor was already there.
Theo Aris sat on the porch steps in his shirtsleeves, a battered leather bag beside him, a cigarette he wasn’t smoking burning between his fingers. He stood up when the boat bumped the ladder and flicked the cigarette into the water.
“So this is the woman who made Volkov burn down half of St. Claude,” he said. “I was expecting someone taller.”
“I was expecting someone who isn’t an asshole,” Delphine said.
Aris grinned. He was the youngest of them, mid-thirties, with dark curly hair that needed cutting, round wire glasses, and the kind of warm, easy face that made frightened people tell him where it hurt. He had lost his medical license four years ago for treating a gunshot wound in his own kitchen and not calling the police. The man he treated had been one of Malachi’s. Malachi had paid him well ever since.
“Fair,” Aris said. “You’re bleeding, by the way.”
She looked down. So did Dane. Her left forearm was dark and wet from elbow to wrist. A long cut, from the broken glass on the back stairs. She hadn’t said a word.
Dane felt something he did not have a name for. It sat behind his ribs like a swallowed stone.
“Inside,” Aris said, gentle now. “Let me look.”
The main room of the camp was simple. A wood table, four mismatched chairs, a small kitchen against one wall, a faded couch, shelves of canned food and old paperbacks swollen from the damp. Two small bedrooms off the back.
Aris sat Delphine at the table under the lamp and cleaned the cut with something that made her hiss through her teeth. Bishop put a pot of coffee on the stove. It smelled of chicory, dark and bitter. Dane stood by the door, because someone should, and watched.
“Nine stitches,” Aris said. “Maybe ten. You want something for the pain?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? I have very good drugs. Excellent drugs. Some of them are even legal.”
“I want to stay awake,” she said, and looked across the room at Dane. “I want to know what’s going on.”
Aris glanced at Dane over his glasses. Dane said nothing. Aris shrugged and threaded his needle.
“Ask,” Dane said.
She flinched when the needle went in, but her eyes didn’t leave his. “Why does Olek Volkov want her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t know,” Dane said again, “and I don’t ask. The why gets people killed, Miss Marchand. The why is what put you in this chair.”
“Then what does Malachi Vane want with her?”
He was silent.
“She’s a kid,” Delphine said. Her voice shook, and he understood that it was not the needle making it shake. “She’s twenty-three and she weighs nothing and she sells paintings for twenty dollars and hides the money in her sock. Whatever this is, she doesn’t know about it. She doesn’t know anything.”
“I know,” Dane said.
“Then tell me she’s safe.”
He thought of Malachi’s office at the top of the tower. The blue folders. The photographs he had once glimpsed on Malachi’s desk, of a thin girl with a sketchbook, taken months before anyone in Volkov’s world had said the name Calloway.
“She is safe tonight,” he said. It was true. It was the only true thing he could give her.
Delphine looked at him. Then she turned her face to the dark window, and Aris tied off the last stitch, and Bishop set a chipped mug of black coffee in front of her and touched her shoulder once, lightly, the way you would touch a skittish horse.
“You have her name,” Delphine said to the window. “Don’t you.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Longer,” Dane said, “than you have had a license.”
Her shoulders went very still. He watched her understand it: that she had been hired to find someone who was already found. That the thing she thought she was protecting, the name in her head that she never wrote down, had never been hers to protect at all.
“Then what am I?” she asked quietly. “If you don’t need what I know. Why am I here?”
“Because Volkov does need it,” Dane said. “And as long as you are alive and he can’t find you, he has to wonder what you told us. That keeps him careful. Careful men don’t start wars.”
“So I’m a bargaining chip.”
“You’re a delay.”
She laughed again, the same cracked laugh. “You really are terrible at this.”
“I’m told.”
Aris snapped off his gloves. “Okay,” he said brightly. “That was depressing. Who wants to eat? I brought sausage. I brought rice. I brought a bottle of wine that cost more than this house.”
“This house cost nothing,” Bishop said from the stove.
It was the first thing he’d said since the car. Delphine turned to look at him, surprised. Bishop shrugged.
“Grand-mère built it,” he said. “With wood from a church that fell down in a storm. Cost nothing. Worth everything.”
And for the first time since Dane had found her in the dark, Delphine Marchand’s face softened.
She fell asleep on the couch with the painting held against her chest, still in its newspaper. Or she seemed to. Bishop covered her with a thin cotton blanket. Aris went out to the porch to smoke the cigarettes he never actually smoked. Dane sat at the table and wound his watch.
It had been his grandfather’s. An old diver’s watch, steel, heavy as a stone, which had never once stopped in fifty years because his grandfather had wound it every morning of his life, and then Dane had, every morning since the funeral. Twenty turns of the crown. Not nineteen. Not twenty-one.
His phone buzzed against the wood.
He took it out onto the far side of the porch, away from Aris’s smoke and away from the open window over the couch. The frogs had gone quiet. The water below was black glass. Somewhere out in the dark, something large slid into it without a splash.
“She’s secure,” Dane said.
“Good.” Malachi Vane’s voice was soft and deep and very calm. It was always calm. Dane had once heard him order a man’s death in the same tone he used to order breakfast. “What does she know?”
“Everything she found, she found in two days. She has the name. She has the address. She says she never wrote either down.”
“Do you believe her?”
Dane looked through the window at the woman on the couch, the blanket half off her shoulder, the bandage white on her arm.
“Yes.”
“Belief is not knowledge, Dane.” A pause. Ice in a glass. “She met the girl today. Face to face. Did she tell you that?”
Dane said nothing. He hadn’t known. He should have known.
“She spoke to her,” Malachi went on. “She bought a painting. She was seen. If Volkov’s people take her, and they will try, she is the shortest road in this city to the one thing I cannot afford to lose. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.”
“The investigator is a loose thread,” Malachi said gently. “Hold her as long as she is useful. And if she becomes a risk, cut it. Cleanly. I will not ask twice.”
The line went dead.
Dane stood on the porch for a long time with the phone in his hand. The watch on his wrist ticked against the silence, steady as a heart that had never been told to stop.
Through the window, Delphine stirred and pulled the little painting closer.
He went back inside, sat down at the table facing the couch, and did not close his eyes until dawn.
