Theft: A Love Story

9

The Art Police are cops, that's all, and they will come and call on you as unexpectedly as Jehovah's Witnesses and for reasons just as stupid. However, on that soupy day in Bellingen I was ignorant of the breed and I mistakenly assumed my visitors were typical.

There was an older man of fifty or so, tall and heavily built like an old-style walloper but with an odd almost lackadaisical gait and a big square head always turning this way and that as if he were trying to spot the Eiffel bloody Tower. He wore a ratty Fair Isle sweater and smoked a stinky pipe from which he continually blew globs of tar and spit onto my pasture. This Detective Ewbank exuded the sloppy good-naturedness of a packing clerk two weeks from retirement whilst, at the same time, having some weird aerial connection with his brainylooking partner.

The younger man, Amberstreet, was not much more than twenty-five but he had already carved on his face a deep set of V-shaped creases which pointed like diagram arrows towards his pale grey eyes. Barry, his mate called him; his mouth was thin, and downturned, and perhaps because he was so stooped and spectacularly unmuscled, he made me imagine that the Art Police must be a very fucking unusual caste indeed, and in the same way that Jean-Paul's beautiful wife might suggest hidden qualities in her very plain husband, Amberstreet's weird bird-like looks gave a value to his mate's pipe and Fair Isle sweater that could not have been more inflated, not even by Sotheby's.

These cops caught me flat-footed, why wouldn't they? They didn't say they were from Sydney. (I thought they had come from Bellingen, for Hugh. Instead they wished to inspect my work and I took them over to the shed to see it. Yes, I had obtained the paint and canvas by what you might call false pretences, so what would they do? Hang me? Yes, I had sold about a ton of fertiliser to Mrs. Dyson and Jean-Paul, I guessed, had got upset. The rich are like that, overcome by panic attacks at the thought they are possibly being used. God, what sort of animal would do that to them?

I walked Ewbank and Amberstreet to the shed as if they were Macquarie Street collectors on a studio visit, and I must say Ewbank was very bloody amiable at that stage, even if he did inform me that I had a record or, as he put it, was "known to the police". Otherwise he was full of questions about the veggie garden and the Brahmin cattle Dozy had agisted on my roadside paddock. Amberstreet, meanwhile, was very quiet, but even this was in no way threatening. As Ewbank pointed out to me, his mate seemed mostly concerned about the danger of getting cow shit on his new Doc Martens.

The shed was a shed, the back third a loading ramp filled with Mrs. Dyson's hay bales, the front two-thirds earth-floored. Here I parked the tractor, stored the chainsaw, the brush cutter and what garden tools I had not left out in the weather. Here too I had rolled my nine canvases around long cardboard tubes. They leaned neatly against the wall, just like the rake, the shovel, the scythe and so on. Of course this was not ideal, but I obviously could not have them in the studio shouting in my ear.

"OK, Michael," said Detective Ewbank, "it's time for show-andtell."

I made some joke—forget it now—about a warrant being required.

"It's in the car," said Amberstreet. "We'll show you later."

This gave me a jolt, but I got over it. What was the worst thing that could happen? I'd be charged with making art on Jean- Paul's credit? Fuck him. The patience of the rich is easily strained. But I remained an obedient little citizen and I rolled out the first painting, 7, the Speaker, Ruled As King Over Israel, laying it on a springy three-inch cushion of improved pasture.

So clock this: eight miles out of Bellingen, NSW, me in my shorts and bare feet and Amberstreet like some crane or heron with his short upper body and his long thin legs and cinched-in belt and the whole of his skeleton throwing all its force into his eyes as he looked down at my canvas. The work had a sort of nailed-down fuck-you quality with all the process showing. I had—I hope I told you—already begun to glue down rectangles of canvas onto the broader field. Even in the warm misty sunlight it looked very bloody good indeed.

The police said nothing throughout the first inspection, not even when we found the nest of baby mice living in the centre of a roll. To tell the truth, I was almost happy. I could not go to gaol, and the work looked so good, in no way diminished by the smell of mice, or the waving light brown watermark that now ran, like the hamon on a Japanese sword, along the bottom edge.

Amberstreet wished to view 7, the Speaker again. And I was an artist. Why wouldn't I wish to show? I watched the strange little critic, arms folded, shoulders hunched. Ewbank, for his part, began to whistle "Danny Boy".

"What would this be worth?" Amberstreet asked me. "On the market, at auction."

I assumed he was trying to think how to recoup the cost of Raphaelson's one-pound tubes, so I told him it was worth exactly nothing at this moment. I was out of fashion. Couldn't sell a painting to save my bloody life.

"Yes, I understand that, Michael. Five years ago, you might have got thirty-five thousand dollars for this."

"No."

"There's no point in lying, Michael. I know what you used to sell for. The thing is now, you're in free fall. Isn't that so?"

I shrugged.

"I'll give you five," he said suddenly.

"Oh, Jesus," said Ewbank, and walked over to inspect the concrete pigsties, whacking at them with a length of irrigation pipe. "Jesus," he cried, "Joseph and Mary."

"No tax," said Amberstreet and I saw his eyes all glistening. "All cash."

Ewbank, meanwhile, was pissing himself with laughter, shoving heaps of black shag into his fat pipe. His younger colleague's face, by contrast, was creased like tissue paper protecting the bright stones of his eyes.

I won't say I wasn't seriously tempted.

Ewbank had wandered back, puffing on his pipe. He had an extraordinary way of doing this, making his big black eyebrows shoot up every time he took a puff, the result being that he looked to be in a state of active astonishment.

"I couldn't give it all at once. I'd pay you over a year."

If it had been a lump sum, I might have said yes, but it was not enough to save me so I turned him down. Even now I don't know if what happened next was connected to my refusal, but I don't think so. It was more as if we'd had a little pleasant break and now we must return to work.

Amberstreet frowned and nodded. "I understand," he said. He then turned to his partner: "You got the tape, Raymond?"

Ewbank withdrew from his pocket a dirty-looking handkerchief and then a very snazzy little tape measure of a type I had never seen before, as if he might be a surgeon with instruments designed in Tokyo for a task so specialised it had no English name. My balls tightened at the sight of it.

"Measure the addition," Amberstreet said, an ugly word for the rectangle which bore the single word "GOD" with all its gooseturd grey and phthalo green smudged and shifted in the battle with the resistant "O".

I watched Ewbank measure it, like you watch your own car crash happen.

"Thirty by twenty and one-half inches," he announced.

Amberstreet gave me a cherubic little smirk.

"Oh, Michael!" he said to me, taking in his belt one more notch.

I suddenly understood he was a scary little shit.

"What?"

"Thirty by twenty and a half," he said. "Oh, Michael!"

"What?"

"Not familiar?"

"No."

"The same dimensions as Mr. Boylan's Leibovitz."

I thought, What is this? Kabala? Numerology?

"Michael, I thought you were a clever man. We know the exact dimensions. They're in the catalogue raisonne."

"What would it matter if it was the same dimensions?"

"It would matter," said Amberstreet, "because as you know Mr.

Boylan's home was burgled and a work by Jacques Leibovitz was stolen."

"Bullshit. When?"

Hearing this Ewbank gave a mighty big suck in of his pipe so his eyebrows disappeared into his hair.

"Oh." Amberstreet smiled incredulously "You didn't know!"

"Don't be so bloody sarcastic. How could I know?"

"Like you know John Lennon's dead," said Ewbank.

"You could try any newspaper," suggested Amberstreet. "You could turn on the radio."

"John Lennon's not dead you dick."

"Don't change the subject, Michael. We're here to investigate a burglary."

It was only then, as we stood staring down at my painting, that I realised something very serious was going on.

"Someone pinched his Leibovitz?"

"Three weeks ago, Michael. You are the only one who knew it was there."

"He never showed it to me. Ask him," I said, but I was seeing the hateful look on Dozy's face as he passed me in the fog.

"But you knew he had it. You knew he was going away, down to Sydney for the night."

"He's always going down to Sydney. You really think I'm stupid enough to glue a two-million-dollar painting to my canvas and then cover it with paint? Is that your point? It's very easy to see you're not a bloody artist."

"We're not saying you've got it under there. We're saying we need to remove the work for X-raying and IR spectography."

"You bugger. You just want to nick my fucking canvas."

"Calm down, pal," said Ewbank. "You'll get a proper receipt.

You can write the description yourself."

"When would I get it back?"

The older man's eyebrows shot up alarmingly.

"That would depend," said Amberstreet.

"On what?"

"If we have to keep it for the trial."

I really did not know what was going on. A certain part of me thought the fucks were robbing me. Another part of me was thinking I was in very serious shit. I don't know which was the better or the worse, and in the end, after I had spent three hours making a crate, a time they used to photograph my pry bar and my other tools, and after I had personally helped them load it in their wagon, they showed me the huge press file on the Leibovitz theft. I read the front-page headlines by the light of their headlights, still clueless about John Lennon, but relieved to understand that I, at least, was not being robbed.