Cairo (34 page)

James stood swaying in the studio doorway. ‘There's no answer at Anna Donatella's gallery.'

This was no surprise. ‘Maybe she went with them? It hardly matters now, does it?'

James looked devastated, like a freshly orphaned boy. He stared around at the filthy walls and the paint-spattered bench, as if seeking evidence that might refute the hideous betrayal we suspected.

‘Do you think they planned this all along?' he asked after a while. The very question (which, doubtless, I would ultimately have asked myself) made me feel ill. It was bad enough to have the future taken away — and in this fashion — but such hacking at the past was too awful to contemplate.

Thankfully, James didn't wait for my response before asking, ‘What do we do now?'

I didn't answer. After a while he slumped into the other chair. Tears glistened on his cheeks. We sat like that for ages, not talking, each of us lost in our private worlds.

*

Ever hopeful, ever gullible, James and I waited for a word (a postcard, an explanatory letter) from them. None came. Their disappearance was as abrupt and complete as death. In subsequent weeks, we learned that Anna Donatella had also left the country, although no one knew where she might have gone. Rio, Paris and Berlin were all touted as possible destinations. Cairo was quiet — downright dull — as if Sally and Max had taken every exciting possibility with them in their suitcases.

I still dreaded arrest over my involvement in Queel's murder. I crossed the road if I saw anyone wearing a uniform; the glimpse of a police car in my rear-vision mirror prompted me to break out in a heavy sweat. Surreptitiously, I replaced the squeaking floorboard in my hall. Several nights a week I woke from violent and visceral dreams — of weird animals, of pistol shots, of windscreens smudged with rain.

As he had threatened, my father put Aunt Helen's apartment up for sale, and I started to look for new accommodation. Packing up a house is always a melancholy process. Although I had only lived at Cairo for ten months, I had in that short time accumulated a variety of mementoes I invested with sentiment and meaning.
There was the note from Max and Sally inviting me to dinner on that first night; some of Sally's records; a collection of T.S. Eliot poems James had pressed upon me; the art-exhibition flyers I had hoarded; matchbooks from various nightclubs — tangible proof I had taken part in the life of the city and had lived as fully as a young man should. These artefacts I bundled and deposited in cardboard boxes, along with clothes, my few cooking utensils and dozens of other books.

James and I spent a lot of time together. Although I felt sorry for myself, I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for him. After all, he had known Max since they were teenagers, and the betrayal he had experienced was profound. We distracted ourselves by playing pool or going to the movies. We tried not to talk of our former friends but, inevitably, our conversation sometimes veered into reminiscence, whereupon one of us would hurriedly (like a pond-skater scrambling to safer ice) change the subject before we went too far. It was easier, perhaps, to pretend the past year had never happened but, alone at night, I thought incessantly of Sally.

The days lengthened as spring gained a foothold. One night James and I were playing pool and sipping some awful homemade grappa at the grimy Double-O coffee bar. We were the only customers, which was fortunate because James was drunk and obstreperous, and it was in such moods he was liable to start fights with strangers.

He hiccuped, mumbled something indeterminate.

‘… But it bloody doesn't, does it?'

‘Doesn't what, James?'

He slapped the table. ‘Kill you. Nor does it make you stronger. That's a lie to make you feel better about suffering. A lie the strong tell the weak.'

Although it wasn't unusual — when he was drunk — for James to launch into monologues barely augured by anything that
preceded them, things were deteriorating more quickly than usual. I felt uneasy and began to plot how I might encourage him to call it a night without provoking an argument.

Before I could say anything, however, he lurched from his chair and played his shot, taking no time to assess the spread of balls before doing so. The pool table at the Double-O was so wonky (sloping to the left, buckled felt) that somehow — almost magically — it compensated for the impaired abilities and judgement of the late-night drunk. James was a rotten pool player, but at the Double-O, with enough alcohol in him to render the average man senseless, he often performed with remarkable skill. That night was no exception, and he sank three balls in a row, one of them a tricky cannon-shot, before falling into his chair.

‘James,' I said, ‘I'm so sorry. About, you know, about Max and everything. I know you loved him.'

He turned his bleary gaze upon me, as if puzzling over who I was and what I might have been referring to. His smile was chilling and the overall effect not only ended the discussion at hand but also indicated, in no uncertain terms, that we were never to speak of it again.

‘It's your shot,' he said.

*

One afternoon, freshly discharged from hospital, Mr Orlovsky knocked on my door. He'd broken his collarbone in the fall, and his recovery was hampered by an infection and other complications that had required him to stay in hospital longer than would normally have been the case.

‘Oh,' he stammered when I had opened it, ‘I'm so glad you're ho-ho-ho home.'

We exchanged pleasantries and, with some relish, he told me of his medical adventures and expressed amazement at some of
the equipment used in hospitals these days. All manner of tubes, machines with flashing lights. He was rather rejuvenated by his stay. The nurses, he told me a number of times, were all very pretty. Even the food was not bad, not too bad at all.

‘Now,' he said, ‘the reason I have come by is because lo-lo-lo lovely Sally left me a gift for you.'

I reeled. Her name, like an arrow loosed with unerring aim from afar.

‘Mo-mo-mo most important, she said it was. Had to guard it with my-my-my life. I was supposed to give it to you some time ago but I was in hospital, so … The trouble is I can't carry the damn thing with this arm of mine in a sling, so you'll have to come over and get it, I'm afraid.'

Tingling with curiosity and dread, I followed him to his apartment. In his dim hallway was a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It was probably Gertrude's Soutine forgery that I had so admired; she must have given it to Sally to leave for me. I recalled Gertrude's words at our first meeting:
You can have it when we've finished with it
.

I accepted the package without enthusiasm, unsure if I wanted such a potent reminder of that period in my life and the betrayals of which it was so redolent.

When I got home I rested it against the wall in the lounge room and there it might have remained, forever unopened, except for an envelope that slipped onto the floor from where it had been wedged beneath a layer of wrapping. On it was written a single word, in handwriting I recognised as Sally's.

Tom

I sat on my couch hard, as if winded. After several minutes, I opened the envelope and shook free the note within. Although
there were only six words written on the sheet of paper, I looked at them for a very long time.

With trembling hands, I set about cutting the string and tearing away the wrapping. It was a warm afternoon. My front door was wide open. James strolled in while I was kneeling on the wooden floor over the torn shards of paper; we had arranged to see a film that afternoon.

He shambled past me and flopped onto the couch with a loud groan. ‘What have you got there?' he asked when I failed to respond to his complaint about the unseasonably warm weather.

‘I'm not sure.'

By this time I had ripped away a large segment of the outer wrapping and the spongy curatorial paper underneath. It was enough to reveal a significant portion of the painting, and although I couldn't yet make out the complete work, I saw enough to stop me in my tracks.

Stunned, I sat back on my haunches.

James lit a cigarette and waved away the smoke from his face. ‘Goodness. That looks like our green friend, doesn't it?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘It does.'

Taking greater care, I peeled away the rest of the wrapping until the painting was in my clammy hands — naked, as it were.

It was Picasso's
Weeping Woman
or, at the very least, a version of it. I closed my front door before resting the canvas on a low bookcase and switching on the lights to better inspect it. I turned the canvas over. On its wooden frame were the faded
10F
stamp, the splodge of paint, the twenty-five screw holes.

James said nothing, but I was aware of him observing me. He cleared his throat. ‘You don't, by any chance, think …'

‘Think what?'

‘Well. What
is
that painting?'

I held it in my hands, gauged its weight. ‘I don't know, to be
honest. You know, the night Max and I went to Queel's place, well, Queel told me he had seen three paintings in Gertrude's studio. I didn't pay much attention at the time. In fact, I've only remembered it now. But what if he was telling the truth? I also remember thinking once that the forgery looked less developed than it had the day before. Maybe they did two copies, and intended to keep the original? To see if they could fool
everyone
? The gallery and their buyer?'

James walked over and inspected the painting as well. ‘But why?'

‘I don't know. To sell it again? Make more money?'

‘Gertrude didn't care about the money. As long as she had some drugs.'

He was right. Never once had Gertrude betrayed any interest in how much she stood to make from her deception; for her it was all about the thrill of the forgery, the contest against those among the art establishment who had spurned her. I remembered a night when we had been discussing the division of money and she had been impatient at the talk of it. I also recalled how reluctant Edward had been to be present when the painting was handed over, and his terror at Eric's presence at the airfield had seemed disproportionate — until now, that is. He knew. He knew we were selling a forgery to Mr Crisp and that his goon would have cut off all our fingers — or worse — had he found out.

‘To see if they could,' I said.

James laughed joylessly. ‘I guess anything's possible, isn't it. Good old Gertrude. I wouldn't put it past her. She told me she didn't even like the painting that much. You saw it more often than I did. Do you reckon it's the real thing?'

In the weeks I had spent at Edward and Gertrude's studio, I had read through their books on Picasso and learned that he had painted many variations of the
Weeping Woman
, mostly in 1937. The version we had stolen exhibited a frenzied quality
that betrayed the speed with which he had completed it. The figure's dark-green hair is combed back hard, the eyes staring in contradictory directions, the purple lips forever open in a gasp. Her tears rest like jewellery on her cheek, and her black tongue, if indeed it is a tongue, hovers between her pebbly teeth. Behind her is a grey, lightly striated wall. If her pinballing gaze could be said to be focused in any one direction, it might be through a black, arched window in the top right corner, through which perhaps lies the source of her grief. The handkerchief clasped to her face is rendered in the same clumsy fashion as the rest of her — as if the scene had been shattered into its constituent parts, then hastily reassembled into a punishing whole. The painting is at once incomplete and crowded with angst.

‘The man who checked over the painting for Mr Crisp talked about the connoisseurship of art,' I said. ‘He reckoned you have to have a feeling about it, a gut instinct.'

‘How very scientific. What sort of feeling?'

‘He said you'd know when you felt it. You'd divine its intent.'

‘What would this be worth, anyway, if it was the original?'

The figures hovering in front of my eyes were staggering. ‘Almost two million dollars. But what would I do with it? I can't hang it on the wall or anything. I can't sell it, can I?'

James straightened up and puffed on his cigarette. ‘No, I guess not. But there would be some consolation in knowing you had it. Everyone knows the poof never lives happily ever after. At least one of us would get what he wanted out of this idiotic caper.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, at least you get the girl.'

I contemplated the painting, the face I had admired for so long in Gertrude and Edward's studio that it had seeped into my dreams. The portrait of photographer Dora Maar, who had attracted Picasso's attention in a Paris cafe by cutting herself
while jabbing a knife-point between her splayed fingers, who had the dubious honour of prompting the artist's famous phrase that women were machines for suffering. She was still alive, almost eighty years old and living in the south of France. I entertained a brief fantasy of her and Sally crossing paths — of them strolling arm in arm through a garden blooming with lavender and roses, laughing, exchanging whispered intimacies, a faint piano melody rising and falling on the air.

Still clasped in my hand was the note. I read it again.

I'm so sorry. With love, Sally
.

And I stared and I stared, until across my skin swept a shiver, like a breeze dimpling the surface of a lake.

Although based around historical events and set among actual places,
Cairo
is a work of fiction. One or two of its characters are real, but most are products of my imagination.

Like any city, a novel is made up of many stories, and a number of other books were invaluable in
Cairo
's creation. At its heart there was, of course,
Fake
by Clifford Irving. Eric Hebborn's
The Art Forger's Handbook
was a goldmine of information on painting history and techniques, as was
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
by Victoria Finlay.