Stealing Picasso (21 page)

Working, as she does, for an important man, Annie Truss's days are full of excitement. Right now, for instance, she is whiting out a Y that will, if subtly obliterated, be replaced with a T, which will begin the word Titian in a letter to the governor-general that Weston Guest has dictated to her. She is wondering if white-out is acceptable for gubernatorial correspondence or whether she should type the whole letter again. As she closes her eyes to visualise the governor-general reading the letter she has typed, the phone rings. Blindly she creeps her left hand across the desktop and picks up the receiver as the governor-general frowns at the whited-out Y in her mind's eye. She tears the letter from the typewriter and screws it up.

‘National Gallery of Victoria, Weston Guest's office. Annie speaking. Can I tell him who's calling? Well, can I tell him
what it's regarding?
Saving?
Turton Pym's sorry arse? Saving Turton Pym's sorry arse.' She reads aloud as she scribbles this on a Spirax pad, the tone of her voice unchanged. Her second incoming line rings before she can put the first call through and she tells the first caller to hold, please, and presses the flashing ‘2' button on her phone.

‘National Gallery of Victoria. Weston Guest's office. Annie speaking. Yes, Mr Draper, I'll see if he's in. Hold one moment please.' She writes ‘Speed Draper – great news' on her pad, just below ‘Saving Turton Pym's sorry arse.' With both calls on hold she shouts to Weston through their adjoining door. ‘Mr Guest, I've got a guy on line one who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym's sorry arse, and Speed Draper on line two who says he has great news about the stolen painting. It really is Mr Draper.' They have had a number of hoax calls since the painting was stolen.

Weston has an Arnold Shore landscape spread on his desk and is hunkered over it, peering at it through a magnifying glass when Annie shouts to him. He doesn't bother to move until he hears her mention Speed Draper and great news, then he comes up out of that painting and drops the magnifying glass and begins gesticulating at her through the glass wall; waving his arms, pointing at his phone, ushering the call onwards.

‘Speed Draper. Speed Draper,' he tells her.

She patches the call through and Weston cools, takes a breath, and lets it ring three times before answering it.

‘Weston Guest.'

‘Get down to Spencer Street station, Weston. We think we've found her in a locker.'

Weston lays a hand flat on his stomach. ‘Oh, thank God. Is she damaged?'

‘We're waiting on a key. Get down here and you can verify if she's genuine or not.'

‘I'll be there in five. Don't let the police touch her, for God's sake. Wait for me.' As he hangs up Weston begins shouting at Annie to get him a car, call the trustees, forget the car, he'll go on foot. He runs a comb through his hair and flounces his bow tie and rushes from the office, telling Annie to wish him luck and leaving her to wonder what to tell the weirdo who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym's sorry arse, whose call is still flashing at her on line one.

‘I'm sorry, sir. Mr Guest has left the office for the day.' There is silence on the other end and Annie asks, ‘Sir?'

‘Tell him Turton Pym's in locker two two eight at Flinders Street,' Larry Skunk says.

‘Mr Guest won't be back today, sir.'

‘Send roses, then, bitch.' He hangs up.

On Flinders Street Weston's brisk walk keeps breaking into a run and he has to force it back to a walk again and again. He has been so much in the news lately, pleading and cajoling, extolling the virtues of Picasso and trusting to the good nature of the thief, that people recognise him now. Some shout out at him. Some, seeing the prospect of drama in his thin-lipped flight, begin to follow. He ducks into a bottle shop for Moët, and marches onwards to the station, a score of curious citizens following in his wake, laughing, cracking jokes, on an expedition, to they don't know where.

A crowd is already milling before locker 227. Speed Draper is there with a scrum of policemen, theatrically huffy, pacing, hands on hips, staring angrily at the locker.
The Age
newspaper has received a tip-off, and, being right across the street, has more journalists and cameramen here than it currently has on continental Europe. When Weston arrives with his trailing
retinue of breathless stickybeaks, the police and newspaper people swear and screw their faces up. Who needs a truckload of citizens trampling around their crime scene and story?

Weston is as excited as a boy queuing for Santa. He picks up Speed's hand from down by his trouser leg and shakes it. ‘Well met, Lord Carnarvon. Shall we broach the final seal?' He indicates locker 227, assuming they have been waiting for him.

‘We're waiting for the station manager. He has the key,' the minister explains huffily. ‘It's locked. We'd force our way in, but we might damage the picture … if it's there.'

A silence follows, in which no one knows what role to play. Weston was all set to be triumphant: the champagne, the quotes – ‘I had ultimate faith in the enforcement agencies' – the photo ops. Now he finds himself having to lay down the Moët and stare at the locker with its suspicious boot print, consult his Rolex, show his concern.

The crowd itself is impatient. It has invested serious legwork to be here alongside Weston and it wants a result. Someone shouts, ‘Crack her open, Speed.' They start to heckle and jeer. ‘Come on, Speed, you tiresome old bag of swamp gas, let's get on with it.'

It becomes quite an uproar – good-natured, but an embarrassment to the Minister of Police and the director of the National Gallery, all the same. Weston now wishes they'd be moved on. The police try to back the crowd up, but, finding half are journalists, make do by frowning at them.

‘Crack the locker.'

‘Give us a look at her.'

Speed and Weston are sweating. It has occurred to both of them that this locker might contain something as rank as a boar's liver, a cow turd, an unknown painting. That this is a
prank. That the thieves, who apparently despise them for not funding young artists, will play them for fools awhile before returning the
Weeping Woman
. Both men know it will be on every front page in the country if they open this locker and pull out an inflatable doll with her mouth bugled to fellate them.

I'll let Draper open the locker, Weston decides. I'll take a couple of steps backwards as he does, then, if he emerges with a smoking turd, I'll be out of shot. I'll slip away through the dirt-bags and it'll be his humiliation. If he emerges with the painting I'll step forwards and make a show of congratulating him and embracing her. I'll edge him out of shot and dance a pas de deux with her. The triumph will be mine.

In the tin confines of locker 228 Turton Pym, artist, not well known, bound and gagged with duct tape, hearing people calling to have the locker opened, urges them on with grunts. ‘Hurry, Jesus bloody Christ, hurry. I'm still here, but I'm dying. Dying. Unable to breathe.' Sitting upright with his hands bound behind his back and his legs folded sharply, he pushes with his toes against the locker door. He tries to draw his feet back to kick the door, but he is folded too tight. Bent like this, his knees pressed against his cheeks, with tape covering his mouth, he has to struggle for every breath.

Hope surges through him into a sob and his stomach vaults as he hears the familiar sound of a key scrabbling at the entrance to a lock. As the key is inserted and turned he half closes his eyes, expecting a blast of light. His pulse lifts. There will be concerned faces, policemen, ambulance people, distraught friends,
another twenty years of life. A masterpiece. An Archibald win. He shivers at the thought of the adhesive tape being torn off his head by some eager young policeman; it will surely peel the skin from his lips and tear a swathe from each of his sideboards. It must be eased off slowly, using a solvent. He hears the creak of an opening door; prepares to accept the world.

But he remains in near darkness, mocked by a meek dribble of illumination through the ventilation slits of the locker door. A different door has opened – another door to another locker. He closes his eyes and listens, unable to move, as the
Weeping Woman
is pulled from locker 227. Of course, they have come for her. His legs are beginning to knot with cramp. He hears the crowd murmur with delight as she is birthed into the world. The murmur becomes a polite fizz of applause. She is powerful, famous. The applause becomes as loud as she is priceless.

People are cheering and Turton Pym is happy she has been saved. He is happy, as well, to know his friends have paid this price, this priceless price, for his freedom. He silently thanks them for that. He wishes he could join the celebrations. Someone out there shouts, ‘Three cheers.' The crowd obeys and the ventilation slits begins to sparkle with camera flash. Turton keeps pulling hard through his nose for every breath and the air whistles in his nostrils so loud he wonders the crowd can't hear. A champagne cork pops, ricochets off the tin door, making him flinch.

His mind turns, as it always does in times of crisis and pain, to finding ways of making this into art. How best to paint the scene? How to capture the irony of a crowd cheering a work of art while an artist dies, unmourned, in their midst? The locker he is in would be transparent, a ghostly white frame surrounding him as he hovers unseen among them. The crowd would be staring rapt at the unrolled masterpiece in postures of triumph
and worship. Some with arms in the air, one holding a spouting bottle of Krug, some kneeling. Turton would be smiling at their childish idolatry. He'd get rid of the duct tape – he must have a smile like Jesus smiled at the last. And an amused twinkle of forgiveness. And Whiteley. Whiteley will be at the centre. Didn't Edward Trelawney reach into Shelley's funeral pyre and save the poet's heart? Yes. There will be a golden heart in Turton's chest, the source of all light in the painting. Whiteley will be reaching for it, through the ghostly geometry of the locker, through Turton's ribs. For Whiteley alone has seen the real treasure here. Whiteley will consult that heart unto his dying day; will plunder its immeasurable depths for inspiration. But … should it be his heart Whiteley is reaching for? What about his eye? Or his brain? Figuratively speaking, what best represents an artist's genius?

Sitting in locker 228 with his knees up against his chin and his eyes twinkling in the camera flash from the ventilation slits, Turton Pym knows his painting would be a masterpiece. The tiny bursts of light he is seeing are the bright flickering of his heart and eye pressed against Whiteley's bosom, and his brain, fierce as a star, held in Whiteley's hand.

Caught in the thrill of creation Turton ignores the dreadful ache of suffocation as it seeps from his lungs into his chest and out into his limbs and lips. It is an aggravation to be ignored, like thirst, hunger, a salesman knocking at the door. He will deal with it later. He is painting now.

The station master is imprisoned in a timetable as fragile as a house of cards. So many trains arrive and depart from Spencer Street each day. The station master is on tenterhooks watching each come and go, because he knows trains are lethargic beasts prone to dawdle and linger. One late train will infect another with its tardiness, and that will infect yet another, and so on and so on, until the timetable collapses and his station resembles a flu ward with locos laying about on sidings leaking a bacteria of hostile commuters, who have prised open electric doors and popped out emergency windows and are now on the hunt for the dimwit who incarcerated them.

In order to prevent this, the station master spends his day shuffling and shooing locos, panicked as a chess master in a burning building. The 8.15 from Rosanna to platform six is ten
minutes overdue. Which moves the 8.30 from Broadmeadows to platform nine … no, ten, no, the 8.45 from Ferntree Gully is there. No, no, no. Trains must run on time.

Just yesterday the 3.40 from Geelong hit a truck that was wedged under a boom-gate at a level crossing in Werribee, killing the truck driver. The station master paced out the minutes waiting for that train, damning the driver of that truck, who turned out to be a father of five, driving long hours to support those five. Sad. But when the Geelong Flyer was delayed, the lateness spread like influenza down the other lines: Hurst-bridge, Frankston, Flemington, even Sydney, and hung there at the outer reaches of the rail network, before ricocheting back in a fusillade of delay and postponement that lasted all day. The station master had every reason to damn that truck driver to hell.

And now this. Now police demanding the master key to his lockers. Reporters sniffing about as if they'd got wind of defective brake pads or sleepers made a feast of by termites. This distraction will keep him from ushering in the 11.42 from Shepparton, a train running a portentous seven minutes behind time, and, unless the passengers disembark smartly, the midday from Geelong will need to be allotted another platform. He is minded to lay this dread scenario at the door of the police and ask them what they intend to do about it.

But he won't. Because all the station master's hostility is deep within the station master. The only hint of its existence is the foulness of his breath caused by his dyspepsia. Outwardly, he is a wheedling presence who imagines himself suave. Smiling a smile that has, he persuades himself, soothed many a momentarily disenchanted passenger over the years, he lays his hands flat on his chest with his fingers laced across his sternum, leans forwards low and tilts his head to look up at
Speed Draper from beneath the peak of his station master's cap and tell him, ‘A face I recognise from the television. Mr Draper. Minister. Honoured.' He holds out his hand. ‘Ian Beaks. I am the station master, fifteenth year, of Spencer Street station. The country's busiest.'

Aware the press is hovering, Speed Draper speaks softly. ‘Do you have the key to this locker?' He touches a knuckle on the locker door.

Aware the press is hovering, the station master speaks loudly. ‘I do, minister. And may I, being legally charged with responsibility and guardianship of the goods and chattels enclosed within all the lockers on these premises, which is a relationship of trust assumed and expected between myself and the lessees of these lockers, ask why you want to open two two seven?'

‘A relationship of trust? Responsible for the contents? I hear
accomplice
, when you say “relationship of trust” with the lessees of this particular locker, Mr Beaks. And I hear
receiver of stolen goods
when you say “responsible” for these particular goods and chattels. Or am I reading too much into your relationship with these lessees?'

The station master's voice drops to a whisper. ‘Most certainly, minister. You are. Oh, yes. I'm sorry to give a wrong idea. No relationship. And I know nothing of the contents of two two seven. Nor any locker here. It would be a breach of privacy if I did. I only ever open the very most noisome lockers. The stinkers. Forgotten lunches and practical jokes of a scatological nature, minister, are the goods and chattels in which I deal, sadly.'

The station master scrabbles a key from his trouser pocket. Attached to it is a white ribbon and on it a foam Smurf with Lachie written on his belly. ‘Lachie locker key,' he explains.

Speed Draper smiles and ushers him towards the locker. The crowd presses in behind the station master as he fits the key to the lock. Despite his earlier plan to keep a safe distance, Weston Guest can't help himself. It is he who reaches in and retrieves the cardboard tube and holds it out in his cupped hands. The crowd makes room as he extracts the canvas and unrolls the
Weeping Woman
. And as she emerges there are murmurs of delight, as if from relatives seeing a newborn baby unswaddled for the first time. No articulation can compete with a simple ‘ooh' or ‘aah'.

Weston studies her suspiciously, his eyes hardened. Eventually he nods and a teardrop forms and runs down his cheek as he announces softly through quivering lips, ‘It is her.'

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.'