The Goldfinch (106 page)
“Yes.”
“She admitted it?”
“Yes.”
“And so you are not standing with her. You are annoyed.”
“More or less.”
“Well”—Boris ran his hand through his hair—“you must go and speak to her now.”
“Why?”
“Because we have to leave.”
“Leave? Why?”
“Because I need you to take a walk with me.”
“Why?” I said, looking around the room, wishing he hadn’t dragged me away from Pippa, desperate to find her again. The candles, the orange gleam of firelight where she’d been standing made me think of the
warmth of the wine bar, as if the light itself might be a passageway back to the night before and the little wooden table where we had sat knee to knee, her face washed with the same orange-tinged light. There had to be some way I could walk across the room and grab her hand and pull her back to that moment.
Boris threw the hair out of his eyes. “Come on. You will feel fantastic when you hear what I have to say! But you will need to go home. Get your passport. And there is a question of cash, too.”
Over Boris’s shoulder: imperturbable faces of strange, cold women. Mrs. Barbour in profile, slightly turned to the wall, clutching the hand of the jolly cleric who didn’t look quite so jolly any more.
“What? Are you listening to me?” Shaking my arm. The same voice that had pulled me back to earth many times, from fractal glue-sniffing skies where I laid open-eyed and insensate on the bed, gazing at the impressive blue-white explosions on the ceiling.
“Come on! Talk in the car. Let’s go. I have a ticket for you—”
Go? I looked at him. It was all I heard.
“I will explain. Don’t look at me like that! Everything is good. No worries. But—first off—you must arrange to be gone for a couple of days. Three days. Tops. So”—flicking a hand—“go, go arrange with Snowflake and let’s get out of here. I can’t smoke in here, can I?” he said, looking around. “No one is smoking?”
Get out of here.
They were the only words anyone had said to me all night that made sense.
“Because you must go home
immediately.
” He was endeavoring to catch my eye in a familiar way. “Get your passport. And—money. How much cash do you have on hand?”
“Well, in the bank,” I said, pushing my glasses up on the bridge of my nose, oddly sobered by his tone.
“I am not talking about the bank. Or tomorrow. I am talking about on hand. Now.”
“But—”
“I can get it back, I’m telling you. But we can’t stand around here any longer. We must go now. Right away. Off with you, go,” he said, with a friendly little kick in the shin.
xxxv.
“T
HERE YOU ARE DARLING
,” said Kitsey, slipping her arm through my elbow and stretching on tiptoe to kiss me on the cheek—a kiss caught, simultaneously, by the photographers circling her: one from the social pages, the other hired for the evening by Anne. “Isn’t this glorious? Are you exhausted? I hope my family hasn’t been too overwhelming! Annie dear”—extending a hand to Anne de Larmessin, stiff blonde hair, stiff taffeta dress, wrinkled neckline that did not match the tautness of her chiseled face—“listen, it’s been absolute heaven… do you suppose we can get a family snap? Just you, me and Theo? We three?”
“Listen,” I said impatiently, as soon as our awkward photo op was over and Anne de Larmessin (who clearly didn’t consider me anything even approaching family) had drifted away to say goodbye to some other, more important guests. “I’m going.”
“But—” she looked confused—“I think Anne’s booked a table somewhere—”
“Well, you’ll have to make an excuse for me. That shouldn’t be a problem for you, should it?”
“Theo, please don’t be hateful.”
“Because your
mother
isn’t going, I’m sure of it.” It was almost impossible to get Mrs. Barbour to go out to a restaurant for dinner, unless it was some place she felt sure she wouldn’t run into someone she knew. “Say I’ve taken her home. Say she’s been taken ill. Say
I’ve
been taken ill. Use your imagination. You’ll think of something.”
“Are you vexed with me?” Family language:
vexed.
A word Andy had used when we were children.
“Vexed? No.” Now that it had settled, and I was used to the idea (Cable? Kitsey?) it was almost like some scurrilous bit of gossip that had nothing to do with me. She was wearing my mother’s earrings, I noticed—which was weirdly moving since she was absolutely right, they didn’t suit her at all—and with a pang I reached out and touched them, and then her, on the cheek.
“Ahhh,” cried some onlookers in the background—pleased to finally see some affection between the happy couple. Kitsey—catching to it instantly—seized my hand and kissed it, prompting another battery of snaps.
“All right?” I said in her ear as she leaned close. “If anyone asks, I’m away on business. Old lady’s called me to look at an estate.”
“Certainly.” You had to hand it to her: she was as cool as dammit. “When will you be back?”
“Oh, soon,” I said, not very convincingly. I would have been happy to walk out of that room and keep walking for days and months until I was on some beach in Mexico maybe, some isolated shore where I could wander alone and wear the same clothes till they rotted off me and be the crazy gringo in the horn rimmed glasses who repaired chairs and tables for a living. “Look after yourself. And keep this Havistock out of your mother’s house.”
“Well—” her voice so low I could scarcely hear her—“he’s been rather a pest recently. Phones
constantly,
wanting to drop in, bring flowers, chocolates, poor old thing. Mum won’t see him. Feel a bit guilty about putting him off.”
“Well, don’t. Keep him away. He’s a sharper. Now, bye,” I said loudly, smacking her on the cheek (more clicking of cameras; this was the shot the photographers had been waiting for all evening), and went to tell Hobie (happily inspecting a portrait, leaning forward with his nose inches from the canvas) that I was leaving for a bit.
“Okay,” he said cautiously, turning away. The whole time I’d worked with him I’d scarcely taken a vacation, certainly never to go out of town. “You and—” he nodded at Kitsey.
“No.”
“Everything all right?”
“Sure.”
He looked at me; he looked across the room at Boris. “You know, if you need anything,” he said unexpectedly. “You can always ask.”
“Right, yes,” I said—taken aback, not quite sure what he meant, or how to respond—“thanks.”
He shrugged, in seeming embarrassment, and turned self-consciously back to the portrait. Boris was at the bar drinking a glass of champagne and gobbling leftover blinis with caviar. Seeing me, he drained the rest of his glass and ticked his head at the door:
let’s get out of here!
“See you,” I said to Hobie, shaking his hand (which was not something I ordinarily did) and leaving him to stare after me in some perplexity. I wanted to say goodbye to Pippa but she was nowhere in sight. Where
was she? The library? The loo? I was determined to catch another glimpse of her—just one more—before I left. “Do you know where she is?” I said to Hobie, after making a quick tour around; but he only shook his head. So I stood anxiously by the coat check for several minutes, waiting for her to return, until finally Boris—mouth full of hors d’oeuvres—grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down the staircase and out the door.
We have art in order not to die from the truth.
—N
IETZSCHE
i.
T
HE
L
INCOLN
T
OWN
C
AR
was circling the block—but when the driver stopped for us, it was not Gyuri but a guy I’d never seen, with a haircut that looked like someone had administered it to him in the drunk tank and piercing, polar-blue eyes.
Boris introduced us in Russian.
“Privet! Myenya zovut Anatoly,”
said the guy, extending a hand slurred with indigo crowns and starbursts like the patterns on Ukrainian Easter eggs.
“Anatoly?” I said cautiously.
“Ochyen’ priyatno?”
A stream of Russian followed, of which I understood not a word, and I turned to Boris in despair.
“Anatoly,” Boris said pleasantly, “does not speak one stitch of English. Do you, Toly?”
In answer Anatoly gazed at us seriously in the rear view mirror and made another speech. His knuckle tattoos, I was pretty sure, had jailhouse significance: inked bands indicating time sentenced, time served, time marked in accretions like rings on a tree.
“He says you are pretty speaker,” said Boris ironically. “Well-schooled in politeness.”
“Where is Gyuri?”
“Oh—he flew over yesterday,” Boris said. Scrabbling in the breast pocket of his jacket.
“Fly? Fly where?”
“Antwerp.”
“My painting’s there?”
“No.” Boris had retrieved two sheets of paper from his pocket, which he scanned in the weak light before passing one to me. “But my flat is in
Antwerp, and my car. Gyuri is picking up the car and some things and driving to meet us.”
Holding the paper to the light, I saw that it was a printout of an electronic ticket:
CONFIRMED
DECKER/THEODORE
DL2334
NEWARK LIBERTY INTL
(EWR)
TO AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
(AMS)
BOARDING TIME
12:45A
TOTAL TRAVEL TIME 7 HRS 44 MINS
“From Antwerp to Amsterdam is only three hours’ drive,” said Boris. “We will arrive at Schiphol about same time—me, maybe an hour after you—I had Myriam book us on different planes. Mine connects through Frankfurt. Yours is direct.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes—well, as you see, it does not leave us much time—”
“And why am I going?”
“Because I may need some help, and do not want to bring anyone else in on this. Well—Gyuri. But I did not tell even Myriam purpose of our trip. Oh, oh, I
could
have,” he said, interrupting me. “It’s only—fewer people know of this, the better. Anyway you must run in and get your passport and what cash you can lay hands on. Toly will drive us to Newark. I—” he patted the carry-on, which I had only just noticed in the back seat—“I am all ready. Will wait in the car for you.”
“And the money?”
“What you have.”
“You should have told me earlier.”
“No need. The cash—” he was rooting around for a cigarette—“well, I would not kill yourself with that. Whatever you have, whatever’s convenient—? Because, is not important. Is mostly for show.”
I took my glasses off, polished them on my sleeve. “Excuse me?”
“Because—” knocking himself with the knuckles on the side of his head, gesture of old,
blockhead—
“because I plan to pay them, but not the full amount requested.
Reward
them for stealing from me? Because why then won’t they rob and steal from me whenever they want? What kind of a lesson is this? ‘This man is weak.’ ‘We can do what we like to him.’
But—” crossing his legs spasmodically, patting himself down for a light—“I want them to think we are willing to pay the whole thing. Possibly you want to stop at a machine and get money—we can do that on the way, or at the airport maybe. They will look nice, the new bills. I think you are only allowed to bring ten thousand currency in, to EU—? But I will rubber-band the extra and carry in my case. Also—” offering me a cigarette—“I do not think it is fair for you to come up with the whole sum. I will supply more cash once we get there. My gift to you. And bank draft, as well—at any rate, bad paper for bank draft—bad deposit slip, bad check. Brass-plate bank down in the Caribbean. Looks very good, very legitimate. I do not know how well that part is going to work out. We will have to play it by ear. No one with any brains is going to accept bank draft instead of cash for something like this! But I think they are inexperienced, and desperate, so—” he crossed his fingers—“I am hopeful. We will see!”
