Theft Read Online Free PDF Page A

cork, brushed down her skirt, sat cross-legged on the kitchen chair and, while she watched me pour the Virgin Hills, she just plain grinned at me.
    "OK," I said. "What happened?"
    "Nothing," she said, her eyes sparkling to the point of carbonation. "Where's your brother? Is he OK?"
    "Asleep."
    Whatever dark visions she then conjured--probably the drowning dog--she could not stay with long. "The good thing," she said, raising her glass, "is that Mr. Boylan knows his Leibovitz is real."

    "Jacques Leibovitz?" "That's the one."
    "Dozy owns a painting by Jacques Leibovitz?"
    I know now that my astonishment seemed put-on to her, but the secretive bugger Dozy had never breathed a word about his treasure. Also, you do not go to northern New South Wales to look at great paintings. And again: Leibovitz was one of the reasons I became an artist. I had first seen Monsieur et Madame Tourenbois at Bacchus Marsh High School, or at least a black-andwhite reproduction in Foundation of the Modern. None of this I was prepared to confess to an American in Manolo Blahniks but I was really offended by Dozy, my so- called mate. "We never even talk about art," I said. "We sit in his miserable
    kitchen, that's where he lives, amongst all those piles of the Melbourne Age. And he showed it to you"?"
    She raised an eyebrow as if to say, Why not? All I could think was that I had given him lovely drawings of the Wombat Fly and Narrow-waisted Mud Wasp and he had stuck them to his fridge with fucking magnets. It was hard to believe he had an eye at all.
    "Are you insuring it?"
    She laughed through her nose. "Is that what I look like?" I shrugged.
    She returned a clear appraising gaze. "Do you mind if I smoke?"
    I fetched her a saucer and she blew some dungy-smelling fumes across the table. "My husband," she said finally, "is the son of Leibovitz's second wife."
    If I did not like her, I liked the husband way, way less. But I was startled and impressed to understand whose son he was.
    "Dominique Broussard is his mother?" "Yes," she said. "You know the photograph?"
    Even I knew that--the tawny blonde studio assistant lying on an unmade bed, her new baby at her breast.
    "My husband, Olivier, he's the baby. He inherited the Leibovitz droit moral" she said, as though having to explain a story she was weary of.
    But I was not weary, not at all. I was from Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. I hadn't seen an original painting before I turned sixteen.
    "You understand how that works?" "What?"
    "Droit moral."
    "Of course," I said. "More or less."
    "Olivier is the one who gets to say if the work is real or fake. He signed the certificate of authentication for Boylan's painting. That is his legal right, but there have been people making mischief, and we have to protect ourselves." "You work together, you and your husband?"
    But she was not being drawn into that. "I've known Mr.
    Boylan's painting for a very long time," she said, "and it is authentic right down to the zinc tacks on the stretcher, but the point has to be proven again and again. It's a little boring."
    "And you know that much about Leibovitz?"
    "That much," she said dryly, and I watched as she butted out her cigarette, grinding it fiercely into the saucer. "But when someone like Boylan is told that his investment is at risk, he is bound to get upset. In this case he showed the canvas to Honore Le Noel who persuaded him he'd bought, not quite a fake, but close enough. May I have more wine? I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a day."
    I poured the wine without comment, not revealing that I was completely gobsmacked to hear Le Noel's name spoken as if he were the local publican or the owner of a hardware store. I knew who he was. I had two of his books beside my bed. "Honore Le Noel has become a joke," she said. "He was Dominique Leibovitz's lover, as you probably know."
    This sort of talk upset me in ways I can hardly bring myself to name. At the heart of it was the notion that I was a hick and she was from the centre of