Stealing Picasso (3 page)

Tonight, above them, in a vast chandeliered gallery hung with European Masters, a cocktail party is underway to welcome the
Weeping Woman
to her new home. It has been a great triumph
to wheedle this much money from an elected government with highways and hospitals to build, so the arts community and their wealthy benefactors have turned out in pearls, dinner suits and jubilation. Smiling waiters work silver trays of champagne through the crowd, while a chamber orchestra plays Bach and people lean towards each other to whisper how good it feels to own a major Picasso. Like being a Parisian, a Roman, a Milanese or an oil Arab.

Speed Draper, the Minister for the Arts, is taking congratulations from a woman who introduced herself as Mireille. He lays his hand on the small of her back to bring her in closer, so he can speak confidentially. ‘San Francisco wanted her badly. We had a big decision to make: refurbish the concert hall and give the troops here a pay rise, or buy the
Woman
. Refurbish the concert hall and San Fran wins the
Woman
. Question of priorities. I think we got it right.'

‘Oh,' Mireille assures him, ‘You made a right decision, Mr Draper.'

‘Speed.' She is in a tight black gown. Bending in with his ear to her mouth as if to hear her, he gets a glance down her cleavage. ‘Call me Speed.'

Weston Guest, the gallery director, wearing a lime-green shirt to match the colour of the
Weeping Woman
's skin and a violet bow tie to match her cheeks and lips, stands alongside the fresh acquisition, advertising his part in the triumph. Amid the camera flashes he receives a procession of bejewelled citizens. He is the champion who wooed a government and won this masterpiece, and everybody wants to congratulate him. ‘She's magnificent, Weston. Well done.'

‘I am merely a figurehead. A team of Titans labours in the wings.' A true narcissist, Weston performs an endless and transparent self-deprecation for the world to oppose.

‘Magnificent, Weston.'

‘The liveability factor of Melbourne on the international stage has just trebled, Weston.'

‘People will come for miles, Weston.'

‘There were times I thought she never would be ours, I admit. But I had a vision. And I persisted. Even the lowliest can persist. I persisted. And here she is.' As if he had painted the thing himself.

‘Really put the gallery on the map, Weston. Japs jetting in … Canberra can shove their bloody Pollock.'

As the crowd is hushed and Weston says his few, admittedly unimportant words to the invitees, artists stand at the back showing contempt for the bureaucrat by talking loudly to one another and laughing heartily at jokes barely worth a grin. Weston waves a hand at the painting; there is no need to extol the greatness of Picasso, just as there is no need to admit how small his own part is in this triumph. He is honoured to fill the position, to be given the chance. A lucky fellow – right place, right time – he took a punt and came up trumps. Anybody could have done it. Parts of the crowd begin to deny this.

‘No, Weston.' ‘Nonsense.' ‘Brilliantly done.' ‘Three cheers.'

He blushes as they hip, hip, hooray and clap. He begins flapping two hands at them, waving away the applause or fanning it large, who could say?

Laszlo Berg – big, shambling and as hairy, cranky and aberrant as a circus bear in his dinner jacket – steps before Weston Guest and shakes the little man's hand, arm, body, self-possession, until Weston's face starts to jitter into the sort of open-mouthed alarm on the
Weeping Woman
herself. The two know and hate each other. The bureaucrat begrudges the tycoon his fortune and his freedom, for when the tycoon buys a masterpiece it is for himself, with vast monies he generated by
his own hand. When the bureaucrat buys a masterpiece he buys it for the people (whom he despises as ignorant) using money wheedled from taxpayers (the very same despised ignorant) and the tycoon.

The tycoon despises the bureaucrat, who comes to him, cap in hand, a beggar, asking for donations. Upon receiving these donations the bureaucrat uses them to outbid the tycoon at auction in the name of a people and government they both despise. The tycoon thinks the bureaucrat a eunuch. The bureaucrat knows the tycoon thinks him a eunuch. They are thus everywhere enemies.

Laszlo thinks Weston a eunuch who wheedles money from a harem of moneyed wives so he can decorate his gallery. And it is true – Weston normally drains money from tycoons through their wives. When it became clear to Laszlo that his own wife was bequeathing money to the NGV and it was being used to bid against him at auctions, he forbade her ever to speak to Weston Guest again. Weston and Laszlo keep score, are both aware that in his tenure as director of the NGV Weston has outbid Laszlo eleven times at auction and has been outbid by him nine times.

‘Well, Weston, everyone's here. Well done,' Laszlo congratulates him. ‘If you're ever strapped for cash give me a call, I'm still in the market.'

‘You so nearly did buy her, Laszlo. We were right at our limit. You blinked, old boy. One more bid and you'd have had her. We'd all be at your place drinking your champagne, congratulating you. Still, you weren't to know.'

‘Missed by that much, eh?' Laszlo smiles grimly. ‘Oh, well … Better the people have her. The citizens.' He flares his fingers at the crowd, saying the word ‘citizens' slowly, to illuminate its full horror. Laszlo would rather a bus-load of citizens
went off a cliff than be admitted to his private collection to ogle and gush. He knows, too, it is a sore point with Weston that he has to let the citizens into his gallery. Their presence proves that Weston operates at the behest of a great many people he wouldn't piss on.

Laszlo leans over the smaller man to confide, and to emphasise their physical difference. Weston's lip curls as though Laszlo's breath were vented from a sewer, as the hulking man begins to whisper.

‘Did you know, Weston, that I was actually present when she was being painted?'

Weston pouts.

‘You don't believe me, I see. It can't be possible that I knew Picasso. But I did. For a time we were close. Very close. I was his gopher.'

Weston laughs at this. Laszlo smiles and nods, snaps his fingers. ‘“Laszlo get me this. Laszlo get me that. Laszlo walk my poodle.” Yes, fifty years ago, I was at the court of the king of the world. And I remember him painting this woman in particular because it was such a trial. Beautiful Dora Maar, so full of energy and ideas, being made to sit there, still as stone, hour after hour. She called him a jailer, a tyrant, a thug; railed against the captivity of being a model, her fingers fidgeting in her lap. She began to rebel, to fight back. When he looked away she would expose a breast, uncover a thigh. Sometimes he would pretend not to notice. At other times he would succumb; lay down his brush and take up the dog leash. “Laszlo, Lisle needs exercise. Perhaps a coffee at Deux Maggots.”'

Laszlo holds up an imaginary leash and Weston looks at it dangling there, and wonders at its truth.

‘Oh, yes. The old boy was a first-rate pants man. But he was getting nowhere with this picture. Dora wouldn't give
him the agony he needed. So one morning he came up with a bright idea. We were having breakfast together when he said, “Voilà,” and winked at me and, to my astonishment, began to cry. Tears ran down his face and he smiled. Armed with these tears he went into their bedroom, where Dora was sleeping, and shook her awake and told her the police had just visited. They had brought bad news: her brother had died of cholera in a quarantine hospital in Provence.

‘For an hour he followed her around the apartment, slyly pouring petrol on the flames of her grief by mentioning things her brother, André, had done – funny things he'd said, good times they'd shared: a bike trip through Normandy, olive-picking in Spain. All the while he sketched her as she wept, though she begged him not to. When his pencil had caught all he needed of Dora's pain, he told her it was a lie. André lived. No police had visited. He apologised to her and admitted it was a monstrous act, and told her he would buy her a sable stole to make it up to her. But, after all, he was an artist, and what price an hour's grief compared to a work that would speak for eternity? She threw a tantrum and some of his best ceramics at him, vases worth millions.'

‘Oh …' Weston grimaces at the thought of these shattering Picassos.

Laszlo half turns so he can see the
Weeping Woman
, as he whispers slowly at Weston's ear. ‘This painting taught me artists are psychopaths. They need other people's pain. They farm it. It is their crop. Without it they starve. So when your old mum carks it and some dreadful, smelly painter puts his arm around you and tells you, there, there, Weston, and how sorry he is … Not a bit of it. Don't believe him. He's leaning in close to study your pain. He's watching for signs of emotional collapse and has an ear cocked to hear your heart break.'

Laszlo taps his champagne on Weston's. ‘Good on old Pablo for killing brother André for an hour so we could enjoy the
Weeping Woman
for eternity. Here's cheers, Weston. To Picasso, and all artists. Their icy hearts deliver us truth.'

‘Cold, hard facts,' Weston nods. As Laszlo shambles away the little man sneers at his curved back. He catches the eye of a friend through the crowd and pulls a face. What a curious, egotistical brute he is with that sewage bubbling up his oesophagus as if the reek of it were a clue to the crap he was speaking. And him supposing his crap is believable and puts him at the centre of the universe and makes him a figure of intrigue and importance rather than just another crook trying to cleanse himself by buying art.

Beneath the gallery Turton Pym, his heart icy tonight, has a joint hanging untended from his lips. He puts his left hand to his face and squirms his forefinger absently, erotically, in the tangle of his sideburn. He points his right ear towards the intake of the ventilation duct and listens in horror. He can hear the noises of revelry spilling down with the smoky air from the gallery above. Bach's
Brandenburg Concerto No. 1
, beautiful wives braying at witticisms and a spoon tapping on a champagne flute calling the crowd to silence for a speech. Here, here; here, here.

With wine, his indignation at not being invited to the celebration above sharpens further until the sounds of a veritable Mardi Gras tumble down to him from that gallery.

‘Bastards. Big wallets and glamour-puss wives and not a bloody artist in the room, I bet. Never invite the people who might appreciate the new acquisition. Invite the people who
might pay for the next one – modus operandi of a welfare leech. I actually fucking met Picasso. I paddled him round in a canvas canoe off Barcelona one day. His feet stunk.' Turton closes his eyes and inhales dreamily, remembering the virtuous stink of Picasso's feet. Then he opens his eyes and shrugs off his purple waistcoat and pelts it at a half-finished painting on an easel by the door.

‘Hey. That's my end-of-term,' says Sedify Bent, lying stoned in a beanbag.

Turton looks at it curiously. ‘What is it?'

‘Whatever emerges.'

‘Good. Brave. Let it become. I like you, Sedi.'

He stands, swaying slightly, steadying himself with a hand on a part-done nude of Chrissy Amphlett, another tilt at another Archibald Prize, and cants his head towards the ventilation duct, grimacing at what he hears there. ‘Listen to them, boys. You think those snobs are who she'd want to be with tonight? Councillors? CEOs? Developers? Game-show hosts?' He turns to face them. ‘Tell you what. When they've gone home, we'll go to her. Us. Artists. People with heart and eye. We'll pay her a visit.'

He crosses his studio purposefully and takes hold of a two-metre-tall canvas on which is a painted a candlebark with a boy high and happy in its pink branches. He wrenches it aside, revealing a green steel door. ‘A door,' he announces. ‘Through there,' he taps it with a knuckle, ‘is the gallery.' From his desk he takes a key and waves it at the door. ‘This is the key. There are no guards at night. They patrol the perimeter and make sure the gallery is locked tight. They're not allowed inside.'