An Object of Beauty: A Novel (16 page)

“I wasn’t in New York before it was stolen.”

The rest of the dinner, Lacey would periodically renew her question, as if she were trying to remember a movie title that escaped her, shouting, “Oh, oh!” and hitting her head with her fist. But still, she hadn’t found the answer. Patrice observed her like a child interested in an automated toy; he kept wondering what it would do next.

The lights in the restaurant were turned low. A pianist could be heard from the bar playing “The Way You Look Tonight,” which worked subconsciously on Patrice. Lacey, now lit by candlelight, her hair relaxed and heading toward unkempt, her concentration diverted, would include him by holding his wrist with one hand and pounding the table with the other when the answer she sought appeared near. In these few seconds, deep inside him, so deep as to be insensible, a passion of viral intensity was slowly infecting him. In spite of their odd beginning, he was deciding not only that Lacey Yeager would make his life wonderful, but that her absence would make it tragic.

Outside, Patrice was shocked to learn it was nine p.m. That meant he and Lacey had spent at least four hours tête-à-tête, talking, eating, flirting, wooing and cooing, and oh yeah, much earlier, fucking. Lacey was exhausted and said good night to him in front of the Carlyle, and a further discussion of another meeting was aborted by the arrival of a cab. Lacey threw her bag in the backseat and said, “Au revoir, baby.”

Lacey crossed the park at 79th Street and rested her head against the door of the cab. Her mind relaxed, allowing a sunken memory to bob to the surface. She had seen the Vermeer, or at least a sliver of it, through a crack in the door on her first visit to Barton Talley’s gallery, when she was there to be interviewed. She straightened up and the image came into focus, a young girl singing to a gentleman whose back was to the frame, all in Vermeer’s unmistakable colors.

She hurried into her apartment, standing vacantly in the center of her living room, wondering what to do. She saw her message light blinking. There were three messages from Talley, saying, “Call me when you get in,” “Call me when you get this,” and “Where are you? Call me.”

She picked up the phone and dialed.

“Oh, Lacey. Gee, darling, where were you? I left word everywhere. I’m getting you a cell phone. Did you get a package? Did someone give you a package?”

“An envelope.”

“You got an envelope. Where is it?”

“I have it here.”

“Is it thick? Thin?”

“Thin, they said it was fragile.”

“Can you bring it over? Can I come get it?”

“You can come get it. I’m dead.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes. Where are you again?”

Lacey hung up the phone and went to her purse. She took out the envelope and examined it. It was stiff in the center but otherwise flimsy. She filled her electric kettle with water and turned it on. She took out a white cloth napkin and laid it on the counter. She went and lay on her bed, closing her eyes, not to rest but to blot out the overhead light, her heart beginning to accelerate. The kettle started to spit.

She went to the kitchen, picked up the envelope, and began to steam it open. After a while, there was success, though she left a few faint tears in the flap. She opened the envelope and poured its contents onto the cloth napkin. She saw two pieces of shirt cardboard, cut to about the size of a playing card, taped together and bulging slightly at the center. She went to her bedroom and got a pair of scissors and a roll of tape. She cut one end of the tape and squeezed the cardboard like a change purse. A small, rectangular piece of canvas fell out, ragged at the edges as though snipped by shears, hard and stiff like plastic.

She turned it over and saw brown, old brown paint made rigid by layers of varnish, and she could see its amber tint affecting the color of what was underneath. She put it under the light. She could see words, and she read, written in script, “Rembrandt van Rijn.”

Lacey took the piece and sealed it back inside the cardboard package. She went into the bathroom and turned on her hair dryer, aiming it at the flap while she stood and waited, waving the envelope through the blasting air.

Her doorbell rang. She checked the envelope, which looked good, and put it back in her purse. She buzzed in Barton Talley, and his first words were, “I’m glad I remembered where you live. Do you realize you gave me the wrong address? You inverted two digits.”

Yes, Lacey thought, while saying, “Oh, sorry, I do that sometimes.”

The teakettle gurgled. “You want some tea?” Lacey asked him.

“No thanks, too late for me. Did you have a good trip?”

“Fabulous. I got a consignment from Hinton Alberg.”

“Really?”

“Nine Pilot Mouse paintings.”

“Well, that will be interesting. Difficult and interesting. How are we supposed to sell those? Anyway, good job. Fill me in.”

“Tomorrow, I’m so tired. Here’s the envelope…” Lacey started to root around in her purse. “What’s in it?” she said, handing it over.

“Come in an hour late tomorrow, Lacey. You’ve worked hard.”

THE NEXT DAY, Lacey banged around the office like a sit-com wife signaling anger. She shut doors with extra force, slammed phones down on their cradles, walked with harder steps on wooden floors. Talley’s door was shut, and Lacey was stuck outside like a cat who wanted in. His phone line would be lit for a solid hour, then he would hang up for seconds, and it would light again for another forty minutes. His voice could be heard, but the closed door gave the effect of a voice in the next room of a cheap motel: you could hear someone was talking but couldn’t understand one clear word. Once, he got angry and his volume rose.

She heard: “Well, they’re idiots! They’re not art people. These people are not art people.”

Lacey continually checked his door and his phone extension light. Closed and on. She went down the hall to the bins, treading lightly even though the bins were a normal place for her to be. The paintings were arranged on shelves covered in carpet and separated by cardboard flats to keep frames from knocking into each other. Some of the pictures were sheathed in bubble wrap, some were in their own pasteboard containers, and some merely had gaffer’s tape stuck on the sides of their frames with the name of the artist written in marking pen. She was familiar with most of the visible stock, but the bins lined both sides of the room and the dark areas toward the back wall remained unexplored.

She wandered down the aisle, her hands touching the frames, left and right, her head doing a tennis match scan of the shelves, pulling the unfamiliar ones out a few inches to check labels. Her head twisted around to the wall phone, and she saw that Talley’s light was still burning. She got to the end of the storage and saw in the last, lower bin a picture wrapped in cardboard and sealed tight with wide, clear tape. Under the tape was written a number, 53876, which she committed to memory. She estimated its dimensions by spreading her hand and counting spans. She had long ago measured this distance for quick calculation of a painting’s size.

She then went back into the hall, which was lined floor to ceiling with art reference books. A never-used section on museum collections had migrated to the bottom row—because nothing in them was ever for sale—and there she found a Gardner catalog published before the theft, in 1974. She didn’t want to be caught holding the book in case Talley suddenly emerged, so she quickly turned back to her office, impressed at her own detective work as she edged out of sight. All this sneaking around was making her agitated, even though every one of her actions could be considered ordinary office maneuvering.

She opened the book and went to Vermeer. There it was,
The Concert
, one of the world’s masterpieces reproduced in muddy, out-of-register ink. Its size was printed as “0.725 x 0.647.” What the fuck does that mean? she thought. She figured it was metric, but there wasn’t as yet an omnipresent Internet to confirm it. She called the Carlyle and asked for Patrice, but he wasn’t in. Before she hung up, the hotel operator came back on the line and asked, “Would you like to leave a message?” The Carlyle was one of the few remaining hotels where unanswered room calls didn’t default to voice mail.

“Yes,” replied Lacey, “ask him how many centimeters are in an inch.”

“Please hold,” said the operator, whose accent placed her in the heart
of Queens. Thirty seconds later, she came back on the line and said, “It’s two point five.”

Lacey computed that
The Concert
was twenty-eight inches by twenty-five inches, and she added three inches all around to allow for the frame and another inch for packaging. Yes, the package was the same size as the wrapped, stolen Vermeer. She was convinced that this was the missing painting.

A moment later, Lacey heard Talley’s door open. She quickly put the book on the floor under her desk. “Lacey, are you here?” he called.

“Yes,” she shouted. “Let’s meet.”

Talley was flush and distracted. “So what about Hinton Alberg?” he said.

“I called him this morning,” Lacey told him. “He’s sending us transparencies. Nine early paintings by Pilot Mouse.”

“Early? The guy’s thirty.”

“Yes, but it seems that in the contemporary world, early can be four years ago.”

“What’s the deal?”

“He paid a hundred eighty thousand for them, and he wants to double it.”

“Can we?”

“Well, if they were on the New York market, we could, but he doesn’t want them on the New York market because he doesn’t want it known he’s selling.”

“Well, we’ll do our best.”

“Who’s your collector in Mexico? Flores? He bought a Hirst, didn’t he? It was in the
Art Newspaper
,” she said.

“Flores buys Légers and Braques.”

“He also buys Hirst.”

“Who’s Hirst?”

“He’s my dry cleaner.”

“Are you joking?”

“Yes, Mr. Talley. You’ve got to get out more.”

“I’ll call him. Tell me about Pilot Mouse.”

“I don’t know much about him. He was with a small gallery, Alberg bought all the paintings, then Pilot Mouse jumped.”

“Jumped?”

“Jumped to another gallery with a higher profile. Then he started doing conceptual pieces, and raids.”

“What are raids?”

“Like happenings. He fills the gallery with nudes, nudes standing around, lots of things banging and sound effects, clatter. He calls them raids, as in raiding the conventional art establishment.”

“Sounds unsalable.”

“I agree. That’s the part I don’t get.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Never seen him.”

“What do I tell Flores?”

“You just say Pilot Mouse and he’s either heard of him or he hasn’t, I guess.”

Talley was not used to talking about living artists. “The deader the better,” he would say. The antics of the long dead, like Duchamp sending a signed urinal to an art show or Salvador Dalí giving an interview with a lamb chop on his head, had transformed in time from pranks to lore, while the actions of Pilot Mouse just sounded juvenile or, at best, lacking in originality. But Talley was not stupid. He knew that “derivative” was an epithet used erratically and that generations of collectors grew up believing that the art of their time, however derivative, was wholly new. He understood that markets could be blinkered, with activity hotly occurring and nobody ever hearing about it. So while Pilot Mouse’s status as an artist of importance was doubtful, his status as a name that could be sold, at least for a while, was probably assured.

I met Lacey for lunch, and she alternated between fretful and enthused. She described the trip to Boston and the consignment from Alberg. When she told me about the office tryst with Patrice Claire, again I felt an involuntary electrical jerk pulse through me, which I interpreted to mean not that I had a crush on Lacey, but that I wished she had commandeered me instead. When she elaborated on the intrigue, she never once asked me what she should do. I only listened. Once she said, “Am I in trouble?” but she answered her own question by placing herself at such a distance from the initial crime that she tried and exonerated herself in a matter of seconds. Whether Talley was complicit or innocent was open to her. He could be working to get the pictures back, but if the Vermeer was indeed in his gallery, didn’t that make him a criminal? And if Talley went to jail, would that hurt her career or help it?

Finally, Lacey said to me, “How are you doing?”

“I’m still writing, got a piece in
ARTnews
, doing an essay for a photography catalog. I keep trying to start a novel.”

“About?”

“About my growing up.”

“Daniel, jeez, get a subject.”

“Well, I’m rethinking.”

“Girlfriends?”

“They come, they go. Nothing sticks.”

“You know what you are, Daniel? You’re too kind. Girls like trouble until they’re thirty-five.”

“I thought I was an intellectual nerd.”

“Wow, if you were an intellectual nerd who made trouble, you would be
potent
.”

Lacey paid the bill, and we walked out of 3 Guys onto Madison Avenue, and in the air were the first real hints of summer.

“IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE to me, Mr. Talley.”

“What is that, Lacey?”

“Why you didn’t go to Boston.”

“I told you—”

“I know what you told me, that you didn’t want to see people from the Boston Museum. But that’s never stopped you. You’re not shy. And the room was filled with collectors. That’s like Ho-Ho’s to a fat man.”

“I’m breaking you in, Lacey.”

“Baloney. Is it that you didn’t want to carry back what was in that envelope?”

Talley looked up at her. “What was in the envelope?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lacey, you carried something back. I didn’t even know what it was. You have to stay out of this.”

“But I’m in it. Your fault.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being fired?”

“But you can’t fire me now, can you? Can you put me loose on the streets?”

Not sure what she meant, Talley squinted fiercely and leaned back, and although he was taking himself farther away from her, his total area seemed to expand. “Oh, I could, Lacey. But truthfully, I wouldn’t.
Go back to work. Zone out. Stare at the Matisse for a few minutes. Use it like Zen.”