Cairo (23 page)

‘Ah, poor Elmyr. He sort of, ah, died in the 1970s. Of a pill overdose. Suicide, they think.'

Addiction, collaboration with Nazis, suicide. This was not encouraging.

‘What are you
doing
, Edward?' Gertrude said. ‘I need some purple for her lips. And a bit thinner this time, please.'

‘It's violet, actually. And I'm looking for it. Give me a minute. I think I need a bit more of this …'

‘Well,' Gertrude said with a droll chuckle, ‘don't look; find.'

Edward tested his colour on a scrap of canvas before proffering her the paste he'd concocted. They analysed it under the light, then Gertrude, satisfied, dabbed her brush in the blob and gazed at the two canvases — the original and its half-formed twin — before darting in and making a few quick brushstrokes.

This was her method: much inspection and comparison, combined with sudden bursts of action. She'd told me how difficult it was to generate the slapdash effect that characterised the
Weeping Woman
, how she needed to make her strokes with speed. This increased the danger of making an error of line or colour. She lessened this risk with careful consideration before she struck.

Although this way of working was painstaking, I had to admit it was effective; her own
Weeping Woman
was (very) slowly but surely taking shape on the canvas, a jagged green monster rising to the surface of a milky bath.

She stepped back, grunted with approval. ‘Forgery is a much purer way of making beautiful and interesting things.'

Edward groaned. ‘Oh dear, here we go. I'm off to make some coffee.'

‘You want to write novels?' Gertrude asked me after Edward had ambled away.

I nodded, reluctant, as ever, to articulate this so boldly.

‘Why?'

This was an excellent question. Writing novels sounded like an interesting thing to do, but I hadn't interrogated my ambition too deeply. If I were brutally honest with myself, there were cravings for fame and recognition in there somewhere, but it felt dishonourable and creatively dubious to admit this. I longed to be in the weekend newspapers, to have my work pored over by experts, to be praised for my creation in a field of endeavour I regarded with awe.

I prepared a more principled answer — about having meaningful things to say, about wishing to contribute to the corpus of literature — but my confusion must have confirmed Gertrude's point, which she now pressed home with the relish of one despatching a floundering opponent.

‘Do you think anyone would bother making a painting or writing a novel if they couldn't attach their name to it? Artists talk about the joy of making work, but I wonder if they'd get so much of this so-called joy if they had no chance of being known for it. Would you write a novel if it was published anonymously? Because the forger doesn't sign her name to a work, there is no ego involved. The pleasure is in the creation, in putting beautiful work into the world. It is, as I said before, quite pure.'

‘You're still engaged in deception,' I said, reluctant to yield to her argument, which would only cast my motives in a suspect light, ‘passing off an artwork as authentic when it isn't.'

Gertrude jabbed me with the gnawed end of her brush. ‘
We
,' she pointed out, ‘are engaged in deception. Don't forget that. Secondly, authenticity is mostly about the person making the work, not the work. Why should we care about the artist? Thirdly, why does it matter, if the work gives people pleasure? Does it matter they're admiring a canvas painted by Gertrude Degraves in a Carlton warehouse in 1986 and not by Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1937? If people see meaning in it, take pleasure or solace in it? That Vermeer forgery was acclaimed as being a work of genius until they realised
it was by someone else. If the differences between an original and a copy are so small as to be indistinguishable, then clearly they are as good as each other. And this
Weeping Woman
will be every bit as good as the original. Think of those Ern Malley poems. Everyone thought they were great — and some of them
are
great — until they were exposed as a con.

‘Our appreciation of a work of art often has nothing to do with the aesthetic virtues of the work alone,' Gertrude went on, warming to her theme. ‘It's the aura that surrounds it. The artist, the time in which it was made, and so on and so on. The brand, essentially. It's ridiculous. You see people in the gallery walking straight past a painting because they don't think much of it. Then they realise it's by a famous painter, someone who's supposed to be great, so they stop to coo over it. Bang! Like that, their opinion is turned right around.'

Edward reappeared with a cup of steaming coffee. ‘Is the lecture finished?'

Gertrude ignored him and lunged once more at the canvas. ‘Trouble is that the skills involved in making modern art have so deteriorated that there's no challenge in trying to copy any of it. They don't even
do
drawing at art school anymore. Only a bunch of theory. Look at that Keith Haring mural down the road in Collingwood. Anyone could do that. Nothing skilful about it. A bunch of green cartoon characters riding on the back of a giant slug. Pfft. Could have been painted by a gang of retarded teenagers on a community outing.'

Edward guffawed, snorted his coffee down the wrong way and lapsed into a coughing fit. When he had recovered, he and Gertrude continued to work in peace for a while.

On the wall above the workbench hung a dozen or so of Gertrude's original paintings, part of her series of gargoyles. Each no larger than a postcard, they were frightening portraits
of spectral creatures peering out as if from the murder holes of a medieval castle. Some of the figures were cowled, others grasped the sill of their canvas with bony fingers as if preparing to leap into the corporeal world. From their unlit windows, they resembled a monstrous jury of goblins casting their tumid, bloodshot eyes over the studio with horrified glee, as if it might be cadavers, rather than art, being assembled in front of them — an impression only enhanced by the candle burning on the bench and the air of criminality that hovered over the room.

Gertrude sat back to smoke a cigarette and assess her handiwork on the
Weeping Woman
. She seemed to fall asleep for a second, as heroin addicts are accustomed to do, before jerking awake in time to tap her sagging caterpillar of ash into a coffee cup.

‘What happened about Tamsin?' she asked.

Her query was presumably in reference to a second letter that Tamsin had sent to the media about the painting's fate. In it, she had threatened to burn the painting if the so-called Australian Cultural Terrorists' demands (which included the establishment of an art prize called the Picasso Ransom) were not met. Max was again furious at what he saw as her increasing the likelihood of putting the police onto us.

‘Max thought it best if James talked to her. He knows her better than anyone.'

‘Quite so. No point sending Max. We don't want to aggravate her further. Who knows what she's capable of.'

‘I don't know if James is the right person to speak to her,' Edward said.

‘James is tougher than he looks,' Gertrude countered. ‘Besides, he'll do anything Max asks.'

This was true. James and Max had a lopsided friendship, based at least in part on James's readiness to endure any humiliations Max dished up.

‘Why is that?' I asked. ‘Why does James put up with Max bossing him around so much?'

As if in sympathy, Gertrude pursed her lips and leaned in to make an alteration to her
Weeping Woman
's mouth. ‘Because James is hopelessly in love with Max, that's why. And when you have a situation where one person loves another more, there's often exploitation. Max is not a kind man. He uses these things to his advantage.'

Although I tried to appear unmoved by this information (a goodly portion of being cool, after all, lies in being unshockable), I was taken aback. To my knowledge I had never met a real-life homosexual before, let alone been friends with one. I considered the numerous times I had been alone with James — the way he rested his hand on my shoulder; the nights we'd staggered home from bars, propping each other up, when we'd both drunk too much. There had even been an instance, some months earlier, when he had insisted I sleep in his bed rather than walk home so late at night and so drunk.

‘Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about our James,' Edward said. ‘He does alright for himself. He goes to that gay bathhouse in Peel Street every so often.'

Peel Street intersected Smith Street several blocks from James's house. I had, in fact, picked James up from that very corner late one night when I happened to drive past on my way home from a party in Collingwood and spotted him walking. I mentioned this, adding that James had been rather pleased with himself for reasons he had refused to disclose at the time.

Edward threw his head back and hooted with laughter. A gold tooth at the back of his mouth glinted, a treasure among the ruins of his other blackened teeth. ‘That's because he'd just had his cock sucked by some brute dressed like a member of the Village People.'

Gertrude smacked Edward with her paintbrush. ‘Oh, Edward.
Please. I cannot work with language like that around. Get to work. Can you make up some more of that violet colour? I need it
very
pale, for the bottom of her handkerchief. See that? The same.'

Still chuckling, Edward scratched his neck and scrutinised for some time the portion of the original painting to which she referred. ‘Hmmm. Very thin, isn't it?'

*

At dawn I bought newspapers at a Lygon Street newsagent and trudged through Carlton Gardens back towards Cairo. A beautiful morning. The wide paths were strewn with leaves the colour of tobacco. There were a few people walking their dogs or jogging.
Jogging!

I sat on a dewy wooden bench to smoke a cigarette and read the papers.
The National Times
had a two-page feature on the theft, accompanied by a large photo of gallery director Patrick McCaughey looking haggard, despite sporting his floppy bow tie. Speaking from New York, art critic Robert Hughes described us as ‘burlap terrorists', while the chairman of twentieth-century art at the Met suggested the theft was not committed by a group of artists but ‘one screwball'.
The Weekend Herald
had a reproduction of the second typed ransom letter on its front page, in which Tamsin and George had referred to the arts minister as a ‘tiresome old bag of swamp gas'. An accompanying analysis from a handwriting expert (improbably named Mr Humphrey Humphrey-Reeve), who had studied the scrawl on the envelope, determined the writer to be a homosexual loner with an artistic disposition.

Despite the huffing of the gallery director, the police and the minister, it was clear no one had any idea how the theft had been committed or who was responsible. A woman had even come forwards claiming to have seen four men and a woman acting suspiciously in the gallery on the Sunday morning (around the
time Max and I were waiting in the car), but the sketches drawn up from her evidence bore no resemblance to anyone involved.

Water dripped from the elm trees around me. Exhaustion and elation pulsed through me. I felt I was seeing the world anew after years in darkness; the colours were brighter, the details so much more piquant. A light plane flew low overhead, birds warbled. For a while I watched two attractive women with ponytails play tennis on the nearby courts. One of them lunged for a wide shot, squealed, almost fell over.

It was Sunday morning. Around me the city was gradually waking. I imagined a suburban father preparing his two children for their weekly football match; elsewhere a girl fed her ash-grey cat; while in another part of town an old man squinted through his frayed curtain to see what kind of weather the day promised. All those paltry, quotidian lives running down like toys. What was it Max had told me?
Their laws don't apply to us
.

It was cold but sunny, the sky a magnificent ultramarine. I sensed other things in the city around me — dozens of police investigators heading into work and preparing to search for the
Weeping Woman
. I had to laugh. I knew where she was, how close to police headquarters she was. Secrets conferred power; and the larger the secret, the more potent its power.

Even an encounter with Mr Orlovsky (‘How about that pay-pay-pay painting, eh?') in the garden on the way up to my apartment that morning couldn't quell my burst of optimism. Despite Gertrude's erratic progress, and Tamsin's rather wild ransom letters and general unpredictability, the plan — improbable as it was — was going ridiculously well. Until a few nights later, that is, when a series of unsavoury events changed things forever.

I WAS AT HOME WATCHING TELEVISION, TRYING TO KEEP WARM.
My aunt's radiator was woefully inadequate; I could see the mist of my exhalations. I was thinking about Sally, brooding over losing the memory of her body (the small of her back, her calf) as an artist might fret over an inability to get a line just so.

The
Weeping Woman
had been in our possession for more than a week, several days longer than had been intended. Max was growing anxious about it, and Mr Crisp had contacted Anna Donatella with concerns about our progress. Although the forgery was nearing completion, it would still take a couple more days, assuming there were no further hiccups. There were fears of the deal falling through — despite assurances from Gertrude that everything was moving ahead swimmingly.

The phone's ring startled me. It was Edward. He groaned as if in pain. After a minimum of chit-chat, he asked to borrow some money.

‘How much?'

‘Two hundred?'

‘
Dollars?
'

He sneezed. ‘Can you? Please? We can't … We won't be able to finish the … Dora without it. We're so sick. And then we'll all be
screwed. I don't think you realise how scary Mr Crisp is.'