Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist. Fully conscious of my folly, I’d downloaded pictures of it to my computer and my phone so I could gloat upon the image in private, brushstrokes rendered digitally, a scrap of seventeenth-century sunlight compressed into dots and pixels, but the purer the color, the richer the sense of impasto, the more I hungered for the thing itself, the irreplaceable, glorious, light-rinsed object.

Dust-free environment. Twenty-four-hour security. Though I tried not to think of the Austrian man who had kept the woman locked in a basement for twenty years, unfortunately it was the metaphor that came to mind. What if I died? Got hit by a bus? Might the ungainly package be mistaken for garbage and tossed in the incinerator? Three or four times I’d made anonymous phone calls to the facility to reassure myself of what I already knew from obsessively visiting the website: temperature and humidity guaranteed within acceptable conservatorial range for artworks. Sometimes when I woke up the whole thing seemed like a dream, although soon enough I remembered it wasn’t.

But it was impossible to even think of going up there with Reeve like a cat waiting for me to scurry across the floor. I had to sit tight. Unfortunately, the rent on the storage unit was due in three months; and what with everything else I saw no point whatsoever in going up to pay it in person. The thing was just to have Grisha or one of the guys go in and pay it for me, in cash, which I was confident they would do no questions asked. But then the second unfortunate thing had happened: because only a few days earlier Grisha had shocked me, thoroughly, by sidling up with a sideways tick of his head when I was alone in the shop and adding up my receipts at the end of the week and saying: “ Mazhor, I need a sit-down.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You on lock?”

“What?” Between Yiddish and gutter Russian, jumbled through a slur of Brooklynese and slang picked up from rap songs, sometimes Grisha’s idioms didn’t make it into any kind of English I could understand.

Grisha snorted noisily. “I don’t think you understanding me right, champ. I am asking is everything square with you. With the laws.”

“Hang on,” I said—I was in the middle of a column of figures—and then looked up from the calculator: “Wait, what are you talking about?”

“You my brother, not condemning or judging. I just need to know, all right?”

“Why? What happened?”

“Peoples are hanging around the shop, keeping an eye on. You know anything about it?”

“Who?” I glanced out the window. “What? When was this?”

“I wanted to ask you. Scared to drive out to Borough Park to meet with my cousin Genka for some business he got going—afraid of getting these guys on me.”

“On you?” I sat down.

Grisha shrugged. “Four, five times now. Yesterday, getting out of my truck, I saw one of them hanging around out front again, but he slipped across the street. Jeans—older—very casual dressed. Genka, he don’t know nothing about it but he’s freaked, like I say we got some stuff going, he told me to ask you what you knew about it. Never talks, just stands and waits. I am wondering if it is some of your business with the Shvatzah,” he said discreetly.

“Nope.” The Shvatzah was Jerome; I hadn’t seen him in months.

“Well then. I hate to break it to you but I think is maybe poh-lices smelling around. Mike—he has noticed too. He thought it was because of his child supports. But the guy just hangs around and does nothing.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Who knows? But one month, at least. Mike says longer.”

“Next time, when you see him, will you point him out to me?”

“He might be private investigator.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because in some ways he looks more like ex-cop. Mike thinks this—Irish, they know from cops, Mike said he looked older, like poh-lice retired from the force maybe?”

“Right,” I said, thinking of the heavyset guy I’d seen out my window. I’d spotted him four or five times subsequently, or someone who looked like him, lingering out front during business hours—always when I was with Hobie or a customer, inconvenient to confront him—although he was so innocuous-looking, hoodie and construction-worker boots, I could hardly be sure. Once—it had scared me, badly—I’d seen a guy who looked like him lingering out in front of the Barbours’ building but when I got a better look I’d been sure I was wrong.

“He’s been around for a while. But this—” Grisha paused—“normally I would not say anything, maybe is nothing, but yesterday…”

“Well, what? Go on,” I said, when he massaged his neck and looked guiltily to the side.

“Another guy. Different. I’d seen him hanging about the shop before. Outside. But yesterday he came in the shop to ask for you by your name. And I did not like the looks of him at all.”

I sat back abruptly in my chair. I’d been wondering when Reeve would take it in his head to drop by in person.

“I did not talk to him. I was out—” nodding—“so. Loading the truck. But I saw him go in. Kind of guy you notice. Nice dressed, but not like a client. You were at lunch and Mike was in the shop by himself—guy comes in, asks, Theodore Decker? Well, you’re not in, Mike says so. ‘Where is he.’ Lot a lot a questions about you, like do you work here, do you live here, how long, where you are, all sorts.”

“Where was Hobie?”

“He didn’t want Hobie. He wanted you. Then—” he drew a line on the desk top with his finger—“out he comes. Walks around the shop. Looks here, looks there. Looks all around. This—I see from where I am, across the street. It looks strange. And—Mike did not mention this visit to you because he said maybe is nothing, maybe something personal, ‘better keep out of it,’ but I saw him too and thought you should know. Because, hey, game recognize game, you get me?”

“What’d he look like?” I asked, and then—when Grisha did not reply—“Older fellow? Heavy? White hair?”

Grisha made an exasperated sound. “No no no.” Shaking his head with resolute firmness. “This was nobody’s grandpappy.”

“What’d he look like, then?”

“He looked like a guy you would not want to get into a fight with, is what he looked like.”

In the silence that followed, Grisha lit a Kool and offered me one. “So what should I do, Mazhor? ”

“Sorry?”

“Do me and Genka need to worry?”

“I don’t think so. Right,” I said, hitting a little awkwardly the triumphant palm that he held up for me to slap, “okay, but will you do me a favor? Will you come and get me if you see either of them again?”

“Sure thing.” He paused, looking at me critically. “You sure me and Genka don’t need to worry?”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re doing, do I?”

Grisha flipped a dirty handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbed his purpled nose with it. “I don’t like this answer from you.”

“Well, be careful, whatever. Just in case.”

“ Mazhor, I should say the same of you.”

iv.

I HAD LIED TO Kitsey; I didn’t have a thing to do. Outside Barneys, we kissed goodbye on the corner of Fifth before she walked back to Tiffany to look at the crystal—we hadn’t even made it to the crystal—and I went to catch the 6. But instead of joining the stream of shoppers pouring down the stairs to the station I felt so empty and distracted, so lost and tired and unwell, I stopped instead to look in at the dirty window of the Subway Inn, straight across from the loading dock at Bloomingdale’s, a time warp straight out of The Lost Weekend and unchanged since my father’s drinking days. Outside: film-noir neon. Inside: same grimy red walls, sticky tables, broken floor tiles, strong Clorox smell, and a concave bartender with a rag over his shoulder pouring a drink for a bloodshot solitary at the bar. I remembered my mom and me losing my dad at Bloomingdale’s once, and how—mysteriously to me, at the time—she’d known to leave the store and walk straight across the street and find him here, throwing back four-dollar shots with a wheezy old Teamster and a bandanna-wearing senior who looked homeless. I’d stood waiting inside the doorway, overpowered by the waft of stale beer and fascinated by the warm secretive dark of the place, the Twilight Zone glow of the jukebox and the Buck Hunter arcade game blinking away in the depths—“Ah, the smell of old men and desperation,” my mother had said wryly, wrinkling her nose as she exited the bar with her shopping bags and caught me by the hand.