Stealing Picasso (12 page)

‘Fuck.'

‘Tanya!'

If Tanya in the cafeteria has heard of Giotto, they are in big trouble.

Sour expressions on their faces, they begin to slit their eyes at one another, each more innocent than his fellows, each remembering it was someone else's idea, each remembering the lead role in the game was taken by some other, each remembering remarks made by another (‘You got Christ in the arse!' ‘The Messiah in the blurter!') Each wishing he hadn't marched blindly at that little canvas and gored it with the safety pin and made jokes about his own inaccuracy. Each wishing he had had to rush off and meet his woman, shop for groceries, join her workmates for drinks even, rather than stay back and play stoned Pin the Tail on the Donkey with a masterpiece.

Each starts to compose his testimony for the cops. A tale that leaves each blameless, coerced, even duped, by the vandals he works with. You bastards, each thinks, were the ones who started this stupid game; you revelled in it, flopped about laughing as Christ was speared. I was a minor player, and can't possibly be as deep in the shit as you, who've ruined a picture by some dude even Tanya in the cafeteria has heard of.

Today the gallery will remain closed. Usually the spirit of the place – its egotism, its hatred of the hoi polloi, the special camaraderie of the chosen – becomes apparent when the doors are locked. Those who work here in the name of Art are never so happy as when the public are excluded. But not today. Today they are uncomfortable with one another and would welcome the public in to erase the terrible intimacy they feel. They would be happy to know a member of the public has stolen the painting, because this is the sort of thing that is to be expected when the public are let in.

The gallery is abuzz with atonement. The misdemeanors and private peccadilloes of three hundred staff over many years are being hastily camouflaged, confessed, erased, made good, explained or run from. There is weeping in the halls. A Picasso has been stolen, and the gallery will surely be laid bare, brick by brick, secret by secret. A great tsunami of law enforcement is going to wash through and float every secret out onto the street into the public eye. This is the Day of Judgement foretold. Some fool has stolen a Picasso and brought judgement down on us of all. Who did it? Is it an inside job? Is one of us to blame for this cataclysm? Accusations are made, friendships curdle to enmity, and the atmosphere in the gallery is poisoned.

Weston Guest stands staring into the ghostly rectangle the
Weeping Woman
has left behind on the wall. It is roughly the size of a broadsheet newspaper and in it he can read tomorrow's headlines. The media, which was complicit in the euphoria of her purchase, will turn on him. Those who deemed her priceless when she arrived will measure her loss in schools and hospitals now she is gone. How many country schools could have been built with the 1.6 million bucks this thing cost us? How many defibrillators could have been purchased to save how many lives? How many hospital beds? How many dullards and deaths has this bauble caused? Some journo looking for an angle will do the math. One point six million dollars divided by the three-hundred-odd nights she was in the gallery: ‘GUEST'S GUEST AT $5333 A NIGHT.
AND YOU PAID
.' That's a headline.

What image could measure up to their outrage? A diptych will be needed – for juxtaposition. The left panel will be Weston in a photo taken on the day of her arrival: triumphant, gleeful, hands extended, showing off his new woman. On the right will be a gaunt pensioner with tubes coming out of her arm, lying on a stretcher in a hospital corridor, the look on her face eerily similar to the
Weeping Woman
. A smiling man wearing a bow tie alongside a dying pensioner can't fail to come off as a demonic turd, an aesthete. ‘Let her eat cake,' Weston imagines the caption.

He whispers at that ghostly rectangle where she hung, ‘Oh, Lord. I may as well be the thief myself.'

He is still standing there when the leather soles of law enforcement chirp panic on the parquetry floor, announcing the arrival of Speed Draper, the Minister for the Arts and Police and a posse of ranking cops. ‘Tell me this is a joke, Weston. You can't have lost the Picasso.'

As Minister for the Arts, Speed bared his teeth for a hundred photo ops when the
Weeping Woman
arrived, his colleagues in parliament joked he had milked her like a wet nurse. She became part of his political profile, inextricably linked with his tenure as minister. As the man who signed the cheque for her, and the man who is responsible for law and order in the state, he knows he will be doubly condemned.

‘
I
haven't
lost
it. It has been stolen.' Weston, now that he has been blamed, feels the dignity that comes with wrongful accusation. His back straightens, he lifts a few centimetres in height.

Speed steps forwards and reads the card on the wall. ‘Who the fuck are these people?' He turns to his policemen. ‘Australian Cultural Terrorists? Ever heard of them?' None of them has.

‘They're not known to my people,' he tells Weston.

‘Is that a good thing?' Weston asks icily.

‘Listen, Weston. Let's get together on this – the media will be here any minute. How did these “terrorists” break in? Do you think it's an inside job? Might she still be here somewhere?' He glances around.

‘Speed, I know as much as you. I got a phone call, I came down and I found that card.'

‘Well, don't worry. Long-term scenario: we'll bang these franger-heads in a cell with rapists, psychopaths and goat-tamperers until Geelong win their next flag.'

Even now Speed can envisage the day of their capture. The Cultural Terrorists in the scrawny, wild-eyed mould of Charles Manson, handcuffed. Speed emerging from their hideout holding the
Weeping Woman
aloft. ‘But in the short term we've got the media outside.'

‘Speed, this is a hideous experience. I feel nothing but ignominy and shame,' Weston confesses.

‘Well … that's about right.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Shit, Weston. The Picasso. Our great coup. Yours and mine. I might have gone a bit over the top myself when we bought her, but, shit, you swanned about like Liberace.'

Weston puts a hand to his breast and steps forwards and leans his head on the wall into the light-coloured rectangle where she hung. ‘Find her, Speed. You have a whole police force. Find her, or we are both doomed.'

Later that day a letter is delivered to
The Age
newspaper and published under the screaming headline: ‘PICASSO STOLEN.'

1. Minister must announce a commitment to increasing the funding of the arts by 10% in real terms over the next three years, and must agree to appoint an independent committee to enquire into the mechanics of the funding of the arts with a view to releasing money from its administration and making it available to artists.
   
2. The Minister must announce a new annual prize for painting, open to artists under thirty years of age. Five prizes of $5000 are to be awarded. A fund is to be established to ensure that the real value of the prizes is to be maintained each year. The prize is to be called The Picasso Ransom.
   

Harry enjoyed writing the letter. Reading it in
The Age
gave him a thrill of pride. He believed what it said. He and his fellow students at the National Gallery are perpetually angered by the great gobs of public cash arts administrators swallow, and the penury in which artists lived.

But, in truth, the aim of the letter is not to change government policy on the funding of the arts. The aim of the letter is to buy him and Mireille and Turton time; to get the cops sniffing for righteous aesthetes and political activists rather than robbers.

Watching TV with a beer in his hand and his legs crossed beneath him later that day, Harry jumps around on his sofa in delight when Speed Draper holds a news conference and refuses to meet the ransom demands, making a virtue of not negotiating with terrorists. ‘Budgeting by blackmail is not on.' Interpol has been called, Speed tells them. Harry shouts indignantly at his TV, ‘You bastard. You're risking our Picasso.'

When the news conference is over he fetches his pad and paper and composes another letter.

1. We have not dumped the painting in a blue-nosed funk. What should have caused us to panic? Perhaps you imagine that the news that Interpol has been alerted will cause us to cower in our ill-lit garrets awaiting the inevitable 3 am knock on the door as the relentless Clouseaux of a hundred nations tirelessly stalk us. What an imaginative fellow you turned out to be. Interpol! Call on Red Adair to read your gas meter, do you?
   
2. We hope you enjoy playing the political he-man, unflinchingly refusing the outrageous demands of these cultural crackpots. You continue flexing your political pectorals before an admiring electorate for as long as you can, Minister. Seven days after the painting came into our hands (Sat. 2
   ^nd
   Aug, 10 pm) if our demands have not been met you will begin the long process of carrying about you the smell of kerosene and burning canvas. You are gambling the state's two-million-dollar investment in the Picasso industry against our twenty-cent investment in Bryant and May. Mind you, we do find your Conan the Barbarian routine terribly diverting.
   
3. The people of Australia, and you as one of their elected representatives, should rejoice that a theft involving less risk than shoplifting cotton hankies from David Jones was performed by a group whose first desire is to return the painting. Not that we should really expect such a sensible reaction from someone so determined to have others shoulder the blame. The responsibility is entirely yours.
   

When this is published the next day in
The Age
, Speed Draper, feeling slighted and desperate, calls another press conference and announces a $50,000 reward for the return of the painting.

Harry, thrilled at this duel between him and Speed, writes another letter.

Upon publication of this letter Speed calls another press conference, assuring the public of the safety of the remaining treasures in the National Gallery. To Harry it is like having the minister on a string. And Speed knows that with each letter he is deflating in the eyes of the public. People on trams are reading these letters aloud, discussing them like they discuss last night's episode of
Minder
. With every new jibe his persona hisses as a few kpa of dignity leak from it. Soon he will be a flaccid sack and his political career will be over.

After this second press conference Harry writes another letter to
The Age
.