“These are the real professionals,” he said. There were only three other customers in the bar, all of them men, all of them gray and beige and lumpy, too intent on their own drinks and misery to even notice our entrance.
“These are sad people who drink alone,” I said. “Be nice, or you’ll be drinking alone too.”
He grumbled at the chastening, but went to order two beers from the bar while I staked a claim to one of the high tables in the corner.
“So, Detective Greary,” I said as he set the drinks down, “what brings you out to Red Hook? There’s not much to see out here, unless you like dingy taverns and warehouses.”
“Mark.”
“Get set, go?”
“Call me Mark.”
“You’re on duty–right, Detective Greary? Are you on the job too?”
“Just call me Mark. What do you mean, on the job?”
“I mean we didn’t just end up on the same street in Red Hook at 11:45 on a Monday morning by accident. Were you hoping I would lead you to the painting?”
“Why else would I be following you?”
I took a sip of my beer, which sparkled with unusually large bubbles, as if it had been diluted with seltzer. It tasted about like seltzer too.
“There are two ways to interpret this scene,” I said. “Maybe you’re a detective following a suspect, hoping she’ll lead you to some stolen property. In which case we’ll finish this beer and then I’ll head home and wait for a time when you’re not following me to do what I need to do. Or maybe you’re just a man on an errand who ran into a woman on another errand. In which case, we could have another drink tonight. Or dinner.”
He took the first sip of his own beer and made a face. Something in the taste seemed to make him aware of the flat, stale smell of the place, and he wrinkled his nose.
“It’s not that easy,” he said.
“It’s not that hard, either. Would this make it easier? I didn’t take that painting.”
“Then what are you doing out here?”
“Trust isn’t your strong point, is it?”
“A trusting nature isn’t usually what drives someone to become a cop.”
“But you like me.”
He refused to meet my eyes.
“And you’re not totally convinced I did it, are you?” I said. “Even with the video. Why?”
He shrugged.
“You see a lot of liars in this line of work. Most people are terrible liars, but every once in a while you run across someone who knows how to tell a lie so that it doesn’t sound like a lie–and that’s enough to fool most people, because that’s what most people are listening for–‘does this sound like a lie?’ But as a cop, you learn to listen for the truth, which is a whole different ball game. A good lie doesn’t sound like a lie, yeah–but only the truth sounds like the truth.”
“I see, so it’s all about authenticity.”
“That’s right.”
“The real thing.”
“There ain’t nothing like it,” he said, and clinked his bottle against mine where it stood on the table–a silly gesture, but I liked the confidence it showed.
“What if there were?” I asked him.
“Sorry?”
“For example, what’s your favorite painting?”
“I don’t really think I have a favorite–painting isn’t really my thing.”
“So you mean your favorite is Van Gogh’s Starry Night.”
He paused, a swallow of beer still in his mouth, and looked at me, baffled.
“No, I don’t read minds,” I said. “It’s just that every tough guy I’ve ever met secretly loved Starry Night. It was probably on the wall of their dorm room, and it’s the image on their computer desktop until their favorite Rottweiler dies and bumps it. But none of them will admit that they like the painting, because they seem to think it would be tantamount to getting caught reading a romance novel in the locker room. So, painting’s not your thing, got it, but if, hypothetically, you could buy Starry Night, would you do it?”
“Legally?”
“Could you pretend for 30 seconds that you’re not a cop? Yes, legally.”
“I don’t know what you think cops make, but I don’t see that happening.”
“For God’s sake, show some imagination. Pretend you had billions and billions of dollars–money you earned through some totally legal enterprise–would you buy Starry Night for 50 million? That’s a very good price, by the way–probably less than half of what it’s worth.”
“Sure, I guess I would buy it and hang it in my yacht. Is that the answer you want?”
This was not the time to lecture him on what salt-water air could do to oil and canvas.
“Fine, so you’d buy it. Now let’s say you could buy a copy of Starry Night–a perfect copy–I mean down to the last detail, absolutely indistinguishable from the original, by even the biggest experts in the field with electron microscopes and what-have-you–for the same price. Would you do it?”
“Of course not.”
“Even though it’s exactly the same–meaning it’s just as good a painting. Think about it.”
“No,” he said, without thinking about it.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s fake. A forgery.”
“Wrong,” I said. “You wouldn’t buy it because you are an essentialist.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but never an …?”
“Essentialist. It means you believe physical things have an essential character. They pick up histories. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Basically the whole human species is essentialist. It’s why you wouldn’t wear Hitler’s sweater, even if it were a very nice sweater and laundered 100 times and dry cleaned and sterilized and rinsed with holy water–which is totally an essentialist concept, by the way–which had been blessed by the Pope himself.”
“I’m not much of a sweater guy.”
“Fine, Hitler’s cowboy boots, then.”
“Cowboy boots? Really? What did I ever do to you?”
“Besides book me for grand theft? But fine, you wouldn’t wear Hitler’s manly, awesome leather holster. Or spend his gold! My point is, don’t you think that’s strange, when all these things are–according to science–just an arrangement of atoms? It’s not like we’re fetishists for atoms–one carbon atom is as good as another–so you’d think it would be the arrangement that mattered to us. But no. If some other atoms are arranged in exactly the same way, we say ‘no, that’s not Starry Night, that’s something different, a forgery.’ As if the atoms were important, not the arrangement. But that can’t be right. Look at us … we’re replacing our own atoms all the time. Are you a different person than you were yesterday, just because some of your atoms are different? Of course not. You’re an arrangement. That’s what matters with people. So why not with a painting?”
Detective Greary made a show of taking a stiff drink. “You have a way of making a man’s head spin,” he said.
“I’m just getting warmed up, Detective Greary.”
“Mark.”
We fell into an awkward silence, and I let him stew as he pretended to sip at his beer, his gaze alternating between me and the back of the bar.
“Mark,” I said, “you’ve been eyeing the bathroom since we came in here. Just go.”
“And have you give me the slip?”
“I’ll still be here when you get out. Scout’s honor.”
“That’s the Vulcan sign for ‘live long and prosper.’ It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“What if I give you my word?”
“Please,” he said. I liked the confident tilt of his head as he said it. He was so much more attractive when he was suspicious.
“Then how about …”
I reached down to my left below the high table.
“… if I give you …”
I reached down on the other side.
“… a collateral?”
I dangled both
of my shoes from my right hand, the heels hooked on my index and middle fingers.
“Come on, Detective Greary, no one is going to walk around Red Hook in stockings. The hypodermics alone!”
“I’m not sure I really want to be seen carrying high heels into a men’s room in a place like this.”
“You struck me as a man who was more secure in his masculinity than that–Starry Night aside.”
“It’s not my masculinity that I’m worried about.”
But he took the shoes from me one by one, letting his fingers brush against mine as he did so. As he walked over to the men’s room, he paused twice to look back. The third time, I waved and smiled.
As soon as the door had closed behind him, I took a pen from my purse, scribbled a note on his napkin, and left, my high heels rapping against the dusty wooden floor of Jerry’s Tavern so loudly that even the day-drinkers looked up.
* * *
After concluding my business in Red Hook, and a brief stop at Hoeffner’s Fine Art Repairs and Restorations in Chelsea, I waited as the afternoon warmed up on the last bench on Central Park West, watching the building across the street until Virginia Firenze came out of it. She was carrying her gym bag and yoga mat, as she did every Monday afternoon, and from the stoop she gave the usual nervous scan of the sidewalk that I had long since realized was not fear of being assaulted or approached for a drug buy, but of running into someone she knew in the art world who might look at her in her unitard, then at the building she had just come out of, and suddenly understand why she and Gustavo Firenze always entertained in the gallery, never in their home, and always reported their home as “Central Park West” without a number or cross street. As soon as she had rounded the corner and disappeared into the subway entrance, I crossed the street and rang the first floor apartment.
“Bella!” said Gustavo Firenze, opening the door to meet me in the hall after he had buzzed me in. As angry as I was with him, I still enjoyed hearing my name rendered in his light Italian accent. “Come in, come in! I am so glad that you have come.” He ushered me in, peering around me for his wife.
“You don’t look glad.”
He always looked shorter at home than at work, as if his merely being in the gallery gave him two-inch platforms. But his apartment, even if it was on the first floor and clinging on to Central Park West for dear life, was impeccably decorated–a Parisian salon made modern with prominent blacks and whites. He was wearing a deep green velvet jacket, which picked up the landscape tints from the Bril on the wall behind him and put him in a dead heat for “most colorful object in the room.”
“Of course I am glad you have come, but I am not happy, how could I be? Such a disaster, a nightmare this whole business has been. I have not slept in days, not a wink. You must know how terrible I feel.”
“So terrible that you pressed charges?”
“Sit, sit, you will fray my nerves otherwise. Virginia insisted that we press charges, over my most strenuous objections. What was I to say? Please, tell me. You have seen the video. The woman is like your twin but with terrible hair. I told the police those were not your bangs but they would not listen. What terrible, no, what infernal bad luck! How could I explain to Virginia that she was not you?”
“You mean, how could you explain it to her without mentioning that, at the exact moment that video was taken, you had me bent over a bed on the third floor of the Mercer?”
“So vulgar when you are angry. Is that how you think of the beautiful connection between us?”
“How should I think of it, Gustavo? You let me spend two nights in jail and then go through an arraignment, all for something you know I couldn’t have done.”
“I promise you that I slept worse than you could have those two nights, my treasure. I am in a different kind of jail–one from which there is no simple release. My heart is one jail, my marriage another.”
“If this goes to trial, I’ll have no choice but to tell where I really was that night.”
“How can you say such things? You know of Virginia’s heart condition–that would kill her.”
“What condition, that she was born without a heart? You mean that she would kill you. Or worse: divorce you and take the gallery.”
“We will find a resolution to this, Bella. We will find a way as we always have, together. Perhaps I can slip you some money–as much as the painting is worth–and then we can settle out of court, for that amount. It will cost you nothing, no one will ever have to know.”
“I know you don’t have 200 thousand lying around, Gustavo. I do the books for the gallery, remember? I’m the one who tells you no one came in all day. You hardly made rent last month.”
“There are always other sources of money–one must be creative, it is the key to life.”
“I’m not going to admit to something I didn’t do.”
“No, there will be no admission of wrongdoing. Only we will settle out of court, and there will be an end to it.”
“And I keep my job?”
Firenze grew agitated, standing and beginning to pace.
“I will pour you a drink,” he said.
“In other words, no. But you’ll still happily fuck me during Yoga Mondays and every other Thursday night while your wife visits with her mother in White Plains, right?”
He covered his ears and moaned, as if I had poured acid into them.
“Oh! How can you use such words with me? You must know that I could not keep you on at the gallery–Virginia would never allow it. But I would find something else for you–a new job, a better job somewhere.”
“Tell me all about this other gallery that will hire me after you fire me for being an art thief.”
“But if we settle out of court, no one will ever need to know. I will make sure that Virginia never breathes a word. And most importantly, even if we cannot work together any longer–which breaks my heart–our deeper, more significant connection can continue, yes?”
“You’re unbelievable,” I said. “Let me propose a different plan. First of all, it’s over between us. Second of all, you’re going to remember that a prospect spilled tea on the Romulus and Remus Wednesday, which you forgot about until the early hours of Thursday. You then called me at 3 a.m., waking me from a sound sleep, and demanded on pain of termination that I return to the gallery right then to retrieve the painting so I could bring it in first thing for an emergency cleaning at Hoeffner’s.
“I was so shaken up that I got all the way to the gallery before I realized that, of course, I don’t have a key. I called you and you insisted that I break the window and take the painting. So all of this is an unfortunate misunderstanding, and entirely your fault for forgetting about those late night phone calls–during which, by the way, you were drunk and verbally abusive.
“Finally, despite your extremely public lamentations and apologies, I’m going to start looking for a new job, and until I find it you’re going to continue to pay me my current salary. And in return for these considerations, I’ll make sure that no one–especially Virginia–ever finds out where you were at 3 a.m. last Thursday, or two Thursdays before that, or before that, and so on. You get the picture?”
He adjusted his collar, and the cast of his face hardened.
“A charming plan, to be sure, charming, if a bit fanciful. But haven’t you forgotten one small detail, my treasure? You don’t have the painting. It might be very difficult to sell your story without the painting. If you were to say unkind things about me publicly, I might be forced to do the same–for the sake of my marriage, you see, though it would break my heart–and then you would just have the word of a suspected art thief with–pardon me for mentioning–your troubled history, against the word of a respected New York gallery owner.”
“Here,” I said, standing up.
“What is this?”
“Your claim at Hoeffner’s–the Chelsea office. Don’t worry, the dates will check out just fine, I’ve taken care of it.”
“This is impossi
ble–you cannot have the painting–you were with me.”
“But it’s happening.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Poor Gustavo,” I said. I stood on my tiptoes and kissed the top of his head, right in the bald spot. “There’s so much you don’t understand, and never will.”
* * *
Aunt Daniela arrived at my apartment just after six, blowing through the door like a warm front, a bag of groceries in each arm. She kissed me on the cheek as she passed.
“How do you live in this clutter, Bella? Where’s your stereo? I need opera when I cook.”
“I’m not sure I have any opera.”
She set down the bags on the counter of my walk-in kitchen and produced a CD of Verdi from her purse.
“I never travel into cultural backwaters without it. Put this on for me. And then stay out–the kitchen is mine.”
“There’s something we need to talk about.”
“Oh,” said Aunt Daniela, looking over her shoulder, “don’t worry. I know all about the developments today, and we’re going to have a long conversation about a good many things over dinner. Where is your saucepan?”
“Which one is a saucepan again?”
“Where are your knives?”
“The knife is in the left drawer.”
“The knife? You’re hopeless. Just put on the opera and let me do my thing.” She began to pull plum tomatoes from one of the bags and pile them next to the sink.
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“What would you do if I weren’t here?”
“Order dinner.”
“Then find something else to do. Out!”
Sitting in the living room I picked through a Cosmo as the smell of sauteed onion and stewing tomatoes filled the apartment. After a while I closed my eyes and, with the unmistakable sense that I would pay for this luxury, allowed myself to imagine that I was twelve again, back home, wasting time in the living room while my mother cooked her ragù. The Verdi on high volume was different–my father would never have stood for it–but behind the quivering sopranos and impassioned tenors, my aunt’s tuneless humming could have been my mother’s. After a few minutes of this I had to flee to the bathroom to get a hold of myself.
Other Copenhagens Page 2