Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  On this occasion I accidentally let in Detective bloody Amberstreet.

  Marlene lowered her weights.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What are you doing here, Marlene?” said Amberstreet, his white creased-up face protruding from a long black quilted coat. “That would be more pertinent.”

  “Nice shoes,” I said, but he had always been impervious to insult and now he complacently considered the snow-encrusted Converse sneakers protruding from the skirt of his black coat. “Thanks,” he said. “They were only sixty dollars.” He blinked. “The thing is Marlene, this loft is the property of the Government of New South Wales. I hope for your sake that you have permission to be here.”

  But then his eye was taken by I, the Speaker, and here his snarky manner unexpectedly melted and that strange adoring look crept into his eyes. Without altering this new focus of attention he removed his ridiculous coat, revealing a sweatshirt reading “UCK NEW YOR,” the “F” and “K” being hidden underneath his arms.

  “So,” he said, hugging the coat against him like a comforter, “so, Michael, were you a friend of Helen Gold?”

  Marlene cast a quick look at me. What the fuck did that mean?

  “She’s a bloody awful painter,” I said. “Why would I know someone like that?”

  “She was artist-in-residence here.”

  “Actually, she was a friend of mine,” said Marlene.

  “So, Mrs. Leibovitz, you knew Helen killed herself.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you understand that you have been contaminating a crime scene?”

  “Sorry,” she said to me. “I did not want you getting spooked.”

  “It has bad light,” Amberstreet announced, taking in his twenty-eight-inch belt another notch. “I don’t know who would buy a space like this for an artist. Are you working here, Michael? Are you producing?” He peered around, his bristly head darting towards the jars of paint I had lined up on the kitchen countertop.

  “A change of palette!”

  He squeaked across the floor towards the kitchen. Marlene shot me a warning look, but why?

  The detective was like a dog, sniffing here, pissing there, running from one smell to the next. He laid his coat down on the countertop and picked up two jars, one red, one yellow. “How exciting.” Pant, pant, pant. Then he was pushing his pointy nose towards I, the Speaker, squizzing up his eyes, clasping my bottles to his chest. If he had opened one and got a whiff of Ambertol…He didn’t.

  “God,” he said, “even if the lighting was a little bit too perfect. I mean at Mitsukoshi. A complete sellout, I mean in the good sense, Michael, of everything being sold. I hope you got some press back home.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you’ve not been home either. It was Mauri, right? Hiroshi Mauri who bought the whole damn show. That’s a class above your mate Jean-Paul.”

  “Yes.”

  “An associate of yours, Marlene, would that be correct?”

  Marlene had been sitting on the bench, but now she stood, wrapping a towel around her shoulders. “Oh please,” she said. “This is so boring.”

  “Yes, you know what I thought, Michael?” He immediately gave me my jars of paint to hold. “You know what I thought when I heard about your show? I thought, This is how Marlene is going to get Mr. Boylan’s Leibovitz out of Australia.”

  It was hard not to laugh at the little fuck. “Yeah, well you were wrong about that one.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Michael. I wasn’t wrong at all. My, this painting was beautifully restored.” The V-shaped creases around his eyes were deepening like wire cuts in a sandstone block. He cocked his head, and, in what seemed a sort of frenzy of curiosity twisted his wire arms fiercely around his chest. “Really, it’s no excuse for what we did to it, but it’s actually improved, don’t you think?”

  I looked to Marlene. Amberstreet caught my look.

  “I heard, Marlene, that there was a new Leibovitz on the market in New York. Ex-Tokyo. So what I realised, Marlene, was Michael’s paintings were a kind of feint. We opened all the crates at Sydney Airport, but you had the Leibovitz in your hand luggage. In your garment bag, I’d say.”

  Oh fuck, I thought, she’s caught. It’s over. It had happened, just like that. But Marlene was not looking caught at all. Indeed, she smiled. “You know very well it can’t be Mr. Boylan’s painting.”

  Amberstreet tipped his head and looked at her, no longer officious or even sarcastic, but, just for a brief moment, showing something close to admiration.

  It was Marlene who finally spoke. “You measured it?”

  The detective did not reply but, in an oddly polite gesture, retrieved my jars of paint from me, and returned them to the kitchen where, in short order, he opened a cupboard door, closed it carefully, ran his finger along the countertop, turned on the tap, washed his finger, and then, finally, it seemed he might speak. But then his eye lit on the back of Dominique’s dumb little canvas. He turned it over. I held my breath.

  “Guess where I was just now,” he demanded.

  “Tell us,” I said. I thought, Where the fuck is all this heading?

  “With Bill de Kooning in the Hamptons.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “No-one ever told me he was so handsome,” said Amberstreet.

  I could not follow him.

  “And there’s the wife. Elaine. Gone back to him.”

  Marlene’s eyes showed no concern at all. They were bright and clear, intensely focused. She handed me my coat.

  “Just wait,” begged Amberstreet. “Please. Just look.”

  From the pocket of his ridiculous coat he produced an envelope from which he removed a two-sheet cardboard sandwich which, in turn, protected a tiny charcoal doodle. This he handed to me, cradled in his palm, as fragile as a butterfly.

  “It’s a de Kooning?”

  “Everyone has to go to the lavatory sometime.”

  “You prick,” Marlene said. “You stole it.”

  “Not really, no. It isn’t even signed.” He danced from one foot to the other, his mouth turned down in a rictus of denial. “Who would believe that in Sydney?” he said. “Who would have any idea? You’re both leaving? I’ll walk down with you, but tell me, I wanted to ask you. Did you see that Noland show?”

  No more was said about Mauri or the stolen Leibovitz.

  “Well,” he said, as we arrived on the street. “I’m off to Greenwich. I’ve got a map of artists’ houses.”

  “You mean the Village.”

  “You know I’m going to get you, Marlene,” he said. “You’re going to go to gaol.”

  And then he winked, the little creep, and we watched him head up towards Houston with his stupid coat floating like a squid in the snowstorm.

  Marlene took my arm and squeezed it.

  “It was a feint?” I asked her. Of course I didn’t think it was, and I should have been furious that she smiled back so readily. In fact I was simply pleased she had not been caught. I laughed and kissed her. My friends all tell me I should have hated her. Oh, what a cheat she was. What a sucker I was, to fall for all that Tokyo bullshit. The best canvas I had managed to produce had been used like a matador’s cape. Surely I was angry?

  No.

  But was it not true that, even as we walked across Canal Street and down into the huge dark silence of Laight Street, amongst the soot-covered ghosts of the former railway-freight terminus, surely as that rat ran across the cobbles, seven of my nine paintings had vanished from the face of the fucking earth? Might they not, for all I knew, be now discarded like pretty paper ripped from Christmas presents, stuffed in black plastic body bags, dumped out on the Rop-pongi streets?

  No.

  But couldn’t I see my own denial? Had all my boring speeches about my art been forgotten?

  No.

  But why would I not turn away from her, now, as we passed this scratched-up metal door from under which wafted the inexpl
icable odours of cumin and cinnamon?

  I did not wish to turn away.

  So I really believed that a self-confessed liar and cheat really loved my paintings.

  I had no doubts. Ever.

  But why?

  Because the work was great, you dipshit.

  As we walked down Greenwich Street, with a bitter wind whipping off the Hudson, sheets of newspaper lifting into the lonely air like seagulls, Marlene made herself small beneath my arm and I was not angry because I knew no-one had ever loved her until now. I understood exactly how she created herself, how she, like I, had entered a world which she should never have been allowed into, the same world Amberstreet crept into when he nicked the piece of paper off Bill de Kooning’s floor.

  We had been born walled out from art, had never guessed it might exist, until we slipped beneath the gate or burnt down the porter’s house, or jemmied the bathroom window, and then we saw what had been kept from us, in our sleep-outs, in our outside dunnies, our drafty beer-hoppy public bars, and then we went half mad with joy.

  We had lived not knowing that Van Gogh was born, or Vermeer or Holbein, or dear sad Max Beckmann, but once we knew, then we staked our lives on theirs.

  This was why I could not seriously dislike Amberstreet, and as for my pale and injured bride, my gorgeous thief, I wished only to hold her in my arms and carry her. And I could see, even in the dark of what is now Tribeca, the miserable lino on her mother’s kitchen floor. It was close to being a vision, watered-down Kandinsky in mad and frightening detail: then the kerosene refrigerator, the chipped yellow Kookaburra stove, the neighbours all called Mr. This and Mrs. That, none of them with any idea that they were being starved to death. Who is Filippino Lippi, Mrs. Cloverdale? You’ve got me there, Mr. Jenkins. I’d have to say I didn’t have a clue.

  Do not make fun of the lower-middle classes, you can get in trouble, get a ticket, be roared up, reported, dobbed in, cut down to size, come a cropper, fuck me dead. A nation that begins without a bourgeoisie does face certain disadvantages, none of them overcome by setting up a concentration camp to get things started. By now of course Sydney is so bloody enlightened it is impossible to board a train without being forced to overhear arguments about Vasari conducted by people on mobile phones.

  Who is Lippi, Mrs. Cloverdale? Excuse me, Mr. Jenkins, do you mean Filippo or Filippino?

  But in the times and places where Marlene and I were born it was different and it was sheer chance that we stumbled onto what would be the obsession of our untidy hurtful lives. Look at all the murder and destruction that led dear little queeny Bruno Bauhaus to the Marsh. And what did he have to feed me when he got there? Nothing but his mad passion for Leibovitz. Not even a real oil painting. There were none for thirty miles around.

  From zis shithole, he told me, you must go.

  And I obeyed him, the strange blue-eyed miniature. I abandoned my mother and my brother to the mercies of Blue Bones and went down to Melbourne on the train, a bruiser, unlettered, with white socks and trousers to my ankles. I had no choice but to play the cards I had been dealt, and I tried to make a virtue of them, deliberately arriving at life class with blood still on my hands. For what was I judged to be but a kind of raging pig? I had not read Berenson or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard but still I argued. Forgive me, Dennis Flaherty I had no right to knock you down. I had no right to speak. I knew nothing, had seen sweet fucking all, had never been to Florence or Siena or Paris, never studied art history. At lunch break at William Angliss’ wholesale butchery, I read Burckhardt. I also read Vasari and saw him patronise Uccello, the prick. Poor Paolo, Vasari wrote, he was commissioned to do a work with a chameleon. Not knowing what a chameleon was, he painted a camel instead.

  Well fuck you, Vasari. That was the level of my response. I thought, You went to the finest schools all right but you are nothing more than a gossip and a suck-up to Cosimo de’ Medici. I was a butcher and I came in through the bathroom window and how could I do anything but hold Marlene? I had never been so close to another human being, not even, forgive me, my darling son. And I kissed my thief at ten o’clock at night, on Greenwich, between Duane and Reade, not because I was blind, or because I was a fool, but because I knew her. I was on her side, not Christie’s, not Sotheby’s, not the dead-eyed pricks from Fifty-seventh Street who presumed to judge my paintings and then went out to bid up Wesselmann or some piece-of-crap de Chirico. I kissed her wet smudgy lids and then, in the blue light, with the wind lifting her straw-coloured hair straight up into the air, she smiled.

  “Do you want to know why the Leibovitz is a different size to Boylan’s?”

  I waited.

  “Dominique,” she said.

  “The catalogue raisonné!”

  “Dominique was a drunk,” she said. “The catalogue raisonné says thirty by twenty and a half inches. It’s wrong. I must be the first one to ever measure it.” She kissed me on the nose. “And I know your secret too.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “You’re painting a new Leibovitz.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re a very naughty boy, but did you consider, for a moment, how a new Leibovitz might possibly acquire a provenance?”

  “You’ll find a way,” I said, and I meant it, for I had thought of this so many times before.

  “I will,” she said and then we kissed, winding, pressing, pushing, swallowing, wet clay, one entity, one history, one understanding, no air left between us. You want to know what love is?

  Not what you think my darling young one.

  46

  I’ve been back since, to that corner where we each formally declared our wholehearted criminal intent. There should be a blue plaque there, but there’s only a Korean nail salon, a pet shop, the sort of wine store that sells Bordeaux futures. The streets are filled with thousand-dollar strollers, wheels as big as SUVs’, every third one carrying twins. I.V.F. Sci-fi. Doesn’t matter. I don’t mind. Here I became a counterfeiter, how fucking shameful. Please let me publicly apologise for my fall from grace. Of course Leibovitz himself, as everybody knows, had been part of what they used to call a “Rembrandt factory.” That was in Munich, in his early teens. He was the pencil man in the employ of a kind of German Fagan, that is, he was the one who went to the ghetto to draw “characters.” These were then handed to a Swiss who would take them to the Pinakothek and there carefully daub them à la Rembrandt. Leibovitz, having walked through ankle-deep mud all the way from Estonia, was just trying to stay alive and his forgeries cannot be compared—morally, artistically, good grief—with what I was making in that cold liquid-blue room above Mercer Street. Here, with the door locked and bolted, I began to prepare that famous lost Leibovitz which had been continually admired by Picasso and described by Leo Stein in his journal. The original hung for a while in the dining room at 157 rue de Rennes, but it is not to be seen in any of Dominique’s boring dinner-party photographs. Forty-eight of these survive, each one the same—that is the guests have been required to turn and face the hostess, each one to raise a glass. The painting, I guess, was behind her back, hidden from her subjects and from history.

  It’s a fair guess that the painting was spirited away on that snowy night in January 1954, and that it went into the garage by the Canal Saint-Martin, but after that, who knows? Everything about it was thought to be remarkable, not least—Stein mentions this—that it was painted on canvas at a time when canvas was impossible to obtain.

  So when you read the signature and date—Dominique Broussard, 1944—what does it tell you about Dominique, that she dared to use a square inch of precious canvas for herself?

  It is also important to remember that the artist was a Jew in Vichy France and by his very refusal to leave Paris had placed himself in mortal danger. The complete and utter seriousness of his situation coincides with his decision to abandon the popular sentimental Shtetl Moderne style he had drifted into since the heights of 1913.

  Leo Stein describes a cubist work, made in t
he characteristic Leibovitz cones and cylinders which suggests to a reader, sight unseen, his younger oeuvre. Stein however is at pains to make it clear that this was “an unexpected leap.” The thing that tickled him the most was a raging Golem, “like a circus beast,” a bright yellow robot with wires and a generator and five frightened villagers turning the generator like a windlass. Anyone who has seen Chaplin Mécanique (1946) will recognise the style here being described, one that owes more to Léger than to Braque while being undeniably a Leibovitz. Writing at a time when Chaplin Mécanique did not yet exist, Stein beautifully evokes the severe mechanical planes, steely grey smoke grey and the armoured victims of the Golem’s wrath, “springs like men, lethal centipedes in terror,” tumbling towards the bottom left, nails, screws, washers, all in the most “elegant geometric chaos of defeat.”

  If the buzzer sounded, forget it. Hugh? Come back later. Marlene? She had a key but even she was denied any sight of the work-in-progress, a great deal of which in any case—took place solely in my head. That is, I sketched and read, filling my Gentile imagination with I. B. Singer’s imps and golems, Marsden Hartley, Gertrude Stein. This was not Leibovitz. I didn’t say it was.

  I sought out the prewar loonies, the futurists, the vorticists of whom it can at least be said that they were kind enough to write more than they painted. Not that Leibovitz the Jew would ever have placed himself amongst their number, but because he had always shown a great communist hope for the technological future. I found a ridiculous bookstore upstairs on Wooster Street where, amongst a lot of creepy comics and works by Aleister Crowley there was Gaudier-Brzeska:

  HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.

  HORSES are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.

  DOGS wander, are destroyed, and others come along.

  I had to somehow feel the past as if it would not arrive until tomorrow, feel it in my gut as it was born, the collision of violent vectors, contradictions driven by Cossacks, Isaac Newton, Braque, Picasso, fear and hope, the dreadful Bosch.