The Goldfinch (111 page)

“And who am I then?”

“Borya-from-Antwerp, innit?” It wasn’t true that he didn’t have a weapon; even I could see it bulging at his armpit. “Borya the Polack? Giggleweed Borya? Horst’s mate?”

“And so if I am?” said Boris genially.

The man was silent. Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes with a flick of his head, made a derisive noise and seemed about to say something sarcastic but just then Victor Cherry came out of the back, alone, pulling what looked like a set of flexcuffs out of his pocket—and my heart skipped to see, under his arm, a package of the correct size and thickness, wrapped in white felt and tied with baker’s twine. He dropped a knee in the Indonesian’s back and began to fumble with the cuffs at his wrists.

“Get out,” said Boris to me, and then, again—my muscles had locked up and hardened; he gave me a little push—“Go! get in the car.”

Blankly I looked around—I couldn’t see the door, there wasn’t a door—and then there it was and I scrambled out so fast I slipped and nearly fell on a cat toy, out to the Range Rover puffing at the curb. Gyuri was keeping watch out front, on the street, in the light drizzle which had just begun to fall—“In, in,” he hissed, sliding into the back seat and waving me to come in after him, just as Boris and Victor Cherry burst out of the restaurant and hopped in too and off we drove, at a sedate and anticlimactic speed.

x.

I
N THE CAR, OUT
on the main road again, all was jubilation: laughter, high fives, while my heart was slamming so hard I could barely breathe. “What’s going on?” I rasped, several times—gulping for breath and looking back and forth between them and then, when they kept ignoring me, babbling in a percussive mix of Russian and Ukrainian, all four of them including Shirley Temple:
“Angliyski!”

Boris turned to me, wiping his eyes, and slung his arm around my neck. “Change of plans,” he said. “That was all on the fly—improvised. We could have asked for nothing better. Their third man didn’t show.”

“Catching them short-handed.”

“Flatfooted.”

“Pants down! On the crapper!”

“You”—I had to gasp to get the words out—“you said no guns.”

“Well, no one got hurt, did they? What difference does it make?”

“Why didn’t we just pay?”

“Because we lucked out!” Throwing up his arms. “Once in a lifetime chance! We had the opportunity! What were they going to do? They were two—we were four. If they had any sense, they should never have let us inside. And—yes, I know, only forty thousand, but why should I pay them one cent if I don’t have to? For stealing my own property?” Boris chortled. “Did you see the look on his face? Grateful Dead? When Cherry whipped him back of the dome?”

“You know what he was complaining about, the old goat?” said Victor, turning to me jubilantly. “Wanted it in Euros! ‘What, dollars?’ ” imitating his peevish expression. “ ‘You brought me dollars?’ ”

“Bet he wishes he had those dollars now.”

“I bet he wishes he kept his mouth shut.”

“I’d like to hear that phone call to Sascha.”

“I wish I knew the name of the guy. That stood them up. Because I would like to buy him a drink.”

“Wonder where he is?”

“He is probably at home in the shower.”

“Studying his Bible lesson.”

“Watching ‘Christmas Carol’ on television.”

“Waiting at the wrong place, most like.”

“I—” My throat was so constricted I had to swallow to speak. “What about that kid?”

“Eh?” It was raining, light rain pattering on the windshield. Streets black and glistening.

“What kid?”

“Boy. Girl. Kitchen boy. Whatever.”

“What?” Cherry turned—still winded, breathing hard. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Well, I did.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Young.” I could still see the freeze-frame of the young ghostly face, mouth slightly open. “White coat. Japanese-looking.”

“Really?” said Boris curiously. “You can tell apart by looking? Like where they are from? Japan, China, Vietnam?”

“I didn’t get a good look. Asian.”

“He, or she?”

“I think is all girls that work in the kitchen there,” said Gyuri. “Macrobyotik. Brown rice and like that.”

“I—” Now I really wasn’t sure.

“Well—” Cherry ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair—“glad she ran, whoever, because you know what else I found back there? Sawed-off Mossberg 500.”

Laughter and whistles at this.

“Shit.”

“Where was it? Grozdan didn’t—?”

“No. In a—” he gestured, to indicate a sling—“what do you call it. Hanging under the table, in some cloth like. Just happened to see it when I was down on the floor. Like—looked up. There it was, right over my head.”

“You didn’t leave it there, did you?”

“No! I wouldn’t have minded to take it except was too big and had my hands full. Unscrewed it and knocked the pin out and threw it in the alley. Also—” he pulled a silver snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket, which he passed over to Boris—“this!”

Boris held it up to the light and looked at it.

“Nice little conceal-carry J-frame. Ankle holster in those bell bottom jeans! But to his misfortune he was not quick enough.”

“Flexcuffs,” said Gyuri to me, with slightly inclined head. “Vitya thinks ahead.”

“Well—” Cherry wiped the sweat from his broad forehead—“they are light and slim to carry, and they have saved me many times shooting people. I do not like to hurt anyone if I don’t have to.”

Medieval city: crooked streets, lights draped on bridges and shining off rain-peppered canals, melting in the drizzle. Infinity of anonymous shops, twinkling window displays, lingerie and garter belts, kitchen utensils arrayed like surgical instruments, foreign words everywhere, Snel bestellen, Retro-stijl, Showgirl-Sexboetiek.

“Back door was open to the alley,” said Cherry, elbowing off his sports coat and swigging from a bottle of vodka which Shirley T. had produced from under the front seat—hands a bit shaky and his face, the nose particularly, glowing a flagrant, stressed-out, Rudolph red. “They must have left it open for him—their third man—to come in at the back. I closed it and locked it—made Grozdan close and lock it, gun to his head, he was snivel and crying like baby—”

“That Mossberg,” Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. “Evil dirty thing. Sawed off—? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.”

“Good trick, no?” said Victor Cherry philosophically. “To say your third man is not there? ‘Wait five minutes, please’? ‘Sorry, mix up’—? ‘He will be here any moment’? While he is all the time in back with the shotgun. Good double cross, if they had thought of it—”

“Maybe they did think of it. Why else have the gun back there?”

“I think we had a narrow miss, is what I think—”

“There was one car pulled up front, scared Shirley and me,” said Gyuri, “while you were all in there, two guys, we thought we were in the shit but was only two gays, French guys, looking for restaurant—”

“—but no one in the back, thank God, I got Grozdan on the floor and cuffed him to radiator,” Cherry was saying. “Ah, but—!” he held up the felt-wrapped package—“first. This. For you.”

He handed it over the seat to Gyuri, who—gingerly, with his fingertips, as if it were a tray he might spill—passed it to me. Boris—downing
his slug, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand—chucked me gaily in the arm with the bottle while humming
we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas

Package on my knees. Running my hands all around the edge. The felt was so thin that I sensed the rightness of it immediately with my fingertips, the texture and weight were perfect.

“Go on,” said Boris, nodding, “better open it, make sure it’s not the Civics book this time! Where was it?” he asked Cherry as I began to fumble with the string.

“Dirty little broom closet. Piece-of-shit plastic briefcase. Grozdan took me right to it. I thought he might fuck around a bit but burner at the head was all it took. No sense getting popped when all that good space cake still around for the taking.”

“Potter,” said Boris, trying to get my attention; and then again: “Potter.”

“Yes?”

Lifting the briefcase. “This 40 rocks is going to Gyuri and Shirley T. Keeping them green. For services rendered. Because it is thanks to these two that we did not pay Sascha
one cent
for the favor of stealing your property. And Vitya—” reaching across to clasp his hand—“we are more than equal now. The debt is mine.”

“No, I can never repay what I owe you, Borya.”

“Forget it. Is nothing.”

“Nothing?
Nothing?
Not true, Borya, because this very night I carry my life because of you, and every night until the last night…”

It was an interesting story he was telling, if I’d had ears to listen to it—someone had fingered Cherry for some unspecified but apparently very serious crime which he had not committed, nothing to do with, perfectly innocent, the guy had rolled for reduced prison time and unless Cherry, in turn, wanted to roll on his higher-ups (“unwise to do, if I wish to keep breathing”), he was looking at ten sticks and Boris, Boris had saved the day because Boris had tracked down the slimebag, in Antwerp and out on bail, and the story of how he had done this was very involved and enthusiastic and Cherry was getting choked up and sniffing a bit and there was more and it seemed to involve arson and bloodshed and something to do with a power saw but by that point I wasn’t hearing a word because I’d gotten the string untied and streetlights and watery rain reflections were rolling over the surface of my painting, my goldfinch, which—I knew
incontrovertibly, without a doubt, before even turning to look at the verso—was real.

“See?” said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in the heat of his story. “Looks good, no, your
zolotaia ptitsa?
I told you we took care of it, didn’t I?”

Running my fingertip incredulously around the edges of the board, like Doubting Thomas across the palm of Christ. As any furniture dealer knew, or for that matter St. Thomas: it was harder to deceive the sense of touch than sight, and even after so many years my hands remembered the painting so well that my fingers went to the nail marks immediately, at the bottom of the panel, the tiny holes where (once upon a time, or so it was said) the painting was nailed up as a tavern sign, part of a painted cabinet, no one knew.

“He still alive back there?” Victor Cherry.

“Think so.” Boris dug an elbow in my ribs. “Say something.”

But I couldn’t. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

“Ah, beautiful,” said Gyuri amiably, leaning in to look at my right side. “So pure! Like a daisy. You know what I am trying to express?” he said, nudging me, when I did not answer. “Plain flower, alone in a field? It’s just—” he gestured,
here it is! amazing!
“Do you know what I am saying?” he asked, nudging me again, only I was still too dazed to reply.

Boris in the meantime was murmuring half in English and half Russian to Vitya about the
ptitsa
as well as something else I couldn’t quite catch, something about mother and baby, lovely love. “Still wishing you had phoned the art cops, eh?” he said, slinging his arm around my shoulder with his head close to mine, exactly as when we were boys.

“We can
still
phone them,” said Gyuri, with a shout of laughter, punching me on the other arm.

“That’s right, Potter! Shall we? No? Maybe not such a good idea any more, eh?” he said across me, to Gyuri, with a raised eyebrow.

xi.

W
HEN WE TURNED IN TO
the garage and got out of the car everyone was still high and laughing and recounting bits and pieces of the ambush in multiple languages—everyone except me, blank and echoing with shock, fast cuts and sudden movements still reverberating from the dark at me and too stunned to speak a word.