Страница 107 из 206
I felt sick. I got up and dumped the paper in the nearest trash can, and—instead of getting on the subway—wandered back down Canal Street and roamed around Chinatown for an hour in the freezing cold, cheap electronics and blood red carpets in the dim sum parlors, staring in fogged windows at mahogany racks of rotisseried Peking duck and thinking: shit, shit. Red-cheeked street vendors, bundled like Mongolians, shouting above smoky braziers. District Attorney. FBI. New information. We are determined to prosecute these cases to the fullest extent of the law. We have full confidence that other missing works will surface soon. Interpol, UNESCO and other federal and international agencies are cooperating with local authorities in the case.
It was everywhere. All the newspapers had it: even the Mandarin newspapers, the recovered Rembrandt portrait amid streams of Chinese print, peeping out from bins of unidentifiable vegetables and eels on ice.
“Really disturbing,” said Hobie later that night at di
“Well, can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mr. Amstiss, who was on his fourth scotch on the rocks. “After that second heart attack of Mother’s? You can’t believe the mess these goons from Beth Israel left. Black footprints all over the carpet. We were finding plastic needle caps all over the floor for weeks, the dog almost swallowed one. And they broke something too, Martha, something in the china cabinet, what was it?”
“Listen, you won’t catch me complaining about paramedics,” said Hobie. “I was really impressed with the ones we had when Juliet was ill. I’m just glad they found the paintings before they were too badly damaged, it could have been a real—Theo?” he said to me, rather suddenly, causing me to glance up quickly from my plate. “Everything all right?”
“Sorry. I’m just tired.”
“No wonder,” said Mrs. Amstiss kindly. She taught American history at Columbia; she, of the pair, was the one Hobie liked and was friends with, Mr. Amstiss being the unfortunate half of the package. “You’ve had a tough day. Worried about your test?”
“No, not really, “ I said without thinking, and then was sorry.
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll get in,” said Mr. Amstiss. “You’ll get in,” he said to me, in a tone implying that any idiot could expect to do so, and then, turning back to Hobie: “Most of these early-college programs don’t deserve the name, isn’t that right, Martha? Glorified high school. Tough pull to get in but then a doddle once you’ve made it. That’s the way it is these days with the kids—participate, show up, and they expect a prize. Everybody wins. Do you know what one of Martha’s students said to her the other day? Tell them, Martha. This kid comes up after class, wants to talk. Shouldn’t say kid—graduate student. And you know what he says?”
“Harold,” said Mrs. Amstiss.
“Says he’s worried about his test performance, wants her advice. Because he has a hard time remembering things. Does that take the cake, or what? Graduate student in American history? Hard time remembering things?”
“Well, God knows, I have a hard time remembering things too,” said Hobie affably, and rising with the dishes, steered the conversation into other cha
But late that night, after the Amstisses had left and Hobie was asleep, I sat up in my room staring out the window at the street, listening to the distant two a.m. grindings of trucks over on Sixth Avenue and doing my best to talk myself down from my panic.
Yet what could I do? I’d spent hours on my laptop, clicking rapidly through what seemed like hundreds of articles—Le Monde, Daily Telegraph, Times of India, La Repubblica, languages I couldn’t read, every paper in the world was covering it. The fines, in addition to the prison sentences, were ruinous: two hundred thousand, half a million dollars. Worse: the woman who owned the house was being charged because the paintings had been found on her property. And what this meant, very likely, was that Hobie would be in trouble too—much worse trouble than me. The woman, a retired beautician, claimed she’d had no idea the paintings were in her house. But Hobie? An antiques dealer? Never mind that he’d taken me in i
Up, down and around my thoughts plunged, like a bad carnival ride. Though these thieves acted impulsively and have no prior criminal records, their inexperience will not deter us from prosecuting this case to the letter of the law. One commentator, in London, had mentioned my painting in the same breath with the recovered Rembrandt:… has drawn attention to more valuable works still missing, most particularly Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch of 1654, unique in the a
I reset the computer for the third or fourth time and shut it down, and then, a bit stiffly, climbed in bed and turned out the light. I still had the baggie of pills I’d stolen from Xandra—hundreds of them, all different colors and sizes, all painkillers according to Boris, but though sometimes they knocked my dad out cold I’d also heard him complaining how sometimes they kept him awake at night, so—after lying paralyzed with discomfort and indecision for an hour or more, seasick and tossing, staring at the spokes of car lights wheeling across the ceiling—I snapped on the light again and scrabbled around in the nightstand drawer for the bag and selected two different colored pills, a blue and a yellow, my reasoning being that if one didn’t put me to sleep, the other might.
Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.
Out on the avenue, a fire engine screamed high and hard before trailing into the distance. Cars, trucks, loudly-laughing couples coming out of the bars. As I lay awake trying to think of calming things like snow, and stars in the desert, hoping I hadn’t swallowed the wrong mix and accidentally killed myself, I did my best to hold tight to the one helpful or comforting fact I’d gleaned from my online reading: stolen paintings were almost impossible to trace unless people tried to sell them, or move them, which was why only twenty per cent of art thieves were ever caught.
Chapter 8.
The Shop-Behind-the-Shop, continued
i.
SUCH WAS MY TERROR and anxiety about the painting that it overshadowed, somewhat, the arrival of the letter: I’d been accepted for the spring term of my early college program. The news was so shocking that I put the envelope in a desk drawer, where it sat alongside a stack of Welty’s monogrammed letter paper for two days, until I worked up the nerve to go to the head of the stairs (brisk scratch of handsaw floating up from the shop) and say: “Hobie?”
The saw stopped.
“I got in.”