Planet Willie (10 page)

“Are you sure
you have that kind of money, Willie?” Lenny asks, beginning to exhibit some
signs of concern.

“Would it
matter if I did, honey?” I say, ignoring the tuxedo’s calls for two hundred
fifty thousand to make it an even three hundred. Lenny’s dad turns around and
seems to notice me for the first time. Also notices his daughter sitting next
to me, and there will be hell to pay. He’s so disgusted with the whole
situation that he decides he’s not going to go any higher, and then it’s going,
it’s going, and it’s sold, to the gentleman in the hat they call The Kid.

I wave a
little to the crowd. From the stage the tuxedo thanks me from the bottom of his
heart. “Hell,” I holler out. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for the kids.”
Everybody loves that, and so I give them all an extravagant bit of face works
of the sort you really don’t want to try at home, and preferably not in
enclosed spaces. Needs the wide open spaces, this smile. I call it the
Billboard Jesus, and mister it just blesses them all with my undying love, all
the people. The kind of billboard smile where maybe you get a little glint of
starlight off of one of your big white teeth and could sell anything from
toothpaste to the moon. Gets to feeling so good I just keep smiling, putting it
out there, professional secrets be damned. I mean it’s come unto me, ye little
children, and preferably ol’ Jeffrey right about now.

Everybody
chuckles real pleasantly for a bit, but soon enough even the excitement
generated from a Billboard Jesus begins to fade, and people go back to their
conversations, or their drinks, or whatever it was that was occupying them before
the auction began. Philanthropists stand to mingle again, refreshing their charitable
outlook at the bar.

At this point
I’m forced to admit that I may not have three hundred thousand bucks on me. May
need to have a word with my man on Wall Street first, to tell you the truth. What
I do in the meantime is slip to the back of the room in hopes of making myself
a little less conspicuous. I bid adieu to Lenny, which I sure as hell don’t
want to do, but I’m a private investigator, it’s what I do, and now that I’m
thinking a little clearer, it occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind having a word
with Kafka. Why the waiter get-up, I have no idea, but if that’s the way he
wants to do it, maybe he could bring me a drink while he’s at it.

So I settle
down real low at a table near the entrance and manage to flag down the kid as
he comes racing by with some caviar. He’s got a nasty looking bruise on his
cheek and is wearing a red jacket and white pants, with a red bowtie and a little
red hat on his head. Kid does love his hats, which you have to respect.

“Now would
that be what you call a fez,” I say, pulling him down into a chair, “or one of
those native Chinese hats, I’m not sure what they’re called.”

Kafka says
something in Albanian it’s just as well he doesn’t translate. “Speaking of
hats,” I say, “how’s the head. Last time I saw you, you were floating like a
butterfly, and I imagine it stung like hell.”

“They took me
to the police station,” he says. “You just left me there.”

“What were you
expecting?” I say, taking a delicious little caviar-topped toastie from his
tray.

“Nothing, I
guess,” he says, sounding more than a little depressed. His posture’s gotten so
bad he’s practically curled up on the table. “This whole business is getting
too crazy for me.”

“By that I
assume you mean the catering business,” I say. “I myself am no stranger to the
service industries, and you don’t have to tell me how unfulfilling they can
sometimes be to the finer self.”

“They wouldn’t
let us in,” he says. “We tried everything. It’s five hundred bucks a plate.
Finally I heard they’d lost a waiter, and they gave me a uniform.”

“Well you’re
looking quite snappy, Kafka,” I say, helping myself to another little toastie.
“So what brings you to Vail? Don’t tell me ALF’s expanding the revolution to Colorado. And speaking of which. Where’s the lovely Twiggy? Don’t tell me they’ve got her
in one of those hats too.”

“She refused
to be a waiter,” he says. “We’re having a few disagreements right now.”

“It’s a long
way across America in a Volkswagen Beetle,” I say.

“Yep,” he sighs,
looking around a little nervously.

“Well I’m glad
you stopped by,” I say.

Then he starts
snickering to himself and may even straighten up a bit. “You just spent three
hundred thousand dollars on a fake,” he snorts, laughter shaking his whole body
now. “And you know what else?
I
painted it. This charity has an office
in New York. We’re giving them out to everybody, so I thought it might be nice
to give a few to charities and maybe help out some people. ALF believes in
social equality, you know. Screw the rich art collectors. There are other
people who need it more. So we donated a few anonymously. Then we found out
Fernanda was coming. That wasn’t part of the plan, but Twiggy refuses to let
her out of her sight now. She’s very determined. She says Fernanda will have to
meet up with Alberto someplace, and when she does, we’ll be there. And if she
hasn’t paid us before then, we’ll get that painting. I can promise you that.”

“Well in the
meantime just let me say that I am honored to be one of the few to possess, at
least in theory, one of your creations,” I say.

He gets to
smiling again. “
Three hundred thousand bucks.”

“Once again,
in theory.”

“You people
are sick,” he says. “You’re all sick.” Devours a couple of toasties as he says
it and just keeps shaking his head. Then he catches himself and takes a quick
glance around the room to make sure the boss isn’t watching.

“So where is
this all taking us, Kafka?” I say. “I don’t have the painting. I wouldn’t have
bid on your fake if I did. Neither does Fernanda, apparently, or she wouldn’t
have bid either.”

“She knows
where it is,” he says, then suddenly jumps out of his chair like he’s been bit.
The boss, a little hatless man in a jacket matching Kafka’s is bearing down on
us fast. “She arranged it,” Kafka murmurs, while making a show of offering the
tray to me real professional-like, which slows the boss down just a tad. He may
not want to interfere, considering I’ve become a major Second Chance celebrity
in the past half hour. “We know that for a fact,” Kafka says. “So good luck,
Willie,” he says, snatching the tray away before I can get a last bit of
caviar. “May the best man win.”

Then he’s off
to his waiting duties, and I’m left needing to talk to Fernanda fast before
anybody comes around asking for a check. In the meantime, the entertainment
portion of the evening has begun, and a dozen chorus girls in short skirts and
military caps come out on stage and start kicking to a brass band, legs
scissoring up and down so prettily that I wouldn’t mind getting up there myself
and letting those legs make confetti out of me. The legs on the girl at the end
of the line are so long that I need four or five of her kicks just to take them
all in. Then I move up to the rest of her, which takes at least another minute
or so. I like to think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of chorus girls, and
it has to be said that she is a bit off in her timing. Seems to be desperately
watching the other girls’ legs in an attempt to catch up. Not that it matters
too much. With a body like that, in a skirt like that, she could serve as the
evening’s entertainment just doing jumping jacks. These are my reflections on
her body, but eventually I do make it up to her face, and when I do I’m more
than a little disappointed in myself for not recognizing the legs in the first
place. Seems like everybody’s got a second job in these tough economic times,
and considering my powers of observation, maybe I could use one too. I mean I
studied those legs on the driving range, I studied them in lamé. Those legs,
mister, are none other than Twiggy’s, and she’s looking like she’s regretting
not putting on a little red hat of her own. Then Fernanda stands and starts
moving across the room, and Twiggy stops kicking entirely.

Which may not
enhance the evening’s entertainment, but it does put Fernanda back on the map.
She’s moving in my direction, and I imagine she’ll want to talk, but before I
can picture exactly how she’ll flip her hair, or how she’ll hide her teeth, or
how those freckles might just break my heart, the real life version is standing
in front of me, and I can assure you she’s no less vivid in the flesh.

“I want to
talk to you,” she says from down in her throat somewhere, without moving her
lips. Her eyes are rimmed red and she’s drinking what looks like some kind of fruity
liqueur.

“I just saved
you and your friends over a quarter million bucks,” I say. “The least you can
do is talk.”

“It’s worth four
times that,” she says, running some fingers through her hair, then suddenly
sitting down, as if she’s decided to do me a big personal favor. Wilted rose is
apparently the effect she’s after.

“Not fake,
it’s not,” I say, as she pours the rest of the drink down her throat.

“Since when
are you the expert?” she says, staring down into the bottom of her glass and
scooping out a few last thick drops with her finger, which she absent-mindedly puts
in her mouth. This is the last place in the world she wants to be, I’m thinking.
Maybe she should have never left South Texas and those warm nights and easy
mornings that make you want to leave the rat race to the rats.

“Let’s cut to it,
Fernanda,” I say, harder than I want to be. I notice Twiggy watching us from up
on stage, where she’s kicking again like she wants us to know what she could do
to us with those heels. “I think I might like you,” I say, “and it just seems
stupid to keep chasing each other across the whole of the United States when we could sort it all out right here. There’s still hope for you,
Fernanda. I’ll explain eventually. And maybe there’s hope for me too.”

“I didn’t
chase you,” she says, still wanting to pout a bit.

“It’s my job,”
I say. “And I never tried to fake a Madonna and pass it off as an original.
What I don’t get is why the hell you were bidding on a painting you’ve already
stolen.”

“I didn’t
steal it.”

“You had it
copied. I know that much. You got the photo from the insurance people and had
it done, I’m guessing by some Albanian acquaintance, maybe somebody recommended
to you by your assistant at the gallery, whom I’d fire on the spot if I was
you. You didn’t know at the time that the photo wasn’t of the greatest quality,
but then I’ve already mentioned that, what, two days ago now? So what I still
can’t figure out is why we’re here, and no that’s not existential.”

She purses her
lips and shakes her hair. It’s no small effort, but a sentence does eventually
work its way out. “It sounds so crazy,” she says, carefully pronouncing each
word, “but there is this group of people with some loony name who have been
threatening me.”

“ALF,” I say. “Don’t ask me to remember what it stands for, but the A should be for those Albanians I was referring to.”

Her breath catches. “You know them?”

“I do,” I say,
while on the stage the first song has ended and the girls are shimmying to
another. “And threatening’s not the word. It’s blackmailing. Meaning you stole
your father’s painting, and they know it.”

“I didn’t
steal it,” she says.

“I’m trying to
make this easy for you, sweetheart,” I say, “but I’ll make it even easier. You
may not have stolen the painting yourself, but you had it stolen. No one else
would have known your father had that painting, nevermind all the other
coincidences, which you have to admit are a bit much. So you had the painting
copied, you had the painting stolen, wanting enough money to keep your gallery going and for who knows what else. And no, I’m not stopping. I’m going out on a
limb here to speculate that the person you called upon to render you this
little service was a certain mystery man named Alberto.”

She gasps as
if it’s a shock to hear it pronounced aloud. Maybe it is. Maybe she’s that
mixed up. “I don’t know what
do
,” she wails, at the point of tears.

“Why don’t you
just start at the beginning,” I say. “Afterwards we’ll worry about forgiveness
and all the rest.”

She looks up
at me for a moment, then looks down at her empty glass, and then something clicks
and she starts talking. It comes out with the force of something she’s kept
inside for too long. She’s a good girl, I think, but she’s most definitely been
bad. I don’t guess I like her any less for it. Sometimes – and this is a point
that others in the department often miss – the good’s not worth much without
the bad.

Several months
ago, she says, she got a call at the gallery from a collector looking to buy
Old Masters. He loved Florence, he told her, and in particular he loved Botticelli.
He wondered if she might have anything to sell. Business hadn’t been too good, and
her first thought was of daddy’s Madonna, which certain experts had attributed
to the school of Botticelli. She humbled herself, she called daddy to ask if he
might let her sell it, and really that was her first mistake. They fought, he
insulted her, she says, and when she hung up the phone, the only thought in her
mind was how to get her hands on that painting. She knew some painters in town.
She’d tried to represent some of their work before she opened the gallery. The
most talented one was called Alberto Pasha, and she knew he needed the money,
so she called him up and offered him some to paint a copy from the photograph
she had gotten from daddy’s insurance company.

“Just
curious,” I say. “How did you get that photograph? I had to steal mine.”

“Ava Gardner,”
she says. “I do a pretty good impersonation. Sit on just about anybody’s lap
and do an Ava Gardner impression, you can get pretty much anything you want.”