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broad, flat nose dominated his face, and his skinny lips were pulled back in a grin, revealing gray, diseased teeth. His skull, pocked and dented, sprouted a tuft of frizz over each shrunken ear. Unlike that unfortunate street person who looked like Joe Butler, when you happened upon this man you did not take him out for fried eggs and ham, and at night he did not rate a mention in your prayers. Instead, you ran from him screaming for 911. Another of the Guild’s name tags had been applied to the portrait. “Hello,” it said. “My name is… Jack.”
    “Hey, bro, you weren’t supposed to see that,” Joe said.
    “Then Rhys shouldn’t have put it there.”
    “Rhys didn’t put it there, Mr. Charbonnet, I did. I should let you punch me out. My apologies. I mean it.”
    “Am I missing something here?” I said. “We’ve never met before, have we?”
    “No, we haven’t. But Rhys told me about Mr. Marion’s dinner party. How you had too much to drink and rolled around on the floor looking up skirts and everything. Also, Mr. Charbonnet, about how nice-looking you are in person, unlike the little picture they used to run over your stories in the paper.”
    “Rhys knew me? She knew I wrote for the
Picayune?”
    He shrugged. “What can I tell you?”
    “I don’t know, Joe. What can you? Is there more?”
    “Just that you were up on the subject of Levette. I don’t mean to leap to conclusions about you, Mr. Charbonnet, but they always try to get to Rhys that way. They fake it. They try to get her to the museum because they think that’s the quickest route to get her in bed. I’ve seen so many come and go by now, shit, bro, maybe I’m cynical. The last one pretended to be related to Picasso. Uncle Pablo, he called him.”
    Patrick stood studying the hideous face in the painting with his hands held together behind his back. “Others might need instant ancestors,” he said, “but not you, Jack. This man has got to be the real thing. The resemblance is… well, shall I say it?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Uncanny.”
    “Can we see the Asmore now?” I said to Joe Butler.
    They were still laughing as he led the way up a narrow oak stairway to the second floor. Joe banged a fist against a door, and after a couple of deadbolts were unlocked, Rhys stepped forward and greeted Patrick with a hug. I was hoping for the same treatment but all she offered was a handshake, and a less than enthusiastic one at that. It was at this moment that I understood how she felt about me. Rhyswas interested. Otherwise she would’ve embraced me as she had Patrick.
    “Jack’s my good-luck charm,” Patrick said to Rhys, misreading the slight. “Plus, I thought I could use some protection traveling to your ‘hood.”
    “Good, keep thinking that,” she said. “I’ve run a studio and lived in neighborhoods all over this city and I’ve had fewer problems here than in all of the others combined. I’ll keep the studio in Central City until this new generation of Goth kids and computer geeks finds us. I see a Bill Gates wannabe, or a boy with dyed black hair in ponytails, and wearing black clothes and jackboots, and quoting from Anne Rice—when those people come snooping around I am definitely a gone pecan.”
    The second floor, decked like the first with shiny old boards, was where the Guild repaired paintings, porcelain and pottery. Rhys introduced us to her staff of artists, two of them young women who sat on plastic lunchroom chairs before easels holding paintings, the third an older man in a lab coat who stood at a worktable cleaning a picture of a riverboat. “You gentlemen have met Joe,” Rhys said. “He’s the Guild’s resident jack-of-all-trades, as proficient at building an exact replica of a Newcomb-Macklin frame as he is at filling in paint loss on a Martin Johnson Heade still life. Sarah and Morgan, like Joe, are retouch specialists who also patch and line paintings in need. Le-land here is the one who does all our