Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Probably not what you think,” came the swift reply.

“No?” I said, easily enough, though his tone took me aback. “Well then. Fill me in.”

“I think you’d probably rather I do that in person.”

“Fine. How about downtown,” I said quickly, “since you were good enough to take me to your club last time?”

xiv.

THE RESTAURANT I CHOSE was in Tribeca—far enough downtown that I didn’t have to worry too much about running into Hobie or any of his friends, and with a young enough crowd (I hoped) to throw Reeve off-balance. Noise, lights, conversation, relentless press of bodies: with my fresh, un-blunted senses the smells were overwhelming, wine and garlic and perfume and sweat, sizzling platters of lemongrass chicken hurried out of the kitchen, and the turquoise banquettes, the bright orange dress of the girl next to me, were like industrial chemicals squirted directly into my eyes. My stomach boiled with nerves, and I was chewing an antacid from the roll in my pocket when I looked up and saw the beautiful tattooed giraffe of a hostess—blank and indolent—pointing Lucius Reeve indifferently to my table.

“Well, hello,” I said, not standing to greet him. “How nice to see you.”

He was casting his glance round in distaste. “Do we really have to sit here?”

“Why not?” I said blandly. I’d deliberately chosen a table in the middle of traffic—not so loud we had to shout, but loud enough to be off-putting; moreover, had left him the chair that would put the sun in his eyes.

“This is completely ridiculous.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. If you’re not happy here…” I nodded at the self-absorbed young giraffe, back at her post and swaying absently.

Conceding the point—the restaurant was packed—he sat down. Though he was tight and elegant in his speech and gestures, and his suit was modishly cut for a man his age, his demeanor made me think of a puffer fish—or, alternately, a cartoon strongman or Mountie blown up by a bicycle pump: cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.

After the food arrived—Asian fusion, with lots of crispy flying buttresses of wonton and frizzled scallion, from his expression not much to his liking—I waited for him to work around to whatever he wanted to tell me. The carbon of the fake bill of sale, which I’d written out on a blank page in one of Welty’s old receipt books and backdated five years, was in my breast pocket, but I didn’t intend to produce it until I had to.

He had asked for a fork; from his slightly alarming plate of “scorpion prawn” he pulled out several architectural filaments of vegetable matter and laid them to the side. Then he looked at me. His small sharp eyes were bright blue in his ham-pink face. “I know about the museum,” he said.

“Know what?” I said, after a waver of surprise.

“Oh, please. You know very well what I’m talking about.”

I felt a jab of fear at the base of my spine, though I took care to keep my eyes on my plate: white rice and stir-fried vegetables, the blandest thing on the menu. “Well, if you don’t mind. I’d rather not talk about it. It’s a painful subject.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

He said this in such a taunting and provocative tone I glanced up sharply. “My mother died, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, she did.” Long pause. “Welton Blackwell did too.”

“That’s correct.”

“Well, I mean. Written about in the papers, for heaven’s sake. Matter of public record. But—” he darted the tip of his tongue across his upper lip—“here’s what I wonder. Why did James Hobart go about repeating that tale to everyone in town? You turning up on his doorstep with his partner’s ring? Because if he’d just kept his mouth shut, no one would have ever made the connection.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You know very well what I mean. You have something that I want. That a lot of people want, actually.”

I stopped eating, chopsticks halfway to my mouth. My immediate, unthinking impulse was to get up and walk out of the restaurant but almost as quickly I realized how stupid that would be.

Reeve leaned back in his chair. “You’re not saying anything.”

“That’s because you’re not making any sense,” I rejoined sharply, putting down the chopsticks, and for a flash—something in the quickness of the gesture—my thoughts went to my father. How would he handle this?

“You seem very perturbed. I wonder why.”

“I guess I don’t see what this has to do with the chest-on-chest. Because I was under the impression that was why we were here.”

“You know very well what I’m talking about.”

“No—” incredulous laugh, authentic-sounding—“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Do you want me to spell it out? Right here? All right, I will. You were with Welton Blackwell and his niece, you were all three of you in Gallery 32 and you —” slow, teasing smile—“were the only person to walk out of there. And we know what else walked out of Gallery 32, don’t we?”

It was as if all the blood had drained to my feet. Around us, everywhere, clatter of silverware, laughter, echo of voices bouncing off the tiled walls.

“You see?” said Reeve smugly. He had resumed eating. “Very simple. I mean surely,” he said, in a chiding tone, putting down his fork, “surely you didn’t think no one would put it together? You took the painting, and when you brought the ring to Blackwell’s partner you gave him the painting too, for what reason I don’t know—yes, yes,” he said, as I tried to talk over him, shifting his chair slightly, bringing up his hand to shade his eyes from the sun—“you end up James Hobart’s ward for Christ’s sake, you end up his ward, and he’s been farming that little souvenir of yours out hither and yon and using it to raise money ever since.”

Raise money? Hobie? “Farming it out? ” I said; and then, remembering myself: “Farming out what?”

“Look, this ‘what’s going on?’ act of yours is beginning to get a bit tiresome.”

“No, I mean it. What the hell are you talking about?”

Reeve pursed his lips, looking very pleased with himself.

“It’s an exquisite painting,” he said. “A beautiful little anomaly—absolutely unique. I’ll never forget the first time I saw it in the Mauritshuis… really quite different from any work there, or any other work of its day if you ask me. Difficult to believe it was painted in the 1600s. One of the greatest small paintings of all time, wouldn’t you agree? What was it”—he paused, mockingly—“what was it that the collector said—you know, the art critic, the Frenchman, who rediscovered it? Found it buried in some nobleman’s store room back in the 1890s, and from then on made ‘desperate efforts’ ”—inserting quotations with his fingers—“to acquire it. ‘Don’t forget, I must have this little goldfinch at any price.’ But of course that’s not the quote I mean. I mean the famous one. Surely you must know it yourself. After all this time, you must be very familiar with the painting and its history.”

I put down my napkin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was nothing I could do but hold my ground and keep saying it. Deny, deny, deny, as my dad—in his one big movie turn as the mob lawyer—had advised his client in the scene right before he got shot.

But they saw me.

Musta been somebody else.

There are three eyewitnesses.

Don’t care. They’re all mistaken. “It wasn’t me.”