by Mike Barnes
“Sorry,” she said, seeing some of it in my face. “It’s just that you get sick of non-artists asking you how you did things. Like you’d say to a surgeon, How. I’ve got a few spare minutes.”
I was dizzy with it, running. Mouse in a maze, sniffing cheese everywhere, bumping walls. How she must have felt that night. Alone in her knowledge, or –
“Does Rick know?” I said.
“He saw what you saw. But Rick’s funny.” Not the word I would use, ever. “He has these little routines, layers. Stupid on the surface. Then smart underneath. Then underneath that, stupid again. It’s hard to tell which side is on the bottom.”
“Can’t keep his eyes open . . . until he grabs you from behind.”
“That’s it.”
“Okay. So we’ll hope he’s no smarter than he looks. What do you mean exactly, you painted the Klee?”
“Here. Come with me.” She didn’t take my hand, but she leaned down and touched it so I’d follow her.
Down the hall, past the bedroom where I’d seen Rick and across from the bathroom, was a second bedroom. I hadn’t even noticed it that mind-fogging night. Claudia turned on the light. A chaos of art and art supplies, waist-high drifts of it in places. Like the jumble in the gallery basement, but even less ordered and with less walking space left over. In one corner, under some of it, I could make out a single bed.
“Robert always said he slept on the couch.”
“He did. I told him I needed my studio and he went with that. Believe it or not, though he tried hard not to let on, he actually did know the difference between walking and talking.”
Brushes, paint tubes, rags. Old clothes, paint-smeared. Stretcher slats, a roll of canvas. Pictures torn from newspapers and magazines, perhaps books, littering the floor, making a kind of crisp surf sound, autumn leaves, as you took a step. The picture on the easel was getting blotted out with thick grey paint, a first coat – recycling the canvas, or abandoning an idea and starting again from scratch. Some stretched canvases leaning inward looked ready to go, or done but not showable. The finished ones hung on the walls, or more often, leaned against them or the bed. Anyone looking at them, I thought, would see that she had talent, intelligence, abundant drive – but somewhere her art had gone off the rails. Or hadn’t got on them yet. The profusion in the room suggested ideas tossed at a dartboard . . . some of them landing within the scoring rings, some of them way off – none of them truly intentional.
She picked out a couple of the finished canvases and leaned them against her legs, facing me.
“What do you think?”
“Honestly?”
She made a face. “No. Flatter me and waste my time.”
I looked at the paintings. They belonged to her “Adjusted” series, parts worked out meticulously, others rough or still in-progress. Mrs. Soames’s mixed-up girl was, honestly, the first phrase that came to mind. But that may have been partly stalling.
“They’re good. But I think I like ‘Two Figures’ better.”
“Really?” She seemed perplexed as well as pleased.
“Yeah. I mean, nothing against Rubens, but why bring him in if you’ve already got your own thing happening?”
“You sound like you paint.”
“I don’t. But four years walking around an art gallery, you pick up things. Leafing through books too, in the beginning.”
Now, after the compliment, she was more ready to talk about the how. We went back to the living room and cracked two more beers. But she kept straying from the how of actually painting it, what really interested me at the moment, to the mechanics of the transaction that had brought it about. What I was supposed to be interested in. It was vaguely insulting. But every time I felt that pressure in my chest and felt like pushing back against the shoving I could feel from her – even in relaxed, beer-sipping mode, legs tucked under on the other end of the couch – her black dress and Robert’s shirt reminded me of the date, the time.
Somebody – “some nerdball” – had phoned her to commission a painting. About a month ago, she thought. He wanted it for a friend, someone who was a lover of Paul Klee but was too poor to ever own one. He made it sound like it might be a bit of a joke.
“I think that part may be true.”
“What do you mean?”
I shook my head. That chord nowhere near playable yet. Just a faint twang.
“He sounded a bit embarrassed, stammering about he hoped there was nothing illegal about making a copy, he didn’t think so really. Did I know?”
“Is there?”
“I checked into that. I was pretty sure, but I called one of my old art instructors at the college. He and I had a bit of a thing for a while, but that’s another story. But he said no, copies themselves are no problem. It’s when you try to pass it off as the original, especially selling it, that things get sticky.”
“Otherwise, it’s just a Klee by Claudia?”
“Pretty much. An ‘Adjusted’ with very little adjustment. As little as possible. But I did make sure to put my orange CJ in the corner.”
When I opened my mouth, she put her hand up. We’d come back to that. The guy on the phone, she went on, who did think it was better if names were left out of it, suggested some sketches done in the gallery. Grids for proportions, some colour trials. “He’d leave a good colour slide for me in an envelope at art rental. The same place he’d leave my money when I brought in the painting. I could use one of the art rental bags I’ve got.”
“Stammering, but he’s got it all worked out.”
She bit her lip. “Yeah, I did think of Rick actually. But I needed the five hundred bucks. That copy was easier than ‘Two Figures’, believe it or not. And every way I thought about it, I couldn’t see any danger I’d be in. Nothing I couldn’t just plead ignorance to, I mean. Naïve, poor artist sucked into scam.”
“I don’t think you’d do naïve very well.”
“You’d be surprised. In a crunch.”
She tipped her bottle. The space between us, worn brown plush shined up and fluffed by vacuuming, was exactly where “Wayward Guest” had sat. Four days ago.
“But how?” I said. It couldn’t wait any longer.
She smiled, a secret smile as if she was toying with me. I liked it even less than the glares. “You know, for all his talk, that’s the one question I never heard Robert ask. How.”
“Too many steps,” I said, unthinkingly. “Too many brush strokes, notes.”
The smile vanished and her eyes were mean. “You don’t give him enough credit. You think ‘brush strokes, notes’” – she had a nasty me down already – “you think of those as ‘steps’. But they can drive you crazy. They’re bound to. The more you get into them . . . thinking there’s a bottom, then finding out there isn’t. Not ever. And that’s if you want to do it. No, if you have to. Want doesn’t come into it. If you don’t have to, maybe it’s better just to dream. Hnh?”
I didn’t say anything. One thing I’d learned with Angela, lecture mode could carry you places, like a tide. Places you couldn’t imagine from whatever ugly bit of shoreline had started it rolling. If you had the stomach not to resist and just let it. I didn’t often.
She looked toward the window and went on more quietly, as if talking to herself. Rambling from inside her art world, which was where she mostly lived. The room at the back was a lair, down to the faintly rank and musty smells I’d caught on Sunday and that wafted around her now. “It’s not a question of copying every detail, not at all. You’d see that in a second if you put the two pictures side by side. It’s . . . complicated. It’s kind of like crawling inside someone’s skin, feeling their approach to painting. How they see things, what guides their arm. You can’t do it with everybody, obviously. Klee was a good choice for me. The sketchy backgrounds, child-like lines. I could get inside that. It felt like somewhere I’d already been heading, actually. Which was spooky. Dali – all that paranoid precision – he would’ve been a nightmare. For me. Maybe no
t for someone else. So you get a general impression that’s right, helped by some key details. And a big help is what the person looking at it expects to see. What they think they’re looking at. That’s a huge part. But not all. The other . . . it’s like you’re walking down a street and you see someone up ahead with your mother’s haircut, jacket, same size, shoes. All that would make you speed up, and then you get close enough and see some differences. But what would really make you run, and never doubt, is if she had your mother’s walk.”
I listened, nodding. And then I said, “And you had some other help.”
She finished her beer and set it down. “Well, yes. That’s what wigged me out that night. Besides just seeing the thing, I mean. Fucking Robert.” She shook her head. “Yeah, of course, someone had taken it those extra steps. Klee’s signature where mine had been. Nice old frame. Some other little touches. The paint looked older somehow, I’m not quite sure how that works. Some baking, I guess.”
“Baking?”
“Sure. Pop it in the oven. Oils take ages to fully dry. Even thin oil with some drying powder added. Maybe some darker varnish after that. Like I say, I don’t really know that end.”
She yawned hugely, her mouth caverning open with clicks of her jaws. Clicks and creaks at the different stages, like a drawbridge lowering. I saw that I had only a very short time if I was going to enlist a helper, even a part-time one, for my gallery snooping.
At the door I said, “About one thing. Rick wasn’t acting totally on his own initiative last night, was he?”
It felt good to see her face when the shoving went the other way, and suddenly. She turned her surprise into a wince, but it took a moment or two.
“Sorry about that. I was scared.”
“Who wasn’t?”
“You showing up that night. Then the next night. What was that about anyway?”
“A tape. I told you.”
“Oh yeah, the one on the mailbox. Thanks.”
“So. Partners?”
“As far as that goes.” She gave me a look that didn’t credit the distance any further than I would have. “But nothing to do with Robert.”
“No. Just a little clearer picture of who’s screwing who. And why.”
She yawned again, couldn’t stop now. “You could use a better hobby.”
Not sure how much she had taken in between yawns, I ran over briefly what we’d agreed might be useful and when to meet again. First steps in a coordinated pawn probe – if there was such a thing. “Nerdball” could have referred to a few people in the gallery – it wasn’t a good narrower in that building – but one face came into my mind more vividly, and more often, than the rest. I just needed to find a way to test it.
“I’ve still got his number,” Claudia said.
I stared at her. Once you got going on the detective work it was a hard habit to break.
She found the scrap of paper in her wallet and I dialled the number. But Peter wasn’t answering his phone that evening. Nor did I feel like talking to his answering machine.
15
Owen was back on days and he had the new Burns trainee beside him. Burns had bypassed the obviously overqualified Stefan as a trainer, which actually gave me my first small flicker of hope for the company. The trainee reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster: huge square head, and stitched-on limbs that I could imagine breaking things. He even had a large wart on his neck for a bolt. And, like the creature, he didn’t seem to have developed the power of speech yet. Which made a welcome change from Stefan. I hoped his first words wouldn’t be “Yes, Paul?”
Owen glanced up from The Man in the High Tower to watch the trainee’s splayed fingers hover over the button he’d just pushed to buzz me in. After a bit, he moved the hand to above some other levers and buttons, then put it back near his side. Owen wasn’t as regular a bather or a conversationalist as Ted, though as a bachelor living with his mother he had more time to be both. But he’d told me about the novel, one he made a point of re-reading several times a year. It sounded like the usual alternative universe idea – where the Nazis won the war and ran the world, efficiently but unpleasantly – but Owen assured me that Dick was a great writer. “He makes Asimov look like shit,” he’d said, the opinion that had stopped him and Ted talking except when the job required it.
Today, though, the title just reminded me of Robert. With all the nasty, niggling differences. A bridge, not a tower. Not in, off. And then, even: man?
“Owen?”
“Hm.”
“Did anyone come into the gallery the night Robert died? Late, I mean.”
“Hm? Well, Robert, obviously.” Owen was either a speed reader or else skimming known passages. He seemed to remember about the trainee standing there, and closed the book over his thumb. “Why, Paul?”
Owen might not have been all that different from Stefan, except for the obsessive reading, which preoccupied him and muted his reactions to you. Five minutes with both men was an excellent argument for the value of literature.
“I mean before Robert. Someone working late, say.” I was back to thinking that Claudia’s from the gallery could really mean from in the sense of location, not of.
“No. Not that I remember. You could check the LogBook. Though you know that doesn’t mean much.”
“I already did.”
Owen glanced up at the huge trainee, who had half turned and was staring off across the jumble toward the washroom. Owen looked down at his paperback, then up at me. He said, dipping his voice a little to get under whatever radar the trainee might have developed, “I told the officer that he’d have to speak to Walter about Robert’s clearance. And I didn’t hear anything since.” A slight widening of the eyes was Owen’s only acknowledgement of how close a call he’d had. Which of course still shed no light on why Walter thought it was fine to have Robert shut off alarms at midnight and go traipsing back into the Teale Gallery with his sister’s painting.
“Could I take a Code 2?” the trainee said. His first words, or nearly. And not so different, in content anyway, from anybody’s first request.
“You don’t ask for relief when you’ve already got relief,” Owen snapped, sounding confused as well as pissed. We all disappeared. The trainee lumbered off to the washroom, I went to the elevator, and Owen dove back down into his book.
I found Sean in the outer room of the surrealist show, frowning and moving his lips in front of the poetry on the walls. He seldom went into the room with the paintings, but if we’d counter-clicked him for every visit he made to the “Literary Antecedents” section, we might have doubled the show’s attendance.
“Do the names Morgan and Knish mean anything to you?” I asked.
His delay in answering might have been the effort of pushing aside his epic, the denunciating stanzas the pretenders on the walls had inspired.
“German for ‘morning’ and Yiddish for ‘fattening,’” he said, and looked pleased for having managed it.
“As poets,” I said, taking the paper with the lines I’d copied from Neale’s office out of my pocket.
Sean’s lips moved even as he was reading someone else’s work. Habit maybe. Or my handwriting. “Tripe,” he muttered. But his eyes flicked at me uncertainly. How could you be sure? With anything that wasn’t bound and printed or, even better, introduced at length by a name you recognized. What would people make of “The Second Coming”, one of Sean’s touchstone poems, which he declaimed, especially at openings, at least as often as Owen re-read the Dick novel, if they were handed it on a Tim Horton’s napkin, scribbled down in pencil by someone who said he’d just composed it? Would they – would Sean – laugh in his face?
While I was wondering and Sean was wondering, Claudia strode past us into the inner room. Sean and I moved out into the MacMahon Gallery to grant her a little space – reflex attendant courtesy – but it wasn’t more than a minute before she strode out again. Passing us with a curt nod that could pass for a greeting.
Klee, not me,
said the flicker in her eyes.
But since when? And for how long? Neither she nor I could answer that.
“Interesting-looking person,” Sean said, watching her go. “Could use a better dermatologist.”
He was exaggerating about her skin, or maybe, given his own blotches, hoping for a kindred spirit in those wan pebbly cheeks. He didn’t seem to recognize her from her previous trips to the gallery. Sean was tuned out to humanity, of course. But also, in her black tights and short tartan skirt, white sweater top, there was an almost complete transformation. Maybe even more so than in the formal wear of last night, which had looked like dress-up. It was almost unnerving. She seemed like a new person. Or just a person. Her former black folds had obliterated her that well.
“Can I keep this till after lunch? I’ll get back to you about it,” Sean said, jamming the paper into his pocket with a show of disregard.
While Sean was taking his half hour, I lingered by the walls of poetry that he’d been frowning at. Hans was having a pipeful at the front desk, lunch spell-offs the only breaks he really took, though he smoked rather than ate during them. His jeans and old grey shirt were darkly smudged, with a couple of sooty spots on his face that he’d enlarged with rubbing. The cleaning of the gallery ventilation ducts and shafts was a job Hans cursed lavishly, but seemed to do more than was strictly necessary. A weird, as well as dirty, job, the couple of times I’d had to help. Up in the metal tunnels, or, if you were bigger than Hans, at least your upper half stretched into them, you heard voices, faint and directionless, echoing from different parts of the gallery. Spook voices. Discussing art, I always assumed, and thought I’d heard, though really the sounds were too faint even to be sure of the speaker’s sex.
Reconnaissance
Guillaume Apollinaire
A solitary twilit beech
On the blue rise of my Reason’s field . . .
I plot the angle in degrees