Free Goodbye Again by Joseph Hone

middleweight. More money, and certainly less trouble, just to floor a man now and then, instead of fighting devious little shysters in the art business.’
    He knew all the history in his field, and more than that: behind the bluff exterior, he had fine taste and an unerring feel for all thatwas best in a painting, in the arts, architecture, in life itself. He’d got a post with the Metropolitan Museum before the war. Then he was drafted, and when the allies went into France after D-Day he’d been among the first off the boats, as one of the US Army’s Monuments Officers, there with the troops to try to protect Europe’s cultural heritage from the general mayhem.
    A man of many amiable parts, wearing his art learning so lightly he sometimes seemed quite naked of it – just a culture-struck GI who had stayed on in Paris after the war, living on his wits and his charm and the kindness of good women.
    He had never left France, but had taken up with and married one good woman, Michele, now dead, with a son and a daughter I’d met years before, both of them now married and married abroad. I’d first met Harry in the early seventies at an exhibition of my paintings at a Left Bank gallery. He’d bought several canvases straightaway, and had compounded his enthusiasm for my work by taking me out afterwards, celebrating his purchases, in a little restaurant round the corner, La Tourelle. It was still there, and had been my regular canteen with Katie whenever we’d come to the city. Harry owned a lovely restored eighteenth-century house on the small square of St Catherine. He had his apartment and leased the other floors, with a fine Polish restaurant on the ground floor. It seemed almost a sideline of his that he had made his fortune in the ruck of the world’s art market, buying and selling, gathering his own fine collection in the process. Whenever I’d been with him he never seemed to be doing anything so vulgar as dealing. He was the old-style, cultured, American gentleman, interested in beautiful things, browsing in antique shops, art galleries, the flea market, and something of a boulevardier after Michele died: theatres, the opera, cinemas, cafés, restaurants – enjoying the city and its people. I liked Harry. He was candid. He took risks. No cagey silences, lies of omission, scheming compromise, comfy wallowing in the greyareas, none of the conventional hypocrisies. He always played high odds, win or lose, like a Runyon gambler. He was a mulberry bush.
    He was taking his breakfast in the big salon looking over the square, some of his pictures on the walls. The three marvellous canvases I remembered, the Utrillo street scene, Porte des Lilas, an early Soutine, Paysan , and a classic Renoir nude of a young woman, untitled. And my two paintings of Katie, away on another wall to the side.
    Sitting down with a cup of coffee I told him about Elsa; how she was so like Katie – that she’d killed herself the week before, and how this other woman, who seemed Katie’s double, had turned up out of the blue at my mother’s funeral reception.
    ‘Now wait a moment, Ben. You’re going too fast. Rewind. What the hell’s been going on?’
    So I told Harry in more detail what had been going on for the past week, told him all I knew and all I didn’t know.
    ‘Okay, but why haven’t you told this Elsa she looks just like Katie? It’s quite a coincidence, but it happens. They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world. It’s not an offence. So why hide it from her?’
    ‘Seems more than a coincidence. It means something.’
    ‘Bullshit! You’re running that Jewish, Irish, Italian thing again. You look worried. You been up to something fishy?’
    ‘No, but someone has. My father, and maybe Elsa … and her father. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’
    ‘You have doubts about this Elsa?’
    I nodded. ‘I don’t know why. I always thought I was good at fathoming women.’
    ‘In your paintings, yes.