Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  Mars began thumping. Striding and blustering. Threatening. It was powerful, stirring stuff. Familiar, too, in some way I couldn’t put my finger on at first. And then realized that it reminded me of movie soundtracks, action or suspense segments. “Alien” came to mind. “The Terminator”, too. I’ll be back: the cyborg with the Austrian accent. And that too was vintage Robert: a composer with a toe in Beethoven and most of the rest of him in Hollywood. But then I looked at the dates Robert had scrawled behind Holst’s name – 1874-1934 – and realized that the influence had gone the other way, the studio composers catching the nearest way. Still, it reduced the effect.

  I got another beer and took out Robert’s chess problem. It showed a cluster of opposing pieces in one corner of the board, with the usual teasing caption: A victim must be sacrificed. That seemed obvious, though I knew the hints were meant to mislead more than help. But I tried a pawn sacrifice first. Nothing: not in the prescribed three moves anyway. The other pawn, then the two of them in different combinations and sequences, didn’t work either. I sipped my beer, considering it. The knight, my other piece, couldn’t be considered a victim. He was a middle power, even if sacrificed. Then I had an inspiration. (“Ready the slot, the penny drops.” I convinced the other Dogs to cover “Bright Idea”, and it actually worked in our up-tempo slam, though the crashing didn’t let the words shine through properly.) Queen the pawn first. Then sacrifice it immediately. Let it pass through a brief portal of power, then trash it to the higher cause.

  Excited, sure that I’d found it, I began working out the possible combinations. But Holst had taken me to “Neptune, the Mystic” – Pluto mustn’t have been discovered yet – and I’d killed the queen many times, in many ways, without getting any closer to the answer. The king often figured in these exercises, a good secret weapon since most players didn’t think of using him to attack, only of protecting him. But the king, while he was the opponent’s intended victim, could never be sacrificed. Obviously. Robert was right: this one was a kicker.

  I took out Holst and gathered my Clash and Kinks tapes in a little pile. Time to get serious.

  When the phone rang, I barely heard it. I was floating in a Carlsberg-“Clampdown”-victim . . . sacrificed haze, like a fly suspended in a soft sagging web, no closer to an answer. I glanced at the clock. 11:15. Angela sometimes phoned midway through the pub debriefing, a little drunk, checking on the state of my parallel play, urging me to go to bed if I got too tired, no reason to wait up paranoid.

  It was Robert. “I’ve got it!” he crowed. “More elegant than you can imagine. Come on over and I’ll show you.”

  If he hadn’t sounded so exultant, so smug, I would have just told him to give me the moves over the phone. But I was in a pissy, frustrated mood by that point anyway, ready for any excuse to leave the chessboard and the room. He hadn’t allowed for any chance that I might have got it too, I noticed. On my way out the door, I turned back and put the Holst tape in the pocket of my leather jacket. It - wasn’t something I’d be listening to again.

  Robert and Claudia’s building down on Park Street was about as old as ours, though even more dilapidated. Dark, chipped brick – the colour of over-steeped tea – with sagging balconies crammed with old furniture left over from previous tenants. The landlord, like everyone currently renting, too lazy to cart it away. There was a For Sale sign on the front lawn. Even out of the recession, as we supposedly were, you could imagine it impaled there for a long time.

  The dim vestibule, though lit by the standard sixty-watt bulb screwed in overhead, had a curiously blotchy or stained appearance. Peering closer, I saw where the wainscoting and banisters had been coated with a dead beige, but so long ago that the paint was cracking and flaking off. The wood underneath, oak by the grain, showed through in large patches, glossy, almost raw-looking. I found Jongkind on the mailbox for the third floor.

  As I climbed the stairs to the top, I felt a bit embarrassed to be finally visiting Robert at home. Scooting over near midnight to get the dope on a chess problem, when I’d never even seen his place before. Though I enjoyed his company fitfully, I’d never tried to take our friendship outside the gallery basement. Neither had he, it occurred to me now.

  The door flew open when I knocked on it, as if Robert had been waiting anxiously on the other side. He was still wearing his shabby black trench coat. He must have called me as soon as he’d arrived, and still hadn’t bothered to take it off.

  “Shh,” he said, a long finger up to his lips. “Claudia’s entertaining a visitor.” The eyes above the finger were wild, dancing with excitement. Glazed, out-of-focus with it. With anyone else, you’d assume by those eyes he was drunk or stoned. But Robert was more easily intoxicated than most. He could get those eyes by sniffing a wine glass as it passed. Or by figuring out a chess problem ahead of the guy who always checkmated him.

  He led me into the living room, which took the theme of Robert’s physical and mental dishevelment and extended it in space. Records and tapes strewn about, paperbacks. Piles of dirty clothes, which looked to have got to a rough sorting stage but no further. Robert standing in the middle of it all, grinning. A musty smell. No plants. Also no chessboard yet. The problem of finding it perhaps tacked on to the actual problem. I was on the verge of leaving.

  Look around, he seemed to be gesturing, flapping his hands.

  Kitchen table, two mismatched chairs. Pizza box, beer bottles. Mirror with a few grains dusting it. Candle sitting in a blob of wax. The remains of Claudia’s party, I gathered. Part one, anyway. More cast-off clothes on the ratty couch, a heap at either end. And between them, snuggled in, Paul Klee’s “Wayward Guest”.

  The feeling that came over me as I stared at it was exactly the one I got from the rare, frighteningly good pure line. The top of my head lifted open cleanly, lid of a jar. Cool air pouring in, then down the empty corridor of my spine. Iced.

  I turned away from it slowly, with effort, and that was another drug similarity: movement gone voluptuous and grave. Significant.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” I said softly.

  Robert had stopped grinning. Was looking soberly down his nose at me, some popish assumption of dignity he must have thought the occasion warranted.

  “Just look at it,” he said. Slight wave of the gracious host.

  “Are you totally insane? I don’t want to fucking look at it. Are you nuts?”

  But then – beyond the shock, beyond the rising anger – beyond the fear . . . of course I wanted to look at it. It was all I wanted to do. And so, swivelling my head slowly like a man enspelled, I did. It was just too luscious a magic to think of this idea transmitted through the fingers of a Swiss genius sixty years before, living its half-life in catalogues and auction houses and museum storage, now sitting on the Sally Ann sofa in this apartment, like a ghostly angel brought back to grubby life. I stared at the little square in its plain wood frame, mesmerized.

  “You know, it’s not that good,” said his voice behind me. “If you don’t know what it is, I mean.”

  I disagreed entirely. But wouldn’t interrupt my looking to say so. The muddy brown background. The little figure – the wayward guest – floating in it, triangle body and circle head. Done in thick black lines, like the stick legs and two-fingered, outstretched arms. Little black eye in profile, like a crow’s eye or a squirrel’s. The one jump-out colour the brilliant, biting red of the body. Seconded, faintly, by a pale pink aura where the limbs met the brown, a suggestion just eased into the background. It was the perfect proof, Exhibit A, for those who claimed that modern art was a sham, “a child could do it.” It was also the perfect refutation of that argument. No child had ever done anything like this. But no one who could be convinced by that reasoning needed to hear it. Klee’s creation was poised between the camps, between all camps, hanging by its divine thread.

  Again I turned away with difficulty. I’d felt something of the painting’s force field in the gallery, but everything was dulled the
re. There was nothing like this buzz. And Robert was grinning again, which actually helped.

  “How?” I said. “No, fuck that. Why?”

  But he answered the first question. “Just like we planned it. Like you said, it’s very small.” He nodded at the briefcase by the table. “I turned off the motion detectors and I went up and I took it off the wall. When Owen arrived, I wished him a good shift and I left.”

  “Don’t pull me into this,” I said, wishing like hell I didn’t already feel neck deep in it. “We didn’t plan anything. We chatted up some fantasies over a fucking chess game. A little ‘thought experiment’, remember? But Einstein didn’t try to hop on a light beam. He just imagined he could.”

  Robert’s face clouded. He looked startled, startled and a bit hurt. “You don’t think I stole it?”

  “Of course not. It just happens to be sitting on your couch beside your underwear.”

  “I thought you of all people would appreciate a surrealist gesture . . . a jeu d’esprit,” he mumbled. Italics from the first page of Neale’s catalogue. Robert was definitely hurt now, no question. He turned his back on me and shambled off into the kitchen. With a frightened glance at the couch, I followed him. To be alone with the thing was impossible; it made me culpable, somehow. Was I?

  Robert rummaged in his fridge and came up with a beer. “Can I offer you a refreshment at least?” he said stiffly.

  My arm flew up and knocked the bottle out of his hand. It smashed by the table. Robert’s eyes went very wide and he gulped, his Adam’s apple lurching. It might have been the first time I’d caught his full attention since we’d met. I grabbed his upper arm, a bone in the trench coat, and started for the living room. He jerked his arm free, but followed me.

  “Listen carefully,” I said when we were facing the painting again. “This isn’t just ridiculous. It’s very dangerous. I’ll stay just long enough to help you figure out how to get it back. Or else I’ll fuck off right now. Your call.”

  Robert stared at me, he seemed about to say something, when his eyes flicked behind me and saw something that made his Adam’s apple lurch again. I turned with a start. Standing right behind me, glaring at Robert, was a skinny pale girl wearing a man’s white long underwear top, thin bare legs below. She broke off her gaze to glare, just as fiercely, at the painting.

  “This is so fucking stupid,” she hissed.

  Robert gulped, seeming even more at a loss for words than he had been with Hans.

  “Also fucking typical.”

  “I think I know how we can get it back safely,” I said.

  Claudia turned her head to look at me. She gave me a quick once-over, a female version of Piccone’s power appraisal, subtler but no less thorough or dismissive. “I don’t know you,” she said. “You don’t know me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned back to Robert and, after berating him again for his stupidity, began interrogating him about what it all meant. Watching her bony profile, glaring and scowling, acne points reddening, I recognized her as someone I’d seen sketching sometimes in the gallery. There she’d seemed to disappear into shapeless black clothes. Seemed waif-like. Here, in the Penman’s white, only slightly less so. Bony outlines and points appeared. But she still seemed sickly, unwholesome. A faintly rank smell came from her. Her eyeliner was smeared out on the temple facing me. Her hair lay down in places in oily whorls, tufted in others to Johnny Rotten spikes of a fading tangerine, that looked like they might have been a stab at dreadlocks that had been abandoned, leaving these tawny nubbly tufts that wouldn’t lie down flat yet. She reminded me of the girls I’d known a few years earlier, always ready to console a Chile Dog after a lame gig. Right down to the pissed-off bitterness, though in their cases lack of confidence made it emerge more slowly. Angela had sailed through their wreckage like a rescue ship.

  I was working up to an exit line – Solve your own fucking problem then the best I’d got to – when suddenly, humiliatingly, I knew I had about thirty seconds to reach a bathroom. The beer in my bladder, ignored for chess and then for Robert, would wait no longer.

  At my request, Claudia wheeled on me in disgust, while Robert’s latent host was reactivated. “Actually, yes,” he said, as if no half-million-dollar painting must ever come between ourselves and common courtesies, “if you just follow the hall to the end you’ll find it.” A distance of about fifteen feet.

  On the way I passed a partly open door and saw the large upper half of a man lying face down, his arms stretched out, in a bed. Somehow, the sight of this unconscious person brought me to the edge of intense fear, almost of panic. I had a sense of people and possibilities multiplying, of the situation spinning quickly beyond anything I could control. I waited in futility above the toilet bowl, my head reeling, my bladder backed into a corner. An organ deemed non-essential to this crisis. Down the hall I could hear an approximation of Robert’s earlier reaming by Hans, except this Hans – what I caught of her voice – had a steelier, more focused approach. Scalpels, not sledgehammers. Keep it down I silently implored the pipe in front of me. Finally coaxed a few drops to fall off the end of me. Then zipped up and went back. Now the man in the bedroom was sitting on the edge of the bed, yawning and buttoning his shirt.

  “Who’s the guy?” I said back in the living room.

  Without turning Claudia flicked her eyes at me. “Just exercise.”

  “Whose exercise?”

  She sniffed. “Not yours, don’t worry.”

  Robert said to Claudia, “Obviously, that was my intention all along. You people don’t know how to enter into the spirit of a jeu d’esprit.”

  “That’s a mind fuck,” said the Exercise, who walked through the room past the three of us and sat down at the littered kitchen table.

  Now we are four, I thought. Quadruple what we started with, and double what we had five minutes ago.

  He was massive. A little over six feet, and carrying at least two hundred and fifty pounds, a fair percentage of it above the waist. Though maybe it didn’t matter so much where it was when there was that much of it. His orange shirt buttoned now but still untucked, black jeans.

  “Rick’s from Quebec,” Robert said.

  Rick nodded sleepily, then yawned and made a show of rubbing his sleepy face. Like the rest of him, his head was huge and square. Handsome in a block-like way, curly-haired. “Anybody want to test-drive some product?” he said, and didn’t seem to mind when no one answered. Went about fixing his own.

  “This is how I can see it working,” I said.

  Claudia threw up her hands. “I don’t care what happens. I just want that thing the fuck out of here.”

  But she listened as I laid it out.

  “You put it in a shopping bag and pretend it’s a late entry from Claudia. When Owen shuts off the alarms to let you back to the CHOP show stuff, you can hang it back on the wall.”

  “Yes,” Robert said, brightening. “Yes, I see. Excellent.” Claudia rolled her eyes.

  “You’ll have to sell the lateness a bit. Worked so hard on it, so important to her. Couldn’t make the drop-off time and then struggled to make it at least by midnight. She wants it to go in the proper gallery, not in the basement overflow. Et cetera. With any luck, Owen will be so far into Philip K. Dick that he won’t make a fuss. Besides, didn’t you say he had the hots for Claudia?”

  Claudia grimaced at that, an ugly scowl that pulled her face in about four directions. But right after, she contributed an idea.

  “I didn’t sign in, actually.”

  “You didn’t sign in?”

  “No, it was too busy. And” – meeting my eyes – “I wanted to avoid your shitty entry fee if I could.”

  “Entry fee?”

  “Twenty-five bucks a painting.”

  “That’s a new one. You’ll have to go in on Tuesday and try to find the sign-in book.”

  “Yeah. I got that.”

  “You better hope the security guy
likes his dick a lot.” All three of us turned at the voice from the table. By the time we did, he was rubbing his face again, stifling a yawn. Too sleepy to stop, but keeping up with all the craziness while razoring his powder. “You want the guy to take it back when it’s hot,” he murmured, as if to himself. Then tried it the other way around: “It’s hot and you want the guy to take it back.” Who is this clown? I thought. He sounded like he was reciting a movie line, but for all I knew there were people who actually talked that way. Even the movies must draw from life sometimes.

  I left Claudia and Robert to hash out the details. But I waited by the side of the building, standing in the shadow of some lilac bushes, to make sure Robert actually came out. A couple of minutes later he appeared, swinging his shopping bag full of Klee. The belt ends of the damn trench coat flapping as he strode briskly in the direction of the gallery. My bladder asserted itself powerfully now. Knowing the peak of trauma to be passed, it bulged painfully into my awareness, seeking its share of the general relief. But I made it wait one more thigh-squeezing minute to make sure Claudia’s sleepyhead didn’t emerge looking for more exercise. What I would have done if he had was beyond my imagination. Based on first impressions, Rick wasn’t someone who would see anything of value in the Klee. He’d see a child’s finger-painting on an old board. Nothing compared to a small baggie of coke. But on the other hand, he’d just slept with someone – someone slippery on ethics – who could set him straight.