The Goldfinch

xiv.

FIVE OR SIX DAYS later, I still had not fully recovered from my evening with Boris—partly because I was busy with clients, auctions to go to, estates to look at, and partly because I had grueling events with Kitsey nearly every night: holiday parties, black-tie di

All week long, I’d been looking forward to Kitsey’s Tuesday with her girlfriends—not because I didn’t want to see her, but because Hobie had a di

He ducked in and shook himself violently so the water went flying. “You want to ride with me uptown?” he said without preamble.

“I’m busy.”

“Yes?” he said, in a voice at once so affectionate, and exasperated, and transparently, childishly hurt, that I turned from my book shelf. “And won’t you ask why? I think you might want to come.”

“Uptown where?”

“I am going to talk to some people.”

“And that would be about—?”

“Yes,” he said brightly, sniffling and wiping his nose. “Exactly. You don’t have to come, I was going to bring my boy Toly, but I thought for several reasons it might be good if you wanted to be there also—Popchyk, yes yes!” he said, stooping to pick up the dog, who had trundled up to greet him. “Glad to see you too! He likes bacon,” he said to me, scratching Popper behind the ears and rubbing his own nose at the back of Popper’s neck. “Do you ever cook bacon for him? Enjoys the bread too, when is soaked with grease.”

“Talk to who? Who is this?”

Boris pushed the dripping hair out of his face. “Guy I know. Named Horst. Old friend of Myriam’s. He got stung on this deal too—honest, I do not think he can help us, but Myriam suggested might not hurt to talk to him again? and I think maybe she is right about that.”

xv.

ON THE WAY UPTOWN, in the back of the town car, rain pounding so hard that Gyuri had to shout for us to hear him (“What a dog’s weather!”) Boris filled me in quietly about Horst. “Sad sad story. He is German. Interesting guy, very intelligent and sensitive. Important family too… he explained to me once but I forgot. His dad was part American and left him a load of money but when his mother remarried—” here he named a world-famous industrial name, with a dark old Nazi echo. “Millions. I mean you can’t believe how much money these people have. They are rolling in it. Money out the ass.”

“Yep, that’s a sad story, all right.”

“Well—Horst is a bad junkie. You know me—” philosophical shrug—“I don’t judge or condemn. Do what you like, I don’t care! But Horst—very sad case. He fell in love with this girl who was on it and she got him on it to o. Took him for everything, and when the money ran out, she left. Horst’s family—they have disowned him many years ago. And still he eats his heart out for this awful rotten girl. Girl, I say—she must be nearly forty. Ulrika her name is. Every time Horst gets a little money—she comes back for a while. Then she leaves him again.”

“What does he have to do with it?”

“Horst’s associate Sascha set up things with this deal. I meet the guy—he seems okay—what do I know? Horst told me that he had never worked with Sascha’s man in person, but I was in a hurry and I didn’t go into it the way I should and—” he threw up his arms—“poof! Myriam was right—she is always right—I should have listened to her.”

Water streamed down the windows, quicksilver heavy, sealing us into the car, lights winking and melting around us in a roar that reminded me of when Boris and I used to ride in the back of the Lexus in Vegas when my dad went through the car wash.

“Horst is usually a bit fussy about who he does business with, so I thought it would be okay. But—he is very restrained, you know? ‘Unusual’ is what he said. ‘Unconventional.’ Well what is that supposed to mean? Then when I get down there—these people are crazy. I mean like shooting-guns-at-chickens crazy. And situations like this—you want it calm and quiet! It was like, have they seen too much TV or something? like, this is how to act—? normally in this type situation everyone is very very polite, hush-hush, very peaceful! Myriam said—and she was right—forget about the guns! What kind of crazy thing is this for these people to keep chickens in Miami? Even a little thing like that—this is Jacuzzi neighborhood, te

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. I got half the goods I was promised—rest coming in a week. That’s not un-typical. But then they were arrested and I didn’t get the other half and I didn’t get the picture. Horst—well, Horst would like to find it too, he is out some big green as well. Anyway I am hoping he has a bit more information than when we spoke last.”

xvi.

GYURI LEFT US OUT in the Sixties, not far at all from the Barbours’. “This is the place?” I said, shaking the rain off Hobie’s umbrella. We were out in front of one of the big limestone townhouses off Fifth—black iron doors, massive lion’s-head knockers.

“Yes—it’s his father’s place—his other family are trying to get him out legally but good luck with that, hah.”

We were buzzed in, took a cage elevator up to the second floor. I could smell incense, weed, spaghetti sauce cooking. A lanky blonde woman—short-cropped hair and a serene small-eyed face like a camel’s—opened the door. She was dressed like a sort of old-fashioned street urchin or newsboy: houndstooth trousers, ankle boots, dirty thermal shirt, suspenders. Perched on the tip of her nose were a pair of wire-rimmed Ben Franklin glasses.

Without saying a word she opened the door to us and walked off, leaving us alone in a dim, grimy, ballroom-sized salon which was like a derelict version of some high-society set from a Fred Astaire movie: high ceilings; crumbling plaster; grand piano; darkened chandelier with half the crystals broken or gone; sweeping Hollywood staircase littered with cigarette butts. Sufi chants droned low in the background: Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Allāhu Allāhu Allāhu Haqq. Someone had drawn on the wall, in charcoal, a series of life-sized nudes ascending the stairs like frames in a film; and there was very little furniture apart from a ratty futon and some chairs and tables that looked scavenged from the street. Empty picture frames on the wall, a ram’s skull. On the television, an animated film flickered and sputtered with epileptic vim, windmilling geometrics intercut with letters and live-action racecar images. Apart from that, and the door where the blonde had disappeared, the only light came from a lamp which threw a sharp white circle on melted candles, computer cables, empty beer bottles and butane cans, oil pastels boxed and loose, many catalogues raiso