The Goldfinch (108 page)

“I think Sascha would have to be very stupid to tell Ulrika,” said Gyuri, with a worried expression on his face.

“I don’t know what Ulrika knows or does not know. Has no relevance. She has loyalty to her brother over Horst, as she has shown many and many times over. You would think—” grandly signalling the waitress to bring Gyuri a pint—“you would think Sascha had sense to sit on it for a while, at least! But no. He can’t get a loan on it in Hamburg or Frankfurt because of Horst—because Horst would hear of it in one second. So he has brought it here.”

“Well look, if you know who has it we should just call the police.”

The silence, and blank looks that followed this, were as if I’d produced a can of gasoline and suggested lighting ourselves on fire.

“Well, I mean,” I said defensively, after the waitress had arrived with Gyuri’s beer, set it down, left again, and neither Gyuri nor Boris had spoken a word. “Isn’t that the safest? And easiest? If the cops recover it and you have nothing to do with it?”

Ding of a bicycle bell, woman clattering by on the sidewalk, rattle of spokes, witchy black cape flying behind.

“Because—” glancing between them—“when you think of what this picture has gone through—what it
must
have gone through—I don’t know if you understand, Boris, how much care has to be taken even to
ship
a painting? Just to
pack
it properly? Why take any chances?”

“This is my feeling exactly.”

“An anonymous call. To the art-crimes people. They’re not like the normal cops—no connections with the normal cops—the picture is all they care about. They’ll know what to do.”

Boris leaned back in his chair. He looked around. Then he looked at me.

“No,” he said. “That is not a good idea.” His tone was that of someone addressing a five year old. “And, do you want to know why?”

“Think about it. It’s the easiest way. You wouldn’t have to do a thing.”

Boris set his beer glass down carefully.

“They’d have the best chance of getting it back unharmed. Also, if
I
do it—if
I
call them—shit, I could have Hobie call them—” hands to head—“any way you look at it, you wouldn’t be putting yourselves at risk. That is to say”—I was too tired, disoriented; two pairs of Dremel-drill eyes, I couldn’t think—“if
I
did it, or someone else not a part of your, um, organization—”

Boris let out a shout of laughter. “
Organization?
Well—” shaking his head so vigorously the hair fell in his eyes—“I suppose we count as organization, of sorts, since we are three or more—! But we are not very large or very organized as you can see.”

“You should eat something,” said Gyuri to me, in the tense pause that followed, looking at my untouched plate of pork and potato. “He should eat,” he said to Boris. “Tell him to eat.”

“Let him starve if he wants. Anyway,” said Boris, grabbing a chunk of pork off my plate and popping it in his mouth—

“One call. I’ll do it.”

“No,” said Boris, glowering suddenly and pushing back in his chair. “You will not. No, no, fuck you, shut up, you
won’t,
” he said, lifting his chin aggressively when I tried to talk over him—Gyuri’s hand on my wrist very suddenly, a touch I knew very well, the old forgotten Vegas language of when my dad was in the kitchen ranting about whose house it was? and who paid for what?—

“And, and,” said Boris imperiously, taking advantage of a lull in my response he was not expecting, “I want you to stop talking this stupid ‘call’ business right away. ‘Call, call,’ ” he said, when he got no answer from me, waving his hand back and forth ridiculously in the air as if “call” were some absurd kiddie word that meant ‘unicorn’ or ‘fairyland.’ “I know you are trying to help but this is not helpful suggestion on your part. So forget it. No more ‘call.’ Anyway,” he said amiably, pouring part of his own beer into my half-empty glass. “As I was explaining to you. Since Sascha is in so
big hurry? Is he thinking clearly? Is he playing more than one, or maybe two moves ahead? No. Sascha is out of towner. His connections here are poisonous to him. He needs money. And he is working so hard to stay clear of Horst that he has wandered smack into me.”

I said nothing. It would be easy enough to phone the police myself. There was no reason to involve Boris or Gyuri at all.

“Amazing stroke of luck, no? And our friend the Georgian—very rich man, but so far from Horst’s world and so far from art collector, he did not even know of picture by name. Just a bird—little yellow bird. But Cherry believes he is telling the truth that he saw it. Very powerful guy in terms of real estate? Here and in Antwerp? Plenty of paper and father to Cherry almost, but not person of great education if you understand me.”

“Where is it now?”

Boris rubbed his nose vigorously. “I do not know. They are not going to tell us that, are they? But Vitya has got in touch to say he knows of a buyer. And a meeting has been set up.”

“Where?”

“Not settled yet. They have already changed the location half a dozen times. Paranoid,” he said, making a screw-loose gesture at the side of his head with his hand. “They may make us wait a day or two. We may know only an hour before.”

“Cherry,” I said, and stopped. Vitya was short for Cherry’s Russian name, Viktor—Victor, the Anglicized version—but Cherry was only a nickname and I didn’t know a thing about Sascha: not his age, not his surname, not what he looked like, nothing at all except that he was Ulrika’s brother—and even this was uncertain in the literal sense, given how loosely Boris threw around the word.

Boris sucked a bit of grease off his thumb. “My idea was—set up something at your hotel. You know, you, American, big shot, interested in the picture. They”—he lowered his voice as the waitress switched his empty pint for a full one, Gyuri nodding politely, leaning in—“they would come to your room. That’s how is done usually. All very businesslike. But”—minimal shrug—“they are new at this, and paranoid. They want to call their own location.”

“Which is?”

“Don’t know yet! Didn’t I just say? They keep changing their mind. If they want us to wait—we wait. We have to let them think they are boss.
Now, sorry,” he said, stretching and yawning, rubbing a dark-circled eye with a fingertip, “I am tired! Want a nap!” He turned and said something to Gyuri in Ukrainian, and then turned back to me. “Sorry,” he said, leaning in and slinging his arm around my shoulder. “You can find your way back to your hotel?”

I tried to disengage myself without seeming to. “Right. Where are you staying?”

“Girlfriend’s flat—Zeedijk.”

“Near Zeedijk,” said Gyuri, rising purposefully, with a polite and vaguely military air. “Chinese quarter of the old times.”

“What’s the address?”

“Cannot remember. You know me. I cannot remember addresses in my head and like that. But—” Boris tapped his pocket—“your hotel.”

“Right.” Back in Vegas, if we ever got separated—running from the mall cops, pockets full of stolen gift cards—my house was always the rendezvous point.

“So—I’ll meet you back there. And you have my phone number, and I have yours. Will call you when I know something more. Now—” slapping me on the back of the head—“stop worrying, Potter! Don’t stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good! You know which way to go to get back, don’t you? Just up this way, and left when you get to the Singel. Yes, there. We will speak soon.”

v.

I
TOOK A WRONG
turn on the way to the hotel and for several hours wandered aimlessly, shops decorated with glass baubles and gray dream alleys with unpronounceable names, gilded buddhas and Asian embroideries, old maps, old harpsichords, cloudy cigar-brown shops with crockery and goblets and antique Dresden jars. The sun had come out and there was something hard and bright by the canals, a breathable glitter. Gulls plunged and cried. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth. In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from
the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration—in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children’s picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows.

But there was much too much to see, and I was overwhelmed and exhausted and cold. Finally, by accosting strangers for directions (rosy housewives with armloads of flowers, tobacco-stained hippies in wire-rimmed glasses), I retraced my path over canal bridges and back through narrow fairy-lit streets to my hotel, where I immediately changed some dollars at the front desk, went up for a shower in the bathroom which was all curved glass and voluptuous fixtures, hybrid of the Art Nouveau and some icy, pod-based, science fiction future, and fell asleep face down on the bed—where I was awakened, hours later, by my cell phone spinning on the bed table, the familiar chirrup making me think, for a moment, I was at home.

“Potter?”

I sat up and reached for my glasses. “Um—” I hadn’t drawn the curtains before I fell asleep and reflections of the canal wavered across the ceiling in the dark.

“What’s wrong? Are you high? Don’t tell me you went to a coffee shop.”

“No, I—” Dazedly I slid an eye around—dormers and beams, cupboards and slants and—out the window, when I stood, rubbing my head—canal bridges lighted in tracework, arched reflections on black water.

“Well I’m coming up. You don’t have a girl up there, do you?”

vi.

M
Y ROOM WAS TWO
different elevators and a walk from the front desk, so I was surprised how quickly the knock came. Gyuri, discreetly, went to the window and stood with his back to us while Boris looked me over. “Get dressed,” he said. I was barefoot, in the hotel robe and my hair standing
on end from falling asleep straight out of the shower. “You need to clean up. Go—comb your hair and shave.”

When I emerged from the bathroom (where I’d left my suit hanging to let the wrinkles fall out) he pursed his lips critically and said: “Don’t you have anything better than that?”

“This is a Turnbull and Asser suit.”

“Yes but it looks like you slept in it.”

“I’ve been wearing it a while. I have a better shirt.”

“Well put it on.” He was opening a briefcase on the foot of the bed. “And get your money and bring it here.”

When I came back in, doing up my cufflinks, I stopped dead in the middle of the room to see him standing head bent at the bedside, intent upon assembling a pistol: snapping a pin with a clear-eyed competence like Hobie at work in the shop, pulling back the slide with a forceful true-to-life quality, click.

“Boris,” I said, “what the mother fuck.”

“Calm down,” he said to me, with a sideways glance. Patting his pockets, taking out a magazine and popping it in: snick. “Is not what you think. Not at all. Is just for show!”

I looked at Gyuri’s broad back, perfectly impassive, the same professional deafness I sometimes turned away to assume, in the shop, when couples were bickering over whether to buy a piece of furniture or not.

“It is just—” He was snapping something back and forth on the gun, expertly, testing it, then bringing it up to his eye and sighting it, surreal gestures from some deep underlayer of the brain where the black and white movies flickered twenty-four hours a day. “We are meeting them on their own ground, and they will be three. Well, really only two. Two that
count.
And I can tell you now—I was a little worried Sascha might be here. Because then I couldn’t go with you. But everything has worked out perfectly, and here I am!”

“Boris—” standing there, it had crashed in on me all at once, in a sick rush, what a dumb fucking thing I’d stepped into—