She made a sound he was not expecting, something choked and awful that seemed ripped out of her heart.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a panic. “I’m sorry. We can just forget I even mentioned it. I didn’t mean to make you cry. That was one of the conditions, you see, that you not get hurt.”
“Get hurt?” she said, voice broken with tears. “I’m going to be worse than hurt. Do you have any idea what he’ll do to me? Any at all? He pushed my mother down the stairs. She barely recovered after I was born. She managed to get away, but she had to leave me, and every letter she writes is ‘Please come! Please!’ But I mentioned it to him once, and….” She shuddered. “So you’re likely here to steal from my family, and all I can do is beg you to take me with you!”
Felix’s heart beat unsteadily in his throat. “I can’t!” he gasped. “We have no place to put you. Danny would get busted. Me and him, we’re practically invisible, but you? You’d be like a signal flare.”
“But….” She caught her breath. “God, please. You’re the first real human I’ve talked to since he brought us here. Everyone’s so afraid of him. He’s going to marry me off to one of his business contacts and… and they’ll kill me. They’ll have to, because….” He couldn’t follow what she said next in the flurry of weeping. He asked again and again, but all he got was “I didn’t know him, but he was sweet, and I didn’t see him afterward and… and… and….”
And then he got it. Got it. Got why she was so afraid, so desperate that she’d run off with a con man and his lover, just to get away.
“Shh,” he soothed, holding her head to his chest like he’d seen people in the movies do. “Shh. We’ll fix it. Danny’s smart. He can fix anything. He’s street smart. He knows how to survive.”
She nodded against him, calming down. He finally took her to her room, afraid her father would get there and find they’d actually communicated. He kissed her on the forehead and grimaced.
“You’ll ask him?” she whispered.
“I’ll ask him.”
The next morning he slipped a note to Berto’s mother. She was their prearranged contact in case the plan changed. Felix remembered that it rained that night—a terrible storm—and he and Julia stood out under the veranda near the garden, waiting for the slight figure to come trudging up the hill, leaning against the wind.
When he finally got to them, Felix practically melted into his arms. He was so glad to see Danny. Couldn’t they just go back to the apartment? God, they’d even go back to the garret if they had to. Where things were simple. They could pick all the pockets and fleece all the tourists and nobody would ever care.
“Felix?” Danny mumbled against his neck. “Felix, there’s a girl here.”
Felix pulled back and nodded at her. “She’d seen us in town,” he admitted. “She’s apparently not blind.”
Danny’s eyes went wide. “So, uh… no adventures tonight?”
Julia shrugged, looking pale in the rain, and held out a small parcel. “It’s an ivory snuff box,” she said, “with a painted miniature of a young noblewoman. Said to be painted by Rosalba Carriera. She painted—”
“In the early 1700s,” Danny murmured. “Was said to have been the face behind the miniatures of the rococo movement. Favored pastels and may have sacrificed her eyesight for little goodies like this.” He took the parcel with reverence. “You want us to fence it or arrange to have your father buy it back from a fence?”
Her eyes sharpened. “That would—” Her mouth flattened, corners twisted up. “—irritate him to no end.”
Danny gave her an equally devious smile. “It would,” he said. Then he took in the two of them. “But that’s not why I’m here, is it?”
Felix told him then about Julia’s pregnancy—probably four months along—and about her father. And her fear.
“He’ll hurt you?” Danny asked, while the olive trees raged around them. The rain poured off the sloped roof of the porch, leaving them alone in the faint glow of the lamp inside. Everything around the three of them was chaos.
“Yes,” Felix said, while Julia nodded. “He’s… he’s more of a bastard than we thought, Danny. She asked to run away with us, but—”
“We don’t have the resources,” Danny said, shaking his head without ego or conceit. He looked at Julia apologetically. “It was one thing for me,” he said, shrugging. “When I started, I could give a blowjob and not give a fuck. You can’t do that.”
Felix remembered breathing in and out hard. He’d suspected. Things Danny had said about using condoms with every guy he’d ever been with until Felix. Things he’d said during lovemaking, when Felix wanted to be sweet. Until that moment, watching Danny assess Julia’s odds of staying alive if she ran away with them right now, tonight, it hadn’t hit him how hard his lover’s life had truly been.
Which made what Danny proposed next both ruthlessly practical and one of the most selfless things Felix had ever seen.
Present
JULIA TOUCHED his elbow, and for a moment, he was still back there in the storm, while the olive trees raged and the rain dripped steadily from the eaves and Danny proposed the salvation and destruction of the three of them.
It took him a moment to put himself back into his Chicago mansion, twenty years later, with the older, wiser, sadder man in front of him as his young and beautiful lover.
No longer young. Still beautiful.
Danny glanced up in the middle of regaling Phyllis with another story—this one about returning a rare miniature of Micaela Almonester to her tiny museum in New Orleans after “liberating” it from her husband’s estate in France. “After all,” he said, finishing the story as he looked Felix in the eyes, “New Orleans was ever her home.”
Felix opened his mouth to say, “And I am always yours,” but at that moment, there was a rattle at the door and Josh walked in, followed by what appeared to be the junior college mafia. At that moment, Felix’s life took a left turn at Albuquerque, fell down the rabbit hole, and ended up in an Elmore Leonard book.
Well, he’d promised himself he’d do anything to get Danny back this summer. It was time to pony up.
Saddle Up
DANNY HAD never been so grateful for anybody’s entrance—not even the copper in Monaco who had taken him to the hospital and saved his life after Kadjic, that bastard, had left him bleeding in an alley for trying to cheat him out of that small country.
For a moment, he’d been lost in Felix’s eyes, surrounded by chaos and blowing olive trees, safe in the circle of his arms as Danny planned to save Julia Dormer just because Felix thought she was worth saving. The moment had spiraled out around them, become every decision thereafter: Felix and Julia’s hasty marriage, their travel back to the States, and ultimately, the thieves’ training ground of a lifetime.
Everything Danny learned about getting in and out of secure buildings, about manipulating businessmen to do what he wanted, about milking a mean-spirited stone for money and making it feel like it had won something, he’d learned by sneaking in and out of Felix’s bed after Felix married Julia Dormer.