The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,18

continued his geometric design around the sides of the canvas. For all I knew Onderdonk’s painting had twice as many colored areas. It might be taller or shorter, wider or narrower. But—

But it still seemed oddly coincidental. Coincidences don’t have to be significant, of course. I’d picked up Carolyn at the Poodle Factory and we’d shared a cab to the Hewlett, and I hadn’t bothered reading our driver’s name on the posted hack license, but suppose I had and suppose it had been Turnquist? Then, when the attendant had greeted the ill-clad artist by name, we might have remarked on the coincidence of having met two Turnquists in half an hour. But so what?

Still—

We circled the room, pausing now and then in front of a painting, including several that left me cold and a Kandinsky I liked a lot. There was an Arp. Onderdonk had an Arp, too, but since we hadn’t been ordered to steal an Arp there was nothing particularly coincidental about it, or nothing remarkable about the coincidence, or—

“Bern? Should I just plain forget about the cat?”

“How would you go about doing that?”

“Beats me. Do you really think they’ll do anything to Archie if we don’t steal the painting?”

“Why should they?”

“To prove they mean business. Isn’t that what kidnappers do?”

“I don’t know what kidnappers do. I think they kill the victim to prevent being identified, but how’s a Burmese cat going to identify them? But—”

“But who knows with crazy people? The thing is, they’re expecting us to do the impossible.”

“It’s not necessarily impossible,” I said. “Paintings walk out of museums all the time. In Italy museum theft is a whole industry, and even here you see something in the papers every couple of months. The Museum of Natural History seems to get hit every once in a while.”

“Then you think we can take it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then—”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I turned at the voice, and there was our artist friend, his ten cent lapel badge fastened to his thrift shop jacket, his yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. We were once again standing in front of Composition with Color, and Turnquist’s eyes gleamed as he looked at the painting. “You can’t beat old Piet,” he said. “Sonofabitch could paint. Something, huh?”

“Something,” I agreed.

“Most of this is crap. Detritus, refuse. In a word, you should pardon the expression, shit. My apologies, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn assured him.

“The museum is the dustbin of the history of Art. Sounds like a quotation, doesn’t it? I made it up myself.”

“It has a ring to it.”

“Dustbin’s English for garbage can. English English, I mean to say. But the rest of this stuff, this is worse than garbage. Dreck, as some of my best friends would say.”

“Er.”

“Just a handful of good painters this century. Mondrian, of course. Picasso, maybe five percent of the time, when he wasn’t cocking around. But five percent of Picasso is plenty, huh?”

“Er.”

“Who else? Pollock. Frank Roth. Trossman. Clyfford Still. Darragh Park. Rothko, before he got so far down he forgot to use color. And others, a handful of others. But most of this—”

“Well,” I said.

“I know what you want to say. Who’s this old fart running off at the mouth? His jacket don’t even match his pants and he’s making judgments left and right, telling what’s Art and what’s garbage. That’s what you’re thinking, ain’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t say it, you or this young lady. She’s a lady and you’re a gentleman and you wouldn’t say such a thing. Me, I’m an artist. An artist can say anything. It’s an edge the artist has over the gentleman. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Uh.”

“And you’re right to think it. I’m nobody, that’s who I am. Just a painter nobody ever heard of. All the same, I saw you looking at a real painter’s work, I saw you keep coming back to this painting, and right off I knew you could tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit, if you’ll pardon me once again, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn said.

“But it puts my back up to see people give serious attention to most of this crap. You know how you’ll read in the paper that a man takes a knife or a bottle of acid and attacks some famous painting? And you probably say to yourself what everybody else says. ‘How could anybody do such a thing? He’d have to be a madman.’ The person who does it is always an artist, and in the papers