Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

He said suit yourself.

Not wishing the clients to know I was being paid I had never talked to them. Now they thought I was Jackson's friend so naturally they did not like me. It was my own stupid fault I was all alone. I missed my brother and could not think how he might ever hear my voice.

And Samson called O LORD GOD, REMEMBER ME? He said, I PRAY THEE, ONLY THIS ONCE. AND HE TOOK HOLD OF THE TWO MIDDLE PILLARS, ONE WITH HIS RIGHT HAND, AND OF THE OTHER WITH HIS LEFT.

It was wrong they should upset me thus.

We fled the subway at Shinjuku and then zigzagged down a lane of bars and she was bright as silver, a fish rising in the night, up a set of stairs until we were—4F—in this huge dark shouting place—Irasshaimase!—where they cooked mushroom, shrimp, lumps of dog shit for all I knew, but they kept the sake coming and Marlene sat beside me at the horseshoe bar, her face washed by orange pops of flame, starry night, Galileo blazing in her almond eyes. As she lifted her sake to me I was reminded of how she sniffed the catalogue in the glassine bag. This thought was not so sudden. I had been seeing that fast sniff all day long.

She clinked my glass. Cheers, she said. She had had a coup. To victory. She had never seemed stranger, more lovely than right now, with those long threads of mushroom in her mouth, all alight, her neck was warm and fragrant, and I was bursting with desire.

"Exactly why did you sniff that catalogue?"

Her mouth tasted sweet and earthy. She wagged her finger and took another sip, then she laid her hand on my thigh and rubbed my nose with hers. "You figure it."

"i9i3ink?"

She was beaming. The shouting cooks sliced squid and hurled it onto the metal plate where it leaped like something in my mother's hell.

"The catalogue's not old at all? That old bugger, Utamaro, he printed it for you?"

Instead of contradicting me, she grinned.

"Look at you!" I cried. "Jesus, look at you!"

She was keyed up, adorable, her lips glistening. "Oh Butcher," she said, shifting her hand to my upper arm. "Do you hate me now?"

I have told this bloody story so often. I am accustomed to the expression on my listeners' faces and I know there must be some essential detail I omit. Most likely that detail is my character, a flaw passed from Blue Bones' rotten sperm to my own corrupted clay. For I can never have anyone really feel why her confession so thrilled me, why I devoured her slippery softmuscled mouth in the dancing light of country barbecue near the Shinjuku railway station.

So she was a crook!

Oh the horror! Fuck me dead!

Yes: she had a dodgy painting, or one with a murky past. Yes: she invented a history with a bullshit catalogue. Yes: it's even worse than this. Well: my complete abject fucking apologies to all the cardinals concerned, but the rich collectors could look after themselves. They would steal my work when I was desperate and sell it for a fortune later. Fuck them. Up their arse a squeegee. Marlene Leibovitz had manufactured a catalogue, a title too as you'll soon learn. She had turned a worthless orphan canvas into something that anyone would pay a million bucks for. She was an authenticator. That's what she did.

"There was really a cubist exhibition in Tokyo in 1913?"

"Of course. God is in the details."

"You have the clippings? Leibovitz was in it?"

She nestled against my neck. "Japan Times, Asahi Shim-bun too."

All through this, the pair of us were smiling, could not stop.

"Of course this particular painting of Mauri's was nowhere near this show?"

"You hate me."

"There were no contemporary reproductions, were there? And of course, newspapers don't report the size of paintings."

"Do you hate me?"

"You are a very bad girl," I said.

But the art business is filled with people so much worse, crocodiles, larcenists in pinstripe suits, individuals with no eye, bottom feeders who depend on everything except how the painting looks. Yes, Marlene's catalogue was fake, but the catalogue was not a work of art. To judge a work, you do not read a fucking catalogue. You look as if your life depended on it.

"You don't hate me?"

"On the contrary."

"Butcher, please come with me to New York."

"One day, sure."

We had been drinking. It was noisy. I was slow to understand she did not mean one day. Also, once again, she was astonished that I had not understood something she thought had been clearly said. Hadn't I heard? Mauri had asked her to sell the Leibovitz? She had asked him to ship it to New York. She hadn't had a choice.

"You heard me, baby."

"I guess," I said but nothing was so simple. There was Hugh, always Hugh. And I know I said I didn't think about him in Tokyo, but how could anyone believe such shit? He was my orphan brother, my ward, my mother's son. He had my brawny sloping shoulders, my lower lip, my hairy back, my peasant calves. I had dreamed of him, had seen him in a Hokusai print, an Asakusa pram.

"He's in good hands."

"I guess."

"He likes Jackson."

"I guess." But it was not just Hugh either. It was Marlene. How had this painting turned up in Tokyo? The fake catalogue said it had been there since 1913.

"Tell me," I said. I held both her hands in one of mine. "Is this Dozy's painting?"

"Will you come with me to New York if I tell you the truth?"

I loved her. What do you think I said?

"No matter what I tell you?" Her smile had a gorgeous rosy lack of definition you might more normally explain with paint, a thumb, a short and stabby brush.

"No matter what," I said.

Her eyes were bright and deep, dancing with reflections.

"How big is Dozy's painting?"

"This one's smaller."

She shrugged. "Maybe I shrank it?"

"It can't be Dozy's," I said.

"Come, Butcher, please. It's just a few more days. We'll stay at the Plaza. Hugh will be fine."

About Leibovitz, Milton Hesse's high-school dropout had become completely, improbably, expert. In the case of Hugh, however, she had not the faintest fucking clue. I could not have the same excuse.

It was in the reign of Ronald Reagan, at three o'clock on a September afternoon, that we arrived in the heart of the imperium. For a moment it was more or less OK, but then, at the limo counter, everything began to come undone. Marlene's Australian bank card was rejected by a tall black woman with rhinestone spectacles and a thin wry mouth. "OK," she said, "let's try another flavour."

It had been an eighteen-hour flight. Marlene's hair looked like a paddock of hail-damaged wheat.

"Any card at all, Miss."

"I've only got one card."

The dispatcher examined my travel-soiled beauty, slowly, from top to bottom. "Uh-huh," she said. She waited just a moment before holding out her hand to me.

"Oh, I don't have cards."

"You don't have cards." She smiled. You don't have cards.

I was not going to explain the terms of my divorce to her.

"You don't neither of you have no credit card?" Then, shaking her head she turned to the man behind us.

"Next," she said.

Of course I had two hundred thousand dollars coming to me, but I didn't have them on me. As for Marlene's credit, something had fucked up at Mauri's office or his bank, but it was three in the morning in Tokyo and we could not find out.

Well, fuck that, I phoned Jean-Paul from Concourse C, and I did reverse the charges but we had just wired the little bugger fifteen thousand bloody dollars—my entire gallery advance—for If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die, so he had made a profit on the painting he had lost. It was five in the morning in Sydney, early, yes, but no reason to scream into my ear about all the litigation he had planned for me. It was his phone bill so I let him rant.