Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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Didn’t the Commandant say something about London?” I asked hopefully in next morning’s flying start.

Guy tore us through the countryside. I wanted some aspirin, but Veronique fell about when I asked. I was really narked. Just my luck to draw the one bird in the world without a ton of paracetamol in her handbag. “Is this north?”

“He’s quick on the uptake!” Guy cried, swerving, sounding his horn. I shrank in my seat as the wind ripped through me. Everything he said sounded copied from American films. Mind you, what’s wrong with that? Same as me, really. Birds often tell me so.

Veronique was smiling. I was exposed in the bucket seat, my regular place now. “He’s a servant,” she said, turning to speak directly at me. “Aren’t you, Lovejoy?”

“Aren’t we all?” I was worried about my helpers. I meant me.

“No!” she cried. “You are dull! Like all the servile! Show you a sham clubhouse, a seaside toy, call it a marina, and you grovel like a dog.” Et withering cetera. I’d made a hit.

“I’m no serf,” I fired back. Staying a buffoon never did me any harm.

Not a bad description of Mentle, marina and all. So she —meaning Guy too—had been there? I thought about poor Baff.

From then on, I decided, I’d really try. I shone, talked instead of sulked. I began trying to draw them out, embarked on some funny not-so-funny tales, Actions I Have Known, scams, robberies (no names, no pack drill as people say), and within a few miles had her smiling. No mean feat, with Guy yippeeing, attacking every vehicle on the road. I slyly timed him, supposing he’d shot his lot before we started out. He’d have to pull in somewhere when his jangles got too much.

“I mean, I really like Alma-Tadema’s paintings,” I was giving out when finally Guy started to become quieter, his driving less flamboyant. What, an hour and a half of belting along the motorway? We’d come out of Paris on the A6. “What’s wrong with detail, if it’s lovely? He painted all the faces in his enormous crowds. But so what? Easier to fake.” I’d been on about the old 1980s forgeries, still around in some galleries.

“You’re a secret luster, Lovejoy,” Veronique gave back in that encouraging reprimand women use. “We heard.”

“Not a word to anyone, or I’ll stand no chance.” I grinned apologetically, innocent Lovejoy, hoping but never really expecting. “Where do you find anybody to do detail like Alma-Tad nowadays?” I hummed, trying to remember the melody of that old music-hall song. “Alma-Tad, oh what a cad…” My Gran used to sing it in her naughty moods, dreadfully risky. It worked.

“Look in the right place, Lovejoy, you’ll find anything.” Veronique’s implacability phase returned for a second.

“Not nowadays, love. Forgers don’t have the application. And if fakers can’t be bothered, who can? You need time, money, love.” I chanced it as Guy, all a-twitch, began looking for exit roads. Veronique darted him a glance, nodded permission. “Don’t annoy me. I’ve lived like a monk since I arrived. Gelt’s all very well, but I’m short on vital necessities.”

She burst out laughing, a beautiful sight, the wind, blonde hair flying, all shape and pattern. “I see, Lovejoy! You’re desperate!”

Even though they’d killed Baff, I was narked at her amusement at my expense. “Look, love. Birds can go years without a bloke. We can’t last more than a couple of days without a bird.” I was still fishing, laying groundwork. “Everybody’s… well, fixed up, except me.”

She was still rolling in the aisles at my lovelorn state when we halted at a service station. On the way in, I took a gander at the wall map, and realized we were heading east. Reims led to Metz, to Strasbourg. The E35 darted south along the Rhine then, to Zurich. A guess right, for once? No sign of the Sweets, which surprisingly gave me a pang. Lilian had been brilliant, for all that she was the wife of a SAPAR hunter. And none of Gobbie and Lysette.

“How long’s this going on, Veronique?” I asked while we waited for Guy. “I need to know the plan, when, some detail.”

“Why?” We’d collared some superb French coffee. She gazed levelly back, chin resting on her linked fingers.

“Good old Suleiman-Aga.” I made a show of relishing my first swig though it burnt my mouth. Women can drink scalding, with their asbestos throttles.

“Who?” Very, very guarded.

“Your Turkish ambassador, brought coffeetime to France. About the time of our Restoration, 1666, give or take a yard.”

She didn’t say anything. She’d already been to the loo, as had I. I realized I couldn’t quite see the edges of her pupils, however hard I looked. Funny, that. I’d done my most soulful gaze a number of times, hoping. Though what I’d learn from seeing if the pupils were dilated or pinpoint, God knows. It’s supposed to be a clue to drugs, but which size meant what?

Her eyes rose, held me hard with an intensity I didn’t like. Lucky that Guy was the mad one, or I’d have suspected the worst.

“We were warned about you, Lovejoy.” She drew a spoony trail in a spillage spot on the table. I was starting to hate surfaces. “I paid no heed. Now I’m wondering if I underestimated you.”

This is the kind of woman-talk I don’t like. Had I been too obvious? I went into a huff. It’s quite a good tactic, played with enough misunderstanding.

“Look, love.” I showed how heated I was. “I’d rather finish this job and get home. If you’re narked because I mentioned I’m a bit short of, ah, close company, then tell Marimee and get me sacked—”

“Sacked, shacked, packed?” Guy raced to the table, literally grabbing Veronique’s coffee. “Hacked?” He laughed so loud people looked round. He hovered about four feet above the floor, zingy, fully restored. “Hacked, then lacked? Wracked?” Happy days were here again. I didn’t need to look into his pupils.

“Guy,” Veronique reprimanded quietly as we rose to depart. Guy shrilled merriment, streaked off to the motor. We followed. “You will be told everything, Lovejoy.” She wore a watch that could have afforded me a thousand times over. “In three hours.”

“Three hours more at Guy’s lunatic speeds’ll have us in Vladivostok. Will we make it back to Paris? Only, I started fancying that hundred-year-old concierge. She’s just my type—breathing.”

That gave her a crinkly half-smile. I felt we were more allies after that short break than before. I tried telling Guy to take his time. He bawled that we were to make Zurich before midnight, and whiplashed us into the traffic with barely a look. Correct, at last. Mind you, the million pointers had helped. Gobbie and Lysette would now meet me as planned.

“Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow,” I sang, explaining to Veronique: “Alma-Tadema used to play that to visitors on his early phonograph. Real class, eh? Was it the onzième?”

“Eleventh?”

“Arrondissement. Your warehouse, the cran. God, I’ve never seen so much reconstruction. Don’t Parisians get fed up? Between the Place de la Bastille arid the Boulevard Voltaire, wasn’t it? Lovely, once. I’ll bet, when it was famous for cabinet-makers.”

Silence. Guy nearly bisected our motor on an oil transporter.

“Mind you, what can you expect?” I said, blathering on. “The City of Paris’s planning department has no conservation section, has it? Cretins. That lets anybody do anything.”

More, but certain, silence. Funny, but now I was sure of their terrible scam my nausea had all gone.

Veronique didn’t chat much more during that pacy journey, and I shut up. But I caught her looking at me in a mirror when she did her lipstick. I cheered up. An ally? Or did her languid look mean she was simply on different shotpot than before?

Three more pit stops for Guy to toot his flute and we were across the Swiss border. I felt bright, optimistic. After all, here was lovely Switzerland. Never having seen it, still I knew it was clean, pristine, beautiful, orderly, utterly correct and safe and lawabiding. Veronique seemed to last out on only one kite flight. Except a vein in her left arm was now swollen and bruised. At the border, Guy produced three passports, one mine. They weren’t inspected, and we drove on through. I was so excited I nodded off.

“Lovejoy? Wake up.”

We’d arrived, quite dark. I stumbled out, bleary. The hotel seemed plain, almost oppressively compact. Stern warnings abounded in umpteen languages on every wall about baths, water, payment, lights, payment, doors, keys, payment. I didn’t read any, but climbed the stairs—stairs were free —thinking that whatever Monique Delebarre’s syndicate was spending, little of it went on lodging. Or was this doss-house strategically placed?

The microscopic room was dingier even than my cottage. One bulb flogged itself, leaking a paltry candlepower that barely made the walls. The place was freezing. I sprawled on the bed and thought of money.

Now I’m not against the stuff, though I know I do go on. It’s really crazy how prices dominate. The UK tries to keep track by teams which examine 130,000 shop-shelf items in 200 towns, compiling the Retail Price Index, but it’s all codswallop. Just as comparing antique prices. It’s a hard fact that a lovely épergne, a decorative table centrepiece, weighing a colossal 478 ounces 10 pennyweights, was auctioned in 1928 for 12 shillings sixpence an ounce, which equals 63 pence as this ink dries. Date 1755, by that brilliant master silversmith Edward Wakelin, no less. And in its original case, that collectors today would kill for. So where’s the sense in comparison? Answer: no sense at all.

The only honest matching is by time. And I knew no forgers, no artisans, who could or would devote time to making furniture exactly as they used to back in the eighteenth century. Except me. Yet Monique Delebarre and Troude and all seemed to have tapped an endless vein of superbs, by the load, by the ware-house.

Even though I’d no pyjamas I decided it was bedtime. Guy and Veronique were rioting and whooping in the next room.

For a while I lay looking at neon on-offs making shadowed patterns on the walls and ceiling. Antiques crept about my mind. Antiques that were laborious, time-consuming the way all creativity is. Like upholstery, tapestry, polishing furniture in a cruel endless method that only the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ever managed. And, I’d bet, paper filigree, and papier mâché, that took many, many poorly paid hands. I think I dozed, and came to with somebody knocking surreptitiously on the door. I was there in a flash, opening it slowly, lifting as I turned the handle so it couldn’t squeak.

Veronique.

My face couldn’t have given me away, not in the semi-darkness of the street glow. She came in and stood leaning against the wall by the doorjamb. I was broken, thinking it would be my home team, Lysette and Gobbie.

“We off somewhere?” For all I knew we might have to steal into the night. It seemed the sort of military thing Colonel Marimee would get up to.

“In a manner of speaking, Lovejoy.” She closed the door.

Then I noticed she had a swish jewel-blue silk nightdress on, to the floor. She shelled the cardigan she’d tied round her shoulders, letting it fall. “Guy’s asleep, sort of,” she said quietly. “Will an hour do? For somebody so deprived?”

My throat swallowed. My question was answered. Guy’s bright episodes were sixty minutes, between doses.

“For what?”

She sighed, pulled me to the bed, pushed me gently down. “You’re hardly the Don Juan they threatened us about, Lovejoy.” She propped herself up on one elbow, and smiled down at me. She was hard put not to laugh her head off. “I come into your bed in the night stripped, shall we say, for action. Does my presence give you any kind of clue as to why?”

They threatened us about you, Lovejoy, when we crossed to murder Baff. And silk is the rarest, most labour-intensive textile. Get enough supply, and you could make enough fake antiques to retire on, if you’d a zillion obedient hands…

“Get that off,” I said thickly, clawing her nightdress while she hushed me and tried to do it tidily faster than I could rip.

Pride creeps into mind-spaces it shouldn’t, I always find. Shame does too, but lasts longer. The trouble is, there’s no way to resist, delay. Women have everything, which is why they get the rest. You can’t stop them. Veronique got me, and I’m ashamed to say now that she was scintillating, wondrous. What’s worse, I had a perverse relish, almost a sadistic glee, knowing that her bloke next door, stoned out of his skull, was the one who’d murdered a mate of mine. And maybe helped to do over Jan Fortheringay? I’d have to work that one out. I behaved even worse than usual.

At the last second I felt her hand fumble and cap my mouth in hope of silence. Women, practical as ever. It wasn’t the end, and, shame to say, I was glad. I harvest shame while I’ve got the chance. Pathetic.

She left after the full hour. When she’d gone I think I hardly slept, wondering about bedbugs in this dive, but finding that antiques marched back in.

There would be others Veronique hadn’t mentioned and I hadn’t asked about. Like paper filigree, which the Yanks call “quilling”, the most painstaking antique of all. Ten years ago, you could get a tiny paper-filigree doll’s house for a month’s wage. Now? Oh, say enough to buy a real-life family house, garden, throw in a new standard model Ford, and you’re about right for price. Inflation, the slump of Black Monday, recession—the antiques made of tiny scraps of paper trounced them all. And their prices soar yet, to this very day. Go to see it done, if there’s ever a demonstration in your village hall.

In the 1790s, Georgian ladies invented this pastime. They’d take slivers of paper so small that your breath blows them away if you’re not careful. Me being all clumsy thumbs, I’ve tried faking these objects and they drive you mad. You roll the paper tightly, then colour it (before or after) and stick a minute slice down to a hardwood surface. Make patterns. Surprisingly durable, you can then fashion tea caddies, boxes, even toys, tiny pieces of furniture, whatever.

There are quilling guilds everywhere now, who preach it as one of the most ancient of arts in ancient Crete. Then it was a religious craft, purely decorative, for shrines and churches, only they used vellum. I’ve seen some on alabaster, to hang in a window so the quilling picture showed in silhouette—translucent alabaster was once used in place of glass, like in some Italian churches. The best quilling examples I’ve seen are nursery toys like minuscule kitchens, with every small utensil made of these small rolls, twists, cones, cylinders. And entire dolls’ houses, rooms fully furnished. “Quilling“, I suppose, because North American ladies used quills of birds and porcupines, though there’s a row about the word as always. Inventive ladies used miniature rolls of wax, hair, leather even, and decorated their purses, pouches, even their husband’s tobacciana.

Maybe you don’t think it’s a very manly pursuit, hunting filigree quilling antiques? Let me cure you: take a look in your local museum—they’ll have one or two pieces if they’re any good—just to get the idea. Then try it. Make a square inch of paper filigree. Go on, I dare you. Know what? You’ll give up in ten minutes. If you’re like me, you’ll get so mad you’ll slam the whole load of paper shreds against the wall and storm out sulking to the tavern until you’ve cooled down.

No. Filigree takes application, skill, endlessly detailed work. Or loads of money, boredom, leisuretime. Or something much, much worse. I sweated, with fear.

As I lay there, hands behind my head and staring at the ceiling, I couldn’t help listening to any sounds that might come from the next room. A few mutters, a single shrill scream of dementia from Guy, silence. No chance of sleeping any more tonight. I knew it.

When I next opened my eyes it was breakfast o’clock, the traffic was howling and daylight was pouring in. Shame hadn’t really done with me yet. It pointed out that I’d awakened refreshed, you cad Lovejoy. I decided I was now willing to give my newly planned role a go. My jack-the-lad manner seemed to be working with Veronique, and anything that works with women is a must. What’s a lifetime’s liberal humanism between friends? I’d become the hard-liner, under Veronique’s tender loving care.

So to Zurich, in clean, pristine, sterile, hand-rinsed, orderly Switzerland. To rob the biggest repository of saleable untraceable antiques in the world. The easy bit.