The Swan Thieves
Chapter 98 Marlow

With Henri Robinson's eyes on me, I rose and went slowly to the cabinet he had indicated. It seemed unreal to me that I was in this overstuffed apartment with a man nearly a century old, rummaging again through the past of a patient who had not only assaulted a work of art but also stolen private papers, as it turned out. And yet I couldn't quite bring myself to condemn Robert. Jet lag swept over me; I thought of Mary's arms and wanted suddenly to go home to her. Then I remembered that she wasn't at my home but at hers. What did four nights and one breakfast mean to someone young and free? I opened the drawer with weakening fingers.
Inside was an envelope dated before Robert's attack on Leda: no return address, a Washington postmark, international postage. Inside that, a folded slip of notepaper.
Dear Mr. Robinson,
Please forgive my borrowing your letters. I WILL get them back to you sooner or later, but I am working on some major paintings, and I must read them every day. They are wonderful letters, full of her, and I hope you agree with this. I have no excuse for myself, but maybe in the end they are safer with me. I remembered enough from them to do a series of paintings already that I think are my best so Jar, but I NEED TO BE ABLE to read them every single day. Sometimes I get up and read them at night. My new series, an important one, will show the world that Beatrice de Clerval was one of the great women of her time and one of the great artists of the nineteenth century. She stopped painting too young. I must continue for her. Someone must avenge her, since she might have continued to paint for decades if she had not been cruelly prevented. And by what? You and I know that she was a genius. You can understand how I have come to love and admire her. Perhaps you know what it is like not to be able to paint when you want to, even if you are not a painter yourself.
Thank you for your help and for the use of her words, and please forgive my decision. I will make it up to you a thousand times over.
Yours,
Robert Oliver
I cannot describe how this letter made my heart sink. It was the first time I'd heard Robert speak at length in his own voice, at least the voice of that moment. The repetitions in it, the irrationality, the fantasies about the importance of his mission, all indicated mania. The self-centered theft of another person's treasure saddened me as much as its significance seemed to elude him; at the same time I understood this as the loss of contact with reality that had culminated in his assaulting Leda. I started to put the letter back, but Henri Robinson stopped me with a gesture. "Keep it, if you like."
"Sad and shocking," I said, but I put it inside my jacket. "We must try to remember that Robert Oliver is a psychiatric patient, and that the letters have indeed come back to you. But I can't, and shouldn't, defend him."
"I am glad that you have returned my letters," he said simply. "They are very private. For the sake of Aude, I would never publish them. I was afraid Robert Oliver would do that."
"Perhaps in that case you should destroy them," I suggested, although I could hardly bear the thought myself. "They may one day be of too much interest to some art historian."
"I will think about that." He folded his hands together with interlaced fingers.
Don't think too long, I wanted to tell him.
"I'm so sorry." He looked up at me. "I have completely forgotten my manners. Would you like some coffee? Some tea, perhaps?"
"Thank you, no. You're very kind, and I won't keep you much longer." I sat opposite him again. "Could I ask you one more favor without trespassing on your hospitality?" I hesitated. "Could I see The Swan Thieves?"
He looked at me gravely, as if considering everything we had already said. Had he given me any inaccurate or invented information? I would never know. He put steepled fingers to his chin. "I did not show it to Robert Oliver, and I am glad now that I did not."
This took me by surprise. "Didn't he ask to see it?"
"I think he did not know I owned it. It is not well known. It is private information, in fact." Then his head snapped up. "How did you know? How did you know I have it?"
I would have to say what I should have said earlier, and I feared it might open old wounds. "Monsieur Robinson," I said, "I wanted to tell you before, but was uncertain--I went to see Pedro Caillet in Mexico. He was very kind to me, as you've been, and that was how I learned about you. He sent you warm greetings."
"Ah, Pedro and his greetings." But he smiled almost impishly. There was friendship still between these men, with their stale, long-forgiven rivalry across an ocean. "So he told you that he sold Aude The Swan Thieves, and you believed him?"
It was my turn to stare. "Yes. That's what he said."
"I think he really believes that, poor old cat. In fact, he tried to buy it from Aude himself. They both considered it extraordinaire. Aude bought it from the estate of Armand Thomas, a gallery owner in Paris. It had never been exhibited, which is strange, and it has not been exhibited since then either. Aude would never have sold it to Pedro, or anyone else, because her mother told her it was the only important thing she had ever painted. I do not know how Armand Thomas got it." He closed his hands over the letters in his lap. "The Swan Thieves was one of the only paintings that remained from the failure of the Thomas business--Armand's older brother, Gilbert, was a good painter, but not a good businessman. They appear in Beatrice's and Olivier's letters, you know. I have always felt they must have been rather mercenary types. Certainly not great friends of painters, like Durand-Ruel. They also made far less money in the end. They did not have his taste."
"Yes, I've seen two of Gilbert's paintings in the National Gallery," I said. "Including, of course, Leda, the one Robert attacked."
Henri Robinson nodded. "You may go in to see The Swan Thieves. I think I will stay here. I see it several times a day." He gestured toward a closed door at the end of the sitting room.
I went to the door. Beyond it was a small bedroom, apparently Robinson's own, judging from the prescription bottles on the bureau and bedside table. The double bed wore a green damask spread. Matching drapes hung at the single window, and again there were shelves of books. The sunlight was dim here, and I turned on the light, feeling Henri's gaze but not wanting to close a door between us. At first I thought there was a window above the head of the bed, looking into a garden, and then I thought there was a painting of a swan there. But I saw at once that it was a mirror, hung to reflect the one painting in the room, on the opposite wall.
I have to stop here, to catch my breath. The Swan Thieves is not easily put into words. I had expected the beauty in it; I had not expected the evil. It was a largish canvas, about four feet by three, rendered in the bright palette of the Impressionists. It showed two men in rough clothes, brown-haired, one with strangely red lips. They were moving stealthily toward the viewer, and toward a swan that rose in alarm out of the reeds. A reversal, I thought, of Leda's fright: now the swan was victim, not victor. Beatrice had painted the bird with hasty, living strokes that made its very wing tips seem real; it was a blur, hastening up out of its nest, a suggestion of lily pads and gray water beneath, a curve of white breast, gray around its numb dark eye, a panic of failed flight, the water churning under a yellow-and-black foot. The thieves were too near already, and the larger man's hands were about to close over the swan's straining neck; the smaller man looked ready to heave himself forward and catch the body.
The contrast between the swan's grace and the coarseness of the two men shone clearly through the rapid brushwork. I had studied the face of the larger man before, in the National Gallery; it was the face of an art dealer counting coins, too eager now, intent on his quarry. If this was Gilbert Thomas, of course, the other man must be his brother. I had seldom seen such skill in a painting, nor such desperation. Perhaps she had given herself thirty minutes, perhaps thirty days. She had thought deeply about this image and then produced it with speed and passion. And after that, if Henri was correct, she had set down her brush and never picked it up again.
I must have stood rooted there a long time, staring, because I felt a sudden fatigue wash over me--the hopelessness of imagining other lives. This woman had painted a swan, it had meant something to her, and none of us would ever know what. Nor would it matter, beyond the vehemence of this work. She was gone and we were here, and someday we would all be gone, too, but she had left a painting.
Then I thought of Robert. He had never stood in front of this image and puzzled over its passionate misery. Or had he? How long had Henri Robinson, old and independent, been safely out of the way? I'd seen just one bathroom so far, near the entrance to the apartment, and there was none here, off the bedroom--the apartment was old, eccentric. Would Robert have stopped at opening a closed door? No--he had surely seen The Swan Thieves; why else would he have returned to Washington in a rage that would shortly after overflow in the National Gallery? I thought of his portrait of Beatrice in Greenhill, her smile, her hand clasping a silk robe over her breast. Robert had wanted to see her happy. The Swan Thieves was full of threat and entrapment--and perhaps revenge as well. Probably Robert understood her grief in a way that I, thank God, never could. He had not needed to look at this painting to understand it.
I remembered Robinson, then, pinioned in his chair, and went back into the salon. I knew I would never see The Swan Thieves again. I had spent five minutes with it, and it had changed the look of the world.
"Ah, you are impressed." He made an openhanded gesture: approval. "Yes."
"Do you think it is her greatest work?"
"You would know better than I."
"I am tired now," Henri said--as Caillet had said to me and Mary, I suddenly remembered. "But I would like you to come back tomorrow, after you have seen my collection at the Maintenon. Then you can tell me if I have kept the best one for myself."
I went quickly to take his hand. "I'm sorry I've stayed so long. And I would be honored to come back. What time tomorrow?"
"I take my nap at three o'clock. Come in the morning."
"I can't thank you enough."
We shook hands and he smiled--those artificially perfect teeth again. "I enjoyed our talk. Perhaps I will decide to forgive Robert Oliver after all."