The Goldfinch

“Oh, hi,” said Hobie, standing to brush off his trouser leg. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to give you a jump! Been intending to get this new pane in ever since you arrived. Of course, I like to use wavy glass in these old windows, the Bendheim, but if you throw in a few clear pieces it really doesn’t matter—say, careful there,” he said, “are you all right?” as I dropped my school bag and sank in an armchair like some shellshocked first lieutenant stumbling in from the field.

It was crackers, as my mother would have said. I didn’t know what to do. Though I was only too aware how strangely Hobie looked at me at times, how crazy I must seem to him, still I existed in a low-grade fog of internal clangor: starting up every time someone came to the door; jumping as if scalded when the phone rang; jolted by electric-shock “premonitions” that—mid class—would compel me to rise from my desk and rush straight home to make sure that the painting was still in the pillowcase, that no one had disturbed the wrapping or tried to scratch up the tape. On my computer, I scoured the Internet for laws dealing with art theft but the fragments I turned up were all over the map, and did not provide any kind of relevant or cohesive view. Then, after I’d been at Hobie’s for an otherwise uneventful eight months, an unexpected solution presented itself.

I was on good terms with all Hobie’s moving-and-storage guys. Most of them were New York City Irish, lumbering, good-natured guys who hadn’t quite made it into the police force or the fire department—Mike, Sean, Patrick, Little Frank (who was not little at all, the size of a refrigerator)—but there were also a couple of Israeli guys named Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (“ ‘Russian Jew’ contradiction in terms,” he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. “To Russian mind anyway. Since ‘Jew’ to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.”) Grisha had been born in Sevastopol, which he claimed to remember (“black water, salt”) though his parents had emigrated when he was two. Fair-haired, brick red in the face with startling robin’s-egg eyes, he was paunchy from drinking and so careless about his clothes that sometimes the lower buttons of his shirt gaped open, yet from the easy, arrogant way he carried himself, he clearly believed himself to be good-looking (as who knew, maybe he had been, once). Unlike stone-faced Mr. Pavlikovsky he was quite talkative, full of jokes or anekdoty as he called them, which he told in a droll, rapid-fire monotone. “You think you can curse, mazhor?” he’d said goodnaturedly, from the chessboard set up in a corner of the workshop where he and Hobie sometimes played in the afternoon. “Go then. Burn my ears off.” And I had let rip such an eyewatering torrent of filth that even Hobie—not understanding a word—had leaned back laughing with his hands over his ears.

One gloomy afternoon, not long after my first fall term in school had begun, I happened to be alone in the house when Grisha stopped by to drop off some furniture. “Here, mazhor,” he said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away between scarred thumb and forefinger. Mazhor—one of his several derisive nicknames for me—meant “Major” in Russian. “Make yourself useful. Come help with this garbage in the truck.” All furniture, for Grisha, was “garbage.”

I looked past him, to the truck. “What have you got? Is it heavy?”

“If it was heavy, poprygountchik, would I ask you?”

We brought in the furniture—gilt-edged mirror, wrapped in padding; a candle stand; a set of dining room chairs—and as soon as it was unwrapped, Grisha leaned against a sideboard Hobie was working on (after first touching it with a fingertip, to make sure it wasn’t sticky) and lit himself a Kool. “Want one?”

“No thanks.” In fact, I did, but I was afraid Hobie would smell it on me.

Grisha fa

“Help you how?”

“Put down your naked-lady book” (Janson’s History of Art) “and ride out to Brooklyn with me.”

“What for?”

“I have to take some of this garbage out to storage, could use an extra hand. Mike was supposed to help but sick today. Ha! Giants played last night, they lost, he had a lot of rocks on the game. Bet he is home in bed up in Inwood with a hangover and a black eye.”

vi.

ON THE WAY OUT to Brooklyn with a van full of furniture, Grisha kept up a steady monologue about on the one hand Hobie’s fine qualities and on the other how he was ru

“Yeah, but he has clients in too. He sold a whole bunch of stuff just last week.”

“What?” said Grisha angrily, whipping his head from the road to glare at me. “Sold? To who?”

“The Vogels. He opened the store for them—they bought a bookcase, a games table—”

Grisha scowled. “Those people. His friends, so called. You know why they buy from him? Because they know they can get low price from him—‘open by appointment,’ ha! Better for him if he keeps the place shut from those vultures. I mean—” fist on breastbone—“you know my heart. Hobie is family to me. But—” he rubbed three fingers together, an old gesture of Boris’s, money! money!—“unwise in business dealing. He gives away his last matchstick, scrap of food, whatever, to any phony and con man. You watch and see—soon, in four-five years, he will be broke on the street unless he finds someone to run the shop for him.”

“Such as who?”

“Well—” he shrugged—“some person like maybe my cousin Lidiya. That woman can sell water to drowning man.”

“You should tell him. I know he wants to find somebody.”

Grisha laughed cynically. “Lidiya? Work in that dump? Listen—Lidiya sells gold, Rolex, diamonds from Sierra Leone. Gets picked up from home in Lincoln Town Car. White leather pants… floor length sable.… nails out to here. No way is woman like that going to sit in junk shop with a bunch of dust and old garbage all day.”

He stopped the van and shut off the engine. We were in front of a blocky, ash-gray building in a desolate waterfront area, empty lots and auto-body shops, the sort of neighborhood where gangsters in the movies always drive the guy they’re going to kill.

“Lidiya—Lidiya is sexy woman,” he said contemplatively. “Long legs—bazooms—good looking. Big zest for life. But this business—you don’t want big flash, like her.”

“Then what?”

“Someone like Welty. There was i