We circled the room, pausing now and then in front of a painting, including several that left me cold and a Kandinsky I liked a lot. There was an Arp. Onderdonk had an Arp, too, but since we hadn’t been ordered to steal an Arp there was nothing particularly coincidental about it, or nothing remarkable about the coincidence, or-

“ Bern? Should I just plain forget about the cat?”

“How would you go about doing that?”

“Beats me. Do you really think they’ll do anything to Archie if we don’t steal the painting?”

“Why should they?”

“To prove they mean business. Isn’t that what kidnappers do?”

“I don’t know what kidnappers do. I think they kill the victim to prevent being identified, but how’s a Burmese cat going to identify them? But-”

“But who knows with crazy people? The thing is, they’re expecting us to do the impossible.”

“It’s not necessarily impossible,” I said. “Paintings walk out of museums all the time. In Italy museum theft is a whole industry, and even here you see something in the papers every couple of months. The Museum of Natural History seems to get hit every once in a while.”

“Then you think we can take it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then-”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I turned at the voice, and there was our artist friend, his ten cent lapel badge fastened to his thrift shop jacket, his yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. We were once again standing in front of Composition with Color, and Turnquist’s eyes gleamed as he looked at the painting. “You can’t beat old Piet,” he said. “Sonofabitch could paint. Something, huh?”

“Something,” I agreed.

“Most of this is crap. Detritus, refuse. In a word, you should pardon the expression, shit. My apologies, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn assured him.

“The museum is the dustbin of the history of Art. Sounds like a quotation, doesn’t it? I made it up myself.”

“It has a ring to it.”

“Dustbin’s English for garbage can. English English, I mean to say. But the rest of this stuff, this is worse than garbage. Dreck, as some of my best friends would say.”

“Er.”

“Just a handful of good painters this century. Mondrian, of course. Picasso, maybe five percent of the time, when he wasn’t cocking around. But five percent of Picasso is plenty, huh?”

“Er.”

“Who else? Pollock. Frank Roth. Trossman. Clyfford Still. Darragh Park. Rothko, before he got so far down he forgot to use color. And others, a handful of others. But most of this-”

“Well,” I said.

“I know what you want to say. Who’s this old fart running off at the mouth? His jacket don’t even match his pants and he’s making judgments left and right, telling what’s Art and what’s garbage. That’s what you’re thinking, ain’t it?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Of course you wouldn’t say it, you or this young lady. She’s a lady and you’re a gentleman and you wouldn’t say such a thing. Me, I’m an artist. An artist can say anything. It’s an edge the artist has over the gentleman. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Uh.”

“And you’re right to think it. I’m nobody, that’s who I am. Just a painter nobody ever heard of. All the same, I saw you looking at a real painter’s work, I saw you keep coming back to this painting, and right off I knew you could tell the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit, if you’ll pardon me once again, madam.”

“It’s all right,” Carolyn said.

“But it puts my back up to see people give serious attention to most of this crap. You know how you’ll read in the paper that a man takes a knife or a bottle of acid and attacks some famous painting? And you probably say to yourself what everybody else says. ‘How could anybody do such a thing? He’d have to be a madman.’ The person who does it is always an artist, and in the papers they call him a ‘self-styled’ artist. Meaning he says he’s an artist but you know and I know the poor fellow’s got shit for brains. Once again, dear madam-”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ll say this,” he said, “and then I’ll leave you good people alone. It is a mark not of madness but of sanity to destroy bad art when it is placed on display in the nation’s temples. I’ll say more than that. The destruction of bad art is in itself a work of art. Bakunin said the urge to destroy is a creative urge. To slash some of these canvases-” He took a deep breath, expelled it all in a sigh. “But I’m a talker, not a destroyer. I’m an artist, I paint my paintings and I live my life. I saw the interest you were taking in my favorite painting and it provoked this outburst. Am I forgiven?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Carolyn told him.

“You’re kind people, gracious people. And if I’ve given you something to think about, why, then you haven’t wasted the day and neither have I.”

CHAPTER Six

“There’s the answer,” Carolyn said. “We’ll destroy the painting. Then they couldn’t expect us to steal it.”

“And they’ll destroy the cat.”

“Don’t even say that. Can we get out of here?”

“Good idea.”

Outside, a young man in buckskin and a young woman in denim were sprawled on the Hewlett’s steps, passing an herbal cigarette back and forth. A pair of uniformed guards at the top of the stairs ignored them, perhaps because they were over sixteen. Carolyn wrinkled her nose as she passed the two.

“Sick,” she said. “Why can’t they get drunk like civilized human beings?”

“You could try asking them.”

“They’d say, ‘Like, man, wow.’ That’s what they always say. Where are we going?”

“Your place.”

“Okay. Any particular reason?”

“Somebody took a cat out of a locked apartment,” I said, “and I’d like to try to figure out how.”

We walked west, subwayed downtown, and walked from Sheridan Square to Carolyn’s place on Arbor Court, one of those wobbly Village streets that slants off at an angle, bridging the gap between hither and yon. Most people couldn’t find it, but then most people wouldn’t have occasion to look for it in the first place. We walked through a lazy overcast September afternoon that made me want to dash uptown and lace up my running shoes. I told Carolyn it was a great day for running, and she told me there was no such thing.

When we got to her building I examined the lock out in front. It didn’t look too challenging. Anyway, it’s no mean trick to get in the front door of an unattended building. You ring the other tenants’ bells until one of them irresponsibly buzzes you in, or you loiter outside and time your approach so that you reach the doorway just as someone else is going in or out. It’s a rare tenant who’ll challenge you if you have the right air of arrogant nonchalance.

I didn’t have to do all that, however, because Carolyn had her key. She let us in and we went down the hall to her apartment, which is on the ground floor in the back. I knelt and studied keyholes.

“If you see an eye staring back at you,” Carolyn said, “I don’t want to know about it. What are you looking for?”

“A sign that somebody tampered with the locks. I don’t see any fresh scratches. Have you got a match?”

“I don’t smoke. Neither do you, remember?”

“I wanted better light. My penlight’s home. It doesn’t matter.” I got to my feet. “Let me have your keys.”

I unlocked all the locks, and when we were inside I examined them, especially the Fox lock. While I was doing this, Carolyn walked around calling for Ubi. Her voice got increasingly panicky until the cat appeared in response to the whirr of the electric can opener. “Oh, Ubi,” she said, and scooped him up and plopped herself down in a chair with him. “Poor baby, you miss your buddy, don’t you?”

I went over to the little window and opened it. Cylindrical iron bars an inch thick extended the length of the window, anchored in the brick below and the concrete lintel above. All the window needed was a few similar bars running horizontally and a few squares of color and it could be a Mondrian. I took hold of a couple of bars and tugged them to and fro. They didn’t budge.