Natan
The two men out of the white van are sitting on the floor of Johansson’s warehouse with their backs against their own rear wheel, and I’ve laid what they were carrying out in a line on the concrete so that their employer has something to look at when he gets here.
Two five-liter drums of solvent. A bolt cutter.
Ten feet of garden hose cut clean at both ends.
A key on a paper tag with the laundry’s address written on it in pencil, and a second key with no tag at all, which Mechislav walked up the alley behind Calloway Street at half past six this morning and fitted into the gate at the back of a converted hardware store.
Kimmie’s gallery.
“Upstairs at the laundry has a sink and a supply that’s still live,” Mechislav says.
He’s got their phones in his jacket. “Hose in the sink, hose out the window, down the wall, through the gate. Water goes under her back door overnight and comes up through that floor. Nobody breaks anything. Nobody’s on a camera. Old building, old pipes, bad luck.”
“And the solvent?”
“For if she’s insured.”
The roller door goes up at eight, and Johansson comes in under it before it’s halfway, because I called him from the phone of the man on the left and told him his van was here and he could come and collect it.
He’s in a gray jacket, and he has the walk of a man who has spent three years being told he’s the cleverest person in whichever room he’s standing in.
He looks at the line of items on the floor. He looks at his two employees. Then he arranges his face into something patient and puts his hands in his coat pockets.
“I don’t know these people,” he says.
I pick up the first drum, unscrew the cap, and pour it over the hood of the Jaguar.
It goes on like syrup and then it starts working, and the paint lifts in long muddy blisters from the middle outward. The smell fills the whole building. Johansson makes a noise I’d describe as involuntary and takes two steps toward the car before he thinks better of it.
“That’s the burst pipe,” I tell him.
“Do you have any idea what that car costs?” he screams.
“To the dollar.” I set the empty drum down on his front tire. “Vestbro Holdings. You’ve been putting a street together one piece at a time and waiting for the difficult ones to get tired. It’s good work. It’s cheap, and it’s slow and nobody ever calls the police about coincidences.”
He doesn’t bother denying it, which I respect more than I expected to.
“It’s just property,” he says. “It’s completely legal.”
“Most of it. Only you walked into her gallery, and I don’t trust your intentions aren’t dishonorable.
” I take my time with the second drum, turning it so the label faces him.
“My family has moved freight over that bridge for forty years. You bought a warehouse two doors down from our yard and never opened it once. I want you to think about how that looks from where I stand.”
“I have never sent a truck across your bridge.”
“I know. If you had, we’d have had this conversation three years ago, and you’d be walking with a stick.”
Johansson takes his hands out of his pockets. He’s working out which version of himself to try next, and he lands on the one where we’re both businessmen.
“Then let’s talk about a number,” he says. “That’s a small street with a lot of empty frontage, and I don’t need a war with anybody. There’s plenty in it for everyone. Certainly enough that neither of us needs to be interested in some little girl and her ugly art shop.”
I have him against the side panel of the van with my hand under his jaw before he finishes the sentence.
He’s lighter than he looks. His heels come off the floor an inch and dangle there.
I hold him at that height while the blisters keep spreading across his hood and one of his men very sensibly studies the concrete between his own feet.
“Her name is Miss Farrow,” I say. “You put a card on her desk and told her to be careful about the company she keeps. That was the sentence that brought me here.”
He tries to nod and can’t.
“Here’s what happens. Vestbro sells the properties it owns on that side of the river to Federov Freight this week for what you paid, and the option on the corner lapses in November without a word from you.
You don’t purchase the painting. You don’t cross that bridge.
If a pipe goes anywhere on Calloway Street, if there’s a fire, if a girl of twenty-four gets a licensing letter about a glass of wine at an opening, I won’t ask you whether it was you. ”
I set him down on his feet and straighten his jacket for him.
“That won’t polish out,” I add, nodding at the car.
He looks at it for a long moment.
The second yard smells like diesel and wet cardboard, and Eduard is in the office at the top of the metal stairs with two phones on the desk in front of him and his coat still on.
He listens to the whole thing without interrupting once, which is his way of telling me he was already halfway to it himself.
“Take the laundry and the lot,” he says. “Jasper can paper it by Thursday. He’s got his own business this week, so don’t stand over him.” He turns one of the phones face down. “Johansson will sell. Men like that only ever wanted a quiet way to be rich.”
“He’ll want it explained to him again in six months.”
“Then explain it again.” Eduard leans back and looks at me for longer than the conversation needs.
“Now the other thing. You put a man against a van this morning over a woman who runs an art gallery. Mechislav thinks you’ve gone soft.
Sammie thinks you’ve gone strange. Delilah has a theory she’s been sharing with the entire street. What is she to you?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
Eduard is a difficult man to surprise, but I’m proud to say I’ve achieved it.
“Does she know that?”
“She knows most of it. I told her what I do all day on the way to work this morning. Where I grew up, my mother, my sister.”
“And this?” He gestures at the window, the yard. “Does she know about this?”
“Not entirely, but we’re getting there.”
“Ah.” Eduard picks up his coffee, finds it cold, and puts it back down.
“That’s a good reason. I had one of those.
I sat in my own kitchen with a very good reason and let Sammie find out on her own, and I’ve never worked so hard for anything in my life as I worked to get her back.
” He looks at me over the desk. “You know what she said to me afterward? That she could have stood the danger. It was being the last one in the room to know.”
I think about that as I make my way back over the bridge.
Bea Rebecchi lives out past the boatyard in a low white house with a rusted trampoline in the garden that I doubt has been jumped on this decade. She opens the door before I’ve knocked, in a cardigan the color of mustard, delighted.
“You’re the one who left with the box,” she says.
“Natan Federov.”
“I know exactly who you are. Everyone on that street knows exactly who you are, and about half of them have decided it’s thrilling.” She stands aside. “Come in. I’ll put the coffee on, and you can tell me why a man like you drives all the way out here on a Sunday morning.”
“I want to buy your painting.”
She stops with her hand on the kettle. “Kimmie sells my painting. That’s the arrangement, that’s what her twenty-five percent is for, and I’d have to be some kind of monster to go behind a girl who hung it on eight feet of white wall and turned the lights down at the other end so it had the room to itself. ”
“I’m paying her commission on top of the price.
In full, today, in cash if you want it that way.
” I stay standing, because the chairs in her kitchen look like they were built for smaller people.
“There’s a man who wants it, and he doesn’t want it for the reasons you’d like.
If he gets it, it goes into a room with no windows and comes out again in four years in another country, and it will have done a job for him by then.
With me, it stays on her wall until the twenty-ninth either way. After that it’s hers.”
Bea sits down. She’s quiet for a while, and I can hear a clock somewhere behind me.
“Hers,” she repeats, and waits.
“Her name on the paperwork. I don’t want it in my apartment. I want it in her gallery, or her house, where she can look at it every morning while she’s getting ready for the day.”
“Oh, you poor man,” Bea says, with enormous satisfaction. “You’ve got it very badly indeed.”
She writes the receipt out at the table on a pad from a bank that closed years ago, and she asks me twice how to spell Farrow, though she knows how to spell Farrow. Then she holds it against her chest before she hands it over.
“Everybody stands in front of that painting and tells me what a beautiful field it is,” she says.
“It’s the hill above the Bellingfell road, at about four in the afternoon in October, and I painted it the week my husband died, from the top, looking at the gap in the cloud, which is the only part of it I got right.
Kimmie’s the only person who’s ever looked at it and asked me who I’d been with.
” She puts the receipt in my hand. “Are you going to tell her what you’ve done? ”
“I suppose that depends on whether or not she says ‘yes.’”
“Mm,” Bea says. “I think she’ll say yes.” She taps my chest a couple of times.
“Go on. My coffee isn’t as nice as that at the Purr & Pour anyway.”
I lift her hands to my lips and kiss her knuckles.
“Thank you, Mrs Rebecchi.”
“It’s Bea, dear. Just Bea.”