Cairo (21 page)

It took numerous attempts to fit my key into the lock and get inside, and when I did, I was startled to find Max sitting in my armchair.

‘Where the hell have you been?' he demanded. ‘I've been waiting for hours.'

My keys fell from my hand and clattered to the wooden floor. ‘Max, I —'

‘Hush!' He looked crazed, unkempt; the very picture of a cuckold.

I had no idea how he'd got inside. As he rose and dashed over to me, I stepped backwards, steeled myself for a blow. None came. Perhaps he had a knife?

Max closed my front door and gripped me tight above my elbow. ‘We're doing it tomorrow. Early.'

All I could think of was the story of the ridiculous duel — the misty Yarra River at dawn, a brace of pistols, death. I could barely speak. ‘What?'

‘We're liberating Dora. In the morning.' He mimed loosening a screw right next to my head. ‘Tamsin and George are there
as we speak.
'

It began to sink in. The theft. Tomorrow. I laughed with relief, with fear and with astonishment.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA IS A RECTANGULAR,
Stalinist bunker covering three or four blocks on St Kilda Road, one of Melbourne's widest and leafiest thoroughfares south of the Yarra River. On the opposite side of the road, several hundred metres from the vast arched entrance, is the Queen Victoria Gardens' floral clock — which is right next to where Max and I were parked on that Sunday morning in August, ten minutes after opening time.

Inside the gallery, figures were moving behind the large water wall, which attracted children as a magnet did iron filings. The two large, shallow pools of water in front of the building threw their shimmering aquatic designs onto the exterior's grey stone walls. I was dreadfully hungover. My mouth was gummed up. I was about to participate in the heist of a major twentieth-century artwork. What the hell was I thinking?

Max, however, was composed. He cleaned his fingernails with the teeth of a key, looking up every now and then to scan the clumps of people milling about on the gallery forecourt. He hummed to himself. At my apartment the night before he had reiterated how calm we needed to be at all times. ‘Two people going out for a drive somewhere. Nothing to be nervous about. Tamsin
and George are taking all the risk. As soon as I give the word, start the car and we'll wheel around to the front of the gallery. Then the twins will hop in the back seat and we'll be off to Edward's place. Remember to drive very carefully. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves.'

My skin felt tender, goose-bumped, horribly alive. I was sweating, despite the cold. Surely, I thought, everyone passing by — any jogger, dog-walker, morning stroller — must realise what we were up to? Two men sitting in a car at twelve minutes past ten on a Sunday morning?

In the rear-vision mirror I spotted a young man with a trim moustache loitering two cars behind,
just standing there
with his hands in his trouser pockets. A policeman, it must be. I cursed my stupidity, my blind faith, my greed. I had spent most of the previous night awake, wondering whether I shouldn't sneak away before dawn, never to return to Cairo again. I had rehearsed countless variations of disaster in my imagination: the car wouldn't start; Tamsin and George would be detained as they tried to get in; the police would pull us over before we'd even crossed the bridge. Stealing a Picasso painting from a major gallery to sell it off to a bunch of international criminals, one of whom was named Mr Crisp. The kind of people who shot dogs.
What the hell was I thinking?

The answer to that question was that I had been thinking about Sally. Or, rather, she was the persistent soundtrack to which every action of mine had become an accompaniment. If my participation in the ridiculous plan was ever in doubt, her pleasure at my involvement had convinced me. Although we had hardly spoken since our few (all too few) times together, she had stood in the garden of Cairo to see us on our way earlier that morning. I detected no change whatsoever in her demeanour until Max (who, thankfully, showed no sign of suspecting anything) charged
off to the car, and she and I were alone. I felt terrified — of her, of what I had become involved in. Then she grasped my hand, reached up to kiss me on the mouth, murmured ‘Good luck' and ran back up the stairs. A glance, a few words. On lesser ephemera have men been emboldened to commit more foolish acts.

I remembered a question I had been meaning to ask Max for some time. ‘You know those guys you told me about who stole the
Mona Lisa
?'

‘Hmm?'

‘Did they get away with it?'

‘Sort of.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘They had it for a couple of years, then tried to sell it to an Italian gallery.'

‘And got caught?'

‘Only because they were very stupid.'

‘Did they go to jail?'

A pause. ‘Yes.'

Before I could digest the implications of this, Max whacked my thigh with the back of his hand. ‘There they are. Quick! Start the car.'

I fiddled with the ignition but accidentally turned on the windscreen wipers. Due to the prohibitions of his much-vaunted ‘need-to-know basis', Max had not described Tamsin to me in great detail, but he had told me enough (‘Short, surly, feels she's letting the sisterhood down because she's not a lesbian') because I spotted her instantly on the footpath across the road. The very image of a Bolshevik art student, she was wearing Doc Marten boots and a man's grey overcoat. A chap I assumed was her brother hovered behind her, dressed similarly.

Trembling all over, I started the car, pulled out into the light traffic and completed a stately circuit of the large block. Like a dog
on the scent, Max sat forwards in his seat, both hands perched on the dashboard in front of him.

‘Easy does it,' he was saying. ‘I think she's spotted us. Yes. Alright. Park behind that white truck. But keep the engine running.'

It all went remarkably smoothly. I pulled over in front of Tamsin and George, behind the ice-cream van Max had indicated. He opened the back door and the siblings slid into the car. I waited for a break in the traffic, then drove off. The steering wheel was slippery under my sweating grip. No one said a word until we crossed Princes Bridge, on the south side of the city centre. I was amazed any of us managed to breathe.

Without turning around, Max asked how it went. For the first time, his voice betrayed a hint of nervousness.

In the rear-vision mirror I saw Tamsin smirk at her brother. She had short, black hair and grubby eyes.

‘That was a piece of cake,' she said in a slight English accent. ‘Those fat old windbags won't know what hit them. I need a bloody cigarette. You got one?'

James, who knew the twins reasonably well, later told me that Tamsin was herself a struggling painter who lived in a draughty, dilapidated house in North Fitzroy with her brother and two other artists. George was a conceptual artist who had worked briefly at Channel Ten in some junior administrative capacity before being fired for smoking a joint in the bathroom. The pair were forever railing against the powers that denied them funding and obliged them to live a pauper's existence or — worse — work a straight job to make ends meet.

We approached the inevitable snarl of traffic around Flinders Street Station. A busker in a wheelchair played the bagpipes amid the crowds on the famous corner outside the main entrance. A large group of punks, complete with mohawks and leather jackets
festooned with studs and badges, gathered on the steps beneath the timetable clocks.

With difficulty, Tamsin eased the painting out from beneath her large overcoat. I felt a surge of fear at the sight — glimpsed in the mirror — of the plain paper in which she had wrapped it. I knew the painting was not large, but it was much smaller than I had envisaged, hardly bigger than a tea towel.

I kept checking the rear-vision mirror for police cars and flashing lights, expecting at any second the windscreen to be stove in or an undercover cop to dive —
Starsky and Hutch
-style — across the Mercedes' dirty bonnet. Nothing.

We cruised unmolested up Swanston Street, past Chat 'n' Chew (the seedy cafe where, over a plate of ancient chips and a couple of steamed dim sims, Max had further expounded to me his theory of benign dictatorship), past the town hall. No one in the car spoke. Tamsin slouched in the back seat and smoked. George stared through the window, to all appearances unperturbed.

At a red light at the corner of Lonsdale Street, they hopped out leaving the painting lying flat on the back seat in its paper wrapping. This must have been part of the arrangement all along because Max evinced no surprise at their departure.

‘OK, guys,' Tamsin muttered before slamming the door. ‘Over to you now.'

‘Ta-ta,' said George, and he gave a curt wave.

We drove on to Edward and Gertrude's warehouse. As soon as we had parked in the empty lot out the back, Max put his hand on mine to prevent me undoing my seatbelt. ‘You drive home. I'll take it upstairs. And don't breathe a word.'

‘I want to see it.'

‘That's not part of the plan.'

‘I should be able to see it after taking all that risk. Please.'

I was shocked by the uncharacteristic steel in my voice,
and Max hesitated, taken aback by my tone. He glared up at the shuttered warehouse windows, at which, as usual, there was no sign of life. ‘Alright,' he said. ‘But only for a minute.'

*

We placed the painting under a bright lamp on Edward and Gertrude's studio workbench, where Max, Edward, Gertrude and I crowded around it in deferential silence. Even Max was lost for words. As soon as it had been unwrapped from its brown paper, Gertrude had examined the canvas edges with white-gloved fingers and pressed her eye almost to the surface. A smell rose from it — of dry paint, of thinner, of something smoky — and it was difficult not to imagine the great man himself (face ascowl, Gitane wedged between meaty fingers) inspecting his handiwork from this very same distance and angle. That dizzying sensation, for me, was almost reward enough for all my anxiety over the theft.

I had seen numerous reproductions of the
Weeping Woman
, but nothing prepared me for the vibrancy of the original when viewed at such close range. The image fairly hummed. Despite the energy of the work, the means of its creation were evident. There was a blob of brown paint under her right eye, a splodge of green on her neck. The lower portion of her green and black hair covered what might have been an angular collar.

During our brief acquaintance Edward had sometimes exasperated me with his hair-splitting ruminations on colour (not to mention the lengthy explanations on their origins and manufacture) but, upon seeing the
Weeping Woman
, I understood at once the need for subtle and precise gradations of hue and tone. Ordinary terms were hopelessly inadequate. Here I saw the difference between cadmium green, olive green, sap green, leaf green, sea green. The urge to touch the painting was almost
irresistible — to finger the canvas where once Picasso himself had — but we had all been warned in advance not to do so. Only Gertrude would handle the work as part of the forgery process.

Gertrude turned the canvas over. The work looked in remarkably good condition, perhaps owing to its having been stored in galleries since its creation, rather than sitting around in attics or the like. On the bottom rung of the frame was a faded purple stamp that read
10F
. There was a smudge of pale-green paint on the top left, in addition to a number of tiny holes where screws must have been used to fix the work to a variety of frames. Gertrude was delighted because none of these marks was difficult to replicate; the painting wasn't even signed. Like a pair of improbable generals poring over a garish map in preparation for an assault, she and Edward began to mutter and point out other details of the painting that caught their eye.

‘Interesting, that mark there,' Gertrude said. ‘And the splodgy way the paint has been applied next to her hair.'

‘Hmm. It looks to me as if the window was originally larger. And look at the line of her nose.'

Now all business, Gertrude didn't respond. She picked up a comically large magnifying glass and hunched over the painting. She was more alert than I had ever seen her, as if galvanised by the challenge of replicating this work.

Since learning they were heroin addicts, I had become adept at discerning Gertrude's and Edward's moods — whether listless and impatient or good-humoured and focused — and how they could be determined by the amount of time that had lapsed since their latest hit. Today they were rather chipper and, sure enough, I glimpsed a smear of blood in the scabby crook of Gertrude's left elbow when she reached out for an exercise book, which was so battered it was held together with sticky tape.

Oblivious to my and Max's presence, she and Edward flicked
through this book, a handwritten manual full of sketches, notes and chemical formulae.

I returned home, leaving Max at the warehouse. It was still only midday. Too fearful to leave my apartment but unable to think of how else to spend my time, I passed the afternoon in an agitated state, prowling the confines of my tiny rooms, listening to the radio for news of the theft. There was no mention of it on any bulletin. The day dragged on. The sound of anyone entering the grounds of Cairo invoked in me a paralysing terror in which I saw (in lurid technicolour) my arrest, the trial, jail, my mother's tears. At least I could write a novel about it. My life story? The thinly veiled autobiographical novel had always been to me a pathetic specimen, but tales have been built on flimsier foundations.

There was nothing about it on the six o'clock television news. It was impossible the gallery didn't know the
Weeping Woman
— their costly new acquisition — was gone. I had no appetite but managed instead to gulp a large glass of whisky that only made me nauseated. I tried to read but words on a page slithered about like worms. I played Sally's Smiths album but Morrissey's plaintive wailing got on my nerves. Eventually, I showered and went to bed early. Gripped alternately by panic and exhilaration, I lay awake all night, smoking in the gloom. Hysterical imaginings. Any voices outside were those of the police, the slam of any door that of the fraud-squad van. Wind hissed through the leaves of the peppercorn tree. What sleep I stole was thin as gruel.