Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story

"Dozy owns a painting by Jacques Leibovitz?"

I know now that my astonishment seemed put-on to her, but the secretive bugger Dozy had never breathed a word about his treasure. Also, you do not go to northern New South Wales to look at great paintings. And again: Leibovitz was one of the reasons I became an artist. I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black-andwhite reproduction in Foundation of the Modern. None of this I was prepared to confess to an American in Manolo Blahniks but I was really offended by Dozy, my so-called mate. "We never even talk about art," I said. "We sit in his miserable kitchen, that's where he lives, amongst all those piles of the Melbourne Age. And he showed it to you"?"

She raised an eyebrow as if to say, Why not? All I could think was that I had given him lovely drawings of the Wombat Fly and Narrow-waisted Mud Wasp and he had stuck them to his fridge with fucking magnets. It was hard to believe he had an eye at all.

"Are you insuring it?"

She laughed through her nose. "Is that what I look like?"

I shrugged.

She returned a clear appraising gaze. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

I fetched her a saucer and she blew some dungy-smelling fumes across the table. "My husband," she said finally, "is the son of Leibovitz's second wife."

If I did not like her, I liked the husband way, way less. But I was startled and impressed to understand whose son he was.

"Dominique Broussard is his mother?"

"Yes," she said. "You know the photograph?"

Even I knew that—the tawny blonde studio assistant lying on an unmade bed, her new baby at her breast.

"My husband, Olivier, he's the baby. He inherited the Leibovitz droit moral" she said, as though having to explain a story she was weary of.

But I was not weary, not at all. I was from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. I hadn't seen an original painting before I turned sixteen.

"You understand how that works?"

"What?"

"Droit moral."

"Of course," I said. "More or less."

"Olivier is the one who gets to say if the work is real or fake. He signed the certificate of authentication for Boylan's painting. That is his legal right, but there have been people making mischief, and we have to protect ourselves."

"You work together, you and your husband?"

But she was not being drawn into that. "I've known Mr.

Boylan's painting for a very long time," she said, "and it is authentic right down to the zinc tacks on the stretcher, but the point has to be proven again and again. It's a little boring."

"And you know that much about Leibovitz?"

"That much," she said dryly, and I watched as she butted out her cigarette, grinding it fiercely into the saucer. "But when someone like Boylan is told that his investment is at risk, he is bound to get upset. In this case he showed the canvas to Honore Le Noel who persuaded him he'd bought, not quite a fake, but close enough. May I have more wine? I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a day."

I poured the wine without comment, not revealing that I was completely gobsmacked to hear Le Noel's name spoken as if he were the local publican or the owner of a hardware store. I knew who he was. I had two of his books beside my bed. "Honore Le Noel has become a joke," she said. "He was Dominique Leibovitz's lover, as you probably know."

This sort of talk upset me in ways I can hardly bring myself to name. At the heart of it was the notion that I was a hick and she was from the centre of the fucking universe. What I knew you could read in Time magazine—Dominique had begun as Leibovitz's studio assistant; Le Noel was Leibovitz's chronicler and critic.

Now that my visitor was halfway through her second glass, she was talkative as hell. She revealed that Dominique and Honore had spent almost eight years, from just after the war until 1954, waiting for Leibovitz to die. (I recalled that the artist's strength was very acutely sketched in Le Noel's monograph—a force of life, short, thick legs, huge square hands.)

It was not until his baby son was five, his daughter-in-law now told me, when Leibovitz himself was eighty-one, that the grim reaper came sneaking up on the old goat, pushing him forward as he stood at the dinner table with a wine glass brimming in his hand. He pitched forward and slammed his broad nose and tortoiseshell spectacles into the Picasso cheese plate. That is how my visitor told it, fluently, a little breathlessly. She finished the second glass without remarking on its character and for this, of course, I judged her quite severely.

The plate cracked in half, she said.

I thought, How would you fucking know? Were you even born?

But I was a stranger to the notion that one might know famous people and of course she was married to the witness, the child— an olive-skinned boy with very large watchful eyes and protruding ears which could not even begin to spoil his beauty.

When his father had fallen dead he apparently had been about to ask if he might be excused, but now he looked to his mother and waited. Dominique did not embrace him but stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.

"Papa est mort."

"Oui, Maman."

"You understand. No-one must know yet."

"Oui, Maman."

"Maman must move some canvases, do you understand? It is difficult because of the snow."

I have recently observed French children, how they sit, so neat with their big dark eyes, and their clean fingernails collected in their laps. What miracles they are. I suppose Olivier sat like that, watching his dead father, but holding a dreadful secret of his own—he had been, at the very moment when his father fell, about to go and make pee-pee.

"Don't move, you understand?"

Of course there was no need for him to be tortured in the chair.

But his mother was about to commit a major crime, that is remove paintings from the estate before the police were notified. "Stay there," she said. "Then I'll know where you are."

Then she was on the telephone, persuading her posh lover to leave his fireside at Neuilly, explaining that they could not afford to wait for the snow to melt, that he must go all the way to Bastille, collect a truck, and drive it to the rue de Rennes.

Somewhere in the confusion and terror of the night the little boy peed his pants, although this misadventure was not discovered until much later, when Honore finally noticed him sleeping with his forehead on the table, and then Dominique took a bloody photograph. Imagine! Later, for whatever reason—perhaps the missing Le Golem electrique was in the shot—she tore half of it away. It might have provided the only forensic evidence of that long night when Dominique Broussard and Honore Le Noel stole some fifty Leibovitzes, many of them abandoned or incomplete, works that would later, with the signature added and some careful revision, become very valuable indeed. They removed them to a garage near the Canal Saint-Martin, the source of that frequently reported "watermark" on a whole array of doubtful Leibovitzes from widely different periods. From this day no-one ever saw the painting that Leo Stein and the fiercer (and therefore more reliable) Picasso both described as a masterwork. Stein referred to it as Le Golem electrique, Picasso as Le Monstre.

It was not until lunch the following day that Dominique reported her husband's death to the gendarmes, and then, of course, the studio was—as is the law in France—sealed off and a full accounting made of the paintings remaining there. No Le Golem electrique. Oh, never mind.

Dominique, the daughter of a tax accountant from Marseilles, now had sufficient Leibovitzes, almost-Leibovitzes and unborn- Leibovitzes to live very well for the next fifty years. Also, of course, she inherited the droit moral. That gave her the right to authenticate, which is, incredible as it may seem, the law, but now she chose to give her rather louche reputation a more reliable character and so she set up Le Comite Leibovitz, and installed the esteemed Honore Le Noel as chair.