Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

They’ll be bringing up people to testify against me all day long.

Fine then. Let them.

Someone had pulled a window blind, throwing our table into tiger-striped shadow. Reeve, eyeing me smugly, speared a bright orange prawn and ate it.

“I mean, I’ve been trying to think,” he said. “Maybe you can help me. What other painting of its size would be anywhere near its class? Maybe that lovely little Velázquez, you know, the garden of the Villa Medici. Of course rarity doesn’t even enter into it.”

“Tell me again, what are we talking about? Because I’m really not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Well, keep it up if you want,” he said affably, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “You’re not fooling anybody. Although I have to say it’s pretty bloody irresponsible to entrust it to these goons to handle and pawn around.”

At my astonishment, which was perfectly genuine, I saw a blink of what might have been surprise cross his face. But just as quickly it was gone.

“People like that can’t be entrusted with something so valuable,” he said, chewing busily. “Street thugs—ignoramuses.”

“You are making absolutely no sense,” I snapped.

“No?” He put down the fork. “Well. What I’m offering—if you ever care to understand what I’m talking about—is to buy the thing off you.”

My tinnitus—old echo of the explosion—had kicked in, as it often did in moments of stress, a high-pitched drone like incoming aircraft.

“Shall I name a figure? Well. I think half a million should do nicely, considering that I’m in a position to make a phone call this moment—” he removed his cell phone from his pocket and put it on the table beside his water glass—“and put this enterprise of yours to a stop.”

I closed my eyes, then opened them. “Look. How many times can I say it? I really don’t know what you’re thinking but—”

“I’ll tell you exactly what I’m thinking, Theodore. I’m thinking conservation, preservation. Concerns which clearly haven’t been paramount for you or the people you’re working with. Surely you’ll realize it’s the wisest thing to do—for you, and for the painting as well. Obviously you’ve made a fortune but it’s irresponsible, wouldn’t you agree, to keep it bouncing around in such precarious conditions?”

But my unfeigned confusion at this seemed to serve me well. After a weird, off-beat lag, he reached into the breast pocket of his suit—

“Is everything okay?” said our male-model waiter, appearing suddenly.

“Yes yes, fine.”

The waiter disappeared, sliding across the room to talk to the beautiful hostess. Reeve, from his pocket, took out several sheets of folded paper, which he pushed across the tablecloth to me.

It was a print-out of a Web page. Quickly I scanned it: FBI… international agencies… botched raid… investigation…

“What the fuck is this?” I said, so loudly that a woman at the next table jumped. Reeve—involved in his lunch—said nothing.

“No, I mean it. What does this have to do with me?” Scanning the page irritably—wrongful death suit… Carmen Huidobro, housekeeper from Miami temp agency, shot dead by agents who stormed the home—I was about to ask again what anything in this article had to do with me when I stopped cold.

An Old Master painting once believed destroyed ( The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius, 1654) was employed as rumored collateral in the deal with Contreras, but unfortunately was not recovered in the raid on the South Florida compound. Though stolen artworks are often used as negotiable instruments to supply venture capital for drug trafficking and arms deals, the DEA has defended itself against criticism in what the art-crimes division of the FBI has called a “bungled” and “amateurish” handling of the matter, issuing a public statement apologizing for the accidental death of Mrs. Huidobro while also explaining that their agents are not trained to identify or recover stolen artwork. “In pressured situations such as this,” said Turner Stark, spokesman for the DEA press office, “our top priority will always be the safety of agents and civilians as we secure the prosecution of major violations of America’s controlled substance laws.” The ensuing furor, especially in the wake of the suit over Mrs. Huidobro’s wrongful death, has resulted in a call for greater cooperation between federal agencies. “All it would have taken was one phone call,” said Hofstede Von Moltke, spokesman for the art-crimes division of Interpol in a press conference yesterday in Zurich. “But these people weren’t thinking about anything but making their arrest and getting their conviction, and that’s unfortunate because now this painting has gone underground, it may be decades until it’s seen again.”

The trafficking of looted paintings and sculptures is estimated to be a six-billion-dollar industry worldwide. Though the sighting of the painting was unconfirmed, detectives believe that the rare Dutch masterwork has already been whisked out of the country, possibly to Hamburg, where it has likely passed hands at a fraction of the many millions it would raise at auction.…

I put down the paper. Reeve, who had stopped eating, was regarding me with a tight feline smile. Maybe it was the primness of that tiny smile in his pear-shaped face but unexpectedly I burst out laughing: the pent-up laughter of terror and relief, just as Boris and I had laughed when the fat mall cop chasing us (and about to catch us) slipped on wet tile in the food court and fell smack on his ass.

“Yes?” said Reeve. He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock. “Found something that amuses you?”

But all I could do was shake my head and look out across the restaurant. “Man,” I said, wiping my eyes, “I don’t know what to say. Clearly you are delusional or—I don’t know.”

Reeve, to his credit, did not look perturbed, though clearly he wasn’t pleased.

“No, really,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. But this is the most absurd fucking thing I have ever seen.”

Reeve folded his napkin and put it down. “You’re a liar,” he said pleasantly. “You may think you can bluff your way out of this, but you can’t.”

“Wrongful-death suit? Florida compound? What? You actually think this has something to do with me?”

Reeve regarded me fiercely with his tiny, bright blue eyes. “Be reasonable. I’m giving you a way out.”

“Way out? ” Miami, Hamburg, even the place names made me burst into an incredulous huff of laughter. “Way out of what?”

Reeve blotted his lips with his napkin. “I’m delighted you find it so amusing,” he said smoothly. “Since I’m fully prepared to phone this gentleman at the art-crimes division they mention and tell him exactly what I know about you and James Hobart and this scheme you’re running together. What would you say to that?”

I threw down the paper, pushed back my chair. “I would say, go right ahead and phone him. Be my guest. Whenever you want to talk about the other matter, call me.”

xv.

MOMENTUM SPUN ME OUT of the restaurant so fast I hardly noticed where I was going; but as soon as I was three or four blocks away I began to shake so violently that I had to stop in the grimy little park just south of Canal Street and sit on a bench, hyperventilating, head between my knees, the armpits of my Turnbull and Asser suit drenched with sweat, looking (I knew, to the surly Jamaican nannies, the old Italians fanning themselves with newspapers and eyeing me suspiciously) like some coked-out junior trader who’d pressed the wrong button and lost ten million.