The Loo Sanction (3 page)

“Ah. A pity. I was for many years associated with the entertainment world. And I must admit that I sometimes miss it. The laughter. The happy times.”

MacTaint shambled over with the drinks. “Her only dealings with theatre were that she used to stand outside and try to hustle blokes too drunk to care what they got into. Here you go, love. Bottoms up, as they used to say in your trade.”

“Don't be crude, love.” She tossed back the glass of gin and smacked her lips, a motion that jiggled her pendulous cheeks. Then she clapped a ham-sized hand onto Jonathan's forearm and said, “Of course, I suppose it's all changed now. The old artists have gone, it's all youngsters with long hair and loud songs.” She relieved herself of a shuddering sigh.

“It's worse than you think,” MacTaint said, drooping into a damask chair and hooking another over with his toe so he could put his feet up on it. “The law doesn't allow you to carry sandwich boards advertising the positions you specialize in. And curb service on rubber mattresses is definitely not in.”

“Fuck you, MacTaint!” Lilla said in a new accent that carried the snarl of the streets in it.

MacTaint instantly responded in kind. “Hop it, you ha'-penny cunt! I'd kick your arse proper for you, if I wasn't afraid of losing me boot!”

Lilla rose with tottering dignity and offered her hand to Jonathan. “I must leave you gentlemen. I have letters to do before retiring.”

Jonathan rose and bowed slightly. “Good night, Lilla.”

She made her way to the door at the far end of the room, sweeping up a bottle of gin as she passed the bar. She had to tack twice to gain the center of the door, which then gave her some difficulty in opening. In the end she gave it a hinge-loosening kick that knocked it ajar. She turned and waved her cigarette holder at Jonathan before disappearing.

Jonathan looked questioningly at MacTaint, who bared his lower teeth in a grimace of pleasure as he dug his fingernails into the ingrown stubble under his chin. “She drinks, you know,” he said.

“Does she?”

“Oh, yes. I found her out there in the yard fifteen years ago,” he explained, shifting the scratching to under an arm. “Somebody'd beat her up pretty badly.”

“So you took her in?”

“To my eternal regret. Still! An occasional spat is good for the glands. She's a good old hole, really.”

“What was this number she was doing for me?”

MacTaint shrugged. “Bits of old roles she's done, I suppose. She's more than a little mental, you know.”

“She's not the only one. Cheers.” Jonathan drank off half his whiskey and looked around the room with genuine appreciation. “You live well.”

MacTaint nodded agreement. “I don't move many paintings anymore. Only one or two a year. But what with no income tax, I do well enough.”

“Who are those painters outside?”

“Damned if I know. They come and they go. I keep the place warm and light, and there's always tea and bread and cheese about for them. Sometimes there's only one or two of them, sometimes half a dozen. That tall one who gave you the evil eye, he's been around for years and years. Still working on the same canvas. Feels he owns the place—by squatter's right, I shouldn't wonder. Complains sometimes if the cheese isn't to his liking. The others come and go. I suppose they hear about the place from one another.”

“You're a good man, MacTaint.”

“Ain't that the bleeding truth. Did I ever tell you that I was once a painter myself?”

“No, never.”

“Oh, yes! More than forty years ago I came down to The Smoke to study art. Full of theories I was, about art and socialism. You didn't look at my paintings, you read them. Essays, they were. Hungry children, strikers being bashed up by police, that sort of business. Trash. Then finally I discovered that my calling lay in stealing and flogging paintings. It's fun to do what you're good at.”

They fell silent for a time, watching the fire loop yellow and blue in the hearth. It settled with a hiss of sparks, and the sound pulled MacTaint from his musings. “Jon? I asked you to drop over this evening for a reason.”

“Not just to drink up your whiskey?”

“No. I've got something I want you to see.” He grunted out of his chair and crossed to a painting that had been standing in an ornate old frame, its face to the wall. He carried it back tenderly and set it up on a chair. “What do you think of that?”

Jonathan scanned it and nodded. Then he leaned forward to examine it in detail. After five minutes, he sat back and finished off his Laphroaig. “You're not thinking of selling it, are you?”

MacTaint's eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy eyebrows. “And why not?”

“I was thinking of your reputation. You've never peddled a fake before.”

“Goddamn your eye!” MacTaint cackled and scratched his scruffy head. “That would pass muster anywhere in the world.”

“I'm not saying it's not a good copy—in fact, it's extraordinary. But it is a forgery, and you don't flog fakes.”

“Don't bother your head about that. I've never sold a piece of shoddy goods before, and I never shall. But slake my curiosity, lad. How can you tell it's phony?”

Jonathan shrugged. It was difficult to explain the almost automatic processes of mind and eye that constituted his gift. “Oh, a thousand things,” he said.

“For instance?”

He sat back and closed his eyes, dredging up the original of J.-B.-S. Chardin's
House of Cards
from the lagan of his memory and holding it in focus as he studied the mental image. Then he opened his eyes slowly and examined the painting before him. “All right. This was done in Holland. At least, the Van M. technique was used. A relatively valueless painting of the proper age and size was sanded down, and the surface crackle was brought up by successive bakings of layers of paint.”

MacTaint nodded.

“But the crackle was not perfect here.” He touched the white areas around the face of the young man in a three-cornered hat. “And when the crackle didn't bake through perfectly, your forger rolled the canvas to force it. Basically a good job too. But in these areas it ought to be deeper and more widely spaced. Your man seems to have forgotten that white dries more slowly than other pigments.”

“And that's the only flaw? Crackle?”

“No, no. Dozens of other errors. Most of them are excessive precision. Forgers tend to be more exact in their draftsmanship than the artist was. Look here, for instance, at the perspective on the boy's left eye.”

“Looks all right to me.”

“Precisely. On the original, Chardin made a slight error—probably caused by two sittings during the drawing. And look here at the coin. It's as carefully drawn as the marker there. In the genuine painting, the coin has blurred outlines, as though it were in a different field of focus from the marker.”

MacTaint shook his head in admiration, and a fall of dandruff floated to his lap. “Goddamn those eyes of yours.”

“Even forgetting my eyes, this thing would bounce the minute it hit the market. The original hangs in the National Gallery.”

“Oh, get along with you!”

They laughed, knowing that many forgeries hang bravely and unchallenged in the major galleries of the world, while the originals hang in clandestine splendor in private collections. This was, in fact, the case with all but one of Jonathan's own Impressionists.

“Would this pass inspection, Jon?”

They both knew that the real skills of major curators were limited to the documentation of ownership patterns, despite their tendencies to report in terms of a genuine knowledge. “With what provenance?” Jonathan asked.

“Oh . . . let's say it was hanging in the National Gallery in place of the real one.”

Jonathan raised his eyebrows, his turn to feel admiration. “No question at all,” he pronounced with confidence. “But how would you get at the real Chardin, Mac? Since the '
57 thing, they've stiffened their security and there hasn't been a successful theft.”

“What makes you think that?” MacTaint's eyes were round with feigned surprise, and he looked more than ever like a mischievous leprechaun.

“But there's a weight alarm system. You couldn't possibly get one off the wall without being detected.”

“Of course it would be detected. It's always detected.”

“Always? Tell me, Mac. How many paintings have you nicked from the National Gallery?”

“All told?” MacTaint squinted sideways in concentration. “Over the years? Ah-h, let's see . . . seven.”

“Seven!” Jonathan stared at the old man. “I'll take that drink now,” he said quietly.

“Here you go.”

“Ta.”

“Cheers.”

They drank in silence. Jonathan shook his head. “I'm trying to see this in my mind, Mac. First, you walk to the gallery.”

“I do that. Yes. In I walk.”

“Then you take the painting from the wall. The alarms go off.”

“Dreadful noise.”

“You hang up a reasonably good forgery in its place, and you stroll out. Is that it?”

“Well, I don't stroll, exactly. More like running arse over teakettle. But in broad terms, yes, that's it.”

“Now the alarm system tells them which picture has been tampered with, right?”

“Correct.”

“And yet it never occurs to them to give the painting a professional scrutiny.”

“They give it a great deal of attention. But not scrutiny.” MacTaint was enjoying Jonathan's confusion immensely. “You're dying to know how I do it, aren't you?”

“I am.”

“Well, I'm not going to tell you. Give that mind of yours something to chew on. You'll figure it out easily enough when you read about it in the newspapers.”

“When will that be?”

“Exactly one week from tonight.”

“You're a crafty and secretive son of a bitch.”

“Part of my charm.”

“MacTaint . . .” Jonathan didn't pursue it. He had no doubt at all but that the old fox would get the painting.

“All right,” MacTaint relented, “I'll give you a little hint.” He fished up a penknife from the depths of his overcoat pocket and pulled open one of the blades with a broken crusty thumbnail. Then he leaned over the painting for a second before slashing it twice, making a broad X through the face of the boy. “There. How's that?”

“You are a nut, MacTaint. I'm getting out of here.”

MacTaint chuckled to himself as he showed Jonathan to the door. “Haven't you ever wanted to do something like that, lad? Slash a painting? Or break a raw egg in your hand? Or kiss a strange lady in an elevator?”

“You're a nut. Give my love to Lilla.”

“I have enough trouble trying to give her my own.”

“Good night.”

“Yes.”

         

The warehouse-cum-studio was in darkness, save for a single light hanging from the corrugated roof and the reddish glow of banked coal fires through the mica windows of the potbellied stoves. Only one painter was still at work, alone in absorbed concentration within the single circle of light. Jonathan walked silently across the cement floor and stood at the edge of the light, watching. His attention was so taken by the alert, feline motions of the painter attacking the canvas, then drawing back to judge effect, that it was some moments before he realized she was a woman. Seemingly oblivious of his presence, she squeezed off the excess paint from her brush between her thumb and forefinger and wiped them on the seat of her jeans, then she put the brush between her teeth sideways and took up a finer one to correct some detail. Her cavalier method of cleaning brushes was evidently habitual, because her bottom was a chaos of pigment, and Jonathan found this more interesting than the modernistic daub on the easel.

“What do you think of it?” she asked between her teeth, without turning around.

“It's certainly colorful. And attractively taut. But I think its potential for motion is its most appealing feature.”

She stepped back and scrutinized the canvas critically. “Taut?”

“Well, I don't mean rigid. More lean and compact.”

“And
interesting?
”

“Most interesting.”

“That's the kiss of death. When people don't like what you've done, but they don't want to hurt your feelings, they always fall back on ‘interesting.'”

Jonathan laughed. “Yes, I suppose that's true.” He was delighted by her voice. It had the curling vowels of Irish, and the range was a dry contralto.

“No, now tell me true. What do you honestly think of it?”

“You really want to know?”

“Probably not.” With a quick movement she brushed a wisp of amber hair away with the back of her hand. “But go ahead.”

“Like most modern painting, I think it's undisciplined, self-indulgent crap.”

She took the brush from her mouth and stood for a moment, her arms crossed over her chest. “Well, now. No one could accuse you of trying to chat a girl up just to get into her knickers.”

“But I am chatting you up,” he protested, “and probably for that reason.”

She looked at him for the first time, her eyes narrowed appraisingly. “Does that work very often—just saying it out boldly like that?”

“No, not very often. But it saves me a hell of a lot of wasted energy.”

She laughed. “Do you really know anything about art?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“I see.” She thoughtfully replaced her brushes in a soup tin filled with turpentine. “Well. That's it, I guess.” She turned to him and smiled. “Are you in a mood to celebrate?”

“Celebrate what?”

“The end of my career.”

“Oh, come now!”

“No, no. Don't flatter yourself that it's just your opinion, informed though you assure me it is. As it happens, I agree with you totally. I suppose I'm a better critic than painter. Still, I've made one great contribution to Art. I've taken myself out of it.”