Theft: A Love Story

32

Marlene said, You must be over the moon with your success.

I said it was a damn good feeling. It was a dirty lie, but it is completely unacceptable to tell the truth—that it is very bloody unpleasant to have all your paintings hoovered out of you by strangers. If it had been a museum, OK, that's completely different. But the punter was someone I understood to be a corporate Japanese. Buy the Empire State Building, you're welcome. Take every Van Gogh you want. Have a Leibovitz, why would I care? But what the fuck was this Mr. Mauri going to do with J, the Speaker? The so-called Plaintiff had all the "precommencement" paintings and now this bugger had the rest. Was there a faster way to be erased from history?

All of these nasty ungrateful thoughts I kept buttoned up for at least twelve hours, until, that is, we were sitting on tatami beside forty Japanese men drinking beer and eating raw fish for their breakfast.

When I said the unsayable, Marlene leaned across to touch my butcher hands, and held each ugly sausage finger as if it had been, individually, miraculously, responsible for The Last Supper.

And then, without for a second interrupting this particular series of caresses, she very quietly drew my attention to the benefits of my situation. For instance, she revealed that she had authenticated a Leibovitz for Henry Beigel, a South African millionaire and had learned, in the process, that the fucker had squirrelled away a hundred and twenty-six works by the American painter Jules Olitski. Beigel was a total bastard, she said, but he had an eye, she said, a real eye, and he was slowly driving up Olitski's prices and he, like Mr. Mauri, had been known to buy a damn show.

So, she told me, her very long eyelashes delineated like pen strokes in the ever-present neon light, if you were Jules Olitski you would know your prices were protected and that your best work would end up in a good museum. You would have your future underwritten, not by some flake like Jean-Paul but by an educated, greedy art collector, no-one better.

Fine, yes, Henry Beigel, but Mr. Mauri, who the fuck was he? I did not mean to be abrasive. I was happy, of course I was bloody happy. I was grateful. I loved her, more than the eyelashes and cheeks, her tenderness, her generosity, and—even if this sounds weird—her guile. I was at home with her, with her light, slight body, her bottomless eyes.

That morning, after breakfast, we both returned to the scene of the crime at Mitsukoshi. I expected I would feel better when we entered. We both expected it, I think. But instead my work seemed lost and alien, almost meaningless, like wretched polar bears in a northern Queensland zoo. What did these punters think? I asked a fellow with a blond streak on his head, but that was later, after lunch. I had been drinking, and Marlene shooshed me and we went out in the streets and walked a little, not stopping at the bars.

The faxed invitation from Mr. Mauri was waiting at the so-called Ryokan. It consisted of two pages, the first a delicately drawn map, the second a very formal letter that read like a comic translation from The Government Inspector.

I decided that I would be a gentleman and stay away from Mr.

Mauri.

To this very generous offer, Marlene made no response, not until we were inside our tiny room. Even there she took her time, removed her sandals, and squatted, quietly before the little table.

"All right, Butcher," she said, "time to cut the crap."

She fixed me with her snake eyes.

"First," she said, "this man is a very important collector. Second, I do a lot of business with him. Third, you are not going to disgrace me now."

In my ugly early life this would have been the starting point for a fearsome row which might have run into the early hours of the following day and ended with me alone in some Ukrainian bar at dawn. To Marlene Leibovitz I said, "OK".

"OK what?"

"OK, I won't disgrace you."

I was embarrassed, I suppose, to give in without a fight. I could easily have worked myself into a fury, but when I slipped into my Armani jacket she reached up to tie my tie.

"Oh," she said, "I do love you."

With Marlene I was always in a foreign country.

Of course everyone but me knows about Roppongi. It was here apparently, in High Touch Town, that Mr. Mauri's father had the famous bar where American spies and gangsters and visiting movie stars would hang out all night long. It was Mr. Mauri's father who claimed to have turned the pinball machine Japanese, by setting it on end and—having made sure a lot could fit into a small space—devised a sly system, involving soft stuffed toys and very nicking narrow alleyways, where it became pachinko, a gambling machine. Some dispute this, but no-one argues that Mauri San was both a thug and a very serious art collector, well before the war. The son was filial to a fault. So to enter Mauri's office you had to walk through the ancestral shrine, the bar, the chalkboard menu featuring shitty pizza and Italian meatballs, leftovers from the cowboy years of occupation.

At that hour, before the famous lighting did its trick, Mauri's Blue Bar had all the fusty dullness of a theatre with the house lights on, and it really took a lot of imagination to understand how anyone would pay twenty dollars for a martini in this joint.

This was where my art had always been headed for, how depressing. We entered the lift and ascended to the eighteenth floor where young Mr. Mauri ran something called the Dai Ichi Corporation, dai ichi meaning "number one".

The receptionist was a very dour long-chinned lady with a helmet cut and dull grey suit, but she did not punish us for long and soon we were brought, through an anteroom, to my new collector's office which was as dull as ply and aluminum can be made to be. Nothing suggested taste or sensitivity at all, and I was taken aback to find myself treated with such veneration by Mr. Mauri who appeared to be an earnest, even studious man of thirty.

Our interview was conducted on either side of his big empty desk on which there was a folder containing not only my press file, but a considerable number of transparencies and these my new patron or owner occasionally held up to his desk lamp, speaking about each at some length. I could understand almost everything he said, and often recognised the sources of his sentences, some praise for me from Herbert Read (1973), a little from Elwyn Lynn (1973) and Robert Hughes (1971). I sat, thinking about the Japanese education system, the benefits of learning things by rote. I looked to Marlene but she would not catch my eye. She sat on the edge of her chintz-covered chair, her hands upon her lap, nodding from time to time.

Once more I was in a room watching the dark come down in Tokyo, the sky outside the uncurtained window filled with pink and green neon advertising bars and go-go and Bangkok Massage. Mr. Mauri finished with his dissertation and led us into another room, much more comfortable, with overstuffed armchairs and a number of early twentieth-century paintings— there was a very plausible Matisse.

One of these, reflecting so much quartz halogen from its shrieking gold perimeter, was Tour en bois, quatre. If I experienced a lurch of disappointment, it was not because this was the study, but because, at this momentous meeting, Leibovitz appeared to be a smaller talent than the one I knew when I was a jerk-off teenager with no more data than a black-and-white sixty-five-screen reproduction. I had imagined something ethereal, transporting, mythic, colours glowing with layers of obsessive underpainting.

"My goodness," said Marlene and she was straight at the canvas without any Japanese preliminaries. Mauri was beside her too, a pig at trough, I thought, his gold-rimmed spectacles twirling like a spastic top in the hand behind his back.

"Oh my God," she said.

Is that all there is? I thought. The canvas was almost homely, a chip missing from the blouse, a slight grubbiness on the surface of the cadmium yellow. All this—little things, easily repaired in restoration—was exaggerated by the gaudy criminal frame, and it took a real act of will to escape the pin-up of my youth, to actually see what was in front of me, the lovely witty squirrelly brushwork of the lathe, and, more generally, the brave decisions the old goat had made at a time when no-one, certainly not Picasso, had entered this particular arena of no synthetic cubism.

Here, in the products of the lathe, in cylinders and cones, there was a clear straight line from Cezanne to Leibovitz.

"May I?" Marlene asked.

She lifted the work off the wall and turned it over. "Look," she said to me. Mr. Mauri bowed me forward so I could see the shadowy secret discoloured canvas, the tracks of staples from its loans and travels, the Japanese characters stamped upon the stretcher which, I guessed, marked its appearance at Mitsukoshi in 1913. There was also a desiccated Stalk-eyed Signal Fly I might not have noticed if I had not spent so many nights drawing the enemies of art. This little bugger had freshly hatched, and found itself behind a Leibovitz, and here it had been caught and died but somehow never eaten. This sad little death would continue in my mind for days.

"Perhaps a problem," said Mr. Mauri, "I do not wish to sell it in Japan." He smiled painfully. "Japanese people don't like so much."

"Of course."

"St. Louis perhaps?"

I was slow to realise what was happening in front of me. Mauri was asking her to sell this work. I looked to her but she would not catch my eye.

"The first thing," she told him, cool as ice, "would be to get it to New York."

"Not Freeport?"

"No need."

Mr. Mauri paused and looked at the painting. "Good," he said.

He bowed. Marlene bowed. I bowed.

And that, I realised, was it. It was done. Presumably there would be paperwork, a signature from the owner of the droit moral, but the painting was now all but authenticated. That much I got completely.

I had expected Mr. Mauri would wish to discuss his clever strategies for driving up the price of my nine paintings, but nothing like that occurred and a few minutes later we had passed through the famous Blue Bar and were on the streets of High Touch Town amongst the jostling crowds. Marlene took my hand and swung it high, literally skipping down the steep stairs to the Oedo line.

"What happened?" I asked as we fed our coins into the ticket dispenser.

"Oh baby, baby," she said, "I am so happy. I love you so."

She turned to me and lifted her chin and her eyes were glowing, clear as water on the subway stairs.

"I'm onto you."

"Sure you are," she said and we kissed there, before the turnstiles, in front of the white-gloved ticket collector, beside the flood of High Touch girls and gaijin hopefuls who pushed around us, buffeting us, not knowing what worlds they were connecting to, threads of history joining us to New York, Bellingen and Hugh, always Hugh, sitting on the footpath with his dripping pram.