Theo confesses everything to Hobie

After returning from Amsterdam on the red-eye, Theo finds Hobie in the kitchen, troubled and distant. The atmosphere is thick with unspoken tension. Hobie, who has been worried sick since Theo vanished from the engagement party, confronts him about the visit from Lucius Reeve, who arrived two days before Christmas with photocopies of shipping bills and signatures, detailing the extent of the furniture fraud. Hobie is stunned by the scale of the deception: "Two million dollars, Theo!" he exclaims, unable to comprehend how it went so far. Theo, exhausted and ashamed, tries to explain that he can now buy everything back, but Hobie is less concerned with the money than with the deeper betrayal and the mystery of where Theo has been.

The Confession

Theo, bone-tired from the plane and still aching, gives Hobie a straightforward account of the past week, steering clear of the two dead bodies but laying out the rest as plainly as he can. He tells Hobie about the painting—how he took it from the museum as a thirteen-year-old, how he hid it for years, how Boris stole it, and how it was finally recovered in Frankfurt through a reward. Hobie listens in complete silence, not even answering the telephone when it rings. When Theo finishes, Hobie sits back and folds his arms, then says quietly, "It does all swing around strangely sometimes, doesn't it?" He reflects on how funny time is, and how many tricks and surprises it holds.

Hobie's Response

Rather than anger, Hobie responds with a story of his own. He retrieves a falling-to-pieces photo album and shows Theo a faded snapshot of a tiny, beaky, birdlike boy—Welty as a child—sitting at a piano in a palmy Belle Époque room in Cairo. Above the boy hangs a reproduction of The Goldfinch. Hobie explains that Welty grew up with that copy, that the painting was a huge part of his childhood, the happiest part, before he was crippled and sent to America. He tells Theo that Welty used to speak of how, with very great paintings, it is possible to know them deeply, even through copies. The line of beauty is the line of beauty, Hobie says; it doesn't matter if it has been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

The Deeper Meaning

Hobie goes on to talk about fateful objects—the pieces that occur and recur in a dealer's life. He suggests that for some people, the nail where fate is liable to catch and snag is not an object but a city, a color, a time of day. He asks Theo who it was that said coincidence was just God's way of remaining anonymous, and when Theo points out that he sounds like his father, Hobie counters by asking who is to say that gamblers don't really understand it better than anyone else. He concludes that everything worthwhile is a gamble, and that good can come around sometimes through strange back doors. The confession ends not with a rupture but with a deepened, if complicated, bond between the two men.