Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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The meeting was billed, quaintly, as Promotion of Exemplary New Arts. I wanted to walk there, but Guy, sniffling and having to blow his nose every minute, objected and we did a murderous dash-stop-dash roar through the traffic. Zurich was lovely, fresh and splendid after the sickness of worrisome lovely Paris. It actually felt seaside, with the Limmit River running down to the broad sunshiny lake, the Zurichsee. We went down the Bahnhofstrasse—I was thrilled to notice the main railway station, because that’s where me and Lysette and Gobbie were to meet. Guy dumped us off near the Rennweg. A sign up and left indicated the tree-dotted mound.

“Have we time to climb up?” I asked Veronique. God, but she dazzled this morning. You can understand the ancient Celts giving up the ghost when tribes of great golden people like her hove in. “Only, it’s the ancient settlement of Zurich. We could see the whole place!”

“No.” She paused, as near as she’d ever come to a hesitation. “Lovejoy. What do you think of Guy?”

“For a psychotic murderous junkie he’s okay.” I gauged her The traffic passed down to the Quaibrucke, that lovely waterside. “Why?”

“When this is over, Guy and I will finish.” She looked away “You are not spoken for, Lovejoy.”

More evidence that she’d accompanied her killer druggie to Mentle Marina, otherwise how did she know I wasn’t heavily involved back in merry East Anglia?

“You mean…?” She couldn’t mean pair up. Not with me. I’m a shoddy scruff. She was glorious, rich, attractive.

“You are an animal,” she admitted candidly. “With an animal’s innocence. It is what I need.”

Why, the silly cow? I’d not even got a motor, nor money, unless this job paid. Odd, but I noticed that the motors reaching the traffic lights switched their engines off and sat in tidy silence until the lights changed. Fantastic, something I’d never seen before. What did they do it for? Save petrol? If I did that to my old Ruby it’d block the traffic for miles, never get anywhere, needing cranking up at every amber-red.

“And do what?”

“Live, Lovejoy.” She nodded at the city. “Grand, no? Wealthy, no? I want everything, every experience. Guy must go.”

Women have the finality of their convictions, know goodbye when they see it. In fact, that little skill of theirs has caused me a lot of trouble. But the way she spoke sent a shiver down me. It was almost as if—

“Let’s go, folkses!” from Guy, practically dancing between us. The district was mostly banking, exclusive and affluent. That Exemplary New Arts notice was a laugh. I avoided Veronique’s meaningful side glance, but in the end couldn’t resist giving her one. Contact lenses show an oblique rim, only just, round the edge of the iris, don’t they? You catch it, if the angle’s just so. And coloured contact lenses show it most. I was the only one not in disguise.

The place was a plush room within a hall, a kind of enclosed box inside a larger assembly space. Exhibition? It reminded me of those set-ups railway modelling societies use to create atmosphere for their titchy displays. I’d also seen one used for war games, nearer the mark.

“You come with us, Lovejoy,” Veronique said. Guy was chatting, waving, slapping backs, reaching for swift handshakes. Around the hall, two beefy blokes at each exit, hands folded. Three were in uniform, talking intently into gadgets. Once you got in, there’d be no way out. Nor could anybody outside get close enough to listen. The box occupied the precise centre of the vast hall. Mausoleum? You get the idea, that degree of welcome.

“Morning, Lovejoy.” Troude, a handshake. Lovely Monique, aloof. No sign of Almira, no Paulie, no Jervis Galloway, MP. “I want to thank you for the work you’ve done for us. Selecting the antiques we needed to buy at the Paris auctions, your Paris sweep, checking the suitability of the, ah, reproductions. You have earned a bonus.”

“Good morning, Monsieur Troude. Thank you.”

We did that no-after-you-please in the one doorway and entered the darkened box. The door closed behind us with a thud. Colonel Marimee was on a dais, hands behind his back, facing the dozen or so folk already in. All were standing. Monique was beside him. It was lit with a single strip light. Battery operated, I saw with surprise. Couldn’t they afford one from the mains? But a wandering flex breaches a wall, and this was—

“Soundproof, Lovejoy.” Philippe Troude was next to me, smiling. I’d been ogling. “Swiss security, that they do so well. Banks, you see.”

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the Commandant rasped in French. This was his scene, everybody listening while he delivered battle plans. Monique translated sotto voce into English for the uneducated, mainly me I suppose.

The pair I’d met at that weird mansion-house garden party were standing nearby. I smiled a hello. They nodded back, tense. I felt my belly gripe. If they were worried sick, I ought to have at least a panic or two. Sweat sprang all over me.

The Colonel spoke. “The event will be perfect. All has gone well.”

At Marimee’s barks people looked at each other in relief. Satisfaction ruled. The audience was affluent, smooth, the women elegant. Dressing had cost a fortune. I expected a series of tactical maps to drop from the ceiling, red arrows sweeping around blue ones, but it was only the Colonel, in his element.

“There are two additional steps.” Marimee stared us all down. Drums should have begun, music pounding to a martial crescendo. “First is financial. Another fourteen per cent is required from each syndicate member. Cash. Investment return will be commensurate. Immediate effect.”

A faint groan rose. I found myself groaning along, like a nerk. I hate that military phrase, as does anyone who’s seen a reluctant soldier. This must be my doing, buying up Paris.

“Mein Herr,” some stout bespectacled put in. I noticed calculators were surreptitiously in action

“No questions!” Marimee barked. “The second step is accomplishment of the objective. Execution will be total effectivity.”

A cluster of three men, almost Marimee look-alikes except less showy, nearly smiled. The executors, if that was the word?

“That is all.”

“Entschuldigen Sie, bitte, Herr Colonel,” the unhappy stout banker type said. I recognized a money man trying to wriggle out of spending.

“Non, Monsieur Tremp,” Marimee said in a muted voice. It shut us all up, groans and all. Except me.

To my alarm, I heard me say, “Mon commandant. I take it the items were all correctly bonded in Liechtenstein?”

“Oui, Lovejoy,” Monique Delebarre said evenly. But not before Marimee had hesitated. Him, whose first and last dither had been which breast when working up to his first suck. “Thank you. That will be all,” Monique intoned.

We filed out of the stuffy little room, me asking Veronique if that was it. I’d felt claustrophobic in there.

The Cayman Islands, and little Liechtenstein, let you lob into bond any antique for seven measly days—then you can legally bring it out and legally sell it to anyone. (That’s legally, got it?) In fact, you may even have sold it while it palely loitered. Our East Anglian antiques robbers love Liechtenstein because that one brief week gives us—sorry again; I meant them— time to forge a new provenance history, no more than a brief receipt, however sketchy, for the stolen antiques. Though nowadays everybody likes point-of-sale transfer, like in some Dutch or Belgian places that pay on the nail for any nicked Old Master, so making the sale legit. Zurich’s bond currently is five years.

“What else is required, Lovejoy?” Veronique was smiling. “How do you say, cold feet?”

“Cold feet, warm heart.” The best reply I could give. “I thought we were going to get our orders, details and all that.”

“We have them, Lovejoy. The meeting confirms that all is on course.”

“For when?”

“For the time of execution. You heard the Commandant.” She smiled. Guy the burke was still chatting, prancing. Folk all around him were amused, in spite of the bad news about the kitty being upped. My belly warned me with an incapacitating gripe that execution has more than one meaning.

The hoods at the exits detained us until Marimee and his three clones left the security room. I was sick of all this cloak-and-dagger malarkey. I mean, why didn’t Marimee just whisper his damned orders to us in the street? But pillocks like him feed on this sort of gunge.

They let us go in dribs and drabs, me and my couple last. Guy tried prattling to Marimee, but he ignored him except for one terse command I couldn’t hear. It didn’t quite bring Guy down through the Heaviside layer, but forced him into fawning agreement.

“Can I see the exhibition?” I asked Veronique. My plan was to bore Guy, literally, to vanishing point. “Is it true the Kunsthaus has a Rembrandt? There are four galleries I want to. go to. The Swiss National, the Landesmuseum, is a must, eh? It has workshops three centuries old from the Zurich arsenal! And I’m dying to see the Rietberg Museum.” Poisonously cheery, I knew my tactic would work, at least on Guy. Once I got rid of him, losing Veronique would be that much easier. “Is it true its collection of Chinese art was got from East Berlin in a swap for Lenin’s tea strainer? Then there’s that other place called the Bührle Foundation. And St Oswald’s…” I smiled an apology. Their eyes were already glazing. “After all, one of ours, in a strange land, eh? I’ll light a candle for him—if Swiss Lutherans are into ritual!” I chuckled into their shocked faces in the great foyer. “Which first?”

It took an hour to shake Guy, then another to get rid of Veronique. We’d reached two of Hobbema’s landscapes when he finally cracked. He’d been twitching some time when he took Veronique to one side and muttered through his sniffles. She let him go, came back to me with questions in her eyes. I took her arm and kept up my dreadful heartiness, yapping non-stop. She’d wondered if my enthusiasm had been a pretence, a ploy to get her alone. I was repellently obsessional, dragging her round the adjacent gardens to see the Henry Moores and Bourdelles.

“I’m not into Magritte and Ernst, that lot,” I told her, pulling her along. “We’ll leave the new extension, eh? Let’s go up to the first floor. There’s a Hans Fries, Adoration of the Magi. Have you seen it? Only, you just guess how many times the bloody thing’s been varnished, and with what sort. Try! I’ll give you three goes, but here’s a clue: it isn’t copal varnish. Know why? Because if you stand about four feet away, then look away and quickly look back, you’ll see a kind of shimmer—”

She broke, to my relief. “I’d better go and see how Guy is, Lovejoy,” she said. “Meet us at the hotel, supper tonight. Okay?”

“Okay,” I cried, giving her a ton of disappointment, riskily saying what if we get sudden orders, where on earth should I find them?

“Today’s free, Lovejoy,” she said. “There’s one job for you tomorrow, then you’re done.”

Done? my mind screamed as I grinned so long. Done for?

Cunningly, and I thought with skilled casualness, I mooched about to see her actually leave. Then I did a series of pretended quick looks in case she doubled back, or one of Marimee’s goons was lurking somewhere in the art gallery. No sign. An hour later I walked openly to the main station, where Gobbie would be waiting, and Lysette Fotheringay. Return to normality.

Me and Gobbie were in the station when Lysette arrived. We were so cunning —in Information looking at these tiresome diagrams of railway networks—and simply walked away giving no sign. We went to a nosh bar —expensive, in Zurich—and apologized to each other for having to share a table. That legitimized our speaking together, my daft idea a kid could have seen through. Pathetic.

“Keep your voices down,” I warned them. Foreign languages carry; indigenous speech doesn’t. It’s always true. “Say as little as possible. Good coffee.”

“Made proper Swiss style,” Lysette said with pride. “Through filter papers, none of your French stewing process.”

I sighed. Two minutes, and already we were into national rivalry.

“Look, love. Cut that out, okay? I know we’re in the most perfect, orderly, tidy, stable country in the world —”

Her face changed. “You think so?”

“That’s what they say, love.” Her sudden ferocity made me uneasy, and I’d had enough of being that. “It’s going to be our main ally. Steady police force, trustworthy citizens. The slightest anomaly must stand out like a torch in a tomb—”

“Mr Veriker, would you excuse us, please?” Lysette said to Gobbie. I stared at him. His name was Gobbie, for heaven’s sake. Everybody knew that. Well, well. Who’d think Gobbie’d go and grow a surname? Him, of all people. “It seems that Lovejoy’s even stupider than we both could possibly imagine.”

“Watch your frigging gob, Lysette.” I was getting narked. Nowt but birds with hobnailed tongues since I’d left home.

“Come, Lovejoy. Perhaps, Mr Veriker, you’d like to meet us here in an hour?”

We left. I trailed after, sheepish but madder. It would be obvious now to anybody that we knew each other. She went down into a shopping precinct underneath the railway station. It was posh, with splendid boutiques, auto-bank windows, luscious grub, imported knitwear, a veritable Bond Street of superb design. Really Swiss, I thought.

“Your arm, Lovejoy.”

“You sure?” I was still furious. Fair’s fair, right? I hadn’t asked to come just to help her and her frigging pansified brother…

“Change?” An apparition said it in three languages, holding out his hand. Maybe four, five. I wouldn’t know.

“Er, aye.” I gave him some. He looked derelict, almost in rags, and filthy.

“Change?” Two more drifted at me from nowhere, hands out. Lysette yanked me aside and we moved on among the people.

They seemed mostly youngsters, huddled in mounds. One or two sprawled. Most sat at a crouch.

“You encourage them to mug you, Lovejoy,” Lysette said, keeping us walking. “It’s a real danger. They sleep here or in doorways up above. I know it happens in all cities—and in lovely neat Zurich.” She sounded bitter.

“Only here, though?” I asked. I knew that in India the railway stations are great social concourses.

She did not laugh, gave me a look of scorn. “You think you have drug problems, Lovejoy? Nothing like ours. The diseases that accompany it offer the proof.”

“In Switzerland?” I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud.

“Yes, here. The capital.” She drew me to the escalator and we made the open air.

“A few homeless in a whole nation…” I faltered.

“How much evidence do you want, Lovejoy? The report from the parliamentary commission which investigated our Ministry of Justice? It found that secret police gangs had records of thirteen per cent of the entire Swiss population on file.” She gave a wintry smile. “So many Swiss subversives!”

“Your Swiss police?” My plans took another tumble.

“Of course,” she said sweetly, “the files vanished when the commission report became, shall we say, famous!” She guided me along the pavement. “Possibly because the secret army we call P26 might have to be unmasked further.”

Either she was off her nut or my plans were even wronger. She hailed a taxi, still talking.

“Economy? All Europe’s ills we Swiss have in abundance. Rising unemployment, inflation, poverty, falling home ownership…”

I won’t tell you the rest, if that’s all right. I’m not scared of such talk, but there’s too much going wrong everywhere, and it shouldn’t. A bird I once knew used to say mine was the typical ostrich mentality, but it’s not. I just don’t want to hear bad things, that’s all. What’s wrong with that? I didn’t look at what she pointed out on that taxi ride, struggled to deafen myself, shut her horrible words out. Lysette went for reprimand.

“It’s no good trying not to listen, Lovejoy,” she was telling me as we finally came back. “Those people in the Platzspitz were mainliners, druggies, pushers, narcos. Needle Park, that place I showed you. It’s an open drugs mart, free needles on the State in hopes of lowering the AIDS rate. The suppliers make a billion francs a year…”

“Alma-Tad,” my mind sang, “oh, what a cad…”

“We have Zahfraulein, tooth ladies,” she was waxing. I tried putting my hands over my ears. She leaned closer, spoke more directly. The taxi driver must have thought us insane. “Spot checks on children’s teeth—so they can start out really healthy derelicts…”

Do women never shut up? “Oh, I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,” my cortex warbled. Thank God, we were back near the Limmatplatz and its massive Migros supermarket with the orange M.

“The Migros?” She’d glimpsed my relieved recognition, rotten cow. “Our famous store, all things to all men!” She scathed on. “We Swiss are so docile! It is 1984. Twenty-five per cent of us shop there daily…” We stopped at a traffic light, and I got out for air and freedom, leaving her to it.

She caught me up, no getting rid of her. I’d dithered, lost for direction. She took my arm. “Switzerland has more drug OD deaths in six months than—”

“Love.” I stopped, broken. “Please. I can’t… I just, well can’t. Don’t you see? For Christ’s sake.”

“You have social and political responsibility, Lovejoy —” She sounded like Colonel Marimee, in her own mad way.

“Lysette. Let’s part, eh? You your way, me mine. Bugger everybody.”

“Community obligations—”

“Aren’t, love. They drive me insane. I can’t take it. I can only escape. It’s all I ever do.”

“He’s right, miss,” Gobbie intruded, thank God. How the hell had he got here? “Lovejoy’s a scrounger, has to travel light or not at all. He’s a weak reed, wet lettuce, broken straw.”

“Here, Gobbie.” Narked, I straightened from my supplication posture. There’s a limit. I’m not that bad. A lady pedestrian spoke sharply to us. We’d been blocking the pavement.

“Lovejoy must be educated, Mr Veriker,” from good old sterling standard Lysette. I could have welted her one. Sociologically minded people once took over ancient Babylon, and we all know what happened then.

“No, Lysette. Educators everywhere ploughed that one.” I reached out and wrung her hand. “This is it. Fare thee well, lass. Cheers, Gobbie.”

He came with me. I was only half surprised. They’d seemed like a going concern, somehow, and him four times her age.

“You were right, son,” he said consolingly. “She’s too wrapped up in do-goodery. Time for a jar?”

“Well, as long as I’d one ally I’d give it a go. I’ve been alone in scams often enough. We settled on the nearest thing we could find to a pub. It was the glossiest dearest pub I’d ever seen. We found a quiet corner, away from some blokes with feathers in their hats talking of some shooting club. The thinnest glass of ale I’ve ever had served. Gobbie tutted, grinned.

“They’d get scragged serving this in my local,” he said. I chuckled obediently, working out how to tell him. “Pity you and her didn’t get on, Lovejoy,” he said. “Now, son. Where do I come in? She won’t give up on you, mark my words.”

“I know, Gobbie. Let’s try survival, eh?”

“If you say, Lovejoy.” He grinned, loving every minute of it when things were going wrong, like now. He must have been the greatest antiques runner on earth when younger. I hoped he was still. He was all I’d got. Maybe I should have gone for Mercy Mallock after all.