mean—” dipping his brush, peering myopically at the chest—“fraud’s hard to prove, but if you don’t take care of this, it’s a pretty sure thing that this will pop back and bite us somewhere down the road.” His hand was steady; the line of his brush was sure. “A heavily restored piece… forget about blacklight, you’d be surprised, someone moves it to a brightly lit room… even the camera picks up differences in grain that you’d never spot with the naked eye. As soon as someone has one of these pieces photographed, or God forbid decides to put it up at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in an Important Americana sale…”
There was a silence, which—as it swelled between us—grew more and more serious, unfillable.
“Theo.” The brush stopped, and then started again. “I’m not trying to make excuses for you but—don’t think I don’t know it, I’m the very person who put you in this position. Turning you loose up there all on your own. Expecting you to perform the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. You are very young, yes,” he said curtly, turning halfway when I tried to interrupt, “you are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don’t care to deal with, and you have been so brilliant at getting us back in the black again that it has suited me very, very well to keep my head in the sand. As regards what goes on upstairs. So I’m as much to blame for this as you.”
“Hobie, I swear. I never—”
“Because—” he picked up the open bottle of paint, looked at the label as if he couldn’t recall what it was for, put it down again—“well, it was too good to be true, wasn’t it? All this money pouring in, wonderful to see? And did I inquire too closely? No. Don’t think I don’t know it—if you hadn’t got busy with your flim-flam up there we’d likely be renting this space right now and hunting for a new place to live. So look here—we’ll start fresh—wipe the board down—and take it as it comes. One piece at a time. That’s all we can do.”
“Look, I want to make it plain—” his calmness harrowed me—“the responsibility is mine. If it comes down to that. I just want you to know.”
“Sure.” When he flicked his brush, his deftness was practiced and reflexive, weirdly unsettling. “Still and all, let’s leave it for now, all right? No,” he said, when I tried to say something else, “please. I want you to take care of it and I’ll do what I can to help you if there’s anything specific but otherwise, I don’t want to talk about it any more. All right?”
Outside: rain. It was clammy in the basement, an ugly subterranean chill. I stood watching him, not knowing what to do or say.
“Please. I’m not angry, I just want to be getting on with this. It’ll be all right. Now go upstairs, please, would you?” he said, when I still stood there. “This is a tricky patch of work, I really need to concentrate if I don’t want to make a hash of it.”
xvii.
SILENTLY I WALKED UPSTAIRS, steps creaking loudly, past the gauntlet of Pippa’s pictures that I couldn’t bear to look at. Going in, I’d thought to break the easy news first and then move along to the showstopper. But as dirty and disloyal as I felt, I couldn’t do it. The less Hobie knew about the painting, the safer he would be. It was wrong on every level to drag him into it.
Yet I wished there were someone I could talk to, someone I trusted. Every few years, there seemed to be another news article about the missing masterworks, which along with my Goldfinch and two loaned van der Asts also included some valuable Medieval pieces and a number of Egyptian antiquities; scholars had written papers, there had even been books; it was mentioned as one of the Ten Top Art Crimes on the FBI’s website; previously, I’d taken great comfort in the fact that most people assumed that whoever had made off with the van der Asts from Galleries 29 and 30 had stolen my painting, too. Almost all the bodies in Gallery 32 had been concentrated near the collapsed doorway; according to investigators there would have been ten seconds, maybe even thirty, before the lintel fell, just time for a few people to make it out. The wreckage in Gallery 32 had been