“You know very well what I’m talking about.”
“No—” incredulous laugh, authentic-sounding—“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Do you want me to spell it out? Right here? All right, I will. You were with Welton Blackwell and his niece, you were all three of you in Gallery 32 and you—” slow, teasing smile—“were the only person to walk out of there. And we know what else walked out of Gallery 32, don’t we?”
It was as if all the blood had drained to my feet. Around us, everywhere, clatter of silverware, laughter, echo of voices bouncing off the tiled walls.
“You see?” said Reeve smugly. He had resumed eating. “Very simple. I mean surely,” he said, in a chiding tone, putting down his fork, “surely you didn’t think no one would put it together? You took the painting, and when you brought the ring to Blackwell’s partner you gave him the painting too, for what reason I don’t know—yes, yes,” he said, as I tried to talk over him, shifting his chair slightly, bringing up his hand to shade his eyes from the sun—“you end up James Hobart’s ward for Christ’s sake, you end up his ward, and he’s been farming that little souvenir of yours out hither and yon and using it to raise money ever since.”
Raise money? Hobie? “Farming it out?” I said; and then, remembering myself: “Farming out what?”
“Look, this ‘what’s going on?’ act of yours is beginning to get a bit tiresome.”
“No, I mean it. What the hell are you talking about?”
Reeve pursed his lips, looking very pleased with himself.
“It’s an exquisite painting,” he said. “A beautiful little anomaly—absolutely unique. I’ll never forget the first time I saw it in the Mauritshuis… really quite different from any work there, or any other work of its day if you ask me. Difficult to believe it was painted in the 1600s. One of the greatest small paintings of all time, wouldn’t you agree? What was it”—he paused, mockingly—“what was it that the collector said—you know, the art critic, the Frenchman, who rediscovered it? Found it buried in some nobleman’s store room back in the 1890s, and from then on made ‘desperate efforts’ ”—inserting quotations with his fingers—“to acquire it. ‘Don’t forget, I must have this little goldfinch at any price.’ But of course that’s not the quote I mean. I mean the famous one. Surely you must know it yourself. After all this time, you must be very familiar with the painting and its history.”
I put down my napkin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was nothing I could do but hold my ground and keep saying it. Deny, deny, deny, as my dad—in his one big movie turn as the mob lawyer—had advised his client in the scene right before he got shot.
But they saw me.
Musta been somebody else.
There are three eyewitnesses.
Don’t care. They’re all mistaken. “It wasn’t me.”
They’ll be bringing up people to testify against me all day long.
Fine then. Let them.
Someone had pulled a window blind, throwing our table into tiger-striped shadow. Reeve, eyeing me smugly, speared a bright orange prawn and ate it.
“I mean, I’ve been trying to think,” he said. “Maybe you can help me. What other painting of its size would be anywhere near its class? Maybe that lovely little Velázquez, you know, the garden of the Villa Medici. Of course rarity doesn’t even enter into it.”
“Tell me again, what are we talking about? Because I’m really not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Well, keep it up if you want,” he said affably, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “You’re not fooling anybody. Although I have to say it’s pretty bloody irresponsible to entrust it to these goons to handle and pawn around.”
At my astonishment, which was perfectly genuine, I saw a blink of what might have been surprise cross his face. But just as quickly it was gone.
“People like that can’t be entrusted with something so valuable,” he said, chewing busily. “Street thugs—ignoramuses.”
“You are making absolutely no sense,” I snapped.
“No?” He put down the fork. “Well. What I’m offering—if you ever care to understand what I’m talking about—is to buy the thing off you.”
My tinnitus—old echo of the explosion—had kicked in, as it often did in moments of stress, a high-pitched drone like incoming aircraft.
“Shall I name a figure? Well. I think half a million should do nicely, considering that I’m in a position to make a phone call this moment—” he removed his cell phone from his pocket and put it on the table beside his water glass—“and put this enterprise of yours to a stop.”
I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Look. How many times can I say it? I really don’t know what you’re thinking but—”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I’m thinking, Theodore. I’m thinking conservation, preservation. Concerns which clearly haven’t been paramount for you or the people you’re working with. Surely you’ll realize it’s the wisest thing to do—for you, and for the painting as well. Obviously you’ve made a fortune but it’s irresponsible, wouldn’t you agree, to keep it bouncing around in such precarious conditions?”
But my unfeigned confusion at this seemed to serve me well. After a weird, off-beat lag, he reached into the breast pocket of his suit—
“Is everything okay?” said our male-model waiter, appearing suddenly.
“Yes yes, fine.”
The waiter disappeared, sliding across the room to talk to the beautiful hostess. Reeve, from his pocket, took out several sheets of folded paper, which he pushed across the tablecloth to me.
It was a print-out of a Web page. Quickly I scanned it: FBI… international agencies… botched raid… investigation…
“What the fuck is this?” I said, so loudly that a woman at the next table jumped. Reeve—involved in his lunch—said nothing.
“No, I mean it. What does this have to do with me?” Scanning the page irritably—wrongful death suit… Carmen Huidobro, housekeeper from Miami temp agency, shot dead by agents who stormed the home—I was about to ask again what anything in this article had to do with me when I stopped cold.
An Old Master painting once believed destroyed (
The Goldfinch,
Carel Fabritius, 1654) was employed as rumored collateral in the deal with Contreras, but unfortunately was not recovered in the raid on the South Florida compound. Though stolen artworks are often used as negotiable instruments to supply venture capital for drug trafficking and arms deals, the DEA has defended itself against criticism in what the art-crimes division of the FBI has called a “bungled” and “amateurish” handling of the matter, issuing a public statement apologizing for the accidental death of Mrs. Huidobro while also explaining that their agents are not trained to identify or recover stolen artwork. “In pressured situations such as this,” said Turner Stark, spokesman for the DEA press office, “our top priority will always be the safety of agents and civilians as we secure the prosecution of major violations of America’s controlled substance laws.” The ensuing furor, especially in the wake of the suit over Mrs. Huidobro’s wrongful death, has resulted in a call for greater cooperation between federal agencies. “All it would have taken was one phone call,” said Hofstede Von Moltke, spokesman for the art-crimes division of Interpol in a press conference yesterday in Zurich. “But these people weren’t thinking about anything but making their arrest and getting their conviction, and that’s unfortunate because now this painting has gone underground, it may be decades until it’s seen again.”
The trafficking of looted paintings and sculptures is estimated to be a six-billion-dollar industry worldwide. Though the sighting of the painting was unconfirmed, detectives believe that the rare Dutch masterwork has already been whisked out of the country, possibly to Hamburg, where it has likely passed hands at a fraction of the many millions it would raise at auction.…
I put down the paper. Reeve, who had stopped eating, was regarding me with a tight feline smile. Ma
ybe it was the primness of that tiny smile in his pear-shaped face but unexpectedly I burst out laughing: the pent-up laughter of terror and relief, just as Boris and I had laughed when the fat mall cop chasing us (and about to catch us) slipped on wet tile in the food court and fell smack on his ass.
“Yes?” said Reeve. He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock. “Found something that amuses you?”
But all I could do was shake my head and look out across the restaurant. “Man,” I said, wiping my eyes, “I don’t know what to say. Clearly you are delusional or—I don’t know.”
Reeve, to his credit, did not look perturbed, though clearly he wasn’t pleased.
“No, really,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. But this is the most absurd fucking thing I have ever seen.”
Reeve folded his napkin and put it down. “You’re a liar,” he said pleasantly. “You may think you can bluff your way out of this, but you can’t.”
“Wrongful-death suit? Florida compound? What? You actually think this has something to do with me?”
Reeve regarded me fiercely with his tiny, bright blue eyes. “Be reasonable. I’m giving you a way out.”
“Way out?” Miami, Hamburg, even the place names made me burst into an incredulous huff of laughter. “Way out of what?”
Reeve blotted his lips with his napkin. “I’m delighted you find it so amusing,” he said smoothly. “Since I’m fully prepared to phone this gentleman at the art-crimes division they mention and tell him exactly what I know about you and James Hobart and this scheme you’re running together. What would you say to that?”
I threw down the paper, pushed back my chair. “I would say, go right ahead and phone him. Be my guest. Whenever you want to talk about the other matter, call me.”
xv.
MOMENTUM SPUN ME OUT of the restaurant so fast I hardly noticed where I was going; but as soon as I was three or four blocks away I began to shake so violently that I had to stop in the grimy little park just south of Canal Street and sit on a bench, hyperventilating, head between my knees, the armpits of my Turnbull and Asser suit drenched with sweat, looking (I knew, to the surly Jamaican nannies, the old Italians fanning themselves with newspapers and eyeing me suspiciously) like some coked-out junior trader who’d pressed the wrong button and lost ten million.
There was a mom-and-pop drugstore across the street. Once my breathing had settled I walked over—feeling clammy and isolated in the mild-hearted spring breeze—and bought a Pepsi from the cold case and walked away without taking my change and went back to the leaf shade of the park, the soot-dusted bench. Pigeons aloft and beating. Traffic roaring past to the tunnel, other boroughs, other cities, malls and parkways, vast impersonal streams of interstate commerce. There was a great, seductive loneliness in the hum, a summons almost, like the call of the sea, and for the first time I understood the impulse that had driven my dad to cash out his bank account, pick up his shirts from the cleaners, gas up the car, and leave town without a word. Sunbaked highways, twirled dials on the radio, grain silos and exhaust fumes, vast tracts of land unrolling like a secret vice.
Inevitably my thoughts went to Jerome. He lived way up on Adam Clayton Powell, a few blocks from the last stop on the 3 line, but there was a bar called Brother J’s where we sometimes met on 110th: a workingman’s dive with Bill Withers on the jukebox and a sticky floor, career alcoholics slumped over their third bourbon at two p.m. But Jerome did not sell pharmaceuticals in increments of less than a thousand dollars and though I knew he would be perfectly glad to let me have a few bags of smack it seemed like a lot less trouble if I just went ahead and took a cab straight down to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Old lady with a Chihuahua; little kids squabbling over a Popsicle. Up above Canal streamed a remote delirium of sirens, a formal offstage note that clashed with the ringing in my ears: something of mechanical warfare about it, sustained drone of incoming missiles.
With my hands pressed over my ears (which didn’t help the tinnitus at all—if anything, amplified it) I sat very still and tried to think. My childish machinations about the chest-on-chest now struck me as ridiculous—I would simply have to go to Hobie and admit what I’d done: not much fun, pretty shitty in fact, but better if he heard it from me. How he would react I couldn’t imagine; antiques were all I knew, I’d have a hard time getting another job in sales but I was just handy enough to find a place in a workshop if I had to, gilding frames or cutting bobbins; restorations didn’t pay well but so few people knew how to repair antiques to any kind of decent standard that someone was sure to take me on. As for the article: I was confused by what I’d read, almost as if I’d walked in on the middle of the wrong movie. On one level it was clear enough: some enterprising crook had faked my goldfinch (in terms of size and technique, not all that difficult a piece to fake) and the phony was floating around somewhere being fronted as collateral in drug deals and mis-identified by various clueless drug lords and federal agents. But no matter how fanciful or off-base the story, how lacking in relevance to the painting or me, the connection Reeve had made was real. Who knew how many people Hobie had told about me showing up at his house? or how many people those people had told? But so far no one, not even Hobie, had made the connection that Welty’s ring put me in the gallery with the painting. This was the crux of the biscuit, as my father would have said. This was the story that would get me put in jail. The French art thief who’d panicked, who’d burned a lot of the paintings he’d stolen (Cranach, Watteau, Corot) had gotten only twenty-six months in prison. But that was France, only shortly after 9/11; and, under the new rubric of federal anti-terrorism laws, the museum thefts carried an additional, more serious charge of “looting of cultural artifacts.” Penalties had grown much stiffer, in America particularly. And my personal life didn’t stand a lot of scrutiny. Even if I was lucky I would be looking at five to ten years.
Which—if I was honest—I deserved. How had I ever thought I could keep it hidden? I’d meant to deal with the painting for years, get it back where it belonged, and yet somehow I had kept on and on finding reasons not to. To think of it wrapped and sealed uptown made me feel self-erased, blanked-out, as if burying it away had only increased its power and given it a more vital and terrible form. Somehow, even shrouded and entombed in the storage locker, it had worked itself free and into some fraudulent public narrative, a radiance that glowed in the mind of the world.
xvi.
“HOBIE,” I SAID, “I’M in a jam.”
He glanced up from the Japaned chest he was retouching: roosters and cranes, golden pagodas on black. “Can I help?” He was outlining a crane’s wing with water-based acrylic—very different from the shellac-based original, but the first rule of restorations, as he’d taught me early on, was that you never did what you couldn’t reverse.
“Actually, the thing is. I’ve sort of gotten you in a jam. Inadvertently.”
“Well—” the line of his brush did not waver—“if you told Barbara Guibbory we’d help with that home she’s decorating in Rhinebeck, you’re on your own. ‘Colors of the Chakras.’ I never heard of such a thing.”
“No—” I tried to think of something funny or easy to say—Mrs. Guibbory, aptly nicknamed “Trippy,” was usually a wellspring of comedy—but my mind had gone completely blank. “Afraid not.”
Hobie straightened up, stuck the paintbrush behind one ear, blotted his forehead with a wildly patterned handkerchief, psychedelic purple like an African violet had thrown up on it, something he’d found probably in a crazy old lady’s effects at one of his sales upstate. “What’s going on, then?” he said reasonably, reaching for one of the saucers he mixed his paint in. Now that I was in my twenties, the generational formality between us had vanished, so that we were collegial in a way it was difficult to imagine being with my dad had he lived—me always on edge, trying to figure out how fucked-up he was and what my percentage point was of trying to get any kind of straig
ht answer.
“I—” I reached to make sure that the chair behind me wasn’t sticky before I sat. “Hobie, I’ve made a stupid mistake. No, a really stupid one,” I said, at his good-natured, dismissive gesture.
“Well—” he was dripping raw umber into the saucer with an eyedropper—“I don’t know about stupid, but I can tell you it wholly ruined my day last week to see that drill bit coming through Mrs. Wasserman’s tabletop. That was a good William and Mary table. I know she won’t see where I’ve patched the hole but believe me it was a bad moment.”
His half-attentive manner made it worse. Quickly, with a sort of sick, dreamlike glide, I rushed headlong into the matter of Lucius Reeve and the chest-on-chest, leaving out Platt and the back-dated receipt in my breast pocket. Once I got started it was like I couldn’t stop, like the only thing to do was keep talking and talking like some highway killer droning on under a light bulb at a rural police station. At some point Hobie stopped working, stuck the paintbrush behind his ear; he listened steadily, with a sort of heavy-browed, Arctic, ptarmigan-settling-into-itself look that I knew well. Then he plucked the sable brush from behind his ear and dabbled it in some water before he wiped it on a piece of flannel.
“Theo,” he said, putting up a hand, closing his eyes—I’d stalled, going on and on about the uncashed check, dead end, bad position—“Stop. I get the picture.”
“I’m so sorry.” I was babbling. “I should never have done it. Never. But it’s a real nightmare. He’s pissed off and vindictive and he seems to have it in for us for some reason—you know, some other reason, something apart from this.”
“Well.” Hobie removed his glasses. I could see his confusion in just how gingerly he was feeling around in the pause that followed, trying to shape his response. “What’s done is done. No point making it worse. But—” he stopped, and thought. “I don’t know who this guy is, but if he thought that chest was an Affleck, he has more money than sense. To pay seventy-five thousand—that’s what he gave you for the thing?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he needs his head examined, that’s all I can say. Pieces of that quality turn up once or twice in a decade, maybe. And they don’t appear on the scene from nowhere.”
“Yes, but—”
“Also, any fool knows, a real Affleck would be worth much more. Who buys a piece like that without doing their homework? An idiot, that’s who. Also,” he said, speaking over me, “you did the correct thing once he called you on it. You tried to refund his money, and he didn’t take it, that’s what you’re saying?”
“I didn’t offer to refund it. I tried to buy the piece back.”
“At a greater price than he paid! And how’s that going to look if he takes it to law? Which I can tell you, he won’t do.”
In the silence that followed, in the clinical blare of his work lamp, I was aware just how uncertain we both were how to move forward. Popchyk—napping on the folded towel that Hobie had set out for him between the clawed feet of a pier table—twitched and grumbled in his sleep.
“I mean,” said Hobie—he’d wiped the black off his hands, was reaching for his brush with a sort of apparitional fixity, like a ghost intent upon his task—“the sales end has never been my bailiwick, you know that, but I’ve been in this business a long time. And sometimes—” darting flick of the brush—“the edge between puffery and fraud is very cloudy indeed.”
I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanned chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain’s home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.
Hobie put down the brush again. “Oh, Theo,” he said, half-angrily, scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand and leaving a dark smudge. “Do you expect me to stand around and scold you? You lied to the fellow. You’ve tried to put it right. But the fellow doesn’t want to sell. What more can you do?”
“It’s not the only piece.”
“What?”
“I should never have done it.” Unable to meet his eye. “I did it first to pay the bills, to get us out from under, and then I guess—I mean some of those pieces are amazing, they fooled me, they were just sitting out in storage—”
I suppose I’d been expecting incredulity, raised voices, outrage of some sort. But it was worse. A blow-up I could have handled. Instead he didn’t say a word, only gazed at me with a sort of grieved fubsiness, haloed by his work lamp, tools arrayed on the walls behind him like Masonic icons. He let me tell him what I had to, and listened quietly while I did it, and when at last he spoke his voice was quieter than usual and without heat.
“All right.” He looked like a figure from an allegory: black-aproned carpenter-mystic, half in shadow. “Okay. So how do you propose to deal with this?”
“I—” This wasn’t the response I’d anticipated. Dreading his anger (for Hobie, though good-natured and slow to wrath, definitely had a temper) I’d had all kinds of justifications and excuses prepared but faced with his eerie composure it was impossible to defend myself. “I’ll do whatever you say.” I hadn’t felt so ashamed or humiliated since I was a kid. “It’s my fault—I take full responsibility.”
“Well. The pieces are out there.” He seemed to be figuring it out as he went along, half-talking to himself. “No one else has contacted you?”
“No.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“Oh—” five years, at least—“one year, two?”
He winced. “Jesus. No, no,” he said, hastily, “I’m just glad you were honest with me. But you’ll just have to get busy, contact the clients, say you have doubts—you needn’t go into the whole business, just say a question has arisen, provenance is suspect—and offer to buy the pieces back for what they paid. If they don’t take you up on it—fine. You’ve offered. But if they do—you’ll have to bite the bullet, understand?”
“Right.” What I didn’t—and couldn’t—say was that there wasn’t enough money to reimburse even a quarter of the clients. We would be bankrupt in a day.
“You say pieces. Which pieces? How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”