Stealing Picasso

by Anson Cameron

  What image could measure up to their outrage? A diptych will be needed – for juxtaposition. The left panel will be Weston in a photo taken on the day of her arrival: triumphant, gleeful, hands extended, showing off his new woman. On the right will be a gaunt pensioner with tubes coming out of her arm, lying on a stretcher in a hospital corridor, the look on her face eerily similar to the Weeping Woman. A smiling man wearing a bow tie alongside a dying pensioner can’t fail to come off as a demonic turd, an aesthete. ‘Let her eat cake,’ Weston imagines the caption.

  He whispers at that ghostly rectangle where she hung, ‘Oh, Lord. I may as well be the thief myself.’

  He is still standing there when the leather soles of law enforcement chirp panic on the parquetry floor, announcing the arrival of Speed Draper, the Minister for the Arts and Police and a posse of ranking cops. ‘Tell me this is a joke, Weston. You can’t have lost the Picasso.’

  As Minister for the Arts, Speed bared his teeth for a hundred photo ops when the Weeping Woman arrived, his colleagues in parliament joked he had milked her like a wet nurse. She became part of his political profile, inextricably linked with his tenure as minister. As the man who signed the cheque for her, and the man who is responsible for law and order in the state, he knows he will be doubly condemned.

  ‘I haven’t lost it. It has been stolen.’ Weston, now that he has been blamed, feels the dignity that comes with wrongful accusation. His back straightens, he lifts a few centimetres in height.

  Speed steps forwards and reads the card on the wall. ‘Who the fuck are these people?’ He turns to his policemen. ‘Australian Cultural Terrorists? Ever heard of them?’ None of them has.

  ‘They’re not known to my people,’ he tells Weston.

  ‘Is that a good thing?’ Weston asks icily.

  ‘Listen, Weston. Let’s get together on this – the media will be here any minute. How did these “terrorists” break in? Do you think it’s an inside job? Might she still be here somewhere?’ He glances around.

  ‘Speed, I know as much as you. I got a phone call, I came down and I found that card.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry. Long-term scenario: we’ll bang these franger-heads in a cell with rapists, psychopaths and goat-tamperers until Geelong win their next flag.’

  Even now Speed can envisage the day of their capture. The Cultural Terrorists in the scrawny, wild-eyed mould of Charles Manson, handcuffed. Speed emerging from their hideout holding the Weeping Woman aloft. ‘But in the short term we’ve got the media outside.’

  ‘Speed, this is a hideous experience. I feel nothing but ignominy and shame,’ Weston confesses.

  ‘Well … that’s about right.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Shit, Weston. The Picasso. Our great coup. Yours and mine. I might have gone a bit over the top myself when we bought her, but, shit, you swanned about like Liberace.’

  Weston puts a hand to his breast and steps forwards and leans his head on the wall into the light-coloured rectangle where she hung. ‘Find her, Speed. You have a whole police force. Find her, or we are both doomed.’

  Later that day a letter is delivered to The Age newspaper and published under the screaming headline: ‘PICASSO STOLEN.’

  We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery as a protest against the niggardly funding of the fine arts in this hick state and against the clumsy, unimaginative stupidity of the administration and distribution of that funding.

  Two conditions must be publicly agreed upon if the painting is to be returned.

  Minister must announce a commitment to increasing the funding of the arts by 10% in real terms over the next three years, and must agree to appoint an independent committee to enquire into the mechanics of the funding of the arts with a view to releasing money from its administration and making it available to artists.

  The Minister must announce a new annual prize for painting, open to artists under thirty years of age. Five prizes of $5000 are to be awarded. A fund is to be established to ensure that the real value of the prizes is to be maintained each year. The prize is to be called The Picasso Ransom.

  Because the Minister of the Arts is also Minister of Plod, we are allowing him a sporting seven days in which to try to have us arrested while he deliberates.

  There will be no negotiation. At the end of seven days, if our demands have not been met, the painting will be destroyed and our campaign will continue.

  Your Very Humble Servants,

  Australian Cultural Terrorists

  Harry enjoyed writing the letter. Reading it in The Age gave him a thrill of pride. He believed what it said. He and his fellow students at the National Gallery are perpetually angered by the great gobs of public cash arts administrators swallow, and the penury in which artists lived.

  But, in truth, the aim of the letter is not to change government policy on the funding of the arts. The aim of the letter is to buy him and Mireille and Turton time; to get the cops sniffing for righteous aesthetes and political activists rather than robbers.

  Watching TV with a beer in his hand and his legs crossed beneath him later that day, Harry jumps around on his sofa in delight when Speed Draper holds a news conference and refuses to meet the ransom demands, making a virtue of not negotiating with terrorists. ‘Budgeting by blackmail is not on.’ Interpol has been called, Speed tells them. Harry shouts indignantly at his TV, ‘You bastard. You’re risking our Picasso.’

  When the news conference is over he fetches his pad and paper and composes another letter.

  Dear, oh dear, Speed Draper, you tiresome old bag of swamp gas …

  We have not dumped the painting in a blue-nosed funk. What should have caused us to panic? Perhaps you imagine that the news that Interpol has been alerted will cause us to cower in our ill-lit garrets awaiting the inevitable 3 am knock on the door as the relentless Clouseaux of a hundred nations tirelessly stalk us. What an imaginative fellow you turned out to be. Interpol! Call on Red Adair to read your gas meter, do you?

  We hope you enjoy playing the political he-man, unflinchingly refusing the outrageous demands of these cultural crackpots. You continue flexing your political pectorals before an admiring electorate for as long as you can, Minister. Seven days after the painting came into our hands (Sat. 2nd Aug, 10 pm) if our demands have not been met you will begin the long process of carrying about you the smell of kerosene and burning canvas. You are gambling the state’s two-million-dollar investment in the Picasso industry against our twenty-cent investment in Bryant and May. Mind you, we do find your Conan the Barbarian routine terribly diverting.

  The people of Australia, and you as one of their elected representatives, should rejoice that a theft involving less risk than shoplifting cotton hankies from David Jones was performed by a group whose first desire is to return the painting. Not that we should really expect such a sensible reaction from someone so determined to have others shoulder the blame. The responsibility is entirely yours.

  Good luck with your huffing and puffing, Minister, you pompous fathead.

  We remain,

  Your Very Humble Servants,

  Australian Cultural Terrorists

  When this is published the next day in The Age, Speed Draper, feeling slighted and desperate, calls another press conference and announces a $50,000 reward for the return of the painting.

  Harry, thrilled at this duel between him and Speed, writes another letter.

  Speed, Old Boy,

  A reward now? With a tubby inconsequential such as yourself acting as custodian of the cultural wealth of this state, may we suggest you spend your fifty thou outfitting visitors to the NGV with gingham frocks and sun bonnets so that they are able to play the part of Old Mother Hubbard with some verisimilitude. We know that you will do your part – the cupboard will surely be bare when they get there.

  Your Chattels,

  Australian Cultural Terrorists

  Upon publication of this letter Speed calls another press conference, assu
ring the public of the safety of the remaining treasures in the National Gallery. To Harry it is like having the minister on a string. And Speed knows that with each letter he is deflating in the eyes of the public. People on trams are reading these letters aloud, discussing them like they discuss last night’s episode of Minder. With every new jibe his persona hisses as a few kpa of dignity leak from it. Soon he will be a flaccid sack and his political career will be over.

  After this second press conference Harry writes another letter to The Age.

  Well now, Speed,

  All is safe, eh? Were you to strip off and disport yourself in the NGV moat like some pallid Nessie heavily in calf, you may well be able to protect the treasures therein. For the hideous nature of your revealed form would, I’m certain, keep any aesthete at bay. (The moat of course may be too shallow to cater for your modesty. One thinks of a hippo trying to hide its privates in a saucer of milk.)

  But I cannot imagine otherwise how you have the gall to offer the public a guarantee of the safety of their treasures. You do not know how we come or go, who we are, where we are, where the Picasso is, or, I hear, how to pleasure a woman.

  Here at Oz Cult Terror HQ we hope you make a breakthrough in one of these endeavours before long.

  Rooting For You,

  Australian Cultural Terrorists

  Harry loved being a robber. Robbery, in his limited experience, was a major buzz: the blast of brouhaha and hoo-ha in the papers; everyone searching for him. Owning a secret this big was as exciting as owning a gorilla. So he had no complaints with the career choice. He was in it eyebrow-deep and grinning.

  But he did have misgivings about Turton as a partner in crime. Quite frankly, he had come to think Turton was mad. And not just because of his fixation with painting pussy, or the fact his only friends were bikies and a Michael Jackson impersonator, or his obsession with the success of Whiteley and Olson. Because, get this, the night they went to knock off the Weeping Woman, they snuck into the gallery and Turton started jumping around like a gibbon. A French gibbon, firing off insults and threats to the other paintings in the gallery in an accent he doesn’t have. Harry got the idea he was pretending to be Picasso. Or maybe, with the stress and suspense and all, he’d flipped out and really thought he was Picasso.

  Anyway, when Turton took his clothes off and brown-eyed paintings and flashed his todger around and generally made a lunatic out of himself, Harry knew they were all on shaky ground. How was this old guy going to hold it together with the cops sniffing around? And if Turton tumbled them all into jail with his lunatic high jinks, the old bastard would be able to get himself out by the same method, pleading insanity as a legal defence. Any jury would agree he was wigged out once they got a look at him.

  But Harry would cop the full brunt of the law because he was clearly sane and in it for monetary gain, being under inordinate financial pressure. That could be testified to by many witnesses who had seen him threatened by debt collectors of a mangy sort. Because, after Mireille’s cheque bounced, Chloe Gwyther sent round two guys to the NGV School of Art. Chloe Gwyther, a respectable woman who owns a damned gallery. There are legitimate ways of pursuing debts, but she sent round two young alcoholics covered in grazes and sores, who smelt of sad ruin. They crashed into Turton’s studio in the School of Art, swearing and tipping shit over and asking people, ‘Where’s this fucking Harry?’

  Sedify Bent, a coward, pointed Harry out with a bottle of turpentine and they told Harry to lie on the floor real quick. Which he did, because one of them was swinging a bayonet in circles over his head as if to motivate a battalion to charge. Harry lay on his back and the guy without the bayonet snatched a paintbrush out of a jar on a desk, dipped it in some yellow paint and grabbed a sheet of A3 paper from a bench top. He put the handle of the brush in Harry’s mouth and told him, ‘Bite that.’ Harry clamped down on the brush.

  So there he was lying on his back with this paintbrush sticking out of his mouth like a petunia and the guy held the sheet of A3 paper down towards the bristle end of the brush and told him, ‘Paint, boy. Go on, paint a picture.’ Being frightened and bewildered, Harry moved his head from side to side, sliding the yellow bristles across the paper.

  ‘No, boy,’ the man said. ‘You got no neck muscles. Okay? Keep your head still. Just use your tongue. Move the brush with your tongue.’ So Harry impaled the point of the brush handle in the tip of his tongue and using his teeth as a fulcrum he moved the brush back and forth across the paper in little strokes about a centimetre long. The guy who wasn’t holding the paper was still helicoptering the bayonet. The guy holding the paper flipped it over and stared at the small yellow mess Harry had made and nodded as if he discerned some artistic merit there.

  ‘Good. Real good. You got a future as a flat-on-his-back quadriplegic artist who paints with his tongue and probably still makes love to a woman, too – builds the tongue muscle up a bit. A guy can make his way with just his tongue muscle these days. So, bon voyage to you, setting out in your quadriplegic adventures, boy. Because you are going to be a turtle on his back with only a tongue muscle to navigate his future. If you don’t pay who you know you got to pay.’

  Then they walked out of the NGV art school the way they came in, swearing and breaking stuff they didn’t have to break.

  All the other students stood around waiting for Harry to explain. ‘I owe a dealer for some hash,’ he told them – a totally respectable debt to have. He couldn’t bring himself to tell them that none of his paintings had sold and he owed money to the Colditz Gallery for being a twenty-four-carat fraud and a fake. And the lie was not just for his own sake. Harry reasoned that these guys looked up to him now as a beacon of hope. If he could make it, maybe they could all make it. His success suggested theirs might be imminent. He didn’t want to ruin that for them.

  ‘The guy’s mad as,’ he explained. ‘I forget to drop a hundred bucks around and he sends dudes. Like … call me up, man. Give me a reminder call. Jesus. I’m getting a new dealer who isn’t schizoid.’

  But Harry was spooked. Idiots with bayonets could jump out of any doorway at him from now on, if Chloe Gwyther was sending flighty young drunks to threaten him with quadriplegia.

  When he got to Mireille’s house he told her about the two guys and the bayonet and the little yellow painting he had painted as a probationary quadriplegic, and she sank down on her sofa and hid her face in her hands. Went still and insular over the problem. Harry tried asking her what she was thinking, calling at her, ‘Hey, hey.’ But she stayed soundless. He got her a manzanilla sherry and sat next to her, waiting. After about ten minutes she took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were red and she called herself a stupid bitch. Then she buried her head in her hands again, but she emerged a few minutes later. Taking the glass from Harry she drank it down, lifted her chin and pursed her lips, apparently setting herself to face these unexpected dangers of young drunks and quadriplegia.

  ‘I have an idea,’ she said, ‘to make the money to pay Chloe Gwyther. And to have some more money left over for us. We can go to Europe. Whatever we think to do.’

  This was when Harry first heard Mireille’s plan. And he had to hand it to her, she had some swerves. First she buys all his paintings to make him a new sensation, then she suggests they steal the Weeping Woman to pay for them.

  And the moment she suggested they steal it, Harry saw the full rainbow of the thing form over his head – the lovely laziness of theft as a means of creating art. He knew you could slave over a painting for a month, screwing down the layers of meaning, working in the drama, and gambling with the colours. Or, it suddenly occurred to him, you could steal one and have all these things blow up around you. The whole play: acts one, two and three.

  The dark fear of being caught, the bright rightness of the cops, the yellow anguish of the bureaucrats and pollies, the bursting beautiful fireworks of them, the thieves making a million bucks. It’s a painting. The whole caper is a canvas, and Harry knew they c
ould make it either a masterpiece or a dud. He definitely wanted to go for masterpiece. He wanted to put all the elements in there to make it good. Certainly, sell the painting to that major-league oinker, Laszlo. Sure, taunt a grandee like Speed Draper in the newspaper, and show him up for what he is. And why not get art in the news? Have Mr and Mrs Citizen out in the burbs ogling Picasso for the first time. Have them hate him … or wake to him.

  And why not make a shitload of dough for themselves, which, this country being all fevered up with business and sport, Harry was starting to suspect he was never going to do with a brush. And why not highlight the fact that arts administrators are gorging themselves on great scads of public cash while the artists live like welfare mothers?

  Harry didn’t see a downside yet. And, man, most beautiful of all, then just give the painting back. Hand it over like they’re disgusted with the shrill panic of the authorities, like they know its true worth and the authorities only see dollar signs. And disappear. Never be heard of again.

  All artists are thieves. Every artist who ever entered a gallery stole something from it. Snuck out with at least a morsel of someone’s masterpiece in his or her mind’s eye. Artists steal from one another. They steal from strangers. They steal from the dead. Then they get as angry as hell and run for their lawyers when some critic points out how deftly they’ve learnt to steal. Art is theft and theft is a risk. Thieves and artists end up in prisons or on yachts. Harry tackled this theft wanting the yacht. But the yacht was hard to get.

  They twiddled their thumbs while Harry taunted Speed Draper in the newspaper. Laszlo wouldn’t take his calls. Laszlo wouldn’t have lunch. Laszlo had to make sure they weren’t going to get caught before he’d even agree to look at her. It was setting out to be a long ten days.