Stealing Picasso

by Anson Cameron

  His bright future is returned to him. They applaud gently, touched by the gallery director’s emotional reaction and not wanting to break into a callow triumphalism that may detract from the poignancy of the moment. She is returned. A priceless, irreplaceable masterpiece is saved. Let us give thanks.

  It is a full thirty seconds before this fine moment of redemption is ended by someone shouting, ‘Three cheers’. The cameras begin to flash as the people hip, hip and hooray and Weston smiles reflexively, brushing away the tears. The champagne cork is fired. Speed Draper moves into shot and lays a soothing hand on the gallery director’s shoulder. He faces the cameras calmly. Deadpan. Perfectly cool. Hadn’t he told them, all those doubters? All those folks who said he was a dolt and didn’t know his arse from his elbow, a tiresome old bag of swamp gas that’d lost a masterpiece and had no clue who had the thing or where it was? Hadn’t he told them he was on the case? And look here, now. He sweeps his hand towards the Weeping Woman as the cameras rattle. Here she is. Voilà.

  Leni Richthofen has walked this route from the county court to her chambers so many times she could do it blindfolded. Which is as well because the wind is gusting, channelled by the canyons of the legal precinct, and she must keep her head bowed and eyes slit to keep the grit from them. One hand is holding a copy of Post-war Commonwealth Tort atop her horse-hair wig to anchor it on her head and the other is gathering her flying black robe before her as she pushes into the wind along Little Bourke Street, navigating by the lower portions of the shopfronts she is passing.

  In the window of Ricardo the Barber, a lamp shaped like a barber’s pole, striped red and white, spins slowly with a payload of mummified blowflies. The next shop is Retravision with seven televisions lined along the floor at the window and six stacked on those seven, and five on those six, and so on, rising in a pyramid of American soap to the summit of televisual art: the thirty-six-inch screen Blaupunkt Ubermall, a screen so perfect that on it the young and restless mother-in-law sleeping with her daughter’s husband almost seems to have invented a fresh and sensible morality.

  Except today, eyes down, half-closed and fluttering against the grit, as Leni comes abreast of the seven lowest televisions, they are not showing American soap. She stops and opens her eyes and lifts her gaze. Thirty Weston Guests are holding thirty Weeping Women. Talking excitedly, his arms and hands are darting here and there excitedly, shuddering with light as cameras flash.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Leni says. Lowering the hand holding the book from her head and taking the wig with it she frees her hair to whip at her face. ‘Oh, God.’

  Hearing her, a man in a waistcoat leaving Ricardo’s, smelling of his trademark minty pomade, stops and nods at the televisions. ‘I know. Apparently those terrorists just gave it back. Makes you wonder.’

  In her office in her chambers in a sandstone Victorian in Little Bourke, at her desk surrounded by a glade of stacked legal books, Leni picks up her phone and slowly dials the headquarters of the Stinking Pariahs.

  ‘Bam?’

  ‘Leni, I been sitting here eyeballing the phone for two hours. Just startin’ to think you were a nice level-headed girl and you weren’t going to call. And I hoped it was so. But, anyway, howdy.’

  ‘Do you have an idea of how much money you owe me, Bam?’

  ‘Rough-ish idea.’

  ‘You wanted to pay that debt with an item.’

  ‘Item I foolishly thought I had, but I didn’t.

  ‘Because I had the item. Or, as it happens, foolishly I thought I did, but I didn’t.’

  ‘Well … I’m not laughing.’

  ‘I’d feel better if you did.’

  ‘Well, I’m not.’

  ‘I’ve got a job for you, Bam. And if you do it, I’ll waive your debt to me.’

  ‘You waived his debt to get the item. You’re goin’ to waive my debt because you didn’t get the item you waived his debt to get. What do you say on your tax return, Leni? “No income to declare. Was paid in forgeries and assassinations this year.”’ Bam waits for a response. A laugh, a sigh, something to tell him she’s given up on the idea. He can hear her, breathing evenly, waiting for him. ‘My advice,’ he says. ‘Back to you, ’cause you gave it to me, is “Don’t do it. Better to cut your losses. Call it a learning experience and walk away.” Would be the smart thing to do.’

  ‘How did you go with that advice?’ she asks.

  ‘I didn’t take it.’

  The canvas satchel under Harry’s arm is empty but it makes him look as if he has business with the lockers. It is cavernously quiet down here now, just the buzz of a fluorescent tube. As he rounds the corner of the aisle in which they left the painting he pulls up abruptly, seeing a policeman sitting on a bench. The policeman stands.

  ‘Hi,’ Harry says. The policeman nods hello. Two two seven is open and has been dusted for fingerprints. The cop steps closer to it, between the locker and Harry. ‘Can I do for you?’

  ‘Nothing. Just dropping this off. I’m going out, clubbing. I don’t want to lose it.’

  ‘This aisle is closed to the public tonight, unless you’re picking something up. It’s a crime scene. Put your bag in another aisle.’

  ‘Okay.’ Harry steps backwards, rounds the end of the lockers into the third aisle and wanders its length, whispering, ‘Turton, Turton?’ He gets down on his knees to look under the lockers. Then he stands on a bench to look on top of them. ‘Turton.’

  ‘You looking for someone?’ The cop has appeared at the end of Harry’s aisle.

  ‘No. A cat. A cat lives down here. Probably out hunting.’ Harry nods.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name? I’m feeding a cat.’

  ‘Feeding it what?’

  The chirp and squeal of his gym boots on the painted cement tells Harry he is running, he has made a break for it. Feeding it what? That cop was closing in on him. He drops his canvas satchel halfway up the ramp. Out on the street, sucking the night air cold on his teeth, he keeps running in the dark, the light, the dark, until he ducks down an alley and steps into a black doorway, breathing hard, covering his sensitive teeth with his lips. The satchel can’t be traced to him. Maybe to Laszlo Berg, but not to him.

  ‘Jesus, Turton,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t you be dead, man. Please.’ He slaps his open hands against the cold brickwork twice, the noise echoing in the alley.

  The policeman stops at Harry’s satchel, bends and picks it up and looks inside. Nothing. He had bet fifty-fifty on cat food or drugs. He pokes his face inside and sniffs an indeterminate smell of stuff. Maybe he was some kid from a student news paper, some nosy prick trying to make his journalism name.

  Back in the locker room the policeman sits himself down again, in front of 228, and is entertained by watching a slow drip of clear liquid. Extraordinary what is in these lockers – this being an affluent society, and people being easy come, easy go about redeeming their personal items.

  Harry waits in the alley longer than he needs to because he doesn’t like what he is going to have to do. When he leaves he crosses Spencer Street and turns into Collins Street, dawdling, stopping to look at gold fountain pens and watches in shop windows, objects that don’t interest him at all. His steps are small, reluctant, like a child called out front of the class.

  It is nearly midnight and there are not many people around now – some drunks out of bars, bewildered as to time and direction; young people clinging to each other, laughing, plenty of the night still ahead. He walks up the street with his head high, trying to be brave. Near the mouth of Centre Way a homeless man is asleep in a shop doorway on a square of flattened cardboard, his legs protruding onto the footpath. Harry sees him too late and stumbles over him. The man groans but doesn’t wake. Instead a small red terrier leaps from where it is nesting in the crook of his groin and gives off a string of urgent barks that meld together and become a howl. Harry is taken by the tiny dog’s defence of its master. He holds his hand out towards the dog and says, ‘Hey, goo
d boy. It’s all right.’ The dog growls and barks and shows its teeth. ‘All right, all right. I’m going.’ The man reaches out, patting the air blindly, feeling for his dog. When he touches its tail he takes hold of it and hauls the dog back to its nest, from where it continues to growl.

  Harry, still dawdling, reluctant, turns off Collins Street into Centre Way. He is on a covered walkway three storeys high with a glass directory board at its mouth listing its shops, and a flight of stairs leading down to a foreign language bookshop advertised by a red and green florescent sign. Furnished with potted palms and dimly lit from either side by the nightlights in shop windows: Birkenstock, Ladies’ Fashions, Mel’s Hair, Shag Second-hand Glad Rags, Sandwich Bar, Converse Sneakers, Sushi Counter – he stops at each window. The grind and crackle of his footsteps in here echoes at him, giving him the urge to creep like some sinister from a pantomime.

  From Centre Way, five steps lead down into an old herringbone-pattern bluestone alley, a cleft in two cliffs of dark stone, and a strip of starlit sky high above. To his right is an alcove filled with dumpsters. In this dark cul-de-sac scented with decay the walls are covered, as high as a man can reach while standing on a dumpster, with a graffiti as primitive as cave art. A wild rant of stencils and sprays: cat faces, multi-coloured Barbarellas with their hands on their hearts. Bulls and chickens. Dick-Tracy-type gangsters. Revolutionaries holding rifles. Some lost story, this. Some language Harry feels sad about not speaking.

  He enters the cul-de-sac and turns a circle looking at the graffiti. He wonders if anyone can paint here. Is this someone’s gallery? Would it be sacrilege to paint over this, or is it a continuing dialogue? Before stepping back out into the alley he tells himself he will work here. He’ll bring cans and stencils to this lost alcove and lay down his own caveman art, where it will be drowned out a week later by some other caveman in a cool conversation, all done while balancing on dumpsters. It’s about all he wants of art now.

  Above the alley, wrought-iron tendrils reach out from either wall, holding saucers of light. All but two of the thin shopfronts have iron shutters pulled down over them. The two that haven’t are bars. On the left is the Lustre Lounge with small cast-iron tables outside and people sitting on tiny stools. Further along the alley on the right is the Barbica Café with a few people at tables talking. There is a faint smell of licorice-flavoured schnapps and coffee on the air, and Tom Waits is growling.

  Large windows overlook the alley on either side, all dark save for the yellow light coming from Hell’s Kitchen. Steel beer barrels are stacked at the foot of the stairway leading up there. Harry stops and lays his forehead on one. The smell of stale beer is on the steel.

  ‘Coward,’ he whispers. ‘Ask her. Who is she? You didn’t just bump into her, boy, by chance – a chance meeting. She chose you. For this. You’re not going to wreck anything by asking. There’s nothing to wreck. Ask her what this is. Ask her, straight up. Am I just a guy you needed?’ He takes five long breaths, before lifting his head, looking about, and nodding.

  A flight of cement stairs, painted red, doubles back on itself. Wires and pipes run along the walls, snaking over and under posters from the world of music announcing upcoming gigs, newly released albums, visiting artists. In Hell’s Kitchen, The Rolling Stones are playing some old song, ‘Stray Cat Blues’. A dimly lit room is divided into two by the doorway. The decor is a sixties mélange of bright plastics, vinyl couches, a kidney-shaped fake wood coffee table, swirling wallpaper that has inspired someone to paint snakes on the wood panelling. Large dirty windows overlook the alley. On the wall across the alley are coloured boxlit signs above cafés and shops. To the left is a bar, ranks of bottles stacked on shelves behind it. On the end of the bar by the window overlooking the alley sits a lamp with a red shade. Mireille sits on a stool beneath it, in the fall of red light.

  Seeing Harry, she stands and puts her arms around him but, feeling his disappointment in his lack of response, releases him and shakes her head at him, asking, ‘No?’

  He loves her. A love he sees as so complete, so sublime, it makes him angry that it might have been used as a weapon against him. ‘I don’t know where he is. There’s a cop there, so I couldn’t search.’

  ‘Maybe he is back at home.’ Harry ignores her invitation to optimism and orders himself a Glenlivet. He takes the drink, sits on the stool next to hers and, looking past her out of the window, asks her, ‘Who are you?’

  She shakes her head and frowns, asking him not to.

  ‘He’s probably dead. I can only think he’s in one of those lockers. And I’m in this and I volunteered and I’ve got no excuse and I thought it was a big fucking adventure … which shows how silly I am.’ Harry sniffs his whisky, drinks it and raises the glass to the barman. He reaches out and touches her hair, trying to make this easier for her. ‘I know you chose me because I was an in to the gallery. I think you probably even trapped me into a debt by buying my paintings, so I would help you steal the Weeping Woman. But even now, with Turton up in smoke like a genie, I wouldn’t care, if you could say to me that during the course of this you’d fallen in love with me. That, despite your cunning, you’d got tangled up, head over heels in love with your baby-faced stooge, and things had become impossibly complicated because … because … big matters of the heart had overtaken little matters of Picasso.’

  Mireille shakes her head, knitting her brow to ask him to stop.

  Harry smiles. ‘That would be the thing to say. I’d be in your lap like that.’ He snaps his fingers.

  She smiles, a denial of her sadness, her eyes brimming tears. ‘But you have said it. And now there is no possibility for me to say it. You did that on purpose.’

  Harry tilts his head to indicate maybe that was his reasoning and maybe it wasn’t.

  ‘You should not have. You should have let me say it.’ Her mouth is quivering.

  ‘Who are you?’ Harry asks gently.

  For a moment Mireille is silent, staring down at the floor. There are just the noises of the bar – chair legs scraping on the floorboards behind them as people stand quickly, a chair falling over. A woman saying, ‘Oh …’ None of this distracts them.

  ‘Turton’s dead, Mireille.’

  Her lips tighten and she looks up at Harry and whispers, ‘She is my mother.’

  ‘What? Who’s your …’

  A woman screams. A horrified noise. Glasses smash as a table upends, and Harry and Mireille turn to see the last bar patrons backing fast down the stairs, stumbling, keeping their horrified eyes fixed on two men at the head of the stairs looking down at them. One is a large man, hunched in a knee-length trench coat. The other is younger, athletic, but with his head lolling madly to one side. He is holding something out to the fleeing patrons, offering something. ‘Want a pat?’ he is asking. ‘He don’t bite. He don’t. Not no more.’

  Winston Bloomfield follows Harry from Spencer Street station up Collins Street, walking like a fighter, bouncing his hips and dipping his shoulders. His gait is a boast, not really suitable for surveillance. But Winston, known as Winnie Blue, is not well chosen for anonymity, he tends to invite attention with his ostentatious hostility. Even now, while on a clandestine operation, he sneers at people passing in the street, spits close to their feet as they walk past. A wiry, athletic man, he has cropped black hair fronted by a widow’s peak and is littered with scars. The streetlights reflect on this scar tissue as he walks beneath them, making it appear as if stars are orbiting his skull.

  He is impatient. He curses out loud every time Harry stops to look in a window or leans on a shopfront smoking, not bothering to pretend to be window-shopping or otherwise occupied. Showily waiting. Almost daring Harry to discover him. Because all this creeping and sneaking is beneath him, really. He is a man for the confrontation. A man to be called in for the endgame.

  But Harry doesn’t discover Winnie Blue following him. Up Collins and into Centre Way and Centre Place. When Harry enters Hell’s Kitchen, Winnie Blue retre
ats to the payphone at the mouth of Centre Way and calls Laszlo Berg, who is taking a nightcap of sloe gin in the Savage Club barely a block away.

  Laszlo arrives on foot, dressed against the night in a long coat. The drunk’s dog growls at him as he passes.

  ‘He’s in there. In a bar,’ Winnie Blue tells him.

  Laszlo wanders the length of Centre Way, peering down into Centre Place, up at Hell’s Kitchen, frowning at the people sitting at cafés in the lower alley. ‘Night owls,’ he says. ‘Witnesses.’

  ‘You want me to kick ’em out?’

  ‘No. We don’t want the police here.’ He walks out of Centre Way with Winnie Blue behind him and takes few steps down Collins Street, to where the drunk is asleep in the doorway. Laszlo makes a rasping noise in his throat, which wakes the small red terrier and draws him growling from his nest in the hollow of the drunk’s crotch. Laszlo rasps his throat noise. The dog advances, barking now, and Laszlo swings a club down onto its head, crushing its skull. He peers at it in the dim light. It looks like a dog in a peaceful slumber. He hits it again. Some teeth break and an eye pops from its skull. Its nose is bloodied. The drunk sits upright, a man grown old too early, dressed in rags, whiskered whitely. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re borrowing your dog. Don’t worry, we’ll bring him back.’

  The drunk tries to stand, but Winnie Blue steps forwards and punches him, sending him sprawling back into his doorway unconscious. ‘You kill his dog?’ Winnie asks.

  ‘It was either that, or you walk around with your cock out.’

  Going back into Centre Way, Laszlo reaches above his head and pulls down the mesh roller-shutter and slides its bolts into its frame, sealing it off from Collins Street. He and Winnie Blue descend into Centre Place. Nearing Lustre Lounge, Laszlo says, ‘Now the pooch earns his keep.’ He begins to stagger. Winnie almost leaps forwards to catch him, but Laszlo frowns him away and begins to snicker like a CBD lunatic, one of those lost men who live crab-like in doorways, troll-like under bridges, shouting at ghosts with whom they disagree. He staggers towards the patrons sitting in the alley outside Lustre Lounge, holding the dead dog at arm’s length before him, its bloodied tongue lolling and an eye swinging pendulously on a tendon with each step he takes. He offers it to the bar patrons, who look up, one by one, dread dawning on their faces.