Stealing Picasso (9 page)

After several secret nocturnal journeys to see the
Weeping Woman
Turton has become conceited in his role as guide. Just as a modern Egyptian feels personal pride as he leads American tourists around the pyramids, as though he were sheened with sweat from lifting those very blocks of stone himself, so Turton Pym, an artist, just like Picasso was an artist, feels a sense of pride and responsibility when he shows off the
Weeping Woman
. When that light twangs on and his visitors gasp, Turton heats with a blush of accomplishment.

Tonight he drapes an angora rug across Harry's shoulders and hands him the picnic basket laden with petit-fours and two bottles of Moët. Harry is more than a little pissed off that his expedition and his woman have been hijacked by Turton dressed like a French Riviera cat-burglar in grey overalls, from beneath which emerge the cuffs and rollneck of a striped skivvy, on his head a
beret and on his feet espadrilles. Turton looks likely to skip and dance. Spry, he looks, he thinks. He takes the key from his desk and, setting aside the painting of the boy in the candlebark tree, he unlocks the green steel door. Gently taking Mireille's hand he steps into the gallery. He leads them with his torch beam up the dark stairs and along the goat-track through the thickets of art in the storeroom, Harry bumping canvases with the picnic basket and being called an ox and a zombie by his teacher.

Turton leads them through dark galleries until they are in the hall of the Great Europeans. He spreads the rug, sits Harry and Mireille on the floor beneath the
Weeping Woman
and goes to the light switch. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, presenting, in all her divine pain … Señor Picasso's
Weeping Woman
.' In a gesture of showmanship he makes them wait five seconds before turning on the spotlight dedicated to her, leaving the rest of the enormous room in darkness.

There she is. Isolated. A screaming diva upon a stage, her ostentatious horror accentuated by the silence and darkness of the gallery. Harry watches Mireille smiling at the woman. Not a smile of admiration, he thinks. Not a beam of adoration. The wistful smile that emerges slowly, unbidden, is of someone reminiscing. Turton pops the cork on the first bottle of Moët and pours the champagne into flutes.

During the night they wander with their torches and glasses of champagne and joints from painting to painting, enjoying having these riches to themselves. Little tête-à-têtes break out between Harry and Rembrandt, Mireille and Sickert, Turton and Gauguin, such is the dream-like feeling in the air. But always they return to home base, the
Weeping Woman
, beneath which their picnic rug is spread, with news of their conversations with long-dead artists.

As they are about to leave Mireille begins to cry. They ask her why. ‘It is … it is … so intimate,' she says. ‘The dark. Such an intimacy that unshackles the art and allows it to … to live.' Holding her cheek against Turton's she whispers thanks.

After this Turton stops taking his posse of students into the gallery at night. Instead he chaperones Harry and Mireille. Mireille packs picnic baskets and they camp beneath the
Weeping Woman
and take strolls from there. Turton puts his arm through hers and squires her around as if he were a duke or a tycoon, the owner of all this priceless wonder.

On their fourth visit they are reclining beneath the
Weeping Woman
when Mireille asks, ‘What is so special about her? Why is she so difficult to paint that only Picasso could paint her?'

‘She's not so difficult to paint,' Turton says. ‘Now that she exists, anyone could paint her.'

‘Not anyone could paint her. I could not paint her. Harry could not paint her. You could not paint her.'

‘I could paint that same painting, stroke for stroke identical, inside a week. The artistic skill required is nothing to speak of. The thing is, I could never have invented her. Picasso invented her. He came up with the idea of her.'

‘You could not paint her. Not the same. Your animals are groovy, but, you know … this is another thing, Turton.'

Turton is wounded by the mention of his animals. ‘Identical twin,' he boasts. ‘Only half a dozen people in Oz could tell them apart. I'm not boasting, you understand. Many an artist can replicate another fellow's work.'

‘Bullshit,' she says. She is lying full length on the rug, her skirt pooled mid-thigh, a joint angling from her lips, staring at the
Weeping Woman
. ‘Bullshit. You could not get close.'

‘Oh,' he says with stubborn finality, ‘I could do it.'

Mireille's feet are in Turton's lap and he is massaging them, forcing surprised whimpers from her. Harry looks on, wondering if he has the right to protest. Is she his woman or not? Are people in the art world naturally licentious? Maybe this is free love and he has to get used to it. It would probably be uncool to say anything. He tries not to bat an eyelid while Turton strokes and kneads her feet.

‘I could,' Turton says softly. ‘Identical.'

‘No. No, no, no. I bet you a foot-massage to a fornication you cannot get anything close of her.' She laughs. Harry strenuously doesn't bat an eyelid.

Turton looks at her with his face held calm and asks slowly, ‘If I can copy that painting exactly, you have sex with me? If I can't, I give you a foot massage? That's the bet?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you aware I win either way?'

‘Well, you cannot do it. So … that is the bet.' She is serious now. Harry looks on with the pulse rate of a charging Hussar, still frantically not batting an eyelid.

‘Then …' says Turton, his mouth suddenly dry, pausing as if considering his options. ‘Then, yes. As my artistic integrity is at stake, yes – I accept the wager.'

He buys a poster of the painting from the gallery shop and pins it to an easel in his studio alongside a blank canvas. Then he searches among hundreds of used tubes of paint in a drawer of a sideboard until he is satisfied he has the colours. He squeezes paint onto the lid of a shoebox and carries it to the blank canvas. His hand hovers, not knowing where to begin. Her hair? The cuff of her shirt? Eventually, with two bold strokes he outlines her nose. ‘Shit, Turton. Slow down,' he tells himself. He slows into torpor and by dawn he has painted the
Weeping Woman
.

That night he takes her into the gallery and looks at her alongside the original. She will not do, she isn't right. He missed her eyes and his brushstrokes are longer than Picasso's. Too confident. But he has come to know her better while painting
this first draft. He smiles at the real one now, and nods. I know you now. I have you.

In his studio Turton staples an ancient linen onto a rectangular stretcher. He puts a saucepan of water on a gas camper-cooker and sprinkles crystallised rabbit skin into it, stirring until the crystals dissolve and the brew bubbles and thickens into glue. This stench of rendered rodent must have assaulted Picasso's nose thousands of times. Turton lights a stick of incense to camouflage the smell. Then he paints a coat of the glue onto the linen, lets it dry and sands it back, before painting on another coat. Next day, when the glue has hardened, he tightens the linen and paints it with a white Jesso. He is ready to begin.

Never has a man thrown himself into a forgery with such passion. If he replicates Picasso's work perfectly he wins Mireille for a night. And, who knows, if he takes her to a ruinous ecstasy (many a good tune played on an old fiddle) he might win her for longer. He goes to a mirror and combs his hair before beginning.

At midnight he sets his easel up beside the
Weeping Woman
in the Hall of the Great Europeans, with Harry and Mireille sitting silently on the bench behind him smoking. A distant clank of a tram on St Kilda Road is the only sound. Beside him on a card table he squeezes blobs of paint from lead tubes. Greens, pinks, blue, yellow, black. Harry counts fifteen colours. Turton lays a brush alongside each one. He takes a tape measure from his pocket and, stepping rapidly from one canvas to another, he makes a grid on his canvas and outlines her profile in pencil on it. Then, with his glasses down the weather end of his nose, he steps up close enough to the
Weeping Woman
to kiss her, and studies a small terrain, a square centimetre of her, for minutes on end, before stepping sideways to his own canvas and reproducing that centimetre there.

This is how he takes the one and makes the other, in parts small enough to be called DNA. He ingests an eyelash here, a runnel of tear-track there, a nostril, a tooth. Each is studied and known before being carried across and rebirthed as part of the new woman. It is a terribly laborious process and though Harry and Mireille are fascinated at first, as though watching an ant trying to relocate the Taj Mahal, before long they are both asleep, knowing Mireille has lost her bet.

For seven nights he returns, moving the
Weeping Woman
fragment by fragment – an iris, a brushstroke, her collar-point – until he has replicated her. Finally, holding aloft a brush that is the lilac colour of her lips, he stands back from his own
Weeping Woman
and says, matter of factly, ‘Done.'

Mireille doesn't even compare the paintings, because she has watched the new one grow. ‘And done like you said. The identical twin. I have lost our bet.'

Having known for days that he was going to win the bet and that he was going to have Mireille for a night, he'd studied his nude self in a full-length mirror that morning, trying to see what she would see. He flexed a quadricep and sighed at the result, flexed a bicep and blinked three times at its deficiency. He thrust his hips forwards and closed one eye for perspective, and made a frame of his thumbs and forefingers. Looking through it he saw himself, almost hairless, his muscles withered, gone, leaving the skin hanging in flaccid pouches. His penis angling pale and knotted from his wizened torso. He could not, in all conscience, present this to a woman of Mireille's beauty.

‘Our bet?' he asks now, feigning ignorance. ‘Our bet? Oh, that. Forget that. I knew I could replicate the painting. There was no bet.' Releasing Mireille from the debt of sleeping with his despicable self, Turton feels like a man who has rescued a princess from the libidinous attentions of a gibbon. He feels
heroic. Stands tall. Probably, he thinks to himself, this flush of chivalry is a better pay-off than I could have got by having sex with her. He wonders, briefly, if this means he is in love with her.

Mireille kisses him. Harry is relieved and pats Turton's back and hugs him and tells him he didn't think he could do it, but, gee, he surely did do it. I … dentical. They drink Armagnac in the dark of the gallery, admiring Turton's
Weeping Woman
. As they lie there Turton massages Mireille's feet, the loser's task, her head in Harry's lap.

But before long Turton's mood darkens. He is beginning to regard his own
Weeping Woman
suspiciously. Staring from her to Mireille, he begins to massage Mireille's feet more and more violently, until she yelps, ‘Ow, too hard. I am not a bear.' She pulls them from him.

‘Why would you make a bet like that? Risk having to sleep with a dirty old man?'

‘You are not so old or so dirty.'

‘Oh, I am. A decrepit thing. Why? Why did you want me to paint her?' He reaches out for her feet again and puts them in his lap. ‘If we stole the original and left mine in its place, I wonder how long it would be before anyone noticed.' He closes his eyes and holds her feet gently in his cupped hands, using them as a seismograph to feel for the telltale vibrations of her guilt. Did she flinch when he said the word ‘stole'?

‘It'd probably be quite a while, wouldn't it?' he asks. ‘Time enough to sell the real painting and get away.' He is fishing now. Why did she want this new painting?

She sits up, folding her feet beneath her. ‘Your reasoning is faulty, Turton. What is the point of stealing a painting if no one knew it was gone? People who buy stolen art must know it stolen before they can buy it. It must announce its availability
on the black market in a great
scandale
of front pages and TV newsflashes and detectives making big statements and politicians harrumphing.'

‘I won't do it,' he tells Mireille. ‘Don't even ask me.' He lets her feet go and takes hold of his sideboards. ‘Don't even tell me.'

She reaches out and unlocks his fingers from his sideboards and puts his hands in her lap. ‘Ask yourself what Picasso would have done,' she whispers, kissing him on the lips, pulling his body against hers.

She doesn't wink at Harry. It would have been better if she had, but Harry knows she wants to. And he is consoled by being sure that Mireille and he are in this together. She is a siren calling a sucker onto the rocks. A woman taking hold of a man's workaday sanity and his proudly held morality and crushing them between her thighs as if she were a vice. It excites Harry that Turton is being gathered up and crushed in the vice of her allure. He feels complicit in the sting. His woman is doing this and he can trust her to do it: take another man's penis in her mouth and not get into it; never, during the entire process have a thought or flicker of lust, because he, Harry, is so strongly the centrepiece of her desire. He isn't worried at the thought of Mireille's sexual predilections being discovered by Turton. He is confident she won't betray them. She will serve Turton up a Punch & Judy show of her own needs.

Still, the sounds of lovemaking, the groans, hyperventilations and whimpers (despite Harry knowing them a crumb-trail of language to lead Turton falsely to a conclusion of his own sexual magnificence) are terrible to hear. Harry feels sick and wanders away humming ‘Advance Australia Fair' loudly enough to drown out Mireille's sounds. He meanders through neo-Byzantine ceramics and into the cul-de-sac
of post-modernism, leaving Modigliani's portrait of Manuel Humbert (that straitlaced virgin, with his startled vicar's eyes and high white collar) to eavesdrop the purple gratitude voiced by Turton Pym as he lays his hands on Mireille. ‘Oh … Oh, yes, indeed … thank you … Yes.'