Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“I know you don’t. Because I used to like test you. Mention Dr. No, make jokes. To see what you would say.”

“What about Dr. No ?”

“Not that long after I met you!” His knee was going up and down like crazy. “I think you weren’t used to vodka—you never knew what size to pour your drink. You came in with huge glass, like so, like water glass, and I thought: shit! You don’t remember?”

“There were lots of nights like that.”

“You don’t remember. I would clean up your vomit—throw your clothes in the wash—you would not even know I had done it. You would cry and tell me all kinds of things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like…” he made an impatient face… “oh, it was your fault your mother died… you wished it was you… if you died, you would maybe be with her, together in the darkness… no point going into it, I don’t want to make you feel bad. You were a mess, Theo—fun to be with, most of time! up for anything! but a mess. Probably you should have been in hospital. Climbing on roof, jumping into the swimming pool? Could have broken your neck, it was crazy! You would lie on your back in the road at night, no streetlights, no way for anyone to see you, waiting for a car to come and run you over, I had to fight to get you up and drag you in the house—”

“I would have lain out in that godforsaken fucking street a long time before a car came by. I could have slept out there. Brought my sleeping bag.”

“I am not going to go into this. You were nuts. You could have killed us both. One night you got matches and tried to set the house on fire, remember that?”

“I was just joking,” I said uneasily.

“And the carpet? Big burned hole in the sofa? Was that a joke? I turned the cushions so that Xandra wouldn’t see it.”

“That piece of shit was so cheap it wasn’t even flame-retardant.”

“Right, right. Have it your way. Anyway, this one night. We are watching Dr. No, which I had never seen but you had, and I was liking it very much, and you are completely v gavno, and it’s on his island, and all cool, and he presses the button and shows that picture he stole?”

“Oh, God.”

Boris cackled. “You did! God help you! It was great. So drunk you are staggering—I have something to show you! Something wonderful! Best thing ever! Stepping in front of the television. No, really! Me—watching movie, best part, you wouldn’t shut up. Fuck off! Anyway, off you go, mad as hell, ‘fuck you,’ making all this noise. Bang bang bang. And then, down you come with the picture, see?” He laughed. “Funny thing—was sure you were bullshitting me. World-famous museum work? give me a break. But—it was real. Anyone could see.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! Anyway—so funny! Here am I, so proudly teaching you to steal apples and candy from the magazine, while you have stolen world masterpiece of art.”

“I didn’t steal it.”

Boris chuckled. “No, no. You explained. Preserving it in safety. Big important duty in life. You’re telling me,” he said, leaning forward, “you really haven’t opened it up and looked at it? All these years? What is the matter with you?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said again. “ When did you take it?” I said when he rolled his eyes away from me. “How?”

“Look, like I said—”

“How do you expect me to believe one word of this?”

Boris rolled his eyes again. He reached in his coat pocket; he punched up a picture on his iPhone. Then he handed it across the table to me.

It was the verso of the painting. You could find a reproduction of the front anywhere. But the back was as distinctive as a fingerprint: rich drips of sealing wax, brown and red; irregular patchwork of European labels (Roman numerals; spidery, quilled signatures), which had the feeling of a steamer trunk, or some international treaty of long ago. The crumbling yellows and browns were layered with an almost organic richness, like dead leaves.

He put the phone back in his pocket. We sat for a long while in silence. Then Boris reached for a cigarette.

“Believe me now?” he said, blowing a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

The atoms in my head were spinning apart; the sparkle of the bump had already begun to turn, apprehension and disquiet moving in subtly like dark air before a thunderstorm. For a long, somber moment we looked at each other: high chemical frequency, solitude to solitude, like two Tibetan monks on a mountaintop.

Then I stood without a word and got my coat. Boris jumped up too.

“Wait,” he said, as I shouldered past him. “Potter? Don’t go angry. When I said I would make it up to you? I meant it—

“Potter?” he called again as I stepped through the clattering bead curtain and out on to the street, into the dirty gray light of dawn. Avenue C was empty except for a solitary cab which seemed to be as glad to see me as I was to see it, and darted over to stop for me immediately. Before he could say another word I got in and drove off and left him there, standing in his overcoat by a bank of trash cans.

x.

IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding my teeth and a heart about to explode. Bureaucratic daylight: pedestrian morning blaring, bright with threat. By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side. Strewn on the carpet around me were a pair of shopping bags; a never-used pup tent; a beige percale pillowcase that still smelled like my bedroom in Vegas; a tin full of assorted Roxicodones and morphs I knew I ought to flush; and a snarl of packing tape into which I’d cut, painstakingly, with an X-Acto knife, twenty minutes of delicate work, pulse throbbing in my fingertips, terrified of going in too hard and nicking the painting by mistake, finally getting the side open, peeling the tape off strip by strip by careful strip, with trembling hands: only to find—sandwiched in cardboard and wrapped with newspaper—a scribbled-up Civics workbook ( Democracy, Diversity, and You! ).

Bright multicultural throng. On the cover Asian kids, Latino kids, African American kids, Native American kids, a girl in a Muslim head scarf and a white kid in a wheelchair smiled and held hands before an American flag. Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities all participated happily in their communities and inner-city kids stood around their housing project with a watering can, caring for a potted tree with branches illustrating the different branches of government, Boris had drawn daggers with his name on them, roses and hearts surrounding Kotku’s initials, and a set of spying eyes, peeping slyly to one side, above a partially filled out sample test:

Why does man need government? to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples

What are some duties of an American citizen? to vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state

Hobie, thankfully, was out. The pills I’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and after two hours of twisting and flopping on my bed in a torturous, falling, half-dream state—thoughts flying, exhausted from my heart beating so fast, Boris’s voice still running through my mind—I forced myself to get up, clear the mess strewn round my bedroom, and shower and shave: nicking myself in the process, since my upper lip was almost dentist-chair numb from the nosebleed I’d suffered. Then I made myself a pot of coffee, found a stale scone in the kitchen and forced myself to eat it, and was down in the shop and open for business by noon—just in time to intercept the mail lady in her plastic rain poncho (looking a bit alarmed, standing well back from rheumy-eyed me with my cut lip and my bloody Kleenex), although as she was handing the mail over to me with latex-gloved hands I realized: what was the point? Reeve could write Hobie all he wanted—phone Interpol—who cared any more.