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.
V.
We have art in order not to die from the truth.
—N
IETZSCHE
Chapter 11.
The Gentleman’s Canal
i.
THE LINCOLN TOWN CAR 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!”
ii.
WHILE ANATOLY CIRCLED THE block, I ran into the shop and grabbed all the unbanked cash to hand without counting it, somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen thousand. Then I ran upstairs and—while Popper paced and circled, whining with anxiety—threw a few things into my bag: passport, toothbrush, razor, socks, underwear, first pair of suit trousers I found, couple of extra shirts, sweater. The Redbreast Flake tin was at the bottom of my sock drawer and I grabbed it up too and then dropped it and shut the drawer on it, quick.
As I hurried down the hall, dog at my heels, Pippa’s Hunter boots standing outside her bedroom door brought me up sharply: their bright summer green fused in my mind with her and with happiness. For a moment I paused, uncertain. Then I went back to my room, got the first edition of Ozma of Oz and dashed off a note so quickly I didn’t have time to second-guess. Safe trip. I love you. No kidding. This I blew dry and tucked in the book, which I placed on the floor by her boots. The resulting tableau on the carpet (Emerald City, green wellies, Ozma’s color) was almost as if I’d stumbled on a haiku or some other perfect combination of words to explain to her what she was to me. For a moment I stood in perfect stillness—ticking clock, submerged memories from childhood, doors opening to bright old daydreams where we walked together on summer lawns—before, resolutely, going back to my room for the necklace which had called to me in an auction house showroom with her name: lifting it from its midnight velvet box and, carefully, draping it over one of the boots so a splash of gold caught the light. It was topaz, eighteenth century, a necklace for a fairy queen, girandôle with diamond bow and huge, clear, honey-colored stones: just the shade of her eyes. As I turned away, averting my gaze from the wall of her photos opposite, and hurried down the stairs, it was almost with the old childhood terror and exhilaration of having thrown a rock through a window. Hobie would know exactly how much the necklace had cost. But by the time Pippa found it, and the note, I would be long gone.
iii.
WE WERE LEAVING FROM different terminals, so we said our goodbyes on the curb where Anatoly dropped me. The glass doors slid with a breathless gasp. Inside, past security, on the shiny floors of the predawn concourse, I consulted the monitors and walked past dark shops with the metal gates pulled down, Brookstone, Tie Rack, Nathan’s hot dogs, bright seventies music drifting into consciousness (love… love will keep us together… think of me babe whenever…) past chilly ghost gates that were roped and empty except for college kids sprawled full-length and drowsing across four seats at a time, past the lone bar that was still open, the lone yogurt hut, the lone Duty Free where, as Boris had repeatedly and with some urgency advised me to do, I stopped for a fifth of vodka (“better safe than sorry… booze only available in the state controlled shops… maybe you want to get two”) and then all the way to the end to my own (crowded) gate filled with dead-eyed ethnic families, backpackers cross-legged on the floor, and stale, oily-faced businessmen on laptops who looked like they were used to the drill.
The plane was full. Shuffling on, crowds in the aisle (economy, middle of the row, five across), I wondered how Myriam had managed to get me a seat at all. Luckily I was too tired to wonder about much else; and I was asleep almost before the seat belt light went off—missing drinks, missing dinner, missing the in-flight movies—waking only when the shades were pulled up and light flooded the cabin and the stewardess came pushing her cart through with our pre-packaged breakfasts: chilled twig of grapes; chilled cup of juice; lardy, yolk-yellow, cellophane-wrapped croissant; and our choice of coffee or tea.
We’d arranged to meet in baggage claim. Businessmen silently grabbed up their cases and fled—to their meetings, their marketing plans, their mistresses, who knew? Loudly shouting stoner kids with rainbow patches on their backpacks jostled each other and tried to snatch duffels that weren’t theirs and argued about which was the best wake-and-bake coffeeshop to hit in the morning—“oh, guys, the Bluebird, definitely—”
“no, wait—Haarlemmerstraat? no, I’m serious, I wrote it down? It’s on this paper? no, wait, listen guys, we should just go straight there? because I can’t remember the name but it opens early and they have awesome breakfasts? And you can get your pancakes and OJ and your Apollo 13 and vape up right at the table?”
Off they trooped—fifteen or twenty of them, carefree, lustrous-haired, laughing, hoisting their backpacks and arguing about the cheapest way to get into town. Despite the fact that I had no checked baggage, I stood in the claim area for well over an hour, watching a heavily taped suitcase circle round and round forlornly on the belt until Boris came up behind me and greeted me by throwing his arm around my neck in a choke hold and trying to step on the back of my shoes.
“Come on,” he said, “you look awful. Let’s get something to eat, and talk! Gyuri’s got the car outside.”
iv.
WHAT I SOMEHOW HADN’T expected was a city prinked-up for Christmas: fir boughs and tinsel, starburst ornaments in the shop windows and a cold stiff wind coming off the canals and fires and festival stalls and people on bicycles, toys and color and candy, holiday confusion and gleam. Little dogs, little children, gossipers and watchers and package bearers, clowns in top hats and military greatcoats and a little dancing jester in Christmas clothes à la Avercamp. I still wasn’t quite awake and none of it seemed to have any more reality than the fleeting dream of Pippa I’d had on the plane where I’d spotted her in a park with many tall fountains and a Saturn-ringed planet hanging low and majestic in the sky.
“Nieuwmarkt,” said Gyuri as we came out on a big circle with a turreted fairytale castle and—around it—an open air market, cut evergreens lightly frosted with snow, mittened vendors stamping, an illustration from a children’s book. “Ho, ho, ho.”
“Always a lot of police here,” said Boris gloomily, sliding into the door as Gyuri took the turn hard.
For various reasons I was apprehensive about accommodations, and ready to make my excuses in case they involved anything like squatter conditions or sleeping on the floor. Luckily Myriam had booked me a hotel in a canal house in the old part of town. I dropped my bags, locked the cash in the safe, and went back out to the street to meet Boris. Gyuri had gone to park the car.
He dropped his cigarette on the cobblestones and dashed it under his heel. “I’ve not been here in a while,” he said, his breath coming out white, as he looked round appraisingly at the soberly clad pedestrians on the street. “My flat in Antwerp—well it is for business reasons I am in Antwerp. Beautiful city too—same sea clouds, same light. Someday we will go there. But I always forget how much I like it here as well. Starving to death, you?” he said, punching me in the arm. “Mind walking a bit?”
Down narrow streets we wandered, damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck. Plastic cup half-submerged and bobbing. The wind was raw and wet with blown pinpricks of sleet and the space around us felt close and dank. Didn’t the canals freeze in winter? I asked.
“Yes, but—” wiping his nose—“global warming, I suppose.” In his overcoat and suit from the previous night’s party he looked both completely out of place and completely at home. “What a dog’s weather! Shall we duck in here? Do you think?”
The dirty canal-side bar, or café, or whatever it was, had dark wood and a maritime theme, oars and life preservers, red candles burning low even in the daytime and a desolate foggy feel. Smoky, muggy light. Water droplets condensed on the inside of the windowpane. No menus. In back was a chalkboard scrawled with foods unintelligible to me: dagsoep, draadjesvlees, kapucijnerschotel, zuurkoolstamppot.
“Here, let me order,” said Boris, and proceeded to do so, surprisingly, in Dutch. What arrived was a typically Boris meal of beer, bread, sausages, and potatoes with pork and sauerkraut. Boris—happily gobbling—was reminiscing about his first and only attempt to ride a bicycle in the city (wipeout, disaster) and also how much he enjoyed the new herring in Amsterdam, which fortunately wasn’t in season since apparently you ate it by holding it up by the tail fin and dangling it down into your mouth, but I was too disoriented by my surroundings to listen very closely and with almost painfully heightened senses I stirred at the potato mess with my fork and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt—to me, anyway—like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.
Before long Gyuri joined us, red-cheeked and breathless. “Parking—bit of a problem here,” he said. “Sorry.” He extended his hand to me. “Glad to see you!” he said, embracing me with a genuine-seeming warmth that startled me, as if we were old friends long separated. “Everything is okay?”
Boris, on his second pint by now, was holding forth a bit about Horst. “I do not know why he does not move to Amsterdam,” he said, gnawing happily on a hunk of sausage. “Constantly he complains about New York! Hate hate hate! And all the holy while—” waving a hand at the canal outside the fogged window—“everything he loves is here. Even the language is same as his. If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long.”
“Horst—?” I said, looking from one to the other.
“Sorry?”
“Does he know you’re here?”
Boris gulped his beer. “Horst? No. He does not. It is going to be much, much easier if Horst learns about all this after. Because—” licking a dab of mustard off his finger—“my suspicions are correct. Fucking Sascha who stole the thing. Ulrika’s brother,” he said urgently. “Which with Ulrika puts Horst in bad position. So—much better if I take care of it on my own, see? I am doing Horst a favor this way—favor he won’t forget.”
“What do you mean, ‘take care of it’?”
Boris sighed. “It—” he looked around to make sure no one was listening, even though we were the only people in the place—”well, it is complicated, I could talk for three days, but I can also tell you in three lines what has happened.”
“Does Ulrika know he took it?”
Rolled eyes. “Search me.” A phrase I had taught Boris years ago, horsing around at my house after school. Search me. Cut it out. Smoky desert twilight, shades drawn. Make up your mind. Let’s face it. No way. Same shadows on his face. Gold light glinting off the doors by the pool.
“I think Sascha would have to be very stupid to tell Ulrika,” said Gyuri, with a worried expression on his face.
“I don’t know what Ulrika knows or does not know. Has no relevance. She has loyalty to her brother over Horst, as she has shown many and many times over. You would think—” grandly signalling the waitress to bring Gyuri a pint—“you would think Sascha had sense to sit on it for a while, at least! But no. He can’t get a loan on it in Hamburg or Frankfurt because of Horst—because Horst would hear of it in one second. So he has brought it here.”
“Well look, if you know who has it we should just call the police.”
The silence, and blank looks that followed this, were as if I’d produced a can of gasoline and suggested lighting ourselves on fire.
“Well, I mean,” I said defensively, after the waitress had arrived with Gyuri’s beer, set it down, left again, and neither Gyuri nor Boris had spoken a word. “Isn’t that the safest? And easiest? If the cops recover it and you have nothing to do with it?”
Ding of a bicycle bell, woman clattering by on the sidewalk, rattle of spokes, witchy black cape flying behind.
“Because—” glancing between them—“when you think of what this picture has gone through—what it must have gone through—I don’t know if you understand, Boris, how much care has to be taken even to ship a painting? Just to pack it properly? Why take any chances?”
“This is my feeling exactly.”
“An anonymous call. To the art-crimes people. They’re not like the normal cops—no connections with the normal cops—the picture is all they care about. They’ll know what to do.”
Boris leaned back in his chair. He looked around. Then he looked at me.
“No,” he said. “That is not a good idea.” His tone was that of someone addressing a five year old. “And, do you want to know why?”
“Think about it. It’s the easiest way. You wouldn’t have to do a thing.”
Boris set his beer glass down carefully.
“They’d have the best chance of getting it back unharmed. Also, if I do it—if I call them—shit, I could have Hobie call them—” hands to head—“any way you look at it, you wouldn’t be putting yourselves at risk. That is to say”—I was too tired, disoriented; two pairs of Dremel-drill eyes, I couldn’t think—“if I did it, or someone else not a part of your, um, organization—”
Boris let out a shout of laughter. “Organization? Well—” shaking his head so vigorously the hair fell in his eyes—“I suppose we count as organization, of sorts, since we are three or more—! But we are not very large or very organized as you can see.”
“You should eat something,” said Gyuri to me, in the tense pause that followed, looking at my untouched plate of pork and potato. “He should eat,” he said to Boris. “Tell him to eat.”
“Let him starve if he wants. Anyway,” said Boris, grabbing a chunk of pork off my plate and popping it in his mouth—
“One call. I’ll do it.”
“No,” said Boris, glowering suddenly and pushing back in his chair. “You will not. No, no, fuck you, shut up, you won’t,” he said, lifting his chin aggressively when I tried to talk over him—Gyuri’s hand on my wrist very suddenly, a touch I knew very well, the old forgotten Vegas language of when my dad was in the kitchen ranting about whose house it was? and who paid for what?—
“And, and,” said Boris imperiously, taking advantage of a lull in my response he was not expecting, “I want you to stop talking this stupid ‘call’ business right away. ‘Call, call,’ ” he said, when he got no answer from me, waving his hand back and forth ridiculously in the air as if “call” were some absurd kiddie word that meant ‘unicorn’ or ‘fairyland.’ “I know you are trying to help but this is not helpful suggestion on your part. So forget it. No more ‘call.’ Anyway,” he