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said as he parked in front of the firehouse.
    He killed the engine and fitted an antitheft device on the steering wheel. Next he placed an antitheft collar on the steering column. Asa final measure he reached under the dashboard and flipped a hidden switch that cut off the flow of fuel to the car’s engine. “Just for the record,” he said, “by taking these precautions I do not in any way mean to insinuate that this is a bad neighborhood.”
    “If not, then what are you doing, Patrick?”
    “I’m stating emphatically that it’s a bad one. I’m shouting it from the rooftops. Jesus, help us, Jack.” Hands gripping the top of the steering wheel, he took in a deep breath. “Now who’s first to make a run for the door?”
    We rang the bell and several minutes passed before anyone answered—minutes that found Patrick nervously watching in every direction for potential trouble. A number of rusty locks were disengaged, a large door was pulled open and finally a scarecrow appeared in a second door’s thatch of iron bars. “We’re here to see Rhys Goudeau,” Patrick said, a slight tremble warping his delivery.
    “And who should I tell her is calling?”
    “I own the Asmore.”
    “Oh, Mr. Marion. It’s Joe, Joe Butler. Please come in.”
    Butler wore eyeglasses with tortoiseshell frames, each stem patched with electrician’s tape, and a badly stained lab coat with his name in red script on the left breast. He seemed to be trying to cultivate a goatee, although the growth on his chin as easily could’ve been acne. You meet a person this undernourished on the street and you lead him to the nearest diner for a plate of fried eggs and ham. You give him ten dollars when he’s done and include him in your prayers at night.
    “I’m Jack Charbonnet,” I said.
    “So, you’re… oh, okay, nice to meet you, too, Mr. Charbonnet.”
    The ground floor was where the Guild built reproduction frames and repaired old ones. Half a dozen worktables stood in the open space. The walls held corner samples of frames and antique mouldings hanging from ten-penny nails, with old mirrors scattered about and an occasional nineteenth-century portrait bringing color to the room. Each portrait had an ID name tag, such as the kind conventioneers are known to wear: “Hello, My name is…” The obese woman in theblack, scalloped church veil was called Gertrude. The old man with bushy whiskers and a greasy, lascivious grin was Carl. “We spend so much time with them,” Joe Butler explained, “that after a while you feel as though you know them. They’re all dead, most of them forgotten, and so we give them names. People collect these old portraits for one of two reasons: either as shabby-chic decorative items to dress up antique homes or because they want instant ancestors.”
    “Instant ancestors, did you say?” asked Patrick.
    “The nouveaux riches like to pretend they come from something. They have the money, they have the manse with the historic designation in the right Uptown neighborhood, they belong to a prestigious Carnival krewe. The only thing they’re lacking is the pedigree. Rhys can provide that. She buys these things at auction for next to nothing, then restores them and sells them as ancestral portraits to clients eager to say their family’s been in the city since it was founded.”
    “When in fact the family was living in a trailer park in Chalmette only a generation before,” said Patrick.
    “Ah, so you know the type, Mr. Marion.”
    “What are you talking about, Joe? I
am
the type.”
    I walked the length of the room, driving my boot heels hard against the red cypress flooring, freshly washed with mint oil. The walls had a nice patina created from orange brick and layers of desiccated paint, but much to my disappointment there were no firehouse poles or blaze-weary Dalmatians asleep in the shadows. Hanging alone on one side of the room was a portrait of perhaps the most unattractive person I’d ever seen. A