The Goldfinch

“Theo, you’re a marvel. You’re a genius at what you do, no question about it. But—” his tone was uncertain again; I could sense him trying to feel his way forward—“well, I mean, dealers live by their reputations. It’s the honor system. Nothing you don’t know. Word gets around. So, I mean—” dipping his brush, peering myopically at the chest—“fraud’s hard to prove, but if you don’t take care of this, it’s a pretty sure thing that this will pop back and bite us somewhere down the road.” His hand was steady; the line of his brush was sure. “A heavily restored piece… forget about blacklight, you’d be surprised, someone moves it to a brightly lit room… even the camera picks up differences in grain that you’d never spot with the naked eye. As soon as someone has one of these pieces photographed, or God forbid decides to put it up at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in an Important Americana sale…”

There was a silence, which—as it swelled between us—grew more and more serious, unfillable.

“Theo.” The brush stopped, and then started again. “I’m not trying to make excuses for you but—don’t think I don’t know it, I’m the very person who put you in this position. Turning you loose up there all on your own. Expecting you to perform the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You are very young, yes,” he said curtly, turning halfway when I tried to interrupt, “you are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don’t care to deal with, and you have been so brilliant at getting us back in the black again that it has suited me very, very well to keep my head in the sand. As regards what goes on upstairs. So I’m as much to blame for this as you.”

“Hobie, I swear. I never—”

“Because—” he picked up the open bottle of paint, looked at the label as if he couldn’t recall what it was for, put it down again—“well, it was too good to be true, wasn’t it? All this money pouring in, wonderful to see? And did I inquire too closely? No. Don’t think I don’t know it—if you hadn’t got busy with your flim-flam up there we’d likely be renting this space right now and hunting for a new place to live. So look here—we’ll start fresh—wipe the board down—and take it as it comes. One piece at a time. That’s all we can do.”

“Look, I want to make it plain—” his calmness harrowed me—“the responsibility is mine. If it comes down to that. I just want you to know.”

“Sure.” When he flicked his brush, his deftness was practiced and reflexive, weirdly unsettling. “Still and all, let’s leave it for now, all right? No,” he said, when I tried to say something else, “please. I want you to take care of it and I’ll do what I can to help you if there’s anything specific but otherwise, I don’t want to talk about it any more. All right?”

Outside: rain. It was clammy in the basement, an ugly subterranean chill. I stood watching him, not knowing what to do or say.

“Please. I’m not angry, I just want to be getting on with this. It’ll be all right. Now go upstairs, please, would you?” he said, when I still stood there. “This is a tricky patch of work, I really need to concentrate if I don’t want to make a hash of it.”

xvii.

SILENTLY I WALKED UPSTAIRS, steps creaking loudly, past the gauntlet of Pippa’s pictures that I couldn’t bear to look at. Going in, I’d thought to break the easy news first and then move along to the showstopper. But as dirty and disloyal as I felt, I couldn’t do it. The less Hobie knew about the painting, the safer he would be. It was wrong on every level to drag him into it.

Yet I wished there were someone I could talk to, someone I trusted. Every few years, there seemed to be another news article about the missing masterworks, which along with my Goldfinch and two loaned van der Asts also included some valuable Medieval pieces and a number of Egyptian antiquities; scholars had written papers, there had even been books; it was mentioned as one of the Ten Top Art Crimes on the FBI’s website; previously, I’d taken great comfort in the fact that most people assumed that whoever had made off with the van der Asts from Galleries 29 and 30 had stolen my painting, too. Almost all the bodies in Gallery 32 had been concentrated near the collapsed doorway; according to investigators there would have been ten seconds, maybe even thirty, before the lintel fell, just time for a few people to make it out. The wreckage in Gallery 32 had been sifted through with white gloves and whisk brooms, with fanatic care—and while the frame of The Goldfinch had been found, intact (and had been hung empty on the wall of the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, “as a reminder of the irreplaceable loss of our cultural patrimony”), no confirmed fragment of the painting itself, no splinter or antique nail fragment or chip of its distinctive lead-tin pigment had been found. But as it was painted on wood, there was a case to be made (and one blowhard celebrity historian, to whom I was grateful, had made it forcefully) that The Goldfinch had been knocked from its frame and into the rather large fire burning in the gift shop, the epicenter of the explosion. I had seen him in a PBS documentary, striding back and forth meaningfully in front of the empty frame in the Mauritshuis, fixing the camera with his powerful, media-savvy eye. “That this tiny masterwork survived the powder explosion at Delft only to meet its fate, centuries later, in another man-made explosion is one of those stranger-than-life twists out of O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant.”

As for me: the official story—printed in a number of sources, accepted as truth—was that I’d been rooms away from The Goldfinch when the bomb went off. Over the years a number of writers had tried to interview me and I’d turned them all away; but numerous people, eyewitnesses, had seen my mother in her last moments in Gallery 24, the beautiful dark-haired woman in the satin trenchcoat, and many of these eyewitnesses placed me at her side. Four adults and three children had died in Gallery 24—and in the public version of the story, the received version, I’d been just another of the bodies on the ground, knocked cold and overlooked in the hubbub.

But Welty’s ring was physical proof of my whereabouts. Luckily for me, Hobie didn’t like to talk about Welty’s death but every now and then—not often, usually late at night when he’d had a few drinks—he was moved to reminisce. “Can you imagine how I felt—? Isn’t it a miracle that—?” Someday, someone had been bound to make the co

I was sitting on the side of my bed, staring out the window onto Tenth Street—people just getting off work, going out to di

After half a minute passed and still he stood there, I switched the lamp off and moved to the window. In an answering gesture the silhouette moved well out of the streetlight; and though his features weren’t plain in the dark I got the idea of him well enough: high hunched shoulders, shortish legs and thick Irish torso. Jeans and hoodie, heavy boots. For a while he stood motionless, a workmanly silhouette out of place on the street at that hour, photo assistants and well-dressed couples, exhilarated college students heading out for di