The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,327

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.

WHEN 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.

“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