The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian - By Lawrence Block Page 0,64

she said, and she began cutting the canvas off the stretcher.

I watched the process. It was unsettling. I’d watched her paint the thing, and I’d painted part of it myself, affixing masking tape to the primed canvas, filling in the lines, peeling off the tape when the quick-drying paint had set. So I knew Mondrian had been no closer to the thing than, say, Rembrandt. Even so, I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach as the knife slashed through it as if it were, well, linoleum.

I turned away and went over to where Jared lay stretched out on the floor, writing UNFAIR! on a large square of cardboard with an El Marko marking pen. Several completed signs, neatly tacked to strips of wooden lath, leaned up against a metal table. “Good work,” I told him.

“They should show up well,” he said. “The media’s been alerted.”

“Great.”

“Performance art,” Denise was saying. “First you paint a picture and then you destroy it. Now all we need is Christo to wrap it in aluminum foil. Shall I wrap it up or will you eat it here?”

“Neither,” I said, and began removing my clothes.

I got to the Hewlett Gallery a few minutes after three, walking a little stiffly in my suit. I was wearing the hat and the clear-lensed horn-rimmed glasses, the latter of which had begun giving me a headache an hour or so earlier. I handed over my suggested contribution of $2.50 without a murmur and went through the turnstile and up a flight of stairs to my favorite gallery.

I’d managed to work up a certain amount of anxiety over the possibility of the Mondrian’s having been moved, or removed altogether for loan to the exhibit that was being organized, but Composition with Color was right where it was supposed to be. The first thing I thought was that it didn’t look anything like what we’d thrown together in Denise’s loft, that the proportions and colors were completely wrong, that we’d produced something on a par with a child’s crayon copy of the Mona Lisa. I looked again and decided that legitimacy, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder. The one on the wall looked right because it was there on the wall, with a little brass plaque by its side to attest to its noble origins.

I just studied it for a while. Then I wandered a bit.

Back on the ground floor, I walked through a room full of eighteenth-century French canvases, Boucher and Fragonard, idealized bucolic scenes of fauns and nymphs, shepherds and Bo-Peeps. One canvas showed a pair of barefoot rustics picnicking in a sylvan glade, and studying that canvas under a uniformed guard’s watchful gaze were Carolyn and Alison.

“You’ll notice,” I murmured to them, “that both of those little innocents have Morton’s Foot.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means their second toes are longer than their big toes,” I said, “and they’ll need special orthotic implants if they’re planning to run marathons.”

“They don’t look like runners to me,” Carolyn said. “They look horny as toads, as a matter of fact, and the only kind of marathon they’re likely to be in is—”

“Jared and his friends are in position outside,” I cut in. “Give them five minutes to get started. Okay?”

“Okay.”

In a stall in the men’s room I took off my jacket and shirt, then put them on again and walked somewhat less stiffly to the gallery where the Mondrian was hanging. No one paid me any attention because there was a lot of noise and commotion out in front of the building and people were drifting toward the entrance to see what was going on.

The sound of rhythmic chanting rose to my ears. “Two, four, six, eight! We need art to appreciate!”

I stepped closer to the Mondrian. Time crawled and the kids went on chanting and I glanced for the thousandth time at my watch and started wondering what they were waiting for when suddenly all hell broke loose.

There was a loud noise like a clap of thunder, or a truck backfiring, or a bomb going off, or, actually, rather like a cherry bomb left over from the Fourth of July. And then, from another direction there was a great deal of smoke and cries of “Fire! Fire! Run for your lives!”

Smoke positively billowed. People bolted. And what did I do? I grabbed the Mondrian off the wall and ran into the men’s room.

And caromed off a balding fat man who was just emerging from a