Still Waters

Twenty-eight

At first sight, he had taken it for a kestrel, but as it came closer, hovering above the shimmer of grass, the reddish underside and rounded wings marked it clearly as a young sparrowhawk.

Up here, from one of a number of wooden benches strategically placed around the area of some ancient burial ground, Grabianski could look down across a swathe of land that had been left to grow like meadow; the drying tops of grass blurred orange to bluish-brown and back again and, as Grabianski watched, alert, the sparrowhawk marked out its territory between an irregular triangle of oaks, firm against the occasional forays of crows.

At Grabianski’s back, purple foxgloves twined out of the sparse undergrowth, and two benches to his right a young woman with almost white hair lay on her back, eyes closed, a copy of Emily Dickinson open on her naked chest. The engraving on the bench against which Grabianski himself leaned read: Ethel Copland Campbell 1897–1987. Vegetarian. Socialist. Pacifist. It was that kind of a place.

He was trying not to think about paintings, forged or otherwise, not to think about his dealings with Vernon Thackray, Eddie Snow. And Resnick, a man whose word he trusted, who, on certain levels, he admired-someone whom, had their lives but shaken down differently, Grabianski might have been pleased to call a friend-how seriously did he have to take the threat of being fitted into a frame and locked in tight?

He watched as the hawk rode the air with the smallest movement of wings and then dropped, almost faster than he could follow, down into the grass and away, a vole or some such fast in its grasp.

Marvellous, Grabianski thought, as the bird was lost to sight between the branches of the farthest tree, how life did that, offered up those little scraps, parables for you to snack on, inwardly digest.

The lower reaches of Portobello were lined by barrows selling fruit and vegetables at knockdown prices, stripy watermelons sliced open, lemons tumbling yellow inside blue tissue. The same black guy, wearing a wide white shirt with a gathered yoke, winked at Grabianski from the doorway of the Market Bar and stepped aside to let him through.

Moving slowly toward the bar, letting his eyes become adjusted to the filtered light, Grabianski saw Eddie Snow seated in the far corner, talking earnestly to a youngish man with shoulder-length hair. The woman Grabianski had seen him with before, the model, was perched on a stool close by, flawless, bored.

Grabianski ordered his pint of beer and waited, certain Snow would have seen him; now it was a matter of form, of etiquette, waiting to see when and how that recognition would be acknowledged.

What happened was that the young woman leaned forward at a sign from Snow’s beckoning finger and after a brief discussion, got down from her stool and came to where Grabianski was standing, one arm against the surface of the bar.

“I’m Faron,” she said, and Grabianski nodded pleasantly, wondering if some of the things he’d read about her were true. He hadn’t recognized her before, not really, a face, thin and feral, like so many that stared out at him, big-eyed, from the fronts of glossy magazines. She was wearing shiny silver tights, clumpy thick-heeled shoes, and either a dress that was really a petticoat or a petticoat that was really a dress.

“Eddie says he’s busy.”

“I can see.”

“It’s important he says, like business. Is it okay for you to wait?”

Grabianski assured her that was fine; she made no move to walk away and when he offered her a drink she asked for an Absolut with ice and tonic and a slice of lemon not lime. According to her press releases she had been born and brought up in Hoxton, East London, one of five children, none of them named Faron nor anything like; the fashion editor for British Vogue had noticed her behind the till at a garage in Lea Bridge Road when she called in for petrol on her way back from a photo shoot in Epping Forest. Wearing one of those awful pink overalls, of course, oil and the Lord knows what underneath her fingernails, but those eyes, those tremendous waiflike eyes.

Not so many months later, after numerous makeovers, a spot of minor surgery, and a name change, there she was in grainy black and white and bleached-out color, wearing price-on-application designer clothing in some industrial wasteland, staring empty eyes and legs akimbo. Since when, affairs with movie stars of both sexes, private clinics, smoked-glass limousines; rumor was she’d turned down a cameo part in the new Mike Leigh-or was that Spike? — and recorded a song for which Tricky did the final mix, but which had yet to be released. Rumor, juiced with money, will say almost anything.

Grabianski wondered if she were yet nineteen.

“What d’you do, then?” she asked.

“I’m a burglar,” Grabianski said.

“Go on, you’re winding me up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yeah? What you burgle then?”

“Houses, apartments, the usual thing.”

She laughed, a giggle, brittle and fast. “You burgle Eddie, then?”

“Not yet.”

She leaned a little away from him, uncertain. “Great security, Eddie, alarms and that, all over. Well, he has to. Paintings and that. Worth a fortune. It’s what he’s interested in, art.” For a moment, she glanced round. “That bloke with him, Sloane, he’s an artist. Painter. You know him? He’s good. Galleries and that. I’ve never been, museums, they’re boring. Well, I’m a liar, not since I was a kid. School trip, down the Horniman. Lost my knickers, coming back.”

Grabianski was looking past her, past those famous eyes and over her shoulder at the man she’d identified as Sloane. His head in profile now and Grabianski could see he was nowhere near as young as he’d first thought. The build, style of the hair had deceived. The nose was full, patrician, etched here and there with tiny broken violet lines. The hair, full at the front too, had grown white above the temples; the lips, narrow and wide, were cracked. Sixty, Grabianski thought, sixty if he’s a day.

“I’ll tell you how good he is,” Faron said. “We was round his place one day, his studio, you know, and I made some joke about Van Gogh, about him slicing off his ear, and Sloane, he got this painting off the wall, turned it round right where he was and done these sunflowers on the back. You never seen nothing like it. They was just like the real thing. Better. But then that’s me, I wouldn’t really know.”

Grabianski nodded and filed it all away.

When Sloane walked past them and around the angle of the bar, Grabianski saw that he’d been right about the age. Sixty-two or sixty-three, he wouldn’t have minded betting. Wearing nothing, nothing Grabianski could see, beneath a pair of paint-patched denim dungarees. Clear blue eyes that saw Grabianski even as they saw right through him. The same eyes that fixed on him now in the fly-specked mirror over the urinal. Sloane’s voice, a stony South London shot through with a brace of New York American, saying, “This isn’t going to be one of those pick-up scenes, is it? You show me yours if I show you mine.”

Grabianski assured him it was not.

“Thank Christ,” Sloane breathed, piss continuing to stream between his fingers, bouncing back from the shiny enamel. “I’m too old for that will-he, won’t-he, kind of shit.”

“You a friend of Eddie Snow?” Grabianski asked.

“Eddie doesn’t have friends,” Sloane said, buttoning up, “just mates he uses whenever there’s a need.”

Rinsing his hands beneath the tap, ignoring the hot-air drier in favor of wiping them on his dungarees, Sloane walked back out into the pub and when Grabianski followed, not so many necessary moments later, he had gone. Faron was sitting alongside Snow and she had taken what remained of Grabianski’s pint with her, placing it across from them, by the place Sloane had vacated.

“Interesting fellow,” Grabianski said, sliding into the empty seat.

“I don’t like it,” Eddie Snow said, “when people come sniffing round after me like dogs after a bone.”

“You were supposed to be getting in touch with me.”

“And I am.”

“A couple of days ago.”

“Ah, well,” Snow said, “like the man said, all relative, time.”

Faron looked at him suspiciously, in case he might have said something clever. Eddie Snow dressed today in his trademark leather, white tight trousers and a black waistcoat over a gray ribbed T-shirt, silver Indian bangles in the appropriate places.

“I just want to know,” Grabianski said, “if you’re still interested in the Dalzeils or not.”

“Shout it from the housetops, why don’t you?”

Swiveling as he rose, Grabianski cupped one hand to his mouth. “I just want to know …”

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point,” said Snow tugging at the sleeve of Grabianski’s coat, “sit your bloody self back down.”

Faron was giggling, pretending not to, and when Snow shot her a glance, she transmuted it into a cough.

“Run along,” Snow told her affably enough.

She ran all the way to the bar.

“As it happens,” Snow said, stretching an arm, “there is a fair bit of potential interest. Qatar. Arab Emirates. Monaco.”

“What are the chances,” Grabianski asked, “of translating this potential into something approaching cash?”

“Good, I’d say. Pretty good.”

“And even while I might take your point about the uncertainty of time, you wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to when …”

“Couple more days.” Snow shrugged.

“Of course, I should have known, a couple more days.”

Snow exchanged a further piece of private semaphore with Faron, who spoke to the barman and brought over fresh drinks.

“So how’s old Vernon,” Snow asked casually, “seen anything of him lately?”

Grabianski shook his head.

“Gone to ground a bit, I hear,” Snow said. “Place out in Suffolk. Warbleswick. Snape. One of those. Like Siberia in the sodding winter and you can’t turn round without squashing some turd in green wellies underfoot-so nice to get the dust of the city off of one’s feet, don’t you think? — but if you’re into samphire or asparagus, oysters, of course, can’t do better.”

When Grabianski walked up the Hill toward his flat, clutching a bag of cherries from Inverness Street and a copy of Mariette in Ecstasy he’d picked up in Compendium, there, smug and unmistakable, was Vernon Thackray’s dark blue Volvo estate, parked right outside.

They went up onto the Heath: Grabianski didn’t want Thackray in his home. The sun was behind them, broken shafts of it still bright through the scattering of trees that lined the south side of the Hill. They were sitting on a bench, looking down over the running track and the pale brickwork of the Lido, Gospel Oak. Squirrels flirted with fear across dusty ground.

“I was beginning to think something had happened,” Grabianski said.

“Happened?”

“To you.”

“Hoped, then, that’s what you mean. Hoped.”

Grabianski didn’t reply. Up to a point, let him think what he wants.

“This business,” Thackray said, “it’s necessary sometimes. A low profile, you understand. Minimum visibility.” He was wearing a pale blue Oxford shirt that shone almost violet when it was caught by the sun, beige twill trousers with a definite crease, tasseled shoes. In certain parts of Suffolk, Grabianski mused, it was probably de rigeur.

“The paintings,” Grabianski said, “the ones you wanted. They’re available, you know that.”

“Still?”

Grabianski half-turned on the bench toward him. “Japan, you said there was a buyer in Japan.”

Thackray made a small gesture with his shoulders, too indefinite to be called a shrug. “Things fluctuate, change.”

“Such as?”

“The yen against the dollar, the dollar against the pound.”

“One of the beauties of art,” Grabianski said, “I thought it maintained its price.”

“I may not be able to get as much now.”

“How much?”

Thackray smiled, rare as frost in July.

“How soon can you let me know?” Grabianski asked. “A definite price. And don’t tell me a couple of days.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Who?”

Thackray’s hand alighted on Grabianski’s leg behind the knee, squeezing tight. “You know the line, ‘Human voices wake us, and we drown’? Listen to Eddie Snow, that’s what happens. Eddie’s hand on your head, holding you down.” Relinquishing his grip, Thackray patted Grabianski gently on the thigh, a caring gesture, designed to reassure; learned, Grabianski imagined, from Thackray’s housemaster at school. “The kind of things he’s into, Eddie, in the end all they’ll bring are grief and aggravation. Take my word, Jerzy, it’s not what you need.”

“What I need is to get these Dalzeils off my hands.”

“Exactly. And now we’ve resumed an understanding, that’s where I’ll direct my attention: making sure that happens.” He was on his feet, brushing dust, real or imaginary, from his clothes. “Nice here; you’ve done well. You’ll have to drive out and see my place some time. Stay over. There’s a guest room. Two. You could bring a friend. Lie in bed at night and listen to the waves lifting the pebbles from the beach, setting them back down.” He gripped Grabianski’s hand. “Early-morning swim before breakfast, quite safe as long as you stay in your depth, don’t fight against the tide.”