Memoir From Antproof Case (41 page)

In the basement of what used to be my house lay Matsuye's
Madonna del Lago,
perfectly aged, in precisely the same frame as the original. Constance never liked the painting, perhaps because she bore too close a resemblance to its subject, and as her father and Matsuye were no longer alive, she had crated it. It's a small painting. Even with the frame it isn't much bigger than a giant box of cereal.

Smedjebakken and I walked up Fifth Avenue until we reached the house. No one was home, and the street was deserted. We were able to climb the iron fence only because Constance had refused my suggestion of sharpening the spear blades. For
reasons that remain incomprehensible to me to this day, very rich people with spear-blade fencing simply will not sharpen the points as required by logic and common sense. As we walked across the lawn without the slightest fear or hesitation (the house, after all, had been mine), Smedjebakken expressed his amazement that I had actually lived there. "The idea of living in such magnificence," I told him, "is better than the actuality."

We dropped into an immaculately clean limestone light well, where we sat with our backs against the wall and waited for Constance to come home for the evening. I knew that the window in this light well had a broken latch. You needed only to push, although someone had to be home so the alarm would be off.

"Don't you know how to work the alarm?" Smedjebakken asked.

"I'm absolutely sure," I said, "that the coffee has exacerbated Constance's paranoia, and that she's changed both the alarm authorizations and the locks. We've just got to wait."

Smedjebakken agreed and said that, indeed, if she were drinking as much coffee as I claimed, she would by now be a raving ps^chotic, and that the house was probably full of medieval instruments of torture and Doberman pinschers with teeth like those of an Oxford don.

"Don't gild the lily," I told him. "It takes years of coffee drinking to get that way. I'm not sure exactly how long she's been at it, but as I know she's a major user she's undoubtedly unapproachable, irrational, and maniacal, though not yet a total goner."

Then we heard the wonderful sound of a 1927 Nagy-Horvath, the one great Hungarian luxury automobile, of which only fifteen were built, all entirely by hand. The kerosene engine was a 750-horsepower masterpiece of stainless steel, nickel, and bronze. It looked (dare I say it?) like one of those gleaming expresso machines you see in fancy restaurants, and sounded like the quarter of the metal tinkerers in New Delhi. So many rods, arms, levers, valves, gears, and bushings would tap, turn, and click that when I used to drive the Horvath around town I saw shell-shocked veterans dive for the ground, convinced it was about to explode.

I will never understand how leather can smell so good twenty-five years after it has been installed, or why the interior refused to get dusty, or the metal to tarnish (though it may have had something to do with the man we hired to take care of the car). The engine stopped, and I waited for the distinctive paleolithic sound of the hand brake, a triceratops clearing his throat, which did not come. As the minutes passed I slowly lost my composure. I lay my head on my upraised knees and breathed like a dog standing on an examination table.

"What's the matter?" Smedjebakken asked.

"She's kissing someone," I said.

"How do you know?"

"She always sets the hand brake immediately, unless she's kissing someone. When Constance kisses, she throws her whole body into it. In a Nagy-Horvath, you can't do that over a raised hand brake."

"Oh."

"There!" I said. "Did you hear that stegosaurus-retch?"

"What stegosaurus?" Smedjebakken asked.

"Let's just get the painting and get out of here."

In a moment or two the lights went on inside. This we knew not because the basement ceased to be anything but dark, but because the waxen leaves of the Xyrothombus above us flashed yellow along their undersides as they reflected the light of the chandeliers in the ballroom.

"Why is she turning on the lights in the ballroom?" I asked. "But what do I care? She's called Holmes by now and the system is at rest."

I pushed at the window and it opened with just the sandy sound I had expected. "I'll go in first and get a stepladder," I told Smedjebakken. Jumping down from the window, I landed badly on my right ankle and fell against the wall. The blow knocked me out. Of this I am certain, because when I awoke I was choking on a bottle of 1933 Lafitte that Smedjebakken was pouring down my throat.

"What are you doing!" I screamed, unmindful of the fact that I was a burglar in my own house.

"You were unconscious. You were getting dehydrated. It was the only liquid I could find except for the champagne. I didn't want to open another bottle of champagne, because when the cork popped it made a huge sound."

I looked down and saw a magnum bottle of champagne at my feet, empty. "Where's the champagne?" I asked.

"In your stomach."

"No wonder I feel full."

"Yeah. I gave you a bottle of Château Haut Brion, too."

"Are you nuts?" I asked, my voice already starting to slur. "I hape wime. I'm going to spent next afternoon throweling up."

"Not if you don't eat."

I struggled to my feet and led Smedjebakken to the painting vaults. I don't remember much, but I do remember that as time passed and I became drunker and drunker I couldn't work the simple combination lock, so I lay there for four hours, declaiming the story of my life to Smedjebakken and listening to the player piano in the ballroom upstairs.

"What the hell is going on up there?" I asked.

"Someone's dancing, I think," Smedjebakken said, looking up.

"See what it is," I said, giving him the flashlight. "I'm too sick to move."

"Why should I risk it?"

"I have to know."

"Why do you have to know?"

"Because she's my wife! I fell in love with her once. I loved her, she loved me, and love stays. It's a fixed quantity, even if we're not."

Smedjebakken left, and more than half an hour later, when I was almost sober, he returned.

"What did you see?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"What do you mean, 'nothing'? Tell me what you saw."

"You want the truth?"

"I always want the truth," I said. "Don't you know that? Everyone always wants the truth."

"All right. After ten minutes I finally found the stairs: this basement is as big as Madison Square Garden. I was frightened that I might open the door in someone's face."

"It opens into the kitchen, not the ballroom."

"I know, but they were going in and out. Luckily, when I came up from the basement they were dancing in the ballroom. In the kitchen a ten-foot-high expresso machine was puffing away, and coffee cups were all over the place. I thought it was a party for fifty people, but there are only two, and they're drinking all that coffee. They use a clean cup each time."

"Who?" I asked, my heart between my toes.

"A beautiful, beautiful woman...."

"That's Constance."

"And a tall, slinky, Brazilian-looking guy with stretched-back
hair. He's wearing pointy shoes, black gaucho pants, and an embroidered shirt. He looks like a cross between a waiter and an acrobat, and he has really thin lips, like Rudolph Valentino."

"What was she wearing?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"There were panties and stuff scattered all over the place. She was totally nude, and she was dancing. Boy, was she dancing!"

"What kind of dances?" I asked, gritting my teeth.

"Snake dances."

"Snake dances," I repeated, my voice falling off.

"She has a way of moving that paralyzed me for half an hour."

"How could that be? For Christ's sake," I said, "they're dancing to a player piano!"

"Yes, but they dance in the coffee style, in a slow counterpoint."

"Do they kiss?"

"They kiss, they fondle, and they sip coffee. I'm sorry, but you wanted the truth."

"I always suspected," I said, "and now I know. It's better to know than to suspect. I still don't understand how it would be possible to kiss someone who drinks coffee, but it's finished, it's over. All I want to do now is rob banks."

 

After the great volume of alcohol Smedjebakken poured into me I was sick for almost a month, and I lay on the floor of one of the upstairs rooms in the Astoria house, watching all of Queens turn to winter. Smedjebakken was a first-class engineer, but he was no doctor: he tried to get me to drink a cup of tea. Why compound poisons when I was hardly alive as it was? I will make no metaphors to describe the pain in my head, because the brain, which makes metaphors, should not be forced to be clever at its own expense. My limbs ached like a kingdom that has lost a war, and my stomach swelled with the nausea of all the seas, but my head, well, it hurt. It really hurt.

Sometimes the soup of toxic residues circulating in my body gave horrible waking nightmares during which I would scream and pound the floor. Smedjebakken, who only several weeks before had poured a magnum of champagne down my throat, had the gall to suggest that my illness was psychosomatic. He said to take an aspirin.

"Are you insane?" I asked. "My uncle took an aspirin once and was sick for a year. The whole country is falling into the grip of drugs and will never recover."

"One aspirin?"

"One aspirin leads to two, two lead to four, four lead to eight, eight to sixteen, sixteen to thirty-two, and thirty-two to sixty-four. Before you knew it, I'd be seesawing on aspirin and coffee. Smedjebakken, the United States of America is becoming an opium den. Somebody,
somebody
, has to resist."

As I regained my strength, Smedjebakken worked tirelessly to equip the house. Because it was situated in an industrial neighborhood, no one took note of the things he trundled into it. When he was done, he was able to weld, cut, mill, grind, mold, tap, forge, plate, braze, drill, or extrude virtually any metal. He was expert in handling and processing, and had been building machines all his life. He told me that, given the time and materials, he could build, for example, a half-sized Rolls-Royce, or a power loom, or an antigravity box. And, because he was doing what he loved, it came easily and went fast.

He wanted to know how we were going to steal the
Madonna del Lago.
At first he thought that I intended merely to pass off the replica to Angelica and cheat my way through her requirement, but I soon had him building a full-size powered wheelchair that ran off D-cells stashed inside the metal tubing of the frame.

"Why not just have a battery at the bottom, as with Connie's wheelchair?"

"Because this is a wheelchair for stealing paintings, that's why," I said, and fell back, too weak to talk.

Three days later he had the wheelchair. "Okay," I told him, "make a box that looks just like a battery box, and mount it in the normal place. Only give it a door that pops open at a touch, and that you can't see—it has to look like the solid end of the box. The button must be concealed, the door should open as fast as a switchblade, and you have to be able to close it with the foot. Inside ... an extendible rail, set on ball bearings, sprung so that it shoots out when the door opens. Between the rails, a cradle that will hold the painting."

"I see," he said. "But what about the alarms? The guards?"

"Guards?" I asked. "Alarms? Oh."

The finished product arrived within forty-eight hours. The battery box looked just like a battery box, but when he lifted the cap on one of the grips and pushed the button underneath it (just as, in a fighter plane, the cannon trigger is set in the stick), the door lifted, and the painting, resting snugly in a felt-covered cradle, suddenly appeared. He pressed the button again, and the process reversed itself.

"It takes half a second to open or close," he said. "It uses oil-filled cylinders, and I quieted the button, the springs, and the latch. You may not have noticed, but you can't hear a thing."

"I noticed," I said.

Then I fell back, ill once more, and went through another period of pain and sickness. Smedjebakken was beginning to lose confidence in me. He was so disturbed that he came the next morning and said it right out.

"How can I trust you to do this thing and not ruin it?" he asked. "You're an invalid. The plan requires daring, strength, and stamina. You've been moaning and groaning for a month."

"I was poisoned!" I screamed.

"Poisoned by what?" Smedjebakken screamed back. "A bottle of the best champagne in the world?"

"Yes."

"Since when does drinking champagne make you sick for a month? What are you? I mean, how tough are you if your body thinks champagne is Drāno?"

"I'm as tough as anyone. Only I recoil from what is false or ugly or untrue (untrue being different from false). I can do extraordinary things at times, but I weaken in the presence of evil."

"Why?"

"Because, once, it beat me. I was completely vanquished, as powerless in its grip as someone paralyzed in a dream."

"And yet you're alive," Smedjebakken said, not to contradict me but to elicit from me the rest of the story, which was not mine to tell.

"Purely by chance."

"Well," said Smedjebakken, "you're not all that bad, but I do hope you get better. When will you get better?"

"Soon," I answered, "soon."

That night I dreamed that I lay in a summer forest, where the trees gave life and depth to air that otherwise would have been only an ether. The birds sang beautifully without knowing what they were saying or why, like a wave that rolls and breaks in the sun. The sea was close by, down a hill, vacant and blue. And the flowers seemed to have been lighted from within.
Though resting and at peace, I was not happy, for I knew that this was the last place, and that after it there would be no other.

 

When I awoke the next morning, the poison had left my system and my affliction had vanished. I was strong, energetic, and confident after the month of sleep.

"Let's go to the museum," I said to Smedjebakken, who was eating, or rather, was about to eat, a kosher turkey anus. (Since Sleepy Hollow, I had grown rather fond of them.)