The Death of Noah Glass Page 3

  ‘Sorry for your loss,’ Detective Malone began. It might have been a lost watch or kitten, judging by his muted tone. ‘This is not about the coroner’s investigation. There is another matter.’

  Here Malone paused, as if on television. He leaned forward, elbows on his desk, commanding their attention. Martin looked away from his compelling face.

  ‘Before your father’s death, only three days before, a report came from Italy alleging a certain object had been stolen. This object was of Italian origin.’ Here, defeated by police-talk, he slowed to consult a sheet of paper. ‘From Sicily, in fact. The report names your father, Noah Glass, as a suspect in a gallery theft and the handling of a stolen national treasure.’

  Detective Malone looked up, expecting a response, a denial, some acknowledgement, at least, of his extravagant and enticingly foreign information. His grey, foreboding face again loomed before them. Evie was staring into space, Martin at the clock.

  ‘Can you confirm your father spent ten weeks in Sicily and returned about four weeks ago?’

  ‘You clearly know this already.’

  ‘The Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Agency have asked for our help in investigating the case of Noah Glass. We need to know what you know. We expect you to be frank.’

  The case of Noah Glass. Was there a case?

  It was Evie who spoke up. ‘We were told nothing about this. Doesn’t it throw suspicion on the death?’

  ‘Coincidence,’ said Malone. ‘The death was initially thought suspicious because of the Italian report, but, as you now know, the coroner ruled natural causes.’

  He spoke in a matter-of-fact way that Martin found infuriating.

  ‘But it seems he’s some kind of suspect? What,’ added Martin, ‘is Noah alleged to have stolen?’

  He liked the way his own voice sounded; this was the right question and he’d remembered to say alleged.

  ‘A sculpture, a bust, late nineteenth century, by an artist named Vincenzo Ragusa.’ The detective extracted a printout from a file and placed it before them on the desk. Under a satin sheen the face of a Japanese woman stared out at them. Japanese? Surely a bungle. They noticed her beauty.

  Martin snorted. ‘There’s obviously some mistake. My father’s field was quattrocento painting, mostly Florentine. He had no interest at all in nineteenth-century art, certainly not sculpture. He visited Italy a great deal and wrote art-historical articles. That’s it, that’s all. They’re looking for someone to blame.’

  Detective Malone said, ‘Nevertheless.’

  Martin and Evie waited.

  ‘Nevertheless, the blokes upstairs love an international request. Makes them feel important. Some desk-bound bugger is hoping for a trip to Palermo. Take the missus, have a holiday. Drink some vino. It’s not your usual break and enter, with some loser from the suburbs ripping off a phone or a telly.’

  They noticed wry scepticism, almost disloyal, in the detective’s attempt to charm them.

  ‘So what was your father doing in Palermo?’

  Martin could have said ‘research’ but was suddenly unsure. Why, he was thinking, would the Italians care about a local piece from the nineteenth century, when there were so many important thefts to chase? It sounded phoney, some speculative pretext or other. And his father was a model of bourgeois rectitude. No criminal, no way.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ Evie said softly. ‘Why do we even have to deal with this? The funeral was only yesterday.’

  Martin heard an implicit plea in her voice. She was right, it was monstrously insensitive, someone’s balls-up or Walter bloody Mitty fantasy; a minor official in Sicily needing a name to pin to a mislaid artwork. There was a world out there of dodgy art deals and the sneaky smuggling of treasures. But no one here knew of Noah’s righteousness. The hard light of the office was beginning to annoy him. They were all bluish beneath it, vein-coloured and strange. Martin examined his own wrists and considered the ugliness of skin.

  When Detective Frank Malone dismissed them ten minutes later, he handed over his card. ‘Anything you think of. Call.’ Fed up with their failure to be impressed, he lifted his long, dark face and pointed with his chin towards the exit.

  It had been the swiftest of meetings, for so grave an accusation. Was this how the law worked, all implication, no nonsense, and the hint of urgent procedure? Language like strategy. Rigid adherence to codes. Even the word ‘detective’ was flagrant when linked to his father.

  Without umbrellas they were beginning to soak. Martin’s hair was flattened, his round face glowed. Evie looked bedraggled and overwrought. Already a mess, Martin thought; she shouldn’t have bothered. They ducked into a café and ordered macchiatos. The scent of arabica coffee was reassuring. Then, realising they were both hungry, Martin ordered again, two gigantic ‘all-day breakfasts’: baked beans, fried eggs, cooked tomatoes, avocado, bacon, mushrooms, with a toppling ziggurat of toast on the side. This inelegant assemblage intimidated Evie. Martin watched as she lifted the eggs with her fork and placed them atop his serve. Four eggs, six this morning. He studied her face.

  ‘I thought policemen didn’t believe in coincidence.’

  ‘It’s crazy, it’s like a giallo,’ Martin responded.

  Evie remained silent.

  ‘Giallo, you remember? Italian detective stories. Yellow covers. Hard-boiled, nuggety crims, dodgy perps, that kind of thing. Something grisly and revolting in the backstreets of Naples.’

  ‘Jesus, Martin. It’s our father we’re talking of.’

  ‘That woman who sold them from a stall outside the place we used to stay in—where was it, now? The woman with the evil eye and the mole on her chin.’

  Evie sighed, shuffled her food.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he added. He saw that she was hurt, and that he’d failed to judge her mood. She’d missed the nevertheless. Though she’d wiped her face, there were still tiny moisture beads clinging to her hair and a liquid pathos to her flushed dishevelment. Rainfall amplified the traffic sounds and there was the whoosh-whoosh of passing cars, all heading down the hill, then up again, towards Anzac Bridge.

  ‘Eat up,’ he urged, finding nothing better to say. Then he added, ‘Detective Malone?’

  And she smiled and nodded with a mouthful of toast, and they were collusive again, brother and sister again, seeing the world with one pair of eyes.

  ‘Glasgow, 1910?’

  And she let out an involuntary laugh, lifting her hand to her mouth too late to prevent a small spray of crumbs. Neither could have said why the clock amused them.

  This was what Martin relied on. In his own disintegrating state, he wanted her to be funny. He wanted his sister to confirm the illogic of things, to notice what he noticed, and to corroborate his mental agitation. The loss of their father was more ruinous than he could yet express. It was a void for which he had no clarifying words or images. He would ask Evie more about the sky man, de Saussure. He would tell her of his artistic project, inspired by Barbie and Piero. And he would speak to his sister of private matters that he could reveal to no other person alive.

  4

  AT THE GUESTHOUSE Evie changed her clothes once again, spreading her damp cotton dress across the back of a chair. Why had she not decided to stay with Martin? It would be wise to save money, to talk more, to share the same space in a companionable grief. But she knew that they would both need time to retreat, and this pastel room, budget-furnished, suited her well. It had a grumbling air conditioner and a mouldy smell, but it overlooked the street, so she could lean on the windowsill and envision her nowhere an anywhere. This contraction of existence felt appropriate to her mourning. Here she might feel what she must—here, in a small anonymous room, where she could fling her bag in a corner and hang her scarf over the mirror, covering it as they did in traditional rituals. Evie liked the idea that she prohibited her own reflection. Corpses and mirrors. No corpse here, but had there been a clock, she would have stopped it; had there been a black armband, she would have w
orn it. Nothing had added nobility to his passing: a crematorium service, not a burial as he would have wished, a brother and sister, mostly estranged, still prickly in conversation, and now cops and robbers and an almost overwhelming sense of absurdity. The dead did not rise. Christianity was a lie. She imagined the scorn of believers, even as she enacted minor ceremonies of appeasement.

  Unlike his atheist children, Noah had retained his religious beliefs and might have expected a crystalline hereafter. He had enjoyed provoking them with God-talk, mostly of transcendence and the persisting soul, with pious Christmas cards—always a classical nativity—and intolerance of the casual blasphemies of swearing and wealth. He’d been a Methodist before he became an Anglican, and something misfortunate and austere remained, an insecurity he attributed to unspecified events in his childhood.

  They’d loved their affectionate banter, she and Noah. Neither owed the other an explanation, but to preserve their dignity and connection, they fought and teased. To express feeling, they’d practised indignation, each unyielding and a little fierce. What to others might have appeared as discord was their expression of love.

  The warm rain continued, slowing to a drizzle. From her window Evie could see a large fig tree, dome-shaped, its black leaves sagging low under the afternoon showers. The road was silver. The traffic was light, seeming behind the glass to float noiselessly past. Martin had agreed they would meet later for dinner, and that they would not drink alcohol.

  Evie sat on the double bed of her rented room and allowed herself to contemplate the accusation that her father was a criminal. That he had stolen an artwork was inconceivable. He deplored the art market and was appalled at the prices Martin’s work commanded. He had always insisted on the immaterial aspects of art, so that when she had objected to religious symbols and institutional power, he had sighed and told her that she was missing the point. The point was the magpie on the roof of the stable, he said. It was the fallible body displayed. It was the unearthly made visible. It was the way one was obliged to stand still and peer into the stopped world of a single image, to consider first things and last things and the threshold of a frame. She had joked: how mystical he was becoming, how like the figures he studied.

  Noah’s apartment in Elizabeth Bay overlooked the harbour. It was full of souvenirs of his travels, unusual objects, curios, but nothing particularly valuable. Evie now wanted to visit his rooms, to see evidence of his work, his papers, his library, his notes, to encounter again the small items he had daily cherished. Though she was at home in the guesthouse, it occurred to her only now that she might stay at her father’s apartment. She would rest her head on his cool pillow and dream him back into life. His rooms would comfort her, or perhaps not; his traces would at least slow or moderate her reckoning of his passing. The more she thought of it, the more solid the idea became. Martin had the keys; she would ask for them at their dinner.

  Evie had locked up her flat in East St Kilda, and told her boss at the bookshop that she was taking a few weeks’ break. She sent farewell messages to her friends, and a vague note to her sometime lover, a man inconveniently, or perhaps conveniently, married to someone else. It had been easy to leave. She’d been untypically decisive with the shockwave of the news, but in truth wasn’t sure what she would do in Sydney. Already she was feeling inert and superficial. Three years ago, she’d abandoned university work as a philosopher, and she didn’t want to resume her academic contacts; she knew few people in Sydney beyond her old field. There was no defining purpose now that the funeral was over. In any case, she imagined herself unrecognisable.

  Evie kicked off her sandals, climbed onto the bed and opened the book she’d brought with her, a history of the Russian Revolution. In her peculiar habit of mind, she was committing the names of revolutionaries to memory in alphabetical order. She already knew she would start with Abramovitch and end with Zhukovsky and Zof. Good to have some Zs. How rare it was to have Zs to play with. It must be a failure of the English-speaking world, she thought, to have neglected the suave authority of a name or thing beginning with Z. With no chores and no wish to be a wandering tourist, she sank into the easy sublimation of reading, and forgot her despondency almost at once. The only interruption was when Angela sent a text message saying that Nina wanted to see her favourite aunt. Evie replied that she would come tomorrow. The afternoon was entirely hers.

  She considered another series of sub-lists—Decembrists, perhaps, or Narodniks. She was aware of the archaism and oddity of her indulgence. Her alphabetical inclination and wish to order might be a named pathology. Someone somewhere must have studied it, and found a distant cause. A childhood germ, a trauma perhaps, a mean genetic malfunction. But in this practice Evie passed her time serenely, and relished the merit of learning in her idiosyncratic way. As if tuned to a devotion or spiritual exercises, she became still, centred and closed in on herself.

  When it was time to prepare to meet Martin again, Evie was ready. She rose and brushed her hair by touch. Loaded with her new alphabetical lists, she felt almost replenished.

  ~

  He’d made a serious effort. Martin had tidied his house, stowed the dead pot plant behind the couch and even bought flowers, lisianthus. He’d arranged them in a black plastic vase on the kitchen table. Evie stared at them, wondering how long ago he must last have bought decorative flowers. For Angela, perhaps. For an anniversary or celebration. She looked at the purple and white blossoms, blazoned in a loose composition against the lime green of a fresh tablecloth. He had placed three navel oranges, just so, at the base of the vase. She saw her brother’s skill. He understood the transforming juxtaposition of things, he noticed hue and texture, he knew how a bloodshot vision could be revived by setting three colours together.

  Martin stretched out an arm. ‘Come,’ he said. Pasta was bubbling in a pot on the stove; a salad—almost unnaturally multicoloured—awaited its dressing on the sideboard. A bottle of fizzing water was open alongside two tumblers. She watched him hover over the stovetop, checking and tasting. His shirt was speckled with oil, proclaiming the slapdash of his cooking. There was the flourish of a tea towel handling a saucepan. Her brother served the meal with an inexperienced rush; he hurried back and forth, could not find the parsley, and fretted with the service as he made her sit at the table. But his efforts were triumphant, and he beamed as he spooned penne arrabbiata into bowls and sprinkled it with parmesan. They both ate their entire portions and were pleased they’d resisted wine. After he had cleared the plates, Martin made coffee. They were enveloped in a unanimous and absent-minded calm. The best meals, Evie thought, are casual and fast.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  ‘Later, we’ll talk later. I can’t now, Martin. I can’t talk about Noah right now.’

  ‘That crime, what do you think?’

  ‘Not now.’

  Why did he make her repeat? How could he not know her feelings?

  ‘Later, then.’

  ‘Later.’

  They sipped at their coffee. She waited for him to resume; there was a boyishness in the way he seemed energised now, and returned to the world.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Martin said, ‘about a trip to Italy. Sicily. I’d like us to go together.’

  So this was the purpose of the meal, this was the proposition. With dour satisfaction Evie thought ‘no’. But instead she said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Obvious reasons. To get away. To honour the old man. To eat more pasta.’

  Here he smiled, but was cautious. She could detect in his offhand manner a wish to persuade and please her, yet all the while she was thinking: what a disaster that would be, to travel with Martin, to have to deal with his moods, and his self-importance and his immature copying of their father.

  ‘I have no money,’ she said.

  ‘No problem, I have plenty. Just think about it—you don’t have to answer me now.’ Martin was losing his composure. ‘Don’t you want to know too? What Noah was doing there?’

&
nbsp; Evie stared at the vase of lisianthus. She could not respond. She choked at the idea of an investigation into her father. And though reluctant to concede it, she knew that Martin, inexplicably, had more intrinsic vitality to counter their loss. She was irritable, dull; he was already imagining new beginnings and the resumption of real life.

  ‘I need to go to his apartment. Would you object if I stayed there? I need to sort some things out…’

  Martin raised his tumbler of water, as if offering a toast. ‘So sort,’ he said.

  When their evening concluded, she had agreed to nothing. They stood closely, silently, facing each other. The importance of what had not yet been said hung fog-like between them. But Martin had given her the keys to their father’s apartment, and she was already anticipating the taxi drive in the morning and the relocation of her luggage.

  The guesthouse room looked dreary when she returned. The daylight and sheltering fig had given the room its air of hospitality, but by night the furnishings were clammy and oppressive. The covered mirror looked pointless; no corpse here. A television hung from the ceiling like a black dead eye. Evie located the remote and watched the screen, unseeing. American crime drama. An improbably good-looking detective was going through her generic motions: confrontation, argument, rapid talk into a phone. A car pulled up in front of a brownstone, and detectives in long coats slammed its doors, turned in an arc and strode up the stoop. There was a female body, prone, and a fabricated tension. There was a babble of law language and a mishmash of cop threat.

  At the ad break Evie switched off, showered, then fell onto the bed. The thin curtains admitted a chalky street light, traffic sounded in a continuous rainy shoosh, and in her troubled mind there was too much distraction to sleep. Somewhere in the dark was the gift of lisianthus, set forth for her benefit on her brother’s kitchen table, the pot plant hidden away, the effort of a meal. These signs of his concern had unaccountably moved her.