The Untouchable by John Banville Page A

he said. “Five hundred quid and it’s yours.”
    I laughed; that was a fortune in those days.
    “I could manage a hundred,” I said. “It’s an obvious copy.”
    Wally put on one of his shtetl expressions, narrowing his eyes and setting his head to the side and hunching a shoulder. “What are you saying to me, my man—a copy, is it, a copy?” Then he straightened up again and shrugged. “All right: three hundred. That’s as low as I’ll go.”
    Baby said: “Why don’t you get Leo Rothenstein to buy it for you? He has pots of money.”
    We all looked at her. Nick laughed, and jumped down nimbly from the table, suddenly animated.
    “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Come on, let’s find him.”
    My heart sank (odd formulation, that; the heart does not seem to fall, but to swell, rather, I find, when one is alarmed). Nick would turn the thing into a rag, and Wally would get peeved, and I would lose my chance, the only one I was ever likely to have, to take possession of a small but true masterpiece. I followed him and Baby (I wonder, by the way, why she was called that—her name was Vivienne, cool and sharp, like her) out to the pavement, where the crowd had thinned. Leo Rothenstein was there still, though; we heard his booming, plummy tones beforewe saw him. He was talking to Boy and one of the blonde, diaphanous girls. They were discussing the gold standard, or the state of Italian politics, something like that. Small talk on large topics, the chief characteristic of the time. Leo had the matt sheen of the very rich. He was handsome, in an excessively masculine way, tall, full-chested, with a long, swarth, Levantine head.
    “Hello, Beaver,” he said. I got a nod, Baby a sharp, appraising look and the shadow of a smile. Leo was parsimonious with his attentions.
    “Leo,” Nick said, “we want you to buy a picture for Victor.”
    “Oh, yes?”
    “Yes. It’s a Poussin, but Wally doesn’t know it. He’s asking three hundred, which is a snip. Think of it as an investment. Better than bullion, a picture is. You tell him, Boy.”
    Boy, for reasons that I could never understand, was considered to have something of a feeling for pictures, and on occasion had advised Leo’s family on its art collection. It amused me to imagine him in the company of Leo’s father, an august and enigmatic gentleman with the look of a Bedouin chieftain, the two of them pacing the showrooms and gravely pausing before this or that big brown third-rate canvas, Boy all the while struggling to suppress a laugh. Now he did his gargoyle grin: eyes bulging, nostrils flared, the thick, fleshy mouth turned down at the corners. “ Poussin? ” he said. “Sounds tasty.”
    Leo was measuring me with genial distrust.
    “I have a hundred,” I said, with the sense of setting a foot down firmly on a sagging tightrope. When Leo laughed his big, soft laugh you could almost see the sound coming out of his mouth spelled out in letters: Ha, Ha, Ha.
    “Oh, go on,” Nick said and scowled in tipsy petulance from Leo to me and back again, as if it were his game and we were laggards. Leo looked at Boy and something passed between them, then he turned his measuring eye back on me.
    “You say it’s genuine?” he said.
    “If I had a reputation I’d stake it on it.”
    The tightrope thrummed. Leo laughed again and shrugged.
    “Tell Wally I’ll send him a cheque,” he said, and turned away.
    Nick punched me softly on the shoulder. “There,” he said; “told you.” He seemed suddenly quite drunk. I had a sensation of helpless, happy falling. Baby squeezed my arm. The blonde girl stepped close to Boy and whispered, “What’s a Poussin?”
    I wonder if that really was August, or earlier in the summer? I recall a white night, with an endlessly lingering glimmer in the sky over the park and shadows the colour of dirty water lying in the muffled streets. Suddenly the city was a place I had not seen before, mysterious, exotic, lit as if from