Theft Read Online Free PDF

the fucking universe. What I knew you could read in Time magazine--Dominique had begun as Leibovitz's studio assistant; Le Noel was Leibovitz's chronicler and critic.
    Now that my visitor was halfway through her second glass, she was talkative as hell. She revealed that Dominique and Honore had spent almost eight years, from just after the war until 1954, waiting for Leibovitz to die. (I recalled that the artist's strength was very acutely sketched in Le Noel's monograph--a force of life, short, thick legs, huge square hands.)
    It was not until his baby son was five, his daughter-in-law now told me, when Leibovitz himself was eighty-one, that the grim reaper came sneaking up on the old goat, pushing him forward as he stood at the dinner table with a wine glass brimming in his hand. He pitched forward and slammed his broad nose and tortoiseshell spectacles into the Picasso cheese plate. That is how my visitor
    told it, fluently, a little breathlessly. She finished the second glass without remarking on its character and for this, of course, I judged her quite severely. The plate cracked in half, she said.
    I thought, How would you fucking know? Were you even born?
    But I was a stranger to the notion that one might know famous people and of course she was married to the witness, the child-- an olive-skinned boy with very large watchful eyes and protruding ears which could not even begin to spoil his beauty.
    When his father had fallen dead he apparently had been about to ask if he might be excused, but now he looked to his mother and waited. Dominique did not embrace him but stroked his cheek with the back of her hand.
    "Papa est mort." "Oui, Maman."
    "You understand. No-one must know yet." "Oui, Maman."
    "Maman must move some canvases, do you understand? It is difficult because of the snow."
    I have recently observed French children, how they sit, so neat with their big dark eyes, and their clean fingernails collected in their laps. What miracles they are. I suppose Olivier sat like that, watching his dead father, but holding a dreadful secret of his own--he had been, at the very moment when his father fell, about to go and make pee-pee.
    "Don't move, you understand?"
    Of course there was no need for him to be tortured in the chair.
    But his mother was about to commit a major crime, that is remove paintings from the estate before the police were notified. "Stay there," she said. "Then I'll know where you are."
    Then she was on the telephone, persuading her posh lover to leave his fireside at Neuilly, explaining that they could not afford to wait for the snow to melt, that he must go all the way to Bastille, collect a truck, and drive it to the rue de Rennes.
    Somewhere in the confusion and terror of the night the little boy peed his pants, although this misadventure was not discovered until much later, when Honore finally noticed him sleeping with his forehead on the table, and then Dominique took a bloody photograph. Imagine! Later, for whatever reason--perhaps the missing Le Golem electrique was in the shot--she tore half of it away. It might have provided the only forensic evidence of that long night when Dominique Broussard and Honore Le Noel stole some fifty Leibovitzes, many of them abandoned or incomplete, works that would later, with the signature added and some careful revision, become very valuable indeed. They removed them to a garage near the Canal Saint-Martin, the source of that frequently reported "watermark" on a whole array of doubtful Leibovitzes from widely different periods. From this day no-one ever saw the painting that Leo Stein and the fiercer (and therefore more reliable) Picasso both described as a masterwork. Stein referred to it as Le Golem electrique, Picasso as Le Monstre.
    It was not until lunch the following day that Dominique reported her husband's death to the gendarmes, and then, of course, the studio was--as is the law in France--sealed off and a full accounting made of the paintings remaining