Overhead in a Balloon Read Online Free Page B

in cheques and banknotes ran to the dry and crisp, when it came to eating they craved the sweet, the sticky, the moist. From the finest pastry shops in Paris Speck brought soft macaroons, savarins soaked in rum, brioches stuffed with almond cream, mocha cake so tender it had to be eaten with a spoon. Sugar was poison to Speck. Henriette had once reviewed a book that described how refined sugar taken into one’s system turned into a fog of hideous green. Her brief, cool warning, “A Marxist Considers Sweets,” unreeled in Speck’s mind if he was confronted with a cookie. He usually pretended to eat, reducing a
mille-feuille
to paste, concealing the wreck of an éclair under napkin and fork. He never lost track of his purpose – the prying of paintings out of a dustystudio on terms anesthetizing to the artist’s widow and satisfactory to himself.
    The Senator had mentioned a wife; where there had been wife there was relict. Speck obtained her telephone number by calling a rival gallery and pretending to be looking for someone else. “Cruche’s widow can probably tell you,” he finally heard. She lived in one of the gritty suburbs east of Paris, on the far side of the Bois de Vincennes – in Speck’s view, the wrong direction. The pattern of his life seemed to come unfolded as he dialled. He saw himself stalled in industrial traffic, inhaling pollution, his Bentley pointed towards the seediest mark on the urban compass, with a vanilla cream cake melting beside him on the front seat.
    She answered his first ring; his widows never strayed far from the telephone. He introduced himself. Silence. He gave the name of the gallery, mentioned his street, recited the names of painters he showed.
    Presently he heard “D’you know any English?”
    “Some,” said Speck, who was fluent.
    “Well, what do you want?”
    “First of all,” he said, “to meet you.”
    “What for?”
    He cupped his hand round the telephone, as if spies from the embassies down the street were trying to overhear. “I am planning a major Cruche show. A retrospective. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
    “Not unless I know what you want.”
    It seemed to Speck that he had already told her. Her voice was languid and nasal and perfectly flat. An index to English dialects surfaced in his mind, yielding nothing useful.
    “It will be a strong show,” he went on. “The first big Cruche since the nineteen-thirties, I believe.”
    “What’s that got to do with me?”
    He wondered if the Senator had forgotten something essential – that Lydia Cruche had poisoned her husband, for instance. He said, “You probably own quite a lot of his work.”
    “None of it’s for sale.”
    This, at last, was familiar; widows’ negotiations always began with “No.” “Actually, I am not proposing to buy anything,” he said, wanting this to be clear at the start. “I am offering the hospitality of my gallery. It’s a gamble I am willing to take because of my firm belief that the time –”
    “What’s the point of this show?”
    “The point?” said Speck, his voice tightening as it did when Walter was being obtuse. “The point is getting Cruche back on the market. The time has come – the time to … to attack. To attack the museums with Hubert Cruche.”
    As he said this, Speck saw the great armour-plated walls of the Pompidou Art Centre and the chink in the armour through which an 80 × 95 Cruche 1919 abstract might slip. He saw the provincial museums, cheeseparing, saving on light bulbs, but, like the French bourgeoisie they stood for, so much richer than they seemed. At the name “Cruche” their curators would wake up from neurotic dreams of forced auction sales, remembering they had millions to get rid of before the end of the fiscal year. And France was the least of it; London, Zurich, Stockholm, and Amsterdam materialized as frescoes representing the neoclassical façades of four handsome banks. Overhead, on a Baroque ceiling,