"You think I did it don't you?" she demanded, breaking a bread roll and pushing it, rather indelicately, into her mouth. "You said to me, 'the missing Leibovitz'. That was really rude, Michael."

"Your name is Marlene Leibovitz. You've been missing."

"Sure," she said.

A peach-pink dress lay like a silk sheet across her lovely brown body, and I could not hold her watery gaze. "I'm sorry if I was rude," I said. "The whole thing really fucked my work. I lost my studio for one thing."

"All right," she said calmly. "If you want to know the truth, it was Honore Le Noel who stole Mr. Boylan's painting."

But then the waiter was there and Hugh had particular demands and I saw Marlene quietly blow her nose.

"Now listen," she said as the wine was poured.

And she told me again about Honore Le Noel being found in bed with Roger Martin. Dominique had thrown him out of 157 rue de Rennes, which he accepted readily enough, not least because he had a far nicer place in Neuilly. But when she demanded he resign from the Comite, he would not budge.

Until that moment Dominique thought the Comite was hers.

She had assembled it after all. Yet when she demanded the Comite dismiss him she was told that M. Le Noel was the great Leibovitz expert and it would damage everyone to do so preposterous a thing. In the end she stacked the Comite with her own allies, but that took years of scheming and Honore had all the time in the world to completely fuck her over.

In 1966 Dominique, being short of cash as usual, brought a lateperiod masterwork into the light. Ampere was its title. She put it up for auction in New York, but Sotheby's, know ing a little of her reputation, wanted the Comite to endorse it and so the painting was crated up and shipped back to Paris.

This must have been what Honore was waiting for—and who knows, maybe he had been whispering to Sotheby's—and he now convinced enough members of the Comite that this was a canvas that Dominique had tampered with. This happened to be completely untrue, but he was the expert, and he was obviously a bad man to have as your enemy for he now managed to make the Comite doubt its own good sense. This didn't happen in a single night, but over weeks or months. At the height of the dispute Dominique walked into La Coupole and threw a jug of water over Honore, but that weakened her cause still further and the Comite refused to endorse Ampere. Once that had happened, droit moral or no, Sotheby's would not take it for its show.

"Having declared the work a fake," Marlene told me, "the Comite had Ampere destroyed."

"What?"

"They burned it."

"You're shitting me."

"This is France. You've got to believe me. It's the law. That's why you never want to let a painting near these comites. They did it with police supervision. Later, of course, it all came out.

They'd incinerated a masterpiece. And it was a huge scandal."

"They burned a Leibovitz!"

"I could cry," she said.

"So why would he steal Dozy's painting?"

She chewed more bread and nodded vigorously. "It will turn up in France. You watch."

"How? Why?"

"He is rich and he has nothing else to do. He's like some insane deposed king who imagines he can get his throne back. He's obsessed with 'the Leibovitz Case'. He sat next to Boylan on an airplane, both in first class, they got to chatting.

Boylan has a Leibovitz. Honore is a leech that has found a vein.

Next thing you know he has travelled to Australia. He removed paint samples, and he is not someone famous for his manual skills. He returned to Paris and wrote a condition report on the painting. It's an insane document. He claims it's a middle-period painting dressed up to look like a valuable early period. How does he know? What right does he have? Because he feels he owns Leibovitz. Because he's an expert. He claims to have Xrays to prove his case, but no-one has ever seen them. Believe me, Michael, I've got nothing to gain from this. I could never bear to hurt a work of art. Please don't think badly of me. I really cannot bear it." At this moment, to my surprise, Hugh placed his greasy hand on Marlene's naked arm and, as I noticed the fat spill of tears caught briefly in the lower lashes of her left eye, I too took her hand. What then are we to do with my emotions? Should they be burned or nailed up on the wall?

16

Marlene would be my brother's girl, that ripped my sausage casings when I saw it, but it was not new that I should understand this before the man himself. Sometimes I have wanted to smash and bash him smite him for his cruelty and he never knows I was in love with the so-called Alimony Whore even worse than he was. In that way we were twins, the best part of us identical. In the Buchanan, I laid my hand on Marlene's tiny arm and I watched all her sad water seeping from her lovely eyes you never saw such blue—hair threads of ultramarine, the blues of an opal, bless us, arranged in the pattern of a human eye.

Butcher always said there was no god, no miracles, he had sat in judgment and found Marlene guilty as a thief but then I saw that ugly smirking look on his face and it made me sick to picture what he would do, his fat dick being in no way deterred by having condemned her without a trial. The artist is always for himself alone, allegedly a MONK, a PRIEST or KING, in spite of which assertion he was always seeking a woman who would let him lie with his BUG IRISH face between her breasts. Who could not fall asleep with the scent of lavender rising from a woman's skin?

When previously resident in Sydney my brother would drive me to A TOUCH OF CLASS in Surry Hills, although not before he had scared the living Christ out of me with condoms and instructions on where my mouth could go. I knew more than him and always had. The girls were very nice NO BATTERIES NEEDED, YOU'RE MY LOVE TOY BABY at least three of them saving to put their children through Sydney Grammar, but Butcher was always waiting outside for me to finish. He said he didn't mind the time, was just thinking, but there were many thoughts that never crossed his mind and when I touched Marlene's arm my feelings occupied a country closed to him, denied entry, UP SHIT CREEK without a paddle.

In Bacchus Marsh we knew many girls with names we pronounced Mah and Wah and Lah. That was a joke. Doo-Wah!

That's another.

MAH-LEEN and not MAH-LANE—they included Marlene Warriner, and Marlene Boatwright and Marlene O'Brien and Marlene Repetti so I was not surprised to learn Marlene Leibovitz was really Marlene Cook and she had been born in Benalla, a very nice town in north-eastern Victoria, not much bigger than Bacchus Marsh.

This surprised my brother greatly as he had her pegged as a NEW YORKER. But she was Marlene Cook, whose mother had the COFFEE PALACE. She was the girl who always WROTE AWAY for information about THE STORY OF SUGAR or the history of AUSTRALIA'S OWN CAR. When I learned this I sadly knew she would be well suited to my brother for he had always caused trouble at our post-office box number forty-six, causing it to get clogged up with BROCHURES and FREE SAMPLES to the detriment of more important business.

All this writing away was what led them apart from their own people, in her case to become an IMAGINARY AMERICAN, an expert on the work of Leibovitz when her only education had been getting thrown out of Benalla High School for insubordination—she admitted so herself, so who would doubt her? Never did I forget I also was cast out from fourth grade. I hid inside my bed for a whole week drawing on the sheets. They never knew what pictures I saw, how close they came to violent death, God save me. Blood pouring through their eyes and noses.

And here you are too, Hugh, she said, eating pork cevapi in Taylor Square. Who could have imagined this in Bacchus Marsh?