The Goldfinch (67 page)
But the final paragraph of the article leaped out as if it had been printed in red.
As for other art still missing, the hopes of investigators have been revived, and authorities are now looking into several local leads. “The more you shake the trees, the more falls out of them,” said Richard Nunnally, city police liaison with the FBI art crimes unit. “Generally, with art theft, the pattern is for pieces to be whisked out of the country very quickly, but this find in the Bronx only goes to confirm that we probably have quite a few amateurs at work, inexperienced parties who stole on impulse and don’t have the know-how to sell or conceal these objects.” According to Nunnally, a number of people present at the scene are being questioned, contacted, and reinvestigated: “Obviously, now, the thinking is that a lot of these missing pictures may be here in the city right under our noses.”
I felt sick. I got up and dumped the paper in the nearest trash can, and—instead of getting on the subway—wandered back down Canal Street and roamed around Chinatown for an hour in the freezing cold, cheap electronics and blood red carpets in the dim sum parlors, staring in fogged windows at mahogany racks of rotisseried Peking duck and thinking:
shit, shit.
Red-cheeked street vendors, bundled like Mongolians, shouting above smoky braziers. District Attorney. FBI. New information.
We are determined to prosecute these cases to the fullest extent of the law. We have full confidence that other missing works will surface soon. Interpol, UNESCO and other federal and international agencies are cooperating with local authorities in the case.
It was everywhere. All the newspapers had it: even the Mandarin newspapers, the recovered Rembrandt portrait amid streams of Chinese print, peeping out from bins of unidentifiable vegetables and eels on ice.
“
Really
disturbing,” said Hobie later that night at dinner with the Amstisses, brow knitted with anxiety. The recovered paintings were all he’d been able to talk about. “Wounded people everywhere, people bleeding to death, and here’s this fellow snatching paintings off the walls. Carrying them around outside in the
rain.
”
“Well, can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mr. Amstiss, who was on his fourth scotch on the rocks. “After that second heart attack of Mother’s? You can’t believe the mess these goons from Beth Israel left. Black
footprints
all
over the carpet. We were finding plastic needle caps all over the floor for weeks, the dog almost swallowed one. And they broke something too, Martha, something in the china cabinet, what was it?”
“Listen, you won’t catch me complaining about paramedics,” said Hobie. “I was really impressed with the ones we had when Juliet was ill. I’m just glad they found the paintings before they were too badly damaged, it could have been a real—Theo?” he said to me, rather suddenly, causing me to glance up quickly from my plate. “Everything all right?”
“Sorry. I’m just tired.”
“No wonder,” said Mrs. Amstiss kindly. She taught American history at Columbia; she, of the pair, was the one Hobie liked and was friends with, Mr. Amstiss being the unfortunate half of the package. “You’ve had a tough day. Worried about your test?”
“No, not really, “ I said without thinking, and then was sorry.
“Oh, I’m
sure
he’ll get in,” said Mr. Amstiss. “You’ll get in,” he said to me, in a tone implying that any idiot could expect to do so, and then, turning back to Hobie: “Most of these early-college programs don’t deserve the name, isn’t that right, Martha? Glorified high school. Tough pull to get in but then a doddle once you’ve made it. That’s the way it is these days with the kids—participate, show up, and they expect a prize. Everybody wins. Do you know what one of Martha’s students said to her the other day? Tell them, Martha. This kid comes up after class, wants to talk. Shouldn’t say kid—graduate student. And you know what he says?”
“Harold,” said Mrs. Amstiss.
“Says he’s worried about his test performance, wants her advice. Because
he has a hard time remembering things.
Does that take the cake, or what? Graduate student in American history?
Hard time remembering things
?”
“Well, God knows, I have a hard time remembering things too,” said Hobie affably, and rising with the dishes, steered the conversation into other channels.
But late that night, after the Amstisses had left and Hobie was asleep, I sat up in my room staring out the window at the street, listening to the distant two a.m. grindings of trucks over on Sixth Avenue and doing my best to talk myself down from my panic.
Yet what could I do? I’d spent hours on my laptop, clicking rapidly through what seemed like hundreds of articles—
Le Monde, Daily Telegraph, Times of India, La Repubblica,
languages I couldn’t read, every
paper in the world was covering it. The fines, in addition to the prison sentences, were ruinous: two hundred thousand, half a million dollars. Worse: the woman who owned the house was being charged because the paintings had been found on her property. And what this meant, very likely, was that Hobie would be in trouble too—much worse trouble than me. The woman, a retired beautician, claimed she’d had no idea the paintings were in her house. But Hobie? An antiques dealer? Never mind that he’d taken me in innocently, out of the goodness of his heart. Who would believe he hadn’t known about it?
Up, down and around my thoughts plunged, like a bad carnival ride.
Though these thieves acted impulsively and have no prior criminal records, their inexperience will not deter us from prosecuting this case to the letter of the law.
One commentator, in London, had mentioned my painting in the same breath with the recovered Rembrandt:…
has drawn attention to more valuable works still missing, most particularly Carel Fabritius’s
Goldfinch
of 1654, unique in the annals of art and therefore priceless…
I reset the computer for the third or fourth time and shut it down, and then, a bit stiffly, climbed in bed and turned out the light. I still had the baggie of pills I’d stolen from Xandra—hundreds of them, all different colors and sizes, all painkillers according to Boris, but though sometimes they knocked my dad out cold I’d also heard him complaining how sometimes they kept him awake at night, so—after lying paralyzed with discomfort and indecision for an hour or more, seasick and tossing, staring at the spokes of car lights wheeling across the ceiling—I snapped on the light again and scrabbled around in the nightstand drawer for the bag and selected two different colored pills, a blue and a yellow, my reasoning being that if one didn’t put me to sleep, the other might.
Priceless.
I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.
Out on the avenue, a fire engine screamed high and hard before trailing into the distance. Cars, trucks, loudly-laughing couples coming out of the bars. As I lay awake trying to think of calming things like snow, and stars in the desert, hoping I hadn’t swallowed the wrong mix and accidentally killed myself, I did my best to hold tight to the one helpful or comforting fact I’d gleaned from my online reading: stolen paintings were almost impossible to trace unless people tried to sell them, or move them, which was why only twenty per cent of art thieves were ever caught.
The Shop-Behind-the-Shop, continued
i.
S
UCH WAS MY TERROR
and anxiety about the painting that it overshadowed, somewhat, the arrival of the letter: I’d been accepted for the spring term of my early college program. The news was so shocking that I put the envelope in a desk drawer, where it sat alongside a stack of Welty’s monogrammed letter paper for two days, until I worked up the nerve to go to the head of the stairs (brisk scratch of handsaw floating up from the shop) and say: “Hobie?”
The saw stopped.
“I got in.”
Hobie’s large, pale face appeared at the foot of the stairs. “What’s that?” he said, still in his work trance, not quite there, wiping his hands and leaving white handprints on his black apron—and then his expression changed when he saw the envelope. “Is that what I think it is?”
Without a word I handed it to him. He looked at it, then at me—then laughed what I thought of as his Irish laugh, harsh and surprised at itself.
“Well done you!” he said, untying his apron and slinging it across the railing of the stairs. “I’m glad about it, I won’t lie to you. I hated to think of packing you up there all on your own. And when were you going to mention it? Your first day of school?”
It made me feel terrible, how pleased he was. At our celebratory dinner—me, Hobie, and Mrs. DeFrees at a struggling little neighborhood Italian—I looked at the couple drinking wine at the only other occupied table besides our own; and—instead of being happy, as I’d hoped—felt only irritated and numb.
“Cheers!” said Hobie. “The tough part is over. You can breathe a little easier now.”
“You must be
so
pleased,” said Mrs. DeFrees, who all night long had been linking her arm through mine and giving little squeezes and chirrups of delight. (“You look
bien élégante,
” Hobie had said to her when he kissed her on the cheek: gray hair piled atop her head, and velvet ribbons threaded through the links of her diamond bracelet.)
“Model of dedication!” said Hobie to her. It made me feel even worse about myself, hearing him tell his friends how hard I’d worked and what an excellent student I was.
“Well, it’s wonderful.
Aren’t
you pleased? And on such short notice, too! Do try to look a bit happier, my dear. When does he start?” she said to Hobie.
ii.
T
HE PLEASANT SURPRISE WAS
that after the trauma of getting in, the early-college program wasn’t nearly as rigorous as I’d feared. In certain respects it was the least demanding school I’d ever attended: no AP classes, no hectoring about SATs and Ivy League admissions, no back-breaking math and language requirements—in fact, no requirements at all. With increasing bewilderment, I looked around at the geeky academic paradise I’d tumbled into and realized why so many gifted and talented high school kids in five boroughs had been knocking themselves senseless to get into this place. There were no tests, no exams, no grades. There were classes where you built solar panels and had seminars with Nobel-winning economists, and classes where all you did was listen to Tupac records or watch old episodes of
Twin Peaks.
Students were free to concoct their own Robotics or History of Gaming tutorials if they so chose. I was free to pick and choose among interesting electives with only some take-home essay questions at midterm and a project at the end. But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.
I could do what I had to. I’d done it before: gone blank, pushed forward. Four mornings a week I rose at eight, showered in the claw-foot tub in the bath off Pippa’s bedroom (dandelion shower curtain, the smell of her strawberry
shampoo wafting me up into a mocking vapor where her presence smiled all around me). Then—abrupt plunge to earth—I exited the cloud of steam and dressed silently in my room and—after dragging Popchik around the block, where he darted to and fro and screamed in terror—ducked my head into the workshop, said goodbye to Hobie, hoisted my backpack over my shoulder, and took the train two stops downtown.
Most kids were taking five or six courses but I went for the minimum, four: Studio art, French, Intro to European Cinema, Russian literature in translation. I’d wanted to take conversational Russian but Russian 101—the introductory level—wasn’t available until the fall. With knee-jerk coldness I showed up for class, spoke when spoken to, completed my assignments, and walked back home. Sometimes after class I ate in cheap Mexican and Italian places around NYU with pinball machines and plastic plants, sports on the wide screen television and dollar beer at Happy Hour (though no beer for me: it was weird readjusting to my life as a minor, like going back to crayons and kindergarten). Afterwards, all sugared-up from unlimited-refill Sprites, I walked back to Hobie’s through Washington Square Park with my head down and my iPod turned up loud. Because of anxiety (the recovered Rembrandt was still all over the news) I was having big problems sleeping and whenever the doorbell at Hobie’s rang unexpectedly I jumped as if at a five-alarm fire.