Harry loved being a robber. Robbery, in his limited experience, was a major buzz: the blast of brouhaha and hoo-ha in the papers; everyone searching for him. Owning a secret this big was as exciting as owning a gorilla. So he had no complaints with the career choice. He was in it eyebrow-deep and grinning.

But he did have misgivings about Turton as a partner in crime. Quite frankly, he had come to think Turton was mad. And not just because of his fixation with painting pussy, or the fact his only friends were bikies and a Michael Jackson impersonator, or his obsession with the success of Whiteley and Olson. Because, get this, the night they went to knock off the Weeping Woman, they snuck into the gallery and Turton started jumping around like a gibbon. A French gibbon, firing off insults and threats to the other paintings in the gallery in an accent he doesn’t have. Harry got the idea he was pretending to be Picasso. Or maybe, with the stress and suspense and all, he’d flipped out and really thought he was Picasso.

Anyway, when Turton took his clothes off and brown-eyed paintings and flashed his todger around and generally made a lunatic out of himself, Harry knew they were all on shaky ground. How was this old guy going to hold it together with the cops sniffing around? And if Turton tumbled them all into jail with his lunatic high jinks, the old bastard would be able to get himself out by the same method, pleading insanity as a legal defence. Any jury would agree he was wigged out once they got a look at him.

But Harry would cop the full brunt of the law because he was clearly sane and in it for monetary gain, being under inordinate financial pressure. That could be testified to by many witnesses who had seen him threatened by debt collectors of a mangy sort. Because, after Mireille’s cheque bounced, Chloe Gwyther sent round two guys to the NGV School of Art. Chloe Gwyther, a respectable woman who owns a damned gallery. There are legitimate ways of pursuing debts, but she sent round two young alcoholics covered in grazes and sores, who smelt of sad ruin. They crashed into Turton’s studio in the School of Art, swearing and tipping shit over and asking people, ‘Where’s this fucking Harry?’

Sedify Bent, a coward, pointed Harry out with a bottle of turpentine and they told Harry to lie on the floor real quick. Which he did, because one of them was swinging a bayonet in circles over his head as if to motivate a battalion to charge. Harry lay on his back and the guy without the bayonet snatched a paintbrush out of a jar on a desk, dipped it in some yellow paint and grabbed a sheet of A3 paper from a bench top. He put the handle of the brush in Harry’s mouth and told him, ‘Bite that.’ Harry clamped down on the brush.

So there he was lying on his back with this paintbrush sticking out of his mouth like a petunia and the guy held the sheet of A3 paper down towards the bristle end of the brush and told him, ‘Paint, boy. Go on, paint a picture.’ Being frightened and bewildered, Harry moved his head from side to side, sliding the yellow bristles across the paper.

‘No, boy,’ the man said. ‘You got no neck muscles. Okay? Keep your head still. Just use your tongue. Move the brush with your tongue.’ So Harry impaled the point of the brush handle in the tip of his tongue and using his teeth as a fulcrum he moved the brush back and forth across the paper in little strokes about a centimetre long. The guy who wasn’t holding the paper was still helicoptering the bayonet. The guy holding the paper flipped it over and stared at the small yellow mess Harry had made and nodded as if he discerned some artistic merit there.

‘Good. Real good. You got a future as a flat-on-his-back quadriplegic artist who paints with his tongue and probably still makes love to a woman, too – builds the tongue muscle up a bit. A guy can make his way with just his tongue muscle these days. So, bon voyage to you, setting out in your quadriplegic adventures, boy. Because you are going to be a turtle on his back with only a tongue muscle to navigate his future. If you don’t pay who you know you got to pay.’

Then they walked out of the NGV art school the way they came in, swearing and breaking stuff they didn’t have to break.

All the other students stood around waiting for Harry to explain. ‘I owe a dealer for some hash,’ he told them – a totally respectable debt to have. He couldn’t bring himself to tell them that none of his paintings had sold and he owed money to the Colditz Gallery for being a twenty-four-carat fraud and a fake. And the lie was not just for his own sake. Harry reasoned that these guys looked up to him now as a beacon of hope. If he could make it, maybe they could all make it. His success suggested theirs might be imminent. He didn’t want to ruin that for them.

‘The guy’s mad as,’ he explained. ‘I forget to drop a hundred bucks around and he sends dudes. Like … call me up, man. Give me a reminder call. Jesus. I’m getting a new dealer who isn’t schizoid.’

But Harry was spooked. Idiots with bayonets could jump out of any doorway at him from now on, if Chloe Gwyther was sending flighty young drunks to threaten him with quadriplegia.

When he got to Mireille’s house he told her about the two guys and the bayonet and the little yellow painting he had painted as a probationary quadriplegic, and she sank down on her sofa and hid her face in her hands. Went still and insular over the problem. Harry tried asking her what she was thinking, calling at her, ‘Hey, hey.’ But she stayed soundless. He got her a manzanilla sherry and sat next to her, waiting. After about ten minutes she took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were red and she called herself a stupid bitch. Then she buried her head in her hands again, but she emerged a few minutes later. Taking the glass from Harry she drank it down, lifted her chin and pursed her lips, apparently setting herself to face these unexpected dangers of young drunks and quadriplegia.

‘I have an idea,’ she said, ‘to make the money to pay Chloe Gwyther. And to have some more money left over for us. We can go to Europe. Whatever we think to do.’

This was when Harry first heard Mireille’s plan. And he had to hand it to her, she had some swerves. First she buys all his paintings to make him a new sensation, then she suggests they steal the Weeping Woman to pay for them.

And the moment she suggested they steal it, Harry saw the full rainbow of the thing form over his head – the lovely laziness of theft as a means of creating art. He knew you could slave over a painting for a month, screwing down the layers of meaning, working in the drama, and gambling with the colours. Or, it suddenly occurred to him, you could steal one and have all these things blow up around you. The whole play: acts one, two and three.

The dark fear of being caught, the bright rightness of the cops, the yellow anguish of the bureaucrats and pollies, the bursting beautiful fireworks of them, the thieves making a million bucks. It’s a painting. The whole caper is a canvas, and Harry knew they could make it either a masterpiece or a dud. He definitely wanted to go for masterpiece. He wanted to put all the elements in there to make it good. Certainly, sell the painting to that major-league oinker, Laszlo. Sure, taunt a grandee like Speed Draper in the newspaper, and show him up for what he is. And why not get art in the news? Have Mr and Mrs Citizen out in the burbs ogling Picasso for the first time. Have them hate him … or wake to him.

And why not make a shitload of dough for themselves, which, this country being all fevered up with business and sport, Harry was starting to suspect he was never going to do with a brush. And why not highlight the fact that arts administrators are gorging themselves on great scads of public cash while the artists live like welfare mothers?

Harry didn’t see a downside yet. And, man, most beautiful of all, then just give the painting back. Hand it over like they’re disgusted with the shrill panic of the authorities, like they know its true worth and the authorities only see dollar signs. And disappear. Never be heard of again.

All artists are thieves. Every artist who ever entered a gallery stole something from it. Snuck out with at least a morsel of someone’s masterpiece in his or her mind’s eye. Artists steal from one another. They steal from strangers. They steal from the dead. Then they get as angry as hell and run for their lawyers when some critic points out how deftly they’ve learnt to steal. Art is theft and theft is a risk. Thieves and artists end up in prisons or on yachts. Harry tackled this theft wanting the yacht. But the yacht was hard to get.

They twiddled their thumbs while Harry taunted Speed Draper in the newspaper. Laszlo wouldn’t take his calls. Laszlo wouldn’t have lunch. Laszlo had to make sure they weren’t going to get caught before he’d even agree to look at her. It was setting out to be a long ten days.

Harry lived in a room in a boarding house on Cecil Street in South Melbourne. His dad paid for it, signing cheques while clicking his tongue behind gritted teeth, shaking his head. His dad had been a self-confessed hero in the Korean War, who had seen the truth about life there, in battle, and was disgusted to have a son who thought art might be as enlightening as war. He wanted Harry to join the army. Vietnam was over but some other educational skirmish would flare up soon.

Harry’s room was fungal and dark, the wooden floorboards and windowsill drilled with wormholes, the walls stained by damp. It wasn’t really a place to paint but he called it his studio. It had a sink, a microwave and a table ranged with paint tubes, brushes, books, jars of coloured water and the many failed paintings one accumulates while trying to make a communication as enlightening as the war your father fought. He slept in a single iron bed against one wall with a few greasy blankets. Down the hall was a communal bathroom where toothless men took turns to stare in amazement at themselves in the mirror, trying to figure out how it was that just last week they were boys with their hair combed neat by their mothers.

Late one night a few days after they stole the Weeping Woman, Harry was in his studio with waves of rain crashing on the window. He was smoking, sitting on his bed, a glass of cask red in his hand, staring unhappily at a half-finished painting of Mireille. It wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do. It looked like she’d undergone a course of high-voltage correctional therapy that had fried her perspicacity and left her dimwitted; blandly handsome, but not a fire starter who stole stuff and lied to people as if lies were no more than chocolate-flavoured truth. A painting of Mireille needed to suggest amorality and fearlessness. He was thinking maybe he should strip her off, paint her bare-breasted, then surround her with bears and have her laughing at them. Not circus bears, angry bears from the deep forest. Sit her outdoors, bare-breasted, laughing at these bears with their furrowed muzzles. A neat external projection of her psychology.

He was nodding his head, having decided tits and bears were needed, when someone tapped apologetically on his door. Must be one of his mates just fallen out of a nightclub, trying not to wake the neighbours. Or one of the old guys who live here, wanting to share his wine.

‘I’m busy,’ he said through the door. ‘With tits and bears.’ The idiocies Harry spoke to his neighbours often excused him their company.

But a rich whisper answered. A cultured voice, right up at the keyhole. ‘Harry Broome? Could I have a word?’

‘Who’s there?’

‘Weston Guest.’

Weston Guest. Knows Harry’s name. Is here at his studio at midnight. In Harry’s line of work, Weston Guest is the king-maker. The guy is an aristocrat travelling through the shitty village of Art in a carriage pulled by white horses. Those who live in the shitty village of Art kneel in the mud as he rides by, and if he stops and smiles at your wares, if he nods, or squints his eyes over some hidden depth he’s found in a work of yours, then you shout it from the rooftops. You tell your mates. You boast to them that Weston Guest likes your stuff. ‘He ogled it … for thirty seconds. He’s definitely gone on me. I’m telling you, guys, he’s reaching for his chequebook. He’s about to buy me like a Grey Street lady.’

Because if Weston Guest buys one of your paintings for the NGV, you are made. You are anointed. And once you are anointed the gloss won’t wash off for ten years, and any crap you turn out will be gold-plated. Because Weston Guest is never wrong. He lost the power to be wrong when he became the director of the NGV. On many nights Harry has dreamt of Weston Guest pulling up before one of his paintings as he sweeps through the NGV School of Art. His eyes would boggle with delight and his jaw fall with astonishment. ‘Who … Who painted this?’

But now, as he steps through Harry’s doorway to shake his hand, Harry knows he can only be here to ruin him. He is wrapped in a trench coat dripping rain, his features pale and anguished. The theft is taking a toll on him.

‘Hello, Harry.’ He looks around the room. ‘A perfect hovel. Why are young artists so convinced talent flourishes amid squalor, as if effluvium were the staff of genius?’

‘It’s not always this messy.’ An obvious lie: the detritus is layered and historic.

‘Oh, I’m not criticising. I’m reminiscing. I used to live this way myself. Don’t think you’re a new phenomenon. Things haven’t changed since the time of Michelangelo, who lived with thirteen cats.’

‘Would you like a glass of wine?’

Weston ignores the offer, lost now in studying the painting of Mireille set up on the easel. ‘She’s pretty.’ A naked criticism.

‘I’ve only got … that … so far. I can’t get any deeper. I haven’t shown what she’s capable of. But I will. I’ve got some ideas. I’ll get her.’

‘And what is she capable of?’

‘Oh … you know.’ She stole your painting. ‘She sort of snarls at the common man.’

‘Have her snarl, then. At a common man.’

‘Yeah. But, you know, I want to do it subtly.’ Harry realises it’s stupid to be trying to convince this guy his art is good. Weston hasn’t come here at midnight to anoint him. He has come here because he knows. Something has led him here, to Harry. Some tip-off, an anonymous call, a fingerprint at the crime scene, intuition.

So far, Harry has only worried about the police. If they got caught would he do community service? Be put on a good behaviour bond? Do time in jail? He hasn’t yet worried what the theft might do to his career. Before the furore, it seemed to him such a cool thing to do, steal a Picasso, that he figured the village of Art, populated by cool cats, would love him for it, would want to elect him mayor. It would enhance his standing. There goes the guy that stole the Weeping Woman. Stole it and gave it back.

He hadn’t reckoned on the damage losing a Picasso would inflict on Weston Guest professionally. The board of a major international gallery is hardly likely to appoint as a director a man with a history of misplacing masterpieces. Weston either has to get the Weeping Woman back or his career is over. The anguish on his face is as much to do with his own future as it is with worry over the painting itself.

‘Harry, I’m here about the Weeping Woman.’

I am here to ruin you. To make you an untouchable. To devalue your art forever. ‘That boy … that Broome boy … he can’t paint.’ A mere utterance, but it will become lore. Harry Broome can’t paint. Harry Broome has been passed over. He has a thousand scenes in his head of his beautiful years as a renowned artist: snorting coke with rock stars, lecturing to starry-eyed wannabes at art schools, the hush as he walks into a harbourside bistro, de Niro holding still for hours (though he would kill for a smoke) while Harry sketches him. But not if Weston Guest says, no. If Weston Guest says a boy is a dud, then that boy better try another country. That boy better try another calling. He can’t be an artist in Oz.

Maybe if I confess, Harry thinks. Repent. Throw myself on his mercy. Pretend I was coerced into this theft by a band of thugs led by Turton. Hand the painting over and beg forgiveness. Might that work? If he returns to the gallery with the painting under his arm, might I come out of this a hero, as some sort of reformed golden boy? A wayward lad saved by Weston Guest’s lucid plea for morality.

And Turton? What of him? He is a demonstrable lunatic. In the dock he will tug at his sideburns like a fur-trapper flaying a beaver, confirming everyone’s view of him as guilty. The blame will attach to him naturally, and rightly so. He is in a position of trust at the gallery and should never have allowed this theft to happen.

Weston Guest reaches out and touches Harry’s arm. ‘Are you all right, Harry? You’re pale as a geisha.’

‘Mr Guest …’

‘Don’t be alarmed at my being here. I’m calling on all the young artists, one by one. Because of the Cultural Terrorists’ demand for extra funding for young artists, we suspect a young artist may be involved. So I’m travelling the town, delivering the same message to you all.’

The blood returns to Harry’s limbs and lips. He is visiting all the young artists. ‘A message?’ Harry would never turn Turton over to this little fop who, in his mustard-coloured bow tie, looks like a jockey throttling himself with linguine. Harry peruses him, head to toe. ‘A message? I’m all ears.’

Weston looks around, perhaps for a place to sit. Finding every surface here likely to stain his clothes, he pockets his hands and widens his stance. ‘I’m told you’re – connected. You get around. People talk of you, anyway.’

‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘Of course not, Harry. But you might know someone who knows someone who knows something.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You’d be surprised. My father laid a carpet for Ronnie Biggs.’

‘Who?’

‘The point is: the Melbourne art scene is small. We’re all only one remove from one another. You may be a buddy of the thief.’

‘An insulting suggestion.’

‘Without knowing it. My father didn’t know he was laying Ronnie Biggs’ carpet.’

‘What did he think he was doing?’

‘Harry, I’m not interested in who stole the painting. The thieves themselves are nothing to me. I’m only interested in getting the painting back. If efforts to bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice were a hindrance to our attempts to get the painting back, then I would resist those efforts. With that in mind, as far as I’m concerned if she were to turn up tomorrow in a locker at Spencer Street, there would be no more questions asked. Case closed. I’d like people to know that. If the perpetrators knew that, it might help us get her back. And if you were to spread that among your acquaintances I would be grateful.’

‘Well, yeah, I’ll mention it around. There’s a sort of pardon on offer if she turns up at Spencer Street.’

‘Not exactly a pardon. Suffice to say the identities of the thieves will not be pursued with any great vigour once the painting is returned.’

‘Yeah. Okay, I’ll spread that.’

‘Thank you.’ Weston nods his head, backing towards the door as he ties the belt of his trench coat. ‘It’s been nice meeting you, Harry. Turton has asked me to sit in on a selection of his end-of-year pracs, so we’ll meet again then.’ He holds up his hand, saying goodbye, but stops at the door, remembering something. ‘When I knocked you said you were busy. With tits and bears, if I heard right? What did that mean? Busy with tits and bears?’

Harry points at the painting of Mireille on the easel. ‘It was just an idea. I’m sort of bogged down trying to paint her. I can’t get inside her head. So I thought, and it seems stupid now, but I thought I might take her top off. Paint her bare-chested, surrounded by grizzly bears – you know, man-eaters – and have her laughing at them, unafraid of danger. Show her psychology by having her react to the bears with laughter. Sort of shit you think of late at night when nothing’s working out.’

Weston walks back into the room, his eyes fixed on the painting. He sits on a chair, forgetting the threat to his clothes, seemingly consumed by Harry’s idea. He places a finger to his lips and leans forwards with a blank look on his face. Harry is supposed to hear the whirring of cogs behind his eyes as he weighs the idea.

After minutes he rises to his feet slowly, holding his left fist in his right hand beneath his chin. The thing has been weighed and Weston is about to tell Harry its weight. ‘Harry, that is an extremely clever trope. Even just imagining her surrounded by bears, her laughing, I want to meet her. And a portrait’s primary function should be to imbue the viewer with a desire to meet the subject. Paint it, I’d like to see it. I think the gallery may be interested.’

Harry’s mind begins to veer between the half-dozen friends he could call at midnight to tell of his luck. Who would he call first? Mireille, Sedify Bent, Turton, his father? Weston Guest has got the hots for me. Weston Guest is about to buy me like a Grey Street lady.