"I need you to listen to me," I say. "Something happened this morning and I need you to listen before you say anything."
After a beat, the tone of his voice shifts. Not alarmed yet, just attentive. "I'm listening."
I tell him everything. The blind, the engines, the containers, the girls. Frame thirty-one. The tip line, the agent, the café on Chartres where I sat across from the man I photographed in the bayou, smiled at him, gave him nothing, and walked out the back. I tell it fast, in order, because that's the only way I know how to tell it.
When I finish, David is quiet for a long moment.
"You're sure it was him," he says. "The same man."
"I spent an hour looking at his face on a laptop screen before I walked into that café. Yes. I'm sure."
Another silence. I can hear him thinking, the particular quality of David's silences when he's not stalling but actually working something through. He was a wire photographer for twenty years before he became an editor, and he has the specific load-bearing steadiness of a person who has been in badsituations and knows that panic is something you afford yourself afterward, when there's time.
"Where are you right now?" he asks.
"A bar on Bourbon Street, in a booth in the back. My back's to the wall."
"Good. Stay there." I can hear him moving, a chair scraping. "Don't go back to the hotel, don't use your credit cards, don't call anyone else until you hear from me. Do you have cash on you?"
"Some."
"Order something. Look like you belong there." He pauses. "Jesslyn. My nephew Daniel, you've heard me mention him."
"Vaguely."
"He's with a motorcycle club out of Magnolia Bend, Mississippi. The Saints Outlaws." He says it carefully, like he's listening to see how I take it. "They're not law enforcement. But they're not the kind of people a dirty DEA agent can reach, either, and right now that's what matters."
I look at the bar around me. The tourists. The bartender. The absolute ordinary midmorning hum of a city that has no idea what I'm sitting in the middle of.
"A motorcycle club," I say.
"I know."
"David, I photograph herons."
"I know what you photograph." His voice is gentle in that immovable way he has, the tone that means he's already decided and is waiting for me to get there too. "Someone will contact you. He'll say I sent him. That's how you'll know. You did the right thing, getting out of that café when you did. Don't second-guess it."
He hangs up.
The bartender brings me a club soda I didn't order. I put a ten on the table and watch the door.
Every person who comes through gets thirty seconds of my full attention before I file them. Tourists with lanyards. A man in his sixties in a linen shirt. Two women with market bags. A kid who can't be more than twenty. I catalogue every face the way I catalogue everything — automatic, thorough, the eye doing its job whether I ask it to or not — and none of them are Delacroix, none of them are anyone he sent.
I pull out my camera anyway. Not to shoot. Just to hold. The weight of it settles something in my chest the way it always does. The familiar solid heft that has been with me in the Atchafalaya at three in the morning, in drought-cracked fields in west Texas, in a December Chesapeake with ice forming on the reeds. It has never once let me down.
The card inside it has frame thirty-one on it. Delacroix in the cargo light, full face, no question and no ambiguity.
He knows someone was in that bayou. He doesn't know what I have.
I put the camera back and watch the door.
Magnolia Bend is four hours from New Orleans. I have no idea when someone is coming, and the morning is sitting on me with both hands. I think about the heron, the great blue that's been working that section of the bayou for two full seasons, the one I've made three separate trips trying to catch in the right light. This morning I had him. The light was exactly right, the bird was still in the water doing what herons do when they think no one is watching.
Then the engines started.
I keep my back to the wall.
It's going to be a long time before anyone says David sent me.
