Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

  He stared at me. “What did I tell you about making assumptions as far as I’m concerned? Don’t do it, Mr. Charbonnet. You make a mistake.”

  He swiveled in his seat and patted Sally’s hand where she gripped the chair. She pushed him out into the hall.

  TWELVE

  To complete the deal, Tommy Smallwood wired his payment to an offshore bank account in George Town, Grand Cayman, an island in the West Indies south of Cuba. I was sitting in Rhys’s office when a representative with the bank called and spoke to Joe Butler, confirming the deposit. I was also there when, moments later, after Joe had left the room, Rhys reached Smallwood on his cell phone and told him she would drop off the painting within the hour.

  “Start over at the beginning,” I said, when she put the phone down. “I’m still not clear about some of the details.”

  “Pay attention this time. You’re supposed to be such a great reporter.”

  “I never claimed that.”

  Only weeks before, Rhys said, she had dispatched Joe to Grand Cayman strictly for the purpose of exploring options that would allow her to conceal a large deposit from the U.S. government. After a few days Joe had called from his hotel room. “You wouldn’t believe this place,” he had said. “They’ve got a total of five, maybe six, traffic lights, and there’s all of twenty-five thousand people living here. But they have more than five hundred banks. I shit you not, boss. They got more banks than New Orleans has daiquiri stores and strip joints put together.”

  Later in the conversation Joe had said, “So what you do, you wire the money to this account, okay? And then the bank does two things. First, it gives you Visa platinum cards with basically unlimited credit lines and lets you access the money using these cards. The bank doesn’t inform the IRS that you own the account or that it even exists. The second thing it does, you ever hear of a Dutch corporation? Well, basically, that lets you secretly borrow mortgage funds from the money you deposit. In other words, this Dutch corporation lets you withdraw whatever you want but makes it look like you’re actually borrowing the money. You get caught,” Joe had told her, “and that’s our ass. Tax evasion, wire fraud. They’ll fine us, throw us in jail, make us suck our thumbs and say we’re sorry over and over for a very long time. But I don’t think we will get caught.” When Rhys didn’t say anything, Joe Butler had added, “Not any more than I think Tommy Smallwood will catch us.”

  I squinted at her now across the piles of paper on the desk. “Repeat that last part again, would you, please?”

  “He said the U.S. government wouldn’t catch us any more than Tommy Smallwood would catch us.”

  “I thought that’s what you said. Now what do you mean?”

  She switched on the episcope, and even before she projected the first image on the wall I felt myself sliding back in my chair, anticipating her next revelation. An image of the mural came up. She gave me time to look at it. She then removed the photo from under the projector and replaced it with a second photo. What appeared to be the same image flashed against the screen.

  “There’s no way I could let that evil sonofabitch have it,” she said.

  “So you sold him a fake?”

  “I sold him a copy.”

  “Which one was at the hotel? Was it the real Asmore or the copy?”

  “Both,” she said. “The one Hairy Mary and the others inspected at the preview was the original. I switched them out after you and I had dinner in the room. That meant coming back here to the studio in the U-Haul and picking up Joe and the copy. We didn’t finish getting everything in place until almost five o’clock in the morning. That’s one reason why I was so tired yesterday. When I finally brought the hammer down I thought I’d collapse from exhaustion.”

  “Was it Joe who made the copy?”

  “Yes, it was. For some reason that’s beyond me Joe has the ability to get inside Levette’s head. It’s uncanny. It’s as though he gets into character, say, as an actor would, and the part he’s playing is Asmore. For the weeks when he was painting the copy he insisted I call him ‘Levette.’ I told him to let me know if ever he had a sudden urge to jump from a bridge.”

  “Funny, Rhys.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t funny at all. But I’ve been going on fumes for weeks. Both of us have. We used an old canvas, circa 1940, that we pulled out of a restaurant that had closed in Mid-City. Joe stripped it, then primed it with gesso. Next we made a tracing to work from. We used slides and a projector and the episcope to get the color and the brushstrokes right and all the subtle variations. If Hairy Mary happens to black-light the copy, she’ll see the same areas of retouch fluoresce that she saw on the original. Making the copy was time-consuming but a lot easier than you might think—easy for a professional conservator. The best fakes in the history of art were made by painting restorers.”

  “So if it’s the copy that’s waiting outside in the U-Haul, where’s the original?”

  “You’ll have the answer soon enough. Better yet, I’ll show you. Why don’t you drive with me to Prytania Street? I’m sure Tommy Smallwood would love nothing more than an opportunity to collapse in your arms again.”

  Past the tall iron fence the black gardeners cut grass, whacked weeds and watered flower beds still sprouting color from the summer planting. On the lower gallery black maids in uniforms used straw brooms to remove cobwebs from the corners of the ceiling. On the upper gallery a black butler wearing white gloves served coffee from a silver pot. When the cup was filled, the man bowed and left Tommy Smallwood alone under the baskets of impatiens and lipstick vine swaying in the breeze.

  “What year is this?” I said.

  “The same one we’ve been living for too damned long,” Rhys answered.

  As she squared the truck against the curb, Smallwood stood and welcomed us with a wave, then disappeared in the house. In minutes he was in the garden, striding toward us, his body naked but for a white Speedo swimsuit, a towel draped around his neck and a pair of flip-flops. Past the suit’s polyester weave one could see the stubborn knot at his crotch. “Lift your feet up off the floor, Jack. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Come on,” I said and opened my door. “You’re almost done.”

  Smallwood had just finished his daily regimen of laps in the pool, and he smelled pleasantly of chlorine and cocoa butter. He was both polite and solicitous, inviting us to join him on the gazebo, where he would have sandwiches and lemonade served. One of his girls, he said, made the best cucumber sandwich in town.

  “No, thank you,” Rhys said. “I have appointments at the studio.”

  She raised the truck’s rear gate and Smallwood put a couple of fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle. The men in the yard looked up. “You think I have all day?” he shouted. Before I could offer to help, six of them were removing the panels and carrying them to the house.

  “I had to let Mary go,” Smallwood said to Rhys, as she was pulling the gate back down. “It’d been coming for a long time. You remember the William Aiken Walker I bought at Neal a while back? It was one of his cotton kingdom paintings, showing all your Africans in the fields. Well, I asked Mary to make the half-breed a little blacker. I call him a half-breed, but he could of been a Mexican. All she had to do was paint the man’s face and arms. Give him a black dab here, a black dab there. She refused to do it. I told her she was being unreasonable and fired her on the spot.”

  Rhys didn’t say anything. She stared up at him, blocking the sun with the flat of her hand.

  “So I need somebody to look after my paintings and my pottery,” Smallwood continued. “And, seeing the job you did restoring my Levette, I thought I’d offer you the position, Miss Goudeau. Conservator of the Thomas Smallwood Collection. It’s yours, dear, if you want it.”

  “It’s mine?” She touched her chest.

  “All yours. What do you say?”

  Rhys was slow to respond, and when she did, it surprised Smallwood no more than me. She began to laugh so hard that t
ears tracked down her face and she lost her breath and seemed to have a hard time getting it back. She fell against the truck and let out a shout that scattered pigeons from the eaves of the garage and drove the doves from the olive trees. The gardeners dropped their tools and stood staring. The maids lowered their brooms. By now Smallwood was laughing, too. It was the laugh of a man who couldn’t decide what was so goddamned funny.

  “No,” Rhys said.

  “No? No what?”

  “No,” she said again, and lunged at him.

  I managed to grab her and pull her away before she could connect with more than a couple of blows. They were roundhouse punches, coming from way up high, both of them landing squarely against Smallwood’s head. He stumbled backward, tripped on the curb and fell to the sidewalk, skinning his knees when he met the bricks. A look of terrible confusion was on his face. Leaves and debris from the ground clung to the thick slab at his waist. I went to help him up but Rhys yelled for me not to touch him. “Get in the truck,” she said. I didn’t move for a second and she said, “Jack, in the truck.”

  She was standing over him now, hands balled into fists. A thin rope of mucus hung from her nose and her mouth was distorted in an angry shape. She seemed to be trying to decide her next move. Her eyes grew large and she snorted as she suddenly seemed to understand what she’d done. But rather than leave then or help Smallwood off the ground, she raised her hand and slapped him once hard across the face. Her open palm meeting his cheek sounded like a rifle shot. Tommy Smallwood crawled back against the fence and wrapped his head in his arms.

  “That last one was for Levette,” she said.

  Toward the end of the year the Wheeler Beauty Academy closed. The few students who were left enrolled in other hair colleges in town and Rhys hired Rondell Cherry to work a variety of jobs at the Guild’s studio. At first she had him answering the phone, cleaning up and making deliveries, but soon he was apprenticing in the frame department. Under Joe Butler’s direction, he learned how to repair antique frames and how to carve and gild moulding. Rhys paid him more than double his previous salary and gave him a lab coat with his name scripted in red thread on the chest. When she finally decided to buy the company a new vehicle—a black SUV with tinted windows to keep people from seeing inside—she sold Cherry the Guild’s old van for less than book value, which was all of five hundred dollars. Since he liked them, Rhys let him keep the magnetic signs on the doors advertising the Guild.

  “Do you ever miss the school?” I asked Cherry one day at the studio.

  He was applying small squares of gold leaf to rabbit glue lathered on the surface of a frame. “I miss the kids,” he said. “They were great. That’s about it.”

  “What about Mrs. Wheeler?”

  “I don’t miss her cigarette smoke, that’s for sure.”

  “But do you miss Mrs. Wheeler the person?”

  “I don’t not miss her, let me put it to you that way.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me, Mr. Cherry. How one doesn’t not miss a person.”

  He’d been listening to music, and presently he put his headphones back on. “You don’t miss them, you don’t not miss them,” he explained. “Look, Jack, that’s the best I can do.” There was a look in his eyes that reminded me of the one I saw when Rhys and I first met him, when he was cleaning the floor and it seemed he could’ve made us both disappear with his mop. “You might not have nothing to do,” he said, “but this frame won’t get done by itself. Let me back to my work, government man.”

  Patrick Marion removed the High Life for-sale sign a few days after we auctioned off the mural, just as another sign was going up in front of the beauty school. Rhys and I checked on the old place whenever we traveled to Riverbend and visited my mother, taking Magazine Street to make sure the property hadn’t sold yet. “Every time I see it the crack in my heart gets a little deeper,” Rhys said one day, as we drove by.

  Sometime later, when I was alone, I surrendered to a spirit of nostalgia and pulled over by the curb and had another long look at the building, rather as Mrs. Wheeler used to do. Its façade was in worse shape than ever, with the broadsheets hanging like tree bark in the process of shedding, and more gaps in the roof layer where shingles had come off. The electric sign by the curb had been turned off for good, and the one over the door had been removed. The only positive change was the grass growing on the front lawn. There were more weeds than grass, but at least it was green.

  The windows upstairs, I noticed, were still black holes without curtains, dead eyeballs staring out at the world. Kids with rocks had broken more of them.

  I’d thought Gail Wheeler was seeing the ghost of her husband past the dusty panes, and for a moment as I stood there I had an unsettling feeling that I was being watched. It wasn’t Jerome Wheeler, however. “You know how we know things?” Rhys had said months before. “How as human beings we just know things or at least intuit them?” It came to me who was looking out at me from a window upstairs. I knew.

  “You’re dead,” I called out. “You’ve been dead.”

  Cars moved past on the street and I looked around to see if anyone had heard me. I was glad Rhys wasn’t there. She surely would’ve thought me insane. But then I shouted out again, and for the same reason as before. I knew.

  “What else, Levette? What else do you want?”

  I never did see his face, and I left wishing I hadn’t stopped. But somewhere on the drive home, down where you leave the dense clutter of houses on Orleans Avenue and arrive at the old bayou, I heard a voice in my head. It wasn’t the voice Rhys had heard telling her to save Levette’s mural. And it wasn’t my own voice, reminding me the way it does when I need to stop at the store and pick up sandwich meat and a loaf of bread. It was the voice the world gives to people when they really need to hear something. “I don’t want you to forget me,” the voice said. “Jack, don’t forget.”

  A few days later Rhys and I were having dinner at my mother’s house. “My lease for the firehouse is up in May,” Rhys said between bites of crawfish étouffée. “If the old post office station is still available, I’m going to buy it and move the Guild there. I can’t see continuing to pay rent to that jerk on Prytania Street.”

  “Why, that sounds wonderful, darling,” my mother said.

  I waited until I’d swallowed my food before letting her know what I thought of the idea. “Hasn’t buying one old place cured you of ever wanting another?”

  “No,” she said. “Just as I’m sure that owning two old places won’t keep me from wanting a third. This is who I am, Jack. And it’s what I do.” She put her fork down and extended her hands across the table and shook them in my face. “I fix things.”

  “She fixed me,” I said to my mother.

  “You…?” And my mother laughed. “No, Jack, you remain a work in progress.”

  Rhys gave her a wink. “Give me time, Mrs. Charbonnet. Just give me time…”

  I saw Mrs. Wheeler only last week outside Canal Place, a shopping center on the edge of the French Quarter. She was there with a woman who looked to be about my age, the two of them seated at a Starbucks patio table with shopping bags collected at their feet. Each had a coffee in a big paper cup, and a cigarette burning in a tin tray. Everything Mrs. Wheeler was wearing this day looked new. Her blouse still had fold lines and creases, as though she’d pulled it off a store shelf only minutes before. She reminded me of the late comedian Minnie Pearl, who kept the price tag hanging from her hat to make sure everyone saw what she’d paid for it. When Mrs. Wheeler didn’t pick me out in the crowd, I thought about moving on and going about my business. But then as I was crossing the street I said to myself, “And where have your manners run off to?” I decided to see how she was doing.

  “Oh, sure,” she said when I told her who I was. “I remember you. You’re that cop with NOPD that came looking for the child molester.”

  “Actually, ma’am, I’m Rhys Goudeau’s friend.”

  “Rhys Goudeau
,” said the other woman, perking up. “Isn’t she the one who hired Rondell Cherry in that bad neighborhood? Oh, I love Rondell. I hope they don’t shoot him. They shoot people over there, you know?”

  It was Alice O’Neil, the niece who’d represented Mrs. Wheeler when the government came to investigate her phony grant applications. Like me, they’d traveled to the Quarter to shop for Carnival costumes. They’d veered off track when they saw the sale signs posted in the mall. Saks had some real bargains in cosmetics, and they recommended I poke my head in Mignon Faget, if I needed any jewelry. Maybe tomorrow they would shop for costumes; they’d spent all the money the budget would allow for today.

  I finally got Mrs. Wheeler on the subject that, if I were to be honest, was the real reason I’d stopped by their table. “Whatever happened to the case the government was building against you?” I said, employing the Rhys Goudeau approach to interviewing, that being to bluntly come right out and ask the question. “Did they ever bring charges?”

  “Charges?” And now Alice O’Neil dragged hard on her cigarette. “I think one of them lectured her once. Pointed a finger. Didn’t one of them get smart with you, Nanny?”

  “Yes, one did. Real smart.”

  “They liked an excuse to leave Baton Rouge and come visit New Orleans, I think,” Alice O’Neil continued. “They would stop by the school for half an hour and poke around then drive to the Quarter for a poboy and lap dances on Bourbon Street. Make a real day of it.” Alice sucked on her cigarette, and Mrs. Wheeler did the same. “They were men, in other words,” Alice said with a note of finality.

  “They were men,” Mrs. Wheeler repeated, with her own note. She flicked a cone of ash in the tray and looked at me. “What are you going to be?” she said.