Theft: A Love Story

37

There were only two bars in SoHo in those years. One of them was Kitty's and the other was Fanelli's, and it was here that a swollen-eyed Marlene found me thirty minutes later. She arrived at my back-room table, light as a moth, carrying two Rolling Rocks, one of which she placed circumspectly before me.

"I love you," she said. "You have no idea how much."

Being filled with raw emotion, I did not trust myself to speak.

She slid onto the opposite bench, raising her bottle to her lips.

"But you can't love me unless you know what it is you've got yourself involved with."

As this was exactly what I had been thinking I lifted my beer and drank.

"So," she placed her own beer, carefully, on the tabletop. "I'm going to tell you."

She paused.

"You know, when you saw me first... in those ridiculous shoes that got you so excited."

"I hated the shoes."

"Yes, but don't hate me. That would be unbearable. Don't worry about Hugh. I'll look after Hugh."

I snorted at this, but I must tell you, it touched me. No-one had even lied to me about this sort of thing before.

"Olivier authenticated Dozy Boylan's painting," she said finally.

"I had been away. By the time I was back in Australia he had done it. Jesus! So dumb. Boylan was a friend of a client of Olivier's and Olivier was too embarrassed to admit he didn't know a rat's arse about his father's work."

"It's a famous painting. Where's the risk?"

"If he had looked past his nose he would have discovered it had been deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art. In other words, dumped."

"I know what it means, baby."

"I know you know, but shouldn't that have been a red flag? Why would they have dumped it? Even Olivier should have thought of this."

"But you said it's fine. It's almost the first thing you ever said to me. 'The good thing is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real.'"

"Shoosh. Listen." She took ahold of both my hands and lifted them to her lips. "Listen to me, Michael. I'm telling you the truth."

"His Leibovitz is not real? Is that it?"

"In my opinion? It was an unfinished postwar canvas that Dominique and Honore removed the night the old goat died."

"Fuck, Marlene!"

"Shoosh. Calm down. This was not a valuable painting, but they doctored it. They dated it 1913. Then it was a valuable painting.

MoMA snapped it up as soon as it came on the market in 1956.

It came straight from the estate. It had a perfect provenance and it was commonly reproduced. But it was a fixer-upper. Honore, of course, knew exactly how much and in what way it had been tampered with. He didn't need an X-ray. He probably watched Dominique do it."

"But you found the paint receipts in the archive? Oh, shit. You printed the receipt yourself?"

"Baby, please don't hate me. I really wasn't always a crook. We should have just taken back the Boylan canvas, but who would have loaned us the one and a half million US dollars we would have had to pay? No-one."

"So you faked a receipt for titanium white."

"That was just plugging a leak with chewing gum. For about two days the painting was legit again. But before too long there would be a real X-ray and then we would be, excuse me, totally racked."

So now I understood. "It was insured. You arranged to have it stolen."

Her eyes were a little puffy and the light from Prince Street was soft: and blue. For all the time she had told the story she had seemed dejected and I was therefore slow to spot the shadow of a smile which was now showing in the corner of her mouth.

"You personally stole it."

"Well, Olivier was not going to do it."

"You walked a mile through the bush at night?" In New York it had begun to rain, great fat drops which struck Fanelli's window and cast dance-floor shadows on that lovely rather lonely face as she explained, checking my reaction constantly, how she had paid cash for a pair of nipple-tipped gardening gloves, a set of screwdrivers, carpet knife, wire cutters, wood chisel, nail pullers, a flashlight, a roll of duct tape and a Wonder Bar. She lived for two days in a Grafton motel and when she knew Dozy had left for Sydney she drove along those lonely back roads to the Promised Land. The rental she parked on an abandoned logging road and from here she walked along a ridgeline through scrubby country, and although she had some difficulty locating the pole, she climbed it easily and disconnected both power and telephone.

"How did you know how to do all that?" She shrugged her left shoulder. "Research." By the time she arrived at Dozy's front door the night was a shower of crystalline stars in a velvet sky.

Working with no more than moon and starlight, she used the Wonder Bar to remove the mouldings on the glass panes in the door. This was something I remembered from the press report, the local detectives saying the robber had been a "neatness freak". Marlene had left the mouldings tidily stacked on top of the dishwasher.

Dozy had already shown her exactly where the painting was and how it was secured. Now she used a bolt cutter to sever the cable, and carefully removed the frame which had always offended her. She covered the painting with a number of pillowcases, wrapped the entire thing with duct tape, and walked up through the bush.

"What then?"

Her lowered eyes were suddenly wide and hard. "Do you still want to have anything to do with me, baby? That is really the question."

I should have been scared, but I wasn't. "I'll have to hear the whole story."

She raised an eyebrow. "You want a written confession?"

"The whole story."

"Oh, really. Indeed," she said, a little rattled.

"Do you remember, when you first came to my place and you saw what I was working on?"

"I've never lied about your work. Never. Ever."

"I don't mean the paintings."

"Yes, you had some lovely drawings of insects."

"Flies, wasps, some butterflies."

"I remember thinking, Thank God, he can draw." She coloured.

"I was ahead of myself."

"Well, the Stalk-eyed Signal Fly, for instance..."

"Michael, you did tell me this before. It's called Borobodur. It's rare except that Boylan found it near his house."

"Borboroidini. That's the Wombat Fly."

"I know."

"When we were looking at Tour en bois, quatre in Mr. Mauri's office, there was a Stalk-eyed Signal Fly caught in a spiderweb on the back. That's a very local insect also."

It took her a moment, but when she got the point she seemed almost pleased.

"You're a very clever man." She smiled. I am.

"So, my sweetheart, tell me how I made it smaller?"

"You tell me."

Just then someone turned the light off in the bar, and she leaned across the wet laminated table and kissed me on the mouth.

"You figure it," she said.

Fanelli's was closing and we stumbled out, down along the slippery cobbles to the big dark loft. We said nothing much really, but when we made love that night it was as if we wished to tear ourselves apart, to death, devour. Hide inside the secret wonder of the other's skin.

The aircraft seat too narrow the roof too low but then Olivier gave me two more yellow pills and soon it was very nice to be above the clouds. My father never saw this sight. Not in all his life. Nor the Kings of England. No-one in the Holy Bible witnessed such a thing unless views are granted in the process of ASCENSION. Blue Bones could not have imagined me, his DISAPPOINTMENT, suspended above the earth, angels and cherubs all around, my heart and arteries clearly seen, being bounced through the heavens like a ping-pong ball inside a gumboot.

At night the eternal river of the sky, my soul like blotting paper dropped in ink. Olivier could not look out the window he said it reminded him that he was nothing. Then he said he wanted to be nothing. He said he only wanted Marlene. He didn't care she had burned down the Benalla High School. It had been a shock to discover but it made no difference to him now. He was all for burning down.

The waitress asked him would he like a drink. He said he was already at thirty-thousand feet. I had a beer.

Olivier smelled of perfume and talcum powder like a BABY'S BOTTOM. The waitresses had been ALL OVER HIM since our arrival and when his lovely white jacket passed between them I saw a slight silver shimmer, a creature flown out of the night to cling to the wall above a woman's bed.

He whispered to me that he did not care his wife had turned out to be a PSYCHOPATHIC LIAR but he wished she would not pity him. Why could she not be like a normal woman and dump him in the street?

He said Marlene either loved my brother or his work, who could ever tell which one? She was a romantic fool and had no idea of the bad character of artists.

I said I understood completely.

He said he understood completely from the day that he was born.

I said it was the same for me. Exactly. When he said his father was a selfish pig I reached to shake his hand.

The waitresses brought dinner on a tray and Olivier thought he might have just a CHOTA PEG which was only whisky in the end. I had a beer.

TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT BOG IN DON'T WAIT.

Olivier nibbled at his RABBIT FOOD but then got bored with it and arranged his bottles like checkers on the tray.

He asked did I want him to tell me his pills.

That was OK with me.

He praised TEMAZEPAM he said the ATIVAN was also good and would I like a GENERIC VALIUM. There was much more than this. These are the ones I knew the names of at the time but he must have had ADDERALL as well.

He took a CODIS tablet and one or two assorted capsules and then a sip of Tasmanian pinot noir saying the wine would POTENTIATE the pills by golly.

You must not think me a sot, old Hughie. See I am in agony. I love her but she is a terrible, terrible woman.

I did not know what to reply as Marlene was my friend and she and my brother had been ROOTING LIKE RABBITS with my full knowledge. I was an ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT for all I know. Many is the night I had to put my head beneath the pillow to block the noise.

Ask me how many women have I been to bed with, Olivier said.

He was like a film star with his red lips and curly black hair the skin of his eyelids was soft as a penis freshly bathed. I said ten.

That made him laugh. He patted my elbow and rumpled up my hair and said there was not one of them like his wife. Just the same it had been a RED FLAG to discover she had burned down the school. He had learned this in the most dreadful way, being told at dinner by a client of his advertising firm who knew only that Olivier's wife came from Benalla.

How old is she? asks the client.

Why twenty-three, says Olivier.

Then she must have been there when that Marlene Cook burned down the high school. What's your wife's name?

Geena Davis, said Olivier.

Like the movie star.

Same, exactly.

I will not easily forget the day I was declared too slow to return to Bacchus Marsh State School number twenty-eight. I would have burned them to the blessed ground if only I had had some damn good pills to stop me being afraid of punishment. God bless me, save me, I have been made good by cowardice nothing more.

Olivier said I might as well have another beer. I had the weight to soak it up, he said so. He asked me did I know Marlene was a thief. I said she was my friend.

At this he moaned, saying she was his friend too, God help him.

Soon he was saying the most frightful things and it took a while to understand he had switched the subject to his mother a very nasty woman. He was happy she was dead. He got a rash when he remembered her.

He was called away by the waitress and I thought he must be in trouble for his violent language but then he returned with airline socks which I must put on. Everyone must obey this rule. He MINISTERED UNTO ME, kneeling to remove my sandshoes and whiffy socks which he tied inside a plastic bag. He said it might be better if I LIMIT MY FLATULENCE to the rear of the plane where it was needed, and then we laughed a lot.

You should have been rich, old chum, he said. You could employ me to change your socks every day.

The waitress brought us each a brandy and put my socks and shoes in the locker overhead.

Olivier said he could have been rich easy enough but his mother was a thieving whore who stole everything from him and it made him sick to think of what she'd done. He would like to be rich and that would be perfect, to look after his horse, to ride like hell, he looked at me and smiled and I knew exactly what he meant—the blood and heart, everything pumping, happy, fearful, the human clock in the river of the day.

She has ruined me, he said. I thought he meant his mother.

Am I her pet dog, he continued, so I knew that was Marlene.

You see, that is exactly what I am, he said. She will fill my bowl and brush my coat. I would rather be put down.

I can ruin her, he said a moment later. That's the irony, old chap. I can destroy her. But what would be the bloody point, old man? If I ruined her she would not rub my ears.

I woke up in the sky above America with my mouth full of dust, scents of fancy gargle, shaving cream, female soap.

That's Los Angeles, he said.

This was my first sighting and I did not know what it could mean, but later I would see the swarms of tiny lights clustered through the night, the cities and highways of America, the beauty of white ants, termites devouring, mating signals glowing in their pulsing tails. Which prophet ever foretold such infestation?

Olivier tapped my knee and said, I am in a state old chap. He offered a pill packet and a sip of his water. He said that if he ate peanuts he would die, if he had oysters his throat would close, but if he did not have Marlene he might as well cut his own throat with a Stanley knife.

I returned his pills. He took one too.

He said, I've just decided I am not going to sign that thing for her.

I asked what thing.

He said, It is completely bogus, so I won't. It's time I had some principles.

I asked what it was.

He said, She would never think I have the nerve. But you watch her old chum. You watch her when I refuse.

I asked would he destroy her.

That made him laugh a long time, stopping and starting and snorting until I feared he had gone mad.

Finally I asked him what was so bloody funny but we were, as they say, PREPARING FOR LANDING and when the aircraft banged itself to earth my question had not been addressed.