Theft (22 page)

"Of course this particular painting of Mauri's was nowhere near this show?" "You hate me."

"There were no contemporary reproductions, were there? And of course, newspapers don't report the size of paintings."

"Do you hate me?"

"You are a very bad girl," I said.

But the art business is filled with people so much worse, crocodiles, larcenists in pinstripe suits, individuals with no eye, bottom feeders who depend on everything except how the painting looks. Yes, Marlene's catalogue was fake, but the catalogue was not a work of art. To judge a work, you do not read a fucking catalogue. You look as if your life depended on it.

"You don't hate me?" "On the contrary."

"Butcher, please come with me to New York."

"One day, sure."

We had been drinking. It was noisy. I was slow to understand she did not mean one day. Also, once again, she was astonished that I had not understood something she thought had been clearly said. Hadn't I heard? Mauri had asked her to sell the Leibovitz? She had asked him to ship it to New York. She hadn't had a choice.

"You heard me, baby."

"I guess," I said but nothing was so simple. There was Hugh, always Hugh. And I know I said I didn't think about him in Tokyo, but how could anyone believe such shit? He was my orphan brother, my ward, my mother's son. He had my brawny sloping shoulders, my lower lip, my hairy back, my peasant calves. I had dreamed of him, had seen him in a Hokusai print, an Asakusa pram.

"He's in good hands." "I guess."

"He likes Jackson."

"I guess." But it was not just Hugh either. It was Marlene. How had this painting turned up in Tokyo? The fake catalogue said it had been there since 1913.

"Tell me," I said. I held both her hands in one of mine. "Is this Dozy's painting?"

"Will you come with me to New York if I tell you the truth?" I loved her. What do you think I said?

"No matter what I tell you?" Her smile had a gorgeous rosy lack of definition you might more normally explain with paint, a thumb, a short and stabby brush. "No matter what," I said.

Her eyes were bright and deep, dancing with reflections. "How big is Dozy's painting?"

"This one's smaller."

She shrugged. "Maybe I shrank it?" "It can't be Dozy's," I said.

"Come, Butcher, please. It's just a few more days. We'll stay at the Plaza. Hugh will be fine."

About Leibovitz, Milton Hesse's high-school dropout had become completely, improbably, expert. In the case of Hugh, however, she had not the faintest fucking clue. I could not have the same excuse.

35

It was in the reign of Ronald Reagan, at three o'clock on a September afternoon, that we arrived in the heart of the imperium. For a moment it was more or less OK, but then, at the limo counter, everything began to come undone. Marlene's Australian bank card was rejected by a tall black woman with rhinestone spectacles and a thin wry mouth. "OK," she said, "let's try another flavour."

It had been an eighteen-hour flight. Marlene's hair looked like a paddock of hail-damaged wheat.

"Any card at all, Miss." "I've only got one card."

The dispatcher examined my travel-soiled beauty, slowly, from top to bottom. "Uh-huh," she said. She waited just a moment before holding out her hand to me. "Oh, I don't have cards."

"You don't have cards." She smiled. You don't have cards. I was not going to explain the terms of my divorce to her.

"You don't neither of you have no credit card?" Then, shaking her head she turned to the man behind us.

"Next," she said.

Of course I had two hundred thousand dollars coming to me, but I didn't have them on me. As for Marlene's credit, something had fucked up at Mauri's office or his bank, but it was three in the morning in Tokyo and we could not find out. Well, fuck that, I phoned Jean-Paul from Concourse C, and I did reverse the charges but we had just wired the little bugger fifteen thousand bloody dollars-

-my entire gallery advance--for If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die, so he had made a profit on the painting he had lost. It was five in the morning in Sydney, early, yes, but no reason to scream into my ear about all the litigation he had planned for me. It was his phone bill so I let him rant.

He calmed after a while, but then he started in on Hugh who he claimed was smashing up his "facility".

"He pulled the washstand off the wall." "What do you want me to do? I'm in New York."

"Fuck you, you thief. I'll have him locked up for his own protection."

After the nice patron slammed the phone down in my ear we found a bar and I drank my first Budweiser. What a jar of cat's piss that turned out to be. "Don't worry," Marlene said, "it'll be all right tomorrow."

But it was Hugh I was thinking of. And although I held Marlene's hand, I was alone, rank with shame and weariness as I was led onto the bus to Newark Station where we caught New Jersey Transit to Perm Station and then changed to an art- encrusted loony bin to Prince Street. It was SoHo but not the SoHo where you bought your Comme des Garcons. I had no idea where I had surfaced, only that I had destroyed my brother's life and that the sirens were hysterical and cabs would not shut the fuck up and that, somewhere, near here, there was a place to stay. I wanted a gin and tonic with a great fat fistful of anaesthetic ice.

At dusk we finally arrived on Broome and Mercer, that is at an hour when the sheet-metal factories were dark, the power was off, the aging pioneers of Colour Field and High Camp Anaesthesia were presumably crawling into their fucking sleeping bags while the web of fire escapes was weaving a last lovely filigree of light across the factories' faces.

On the corner of Mercer Street, Marlene said, "I'm going to stand on your shoulders."

I obediently held out my hands, and Marlene Cook climbed up me like a full forward in the goal square in the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was the first time I glimpsed the size of what might be still hidden from me. With her big handbag still across her shoulder my intimate companion leaped from my hands to my shoulders. Only one hundred and five pounds but she departed with such force that my knees bent like tired old poppy stems and by the time I steadied myself she was pulling herself up on the rusty ladder, then zigzagging through the filigree to the fifth floor. I heard a resistant window break free, a kind of pop, like a locked-up vertebra achieving independence.

Who was this fucking woman? There was a police car approaching, lumbering slowly along the broken street, headlights up, headlights down. And who the fuck was I? My money was all Japanese. My passport was with my bags in a locker in Penn Station. A silver key fell from the night and bounced across the cobbles. The police car braked and waited. I entered the spotlight, picked up the key, retreated. Then the car lumbered onwards, dragging its muffler like a broken anchor chain.

This was not Sydney. Let me list the ways. "Come on up," my lover called. "Fifth floor."

On the other side of the door it was pitch bloody dark and I made my way slowly up the stairs, feeling my way past a landing filled with disgusting smoke- damaged carpet and another with cardboard boxes and then on the fourth floor I saw the flickering light of candles spilling from behind a battered open metal door. "How's this?"

It was a loft, almost empty, almost white. Marlene stood in the centre. Her big black handbag was on the floor behind her, beneath the big deep-silled window, amidst the mess of wooden splinters which announced her entry. Abandoned on the sill was a fucking Stanley Super Wonder Bar, a heavy-duty piece of steel with a ninety-degree-angle claw for pulling nails and, at the other extremity, a deadly point.

"Honey, is this yours?"

She took it from me without a word.

I observed how familiarly she hefted it. "Whose place is this we're in?"

She was studying me closely, frowning. "New South Wales Government Department of the Arts," she said. "They have it for artists-in-residence."

"Where is the artist?"

"You?" She approached, a supplicant, her shoulders bending to fit against my chest.

I snatched the pry bar from her. "Who lives here?"

I had hurt her hand, but she smiled, soft and bruised as peaches in the grass. "Baby, we'll have money from Tokyo tomorrow."

"Tomorrow I have to fly home."

"Michael," she said. And then she broke apart and she was weeping, Gaudier- Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, fractured, her beauty divided against itself by cracks and fissures, a pit, eyes like animals, God have mercy I threw the bar away and held her, so shockingly tiny against my chest, her little head within my hands. I wanted to wrap her tight inside a blanket.

"Don't go," she said. "He's my brother."

She turned her big wet eyes up to me.

"I'll bring him here," she said suddenly. "No, no," she said, jumping away from my nasty laugh. "No, really." She joined her palms and did a weird sort of Buddhist thing. "I can do this,"

Marlene said. "He can come with Olivier."

Oh no, I thought, oh no. "Olivier is coming here?" "Of course. What did you imagine?"

"You never said a thing."

"But he's the one with the droit moral. I can't sign." "He's coming here? To New York?"

"How else could I do it? Really? What did you think?" "I thought this was some little romantic tryst."

"It is," she said. "It is, it is."

For this I had betrayed my mother and my brother? So fucking Olivier could be witness to adultery?

"Don't you fuck with me, Marlene." I was Blue Bones' son and don't know what else I said. I certainly kicked the nasty wonder bar against the wall. "What's that?" I roared. "What the fuck is that?"

"I don't know."

"Bullshit you don't know."

"I think it's called a pry bar." "You think?"

"Yes."

"And you really carry this in your purse?" "I had it in my suitcase until Penn Station." "Why?"

She shrugged. "If I was a man you'd never ask me that."

That was when I walked out. I found a place called. Fanelli's up on Prince Street where they were nice enough to let me pay a thousand yen for a glass of scotch.

36

One Sunday in the Marsh.

One Sunday in the Marsh there came a bishop walking out of the vestry like a crab he had been in Sydney that very morning but before that time he had been tortured by Chinese communists. He had his back split open by whips and his flesh had hardened rough and raw as a Morrisons road full of dried tyre tracks after heavy rain. Following the first Psalm he explained why no-one should vote for the Australian Labor Party and then he removed his vestments in full sight

of the CONGREGANTS and my mother said Lord save us but when invited to respond my daddy wished to know what time did the bishop have his breakfast in Sydney.

What was the question?

How long did it take to fly from Sydney? One hour, said the bishop.

My mother kicked my father but he was Blue Bones and he did not give a tinker's damn about the opinion of the men in the vestry and he certainly would not modify his behaviour on account of a size-four female shoe. Our father was a well-known MARSH IDENTITY. The flight from Sydney was a bloody miracle as far as he was concerned, so he wanted the bishop to answer him--was it rough or smooth? The bishop told him smooth.

Lord knows what my father would say now if he rose from the grave to find me prisoner in the utility room of Jean-Paul's nursing home. No doubt give me the STROP to punish me for destroying PRIVATE PROPERTY. Fair enough. Only when justice had been done would he understand that Butcher had flown all the way to New York, had abandoned me again.

That would get my father straightaway. Ah, he would ask, how long would that take?

Thirteen hours. Good heavens.

My daddy was a REAL CHARACTER, as the saying is. Everyone remembers him. WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?

The police are little Hitlers according to Butcher Bones but when I was in arrears at the nursing home they did not charge me with a crime. As long as I remained inside the utility room everything was hunky-dory. They brought me interesting objects they had discovered in their travels including a bear used to advertise a doughnut shop.

My father was a hard man living in an age of miracles and wonder. I would come upon him in the night as he contemplated the wonder of REFRIGERATION. Before refrigeration he drove his wagon to Madingley to meet the Melbourne train, then back to fill the ice chamber. Then came the fridge EUREKA you would think but the GENERAL PUBLIC did not like cold meat and would only buy what was hanging in the shop THE MORONS as my father said. He was always for progress, including widening the main street even if it meant we had to kill the trees. My father was a well-known REALIST. The leaves blocked up the gutters anyway, as he said more than once in the public bar of the Royal Hotel.

I was sitting on my chair in front of the shop. This was several years ago, bless me, Blue Bones had not been taken from us.

Two Melbourne fellows came by travelling in a Holden which was a new BRAND never heard of before that year. One had a pinstripe suit the other tartan shorts you would split your sides to look at him. The one in the suit asked may we take your picture. Not being certain of my GROUND I fetched Blue Bones and I could see from his face he agreed they were a pair of POOFTERS but he did not mind if he and I posed together father and son. The poofters had what is called a POLAROID. When the photograph was taken, we stood around and I watched myself appear like a drowned man floating to the surface of a dam.

Look at this, my daddy said. See, this didn't work at all.

I saw his point immediately, but it took some time for the poofters to understand my father's objection which was you could see no more of Blue Bones than his apron. They then agreed to take a second Polaroid and he could keep it, welcome to it, no trouble to them at all.

When they had made a portrait to Blue Bones' satisfaction they presented it to him and then SKEDADDLED. Who can ever imagine where they went to?

Fancy that, my father said, studying his likeness as it bloomed before him. He had a face like a hatchet and angry red eyes but when he placed the Polaroid on the mantel he was a different man. Fancy that, he said. He cocked his head. He almost smiled.