a painting,” said Phyllis. “He was just getting the paint off his brushes is what I think.”
She said it in an absolutely Phyllis-like way. Phyllis never joked around, but Lil and Edith and Nestor had to laugh anyway. They were all having a great time making fun of the deluded Russian who thinks he’s an artist.
“Hahhh, you see that one?” said Edith. “That poor zhlub, he takes a ruler and he makes that cross theh’s-about-to-fall-over and he looks at it and says, ‘Shmuck!’ ”—hitting herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand—“ ‘I give up!’ and he paints the rest of it plain white-you-gotta-give-him-credit. It’s better’n ’at cockamamie cross!”
The three women laughed and laughed, and Nestor couldn’t hold back a chuckle himself.
They took a look at that one with all the tapeworms-jumped-out-of-the-john and that one with the hands-look-like-two-clumps-of-asparagus and the one on the end theh—looks-like-a-pile-a-shucked-oysters-gone-high, and get that one!—the one below it—Tethered at Collioure. Tethered must mean you smear glue all over the thing and then you dump a bag full a different-colored confetti on it and you got yourself a painting!… and by the time they get to that one theh of the patchwork-quilt-only-he-can’t-draw-a-straight-line-and-it’s-all-falling-to-pieces… and that one of a pitcher of beer and a tobacco-pipe-cut-in-half… and that one theh—looks like two aluminum nudes-with-screw-on-nipples… and that one next to it-looks-like-three-aluminum-men-eating-playing-cards… and they’re laughing until the tears come, they’re shaking their heads, pulling faces, putting on sardonic smiles or intentionally retarded gapes with their mouths hanging open, rolling their eyeballs up so far they practically disappear. Edith is so swept away, she’s still hunched over, leaning on her walker, but she manages to stamp her feet up and down in a paroxysm of hilarity gone wild. Not even the dead serious iron-faced Phyllis can resist. She breaks out of her iron capsule with a single burst of laughter—“Honnnkkuhhh!”
Lil says, “An artist he’s supposed to be, and that’s the best he can do? I’d come and go in the dark, too! My face I wouldn’ wanna show people!”
Another round of uncontrollable laugher… even Nestor’s professional resolve turns to jelly, and he’s laughing, too. He looks over at John Smith to catch his reaction… and John Smith is oblivious of it all. He might as well be all by himself. He has his little narrow spiral notebook and his trick ballpoint out, and he’s busy looking at the paintings one by one and taking notes.
Nestor sidles over and says to him, “Hey, John, whattaya doin’?” John Smith acts as if he didn’t hear him and pulls a small camera out of an inside pocket of his jacket and starts taking pictures of the paintings one by one. He walks amidst the women as if he doesn’t know they’re there… Lil leans down to Edith’s level and says in a low voice, “The big-shot.”
Then he walked back past them, eyes fixed on the rear screen of the camera. Thing had him in a trance. He didn’t even look up when he reached Nestor. With his back to the three women, he lowered his head, eyes fixed on his notebook, and said, “You know what you’re looking at on that wall?”
“No. Somebody’s day care center?”
“You’re looking at two Picassos, one Morris Louis, one Malevich, one Kandinsky, a Matisse, a Soutine, a Derain, a Delaunay, a Braque, and two Légers.” For the first time during this recitation, John Smith lifted his head enough to see Nestor face-to-face. “Take a good look, Nestor. You’re looking at twelve of the most perfect, most subtle forgeries you or anybody else is ever going to lay eyes on. Don’t worry. These aren’t by ‘Nicolai.’ These are by a real artist.”
With that, John Smith winked a confident, reassuring wink at Nestor.
::::::The hell with you and your reassuring me. You’re trying to act like a real detective.::::::
To be on the safe side, Magdalena had come to the office an hour early, 7:00 a.m. She had been sitting here in her white uniform rigid as a corpse… or up to a point. This corpse’s heart was going 100 b.p.m. and heading for tachycardia. The girl was braced for the worst.
Ordinarily the Worst arrived about 7:40, twenty minutes before the office opened, to brief himself on what the eight o’clock patient has been puling and mewling about… He often told Magdalena he couldn’t imagine himself becoming so weak that he’d go whining to somebody like himself, to put himself up on a stage as the star of a tragedy before an audience