"What are you doing!" I screamed, unmindful of the fact that I was a burglar in my own house.
"You were unconscious. You were getting dehydrated. It was the only liquid I could find except for the champagne. I didn't want to open another bottle of champagne, because when the cork popped it made a huge sound."
I looked down and saw a magnum bottle of champagne at my feet, empty. "Where's the champagne?" I asked.
"In your stomach."
"No wonder I feel full."
"Yeah. I gave you a bottle of Château Haut Brion, too."
"Are you nuts?" I asked, my voice already starting to slur. "I hape wime. I'm going to spent next afternoon throweling up."
"Not if you don't eat."
I struggled to my feet and led Smedjebakken to the painting vaults. I don't remember much, but I do remember that as time passed and I became drunker and drunker I couldn't work the simple combination lock, so I lay there for four hours, declaiming the story of my life to Smedjebakken and listening to the player piano in the ballroom upstairs.
"What the hell is going on up there?" I asked.
"Someone's dancing, I think," Smedjebakken said, looking up.
"See what it is," I said, giving him the flashlight. "I'm too sick to move."
"Why should I risk it?"
"I have to know."
"Why do you have to know?"
"Because she's my wife! I fell in love with her once. I loved her, she loved me, and love stays. It's a fixed quantity, even if we're not."
Smedjebakken left, and more than half an hour later, when I was almost sober, he returned.
"What did you see?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"What do you mean, 'nothing'? Tell me what you saw."
"You want the truth?"
"I always want the truth," I said. "Don't you know that? Everyone always wants the truth."
"All right. After ten minutes I finally found the stairs: this basement is as big as Madison Square Garden. I was frightened that I might open the door in someone's face."
"It opens into the kitchen, not the ballroom."
"I know, but they were going in and out. Luckily, when I came up from the basement they were dancing in the ballroom. In the kitchen a ten-foot-high expresso machine was puffing away, and coffee cups were all over the place. I thought it was a party for fifty people, but there are only two, and they're drinking all that coffee. They use a clean cup each time."
"Who?" I asked, my heart between my toes.
"A beautiful, beautiful woman...."
"That's Constance."
"And a tall, slinky, Brazilian-looking guy with stretched-back hair. He's wearing pointy shoes, black gaucho pants, and an embroidered shirt. He looks like a cross between a waiter and an acrobat, and he has really thin lips, like Rudolph Valentino."
"What was she wearing?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"There were panties and stuff scattered all over the place. She was totally nude, and she was dancing. Boy, was she dancing!"
"What kind of dances?" I asked, gritting my teeth.
"Snake dances."
"Snake dances," I repeated, my voice falling off.
"She has a way of moving that paralyzed me for half an hour."
"How could that be? For Christ's sake," I said, "they're dancing to a player piano!"
"Yes, but they dance in the coffee style, in a slow counterpoint."
"Do they kiss?"
"They kiss, they fondle, and they sip coffee. I'm sorry, but you wanted the truth."
"I always suspected," I said, "and now I know. It's better to know than to suspect. I still don't understand how it would be possible to kiss someone who drinks coffee, but it's finished, it's over. All I want to do now is rob banks."
After the great volume of alcohol Smedjebakken poured into me I was sick for almost a month, and I lay on the floor of one of the upstairs rooms in the Astoria house, watching all of Queens turn to winter. Smedjebakken was a first-class engineer, but he was no doctor: he tried to get me to drink a cup of tea. Why compound poisons when I was hardly alive as it was? I will make no metaphors to describe the pain in my head, because the brain, which makes metaphors, should not be forced to be clever at its own expense. My limbs ached like a kingdom that has lost a war, and my stomach swelled with the nausea of all the seas, but my head, well, it hurt. It really hurt.
Sometimes the soup of toxic residues circulating in my body gave horrible waking nightmares during which I would scream and pound the floor. Smedjebakken, who only several weeks before had poured a magnum of champagne down my throat, had the gall to suggest that my illness was psychosomatic. He said to take an aspirin.
"Are you insane?" I asked. "My uncle took an aspirin once and was sick for a year. The whole country is falling into the grip of drugs and will never recover."
"One aspirin?"
"One aspirin leads to two, two lead to four, four lead to eight, eight to sixteen, sixteen to thirty-two, and thirty-two to sixty-four. Before you knew it, I'd be seesawing on aspirin and coffee. Smedjebakken, the United States of America is becoming an opium den. Somebody, somebody, has to resist."
As I regained my strength, Smedjebakken worked tirelessly to equip the house. Because it was situated in an industrial neighborhood, no one took note of the things he trundled into it. When he was done, he was able to weld, cut, mill, grind, mold, tap, forge, plate, braze, drill, or extrude virtually any metal. He was expert in handling and processing, and had been building machines all his life. He told me that, given the time and materials, he could build, for example, a half-sized Rolls-Royce, or a power loom, or an antigravity box. And, because he was doing what he loved, it came easily and went fast.
He wanted to know how we were going to steal the Madonna del Lago. At first he thought that I intended merely to pass off the replica to Angelica and cheat my way through her requirement, but I soon had him building a full-size powered wheelchair that ran off D-cells stashed inside the metal tubing of the frame.
"Why not just have a battery at the bottom, as with Connie's wheelchair?"
"Because this is a wheelchair for stealing paintings, that's why," I said, and fell back, too weak to talk.
Three days later he had the wheelchair. "Okay," I told him, "make a box that looks just like a battery box, and mount it in the normal place. Only give it a door that pops open at a touch, and that you can't see—it has to look like the solid end of the box. The button must be concealed, the door should open as fast as a switchblade, and you have to be able to close it with the foot. Inside ... an extendible rail, set on ball bearings, sprung so that it shoots out when the door opens. Between the rails, a cradle that will hold the painting."
"I see," he said. "But what about the alarms? The guards?"
"Guards?" I asked. "Alarms? Oh."
The finished product arrived within forty-eight hours. The battery box looked just like a battery box, but when he lifted the cap on one of the grips and pushed the button underneath it (just as, in a fighter plane, the cannon trigger is set in the stick), the door lifted, and the painting, resting snugly in a felt-covered cradle, suddenly appeared. He pressed the button again, and the process reversed itself.
"It takes half a second to open or close," he said. "It uses oil-filled cylinders, and I quieted the button, the springs, and the latch. You may not have noticed, but you can't hear a thing."
"I noticed," I said.
Then I fell back, ill once more, and went through another period of pain and sickness. Smedjebakken was beginning to lose confidence in me. He was so disturbed that he came the next morning and said it right out.
"How can I trust you to do this thing and not ruin it?" he asked. "You're an invalid. The plan requires daring, strength, and stamina. You've been moaning and groaning for a month."
"I was poisoned!" I screamed.
"Poisoned by what?" Smedjebakken screamed back. "A bottle of the best champagne in the world?"
"Yes."
"Since when does drinking champagne make you sick for a month? What are you? I mean, how tough are you if your body thinks champagne is Drāno?"
"I'm as tough as anyone. Only I recoil from what is false or ugly or untrue (untrue being different from false). I can do extraordinary things at times, but I weaken in the presence of evil."
"Why?"
"Because, once, it beat me. I was completely vanquished, as powerless in its grip as someone paralyzed in a dream."
"And yet you're alive," Smedjebakken said, not to contradict me but to elicit from me the rest of the story, which was not mine to tell.
"Purely by chance."
"Well," said Smedjebakken, "you're not all that bad, but I do hope you get better. When will you get better?"
"Soon," I answered, "soon."
That night I dreamed that I lay in a summer forest, where the trees gave life and depth to air that otherwise would have been only an ether. The birds sang beautifully without knowing what they were saying or why, like a wave that rolls and breaks in the sun. The sea was close by, down a hill, vacant and blue. And the flowers seemed to have been lighted from within. Though resting and at peace, I was not happy, for I knew that this was the last place, and that after it there would be no other.
When I awoke the next morning, the poison had left my system and my affliction had vanished. I was strong, energetic, and confident after the month of sleep.
"Let's go to the museum," I said to Smedjebakken, who was eating, or rather, was about to eat, a kosher turkey anus. (Since Sleepy Hollow, I had grown rather fond of them.)
"To scout it out?"
"No. To do the job."
"Don't be ridiculous," he said. "We're going to have to practice for a month. I've never seen the painting, I don't even know the plan."
"I have been practicing for a month," I said pompously. "And it will go just like that." I snapped my fingers.
"You've been in bed for a month, totally incapacitated, while I've been turning my house into a factory and making hollowed-out wheelchairs."
"Don't you understand?" I asked.
"Don't I understand what?"
"Where I get my capacities."
"No. I don't understand where you get your capacities. Where do you get your capacities?"
"From my incapacities."
"You get your capacities from your incapacities."
"Yes."
"Well, that's great. As for me, I get my capacities from my capacities."
"Then you've got a level road ahead of you. You're probably quite happy."
"As happy goes."
"The road for me has deep hollows," I told him, "and high hills. I can get to the top of the hills because I've been to the bottom of the hollows. By the way, do you have a wire-tool that produces a jagged cut?"
He looked at me without understanding. "Yes, though not deliberately: I've been too cheap to throw it away."
"Good. That's what we need. I'll explain the plan on the subway. Wear an overcoat that's very baggy."
"Okay. I have one left from my muffin craze. But why?"
"For the cat. Catch a cat."
"Catch a cat," he mumbled. There is no question in my mind that at that moment he was certain that we were both going to grow old in jail, but he stuck to my guns.
"Get the reproduction."
Smedjebakken brought up the chair, pushed the button, and lifted the painting from the cradle.
"Look at the back," I said.
Varnished to the back of the canvas was a row of parallel gold wires, all of which were connected in series to two copper wires about a foot and a half in length.
"I did it this morning before you got up," I said. "The wires still need to be snipped at the ends with your wire-tool."
"It looks professional."
"This is how the more valuable paintings at the Met are alarmed. I know because Constance is on the board, we went to many meetings, I asked, and they showed me."
"I see," Smedjebakken said, his confidence in me apparently beginning to return, "but did you say that we have to catch a cat?"
The cat, a huge gray and mother-of-pearl Manx that we scooped up from the back of a pizza place in Astoria, went into Smedjebakken's coat at Madison and Eighty-sixth. For the few blocks to the museum and until I pushed the wheelchair into the Renaissance-Italian rooms, the cat fought like a Tasmanian devil, but Smedjebakken was so tough that he merely grimaced. Now and then a mother-of-pearl-colored paw would shoot from between Smedjebakken's lapels, he would cough and stuff it back in, and we would continue on our way. No one noticed, because people tend to avert their eyes from someone in a wheelchair, a fact of which Smedjebakken was well aware.
That was the hard part, the cat putting huge welts in Smedjebakken's torso, which bloodied him like a bird.
We came to the Madonna and waited until the room was empty. Smedjebakken gratefully opened his coat, and the cat leapt out and ran forward at about sixty miles an hour. We had aimed him at the adjacent room, where a guard was stationed: every three rooms had a sleepy old man in uniform, who was not allowed to sit down at any time, and to whom nothing ever happened.
"Get that cat!" I screamed at the top of my lungs. As the cat flew by, the guard instinctively gave chase. Smedjebakken rose from the chair, the pliers in his right hand, and I lifted the painting from the wall. I had opened the box already. As I removed the painting, Smedjebakken cut the wire, and every bell in the world began to ring.
He lifted the replica from the cradle and fell against the wall. I put the original in its place, closed the door with my foot, and toppled the wheelchair. In the last few seconds, I opened Smedjebakken's overcoat to reveal his blood-stained front. "Moan," I commanded.
"There's no one here yet," he whispered.
"Ars gratia artis," I said.
He began to moan. It all had taken less than ten seconds. We waited and waited, until, finally, we heard the pounding of many feet. Just before a phalanx of guards arrived—two with shotguns—Smedjebakken interrupted his moaning to say, "We had so much time we could have done the crossword puzzle."
"Moan!" I said. "This is the moment of truth."
The first thing they did was lift the painting from Smedjebakken's hands, and as the bells rang and Smedjebakken (purely from excitement) began to scream, I too began to scream. "He was attacked by a cat! He was attacked by a cat!"
The cat, it seems, had gone straight out the main entrance and disappeared into the Upper East Side. Most of the guards had seen him, even if only as a blur, and Smedjebakken's wounds were nothing if not genuine: his blood made the floor around us as slick as ice.
The guards had absolutely no idea what to do. Having secured what they thought was their painting, they were faced with what they thought was the victim of a cat attack. One of them announced that he was going to call an ambulance, and ran off into an infinity of Flemish landscapes.
Then appeared a preppy in an expensive suit—the assistant director. (The director was, of course, in Florence.) "What happened?" he asked of the ranking guard. As he was briefed, I petrified. This was a classmate of mine from Harvard—Cuckoo Prescott, famous for having switched his major (we called it "concentration") from ornithology to fine arts in the last term of his senior year. His thesis was entitled "Evolutionary Raptor Flight Structures in the Paintings of Sir Thomas Boney." I recognized him, and he had just as good a chance of recognizing me, except that he was off balance.
I feared that his memory of me might be quite vivid, as I had punished, him for drinking coffee, by reading him the Abbé Bobigny-Soissons-Lagare's Les Mais da Café, prior to which I had chloroformed him and wrapped him in real mummy tape that I obtained from the Department of Art & Archaeology.
What could I do? I messed up my hair, grimaced, and began to speak as if I were a Hollywood version of a Mexican bandit. (I'm afraid that Cuckoo Prescott was looking at me as I prepared for this role.)
"De cat almos keel my so
n!" I screamed. "We weel not forgeh dis!"
Cuckoo looked at us in astonishment. "Who are these people?" he asked.
"Visitors," was the reply.
All Cuckoo's flaccid genes strained to be responsible, worried, and polite. I could see that many whaling captains were spinning in the graveyards of Salem and Gloucester, sending out mystical transmissions about liability. It worked: his apologies were so profuse that they overwhelmed his suspicions. I tried not to look at him directly, and cursed myself when my Mexican bandit turned into a vaudeville Italian. I couldn't help it. One just slid into the other.
"Hey! Itsa no matta. We go to de hosp and itsa okay."
"Where are you from?" Cuckoo asked, his subconscious working meticulously.
To which Smedjebakken answered, "The District of Colombia."
What could Cuckoo say? The ambulance attendants arrived and put Smedjebakken back in the wheelchair. Then we received a royal escort through the museum, with offers of lifetime membership and huge discounts at the café and gift shop.
At Lenox Hill Hospital a doctor painted Smedjebakken's chest with Mercurochrome and gave him a tetanus shot. When he was discharged, we went straight to the apartment, showed the painting to Angelica, who was very impressed, and then wrapped it in tissue paper and green ribbon. When evening fell I went outside and walked through the clear dusk as orange and yellow lights blazed across Manhattan. I brought my package to the main desk of the museum just before closing time.
"This is a package for Mr. Prescott," I said to the receptionist, who was very gracious. "Would you take down a message for him?"
"Certainly," she said, seizing paper and pencil.
"One: It's always better for a museum to display originals, and this is the original.
"Two: He can keep the replica.
"Three: Coffee is bad."
After we stole—and returned, the Madonna del Lago—we were ready for the real thing.