Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

I looked to Marlene. Amberstreet caught my look.

"I heard, Marlene, that there was a new Leibovitz on the market in New York. Ex-Tokyo. So what I realised, Marlene, was Michael's paintings were a kind of feint. We opened all the crates at Sydney Airport, but you had the Leibovitz in your hand luggage. In your garment bag, I'd say."

Oh fuck, I thought, she's caught. It's over. It had happened, just like that. But Marlene was not looking caught at all. Indeed, she smiled. "You know very well it can't be Mr. Boylan's painting."

Amberstreet tipped his head and looked at her, no longer officious or even sarcastic, but, just for a brief moment, showing something close to admiration.

It was Marlene who finally spoke. "You measured it?"

The detective did not reply but, in an oddly polite gesture, retrieved my jars of paint from me, and returned them to the kitchen where, in short order, he opened a cupboard door, closed it carefully, ran his finger along the countertop, turned on the tap, washed his finger, and then, finally, it seemed he might speak. But then his eye lit on the back of Dominique's dumb little canvas. He turned it over. I held my breath.

"Guess where I was just now," he demanded.

"Tell us," I said. I thought, Where the fuck is all this heading?

"With Bill de Kooning in the Hamptons."

"Yes. So?"

"No-one ever told me he was so handsome," said Amber-street.

I could not follow him.

"And there's the wife. Elaine. Gone back to him."

Marlene's eyes showed no concern at all. They were bright and clear, intensely focused. She handed me my coat.

"Just wait," begged Amberstreet. "Please. Just look."

From the pocket of his ridiculous coat he produced an envelope from which he removed a two-sheet cardboard sandwich which, in turn, protected a tiny charcoal doodle. This he handed to me, cradled in his palm, as fragile as a butterfly.

"It's a de Kooning?"

"Everyone has to go to the lavatory sometime."

"You prick," Marlene said. "You stole it."

"Not really, no. It isn't even signed." He danced from one foot to the other, his mouth turned down in a rictus of denial. "Who would believe that in Sydney?" he said. "Who would have any idea? You're both leaving? I'll walk down with you, but tell me, I wanted to ask you. Did you see that Noland show?"

No more was said about Mauri or the stolen Leibovitz.

"Well," he said, as we arrived on the street. "I'm off to Greenwich. I've got a map of artists' houses."

"You mean the Village."

"You know I'm going to get you, Marlene," he said. "You're going to go to gaol."

And then he winked, the little creep, and we watched him head up towards Houston with his stupid coat floating like a squid in the snowstorm.

Marlene took my arm and squeezed it.

"It was a feint?" I asked her. Of course I didn't think it was, and I should have been furious that she smiled back so readily. In fact I was simply pleased she had not been caught. I laughed and kissed her. My friends all tell me I should have hated her. Oh, what a cheat she was. What a sucker I was, to fall for all that Tokyo bullshit. The best canvas I had managed to produce had been used like a matador's cape. Surely I was angry?

No.

But was it not true that, even as we walked across Canal Street and down into the huge dark silence of Laight Street, amongst the soot-covered ghosts of the former railway-freight terminus, surely as that rat ran across the cobbles, seven of my nine paintings had vanished from the face of the fucking earth? Might they not, for all I knew, be now discarded like pretty paper ripped from Christmas presents, stuffed in black plastic body bags, dumped out on the Roppongi streets?

No.

But couldn't I see my own denial? Had all my boring speeches about my art been forgotten?

No.

But why would I not turn away from her, now, as we passed this scratched-up metal door from under which wafted the inexplicable odours of cumin and cinnamon?

I did not wish to turn away.

So I really believed that a self-confessed liar and cheat really loved my paintings.

I had no doubts. Ever.

But why?

Because the work was great, you dipshit.

As we walked down Greenwich Street, with a bitter wind whipping off the Hudson, sheets of newspaper lifting into the lonely air like seagulls, Marlene made herself small beneath my arm and I was not angry because I knew no-one had ever loved her until now. I understood exactly how she created herself, how she, like I, had entered a world which she should never have been allowed into, the same world Amberstreet crept into when he nicked the piece of paper off Bill de Kooning's floor.

We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist, until we slipped beneath the gate or burned down the porter's house, or jemmied the bathroom window, and then we saw what had been kept from us, in our sleep-outs, in our outside dunnies, our drafty beer-hoppy public bars, and then we went half mad with joy.

We had lived not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, then we staked our lives on theirs.

This was why I could not seriously dislike Amberstreet, and as for my pale and injured bride, my gorgeous thief, I wished only to hold her in my arms and carry her. And I could see, even in the dark of what is now Tribeca, the miserable lino on her mother's kitchen floor. It was close to being a vision, watereddown Kandinsky in mad and frightening detail: then the kerosene refrigerator, the chipped yellow Kookaburra stove, the neighbours all called Mr. This and Mrs. That, none of them with any idea that they were being starved to death. Who is Filippino Lippi, Mrs. Clover-dale? You've got me there, Mr. Jenkins. I'd have to say I didn't have a clue.

Do not make fun of the lower-middle classes, you can get in trouble, get a ticket, be roared up, reported, dobbed in, cut down to size, come a cropper, fuck me dead. A nation that begins without a bourgeoisie does face certain disadvantages, none of them overcome by setting up a concentration camp to get things started. By now of course Sydney is so bloody enlightened it is impossible to board a train without being forced to overhear arguments about Vasari conducted by people on mobile phones.

Who is Lippi, Mrs. Cloverdale? Excuse me, Mr. Jenkins, do you mean Filippo or Filippino?

But in the times and places where Marlene and I were born it was different and it was sheer chance that we stumbled onto what would be the obsession of our untidy hurtful lives. Look at all the murder and destruction that led dear little queeny Bruno Bauhaus to the Marsh. And what did he have to feed me when he got there? Nothing but his mad passion for Leibovitz. Not even a real oil painting. There were none for thirty miles around.

From zis shithole, he told me, you must go.

And I obeyed him, the strange blue-eyed miniature. I abandoned my mother and my brother to the mercies of Blue Bones and went down to Melbourne on the train, a bruiser, unlettered, with white socks and trousers to my ankles. I had no choice but to play the cards I had been dealt, and I tried to make a virtue of them, deliberately arriving at life class with blood still on my hands. For what was I judged to be but a kind of raging pig? I had not read Berenson or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard but still I argued. Forgive me, Dennis Flaherty, I had no right to knock you down. I had no right to speak. I knew nothing, had seen sweet fucking all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Angliss's wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel instead.