The Exquisite by Laird Hunt Read Free Book Online Page B

of luck he had so he became a thief. He stole scrap iron from a blacksmith to sell to a cooper and flour from a baker to sell to local housewives. He stole three copper coins from an apothecary and a bolt of blue silk off the back of a milliner’s cart. He stole eggs and whole cheeses and bundles of hops and once the corpse of a foal, which he attempted to sell for its hooves. For a long time he was unable to rid his mind of the smell of the rotting foal, even though he had tied a rope to it and dragged it well behind him. Then he got run out of town. He was not hurt badly, but was badly scared and was nervous around open fire for the brief remainder of his days. For a time he wandered. Autumn gave way to brutal winter. After knocking about at loose ends for some weeks he ended up in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, his luck went from poor to very bad. A woman he groped at one night took his purse and left blood dripping from his right eye. The next day he attempted to knock someone down and to steal this someone’s cape. He had been drinking. A kind of potato spirit. Very potent. He had procured a large knife, a jagged, rusty job with a bad handle. What he attempted to do was not what he did. His efforts were approximate. The someone he attempted to knock down and whom he had slightly wounded with the knife, the handle of which had crumbled during the attack, was a magistrate. Not a great magistrate. Not the magistrate behind door number one or two, the magistrate behind door number four or five, but still, a magistrate, and a vigorous, broad-shouldered one at that, who got up, flung down our drunken thief, and promised, through clenched teeth, to deliver him to justice. He was duly arrested, beaten, tried, hung. Within hours, perhaps as an extension of his punishment, his corpse was taken to the Waaggebouw, a medical amphitheater, where, before an audience of Amsterdam’s finest citizens and foreign guests, possibly including such luminaries as René Descartes and Sir Thomas Browne, it was opened and sectioned with a scalpel and a number of fine saws. Rembrandt, who was also in attendance that day and made sketches, later immortalized the event in one of his most famous paintings,
The Anatomy Lesson.
Are you familiar with that painting?
    I think so, I said.
    I’m sure you know it. I’ll have to see if I can put my hands on a reproduction, there are some very faithful ones available. Of course these widely available reproductions lack texture and ruin the colors, but they will give you the idea, put across the gist.
    I’d like that, but …
    But why, my dear Henry, am I telling you this?
    I nodded.
    You should sleep now, he said. You are not well and I’ve troubled you enough.
    No trouble at all, I said.
    That’s very nice of you to say, but still, I should go.
    Before you do, why don’t you tell me what it is you think we have in common?
    Mr. Kindt looked at me with his pale blue eyes. He licked his lips and leaned closer.
    What we have in common is that we’re both thieves, Henry. Not terribly successful ones.

NINE
    New York is swell. It is swell on a cold wet night and it is swell on a cold clear dawn. It is swell with the cars coming fast toward you and it is swell down by the subway tracks, where the people come to gather and watch each other and wait. It is swell with the attractive denizens and with those who are not, including those, like you, who might once have been. It is swell with the shop lights and it is swell with its skyscrapers and acres of rubble and brilliant glass-strewn streets with everyone loving everything and moving through the haze of airborne particles saying fuck you. It is swell with its parks and harsh, windswept open spaces, with its beautiful giant bridges, with its great river and grim estuary, its cardboard villages, its scaffolding, its doves in the morning, its sparrows and pigeons and hawks and wild parrots basking in the sun. Its layers of sonic and visual complexity are swell.