The Homeless Millionaire

I painted the kitchen the next day in a somber mood. It was easy to to fall into a somber mood while painting that kitchen; in spite of all the cleaning efforts made the previous day, it needed three coats. I had suggested using a different color, for example a watery ochre that would work nicely with the wooden cupboards, but Roch was adamant.

"White is best," he'd told me. "It gives a room more light, and makes it appear larger." I looked at him steadily as he said that, and he had the grace to blush and add:

"I'm sorry. I forgot who I'm talking to."

So, white it was. As I painted, I did a lot of reflecting on what Michel had had to say the previous evening. He'd ended with something that made me and Roch stay silent for a long while. He said:

"We just have to sit and wait it out, guys. There's no other choice. Armand is going to stay in hospital for a couple of weeks at the very least, and I doubt that he'll be ready to jump right back into business when he gets out. I don't know of anyone else who could help us dispose of all that stuff, and it's definitely the wrong time to start looking for a fence. It would be equal to standing on the corner with a megaphone and shouting: hey guys, it's us, we've robbed a museum and we need a buyer for the stuff we've taken. The cops are pretty stupid, but they'll catch onto something like that for sure. Peace and quiet, that's the recommended course. I'm going to move everything to a very good hiding place, so good that I have to remind myself where it actually is every day."

"Where?" Roch asked, beating me to it by a fraction of a second.

"It's better that you don't know."

"Don't be f.u.c.k.i.n.g silly," I said.

"No, it's true. We shouldn't be meeting that often either. We should - " Michel had caught himself there, and had the decency to apologize. We settled on his writing down instructions and drawing a plan and delivering this to us in a sealed envelope. We were to open it up only if something happened to him. I was designated the keeper of this sacred envelope.

"You're already sitting on your Rembrandt," Michel had said. "If the cops find it, we're sunk anyway. I hope you've hidden it well."

"Oh yes," I said. "It's under my bed." We'd all laughed at that, but the laughter sounded sad.

Working on that f.u.c.k.i.n.g kitchen didn't make me feel better. A kitchen is a place where people prepare food and eat: a vital life function. The people who had planned and built this kitchen, the people who had cooked and eaten in it were long dead, with the possible exception of Roch's aunt who died quite recently. All that lovely food hadn't helped. They died anyway. Eating was a waste of time, life was a waste of time: everyone died anyway.

Ironically, a tragedy half the world away worked in our favor. A couple of days earlier, Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped Israeli athletes competing at the summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. All the media jumped at the news with the ferocity of a pack of hungry wolves; the museum robbery was all but forgotten. The kidnapped Israelis were murdered; for the second time in a row, other people's deaths deflected attention from what we'd done. First the nightclub fire, then this: it felt almost as if the Devil himself decided to give us a hand.

It made me feel guilty about what we'd done. Prior to this, I hardly felt any guilt at all. Sure, what we'd done was wrong, but the theft didn't make me feel bad. The museum was insured, and insurance companies could swallow that loss; they were o.b.s.c.e.n.ely profitable anyway. The only thing that bothered me about the robbery was giving the museum guards a really bad scare. But we hadn't hurt them, and Michel had even taken the trouble to loosen the ties on one of those guys so that they could free themselves after a while, and didn't have to wait till morning in discomfort. However, the fire at the nightclub just prior to the robbery, and then the massacre at the Munich Olympics - somehow, those two events gave a new, evil dimension to what we had done.

Roch's thoughts must have run along similar lines: we were both remarkably silent when we shared some beers after work that day. The only bit of conversation we had was when Roch asked if I wanted to make some money by painting a few rooms in another house. He was really impressed by the quality of my work, it seemed. I said yes, of course, sure, at least something I'd painted would get looked at by other people. The laughter sounded even more sad than the previous night. We quickly drank ourselves into a state of mild oblivion, and went to bed early. I tried to console myself by looking at the Landscape With Cottages before falling asleep. The face of the young woman staring at me from the picture seemed to be full of condemnation.

The next day - Friday - was a repeat of the previous one, except that by afternoon I'd finished working on that goddamn kitchen and moved on to a room upstairs. We also drank twice as much beer as the night before, talked half as much, and went to bed even earlier. We bought newspapers and looked through them: they were all about what had happened at the Olympic Games, our robbery had been relegated to the back pages. It didn't make us happy; it made us feel worse, and it wasn't because we were craving fame. It was lucky that both I and Roch didn't believe in God, Devil, Hell, any of that stuff. Had we believed any of that, we might have started thinking about turning ourselves in to wipe out some of the guilt that we felt.

But on Saturday morning, things changed.