Cairo (29 page)

‘Walk in confidently,' said Max, ‘and no one will suspect a thing.'

Tamsin grinned. It was clear she was enjoying herself.

Whether I was still dozy from all the Serepax or my benumbed state was a psychological response to the events of the past few days, I'll never know, but I more or less sleepwalked through the following hours. Max and I dropped Tamsin and George off at Spencer Street Station, the rectangular parcel tucked under Tamsin's arm. To me the Bolshevik twins were incredibly suspicious, but no one else gave them a second glance. We parked in nearby Bourke Street and sat smoking in the car.

Fifteen minutes later, George knocked on the window, told us it was done and walked away with his sister. ‘We'll see you at the warehouse later,' he said over his shoulder.

It was not much after ten a.m. Dropping off the forgery was, as Gertrude had predicted, a piece of cake.

Max and I returned to the warehouse. Once inside, Anna Donatella told us she had spoken to Mr Crisp on the telephone. It was arranged that she and Edward would meet him that afternoon at an airfield out of town.

Edward was thrown into panic at this development, and I recalled him telling me how scary Mr Crisp was.

‘But this wasn't the plan,' he wailed. ‘Why me? Only Anna needs to go. She arranged everything. I've never had to go along before.'

Anna crossed her arms. ‘He wanted you there. He was adamant about it. You and me.'

‘But why?'

‘I don't know, Edward. Perhaps he wants the actual forger there. What the hell's the matter with you?'

Edward appealed to Max. ‘But you promised you would handle this part of the operation.'

‘I'm not sure what I can do. Mr Crisp wants both you and Anna.'

Gertrude interceded. She rested a hand on Edward's forearm. ‘It will be fine. I promise you.'

He contemplated her. His forehead shone with perspiration. ‘Do you?'

It was an unexpected gesture, freighted with a significance I would not understand until days later.

‘Yes,' Gertrude said at last.

‘But how are we getting to this airfield?'

Everyone stared at me.

I shook my head. Edward's dread of the expedition had infected me. ‘Why not take your car? Drive there yourself?'

Anna stepped forwards. ‘Because people know my car. I mustn't be seen driving around today. Besides, you're in no position to argue, young man.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘You know very well what it means.'

And I did know what she meant: I had ventured so far into the cave that the only way out would be through the other side.

In that clumsy fashion the matter was settled. It was cold but sunny, a pleasant day for a drive. Although I hadn't slept much the night before, I was calm as we arranged a stolen, million-dollar modernist masterpiece beneath heavy blankets in the boot of my old Mercedes.

SUNBURY AIRFIELD IS AROUND FIFTY KILOMETRES NORTH-WEST
of Melbourne, set among flat, wind-sheared plains. Driving at a steady pace, we took an hour to get there. The city gave way to suburbia, which in turn gave way to pastoral vistas of fields and horses.

The journey was tense. Everything hinged on the next hour or two. Edward sat in the passenger seat and smoked cigarette after cigarette, drummed his fingers on his knee. I had noticed before that, during conversational lulls, there often passed across his face the expressions of one engaged in wordless argument (mouth pursing, head shaking) and during that drive his features were especially animated.

Anna Donatella sat imperiously in the back seat, hands clasped in her lap, as if she were a queen being escorted to her country seat. Every so often she clucked her tongue with disgust at the sprawling housing estates scattered around past the main airport, and I recalled her boasting at an art opening that she had not left the inner city since 1979. Clearly, the mere sight of suburbia disturbed her.

Edward, too, was baffled. ‘What do people
do
out here,' he would mutter every so often. ‘Milk their cows, I suppose. Make things out
of, I don't know, wood or rocks. What is that horse thinking, do you reckon?
Watching
us like that? Ugh. Creepy animals.'

Anna directed me off the main road and across a railway line. The airfield was small and forlorn. In addition to a hangar that housed a blue, twin-engine plane, there was a tin shed that obviously served as an office. A weathered church pew stood outside the office. Three other light planes were moored nearby. A pair of shrubs shivered in the wind. No one spoke as we all peered through the car's windscreen, searching for signs of life.

Edward grew even more agitated. In addition to drumming his fingers, he had started jiggling his knee and wiping his palms repeatedly on his trousers. I felt his anxiety was misplaced: surely this final stage of the operation — swapping the painting for the money — was a mere formality.

‘There,' Anna said, tapping a fingernail on the glass as a thin, bearded man wearing dirty overalls stepped from the office and waved us over. Edward groaned, swore under his breath.

Anna squeezed Edward's shoulder. ‘Steady, Edward. Steady.'

Following the man's directions, I pulled up on the grass outside the office. Anna wound down her window, and the man leaned in. He was sucking energetically on a sweet, and his caramel-scented breath filled the car interior.

‘G'day,' the man said, nodding to Anna and Edward.

‘Hello, Oliver,' Anna said. ‘How delightful to see you.'

‘Who's this, then?' the man asked, pointing at me.

‘This is Tom,' Anna replied. ‘Our driver.'

I turned in my seat and stuck out my hand to shake his, but he ignored me and stepped back to open the rear door. ‘Come on then. Crisp is in the office. He's already pissed off you kept him waiting so long. Don't let's make it longer, eh.'

We got out of the car, removed the swaddled painting from the boot and crowded into the tiny office to find Mr Crisp inside.
There was a round of greetings but — strangely, considering the fuss over who was to attend the handover — no one paid the slightest attention to me.

Hanging on the wall was an out-of-date calendar featuring photographs of light aircraft, alongside a crumpled centrefold of a blonde Playboy Playmate lounging on a picnic rug. There was a glass-fronted fridge containing cans of soft drink, and a shelf of screws and various machine parts.

‘About time,' Mr Crisp said. ‘I was despairing of you, Edward. Truly despairing. My buyer is getting most anxious. What's taken you so long?'

‘Sorry,' Edward said. ‘We had some unexpected trouble.'

‘What kind of trouble?'

‘Nothing to worry about.'

‘That is where you are so very, very wrong, Edward. It's my job to worry. Now, let me ask you again: what kind of trouble?'

Edward brushed his hair back and glanced at Anna. ‘Well, er …'

Mr Crisp smiled a Dickensian smile — avid, spittle-lipped — and I understood at once why Edward was so afraid of him.

‘We had some trouble scoring smack and got held up, that's all. There's a bit of a drought on.'

Mr Crisp — who was by this time sitting on the edge of the desk, as if settling in to wait as long as necessary for Edward's response — rubbed the knuckles of one hand under his chin. He pondered this for a few seconds before standing, satisfied. ‘Alright then. Let's see what we have here, shall we. Careful, Oliver, careful.'

Oliver took the package, laid it on the bench and unwrapped it as Mr Crisp hovered at his shoulder issuing instructions with an air of jovial menace. He breathed through his mouth and spoke in abrupt barks, as if language were a bad taste of which he was eager to rid himself.

‘Not the knife! You wanna wreck the thing? Fuck, Oliver. Untie
it. Get that bit there. Watch that bit of sticky tape. There you go. Jesus, look at that, will ya.'

At the sight of the painting, I was startled anew by its energy, by its spiky eroticism. No one spoke. Mr Crisp gestured impatiently for Oliver to hand him a cigarette. Oliver complied. They both lit up and ogled the
Weeping Woman
without talking (mouths puckered, wincing, cocking their heads), like a pair of gobsmacked pirates trying to decipher an unexpectedly complex treasure map.

‘What a fucking piece of shit,' Mr Crisp said. ‘I wouldn't give you more than a coupla dollars for that thing, but there's no accounting for taste, eh. No accounting for it. A million bucks for
that
. I seen photos of it in the paper but …' Words up to the task of articulating his outrage failed him.

Eventually, Edward clapped his hands together and jerked his thumb towards the closed door. ‘OK. So that's that. The
Weeping Woman
, as you can see. Perhaps we should just get the, uh, money and be on our way?'

Oliver and Mr Crisp looked at him in disbelief. The door behind us opened, ushering in a blast of cold air.

Mr Crisp beamed. ‘Eric! There you are. Thought you must have fallen in. You are a brave soul. I hate taking a dump in public toilets at the best of times, but the one out here is very unpleasant. I'd have hung on meself.'

Mr Crisp's commiseration for Eric's plight sounded genuine, but Eric glanced at him with undisguised contempt before approaching the painting.

‘Why is he here?' Edward asked.

‘Well, if you're willing to fool the state gallery, who's to say you're not gonna try and fool us? Gotta be sure you're giving us the right one, eh? I don't wanna hand over money for nothing. You wouldn't want to doublecross me now, would you?'

With one hand he mimed using a pair of shears to cut the
fingers off the other. The action alone was intimidating enough, but it was accompanied by a horrid wet sound in his throat; a remarkable simulation of cracking bone.

At this, Oliver giggled, and I realised he was the man I had seen from Gertrude's bedroom window all those months earlier: the man who had shot poor Buster. If I were not already disenchanted to discover that those involved in the world of art theft were not cigar-smoking, skivvy-wearing, Lear Jet-flying aesthetes but merely grubby, foul-mouthed gangsters, then this exchange nailed shut the coffin on my naive expectations.

Eric was evidently an art authenticator, and he slipped on a pair of white gloves before manoeuvring a desk lamp over the painting and applying himself to his task, his face only millimetres above the canvas. He produced various items from a Gladstone bag: cotton buds, a magnifying glass, vials of liquid, a Picasso monograph.

He checked the painting against a handful of notes. He held the canvas up to the light, pressed here and there with his thumb, considered it from all angles. He turned the painting over and inspected the wooden stretcher, humming as he worked, grunting every so often with approval or recognition.

As if he were facing a firing squad, Edward stood staring ahead at some point on the opposite wall. His hands were clenched into tight balls and, reflexively, mine did the same. Anna, who seemed to have missed the implications of Mr Crisp's little pantomime, had installed herself in the only other chair in the office and was busy poking at the heel of one of her shoes.

Eric, meanwhile, dipped a cotton bud into a bottle of liquid and rolled the bud across the painting's upper right corner. Then he examined the bud, presumably seeking telltale signs of fresh paint or a finish that would reveal the work's true age. Mr Crisp's eyebrows arched in anticipation. Anna looked up attentively. Even
Oliver broke off his slack-jawed consideration of Miss June 1984. Finally, Eric placed the cotton bud to one side, took up the painting at arm's length and gazed at it. This, I sensed, was the final test.

But Mr Crisp was impatient. ‘What the hell you doing now?'

‘Waiting for the feeling.'

‘The
feeling
?'

‘You've heard of those, I imagine? The feeling that this is the real one. Instinct.'

‘What kind of feeling?'

‘Hard to describe but you know when you get it, that's all. It's like love, I suppose. You know when it's real. You have to divine the intent of the artwork.'

‘Wait a sec. You're telling me that you're going to advise me to drop a buncha cash on the basis of a
feeling
?'

‘It's called connoisseurship. It's what you're paying me for, as a matter of fact. I'm afraid it's the best thing to go on.'

Mr Crisp was appeased for all of thirty seconds. ‘Time's up, mate. You got a good fucking feeling or what?'

Eric nodded. ‘Yes. It's the real thing.'

Edward made a gasp of relief in his throat.

‘Well, of course,' Anna Donatella snapped. ‘What did you expect?'

*

The warehouse erupted into jubilant cheers upon our return. With chopsticks raised aloft, Max and Sally formed a guard of honour. Gertrude made tickertape from shredded newspaper. The money was fondled and admired before it was stashed beneath the kitchen sink for safekeeping. Anna bought bottles of wine and Scotch from Chalky's. Edward vanished — no doubt to score heroin — and on his return, he and Gertrude danced over and again to the David Bowie song
Heroes
, which had become an anthem for them on
account of its references to Berlin and its infamous wall. For once relinquishing his disdain for modern music, even Max clapped along and performed a jig. I managed to dance with Sally and tried (in vain) to glean from her movements any sign of her feelings for me. She was restrained, even a little cold, but I was determined to ignore it.

We toasted Gertrude and Edward for their skill, George and Tamsin for their audacity. We toasted our brilliant selves. We all hooted and stamped our feet in appreciation. Anna Donatella stalked about the warehouse, saying every now and again, ‘I knew we could pull it off …'