Theft (27 page)

Everything is straight up and down except Broadway. Keep an eye on that one, chum. He marked Broadway with his pen. A snake in the grass.

Her father?

Broadway. Also West Broadway. Not to be confused.

To complete my map he ripped across the top at 55th Street.

World ends here, he said. My office. Top right corner of the map. Now, he said, test drive.

We set off across to Fifth Avenue where we found a Duane Reade a CHEMIST SHOP where I was introduced to his client's products the denture glue also the bubbling tablets the sufferers used to clean their teeth at night, poor Mum, she was what is called the TARGET MARKET.

On Sixth Avenue Olivier bought SUPPLIES including a flask of bourbon which fitted nicely inside his coat. This is your town, old mate. Never let them tell you otherwise. He waited while I checked our map. I saw exactly where I was.

Now, old chum, we're going to walk clean off the map. Don't panic. Watch exactly how it's done.

Soon thereafter, on 24th Street, we found a group of men outside a church. Not all had chairs like mine, but at least four did. Others preferred the fire hydrant, church steps, SIAMESE CONNECTION. A close similarity to a gathering of PUDDING OWNERS with diseases that swelled their ankles and turned their legs all blue and black.

Fellow professionals, he said. Your peers.

I opened my chair. Olivier was wearing his shimmering grey suit and his poofter shoes. He didn't have a chair but when he took out his flask of whisky he soon made friends.

New York is a very friendly town, he said to me.

The first person to take a swig gave us his business card.

Vincent Carollo

Film musician • Chelsea Diner

His black hair was due to boot polish. It made a straight line across his forehead and the hair was all swept back from there.

He said call me Vinnie. He had played a banjo in Chelsea Diner, a famous film apparently. Also, we should never stay in the West 16th Street shelter, and remember, the soup at St. Mark's was better than what they give you at St.

Peter's. He also taught me never leave my chair unattended and then I sang "ADVANCE AUSTRALIA FAIR". He took back his card as he needed it for later. He said I would be in the next film too but when I invited him to the Bicker Club Olivier said it was time to go.

But he had showed me I could make friends. I didn't need him now. That was his whole point. He was going to abandon me. I could not be permitted to sit with

him in his office, nor to visit at any hour. He was hoping he could have this rule changed but don't hold your breath, Hughie.

The thing is, old chum, he said, they are very superficial individuals. I asked could I stand on the street outside.

He said you have UNIQUE TALENT, old chum. I mean, old chum, you do know how to BE.

He meant my talent for sitting on a chair while Butcher flew around in a mad frenzy, a willy wagtail trying to be a king. He did not know I had a TALENT for drawing. When they sent me home from school I did not burn them down. Instead I began to work peacefully with biro on my sheets and by the time Mum LOOKED IN ON ME I had all the Marsh laid out in pen across it. Blue Bones dealt with that one in his usual style.

The Marsh was my place as no other. Not only the chair, the footpath. I knew the drains and culverts, the length of every street and where they crashed together. From Mason's Lane to the Madingley railway crossing was 6,450 heartbeats. In the whole five thousand pop. who else knew this simple fact? Yes it was a talent but I was allegedly too slow to go to school.

When Olivier left me on Monday morning I took the map and lay it on the carpet in the room. Explosions in my neck but nothing bad. I drew the Main Street of Bacchus Marsh down Broadway, and the Gisborne Road across 34th Street. Lerderderg Street lying like a ghost along Eighth Avenue.

I felt better. I felt worse. Then I could not stand the map. Heft.

Across to Third Avenue and up. That was my plan. Twentysecond Street, 23 rd Street, and so on. There was no doubt I could reach 55th. Heart closer to two hundred, great red lump of muscle in an uproar, never mind. Reaching 55th Street I was denied access to the building by a man in a brown suit.

I walked back Downtown. Followed the map of the Marsh and arrived at the butcher shop next door to Duane Reade where I bought a pack of Band-Aids it was HIGHWAY ROBBERY.

Olivier finally arrived back at the club BETTER LATE THAN NEVER I gave him the Band-Aids and instructed him to stick one on his window so I could see his office from the street.

Old Chum, he said, I will put up the Band-Aid at exactly ten past one. When we set up in the bar, Olivier told me he was getting his life back. Here, he said, have one of these.

He would now divorce Marlene.

He downed a big gin and tonic and crunched up the ice. This will totally fuck the bitch, he said. Once she was divorced she would never authenticate another painting or try to make him sign a form.

Here, he said, have one of these as well.

I pointed out the second pill was a different colour from the first pill. He replied that we were desperados not decorators.

He was on his HOBBY HORSE and galloping. She could go back to the typing pool, old mate, the pond from which she rose and then he listed the names of different SCUM that grew on top of ponds for instance SPIROGYRA.

Jeavons came to have a word.

BLOOD ON HER SADDLE he said the words from a song who knows which one. Jeavons made a sign to the bartender and I understood Olivier was going mad.

Next morning I knew I must take a holiday with my brother. It was his job to care for me. On arrival I requested sausages and eggs. He knew his obligation.

Marlene was asleep in the mattress on the floor. She had a bare leg sticking out beneath her quilt and I could see her batty, bless me, it was so pretty I had to look away. For REASONS KNOWN ONLY TO HIMSELF my brother had purchased a sheet of glass and was grinding pigments, gathering and scraping the pigment with a spatula.

I asked him why he did not buy some nice one-pound tubes. He said I could go and rack myself.

Very nice. I sat and watched him until he asked me would I like a try. So I was needed to be the DOGSBODY.

He had no linseed oil but something else called AMBER-TOL. I was pleased to show how well I produced the buttery texture he required. The colour very soothing

before he made it into something angry. Oceans of yellow, colour of God, light without end.

So, said he, how is your mate Dr. Goebbels? Who?

Olivier.

I told him Olivier was going to divorce Marlene. I intended to make him happy. Perhaps I did. In any case I heard Marlene shift in the bed but she might as well have been asleep because she did not say a word.

45

The face of Dominique Broussard's dusty canvas was now turned permanently towards the wall, and if there was still a certain tension between the pair of us, it was entirely pleasant.

That is, my baby had a secret--how had she shrunk the painting? And I also had a secret of my own--jars of paint in colours I refused to explain to her. I left these five enigmas in full view on the blistered kitchen countertop, and I made sketches twenty feet away from them, in a corner by the windows, sitting on a wooden box with my back turned to the dirty street. What was I up to? I would not tell her and she would not ask. We smiled a lot, and made love more than ever.

Then she bought a bench press, assembling it in pretty much the same spirit that I worked on my paints and pencil studies.

Sometimes I stepped away from my secret project to draw her lovely slender arms, the stretched tendons in her neck. She sweated readily when exercising but in these drawings, which I still have, it is my own desire that glistens on her skin.

It was 1981 and the only rule was DON'T BUZZ IN PEOPLE YOU DO NOT KNOW. But when, late one snowy morning, the street bell rang, I buzzed in the stranger and threw our apartment open to the fates. It was either that or walk down five flights to find no-one more interesting than the UPS guy.

On this occasion I accidentally let in Detective bloody Amberstreet. Marlene lowered her weights.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"What are you doing here, Marlene?" said Amberstreet, his white creased-up face protruding from a long black quilted coat.

"That would be more pertinent."

"Nice shoes," I said, but he had always been impervious to insult and now he complacently considered the snow-encrusted Converse sneakers protruding from the skirt of his black coat.

"Thanks," he said. "They were only sixty dollars." He blinked.

"The thing is Marlene, this loft is the property of the Government of New South Wales. I hope for your sake that you have permission to be here."

But then his eye was taken by I, the Speaker, and here his snarky manner unexpectedly melted and that strange adoring look crept into his eyes. Without altering this new focus of attention he removed his ridiculous coat, revealing a sweatshirt reading "UCK NEW YOR," the "F" and "K" being hidden underneath his arms.

"So," he said, hugging the coat against him like a comforter, "so, Michael, were you a friend of Helen Gold?"

Marlene cast a quick look at me. What the fuck did that mean?

"She's a bloody awful painter," I said. "Why would I know someone like that?" "She was artist-in-residence here."

"Actually, she was a friend of mine," said Marlene. "So, Mrs. Leibovitz, you knew Helen killed herself." "Of course."

"So you understand that you have been contaminating a crime scene?" "Sorry," she said to me. "I did not want you getting spooked."

"It has bad light," Amberstreet announced, taking in his twentyeight- inch belt another notch. "I don't know who would buy a space like this for an artist. Are you working here, Michael? Are you producing?" He peered around, his bristly head darting towards the jars of paint I had lined up on the kitchen countertop. "A change of palette!"

He squeaked across the floor towards the kitchen. Marlene shot me a warning look, but why?

The detective was like a dog, sniffing here, pissing there, running from one smell to the next. He laid his coat down on the countertop and picked up two jars, one red, one yellow. "How exciting." Pant, pant, pant. Then he was pushing his pointy nose towards I, the Speaker, squizzing up his eyes, clasping my bottles to his chest. If he had opened one and got a whiff of Ambertol...

He didn't.

"God," he said, "even if the lighting was a little bit too perfect. I mean at Mitsukoshi. A complete sellout, I mean in the good sense, Michael, of everything being sold. I hope you got some press back home."

"I don't know."

"Of course you've not been home either. It was Mauri, right?

Hiroshi Mauri who bought the whole damn show. That's a class above your mate Jean-Paul."

"Yes."

"An associate of yours, Marlene, would that be correct?"

Marlene had been sitting on the bench, but now she stood, wrapping a towel around her shoulders. "Oh please," she said.

"This is so boring."

"Yes, you know what I thought, Michael?" He immediately gave me my jars of paint to hold. "You know what I thought when I heard about your show? I thought, This is how Marlene is going to get Mr. Boylan's Leibovitz out of Australia."

It was hard not to laugh at the little fuck. "Yeah, well you were wrong about that one."

"No, I don't think so, Michael. I wasn't wrong at all. My, this painting was beautifully restored." The V-shaped creases around his eyes were deepening like wire cuts in a sandstone block. He cocked his head, and, in what seemed a sort of frenzy of curiosity, twisted his wire arms fiercely around his chest. "Really, it's no excuse for what we did to it, but it's actually improved, don't you think?"

I looked to Marlene. Amberstreet caught my look.

"I heard, Marlene, that there was a new Leibovitz on the market in New York. Ex- Tokyo. So what I realised, Marlene, was Michael's paintings were a kind of feint. We opened all the crates at Sydney Airport, but you had the Leibovitz in your hand luggage. In your garment bag, I'd say."

Oh fuck, I thought, she's caught. It's over. It had happened, just like that. But Marlene was not looking caught at all. Indeed, she smiled. "You know very well it can't be Mr. Boylan's painting."

Amberstreet tipped his head and looked at her, no longer officious or even sarcastic, but, just for a brief moment, showing something close to admiration. It was Marlene who finally spoke. "You measured it?"

The detective did not reply but, in an oddly polite gesture, retrieved my jars of paint from me, and returned them to the kitchen where, in short order, he opened a cupboard door, closed it carefully, ran his finger along the countertop, turned on the tap, washed his finger, and then, finally, it seemed he might speak. But then his eye lit on the back of Dominique's dumb little canvas. He turned it over. I held my breath.

"Guess where I was just now," he demanded.

"Tell us," I said. I thought, Where the fuck is all this heading? "With Bill de Kooning in the Hamptons."

"Yes. So?"

"No-one ever told me he was so handsome," said Amber-street. I could not follow him.

"And there's the wife. Elaine. Gone back to him."

Marlene's eyes showed no concern at all. They were bright and clear, intensely focused. She handed me my coat.

"Just wait," begged Amberstreet. "Please. Just look."

From the pocket of his ridiculous coat he produced an envelope from which he removed a two-sheet cardboard sandwich which, in turn, protected a tiny charcoal doodle. This he handed to me, cradled in his palm, as fragile as a butterfly. "It's a de Kooning?"

"Everyone has to go to the lavatory sometime." "You prick," Marlene said. "You stole it."

"Not really, no. It isn't even signed." He danced from one foot to the other, his mouth turned down in a rictus of denial. "Who would believe that in Sydney?" he said. "Who would have any idea? You're both leaving? I'll walk down with you, but tell me, I wanted to ask you. Did you see that Noland show?"