Vincent

Vincent Penn, fresh from his acquital of all thievery, tracks down a mysterious follower.

1910

 

Not that Samuel “Stinky” Handers would have known, striking an obstinate match at a picture frame that was perhaps too slick to provide a spark, but the Boston Museum of Art was missing a painting of a ravine whose only redeeming value was that it had been painted by Vincent Van Gogh, a Dutchman who was barely even dead enough to warrant such mysterious theft of his paintings. Inevitably though, Stinky Handers did find out from his superior (who thought he saw viridian soot everywhere) that, in fact, the painting that he, Stinky, had been tasked with protecting on these cold Novembers may well have disappeared down the same rabbit-hole as his career as the assistant to the security guard of what has been lauded the most second-rate museum of art in the western hemisphere. And that was all he knew. Maybe it was the soot.

 

Because that is what Mr. Eyewitness Samuel “Stinky” Handers said (in not so many words) at the few months’ subsequent trial of one Vincent Penn, at this moment the most complacent Italian-American in the world currently about to be acquitted of two counts of art thievery, three counts of perjury, three more counts of conspiracy to commit crimes like perjury and art thievery, and one count probably loosely relating to the honorable daughter of the honorable Judge Ben Barkley. Her name is Leila, and when she secretly wishes to rendezvous with you in the deep evening, she deposits a tattered Taft Taft Taft ribbon over the brim of the gas lamp by her window, which itself is visible from the courthouse’s own warped parallax. Also visible is the gently vacillating prow of the schooner Lincoln in the Charles, one of Judge Barkley’s toys leftover from the calamity in the Philippines and his chief means of defending his daughter’s window.

 

Vincent feels a hole in his stomach where a warm pastry might find a loving reception, and allows a resonant gurgle of tribute before clanking open his pocketwatch, a loud contraption that arrogantly declares the time is not nine-thirty at all, but rather –

 

“Ten thirty, your Honor! In Baltimore that’s called brunch!”

 

“Seat yarself, Penn,” sez Barkley, who Vincent prays is equally famished. “Baltimah still has all its warks of ahht. Shaddap.”

 

From the perspective of Stinky Handers, still slumped in the witness stand and picking at the benevolent tobacco scar on the inside of his cheek, the now-animated rear of the defendant seemed to rebound from its chair with triple the energy with which it had been court-ordered to descend to. “Your Honor, the way I see it, the way I’m sure the state sees it, we can all remain here to relish the spectacle of this imbecile on the stand, and then acquit me, or we can simply acquit me now and perchance be at Caroline’s place for scones by quarter-of.”

 

Barkley fumes, a sensory profusion of sounds, snorts, and colors. “I can’t jest acquit yah, Penn, thez a thing called a jarry here in Bahston, and I know they have ‘em too in Baltimah! Shaddap.”

 

“Barkley, your Honor, not you too! Since when did America start letting pathetic little bugs like juries tell its Judges what to do? Are we Republicans or not? Hell–,” now beholding the astonished jury with all the vitriolic handsomeness his figure could muster, “what’s the split right now anyway? Eight – four? Nine – three?” Back to the positively crimson Judge Barkley, whose gavel hand shook in a rhythm concurrent to Stinky Handers’ effort at dental hygiene. “Call it twelve – oh, and I’ll stay a good city block away from Miss Leila at all times, how’s that, your Honor? Not to mention that silly painting could still always turn up somewhere. I found my lost harmonica, silver one, dabbling through the Charles last evening, sir, and all that somehow after five years I dropped it in a lavatory in Napoli. Journey improved it too, it seems –”

 

“Shaddap, Penn!” The courthouse stills, and even Handers, getting tired now, slows his digging to a bare scratch of dirty fingernails against his inflamed mouth. Barkley leans forward now from his perch, the Judge’s roost above the realm of the plebeians, and in the few grim seconds before his wheezing retort fails to notice the entrance of one figure who, in Vincent’s harried bewilderment, simply did not belong in a middle-class courthouse on the Charles in Boston during springtime. But there was no time. The honorable Judge Barkley had given in.

 

Vincent Penn, less than thirty years young and clad in his trim black suit, rises from his chair one last time, lets his hands fall to rest, important, so that he may luridly crack his knuckles to pass the time to Barkley’s dismissal, which crashes down with all the force of a wave that would rather explode before it graces sand. “Vincent Cawson Penn!” Barkley caterwauls from the perch. “Yah-ahh dismissed! Thahh’s jess naw evidenze!” he adds with a helpless look to Stinky Handers, still not wholly cognizant of his role in the proceeding.

 

When the bailiff shuffles up to coach Handers from the witness stand, Vincent strides, his victory away and contained in azure bottles drifting in an elsewhere ocean, and focused on his pursuit, his trough from the hazy courtroom to the clear temperate lunchtime outside. The stream flows, jacketed masses in work-lunch circuit, series here and parallel there, nowhere his mark. Where was the man, the non-belonger with the gray overcoat but no derby, the slim cane but no limp. In Boston’s brickstacked intestines, and where is a man in a sea of hats? Vincent trots delicately, less than inconspicuously into the denser herds of crowds, where is the man, suspecting (but it’s inconceivable!) there may perhaps be one other in Boston who knows just where that painting got off to. Behind the post box, always gilded with angels or muted trumpets this entrenched into downtown, where the newspapers were stacked, the man with the telltale walk of innocence, the duplicity audacious and washed out by the sun.

 

Something in Vincent cries to turn around, to pursue instead that pasty which seemed such a grand idea back in the courtroom. His nerves pulse on autopilot, the job is compromised, the stranger is the compromiser, the man is stopped now, fussing with gloves, time to act … Vincent, time to act …

 

“Sir, excuse me,” says the fool Vincent, “my name is Vincent Penn. I saw you at my acquittal, just right now, am I correct?” The man turns, slowly and deliberately (de-libera-tely, Vincent ruminates, or derived from the Latin of liberty) and douses Vincent in cold rain, eyes wise and unassuming, and voice dark and without accent, crisp power under its sly melody.

 

“Vincent Penn, you are a fine thief.” Heart stops in the instant of reckoning. “And for that you are famous. Not so unlike Jesse James, half a century ago. But I need a true thief, not a lucky legend. I would like a thief to steal for me this day’s most prized work of art, and then shut up indefinitely. Are you my thief, Mr. Penn? Or shall I tell Judge Barkley just where you found that painting?”

 

“What?” escapes in a whisper. Somewhere, a swallow calls.

 

“Come.”