Stealing Picasso (13 page)

Harry loved being a robber. Robbery, in his limited experience, was a major buzz: the blast of brouhaha and hoo-ha in the papers; everyone searching for him. Owning a secret this big was as exciting as owning a gorilla. So he had no complaints with the career choice. He was in it eyebrow-deep and grinning.

But he did have misgivings about Turton as a partner in crime. Quite frankly, he had come to think Turton was mad. And not just because of his fixation with painting pussy, or the fact his only friends were bikies and a Michael Jackson impersonator, or his obsession with the success of Whiteley and Olson. Because, get this, the night they went to knock off the
Weeping Woman
, they snuck into the gallery and Turton started jumping around like a gibbon. A French gibbon, firing off insults and threats to the other paintings in the gallery in an
accent he doesn't have. Harry got the idea he was pretending to be Picasso. Or maybe, with the stress and suspense and all, he'd flipped out and really thought he was Picasso.

Anyway, when Turton took his clothes off and brown-eyed paintings and flashed his todger around and generally made a lunatic out of himself, Harry knew they were all on shaky ground. How was this old guy going to hold it together with the cops sniffing around? And if Turton tumbled them all into jail with his lunatic high jinks, the old bastard would be able to get himself out by the same method, pleading insanity as a legal defence. Any jury would agree he was wigged out once they got a look at him.

But Harry would cop the full brunt of the law because he was clearly sane and in it for monetary gain, being under inordinate financial pressure. That could be testified to by many witnesses who had seen him threatened by debt collectors of a mangy sort. Because, after Mireille's cheque bounced, Chloe Gwyther sent round two guys to the NGV School of Art. Chloe Gwyther, a respectable woman who owns a damned gallery. There are legitimate ways of pursuing debts, but she sent round two young alcoholics covered in grazes and sores, who smelt of sad ruin. They crashed into Turton's studio in the School of Art, swearing and tipping shit over and asking people, ‘Where's this fucking Harry?'

Sedify Bent, a coward, pointed Harry out with a bottle of turpentine and they told Harry to lie on the floor real quick. Which he did, because one of them was swinging a bayonet in circles over his head as if to motivate a battalion to charge. Harry lay on his back and the guy without the bayonet snatched a paintbrush out of a jar on a desk, dipped it in some yellow paint and grabbed a sheet of A3 paper from a bench top. He put the handle of the brush in Harry's mouth and told him,
‘Bite that.' Harry clamped down on the brush.

So there he was lying on his back with this paintbrush sticking out of his mouth like a petunia and the guy held the sheet of A3 paper down towards the bristle end of the brush and told him, ‘Paint, boy. Go on, paint a picture.' Being frightened and bewildered, Harry moved his head from side to side, sliding the yellow bristles across the paper.

‘No, boy,' the man said. ‘You got no neck muscles. Okay? Keep your head still. Just use your tongue. Move the brush with your tongue.' So Harry impaled the point of the brush handle in the tip of his tongue and using his teeth as a fulcrum he moved the brush back and forth across the paper in little strokes about a centimetre long. The guy who wasn't holding the paper was still helicoptering the bayonet. The guy holding the paper flipped it over and stared at the small yellow mess Harry had made and nodded as if he discerned some artistic merit there.

‘Good. Real good. You got a future as a flat-on-his-back quadriplegic artist who paints with his tongue and probably still makes love to a woman, too – builds the tongue muscle up a bit. A guy can make his way with just his tongue muscle these days. So, bon voyage to you, setting out in your quadriplegic adventures, boy. Because you are going to be a turtle on his back with only a tongue muscle to navigate his future.
If
you don't pay who you know you got to pay.'

Then they walked out of the NGV art school the way they came in, swearing and breaking stuff they didn't have to break.

All the other students stood around waiting for Harry to explain. ‘I owe a dealer for some hash,' he told them – a totally respectable debt to have. He couldn't bring himself to tell them that none of his paintings had sold and he owed money to
the Colditz Gallery for being a twenty-four-carat fraud and a fake. And the lie was not just for his own sake. Harry reasoned that these guys looked up to him now as a beacon of hope. If he could make it, maybe they could all make it. His success suggested theirs might be imminent. He didn't want to ruin that for them.

‘The guy's mad as,' he explained. ‘I forget to drop a hundred bucks around and he sends dudes. Like … call me up, man. Give me a reminder call. Jesus. I'm getting a new dealer who isn't schizoid.'

But Harry was spooked. Idiots with bayonets could jump out of any doorway at him from now on, if Chloe Gwyther was sending flighty young drunks to threaten him with quadriplegia.

When he got to Mireille's house he told her about the two guys and the bayonet and the little yellow painting he had painted as a probationary quadriplegic, and she sank down on her sofa and hid her face in her hands. Went still and insular over the problem. Harry tried asking her what she was thinking, calling at her, ‘Hey, hey.' But she stayed soundless. He got her a manzanilla sherry and sat next to her, waiting. After about ten minutes she took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were red and she called herself a stupid bitch. Then she buried her head in her hands again, but she emerged a few minutes later. Taking the glass from Harry she drank it down, lifted her chin and pursed her lips, apparently setting herself to face these unexpected dangers of young drunks and quadriplegia.

‘I have an idea,' she said, ‘to make the money to pay Chloe Gwyther. And to have some more money left over for us. We can go to Europe. Whatever we think to do.'

This was when Harry first heard Mireille's plan. And he had to hand it to her, she had some swerves. First she buys all his paintings to make him a new sensation, then she suggests they steal the
Weeping Woman
to pay for them.

And the moment she suggested they steal it, Harry saw the full rainbow of the thing form over his head – the lovely laziness of theft as a means of creating art. He knew you could slave over a painting for a month, screwing down the layers of meaning, working in the drama, and gambling with the colours. Or, it suddenly occurred to him, you could steal one and have all these things blow up around you. The whole play: acts one, two and three.

The dark fear of being caught, the bright rightness of the cops, the yellow anguish of the bureaucrats and pollies, the bursting beautiful fireworks of them, the thieves making a million bucks. It's a painting. The whole caper is a canvas, and Harry knew they could make it either a masterpiece or a dud. He definitely wanted to go for masterpiece. He wanted to put all the elements in there to make it good. Certainly, sell the painting to that major-league oinker, Laszlo. Sure, taunt a grandee like Speed Draper in the newspaper, and show him up for what he is. And why not get art in the news? Have Mr and Mrs Citizen out in the burbs ogling Picasso for the first time. Have them hate him … or wake to him.

And why not make a shitload of dough for themselves, which, this country being all fevered up with business and sport, Harry was starting to suspect he was never going to do with a brush. And why not highlight the fact that arts administrators are gorging themselves on great scads of public cash while the artists live like welfare mothers?

Harry didn't see a downside yet. And, man, most beautiful of all, then just give the painting back. Hand it over like they're
disgusted with the shrill panic of the authorities, like they know its true worth and the authorities only see dollar signs. And disappear. Never be heard of again.

All artists are thieves. Every artist who ever entered a gallery stole something from it. Snuck out with at least a morsel of someone's masterpiece in his or her mind's eye. Artists steal from one another. They steal from strangers. They steal from the dead. Then they get as angry as hell and run for their lawyers when some critic points out how deftly they've learnt to steal. Art is theft and theft is a risk. Thieves and artists end up in prisons or on yachts. Harry tackled this theft wanting the yacht. But the yacht was hard to get.

They twiddled their thumbs while Harry taunted Speed Draper in the newspaper. Laszlo wouldn't take his calls. Laszlo wouldn't have lunch. Laszlo had to make sure they weren't going to get caught before he'd even agree to look at her. It was setting out to be a long ten days.

Harry lived in a room in a boarding house on Cecil Street in South Melbourne. His dad paid for it, signing cheques while clicking his tongue behind gritted teeth, shaking his head. His dad had been a self-confessed hero in the Korean War, who had seen the truth about life there, in battle, and was disgusted to have a son who thought art might be as enlightening as war. He wanted Harry to join the army. Vietnam was over but some other educational skirmish would flare up soon.

Harry's room was fungal and dark, the wooden floorboards and windowsill drilled with wormholes, the walls stained by damp. It wasn't really a place to paint but he called it his studio. It had a sink, a microwave and a table ranged with paint tubes,
brushes, books, jars of coloured water and the many failed paintings one accumulates while trying to make a communication as enlightening as the war your father fought. He slept in a single iron bed against one wall with a few greasy blankets. Down the hall was a communal bathroom where toothless men took turns to stare in amazement at themselves in the mirror, trying to figure out how it was that just last week they were boys with their hair combed neat by their mothers.

Late one night a few days after they stole the
Weeping Woman
, Harry was in his studio with waves of rain crashing on the window. He was smoking, sitting on his bed, a glass of cask red in his hand, staring unhappily at a half-finished painting of Mireille. It wasn't doing what he wanted it to do. It looked like she'd undergone a course of high-voltage correctional therapy that had fried her perspicacity and left her dimwitted; blandly handsome, but not a fire starter who stole stuff and lied to people as if lies were no more than chocolate-flavoured truth. A painting of Mireille needed to suggest amorality and fearlessness. He was thinking maybe he should strip her off, paint her bare-breasted, then surround her with bears and have her laughing at them. Not circus bears, angry bears from the deep forest. Sit her outdoors, bare-breasted, laughing at these bears with their furrowed muzzles. A neat external projection of her psychology.

He was nodding his head, having decided tits and bears were needed, when someone tapped apologetically on his door. Must be one of his mates just fallen out of a nightclub, trying not to wake the neighbours. Or one of the old guys who live here, wanting to share his wine.

‘I'm busy,' he said through the door. ‘With tits and bears.' The idiocies Harry spoke to his neighbours often excused him their company.

But a rich whisper answered. A cultured voice, right up at the keyhole. ‘Harry Broome? Could I have a word?'

‘Who's there?'

‘Weston Guest.'

Weston Guest. Knows Harry's name. Is here at his studio at midnight. In Harry's line of work, Weston Guest is the king-maker. The guy is an aristocrat travelling through the shitty village of Art in a carriage pulled by white horses. Those who live in the shitty village of Art kneel in the mud as he rides by, and if he stops and smiles at your wares, if he nods, or squints his eyes over some hidden depth he's found in a work of yours, then you shout it from the rooftops. You tell your mates. You boast to them that Weston Guest likes your stuff. ‘He ogled it … for thirty seconds. He's definitely gone on me. I'm telling you, guys, he's reaching for his chequebook. He's about to buy me like a Grey Street lady.'