Theft (21 page)

That morning, after breakfast, we both returned to the scene of the crime at Mitsukoshi. I expected I would feel better when we entered. We both expected it, I think. But instead my work seemed lost and alien, almost meaningless, like wretched polar bears in a northern Queensland zoo. What did these punters think? I asked a fellow with a blond streak on his head, but that was later, after lunch. I had been drinking, and Marlene shooshed me and we went out in the streets and walked a little, not stopping at the bars.

The faxed invitation from Mr. Mauri was waiting at the so-called Ryokan. It consisted of two pages, the first a delicately drawn map, the second a very formal letter that read like a comic translation from The Government Inspector. I decided that I would be a gentleman and stay away from Mr.

Mauri.

To this very generous offer, Marlene made no response, not until we were inside our tiny room. Even there she took her time, removed her sandals, and squatted, quietly before the little table.

"All right, Butcher," she said, "time to cut the crap." She fixed me with her snake eyes.

"First," she said, "this man is a very important collector. Second, I do a lot of business with him. Third, you are not going to disgrace me now."

In my ugly early life this would have been the starting point for a fearsome row which might have run into the early hours of the following day and ended with me alone in some Ukrainian bar at dawn. To Marlene Leibovitz I said, "OK".

"OK what?"

"OK, I won't disgrace you."

I was embarrassed, I suppose, to give in without a fight. I could easily have worked myself into a fury, but when I slipped into my Armani jacket she reached up to tie my tie.

"Oh," she said, "I do love you."

With Marlene I was always in a foreign country.

Of course everyone but me knows about Roppongi. It was here apparently, in High Touch Town, that Mr. Mauri's father had the famous bar where American spies and gangsters and visiting movie stars would hang out all night long. It was Mr. Mauri's father who claimed to have turned the pinball machine Japanese, by setting it on end and--having made sure a lot could fit into a small space-- devised a sly system, involving soft stuffed toys and very nicking narrow alleyways, where it became pachinko, a gambling machine. Some dispute this, but no-one argues that Mauri San was both a thug and a very serious art collector, well before the war. The son was filial to a fault. So to enter Mauri's office you had to walk through the ancestral shrine, the bar, the chalkboard menu featuring shitty pizza and Italian meatballs, leftovers from the cowboy years of occupation.

At that hour, before the famous lighting did its trick, Mauri's Blue Bar had all the fusty dullness of a theatre with the house lights on, and it really took a lot of imagination to understand how anyone would pay twenty dollars for a martini in this joint.

This was where my art had always been headed for, how depressing. We entered the lift and ascended to the eighteenth floor where young Mr. Mauri ran something called the Dai Ichi Corporation, dai ichi meaning "number one".

The receptionist was a very dour long-chinned lady with a helmet cut and dull grey suit, but she did not punish us for long and soon we were brought, through an anteroom, to my new collector's office which was as dull as ply and aluminum can be made to be. Nothing suggested taste or sensitivity at all, and I was taken aback to find myself treated with such veneration by Mr. Mauri who appeared to be an earnest, even studious man of thirty.

Our interview was conducted on either side of his big empty desk on which there was a folder containing not only my press file, but a considerable number of transparencies and these my new patron or owner occasionally held up to his desk lamp, speaking about each at some length. I could understand almost everything he said, and often recognised the sources of his sentences, some praise for me from Herbert Read (1973), a little from Elwyn Lynn (1973) and Robert Hughes (1971). I sat, thinking about the Japanese education system, the benefits of

learning things by rote. I looked to Marlene but she would not catch my eye. She sat on the edge of her chintz-covered chair, her hands upon her lap, nodding from time to time.

Once more I was in a room watching the dark come down in Tokyo, the sky outside the uncurtained window filled with pink and green neon advertising bars and go- go and Bangkok Massage. Mr. Mauri finished with his dissertation and led us into another room, much more comfortable, with overstuffed armchairs and a number of early twentieth-century paintings-- there was a very plausible Matisse.

One of these, reflecting so much quartz halogen from its shrieking gold perimeter, was Tour en bois, quatre. If I experienced a lurch of disappointment, it was not because this was the study, but because, at this momentous meeting, Leibovitz appeared to be a smaller talent than the one I knew when I was a jerk- off teenager with no more data than a black-and-white sixty-five-screen reproduction. I had imagined something ethereal, transporting, mythic, colours glowing with layers of obsessive underpainting.

"My goodness," said Marlene and she was straight at the canvas without any Japanese preliminaries. Mauri was beside her too, a pig at trough, I thought, his gold-rimmed spectacles twirling like a spastic top in the hand behind his back.

"Oh my God," she said.

Is that all there is? I thought. The canvas was almost homely, a chip missing from the blouse, a slight grubbiness on the surface of the cadmium yellow. All this--little things, easily repaired in restoration--was exaggerated by the gaudy criminal frame, and it took a real act of will to escape the pin-up of my youth, to actually see what was in front of me, the lovely witty squirrelly brushwork of the lathe, and, more generally, the brave decisions the old goat had made at a time when no-one, certainly not Picasso, had entered this particular arena of no synthetic cubism.

Here, in the products of the lathe, in cylinders and cones, there was a clear straight line from Cezanne to Leibovitz.

"May I?" Marlene asked.

She lifted the work off the wall and turned it over. "Look," she said to me. Mr. Mauri bowed me forward so I could see the shadowy secret discoloured canvas, the tracks of staples from its loans and travels, the Japanese characters stamped upon the stretcher which, I guessed, marked its appearance at Mitsukoshi in 1913. There was also a desiccated Stalk-eyed Signal Fly I might not have noticed if I had not spent so many nights drawing the enemies of art. This little bugger had freshly hatched, and found itself behind a Leibovitz, and here it had been caught and died but somehow never eaten. This sad little death would continue in my mind for days.

"Perhaps a problem," said Mr. Mauri, "I do not wish to sell it in Japan." He smiled painfully. "Japanese people don't like so much."

"Of course."

"St. Louis perhaps?"

I was slow to realise what was happening in front of me. Mauri was asking her to sell this work. I looked to her but she would not catch my eye.

"The first thing," she told him, cool as ice, "would be to get it to New York." "Not Freeport?"

"No need."

Mr. Mauri paused and looked at the painting. "Good," he said. He bowed. Marlene bowed. I bowed.

And that, I realised, was it. It was done. Presumably there would be paperwork, a signature from the owner of the droit moral, but the painting was now all but authenticated. That much I got completely.

I had expected Mr. Mauri would wish to discuss his clever strategies for driving up the price of my nine paintings, but nothing like that occurred and a few minutes later we had passed through the famous Blue Bar and were on the streets of High Touch Town amongst the jostling crowds. Marlene took my hand and swung it high, literally skipping down the steep stairs to the Oedo line.

"What happened?" I asked as we fed our coins into the ticket dispenser. "Oh baby, baby," she said, "I am so happy. I love you so."

She turned to me and lifted her chin and her eyes were glowing, clear as water on the subway stairs.

"I'm onto you."

"Sure you are," she said and we kissed there, before the turnstiles, in front of the white-gloved ticket collector, beside the flood of High Touch girls and gaijin hopefuls who pushed around us, buffeting us, not knowing what worlds they were connecting to, threads of history joining us to New York, Bellingen and Hugh, always Hugh, sitting on the footpath with his dripping pram.

33

Jean-Paul came to visit in shirt cuffs and perfume. He was very cross because Marlene Leibovitz had wired him fifteen thousand dollars. What had offended him? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me.

He had spent the MORNING WITH LAWYERS. Christ Almighty, Marlene Leibovitz had tricked him into signing over the right to sell If You Have Ever Seen a Man Die in Japan. This painting was his PROPERTY. It had been NOT FOR SALE AT ANY PRICE so Marlene was an EMBEZZLER and a CON ARTIST. He said he would report her to INTERPOL as soon as he could find out how.

I thanked him for being so kind--suck up suck up. Immediately he asked to see my room and I was sorry I had spoken but my FEW POSSESSIONS were in their proper place including the wreath and radio given me by the police. Jean-Paul turned very thoughtful. He put his cigarette under the running tap and said he was worried for my safety. I said Butcher would soon return to fetch me and he gave me a look so full of pity it made my stomach turn.

MINUTES LATER I was informed by Jackson that my bed was needed for a new CLIENT and I must remove my pram and second trolley to the utility room where I would live until my position was made clear. My brother was IN ARREARS. What would happen to me now? My brother had once forced me to live in the back of his FC Holden. I had been LEGALLY IN HIS CARE in the streets of St. Kilda, Mordiallac, East Caulfield and other places he was drawn to by his pursuit of women who would hold his ugly head between their breasts. Yellow streetlights, redbrick flats, designated parking, oil stains on the concrete, no soul alive except, every now and then a single REFFO or a WOG or B ALT each man driven from his place of birth condemned to roam the earth at night.

The FC Holden stank of wet cigarette butts, potatoes sprouting in the damp rusting floor, piles of newspapers mouldering and all this FLOTSAM meant the LAYBACK SEAT could not be lowered, all sleep denied.

At East Ryde, even Bellingen and Bathurst Street I had thought those bad days over but the utility room had been always waiting at the end of the L-shaped hallway, down five steps, beside the laundry, the sour smell of cleaning rags worse than the smell of AUSTRALIA'S OWN CAR. I asked Jackson was there a nicer room. He said no, and then he tried to give me money off the books but I dare not take it.

He said suit yourself.

Not wishing the clients to know I was being paid I had never talked to them. Now they thought I was Jackson's friend so naturally they did not like me. It was my own stupid fault I was all alone. I missed my brother and could not think how he might ever hear my voice.

And Samson called O LORD GOD, REMEMBER ME? He said, I PRAY THEE, ONLY THIS ONCE. AND HE TOOK HOLD OF THE TWO MIDDLE PILLARS, ONE WITH HIS RIGHT HAND, AND OF THE OTHER WITH HIS LEFT.

It was wrong they should upset me thus.

34

We fled the subway at Shinjuku and then zigzagged down a lane of bars and she was bright as silver, a fish rising in the night, up a set of stairs until we were--4F--in this huge dark shouting place--Irasshaimase!--where they cooked mushroom, shrimp, lumps of dog shit for all I knew, but they kept the sake coming and Marlene sat beside me at the horseshoe bar, her face washed by orange pops of flame, starry night, Galileo blazing in her almond eyes. As she lifted her sake to me I was reminded of how she sniffed the catalogue in the glassine bag. This thought was not so sudden. I had been seeing that fast sniff all day long.

She clinked my glass. Cheers, she said. She had had a coup. To victory. She had never seemed stranger, more lovely than right now, with those long threads of mushroom in her mouth, all alight, her neck was warm and fragrant, and I was bursting with desire.

"Exactly why did you sniff that catalogue?"

Her mouth tasted sweet and earthy. She wagged her finger and took another sip, then she laid her hand on my thigh and rubbed my nose with hers. "You figure it."

"i9i3ink?"

She was beaming. The shouting cooks sliced squid and hurled it onto the metal plate where it leaped like something in my mother's hell.

"The catalogue's not old at all? That old bugger, Utamaro, he printed it for you?"

Instead of contradicting me, she grinned. "Look at you!" I cried. "Jesus, look at you!"

She was keyed up, adorable, her lips glistening. "Oh Butcher," she said, shifting her hand to my upper arm. "Do you hate me now?"

I have told this bloody story so often. I am accustomed to the expression on my listeners' faces and I know there must be some essential detail I omit. Most likely that detail is my character, a flaw passed from Blue Bones' rotten sperm to my own corrupted clay. For I can never have anyone really feel why her confession so thrilled me, why I devoured her slippery softmuscled mouth in the dancing light of country barbecue near the Shinjuku railway station.

So she was a crook!

Oh the horror! Fuck me dead!

Yes: she had a dodgy painting, or one with a murky past. Yes: she invented a history with a bullshit catalogue. Yes: it's even worse than this. Well: my complete abject fucking apologies to all the cardinals concerned, but the rich collectors could look after themselves. They would steal my work when I was desperate and sell it for a fortune later. Fuck them. Up their arse a squeegee. Marlene Leibovitz had manufactured a catalogue, a title too as you'll soon learn. She had turned a worthless orphan canvas into something that anyone would pay a million bucks for. She was an authenticator. That's what she did.

"There was really a cubist exhibition in Tokyo in 1913?" "Of course. God is in the details."

"You have the clippings? Leibovitz was in it?"

She nestled against my neck. "Japan Times, Asahi Shim-bun too." All through this, the pair of us were smiling, could not stop.