Catalogue Raisonne

by Mike Barnes

  I went to the tape player and pressed Play. Human League. I cranked it. Rock would have masked sound better: harsh walls of screams and guitars. There were more spaces in this music, even when it was thudding; you could talk, but also listen, better over it. There seemed to be ample time to reflect on this in the time it took to turn and walk over to the antique clock. I felt accelerated, like a Star Trek creature. Getting places, like up to Iris, without knowing how I’d got there – before I’d known I was heading there.

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” Peter said when I put my hands on the wood. Memory flash of my fist trickling blood, the splintered hole in the closet door. How’d that happen?

  I grabbed Peter’s wrist as hard as I could. He looked at the hand clamped above his, then twisted away easily. So deftly, a jerk at the right angle, that I knew some martial art was in the repertoire of skills he’d mastered.

  I picked up a bottle from a shelf. Unscrewed the cap, held it ready to splash backhand.

  “That wouldn’t hurt me much. It’s glue.”

  “Something in here will.” I let the bottle fall – a smaller crash and splurt than the beer in Robert’s apartment – and began rummaging in the shelves, looking for something with a skull or a red X. Behind me, in his stillness that was somehow more threatening than active resistance, I could feel Peter gathering strength from my disarray. Seeing that he could discount me: sucking on the diminished danger like a lozenge.

  “Wouldn’t pistols at dawn be easier?”

  Then I saw it. Back to basics. The first rule in every game.

  “No, x-acto knife. Now.”

  It didn’t sound like I intended it – it sounded a bit silly actually as it came out of my mouth – but there was no problem with the effect of the blade sliding out. Long and thin, a sharp sliver. Like a scalpel. A precision instrument.

  “I thought we had our little discussion,” Peter said. Now – finally – with a little quaver in the voice. And the face was doing a reverse-Bud, the colour spilling downwards out of it, leaving white below platinum curls. Malevich Man. “The Suprematist”.

  “Two things, asshole. I want to know two things.”

  “Which are?”

  “What did you and Neale do to Robert?”

  “When?”

  “Don’t be silly. The night he brought back the Klee. The night you were here.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “Talk,” I said. This would have been better with a step toward him, but I remembered the kung fu reflexes.

  “That’s all Neale did. Talked to him. Very friendly, at first.” I tried to imagine this. People could summon new resources, forgotten skills, when desperate. “Robert tried to explain it all with some silly story about ‘testing security . . . demonstrating breaches.’” Along with the pompous voice, Peter had his hands flipping too. Everyone did a good Robert, I thought sadly.

  “And?”

  “Neale didn’t believe that, of course. Who would? But it was pretty obvious Robert didn’t know anything that might, ah – ”

  “Help his case.”

  “Yes. So Neale told him that if he quit, no charges would be laid.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Robert left.”

  A good cop/tough cop routine. As performed by one man, according to Peter. It might be true. Without any proof either way, I found myself believing it.

  “You and Neale just happened to be working here when he walked in with it?”

  Peter relaxed enough now to sneer a little. “You know his sister called me.”

  This time it was my face that couldn’t quite disguise the shock. Which didn’t feel like shock exactly. It felt more like a sudden slip or sinking, the stomach floating at the start of a long fall – forcing the eyes, the lips, open wide. Wider. Peter’s lips were verging on a smile, and I had lowered the x-acto blade.

  “Right. And you called her.” Maybe two weeks ago?

  Peter looked away, remembering something he resented. “That was Barbara’s deal. But I wouldn’t help her contact Claudia. Neale made me promise that. As if I would have.”

  A clam. That’s what Peter reminded me of. The shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, the thin mouth parting under pressure, then clamping shut again. But I knew his high-mindedness had evolved. He had made at least the one call to Claudia. Inquiring about further copywork, and then – he claimed – thinking better of it. Backing off into his cave.

  “I’m still curious about when Barbara came on board,” I said.

  “She isn’t on board, as far as I know. But you’d have to ask Neale about that.”

  “Last I heard, they haven’t been on board for a while.”

  “We all have our little lapses, Paul. All I know is she answered the phone when I called Neale.”

  “The night Robert came in. Last Sunday.”

  “That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  I threw the blade at a corner, a loud clatter. Took the tape out of the machine, pinched the ribbon between the two ends and yanked. A snarl of tape, flimsy-feeling. It was only a tantrum, and after a few seconds I realized what it must look like, even without checking Peter’s face. I took two good steady steps to reach the door, then turned. No idea what I was about to say.

  “Hey, good luck with Kleinburg, eh?”

  But he’d got himself turned around and down near his table. And it never worked as well that way. Didn’t work at all, actually.

  19

  I went for a walk before knocking on Claudia’s door. Partly it was to try out the new chord I was groping for. The song was getting complicated. I seemed to have left my punk roots to go floundering around in jazz. “Symphonic” pop, at least: Pink Floyd, Supertramp. Long years after I’d supposedly quit music altogether. And I didn’t even like those bands.

  Also, though, I was trying to work up a healthy distrust of Claudia. It wasn’t that I did trust her, exactly. Or that I couldn’t think of reasons, good reasons, she would have called Peter that crazy night. Still, it was a lie. Whoever phoned my brother last night. The first confirmed one. And that always meant others. Focusing on that felt like trying to sharpen a knife edge that had got dulled without my noticing it. Dulled by coffee and cake – and a smile – in Rehak’s. By walking along the street. By talking. Some people you could never trust, even if you never nailed them in an outright lie. But the reverse could be true, too. People waving deceit in your face, and you still couldn’t muster the proper suspicion, or keep a decent distance.

  I wandered into the Holiday Inn mall and saw Rick standing with another man outside the hotel coffee shop. The other man was also huge, as large as Rick, but stretching a suit that looked to be in Walter’s league. I backed out quietly – Rick’s attention was all on the other man’s face, though neither man was speaking – and watched from outside the double glass doors. The suited man brought his hands up to Rick’s shoulders and squeezed. He just squeezed with both hands, like he was trying to wring excess water out of a giant sponge. Rick’s shoulders were too padded for there to be much pain involved, but in the language of squeezing pain isn’t really the main point. Rick did look scared. Meek, almost. With glints of helpless resentment flickering in his eyes – little shines, like minnows darting. I thought of a New Yorker cartoon I’d seen, an evolution spoof, which showed a series of fish with gaping toothy jaws, each one chasing a smaller fish while being chased by a larger fish behind . . . until the smallest fish, the one at the head of the line with nothing smaller to chase and nothing to lose, spurts up onto dry land, desperate enough to become a mammal. Rick was shark-sized in my world. In another world he might well be a guppy. Lunch.

  My feet moved me back toward the gallery, though I didn’t have the ghost of an idea what I would do once I got there. I was like an information junky, hustling to the only alley I knew where I might get my fix. As I walked, I turned over what I had just seen. In outline it was clear enough – the squeeze from ab
ove – but I wondered about the details. For some reason I thought of ancient Rome. Rick and his master both had large straight noses and short cropped hair, like the marble heads of senators I’d seen, though much younger – but it went beyond that. Rick as the minor official – a screw-up, wannabe, or just small and ambitious – dispatched to another province to manage the local trade in girls and drugs. So far his returns were disappointing. He’d let Ramon’s network go fallow without cultivating one of his own. But, strangely, this vision of Rick’s essential inadequacy – someone who’d have to hustle hard just to reach the Pontius Pilate level of chicanery – only made me fear him more. Inadequate people could be dangerous, especially if they knew, as they began to recognize, their inadequacy.

  Or was the pressure something else entirely? Not the wages of failure, but the thing that came before, the command to do well. The big score. Rick’s art heist. Could the squeezer possibly be a supervisor, sent in to suss out – oversee? – a hare-brained scheme from the hinterlands? Dubious about the details – the squeeze – but unable to ignore its wild promise of profit.

  The addict ends up craving the drug, but it’s not what he seeks first. What does an information junky seek? Connection. Easy answer.

  I buzzed, and got the Stefan-wait I’d expected. While I stood in the shadowed corner outside the unmarked grey door on King Street, preparing my patience along with my replies (a sudden urge to renege and join Hans? – providing the little German was too far up inside his ducts to bother with the squawking at his belt), a woman in a green top walked past. She didn’t see me in the shadow. In the bright sunlight her top seemed a colour in a dream, luminous lime green, like Jell-O under a fluorescent strip. Just someone walking by. Heading somewhere.

  But no Stefan-questions came. After a brief delay, the door clicked open. So did each of the two inner doors – each time after a pause, my hand on the door handle, waiting. Frankenstein was standing behind the panel. My briefly favourable impression of Burns deflated again.

  Speech was still lagging: in answer to my question, he rolled his eyes at the washroom. I wondered how much snooping you could accomplish if you just learned to coordinate yourself with people’s bowels.

  “Have you been trained on the motion detectors?” I asked the monster.

  He rolled great brown glossy eyes down at me. Nodded. If he became a regular I would have to avoid those eyes – emotional sinkholes. He swayed his great shaggy head from side to side. Yes and no, I gathered was the answer.

  I stood beside him behind the panel, wishing I’d been trained on it. Robert had offered to explain it often enough – had explained it a couple of times, when I was too tired to stop him – but now I just saw rows of buttons and levers and camera views. As Frankenstein watched, thinking God knows what, I moved the toggle below the lobby camera. That seemed safe enough. My view flew up to the ceiling, it dropped down to the floor. With gentler toggles I got it wobbling across the mid-range. I panned across the lobby and found Josh MacMahon in black and white, his lumpy vibrant colours erased. Not on your watch, I thought. I felt light-headed. A giddiness was possessing me – too swiftly for me to resist it, even if I’d wanted to.

  I found Barbara on one of the back gallery screens, walking out of the surrealist show. Walter wasn’t with her at the moment. Too late, I found the switch for the motion detector and flipped it on. It wasn’t a plan, or even a pawn probe. It felt more like an urge to throw a little mayhem into a scene that was just too static, too pat.

  A green light glowed on the panel. Another flaw in the system: the thief alarmed, made desperate by jangling noise, and the little glow, like a night light, beside a guard who was dozing or engrossed in reading.

  But Barbara was walking through the larger of the Teale Galleries, strolling comfortably, as if she couldn’t hear the clanging behind her. Or perhaps it was just someone else’s problem. She was strolling down the centre of the gallery, looking to either side, like someone walking down the middle aisle of a mall, taking in the shops, glad to be among them, but not compelled to press her face to the glass. I wasn’t qualified to say whether or not she had any understanding of art. But more and more I doubted that she had any interest in it. That incuriousness – along with beauty – might have been the source of her power.

  I tried to turn on the alarm in the Teale Gallery. I wanted to make her react – startle her at least. She kept walking. Then I realized I’d been misreading the labels below the buttons – T1 referred to the button above, not below – and I’d been setting off panics in the deserted Pettit Gallery and sculpture corridor. Which ducts was Hans working on today? The thought struck suddenly, but I hadn’t been paying attention when he’d asked.

  I waited until Barbara was in the middle of the CHOP show – standing in the middle of the room staring at one wall (if she was trying to imitate Walter she wasn’t moving her head enough; the eye didn’t need to stare, just glance at) – and I pushed the button above T2. There was a wonderful delay before she moved, like the diagram in the old science textbook that showed the ball at the top of the slide, loaded with potential energy about to become kinetic. She took a step, the green light glowed. She started, her shoulders jumping, and began glancing about for the source of the noise. I’d been there, of course, and knew the harsh jangling – strange to watch someone’s reactions to it without being able to hear, seeing just the green glow and the jerky, low-resolution images in black and white, like the motions of a comedian in an old silent film. She jerked her head about, her hair flying after it. She strode on high heels a few steps this way, then that; as if motion in another direction, any direction, might stop it. She kept coming back to the centre of the room and then striking out on another tack, like someone drawing an asterisk using vectors of her own movement.

  It was curious to me that she couldn’t stop the sound. There were two ways – known, I would have thought, to anyone who worked at the gallery. First, she could have found an intercom – there was one just around the corner in the lighting panel box – and called security. To see if we’d just lost “Montmorency Falls”, if not just to stop the racket. Or, if you didn’t take the alarm seriously, you could simply open an Emergency exit. For some reason – a circuit problem, which had been noted with concern for my four years at least – the sounding of one alarm cancelled the other. And the sound in the stairwell was more muffled, once you got the door closed again.

  But Barbara looked helpless. I stared down at her scrambling like an insect in a box. It couldn’t have lasted longer than half a minute but it felt painfully protracted, even to me. When she stalked out toward the elevator, so quickly that I lost her on the cameras, I flicked on the Lamont and then the MacMahon alarms ahead of her, pushing Reset on the rooms she’d left. It felt cruel, but I wanted to wind her up to the maximum.

  I looked at Frankenstein, standing patiently beside me. He blinked. Not understanding much more of what I was doing than I did, but expressing his bewilderment more eloquently.

  Stefan timed his return badly. I’d got clear of the panel, and the elevator doors had just opened, releasing Barbara. She swept past me so fast that I caught only a gust of spicy perfume and a blur of brown-and-blonde. But in that blur, like a freeze-frame, was a snapshot of perfect fury. Rage did a strange thing to her beauty. It clarified and removed it – all the straight lines tightening and becoming rigid, but also retreating behind a thin shell or veil, a slight cold distance – like a Greek head wrapped in cellophane.

  “What do you think you’re doing down here?” she snapped. “Who’s in charge here?” Again, that strange ignorance of gallery basics that had been captured by the camera. No practical outlet for frustration; not even knowing the right person to blast.

  She had nothing but her fury, which was frightening enough, even from a few feet away, wondering when it might wheel and find me. This, I saw, beyond the beauty and the clothes and the style and charm – the threat of this, which anybody close to her would feel – I’d fe
lt it once or twice, making mistakes in my gallery daze – this is what kept them all in line. Why don’t those old bags tell her to fuck off? We’d all asked it – post-opening, post-wine, post-coke – packing disgust with the volunteers and their mistress and the gallery into one bored-sounding query. This was why.

  Peter: I wouldn’t advise that. When my hand was on the clock. Her clock.

  Stefan, even when Barbara began articulating her outrage more precisely, couldn’t do much more than say “Yes,” and “Yes, Barbara,” and “I’m sorry,” and “I understand” – and, when she had stopped and stalked back to the elevator, put as much into glowering at me as he could manage. Which with Stefan of course was quite a lot.

  The monster snuck a peek at me as I was leaving. Learning. Slowly but surely, learning.

  “Hnh?”

  The perplexed sound Claudia made in her nose made me slow down and stop for a moment. The breath I took felt like the first breath I’d taken since leaving the gallery, air stopped in my chest as my fingers stretched for the chord. Walking fast, almost running, up to her apartment. Her face at the door strained, not pleased by the interruption. Yet another reason to hurry my story, with her in her paint-stained jeans and T-shirt looking restless on the edge of the couch. The tight uptilt of her jawline: the first line, the main one, if you were sketching her.

  “You’re saying you believe them now,” she said. “Neale and the other guy . . . Peter?”

  “Yes. I think so anyway. Maybe not on every detail. But . . . on the main things, yeah.” On “Wayward Guest”. On Robert.

  “You trust Peter?”

  “Oh God, no. Not at all. But like I’m saying – you have to know the people. This particular guy, I think he’d be more comfortable with a big secret than a small lie. Lies are too . . . I don’t know . . . messy, maybe.”