The Vatican Rip

CHAPTER 11

I slept that night in the park near the great Castel Sant' Angelo. Edgy as hell, I kept imagining there was somebody standing watching me under the trees but when I crept over to see who it was I found nobody. I didn't sleep well. The castle's brooding bulk added nothing to my slumber, but at least it didn't rain. Most of the night I thought about popes.

Now, popes have a very chequered history. They haven't always been sweetness and light. If you crossed them— and sometimes even if you didn't—you finished up stabbed, poisoned, burned, garotted, buried, castrated, starved, or if you were lucky simply ignored to death. Even an innocent joke could earn a horrible joke in return.

I couldn't get out of my mind that whizz-kid Sixtus V. His sister had once been a washerwoman, and he considered himself ridiculed when some wag pointedly stuck a dirty shirt on one of Rome's many battered statues. Cunning as a fox, Sixtus pretended great hilarity and offered a reward to the anonymous wag—and cut off the joker's hand when he came to claim it. 'I never said I wouldn't,' the Pope calmly pronounced afterwards, the ultimate infallible theological argument. Well, my worried mind went, if a laugh gets you maimed for life, ripping the Vatican off won't exactly go over as a comedy act. And don't try telling me we don't live in the Dark Ages any more—poor old mankind is always in the Dark Ages, and that includes today. No mistake about that. If you don't believe me, walk around any city at nightfall, or just read tomorrow's morning newspaper. And I had even better evidence than that. I'd met Arcellano.

Twice during that long night I had to shuffle down into a small grove while police cars cruised past and their nasty beams probed the darkness searching for layabouts. I'm hardly ever cold but by dawn I felt perished and was certain I looked a wreck. Anybody that's ever been unwashed and unshaven and unfed knows the feeling, especially when the rest of the world looks poisonously bright and contented. Rome's favourite knack is appearing elegant. On this particular morning its elegance got right up my nose.

I was supposed to be at the antiques place by nine so I scrambled about, had a prolonged breakfast, a barbershop shave and a wash and brush up. Naturally I walked everywhere to harbour my dwindling gelt. Even so, I was early and stood among passing pedestrians at the window of the Albanese Antiques Emporium.

Piero the ape was first to arrive and unlocked the shop's glass door with a proprietary flourish. Adriana herself arrived a minute later, coolly stepping out of a mile-long purple Rolls-Royce and doubtless stopping a few pacemakers among the peasants as she did so. She was blindingly beautiful. The only person blissfully unaffected by her sleek attractiveness was her other assistant, outrageous in a silver chiffon scarf and earrings, who came rushing in after her, complaining about the traffic on the Corso.

'Morning, tout le monde!' he crooned. 'Like my new hairdo?'

He introduced himself as Fabio—'Fab as in fabulous, dearie!'—but I wasn't taken in. I'd once seen a really vicious knife artist with all Fabio's exotic mannerisms.

'Good morning, Signora Albanese,' I said politely.

'Come through.' She swept past into the rear office.

Humbly I stood while she ripped through a couple of letters and checked the phone recorder. Seven messages out of hours, I noted with interest. A thriving business. As she settled herself I wondered about that chauffeur-driven Rolls. There had been a stoutish bloke with her, riffling paperwork in his briefcase. He had barely bothered to look up as she descended. I'd never seen such a distant goodbye. Presumably Signor Albanese.

She looked up at last. 'Your story, please.'

'Oh, er, I was on a tourist trip—'

'Name and occupation?'

She appraised me, her eyes level and cold. First fag of the day lit for effect and radiating aggro. She really was something, stylish to a fault and straight in the bella figura tradition. Her smart pastel suit was set off by matching gold bracelets and a sickeningly priceless platinum-mounted intaglio that had seen Alexander the Great embark to conquer the world. I wanted her and her belongings so badly I was one tortured mass of cramp.

'Lovejoy. Antique dealer.'

'And you are in a mess.'

'Temporarily, signora.'

She indulged in a bleak smile to show she thought my mess very permanent indeed.

'Money problems?'

'Yes, signora. I was dipped. I have to earn my fare home.'

'So last night's performance was a tactic?'

'I admitted that, signora.'

She nodded and with balletic grace tapped ash into a rectangular porcelain ash trough.

'What's your speciality?'

'Speciality?' It was years since anybody had asked me this sort of stuff.

'In antiques,' she said as if explaining to a cretin.

'None.' And that was the truth.

She purred, about to strike. 'Then let me put it another way, Lovejoy. Which of my antiques do you prefer? Even an imbecile like you must have some preference.'

I could be as vindictive as her any day of the week. 'The genuine ones.'

'All my antiques are genuine!' She even stood up in her fury.

'Balls,' I said calmly into her face. 'Half your stuff is crap, love. I'm a divvie.“

That shut her up. She made to speak a couple of times but only finished up standing and smoking. Behind me Piero cleared his throat. I heard Fabio whisper something.

Both had evidently been attracted by Adriana's outburst and come in to see the blood.

'Ask him!' I heard Fabio hiss.

She judged me then in a different way, blinking away from me, then glancing back several times. I knew the syndrome. Before, it was merely a question of using a scruffy bloke who seemed to possess a limited skill. Now it was a different question entirely.

The problem was how much I'd want, because as far as her and her little antiques emporium were concerned I was the best windfall since penicillin. She drew a long breath and fumigated me with carcinogens.

'You two get out,' she said at last. Then to me, 'Do sit down. Cigarette?'

* * *

Everybody's a born dazzler—at something. You, me, the tramps padding among the dustbins, and that funny woman down the street. We are all the world's greatest. The only question for each of us is the world's greatest what.

I once knew a bloke who was the world's worst everything—well, almost everything. If he drove a car it crashed. If he wound his watch up its hands fell off. If he dialled a friend the phone electrocuted somebody at the other end. He was a menace at work.

Finally, in despair, his boss wrote him off and begged him, tears in his eyes, to get the hell off and out into premature retirement. Honestly, they actually paid him to do nothing. He was a brand new kind of national debt.

Then, doodling one day in the public library—which incidentally he'd accidentally set on fire the week before—he realized the singular pleasure he was deriving from simply copying the stylized scrawl of an early manuscript which was framed on the wall. I won't tell you his name, but he is now the greatest mediaevalist calligrapher in Northern Europe, and official master copyist of manuscripts for universities the world over. Get the message? Even the worst of us is the best mankind has got—for something.

A 'divvie' is a nickname for somebody with the special knack of knowing an antique when he sees one. Some divvies are infallible only for genuine oil paintings, or sculpture, or first editions, or porcelain, or Han dynasty funereal pottery. Others like me—rarest of all—are divvies for practically any antiques going. Don't ask me how it's done, why a divvie's breathing goes funny when he confronts that da Vinci painting, or why his whole body quivers to the clang of an inner bell when near that ancient pewter dish or Chippendale table. Like the old water diviners—from whom we derive our nickname— who go all of a do when that hazel twig detects a subterranean river, there's very little accounting for these things.

If people ask me to explain, I say it's just that the antiques' love comes through and reaches out to touch me. And, since everything modern is rubbish, that's QED as far as I'm concerned.

She was staring. 'For everything antique?'

'Yes. Except when it's mauled into a pathetic travesty, like your mahogany occasional table out there.'

She flared briefly. 'That's genuine Georgian!'

'It's wood is that old,' I conceded. 'But it's a hybrid made up of a pole screen's base and a remade top.'

She was badly shaken. I wondered how much she'd been taken for. 'Is that true, Lovejoy? I bought it as Cuban mahogany.'

'The bit you are looking at is veneer.' It's one of the oldest tricks in the book: get an original piece of the right date, and simply remould it. Most commonly done with tables, bureaux, cabinets and chairs. Some of these hybrids have to be seen—or bought—to be believed. I hate them, because some beautiful original has been devastated just for greed. Greed, that horrible emotion which makes hookers of us all.

'And you'll divvie for me?'

I prompted, 'For…?'

'You mean payment.' Meeting an antiques man better than herself had rocked her, but money was home ground. She became brisk, her old poised and perfect self again.

'How will I verify your accuracy? Of course, I can always give you a knowledge test.'

'I might fail it.' They always ask the same things. “Then where would you be?'

She blew a spume of smoke into the air, getting the point. Knowledge is only knowledge. I was on about the actual business of knowing, which is light years ahead.

'Have you any suggestions?'

'For proof? Yes. Stick your own price on any genuine antique, picked at random. I'll work for it.'

She bowed like the Gainsborough lady but her eyes were focused on distant gold.

'Instead of money? No other pay?'

I smiled at the caution in her tone. People are always stunned by somebody who backs his judgement to the hilt. I said, 'There is no higher price than time, love. It's all a person has.'

'You're hired.'

'Lend me enough to see the week out, please.'

Her eyes narrowed. 'I thought—'

'There's no future in starving to death, love.'

'That bad?' She drummed her fingers on her desk, shook her head. 'No. You might take off. If you are a genuine divvie, I need you here. Fabio!'

Fabio was into the office instantly, waving a notebook and agog with inquisitiveness.

He'd been listening, of course.

'Yes, Adriana.' He struck an exasperated pose. 'What's the verdict? Hitch him to our star, or under a passing bus?'

'Hitch.'

'Ooooh, fantabulation!' he squealed excitedly. 'I wonder what he'll say about that ebony thing you keep saying is an eighteenth-century Benin ceremonial mask prototype!' He winked at me with grotesque roguishness. 'She paid a fortune for it, dearie, been on tenterhooks ever since!'

I thought, oh dear. They make them near Dakar and have fooled the best of us. My expression must have changed because his eyes ignited with delighted malice. Adriana sensed the bad news and nipped it swiftly in the bud.

'Fabio. See that Lovejoy receives no money, no expenses of any kind.'

Fabio fingered his amber beads and beamed. 'Is it to be entirely a labour of love?'

'And you can stop that. We've come to an arrangement. Lovejoy will be paid in antiques of our choosing— after he's divvied them for us.'

'I'll book it in as payment in kind,' Fabio whispered confidentially to me. Adriana's lips thinned even more. I could see how Fabio could get on the calmest nerves.

'His food will be provided by me,' she coursed on tonelessly.

'Must I book a table, dear?' Fabio asked innocently, eyes on the ceiling.

She iced him with a look. 'By that I mean under my supervision.'

He pencilled an ostentatious note, murmuring to himself, 'Lovejoy to feed under Adriana,' then asked briskly, 'Anything else, dear?'

She gave up and turned to me. 'Have you a place to live?'

I thought swiftly. If she was this careful and I was fool enough to admit that I dossed in the park she'd probably stick me in some garret over her stables, with that businessman of hers counting the teaspoons every time I went for a pee.

'Yes, thanks,' I said. 'I'm fixed up.'

They both looked dubious at that but said nothing, and we went to work.

* * *

I'd found a nook. I was in with a chance of doing the rip. And doing Arcellano.