Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  “Piccone seems like a pretty shrewd businessman.”

  She shot me the glance I was beginning to expect: like I wasn’t keeping up with the play, and in my case that might not be good enough. “He’s also an old-fashioned gentleman. That’s part of it, for him. He sent this one long-stemmed red rose to the funeral parlor. Corny, but also nice. It stood out because one flower – one rose – was obviously for me. Not ‘With Hearfelt Sympathy for the Family’. I’ve got it drying upside-down in my room.”

  No mention of the gallery’s vase and flowers, which, I thought, for all Mrs. Soames’s care, might have got pitched in the garbage. Or maybe sent home with her mother.

  “And?” I said.

  “And he’s got a William Kurelek hanging on his office wall.”

  “Real?”

  “From ten feet away. You’re not suspecting a forgery epidemic, are you?”

  “No.” Something did occur to me, but I would ask it in a minute. Right now I needed to know Piccone’s feeling about the new rental.

  “He’s not doing any bliss dance about it, but he seems to like it all right. It was hard to get him off the topic of the last painting. ‘Squiggles,’ he kept saying, doing this prissy little thing with his hands, ‘like my granddaughter.’ But he likes all the ‘little people’ in the Kurelek painting. Working in the field, the barn . . . women bringing food out to picnic tables. But I think he finds Kurelek a little rough. He did another thing with his hands, some crude fast thing. Maybe someone holding a brush in his fist and swiping. And Kurelek is a bit like that.”

  “I guess after Krieghoff you’re a bit spoiled for little people.” I took another bite of the cookie, a small one, trying to make it last. “And you never saw that when he had it?”

  “Like I said Thursday, no. Maybe he took that one to the house. His prize.”

  I thought about that. Who would be in Piccone’s house? A wife making espresso and gnocchi. A grandmother in black, helping her. Sons coming home to change before hitting the clubs. His office was where Piccone really lived, where he could look at the painting. Where his visitors could see it.

  “Does he know you paint?”

  “I might’ve mentioned it, but I doubt he heard me. I’m his bartender . And a chick who won’t wear his G-string.” She sipped her coffee and finished her plum square. “What about you?”

  It was hard to imagine Neale, with his head filled with Breton and Spectrist quotes, planning on a practical, day-to-day level. But didn’t that ivory tower vision of him have to be adjusted now, in light of the revised LogBook? With Walter away when the cop arrived – a lucky bit of timing, though chance favors the prepared mind – he had seen his shot to clear up Robert’s midnight stroll through the galleries. Official clearance given, a little lax there on the security, admittedly – that faint, wry smile – don’t overdo it, be yourself – as the notepad closes. Was there even a notepad? Cases got closed pretty quickly for drunken security guards doing sloppy swans off the Skyway. And then the name added to the LogBook, suggesting an alibi in the remote event that one was asked for. Extra caution? Neale didn’t seem aware enough of himself to be paranoid. And not Peter’s name. A difference of opinion? Neale the smarter, or at least subtler, man. He knew it was risky to be at the gallery any time that night. But riskier not to be. Why? Because someone was going to die. Had to . . . had. Why?

  It was also hard, in relaying this to Claudia, to convey all the delicate possibilities, the way they hung together like filaments in a web. They seemed to blow away in the telling, leaving a few tattered facts. Especially when you weren’t allowed to mention the biggest fact, the spider that might be lurking near the edge, or hunkered down motionless right in the centre. Though Claudia sensed me skirting it, and asked.

  “What’s this got to do with my brother?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing.”

  “I told you that’s all bullshit. This stuff you’re talking about . . . it’s just bullshit games.”

  “Probably.” But why does it have to be? “It’s just. You’re probably right. It only starts to make sense if you know the people involved. Sometimes not even then.”

  “I think I have met Neale.”

  As soon as she said it, I thought of the “Adjusted” painting. Art rental’s confidential policy regarding their artists and buyers. But how would Mrs. Soames stop Neale from meeting an artist that interested him? I’d thought of it before, promised myself to ask it, and then forgotten about it. The detective work was hard. Lots of things were, of course, but this felt hard in a new way. You had to pay close attention to details. Lots of them, and not let up. I felt like I’d been playing a lazy game of chess with Robert and someone sharp had sat down at the board. I’d got so sloppy I hadn’t even noticed at first.

  “Very tall. Good-looking,” Claudia said.

  Good-looking? “I guess so. If you don’t mind being stared at down a very long nose.”

  She gave me a bit of the same stare: shorter nose, no glasses. “Cowboy boots.”

  “That’s him.”

  “He stood behind me while I was sketching a couple of times. ‘Quite strong,’ he said once. It startled me. But when I turned he was already walking away. It was like he was talking to himself.”

  “That’s Neale.”

  “Well, not to brag, but a lot of people stop when I’m drawing. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do it in public anymore.”

  Rehak’s didn’t give you a warning at closing time. They carried on with business as usual and then, at five to six, began scurrying about behind the counter and among the tables. At one minute to six, they asked you to pay the bill, and shoved your change at you with a chilly “Danke schön. Goodbye.” Or: “Thank you. Auf wiedersehen.” It was a very uptight, very cosy little café.

  When we were about five minutes from close-up, Claudia said, “There’s still one thing you don’t know.”

  “Oh, that thing.”

  Ghost of a smile. It would be tiring, I thought, trying to coax it out of her.

  “I did get another call from the gallery.”

  Fucking Peter. “Another commission?”

  “More like the possibility of one. ‘Would you ever be interested,’ et cetera.”

  “Would you be?”

  “No. I told him that.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not good on dates. Maybe two weeks ago.”

  “How’d that go down?”

  “Didn’t seem to be a problem. He didn’t call back.”

  We sipped our coffees. Always this bad, bitter coffee at Rehak’s, though the traffic was steady enough to keep the pots fresh and the pastries were amazing. And coffee so simple. Once you started focusing on mysteries, they began sprouting up all around you. Like mushrooms in the dark.

  When I raised my eyes Claudia was looking at me. Smiling faintly – not her nasty smirk, a warmer version. It flustered me.

  “Whaddya think” – I started, too fast, then began again. “What do you think someone like Neale would say if you suggested forging art works on a larger scale?”

  “To sell you mean?”

  “Sell or rent.”

  “Rent?”

  “Humour me.”

  “I think he’d say, Don’t be silly.”

  “That’s what I think too. But tell me why.”

  “It’s too hard. It’s almost impossible actually. There was this New York Times article about these two guys. . . .” No sign in her face that she remembered telling me the story two days ago. Well, she’d warned me she was a bad listener. Apparently the crowd of people she could tune out included herself.

  When I caught the first sharp look from the waitress – a sort of warm-up scowl – I said, “You don’t think. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I mean, with things turning upside-down so much in that place . . . you don’t think Robert would actually try to steal a painting?”

  She didn’t laugh. Or smi
le even. “Hide a real grab behind a phony one, you mean?”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s what I’m getting at.”

  “He might have thought about thinking about it.” Past tense. The first time that I’d noticed. “Planned to plan.”

  “You sure?”

  She drained the bitter coffee. “I think we both know he’d need some serious help.”

  We stopped in at Book Villa on our way back up King Street. The young clerk was sulky, then jolted out of it by my request, suddenly eager to lead me back to a paperback translation of Lautréamont’s Maldoror. I wasn’t very curious about the encounter on the dissection table between the sewing machine and the umbrella, but Sean had said there were better lines in it. And it was another strand. Claudia waited by the door. As I was paying, I noticed Ramon at the magazine rack. A copy of Rolling Stone open in his hands, but glancing over it out the window at the street.

  “Ramon, what are you doing – ” And then I remembered that he lived upstairs. I’d been up there with him just three nights ago. I seemed to be forgetting and remembering things at random. Bits sloshing out of an overfilled pail.

  “I saw Rick out my window. He’s been coming to see me.”

  “What for?”

  “Coming to my gigs. Coming to my place. Asking me do I have names, man.” It took some persistent hassling to make Ramon lose his cool and start muttering.

  “What’s he want?”

  “He wants in, man.”

  Which matched the impression I had exactly. Someone desperate to find a way inside, any inside. Like a wasp pestering window panes at the end of summer . . . fat squirrels and chipmunks scouting open doors, gnawing the weatherstripping in November.

  “Like a mouse,” I said.

  “A big mouse.” Ramon put the magazine back and picked up People . “Cruising around in his shitty car, he sees Barbara and me, just talking outside the gallery. Now he wants to meet her.”

  I looked around me. “To sell to?”

  “To do whatever to.” Seeing Claudia behind me, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, diverted him from Rick for a moment. He checked her out with a slower eye: maybe that was the secret. Slow. Then raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Just friends,” I said.

  “Art friends.”

  “You got it.”

  But then Rick came buzzing back, he always did. “That guy, man, you know, he’s really got a hard-on for you too.”

  “To each his own.” Ramon smiled at that. His sense of humour maybe the exact opposite of Claudia’s: a spring or stream bubbling just below the surface, welling up through any small crack. “What’d you tell him?”

  “That you were cheap. Never buy your own. Just get off on someone else’s.” Ramon winced, remembering it was the truth. “Sorry, man.”

  “No problem.” This time I was the one who shrugged.

  “What can I say, man?” I think we were back to Rick.

  “I know,” I said. “I know. It’s like you with the little girls.”

  “It’s a weakness, man.”

  As we were walking away up the street, Claudia said, “Cute guy.”

  I looked at the side of her face. She was a fast walker, like Robert, skimming on stalks like a waterbug. “You never noticed him in the gallery?”

  “Put a pencil in my hand, I’m pretty much blind.”

  18

  This time it was the deadness, the sheer dead hanging space, that was the tipping point. No sound but the sherf sherf of my crepe-soled shoes across the beige, like the plaza in the Chirico but without the interesting, ominous shadows – well-lit by Ramon . . . that tipped me.

  But it was a slow poisoning: it took all day.

  After a couple of hours of it, I encountered Walter up in the Pettit Gallery. Walter had left word at the front desk that he was waiting to meet Barbara, but that seemed like hours ago. It might have been half an hour. The two often kept each other waiting. Barbara kept a lot of people waiting, but Walter sometimes returned the favor. The services they rendered each other, and the mutual tolerance these required, left room for, and maybe made necessary, some lashings of petty punishment on the side. Their last Sunday tour through the galleries had resulted in Barbara’s Spring Fling Fashion Show: a runway built from our risers running the length of the MacMahon Gallery, a Thursday evening attendance record, and Cleo Carlsson – the surprise highlight of the evening – looking not at all out of place among the local models in the swimsuit finale. Though I wondered why she stuck to a one-piece Jantzen instead of the prevailing bikinis. “She’s had two kids,” said Hans, puffing on his pipe under Josh MacMahon afterwards. Which brought the twins’ blushes, which had been fluttering all evening, up to crimson again. “Mom’s old,” they’d moaned, deflecting all tributes.

  I’d been in the sculpture corridor, ogling the leaping Iris from a lust of pure boredom, when I moseyed into the back gallery and found Walter. Most of the visiting shows got hung downstairs. The local artists, ten or twelve of them a year, were shown up here in the Pettit Gallery. Currently displayed were watercolours of flowers, very large, seen from close-up. Soft-focus Georgia O’Keefe under a magnifier. Walter, a little unusually for him, was leaning in close to view one of them. Like Peter, he was vain about his eye, and liked to give the impression that he could take in everything about a room by standing in the centre of it.

  “What do you think of these, Walter?” I said, approaching him.

  “They’re fine, Paul.”

  Meaning, I thought, awful. Along with: Fuck off. Walter had another dark suit on, blue but not banker’s blue, richer and darker, almost black; his longish silver hair trained back, but not severely. As a photograph in a picture dictionary, I thought, he would be a good demonstration of the limitations of the word cute, where it had to give way to something with more resonance and shading, reaching up toward handsome or distinguished.

  “They seem to be selling well,” I said. Looking around the room I could see at least six red dots on Jason’s labels.

  “Yes, we-ell. Now they are.” And Walter, who could be expansive when he was waiting, began telling me – in that drawl he called on intermittently – about the “little talk” he’d had with the artist about his pricing. Walter had suggested doubling the prices, since “many collectors only respond to a challenging figure.”

  I remembered, when I heard the “challenging figure” phrase, that he’d told me this before. Two or three years ago maybe. Then it had been a more blatantly cautionary tale, perhaps even a kind of revenge, told on a pugnacious artist, a painter of detailed planetary surfaces – “Saturnscape”, “Plutonian Summer” – who hadn’t taken the advice and hadn’t sold a piece. “You mean that’s the only way they can tell if it’s good?” I’d asked. But Walter wasn’t a sucker for innocence, feigned or real. He’d smiled indulgently: “It’s a personal decision in the end.”

  “I told Donald Donalblatt that when we were both in art school,” Walter said now. “Before long he was selling like hot cakes.”

  I did, or tried to do, a quick mental review of the paintings I’d seen in my four years here, plus the undisplayed ones in the vaults. Walter must have read my mind. He smiled.

  “Too rich for our blood, I’m afraid. Besides, Don’s reputation never really recovered from that first critical mugging he got.”

  Time ticked by, much as it had in the Clock Gallery. With an hour to go, Hans found me and offered me extra hours working with him on the ventilation ducts. He thought it could all be done tomorrow, but wasn’t positive; he wanted to get a good start tonight to be sure. If Ramon was busy – he had a private party tonight – Hans always gave me first chance at any overtime. “As a married man,” he’d said the first time, classifying Angela and me as Ramon did. Hans had a bit of a thing for Angela, I knew. Pretty, plump, vivacious, with study skills – she would fit his ideal of a schönes Mädchen pretty neatly, I thought. Just as she’d always fit mine.

  But this time I turned
him down. Tempting as it was to stick my head in those grimy tubes, maybe hear some ghost voices parleying around me, I just couldn’t stand another minute past the required in the place. Forgetting for a moment that the gallery became much more tolerable to me as soon as it was closed. As soon as it was officially empty of people.

  “You’re sure, now. There’ll be no backtracking tomorrow,” Hans said sourly. Young people declining work always rankled him. He might also have been looking ahead to the hours with a giggling L. Or just alone, if there was something good on television that night.

  But I was sure. Whatever it cost me – money, information – I wanted out. The gallery poison had crept up to toxic levels without my noticing, and now all of a sudden, I was nothing but a bundle of symptoms.

  Amnesia was the next sign. I found myself upstairs in front of Iris again, without remembering how I’d got there. I stared at the corrugated bronze slit between her muscled thighs, trying to feel at least arousal. Trying to imagine the leaping girl alive, the man who had fashioned her. Fingers in wet cool plaster, firming and finding shape. Something came through to me of that, a remote buzz. But it was weak, like the faint echo of a knock on a metal shell encasing me, dead air between myself and the shell’s sides. I could almost see the shell, dull and dark. Lit by low, low light, or else somehow gleaming faintly from within. Pencil lead in a room with the lights off.

  I heard a click.

  Nearby, Peter was inserting his access card into the slit in the wall outside Conservation. Without thinking, I walked over and slipped in behind him before the door closed.

  Sometimes what shocks others can be the most shocking thing. Shocked is too strong a word – I’d never seen Peter shocked, and I didn’t now. But some sort of emotion rearranged his features out of their placid pattern. Was it simply someone entering his domain, rather than being let into it? He got his face under control in a second or two, but he still stood with his back to the work surface, facing me. Normal procedure, especially under pressure, would have been to get busy with some tools and art objects – head lowered, listening, watching peripherally. Facing me without blinking, he reminded me of a deep-sea creature caught loitering outside its crevice.