If I want it, said Speck to himself. If I want it. With the best work sold and the insurance rates tripled and the commissions shared out like candy. And with everyone saying Speck jumped on the bandwagon, Speck made the last train.
“Lydia, listen to me,” he said. “I invented Hubert Cruche. There would be no Hubert Cruche without Sandor Speck. This is an unspeakable betrayal. It is dishonourable. It is wrong.” She listened, nodding her head. “What happens to me now?” he said. “Have you thought about that?” He knew better than to ask, “Why didn’t you tell me about him?” Like all dissembling women, she would simply answer, “Tell you what?”
“It might be all the better,” she said. “There’ll be that much more interest in Hube.”
“Interest?” said Speck. “The worst kind of interest. Third-rate, tawdry interest. Do you suppose I can get the Pompidou Centre to look at a painter who has been trailing around in Trieste? It had to be a new idea. It had to be strong.”
“You’ll save on the catalogue,” she said. “He will probably want to share.”
“It’s my catalogue,” said Speck. “I’m not sharing. Senator Bellefeuille … my biography … never. The catalogue is mine. Besides, it would look as if he’d had the idea.”
“He did.”
“But after me,” said Speck, falling back on the most useless of all lover’s arguments. “After me. I was there first.”
“So you were,” she said tenderly, like any woman on her way out.
Speck said, “I thought you were happy with our arrangement.”
“I was. But I hadn’t met him yet. You see, he was so interested in the Japhethite movement. One day he opened the Bible and put his finger on something that seemed to make it all right about the graven image. In Ecclesiastes, I think.”
Speck gave up. “I suppose it would be no use calling for a taxi?”
“Not around here, I’m afraid, though you might pick one up at the shopping centre. Shouldn’t you report the accident?”
“Which accident?”
“To the police,” she said. “Get it on record fast. Make it a case. That squeezes the insurance people. The phone’s in the hall.”
“I don’t care about the insurance,” said Speck.
“You will care, once you’re over the shock. Tell me exactly where it happened. Can you remember? Have you got your license? Registration? Insurance?”
Speck sank back and closed his eyes. He could hear Lydia dialling; then she began to speak. He listened, exactly as Cruche must have listened, while Lydia, her voice full of silver bells, dealt with creditors and dealers and Cruche’s castoff girlfriends and a Senator Bellefeuille more than forty years younger.
“I wish to report an accident,” Lydia sang. “The victim is Dr. S. Speck. He is still alive — luckily. He was forced off the road in the Bois de Vincennes by a tank truck carrying high-octane fuel. It had an Italian plate. Dr. Speck was too shaken to get the number. Yes, I saw the accident, but I couldn’t see the number. There was a van in the way. All I noticed was ‘MI.’ That must stand for Milan. I recognized the victim. Dr. Speck is well known in some circles … an intimate friend of Senator Antoine Bellefeuille, the former Minister of … that’s right.” She talked a few minutes longer, then came back to Speck. “Get in touch with the insurance people first thing tomorrow,” she said, flat Lydia again. “Get a medical certificate — you’ve had a serious emotional trauma. It can lead to jaundice. Tell your doctor to write that down. If he doesn’t want to, I’ll give you the name of a doctor who will. You’re on the edge of nervous depression. By the way, the police will be towing your car to a garage. They know they’ve been very remiss, letting a foreign vehicle with a dangerous cargo race through the Bois. It might have hit a bus full of children. They must be looking for that tanker all over Paris. I’ve made a list of the numbers you’re to call.”
Speck produced his last card: “Senator Bellefeuille will never allow his Cruches to go to Milan. He’ll never let them out of the country.”
“Who — Antoine?” said Lydia. “Of course he will.”
She cut a cupcake in half and gave him a piece. Broken, Speck crammed the whole thing in his mouth. She stood over him, humming. “Do you know that old hymn, Dr. Speck — ‘The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended’?”
He searched her face, as he had often, looking for irony, or playfulness — a gleam of light. There floated between them the cold oblong on the map and the Chirico chessboard moving along to its Arctic destination. Trees dwindled to shrubs and shrubs to moss and moss to nothing. Speck had been defeated by a landscape.
Although Speck by no means considered himself a natural victim of hard luck, he had known disappointment. Shows had fallen flat. Galleries had been blown up and torn down. Artists he had nursed along had been lured away by siren dealers. Women had wandered off, bequeathing to Speck the warp and weft of a clear situation, so much less interesting than the ambiguous patterns of love. Disappointment had taught him rules: the first was that it takes next to no time to get used to bad news. Rain began to fall as he walked to the taxi stand. In his mind, Cruche was already being shown in Milan and he was making the best of it.
He gazed up and down the bleak road; of course there were no taxis. Inside a bus shelter huddled a few commuters. The thrust of their lives, their genetic destiny obliged them to wait for public transport — unlike Speck, thrown among them by random adventures. A plastic-covered timetable announced a bus to Paris every twenty-three minutes until five, every sixteen minutes from four to eight, and every thirty-one minutes thereafter. His watch had stopped late in the afternoon, probably at the time of the accident. He left the shelter and stood out in the wet, looking at windows of shops, one of which might contain a clock. He stood for a minute or two staring at a china tea set flanked by two notices: “Hand Painted” and “Christmas Is Coming,” both of which he found deeply sad. The tea set had been decorated with reproductions of the Pompidou Art Centre, which was gradually replacing the Eiffel Tower as a constituent feature of French design. The day’s shocks caught up with him: he stared at the milk jug, feeling surprise because it did not tell him the time. The arrival of a bus replaced this perplexity with one more pressing. He did not know what was needed on suburban buses — tickets or tokens or a monthly pass. He wondered whether the drivers accepted banknotes, and gave change, with civility.
“Dr. Speck, Dr. Speck!” Lydia Cruche, her raincoat open and flying, waving a battered black umbrella, bore down on him out of the dark. “You were right,” she said, gasping. “You were there first.” Speck took his place at the end of the bus queue. “I mean it,” she said, clutching his arm. “He can wait.”
Speck’s second rule of disappointment came into play: the deceitful one will always come back to you ten seconds too late. “What does it mean?” he said, wiping rain from the end of his nose. “Having it before him means what? Paying for the primary expenses and the catalogue and sweetening the Paris critics and letting him rake in the chips?”
“Wasn’t that what you wanted?”
“Your chap from Milan thought he was first,” said Speck. “He may not want to step aside for me — a humble Parisian expert on the entire Cruche context and period. You wouldn’t want Cruche to miss a chance at Milan, either.”
“Milan is ten times better for money than Paris,” she said. “If that’s what we’re talking about. But of course we aren’t.”
Speck looked down at her from the step of the bus. “Very well,” he said. “As we were.”
“I’ll come to the gallery,” she called. “I’ll be there tomorrow. We can work out new terms.”