Theft: A Love Story

15

I had been an almost decent man the night Marlene and I had talked in Bellingen. But at the disgusting Stewart Masters show I was snickered, three sheets to the wind, and everything I cast my eyes on seemed false, meretricious, nasty as sequins on a dunny door, but then, there she was—narrowed eyes, swollen lips, and those twin honey-coloured wells made by her clavicle. She smiled and her eyes slitted as she offered me her hand and I thought, You stole that fucking Leibovitz.

And Hugh—Goddamn—he bloody winked at me.

Oh, I thought, fuck you. You think it is all hubba-hubba?

But he was folding up his chair for travel, sending his glass sliding, slamming, shattering against the gallery wall.

Marlene Leibovitz stood to dodge the flying shards.

"Let's go!" My brother kicked the glass beneath a desk. "The Buchanan," he said. "Bo-bo-lula." I abbreviate to spare you, don't be sorry, there is no translation except that when he said "the Buchanan" he meant "the Balkan", a restaurant on Oxford Street where he intended that I entertain Mrs. Leibovitz while he, the great fat carnivore, filled his face with grilled Croatian meats. And you know what? Five minutes later the three of us were in the ute, thundering along Oxford Street, Hugh's chair crashing around the tray behind and the art thief—for that is how I knew her then—-light and silky as a wish beside me. My passengers were both talking, Hugh about the need to pound the flesh of unborn calves with a wooden hammer, over which brutality I clearly heard Marlene Leibovitz tell him she was having trouble with the police. This interesting news cut straight through the pinot noir but then I had to run a red light beside Ormond Street, and by the time we were nosing up to Taylor Square I was beginning to wonder—my fellow drunks will understand—if I had imagined it.

I would have asked her about the police but then I had to park and, as I wound down the windows to permit the junkies easy access, she told me anyway. The Art Police, she claimed, had burgled her apartment. "But you know all this," she said.

"I don't think so. No."

She frowned. "They put out an Interpol alert for him."

"For who?"

"For Olivier, my husband. He ran away. Don't you read the papers?"

My brother was now stomping off" through the crowds with his chair swinging so dangerously there was no time to answer.

"You do remember," she insisted, hurrying behind.

I remained distracted by my brother and she insisted, "We talked about my husband."

"In a sort of way."

"No." She took my sleeve. "In a very specific way. His father's work makes him ill. You do remember that?"

I did not know what to say or where to look and I certainly did not enquire how someone might be made ill by a great painting.

"The police are persecuting the only man on earth who can't have done it."

Why did she want to tell me quite so much?

"He is physically incapable of touching a Leibovitz."

I shrugged.

She folded her arms and surveyed the traffic and we maintained a stiff silence until our table was ready and Hugh had been permitted to unfold his chair. Watching him, Marlene Leibovitz's eyes were surprisingly soft, and when she smiled—not much, a tiny stiffening of the muscle in her upper lip—I thought for a mistaken moment that she was going to cry.

"You think I did it don't you?" she demanded, breaking a bread roll and pushing it, rather indelicately, into her mouth. "You said to me, 'the missing Leibovitz'. That was really rude, Michael."

"Your name is Marlene Leibovitz. You've been missing."

"Sure," she said.

A peach-pink dress lay like a silk sheet across her lovely brown body, and I could not hold her watery gaze. "I'm sorry if I was rude," I said. "The whole thing really fucked my work. I lost my studio for one thing."

"All right," she said calmly. "If you want to know the truth, it was Honore Le Noel who stole Mr. Boylan's painting."

But then the waiter was there and Hugh had particular demands and I saw Marlene quietly blow her nose.

"Now listen," she said as the wine was poured.

And she told me again about Honore Le Noel being found in bed with Roger Martin. Dominique had thrown him out of 157 rue de Rennes, which he accepted readily enough, not least because he had a far nicer place in Neuilly. But when she demanded he resign from the Comite, he would not budge.

Until that moment Dominique thought the Comite was hers.

She had assembled it after all. Yet when she demanded the Comite dismiss him she was told that M. Le Noel was the great Leibovitz expert and it would damage everyone to do so preposterous a thing. In the end she stacked the Comite with her own allies, but that took years of scheming and Honore had all the time in the world to completely fuck her over.

In 1966 Dominique, being short of cash as usual, brought a lateperiod masterwork into the light. Ampere was its title. She put it up for auction in New York, but Sotheby's, know ing a little of her reputation, wanted the Comite to endorse it and so the painting was crated up and shipped back to Paris.

This must have been what Honore was waiting for—and who knows, maybe he had been whispering to Sotheby's—and he now convinced enough members of the Comite that this was a canvas that Dominique had tampered with. This happened to be completely untrue, but he was the expert, and he was obviously a bad man to have as your enemy for he now managed to make the Comite doubt its own good sense. This didn't happen in a single night, but over weeks or months. At the height of the dispute Dominique walked into La Coupole and threw a jug of water over Honore, but that weakened her cause still further and the Comite refused to endorse Ampere. Once that had happened, droit moral or no, Sotheby's would not take it for its show.

"Having declared the work a fake," Marlene told me, "the Comite had Ampere destroyed."

"What?"

"They burned it."

"You're shitting me."

"This is France. You've got to believe me. It's the law. That's why you never want to let a painting near these comites. They did it with police supervision. Later, of course, it all came out.

They'd incinerated a masterpiece. And it was a huge scandal."

"They burned a Leibovitz!"

"I could cry," she said.

"So why would he steal Dozy's painting?"

She chewed more bread and nodded vigorously. "It will turn up in France. You watch."

"How? Why?"

"He is rich and he has nothing else to do. He's like some insane deposed king who imagines he can get his throne back. He's obsessed with 'the Leibovitz Case'. He sat next to Boylan on an airplane, both in first class, they got to chatting.

Boylan has a Leibovitz. Honore is a leech that has found a vein.

Next thing you know he has travelled to Australia. He removed paint samples, and he is not someone famous for his manual skills. He returned to Paris and wrote a condition report on the painting. It's an insane document. He claims it's a middle-period painting dressed up to look like a valuable early period. How does he know? What right does he have? Because he feels he owns Leibovitz. Because he's an expert. He claims to have Xrays to prove his case, but no-one has ever seen them. Believe me, Michael, I've got nothing to gain from this. I could never bear to hurt a work of art. Please don't think badly of me. I really cannot bear it." At this moment, to my surprise, Hugh placed his greasy hand on Marlene's naked arm and, as I noticed the fat spill of tears caught briefly in the lower lashes of her left eye, I too took her hand. What then are we to do with my emotions? Should they be burned or nailed up on the wall?