Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

I waited on the mansion steps, which was as close to Olivier as anyone permitted me to get. Hugh and I were side by side, numb and dumb. Marlene emerged, opened her mouth to speak, and vomited across the stoop.

Hugh accompanied the police into the Bicker Library. Marlene was retching on the footpath, but I was directed to accompany Hugh a certain distance. I observed his tape-recorded interrogation from the high-arched doorway while they sat him beneath a nasty poster for a production of Hamlet with John Wilkes Booth. I could not hear what was said, but it seems he confessed to murder. I believed it, totally. As they applied their rattraps to his wrists my brother looked at me, no longer crying, his little eyes so weirdly still and dark.

They got the big old fellow on his feet and spun him round and left him standing, facing the corner of the library.

Something then occurred, God knows what exactly—coming and going on the stairs. Then the youngest cop, a young crewcut fellow in sneakers and jeans, released Hugh's cuffs and the old bull rushed towards me, head down.

"Hugh!"

He brushed past.

The cop was a trim brush-cut fellow, not like any cop I knew, more like the Lebanese guys selling hash at Johnny's Green Room in Melbourne.

"That's your brother?"

"Yes."

"He's a little slow?"

"That's right."

"Get him out of here."

"What?"

"He's free to go."

Hugh was hovering with his little blaming eyes. He permitted me to put my arm around him and escort him down the steps.

"Sit here a minute, mate."

I took off my sweater and my T-shirt, pulled the prickly wool back over my ruined skin, used the T-shirt to clean Marlene who had propped herself between two parked cars and was still gulping and gasping, although now she was producing little more than bile. I had not seen what she had seen, and I did not want to. I wiped her mouth, and chin, leaving the shirt coloured by the bitter green and when I was done I threw it—fuck them—across the rail of Gramercy Park.

An ambulance came, but no-one bothered to get out. It was grey, overcast, damp, sweaty. We were lifeless, all our marrow sucked into the maw of God knows what dimension.

Police arrived and departed. Taxis hooted at the ambulance, but no-one was in a hurry to bring the famous artist's son downstairs.

Of course I could not yet know about the freshly broken metacarpal bone in Olivier's right hand. I wonder what I would have done. Would I have tried to turn in my brother? Report him? Dob him in? How the fuck would I know? The real mystery, however, was not my character, but the crime itself.

The killer had either had a key—but all keys were accounted for—or he had entered an open window by scaling a sheer fiftyfoot wall.

Hugh, who did have a key, was still asleep at Mercer Street at the time Jeavons brought in the tea and found the body. Had Jeavons done it? No-one thought so. As Hugh ran away from the scene, by the time he had seen the body, the corpse was already five hours old.

So it was nothing to do with Hugh, and yet the body contained a message to anyone who knew Hugh's history.

The Office of Chief Medical Examiner did not know Hugh, did not know it was a message, although God knows they went digging. They took little bits of Olivier's brain, liver, blood.

There was Adderall and Celexa and Morphine in his brain, but these drugs had not killed him. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The autopsy reported the telltale signs: intensive heart congestion (enlarged heart; right-side ventricle), venous engorgement above the point of injury and cyanosis (blue discolouration of lips and fingertips). That had been achieved by the folding legs of Hugh's chair.

Enough you would imagine, but not for them. They cut him up like a pig at the Draybone Inn, opening his beautiful body with "the usual incision". The flies were buzzing. They weighed his poor sad brain. They found the vessels at the base of the brain to be "smooth-walled and widely patent", whatever that means.

They weighed his lungs, his heart, and liver. Will that be all Mrs.

Porter? They found the esophagus unremarkable. They poked around his stomach and reported "undigested foodstuff with recognisable fragments of meat and vegetable and a marked odour of alcohol."

They cut up his dick. "The calyces, pelves, ureters and urinary bladder are unremarkable. The capsule strips with ease revealing markedly pale and smooth cortical surfaces." I did not even want to know what this meant, but what had he done to deserve it? Be born inside the castle walls of art? They cut him from colon to bowel and wrote down the contents of his shit. This was a life, a man, in part, in whole.

The tabloids were almost as thorough—they noted that his mother, Dominique Broussard, had died a similar death in Nice in 1967. They went right into it. So enlightening to read that strangulation is normally the fate of women and children. Only one detail escaped them, although it was plainly stated in the autopsy if anyone wished to think what it might mean—the killer had also broken the bone of Olivier Leibovitz's right metacarpal.

Hugh had not done this.

I had not done this.

In all New York, there was only one person who would understand that this injury, inflicted at the time of death, had a direct connection to my brother's history.

Of course I did not know this straightaway. It was a Saturday morning when Olivier died, and it was not until Wednesday— very fast for the Chief Medical Examiner, or so they told me at the precinct—that I picked up the coroner's report and brought it back to Mercer Street. I cooked Hugh sausages and mashed potatoes and then I began to read. It took a minute or two before I reached the metacarpal bone.

Marlene had been sitting very still and quiet reading Mayer's handbook of artist's materials, but she looked up so sharply it was clear she had been waiting for me to respond.

"What is it, baby?"

I slid the page through the toast crumbs, underlining with my nail the "metacarpal bone."

There was a small flicker in her mouth. Not a smile, but a meaningful contraction. She held my eyes, as she slowly folded the report.

"You don't need this," she said. I finally understood—she had the droit moral now. Olivier was dead.

Beside me Hugh continued chopping up his sausages, sawing them into careful sections one-quarter inch in width.

"I know it looks bad," she said. "It isn't bad, baby. It's just careful."

What she was saying was monstrous, but she was just sitting at the table, her hand resting on my hand, as tender as she always was.

"What looks bad?"

"That injury," she said, casting her eyes in my brother's direction.

"The break?"

"Insurance," she said. This was the second time she almost smiled.

She had the fucking droit moral. God save us. I crossed the room, opened the trunk where she had kept her running things, her burglary tools if you want to know the truth. There was nothing left but smelly sneakers and a pair of shorts.

"Where's your rope?"

What did I expect her to answer? Oh, I used the rope to climb into my fucked-up husband's room. When I had finished killing him I threw the thing away. Then I came home and snuggled into bed. What she actually said was: "God is in the details."

And thence solemnly stretched out her hand towards me.

"Nothing bad will happen now, baby. It's just I can be confident that our secret is secure."

"For God's sake," I nodded at my eating brother, "he was sound asleep. He was here."

"From an evidentiary point of view, that's sort of tricky.

Anyway, no-one wants to open up that can of worms," she said.

"Certainly not me."

I made a breathy, incredulous, limp-dick laugh.

"Baby, it's not anything I'll ever need to use. You're acting as if I plan to. I don't."