The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian

CHAPTER Five

Asign on the counter said the suggested contribution was $2.50. “Contribute more or less if you prefer,” it counseled, “but you must contribute something.” The chap immediately in front of us plunked down a dime. The attendant started to tell him about the suggested contribution, but our lad wasn’t open to suggestion.

“Read your own sign, sonny,” he said sourly. “How many times do I have to go through this with you vermin? You’d think it was coming out of your own pockets. They haven’t got you on commission, have they?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, I’m an artist. The dime’s my widow’s mite. Take it in good grace or in the future I’ll reduce my contribution to a penny.”

“Oh, you can’t do that, Mr. Turnquist,” the attendant said archly. “It would throw our whole budget out of whack.”

“You know me, eh?”

“Everybody knows you, Mr. Turnquist.” A heavy sigh. “Everybody.”

He took Turnquist’s dime and gave him a little yellow lapel pin for it. Turnquist faced us as he fastened the pin to the breast pocket of his thrift shop suit jacket. It was a sort of gray, and came reasonably close to matching his thrift shop trousers. He smiled, showing misaligned tobacco-stained teeth. He had a beard, a ragged goatee a little redder than his rusty brown hair and a little more infiltrated with gray, and the rest of his face was two or three days away from a shave.

“Little tin gods on wheels,” he advised us. “That’s all these people are. Don’t take any crap from them. If Art can be intimidated, it ain’t Art.”

He moved on and I laid a five-dollar bill on the counter and accepted two lapel pins in return. “An artist,” the attendant said meaningfully. He tapped another sign, which announced that children under the age of sixteen were not admitted, whether or not accompanied by an adult. “We ought to amend our policy,” he said. “No children, no dogs, and no artists.”

I’d awakened before Carolyn and went directly to a liquor store on West Seventy-second, where I bought a replacement bottle of Canadian Club. I took it home and knocked on Mrs. Seidel’s door, and when my knock went unanswered I let myself in and cracked the seal on the bottle, poured an ounce or so down the sink drain, capped the bottle and put it back where I’d found its fellow the night before. I let myself out and met Mrs. Hesch in the hallway, the inevitable cigarette burning unattended in the corner of her mouth. I stopped at her apartment for a cup of coffee-she makes terrific coffee-and we talked, not for the first time, about the coin-operated laundry in the basement. She was exercised about the driers, which, their dials notwithstanding, had two temperatures-On and Off. I was vexed with the washers, which were as voracious as Pac-Man when it came to socks. Neither of us said anything about the fact that I’d just let myself out of Mrs. Seidel’s place.

I went back to my apartment and listened to Carolyn being sick in the bathroom while I put a pot of coffee on. She came out looking a little green and sat in the corner of the couch holding her head. I showered and shaved and came back to find her staring unhappily at a cup of coffee. I asked her if she wanted aspirin. She said she wouldn’t mind some Extra-Strength Tylenol, but I didn’t have any. I ate and she didn’t and we both drank coffee and the phone rang.

A woman’s voice, unaccented, said, “Mr. Rhodenbarr? Have you spoken to your friend?”

I thought of pointing out that the question was implicitly insulting, presuming that I only had one friend, that I was the sort of person who couldn’t possibly have more than a single friend, that I was lucky to have one and could probably expect to be deserted by her when she wised up.

I said, “Yes.”

“Are you prepared to pay the ransom? A quarter of a million dollars?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as a shade high? I know inflation’s murder these days, and I understand it’s a seller’s market for Burmese cats, but-”

“Do you have the money?”

“I try not to keep that much cash around the house.”

“You can raise it?”

Carolyn had come over to my side when the phone rang. I laid a reassuring hand on her arm. To my caller I said, “Let’s cut the comedy, huh? Bring the cat back and we’ll forget the whole thing. Otherwise-”

Otherwise what? I’m damned if I know what kind of a threat I was prepared to make. But Carolyn didn’t give me the chance. She clutched my arm. She said, “Bernie-”

“Ve vill kill ze cat,” the woman said, her voice much louder and suddenly accented. The effect was somewhere between an ad for Viennese pastry mit schlag and that guy in the World War II movies who reminds you that you’ve got relatives in Chermany.

“Now let’s be calm,” I said, to both of them. “No need to talk about violence.”

“If you do not pay ze ransom-”

“Neither of us has that kind of money. You must know that. Now why don’t you tell me what you want?”

There was a pause. “Tell your vriend to go home.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Zere is somesing in her mailbox.”

“All right. I’ll go with her, and-”

“No.”

“No?”

“Stay vere you are. You vill get a phone call.”

“But-”

There was a click. I sat looking at the receiver for a few seconds before I hung it up. I asked Carolyn if she’d heard any of it.

“I caught a few words here and there,” she said. “It was the same person I talked to last night. At least I think it was. Same accent, anyway.”

“She switched it on in midstream. I guess she forgot it at the beginning, and then she remembered she was supposed to sound threatening. Or else she slips into it when she gets excited. I don’t like the idea of splitting up. She wants you to go to your apartment and me to stay here and I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Well, who knows what she’s going to try to pull?”

“I have to go downtown anyway. Somebody’s bringing me a schnauzer at eleven. Shit, I don’t have much time, do I? I can’t face a schnauzer with a head like I’ve got. Thank God it’s a miniature schnauzer. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to wash a giant schnauzer on a day like this.”

“Stop at your apartment on the way. If you’ve got time.”

“I’ll make time. I have to feed Ubi, anyway. You don’t think-”

“What?”

“That they took him too? Maybe that’s why they want me to go to my apartment.”

“They said to check your mailbox.”

“Oh, God,” she said.

When she left I went to work on Appling’s stamp collection. I suppose it was a cold-blooded thing to do, what with Archie’s life hanging in the balance, but that still left him with eight and I wanted to render the Appling stamps unidentifiable as soon as possible. I sat under a good light at my kitchen table with a pair of stamp tongs and a box of glassine envelopes and a Scott catalog, and I transferred the stamps a set at a time from their mounts to the envelopes, making the appropriate notation on each envelope. I didn’t bother figuring out the value. That would be another operation, and it could wait.

I was laboring over George V high values from Trinidad amp; Tobago when the phone rang. “What’s this crap about my mailbox?” Carolyn demanded. “There’s nothing in it but the Con Ed bill.”

“How’s Ubi?”

“Ubi’s fine. He looks lost and lonely and his heart is probably breaking, but aside from that he’s fine. Did that Nazi call back?”

“Not yet. Maybe she meant the mailbox at your shop.”

“There’s no box there. There’s just a slot in the door.”

“Well, maybe she got a wire crossed. Go wash the saluki anyway and see what happens.”

“It’s not a saluki, it’s a schnauzer, and I know what’ll happen. I’ll wind up smelling of wet dog for a change. Call me when you hear from them, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and fifteen minutes later the phone rang again and it was the mystery woman. No accent this time, and no elaborate runaround, either. She talked and I listened, and when she was done I sat for a minute and thought and scratched my head and thought some more. Then I put Appling’s stamps away and called Carolyn.

And now we were in a small room on the second floor of the gallery. We’d followed my caller’s directions to the letter, and we were accordingly standing in front of a painting that looked remarkably familiar.

A small bronze rectangle affixed to the wall beside it bore the following information: Piet Mondrian. 1872-1944. Composition with Color, 1942. Oil on canvas, 86 x 94 cm. Gift of Mr. amp; Mrs. J. McLendon Barlow.

I wrote the dimensions in my pocket notebook. In case you haven’t caved in and learned to think metric, they worked out in real measurement to something like 35 by 39 inches, with the height greater than the width. The background color was white, tinted a little toward gray by either time or the artist. Black lines crisscrossed the canvas, dividing it into squares and rectangles, several of which were painted in primary colors. There were two red areas, two blue ones, and a long narrow section of yellow.

I stepped closer and Carolyn laid a hand on my arm. “Don’t straighten it,” she urged. “It’s fine the way it is.”

“I was just having a closer look.”

“Well, there’s a guard by the door,” she said, “and he’s having a closer look at us. There’s guards all over the place. This is crazy, Bern.”

“We’re just looking at pictures.”

“And that’s all we’re gonna do, because this is impossible. You could no more get a painting out of this place than you could get a child into it.”

“Relax,” I said. “All we’re doing is looking.”

The building where we stood, like the painting in front of us, had once been in private hands. Years ago it had served as the Manhattan residence of Jacob Hewlett, a mining and transport baron who’d ground the faces of the poor with inordinate success around the turn of the century. He’d left his Murray Hill townhouse at the corner of Madison and Thirty-eighth to the city, with the stipulation that it be maintained as an art museum under the direction and control of a foundation established by Hewlett for that purpose. While his own holdings had served as the core of the collections, paintings had been bought and sold over the years, and the foundation’s tax-exempt status had encouraged occasional gifts and bequests, such as the donation of the Mondrian oil by someone named Barlow.

“I checked the hours when we came in,” Carolyn was saying. “They’re open from nine-thirty to five-thirty during the week and on Saturdays. On Sunday they open at noon and close at five.”

“And they’re closed Monday?”

“Closed all day Monday and open until nine on Tuesdays.”

“Most museums keep hours about like that. I always know when it’s Monday because the impulse comes on me to go to a museum, and they’re all closed.”

“Uh-huh. If we’re planning to break in, we could do it either after hours or on Monday.”

“Either way’s impossible. They’ll have guards posted around the clock. And the alarm system’s a beaut. You can’t just cross a couple of wires and pat it on the head.”

“So what do we do? Snatch it off the wall and make a break for it?”

“Wouldn’t work. They’d bag us before we got to the first floor.”

“What does that leave?”

“Prayer and fasting.”

“Terrific. Who’s this guy? What’s it say, van Doesburg? He and Mondrian must have gone to two different schools together.”

We had sidled around to our left and were standing in front of a canvas by Theo van Doesburg. Like Mondrian’s work, his was all right angles and primary colors, but there was no mistaking one artist for the other. The van Doesburg canvas lacked the sense of space and balance that Mondrian had. How curious, I thought, that a man could go for months without standing in front of a single Mondrian canvas, and then he’d stand before two of them on successive days. All the more remarkable, it seemed to me, was the similarity of the Hewlett’s Mondrian to the one I’d seen hanging over Gordon Onderdonk’s fireplace. If memory served, they were about the same size and proportion, and must have been painted at about the same stage in the artist’s career. I was willing to believe that they’d look very different if one saw them side by side, but such a simultaneous viewing didn’t appear to be an option, and if someone had told me that the Onderdonk painting had been hustled downtown and stuck up on the Hewlett’s wall, I couldn’t have sworn he was wrong. Onderdonk’s painting was framed, of course, while this canvas was left unframed so as to show how the artist had continued his geometric design around the sides of the canvas. For all I knew Onderdonk’s painting had twice as many colored areas. It might be taller or shorter, wider or narrower. But-

But it still seemed oddly coincidental. Coincidences don’t have to be significant, of course. I’d picked up Carolyn at the Poodle Factory and we’d shared a cab to the Hewlett, and I hadn’t bothered reading our driver’s name on the posted hack license, but suppose I had and suppose it had been Turnquist? Then, when the attendant had greeted the ill-clad artist by name, we might have remarked on the coincidence of having met two Turnquists in half an hour. But so what?

Still-

We circled the room, pausing now and then in front of a painting, including several that left me cold and a Kandinsky I liked a lot. There was an Arp. Onderdonk had an Arp, too, but since we hadn’t been ordered to steal an Arp there was nothing particularly coincidental about it, or nothing remarkable about the coincidence, or-

“ Bern? Should I just plain forget about the cat?”

“How would you go about doing that?”

“Beats me. Do you really think they’ll do anything to Archie if we don’t steal the painting?”

“Why should they?”

“To prove they mean business. Isn’t that what kidnappers do?”

“I don’t know what kidnappers do. I think they kill the victim to prevent being identified, but how’s a Burmese cat going to identify them? But-”

“But who knows with crazy people? The thing is, they’re expecting us to do the impossible.”

“It’s not necessarily impossible,” I said. “Paintings walk out of museums all the time. In Italy museum theft is a whole industry, and even here you see something in the papers every couple of months. The Museum of Natural History seems to get hit every once in a while.”

“Then you think we can take it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then-”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I turned at the voice, and there was our artist friend, his ten cent lapel badge fastened to his thrift shop jacket, his yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. We were once again standing in front of Composition with Color, and Turnquist’s eyes gleamed as he looked at the painting. “You can’t beat old Piet,” he said. “Sonofabitch could paint. Something, huh?”

“Something,” I agreed.

“Most of this is crap. Detritus, refuse. In a word, you should pardon the expression, shit. My apologies, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn assured him.

“The museum is the dustbin of the history of Art. Sounds like a quotation, doesn’t it? I made it up myself.”

“It has a ring to it.”

“Dustbin’s English for garbage can. English English, I mean to say. But the rest of this stuff, this is worse than garbage. Dreck, as some of my best friends would say.”

“Er.”

“Just a handful of good painters this century. Mondrian, of course. Picasso, maybe five percent of the time, when he wasn’t cocking around. But five percent of Picasso is plenty, huh?”

“Er.”

“Who else? Pollock. Frank Roth. Trossman. Clyfford Still. Darragh Park. Rothko, before he got so far down he forgot to use color. And others, a handful of others. But most of this-”

“Well,” I said.

“I know what you want to say. Who’s this old fart running off at the mouth? His jacket don’t even match his pants and he’s making judgments left and right, telling what’s Art and what’s garbage. That’s what you’re thinking, ain’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t say it, you or this young lady. She’s a lady and you’re a gentleman and you wouldn’t say such a thing. Me, I’m an artist. An artist can say anything. It’s an edge the artist has over the gentleman. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Uh.”

“And you’re right to think it. I’m nobody, that’s who I am. Just a painter nobody ever heard of. All the same, I saw you looking at a real painter’s work, I saw you keep coming back to this painting, and right off I knew you could tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit, if you’ll pardon me once again, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn said.

“But it puts my back up to see people give serious attention to most of this crap. You know how you’ll read in the paper that a man takes a knife or a bottle of acid and attacks some famous painting? And you probably say to yourself what everybody else says. ‘How could anybody do such a thing? He’d have to be a madman.’ The person who does it is always an artist, and in the papers they call him a ‘self-styled’ artist. Meaning he says he’s an artist but you know and I know the poor fellow’s got shit for brains. Once again, dear madam-”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ll say this,” he said, “and then I’ll leave you good people alone. It is a mark not of madness but of sanity to destroy bad art when it is placed on display in the nation’s temples. I’ll say more than that. The destruction of bad art is in itself a work of art. Bakunin said the urge to destroy is a creative urge. To slash some of these canvases-” He took a deep breath, expelled it all in a sigh. “But I’m a talker, not a destroyer. I’m an artist, I paint my paintings and I live my life. I saw the interest you were taking in my favorite painting and it provoked this outburst. Am I forgiven?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Carolyn told him.

“You’re kind people, gracious people. And if I’ve given you something to think about, why, then you haven’t wasted the day and neither have I.”