Catalogue Raisonne (11 page)

“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.

When the street stayed bare, I hobbled to the centre of the lawn,
unzipped, and let it go all over the wooden stake and then the cardboard of the For Sale sign. Which belonged, I saw when I finally opened my eyes, to
Piccone Realtors
. Construction, I remembered now, was where he had begun.

I
t was a mystery to me why I agreed to so much Monday overtime. Except for all-hands-on-deck occasions like the Gala Preview, it was supposed to be strictly voluntary, though Hans's grimace when you refused could be hard to take. The twist of disgust that aligned for some nasty moments all the seams in his face implied that your “personal reasons” could only be sheer laziness, if not something even more despicable.

It wasn't the extra money. Angela and I were getting by, the takings of two wage slaves combining to make about the salary of a low-level office worker, or just below what a first-year teacher might earn, sans benefits or pension of course. And Sean certainly had a point when he said that “time and a half mainly makes one realize how small time is.” It had a nice cryptic ring; he repeated it quite often. Sean had solved the Monday overtime problem in the neatest way, declaring, the first time he was asked, that he wouldn't dream of being in the gallery any time it wasn't mandatory, and especially not when he would be kept too distracted to attend to his real labour of composition. This speech, delivered with requisite pomposity, meant that Sean had to endure possibly the worst reaction I'd seen yet in Hans – a gape and shudder, that passed through various grimaces and twitches as if choosing among them, to reach a frozen sneer of disbelief – but he only had to endure it the once. Whereas the rest of us had to shift and mumble, and then capitulate, each time there was a hanging. Or ventilation ducts that needed reaming. Or a luncheon of Barbara's ladies for which tables needed to be carried.

Angela might have minded more if she hadn't developed such a severe case of gallery devotion. The attendants followed a rotating series of mostly split days off – Monday, Tuesday; Monday, Wednesday; Monday, Thursday . . . and so on – so Monday was our only
guaranteed day together. Sometimes she became kittenish when the alarm went off – pitting her rubbery nipples and strong thighs against my loyalty to art, or the local chapter of it anyway. Hardly a fair contest. But today she just groaned and rolled over. I'd got to sleep very late – tossing and turning, and then willing, sort of mentally pitching, myself down into coma – and hadn't even heard her come in.

Which left me where I found myself too many Monday mornings. Groggily pulling on my jeans and T-shirt – street clothes and whiskers the day's main privileges – while wondering whether it was a case of simple masochism or a more insidious addiction, some creeping attachment to the gallery that hid itself behind a mask of loathing. Gallery addiction: even the thought was repulsive. Like a soft and private tumor, spongy and non-fatal and too humiliating to name.

And then I remembered that today –
today
– I did have a reason to go in.

Checkpoint. Checkpoint Charlie. First checkpoint, second checkpoint. Roger that. They were phrases from bad movies . . . until they actually meant something. Each person I passed on my way into the gallery was a checkpoint. Getting by each one another optimistic whisper that last night's outlandish dream would not take a swerve down into nightmare.

Ted: buzzing me in without a glance up from his
Foundation Trilogy
paperback. Foundation: good, solid word. Very safe.

Hans and Ramon detaching CHOP works from the jumble and loading them onto the freight elevator. Lars and Leo nowhere in sight: another positive sign. Less buffoonery, which I was beginning to see new peril in. Their parents forbade much expansion of their part-time hours, apart from high-visibility events like the Gala Preview. Like a lot of self-made men, Mr. Carlsson was insisting that his sons pay a modest entry fee – a token of sweat equity – before inheriting the family firm. He wanted a university or college degree, though was said to be close to settling for high school graduation, which the twins had been wrapping up for a couple of years.