Working, as she does, for an important man, Annie Truss’s days are full of excitement. Right now, for instance, she is whiting out a Y that will, if subtly obliterated, be replaced with a T, which will begin the word Titian in a letter to the governor-general that Weston Guest has dictated to her. She is wondering if white-out is acceptable for gubernatorial correspondence or whether she should type the whole letter again. As she closes her eyes to visualise the governor-general reading the letter she has typed, the phone rings. Blindly she creeps her left hand across the desktop and picks up the receiver as the governor-general frowns at the whited-out Y in her mind’s eye. She tears the letter from the typewriter and screws it up.
‘National Gallery of Victoria, Weston Guest’s office. Annie speaking. Can I tell him who’s calling? Well, can I tell him what it’s regarding? Saving? Turton Pym’s sorry arse? Saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse.’ She reads aloud as she scribbles this on a Spirax pad, the tone of her voice unchanged. Her second incoming line rings before she can put the first call through and she tells the first caller to hold, please, and presses the flashing ‘2’ button on her phone.
‘National Gallery of Victoria. Weston Guest’s office. Annie speaking. Yes, Mr Draper, I’ll see if he’s in. Hold one moment please.’ She writes ‘Speed Draper – great news’ on her pad, just below ‘Saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse.’ With both calls on hold she shouts to Weston through their adjoining door. ‘Mr Guest, I’ve got a guy on line one who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse, and Speed Draper on line two who says he has great news about the stolen painting. It really is Mr Draper.’ They have had a number of hoax calls since the painting was stolen.
Weston has an Arnold Shore landscape spread on his desk and is hunkered over it, peering at it through a magnifying glass when Annie shouts to him. He doesn’t bother to move until he hears her mention Speed Draper and great news, then he comes up out of that painting and drops the magnifying glass and begins gesticulating at her through the glass wall; waving his arms, pointing at his phone, ushering the call onwards.
‘Speed Draper. Speed Draper,’ he tells her.
She patches the call through and Weston cools, takes a breath, and lets it ring three times before answering it.
‘Weston Guest.’
‘Get down to Spencer Street station, Weston. We think we’ve found her in a locker.’
Weston lays a hand flat on his stomach. ‘Oh, thank God. Is she damaged?’
‘We’re waiting on a key. Get down here and you can verify if she’s genuine or not.’
‘I’ll be there in five. Don’t let the police touch her, for God’s sake. Wait for me.’ As he hangs up Weston begins shouting at Annie to get him a car, call the trustees, forget the car, he’ll go on foot. He runs a comb through his hair and flounces his bow tie and rushes from the office, telling Annie to wish him luck and leaving her to wonder what to tell the weirdo who wants to talk about saving Turton Pym’s sorry arse, whose call is still flashing at her on line one.
‘I’m sorry, sir. Mr Guest has left the office for the day.’ There is silence on the other end and Annie asks, ‘Sir?’
‘Tell him Turton Pym’s in locker two two eight at Flinders Street,’ Larry Skunk says.
‘Mr Guest won’t be back today, sir.’
‘Send roses, then, bitch.’ He hangs up.
On Flinders Street Weston’s brisk walk keeps breaking into a run and he has to force it back to a walk again and again. He has been so much in the news lately, pleading and cajoling, extolling the virtues of Picasso and trusting to the good nature of the thief, that people recognise him now. Some shout out at him. Some, seeing the prospect of drama in his thin-lipped flight, begin to follow. He ducks into a bottle shop for Moët, and marches onwards to the station, a score of curious citizens following in his wake, laughing, cracking jokes, on an expedition, to they don’t know where.
A crowd is already milling before locker 227. Speed Draper is there with a scrum of policemen, theatrically huffy, pacing, hands on hips, staring angrily at the locker. The Age newspaper has received a tip-off, and, being right across the street, has more journalists and cameramen here than it currently has on continental Europe. When Weston arrives with his trailing retinue of breathless stickybeaks, the police and newspaper people swear and screw their faces up. Who needs a truckload of citizens trampling around their crime scene and story?
Weston is as excited as a boy queuing for Santa. He picks up Speed’s hand from down by his trouser leg and shakes it. ‘Well met, Lord Carnarvon. Shall we broach the final seal?’ He indicates locker 227, assuming they have been waiting for him.
‘We’re waiting for the station manager. He has the key,’ the minister explains huffily. ‘It’s locked. We’d force our way in, but we might damage the picture … if it’s there.’
A silence follows, in which no one knows what role to play. Weston was all set to be triumphant: the champagne, the quotes – ‘I had ultimate faith in the enforcement agencies’ – the photo ops. Now he finds himself having to lay down the Moët and stare at the locker with its suspicious boot print, consult his Rolex, show his concern.
The crowd itself is impatient. It has invested serious legwork to be here alongside Weston and it wants a result. Someone shouts, ‘Crack her open, Speed.’ They start to heckle and jeer. ‘Come on, Speed, you tiresome old bag of swamp gas, let’s get on with it.’
It becomes quite an uproar – good-natured, but an embarrassment to the Minister of Police and the director of the National Gallery, all the same. Weston now wishes they’d be moved on. The police try to back the crowd up, but, finding half are journalists, make do by frowning at them.
‘Crack the locker.’
‘Give us a look at her.’
Speed and Weston are sweating. It has occurred to both of them that this locker might contain something as rank as a boar’s liver, a cow turd, an unknown painting. That this is a prank. That the thieves, who apparently despise them for not funding young artists, will play them for fools awhile before returning the Weeping Woman. Both men know it will be on every front page in the country if they open this locker and pull out an inflatable doll with her mouth bugled to fellate them.
I’ll let Draper open the locker, Weston decides. I’ll take a couple of steps backwards as he does, then, if he emerges with a smoking turd, I’ll be out of shot. I’ll slip away through the dirt-bags and it’ll be his humiliation. If he emerges with the painting I’ll step forwards and make a show of congratulating him and embracing her. I’ll edge him out of shot and dance a pas de deux with her. The triumph will be mine.