Theft: A Love Story

29

The Plaintiff had a horse at one time, a very flighty Arab named Pandora and by the time Pandora had ripped her fetlock on barbed wire and then, three weeks later, thrown the Plaintiff, thus breaking six bones in her so-called art hand, I was pretty much retired from horses.

That is to say, I have not the least interest in the horse Olivier Leibovitz kept on West 89th Street and I never enquired as to exactly what sort of animal it was, only being sure—because Marlene told me—that it was absolutely not one of those Claremont Riding Academy horses from the same address, notorious bitter nags which had the habit of crushing their riders on the walls of the transverse on 102nd Street. The riding-school horses were as close as Marlene got to Manhattan equestrian life, and her own feeling for horses was not really the point. For she loved Olivier and she loved Olivier on a horse, how he looked and smelled, and most importantly, how happy it made him.

Contrary to what I thought when she walked across my paddock carrying her alimony-whore shoes, Marlene was extraordinarily kind to those she loved and it was completely typical of her to go out of her way to give me pleasure by arranging the ad in Studio International or to butter raisin toast for Hugh or read aloud from The Magic Pudding and, years earlier, when Olivier's divorce left him so broke that he had to sell his horse, it was a case of fuck the court and all of 60 Center Street.

He would get it back, the horse, she would make sure of it.

At first Olivier's stable expenses had been covered by his pathetic efforts on the Lazy Lucy, that is, licensing small slices of three Leibovitzes. These were not works chosen with any care, just scratched transparencies that had been, left to float around in the company of paper clips and pencils and bits of art-related correspondence. Most of the latter was in French, a language he spoke fluently but which he affected to be unable to read.

At the time when Marlene first surprised him he had imagined he was hiding his tiny licensing profits from his wife's lawyers, a fantasy of course—his possession of the Leibovitz droit moral was no secret and it was naturally deemed to be part of Marital Assets and he was forced to cough up every cent he made from his tacky souvenirs. His only luck, which was not clear until later, was that the lawyers, being philistines and ignoramuses, valued the droit moral in terms of the profit he had previously gained from it: i. e. sweet fuck all.

By the spring of 1975, which was when he lost the horse and stable, Marlene was his secretary and had therefore been granted the care of that rat's nest of paper he referred to only as "the French Material".

She asked him, "What shall I do with it?"

He looked into the grey metal cupboard with its bulging files,, its ribbon-bound sheaves, its single orphaned pages, yellowed, browned, creased. He shrugged, a Gallic gesture, so it seemed to Marlene Cook.

"Is it about the art?"

"Yes." He startled, smiling. "Absolutely! About the art."

He could have had no clue that she was already half drunk on her learning curve. She would have been far too shy to tell him that she had read Berenson and Vasari, Mars-den Hartley and Gertrude Stein, but at the time she asked, Is it about the art? she knew the importance of such correspondents as Vuillard and Van Dongen, and she had eaten enough hot dogs during lunch at Phillips and Sotheby's to wonder if this rat's-nest archive might not cover his horse and stable costs entirely. He had no idea how she loved him. She thought herself below him in every way, in grace, in beauty, in sophistication. He hadn't noticed that she was his angel, repairing him, dressing all his bleeding wounds.

So she turned to raging old Milton Hesse who was, for his part, smitten with her. It is easy enough to decide that she was using the poor bugger but I doubt either of them would have seen it quite like that. She knew that Hesse despised Olivier, and knew she could not change his mind, but she shopped for Milt at Gristede's. She made him tuna casserole with a recipe from the Australian Women's Weekly. And she paid him, always, at least five dollars every week.

"Bring me the letters then," said Milton. "Let's see what you got."

"I'll have to ask permission."

"Permission! Bullshit. Just borrow them, doll-face. No sense making a fuss if they're worth nothing."

So she schlepped two heavy boxes down to the F train and sat with the weight cutting into her thighs all the way to Delancey and it was in his freezing studio, while she made lentil soup, that the old man read stuff that made his eyes bulge more than usual.

For at that moment, in 1975—this was what the most recent letters showed—the following paintings were on the market, or would be once Olivier Leibovitz was nice enough to authenticate them: Le Poulet 240V (1913), Le Dejeuner avec les travailleurs (1912), Nature morte (1915). The total value of these works today would be at least ten million US dollars. You will find them in all the books now, but at that time they had no official existence, having been omitted from Dominique's shoddy catalogue raisonne and traded and stored in God knows what shady circumstances.

"The Dauphin never replied to these letters?" asked Milton who, for the first time, had abandoned his waterfront-bull persona and, with his tufts of eyebrows, and his rimless glasses on his forehead, was more like an old Jewish scholar, very foreign, very far away from anything Marlene could even half imagine.

"How could he have?" she asked. "He really knows nothing about art. He doesn't care to."

"It takes no knowledge, toots, just his own birth certificate."

"He can't."

"Baby," said Hesse, "it is not so complicated. If you can recognise Maman's wet and sloppy brushstrokes, which you can, I know, you simply say, ah—this one stinks. No-one likes to think this, but it really does not help to go to Cooper Union.

You could do it now, today. It's not rocket science."

Marlene Cook, hearing her future described, did not understand she was no longer a dunce. "Would you do it, Milton? You could advise him."

"No."

"Please."

He folded his spectacles and snapped them inside a metal case.

"It is not the relationship I have with Jacques."

She liked him too much to think him pompous. She smiled at him and at first this produced no more than his assistance in repacking the cardboard boxes, but then he opened up his spectacle case once more.

"Here, read this," he relented, "from Monsieur L'Huillier in the sixteenth arrondissement."

"You know I can't read French."

"Then I'll translate. If Mr. Olivier Leibovitz can introduce Mr.

L'Huillier to a buyer for a Leibovitz presently owned by Mr.

L'Huillier, then Mr. L'Huillier will split commission with Mr.

Leibovitz."

"But Olivier does not know people who buy art."

"Of course. He's an idiot, forgive me. But he does not need to know anyone. Listen, baby. This is code. L'Huillier already has the buyer. But he needs—listen to me—he needs the painting authenticated. He's saying, just confirm that this is a Leibovitz and I'll give you a pile of cash, in a leather suitcase if you like.

This is what art has been reduced to. These are the most larcenous people on earth. In France this is even recognised in law, that dealers are the lowest of the low, beyond leniency."

"Oh my God," said Marlene Cook. "I've been a perfect dill."

"So do you understand?" asked Milton who, in laying his broad square hand across her own, was putting quite another, much sadder, question.