‘Perfect,’ Turton shouts, and claps his hands. ‘The clueless little fool has just given our plan the seal of approval. This is just what we wanted.’
‘Yeah, it is.’ Harry lies the real Weeping Woman on top of Turton’s forgery, rolls them up together and takes them back with him to Mireille’s place.
So Turton isn’t a perfect partner in crime. But Laszlo … Laszlo is the perfect mark, if what Mireille says about him is true. He has money, he invests in art, is greedy and totally crooked, has a past conviction for receiving stolen goods, and goes round boasting about being a buddy of Picasso.
Mireille has known Laszlo back in France. And while Harry wouldn’t say that everything Mireille tells him is a hundred per cent true, and he has to admit to himself that she is prone to versions and approximations, he can believe what she says about this Laszlo by the way he carries himself.
Mireille says she met Laszlo when she was living in Marseille in an apartment on the Quai du Port working for the Port Authority. Laszlo was bribing customs officers there to turn a blind eye while he smuggled Algerians into the country. These flat-land Africans would hand over their life savings and he’d ship them into the country in containers and set them up in a high-rise housing hell of vertigo and claustrophobia, and then he’d call in the same customs officers he’d bribed to turn a blind eye and, thirty storeys up in the air, the Algerians were arrested, manacled, manhandled. The customs guys got in the newspapers and received commendations for bagging illegals, and the Algerians wound up, bereft, back in the dust of Africa for Arab slavers to swoop on. That’s how Laszlo made his dough: smuggling Algerians into France and selling them to customs.
So he is a bad man. Which makes it easy for Harry to rip him off. Because he couldn’t rip off just anyone. You know, single mums, school kids, pensioners. Harry suspects he is the same blood type as Robin Hood. Take from the rich and give to the poor. The poor here, happily enough, turns out to be himself.
The rich is Laszlo. After ten days Harry goes to meet him. He has Turton’s forgery under his arm, rolled up in a cardboard tube. It’s scary walking through the city carrying the kidnapped woman everyone is hunting. He turns into Bank Place watched by the whole world and a God he doesn’t even believe in. Great vats of adrenalin are churning and bubbling inside him. It is mid-afternoon; the city is still at work.
The Savage Club’s own heraldry calls itself a ‘Club of Bohemian Spirit’. One supposes its members regard a glass of sloe gin and a cigar taken in the company of other barristers to be dissolute, even wicked. At Christmas the club puts on a review, the highlight of which is a musical number where inductees are made to dress in showgirl outfits and perform the can-can while pillars of society hoot and fart on the edge of cardiac arrest.
The club was built in the 1880s, a townhouse in which a Melbourne knight installed his mistress. A keep for a kept woman, it still faces Bank Place like a fortress, guarding a treasure long ago buried in the Melbourne cemetery at a discreet distance from her lover.
Inside is a polar bear raised on his hind legs snarling silently. Inside is an elephant’s foot umbrella stand. Inside on a mantelpiece is a Red Indian skull, alongside it a shrunken head. In another room is a Persian mummy. A rhino’s horn. The bark-wrapped bones of several Aboriginals. A stuffed dodo. Inside, pieces of all the great beasts and lost civilisations are used as doorknockers, ornaments, drinking vessels and coat-spikes. Inside is Laszlo Berg.
The doorman hands Harry a tie and he drapes it around his neck before realising he doesn’t know how to tie it. ‘Um …?’ The doorman takes it back, makes the noose, hands it to Harry and bows with his head and eyes.
The rooms are panelled in beech and dimly lit. Native headdresses from New Guinea hang high on the walls. Mallee roots pulse and murmur in enormous fireplaces, while old men dream in deep chairs before them. Laszlo leads Harry up a flight of stairs to a room in which newspapers and financial journals hang on racks where the news and market movements of a century have hung before them. A skull lolls on the mantelpiece with a cufflink in its eye-socket. A card says it belongs to a Sioux chief called Waqapit. A maid brings them each a sloe gin on a silver tray. When she has gone Laszlo says, ‘Love the terrorist thing. Wonderful touch. The posse gallops off to scour the woods for revolutionaries while thieves dance in the street. First rate.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How did you get her?’ Laszlo kinks his head sideways and raises his eyebrows when Harry doesn’t answer. This great hulking cratered beast dressed in a bold check suit looks Harry up and down, shallowly interested, as if he’s a beetle that may or may not be a danger to his roses. He locks the door. ‘You do have her?’
Harry holds up the cardboard tube.
‘Then,’ Laszlo waves a hand at the table in the centre of the room, ‘Lay her down.’
Slowly, with great care, and hoping like hell he’s not overacting, Harry unrolls Turton’s ancient canvas on the table. Laszlo bends across her, his face close to hers, his eyes flicking back and forth, up and down. Harry is holding his breath, silently praying he isn’t exposed. What does a man like Laszlo Berg do when he finds another man is trying to cheat him? Did he really ruin ten thousand Algerians and send them into slavery? Harry has a sudden vision of an African village, wind whirling between mud huts, not a soul to be seen, not a goat, not a chicken. A ghost town. In the dust a French tourism brochure flaps against a doorway. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe. He blinks his way out of that vision and, as Laszlo studies the painting, Harry clears his throat to cover telltale squelchings of his digestive fluids.
Laszlo turns the canvas over and takes off his glasses, running them across it, using them as a magnifying glass, looking deep into the weave, hauling air loudly through his nose. Turton has left a few brushstrokes on the back and Laszlo studies these for a long time before turning her face up again. He smiles at her briefly, abstractedly, and a little flare of reminiscence, a momentary flush of remembered love, crosses his face. When Harry sees this he knows Turton’s Woman has passed inspection and he feels a wave of relief that nearly makes him laugh.
Laszlo does laugh. ‘Well, I’m happy with the painting. I know paintings. And this,’ he nods at her, ‘is a remarkable work.’
‘Pure genius.’
‘And I’m going to pay you a million dollars for it.’
‘As we agreed.’ Harry looks down through the window into Bank Place, where circles of lunchtime drinkers have spilled from the Mitre Tavern into the winter sun, all in fine suits, holding pots of beer. Gifted young men of the city, who move mountains of money before lunch. He’s flooded with euphoria to know none of them could pull off a beautiful crime like this. To know they lack the ethical fluidity, the bravery, the imagination. That he has it and they don’t.
‘Would you like another gin?’ Laszlo asks.
‘Thank you, yeah. It’s good, this. Where do you get it?’
‘The club imports it. It’s not available to buy. I’ll throw a bottle in with the settlement.’
Laszlo rolls up the painting, slides it into the cardboard tube and unlocks the door before ringing the bell for the maid. When she has come and gone he raises his glass, ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
Laszlo points at a canvas ammunition satchel on the floor in the corner. ‘That’s yours.’
Harry puts the satchel on the table and looks at the top layer of notes; digs down among them, all fifties, probably a million dollars. No way to count them now that wouldn’t look tawdry. ‘I chose the satchel to go with your … look,’ Laszlo says. ‘A briefcase would’ve looked odd – on you.’
‘Good choice. Looks like just regular shit’d be in this. School books and junk.’
‘Are school books regular shit for you?’
Harry flashes him a frown as though he’s disappointed in him, in his weak attempt to winkle out Harry’s identity.
Laszlo changes tack. ‘As you’re aware, I’m close to the gallery. I thought
it might relax you to know they have no idea who stole it. The cops are clueless.’
‘Oh, we’re pretty relaxed. Real relaxed. Lying back on banana lounges sucking on pina coladas. But thanks, anyway.’ Harry waggles his head side to side in thanks.
‘Who painted it?’
Harry is momentarily dumbfounded by the question. Laszlo knows who painted it. It’s a goddamned icon he’s just paid a million bucks for.
‘P … Picasso,’ he says, as the meaning of Laszlo’s question dawns on him, making his answer sound cheap and wrong, more a plea than a fact.
Laszlo looks puzzled, purses his lips. He comes over and leans on the mantel next to Harry. Screws his face into a pout and moves his chin back into his neck before theatrical enlightenment breaks across his face. ‘Oh, no. I see your confusion. One could easily get confused. Two identical paintings. I was talking about this one. Not the one you stole from the gallery. Who painted this one? But forget it. I don’t want to know.’ Laszlo takes a sip of sloe gin. ‘What I do want to know is, is the real one taken care of?’
‘Taken care of?’ Harry says this dry-mouthed, wondering if he should reach out with the tip of his tongue and remove the perspiration from his upper lip.
‘Taken care of, as in: “That man stole from me and now I intend to take care of him.” Burnt would be best. Best for you, best for me. But you’re a fucking artist. You haven’t burnt her.’
Harry watches as Laszlo reaches out and worms a finger into each of Waqapit’s eye sockets and a thumb into his mouth, as if that chief’s skull were a bowling ball he is trying on for size. He raises the skull high and swings it down on Harry, who undergoes a withering flare of light and a notion his own death may have occurred.
Harry thinks the Savage Club has the skull labelled wrongly. He suspects Waqapit is more likely a Neanderthal made strong in the mandible by chewing raw elk than a fine-boned red spiritualist who smoked the pipe. The guy is a cannon ball of cranial engineering who lays Harry on the Axminster with a jellied spine, where he becomes a doll for Laszlo Berg to play with.
Laszlo sits alongside him and whispers. ‘Our transaction hasn’t changed. Only the relative cognisance of the interested parties has changed. Unbeknown to me, you were going to sell me a fake. You still are. But now I know it’s a fake and you know I know it’s a fake. You were rude not to tell me that in the first place. Fraudulent, even. But forget that. Let’s shake on our new deal.’
He picks up Harry’s hand and shakes it. He lifts Harry’s head and places it in his lap. It is a lover’s gesture and Harry fears fellatio. With one hand Laszlo smoothes the lump on Harry’s forehead, with the other he waves the skull of Waqapit above him absently, as if he had forgotten the murderous thing is still skewered on his fingers.
‘I don’t mind buying a fake. She’s a beautiful fake, and I’m happy with her. I’m a connoisseur, and, I tell you, whoever painted her knew what he was doing. She’s as worthy of being the Weeping Woman as the true Weeping Woman is. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, she has ascended the throne and is now the Weeping Woman. I have fallen in love with her. I pledge my allegiance to her. It would break my heart to see her usurped.’
Laszlo takes gentle hold of Harry’s bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger and pulls it up and down, increasing Harry’s fear of fellatio. But he is working Harry’s mouth as if it was a puppet’s, asking in a clueless falsetto, ‘But how could that happen, Mr Berg? What dreadful turn of events could lead to your Weeping Woman being dethroned?’ Laszlo lets go of Harry’s lip.
‘I’m glad you asked,’ he says in his own voice again. ‘Because this brings us to the clause in our agreement that I had forgotten to mention before we shook hands. The clause that states that if the original Weeping Woman ever re-emerges into public life, then Laszlo Berg kills you and any sneaky little friends involved in this … scheme, deader than the thylacine.’ He seizes on Harry’s blank look. ‘The Tasmanian fucking tiger.’
Pulling at Harry’s lip again, miming speech, he asks in a falsetto, ‘Why would you do that, Mr Berg?’
‘Because if the true and rightful Weeping Woman surfaces, then this one, excellent stand-in though she has been, and as much happiness and fulfillment as she has brought, is out of a job. The true and rightful Weeping Woman becomes the Weeping Woman again. And, unjust and downright callous as it is, this one here – she becomes a worthless piece of shit. And a million dollars is too much to pay for a worthless piece of shit.’ Laszlo takes a white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and tenderly dabs away a runnel of blood leading from Harry’s hairline to his eyebrow.
‘You wouldn’t pay a million dollars for a worthless piece of shit, would you?’ He flexes his thigh, causing Harry’s to shake. ‘I thought not. Now, how I see it, you have either sold Señor Picasso’s painting to someone else, which would be greedy but understandable, and if you have, then hooray for you. Or you intend to give Señor Picasso’s painting back to the gallery and to disappear, thereby stalling further police investigations, and leaving me having shelled out a million for a worthless piece of shit. This is the plan of action I suspect you of. And it is the plan of action I am advising you against. I know you haven’t burnt her. You are a painter. Paint under your nails, paint on your boots … an obvious fucking artist. So … where is she?’
Harry knows now that this guy is so steeped in the double-cross, such a nomad on the byways of treachery, that he has seen through their plan from the start. He never expected the real Weeping Woman to turn up here. He was only waiting to see if their forgery was worthwhile. He had them a hundred per cent sussed out from the start.
‘We sold her.’ Harry is talking again.
‘Who to?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Then you and the chief will go at it like a couple of ibex.’ Laszlo raises Waqapit above Harry. The old boy has a thunderous criminal brow. All Harry can think of, lying there at Laszlo’s mercy, are those Algerians he sold to the Arabs and a life of slavery.
‘An oil Arab. From Saudi. Oil money.’
‘Ah.’ Laszlo says. ‘Saudi Arabia. A faraway, mysterious land that has, it is estimated, another fifty years of oil. Which means the aristocracy there won’t have to sell their treasures to make ends meet for at least, oh, fifty-five years. Which puts you and me out of harm’s way. Love it. I wish him a long life and much happiness, your wealthy Mohammedan. And I hope he is a true and breathing receiver of stolen goods and not some figment conjured up to placate me.’
Laszlo lays Waqapit on Harry, face to face, eyeball to socket. Harry is staring into the horrible darkness of a dead man’s head. ‘How did you get it? Tell me. Or this time next year some other nitwit will be staring into your hollow skull, wondering if I’m going to club him to death with it.’
‘I’m a student at the NGV. It was my teacher and me. We went up from underneath. There’s a door.’
‘Your teacher. Is your teacher generally thought an asset to the gallery? A talented but tortured soul with the knack of being able to inspire the young? Outlandish side levers?’ Harry doesn’t confirm this by word or sign.
‘Say his name,’ Laszlo demands.
‘Turton.’
‘Turton Pym. And a thankless little prick, he is. I sat on the board at the NGV that hired Turton fucking Pym.’
Laszlo takes the skull of the Indian off Harry’s face and smiles at him. ‘The moment I saw this painting I said to myself, “That thankless little prick, Turton fucking Pym.” It’s exceptionally good.’
Laszlo draws his face back from Harry, lifts his chin and shakes his head. ‘But did he really think it would fool me?’
‘He was pretty proud of it.’
‘The little bastard’s more lunatic than even I gave him credit for. I watched Picasso paint the Weeping Woman. Three seconds. Tell him Turton had me for three seconds.’
Laszlo takes hold of Harry by the jaw. ‘It is good, though. Good enough that, while the real thing remains missing, thi
s forgery is the real thing. So, make no mistake, I’m not paying you a million dollars for this painting. I am paying you a million dollars to ensure that the real painting never reappears. Either bring the real painting to me today or make sure it never reappears. Do you understand that?’
‘We’ve sold it to an Arab.’
Laszlo gets up and puts Waqapit back on the mantelpiece. He leans down and grasps Harry’s arm to help him stand, in the process taking Harry’s wallet from his pocket. He opens it, takes out the driver’s licence and hands Harry back the wallet. Reading the licence he says, ‘Harold. With an H.’ He hands it back to Harry. ‘If your wealthy Mohammedan is real, then good. He hangs the Weeping Woman in his harem among a bevy of fat whores and she is as lost to the world as they are. But if not, if you haven’t sold it to an Arab, then you or Turton hang it on your own bedroom wall – enjoy the secret thrill of owning your own Picasso. But do not give it back to the gallery. You understand? I will dismember you and Turton and smoke your body parts in my humidor until they are black as licorice and can be passed off as pieces of Pharaonic Egyptians, and I will donate them to the Savage Club and they will bedeck these walls and gentlemen will raise their glass of Muscat and shake their heads and wonder, did you two help build the fucking sphinx.’
Laszlo snatches the chief off the mantelpiece again and brandishes him above Harry. ‘You think old Waqapit here was a redskin? He wasn’t. His name was Wallace Andrew Quentin Ainsworth Phillip Ian Thompson. He was a scratch golfer. Not such a good bookmaker. Bequeathed to the club by a generous member, whom modesty insists shall remain nameless.’
‘We sold it, man. We sold it to an Arab.’
‘I guess what you’re telling me is, one way or another, she is dead to the world. Arab or not, she is gone.’
‘Gone.’
‘Good.’
Harry wanders through the city with blood slowly streaming from his hairline down his face to his mouth. Taxis shun him. He is tempted to jump from the curb waving a wad of cash. But he walks. With his headache and his million, and his new scenario to ponder, cursing cabs, he walks all the way to Mireille’s place. By the time he gets there he has rejigged their plans and reshaped their future as a flight to Spain and a life of bullfights and tortillas and sherry and sun. He and Mireille living, dissolute, in a land of hissing Catholics.
Stealing Picasso Page 12
