The Goldfinch (112 page)

“Look at him,” said Boris, breaking short from what he was saying and knocking me in the arm. “He looks like he just had the best blow job of his life.”

They were all laughing at me, even Shirley Temple, the whole world was laughter bouncing fractal and metallic off the tiled walls, delirium and phantasmagorica, a sense of the world growing and swelling like some fabulous blown balloon floating and billowing away to the stars, and I was laughing too and I wasn’t even sure what I was laughing at since I was still so shaken I was trembling all over.

Boris lit a cigarette. His face was greenish in the subterranean light. “Wrap that thing up,” he said affably, nodding at the painting, “and then we will stick it in the hotel safe and go and get you a real blow job.”

Gyuri frowned. “I thought we were going to eat first?”

“You are right. I am starving. Dinner first, then blow job.”

“Blake’s?” said Cherry, opening the passenger door of the Land Rover. “An hour, say?”

“Sounds good.”

“Hate to go like this,” Cherry said, plucking at the collar of his shirt, which was transparent and stuck to him with sweat. “Then again I could use a cognac. Some of the hundred-euro stuff. I could install about a quart right now. Shirley—Gyuri—” he said something in Ukrainian.

“He is saying,” said Boris, in the burst of laughter that followed, “he is telling Shirley and Gyuri that they are buying the dinner tonight. With—” Gyuri triumphantly hoisting the bag.

Then—a pause. Gyuri looked troubled. He said something to Shirley Temple, and Shirley—laughing at him, deep peachy dimples—waved him off, waved off the bag that Gyuri tried to offer, and rolled his eyes when Gyuri offered it again.

“
Ne syeiychas,
” said Victor Cherry irritably. “Not now. Divide it later.”

“Please,” said Gyuri, offering the bag one more time.

“Oh, come on. Divide it later or we’ll be here all night.”

Ya khochu chto-by Shirli prinyala eto,
said Gyuri, a sentence so plain and so earnestly enunciated that even I, with my lousy Russki, understood it.
I want that Shirley takes it.

“No way!” said Shirley, in English, and—unable to resist—darted a glance at me to make sure I’d heard him say it, like a kid proud of knowing the answer in school.

“Come
on.
” Boris—hands on hips—looked aside in exasperation. “Does it matter who carries in their car? One of you is going to make off with it? No. We are all friends here. What will you do?” he said, when neither of them made a move. “Leave it on the floor for Dima to find? One of you decide please.”

There was a long silence. Shirley, standing with arms folded, shook his head firmly at Gyuri’s repeated insistence and then, with a worried look, asked Boris a question.

“Yes, yes, fine with me,” said Boris impatiently. “Go ahead,” he said to Gyuri. “You three go together.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am positive. You have worked enough for tonight.”

“You’ll manage?”

“No,” said Boris, “we will two of us walk! of course, of course,” he said, shushing Gyuri’s objection, “we can manage, go on,” and we were all laughing as Vitya and Shirley and Gyuri too waved us goodbye (
Davaye!
) and hopped in the Range Rover and drove away, up the ramp and out to the Overtoom again.

xii.

“A
H, WHAT A NIGHT
,” said Boris, scratching his stomach. “Starving! Let’s get out of here. Although—” he glanced back, knotted brow, at the Range Rover driving off—“well, no matter. We will be fine. Short hop. Blake’s is easy walk from your hotel. And you,” he said to me, nodding—“careless! You should tie that thing up again! Don’t just carry it wrapped with no string.”

“Right,” I said, “right,” and I circled to the front of the car so I could rest it on the hood while I fumbled for the baker’s twine in my pocket.

“May I see?” said Boris, coming up behind me.

I drew back the felt, and the two of us stood awkwardly for a moment like a pair of minor Flemish noblemen hovering at the margin of a nativity painting.

“Lot of trouble—” Boris lit a cigarette, blew the smoke in a sidestream away from the picture—“but worth it, yes?”

“Yes,” I said. Our voices were joking but subdued, like boys uneasy in church.

“I had it longer than anyone,” said Boris. “If you count the days.” And then, in a different tone: “Remember—if you feel like, I can always arrange something for money. Only one deal, and you could retire.”

But I only shook my head. I couldn’t have put into words what I felt, though it was something deep and primary that Welty had shared with me, and I with him, in the museum all those years ago.

“Was just kidding. Well—sort of. But no, seriously,” he said, rubbing his knuckles on my sleeve, “is yours. Free and clear. Why don’t you keep for a while and enjoy, before you return to museum people?”

I was silent. I was already wondering how exactly I was going to get it out of the country.

“Go on, wrap it up. We need to get out of here. Look at it later all you want. Oh, give it here,” he said, snatching the string from my clumsy hands; I was still fumbling, trying to find the ends—“come on, let me do it, we’ll be here all night.”

xiii.

T
HE PAINTING WAS WRAPPED
and tied, and Boris had tucked it under his arm and—taking a last draw on his cigarette—had stepped around to the driver’s side and was about to get in the car when, behind us, a casual and friendly-sounding American voice said, “Merry Christmas.”

I turned. There were three of them, two lazy-walking middle-aged men drifting along a bit bemusedly with the air of having come to do us a favor—it was Boris they were addressing, not me, they seemed glad to see
him—and, skittering slightly in front of them, the Asian boy. His white coat was not a kitchen worker’s coat at all but some asymmetrical thing made out of white wool about an inch thick; and he was shivering and practically blue-lipped with fright. He was unarmed, or seemed to be, which was good, because what I mainly noticed about the other two—big guys, all business—was blued handgun metal glinting in the sleazy fluorescents. Even then, I didn’t get it—the friendly voice had thrown me; I thought they’d caught the boy and were bringing him to us—until I looked over at Boris and saw how still he’d gone, chalk-white.

“Sorry to do this to you,” said the American to Boris, though he didn’t sound sorry—if anything, pleased. He was broadshouldered and bored-looking, in a soft gray coat, and despite his age there was something petulant and cherubic about him, overly ripe, soft white hands and a soft managerial blandness.

Boris—cigarette in mouth—stood frozen. “Martin.”

“Yeah, hey!” said Martin genially, as the other guy—gray blond thug in a pea coat, coarse features out of Nordic folklore—ambled straight up to Boris, and, after grappling around at Boris’s waistband, took his gun and passed it over to Martin. In my confusion I looked at the boy in the white coat but it was like he’d been struck on the head with a hammer, he didn’t seem any more amused or edified by any of this than I was.

“I know this sucks for you,” said Martin—“but. Wow.” The low key voice was a shocking contrast to the eyes, which were like a puff adder’s. “Hey. Sucks for me too. Frits and I were at Pim’s, we weren’t expecting to get out. Nasty weather, eh? Where’s our white Christmas?”

“What are you doing here?” said Boris, who despite his overly still air was as afraid as I’d ever seen him.

“What do you think?” Jocular shrug. “I’m surprised as you, if it makes any difference. Never would have thought Sascha had the balls to call in Horst on this. But—hey, fuck-up like this, who else could he call, I guess? Let’s have it,” he said, with an affable tick of the gun, and with a rush of horror I realized he was pointing the gun at Boris, gesturing with the gun at the felt-wrapped package in Boris’s hands. “Come on. Give it over.”

“No,” said Boris sharply, shaking the hair from his eyes.

Martin blinked, with a sort of befuddled whimsy. “What’s that you say?”

“No.”

“What?” Martin laughed. “
No?
Are you kidding me?”

“Boris! Give it to them!” I stammered, as I stood frozen in horror, as the one named Frits put his pistol to Boris’s temple and then caught Boris by the hair and pulled his head back so sharply he groaned.

“I know,” said Martin amicably, with a collegial glance at me, as if to say
: hey, these Russians—nuts, am I right?
“Come on,” he said to Boris. “Let’s have it.”

Again Boris moaned, as the guy yanked his hair once more, and from across the car threw me an unmistakeable look—which I understood just as plainly as if he’d spoken the words aloud, an urgent and very specific cut of the eyes straight from our shoplifting days:
run for it, Potter, go.

“Boris,” I said, after a disbelieving pause, “please, just give it to them,” but Boris only moaned again, despairingly, as Frits jammed the gun hard under his chin and Martin stepped forward to take the painting from him.

“Excellent. Thanks for that,” he said bemusedly, tucking his gun under his arm and beginning to pluck and fumble with the string, which Boris had tied in an obstinate little knot. “Cool.” His fingers weren’t working very well, and up close, when he’d reached to take the painting, I’d seen why: he was high as a kite. “Anyway—” Martin glanced behind him, as if wanting to include absent friends on the joke, then back with another bemused shrug—“sorry. Take them over there, Frits,” he said, still busy with the painting, nodding at a shadowy, dungeon-like corner of the garage, darker than the rest, and when Frits turned partly from Boris to gesture at me with the gun—
come on, come on, you too
—I realized, cold with horror, what Boris had known was going to happen from the moment he saw them: why he’d wanted me to run for it, or at least to try.

But in the half-moment as Frits was motioning to me with the gun, we’d all lost track of Boris, whose cigarette flew out in a shower of sparks. Frits screamed and slapped his cheek, then stumbled back grappling at his collar where it had lodged against his neck. In the same instant Martin—distracted with the painting, directly across from me—looked up, and I was still looking at him blankly across the roof of the car when I heard it, to my right, three fast cracks which made us both turn quickly to the side. With the fourth (flinching, eyes closed) a warm spray of blood thumped across the car roof and struck me in the face and when I opened my eyes again the Asian kid was stepping back horrified and drawing a hand down his front in a bloody smear like a butcher’s apron and I was staring at a lighted sign
Beetaalautomaat op
where Boris’s head had been; blood
was pouring from under the car and Boris was on the ground on his elbows, feet going, he was trying to scramble up from the floor, I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or not and I must have run around to him without thinking because the next thing I knew I was on the other side of the car and trying to help him up, blood everywhere, Frits was a mess, slumped against the car with a baseball-sized hole in the side of his head, and I’d just noticed Frits’s gun lying on the ground when I heard Boris exclaim sharply and there was Martin, tight-eyed with blood on his sleeve, hand clamped to his arm and fumbling to bring up his gun

It had happened before it even happened, like a skip in a DVD throwing me forward in time, because I have no memory at all of picking the pistol off the floor, only of a kick so hard it threw my arm in the air, I didn’t really hear the bang until I felt the kick and the casing flew back and hit me in the face and I shot again, eyes half-closed against the noise and my arm jolting with every shot, the trigger had a resistance to it, a stiffness, like pulling some too-heavy door latch, car windows popping and Martin with an arm coming up, exploding safety glass and chunks of concrete flying out a pillar and I’d got Martin in the shoulder, the soft gray cloth was drenched and dark, a spreading dark stain, cordite smell and deafening echo that drove me so deep inside my skull that it was less like actual sound striking my eardrums than a wall slamming down hard in my mind and driving me back into some hard internal blackness from childhood, and Martin’s viper eyes met mine and he was slumped forward with the gun propped on the roof of the car when I shot again and hit him above the eye, red burst that made me flinch and then, somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of running feet slapping on concrete—the boy, white coat running to the exit ramp with the painting under his arm, he was running up the ramp to the street, echoes reverberating in the tiled space and I almost shot at him only somehow it was a completely different moment and I was facing away from the car, I was doubled over with my hands on my knees and the gun was on the ground, I had no memory of dropping it although the sound was there, it was clattering to the floor and it kept on clattering and I was still hearing the echoes and feeling the vibration of the gun up my arm, retching and doubled over, with Frits’s blood crawling and curling on my tongue.