The Goldfinch (95 page)

“What does he have to do with it?”

“Horst’s associate Sascha set up things with this deal. I meet the guy—he seems okay—what do I know? Horst told me that he had never worked with Sascha’s man in person, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t go into it the way I should and—” he threw up his arms—“poof! Myriam was right—she is always right—I should have listened to her.”

Water streamed down the windows, quicksilver heavy, sealing us into the car, lights winking and melting around us in a roar that reminded me of when Boris and I used to ride in the back of the Lexus in Vegas when my dad went through the car wash.

“Horst is usually a bit fussy about who he does business with, so I thought it would be okay. But—he is very restrained, you know? ‘Unusual’ is what he said. ‘Unconventional.’ Well what is that supposed to mean? Then when I get down there—these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy. And situations like this—you want it calm and quiet! It was like, have they seen too much TV or something? like, this is how to act—? normally in this type situation everyone is very very polite, hush-hush, very peaceful! Myriam said—and she was right—forget about the guns! What kind of crazy thing is this for these people to keep chickens in Miami? Even a little thing like that—this is Jacuzzi neighborhood, tennis courts, you understand me—who keeps chickens? You don’t want a neighbor phoning in complaint because of chicken noise in the yard! But by that time—” he shrugged—“there I was. I was in. I told myself not to worry so much, but turned out I was right.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. I got half the goods I was promised—rest coming in a week. That’s not un-typical. But then they were arrested and I didn’t get the other half and I didn’t get the picture. Horst—well, Horst would like to find it too, he is out some big green as well. Anyway I am hoping he has a bit more information than when we spoke last.”

xvi.

G
YURI LEFT US OUT
in the Sixties, not far at all from the Barbours’. “This is the place?” I said, shaking the rain off Hobie’s umbrella. We were out in front of one of the big limestone townhouses off Fifth—black iron doors, massive lion’s-head knockers.

“Yes—it’s his father’s place—his other family are trying to get him out legally but good luck with that, hah.”

We were buzzed in, took a cage elevator up to the second floor. I could smell incense, weed, spaghetti sauce cooking. A lanky blonde woman—short-cropped hair and a serene small-eyed face like a camel’s—opened the door. She was dressed like a sort of old-fashioned street urchin or newsboy: houndstooth trousers, ankle boots, dirty thermal shirt, suspenders. Perched on the tip of her nose were a pair of wire-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses.

Without saying a word she opened the door to us and walked off, leaving us alone in a dim, grimy, ballroom-sized salon which was like a derelict version of some high-society set from a Fred Astaire movie: high ceilings; crumbling plaster; grand piano; darkened chandelier with half the crystals broken or gone; sweeping Hollywood staircase littered with cigarette butts. Sufi chants droned low in the background:
Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq.
Someone had drawn on the wall, in charcoal, a series of life-sized nudes ascending the stairs like frames in a film; and there was very little furniture apart from a ratty futon and some chairs and tables that looked scavenged from the street. Empty picture frames on the wall, a ram’s skull. On the television, an animated film flickered and sputtered with epileptic vim, windmilling geometrics intercut with letters and live-action racecar images. Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raisonnés, books in German and English including Nabokov’s
Despair
and Heidegger’s
Being and Time
with the cover torn off, sketch books, art books, ashtrays and burnt tinfoil, and a grubby-looking pillow where drowsed a gray tabby cat. Over the door, like a trophy from some Schwarzwald hunting lodge, a rack of antlers cast distorted shadows that spread and branched across the ceiling with a Nordic, wicked, fairy-tale feel.

Conversation in the next room. The windows were shrouded with tacked-up bedsheets just thin enough to let in a diffuse violet glow from the street. As I looked around, forms emerged from the dark and transformed with a dream strangeness: for one thing, the makeshift room divider—consisting of a carpet sagging tenement-style from the ceiling on fishing line—was on closer look a tapestry and a good one too, eighteenth century or older, the near twin of an Amiens I’d seen at auction
with an estimate of forty thousand pounds. And not all the frames on the wall were empty. Some had paintings in them, and one of them—even in the poor light—looked like a Corot.

I was just about to step over for a look when a man who could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty appeared in the door: worn-looking, rangy, with straight sandy hair combed back from his face, in black punk jeans out at the knee and a grungy British commando sweater with an ill-fitting suit jacket over it.

“Hello,” he said to me, quiet British voice with a faint German bite, “you must be Potter,” and then, to Boris: “Glad you turned up. You two should stay and hang out. Candy and Niall are making dinner with Ulrika.”

Movement behind the tapestry, at my feet, that made me step back quickly: swaddled shapes on the floor, sleeping bags, a homeless smell.

“Thanks, we can’t stay,” said Boris, who had picked up the cat and was scratching it behind the ears. “Have some of that wine though, thanks.”

Without a word Horst passed his own glass over to Boris and then called into the next room in German. To me, he said: “You’re a dealer, right?” In the glow of the television his pale pinned gull’s eye shone hard and unblinking.

“Right,” I said uneasily; and then: “Uh, thanks.” Another woman—bob-haired and brunette, high black boots, skirt just short enough to show the black cat tattooed on one milky thigh—had appeared with a bottle and two glasses: one for Horst, one for me.

“
Danke
darling,” said Horst. To Boris he said: “You gentlemen want to do up?”

“Not right now,” said Boris, who had leaned forward to steal a kiss from the dark-haired woman as she was leaving. “Was wondering though. What do you hear from Sascha?”

“Sascha—” Horst sank down on the futon and lit a cigarette. With his ripped jeans and combat boots he was like a scuffed-up version of some below-the-title Hollywood character actor from the 1940s, some minor
mitteleuropäischer
known for playing tragic violinists and weary, cultivated refugees. “Ireland is where it seems to lead. Good news if you ask me.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“Nor to me, but I’ve talked to people and so far it checks out.” He spoke with all a junkie’s arrhythmic quiet, off-beat, but without the slur. “So—soon we should know more, I hope.”

“Friends of Niall’s?”

“No. Niall says he never heard of them. But it’s a start.”

The wine was bad: supermarket Syrah. Because I did not want to be anywhere near the bodies on the floor I drifted over to inspect a group of artists’ casts on a beat-up table: a male torso; a draped Venus leaning against a rock; a sandaled foot. In the poor light they looked like the ordinary plaster casts for sale at Pearl Paint—studio pieces for students to sketch from—but when I drew my finger across the top of the foot I felt the suppleness of marble, silky and grainless.

“Why would they go to Ireland with it?” Boris was saying restlessly. “What kind of collectors’ market? I thought everyone tries to get pieces out of there, not in.”

“Yes, but Sascha thinks he used the picture to clear a debt.”

“So the guy has ties there?”

“Evidently.”

“I find this difficult to believe.”

“What, about the ties?”

“No, about the debt. This guy—he looks like he was stealing hubcaps off the street six months ago. “

Horst shrugged, faintly: sleepy eyes, seamed forehead. “Who knows. Not sure that’s correct but certainly I’m not willing to trust to luck. Would I let my hand be cut off for it?” he said, lazily tapping an ash on the floor. “No.”

Boris frowned into his wine glass. “He was amateur. Believe me. If you saw him yourself you would know.”

“Yes but he likes to gamble, Sascha says.”

“You don’t think Sascha maybe knows more?”

“I think not.” There was a remoteness in his manner, as if he was talking half to himself. “ ‘Wait and see.’ This is what I hear. An unsatisfactory answer. Stinking from the top if you ask me. But as I say, we are not to the bottom of this yet.”

“And when does Sascha get back to the city?” The half-light in the room sent me straight back to childhood, Vegas, like the obscure mood of a dream lingering after sleep: haze of cigarette smoke, dirty clothes on the floor, Boris’s face white then blue in the flicker of the screen.

“Next week. I’ll give you a ring. You can talk to him yourself then.”

“Yes. But I think we should talk to him together.”

“Yes. I think so too. We’ll both be smarter, in future… this need not have
happened… but in any case,” said Horst, who was scratching his neck slowly, absent-mindedly, “you understand I’m wary of pushing him too hard.”

“That is very convenient for Sascha.”

“You have suspicions. Tell me.”

“I think—” Boris cut his eyes at the doorway.

“Yes?”

“I think—” Boris lowered his voice—“you are being too easy on him. Yes yes—” putting up his hands—“I know. But—all very convenient for his guy to vanish, not a clue, he knows nothing!”

“Well, maybe,” Horst said. He seemed disconnected and partly elsewhere, like an adult in the room with small children. “This is pressing on me—on all of us. I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you. Though for all we know his guy was a cop.”

“No,” said Boris resolutely. “He was not. He was not. I know it.”

“Well—to be quite frank with you, I do not think so either, there is more to this than we yet know. Still, I’m hopeful.” He’d taken a wooden box from the drafting table and was poking around in it. “Sure you gentlemen wouldn’t like to get into a little something?”

I looked away. I would have liked nothing better. I would also have liked to see the Corot except I didn’t want to walk around the bodies on the floor to do it. Across the room, I’d noticed several other paintings propped on the wainscoting: a still life, a couple of small landscapes.

“Go look, if you want.” It was Horst. “The Lépine is fake. But the Claesz and the Berchem are for sale if you’re interested.”

Boris laughed and reached for one of Horst’s cigarettes. “He’s not in the market.”

“No?” said Horst genially. “I can give him a good price on the pair. The seller needs to get rid of them.”

I stepped in to look: still life, candle and half-empty wineglass. “Claesz-Heda?”

“No—Pieter. Although—” Horst put the box aside, then stood beside me and lifted the desk lamp on the cord, washing both paintings in a harsh, formal glare—“this bit—” traced mid-air with the curve of a finger—“the reflection of the flame here? and the edge of the table, the drapery? Could almost be Heda on a bad day.”

“Beautiful piece.”

“Yes. Beautiful of its type.” Up close he smelled unwashed and raunchy,
with a strong, dusty import-shop odor like the inside of a Chinese box. “A bit prosaic to the modern taste. The classicizing manner. Much too staged. Still, the Berchem is very good.”

“Lot of fake Berchems out there,” I said neutrally.

“Yes—” the light from the upheld lamp on the landscape painting was bluish, eerie—“but this is lovely… Italy, 1655‥… the ochres beautiful, no? The Claesz not so good I think, very early, though the provenance is impeccable on both. Would be nice to keep them together… they have never been apart, these two. Father and son. Came down together in an old Dutch family, ended up in Austria after the war. Pieter Claesz…” Horst held the light higher. “Claesz was so uneven, honestly. Wonderful technique, wonderful surface, but something a bit off with this one, don’t you agree? The composition doesn’t hold together. Incoherent somehow. Also—” indicating with the flat of his thumb the too-bright shine coming off the canvas: overly varnished.

“I agree. And here—” tracing midair the ugly arc where an over-eager cleaning had scrubbed the paint down to the scumbling.

“Yes.” His answering look was amiable and drowsy. “Quite correct. Acetone. Whoever did that should be shot. And yet a mid-level painting like this, in poor condition—even an anonymous work—is worth more than a masterpiece, that’s the irony of it, worth more to
me,
anyway. Landscapes particularly. Very very easy to sell. Not too much attention from the authorities… difficult to recognize from a description… and still worth maybe a couple hundred thousand. Now, the Fabritius—” long, relaxed pause—“a different calibre altogether. The most remarkable work that’s ever passed through my hands, and I can say that without question.”