I HADN’T DONE BLOW since Carole Lombard left town and there was no possibility of going to sleep. At six-thirty in the morning Gyuri was spinning around the Lower East Side with Popchik in the back (“I will take him to the deli! For a bacon egg and cheese!”) and we were wired and chattering in some dank 24-hour-a-day bar on Avenue C with graffiti-scrawled walls and burlap tacked over the windows to keep the sunrise out, Ali Baba Club, Three Dollar Shots, Happy Hour 10:00 AM to Noon, trying to drink enough beer to knock ourselves out a bit.
“You know what I did in college?” I was telling him. “I took Conversational Russian for a year. Totally because of you. I did really shitty in it, actually. Never got good enough to read it, you know, to sit down with Eugene Onegin—you have to read it in Russian, they say, it doesn’t come through in translation. But—I thought of you so much! I used to remember little things you’d say—all sorts of things came back to me—oh, wow, listen, they’re playing ‘Comfy in Nautica,’ do you hear that? Panda Bear! I totally forgot that album. Anyway. I wrote a term paper on The Idiot for my Russian Literature class—Russian Literature in translation—I mean, the whole time I was reading it I thought about you, up in my bedroom smoking my dad’s cigarettes. It was so much easier to keep track of the names if I imagined you saying them in my head… actually, it was like I heard the whole book in your voice! Back in Vegas you were reading The Idiot for like six months, remember? In Russian. For a long time it was all you did. Remember how for a long time you couldn’t go downstairs because of Xandra, I had to bring you food, it was like Anne Frank? Anyway, I read it in English, The Idiot, but I wanted to get there too, to that point, you know, where my Russian was good enough. But I never did.”
“All that fucking school,” said Boris, plainly unimpressed. “If you want to speak Russian, come to Moscow with me. You will speak it in two months.”
“So, are you going to tell me what you do?”
“Like I told you. This and that. Just enough to get by.” Then, kicking me under the table: “You seem better now, eh?”
“Huh?” There were only two other people in the front room with us—beautiful people, unearthly pale, a man and a woman both with short dark hair, eyes locked, and the man had the woman’s hand across the table and was nibbling and chewing on the inside of her wrist. Pippa, I thought, with a pang of anguish. It was nearly lunchtime in London. What was she doing?
“When I ran into you, you looked on your way to jump in the river.”
“Sorry, it was a rough day.”
“Nice set up you’ve got there though,” Boris was saying. He couldn’t see the couple from where he was sitting. “So you guys are partners?”
“No! Not like that.”
“I didn’t say so!” Boris looked at me critically. “Jesus, Potter, don’t be so touchy! Anyhow that was his wife, the lady, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said restlessly, leaning back in my chair. “Well, sort of.” The relationship of Hobie and Mrs. DeFrees was still a deep mystery, as was her still-extant marriage to Mr. DeFrees. “I thought she was a widow for ages but she’s not. She—” I leaned forward, rubbed my nose—“see, she lives uptown and he lives downtown, but they’re together all the time… she has a house in Connecticut, sometimes they go out together for the weekend. She’s married—but. I never see her husband. I haven’t figured it out. To tell you the truth I think they are probably just good friends. Sorry I’m going on. I really don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“And he taught you your trade! He seems like nice fellow. Real gentleman.”
“Huh?”
“Your boss.”
“He’s not my boss! I’m his business partner.” The glitter of the drugs was wearing off; blood swishing in my ears, sharp high pitch like crickets singing. “As a matter of fact I run the whole sales end of things pretty much.”
“Sorry!” said Boris, holding up his hands. “No need to snap. Only I meant it when I asked you to come work with me.”
“And how am I supposed to answer that?”
“Look, I want to repay you. Let you share in all the good things that have happened to me. Because,” he said, interrupting me grandly, “I owe you everything. Everything good that has happened to me in life, Potter, has happened because of you.”
“What? I got you in the drug-dealing business? Wow, okay,” I said, lighting one of his cigarettes and pushing the pack across to him, “that’s good to know, that makes me feel really great about myself, thanks.”
“Drug dealing? Who said drug dealing? I want to make things up to you! For what I did. I’m telling you, it’s a great life. We would have a lot of fun together.”
“Are you running an escort service? Is that it?”
“Look, shall I tell you something?”
“Please.”
“I am really sorry about what I did to you.”
“Forget it. I don’t care.”
“Why should you not share in some of these good profits I’ve made from you? Reap some of the cream for yourself?”
“Listen, can I say something, Boris? I don’t want to be involved in anything dodgy. No offense,” I said, “but I’m trying hard to get out from under something and, like I said, I’m engaged now, things are different, I really don’t think I want to—”
“Then why not let me help you?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean—well, I’d rather not go into it but I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have, I want to put them right. That is, I’m trying to figure how to put them right.”
“Hard to put things right. You don’t often get that chance. Sometimes all you can do is not get caught.”
The beautiful pair had risen to leave, hand in hand, pushing aside the beaded curtain, drifting out together into the faint cold dawn. I watched the beads clicking and undulating in the slipstream of their departure, rippling with the sway of the girl’s hips.
Boris sat back. He had his eyes fixed on mine. “I’ve been trying to get it back for you,” he said. “I wish I could.”
“What?”
He frowned. “Well—this is why I came by the store. You know. Am sure you’ve heard, the Miami stuff. Was worried what you’d think when it hit the news—and, honest, was a little afraid they’d trace it back to you, through me, you know? Not any more, so much, but—still. Was up to my neck in it, of course—but I knew the set-up was bad. Should have trusted my instincts. I—” he dipped his key for another quick snort; we were the only people in the place; the little tattooed waitress, or hostess, or whoever she was, had disappeared into the sketchy back room where—from my very brief glimpse—people on yard sale sofas appeared to be gathered for a screening of some 1970s porn—“anyhow. It was terrible. I should have known. People got hurt and I’ve come up short, but I learned a valuable lesson from this. Always a mistake—here, wait, let me hit the other side—like I was saying, always a mistake to deal with people you don’t know.” He pinched his nose shut and passed the bag under the table to me. “It’s the thing you know, that you always forget. Never deal with strangers on the big stuff! Never! People can say ‘oh, this person is fine’—me, I want to believe it, it’s my nature. But bad things happen like that. See—I know my friends. But my friends of my friends? Not so well! It’s the way people catch AIDS, right?”
It was a mistake—I knew, even as I was doing it—to do any more blow; I’d done way too much already, jaw clenched tight and blood pounding in my temples even as the unease of the comedown had begun to steal over me, a brittleness like plate glass shivering.
“Anyway,” Boris was saying. He was speaking very fast, foot tapping and jittering under the table. “Have been trying to think how to get it back. Think think think! Of course I can’t use it myself any more. I’ve burned myself with it but good. Of course—” he shifted restlessly—“that’s not why I came to see you, exactly. Partly I wanted to apologize. To say ‘sorry’ to you in my own voice. Because—honestly, I am. And partly, too, with all this
stuff in the news—I wanted to tell you not to worry, because maybe you are thinking—well, I don’t know what you’re thinking. Only—I didn’t like to think of you hearing all this, and being afraid, not understanding. Thinking it might be traced back to you. It made me feel very bad. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you. To tell you that I’ve kept you out of it—no one knows of your relation with me. And moreover to tell you, that I’m really, really trying to get it back. Trying very hard. Because—” three fingertips to forehead—“I’ve made a fortune off it, and I would really like for you to have it all to your own again—you know, the thing itself, for old times’ sake, just to have, to really be yours, keep in your closet or whatever, get out and look at, like in old days, you know? Because I know how much you loved it. I got to where I loved it myself, actually.”
I stared at him. In the fresh sparkle of the drug, what he was saying had begun, at last, to sink in. “Boris, what are you talking about?”
“You know.”
“No I don’t.”
“Don’t make me say it out loud.”
“Boris—”
“I tried to tell you. I begged you not to leave. I would have given it back to you if you had waited just one day.”
The beaded curtain was still clicking and undulating in the draft. Sinuous glassy wavelets. Staring at him, I was transfixed with the obscure, light sensation of one dream colliding with another: clatter of silverware in the harsh noon of the Tribeca restaurant, Lucius Reeve smirking at me across the table.
“No,” I said—pushing back in my chair in a cold prickle of sweat, putting my hands over my face. “No.”
“What, you thought your dad took it? I was kind of hoping you thought that. Because he was so in the hole. And stealing from you already.”
I dragged my hands down my face and looked at him, unable to speak.
“I switched it. Yes. It was me. I thought you knew. Look, am sorry!” he said when still I sat gaping at him. “I had it in my locker at school. Joke, you know. Well—” weakly smiling—“maybe not. Sort of joke. But—listen—” tapping the table to get my attention—“I swear, I wasn’t going to keep it. That was not my plan. How was I to know about your dad? If only you had spent the night—” he threw up his arms—“I would have given it to you, I swear I would have. But I couldn’t make you stay. Had to leave! Right that minute! Must go! Now, Boris, now! Wouldn’t wait even till morning! Must go, must go, this very second! And I was scared to say to you what I’d done.”
I stared at him. My throat was too dry and my heart had begun to pound so fast that all I could think to do was to sit very still and hope it would slow down.
“Now you are angry,” said Boris resignedly. “You want to kill me.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I—”
“What do you mean, switch it?”
“Look—” glancing around nervously—“I am sorry! I knew it was not a good idea for us to get wired together. I knew this would end up coming out maybe in some ugly way! But—” leaning forward to put his palms on the table—“I have felt really bad about it, honest. Would I have come to see you, if not? Shouted your name on the street? And when I say I want to pay you back? I am serious. I am going to make it up to you. Because, you see, this picture made my fortune, it made my—”
“What’s in that package I’ve got uptown then?”
“What?” he said, his eyebrows coming down, and then, pushing away in his chair and looking at me with his chin pulled back: “You’re kidding me. All this time and you never—?”
But I couldn’t answer. My lips were moving but no sound was coming out.
Boris slapped the table. “You idiot. You mean you never even opened it up? How could you not—”
When I still didn’t answer him, face in hands, he reached across the table and shook me by the shoulder.
“Really?” he said urgently, trying to look me in the eye. “You did not? Never opened it to look?”
From the back room: a weak female scream, inane and empty, followed by equally inane hoots of male laughter. Then, loud as a buzz saw, a blender started up at the bar and seemed to go on for an excessively long time.
“You didn’t know?” said Boris, when the racket finally stopped. In the back room, laughter and clapping. “How could you not—”
But I couldn’t say a word. Multilayered graffiti on the wall, sticker tags and scribbles, drunks with crosses for eyes. In the back, a hoarse chant had risen of go go go. So many things were flashing in on me at once that I could hardly get my breath.
“All these years?” said Boris, half-frowning. “And you never once—?”
“Oh, God.”
“Are you okay?”
“I—” I shook my head. “How did you know I even have it? How do you know that?” I repeated, when he didn’t answer. “You went through my room? My things?”
Boris looked at me. Then he ran both hands through his hair and said: “You’re a blackout drunk, Potter, you know that?”
“Give me a break,” I said, after an incredulous pause.
“No, am serious,” he said mildly. “I am alcoholic. I know it! I was alcoholic from ten years old, when I took my first drink. But you, Potter—you’re like my dad. He drinks—he goes unconscious while he is walking around, does things he can’t remember. Wrecks the car, beats me up, gets in fights, wakes up with broken nose or in whole different town maybe, lying on bench in railway station—”
“I don’t do things like that.”
Boris sighed. “Right, right, but your memory goes. Just like his. And, I’m not saying you did anything bad, or violent, you are not violent like him but you know, like—oh, that time we went to the play pit at McDonald’s, the kid pit, and you are so drunk on the puffy thing the lady called the cops on you, and I got you out of there fast, standing in Wal Mart half an hour pretending to look at school pencils and then back on the bus, back to the bus stop, and that night you don’t remember any of it? Not one thing? ‘McDonald’s, Boris? What McDonald’s?’ Or,” he said, sniffling lavishly, talking over me, “or, that day you are totalled, wrecked, and make me go with you for ‘walk in the desert’? Okay, we go for a walk. Fine. Only you are so drunk you can barely walk and it is a hundred and five degrees. And you get tired of walking and lay yourself down in the sand. And ask me that I leave you to die. ‘Leave me, Boris, leave me.’ Remember that?”
“Get to the point.”
“What can I say? You were unhappy. Drank yourself unconscious all the time.”
“So did you.”
“Yes, I remember. Passing out on the stairs, face down, remember? Waking up on the ground, miles from home, feet sticking out from a bush, no idea how I got there? Shit, I emailed Spirsetskaya one time in the middle of the night, crazy drunk email, stating she is a beautiful woman and that I love her completely, which at that time I did. Next day at school, all hung over: ‘Boris, Boris, I need to talk to you.’ Well, what about? And there she is all gentle and kind, trying to let me down easy. Email? What email? No recollection whatsoever! Standing there red in the face while she is giving me xerox from poetry book and telling me I need to love girls my own age! Sure—I did plenty of stupid things. Stupider than you! But me,” he said, toying with a cigarette, “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.”
“Why do I feel like you’re trying to change the subject?”
“Not trying to judge! It’s just—we did crazy things back then. Things I think maybe you don’t remember. No, no!” he said quickly, shaking his head, when he saw the look on my face. “Not that. Although I will say, you are the only boy I have ever been in bed with!”
My laugh spluttered out angrily, as if I’d coughed or choked on something.
“With that—” Boris leaned back disdainfully in his chair, pinched his nostrils shut—“pfah. I think it happens at that age sometimes. We were young, and needed girls. I think maybe you thought it was someth
ing else. But, no, wait,” he said quickly, his expression changing—I’d scraped back my chair to go—“wait,” he said again, catching my sleeve, “don’t, please, listen to what I’m trying to tell you, you don’t at all remember the night when we were watching Dr. No?”
I was getting my coat from the back of my chair. But, at this, I stopped.
“Do you?”
“Am I supposed to remember? Why?”
“I know you don’t. Because I used to like test you. Mention Dr. No, make jokes. To see what you would say.”
“What about Dr. No?”
“Not that long after I met you!” His knee was going up and down like crazy. “I think you weren’t used to vodka—you never knew what size to pour your drink. You came in with huge glass, like so, like water glass, and I thought: shit! You don’t remember?”
“There were lots of nights like that.”
“You don’t remember. I would clean up your vomit—throw your clothes in the wash—you would not even know I had done it. You would cry and tell me all kinds of things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like…” he made an impatient face… “oh, it was your fault your mother died… you wished it was you… if you died, you would maybe be with her, together in the darkness… no point going into it, I don’t want to make you feel bad. You were a mess, Theo—fun to be with, most of time! up for anything! but a mess. Probably you should have been in hospital. Climbing on roof, jumping into the swimming pool? Could have broken your neck, it was crazy! You would lie on your back in the road at night, no streetlights, no way for anyone to see you, waiting for a car to come and run you over, I had to fight to get you up and drag you in the house—”
“I would have lain out in that godforsaken fucking street a long time before a car came by. I could have slept out there. Brought my sleeping bag.”
“I am not going to go into this. You were nuts. You could have killed us both. One night you got matches and tried to set the house on fire, remember that?”
“I was just joking,” I said uneasily.
“And the carpet? Big burned hole in the sofa? Was that a joke? I turned the cushions so that Xandra wouldn’t see it.”
“That piece of shit was so cheap it wasn’t even flame-retardant.”
“Right, right. Have it your way. Anyway, this one night. We are watching Dr. No, which I had never seen but you had, and I was liking it very much, and you are completely v gavno, and it’s on his island, and all cool, and he presses the button and shows that picture he stole?”
“Oh, God.”
Boris cackled. “You did! God help you! It was great. So drunk you are staggering—I have something to show you! Something wonderful! Best thing ever! Stepping in front of the television. No, really! Me—watching movie, best part, you wouldn’t shut up. Fuck off! Anyway, off you go, mad as hell, ‘fuck you,’ making all this noise. Bang bang bang. And then, down you come with the picture, see?” He laughed. “Funny thing—was sure you were bullshitting me. World-famous museum work? give me a break. But—it was real. Anyone could see.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! Anyway—so funny! Here am I, so proudly teaching you to steal apples and candy from the magazine, while you have stolen world masterpiece of art.”
“I didn’t steal it.”
Boris chuckled. “No, no. You explained. Preserving it in safety. Big important duty in life. You’re telling me,” he said, leaning forward, “you really haven’t opened it up and looked at it? All these years? What is the matter with you?”
“I don’t believe you,” I said again. “When did you take it?” I said when he rolled his eyes away from me. “How?”
“Look, like I said—”
“How do you expect me to believe one word of this?”
Boris rolled his eyes again. He reached in his coat pocket; he punched up a picture on his iPhone. Then he handed it across the table to me.
It was the verso of the painting. You could find a reproduction of the front anywhere. But the back was as distinctive as a fingerprint: rich drips of sealing wax, brown and red; irregular patchwork of European labels (Roman numerals; spidery, quilled signatures), which had the feeling of a steamer trunk, or some international treaty of long ago. The crumbling yellows and browns were layered with an almost organic richness, like dead leaves.
He put the phone back in his pocket. We sat for a long while in silence. Then Boris reached for a cigarette.
“Believe me now?” he said, blowing a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.
The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.
Then I stood without a word and got my coat. Boris jumped up too.
“Wait,” he said, as I shouldered past him. “Potter? Don’t go angry. When I said I would make it up to you? I meant it—
“Potter?” he called again as I stepped through the clattering bead curtain and out on to the street, into the dirty gray light of dawn. Avenue C was empty except for a solitary cab which seemed to be as glad to see me as I was to see it, and darted over to stop for me immediately. Before he could say another word I got in and drove off and left him there, standing in his overcoat by a bank of trash cans.
x.
IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding my teeth and a heart about to explode. Bureaucratic daylight: pedestrian morning blaring, bright with threat. By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side. Strewn on the carpet around me were a pair of shopping bags; a never-used pup tent; a beige percale pillowcase that