by Noah Charney
Harry wiped his precipitous eyes with the back of his hand. He slid his moist palm down his body to wipe it dry, and then into his coat pocket. Inside, he found his blue paisley handkerchief, and something else. He blindly fumbled fingers around a small orange plastic tube, whose contents ticked together inside. Harry stopped moving for a moment. His heavy head leaned against the back of the seat before him. Then he gripped the plastic tube, and pulled his hand out of his pocket.
Held low in his lap, Harry looked down at the tube. It was translucent orange, the form of little pills piled up beneath the fleshy plastic, the oversize white top like a sailor’s cap. How many were in there? What would happen if he took them all?
He pushed the meat of his palm onto the cap, and twisted. It made a pink impression in his hand. He poured the contents of the small container into his palm. The pile of happy oval pills, half green, half yellow, seemed to smile up at him. He pushed his finger into the pile and rolled them around with a dirty fingernail.
The bus came to a stop, and the old woman left the front seat. In her absence, the light shattered unbroken through the window and soaked him in its unwanted brilliance. Harry’s eyes narrowed. Then he looked back down at the pile of pills. He breathed in, deep and slow. He pinched one pill between two fingers, held it for a moment, then popped it in his mouth and swallowed it down. He turned back to the rest of the yellow-and-greens, so light in his hand, promising weight-lessness, a beautiful storm cloud void. Then he tipped them back into their plastic tube—some stuck to his palm—before twisting tight the bright white cap and returning it to his pocket. He sat up straighter and opened his eyes to see the world passing through the great window before him. Through the squinty glint he remained but did not move to the vacant front seat. Perhaps the second seat would do, for now.
When he’d reached his stop, Harry dismounted, first from his reverie, then from the bus. His street looked clean and gleamed, as he began to walk the short distance home, past the Italian restaurant, the coffee shop, the Coach & Horses pub, the fresh-flower stand on the street, the Laundromat…
Then Harry stopped for a moment. His shoulder rolled back, and his chest pressed forward ever so slightly. He turned and walked back several paces, then cleared his throat.
“Um, excuse me, miss. May…may I have, uh, one white carnation, please?”
“Certainly, sir.” A young woman smiled at him. “Here you are.”
“Thank you.” Harry took the flower between thumb and forefinger. He reached into his back pocket.
“No need,” said the bright young woman.
“Thank you.” Harry mustered a half-smile as he turned to walk home through the harsh sunshine to see his beautiful wife.
CHAPTER 33
The next morning, the rain smiled faces on weepy windowpanes as Lord Harkness opened his eyes. He stared up at the dark wooden ceiling of the master bedroom in Harkness Hall. Craning his neck backward against the soft of the pillow, he saw, inverted, the rain-bitten day through the foggy-glassed windows.
Elizabeth Van Der Mier, her back turned to him as she lay asleep, arched feline, the lift and fall of her shoulder blades like butterfly wings. Her back shuddered in tender breath. She rolled over and slung a sleepy arm across Harkness’s bare chest. She nuzzled in close to his gritty, unshaven neck.
“Good morning,” she sighed.
“Good morning, darling.”
“Must we get up?”
“It’s Sunday out. You can sleep as long as you like.”
“As long as I like?” She lifted her head just enough to give him a breathy kiss on the cheek, missing his lips from fatigue, and then she fell back to her pillow.
“It’s raining out, anyway. Best to stay where it’s safe.” Harkness fluttered his fingers through her long white-blond hair, as he lay on his back, eyes open but, as yet, senseless. Comfort finally won out, and his lids slowly dragged shut. He was asleep again.
Hours later, Harkness was slipping on his burgundy-brown dress shoes over plaid-stockinged feet. He was dressed for a leisurely Sunday in the country: no jacket to cover his immaculate dress shirt, only perhaps a Burberry cardigan. Elizabeth emerged from the shower, a white towel wrapped round her breasts, and hanging to her knees. She leaned her head left and dried her hair with another towel.
In the breakfast room, Harkness sat with the Financial Times and a half-eaten croissant with strawberry preserves, and a quarter-full cup of white tea. Elizabeth, at the other end of the table, corrected the proof for an upcoming exhibition, her right hand raised, hovering her teacup inches from lips.
“Do you have a dictionary, Malcolm?”
“In the study, there should be one. What’s the word?”
“How do you spell perspicacity?”
“I’ve no idea, darling.”
“Right. This fellow’s spelled it with an h.” Elizabeth replaced her teacup, stood, and left the room.
A moment later, her cry filtered through, from several rooms away.
Harkness stood up immediately at the sound, spilling what remained of his tea, and hurried to the study. Elizabeth was in the middle of the room, leaned up against the desk, her left arm across her chest, right hand cupped to mouth. Harkness tried to follow the line of her eyes, down to the floor, against the wall, below the Malevich painting. There was nothing there.
“Where’s lot 27, the gessoed canvas?” he asked of no one, knowing the answer. “But why would he take that from me? There’s nothing on it…”
Elizabeth could not move. She muttered to herself in shivers. Harkness came to her and placed his arm on her shoulder. She did not respond.
Then he saw it.
There was a note on the floor, where the gessoed canvas had been. It was written on glossy paper, in sharp-scrawled red ink: “Never judge a book by its frontispiece. Zechariah 5:4, Psalms 23:4.”
He spun to the far corner of the study, to the glass case in which he kept his sixteenth-century family Bible. With stormy steps, he crossed the room and looked down at the case.
It was still locked. The Bible was still inside. His shoulders rolled to ease, but only for a moment, as his eyes focused through the glass, onto the aged, inky Bible below. It was open to the book of Zechariah.
Harkness looked to the note in his hand, then sought chapter 5, verse 4, beneath the glass. I will bring it forth, saith the Lord, and it shall enter the house of the thief, and into the house of him who sweareth falsely by my name…
That self-righteous, pretentious bastard, thought Harkness, as he clenched his teeth. Why the hell is he doing this? Just because I stole the Grayson painting? He paused for a moment, then looked back at the note. Psalms 23:4, what the…wait. I know that line. The only one I do know. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…valley of the shadow…Vallombro…Oh, my God…Harkness’s fist cupped in front of his open mouth, a mix of admiration, realization, frustration, and anger. So that’s how he stole, she did…and that’s why he’s doing this to me, because of what I did to…
He looked up at Elizabeth. She was staring at the note clasped in his hand. Then he realized why. Harkness felt his fingers stick along the back of the note. He turned it over in his hands. The note had been written on the back of a photograph—a photograph that showed him and Elizabeth in his bedroom, lying asleep, dressed as they were last night. Harkness tight-shut his eyes. His mind spun from rapid revelations. Never judge a book by its frontispiece? What the hell does…and then he realized. His unbroken demeanor slowly splintered, as the full brunt of his own perceptive failure struck him between the eyes.
He crushed the photograph into his talon-fist fingers, and cast it violently to the floor.
“Elizabeth, what…”
Elizabeth pressed the lids to her tight-shut eyes.”…There’s another note,” she whispered. Harkness spun around in white anger.
A piece of paper was pinned to the Malevich White on White that hung on his wall. His heart slipped bef
ore he saw its contents. Then he approached.
The note contained four red words: “I’m not real either.”
“That goddamned…But if this is not my family’s original Malevich, then where the hell is it!?”
In the Roman church of Santa Giuliana in Trastevere, Father Amoroso gave communion to his small congregation. As the congregants knelt to genuflect and receive the body and blood of Christ, they crossed themselves and looked up at the Caravaggio altarpiece that hung on the wall above the priest.
EPILOGUE
Gabriel Coffin and Daniela Vallombroso drank espresso from tiny brushed-metal cups in their London flat across the street from the British Museum, beneath the ocular window, above the Forum Café.
Gabriel crossed his right leg over his left and set down his empty cup.
“Feel better now?”
“Much, thank you,” Daniela sighed, as she slunk back in her chair. “Treachery must be punished. Even among thieves.”
“Especially among thieves.”
Daniela’s gaze swept to the modern copy of the Dürer engraving Melencolia I, framed in silver on the wall, by the table at which they sat. “Tell me, Gabriel. Do you like abstract art?”
“Not particularly.”
“It occurs to me that you seem to get yourself involved with it rather often, for someone who is a devout formalist.”
Gabriel twisted his cup in his fingers. “If you’re asking whether I’d like to have an abstract painting on my living room wall, the answer is, not particularly. An old professor of mine once said, ‘If you had a Mondrian in the kitchen, you would burn the soup.’”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I’ve no idea, really, but it’s always stuck with me, and somehow seems apt. In the absence of something genuinely profound, always say something quotable, right?”
Daniela laughed, “I suppose.”
“But if you’re asking about work, well, I must admit that I’m inherently lazy, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to forge a painting that is all white, than it is to forge a Caravaggio.”
“Hmm. That’s a simple answer.”
“The right ones always are. I only paint Caravaggios when I really must, but I can fire off a Malevich. You do what you’re good at. Try not to push too hard against the grain, if you can circumnavigate it.”
Vallombroso and Coffin sat in silence for a moment.
“I’ve been thinking, Gabriel…”
“Always a bad sign. I prefer my women as dumb as possible.” He smiled.
“That’s because your iron logic is prone to developing fissures.”
“Touché.” Coffin took Daniela’s hands in his and looked at her red nails.
“I’ve been thinking that iconography is a dangerous knowledge,” Daniela continued. “I’ll give you an example. Your study of the language of icons allows you to interpret paintings…”
“Yes,” said Coffin, “you’ve been to my lectures…”
“But if I know that you have this knowledge, then the advantage is mine.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the brawn of this team, not the…How is my knowledge a weakness? Knowledge is power. Or so I’ve read.”
“You’ve said that iconography is a language. It’s the same as learning…oh I don’t know…Italian. If you know that buongiorno means hello, and arrivederci means good-bye, then you are privy to information that was hitherto held secret from you. A piece of the great jigsaw is unlocked and shifted into place, and if you bother to learn another few thousand words, then the puzzle is solved, the language known…”
“I’m the one meant to give the boring lectures, Daniela, I…”
She raised her finger in polite protest. “But if I am aware that you have learned that buongiorno means hello, then I can choose to say it when I want you to hear and understand it, or not to say it at all.”
“I don’t think…”
“It’s like painting. If I paint an old man with an hourglass, your knowledge might lead you to think that he represents Time. But what if it’s actually a portrait of my grandfather, and the hourglass is arbitrary. Then your knowledge would have led you astray. You can know too much, or at least think too much.”
“Well, um, yes. But no.” Coffin leaned back. “Nothing is arbitrary, especially in art. If, as you say, you painted the work, but did not intend to incorporate iconography, I would say to you that it was beyond your control.”
“What do you mean, beyond my control? If I didn’t put in a symbol, then there isn’t a symbol.”
“What would Freud say? Or Roland Barthes, or any of a swarm of art theorists? Whether or not you intended it, cultural, and especially art-historical, awareness has floated through the oxygen you breathe, drawn into your lungs, and will emerge again in anything you create,” said Coffin. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you meant this painting to refer to Time. It simply does, to anyone exposed to culture. If someone speaks in nonsense words that flow from his stream of conscious, but each word happens to be a real one, in Italian for example, then he’s still speaking Italian, whether or not he means to, or is even aware of it.”
“I read Barthes and all the rest. There was little else to do when I was…visiting Turin. The author loses power the moment his creation is experienced by an audience. Whatever the audience reads into the work is correct, for that reader. But what if I know what you will think? That’s when your knowledge can be used against you. If I say that a man dressed all in black, carrying a flashlight, tiptoes through a dark house at night, you’ll likely think that it’s a burglar. But what if the man is a priest, and the electricity has gone out, and the house is his own? Your assumption would have been incorrect. How do we logically deduce? Deduction is based on inference. You take the evidence given, you call upon experience from past examples, and you infer from a combination of this evidence and experience that the past experience will repeat. Evidence: I tell you that a painting shows an old man with an hourglass. Experience: you have seen many such paintings that refer to Time. Inference: paintings of this subject will follow the trend of past examples, and the new painting in question follows the thread of the others you have seen. But I know this about you. I can manipulate your thoughts.”
Coffin sat silent for a moment. “Why do you bring this up now?”
“The point, Gabriel, is that you and your iconographic paintings, and your logical, observation-based deductions, are dangerously prone to manipulation. And your own knowledge should tell you that, whether or not you were thinking of the connection at the time, there is a reason that you return to the number thirty-four. And that could be used to hunt you down.”
They were quiet for a moment, before she spoke again. “I worry…”
“You needn’t.”
“The profiler can be profiled. Be careful. There’s only one thing that I believe to be safe.”
Coffin crossed his arms. “And what’s that?”
“Malevich. With White on White, iconography is negated. There is nothing but the art, nothing to infer, no piece of evidence, no experience to call on. It just is.”
“But even Malevich is reacting against, and in doing so, he refers to. At first, some things were art. In postmodernism, everything is art. The only logical next step is that nothing will be art. A white canvas. But even that would be referring back to art, to Malevich. And Malevich was referring back. Even in an unprecedented all-white painting, the history of art is lurking, hiding in plain sight, because there’s nothing on the canvas to hide behind.”
Daniela leaned in to speak again, but Coffin resumed. “But your point is well taken. Shall we call it a draw? Two kings on the board?”
Daniela nodded. They sat in each other’s arms.
“One final and significant question for you, Dani.”
“Sì?”
“Do you feel better? I mean…avenged?”
Daniela paused. “The man who framed me for arrest during my last job, and got me sent to prison, has been
deprived of the painting he loves and which he hired you to steal for him, the Caravaggio. We’ve also deprived him of his family’s greatest treasure, his original Malevich White on White. And he has been tricked. The justice may not be biblical, but it is poetic.”
“I’m glad. And we have come out ahead…with an unexpected house guest…” Gabriel leaned in. “Shall I?”
“Prego.”
Gabriel rose and walked into the bedroom. On the wall, above the head of the bed, hung a substantial engraving of a Roman ruin, by Giovanni Piranesi. Gabriel glanced at it, then turned with a smile to the painting on the wall opposite it. This painting was a large, heavily chiaroscuro oil on canvas. Two figures seemed to swim in the amorphous black shadowy background. One figure, with its back to the viewer, had bright wings.
It was Jacob Wrestling the Angel by Palma il Vecchio. Gabriel recalled the storm-tossed day, wind-beaten watery leaves shaking outside, when he’d bought that painting at auction, nearly twenty years ago.
He moved past it and turned to the third wall of his bedroom, on which hung an enormous ornate Indian tapestry, a wash of saffron, gold, rust, and cinnamon. He slipped his hand into his pocket and withdrew a thin brass key. Coffin lifted the tapestry aside and slid the key into the knobless door hidden beneath it. The door clicked open.
The small secret room fluoresced with a gentle hum, as Coffin switched on the light. Immaculately kept shelves and file cabinets were labeled with the names of chemicals, pigments, samples, reference books, and photographs. A small, round, convex mirror hung opposite the door, on the bare plywood wall that smelled of dust and sour chemicals. The portions of interior wall that were not blocked by cabinets contained pasted cutouts of paintings, newspaper clippings, and art postcards. A framed black-and-white photograph showed Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked woman. One painting hung on the wall, frameless, a Rembrandt: shipwreck-bound sailors clung for help on the crest of a storm-tossed sea.