Free Theft by Peter Carey

with all its gooseturd grey and phthalo green smudged and shifted in the battle with the resistant "O".
    I watched Ewbank measure it, like you watch your own car crash happen. "Thirty by twenty and one-half inches," he announced.
    Amberstreet gave me a cherubic little smirk.
    "Oh, Michael!" he said to me, taking in his belt one more notch. I suddenly understood he was a scary little shit.
    "What?"
    "Thirty by twenty and a half," he said. "Oh, Michael!" "What?"
    "Not familiar?" "No."
    "The same dimensions as Mr. Boylan's Leibovitz." I thought, What is this? Kabala? Numerology?
    "Michael, I thought you were a clever man. We know the exact dimensions. They're in the catalogue raisonne."
    "What would it matter if it was the same dimensions?"
    "It would matter," said Amberstreet, "because as you know Mr. Boylan's home was burgled and a work by Jacques Leibovitz was stolen." "Bullshit. When?"
    Hearing this Ewbank gave a mighty big suck in of his pipe so his eyebrows disappeared into his hair.
    "Oh." Amberstreet smiled incredulously "You didn't know!" "Don't be so bloody sarcastic. How could I know?"
    "Like you know John Lennon's dead," said Ewbank.
    "You could try any newspaper," suggested Amberstreet. "You could turn on the radio."
    "John Lennon's not dead you dick."
    "Don't change the subject, Michael. We're here to investigate a burglary."
    It was only then, as we stood staring down at my painting, that I realised something very serious was going on.
    "Someone pinched his Leibovitz?"
    "Three weeks ago, Michael. You are the only one who knew it was there."
    "He never showed it to me. Ask him," I said, but I was seeing the hateful look on Dozy's face as he passed me in the fog.
    "But you knew he had it. You knew he was going away, down to Sydney for the night."
    "He's always going down to Sydney. You really think I'm stupid enough to glue a two-million-dollar painting to my canvas and then cover it with paint? Is that your point? It's very easy to see you're not a bloody artist."
    "We're not saying you've got it under there. We're saying we need to remove the work for X-raying and IR spectography."
    "You bugger. You just want to nick my fucking canvas." "Calm down, pal," said Ewbank. "You'll get a proper receipt. You can write the description yourself."
    "When would I get it back?"
    The older man's eyebrows shot up alarmingly. "That would depend," said Amberstreet.
    "On what?"
    "If we have to keep it for the trial."
    I really did not know what was going on. A certain part of me thought the fucks were robbing me. Another part of me was thinking I was in very serious shit. I don't know which was the better or the worse, and in the end, after I had spent three hours making a crate, a time they used to photograph my pry bar and my other tools, and after I had personally helped them load it in their wagon, they showed me the huge press file on the Leibovitz theft. I read the front-page headlines by the light of their headlights, still clueless about John Lennon, but relieved to understand that I, at least, was not being robbed.

    10

    Of course the pipsqueak Michael Boone was ignorant of anything that did not personally benefit him, and on the subject of the wombat he incorrectly used the expression MUDDLEHEADED which might be the title of a book but is wrong because the wombat is a clever fellow who can, God bless him, do a barrel-roll-with- twist inside his tunnel, scratch his ears, flatten himself like dough under a rolling pin and I knew this because I had SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES. Of course I never told my brother and he had no idea what plans I had made in preparation for the visit by police, although the moment I snapped Evan Guthrie's metacarpal I expected BYAR-BYAR-BYAR blue light flashing THE WRATH OF THE LAW and then I would not be able to rely on Butcher Bones to save me. Many a time he had threatened to have me put under MANAGED CARE where they would remove the tartar from my teeth.
    The coppers were SLOW AS A WET WEEK and