Freddy had a standard joke. Sometimes, he’d say, the S&M customers came into his gallery by mistake, and when reminded of their error, they asked, ‘Well, while I’m here, do you mind hanging me?’ Boom, boom.
‘Fairweather?’ Freddy said on the phone. ‘You want to buy or sell?’
‘Neither. Is he a big name these days? What’s he getting on the market?’
‘Let’s put it this way — if you’ve got a Fairweather, I’d hang on to it. One of his abstract soliloquies sold at auction for $80,000, which I think was a steal. For a smallish picture painted on a page of The Courier-Mail newspaper. That was in the seventies. Recently? A major work topped one million dollars.’
‘Who’s the best person to see in Brisbane about Fairweather?’
‘I always used James Fenton Browne. A terrific appraiser of Fairweather. He could sniff a Fairweather fake a mile off.’
‘Used?’
‘They found him eaten out by crabs in Moreton Bay about a month ago.’
‘Are you serious?’ I suddenly remembered a story about the mystery of the Crab Pot Hand in the local newspaper.
‘Some place called Peel Island. They almost didn’t find him in the mangroves. Until a local fisherman pulled up his crab pot and found nothing in it. Just poor old James Fenton Browne’s left hand.’
I felt squeamish. I saw the dead art appraiser with eyes on his forehead and a nose coming out of his neck.
Picasso had a lot to answer for.
~ * ~
6
I always know when I’m being followed. That’s not intuition or street smarts or an irregularly well-honed radar. I thank the French for this quality in my life.
I drive a Peugeot 504, white, with light-brown upholstery still as good as the day the car rolled off its factory floor, except where the stuffing is blooming like old yellow carnations out of rips and tears. I love that car. I bought it shortly after Peg and I got married and, despite her protestations, I have refused to get rid of it. Bury me at wounded Peugeot, I tell her.
If it was good enough for De Gaulle, it’ll do me.
The one thing I know is that I can’t go over 80 km an hour in the old warhorse. Well, I can. It can physically go faster. But if I bust 80, the steering wheel starts to shake and a thin branch of smoke, as blue-grey as from the tip of a Gauloise, issues from the steering column. Pffft, I have been known to exhort. So what? It is French, after all. Of course it smokes.
So on the day I headed up to Brisbane in my Gallic rattler, I never exceeded the car’s known limit, which, on the Gold Coast to Brisbane superhighway is not even a canter, and I noticed in my trembling rear-vision mirror a large black sedan creeping along at the same pace about 200 metres behind me.
As I said, it didn’t take a Mensa membership to deduce the obvious.
The black car was still keeping pace with me when I pulled into Little Stanley Street and disappeared into an underground car park. I cruised around for a while and waited for my pursuers to follow suit. They didn’t.
When I parked and climbed the stairs to South Bank, it only took a few minutes for two goons to suddenly appear in my peripheral vision. They were wearing black suits and black shades. Nobody wore black suits and black shades in Queensland, unless they were undertakers with light-sensitive eye conditions. Or first years in Gangster 101. Or members of Johnny Cash’s extended family.
They followed me into the newly refurbished Queensland Art Gallery. Didn’t even remove their sunglasses. I went straight to the Fairweather room. I harboured a humorous fantasy that one of the guards might recommend the goons remove their shades to best appreciate Fairweather’s subtle colourations. I might even suggest it myself.
Besides, they weren’t going to inflict grievous bodily harm on me in an art gallery. This wasn’t The Da Vinci Code, though I think I was one of the few people on earth who had not read the book. In the film I’d only made it to the part where they find the old man naked in the Louvre. I did not like to think of old men dead and naked. It turned my stomach like the offal Picassos.
When it transpired the dead Da Vinci pensioner had scrawled clues to his killers in his own blood, I turned off the DVD. I had experienced enough death to know that victims of fatal shootings don’t present intellectual riddles in blood before expiration. They are too busy calling for their mother, or holding their innards in, or trying to locate a missing part of their skull, or not.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. Was I seeking the crab-nibbled James Fenton Browne amidst all this beauty? For the Fairweathers, face to face, were extremely beautiful. A book could not reproduce their ethereal quality, the life of them that seemed to hover above ordinary sheets of paper and cardboard and fragments of masonite.
I had come to art late in life. You don’t get much time to ponder Courbet’s line work or Rockwell’s romanticism when you’re banging villains’ heads against cobblestones in Surry Hills or saving some junkie from drowning in Rushcutters Bay. I’m the sort of guy who, when I was young and didn’t know any better, bought poster prints of famous art works like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or Monet’s lilies with VAN GOGH and MONET in big letters along the bottom and got them framed. We once had a little tile hanging on a nail on the lavatory door which read: ‘Here ‘Tis, Hers or His, So in You Whiz, on Private Biz’. Not one of the great works of art, but direct.
No. I had to meet Mr Freud before I knew what to look for in a picture.
The goons were pretending to be viewing works in the adjoining room and kept poking their heads into the Fairweather space to see if I was still there. I took out my little system cards and jotted a few notes about the Bribie Island artist. I had never heard of Bribie Island. Seeing how he painted, I assumed it was in Indonesia or Tahiti.
I was very taken by the Fairweathers’ renditions of mother and child. I felt a lot of love in Fairweather. I thought for a moment I might pop into the gallery shop on the way out and see if they had some posters of his paintings with FAIRWEATHER written across the bottom.
Turning my back on the goons, I made some more notes about a wonderful picture of women bathing and heard someone cough lightly behind me.
‘May I help you?’ a voice said.
‘Not really,’ I said, finishing my jottings on Fairweather’s failed raft expedition from Darwin to Bali. Just as the cough was delivered I had a strange sense of déjà vu. There had been a case, many years ago in Sydney, involving the corrupt magistrate Murray Farquhar and a number of famous artworks. I was starting to think one of them might have been a Fairweather. I was hastily writing this down, when another cough cut through my thoughts.
‘Are you quite sure you don’t need any assistance?’
I turned, annoyed. It was a well-presented gentleman, also in a suit — this one a fitted three-button number, dark blue, with the finest pinstripe through it, as delicate as trails of spider web.