The Goldfinch (70 page)

O
N THE WAY OUT
to Brooklyn with a van full of furniture, Grisha kept up a steady monologue about on the one hand Hobie’s fine qualities and on the other how he was running Welty’s business into the ground. “Honest man, in dishonest world? Living in reclusion? It hurts me right here, in my heart, to see him throwing his moneys out the window every day. No no,” he said, holding up a grimy palm as I tried to speak, “takes time what he does, the restorations, working by hand like the Old Masters—I understand. He is artist—not businessman. But explain for me, please, why he is
paying for storage out at Brooklyn Navy Yard instead of moving inventorys and getting bills paid? I mean—just look, the junk in basement! Things Welty bought at auction—more coming in every week. Upstairs, store is packed tight! He is sitting on a fortune—would take hundred years to sell it all! People looking in the window—cash in hand—wanting to buy—sorry, lady! Fuck off! Store is closed! And there he is downstairs with his carpenter tools spending ten hours to carve
this-small
” (thumb and forefinger) “—piece of wood for some piece-of-shit old lady chair.”

“Yeah, but he has clients in too. He sold a whole bunch of stuff just last week.”

“What?” said Grisha angrily, whipping his head from the road to glare at me. “Sold? To who?”

“The Vogels. He opened the store for them—they bought a bookcase, a games table—”

Grisha scowled. “
Those
people. His
friends,
so called. You know why they buy from him? Because they know they can get low price from him—‘open by appointment,’ ha! Better for him if he keeps the place shut from those vultures. I mean—” fist on breastbone—“you know my heart. Hobie is family to me. But—” he rubbed three fingers together, an old gesture of Boris’s,
money! money!
—“unwise in business dealing. He gives away his last matchstick, scrap of food, whatever, to any phony and con man. You watch and see—soon, in four-five years, he will be broke on the street unless he finds someone to run the shop for him.”

“Such as who?”

“Well—” he shrugged—“some person like maybe my cousin Lidiya. That woman can sell water to drowning man.”

“You should tell him. I know he wants to find somebody.”

Grisha laughed cynically. “Lidiya? Work in
that
dump? Listen—Lidiya sells gold, Rolex, diamonds from Sierra Leone. Gets picked up from home in Lincoln Town Car. White leather pants… floor length sable.… nails out to
here.
No way is woman like that going to sit in junk shop with a bunch of dust and old garbage all day.”

He stopped the van and shut off the engine. We were in front of a blocky, ash-gray building in a desolate waterfront area, empty lots and auto-body shops, the sort of neighborhood where gangsters in the movies always drive the guy they’re going to kill.

“Lidiya—Lidiya is sexy woman,” he said contemplatively. “Long legs—bazooms—good looking. Big zest for life. But this business—you don’t want big flash, like her.”

“Then what?”

“Someone like Welty. There was innocent about him, you know? Like scholar. Or priest. He was grandfather to everyone. But very smart businessman all the same. Fine to be nice, kind, good friends with everyone, but once you have your customer trusting and believing lowest price is from you, you’ve got to take your profit, ha! That’s retail,
mazhor.
Way of the fucking world.”

Inside, after we were buzzed in, there was a desk with a lone Italian guy reading a newspaper. As Grisha was signed in, I examined a brochure on a rack beside the display of bubble wrap and packing tape:

ARISTON FINE ARTS STORAGE

STATE-OF-THE-ART FACILITY

FIRE SUPPRESSION, CLIMATE CONTROL, 24 HOUR SECURITY

INTEGRITY—QUALITY—SAFETY

FOR ALL YOUR FINE ARTS NEEDS

KEEPING YOUR VALUABLES SAFE SINCE 1968

Apart from the desk clerk, the place was deserted. We loaded the service elevator and—with the aid of a key card and a punched-in code—took the elevator up to the sixth floor. Down corridor after long, faceless corridor we walked, ceiling-mounted cameras and anonymous numbered doors, Aisle D, Aisle E, windowless Death Star walls that seemed to stretch into infinity, a feel of underground military archives or maybe columbarium walls in some futuristic cemetery.

Hobie had one of the larger spaces—double doors, wide enough to drive a truck through. “Here we go,” said Grisha, rattling the key in the padlock and throwing the door open with a crash of metal. “Just look at all this shit he has in here.” It was jammed so full of furniture and other items (lamps, books, china, little bronzes; old B. Altman bags full of
papers and moldy shoes) that at first confused glance I wanted to back off and shut the door, as if we’d stumbled into the apartment of some old hoarder who had just died.

“Two thousand a month he pays for this,” he said gloomily as we took the padding off the chairs and stacked them, precariously, atop a cherrywood desk. “Twenty-four thousand dollars a year! He should rather be using those moneys to light his cigarettes than pay rents for this shithole.”

“What about these smaller units?” Some of the doors were quite tiny—suitcase-sized.

“People are crazy,” said Grisha resignedly. “For space the size of car trunk? Hundreds of dollars a month?”

“I mean—” I didn’t know how to ask it—“what keeps people from putting illegal stuff here?”

“Illegal?” Grisha blotted the sweat from his brow with a dirty handkerchief and then reached around and mopped the inside of his collar. “You mean like, what, guns?”

“Right. Or, you know, stolen stuff.”

“What keeps them? I will tell you. Nothing is what keeps them. Bury something here and no one will find it, unless you get bumped off or sent to the can and don’t pay the fee. Ninety per cent of this stuff—old baby pictures, junk from Bubbe’s attic. But—if walls could talk, you know? Probably millions of dollars hidden away if you knew where to look. All kind of secrets. Guns, jewels, murder victim bodies—crazy things. Here—” he’d slammed the door with a crash, was fumbling with the slide bolt—“help me with this fucker. I hate this place, my God. Is like death, you know?” He gestured down the sterile, endless-looking corridor. “Everything shut up, sealed away from life! Whenever I’m coming here, I get a feeling like hard to breathe. Worse than a fucking library.”

vii.

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
GOT
the Yellow Pages from Hobie’s kitchen and carried it back to my room and looked under
Storage: Fine Arts.
There were dozens of places in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, many with stately print ads detailing their services: white gloves, from our door to yours! A cartoon
butler proffered a business card on a silver tray: B
LINGEN AND
T
ARKWELL, SINCE 1928.
We provide discreet and confidential State-of-the-Art storage solutions for a wide range of businesses and private clients.
ArtTech. Heritage Works. Archival Solutions.
Facilities monitored by hygrothermograph recording equipment. We maintain custom temperature control to AAM (American Association of Museums) requirements of 70 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity.

But all this was much too elaborate. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to the fact that I was storing a piece of art. What I needed was something safe and inconspicuous. One of the biggest and most popular chains had twenty locations in Manhattan—including one in the East Sixties by the river, my old neighborhood, only a few streets away from where my mother and I had lived.
Our premises are secured by our custom 24-hour manned security command center and feature the latest technology in smoke and fire detection.

Hobie was asking me something from the hallway. “What?” I said hoarsely, my voice loud and false, shutting the phone book on my finger.

“Moira’s here. Want to run down to the local with us for a hamburger?” The Local was what he called the White Horse.

“Sounds great, be there in a minute.” I went back to the ad in the Yellow Pages.
Make Space for Summer Funtime! Easy solutions for your sports and hobby equipment!
How simple they made it sound: no credit card required, cash deposit and off you went.

The next day, instead of going to class, I retrieved the pillowcase from under my bed, taped it shut with duct tape, put it in a brown bag from Bloomingdale’s, and took a cab to the sporting goods store in Union Square, where after a bit of dithering I purchased a cheap pup tent and then caught a cab back up to Sixtieth Street.

At the space-age, glassed-in office of the storage facility, I was the only customer; and though I’d prepared a cover story (ardent camper; neatfreak mom) the men at the desk seemed completely uninterested in my large, well-labeled sporting goods bag with the tag of the pup tent dangling artfully outside. Nor did anyone seem to find it at all noteworthy or unusual that I wanted to pay for the locker a year in advance, in cash—or two years maybe? Was that all right? “ATM right out there,” said the Puerto Rican at the cash register, pointing without looking away from his bacon and egg sandwich.

That easy? I thought, in the elevator on the way down. “Write your locker number down,” the guy at the register said, “and your combination too, and keep it in a safe place,” but I’d already memorized both—I’d seen enough James Bond movies that I knew the drill—and the minute I was outside tossed the paper in the trash.

Walking out of the building, its vaultlike hush and the stale breezelet humming evenly from the air vents, I felt giddy, unblinkered, and the blue sky and trumpeting sunlight, familiar morning exhaust haze and the call and cry of car horns all seemed to stretch down the avenue into a larger, better scheme of things: a sunny realm of crowds and luck. It was the first time I’d been anywhere near Sutton Place since returning to New York and it was like falling back in a friendly old dream, crossfade between past and present, pocked texture of the sidewalks and even the same old cracks I’d always jumped over when I was running home, leaning in, imagining myself in an airplane, tilt of an airplane’s wings,
I’m coming in,
that final stretch, strafing in fast towards home—lots of the same places still in business, the deli, the Greek diner, the wine shop, all the forgotten neighborhood faces muddling through my mind, Sal the florist and Mrs. Battaglina from the Italian restaurant and Vinnie from the dry cleaner’s with his tape measure around his neck, down on his knees pinning up my mother’s skirt.

I was only a few blocks from our old building: and looking down towards Fifty-Seventh Street, that bright familiar alley with the sun striking it just right and bouncing gold off the windows I thought: Goldie! Jose!

At the thought, my step quickened. It was morning; one or both of them should be on duty. I’d never sent the postcard from Vegas like I’d promised: they’d be thrilled to see me, clustering round, hugging me and slapping me on the back, interested to hear about everything that had happened, including the death of my dad. They’d invite me back to the package room, maybe call up Henderson the manager, fill me in on all the building gossip. But when I turned the corner, amidst stalled traffic and car horns, I saw from halfway down the block that the building was cicatriced with scaffolding and the windows slapped shut with official notices.