Goodbye Again Page 7

  ‘I don’t want to repeat the past! Just the opposite. I want to make it work this time.’ I finished the drink. ‘I’d like to find a life with this new woman.’ I was excited, breathing hard.

  ‘Okay, but for one small problem – she’s a lesbian.’

  ‘She liked men once. She was married to one, she told me.’

  Harry shook his big old boxer’s head in disbelief. ‘So you’re betting on turning this woman round sexually – and then loving her only because she looks like Katie. You’re nuts, Ben. Always crazy about women.’

  ‘One woman.’

  ‘Right, well then keep out of the way of the krauts, or maybe you won’t be betting on any more women – ever.’

  I turned to him. ‘I’m surprised, from your point of view. Wouldn’t you like to know where this art loot went to, where the rest of it must be hidden?’

  ‘No. If the stuff still exists, let it rot,’ he added with a touch of vehemence. ‘Old stones – never found any good in turning ’em over.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Come on, Ben, stop fancying yourself as a Nazi hunter, pretending concern about things you know damn all about.’ Harry was edgy, almost angry. I dropped the topic.

  ‘Okay. Come and look at this other thing I brought over.’ I unwrapped the Modigliani nude. ‘Is it the real thing?’

  Harry gazed at the nude for a minute, then looked up. ‘Where in hell did you get this?’

  ‘My father’s house. Hidden in an attic, like the inventory. It’s not a copy?

  He looked at it for another minute. ‘No. No, it’s the real thing. One of his finest.’

  ‘Ever seen it before? Or know about it?’

  ‘No. Never, and I know nothing about it, except it’s from Modi’s later period, that great year in Paris, 1916 and 17, when he did all those marvellous nudes, dozens of them. Who is she?’

  ‘“Amelie”.’ I showed him the inscription on the turnover at the bottom of the canvas. “Amelie-Amedeo-Amore”.’

  ‘That’s not an “A”, it’s an “E”. And it’s a last “a”. You’ve got Modi’s script wrong. That’s “Emelia”, Italian.’

  ‘OK, so how did my father come by it? It’s at the end of his inventory.’

  ‘This must have been looted, too.’

  ‘Yes, and that does interest me, because the woman interests me. Who is she? How did my father come by her? Why hide her up in the attic all these years? You think to find out would be to unearth something nasty under the woodpile?’

  He nodded. ‘You go ahead, turn over the woodpile. I’d take this woman as she is. A gift horse. Don’t start looking at her teeth. Never does any good.’

  It was Harry’s turn now to pour himself another drink. He seemed unnerved. The past was hurting him in some way or other, that was understandable – his couldn’t have been a pleasant past in Europe, during and just after the war. He drank his vodka quickly, then moved away, looking up at my nude of Katie on the far wall. He turned back.

  ‘Yes, you’ve lost Katie, and your wife as I remember, and quite a few other women in between you told me of.’

  ‘Yes, a whole gallery of women; but at least I still have them on canvas, back at the barn.’

  ‘Better to have kept one or two in the flesh.’

  ‘I always tried to keep them both ways. “Perfection of the work and of the life”. Most of them ran out on me, like you said.’ I rolled a cigarette, turning away.

  ‘Ever strike you why?’

  I turned back quickly. ‘I was too much my own man. The mistake I made was in pointing out their faults now and then. That wasn’t part of the deal for them. Now I just want the decent life. With this woman. Start over.’

  ‘The life? What about your art?’

  ‘Christ, Harry! I’ve not painted anything good in two years, and barely made a penny out of my “art” in twice as long. I’m just a piss-artist now, or very nearly.’

  ‘Didn’t think you’d throw in the towel so easily, Ben. You’re good. Good as Modi in your way. Christ, sometimes I think – you and your nudes – that you are Modi, reincarnate! Just look at those pictures of Katie. Think I’d have them in the same room with the Soutine, Utrillo, the Renoir nude – if they weren’t the best?’ He turned to me. ‘Know something? Do you good if this broad Elsa runs out on you. You’re not cut out for the domestic life, and maybe you’re right about her. Something fishy there. You should cut your losses, while you still have the chance.’

  ‘You think I’m on a hiding to nothing with her?’

  ‘Yes, but you’ll always have your work. Maybe you should just cut out the women for a bit.’

  ‘The women are my work, Harry. You know that. There wouldn’t be any work, but for them.’

  ‘You can’t always afford them, and not this one. Not one with whom you’re trying to relive the life you had with a dead woman. That’s just obsessional.’

  ‘All decent work is obsessional.’

  He sighed. ‘Ben, forget Katie. Most affairs go wrong in the end, unless you’re both going some place serious with them. If you’re not, they explode.’

  ‘Wrong? It didn’t go wrong between Katie and me! It went wrong because her father turned up out of the blue two years ago, came back home to roost. He’d left the last woman he’d been living with, having left others before that, but he was getting on. Decided to pack the women in for some home comforts. Katie’s mother divorced him years ago, when Katie was a child. Lot of turbulence then, and a bad business for Katie, all kept under wraps behind the solid bourgeois façade. Anyway, Katie took up with him when he came back. That’s what went wrong between us. She had no real time for me then, only for him.’

  ‘Christ! She took up with him – that way?’

  ‘I don’t think so, since that was the only thing she kept with me – bed. She could never commit herself to a man, except her father, because she thought he’d abandoned her as a child – and that this was her fault because she’d been a bad girl – she always wanted him back, to make things up with him, to be loved by him again. The only intimacy she could give anyone else was in sex. It was the only thing that always tempted her back to me.’

  Harry was silent for a moment.

  Then he said, ‘Okay, Ben. You may be right, but stop piling up the agony for yourself over her. Where she is now not even sex is going to tempt her back to you.’

  ‘Okay, like I said, I’ll tell Elsa about Katie. Forget how she might be “meant”. See if I can make something with her, just as she is, for who she is.’ I started to leave, then turned. ‘Oh, something else.’ I held up the Modi nude. ‘Know anyone else in Paris who might know about the painting? Some expert? Or an old-timer who maybe knew Modi’s friends?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t. All the Modi old-timers are dead. Besides, I can vouch for the authenticity of that painting as it stands, if you wanted to sell it. Worth upwards of fifteen million bucks, or more. Never have to worry about money again.’

  Harry was playing the devil on a high hill.

  ‘I don’t want to sell it,’ I said firmly. ‘I want to find out who she is. How my father came by her. And why he had that list of looted art. I loved him. He was good to me. Now it turns out he may have been a Nazi art looter. I want to find out which man he was. And maybe this Modi nude is the key to the whole thing, which is why we came over here, to find out about her. Because Elsa’s in the same boat. Was her father a Nazi art looter, too? She loved him as well.’

  ‘So – several other father figures involved in all this. Yet you blame Katie for that.’ He shrugged. ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’

  ‘I’d like to know the truth, one way or the other. Thought you would, too.’

  He was suddenly roused. ‘Some truths are better left hidden.’

  ‘Yes, if you want them to fester, and end up having to take a leg off, instead of a finger. Unless you think my father was a Nazi art looter – or worse?’

  ‘No, Goddamnit! He couldn’t have been. Your father
was a Jew who survived Auschwitz, and you can’t get more Jewish than that. You’re nuts, Ben.’

  ‘Okay, maybe there’s some innocent explanation for that list. Maybe not. I’d like to know, one way or the other, win or lose. Least I can do for him now – give him the justice of the truth.’

  Harry didn’t comment. He went to the window again, then turned around. ‘Tell you what – like I said, I can sell that Modi nude for you tomorrow – ten, fifteen million dollars or more. Go back home, put it in some good securities, get yourself a decent place to live. And Elsa – you might get her then. Because I’ll tell you one reason why you and Katie went wrong. You hadn’t had a bean for most of the time you were with her. Penniless, and likely to stay that way. Still married, and living in a draughty barn in the boondocks with no heating, telephone or plumbing. Women like to take a bath now and then, you know. No future that way with you. Maybe you thought that didn’t matter because you were so good in bed together and had such good times and jokes and trips abroad.’

  ‘Don’t those things matter plenty, Harry?’

  ‘Yes, but with the bourgeois money matters more – more than the thirty-two positions, Groucho Marx and the leaning tower of Pisa. Money in the bank, Ben, and not on your mind – matters a helluva lot to them, because the old bourgeoisie are just in the business of survival now. And so are you. And that painting, “Emelia” – she’s your meal-ticket. If you sell her, and drop all your other cockamamie theories and enquiries. If you don’t, if you’re so damned contrary as to want to go digging into her past, and your father’s and Elsa’s – well then, you’ll deserve everything you’ll probably get.’

  He turned away, looking out the window. Then he turned back, almost petulant. ‘Get Katie right out of your mind, too. Stop trying to figure out why she killed herself.’

  ‘Why bring her up again?’

  ‘Because you’re still obsessed with her – and she’s put you out of your right mind about things generally, made you crazy about all this Nazi art loot thing. Accept the fact she just chucked you. Accept that you crossed onto the wrong side of the tracks there, Ben, into that smart riding school of hers. And so did she, into a drafty barn, no plumbing, with a penniless married man, awash in turpentine, booze and dreams of good women. What future was there for her with you in your arty barn? Or was she to have you and your turps and booze and sex up at her riding school – and frighten the horses?’

  ‘No, not necessarily.’

  ‘Look, she saw all this – that she couldn’t live with you on your “creative” terms, in her place – and she wasn’t going to abandon the riding school and set up shop with you in your bohemian barn. So she retreated, started to drop you, and made up excuses; that you were difficult, unreasonable, childish, whatever.’

  ‘Okay, but …’

  ‘You know something else – you’re better off without Katie. I knew her. She was an original and plenty attractive but ruthless behind the accommodating façade. Always thought she was right, especially when she was in the wrong. You blinded yourself to her faults. She probably took to you for the sex, Ben. That’s what she really wanted from you: just a good screw now and then, no strings attached.’

  ‘You make her out to be something of a bitch.’

  ‘You said it, Ben, but you should have known something of all this, because it’s in your two paintings of her, up there on the wall. In her eyes, expression – the hardness, arrogance, along with the sexiness, but you were besotted with her, so you wouldn’t see this other side to her.’

  I might have been angry by now, if there hadn’t been some truth in all that Harry had said. ‘No, it wasn’t all just sex, Harry. You can tell.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Maybe, but I can tell you the real thing you and Katie were up to together, like all lovers in the end – the power play, the sexual politics that always sneaks in between the sheets. Control, Ben. You had it, you lost it. She had it then, but the only way she could really control things in the end was by chucking you and taking up with her father, if that makes you feel better.’

  Harry moved away. I was surprised he’d brought Katie up again. He was hitting below the belt, clearly aiming to sink me on a personal level.

  He came over to me, relaxed now, the honest broker. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What about selling the picture? With a bit of money you could really concentrate on your work back home. Your problems would be over. I’m being absolutely straight with you.’

  Harry wasn’t being absolutely straight with me. He had some other reason, besides my art and my well being, for not wanting me to go on with my enquiries. So here he was offering me millions to produce work again, and to get rid of Elsa. All this was an offer he hoped I couldn’t refuse.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, stalling. ‘I’ll consider selling the picture. Though if I did sell it, you’d need to produce the provenance, wouldn’t you? What would you say? “Hidden in the attic of a house in Dublin, owned just after the war by a penniless Jew from Auschwitz.” And there’s the rub – it probably was owned by some Jew originally, who ended up in Auschwitz. Some rich Jew – and not my father.’

  Harry said nothing, until he looked at me. ‘Ben, don’t mess with this business. Drop it. Drop Elsa. Drop it all. I’ll sell that Modi for you. Take the money and run.’

  ‘I told you – I’ll consider it. I can’t drop Elsa. I brought her over here. I’ll go pick her up now, and you can meet her later, make up your own mind.’

  I wrapped up the picture, said goodbye, went downstairs and walked back to the boat. And then I saw how my father had got all those pictures safely over to Dublin. The Carrara marble he’d shipped from Italy over the years, out of the Carrara port, the finer polished stuff protected in big wooden crates, landed at the Dublin docks, and never opened until they’d been trucked out to his marble works in the suburbs. He’d hidden the paintings in those unopened crates.

  The jigsaw was beginning to fit, and the more the pieces came together the more I wondered about Elsa, the more I had doubts about Harry. He didn’t want me to continue with my enquiries about the Nazi art-looting business, was willing to pay me off to see that I didn’t – and had taken against Elsa. Why? Maybe because he’d been involved in a bit of art looting himself after the war.

  Well, perhaps I was crazy, with all these intimations and theories. A dictatorial, difficult, penniless piss-artist – beyond the endurance of the best of women. A real loser. I could chuck it all, turn round, go back to Harry with the picture, let him sell it, and live happily ever after. But I couldn’t do this, because I saw now what was ‘meant’ in all my intimations and theories. My whole life was at stake, as were the lives of my father and mother, and of Katie – and now it seemed of Elsa and Harry as well. They’d all been hiding something. That was the real reason I couldn’t take the money and run, because if I didn’t prove them all liars and deceivers I’d certainly be a loser. Deception was the great leveller for them all, but it wasn’t my style.

  Elsa’s Story

  Coming up from the saloon to the wheelhouse, the sun in my eyes, I didn’t see him at first. He was standing by the wheel, gun in hand, waiting for me. ‘Don’t shout.’ The almost apologetic, American voice I remembered in my father’s house in Dublin. Then, with sudden venom, ‘We have to talk.’

  It was the same man, in his thirties. You could see this in the tired skin, but at a glance he looked younger. The air of an eternal, book-swamped student, dazzled by ideas beyond his reach. A narrow, undernourished face, granny glasses, lank dark dandruffy hair, tired blue eyes, gazing through me as if at some ever-receding holy grail. Baggy white tracksuit bottoms, T-shirt and trainers all at least a size too big for him, so that the movement of his stick-like body and spindly legs inside the swathes of billowy material made him look grotesque. A thin man desperately trying to fill out a fat one. Everything was at odds, didn’t match. He was piteous – and dangerous.

  ‘It seems –’ He hesitated, an actor unsure of his lines. ‘Seems you though
t you could give us the slip, coming over here on his boat like that.’ I didn’t reply. ‘Didn’t you?’ He threatened me with the gun.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea. It was his. His boat.’

  ‘Don’t try to get away from us again. We’ll find you … we have people everywhere. We’re watching him right now. His bags and things. Where are they? I don’t have much time.’

  ‘Down in his cabin, beyond the saloon.’

  He gestured me down the stairs, following me through the saloon and into Ben’s cabin. He found his bag, started to go through it quickly. He came on a cloth-bound book, opened it, flicking through the pages. Some sort of journal, written in a scrawled hand, and a scrapbook, with dried leaves and wild flowers stuck between the pages. He stopped at a page. ‘Well, at least you’ve got him that way. Sleeping with him already.’

  I turned on him. ‘I haven’t been sleeping with him.’

  He showed me the drawing. ‘How did he get to draw you naked in bed like this then?’ I saw the sheet of white paper, tipped into the scrapbook, a pen and ink drawing. It was me. I was mystified. The drawing showed me sleeping, naked, head on a pillow, my face in half-profile.

  My spine prickled. It wasn’t me. This was another woman, who looked just like me. Of course – it must have been Ben’s dead girlfriend, Katie. It was her scrapbook, and Ben’s drawing of her. I was looking at my double. A dead woman. I turned the pages casually while he carried on looking through the cabin, opening drawers, cupboards. I read a bit of the journal, near the end. ‘I want to stop his pain, and mine, and the only way to do that is to stop “us”.’

  Why hadn’t Ben told me Katie looked just like me? What the hell was he up to? I needed to know, and I needed some hard evidence, to confront him with. So I needed this drawing. When the guy wasn’t looking I put it in my bag.

  The man found nothing, or nothing he was looking for. ‘I don’t have time.’ He turned, frustrated, mopping his brow in the heat. Then he smiled. ‘He still has the painting, and that’s what really counts.’