Stealing Picasso (11 page)

While Turton and Mireille are talking, Picasso has unpicked the painting from its frame. He kisses her on her crying lips before rolling her up and tucking her under his arm. He calls to them, ‘Hurry, my friends,' and they creep from the gallery. As they step through the door back into Turton's studio, Picasso thrusts the stolen painting into Turton's hands, not having second thoughts about what they are doing, Turton hopes. Then he is gone, gone back to inhabit every gallery forever. Turton blinks slowly several times but he cannot reinvent him. He locks the door and covers it with his painting of the boy in the tree.

Standing here with a stolen Picasso under his arm, Turton has an unaccountable urge to weep. Whether this is because he has locked Picasso away forever, or because he has ruined his own life, he couldn't say. But all of them, Harry, Mireille and Turton, are a bit shocked at what they have just done, at where they find themselves. At the great success of their venture. Harry twinkles his fingers before him as though he has just touched something hot, telling himself, ‘Well … We did it … We got it …' Turton holds the
Weeping Woman
in his right hand, tugs at his left sideboard with his other and breathes deeply to ward off tears. Mireille kisses them both and congratulates them. ‘Rejoice, terrorista.'

The next day is a Sunday, a longish purgatory Turton has to drink himself through with a bottle of Jamieson. Because the authorities, sly bastards, do absolutely nothing. They are inconceivably cool.

The three of them wait on tenterhooks for a newsflash, for sirens, for footsteps, for their door to come crashing in in an avalanche of coppers shouting for them to put their fucking hands in the air. Not a peep. They are surrounded and outwitted and very nearly conquered by a display of total inactivity.

As Mireille is unconnected to the gallery, they spend the day at her place, the Hell's Bells. When not staring out at the street and across the bay to a black eternity, Turton keeps going to her radio and cranking the tune dial back and forth to catch the breaking news of their venture. Harry sits smoking pot, staring at the TV, changing channels. Torvill and Dean are skating in gold costumes, Ronald Reagan is hustling along in a crouch beneath the rotors of a helicopter, waving with one hand and holding onto his hairstyle with the other. Where is the news of their great abduction? It begins to seem to them like a media blackout – a conspiracy between the fourth estate and the long arm of the law. Perhaps this crime is so important it is going to remain a secret until it is cracked. The state is in cahoots with the media on this one. Like flying saucers, like JFK's assassination.

As the whisky begins to take effect, Turton feels like a child who has committed an offence so grave that his mother refuses to admonish him. The silence starts to get to him. He begins to crave the dire consequences, the doorbusting coppers. Doesn't this alternative mean they are surrounded?

‘What is this silence? Is it psychology? Are they fucking with us?' Turton asks.

‘Yeah, Mireille. We can't sell the painting to our guy until he knows it's stolen,' Harry says. He is rubbing his face all over as if trying to wake to a new truth. ‘What's going on? Why aren't we on the news?'

Her first language is, Turton supposes, French. Certainly it is not English, with which she can inter meaning in a graveyard of syntax. ‘Patiently does it,' she tells them. ‘Stay cooler. The galleries are not places of clockwork and synchronicity and army-life precise times. Not of dotted i and crossed t. The galleries are run by dreamers and smilers whose days keep time to the beat of their own big hearts. Boom … boom … boom … They are run by people who are made slow and happy by the art. People stoned by sixteenth-century frescoes and fourth-century figurines and post-modern nudes. They do not make good detectives. Maybe tomorrow they discover her gone.'

Harry and Turton nod agreement and Turton thinks to himself, well, true, the place is run by a posse of dilettantes, aesthetes, historians and emeritus hippies, all of them dreamy with worship, happy to be locked in the cathedral with Gauguin and Rembrandt and Picasso and El Greco. Believers far enough gone to want to live in the landscapes and gorge themselves on the still lifes and screw the nudes. And it is conceivable that people this blissed-out wouldn't notice the cornerstone of their whole ethos has been filched.

But by Monday lunchtime even Mireille has lost patience with what she calls the irresponsible dickheads who run the place.

‘A Picasso', she shouts. ‘A Picasso. What are they doing? These people need the rocket.'

She rings
The Age
and her voice clears into an alarmingly natural Australian accent as she tells a woman on the news
desk, ‘The Picasso at the National Gallery has been stolen. It is gone, baby.' She raises her eyebrows at Harry and Turton in apology for this theatrical touch.

Then she rings the gallery itself. When she finally gets Weston Guest on the line Turton nearly ducks down behind her sofa at the tinny bombast of his voice, a man shrunk to a toy soldier but still demanding his place at the feast.

‘Have you checked the Picasso?' she asks. ‘It has been stolen.' She smiles at the mousy uproar in her hand. ‘We will be in touch.' She hangs up.

Within half an hour of that phone call the natural dreaminess of the National Gallery fractures into a thousand private panics. A great energy enlivens the staff, who rush about completing tasks they should have completed days, or weeks, ago and covering up iniquities they shouldn't have contemplated, but had, instead, completed.

By the main goods entrance a man, wearing his blue overalls inside out so the word MAINTENANCE cannot be read on his back, can be seen throwing
Penthouse
magazines into a dumpster. A well-thumbed six-year-old library of adored Pets cascade into the food scraps as he says a sombre goodbye to a select few, ‘Bye, Jenny-Lee. Bye, Bobby-Pam. Thank you, Chantilly.' He covers them over with waste paper and bends to plant a quick kiss on the side of the dumpster.

In Finance an accountant is hurriedly reversing a history of partially misallocated superannuation benefits, touching his forehead with his fingertips, asking himself, ‘Why?' and telling himself, ‘The pokies.'

In Restoration, where, because of the ancient canvases on which they work, it is strictly forbidden to smoke, a large, slow-moving woman called Henrietta, whose eye is so good and hand so steady that her friends joke she could write The Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin and still have room for ‘There was a young man from Nantucket', sneaks a jar of Marlboro butts into her handbag and out past the guard into the fire escape, where she wipes the jar clean of fingerprints before setting it down against the banister and sneaking back to her fading Tucker. There she sits tallying her many sick days and late-for-works on her paint-stained fingers, tut-tutting at her own truancy.

Cindrich Psijek and Bao Ng are sitting on the edge of a loading dock swinging their legs, looking down Southbank Boulevard at the traffic and lunchtime pedestrians. Peeling the lids off their lunchboxes they tilt them to see what their wives have prepared for them today. They are maintenance workers at the gallery, both immigrants. Cindrich is from Croatia and Bao from Vietnam. They have become friends inside the small overlapping part of their worlds where English is spoken. But they speak so little English that news of the theft has not reached them.

Cindrich's lunchbox holds a sheep's cheese and some bread, as well as a selection of nettles and thistles, delicacies that can be purchased in no market in this strange new country, which his wife has to harvest from vacant blocks of land in Hampton Park, while shaking her head and hissing at the wastefulness
of these Australians. He peels back the outer bark of a Scotch thistle and nibbles its white meat. Holds it out to Bao, offering him a bite, laughing when the little man curls his lips, as he knew he would. Bao is having cold noodles with shrimp and fish sauce. He wafts this under Cindrich's nose and Cindrich draws his head away and growls, making Bao laugh. ‘This arvo am early take off.' He hands Bao his time card. ‘Okay you?'

Bao nods and pockets the card. ‘Tomorrow me. Tomorrow school sing.' Cindrich nods sadly, he too has been trapped in school concerts. ‘Bwah, bwah, bwah,' he falsettos a song and they both laugh. They often cover for each other's early exits.

As they eat their lunch they see a posse of cops come striding towards them down Southbank Boulevard with jaws set hard, the sun bright off their caps and buttons. Cindrich and Bao stop chewing as fear flares in the gut of each, and they ask themselves questions. Is this about the handsaw I have taken from Maintenance? Is it the balsa and wood glue I smuggle home for Anh's models? Is it my falsified time sheets? The iced coffee I pilfer from the staff canteen? But each quickly realises his crimes do not warrant a gang of cops as ugly as this one, some with grey hair and medals. The other man must be the culprit. Each is suddenly sure he is consorting with a criminal. Cindrich looks angrily at Bao. Bao returns his glare.

‘Big thief you,' Bao says angrily. When Cindrich hears this he knows Bao has done something stupendously bad and is trying to get him blamed. Goddamned little yellow bastard.

‘Confess,' he demands, and slaps Bao's face with a stinging nettle. He reaches out and traps Bao in a headlock, calling to the police, ‘I have him. I have.' But the little man slips his grasp and is on his back calling him, ‘Riar. Arseho. Badman.'

‘Bastard.'

‘Arseho.'

They wrestle and gouge, each trying to defeat and capture the other and prove his own innocence and goodness to the cops, who stride on past into the gallery without so much as a glance at the two fighting men.

After the police have passed them by and disappeared into the gallery they wrestle on for perhaps a minute more, bewildered. Then their grips relax and their struggles lessen. Bao lets go of Cindrich's collar and brushes some dirt from his friend's cheek. Cindrich releases Bao's fingers and brushes down the front of the little man's shirt. They stand and begin to dust each other off. They pick up each other's lunches. Cindrich offers Bao his comb and the small man recomposes his hair. Neither apologises to the other. No mention is made that they did this to each other. It's as if a passing gang had thrashed them both.

‘You okay?' Bao asks his friend. ‘I good. You good?'

‘I good.'

‘This arvo I early take off. Okay you?'

‘Okay.'

In a concrete service corridor that leads from the gallery restaurant, the Chef's Bequest, Armand, the long-toothed, black-eyed sommelier of that establishment, is hustling along as fast as he can, blinded by the towering bouquet of silver wine bladders he is holding. The crescendo of tiny, urgent steps moves towards the dumpster. Five years ago Armand bought himself a plastic funnel, placed that funnel above an empty bottle of Chateau Lafayette and, in a large-spirited alchemy, poised a box of local rot-gut above that funnel and pressed its trigger. In the years since, Armand has fired thousands of litres of box-wine hissing into that funnel's wide end and been delighted to hear the
chug and gurgle of thousands of litres of Chateau Lafayette and presumptuous Californian Chablis flowing from its thin end and finding refuge in the bottles to which it belonged.

Ever since his alchemy began he has hovered above diners in the Chef's Bequest, agreeing with them that there is nothing anywhere to compare with the admirable individuality of Bordeaux and that the American can-do attitude is relocating the international centre of gravity of Chablis. It is a neat process of value-adding with no loser, no side effect, and no by-product, apart from a silver contraband of emaciated wine bladders to be smuggled from the gallery. ‘Jesus,' Armand sometimes says to himself, ‘may have turned water into wine, but I have turned camel's piss into Chateau Lafayette.' Armand's alchemy is financing his daughter's violin lessons, golf-club fees at three of Melbourne's sand-belt courses, and a once-a-month tryst with a prostitute who looks like Olivia Newton John.

When Armand reaches the open dumpster he pitches the wine bladders into it, retrieving and slam-dunking those that missed the mark, stabbing the unwounded few with a fruit knife and deflating them so they lie low. When he is done, a jagged silver range lies over the detritus. Wine leaking down into the dumpster trickles over the Misses November, May and June, staining their breasts, soaking their memorable thighs, pooling in their belly buttons.

Indeed, the dumpster is now a layer-cake of iniquity, the seven deadly sins all generously represented. This great repository of refuse is bulging at the mouth with evidence of lust, evidence of gluttony, evidence of sloth, evidence of greed, evidence of wrath, evidence of envy and evidence of pride. Everything has been placed there hurriedly, furtively, by gallery staff in these last few hours since the announcement that she is taken.

The principal's secretary, Lizzie Bell, comes to Turton and tells him, ‘Turton? Turton? I've done something.' He frowns and laces his fingers in admonition. ‘What?'

‘Since my marriage break-up, when I moved into my flat … I've stored a sofa and two armchairs here. In storeroom five. It's just … there's so much space here, and I had to leave home so fast and I was only going to leave them here until I found somewhere else, but …'

Turton, wanting to shout at her, ‘Who gives a shit? I've stolen the
Weeping Woman
,' curls his lip in distaste at her wicked ness and says instead, ‘Goodness, Lizzy. Furniture? Like we're Storage King?'

Deirdre Bremner, a married mother of three and archivist seconded to the gallery from the Museum of Victoria, sensing the heat, feeling the guilt, visualising the wreckage (her children's faces white with shock, her husband holding his chin high against the heartbreak) times her run to the Café Bar to coincide with Christian Beaumont's. Christian is a valuer of post-modern art. As he's chunking a lever on the machine, dumping sugar into his Styrofoam cup, she tells him, ‘We can't do this any more.' He puts down his coffee and takes her by the wrist. She frees herself. ‘No. We've been lucky. But things have changed. The painting … No more, Chris.' She watches his face go loose, his mouth hang open, and she imagines the pain this transformation represents, and silently damns the thieves who stole that painting.

In the lunch queue in the cafeteria Terry Radcliff, foreman of packers, dressed in khaki overalls, finds himself standing behind Walt Lew, professor of Antiquities at Melbourne University and a consultant valuer on acquisitions at the gallery. He is a great favourite of the working men at the gallery, the old prof, for his ability to tell a foul joke and spill scuttlebutt about the
executive staff and conjecture in Shakespearian English about the horizontal proclivities of passing female staff members. Terry asks him, just casually and by way of making conversation, if he's ever heard of some joker by the name of Gee-yo-to.

‘Geeyoto. You mean Giotto?' Walt Lew asks. ‘A painter?'

‘Yeah, yeah. Painter. Starts with a G, the name. I, O, double T, O.'

‘Giotto,' the professor confirms. ‘I have, Terry. Everybody has. Even the big-titted fellatrix serving the goulash has heard of Giotto.'

Terry leans out of the queue and looks towards the counter. ‘Tanya? World-famous guy, then?'

‘Indeed.'

‘Expensive to buy?'

‘Up there with El Greco.'

Terry waits, blank-faced, for expansion.

‘Exceedingly expensive,' Walt Lew obliges.

Terry breaks from the queue.

‘Not a goulash fan?' Walt Lew asks.

Terry sticks a finger down his throat and makes vomiting noises.

In the packing room Terry and the five packers who work under him stand around their wounded Giotto looking worried, like a hunting party who have fired blindly though the foliage at what they thought was a boar, but turned out to be a child. It is a small canvas titled
The King Entering Jerusalem
, a scene of Christ riding an ass through a gate of a mud-walled city. A scattershot of pinpricks speckles the canvas, radiating out from the rump of the ass.

Yesterday Terry and his men packed an exhibition containing seventy-eight Rembrandts for shipment back to the Rijks museum, while Dutch gallery officials in skivvies and
stovepipe trousers and rimless glasses oversaw their every move. Packing Rembrandts is like handling high explosives – any false move is disaster. A day of it left you drained and strung out. So when, at day's end, after the Dutch had departed, Terry pulled out his beer-can bong and a matchbox of hash and asked, ‘Anyone for a choof?' the packers went for it like paratroopers on leave.

In the hilarious debauch that followed, one of them slid a picture from the packing shelves. A little Giotto. Out from under the weight of all those Rembrandts, returned to life and hilarity by the hashish, they played a game of stoned Pin the Tail on the Donkey with this picture, laughing hysterically every time Christ copped it in the rear.

‘Everyone knows this Giotto bloke,' Terry tells them now. ‘Even Tanya,' he cups his hands to his chest, miming large breasts, ‘in the cafeteria.'

‘Shit.'