Stealing Picasso

by Anson Cameron

  ‘Will I need them? Where I’m going?’

  ‘I’m not going to kill you. You deserve to walk away. To live, knowing you got your only friend killed.’

  ‘Turton’s dead?’

  Larry Skunk doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know if Turton is dead, but he has a need to hurt Marcel in some way.

  ‘Come with me, Larry Skunk. We’ll go to São Paulo. It’s where I’m going. There are whole cafés full of sad guys with screwed-up lives. We’ll fit right in.’

  ‘Cafés? Cafés now? You going to sit in some café batting your fucking eyelids?’

  Marcel lays his hand on Larry Skunk’s gloved hand. Larry Skunk pulls it away, tucks it under his arm. ‘I’ll see you, Larry Skunk. I’m sorry. And … thank you. I know what this cost.’ Marcel has still got his ticket. He’ll catch another plane. He’ll be in São Paulo yet.

  Larry Skunk doesn’t watch Marcel walk away. He starts up his bike and sits there, staring down at its shuddering chrome dials. A Harley Davidson is a stallion if you’ve got a tribe to ride with. It’s heavy-set and laughably conspicuous if you haven’t. Slow, clumsy, loud and vain. You can’t creep along alone, unnoticed, on a Harley. It honks vainglory and hubris. An ugly sound, Larry Skunk thinks – a sound engineered to draw attention. It always made him feel strong. But tonight, here in the dark, it makes him glance over his shoulder. He turns the throttle slow and low, trying to tiptoe away.

  Larry Skunk is living in a frightening new land where everyone is stronger and smarter than he is. He is practically a boy again, with this compassion thing afflicting him. He doubts he will be able to make it. A hard heart was all he brought to the table. He knows nothing about making a lawful, legitimate living. How do you scrape together even ten bucks for a veal parmigiana if you got to care about everyone involved?

  Working, as she does, for an important man, Annie Truss’s days are full of excitement. Right now, for instance, she is whiting out a Y that will, if subtly obliterated, be replaced with a T, which will begin the word Titian in a letter to the governor-general that Weston Guest has dictated to her. She is wondering if white-out is acceptable for gubernatorial correspondence or whether she should type the whole letter again. As she closes her eyes to visualise the governor-general reading the letter she has typed, the phone rings. Blindly she creeps her left hand across the desktop and picks up the receiver as the governor-general frowns at the whited-out Y in her mind’s eye. She tears the letter from the typewriter and screws it up.

  ‘National Gallery of Victoria, Weston Guest’s office. Annie speaking. Can I tell him who’s calling? Well, can I tell him what it’s regarding? Saving? Turton Pym’s sorry arse? Saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse.’ She reads aloud as she scribbles this on a Spirax pad, the tone of her voice unchanged. Her second incoming line rings before she can put the first call through and she tells the first caller to hold, please, and presses the flashing ‘2’ button on her phone.

  ‘National Gallery of Victoria. Weston Guest’s office. Annie speaking. Yes, Mr Draper, I’ll see if he’s in. Hold one moment please.’ She writes ‘Speed Draper – great news’ on her pad, just below ‘Saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse.’ With both calls on hold she shouts to Weston through their adjoining door. ‘Mr Guest, I’ve got a guy on line one who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse, and Speed Draper on line two who says he has great news about the stolen painting. It really is Mr Draper.’ They have had a number of hoax calls since the painting was stolen.

  Weston has an Arnold Shore landscape spread on his desk and is hunkered over it, peering at it through a magnifying glass when Annie shouts to him. He doesn’t bother to move until he hears her mention Speed Draper and great news, then he comes up out of that painting and drops the magnifying glass and begins gesticulating at her through the glass wall; waving his arms, pointing at his phone, ushering the call onwards.

  ‘Speed Draper. Speed Draper,’ he tells her.

  She patches the call through and Weston cools, takes a breath, and lets it ring three times before answering it.

  ‘Weston Guest.’

  ‘Get down to Spencer Street station, Weston. We think we’ve found her in a locker.’

  Weston lays a hand flat on his stomach. ‘Oh, thank God. Is she damaged?’

  ‘We’re waiting on a key. Get down here and you can verify if she’s genuine or not.’

  ‘I’ll be there in five. Don’t let the police touch her, for God’s sake. Wait for me.’ As he hangs up Weston begins shouting at Annie to get him a car, call the trustees, forget the car, he’ll go on foot. He runs a comb through his hair and flounces his bow tie and rushes from the office, telling Annie to wish him luck and leaving her to wonder what to tell the weirdo who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse, whose call is still flashing at her on line one.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Mr Guest has left the office for the day.’ There is silence on the other end and Annie asks, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Tell him Turton Pym’s in locker two two eight at Flinders Street,’ Larry Skunk says.

  ‘Mr Guest won’t be back today, sir.’

  ‘Send roses, then, bitch.’ He hangs up.

  On Flinders Street Weston’s brisk walk keeps breaking into a run and he has to force it back to a walk again and again. He has been so much in the news lately, pleading and cajoling, extolling the virtues of Picasso and trusting to the good nature of the thief, that people recognise him now. Some shout out at him. Some, seeing the prospect of drama in his thin-lipped flight, begin to follow. He ducks into a bottle shop for Moët, and marches onwards to the station, a score of curious citizens following in his wake, laughing, cracking jokes, on an expedition, to they don’t know where.

  A crowd is already milling before locker 227. Speed Draper is there with a scrum of policemen, theatrically huffy, pacing, hands on hips, staring angrily at the locker. The Age newspaper has received a tip-off, and, being right across the street, has more journalists and cameramen here than it currently has on continental Europe. When Weston arrives with his trailing retinue of breathless stickybeaks, the police and newspaper people swear and screw their faces up. Who needs a truckload of citizens trampling around their crime scene and story?

  Weston is as excited as a boy queuing for Santa. He picks up Speed’s hand from down by his trouser leg and shakes it. ‘Well met, Lord Carnarvon. Shall we broach the final seal?’ He indicates locker 227, assuming they have been waiting for him.

  ‘We’re waiting for the station manager. He has the key,’ the minister explains huffily. ‘It’s locked. We’d force our way in, but we might damage the picture … if it’s there.’

  A silence follows, in which no one knows what role to play. Weston was all set to be triumphant: the champagne, the quotes – ‘I had ultimate faith in the enforcement agencies’ – the photo ops. Now he finds himself having to lay down the Moët and stare at the locker with its suspicious boot print, consult his Rolex, show his concern.

  The crowd itself is impatient. It has invested serious legwork to be here alongside Weston and it wants a result. Someone shouts, ‘Crack her open, Speed.’ They start to heckle and jeer. ‘Come on, Speed, you tiresome old bag of swamp gas, let’s get on with it.’

  It becomes quite an uproar – good-natured, but an embarrassment to the Minister of Police and the director of the National Gallery, all the same. Weston now wishes they’d be moved on. The police try to back the crowd up, but, finding half are journalists, make do by frowning at them.

  ‘Crack the locker.’

  ‘Give us a look at her.’

  Speed and Weston are sweating. It has occurred to both of them that this locker might contain something as rank as a boar’s liver, a cow turd, an unknown painting. That this is a prank. That the thieves, who apparently despise them for not funding young artists, will play them for fools awhile before returning the Weeping Woman. Both men know it will be on every front page in the country if they open this locker and pull out an inflatable do
ll with her mouth bugled to fellate them.

  I’ll let Draper open the locker, Weston decides. I’ll take a couple of steps backwards as he does, then, if he emerges with a smoking turd, I’ll be out of shot. I’ll slip away through the dirt-bags and it’ll be his humiliation. If he emerges with the painting I’ll step forwards and make a show of congratulating him and embracing her. I’ll edge him out of shot and dance a pas de deux with her. The triumph will be mine.

  In the tin confines of locker 228 Turton Pym, artist, not well known, bound and gagged with duct tape, hearing people calling to have the locker opened, urges them on with grunts. ‘Hurry, Jesus bloody Christ, hurry. I’m still here, but I’m dying. Dying. Unable to breathe.’ Sitting upright with his hands bound behind his back and his legs folded sharply, he pushes with his toes against the locker door. He tries to draw his feet back to kick the door, but he is folded too tight. Bent like this, his knees pressed against his cheeks, with tape covering his mouth, he has to struggle for every breath.

  Hope surges through him into a sob and his stomach vaults as he hears the familiar sound of a key scrabbling at the entrance to a lock. As the key is inserted and turned he half closes his eyes, expecting a blast of light. His pulse lifts. There will be concerned faces, policemen, ambulance people, distraught friends, another twenty years of life. A masterpiece. An Archibald win. He shivers at the thought of the adhesive tape being torn off his head by some eager young policeman; it will surely peel the skin from his lips and tear a swathe from each of his sideboards. It must be eased off slowly, using a solvent. He hears the creak of an opening door; prepares to accept the world.

  But he remains in near darkness, mocked by a meek dribble of illumination through the ventilation slits of the locker door. A different door has opened – another door to another locker. He closes his eyes and listens, unable to move, as the Weeping Woman is pulled from locker 227. Of course, they have come for her. His legs are beginning to knot with cramp. He hears the crowd murmur with delight as she is birthed into the world. The murmur becomes a polite fizz of applause. She is powerful, famous. The applause becomes as loud as she is priceless.

  People are cheering and Turton Pym is happy she has been saved. He is happy, as well, to know his friends have paid this price, this priceless price, for his freedom. He silently thanks them for that. He wishes he could join the celebrations. Someone out there shouts, ‘Three cheers.’ The crowd obeys and the ventilation slits begins to sparkle with camera flash. Turton keeps pulling hard through his nose for every breath and the air whistles in his nostrils so loud he wonders the crowd can’t hear. A champagne cork pops, ricochets off the tin door, making him flinch.

  His mind turns, as it always does in times of crisis and pain, to finding ways of making this into art. How best to paint the scene? How to capture the irony of a crowd cheering a work of art while an artist dies, unmourned, in their midst? The locker he is in would be transparent, a ghostly white frame surrounding him as he hovers unseen among them. The crowd would be staring rapt at the unrolled masterpiece in postures of triumph and worship. Some with arms in the air, one holding a spouting bottle of Krug, some kneeling. Turton would be smiling at their childish idolatry. He’d get rid of the duct tape – he must have a smile like Jesus smiled at the last. And an amused twinkle of forgiveness. And Whiteley. Whiteley will be at the centre. Didn’t Edward Trelawney reach into Shelley’s funeral pyre and save the poet’s heart? Yes. There will be a golden heart in Turton’s chest, the source of all light in the painting. Whiteley will be reaching for it, through the ghostly geometry of the locker, through Turton’s ribs. For Whiteley alone has seen the real treasure here. Whiteley will consult that heart unto his dying day; will plunder its immeasurable depths for inspiration. But … should it be his heart Whiteley is reaching for? What about his eye? Or his brain? Figuratively speaking, what best represents an artist’s genius?

  Sitting in locker 228 with his knees up against his chin and his eyes twinkling in the camera flash from the ventilation slits, Turton Pym knows his painting would be a masterpiece. The tiny bursts of light he is seeing are the bright flickering of his heart and eye pressed against Whiteley’s bosom, and his brain, fierce as a star, held in Whiteley’s hand.

  Caught in the thrill of creation Turton ignores the dreadful ache of suffocation as it seeps from his lungs into his chest and out into his limbs and lips. It is an aggravation to be ignored, like thirst, hunger, a salesman knocking at the door. He will deal with it later. He is painting now.

  The station master is imprisoned in a timetable as fragile as a house of cards. So many trains arrive and depart from Spencer Street each day. The station master is on tenterhooks watching each come and go, because he knows trains are lethargic beasts prone to dawdle and linger. One late train will infect another with its tardiness, and that will infect yet another, and so on and so on, until the timetable collapses and his station resembles a flu ward with locos laying about on sidings leaking a bacteria of hostile commuters, who have prised open electric doors and popped out emergency windows and are now on the hunt for the dimwit who incarcerated them.

  In order to prevent this, the station master spends his day shuffling and shooing locos, panicked as a chess master in a burning building. The 8.15 from Rosanna to platform six is ten minutes overdue. Which moves the 8.30 from Broadmeadows to platform nine … no, ten, no, the 8.45 from Ferntree Gully is there. No, no, no. Trains must run on time.

  Just yesterday the 3.40 from Geelong hit a truck that was wedged under a boom-gate at a level crossing in Werribee, killing the truck driver. The station master paced out the minutes waiting for that train, damning the driver of that truck, who turned out to be a father of five, driving long hours to support those five. Sad. But when the Geelong Flyer was delayed, the lateness spread like influenza down the other lines: Hurst-bridge, Frankston, Flemington, even Sydney, and hung there at the outer reaches of the rail network, before ricocheting back in a fusillade of delay and postponement that lasted all day. The station master had every reason to damn that truck driver to hell.

  And now this. Now police demanding the master key to his lockers. Reporters sniffing about as if they’d got wind of defective brake pads or sleepers made a feast of by termites. This distraction will keep him from ushering in the 11.42 from Shepparton, a train running a portentous seven minutes behind time, and, unless the passengers disembark smartly, the midday from Geelong will need to be allotted another platform. He is minded to lay this dread scenario at the door of the police and ask them what they intend to do about it.

  But he won’t. Because all the station master’s hostility is deep within the station master. The only hint of its existence is the foulness of his breath caused by his dyspepsia. Outwardly, he is a wheedling presence who imagines himself suave. Smiling a smile that has, he persuades himself, soothed many a momentarily disenchanted passenger over the years, he lays his hands flat on his chest with his fingers laced across his sternum, leans forwards low and tilts his head to look up at Speed Draper from beneath the peak of his station master’s cap and tell him, ‘A face I recognise from the television. Mr Draper. Minister. Honoured.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Ian Beaks. I am the station master, fifteenth year, of Spencer Street station. The country’s busiest.’

  Aware the press is hovering, Speed Draper speaks softly. ‘Do you have the key to this locker?’ He touches a knuckle on the locker door.

  Aware the press is hovering, the station master speaks loudly. ‘I do, minister. And may I, being legally charged with responsibility and guardianship of the goods and chattels enclosed within all the lockers on these premises, which is a relationship of trust assumed and expected between myself and the lessees of these lockers, ask why you want to open two two seven?’

  ‘A relationship of trust? Responsible for the contents? I hear accomplice, when you say “relationship of trust” with the lessees of this particular locker, Mr Beaks. And I hear receiver of stolen goods when you say “respons
ible” for these particular goods and chattels. Or am I reading too much into your relationship with these lessees?’

  The station master’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘Most certainly, minister. You are. Oh, yes. I’m sorry to give a wrong idea. No relationship. And I know nothing of the contents of two two seven. Nor any locker here. It would be a breach of privacy if I did. I only ever open the very most noisome lockers. The stinkers. Forgotten lunches and practical jokes of a scatological nature, minister, are the goods and chattels in which I deal, sadly.’

  The station master scrabbles a key from his trouser pocket. Attached to it is a white ribbon and on it a foam Smurf with Lachie written on his belly. ‘Lachie locker key,’ he explains.

  Speed Draper smiles and ushers him towards the locker. The crowd presses in behind the station master as he fits the key to the lock. Despite his earlier plan to keep a safe distance, Weston Guest can’t help himself. It is he who reaches in and retrieves the cardboard tube and holds it out in his cupped hands. The crowd makes room as he extracts the canvas and unrolls the Weeping Woman. And as she emerges there are murmurs of delight, as if from relatives seeing a newborn baby unswaddled for the first time. No articulation can compete with a simple ‘ooh’ or ‘aah’.

  Weston studies her suspiciously, his eyes hardened. Eventually he nods and a teardrop forms and runs down his cheek as he announces softly through quivering lips, ‘It is her.’