Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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Lorela Chevalier,” the woman said, smart as a pin, steady eyes. Not much change out of her, I thought, giving her my innocent millionaire smile and shaking hands. The other two proved mere serfs, oiling ahead to open doors, snapping into squawk-boxes. “Repository Director.”

A woman of few words? I wasn’t too sure I liked such novelties, but showed willing.

“Getty No Relation,” I said, typecast buffoon. “Trade you Henry for Lorela. Deal?”

“How charming!” she exclaimed, but it was very practised and she kept her eyes on Monique. Women spot where power lies. I was instantly relegated, second-division status.

“Madame Getty,” I said lamely, out of it.

“How do you do,” from Monique, no sudden friendships on offer from Monique, thank you.

“Madame. You received our charges, conditions, prerequisites…?”

“Certainly.” We moved gently towards the house, me depressed because they’d slipped into French. Lorela broke off to spout a command in sideways German before continuing handling us. A lovely scoop of a face, the sort you’d trust instantly if she wasn’t in antiques. I was among polyglots, handicapped by being an idiot in my own language let alone everybody else’s.

The house was the carousel one we’d had that garden party in. Except it wasn’t. I bet myself that this one would stay still. A disturbingly similar mansion house, in unsettlingly similar grounds. Copses, statues, lawns, everything within four hundred yards was uncannily similar. Only the sun was angled differently. I inspected the great pile as we strolled chatting along the terrace. Yes, virtually identical. The Commandant had done his groundwork well, down to the shape of the windows, doors, type of brick, even a stone buttress reinforcing the west wing. Typical military: prepare a model, then a precise life-size mock-up of the objective. Then go to war.

“Lovely house, Lorela,” I interrupted. Monique smiled with woman’s complicity at the director. “Been here long?”

“Twenty years,” from Lorela. “The building’s history, cited you’ll recollect on the information we dispatched to you, is rather briefer than first-time visitors usually assume from the exterior.”

“Like many!” I chuckled. “We’ve two or three phoneys too. Right, honey?” I gave Monique a squeeze. She didn’t have me gunned down, but her stare lasered a hole in my skull. “In the Santa Monica Mountains.” I nudged Monique. “Neeky here complains it’s too near J. Paul Getty—you’ve heard of that architectural shambles down those foothills? Everybody’s laughing at it.”

“They are?” Cool, cool Ms Chevalier. “Isn’t it a breathtaking concept? What did they describe it as, a secular monastery?”

I laughed, putting a sneer in. “I’m not being critical, ”Rela, when I say that J. Paul G.’s a cardboard cut-out of the real thing—which real thing is me! But d’you see any delight in having to go to Malibu to see the statues, then crawl up a Los Angeles hilltop for one of Cousin P.’s daubs?”

“Henry,” Monique said sweetly. “Remember what we decided!”

“Right, Moneekee, right!” Buffoon, grinning, winking. I was repellent. “No relation!”

“Fully understood,” Lorela said in her slightly American accent. Thank God they’d lapsed into English. (Hang on—why did I register that they’d slipped into French, but then lapsed into English?) “You have brilliantly covered your origins, if I may say.“ To Monique’s raised eyebrows she smoothly added, ”Madame Getty will recall the security cover, detailed in the blue appendix to our advice brochures—”

“You excavate all possible approaches.” Monique nodded. “I’m relieved to hear that our incognito status held up.”

“It’s the reason we chose the Repository,” I cut in. “In spite of your charges. They’m punishment, ’Rela, hon!”

We moved into the grand hall. Balcony, sweeping staircase, hall windows. Identical. Good old Colonel Marimee. His team only needed to stay a week at his country mansion to be able to creep in here at night and move around blindfold. Brilliant. Lorela, her Repository Director’s horns out, instantly launched into a spirited defence of her fees.

“There are so many expenses!” she battled. “You must be aware of the vast intelligence network the Repository must operate? All staff are security cleared. We have sixteen electronic, seven non-electronic auto systems—”

“You come strongly recommended, Ms. Chevalier,” Monique said, which got me narked. Here was I getting the whole dump’s security details, and she shuts her up. That’s women all over. They can’t plan. And nothing needs planning like a robbery. Hers or mine.

“Thank you, Madame,” from Lorela, leading us with the career woman’s defined walk into a drawing room. She hadn’t finished with me. “You could go to cheaper… firms.” She hated having to mention competitors. “Christie’s, Bonhams, or—”

“Sotheby’s Freeport Geneva, right? Lucky Number 13, Quai du Mont-Blanc?” I gave a sharp bark, digging Monique in the ribs. “She hates the enemy, notice that? Trying to sound they’s all colleagues! I like it! Commitment! Hustle, hustle, make a buck!”

Lorela gave a glacial nod. Serfs ushered coffee, chocolates, those small sweet things that get your stomach all excited but turn out to be teasing promises. The silver was modern, I noticed, and therefore gunge. Why not go the whole hog, serve plastic from Burger Boss? I scrounged some edibles from habit. The women pretended to taste one. I often wonder if birds think noshing vulgar. “The difference is that the Repository is the Repository, not merely one more imitation.” I whooped in glee at her cool claim to superiority. Lorela Chevalier appraised me levelly. “We have never, never ever, been burgled, Mr Getty. Other firms have. Which is not to say”, she added, critically inspecting a maid’s skill pouring coffee, “that attempts haven’t been made.”

“Henry adores the ins and outs of commerce,” Monique said distantly, to effect repair.

“Not me, Mow-Neekee.” I wouldn’t leave the subject. “Hate any kind of work.” I leered grossly at Lorela. “Except one—know what I mean?”

“Your requirements, Madame,” La Chevalier said, struggling on under my barrage of vulgarity. “Your possessions are to be in two lots, I understand. One group for shipment to a destination to be notified. One, much larger, group for storage until further notice.”

“Correct.” Monique held a cigarette for villeins to hurl platinum lighters at. “My husband has decided he will select which antiques will go into which group.” She let her withering scorn for me show, peekaboo.

Lorela smiled, offered me more of the vaporous grub fragments. I took the dish from her, irritated, and had the lot, getting hungrier with each mouthful. What narked me was the cleverness of Monique’s ploy. Spring my new identity on me at the last minute, as we enter the Repository, and I’d have no time to devise any alternative ploys. She’d say the play. Me dolt, her the brain—and that’s how Lorela was registering us. I’d done exactly as Monique planned. For the first time I really began to wonder how far they were willing to go in all this, and felt truly disturbed. I was on a raft in the rapids.

“Your shipments are already in the motor park, Madame,” Lorela said. “My apologies for the delay. The Repository insists on a thorough security scan of each vehicle before it can proceed to our unloading bays.”

“Had trouble?” I asked, an oaf trying to be shrewd.

“Over seventy robbery attempts in the past two years, Henry.” No harm in first names now the two women had tacitly agreed on my being a transparent idiot. “Robbers hiding in bureaux, silence-activated robots sealed in a Sheraton commode.”

I brightened. I’d not heard of a silence-activated robot before. First chance I got, I’d ask Torsion back home if he could knock me one up, have a go at the Ipswich depot. Or had they already tried it in Newcastle? They’re very innovative up there. Torsion’s a Manchester brain, thinks only electronics.

“How long was its trigger mode?” I tried to work it out. “They used a robot cable-cutter for that Commercial Street spang. It went wrong. Remote control’s overrated, I reckon—”

“Henry.” Monique viciously stabbed a phoney Lalique-style ashtray with the burning point of her cigarette, and rose. “You don’t want to tire Miss Chevalier with your famous stories. We’ll get on. Come, Henry.” Like come, Paulie.

And they were off, speaking in German, French, anything but my lingo. I crammed the few remaining petits fours in my pocket to eke out life, and followed. I was right—anybody could do this, any time, anywhere. They didn’t need me. Maybe, the intriguing thought came as we descended in a lift, they were making sure I wasn’t employed by rival thieves? Now there’s a thought…

Except, I saw as we went through doors on to a long wide loading platform, there was room for no fewer than six furniture pantechnicons backed up the ramp. Simulated daylight—never quite right to look at antiques by, but next best if rigged by experts. And clerks on old-fashioned high stools at tall Dickensian teller desks, snooping on all they surveyed. A humorous touch: their pens had prominent feathers. I smiled, not fooled. Every pen and pinna would be wired for sight, sound, gunfire.

“Simultaneous, then, Lorela?”

I laughed. A team of blokes in tan overalls were unloading the vans as they went. One queue of whifflers, antiques shifters, nurtured the antiques on to auto-trolleys, forming up at the end of the loading bay. There was no sound except the grunts and murmurs of the men. No fatties, no beer guts. They looked a fit lot. Thirty? With the clerks, about that.

“Queue theory, Henry,” Lorela replied without blanching. “One line moves more expeditiously than several.” She ushered me and Monique to the head of the column. Two wall vents were already running conveyor walkways, each as wide as the lane leading to my cottage. One exit was painted yellow, one black. “Here you will select the destinations, and check that your antiques have all arrived undamaged.”

“Well planned, Lorela!” I was starting to dislike this bird. There’s such a thing as being too efficient.

“Your antiques for shipment along the yellow conveyor, storage into the black.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Where do they lead?”

“That information is classified, Henry.” She smiled, indicated the workers. Not in front of the hired help. “Personnel are not entitled to details that are inessential for their work sector. When you have finished, you shall be shown.”

“And the security?” I asked. “Can’t be too careful!”

Monique could have throttled me, which told me what I wanted to know. “That I’m sure is also classified, Henry. Hadn’t we better get on?”

When a woman says “we” like that, she means you, not her.

“Sure thang.” I called for bourbon, though I can’t stand the stuff, shouting let’s get the hell on with it, and shelled my jacket, shoving a clerk off his stool. “Hey!” I called as the vannies wheeled the first antique on to a disc-shaped area down below and stood waiting in the pool of light. “Hey, Monique! All I need here’s a green eyeshade to be calling the shots in the pool championship! Remember that time in Reno, Nevada?”

“Would Madame like to inspect our display of Japanese art upstairs?” Lorela suggested gracefully, signalling for the work to begin. “I hope Madame will not be disappointed…”

“Thank you.”

There’d be trouble after this. I could tell from the way Monique walked, slightly faster than usual, straight as a die. Women don’t walk straight as a rule, unless they’re blind with rage. Check it. Watch a woman on any pavement, she proceeds anywhere but directly forward. Women waver, men walk ahead. It drives me mad when I’m in a hurry, always get stuck behind a bird and have to duck into the roadway at peril of losing my life simply to get past. Monique walked straight. Ergo, furious. And who at? I was doing my best, for God’s sake. I mean, all this trouble just to case a storage dump was barmy. Mad military overkill.

“Okay, men,” I told the waiting crews of vannies. “Zoom on.”

“One, Monsieur.” The first pair wheeled their trolley forward into the cone of light, halted.

“Turn it round, please.”

The men stepped aside. The floor revolved slowly, the piece revolving at viewing pace. An inbuilt turntable. Screens on the ceiling announced the piece’s weight, the relative humidity, temperature, reflectances, dimensions scanned from a million angles. Equinoctial phases of the moon in Burundi too, I shouldn’t wonder. Never seen so much data, and more searchlights than the Edinburgh Tattoo. Even the floor was illuminated, like in coffee dances. Monique and Lorela had gone. I relaxed.

“Look, lads,” I announced. “I don’t want a frigging circus. Just enough light to see the items. Switch off, and for Christ’s sake stop everything spinning round.”

In silence, checking that I meant what I said, the clerks made the screens vanish to where good screens go. The lights dimmed to partially blinding.

“No frigging ears in your heads?” I yelled, really getting narked at their hesitancy. I slid off my perch and walked about, pointing. Turn that off, leave that on. Honest, you’d think this lot had never seen an antique in their lives, let alone handled daily intakes of the world’s most precious antiques. I wouldn’t have got so wild, except the first was a genuine card table, William IV, of the rare kingwood so dark it was almost purple. And not stained with a single dye! Lovely fold-over pattern, plain as King Billy himself always loved furniture to be. Dealers call these “Adelaide tables’, but the Queen had nowt to do with progress except import the Christmas tree to our fair land.

“Right.” I swarmed back up, looked along the clerks similarly perched, down at the whifflers in their tan overalls. Like a Le Mans starting grid, except this was interesting and important, and motor racing never can be. “Light down to daylight candlepower. Floor still. No information.” And antiques somewhere around. Ready, steady.

Genuine. For a second I let myself bask in its warm glow, then came to. Into the yellow conveyor, right? Wasn’t that the way round? Genuine antiques for shipment, fakes into the black for storage? I had to think to make sure.

“Down the yellow chute, lads.”

The pair wheeled the card table up the ramp, and unloaded it through the yellow entrance. A man accompanied it on the conveyor, standing like a moving duck on a fairground shoot, out of sight. You couldn’t moan that lovely Lorela Chevalier was disorganized. Her —sorry, the— Repository ran like clockwork. No chinks, no loose cogs. I felt myself becoming intrigued. How was Colonel Marimee going to raid this place, get this lot out? Nearly four dozen vanloads, plus what was already here. Beyond belief for size. I felt proud to be in on a scam this big. It’d set them by the ears at the White Hart.

“Two, Monsieur.”

Marble-topped table, Dresden manufacture about 1729, give or take. Hoof feet, “Indian” masks high on the table’s knees to show trendy obsession with the cult of the Americas. Gilt gesso, very flash, beautifully preserved. Dealers would advertise it as mint. Except it was fake. Phoney, false, dud, it was still exquisitely made, by all the same old processes that the ancient craftsmen had used, in their hellish conditions…

“Eh? Oh.” Somebody had asked me what I’d muttered. I gave my glittering grin, but mirthless. “Black. Storage, please. Next.”

And the next. Next. And next. Genuine down the yellow conveyor, false down the black.

An hour or so, I called a halt for a stretch. Clearly, I was here as a double-check, that the vannies hadn’t pulled a switch somewhere along the way, right? Otherwise, anybody could have done it. Just sit there, sending our genuine antiques, the ones I’d bought in Paris or ordered Guy and Veronique to arrange bids for through the Hôtel Drouot auctions, down the yellow path, and the zillion fakes—which merely meant any others—down the black. I didn’t feel proud, perched there saying “Yellow”, and “Black” with the blokes sweating and lifting, trolleying the pieces in the viewing area.

Except it got easier when we resumed. The small items started coming sooner than I expected. But there was a mistake. It happened after I ordered a restart. The whifflers placed a plant stand, quite well made but modern and therefore dross, in the circle, and stepped away while the disc rose like an ancient cinema organ from the floor until it reached my eye-level, four feet away. Steps raked alongside so they could reach up. Then they brought in a small box I didn’t recognize. By which I mean I really truly did.

It sat there, smiling, mystic, wondrous.

Dilemma-time. I’d not picked this little box out in Paris, at Monsieur Jacques Dreyfus’s auction place, at the antique shops when I’d gone ape and bought everything genuine I could see. Therefore it should be fake, right? That was Monique’s and Marimee’s infallible plan. Me to buy the genuines, the syndicate to manufacture fakes. By separating the genuine antiques from the mass of fakes, I’d earn my percentage of this superb, flawless scam pay-out time. I’d got it right, hadn’t I?

Now this box.

Onward shipment, the antiques I’d earmarked in Paris, right? All of which I’d seen, right? Therefore, I should recognize each and every single genuine antique, right? No problem.

The box looked at me. I looked at the box.

And, the Troude-Marimee-Monique scam scenario went, Lovejoy would funnel the fakes one way, and the genuine antiques, all familiar friends, the other. Okay?

The box sat there, waiting.

Now, I had my orders so firm I’d no doubts about what would happen if I disobeyed. Look at poor Baff. Look at poor old Leon. Look at Jan. I didn’t want it to be look at poor Lovejoy. The rule was, make no changes. Monique said so. Guy and Veronique had been terrified out of their drug-sozzled wits when I’d bent them ever so slightly. The rule? Genuine antiques, ship; the fakes, storage.

The box smiled.

Genuine, pristine, beautiful, antique—and I’d never seen it before. It ought to be fake, so chuted down the black conveyor. Except it was genuine. So down the yellow. Except I’d never clapped eyes on it. So down the black. Except I recognised it. So yellow.

The box beamed. I smiled back. Watcher, Jamie, my mind went. “Monsieur?” a puzzled vannie said.

“Sorry, mate. Un moment, please.”

A snuffbox, the colour of old tea, decorated with a simple engraved leaf. Not much to look at, maybe, but the genius that made it was one of the most lovely souls who ever lived. Yonks ago, it was the fashion to go and visit this crippled lad—legs paralysed as a child —in Laurencekirk. He had a great circular bed, and thereon he was stuck, for life. It had shelves, lathes, tool racks, a workbench, all within reach. There, this game youth made these boxes, plus others for tobacco, tea, needles, wools. He even made furniture, and unbelievably cased some clocks, worked in metal and engraved glass. His dander up, he stormed on making violins, flutes, even nautical instruments. A veritable ball of fire, was little crippled lame game James Sandy of Laurencekirk on his circular bed.

Even better, children used to bring him birds’ eggs from the surrounding countryside—it’s between Montrose and Stonehaven in what I, and others who also haven’t yet lost their wits, still call Kincardine. Spectacularly, James Sandy used to hatch these eggs with the warmth of his body, then feed the fledglings and release them to the wild. Can you think of a more beautiful life? Especially considering how oppressed his dauntless spirit must have been?

“Monsieur?”

“Sorry, pardon, entschuldigan—er, I’ve a cold coming. Un malade.” I coughed, came to.

Jamie Sandy invented an invisible wooden hinge held by a small transfixing brass pin. Practically airtight, it was highly prized, since your pricey spice or costly snuff never lost its flavour. Eventually, their manufacture centred on Mauchline in Ayr under the Smith brothers during the Napoleonic Wars. Whole societies of collectors now fight over napkin rings, pipes, ring trees, walking sticks, all Mauchline ware in sycamore. But the real gems are these originals, made plain by little James Sandy in Laurencekirk. Okay, so they were only copies of touristy trinkets filched from Spa in Belgium. And okay, so it was a deliberate act of head-hunting when Lord Gardenston enticed a Spa souvenir-carver from the Low Countries to show the Laurencekirk locals how. But what’s wrong with that? It produced one of the loveliest geniuses in that age of geniuses. It’d even be worth going to boring old Heaven one day, just to meet James Sandy.

This wasn’t one of your machine-mades. Nor one of the Mauchline ware sycamores with their nicotine-coloured varnished transfer-prints of Skegness. This was exquisite, by the original hand of an immortal. I looked away, uncomfortable. My duty was to stick to Monique’s rule: fail to recognize an item, label it a fake and chute it down the black conveyor to storage.

And call James Sandy’s work fake? Bloody cheek.

“Yellow,” I heard myself say calmly. Yellow for genuine, authentic, superb. Hang the cost. I could argue the genius’s case any day of the week, even with Monique Delebarre and Colonel Marimee, Philippe Troude. And sighed as the bloke nodded and made for the ramp carrying Sandy’s wondrous skill. Once a fool, as they say.

“Next, Monsieurs,” my voice went through a great calm. And so signalled the death of somebody I knew, somebody I shouldn’t have killed at all, among the rest.