Theft: A Love Story

by Peter Carey

  “Can you still love me?”

  Headache or no, I loved her, as I had never loved in all my life, loved her wit, her courage, her beauty I loved the woman who stole Dozy’s painting, who read The Magic Pudding, who faked the catalogue, but even more the girl escaping the vile little room in Benalla and I could smell the red lead paint her mother brushed on the fireplace every Sunday, taste the shitty ersatz coffee made from chicory, the canned beetroot staining the boiled egg white in the deadly iceberg salad.

  “Shush. I love you.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Shush.”

  “You won’t love me. You can’t.”

  “I do.”

  “I did it,” she cried suddenly.

  “What did you do?”

  I looked into her face and saw an alarming terror, a dreadful cringing in the face of my tender enquiry. She gave a little moan and hid her head in my chest and began to sob again. Through all of this, I detected Hugh. He was now standing right over us.

  “Go to bed, now.”

  His bare feet brushed across the floor.

  “I did it,” she said.

  “She burnt down Benalla High School,” said Hugh mournfully. “I’m sorry.”

  I took her chin and tilted her face towards me, all the street light trapped in a tide around her pooling eyes.

  “Did you, my baby?”

  She nodded.

  “Is that what you did?”

  “I’m vile.”

  I took her to me, and held her, the whole cage of mystery that was her life.

  53

  I was wrong, quite possibly, I had sinned, very likely, had borne FALSE WITNESS, become a COMMON GOSSIP. Have you heard? They say Marlene Cook burnt down the high school. Who is THEY? Why, it was only Olivier. So it was just SCUTTLEBUTT and HEARSAY, bless me, I would never have repeated it if I had not SMELLED A RAT, as the saying is. I was DISCOMBOBULATED—that’s a good one—and so I foolishly repeated what a DRUG ADDICT had ALLEGED and caused Marlene to weep, deep in the middle of the night, a human lost in outer space or inside a plastic bag, gulping for air, their GOOD NAME vacuumed from them, the HOOVER sucking oxygen, roaring like the mills of God.

  What right did I have? No right, only wrong. Forgive me Lord Jesus, it was agony to hear her suffer and I could not wait for the dawn so I could go back to the Bicker Club and PUT IT TO Olivier that he had invented the story because he hated her.

  When it was grey light I stood above them. I wished I was an angel, but there never would be feathers on my hairy back. She was sleeping, her head as always against my brother’s chest. He opened one eye and peered at his watch.

  Out? he asked.

  Walk, I said.

  It was a clear morning, just after seven, pigeons already cooing on the rusty fire escape, not knowing one day from the other I presume, or only wet from dry, hot from cold, their hearts the size of a lump of gum, insufficient blood to fill a cup. Nothing like my agony for them, I thought, but then again who can imagine the constant torment from the lice, the pain of diseases unknown to any but the sufferer, their own secret horrors, no worse, no better. Walking up Mercer Street, head down. All around me black plastic bags, erupting, spewing, restaurant fish for instance. What knowledge might a fish have? Who would forewarn a red snapper of the afterlife, this purgatory on Mercer Street? These dreadful thoughts pursued me SMELLS IN HELL as I bolted up Broadway, was nearly killed. Then Union Square, Gramercy Park, but where was Jeavons now? It did not matter. I had my key. As I have confessed. As I have told the sequence of events. As the story has been recorded, reel to reel.

  I PROCEEDED to the second floor and unlocked the door, bless me. I did not know what I had done.

  Olivier in black pajamas, his face hidden by the chair, the legs of the chair closed like scissors around bruised white throat, a great blue birthmark, an underground lake spilling beneath his skin. His eyes were open. He was still. What had SLIPPED MY MIND I could not tell. I touched him with my foot and he moved like a dead beast but no more.

  I did not touch the body with my hands. I ran from the club with Jeavons calling to me STOP. I ran down Broadway howling DON’T WALK DON’T CARE. Save us from me, tell me what is done.

  54

  Slow Bones woke us. Like sheet metal falling, flailing, slamming on the bed. No time for socks or underwear, we traveled, all three together, to the Bicker Club, and there we found the so-called Jeavons in a state that was unpleasantly like a snit.

  It was he who pointed out “the wife” to the police and as a result Marlene had the privilege of being taken to the crime scene—the cops getting very bloody physical with me when I thought I had a right to come along—and it was she who then became “the deponent” who swore “the remains” of the deceased had once been Olivier Leibovitz.

  I waited on the mansion steps, which was as close to Olivier as anyone permitted me to get. Hugh and I were side by side, numb and dumb. Marlene emerged, opened her mouth to speak, and vomited across the stoop.

  Hugh accompanied the police into the Bicker Library. Marlene was retching on the sidewalk, but I was directed to accompany Hugh a certain distance. I observed his tape-recorded interrogation from the high-arched doorway while they sat him beneath a nasty poster for a production of Hamlet with John Wilkes Booth. I could not hear what was said, but it seems he confessed to murder. I believed it, totally. As they applied their rattraps to his wrists my brother looked at me, no longer crying, his little eyes so weirdly still and dark.

  They got the big old fellow on his feet and spun him round and left him standing, facing the corner of the library.

  Something then occurred, God knows what exactly—coming and going on the stairs. Then the youngest cop, a young crew-cut fellow in sneakers and jeans, released Hugh’s cuffs and the old bull rushed towards me, head down.

  “Hugh!”

  He brushed past.

  The cop was a trim brush-cut fellow, not like any cop I knew, more like the Lebanese guys selling hash at Johnny’s Green Room in Melbourne.

  “That’s your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a little slow?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Get him out of here.”

  “What?”

  “He’s free to go.”

  Hugh was hovering with his little blaming eyes. He permitted me to put my arm around him and escort him down the steps.

  “Sit here a minute, mate.”

  I took off my sweater and my T-shirt, pulled the prickly wool back over my ruined skin, used the T-shirt to clean Marlene who had propped herself between two parked cars and was still gulping and gasping, although now she was producing little more than bile. I had not seen what she had seen, and I did not want to. I wiped her mouth, and chin, leaving the shirt coloured by the bitter green and when I was done I threw it—fuck them—across the rail of Gramercy Park.

  An ambulance came, but no-one bothered to get out. It was grey overcast, damp, sweaty We were lifeless, all our marrow sucked into the maw of God knows what dimension.

  Police arrived and departed. Taxis hooted at the ambulance, but no-one was in a hurry to bring the famous artist’s son downstairs.

  Of course I could not yet know about the freshly broken metacarpal bone in Olivier’s right hand. I wonder what I would have done. Would I have tried to turn in my brother? Report him? Dob him in? How the fuck would I know? The real mystery, however, was not my character, but the crime itself. The killer had either had a key—but all keys were accounted for—or he had entered an open window by scaling a sheer fifty-foot wall.

  Hugh, who did have a key, was still asleep at Mercer Street at the time Jeavons brought in the tea and found the body. Had Jeavons done it? No-one thought so. As Hugh ran away from the scene, by the time he had seen the body, the corpse was already five hours old.

  So it was nothing to do with Hugh, and yet the body contained a message to anyone who knew Hugh’s history.

  The Offic
e of Chief Medical Examiner did not know Hugh, did not know it was a message, although God knows they went digging. They took little bits of Olivier’s Brain, Liver, Blood. There was Adderall and Celexa and Morphine in his brain, but these drugs had not killed him. The cause of death was asphyxiation. The autopsy reported the telltale signs: intensive heart congestion (enlarged heart; right-side ventricle), venous engorgement above the point of injury and cyanosis (blue discolouration of lips and fingertips). That had been achieved by the folding legs of Hugh’s chair.

  Enough you would imagine, but not for them. They cut him up like a pig at the Draybone Inn, opening his beautiful body with “the usual incision.” The flies were buzzing. They weighed his poor sad brain. They found the vessels at the base of the brain to be “smooth-walled and widely patent,” whatever that means. They weighed his lungs, his heart, and liver. Will that be all Mrs. Porter? They found the esophagus unremarkable. They poked around his stomach and reported “undigested foodstuff with recognizable fragments of meat and vegetable and a marked odor of alcohol.”

  They cut up his dick. “The calyces, pelves, ureters and urinary bladder are unremarkable. The capsule strips with ease revealing markedly pale and smooth cortical surfaces.” I did not even want to know what this meant, but what had he done to deserve it? Be born inside the castle walls of art? They cut him from colon to bowel and wrote down the contents of his shit. This was a life, a man, in part, in whole.

  The tabloids were almost as thorough—they noted that his mother, Dominique Broussard, had died a similar death in Nice in 1967. They went right into it. So enlightening to read that strangulation is normally the fate of women and children. Only one detail escaped them, although it was plainly stated in the autopsy if anyone wished to think what it might mean—the killer had also broken the bone of Olivier Leibovitz’s right metacarpal.

  Hugh had not done this.

  I had not done this.

  In all New York, there was only one person who would understand that this injury, inflicted at the time of death, had a direct connection to my brother’s history.

  Of course I did not know this straightaway. It was a Saturday morning when Olivier died, and it was not until Wednesday—very fast for the Chief Medical Examiner, or so they told me at the precinct—that I picked up the coroner’s report and brought it back to Mercer Street. I cooked Hugh sausages and mashed potatoes and then I began to read. It took a minute or two before I reached the metacarpal bone.

  Marlene had been sitting very still and quiet reading Mayer’s Handbook of Artist’s Materials, but she looked up so sharply it was clear she had been waiting for me to respond.

  “What is it, baby?”

  I slid the page through the toast crumbs, underlining with my nail the “metacarpal bone.”

  There was a small flicker in her mouth. Not a smile, but a meaningful contraction. She held my eyes, as she slowly folded the report.

  “You don’t need this,” she said. I finally understood—she had the droit moral now. Olivier was dead.

  Beside me Hugh continued chopping up his sausages, sawing them into careful sections one quarter inch in width.

  “I know it looks bad,” she said. “It isn’t bad, baby. It’s just careful.”

  What she was saying was monstrous, but she was just sitting at the table, her hand resting on my hand, as tender as she always was.

  “What looks bad?”

  “That injury,” she said, casting her eyes in my brother’s direction.

  “The break?”

  “Insurance,” she said. This was the second time she almost smiled.

  She had the fucking droit moral. God save us. I crossed the room, opened the trunk where she had kept her running things, her burglary tools if you want to know the truth. There was nothing left but smelly sneakers and a pair of shorts.

  “Where’s your rope?”

  What did I expect her to answer? Oh, I used the rope to climb into my fucked-up husband’s room. When I had finished killing him I threw the thing away. Then I came home and snuggled into bed. What she actually said was: “God is in the details.” And thence solemnly stretched out her hand towards me. “Nothing bad will happen now, baby. It’s just I can be confident that our secret is secure.”

  “For God’s sake,” I nodded at my eating brother, “he was sound asleep. He was here.”

  “From an evidentiary point of view, that’s sort of tricky. Anyway, no-one wants to open up that can of worms,” she said. “Certainly not me.”

  I made a breathy, incredulous, limp-dick laugh.

  “Baby, it’s not anything I’ll ever need to use. You’re acting as if I plan to. I don’t.”

  “And what did you imagine I would feel about this?”

  “That maybe we could all go to the south of France. And be happy together. Hugh would love it. You know he would.”

  Hugh sat slurping at his tea. Who knows what he heard or thought?

  Marlene came round the table and stood directly before me, a good nine inches shorter even in her heels. “Australia is still O.K. I don’t have to go to France.” I felt her gentle hand upon my arm and, looking down into her eyes, saw, in the flare of iris around her pupil, the rocks beneath the ocean, clouds of nebulae, a door to something completely fucking strange.

  Then, at last, I was afraid.

  “No?” she asked.

  I could not even move.

  “Butcher, I love you.”

  I shivered.

  She shook her head, her eyes swollen with big tears.

  “Whatever you think, I’ll prove it isn’t true.”

  “No.”

  “You’re a great painter.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  She flinched, but then she touched my frozen cheek. “I’ll look after you,” she said. “I’ll bring you breakfast in bed. I’ll place your paintings anywhere you want them in the world. When you’re old and sick, I’ll care for you.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Not about that, baby.” Then, standing on her toes, Marlene Leibovitz kissed me on the mouth.

  “It was only technical,” she said. She waited for a moment as if I might miraculously change my mind then, sighing, she slid the autopsy into her purse.

  “You’ll never find anyone like me,” she said.

  Again, she awaited my response while Hugh stared fiercely at his cup.

  “No?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  She walked out the door without another word. Who knows where she went? Hugh and I flew out of JFK the following morning.

  “Is Marlene coming?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  55

  The pilot said, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls—the voice of our father, a CHARACTER—he said it is DOWNHILL all the way to Sydney. I asked my brother what would now be the fate of his ART he said it was lost forever, property of a Japanese he hoped the bastard died. When we were airborne he drank many small bottles of red wine and would not stop until the PRISSY BASTARD would no longer CATCH HIS EYE.

  Very long night bouncing above the earth.

  Then followed a ROUGH PATCH at various addresses in Sydney—Tempe, Marrickville, St. Peter’s. Butcher was completely GUTTED, his life-work stolen by the PLAINTIFF and the JAPANESE.

  I HAVE SEEN ALL THE DEEDS THAT ARE DONE HERE UNDER THE SUN; THEY ARE ALL EMPTINESS AND CHASING THE WIND. He never knew what he was painting.

  For a month or two he MADE ART but then he heard on Sydney radio 2UE that the Plaintiff and Jean-Paul had sold all their holding of Michael Boone to the Japanese. My brother had been a King but now he was a Pig, eviscerated. Turn the beast on its side and start pulling out the intestines. Take great care not to break open the stomach or intestines. When you’ve got the stomach and intestines pulled out as much as you can, you will find it hanging up just below the liver. R.I.P. He threw fifteen yards of good canvas on the Tempe Tip.

  The ONCE-FAMOUS Michael Boone then established a
lawn-cutting enterprise. I was never happier with an occupation but my brother was his father’s son, always in a rage with traffic jams on the Parramatta Road, cost of two-stroke fuel, lawns too wet for decent care. FOR IN SUCH WISDOM IS MUCH VEXATION, AND THE MORE A MAN KNOWS THE MORE HE HAS TO SUFFER.

  My sleep was penetrated by his bare feet, shuffling around the flat, his mind in a muddle, heart at its ceaseless work, fat collecting around the kidneys. I did not forget that my own happiness had been purchased at dreadful expense to him. BUT …MY TURN NOW. I wish I were a nicer man. I liked to cut the grass, spring blades, the sweet smell, thrips flying in the hazy light, monarch butterflies, others whose names I did not know.

  For five summers we had NORMAL LIFE.

  Then the letter arrived from OUR FORMER ENEMIES in Germany and everything was changed. We had BOMBED THE SHIT OUT OF THEM but no mention was made of that when writing to inform Butcher of RECENT DEVELOPMENTS. The letter was from the MUSEUM LUDWIG ha-ha no batteries needed. They invited my brother to see his pictures hung inside their VERY IMPORTANT MUSEUM as he told me more than once. At the same time he feared it was a very CRUEL TRICK.

  He was a great fat old fellow now, his head burnt violently by the summer sun, mouth turned down, hands always in his pockets looking for small change he was always SKINT. But the night he opened the letter from the Museum Ludwig it was FUCK THE EXPENSE he would talk to them ON THE BLOWER man to man. Thus in the kitchen of our comfy flat in Tempe it was officially confirmed that he had been rescued from the SCRAP HEAP OF HISTORY. The Japanese had donated two of his paintings to the Museum Ludwig and these two canvases—last seen in Mercer Street, New York, NY 10013—were now being given PRIDE OF PLACE. Well fuck me dead.

  One minute we were broke—no money for anything but scrag end of lamb—but now we could afford air tickets to Germany, not just the two of us, but young Billy Bones as well, a great tall handsome bugger, no credit to the sire. Where did this money come from? MYOB.