Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  “How?”

  “If it’s 1913 it’s great Leibovitz. It’s worth a fortune. If it’s 1920 …well, forget it.”

  “Come on, mate, this one is in all the books. It’s also in the Modern. Everyone knows it.”

  “Was in the Modern, Michael. So why do you think they got rid of it?”

  “And why are you showing this to me?”

  “I would think that was obvious.”

  Obvious? All that had ever been obvious was the little creep had stolen my canvas and then ripped it apart. Now he handed me the Condition Report and said, “I think the forensic significance of this is very clear.”

  “You know, Barry, frankly, I don’t give a shit.”

  “I know,” he said, “but just imagine if you’d authenticated this, Michael. You might just want the canvas to disappear. You might want to smuggle it to Japan, say, where the rules are different.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh,” he said, folding his big white hands across his crotch.

  “You think this is what my show is all about?”

  “Michael, I’m very sorry.”

  “You know, Barry, why is it when an Australian does well outside the country everyone thinks it’s a scam? What if I was a great painter?”

  “You are a great painter, Michael. That’s why I hate to see you used.”

  I looked up to see the authenticator herself moving towards us. I pulled a chair out for her, but she leaned across my shoulder and then, suddenly, violently, snatched the paper from my hand. Turning, I could hardly recognise her—the cheeks made into hard angular planes, eyes narrowed in fury.

  “This is crap,” she said to Amberstreet. “You know this is crap. It’s not even your property.”

  “It came into our possession, Marlene.”

  “Yes!” She sat beside me, looked around wildly, ordered a glass of water, stood and drank it so rapidly that it spilled down the front of her dress. “Yes, it came into your possession,” she said, returning the glass loudly to the table. “Because you burgled my apartment and stole it from my files. You’ve been hanging out with art dealers too long, my friend. Do you know who actually wrote this criminal shit? Do you really seriously believe it was ever X-rayed?”

  Amberstreet lifted his head as if expecting to be kissed.

  “We explore all avenues,” he said. “That’s our job.”

  “Then piss off,” I said. “Explore that avenue.” And when I turned I saw Hiroshi, the owner, and I ordered a bottle of Fukucho sake and when I had done with that I discovered the detective gone, Marlene in tears, my copy of Studio International gleaming in the summer light. She saw me reach for it and, bless her, smiled.

  “Do you like your ad, my darling?”

  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  28

  Yes sir, no sir. My brother persisted in sticking his PROBOSCIS up the policeman’s arse. Yes sir, no sir, be-bop-a-lula, it was a blessed wonder he could breathe at all. No sir, I don’t mind you destroyed my art. He was ALL PISS AND WIND as our father said when my brother would not fight ALL MOUTH AND TROUSERS what an ugly picture that made. I departed urgently with my chair to Kellett Street it was no wider than a lane but connected to bigger streets and highways so the shortness was not soothing as you might expect. Also the footpath was narrow my chair IMPEDED THE RIGHT OF WAY, no place to rest. Nearby was Elizabeth Bay Road an ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN although I had previously traveled that way to the GREEK MILK BAR and the ALL-IMPORTANT bottle shop, but sitting was locally ILLEGAL and the police were VIGILANT.

  Across from Go-Go Sushi was a green brothel popular with UNSAVOURY CUSTOMERS I have watched them come and go but even when I was most particularly upset I was never such a reckless fool as to have my BRAIN IN MY DICK. I turned left in the direction Marlene had taken, past SPORT ITALIA where the COLOURFUL RACING IDENTITY was shot in the neck by a KNOWN ASSOCIATE OF CRIMINALS. Thank God I had no gun myself. A very short distance beyond this BLOOD-SPATTERED CRIME SCENE was Bayswater Road which would make you giddy with bridges and tunnels and cars descending and rising and crossing the abyss not a LIVING SOUL God save us all. What will happen to me? I searched for Marlene, back and forth between Bayswater Road and Elizabeth Bay Road, the narrow footpath causing both dents and bruises which would later bloom pink yellow green the colour of SWEET BREADS. I was making a map. Too late. This was how I should have learned a bigger territory, like the children singing their times tables.

  In the Vauxhall Cresta I was six years old fighting with my warty brother. I did not start the war but neither could I stop and suddenly Blue Bones pulled up the car by the salt pans at Balliang East.

  Get out, he said.

  It was just on dusk when I obeyed and my father reached back a long wiry arm and slammed the door shut. Then he drove away, the taste of the salt dust, crows cawing, the tail-light red as it proceeded into dark, sixteen miles towards the safety of the Marsh. It was well after the moon had risen before the OLD MAN returned to find his bawling boy. It learned me, as he told me more than once.

  As chance would have it I heard Marlene’s voice calling from beneath the grapevines of the crime scene and looking into the shady garden I saw she and Jean-Paul at a round green table with the dreadful catalogue laid out before them. They were IN CONFERENCE’RE JAPAN. I easily got my chair untangled from the garden gate and I sat between her Jasmine and his Brut de Brut where I was informed that Jean-Paul had agreed If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die would be picked up by Woollahra Art Removals that very day.

  I began GRINNING LIKE AN APE as the saying is.

  Jean-Paul asked me how was Butcher.

  My face was hurting very bad.

  I heard Jean-Paul ask me would I like to get a job but he had no understanding of my situation. If I am GAINFULLY EMPLOYED the social services will stop my disability pension and when I finally lose my job I will never get the pension back for having LIED TO THE GOVERNMENT. If Butcher had been here he would have explained it properly but Jean-Paul did not believe me. I said I was no good at jobs and would not stand being shouted at as he might have reason to recall.

  I mean, he said, off the books.

  Whatever it was OFF THE BOOKS made my stomach sick. I pointed out that the social services were LITTLE HITLERS sometimes they came to inspect our garbage to see if I had a job and was buying Tasmanian Pinot Noir for instance.

  No, he said, they don’t do that.

  I smiled at Marlene like a dog. She placed her hand on me, it had no more weight than a cabbage moth upon my shoulder. Off the books, she said, means Jean-Paul would not tell anyone you were working but he would give you money.

  But Butcher had been in prison and it nearly killed him. I began to explain his continuing difficulty with Detective Amberstreet but Marlene prevented me, resting her hand light as a whisper on my lips.

  Would you mind helping out Jackson at the Edgecliff Nursing Home?

  I asked her, Do you know Jackson?

  No, she said. Jean-Paul tells me you were mates when Butcher was in gaol. You raced his pigeons.

  But no-one understood anything.

  You were his friend, the night man.

  I touched his pigeons, that’s all.

  Would you like to help him be the night man for a week or two? For money? Off the books?

  I asked her if she thought I should.

  She said yes, so I said I supposed that would be O.K.

  Marlene then stood. She said she had to CATCH UP with Butcher at Go-Go Sushi and that she would see me in a minute and then she walked raising fine white dust from the gravel with her lovely sandaled feet.

  I smiled at Jean-Paul but began to gag.

  He pushed his chair away from the table and said, You would sit at the door all night and if anyone is sick you pick up the phone for the duty nurse.

  I asked him, Was this so my brother did not have to take me to Japan?

  He said, Yes that was so, he would not lie.

  I asked whe
n this would start but the truth is I could not even hear him anymore. God knows what damage I might cause if left alone.

  29

  The Plaintiff had a horse at one time, a very flighty Arab named Pandora and by the time Pandora had ripped her fetlock on barbed wire and then, three weeks later, thrown the Plaintiff, thus breaking six bones in her so-called art hand, I was pretty much retired from horses.

  That is to say, I have not the least interest in the horse Olivier Leibovitz kept on West Eighty-ninth Street and I never enquired as to exactly what sort of animal it was, only being sure—because Marlene told me—that it was absolutely not one of those Claremont Riding Academy horses from the same address, notorious bitter nags which had the habit of crushing their riders on the walls of the transverse on 102nd Street. The riding-school horses were as close as Marlene got to Manhattan equestrian life, and her own feeling for horses was not really the point. For she loved Olivier and she loved Olivier on a horse, how he looked and smelled, and most importantly, how happy it made him.

  Contrary to what I thought when she walked across my paddock carrying her alimony-whore shoes, Marlene was extraordinarily kind to those she loved and it was completely typical of her to go out of her way to give me pleasure by arranging the ad in Studio International or to butter raisin toast for Hugh or read aloud from The Magic Pudding and, years earlier, when Olivier’s divorce left him so broke that he had to sell his horse, it was a case of fuck the court and all of 60 Centre Street. He would get it back, the horse, she would make sure of it.

  At first Olivier’s stable expenses had been covered by his pathetic efforts on the Lazy Lucy that is, licensing small slices of three Leibovitzes. These were not works chosen with any care, just scratched transparencies that had been left to float around in the company of paper clips and pencils and bits of art-related correspondence. Most of the latter was in French, a language he spoke fluently but which he affected to be unable to read.

  At the time when Marlene first surprised him he had imagined he was hiding his tiny licensing profits from his wife’s lawyers, a fantasy of course—his possession of the Leibovitz droit moral was no secret and it was naturally deemed to be part of Marital Assets and he was forced to cough up every cent he made from his tacky souvenirs. His only luck, which was not clear until later, was that the lawyers, being philistines and ignoramuses, valued the droit moral in terms of the profit he had previously gained from it: i.e. sweet fuck all.

  By the spring of 1975, which was when he lost the horse and stable, Marlene was his secretary and had therefore been granted the care of that rat’s nest of paper he referred to only as “the French Material.”

  She asked him, “What shall I do with it?”

  He looked into the grey metal cupboard with its bulging files, its ribbon-bound sheaves, its single orphaned pages, yellowed, browned, creased. He shrugged, a Gallic gesture, so it seemed to Marlene Cook.

  “Is it about the art?”

  “Yes.” He startled, smiling. “Absolutely! About the art.”

  He could have had no clue that she was already half drunk on her learning curve. She would have been far too shy to tell him that she had read Berenson and Vasari, Marsden Hartley and Gertrude Stein but at the time she asked, Is it about the art? she knew the importance of such correspondents as Vuillard and Van Dongen, and she had eaten enough hot dogs during lunch at Phillips and Sotheby’s to wonder if this rat’s-nest archive might not cover his horse and stable costs entirely. He had no idea how she loved him. She thought herself below him in every way, in grace, in beauty in sophistication. He hadn’t noticed that she was his angel, repairing him, dressing all his bleeding wounds.

  So she turned to raging old Milton Hesse who was, for his part, smitten with her. It is easy enough to decide that she was using the poor bugger but I doubt either of them would have seen it quite like that. She knew that Hesse despised Olivier, and knew she could not change his mind but she shopped for Milt at Gristede’s. She made him Tuna Casserole with a recipe from Australian Women’s Weekly. And she paid him, always, at least five dollars every week.

  “Bring me the letters then,” said Milton. “Let’s see what you got.”

  “I’ll have to ask permission.”

  “Permission! Bullshit. Just borrow them, doll-face. No sense making a fuss if they’re worth nothing.”

  So she schlepped two heavy boxes down to the F train and sat with the weight cutting into her thighs all the way to Delancey and it was in his freezing studio, while she made lentil soup, that the old man read stuff that made his eyes bulge more than usual. For at that moment, in 1975—this was what the most recent letters showed—the following paintings were on the market, or would be once Olivier Leibovitz was nice enough to authenticate them: Le Poulet 240V(1913), Le Déjeuner avec les travailleurs (1912), Nature Morte (1915). The total value of these works today would be at least ten million U.S. dollars. You will find them in all the books now, but at that time they had no official existence, having been omitted from Dominique’s shoddy catalogue raisonné and traded and stored in God knows what shady circumstances.

  “The Dauphin never replied to these letters?” asked Milton who, for the first time, had abandoned his waterfront-bull persona and, with his tufts of eyebrows, and his rimless glasses on his forehead, was more like an old Jewish scholar, very foreign, very far away from anything Marlene could even half imagine.

  “How could he have?” she asked. “He really knows nothing about art. He doesn’t care to.”

  “It takes no knowledge, toots, just his own birth certificate.”

  “He can’t.”

  “Baby,” said Hesse, “it is not so complicated. If you can recognise Maman’s wet and sloppy brushstrokes, which you can, I know, you simply say, ah—this one stinks. No-one likes to think this, but it really does not help to go to Cooper Union. You could do it now, today. It’s not rocket science.”

  Marlene Cook, hearing her future described, did not understand she was no longer a dunce. “Would you do it, Milton? You could advise him.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  He folded his spectacles and snapped them inside a metal case. “It is not the relationship I have with Jacques.”

  She liked him too much to think him pompous. She smiled at him and at first this produced no more than his assistance in repacking the cardboard boxes, but then he opened up his spectacle case once more.

  “Here, read this,” he relented, “from Monsieur L’Huillier in the sixteenth arrondissement.”

  “You know I can’t read French.”

  “Then I’ll translate. If Mr. Olivier Leibovitz can introduce Mr. L’Huillier to a buyer for a Leibovitz presently owned by Mr. L’Huillier, then Mr. L’Huillier will split commission with Mr. Leibovitz.”

  “But Olivier does not know people who buy art.”

  “Of course. He’s an idiot, forgive me. But he does not need to know anyone. Listen, baby. This is code. L’Huillier already has the buyer. But he needs—listen to me—he needs the painting authenticated. He’s saying, just confirm that this is a Leibovitz and I’ll give you a pile of cash, in a leather suitcase if you like. This is what art has been reduced to. These are the most larcenous people on Earth. In France this is even recognised in law, that dealers are the lowest of the low, beyond leniency.”

  “Oh my God,” said Marlene Cook. “I’ve been a perfect dill.”

  “So do you understand?” asked Milton who, in laying his broad square hand across her own, was putting quite another, much sadder, question.

  30

  When my brother left to suck up to the Japanese, Jackson was my friend and gave me money OFF THE BOOKS. Jackson was not going nowhere, believe him mate. Jackson was here to stay, no worries. Jackson was wired like a generator, so he said, sparks came from his fingers in the night. Once he had been a RAWLEIGH’S MAN, traveling hundreds of miles a day. White dust on the blackberries beside the roads, purveying tonics FOR MAN OR BEAST. He had see
n many women with nothing on beneath their dressing gowns a GREAT BIG BUSH between their legs. As a YOUNG BLADE Jackson had bright red hair and even now it was a GOOD THICK CROP which he combed as often as time permitted.

  After years of living in an Austin A40 van and many bad frosts especially in the southern highlands he returned to his trade as a FABRICATOR. In the city of Warrnambool, Victoria, Jackson invented the shopping cart for supermarkets. This was the first in the world, and has been proven. Warrnambool is where the famous Fletcher Jones trousers are made in a huge factory i.e. you can get very rich in Warrnambool. The shopping cart was constructed from a FOLDING CHAIR with two wire baskets Jackson borrowed from the bicycles of TWO SPINSTER TEACHERS at the high school. I was Slow Bones, never understanding the possibility of the folding chair although I was SITTING ON A GOLD MINE all those years. When not in use Jackson’s carts could be stored against the supermarket wall and the handbaskets were stacked like dishes in the sink.

  At this time there were no supermarkets in the so-called LUCKY COUNTRY otherwise he would have been a rich man rather than be gaoled for larceny of two baskets not his own.

  Jackson was married twice and has the photos including plaintiffs, bridesmaids and many stories, also snapshots of five dogs including two of them run over by the same truck in different years. At the nursing home Jackson slept in Room #1 and worked from eight o’clock till breakfast, on the SHIT AND WANDER shift. He brought his best racing pigeons to be stroked by patients out of THE GOODNESS OF HIS HEART but there was a complaint about BIRD LICE by people with eyes so bad they would not be able to read their own death notice.