The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “Precisely. Now suppose that you know a terrorist is making bombs in Austin, Texas. Where do you suspect he is getting his materials?”

  “From a college laboratory.”

  “Which one?” he asked, with eyes still fixed on her.

  “The University of Texas.”

  “Why not Concordia? Or Austin Community College? Wouldn’t these smaller colleges have fewer security measures in place?”

  “It’s easier to blend in at a big school. At smaller schools, people in the lab know everyone who uses the lab. At UT, there are so many people that no one would think twice about seeing someone they didn’t recognize.”

  “And why else?”

  She felt as if she were on the rapid-fire segment of a game show. “The University of Texas is likely to have a larger variety of chemicals, and also a larger supply of each chemical, which means that you might find what you need and be able to take some without a noticeable depletion of the supply.”

  “Mr. Walton?”

  “Yes, sir?” Opie stammered.

  “Suppose someone from Concordia University tells you that they are missing small quantities of ammonium nitrate and chlorine gas. Are you worried?”

  “I’m actually”—his voice cracked—“a forensic accountant.”

  “I didn’t ask what you are. I asked if you’re worried.”

  “It’s not my specialty, so—”

  “Are you worried?” the Professor bellowed.

  “I am now,” Walton said. No one was brave enough to laugh.

  “One minute with the Google you kids are always talking about will show you that you need to be worried about the creation of nitrogen trichloride, which will explode violently if heated to above sixty degrees Celsius.”

  The next three hours were more of the same. The Professor grilled his captives on the explosive properties of various chemical agents, the philosophical treatises underpinning the modern ecoterrorist movement, the historical and biological differences between the tangelo and the clementine, the emergence of three-dimensional imaging in ballistic identification, and the fundamental failings of the legal profession. Each of these digressions was punctuated with periodic outbursts of anger and occasional, but mild, cursing. The Professor threw three more books, confiscated two Game Boys, called one agent fat, and finally drove the sleepy woman to tears.

  Most of the students sat in silent, abject horror. Dagny loved every moment of it.

  She did not love the trek to the medical center. Since Cooper’s ultimatum, she’d eaten less, not more. Maybe it was the stress of the situation. Maybe she thought it would be better to start at a lower weight, so that it would be easier to show progress. She did not try to analyze her behavior; she knew she couldn’t justify it.

  A man in a doctor’s coat met her at the top of the building’s steps. His name tag read “Malloy.” He looked her up and down, fished some keys from his pocket, and unlocked the door. “Follow me,” he said, grimly.

  He led her through the waiting area, down a dark corridor, and past a series of examination rooms. With his thumb, he herded her inside the last room and flicked on the light. He opened a drawer under the examination table, withdrew a paper gown, and tossed it at her. “Change into this and then meet me in the hallway.”

  “I can’t just wear my clothes?”

  He smirked and shook his head before closing the door behind him. That smirk stayed with her. She’d seen enough smirking doctors to last a lifetime.

  She changed as instructed and walked out into the hall. Dr. Malloy was waiting by the scale. He motioned for her to step onto it. Bathroom scales are kinder, Dagny thought. They give instant readings. Physicians’ scales require the sliding of weights and the settling of levers, and this only serves to ratchet up the suspense and maximize the agony. Physicians’ scales were suitable for produce or livestock, not people.

  Malloy fiddled with the smaller weight, sliding it back and forth until the beam finally settled. One hundred eight. It was actually better than she had expected. She had two months to gain seventeen pounds.

  She changed back into her clothes, and he walked her back down the hallway to the main doors. There was no humor in his face. “You would be perfectly healthy at one forty. This one twenty-five...” He shook his head. “If it had been up to me, your target wouldn’t be one twenty-five,” he sighed. “I’ll see you next week.”

  Dagny nodded and started down the steps. She felt relieved that the ordeal was over, until she realized that it had just begun.

  CHAPTER 6

  January 17—Alexandria, Virginia

  Dagny climbed out of bed and walked blindly through the darkness to the bathroom. She flicked on the light, stripped off her nightgown, and looked at herself in the mirror.

  People had told her that she was beautiful, but they were wrong. Sure, there were some things she liked—her high cheekbones, for instance, or her long legs, or her small breasts; the silky-smooth dark hair that hung past her shoulders; the soft olive skin that had slipped down the gene pool from a Korean grandmother she’d never met. But when her gaze shifted from isolated parts to her body as a whole, everything fell apart. She turned away from the mirror and looked over to the bathroom scale, pondered its utility and purpose, and decided once again to leave it alone.

  Back in the bedroom, Dagny dressed quickly—nylon running shorts, a sports bra, and the Harvard Law sweatshirt she wore only under the cover of darkness. She pulled on her advanced-performance, friction-free, low-cut socks and the new pair of Nikes that she’d laced the night before. Grabbing her keys, her iPod, and her gun, she raced downstairs.

  At five in the morning, all of the homes in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria were dark except for hers: a small Prairie-style two-story—all horizontal lines, overhanging eaves, and intricately cut wood—set back on a heavily wooded quarter-acre lot. It was fifteen degrees outside when Dagny ran out of the house. The cold air felt like a sharp slap against her bare legs, but after a dozen strides, the sting faded.

  It was quiet except for the buzz of a dying streetlight, the flicker of which glistened against dangling icicles, remnants of a freezing rain from the night before. No cars filtered through the streets. The morning papers had not yet come. These early hours belonged to Dagny alone.

  After five minutes of sidewalks and streets, Dagny reached the Mount Vernon Trail, which snaked along the Potomac from George Washington’s plantation toward the District. She turned left on the trail, cranked the alt-piano rock of Ben Folds’s Rockin’ the Suburbs, and sprinted through dark woods and past wet swamps. She followed the trail around Reagan National Airport, under the roar of a United jet taking to the skies. A mile later, she was across Gravelly Point, a large grassy field that jutted out along the Potomac. During the summer, the field was covered in blankets and the air was full of Frisbees. Now, in the cold and dark, Dagny saw only a single homeless man, wrapped in a blanket and leaning against a tree. He followed her with his eyes.

  Another mile and she passed the Navy–Merchant Marine Memorial, a sculpture of seven seagulls flying above the crest of a wave. Dagny looked across the Potomac and saw the Washington Monument guarding the city. She’d worked in DC for years, but the monument still moved her. No time for gawking—she ran harder, through the LBJ Memorial Grove, past the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and all the way to the entrance to Theodore Roosevelt Island. She’d run eight miles already. If she kept going and crossed the Key Bridge, she’d end up at Mike’s house, many hours too early. She blew out a big white cloud of air and turned around.

  There was a time when her feet would have been sore, her legs would have ached; but that time was long past. Some people abandon their warm desks to stand in a freezing rain to smoke a cigarette. Others toss back a shot or two of whiskey after a long day at work. Her father, before he was murdered, always and obsessively tuned the television to Channel 12 before he turned it off. Everyone needed something. Dagny needed to run.

  Mike had
been away at a conference. Between their busy schedules, they’d managed only three dates—dinner and an art-house flick, a hike through Great Falls Park, and a lecture by Gary Becker at Politics and Prose. In all, Dagny had spent less than twelve hours in his company, but it was enough to make her feel lonely when he was gone.

  Mike lived in a three-story Italianate town house on the corner of Thirty-Third and Prospect in Georgetown, just a couple of blocks from Zegman’s Gallery and a short walk to the university’s campus. Cursive letters had been carved all the way through the cherry front door, and the gaps had been filled with thick, undulating glass. The letters spelled “Brodsky” and rose slightly from left to right, just like the signature on his paintings. Dagny rang the bell. Was it stupid to buy a man flowers? Probably. She tossed the bouquet behind the shrubs just before he answered the door.

  He kissed her and invited her in. The entry was a long hallway that extended the full length of the town house. On the right side of the hallway was a red brick wall, accentuated by alternating bay windows and light sconces; on the left, clean white drywall held just three paintings, spaced three feet apart.

  She walked over to the first, a Picasso—a cubist rendering of a girl with dark hair. The girl’s right eye and nose seemed to float a few inches to the side of her head. Her clothing was a hodgepodge of mismatched patterns. The grooves of brushstrokes announced that this was no print—it was real. She moved to the next painting, a Monet. A girl with an umbrella stood on a hill in a field, white clouds and blue sky behind her. Dagny had seen a similar Monet; but in this one, the girl’s hands were outstretched, as if she were dancing in the summer’s breeze.

  The third painting she recognized right away. It was the portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife by Jan van Eyck. The original was in the National Gallery in London—she had visited it many times the summer she spent in England before law school.

  It was a strange and captivating work. Arnolfini holds the right hand of his apparently pregnant bride while he raises his right hand, as if greeting a guest or perhaps reciting an oath. He wears a large hat that dwarfs his small head. The bride looks down, in shame perhaps, or maybe just in resignation. Her long green dress gathers in a pile at the floor. Both Arnolfini and his bride are pale, their faces smooth, like dolls. They stand between the bedroom window and a bed draped in red velvet. A small dog stands between them; some discarded clogs rest on the floor. The chandelier above is painted in extraordinary detail, as is a small mirror on the back wall. The work is famous in large part because of this small mirror. With proper magnification, the mirror reveals the backs of Arnolfini and his wife, two witnesses, and the artist, Jan van Eyck, who stands in the middle, painting the scene. Dagny squinted at the painting on Mike’s wall but couldn’t make out the figures in the small mirror.

  “I love this painting,” Dagny said.

  “Me, too,” Mike replied. “That’s why I painted it.”

  “You painted this?” Dagny was impressed. It looked so much like the original. “Wait a second.” Mike walked back around the corner, and returned with a magnifying glass. He handed it to her. “Look in the mirror.”

  Dagny held the glass close to the painting. The artist reflected in the small mirror was Mike Brodsky, clutching his palette, cleft chin and all. She laughed. “What about the Picasso? And the Monet?”

  “Sadly, those are Brodsky originals, too.”

  “They’re amazing.”

  “Yeah, well...” he shrugged. Before she could ask him more, he grabbed her hand and led her around the corner.

  His home was open and modern, more SoHo loft than Georgetown town house. A thick granite countertop swooped around the kitchen, widening into a rounded breakfast bar, large enough to accommodate six swivel stools, each bolted to the floor. Dagny had tried, and failed, to achieve a similar look on an IKEA budget. His Sub-Zero refrigerator had four deep drawers at the bottom, and the right-hand door was made of glass. The cabinets were beech wood with silver hardware. Calphalon cookware dangled from a hanging rack. Dagny had kitchen envy.

  Crushed garlic and chopped onion sat in a saucepan on the stove. Mike doused them with olive oil and then turned on the flame. Dagny leaned against the counter and surveyed the living room. Bright colors, sleek lines. The sofa seemed familiar—she had seen it in a book or magazine. “Is that a Hans Wegner couch?” she asked.

  “I’m impressed,” he said, adding red pepper flakes to the pan, then stirring the concoction with a spatula. “So tell me about the class.”

  “He throws books at people.”

  “I thought you guys only did that figuratively.”

  She laughed. “I think it’s actually going to be a good course. I don’t think anyone else in the class is going to like it, though.”

  He put his hand on her back. “That’s how I feel about the classes I teach. I think they’re good, but I don’t expect anyone else to like them.”

  She knew that wasn’t true. His classes were popular at Georgetown; there was a waiting list every semester. “I’m already tired of the drive to Quantico. Forty-five minutes this morning.”

  His hand slid down to her waist, and she pulled away. It was instinctual, and more dramatic than she would have liked. They stood in silence for a moment. He furrowed his brow, and seemed to be debating whether to let the moment pass. “I think maybe we should talk about that.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.” She’d said that sentence several hundred times in her life.

  He shook his head. “No, see, I like you. I like you a lot. So I want to get this right from the start.”

  She thought about that, and was going to cry.

  He saved her. “About those paintings in my hallway...”

  Mike turned down the flame and opened a cabinet door, grabbing a plain glass jar of whole, peeled tomatoes. “I’m going to tell you a story, and it’s not a good one.” He opened the jar into a large porcelain bowl, then washed his hands. He dug his hands into the bowl and crushed the tomatoes, one by one, into a consistent pulp.

  Dagny stared at him expectantly.

  “A long, long time ago, I dabbled a little in art forgery.” He noticed her surprise and chuckled. “You don’t need to read me my rights just yet.” He dumped the crushed tomatoes into the saucepan. “I think the statute of limitations has run out. I hope so anyway.”

  It had started, he explained, as a joke. Trying to prove to his professor that Picasso wasn’t that interesting, he’d painted a fake Picasso for his midterm exam. The professor gave him an F—“F for Fake”—and then promptly hung the picture in his home, where he passed it off to visitors as the real thing. One of his professor’s friends was a partner at a big law firm in Baltimore. After some heavy questioning from this friend, the professor confessed that it was a fake and sent the lawyer Mike’s way. Eager to outfit the firm’s walls with a classic on the cheap, the lawyer offered him $1,000 to paint another Picasso.

  “Then they wanted a Van Gogh, and then a Monet. And then a Modigliani. Pretty soon, my paintings covered most of their lobby and conference-room walls.” He poured two glasses of wine, then added a splash to the sauce.

  Mike reached up and grabbed a stainless steel pot from the rack. He filled it with water, set it on the stovetop’s lone induction burner, and continued his story. “Some of the lawyers started to send their clients my way—early techies, software developers—people trying to impress the venture capitalists by making them think that they were already successful. The money was good, but it was a pain. I had to study up on every painter, their techniques, their materials, then figure out ways to age the paintings so they would look right. I spent hours tracking down old unused canvas, scraping paint off old junk paintings. I told myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, because I wasn’t lying to anyone, and I didn’t have any reason to believe my buyers were going to resell the paintings.” He dumped fettuccine noodles into the boiling water.

  “But it was wrong,” he continued. �
�These people were using the paintings to lie to people. And I knew that eventually they could end up lost in the marketplace. Look at all the dot-coms that went bust. The longer they held on to the paintings, the more real they would look. Some of the paintings, like the Monet, or especially the Van Gogh, had thick paint that wouldn’t dry for years, so they couldn’t have fooled an expert when I painted them. But years later when the paint dries?” The pasta started to boil over, so Mike turned down the heat and stirred the pot. He tossed a handful of peeled shrimp into the simmering sauce. “I couldn’t sleep at night. I started getting paranoid; every time I saw a man in a suit, I thought he was coming to arrest me. One day I read a story in the paper about a guy named Tony Tetro. Ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “Dalis and Rembrandts and Rockwells—he could make anything. A genius. A real genius.” Mike shook his head. “They charged him with forty-four counts of felony forgery.”

  “But I’m sure he was selling them to people who thought they were real,” Dagny countered. “You were selling them to people who knew they were fake. That’s not a crime.”

  “Even if mine wasn’t technically a crime against the law, it was a crime against art. I was ashamed of myself. I hated myself. So I stopped. It wasn’t easy. No one wanted to buy a Brodsky original back then. I worked in a restaurant to pay the rent. Tried to live honestly.”

  Mike drained the pasta in a colander over the sink, then dumped the noodles into two large bowls, topped them with sauce, and sprinkled fresh parsley on top. “Shrimp Fra Diavolo,” he said, placing a bowl in front of her. “So now you know the worst thing about me, Dagny Gray. For a short time, I was a fraud.”

  “So was I,” Dagny said.

  He smiled. “How so?”

  “I practiced law for four years.”

  “Yours is worse!” he joked. “Tell me about it.”

  She carried the bowl and wineglass around the counter and sat on a stool. He did the same.