Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [52]
“Why do I have to know his name? He’s Martin. What will I know about him if I know his name that I don’t know now?”
“You’ll know his name.”
“He’s Martin.”
“You’ll know his name. This is nice to know.”
Her mother nodded toward the two paintings on the north wall.
“When we first knew each other I talked to him about Giorgio Morandi. Showed him a book. Beautiful still lifes. Form, color, depth. He was just getting started in the business and barely knew Morandi’s name. Went to Bologna to see the work firsthand. Came back saying no, no, no, no. Minor artist. Empty, self-involved, bourgeois. Basically a Marxist critique, this is what Martin delivered.”
“Twenty years later.”
“He sees form, color, depth, beauty.”
“Is this an advance in aesthetics?”
“He sees the light.”
“Or a sellout, a self-deception. Remarks of a property owner.”
“He sees the light,” Nina said.
“He also sees the money. These are very pricey objects.”
“Yes, they are. And at first, quite seriously, I wondered how he’d acquired them. I suspect in those early years he sometimes dealt in stolen art.”
“Interesting fellow.”
“He said to me once, I’ve done some things. He said, This doesn’t make my life more interesting than yours. It can be made to sound more interesting. But in memory, in those depths, he said, there is not much vivid color or wild excitement. It is all gray and waiting. Sitting, waiting. He said, It is all sort of neutral, you know.”
She did the accent with a deft edge, maybe a little nasty.
“What was he waiting for?”
“History, I think. The call to action. The visit from the police.”
“Which branch of the police?”
“Not the art-theft squad. I know one thing. He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I’m not sure what he did. I think he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“Twenty years. Eating and sleeping together. You don’t know. Did you ask him? Did you press him?”
“He showed me a poster once, a few years ago, when I saw him in Berlin. He keeps an apartment there. A wanted poster. German terrorists of the early seventies. Nineteen names and faces.”
“Nineteen.”
“Wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies. He keeps it—I don’t know why he keeps it. But I know why he showed it to me. He’s not one of the faces on the poster.”
“Nineteen.”
“Men and women. I counted. He may have been part of a support group or a sleeper cell. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood.”
“Do they make him nostalgic?”
“Don’t think I won’t bring this up.”
“Bare walls. Nearly bare, you said. Is this part of the old longing? Days and nights in seclusion, hiding out somewhere, renouncing every trace of material comfort. Maybe he killed someone. Did you ask him? Did you press him on this?”
“Look, if he’d done something serious, causing death or injury, do you think he’d be walking around today? He’s not in hiding anymore, if he ever was. He’s here, there and everywhere.”
“Operating under a false name,” Lianne said.
She was on the sofa, facing her mother, watching her. She’d never detected a weakness in Nina, none that she could recall, some frailty of character or compromise of hard clear judgment. She found herself prepared to take advantage and this surprised her. She was ready to bleed the moment, bearing in, ripping in.
“All these years. Never forcing the issue. Look at the man he’s become, the man we know. Isn’t this the kind of man they would have seen as the enemy? Those men and women on the wanted poster. Kidnap the bastard. Burn his paintings.”
“Oh I think he knows this. Don’t you think he knows this?”
“But