Theft (31 page)

Marlene was dressed for running, in baggy daggy shorts and a soiled white T- shirt. Until now she had ignored my brother's close attention, but when she stood Hugh cocked his head and raised an interrogative eyebrow.

"What?" she asked. The buzzer sounded.

Hugh started, and went back under cover.

He was a silly bugger, but my own relation with that buzzer was not much better. I certainly did not want to have Detective Dickhead enquiring about the painting I had wrapped so carefully with newspaper the night before. It lay now exactly where it had lain in its freshly sanded state, leaning against the wall.

Thinking to move it, I stood, but not before Milt Hesse walked in. It was the first time I was ever pleased to see the old cunthound, for he had come to take our treasure to be cleaned. As he entered my brother glared at him so fiercely I feared that he might charge.

"Whoa," I said. "Whoa, Dobbin."

Before Milt had a chance to properly understand his situation, he advanced on the huge swaddled creature, his arm outstretched. "I haven't met you, sir. Are you another Aussie genius?"

But Hugh would not touch him and Milt, doubtless having a New Yorker's well- calibrated judgment of all forms of madmen, swerved sideways to the table where he kissed Marlene.

"Doll-face."

His left arm, having been injured in a fall, was supported by a sling and he now allowed Marlene to tuck the parcel beneath the right.

Hugh meanwhile was all hunched over, knees to his chest, rocking sideways. If you did not know him you would think he was ignoring the guest but I was not at all surprised when, as Milt was leaving, my brother suddenly lurched to his feet.

"I'll see you out," Marlene said suddenly.

Hugh dropped back to his knees, burrowing in the tangle of bedclothes where he finally found his coat and separated it from quilt and sheet and then, with Marlene and Milt not too far ahead of him, he was heading towards the door. "No, mate, you don't want to do that."

I blocked his way, but he shouldered me away. "Please, mate. No trouble."

He paused. "Who is he?"

"He's going to clean the painting." "Oh."

He drew back, puzzled at first, but finally displaying a stupid knowing smirk, as if he, of all people, was privy to some hidden truth.

"What is it that you're thinking, mate?" He tapped his head.

"You're thinking?" "Roof," he said.

The fucking smirk was physically unbearable. "What roof, mate?"

He withdrew further, back towards the mattress, his mouth now impossibly small, his ears slowly suffusing with blood. As he settled back into his nest his dry hair, confused by static, rose slowly on his head. He was still like this, a dreadful grinning fright, when Marlene came back from her run.

She also was on edge, had been on edge in any case, and no matter how she ran or worked her weights, nothing would give her any peace.

Sitting at the table, she went straight back to the Times. "You burned down the high school," my brother said.

Oh Hugh, I thought, Hugh, Hugh, Hugh.

Marlene's colour was already high, a lovely pink that revealed the tiniest palest freckles.

"What did you say to Marlene?"

Hugh hugged his big round knees and giggled. "She burned down Benalla High School," he said.

Marlene smiled. "Hugh, you are very strange."

"You too," my brother said, somehow seeming contented, as if some puzzle had been solved. "I heard you burned down Benalla High School."

Marlene was staring at him now, and for a moment her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened, but then her face relaxed.

"Why Hugh," she smiled, "you are as full of tricks as a bag full of monkeys." "You too."

"You too."

"You too," until the pair of them were laughing uproariously and I went to the dunny to get away.

At lunchtime, Milt called to say Jane had the painting which appeared, she said, to have been hung in someone's kitchen.

That night I cooked sausages for Hugh and after Marlene had taken her evening run, she and I went to dinner at Fanelli's where we drank two bottles of fantastic burgundy.

I didn't feel drunk, but I fell into bed and passed out like a light.

I woke to find Marlene crawling back into bed. I had a splitting headache. She was freezing cold. At first I thought her shivering but when I touched her face it was aflood with tears. As I held her, her body shook convulsively.

"Shush, baby. Shush, it's all right." But she could not stop.

"I'm sorry," said Hugh, standing in the doorway.

"For fuck's sake, go back to fucking sleep. It's three o'clock." "I shouldn't have said it."

"It's nothing to do with you, you idiot."

I heard him sigh and Marlene was almost choking, a dreadful noise like someone drowning. I could see her by the light from the street, all her smooth lovely planes crushed and broken inside a fist. It was the dumb divorce, I thought, the bloody droit moral. Why she had to have it, I really, really could not see. "Can you still love me?"

Headache or no, I loved her, as I had never loved in all my life, loved her wit, her courage, her beauty. I loved the woman who stole Dozy's painting, who read The Magic Pudding, who faked the catalogue, but even more the girl escaping the vile little room in Benalla and I could smell the red lead paint her mother brushed on the fireplace every Sunday, taste the shitty ersatz coffee made from chicory, the canned beetroot staining the boiled egg white in the deadly iceberg salad.

"Shush. I love you." "You don't know." "Shush."

"You won't love me. You can't." "I do."

"I did it," she cried suddenly. "What did you do?"

I looked into her face and saw an alarming terror, a dreadful cringing in the face of my tender enquiry. She gave a little moan and hid her head in my chest and began to sob again. Through all of this, I detected Hugh. He was now standing right over us.

"Go to bed, now."

His bare feet brushed across the floor. "I did it," she said.

"She burned down Benalla High School," said Hugh mournfully. "I'm sorry."

I took her chin and tilted her face towards me, all the street light trapped in a tide around her pooling eyes.

"Did you, my baby?" She nodded.

"Is that what you did?" "I'm vile."

I took her to me, and held her, the whole cage of mystery that was her life.

53

I was wrong, quite possibly, I had sinned, very likely, had borne FALSE WITNESS, become a COMMON GOSSIP. Have you heard? They say Marlene Cook burned down the high school.

Who is THEY? Why, it was only Olivier. So it was just SCUTTLEBUTT and HEARSAY, bless me, I would never have repeated it if I had not SMELLED A RAT, as the saying is. I was DISCOMBOBULATED--that's a good one--and so I foolishly repeated

what a DRUG ADDICT had ALLEGED and caused Marlene to weep, deep in the middle of the night, a human lost in outer space or inside a plastic bag, gulping for air, their GOOD NAME vacuumed from them, the HOOVER sucking oxygen, roaring like the mills of God.

What right did I have? No right, only wrong. Forgive me Lord Jesus, it was agony to hear her suffer and I could not wait for the dawn so I could go back to the Bicker Club and PUT IT TO Olivier that he had invented the story because he hated her.

When it was grey light I stood above them. I wished I was an angel, but there never would be feathers on my hairy back. She was sleeping, her head as always against my brother's chest. He opened one eye and peered at his watch.

Out? he asked. Walk, I said.

It was a clear morning, just after seven, pigeons already cooing on the rusty fire escape, not knowing one day from the other I presume, or only wet from dry, hot from cold, their hearts the size of a lump of gum, insufficient blood to fill a cup. Nothing like my agony for them, I thought, but then again who can imagine the constant torment from the lice, the pain of diseases unknown to any but the sufferer, their own secret horrors, no worse, no better. Walking up Mercer Street, head down. All around me black plastic bags, erupting, spewing, restaurant fish for instance. What knowledge might a fish have?

Who would forewarn a red snapper of the afterlife, this purgatory on Mercer Street? These dreadful thoughts pursued me SMELLS IN HELL as I bolted up Broadway, was nearly killed. Then Union Square, Gramercy Park, but where was Jeavons now? It did not matter. I had my key. As I have confessed. As I have told the sequence of events. As the story has been recorded, reel to reel.

I PROCEEDED to the second floor and unlocked the door, bless me. I did not know what I had done.

Olivier in black pyjamas, his face hidden by the chair, the legs. of the chair closed like scissors around bruised white throat, a great blue birthmark, an underground lake spilling beneath his skin.

His eyes were open. He was still. What had SLIPPED MY MIND I could not tell. I touched him with my foot and he moved like a dead beast but no more.

I did not touch the body with my hands. I ran from the club with Jeavons calling to me STOP. I ran down Broadway howling DON'T WALK DON'T CARE. Save us from me, tell me what is done.

54

Slow Bones woke us. Like sheet metal falling, flailing, slamming on the bed. No time for socks or underwear, we travelled, all three together, to the Bicker Club, and there we found the socalled Jeavons in a state that was unpleasantly like a snit.

It was he who pointed out "the wife" to the police and as a result Marlene had the privilege of being taken to the crime scene--the cops getting very bloody physical with me when I thought I had a right to come along--and it was she who then became "the deponent" who swore "the remains" of the deceased had once been Olivier Leibovitz.

I waited on the mansion steps, which was as close to Olivier as anyone permitted me to get. Hugh and I were side by side, numb and dumb. Marlene emerged, opened her mouth to speak, and vomited across the stoop.

Hugh accompanied the police into the Bicker Library. Marlene was retching on the footpath, but I was directed to accompany Hugh a certain distance. I observed his tape-recorded interrogation from the high-arched doorway while they sat him beneath a nasty poster for a production of Hamlet with John Wilkes Booth. I could not hear what was said, but it seems he confessed to murder. I believed it, totally. As they applied their rattraps to his wrists my brother looked at me, no longer crying, his little eyes so weirdly still and dark.

They got the big old fellow on his feet and spun him round and left him standing, facing the corner of the library.

Something then occurred, God knows what exactly--coming and going on the stairs. Then the youngest cop, a young crewcut fellow in sneakers and jeans, released Hugh's cuffs and the old bull rushed towards me, head down.

"Hugh!"

He brushed past.

The cop was a trim brush-cut fellow, not like any cop I knew, more like the Lebanese guys selling hash at Johnny's Green Room in Melbourne.

"That's your brother?" "Yes."

"He's a little slow?" "That's right."

"Get him out of here." "What?"

"He's free to go."

Hugh was hovering with his little blaming eyes. He permitted me to put my arm around him and escort him down the steps.

"Sit here a minute, mate."

I took off my sweater and my T-shirt, pulled the prickly wool back over my ruined skin, used the T-shirt to clean Marlene who had propped herself between two parked cars and was still gulping and gasping, although now she was producing little more than bile. I had not seen what she had seen, and I did not want to. I wiped her mouth, and chin, leaving the shirt coloured by the bitter green and when I was done I threw it--fuck them--across the rail of Gramercy Park.

An ambulance came, but no-one bothered to get out. It was grey, overcast, damp, sweaty. We were lifeless, all our marrow sucked into the maw of God knows what dimension.

Police arrived and departed. Taxis hooted at the ambulance, but no-one was in a hurry to bring the famous artist's son downstairs.

Of course I could not yet know about the freshly broken metacarpal bone in Olivier's right hand. I wonder what I would have done. Would I have tried to turn in my brother? Report him? Dob him in? How the fuck would I know? The real mystery, however, was not my character, but the crime itself.

The killer had either had a key--but all keys were accounted for--or he had entered an open window by scaling a sheer fiftyfoot wall.

Hugh, who did have a key, was still asleep at Mercer Street at the time Jeavons brought in the tea and found the body. Had Jeavons done it? No-one thought so. As Hugh ran away from the scene, by the time he had seen the body, the corpse was already five hours old.

So it was nothing to do with Hugh, and yet the body contained a message to anyone who knew Hugh's history.

The Office of Chief Medical Examiner did not know Hugh, did not know it was a message, although God knows they went digging. They took little bits of Olivier's brain, liver, blood.

There was Adderall and Celexa and Morphine in his brain, but these drugs had not killed him. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The autopsy reported the telltale signs: intensive heart congestion (enlarged heart; right-side ventricle), venous engorgement above the point of injury and cyanosis (blue discolouration of lips and fingertips). That had been achieved by the folding legs of Hugh's chair.

Enough you would imagine, but not for them. They cut him up like a pig at the Draybone Inn, opening his beautiful body with "the usual incision". The flies were buzzing. They weighed his poor sad brain. They found the vessels at the base of the brain to be "smooth-walled and widely patent", whatever that means. They weighed his lungs, his heart, and liver. Will that be all Mrs.

Porter? They found the esophagus unremarkable. They poked around his stomach and reported "undigested foodstuff with recognisable fragments of meat and vegetable and a marked odour of alcohol."

They cut up his dick. "The calyces, pelves, ureters and urinary bladder are unremarkable. The capsule strips with ease revealing markedly pale and smooth cortical surfaces." I did not even want to know what this meant, but what had he done to deserve it? Be born inside the castle walls of art? They cut him from colon to bowel and wrote down the contents of his shit. This was a life, a man, in part, in whole.