Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

My father was a hard man living in an age of miracles and wonder. I would come upon him in the night as he contemplated the wonder of REFRIGERATION. Before refrigeration he drove his wagon to Madingley to meet the Melbourne train, then back to fill the ice chamber. Then came the fridge EUREKA you would think but the GENERAL PUBLIC did not like cold meat and would only buy what was hanging in the shop THE MORONS as my father said. He was always for progress, including widening the main street even if it meant we had to kill the trees. My father was a well-known REALIST. The leaves blocked up the gutters anyway, as he said more than once in the public bar of the Royal Hotel.

I was sitting on my chair in front of the shop. This was several years ago, bless me, Blue Bones had not been taken from us.

Two Melbourne fellows came by travelling in a Holden which was a new BRAND never heard of before that year. One had a pinstripe suit the other tartan shorts you would split your sides to look at him. The one in the suit asked may we take your picture. Not being certain of my GROUND I fetched Blue Bones and I could see from his face he agreed they were a pair of POOFTERS but he did not mind if he and I posed together father and son. The poofters had what is called a POLAROID. When the photograph was taken, we stood around and I watched myself appear like a drowned man floating to the surface of a dam.

Look at this, my daddy said. See, this didn't work at all.

I saw his point immediately, but it took some time for the poofters to understand my father's objection which was you could see no more of Blue Bones than his apron. They then agreed to take a second Polaroid and he could keep it, welcome to it, no trouble to them at all.

When they had made a portrait to Blue Bones' satisfaction they presented it to him and then SKEDADDLED. Who can ever imagine where they went to?

Fancy that, my father said, studying his likeness as it bloomed before him. He had a face like a hatchet and angry red eyes but when he placed the Polaroid on the mantel he was a different man. Fancy that, he said. He cocked his head. He almost smiled.

Fancy fucking that now.

Later the Polaroid began to fade and then it got much worse because within a week it had completely VANISHED. You would expect our father to get into a whipping rage, but he never did, not once, and the Polaroid stayed on the mantel for as long as he lived and sometimes I would see him checking on it as if it was a barometer or clock. Then he died, everything gone and weeds coming through the floor of the sleep-out.

I stayed in the utility room for many days waiting for my brother to deal with the ARREARS. It was an ugly room with a basin and a bucket and a gas hot-water service that roared to life in the middle of the night. WHOOMP. WHOOMP. It would put the fear of God in you. I arranged the bear and the wreath and turned on the radio and although it would not play its green light was always comforting.

I opened my eyes one morning and saw steam from the laundry, sun streaming through the clouds and the HEAVENLY CREATURE was there even though he was a MALE he was as beautiful as the famous painting by FILIPPINO LIPPI—his suit was a dusty white silver like the underside of moth wings when they are dying in the holy light.

And thus the stone was rolled away and I followed him along the hallway where the old people came out to tell me I would trip on the cord trailing from my radio and it must have been before eight o'clock because Jackson was still sitting at the desk.

The angel creature said, Give him his money.

Jackson gave me an envelope. He said no hard feelings.

In the street outside there was waiting a white Mercedes-Benz as if it was a wedding. I got in next to the angel creature. He had dark ringlets glistening, freshly blessed. He said I am very pleased to meet you. He said, It appears we are travelling together. Good grief. Where to? Suddenly I was afraid.

He said I am Olivier Leibovitz and you and I are going to New York today. Forgive me, all I could think was my brother was ROOTING his wife. Should I tell him? What would become of me? I told him I did not have my chair. I said I must return for it.

There are many chairs in New York, said he. I'll buy you one at the Third Street bazaar.

At Kingsford Smith International Airport Olivier took a pill.

Here, he said, you better have one too. He gave me a Coke and two pills. I took them both and soon after that I discovered I had a passport. I never knew I had one, or what one looked like.

When I went into the airplane I was thinking of my father.

I asked Olivier how long it would take to get to America.

He said thirteen hours to Los Angeles, Bless me, bless my poor dead darling daddy. He could not have borne it, to see Slow Bones sitting in his seat.

There were only two bars in SoHo in those years. One of them was Kitty's and the other was Fanelli's, and it was here that a swollen-eyed Marlene found me thirty minutes later. She arrived at my back-room table, light as a moth, carrying two Rolling Rocks, one of which she placed circumspectly before me.

"I love you," she said. "You have no idea how much."

Being filled with raw emotion, I did not trust myself to speak.

She slid onto the opposite bench, raising her bottle to her lips.

"But you can't love me unless you know what it is you've got yourself involved with."

As this was exactly what I had been thinking I lifted my beer and drank.

"So," she placed her own beer, carefully, on the tabletop. "I'm going to tell you."

She paused.

"You know, when you saw me first... in those ridiculous shoes that got you so excited."

"I hated the shoes."

"Yes, but don't hate me. That would be unbearable. Don't worry about Hugh. I'll look after Hugh."

I snorted at this, but I must tell you, it touched me. No-one had even lied to me about this sort of thing before.

"Olivier authenticated Dozy Boylan's painting," she said finally.

"I had been away. By the time I was back in Australia he had done it. Jesus! So dumb. Boylan was a friend of a client of Olivier's and Olivier was too embarrassed to admit he didn't know a rat's arse about his father's work."

"It's a famous painting. Where's the risk?"

"If he had looked past his nose he would have discovered it had been deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art. In other words, dumped."

"I know what it means, baby."

"I know you know, but shouldn't that have been a red flag? Why would they have dumped it? Even Olivier should have thought of this."

"But you said it's fine. It's almost the first thing you ever said to me. 'The good thing is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real.'"

"Shoosh. Listen." She took ahold of both my hands and lifted them to her lips. "Listen to me, Michael. I'm telling you the truth."

"His Leibovitz is not real? Is that it?"

"In my opinion? It was an unfinished postwar canvas that Dominique and Honore removed the night the old goat died."

"Fuck, Marlene!"

"Shoosh. Calm down. This was not a valuable painting, but they doctored it. They dated it 1913. Then it was a valuable painting.

MoMA snapped it up as soon as it came on the market in 1956.

It came straight from the estate. It had a perfect provenance and it was commonly reproduced. But it was a fixer-upper. Honore, of course, knew exactly how much and in what way it had been tampered with. He didn't need an X-ray. He probably watched Dominique do it."

"But you found the paint receipts in the archive? Oh, shit. You printed the receipt yourself?"

"Baby, please don't hate me. I really wasn't always a crook. We should have just taken back the Boylan canvas, but who would have loaned us the one and a half million US dollars we would have had to pay? No-one."