Catalogue Raisonne (16 page)

“If you'll remember” – eyeing the black book nervously – “I wasn't
on
the panel the night of the incident. Owen was.”

“Right. Right.”

Silence. I moved my thumb. “So I guess he'll be interviewing Owen.”

“We do have a phone here.” Indicating it. “I suggested to the officer that he could save himself time by simply calling Owen, and he agreed that was a good idea. Unfortunately, I don't think Owen was completely
awake
. He lives with his mother, as you know.” I stopped moving my thumb. Sometimes, if you let Stefan transfer his disgust to another and didn't distract him, you could get useful results. “The officer kept having to repeat his questions, which were very basic. ‘Were you on duty that night and when did you last see Robert?' Owen actually seemed to have trouble
remembering
. But finally, I guess he did.”

“That was it?”

“Yes, Paul. It was.” I raised my thumb in the LogBook pages. “Except for the officer asking me if it was usual procedure for an off-duty guard to return to the gallery at midnight.”

“So you sent him upstairs to verify it with someone who could give security clearance.”

Stefan looked stunned by my telepathy. “Yes, Paul.”

I opened the LogBook and flipped back two pages. When I saw the blank page, Sunday, May 13, the sounds of Stefan's protest dwindled into fuzz, fussing hands became blurs. Blank. No one in or out. And over a page, carrying on from midnight into Monday – no one there either. Blank. But what did that mean with Owen on, sunk in
Ubik
or
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
For the first time ever possibly, I wished that Stefan, who read nothing and let no printed matter distract him from his duties, had been on that night. Robert would be in jail now, but alive.

I stood for longer than usual in front of the yellow elevator door. Not forgetting what I had to do, but unwilling for some moments to do it. There were days – and this was turning into one of them – when the gallery seemed like nothing more than a giant kindergarten, a four-story Jungle Gym hung with squabbling, hair-pulling kiddies.

Finally I said, “Could I have access upstairs, please?”

“Yes, Paul. You have it now.”

Hans called a little meeting by the front desk in the afternoon. He'd been upstairs collecting donations for flowers and a card to be sent to the funeral home from the gallery. “Hard to squeeze a bill out of some of those wallets,” he muttered, his jaw beginning to lock and load. But then he relaxed again. “Except for that lady of yours, Paul. She's a good girl, Angela.”

“How much?” L said.

Hans frowned. “It's not a toll both, son. I've been suggesting five dollars from everyone.”

But when I handed over ten dollars, he handed one of the bills back. “Just the required, Paul. Same for everyone.” Extravagance as great, or
a greater, sin than stinginess. And one far more often on display in the gallery.

We were looking in the Yellow Pages for a florist when Mrs. Soames came out from the gift shop. Limping, swimming in her yellow smock, hair slightly askew, she could seem quite addled at times; though not at all, just now.

“I wasn't eavesdropping,” she said, “but I couldn't help but overhear you planning the flowers. It's a lovely idea. But – if you don't mind my asking – how much money do you have to work with?”

Hans told her.

“Well. Of course any decent florist will make you up a nice arrangement for that. Perfectly acceptable. But for half the price you could walk over to the market – it's Tuesday, isn't it? Yes, well. You can get all kinds of fresh spring flowers and make up your own bunch. Now I'm not trying to interfere here – and if you say the word I'll just buzz off – but I'd be happy to arrange them for you. None of you men, I don't imagine, is much good at that. I'll make them up in one of our long white gift boxes, with a nice tall vase tucked in on the side. And a card. We can do all that – yes we can – and for less than you've got in your hand. It would make a lovely gesture. And the personal touch is always best, don't you think?”

What do you say in the face of wisdom and class? Nothing but yes, if you can help it.

Ramon, our specialist in things fresh and lovely, volunteered to take down Mrs. Soames's suggestions of flowers and go over to the market to purchase them. When he returned, you could actually smell the blooms before he got up the stairs, a draft of May blowing in the door.

Ramon went back to what he'd been working on with Hans, some repair or maintenance somewhere. L was on the desk. Hans, with a glance into the vacant galleries, motioned me to follow Mrs. Soames, now tottering back into the gift shop under her load of flowers.

Helping Mrs. Soames on a non-addled day mainly meant standing by and listening as she went about her business. I watched as she laid down the plastic bags Ramon had brought back and spread the flowers out on them, trying some preliminary arrangements, bunches grouped and altered and set aside for the moment, as she used the gift shop
scissors to snip the stems and leaves. Quick, deft, practiced movements. Almost automatic. You had to wonder how many weddings, funerals, graduation days had gone into them. Mrs. Soames was tiny now. Bent with age, but she must always have been petite. The scent of her perfume mingled well with the flower scents; tasteful mists, probably expensive. The brown age spots on her cheeks and forehead were blurred by skilfully applied makeup, but she could do nothing about the ones appearing on her scalp beneath her thinning hair. It was hard not to see her as a diminished person. And – to judge by the dish detail she'd been given at the Gala Preview, a typical Mrs. Soames assignment – very few even tried. Still, the gems behind her swollen knuckles proclaimed that she had once been, and perhaps still was, precious to someone.

“It's hard to lose a brother,” she was saying. “Hard to lose anybody. But especially when you're young.” As she murmured her arthritic fingers never stopped moving. Still nimble, dextrous. Muscle memory. Guessing her age to be near eighty, I mentally placed her back in time: a child before the First World War. Already middle-aged in the Second. Someone had said that the first sign of aging was an interest in family history. That hadn't hit me yet. But I was starting to position people in relation to world events, adjusting them like a makeup artist and fitting them alongside, or inside, the pictures in history books.

Mrs. Soames chose a tall fluted vase with a solid bottom, hand blown by a local glassworker, its colour a shy spring green. The perfect complement, and one Mrs. Soames would be subsidizing herself, as I saw before she picked the price tag off. When she'd wrapped it in tissue paper, and tucked it beside the stems of the flowers lying on tissue in the box, she found an equally tasteful card.

“Should we try to collect signatures?” she asked, her clouded eyes flicking up at me. Whatever she saw in my face must have been answer enough. She made a clucking sound in her cheek. “You're right, darn it.”

And signed it herself, “With deepest sympathy from the gallery staff,” in beautiful flowing script.

Ramon was dispatched to deliver the box to the funeral home named in the
Witness
. I stood beside Mrs. Soames in the gift shop
doorway. She was looking across the lobby at the top of the stairs down which Ramon had just disappeared with the long white box, rocking back and forth slightly, like a thin yellow stalk swaying in a breeze.

“Do you know Claudia, then?” I said.

“Who, dear? Oh, well, no, I wouldn't say know, exactly. But yes, we meet all of the artists.” She made the clucking sound, just faintly, again. “That poor girl.”

Then, peering fiercely up at me: “Come with me.”

I followed her to the art rental area at the back of the shop. When I'd first started the rental paintings had been in big bins, like items at a discount sale, awkward to flip through and sometimes damaging to the works. Then Hans and Peter, collaborating well for once, had devised the present system, a modification of the one in use in the gallery vaults. They'd constructed large rectangular metal frames spanned by metal mesh, the links thick enough to support even large works, and then hung these on heavy hinges so that they swung freely back and forth. You could leaf through the row of them like the pages of a huge book. But they were heavy, especially when hung with paintings on both sides. Mrs. Soames – and even some of the younger volunteers – often had to get our help to move them. It had been years since I'd paid much attention to the pictures inside the pages I was swinging.

Now I did. “Stop,” Mrs. Soames said when I was about six screens in, but I'd already seen them.

“Some of the other volunteers don't even show them any more. They say if they haven't rented out in six months, not even once, why bother? But I think if we're going to accept an artist's work, then we owe it to him – or her in this case – to show it. Walter thinks she's quite good actually. He says if people knew what they were looking at they'd be flying out of here.” She squinted and her tongue went into her cheek, but no sound came out this time.

I remembered Walter's praise, over Neale's demurral, of the “Two Figures” painting in the CHOP show. These, though very different, were clearly by the same artist. You couldn't be sure if she was slumming or just confused. But there was a signature of style, and of raw skill. And an attitude. They reminded me of Duchamp's Mona Lisa with a moustache. But seventy years after Duchamp, wasn't the gesture
trivial? “Adjusted Vermeer” showed a centre square of the famous jug and hand, a bit of blue-purple dress, close-painted, highly finished – not as good as Vermeer, of course, but you had to lean in a bit to be sure of that – but then the woman above this careful square became sickly – sketchily painted, with ugly cross-hatching, some actual gouges in the paint, like Munch's dying sister. We'd had a show of “Northern Images”, meaning some prints from Oslo, and the highlight had been a woodcut version of “The Sick Child”. “Adjusted Manet” was more ambitious, and maybe a little more successful. The nude woman in the centre was pretty much as Manet had had her, but the flanking men at the picnic were smeary and globby-sombre, heading toward Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud territory as they leaned in with gaping, wound-like mouths.

“I think she's mixed up,” Mrs. Soames said.

Apart from lacking detail, it wasn't a bad summary of what I was thinking.

“There's a space at the bottom. Was there another one before?” Something told me they wouldn't hang another artist's painting next to hers. It wouldn't be fair – from their point of view or mine.

“Yes. Yes there was. Believe it or not, we did sell one.”

“Who to?”

“Oh, I don't remember. Anyway, I wouldn't tell you if I did.” Her sly glance up at me came from the Manet girl more than from the Vermeer. She'd been young, I should remember, and not shy. “It's gallery policy to keep some distance between the buyer and the seller. Walter calls it a ‘discreet distance'. How long do you think we'd be in business if they didn't have to go through us? Of course, some of them find out. And then that's the last we see of them. We've lost some of our best renters that way. You can't really blame them.”

“But you must keep the receipts. Some records.”

“Oh, well. We're swimming in paper here most of the time. But it all goes upstairs eventually. Whoosh. Good riddance, I say. I can't stand clutter.”

Art rental was a busy place that afternoon. The only part of the gallery that was. Shortly before closing, John Piccone came up the stairs in a huff. I heard hoarse wheezing breaths, and when I saw him, his bulbous face flushed with blasts of colour, sweat fringing his curly grizzled hair, the similarity with Arcimboldi's vegetable man was sealed. It might have been the title even more than the picture. “Summer”. Growth in a hurry.